The Critique of Religion and Religions Critique On Dialectical Religiology (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 165) 9789004419032, 9789004419049, 9004419039

Citation preview

The Critique of Religion and Religion’s Critique

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (soas University of London) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University) Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside) William Carroll (University of Victoria) Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney) Kimberle W. Crenshaw (University of California, LA, and Columbia University) Raju Das (York University) Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University) Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen) Alfredo Saad-Filho (King’s College London) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)

volume 165

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss

The Critique of Religion and Religion’s Critique On Dialectical Religiology Edited by

Dustin J. Byrd

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: ‘St. John the Baptist’, by Igor Mitoraj. Marble sculpture, The Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs, Rome, Italy. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020008691

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1573-4234 ISBN 978-90-04-41903-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41904-9 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

This book is dedicated to Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert, critical theorist, mentor, friend, and prophetic intellectual. In honor of your career of over 50 years and your “early” retirement from Western Michigan University’s Department of Comparative Religion (1965–2019). In absentia lucis, Tenebrae vincunt!

∵

Contents

Preface  ix Notes on Contributors  xv

1

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society: Union, Disunion, and Reunion of the Sacred and the Profane (1946–2019): Part I  1 Rudolf J. Siebert

2

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society: Union, Disunion, and Reunion of the Sacred and the Profane (1946–2019): Part II  64 Rudolf J. Siebert

3

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion: Aufhaben and Tajdīd, and the Potential for Renovatio and Renewal  115 Dustin J. Byrd

4

Fomenting the Constellations of Revolutionary “Now-Time”: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Theory of Religion, Society and History  143 Michael R. Ott

5

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity: Political-Theological Reflections  186 Edmund Arens

6

Siebert on Nationalism as Pathology  202 Denis R. Janz

7

April 1945 – The War is Over in Frankfurt am Main  211 Hans K. Weitensteiner

8

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach: the Foundation of a New Spirituality?  218 Francis Brassard

9

The Power of Ideas and Life: Alexander Herzen and the Russian Intelligentsia – an Outline  243 Gottfried Küenzlen

viii

Contents

10

KJV in the USA: the Impact of the King James Bible in America  261 Brian C. Wilson

11

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “Wretched”: On the Ideology of Alt-Fascism  279 Dustin J. Byrd

12

Globalization Challenge: Economic Unification vs. Cultural and Religious Differences  314 Mislav Kukoč

13

Laudato Si’  324 Gregory Baum

Index  331

Preface

Rudolf J. Siebert and Dialectical Religiology

Few academics have careers that are as long and productive as Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert. The author of dozens of books and hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics, Siebert has over his long career shaped the trajectory of comparative religion, critical theory, and the critical-political approach to understanding the dialectical nature of religion and theology. Rooted both in his theological education, as well as the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory of Society, he is the initiator of what he called Dialectical Religiology, which seeks to understand religion as a dialectical phenomenon – both embodying emancipatory, liberation, and revolutionary elements, while also holding fast to its dogmatism, obscurantism, and authoritarianism. Like the first generation of critical theorists before him, Siebert is not a proponent of a positivistic “outsiders” perspective to the study of religion, as if religion is merely an “interesting” sociological phenomenon, the claims of which one can study without ever taking seriously. Rather, he has attempted to emancipate those prophetic, recalcitrant, and non-conforming elements within the world religions from the reactionary, conservative, and ­stasis-inducing historical forms in which they reside. Although he appropriated their well-founded critiques, and advanced them against positive religion, Siebert did not wholly follow the anti-religion intellectuals of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, and Vladimir Lenin, just to name a few, who saw religion onesidedly. Being men of their times, religion, as it was defined and embodied by the ruling Bourgeoisie and the dogma of “progress,” was seen merely as a reactionary impediment to humanity’s earthly emancipation. In other words, they totalized the ideologically distorted Christianity of Emperor Constantine (and his successors) and the many who distorted Christianity by transfiguring it into a means of domination, but forgot the anti-ideological and anti-idolatry Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and his revolutionary weltanschauung. For the 19th century critics, religion had to vacate history. For the dialectician, religion had to be rescued. Throughout his work, Dr. Siebert has returned to Immanuel Kant and Georg W.F. Hegel, and their dialectical approach to religion. Through aufhaben (determine negation), that which was salvageable within the historical world religions, i.e. their inherent negativity towards the world-as-it-is (contra mundum), can be delivered to an emancipatory critical-political philosophy, wherein the

x

Preface

antagonism between the sacred and the profane, reason and revelation, the religious and the secular, may find reconciliation and fulfillment. Dr. Siebert’s dialectical religiology has its roots not only in Kant, Hegel, Marx, and other Enlightenment intellectuals, but also in numerous Left-wing theologians, such as Walter Dirks, Hans Küng, and Johannes Baptist Metz, as well as the first generation of the Frankfurt School, who, like Siebert, saw elements within religion that were still salvageable, precisely because they were still loaded with emancipatory potentials, i.e. they lent themselves towards an exodus from human misery towards a future reconciled society, wherein the entrenched antagonisms that now defines the damaged and degraded conditions of human existence, are alleviated. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Leo Löwenthal, and Erich Fromm, etc., were all keenly aware that religion was dialectical, and not an entirely positive (status-quo affirming) epiphenomenon of human misery, rooted solely in humanity’s longing for a world better than this one, a merely delusion, or a reactionary ideology. Rather, it was also a powerful motivating force and critique against the world-as-it-is, in the name of the world-as-it-should-be, and thus, as Walter Benjamin stated, certain theological elements could be “enlisted” by historical materialism into the struggle against the structures of human oppression, exploitation, necrophilia, and unnecessary human suffering.1 As such, Critical Theory was the successor of prophetic religion, and allowed revolutionary religious potentials to remain alive after the functional death of their exterior forms. The first generation of critical theorists, writing within the catastrophes of World War I and II, Auschwitz, and the ever-looming threat of a nuclear holocaust, could not, like many of their philosophical predecessors, abstractly negate religion. Such a deflation of human intellectual and moral potentials would have contributed to the further suffering, debasement, and enslavement of mankind – the “slaughterbench of history” or “universal Golgotha” – thus preparing the way for further barbarism. At a time of civilizational crisis, wherein (1) the true individual, who is capable of resisting irrational outbursts of fascist collectivism, continues to collapse; (2) serious literature has degenerated into superficial word-bound-entertainment; (3) music is a mere widget of corporate capitalism; (4) critical philosophy is abandoned for “self-help” guruism; (5) history is forgotten amidst national amnesia; (6) cheap entertainment and consumerism is the predominant method for anesthetizing the meaninglessness of modern life; (6) wherein war increasingly becomes the norm because it is profitable; (7) “education” is mere training for careerism; 1 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253.

Preface

xi

(8) positivism is made into a metaphysical dogma; and finally critical thought itself is absorbed into the capitalist totality and thus nullified, the lack of critical religion as a source of being-outside of the status quo, while being committed to the humanity of those still ensnared within the status quo, is a serious setback. The Frankfurt School, including Dr. Siebert’s dialectical religiology, did not only wish to avoid such a collapse, but attempted to fight against such a trend. Religion, the critical theorists thought, had its rightful place within that struggle, and therefore its emancipatory and liberational elements had to be rescued from the ideological cover that so distorted it. Dialectical Religiology has its roots not only in the modern condition, but also in the on-going perpetual tragedy of history and humanity’s attempt to understand and live with the meaning of such senseless suffering within a seemingly “Godless” world, which ironically is said to be saturated with the presence of a merciful and loving God. The theodicy problem is an ever-­present spectre in Siebert’s dialectical religiology.2 From his study of the global class conflict, World War I and II, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, the rise of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany, and their reemergence and reconfiguration in the 21st century West through palingenetic ultra-nationalism, the return of which the Frankfurt School had predicted already at the end of the second world war, the pain of longing for a merciful and compassionate God (the Totally Other) in the face of a merciless and uncompassionate world historical process, lingers behind every word he has written. Such work is also born out of the suffering of his own biography; from the death of his parents, his brother Karl, his beloved wife Margie, his son Steve, and his numerous friends, not to mention the tragedy of witnessing the destruction of Frankfurt, Germany, his hometown, and its innocent inhabitants, by the saturation bombing of the Americans and the British; each tragedy informs his dialectical religiology. His participation in the Battle of Aschaffenburg (1945); his ­experiences as a prisoner of war, both in Europe and in the United States; his experiences with Jews during the war – amidst the Endlösung der Judenfrage (final solution to the Jewish question); the anti-Hitler Catholic youth movement, his experience with a Protestant minister who shared his water after young Siebert had been struck by a protester’s stone while being transferred via train to another P.O.W. camp; all of these episodes were formative to the development of his dialectical religiology.

2 See Rudolf J. Siebert, From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and University Solidarity. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

xii

Preface

The Frankfurt Mentor and his Students

Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert has spent more than fifty years at Western Michigan University, where I first met him my freshman year (1994–1995). While studying music and comparative religion, I was repeatedly drawn to Siebert’s popular classes, Psychological Elements of Religion, Religion and Revolution, and Religion and Social Ethics, not to mention the numerous graduate courses he offered in the Frankfurt School, many of which were taught in his home, the “House of Peace,” wherein numerous graduate students stayed for free as they pursued their graduate degrees at WMU. In my experience as a young undergraduate, Dr. Siebert’s analyses of current affairs, his time diagnosis and prognosis, rooted in a dialectical understanding of the historical processes that brought history to that particular point, was matched only by one other person I had studied: Malcolm X. Both had the uncanny ability to penetrate through the ideological camouflage that perpetually blurred the vision between reality and fiction, essence and appearance, truth and ideology. His inter-disciplinary approach to comparative religion, and the broader study of society and history, rooted in dialectics, appealed to me, just as it did for many other former students of his, some of whom have contributed to this festschrift, including Dr. Michael R. Ott, Siebert’s most prominent intellectual heir. Over the course of decades, Siebert has educated thousands of students from all over the world. He has taught in the United States, Canada, Europe, the former Soviet Union, as well as Japan, and is known throughout for his Critical Theory of Religion, or Dialectical Religiology, which has come to cross-fertilize many other disciplines, such as political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history. He has served on numerous master’s thesis committees and doctoral dissertation committees, and has directed two international courses, one in Dubrovnik, Croatia (formally Yugoslavia): The Future of Religion, and the other in Yalta, Russia (formally Ukraine): Religion in Civil Society. Both of which many of the contributors to this volume have attended and benefited from. I personally had one of those truth-revealing moments while traveling abroad with Dr. Siebert. In 2004, while at the Future of Religion conference in the Crimea, he and I visited the little castle commonly called the “swallow’s nest,” just outside of Yalta. As a graduate student, coming from the United States, which is devoid of castles, but plagued with corporate architecture, I was amazed by this small Neo-Gothic structure that seemed to defy gravity, as it sat on a cliff overlooking the Black Sea. I said to Siebert, ‘Isn’t that amazing,’ to which he replied: ‘It is a catastrophe!’ Stunned, I asked why he would say that. Analyzing it intently, he said, ‘think of all the workers who died fall-

Preface

xiii

ing off the cliff to build that monstrosity for the German nobleman (Baron von Steingel), just so he could meet his lover here.’ What I was seeing was the ­exoskeleton – the outward appearance of the castle: no more, no less. What he was seeing was its essential reality; the human cost of its existence – a cost that still remained within its walls and turrets. He was engaged in anamnestic, present, and proleptic solidarity – a “being-with” form of intense solidarity that doesn’t forget the innocent victims, even when they fail to appear in the footnotes of history. In 2004, I was still lost in the realm of appearances. However, the ability to see through the façade of the given, the ideological distortion that camouflages the horror and terror of history and nature, and develop an openness for the innocent victims, are two of the most important abilities I’ve learned from Siebert throughout our years studying, writing, traveling, and developing the Critical Theory of Society and Religion. As it is demonstrated on a daily basis, the “labor of the negative” never ends. The Critical Theory of Religion, as developed by Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert is dynamic; it rejects any attempt at dogmatization and/or reification. True to the nature of Critical Theory, as written in Max Horkheimer’s 1937 essay, Traditional vs. Critical Theory, Dr. Siebert has always encouraged his students to take dialectical religiology into other realms – opening up new avenues of inquiry, mining other subjects and disciplines for valuable insights, concepts, and notions, and challenging the dogmatism and authoritarianism of all other seemingly closed semantic universes.3 The evidence of such an theoretical openness towards other schools of thought, academic disciplines, ways-of-beings, as well as the thought of the ideological “enemies,” is characteristic of Siebert’s own work, as it is expressed in the millions of words he’s penned over the course of his long and prestigious career. For his work and his revolutionarycompassionate praxis, both at home and abroad, he has engendered respect and admiration from many scholars outside of his own discipline and outside of academics altogether. I would like to thank my dear friend and brother, Dr. Michael R. Ott, for assisting me in the reading of the manuscript. His sharp eye catches what I miss. If there are any mistakes in the manuscript, the fault is wholly mine. If there are none, credit should be given to him. I would also like to thank Jamie Groendyk for assisting me in preparing the manuscript for publication. Without her help, support, and encouragement, rest assured, this book would never have come to fruition. I would also like to thank my parents, Joyce Weber and Roger Byrd, who to this day continue to motivate me to work hard and honor their 3 Max Horkheimer, Selected Essays. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 188-243.

xiv

Preface

lives by living a good and moral life myself. And to my children, Benjamin, Layla, Maxwell, and the newest addition, Alexander. They are the reasons why I continue to work for a peaceful and reconcilied society dreamed of in our Critical Theory – a society that is worthy of their existence. It is fitting that we show our well-deserved gratitude to Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert for his friendship, mentorship, guidance, and influence upon us and our work. We are forever in his debt. On behalf of all the contributors and those who could not contribute but would have liked to, we thank Dr. Siebert for his over fifty years of teaching, lecturing, researching, and writing. We would not be who we are if he was not who he is. Remember, as the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus said, ‘in regione caecorum rex est luscus.’4 Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–264. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Horkheimer, Max. Selected Essays. New York: Continuum, 2002. Siebert, Rudolf J. From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and University Solidarity. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. 4 ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’

Notes on Contributors Edmund Arens was born in Germany, in 1953, and is Professor of Fundamental Theology at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland). He studied theology and philosophy at the Universities of Münster and Frankfurt with Johann Baptist Metz, Helmut Peukert, Karl-Otto Apel, and Jürgen Habermas. He has published about 20 books on critical theory, communication theory, political theology, public theology, and communicative theology. His publications include: The Logic of Pragmatic Thinking: From Peirce to Habermas (Prometheus Books, 1994); Christopraxis: A Theology of Action (Fortress Press, 1995); Gottesverständigung: Eine kommunikative Religionstheologie (Herder Verlag GmbH, 2007); Integrationspotenziale von Religion und Zivilgesellschaft: Theoretische und empirische Befunde (with M. Baumann and A. Liedhegener) (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2016). Gregory Baum was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1923. He received his Doctorate of Theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland in 1956. He later taught at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, and McGill University. He was the Peritus at the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and the Second Vatican Council. He founded and edited the journal The Ecumenist, and was later on the editorial board of the journal Relations, a Montreal-based Francophone Catholic review. He is the author of many books, including: Nationalism, Religion and Ethics (McGill-Queens’s University Press, 2001); The Theology of Tariq Ramadan: A Catholic Perspective (Novalis, 2009); Truth and Relevance: Catholic Theology in French Quebec since the Quiet Revolution (McGillQueen’s University Press, 2014); Fernand Dumont: A Sociologist Turns to Theology (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), and his biography, The Oil has not Run Dry: The Story of my Theological Pathway (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2016). The recipient of numerous honorary doctorates, he was also decorated with the title: Officer of the Order of Canada. Gregory Baum passed away on October 18, 2017, in Montreal. Francis Brassard is from Quebec, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from McGill University in religious studies. He also studied at the Institut für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets, Hamburg University. His research interests include Buddhist philosophy and psychology, comparative religions and philosophies, and

xvi

Notes on Contributors

interreligious dialogue. His book, The Concept of Bodhicitta in Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra, was published by the State University of New York Press (2000). Some of his other publication titles include: “Buddhism” in A Catholic Engagement with the World Religions in collaboration with Franco Sottocornola and Maria de Giorgi. (Orbis Book, 2010), “Asking the Right Question,” in Asian Texts – Asian Contexts: Encountering the Philosophies and Religions of Asia. (SUNY Press, 2010), “The Path of the Bodhisattva and the Creation of Oppressive cultures,” in Buddhism and Violence, edited by M. Zimmermann. (Lumbini International Research Institute, 2006). He is now an independent scholar living in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Dustin J. Byrd is originally from South Haven, Michigan. He is a specialist in political philosophy, the Frankfurt School’s “Critical Theory of Religion,” and contemporary Islamic thought. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Arabic at Olivet College in Michigan, USA. In 2018 he was appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of the Islamic Perspective Journal, published by the London Academy of Iranian Studies. Along with dozens of articles, Dr. Byrd has published numerous books, including Unfashionable Objections to Islamophobic Cartoons: L’affaire Charlie Hebdo (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), and Islam in a Post-Secular Society: Religion, Secularity, and the Antagonism of Recalcitrant Faith (Brill, 2017; Haymarket Book, 2018). The latter was translated into Arabic by Dr. Mohammad ‘Aafif and published by Mominoun Without Borders (Rabat, Morocco) in 2019. He also authored A Critique of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy of Religion: The Gospel According to John Galt (Lexington Books, 2015); Ayatollah Khomeini and the Anatomy of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: Towards a Theory of Prophetic Charisma (University Press of America, 2011). Along with Seyed Javad Miri, he has co-edited the following books: Malcolm X: From Political Eschatology to Religious Revolutionary (Brill, 2016; Haymarket Books, 2017); Ali Shariati and the Future of Social Theory: Religion, Revolution, and the Role of the Intellectual (Brill, 2018; Haymarket Books, 2018); Frantz Fanon and Social Theory: A View from the Wretched (Brill, 2019). Denis R. Janz grew up in Western Canada and completed his Ph.D. in the history of Christianity at St. Micheal’s College in the University of Toronto. He served as Provost Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Loyola University in New Orleans and was promoted to Professor Emeritus in 2017. His teaching, writing and editing have covered the entire history of Christianity.

Notes on Contributors

xvii

Gottfried Küenzlen was born 1945 in Calw (Germany). He studied protestant theology, sociology and philosophy; Dr.rer.soc., Dr. phil. habil, University-Professor; 1995–2010 full professor (chair) for “Protestant Theology and Social ethics” at the Universität der Bundeswehr, München; 2010 emeritus. He has numerous publications in the field of sociology of culture, sociology of religion, social ethics and theology. His main books include: Die Religionssoziologie Max Webers: Stufen ihrer Entwicklung (Duncker & Humblot, 1981); Der Neue Mensch: Zur säkularen Religionsgeschichte der Moderne, (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995) (2nd edition: Suhrkamp, 1997); Die Wiederkehr der Religion: Lage und Schicksal in der säkularen Moderne. (Olzog, 2003); Religion im säkularen Verfassungsstaat, edited with Th. Bohrmann, (LIT Verlag Münster, 2012). Mislav Kukoč is Professor of Ethıcs, Socıal Phılosophy, Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Globalization, Head of the Department of Philosophy, Commissioner for Postgraduate Studies, and Head of the Doctoral Programme in Philosophy at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (CD FISP) and the chair of the FISP Consultative Committee on Philosophical Encounters and International Cooperation. He is also the president of the international conference Mediterranean Roots of Philosophy in Split, Croatia and co-director of the international course: Future of Religion at the Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik. Dr. Kukoč was president of the Croatian Philosophical Society, vice-president of the Croatian Bioethical Society and member of the Croatian National Commission for UNESCO. He has given lectures at numerous congresses, conferences, and universities, including in New Orleans (USA), Munich (Germany), Sapporo (Japan) and Klagenfurt (Austria). He has published nine books and a hundred scientific papers. Michael R. Ott holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Western Michigan University (1998) and a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary (1975). In 1976, Michael was ordained a minister in the United Church of Christ and served the next 25 years as a pastor of three UCC churches in Michigan. In 2002, he accepted a position as a Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University, where he specialized in the study, teaching, and advancement of the critical theory of society and religion of the “Frankfurt School.” He incorporated this critical theoretical paradigm, which seeks the socio-historical creation of a

xviii

Notes on Contributors

more reconciled, humane future society, both in the church and in his courses on: Sociology/Critical Theory of Religion; Contemporary Sociological Theory; Globalization: Structures and Movements; Social Class Inequality; The Theory and Praxis of Social Change Movements; the Senior Seminar in Sociology/Capstone; Social Problems, and Christianity: Scriptures, Traditions, and Hope for the Future. Since his retirement from the university in 2015, he now works as a private researcher and writer on developing the revolutionary critique of the Critical Theory of the first generation of the Frankfurt School in addressing the contemporary crises of global capitalism and its global class-war hegemony. His publications include numerous articles and book chapters on the critical theory of society and religion, as well as five published books: Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion: The Meaning of Religion in the Struggle for Human Emancipation (University Press of America, 2001); an edited volume entitled The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society (Brill, 2007; Haymarket Press, 2009); an edited volume entitled, The Dialectics of the Religious and the Secular: Studies on the Future of Religion (Brill, 2014; Haymarket Press, 2016); and a co-authored book with Rudolf J. Siebert entitled: The Future of Religion: Creator, Exodus, Son of Man and Kingdom (Sanbun Publishers, 2016). Michael is a Co-Director of the international course The Future of Religion, held annually since 1977 at the Inter-University Centre of Post-Graduate Studies in Dubrovnik, Croatia. He is also a member of the Global Advisory Board of the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Institute. Rudolf J. Siebert was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1927. He studied history, philology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, social work and theology at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main, Mainz, and Münster, and at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. He is Professor of Religion and Society, and the director of the Center for Humanistic Future Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, and since 1975, the Director of the international course on the “Future of Religion” in the Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, Croatia. He is also the director of the international course on “Religion and Civil Society” in Yalta, Crimea. Siebert has taught and lectured at many universities in Western and Eastern Europe, the United States and Canada. After 54 years of teaching at Western Michigan University, Department of Comparative Religion and the Department of Sociology, Siebert retired his position in 2019. He is author of dozens of books and hundreds of articles, his major works include: Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness, and the Rescue of the Hopeless – 3 Vols. (Brill, 2010); From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy

Notes on Contributors

xix

and Universal Solidarity (Peter Lang, 1994), and Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School (Scarecrow Press, 2001). Hans K. Weitensteiner was born in 1936 in Frankfurt am Main. He studied German history, philosophy, politics, and pedagogy in Frankfurt am Main and Freiburg im Breisgau. He earned his doctorate in 1976 with a work on the Frankfurt social politician Karl Flesch at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. For more than thirty years, he was a master of grammar-schools in the Hessen region. He is the author of Warum den wir, immer wir…? War diese Stadt Frankfurt schuldiger als London? Katholisches Gemeindeleben im Dritten Reich und waehrend der ersten Nachkriegsjahre 1932–1950. Dokumente und Darstellung. (Haag & Herchen Verlag, 2002). Brian C. Wilson is Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. A native of Santa Clara, California, he earned a B.S. in Medical Microbiology from Stanford University (1982), and, after three years in the Peace Corps (Honduras, Dominican Republic), went on to earn an M.A. in Spanish from the Monterey Institute of International Studies (1990) and an M.A. (1991) and Ph.D. (1996) in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Professor Wilson joined the faculty of the WMU Department of Comparative Religion in 1996 and served as department chair from 2001 to 2009. His areas of research and teaching include American religious history with an emphasis on new religious movements and religion in the Midwest. He is the author of Christianity (Routledge, 1999) and Yankees in Michigan (MSU Press, 2008); his book Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living (Indiana University Press, 2014) has been awarded the 2015 National Silver Medal for Biography from the Independent Publishers Association and the 2015 State History Award from the Historical Society of Michigan. His latest book, John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age, which was supported by a grant from the Memorial Trust of the Fetzer Institute, is published by Wayne State University Press in August 2018.

Chapter 1

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society: Union, Disunion, and Reunion of the Sacred and the Profane (1946–2019): Part i Rudolf J. Siebert 1 Introduction The beginning of the critical theory of religion and society, or dialectical religiology, reaches far back to the middle of the 20th century, to my return to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, from the American prisoner of war camp, Camp ­Allen, in Norfolk, Virginia, usa, in February of 1946. The start of the critical theory of religion and society in Frankfurt was the consequence of the experiences of my generation, born in the late 1920s, after the First World War. 2

Ideology Critique

The beginning of the critical theory of religion and society, as ideology critique, was the consequence of my growing up under German and European fascism; my participation in World War ii; living through the period of liberal restoration, the cold war between the capitalist and the socialist block, including the wars in Vietnam and Yugoslavia, and finally through the conflict ­between parts of the Muslim world and the West, including the Afghan, Iraq and Syrian wars. This East/West conflict still continues today most fanatically, as shown by the recent double bombing of a Roman Catholic Cathedral by isis in the Philippines, on January 26, 2019, and by the March, 2019, murder of 49 Muslims in a Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, by the Australian Brenton Tarrant. He made his authoritarian-populist, and fascist position and ­motivation quite clear in his manifesto: The Great Replacement: Toward a New Society.1 Here ideology is understood critically as “false consciousness;” as necessary appearance; as fake news; as the masking, hiding and cover up of particular, economic, political and military interests; as reason without realty, and as realty without reason. It is idealism without materialism, and as materialism 1 Brenton Tarrant, The Great Replacement: Toward a New Society. Self-Published, 2019.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_002

2

Siebert

without idealism; as the religious without the secular, and as the profane without the sacred; as abstractions intervening between subjective and objective reason; as the concealment of an existing lack; as meaning without reality, and reality without meaning; shortly, it is the untruth. All these historical events above made up and constituted an era, an age, an epoch, of greatest secular and religious, personal and collective insecurity – uncertainty of knowledge, unsafety of the physical existence, and social insecurity – which nourishes irrationality, despair, extremism, and populism. It is also continually accompanied by historical regressions, e.g. the present wave of secular authoritarian, or even totalitarian nationalism in America and Europe. This happens only 70  years after the fascists Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Ante Pavelić, António Salazar, Philippe Pétain, etc., and their paradoxical alliances with religion, particularly with the Vatican and the Roman-Catholic, as well as the Protestant, paradigm of Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom: a completely ideological, and thus untrue reunion, or reconciliation of the modern disunion between the religious and the secular, in which the sacred is betrayed, and the profane is mystified, justified, elevated, idealized, and glorified, no matter, how unjust and evil it may be, or if in it secular salvation is promised idolatrously, and in hubris. Dialectical Religiology is essentially critique of the untruth in the spheres of personal life, private right, personal ­morality, family, civil society, liberal or social state, history, art, religion, philosophy and science.2 3

Last Battle

It was at the end of World War ii, after the Battle of Aschaffenburg, Germany, my last battle, in March 1945, during Easter, that I surrendered as a young German soldier of the officer company from the Kaserne (barracks) of the ­Tank-Destroyer Battalion in Büdingen, to General Patton’s army near Alzenau, Germany.3 In Büdingen, I had been trained to fight at the Eastern Front against so-called “atheistic bolshevism.” But then I, nevertheless, battled at the Western front, when General Patton attacked the Rhine-Main area. I was brought as a prisoner of war on trucks, trains, and ship over Babenhausen, Dieburg, Darmstadt, Worms, Marseille, France, Oran, Africa, Gibraltar, across the Atlantic to 2 Rudolf J. Siebert, Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness, and the Rescue of the Hopeless. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 3 Quentin W. Schillare, The Battle of Aschaffenburg: An Example of Late World War ii Urban Combat in Europe. Fort Leavenworth: Kansas, 1989.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

3

Camp Allen in Norfolk, Virginia. In Alzenau, part of the second German ­defense line after the Siegfried Line, conquered by, and then lost again to my battalion on the Hahnenkamp mountain, and then reconquered again by Patton’s tanks and infantry, I was imprisoned in a basement full of canned fruit, which I did not eat, thinking in my Catholic conscience that I should not steal from the family who had produced it for its needs in the cold winter of 1944– 1945.4 Later on, I regretted somewhat this virtuous behavior, when in Worms I starved for a whole week with thousands of other prisoners in a huge, most primitive camp in an old barracks complex. On the way to Marseille, in Alsace Lorrain, I was stoned in a livestock transporter train, a cattle car, by former Germans, who now wanted to prove that once more they had become passionate French patriots, and was awakened again by a co-prisoner, a Protestant pastor, who gave me his last bit of water in his canteen. This event made me, the young Catholic, an ecumenist for life. One day in the huge prisoner of war camp in Marseille, I was marching out as usual with a hundred other prisoners to the beach in order to undo a hill of little stones, which another hundred prisoners had accumulated the day before, just in order to keep us busy, when my group was suddenly redirected to a liberty ship in the harbor, which was leaving for Oran (French Algeria), where we were supposed to work on roads. I had to leave behind my luggage, my jacket, and other clothing, as well as my Bible and my diary. In the end of April, 1945, on the same liberty ship now in the company of a whole escort fleet of such ships, protected by battleships, on the way from Oran and Gibraltar to Norfolk and Newport News, Virginia, I was lined up with many other prisoners along the railing of the liberty ship, because the periscopes of three German U-boats had appeared. The all too ­optimistic assumption of the American commanders was that the German submarines would not torpedo ships with German prisoners on board. But the war was coming to its end, and the German U-boats were no longer interested in battle and sinking enemy ships, but rather in rescuing themselves, and their Nazi-personal, and treasure in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, but also in Bolivia, etc., where their many fascist friends lived, prospered, and waited for them. After arriving in Norfolk and Camp Allen, my comrades and I were greeted at the door by a high German officer, named Stauffenberg, in a clean and much decorated uniform, a cousin of the late Catholic Graf Claus von Stauffenberg, who had tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, the year before. In contrast to his late cousin, the officer was still a fascist, as were most of the prisoners in the camp, mostly members of the old Afrika Korps (Deutsches Afrikakorps). They all were, according to the Geneva Convention, 4 Ibid.

4

Siebert

well fed and dressed, even after the destruction of the German Government. They did not believe that the German cities had been bombed out, or that the war was being lost: it was all enemy ideology and propaganda to them! The officer asked us newcomers, in our miserable residual rag uniforms, why we had not fought better and had surrendered. We asked him and his friends the same question. During the first night at Camp Allen, a prisoner was sentenced to death by his own comrades in the name of the Führer, Adolf Hitler – who by that time had already committed suicide together with his wife Eva Braun in his bunker in Berlin (April 30, 1945) – because he, a German soldier, had talked with a Jewish secret service agent outside the camp. He was executed as a traitor by drowning in a toilet. The military police never found out who had done the crime. Everybody was silent in fascist solidarity! Here in Camp Allen, while other prisoners were categorized through cross hearings, without any torture as Nazis, or even as war criminals, I was selected in the same procedure as an Anti-Nazi by the Secret Service (who were mainly Jewish officers), on the basis of my membership in the Catholic Youth Movement in Frankfurt am Main, during the 1930s and 1940s. We had been engaged in Anti-Fascist activities, e.g. the spreading of the letters of Bishop Graf von Galen, the Lion of Münster, against the concentration camps, as well as against bombardments of open cities, and in the help for Jewish citizens under Nazi persecution in the Frankfurt area. We had been persecuted ourselves under violation of the ambiguous Vatican Concordat, or Reich’s Concordat (Reichskondordat), between the Vatican (Pope Pius xi) and Hitler’s Third Reich in 1933, which is still valid today, in 2019, in the German Federal Republic, as it had been in the 1930s and 1940s.5 4 Re-education Thus, in Camp Allen, in spring and summer 1945, I became one of 25,000 German prisoners, who were chosen from 300,000 German and 100,000 Italian prisoners in the usa, mainly the German-Italian Africa Corps, for re-education, in order to be sent back to reform Germany, so that we would help to transform the fascist state into a liberal, democratic one again.6 The initiative for this re-education program for prisoners had come partially from the phenomenological New School in New York, and partially from the mainly 5 John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius xii. (New York: Viking, 1999), 157–178; Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 126–178. 6 Erich Achterberg. General Marshall Macht Epoche: Konferenzen, Gestalten, Hintergründe. Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein Verlag. 1964.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

5

Jewish International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, from its fundamental critical theory of society. It happened probably through the mediation of Mrs. Roosevelt and her circle, on the basis that not all Germans had been Nazis, as Henry Morgenthau ii, the Jewish Secretary of Treasury in the Roosevelt Cabinet and his friends had asserted. Morgenthau had once demanded the de-industrialization of Germany, and the castration of German men. Yet, there were Anti-Nazis in the German army, like former Graf von Staufenberg and his friends, who could be helpful in the reconstruction of a new, democratic Germany, after some economic and political re-education. It was through this re-education program, carried out by professors of the social sciences from several outstanding American universities in Camp Allen, that I came into contact for the first time with Max Horkheimer’s, Friedrich ­Pollock’s, Walter Benjamin’s, Arkadij Gurland’s, Theodor Adorno’s, Herbert Marcuse’s, Franz Neumann’s, Otto Kirchheimer’s, Erich Fromm’s, Leo Löwenthal’s, etc., anti-authoritarian, anti-Rightwing p ­ opulism, anti-fascist critical theory of society, and the International Institute for Social Research at Colombia University (New York), the earlier and later Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or “Frankfurt School,” out of which my friends and I developed our critical theory of religion and society, or dialectical religiology, for the last 74 years.7 At the time in American exile, Max Horkheimer knew very well that in view of everything that was engulfing Europe and perhaps the whole world, his and the other critical theorists work was destined to be passed on through the night that was fast approaching: a kind of “message in a bottle” (flaschenpost). In American exile, the critical theorists heard rumors that Jews were to be transported to Alaska. They were afraid that European fascism could spread also to North America. Our dialectical religiology picked up this message in the bottle of the Frankfurters, the critical theorists, from 1946 on, and carried and developed it further through the persistence of right-wing authoritarian populism, up to the nightmare of the present Trumpism, its ­media spectacle, and its authoritarian nationalism, with its many devoted followers in America, Europe, and elsewhere, in 2019.8 4.1 L’île heureuse Max Horkheimer had started his critical theory of society with poetical attempts, consisting of diary pages and novels, concerned with not only ethical, but also religious and theological issues and problems, in Stuttgart, Germany,

7 Siebert, Manifesto, Vol. i–iii. 8 Ibid.; Jeremiah Morelock, ed., Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism. London: University of Westminster Press, 2018.

6

Siebert

his hometown, during World War I.9 One of these novels, an autobiographical one, was called L’île heureuse (The Island of Happiness.)10 It contained a discourse among three Jewish friends: Horkheimer himself, his lifelong friend, Friedrich Pollock, and a French woman from Paris, named Susanne Niemeyer, or “Suze,” a distant relative of Horkheimer. Suze later on betrayed the circle of friends, which, like Horkheimer’s novel, they had dubbed the Island of Happiness, and regressed again back into her petite bourgeois milieu. Nevertheless, Horkheimer visited Suze once more in Paris after the end of World War ii, making his wife Maidon jealous back home in California. Horkheimer did not think that the message of the Island of Happiness lost its authenticity and truth, because it was betrayed and lasted only a short time.11 He compared his circle of friends with Rabbi Jesus and his disciples: as little as the authenticity and truth of Rabbi Jesus’s teaching on the love of man could be doubted, simply because its greatest announcer was betrayed by his own disciple, Judas Iscariot, and because he was the victim of an ignominious and shameful death, and because his word became the cause of innumerable wars and murderous deeds, so little could the authenticity and the truth of the teaching of the friends of the Island of Happiness, the earliest critical theorists of society, be doubted, because it was betrayed and short lived.12 That failure only proved how much reality contradicted the truth: the Idea. Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity, and Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, and we may add Islam, the Religion of Law, on the one hand, and German idealism and German materialism, on the other, have in common that they both held on to the Idea, the Truth, no matter how deep the antagonism between the Idea and reality was. Both fought most radically all forms of authoritarian idolatry and ideology. The longing for the Island of Happiness, which initiated the critical theory of society, remained present also in the critical theory of religion and society, throughout its whole evolution.13 5

Justice and Equality

The novel Island of Happiness was for Horkheimer and Pollock more than free phantasies of youth, or immature products of puberty, of which they would have 9

John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 19–84. 10 Ibid., 46–50. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Siebert, Manifesto, Vol. i–iii.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

7

to be ashamed of later on.14 Its ethical, religious, and theological content rather stayed with them throughout their lives, and constituted the very core of their friendship and their work.15 Decisive were in all of Horkheimer’s n ­ ovels the social, religious, theological, erotic, rebellious and revolutionary ideas, as they toward the end of puberty determine, in harmonies and contrasts, the thinking and feeling of the youth, as it approaches an independent, autonomous life. For Horkheimer, the unconditional confession, the faithfulness to a faith, the complete devotion to justice and equality, no matter how the devoted person may suffer through the loss of his or her own rights, even the erotic love and the sacrifices connected with it, every virtue without compromise and its role in this world, were reasons for the restlessness in the immature stage of life.16 The fate of such youthful radicalism, the expression of the contrast between idea and ideal, on one hand, and reality on the other, determined the content of many of the novels and narratives of Horkheimer, and finally remained even present in his mature critical theory of society. When Horkheimer was 15 years old, after finishing the Under-Secunda class in the Stuttgart Gymnasium, he left school and prepared himself in Germany and other European countries for the profession of an industrialist, who was to become a ceo in one of his father’s, Moritz Horkheimer, textile factories, and finally their owner. His stylistic and literary knowledge was still minimal at the time when the novels were created. He did not yet have any professional insights into psychology or sociology. He had only the will to truth and to the right life, which he ­received from his Jewish family. He had not yet developed a sophisticated annunciation of such knowledge. As such, religious as well as moral imperatives appeared in Horkheimer’s novels, narratives, and discourses, without the differentiations usually articulated by academic disciplines. Horkheimer was not yet familiar with the doubtful adaptation of theological, or other embracing principles, to everyday life. Horkheimer experienced the contrast and antagonism of confession, on the one hand, and real behavior, on the other, (and the inevitable hypocrisy), of the members of the German and European bourgeoisie, to which he and his friends Pollock, as well as Niemeyer, and their families belonged. The Island of Happiness portrays the idea, realization, and failure of a sworn community of two men and one woman, who devoted themselves to each other without reservation, connecting spiritual and erotic elements, in order to make alone their own free conviction into the measure of all their actions. To despise ­everything 14

Rudolf J. Siebert, Early Critical Theory of Religion: The Island of Happiness. New Delhi, Sanbun Publishers, 2014. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.

8

Siebert

material was the simple life-wisdom of the three friends. They wanted to stand in cold contemplation opposite all changes, which fate brings about, and strive for their goal: L’île heureuse, and to live for the knowledge of the beautiful world and for their trinitarian love. The three friends’ contempt was directed against the world of bourgeois prejudices, and its laws of the base and voracious selfpreservation.17 Justice and equality remained guiding principles also for the critical theory of religion and society, as we developed it out of the mature critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School. 5.1 Novum Almost four decades after the creation of his novels, in the 1950s, Horkheimer and his lifelong trusted friend Frederick Pollock formulated in one of their common private memoranda in their Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, that their life should be a witness.18 They wanted to realize the utopia of the L’île heureuse to the smallest detail. The friends desired, longed for, and wanted the totally Other, the Novum, the New, the Unconditional.19 Their life was serious, as any authentic religious life. With the friends the social laws of the ­bourgeoisie were not to have any validity even still in the midst of the bourgeois, German Federal Republic of the Christian-Democratic Chancellor Conrad Adenauer and the liberal President Theodor Heuss, with their restoration program, and their economic miracle. Horkheimer greeted and honored both Chancellor and President, publicly as Rector of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main. Those Memoranda contained introductory sentences of Horkheimer and Pollock concerning a decision – one of a series of many of such decisions during the years – about the forms that their common life and work should take on. Those sentences could have been taken out unchanged from Horkheimer’s novel L’île heureuse, or any other of his early novels. Horkheimer and Pollock were driven by the impulse, to explore the social laws of the modern bourgeois civil society, just in order not to recognize them. This dialectic of a historical materialism, which, to speak with the words of the L’île heureuse, “despises the material,” is a fundamental dialectical trait of Horkheimer’s critical theory of society, which concretely supersedes in itself, both German idealism as well as German materialism.20 Thus, the novel The Island of Happiness reveals in poetical form a new humanist, democratic, 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.; Abromeit, Max Horkheimer, 141–184. 19 Max Horkheimer, Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Ein Interview mit Kommentar von Helmut Gumnior. Hamburg: Furch-Verlag, 1970. 20 Siebert, Early Critical Theory, 29–50.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

9

socialist life-plan, informed by the Jewish Religion of Sublimity of the young Horkheimer and Pollock, to which they held onto throughout their whole lives, despite of all later modifications in terms of new social, political, and historical circumstances. It was indeed a new humanist, or democratic socialist, life plan.21 Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity, and Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, continued to sustain within the critical theory of religion and society the eschatological, concrete utopian, hopeful, and revolutionary, panentheistic and even atheistic, socialist-humanistic impulses towards the breaking in of the “New” into world history and beyond, against all positivistic and fascist blockages and resistance. The most revolutionary sentences in Christianity are: Why look among the dead for someone who is alive? He is not here; he has risen. Remember what he told you when he was with you in Galilee: that the Son of Man had to be handed over into the power of sinful men and be crucified, and rise again on the third day. And they remembered his words.22 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now. And there was no longer any sea…. Then the One sitting on the throne spoke: ‘Now I am making the whole creation new…’23 The rest are positivistic and fascist ideologies and culture of death. 6 Return I returned from Camp Allen, Norfolk, in February 1946, by train and liberty ship through New York, by mistake of the State Department, through Le Havre, France, through Bolbek, an American prisoner of war camp for SS men, employed in French coal mines, or in Normandy’s mine fields, which looked like a concentration camp, to Heilbronn, another prisoner of war camp, in Germany, and finally to the ruins of Frankfurt am Main. The commander of the Bolbek camp had taken away from those of us who were declared Anti-Nazis all of our sea sacks full of Camel cigarettes and chocolate, with which we were to feed 21 Ibid. 22 Luke 24: 5–8. 23 Revelation 21:1–5.

10

Siebert

ourselves through the black market in Frankfurt. One had to eat before one could democratize. That made Camp Allen’s democratization mission more difficult. However, I could practice it through my leadership in the Catholic Youth Movement, which I continued after the war. At the same time, I completed my Abitur at the humanistic Lessing Gymnasium, which had been bombed out at the end of the war, and relocated to a school near the Frankfurt zoo. I also heard lectures by the anti-positivist, anti-fascist Professor Weinstock, who was the Substitute-Director of the Lessing Gymnasium, successor of the fascist Director Silomon, who had written a book on the Indo-Germanic tribesmen and languages, in a positivistic and fascist manner, and had eliminated all Jewish students from the humanistic Lessing Gymnasium without any resistance.24 All fascists are positivists, but not all positivists are fascists. Professor Weinstock, a specialist in ancient Greek literature, may have been close to the Confessing Church, which resisted the Hitler regime, like his Co-Director, Robert Schuhmann, specialist in Roman Literature. During his ­service as an officer in the German Army, Weinstock had newly translated and edited the tragedies of Sophocles. At the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, Professor Weinstock lectured on philosophical and political concepts, like liberal, fascist, ­progressive, conservative, reactionary, revolutionary, counter-­revolutionary, positive, negative, etc. in the humanistic tradition of the Sophoclesian tragedies Electra, Antigone, King Oedipus, Oedipus on Kolonos, etc., in the context of the horrible German tragedy, which was all around us in the ruins of Frankfurt.25 His lectures supplemented what I had learned at Camp Allen in my first encounter with the originally Jewish, critical theory of society. From the very start, Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian elements entered the formation of our critical theory of religion and society; it combined Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome with Paris, the capital of the modern secular enlightenment. The critical theory of religion and society was born out of the tragic ruins of the city of Frankfurt, Germany, and Europe in general. At the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University, I saw the ruins of Horkheimer’s old Frankfurt Institute for Social ­Research, which had been financed and built by the businessman Hermann Weil, and his son Felix Weil, which had been destroyed by the American Airforce in February of 1945. Hermann Weil built a similar Institute for Social Research in communist Moscow. Capitalists sometimes support socialists, who will concretely supersede them. In general, the workers depend on traitors from 24

Hans K. Weitensteiner, Warum denn wir, immer wir? War diese Stadt Frankfurt schuldiger als London? Katholisches Gemeindeleben im Dritten Reich und während der ersten Nachkriegsjahre 1932–1950. Dokumente und Darstellung. Frankfurt a. M.: Haag und Herchen, 2002. 25 Ibid.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

11

the bourgeoisie, in order to break the latter’s educational monopoly, and apply the latter’s knowledge to the revolutionary cause of the former. 6.1 Dioscuri From 1946 on, I studied philosophy, theology, history, psychology, and sociology at the Universities of Frankfurt, Mainz, and Münster, and finally at the Catholic University of America, in Washington d.c. At the same time, I tried to accomplish in practice the mission of liberalization and democratization, which I had received theoretically through the re-education program at Camp Allen. Doing so, I came in contact with the anti-fascist, left-wing Catholics: Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon. Between World War i and ii, Walter Dirks and Theodor W. Adorno had been friends, and their friendship was continued after Adorno and Horkheimer returned from American exile in the 1950s. Adorno had introduced Walter to modern music, e.g. of Alban Berg.26 Both were masters on the piano. In Walter’s home in Wittnau, in the Blackforest, I found a grand piano standing beside a huge cross. During the fascist period in Germany, the half-Jewish Adorno left for England and America. Between the wars, Dirks was the assistant of Romano Guardini, a famous Catholic theologian in Nazi Germany. In 1935, the phenomenologist, existentialist theologian Guardini published an article Der Heiland (The Savior), accusing Adolf Hitler of promoting idolatry, of putting himself where only Jesus Christ should stand in people’s lives.27 From then on Guardini was plagued with Nazi informers.28 Guardini meant much to me as a leader in the Catholic Youth Movement between the Wars and during World War ii, and even still afterwards in the ­beginning of the critical theory of religion and society, particularly his philosophy of opposites, which later on led me to the triplicity of Kant, and to the dialectic of Hegel, who had considered his whole philosophy and theology to be the sublation of the trinitarian Christian catechism, and a completion ­Martin Luther’s work on a higher intellectual level: the dialectical notion, the self-particularizing and self-singularizing of the universal. Dialectical Religiology was from its very start dialectical, i.e. it emphasized and embodied determinate negation.29 In world history, one nation determinately negated the ­previous one. In the history of religions, one positive religion determinately negated the previous one. While the critical theory of society vacillated 26

Walter Dirks, “Zwischen den Zeiten: Brief an Eugen Kogon.” Frankfurter Hefte. 18. no. 2 (February 1963). 27 Ulrich Bröckling, Katholische Intellektuelle in der Weimarer Republik: Zeitkritik und Gesellschafttheorie bei Walter Dirks, Romano Guardini, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Michel und Heinrich Mertens. Paderborn: W. Fink Verlag, 1993. 28 Ibid. 29 Siebert, Manifesto, Vol. i–iii.

12

Siebert

continually ­between Kant and Hegel, critical theory concretely superseded Kant in Hegel. The most conservative or counter-revolutionary, Adolf Hitler, and the fascists in general, hated dialectics, as well as the revolutionary socialists and communists who used it. Hitler and Dr. Goebbels chose Schopenhauer over Hegel, whom they, nevertheless, considered to be a great German thinker: Hegel without dialectics; right-wing Hegelianism; positivism (Comtism). The critical ­theory of religion and society is as dialectical as it is anti-positivistic, and anti-fascist. During the Great Depression of 1929, dialectics were repressed in American civil society. Hegel became a persona non grata in many American universities. He was considered to be dangerous because he stressed, like Heraclitus, becoming over being and nothing. He reminded the capitalist ruling class that it was as finite and transitory as once the slave holders and the feudal lords before them, whom the bourgeoisie had determinately negated, sometimes decapitated, sometimes hanged, sometimes guillotined: Panta rei! (Everything is in motion) Polemos pataer panton! (War is the father of all things)! In contrast to Heraclitus or Hegel, slaveholders, feudal lords, and capitalists wanted to make slaves, serfs, and wage laborers believe, that they were eternal: that has been the very core of their ideology of domination, control, and exploitation: no Alternative Future. The ruling classes stressed with Parmenides being without nothing, and thus excluded becoming, or they emphasized with the Gautama (Buddha), nothing without being, and thus once more excluded becoming. Heraclitus and Hegel stressed becoming as the synthesis of being and nothing, and thus became the fathers of revolution or pro-volution: the power of the negative in history, versus positivism.30 In recent European and American history, the repression of dialectics has demanded a high price, wherever positivistically trained generals encountered dialectically educated generals: General Friedrich Paulus and General Georgy Zhukov in Stalingrad; General William Westmoreland and General Võ Nguyên Giáp in Vietnam; General Joseph Votel and the Iraqi Bath generals, who would later join isis in Syria and Iraq, and beyond that in North Africa, up to the present. From its very start and throughout, the critical theory of religion and society was dialectical in the Hegelian sense, and like the two pairs of dioscuri: The Christians Dirks and Kogon, and the enlighteners Horkheimer and Adorno. The Christian Dioscuri were friends with and followed the example of the journalist, psychotherapist, and Catholic theologian Ernst Michels, who together with the Protestant Theologian Paul Tillich, and the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, constituted after World War i the Theology Department of the secular Johann Wolfgang Goethe 30 Siebert, Manifesto, Vol. i–iii.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

13

University in Frankfurt, which had been founded shortly before World War i as a completely commercial university.31 As such, the Christians Dirks and Kogon emphasized and recognized the worldliness of the world, and proclaimed and pronounced the Evangelium in a non-traditional, non-eccesiastical language in secular civil society and state, in economic and political terms. The Christian dioscuri translated the biblical love of the neighbor into the secular ­anamnestic, present, and proleptic interdependence and solidarity with slaves, serfs, and wage laborers, following the example of the other dioscuri, the enlighteners Horkheimer and Adorno. Therefore, the Christian Dioscuri were later on often misunderstood by Catholics, as if they were secular enlighteners like their friends Horkheimer and Adorno, and thus were rejected. During the Adenauer restoration, the Frankfurter Hefte of Dirks and Kogon, lost many Catholic readers. Only the Reform-Catholics, together with many other religious and secular people, continued to read the Frankfurter Hefte before and after the Vatican Council ii, and even still after they had been sold not to the Catholic Church, but to the Social Democratic Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, and were called Neue Gesellschaft – Frankfuter Hefte. They certainly remained a most precious and rich resource of knowledge about past, present, and future macro-paradigmchanges for dialectical religiology, from 1946 to the present 2019. 7 Anti-fascism The critical theory of religion and society remembers the great Protestant, ­existential, and political theologian, Paul Tillich, the friend of the dioscuri Horkheimer and Adorno and of Erich Fromm, who was one of the few scholars ­besides Karl Marx who understood and comprehended fully Hegel’s dialectical logic, and turned against the Third Reich, and left with Horkheimer into American exile, and from there delivered wartime radio broadcasts into and against idolatrous Nazi Germany.32 The anti-idolatry attitude connected Guardini and Tillich, Dirks, and Kogon, as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, the latter being Tillich’s doctoral student, determined dialectical religiology. The Christian theologian and journalist, Dirks, wrote his incomplete dissertation on the young Marx. He wanted to bring together the sacred and the 31 32

Dirks, “Zwischen den Zeiten,” 85–93. Raffaele Laudani, ed., Secret Reports of Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013; Rolf Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson. (Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1994), 149–260.

14

Siebert

profane, C ­ atholicism and Marxism, and later on toward the end of his life had two Marxist assistants, who were also atheists, helping him compile his literary life-work. Walter Dirks composed open and anonymous Anti-Fascist articles in the Allgemeine Zeitung, and in other newspapers and journals in Frankfurt am Main, like Walter Benjamin, the teacher and friend of Adorno, and of the Marxist Bertolt Brecht, and of the Kabbalist, Gerhard Scholem, who tried to build a bridge between the secular and the religious, Marxism and Jewish mysticism.33 After World War i, Walter Dirks wrote against the German aristocracy receiving pensions, against the building of a German battleship, and finally against the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (National Socialist German Workers Party), or nsdap.34 While the Jew Walter Benjamin went with his sister into French exile, and was even for some time kept in a concentration camp, the Christian Walter Dirks was imprisoned, because of his resistance against fascism, and finally went into internal exile in Southern Germany. After the end of World War ii, Walter Dirks founded with Eugen Kogon the Catholic, a left-wing journal, the Frankfurter Hefte, for culture and politics, to which also Horkheimer and Adorno, and later on Jürgen Habermas, contributed. The Frankfurter Hefte were very popular among Catholics and others in West Germany until the Adenauer restoration period started, which returned to the pre-war German class society, the liberal Weimar Republic, out of which fascism had arisen in the first place, making it very likely and probable that it would return in the future. Seventy years later, in the form of the right-wing culturalization of inequality, right-wing populism, identity-politics, identitarianism, corporatism, fascism, and Trumpism, which opposes left-wing identity politics, including and recognizing more and more excluded groups, like homosexuals, lesbians, women, native people, Jews, Muslims, gypsies, and other minority ethnic groups in America and Europe, fascism has returned, decades earlier than Hitler had predicted before his double suicide with his wife Eva Hitler née Braun in his Berlin bunker, shortly before the double suicide of Dr. Joseph Goebbels and his wife, after she had poisoned her five children.35 Hitler and his wife, as well as Goebbels, had been baptized Catholics, and had been educated by priests and nuns in Austria. Goebbels was already fascist propaganda minister when he still payed back to the Catholic Church a loan that he received as a student completing his dissertation. Hitler had many 33

Walter Dirks, Der singende Stotterer: Autobiographische Texte. München: Kossel Verlag. 1983. 34 Ibid. 35 Anthony Read, The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 891–923.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

15

priest friends, who sold his paintings for him, and with whom he had long talks. He visited Benedictine monasteries and had long discussions with the Abbots. In his youth, Hitler wanted to become an Abbot himself. As apostate, Hitler shaped his SS formations according to the model of Catholic monastic orders. Hitler was horribly upset when his friend Father Leo, a former monk, with whom he had long talks for years in his apartment in Munich, was murdered by the SS during the Night of long knives, together with his former friend Röhm, and 180 other gay SA men, who were found in bed with Hitler Youth boys in inns in villages around Munich.36 Through the anti-fascist Catholic dioscuri, Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon and their Frankfurter Hefte, I became more and more familiar with the critical theorists of society, the anti-positivists, and anti-fascist, Jewish, enlightenment dioscuri, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Walter had called first Horkheimer and Adorno the dioscuri: in Greek mythology dioskouroi; being Greco-Roman deities; also being called in French Castor and Polydeuces, and in Latin Castor and Pollux; their mother being Leda, to whom Zeus appeared in the incarnation of a swan; being linked with Sparta and having their own temples in Athens and on Delos; the twins also being the namesake of the constellation Gemini; also having statues in Rome.37 The names of the dioscuri indicated that the pair of intellectuals, Horkheimer and Adorno, were as Jews not only rooted in Jerusalem, but also in Athens, Rome, and Paris.38 Dialectical religiology speaks of two pairs of dioscuri: Dirks and Kogon, on one hand, and Horkheimer and Adorno, on the other.39 Like the two pairs of dioscuri, the critical theory of religion and society has been rooted in Jerusalem/religion, Athens/philosophy and science, Rome/politics, and ­Paris/the modern enlightenment. Through Dirks and Kogon, I became familiar with Adorno and Horkheimer and their friends before I met some of them personally, as they were slowly returning from exile in the United States in the 1950s, in the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, and finally in the Institute for Social Research. It was rebuilt with the financial help of the City of Frankfurt and the American Military Government, situated in the headquarter building of I.G. Farben, one of the large corporations which had supported Adolf Hitler and his hell’s cartel, which produced Zyklon B, with which many Jews were gassed in the death camps.40 The humanistic Lessing Gymnasium, to which I went, stood very close to the I.G. Farben a­ dministration building. 36 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. 37 Dirks, Der Singende Stotterer. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, 431–507; Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008.

16

Siebert

Close to this building I once helped an old Jewish lady carry her suitcases to the air-shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium, from where she was to be transported with many other Frankfurt Jews to Eastern Europe. Neither of us knew where she was going once on the train. Neither did we know what was being developed in the I.G. Farben building before which we met: the insecticide Zyklon B.41 The Institute for Social Research has most recently been renovated again under the leadership of Director Axel Honneth, the student of Jürgen Habermas, sharing with him the emphasis on the human potentials of language and recognition, concentrating on the latter. Honneth often teaches in the United States, in New York, at Columbia University, etc. From 1946 to the present, 2019, the Frankfurter Hefte, aiming at the reconciliation of religion, Christianity, Judaism, ­Islam, Buddhism, etc., on one hand, and modern, secular culture and politics, as well as the bourgeois, Marxist, and Freudian enlightenments, on the other, have been a continual source of information and thought for the initiation and formation of the Anti-Fascist dialectical religiology, on the basis of the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School. All monthly issues of the Frankfurter Hefte, which toward the end of their lives Dirks and Kogon sold to the Social Democratic Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, and which then was renamed Neue Gesellschaft – Frankfurter Hefte, are collected in my personal library in the House of Peace, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, usa, and still serves continually the further evolution of the critical theory of religion and society. 8

Concentration Camps

Eugen Kogon was an Austrian Jew, who converted to Catholicism and NeoThomism. He was an outstanding political scientist. Because of his Anti-­Fascist criticism during business trips through fascist Germany, he was imprisoned in the concentration camp Buchenwald, near Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Weimar, the center of German classical culture, where he spent seven years. During Kogon’s imprisonment, his family in Vienna was neglected by the Cardinal, who had fascist inclinations, and thus lost their faith, for which their father suffered. Kogon was later liberated by American troops. They gave him a jeep with which he could travel from one liberated concentration camp to the next, and could finally write his famous book: Der SS Staat (The SS State).42 For four decades, Dirks and Kogon, on one hand, and the Dioscuri Horkheimer 41 Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel, 325–327. 42 Eugen Kogon, Der SS–Staat: Das System der Deutschen Konzentrationslager. Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1947.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

17

and Adorno, on the other, were in continual discourse and cooperation with each other concerning the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic revelation, on one hand, and modern, secular autonomous reason, and enlightenment, on the other. The two pairs of intellectuals always respected each other, but never converted to each other’s philosophical position. Kogon and Dirks were Christian believers, open for the enlightenment, and the Dioscuri Horkheimer and Adorno were enlighteners, open for progressive elements in Judaism, the ­Religion of Sublimity, Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, and Buddhism, the Religion of Inwardness, being willing to translate them into the modern discourse of the expert cultures, and into the modern lifeworld, in the modern systems of the human condition and action systems, still rooted in the human potential of language and memory, and in the evolutionary universal of the struggle for recognition, and in the mimetic and communicative rationality and praxis derived from them, and mediated by ethical values and norms; and even into the economic subsystem, rooted in the human potential of work and tool, and in the instrumental, or functional rationality and action, mediated by money; and into the political subsystem, also rooted in functional ­rationality and action, and being mediated by power.43 9 Theodicy Walter Dirks was usually more open to the Dioscuri Horkheimer and Adorno, and their enlightenment position, than his Thomistic friend Kogon.44 But toward the end of their cooperation in the Frankfurter Hefte, Kogon wanted to devote a whole issue on the theodicy of the goodness of God, the freedom of man, and the origin of evil , or simply the problem of the justification of God’s justice in the face of the injustices in his world: the problem about which one could not be silent any longer, particularly not after Auschwitz-Birkenau, B ­ uchenwald, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Auschwitz did not happen, because of Hegel’s holistic notion of the absolute Spirit, as some positivists argued; it did not happen because of Leibniz’s God, who supposedly created the best of all possible worlds; or because of the Rabbis, who prayed to Yahweh or Elohim; or because of the Christians, who elevated themselves to the Father of Jesus, the Christ; or of Kant’s imageless Thing in itself; or of the Idea of the German idealists; or of some of the German materialists, e.g. the totally Other, or the X-­ experience of the critical theorists of society. Auschwitz rather happened 43 Siebert, Manifesto. Vol. i–iii. 44 Dirks, Der Singende Stotterer.

18

Siebert

b­ ecause of positivism as the “metaphysics-of-what-is-the-case,” climaxing in fascism: its aristocratic principle of nature.45 The theodicy was also of greatest interest for the enlightenment Dioscuri, particularly after Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Mauthausen. Horkheimer and Adorno followed Marx and Freud, who had transformed the theodicy into a science of human suffering, the former identifying private property and the latter patricide as the cause of all evils.46 Walter did not agree with his friend Kogon concerning a whole Frankfurter Hefte issue on the theodicy problem. He did not believe that one had to have been in a concentration camp in order to have the right to happiness. Tears were flowing and Kogon gave in. The theodicy issue never h ­ appened in the Frankfurter Hefte, or later on in the Neue Gesellschaft – Frankfurter Hefte. But I spoke about the theodicy with Walter in his home in the Black Forest, when he was dying from Alzheimer’s disease. He confessed that he had suffered much. He, the believer, counted nevertheless on the possibility of the opposite of the resurrection, that death would lead us into nothingness, but even that would be interesting since we never experienced it before. While Walter had indeed suffered much in his life, he did, however, not want to talk about it. His atheistic assistants had to remind Walter in my presence that he suffered often from depression. In his last years, Walter could only overcome his depression, if at all, by traveling to the Swiss Benedictine monastery, Maria Einsiedeln, and by participating in its very festive high masses. The pillars of his life were, and remained to the end, marriage, Eucharist, and socialism.47 Walter had married late, when he was 40. He had four children. His wife, who shared with him not only marriage, family, and Eucharist, but also his humanistic and democratic socialism, took care of Walter most faithfully and tenderly up to the end. Walter died on May 30, 1991, near the Feast of Corpus Christi, which celebrates the Eucharist. In the development of the critical theory of religion and society, we followed rather Kogon than Walter Dirks, when we made the theodicy problem its very center.48

45 Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. ­Washington D.C.: Regnery History, 2016. 46 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. 47 Dirks, Der Singende Stotterer; Rudolf J. Siebert, “Marriage, Eucharist, and Socialism,” Cross Currents 39 no. 4 (1986): 442–457. 48 Rudolf J. Siebert, From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and Universal Solidarity. (New York: Peter Lang Inc., 2002), Chapters 2 & 6.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

19

For dialectical religiology, as for the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of society, the dialectical method, which stresses the negative, i.e. human suffering, was the most adequate way to deal with the theodicy problem. 10

Christianity and Socialism

In order to realize my democratization mission, which I received in Camp ­Allen, in Germany, in the spirit of the evolving dialectical religiology, I joined Dirks and Kogon, both being influenced by the critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno, before and after their return to their new Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, in the 1950s, in their attempt to form a Christian Democratic Party in Hessen, Germany, which would mediate and reconcile the modern disunion between the religious and the secular, more specifically, between Christianity and socialism, between Christians and workers. It was to replace the former, mainly bourgeois Center Party in the Weimar Republic, destroyed by fascism, which had been a purely Catholic party. During the Weimar Republic, my family, which was split partly into a Protestant-proletarian part, and partly into a Catholic-bourgeois part, the former voted for the Social Democratic Party (spd), and the latter for the Center Party. One member of my family, because he looked Jewish, because of some Jewish influence from the early 18th century, joined Hitler’s nsdap in order to protect himself, as he worked in the Dresdener Bank in Frankfurt. The Catholic Center Party gave Adolf Hitler the Emergency Laws, after he had burned the Reichstag and blamed the c­ ommunists for it in 1933, and thus produced an artificial political crisis. The Emergency Laws made Hitler legitimately a dictator. Pagan Fascism had hijacked not only the Weimar Constitution, but also Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. Afterwards, the Center Party was dissolved with the agreement of the ­Vatican. Its leader, Prelate Karst, went into hiding in Rome, searching in the Vatican, under the St. Peter’s Cathedral, in vain for the graves of Peter and Paul. Dirks and Kogon planned a new Post-Center party, in which not only Catholics, but also Protestant Christians would be united with workers. This connection of the Christians with the workers, Christianity with socialism, would indeed have been something new after the Vatican had been allied for decades with fascist dictators, like Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Pavelić, and Petain, the hero of Verdun, etc. Dirk’s and Kogon’s project failed. Adenauer formed a Christian Democratic Party, in which the Catholic and Protestant bourgeoisie was united, and the workers, who distrusted the Christians as much as the Christians distrusted them, joined the charismatic Social Democratic leader Kurt Schuhmacher, whom Kogon had met already in the concentration Camp ­Buchenwald, and

20

Siebert

the communist party, which had reached its climax in the Spartacus Movement of the martyrized Dr. Rosa Luxemburg and Dr. Karl Liebknecht, which was soon abolished by the restorative Adenauer Regime.49 Kogon’s and Dirk’s other project, the European Union, succeeded up to the present, 2019: the end of the Pax Americana. Both projects remained important for the evolving critical theory of religion and society. 11

Double Reunion

In the perspective of the critical theory of religion and society, the very motivation for the Christian alliance with fascism in the 20th and 21st centuries has been a strong and often hateful anti-socialism, as well as anti-communism, in the partially still feudal and bourgeois Roman Catholic Church, as well as in the bourgeois Protestant Churches, particularly the one of the German Christians under Bishop Müller, appointed by Adolf Hitler in Berlin. A century before Adolf Hitler, a Catholic Spanish diplomate, Donoso Cortes, had predicted, that with the fall of the monarchies in Europe through the bourgeois revolutions, dictators would arise. There would be bourgeois dictators-from-above, and there would be socialist and communist dictators-from-below. Long ­before the Catholic and bourgeois dictators Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pavelić, and Petain, etc., an authoritarian, political tradition and disposition was formed in the Latin Church, to side with the bourgeois dictators-from-above against the socialist and communist dictators-from-below, when the time would come. To the contrary, the attempt of Dirks and Kogon to unite Christianity and other world religions on one hand, with a humanistic, democratic socialism on the other, continued into our new dialectical religiology.50 Here, however, dialectical religiology had to disagree not with Dirks and Kogon, but with Adorno. In the 1960s, Adorno defended his great teacher, and doktorvater (doctor-father) for his dissertation on Søren Kierkegaard, in the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, the socialist theologian Paul Tillich, against one of his revolutionary students and doctoral candidates, but added to the defense that his ­teacher’s Christian socialism was nonsense. Here, Adorno sided and agreed with Bertolt Brecht and Gerhard Scholem – rather than with his teachers and friends Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Paul Tillich, who emphasized reunion – that the disunion between Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity, or Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, on one hand, 49 Dirks, Der Singende Stotterer. 50 Siebert, Manifesto, Vol. i–iii.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

21

and Marxism, on the other, could not be reconciled. It would, according to Scholem, be suicidal, to try to do so.51 In contrast, dialectical religiology opted more for Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Fromm, and their possible reunion of religion and reason, faith and enlightenment, than for Adorno, Brecht, or ­Scholem, and their continuing insistence on the antagonism between them. As Horkheimer saw the possibility of a reunion of Judaism and bourgeois enlightenment, Moses and Kant, so dialectical religiology envisioned the possibility of a reunion between Christianity and socialist enlightenment, taking ­seriously Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth’s humanity, his teachings and his parables on one hand, and the Marxist Bertolt Brecht and his dramas and prose on the other. We are reminded that Brecht, who lived up to his last days in his apartment above the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in East Berlin, read the Bible and the Christian Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and was finally, according to his own wishes, buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery besides Hegel and his wife Marie von Tucher. They were buried also besides Hegel’s friend Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his wife, and also besides the first German novelist, Theodor Fontane. In any case, the Christian Eugen Kogon wished that there had existed in the 20th century a Christian, Anti-Fascist, humanist-socialist Bertolt Brecht, despite of the latter’s highly critical attitude toward the historical church, and his temptation not to believe in eternal life.52 12 Universalization From its very start, the critical theory of religion and society aimed at the universalization of the reunion of religion and, not only of analytical understanding, but also, and most of all, of dialectical reason, achieved by the German idealists, as well as of the resolution of the class antagonism in modern civil society, fought for by the German materialists, seeing both aims as being ­interconnected and equally important. Like the idealists, the dialectical religiology tried to recognize as necessary the history of religion in its manifold formations, and to find again in the Manifest Religion of Christianity the Truth and the Idea, which had been hidden already in their very beginning: the reconciliation of God with himself, the Spirit, the divine trinitarian structure and dynamic, and with nature, that nature as being the totally other of God, is divine in itself at least in its origin, and that the finite spirit of man is that to 51 52

Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2012. Eugen Kogon, “Der Christliche Politiker.” Frankfurter Hefte 12 (November 1957), 753–758.

22

Siebert

e­ levate himself or herself from nature, partially as individual, to that divine mediation, partially to come to it as nations in world history as the realm of freedom, and in the history of religions as Kingdom of God. The critical theory of religion and society separates both realm of freedom and Kingdom of God as sharply as Church and Kingdom of Heaven. In the Church the believers still get married, because they still die, and in the Kingdom of Heaven people no longer get married, because they no longer die. 13

Trinitarian Dynamic

According to the critical theory of religion and society, in Christianity, God’s trinitarian structure and dynamic was reflected in nature and man, who had been created in his image. The world was not without order. According to Augustine, the Neoplatonic Church father, in Antiquity, and the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, in the Middle Ages, the structure and dynamic of the divine Trinity was mirrored most of all in man’s subjective spirit. For the Franciscan Bonaventura, the divine trinitarian structure and dynamic was reflected in all spheres of finite being, in nature and man, and that reflective order could be seen in Paradise by pre-lapsarian man, but was lost by fallen man, and his defective intellect, but could be envisioned again by post-lapsarian redeemed man. Unfortunately, the Latin Church followed Thomas Aquinas rather than Bonaventura, at least up to Vatican Council ii. Dialectical religiology always remained aware of the trinitarian structure and dynamic not only in Christianity, but also in many other positive religions, theologies, and philosophies of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. 14

Dialectical Notion

For dialectical religiology, according to the German idealists, the trinitarian structure and dynamic of the Divinity could be recognized again in itself by man. In the view of Meister Eckhart and Hegel, the “eye” (Logos, Reason, Logic) through which God sees man is the eye through which man sees God.53 The Divine and the human logic were one and the same. Man could also recognize again the reflection of God’s trinitarian dynamic and structure, his logic, in nature and man, and this reflection could become again the basis for his ethics 53

Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C. Walshe. New York: The Crossroads Publishing Company, 2009.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

23

and social ethics, his morality, his actions. For the German idealists in the 18th and 19th century, the time was fulfilled that the justification through the ­dialectical, holistic notion, or nature, of things – the unity of the universal, particular and singular, or the unity of notion, judgement, and conclusion – ­became a spiritual need. When this happened, the unity of the internal and the external world was no longer present in the immediate consciousness of the people, or in reality, and in religious faith nothing was justified any longer in enlightened modern civil society. The harshness and hardness of an objective command, an external enforcement, the power of the state or the Church, could not accomplish any moral reform any longer. The public sphere was characterized by hoaxes, humbug, plagiarism, phonies, post-facts, and fake news. The moral swamp could no longer be drained. The moral decay penetrated even the Vatican as well as the White House. Wall Street responded to ­President Trump’s second State of the Union Address in 2019, stating: Metaphysically, the American language is money – the shared idiom, the common denominator, the national theme and genius that overrides all others. Mr. Trump, a man of money, advanced his strongest argument early on in his State of the Union of 2019, when he conjured the flourishing state of the American economy, a revival, a religious term as well as an economic one, that carries with it the most reliable possibilities of American hope, unity and inclusion. Immigrants are drawn first of all, by the promise of American money: that is the freedom to seek it. Freedom and money are the keys to everything. Mister Trump said as much in his State of the Union. It was his promise. He may be a spectacular oddity in ­American history and politics, but he was entirely traditional as he made the essential, paradoxical connection between American money and American virtue: the linkage of opportunity, freedom and possibility.54 For dialectical religiology, here Wall Street delivers the best definition of the idolatrous, bourgeois materialism of money, in opposition to any form of idealism, or of historical materialism. Of course, for President Trump’s principled realism, capitalism is also idealism, somehow? Maybe he means the philanthropy, introduced into American civil society after the Ludlow Massacre of workers and their families, initiated by Rockefeller and supported by the Federal Government in Colorado on April 20th, 1914, if that is not only a small ­return of the surplus value produced by the workers, and appropriated by the 54

Lance Morrow, “The Longest Day for Trump’s Adversaries.” Wall Street Journal. February 6, 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-longest-day-for-trumps-adversaries-11549497693.

24

Siebert

owners, for tax deduction, or a mere means to give the capitalist oligarchs a human face, i.e. idealism as ideology.55 The dollar does, indeed, as Wall Street and Goldman Sachs say, include some people, but it also excludes masses of others, and throws them into the innumerable urban and rural slums, without opportunity, freedom, and possibility; that precisely is the powerful negativity that drives capitalism, as the private appropriation of collective surplus value, into socialism, as the collective appropriation of collective surplus value. For Wall Street, money is no longer the source of all evil, as many positive religions and philosophies have taught in connection with their usury laws. Moral reform of such idolatrous, bourgeois materialism, as portrayed by Wall Street, may not be possible, as the disintegration of modern bourgeois culture has reached and penetrated too deeply into the family, civil society, state, and history. In this materialistic late capitalistic society, the younger generations, the millennials, look at the immoral swamp of church and state with skepticism and even cynicism, and consider the religious faith of their still believing parents to be ­primitive, while at the same time they do not deem it primitive when homosexual communities in California spread the ashes of their departed friends over the Pacific Ocean, as once the Vikings did when they burned their dead on their ships in the Baltic Sea, or in the North Sea, in the spirit of the trinitarian Gothic Religion of Blood and Soil. The critical theory of religion and society addresses precisely these younger generations in late capitalist societies, which still determinately negate the Middle Ages and Antiquity, as they are already themselves concretely superseded by the desirable, Post-Modern, Alternative Future iii – a new humanist, or democratic socialist global macro-paradigm, if not by the less desirable Post-Modern Alternative Future I – the totally administered signal society, or by the entirely undesirable, Alternative Future ii – ­traditional regime-change and drone wars and civil wars, and finally the abc war, the clash between the Eastern and Western civilizations, i.e. total barbarism or death, as the Millennials know only too well. They don’t need the ­Pentagon advisor Huntington in order to know it. At present, 2019, 50% of the younger generation in the United States are longing, like the generation of the 1960s, for a humanistic, or democratic socialism, and express this desire quite openly: they want to transform the Democratic Party into a Labor Party, a humanistic, or democratic socialist party, and they are working on it, even in the u.s. Congress with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, etc. What in the view of critical theory stands in the way of a labor party in Washington d.c., like in Ottawa, or L­ ondon, 55

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–2001. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

25

or Paris, etc. is the lack of an adequate class consciousness among the 156 million American workers, too many of whom are longing for being middle class, like the Trump family. 14.1 Evangelium According to the German idealists, when the Evangelium was no longer preached to the poor farmer and worker classes, when, as Rabbi Jesus put it in the Sermon on the Mount that the salt had become tasteless – ‘You are the salt of the earth. But if salt becomes tasteless, what can make it salty again? It is good for nothing, and can only be thrown out to be trampled underfoot by men’ – and when all religious and metaphysical foundations had been taken away silently from the family, civil society, state and history by the bourgeois enlightenment, then the farming and working classes, for the remaining undeveloped reason of which the Truth could only be in the form of representations, like images, stories, and music, do no longer know how to help their urge, desire, and longing of their interior world for the Transcendence, the Absolute, the Idea, the totally Other than the horror and terror, the cross of nature and history, the death of God, the dialectical monstrosity of Christ, the pain of God.56 The farming and working classes in antagonistic, modern civil society stood still closest to the infinite pain of God’s love, revealed through the crucified Christ for centuries. But since the bourgeois enlighteners had perverted love into a love without all pain, farmers and workers saw themselves abandoned by their enlightened teachers. These bourgeois intellectuals had admittedly helped themselves through the reflection of analytical understanding. They had found their satisfaction in the finitude, in their subjectivity and its virtuosity, and precisely thereby in utter vanity. But in this vain virtuosity of the bourgeois intellectuals, that substantial core of the nations, the farmer and worker classes, could not find their own satisfaction. Unlike the German materialists, including the critical theorists of society, dialectical religiology does not separate dialectic and notion, and does not reject the latter as mere myth and magic, but intends through it to mediate and reconcile the internal and external world, the Evangelium and the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements, religious faith and autonomous reason, in the extremely materialistic, empirical, and extrovert, late capitalist society.

56

Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjevic, God in Pain. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012; Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 2008.

26

Siebert

15 Enlightenment In the view of the critical theory of religion and society, Immanuel Kant, the greatest bourgeois enlightener, discovered the trinitarian structure and dynamic of the Divinity in many positive religions: in Daoism, the Religion of Measure, in Hinduism, the Religion of Imagination, in Zoroastrianism, the Religion of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, in the Egyptian Religion of Riddle, in the Greek Religion of Fate and Beauty, and in the Platonic philosophy, ­developed out of it and against it, in the Roman Religion of Utility, and even in the Gothic Religion of Blood and Soil, and finally in Christianity, as the Religion not only of Being and Nothing, but of Becoming, in which the former were concretely superseded, and of Freedom, or as the Absolute Religion, in which all other p ­ ositive religions were determinately negated, i.e. not only critiqued, but also preserved, and elevated, and fulfilled, as it itself has been continuing to evolve.57 Kant saw the divine Trinities in all these positive religions grounded in the trinitarian structure of the human mind, and explained them in this way out of it. Hegel saw the divine trinitarian structure and dynamic reflected in all dimensions of nature and man: in the cosmos, in the human organism, as well as in the human subjectivity, in abstract right, in personal morality, in family, in civil society, in the state, in history, in art, in religion and in philosophy and science.58 For Hegel, the trinitarian structure and dynamic and its reflection in nature and man is revealed clearest and most completely in still evolving Christianity as the Manifest Religion, and its sublation in the dialectical, theological philosophy, or philosophical theology: the exitus movement of God through the differentiation between God and Logos, the creation of nature and man through the Logos, the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus, the Christ, his birth, and death on the cross, and the reditus movement of God through resurrection, ascension, and sitting to the right hand of the Father, and the coming of the Spirit, as so many moments in God’s history.59 According to the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, founder of the anti-fascist Confessing Church, Hegel should have become the Thomas Aquinas of the Protestants, and so the dialectical religiologists may add, of the Catholics as well, at least after Vatican Council ii. Unfortunately, the Latin Church rejected Hegel, as it had neglected Bonaventura, and as it had censured and excommunicated Meister Eckhart up to the present, the fathers of the inquisition m ­ isunderstanding his o­ rthodox 57

Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And other Writings, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Georg W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Vol. ii: Determinate Religion. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 233–760. 58 Ibid. 59 John 1 & 4:1–42.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

27

­ anentheism as heretical pantheism.60 This, however, did not prevent the p Catholic city of Cologne in Germany to dedicate one street near the Cathedral to St. Albertus Magnus, and another to the excommunicated Meister Eckhart. Horkheimer’s critical theory of society came close to Barth’s dialectical theology, but did not understand the Christian or any other Trinity. The German materialists superseded the German idealists, and the bourgeois, enlightenment movements and revolutions from Oliver Cromwell to the American Civil War. They moved more on the phenomenological level of analytical understanding than of dialectical reason. They became precisely thereby Unitarian, and thus negated the German idealists too abstractly. Thus, they lost the theological and philosophical trinitarian Idea, and ended up in the present disorder, in which the bourgeois revolutions turned into the fascist counter-revolutions, in order to defend themselves against socialism and communism.61 The Marxist revolutions turned into Stalinism and red fascism, and were finally overcome by the neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989 and 1991, for the time being. The Freudian revolutions turned into the unlimited porno-society, which produces havoc on the highest levels of state and church, in the White House, and in the Vatican.62 Critical theory of religion and society remained throughout its evolution committed to Kant and his subjective-idealistic enlightenment, as well as to Hegel, his disciple, being an objective and absolute idealistic enlightener, critical of the dialectic of enlightenment a century before Horkheimer and Adorno.63 The critical theorists of society were, following Marx, critical of m ­ odern Christianity because it was not dialectical enough: i.e. it was not ­sufficiently concerned with the negative in the modern world – the evil, the suffering, i.e. theodicy.64 16

The Truth

The non-conforming critical theory of religion and society aims at helping to make this still partial, merely theological and philosophical Christian 60 61 62

John 1 & 4: 1–42; Acts 17; Siebert, Manifesto. Christian Zentner, Illustrierte Geschichte der Ära Adenauer. München: Nebel Verlag, 1984. Fabian Thunemann, “Kiran Klaus Patels: Bestandaufnahme Europas.” Neue GesellschaftFrankfurter Hefte 66 (January 2019): 84–85; Sharon LaFraniere, “Seeking Truth, Mueller Exposes Culture of Lies Around Trump.” New York Times December 2, 2018; Zentner, Illustrierte Geschichte. 63 Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason; Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Vol. ii, 233–760. 64 Theodor W. Adorno, Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse: Ein philosophisches Lesebuch. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997.

28

Siebert

t­rinitarian reconciliation, into a universal, psychological, and sociological ­mediation.65 As such it has to protect and preserve the Truth, the Rose of Reason in the Cross of the Present, and it has to help to make the rational real and the real rational in direction of post-modern, Alternative Future iii – the just and free, classless, and reconciled society, and to avoid Alternative Future i – the totally administered society, and Alternative Future ii, the entirely militarized society.66 Dialectical religiology, embracing the biological, psychological, sociological, philosophical and theological, intends to help the temporal, empirical, historical present of modern civil society find its way out of its double disunion between the religious and the secular, and between the bourgeoisie and the masses of the workers. It does not leave in place idealistic indifference to the historical present. It combines dialectically German idealism and German materialism.67 Like the idealists, dialectical religiology tries to recognize as necessary the history of religions in its manifold formations, and to find again in the Manifest Religion of Christianity as their climax in the Truth and the Idea: the reconciliation of God with himself, the trinitarian dynamic, the Spirit, and with nature, that the being other of God, is divine in itself at least in its origin, and that the finite spirit of man is partially in himself that, to elevate himself from nature to that divine mediation, partially to come to it in world history.68 The non-conformist critical theory of religion and society aims at making this partial, merely theological and philosophical trinitarian reconciliation, into a universal, psychological and sociological one. It has to protect and preserve the Truth, the Rose of Reason in the Cross of the Present, and it has to help to make the Rational real and the real rational in direction of post-modern Alternative Future iii – the just and free, classless and reconciled society, and to avoid postmodern Alternative Future i – the totally administered society, and postmodern Alternative Future ii – the entirely militarized society.69 That precisely is the immediate practical issue and concern of dialectical religiology as characterized by the theory–praxis dialectic.70 It is its praxis, which has to prove the truth of the critical theory of ­religion and society.

65 Siebert, Manifesto, Vol. i–iii. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

17

29

Christian Communism

From the very start of the critical theory of religion and society, the religious, and particularly Christian, both Catholic and Protestant, often fanatic and most aggressive hostility toward socialism and communism, which had been expressed most powerfully in Operation Barbarossa, 4 million men from all over Europe, most of them baptized Christians, marching into the Soviet Union, murdering 26 million communists, was very astonishing, since Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth had made communism the condition for entering the Kingdom of Heaven. The early Church had been communistic, and communism was present in all monastic orders ever since in the Latin and the Greek Church. This was expressed in the vow of poverty: These (the newly converted and baptized Christians in Jerusalem) remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. The many miracles and signs worked through the apostles made a deep impression on everyone. The faithful all lived together and owned everything in common; they sold their goods and possessions and shared out the proceeds among themselves according to what each one needed. They went as body to the Temple every day, but met in their houses for the breaking of bread; they shared their food gladly and generously; they praised God and were looked up to by everyone. Day by day the Lord added to their community those destined to be saved.71 The whole group of believers was united, heart and soul; no one claimed for his own use anything that he had, as everything they owned was held in common. The apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with great power, and they were all given great respect. None of their members was ever in want, as all those who owned land or ­houses would sell them, and bring the money from them, to present it to the apostles; it was then distributed to any members who might be in need.72 From the book of Acts, from Christianity as the Religion of Becoming, rather than of Being or Nothing, and of Freedom, Karl Marx, the baptized Jew, had taken the principle of his communism: from everybody according to his ability, 71 72

Acts 2:42–47. Acts 4:32–35.

30

Siebert

to everybody according to his need.73 Marx did not only take his children to a Catholic Church in London to hear the beautiful music, but also told them about the poor carpenter Jesus of Nazareth who was murdered by the rich people.74 Marx was grateful to Christianity, and was willing to forgive it much, because it introduced the importance and recognition of the child into history. But he also criticized the bourgeois Christians of his time in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and Washington d.c. etc. for not following the Gospels, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. However, my Pastor, Georg W. Rudolphi of the Catholic Parish Sta. Familia in Frankfurt-Ginnheim, who resisted fascism most bravely, and suffered much from it between 1933 and 1945, still believed in the last year of the war, that Adolf Hitler was the only man who could possibly conquer and destroy atheistic bolshevism, and Eastern and Western Marxism in general, even still after the lost battles of Stalingrad and Kursk.75 18

Christian Democratic Party

The critical theory of religion and society has to admit sadly, that Dirks and Kogon lost their battle for a Christian Democratic Party (cdu), which would have united workers and Christians.76 The Christians did not trust the workers, and the workers did not trust the Christians. Conrad Adenauer, who had once congratulated Benito Mussolini in Rome for his election victory, formed a cdu, which united the Catholic and Protestant bourgeoisie.77 The workers followed the charismatic Social-Democratic leader, Kurt Schuhmacher, whom Eugen Kogon had met already in the concentration camp Buchenwald, and had had discourse with about Christianity and socialism.78 Other workers joined the Communist Party, which Chancellor Adenauer outlawed. Ludwig Erhard, whom Hitler had met already during the war, was asked to prepare a currency reform, which would leave the German class system intact, he carried it out after the war, and promised, nevertheless, wealth for everybody in a social, but capitalistic economy. Erhard became economics minister under Adenauer, and 73

Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program.” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978), 531. 74 Eleanor Marx-Aveling in Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981), 252–253. 75 Weitensteiner, Warum denn wir, immer wir? 76 Eugen Kogon, “Revolution und Theologie–Das Neue in unserem Zeitalter: Ein S­ ymposion.” Frankfurter Hefte 9 (September 1967): 299–302; Zentner, Illustrierte Geschichte. 77 Zentner, Illustrierte Geschichte. 78 Ibid., 189.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

31

finally Chancellor after Adenauer. He also became very rich in the process.79 While Kogon and Dirks failed in resisting Adenauer’s restoration policies and politics, they were, nevertheless, successful with him in preparing the European Union.80 Kogon joined the Social Democratic Party. Dirks joined the Christian Democratic Party. I joined cdu with Walter. The political struggles for a cdu, which would unite Christians and workers, influenced very much the formation of our dialectical religiology. We stood with Walter and then with Johannes Baptist Metz, the father of the new political theology and liberation theology, on the side of the workers, against Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s jurist and political theologian, and against the traditional political theology, which always stood on the side of slaveholders, feudal lords, and capitalists. Schmitt and Metz met once in the latter’s small country church in Bavaria, and compared their contradictory theological views quite peacefully. Schmitt called Metz’s theology a Prometheus theology, and his own an Epimetheus theology.81 Also the critical theory of religion and society can be called a Prometheus theory. 19 Seminary While I was studying at the University of Mainz, from 1947 – 1953, and cooperated with Dirks and Kogon, and through them with Horkheimer and Adorno, and later on with their Institute for Social Research, while developing the ­critical theory of religion and society, I resided in the Priest Seminary of the ­Diocese of Mainz, near the St. Martin’s Cathedral, together with many other seminarians who had just returned from the different fronts of World War ii, and were through their terrible war experiences motivated to study theology, and for the priesthood. The hands that had been trained to kill, were now to be prepared to celebrate the Holy Mass for the sins of the world. Regens Joseph Maria Reuss had himself been an army chaplain, and had worn an officer’s uniform with the cross and the swastika on it. He had fought so fanatically on the back of a tank at the Eastern front in Operation Barbarossa against atheistic bolshevism, that he did not notice how half of each of his feet were freezing off, and had later on to be removed without anesthesia. He was witness, together with his Protestant colleague, how thousands of Russian children were mowed down by machine gun fire, and being bound by the Empire-Concordat, 79 Ibid., 310–313. 80 Ibid. 81 Rudolf J. Siebert, “Introduction,” in The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society, ed. Michael R. Ott. (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 67–68.

32

Siebert

could not do anything else than pray the Rosary. He finally had served in an SS prison in Paris, accompanying daily more or less guilty or innocent prisoners to the gallows, or to the shooting place, and then writing consoling letters to the relatives at home.82 When Reuss came home from the war, he felt so guilty, that he wanted to resign from the priesthood. It would indeed have been the right thing to do. But instead he let himself be persuaded, nevertheless, by Bishop Stohr of Mainz, to become Regens of his Seminary, and later on became even Sufragan Bishop. Reuss taught and wrote much about love. But he repressed homosexual tendencies in the all-male Seminary as rigorously as heterosexuality, and when it surfaced, nevertheless, he ignored or denied it, without doing much about it. Clerical sexual abuse cases happened outside the Seminary in the University and in an orphanage, and were handled by the Bishop and by the church court without state interference. The guilty priests were released from their offices and sent to a monastery for a year, and then were reassigned again. Regens Reuss promised his seminarians that he would lead them either to the altar, the Sacrament of the Priesthood, or to the Sacrament of Marriage, keeping both sacraments separate and exclusive from each other, which he knew was wrong. He smoked day and night, in order to master his tensions, which drove him up the walls. He loved his mother. His father had committed suicide. During the Second Vatican Council, Reuss fought for a married and unmarried priesthood. When he was unsuccessful in his plea, he fought for the renewal of a married diaconate and succeeded. The Regens never spoke about politics. But when a socialist student from the German Democratic Republic wanted to study for the priesthood in his Seminary, he rejected him.83 His hate against socialism and communism survived the war into the Adenauer restoration period; there was no love for the identified enemy.84 When Reuss retired, he was very lonely. When he died, he was buried in the St. Martin’s Cathedral together with all the previous bishops of Mainz. In the Seminary, I was very much interested in theology. But I was, like Romano Guardini, whom I admired, forty years earlier in the same place, very critical of the intellectually deadening neo-scholasticism, and the overall authoritarian, which was half feudal and half bourgeois spirit.85 Whenever Bishop Stohr came for a visit, and wanted his ring to be kissed, I escaped into the toilet. I paid for my room and board in the Seminary and my tuition at the University through my work 82

Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933–1949. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983. 83 Zentner, Illustrierte Geschichte. 84 Matthew 5–7. 85 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1969.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

33

as a journalist in Frankfurt, as an assembly worker in the Opel car factory in Rüsselsheim, and in the coal mine in Bottrop, with the financial help of a good family friend, Dr. Alois Bilz, a journalist at the Frankfurter Börse, or Stock Exchange, a good Catholic and former member of the Center Party. Wherever I worked, I was very much interested in what co-workers were thinking about religion in general (and Christianity in particular) on one hand, and socialism/ communism on the other, and if the Evangelium was still preached to them, and if they could still accept it, or if the work world had become entirely deChristianized and secularized.86 I found that some workers were still very religious. My supervisor in the Bottrop mine operation had a son, who was 40 years old, but behaved as if he was four years old. His sister had continually taken care of him. During the war, the fascist party members and administrators came to the supervisor and offered to him the possibility of euthanasia for his mentally-disabled son, as to many others. It would lift a great burden from the son himself, as well as from his sister, and from the whole family, and from the Volksgemeinschaft (the national community), and from the fascists state. Whoever did not produce surplus value and at the same time cost a lot, was life-not-worthy-of-life in the capitalist and fascist view. But the father threatened the fascists; he said he would defend his son with a gun if they would come back again to get him. They did not come back. However, I found a majority of workers everywhere were not like the saintly Catholic supervisor, but rather had become completely secularized in the late capitalistic world, liberal or fascist, as well as in the socialist world.87 At the time, I was an enthusiastic follower of the Jesuit priest, Father Leppich, who came from the now Polish Silesia, and preached a Christian-socialist message all over West Germany in large mass rallies. He translated the Gospels well to masses of people, who suffered much, and who knew that something was missing in the post-war, capitalistic, economic miracle, stimulated by the Marshall Plan.88 Unfortunately, Father Leppich was sacrificed by his Jesuit Order and his Church to the Adenauer restoration, never to be seen again. I was also very much interested in the worker-priest project in France.89 But, unfortunately, this project was also cancelled by the good Pope John xxiii, because the priests worked with the workers in the factories, and then lived with them in their poor housing, and then became leaders in the communist party, and then some of them also got 86

Walter Dirks, “Die Entchristlichung der Arbeitswelt: Dokumentation zu Abschluss des Apostolats der französischen ‘Arbeiterpriester.’” Frankfurter Hefte 14 no. 12. (December 1959), 851–860. 87 Zentner, Illustrierte Geschichte. 88 Ibid. 89 Dirks, “Die Entchristlichung der Arbeitswelt,” 851–860.

34

Siebert

married. It was obviously hard to get together Christianity and the workers, theology and socialism. But critical theory of religion and society was committed to this mediation, nevertheless, and we have worked for it up to the present – 2019 – in the American, European, and Slavic World.90 20

Cult and Mimesis

So, finally, as I continued to develop my dialectical religiology in the Seminary, I remained interested in theology and humanism, in Christianity and democratic socialism, and later on in the new political theology and liberation ­theology. But I did not let myself be ordained a priest of the Latin Church. Enlightened friends thought I had entered the Seminary in the first place only out of gratitude to my Uncle, Dr. Alois Bilz, who told me of the glory of the priesthood and the papacy from my childhood on, and of Augustine and his tolle lege, and who gave me a book about Nonni, who found his happiness as a missionary to the Eskimos who even used an airplane in his work, or to my youth chaplain, Father Hermann Schlachter, a follower of Don Bosco, who ­contributed much to my religious education, and showed me the way to St. Paul. His father, a good Catholic, worked for the German Empire Railroad in a high management position, being responsible for the train schedules; also for those trains that travelled to Auschwitz and Treblinka, and all other concentration camps and death camps. However, I did not let myself be ordained because I felt very much like Horkheimer, the founder of the critical theory, in his Christology from below, at the same time in the 1950s, amidst the restoration German Federal Republic, and I still feel that way today in the face of the political decisions of the Church, and of the global clerical child abuse scandals. Jesus died for the human beings, he could not keep himself for himself miserly and mean and he belonged to all what suffers. The Church Fathers made out of that a positive religion. That means, they made out of that a teaching which was also still a consolation for the evil person. Since then, that was in the world so successful, that the thought of Jesus has in general nothing at all any longer to do with actions and, yes, certainly nothing at all any longer with the suffering people. Whoever reads the Evangelium and does not see that Jesus has died against his present day representatives cannot read at all. This theology is the most furious, fierce and severe scorn, and sheer mockery, which has ever happened to a thought. The early Church accepted finally after many internal fights and battles soldiers into its community, it did not yet bless the 90 Siebert, Manifesto, Vol. i–iii.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

35

murder weapons of two hostile armies. The spiritual energies, which were awakened through the unheard of deed of Jesus, which broke through the coldness of Antiquity, the positive religion, which appealed to him, directed away from mimesis to cult, from action to worship. If that had not happened, Jesus would probably have been forgotten, his supporters would have squandered themselves, they would have perished in darkness; instead of a successful organization, which is also not poor in education results, nothing would remain, the good deeds and organizations and the bad deeds and institutions of Christianity would not be listed and registered in any history book, and Jesus would remain right. His realm would not be of this world; who could dare to say what is the better.91 As enthusiastic as I was concerning Father Leppich and the French worker priests, I could not imagine myself being locked up in an authoritarian, bourgeois parish, thinking in neo-scholastic terms without dialectics, sufficient theodicy, serious concern with the negative, evil, suffering of the world; overemphasizing cult versus mimesis; celebrating a harmonious liturgy incongruent and out of touch with the horror and terror of nature and history; serving in a bureaucratic, half feudal and half bourgeois Church, continually being in tension with the Gospels, to which it refers; giving meaning to reality without giving reality to meaning; holding on to a Christology from above without a sufficient Christology from below, or vice versa; and preaching to the rich people of the economic miracle of the German Federal Republic after a murderous war, which cost the lives of 70 million people, that, as Jesus put it, ‘No one can be the slave of two masters: he will either hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn. You cannot be the slave both of God and of money.’92 Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘I tell you solemnly, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yes, I tell you again, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven…’93 And he (the rich young man) said to him (Jesus), ‘Master, I have kept all of these (Ten Commandments) from my earliest days.’ Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him and he said, ‘There is one thing you lack. Go and sell everything you own and give the money to the poor, and you

91 92 93

Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason. (New York: Continuum, 2004), 87–109. Matthew 6:24. Matthew 19:23–26.

36

Siebert

will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ But his face fell at these words and he went away, for he was a man of great wealth.94 Just before the Jewish Passover (28 AD) Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and in the Temple he found people selling cattle and sheep and pigeons, and the money changers sitting at their counters there. Making a whip out of some cord, he drove them all out of the Temple, cattle and sheep as well, scattered the money changers’ coins, knocked their tables over and said to the pigeon-sellers ‘Take all this out of here and stop turning my Father’s house into a market.’ Then his disciples remembered the words of scripture: Zeal for your house will devour me.95 I found it strange that a celibate clergy, eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven sake, without marriage and family, would regulate the married and family life of the laity. I could not imagine myself walking around in the black clerical uniform, the white collar turned backward, and maybe even driving on a motorcycle like Father Schlachter and other good clerical friends of mine, in order to prove to the youth that I was not only Medieval, but also Modern, not only non-contemporaneous, but also contemporaneous. I could not imagine myself preaching in a parish that the world had already been redeemed, when it was only too obvious from the terrible experiences of my generation before, during and after World War ii, that the world was not yet redeemed. Things had even become worse in the Christian centuries; there had been no Auschwitz or Buchenwald, death camps, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before in world history. Things were certainly not – in the words of Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth – as they had been intended to be by God from the beginning of creation, or essentially, or as they ought to be according to their triplicate nature, but rather the very opposite, in family, society, state, history, culture, and even in the Church; people had become more and more unteachable. The Kingdom of Heaven had not yet arrived. Sometimes I sat with my family in the air-shelter of my Pastor Georg Wilhelm Rudolphi, who was my great and admired example, below the Sta. Familia Church in Ginnheim, Frankfurt, when the British bombers came at night with their roaring engines in order to bomb the open city. Father Rudolphi was frightened as we all were. He suffered much from the British and American bombers, as well as from the fascist officials around him, and from the I.G. Farben employees who were his parishioners but did not like him and wanted him to go. Nazi informers, some of them former priests, came to his very prophetic sermons and wrote down his provocative sentences. At the end 94 95

Mark 10:17–23. John 2:13–16.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

37

of the war, an American bomber was shot down above the Sta Familia Church. A pilot landed in a nearby forest and being wounded called for a doctor. A local Nazi leader, Bauchspiess, came instead and shot him. Father Rudolphi also came, but gave him the last rites. After Frankfurt had been conquered by American troops, a military court caught and tried the murderer. Father Rudolphi was called by the court as witness against Bauchspiess, who had made life hard for him for 12 years, but then who payed him a last visit to confess. Father Rudolphi could not witness before the military court because of the seal of confession. The Judge said that Bauchspiess was a Protestant. For Father Rudolphi, Bauchspiess was a baptized Christian, and therefore could go to confession. A local communist took Father Rudolphi’s place as witness in the American military court. Bauchspiess was sentenced to death, and he was executed by hanging. Father Rudolphi’s Chaplain Wehenkel performed his funeral. Once Father Rudolphi, a great historian, told me: ‘nobody will ever understand in the future what we are going through at present.’96 Father Rudolphi, who had been a soldier during World War I, having been wounded four times, asked: ‘Warum denn wir, immer wir…? War diese Stadt Frankfurt schuldiger als London?’97 For Father Rudolphi, suffering was the result of sinning. He had the most ancient retaliation theodicy, which we find in many world religions. Father Rudolphi could not answer his own theodicy question: why more suffering for Frankfurt than for London? How could I preach meaningfully to the suffering people without having an adequate theodicy answer? There was too much in the ­ecclesiastical apologetics that I could not possibly defend: the crusades; the religious Anti-Semitism; the holy inquisition and its tortures and waterboarding; the Church’s alliance with fascism; the war involvement of the churches; the blessing with holy water of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs by a Catholic army chaplain, etc. To be sure, I would not have lasted long as a priest in any parish, or in any ecclesiastical office. However, I did not leave the Church, as many others did, and still do, particularly in Europe and North America. I rather remained faithful to an Ecclesia semper reformanda, like my friends Johannes Baptist Metz, Hans Küng, Gregory Baum, etc., and promoted as much as ­possible reform tendencies, initiated by Vatican ii, against an always-stronger counter-reformation pressure. I combined theology and Religionswissenschaft, or comparative religion. For 8 years I taught religion to working class youth in trade schools in Hessen, which had a socialist government, and in Westphalia, which had a Christian Democratic government. I also taught in Occupation Reconstruction Programs, which socialists had introduced into the very

96 Weitensteiner, Warum denn wir, immer wir?; Siebert, A German Experience, 12–14. 97 ‘Why we, always we? Was this city of Frankfurt guiltier than London?’ Ibid.

38

Siebert

­ rogressive trade school system of the German Federal Republic, and which p made it possible for trade school students to move up into the university. I visited my working class students in the factories, in which they worked, and tried to improve their working conditions, so that they could develop different sides of their personalities. I took the working class students on vacations into the Alps, which they otherwise could not afford. I also taught bourgeois youth in a humanistic gymnasium, and practically on all levels of the German school system. In all these activities, I practiced different aspects of the evolving critical theory of religion and society. It gave direction to all these actions, and they gave concreteness and actuality to it. While dialectical religiology did concretely supersede into itself Horkheimer’s Christology from below, it also ­corrected its deficiencies: that already the early Church long before the ­appearance of the Greek and Roman Church Fathers combined cult in the Temple of Jerusalem and in private homes, with mimesis, the practice of communism; that the Christology from below calls with necessity for a complementary Christology from above; that the Trinity in Christianity and in many other world religions cannot simply be ignored, or explained materialistically, psychologically, or sociologically, as attempt to reconcile Jewish monotheism with Greek and Roman polytheism, or Jesus with Yahweh, but must also be seen, understood, and comprehended in terms of the Kantian subjective idealism and triplicity, and the Hegelian objective and absolute idealism and dialectic, or determinate negation, and beyond them; that Christianity may not from its start have been a slave religion, but rather a revolutionary, or provolutionary Religion of Becoming and Freedom, etc. For the critical theory of religion and society, theodicy remained the central problem, and mimesis, the Imitatio Christi, and the humanist socialism were the only practical answer and ­solution to it for the time being. 21

In the Beginning

In the critical theory of religion and society, we were always aware that the Church was not the Truth, the Kingdom of Heaven, to which Jesus confessed to before Pontius Pilatus, the representative of the Roman Empire, the mass murderer, who among many others had killed 43 Galileans, while they were ­sacrificing in the Temple of Jerusalem: So Pilate went back into the Praetorium and called Jesus to him. ‘Are you the king of the Jews’ he asked. Jesus replied ‘Do you ask this of your own accord, or have others spoken to you about me?’ Pilate answered ‘Am I a

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

39

Jew? It is your own people and the chief priests who have handed you over to me: what have you done?’ Jesus replied, ‘Mine is not a kingdom of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my men would have fought to prevent my being surrendered to the Jews. But my kingdom is not of this kind.’ ‘So you are a king then?’ said Pilate. ‘It is you who say it’ answered Jesus. ‘Yes, I am a king. I was born for this. I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.’ ‘Truth?’ said Pilate. ‘What is that?;’ and with that he went out again to the Jews and said ‘I find no case against him. But according to a custom of yours I should release one prisoner at the Passover; would you like me, then, to release the king of the Jews.’ At this they shouted: ‘Not this man,’ they said, ‘but Barabbas.’ Barabbas was a brigand.98 Unfortunately, the Church became of this world, and thus more similar to the Roman Empire, the German Empire, the British Empire, the American Empire, etc., than to the Truth or the Kingdom of Jesus, and that the more so the longer the parousia delay lasted. 22

Man and Woman

The critical theory of religion and society remembers that the Kingdom of Heaven, which Jesus announced, was grounded in the beginning when God created man as man and woman, and united them not to be separated by men, which commandment excluded not only divorce, or homosexuality, or Lesbianism, or gay marriage, but also celibacy, and affirmed married and family life: ‘Yahweh God said ‘It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helpmate… This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife, and they become one body.’99 Some Pharisees approached him, and to test him they said ‘Is it against the Law for man to divorce his wife on any pretext whatever.’ He (Jesus) answered, ‘Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning made them male and female and that he said: this is why a man must leave father and mother, and cling to his wife, and the two become one body? They are no longer two, therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide. 98 99

John 18:28–40. Genesis 2:18 & 24.

40

Siebert

They said to him, ‘Then why did Moses command that a writ of dismissal should be given in cases of divorce.?’ ‘It was because you were so unteachable’ he said ‘that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like this from the beginning. Now I say this to you: the man who divorces his wife – I am not speaking of fornication – and marries another, is guilty of adultery.’ The disciples said to him, ‘If that is how things are between husband and wife, it is not advisable to marry.’ But he replied, ‘It is not everyone who can accept what I have said, but only those to whom it is granted. There are eunuchs born that way from their mother’s womb, there are eunuchs made so by men and there are eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.’100 In contrast to some Essene communities, who had a “eunuch” or celibate lifestyle, the immediate disciples of Jesus were all married and remained married after his death. Of the apostles, Paul alone lived a celibate lifestyle. In Judaism, as the Religion of Sublimity, the Rabbis were usually married by the age of 30.101 In Christianity, as the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, the orthodox Church father Origenes castrated himself, but his praxis did fortunately not become part of the Eastern or Western Catholicism.102 In the perspective of dialectical religiology, what is in the beginning, the origin of the Kingdom of Heaven, is essential, necessary, normative, valid, what ought to be, what is right, the trinitarian notion of things in nature and man’s realm of freedom, and it is hard to understand in the post-lapsarian state. It is therefore continually transgressed in the historical reality, including the Church, by those who are not teachable: e.g. the triplicate notion of the family as marriage, familial property, and ­education of children. 23 Leadership In 1953, in order to improve the praxis of the critical theory of religion and society, I participated in a leadership program in the Social Work Department of the Catholic University of America. It was for me the continuation of the reeducation program in the prisoner of war Camp Allen, 8 years earlier. I heard 100 Matthew 19:3–12. 101 Hans Küng, Das Judentum. München: Piper Verlag. 1991. 102 Hans Küng, Das Christentum. Wesen und Geschichte. München: Piper Verlag, 1994.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

41

many good lectures about group work, case work, and social administration. I practiced group work in orphanages in and around Washington d.c. I travelled from coast to coast to study welfare institutions, and to see how they dealt with poor people. I even visited a Navajo Indian village in New Mexico, which had just burned its church down and had driven out the nuns, but kept their missionary priest, who had studied their language, and who had written down its grammar. I finally worked as counselor in a camp in Chagrin Falls for children from the Cleveland slums. I learned all about the often hidden class and race division in American civil society. I was amazed that there were only two bourgeois parties in Congress, and no labor party. The leadership study at the Catholic University of America helped me to make critical theory more inclusive. I had promised the American Government to return to Germany again after a year, in order to apply there my newly gained knowledge, and so I did. In the view of the critical theory of religion and society, already in 1953, the Catholic University of America represented an astonishing, if also not entirely unproblematic, attempt, to mediate and reconcile the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, Catholicism and liberal American federal state and culture, Christianity and capitalism, very much in contrast to the liberation theologians in Central and Latin America, or priests in Detroit, Michigan, who would call capitalism to be absolutely evil. Margie and I certainly learned much about dealing with the antagonism between Christianity and capitalism for dialectical religiology at Catholic University of America, where already her father Karl Henry Neuss had studied electrical engineering, and her mother Margaret had worked in the library, and from which our daughter Jeanne would receive her law degree. 24

Marriage and Family

During my studies at Catholic University, I met my future wife Margaret Noyes, who studied case work in the Social Work Department of the Catholic University of America, and who wrote her master’s thesis about the obligations of ­fathers for their illegitimate children. Margie and I agreed on the evolving dialectical religiology, and together we worked on it, both in theory and pedagogical and political praxis. Margie and I married in 1956 in Dieburg, Germany, in a Catholic College. Suffragan Bishop Reuss kept his promise, altar or marriage, and witnessed and blessed our marriage. The American General from Babenhausen participated in the wedding mass. The Sisters of the Catholic College, who were not allowed to participate in our wedding mass, prepared for us, nevertheless, a wonderful wedding feast with many guests. My student c­ orporation

42

Siebert

Winfriedia was represented as well. Margie and I worked together for the working class youth in Hessen and Westphalia. One of our special projects was to support German girls who had illegitimate children from American soldiers, and gave them away for a pound of coffee to American officers. Sometimes they wanted to have more coffee, or wanted to have their babies back again. Working together with the American Army, we brought some law and order into this adoption process in order to protect the girls, their children, the officers, and their families. Margie and I also worked in a nearby orphanage for working class boys. The Army chaplain from Babenhausen, Father Mayer, helped us to find food for the hungry boys. Our critical theory of religion and society inspired us to engage in many forms of pedagogical and political praxis in Germany and later in the United States. We started our family in Germany and then continued it in the u.s. We finally had 8 children and 14 grandchildren, and 4 greatgrandchildren. We educated our children in the spirit of the dialectical religiology. They all became good and critical people. 25

Right-wing Extremism

In 1962, Margie and I returned to the United States. While in 1946, I had begun to apply the more and more developing critical theory in order to help transform the German fascist state into a liberal one; now a new task appeared on the horizon. The rebuilt Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main was engaged in studies of right-wing extremism and authoritarian populism, as well as hostility toward foreigners.103 We returned to America in order to help to prevent a liberal state from being made into a fascist one. I started out teaching theology and economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. The ­Jesuits told me that if I would teach the Papal Social Encyclical Letters, which moved solidarism between liberalism and socialism, in conservative America, I would lose all my friends. I did not lose all my friends, but teaching the Encyclicals was nevertheless a difficult job. After three years, I moved through Jesuit connections to the Department of Comparative Religion, at Western Michigan University, from the religious to the secular, from the Church to the state. Here, I developed further and taught the critical theory of religion and society, and its praxis, for 54 years. In this spirit, I soon founded the labor union together with my late friend Arthur Falk (d. 2018), from the wmu Philosophy Department, since the wmu Senate did not have enough power. Throughout the years, we had several strikes and produced good contracts for the faculty. The 103 Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, 381–507.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

43

union would have been even more productive if it had had the support of a labor party, which unfortunately did not exist. In the spirit of dialectical religiology, I founded a Center for Humanistic Future Studies, according to the model of the socialist humanist Ossip Flechtheim, and through it two international courses, one on the Future of Religion in the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), which has lasted for 43 years, and one on Religion in Civil Society in Yalta, Ukraine (now Russia), which has lasted for 20 years. The Center of Humanistic Future Studies was very successful, but was unfortunately repressed after a few years, because its academic minor had supposedly too many foreigners in it. It was in the Center for Humanistic Future Studies where we discussed authoritarian extremism, long before Trumpism arrived on the historical scene, trying to identify forces in family, civil society, public sphere, state, church, international organizations, which could possibly effectively resist it. In the spirit of the critical theory of religion and society, I was the campaign manager twice in the third Congressional District for the very liberal Presidential candidate, Senator George McGovern, a Methodist minister and historian, who promised the end of the Vietnam War, and a fundamental income for every American citizen, which was supposed to take care of the chaotic and insufficient welfare system. I worked as the liaison between the revolutionary student movement in Michigan and Western Michigan University and other universities. I gave speeches in the slums of Kalamazoo about the emancipation of African-Americans as well as all other workers, and was called “Rudi the Red.” In the many discourses at home and abroad, in Dubrovnik and Yalta, the critical theory of religion and society, and its praxis, was further developed and received a national as well as international formation, and found expression in many books and articles. Margie and I worked together in all these projects as we also developed at the same time our family, educating our children in the spirit of the dialectical religiology, protecting them from religious as well as secular ideology. Margie and I taught critical theory at Western Michigan University in many different classes, and to many different students from different nations, in the Department of Comparative Religion, the Sociology Department, and in General Studies. I also taught dialectical religiology outside of Western Michigan University and the usa, not only in Canada, but also in Europe, even in the German Democratic Republic, in the ­Protestant Theology Department of the University of Rostock, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was amazing that theology could be taught in a state university of a socialist country, like the German Democratic Republic, or today in the Republic of Slovenia, but that this cannot happen in state universities of the United States. At this point, the bourgeois enlightenment seems still to be more radically secular than the socialist enlightenment.

44

Siebert

Margie died from cancer in 1978 while I was teaching in London, Ontario, at Kings College, Western Ontario University, and I had to raise and educate our seven children alone, who today are spread with their families all over the United States and Canada.104 After Margie’s death, our son Steve carried our whole household singlehandedly.105 Our family could not have survived without him. When Steve left for law school, my student Karen Shoup-Pilarski, took over, later on with the help of her husband Kenneth. Steve remained helpful up to his cancer death in 2017. For all of us, the critical theory of religion and society always opened up new theoretical and practical horizons we were living toward. 26

Farmer Revolution

The critical theory of religion and society found its first mayor written expression after an article about The Endangered Underground of the Masses appeared in a German pedagogical journal, and in my doctoral dissertation, ­entitled Die Anthropologie Michael Helding eines Humanisten und Theologen im Umkreis der Geistigen Neuordnung des 16. Jahrhunderts (1506–1561), (The Anthropology of Michael Helding, a Humanist and Theologian in the Period of the Spiritual New Ordering of the 16th Century (1506–1561)). I became interested in Michael Helding, a Roman Catholic bishop, scholar, writer, and Erasmian ­humanist, also known by his pen name Sidonius, because, while he was born in 1506 in the village of Langenenslingen, near Riedlingen/Sigmaringen, ­Schwaben/Suebia, as a miller’s son, and thus into the lowest farmer class in the ­German and European feudal system, he was nevertheless elevated in a revolutionary time to the highest offices in Church and German Empire of Charles v and Ferdinand I, of the House Habsburg. At the time, Helding was the only German bishop from the farmer class. All the other bishops were from feudal and bourgeois backgrounds. When in 1953, I motorcycled with my brother, Karl Siebert, to the village of Langenensling in order to do research, we still found the mill standing at the trout rich Biberbach, where Helding had been born in 1506, 447 years earlier. In 1525, Helding, then called Riedlingensis, because he came from schools in Riedlingen, matriculated himself, being 19 years old, in the University of Tübingen. He earned his living and tuition in Riedlingen and 104 Rudolf J. Siebert, The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2001. 105 Rudolf J. Siebert, The World Religions in Idealistic and Materialistic Perspective: The Loss and the Rediscovery of the Idea. New Delhi, India: Sanbun, 2019.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

45

Tübingen by singing in front of the big houses of the rich bourgeois and feudal lords. At the time, the farmer revolution against the feudal lords, the prototype of the later, not bourgeois, but rather socialist revolutions, went on, and Charles v and his General Frundsberg killed 100,000 farmers and their families, and thus repressed the revolution, and degraded the farmers for centuries to come.106 Finally, not the farmers would overthrow the feudal lords, but the bourgeoisie. It would happen over 200 years later. Only four hundred years later the farmers would join the workers in socialist revolutions, and they together would determinately negate the bourgeoisie and the residuals of the feudal lords in Russia, China, North Korea, Central America, e.g. Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc., in the long and violent history of class ­struggles, and on the long march of man from animality to freedom. Thomas Münzer, the former priest and then friend of Martin Luther for some time, theologian of revolution, and strong believer in God’s Providence, and his brave farmer army, were slaughtered at Mühlhausen, in Thüringia, by the much better trained and equipped army of General Frundsberg.107 Thomas Münzer was tortured and decapitated, and his wife and children got lost in the counter-reformatory and counter-revolutionary turmoil. The Catholic and Protestant feudal lords, and bourgeoisie, were most successful in repressing the memory of Thomas Münzer and his farmer revolution, until they were rediscovered again by Friedrich Engels, the friend of Karl Marx, in the 19th century, when the bourgeois revolutions were concretely superseded by the socialist revolutions, and by the ­Marxist Ernst Bloch in the 20th century, when the liberal and fascist counterrevolutions tried to stop them, mostly in vain. Engels and Bloch played an important role in the formation of the critical theory of religion and society. There would be a continual vacillation of socialist revolutions and liberal and fascist counter-revolutions. There would be 25 more or less successful bourgeois counter-revolutionary changes of socialist regimes between 1945 and 2019. For my dissertation on Michael Helding on the basis of my dialectical religiology, I chose the Luxemburgian Catholic church historian, Joseph Lortz, as doctor father. I met Lortz during my studies at the University of Münster in 1950, and joined him again when he moved to the University of Mainz with the help of the French Cultural attaché for the French Occupation Zone for the defeated Germany, General Schmidlein, in order to become the Director of the Ecumenical Institute in the old Jesuit University building near the St. Martin’s 106 Friedrich Engels, The German Revolutions: The Peasant War in Germany – Revolution and Counter-Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. 107 Ernst Bloch, Thomas Münzer: Als Theologie der Revolution. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1960.

46

Siebert

Cathedral of Mainz, which also housed an historical Institute for French-­ German Relations. The French General Schmidlein and his wife adopted a German officer as their son, who then became a priest in the Diocese of Mainz and continued as Father Mann the work of Lortz after his retirement. I was fascinated by Lortz because he had corrected for the first time the ideological ­distortions that Martin Luther’s image had suffered in counter-reformation Catholicism for 400 years, and because he no longer blamed Luther for the disintegrative effects of the Reformation, but rather the miserable conditions of late Medieval Catholicism. However, at the time in West Germany, under the Adenauer restoration, it was rather taboo to speak about the fascist past. Old Nazi’s returned to high positions in the state and church, and were even decorated. Thus, I did not know at the time that in 1934, one year after Hitler came into power, Lortz had written a book in order to introduce Catholics to National Socialism, which would rescue and renew the Heilige Christliche ­Abendland, the Western civilization.108 Even before 1933, when Hitler came into power, Lortz had marched around in an SA uniform on university ­campuses, and during World ii he kept his professorship in the University of Münster while his critical colleagues were all fired by the fascist culture minister in Berlin. Thus, I did not know about Lortz’s fascist past, which only slowly surfaced in our discourses on Helding and his time. When Lortz and I came in the old Jesuit University building in order to discuss Helding’s origin in the farmer class, and of the farmer revolution as prototype of the present socialist revolutions, and of Thomas Münzer as theologian of revolution, and of the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, and of Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Bloch, and dialectics, and of the Jewish critical theorists of society in the nearby Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main, etc., he and I came to even deeper disagreements. In seminars at the University of Mainz, I found out that Lortz was also very much devoted not only to Martin Luther, but also to Tertullian, who believed the Revelation because it was absurd.109 The critical theory of religion and society rather followed Anselm of Canterbury, as well as Kant and Hegel, who believed in the Revelation in order to know. Because of his irrational fascist past, Lortz and I came into greater conflicts, which did not become easier when he was promoted to Spiritual Council by Bishop Albert Stohr of Mainz, so that he would not walk around nakedly in the St. Martin’s Cathedral 108 Lortz, Joseph. Katholischer Zugang zum Nationalsozialismus. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1934. 109 Ibid.; Joseph Lortz, Die Reformation in Deutschland. Band i. Vorraussetzungen. Aufbruch. Erste Entscheidungen. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1962; Joseph Lortz, Die Reformation in Deutschland. Band ii. Ausbau der Fronten. Unionsversuche. Ergebnis. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1962; Joseph Lortz, Geschichte der Kirche. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1964.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

47

of Mainz. Lortz told the world that he had remained faithful to his Bishop Graf of Galen in Münster during the Nazi time, and that he had been betrayed by Hitler.110 Finally, I had to find another doctor-father, the Mainz church historian Dr. Anton Brück, who had a more innocent past was most helpful. With Brück I pursued successfully my dissertation on Helding in the spirit of dialectical religiology. The dissertation gave the Anti-Fascist critical theory of religion and society its historical, humanistic, and theological depth. When many years later, Pope John Paul ii came to visit Mainz, he rejected in the counterreformation spirit of his Cardinal Ratzinger, his Inquisitor, the later Pope ­Benedict xvi, Lortz’s Luther book, and the ecumenical progress he and his successor, Father Mann, had made. The Pope ordered Lortz’s Luther book to be rewritten in a few months. That meant, indeed, a counter-reformation regression behind Lortz, who supposedly had fallen victim to irrational, counterrevolutionary fascism, and Father Mann, a former officer in the German army, which served the counter-revolutionary, anti-socialist, and anticommunist cause of fascism for 12 years, until it was beaten in Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin, in a post-secular liberal society, which was still aware that something was missing, and which needed new religious translators who were not forthcoming, or who were repressed when they were forthcoming.111 In the view of the critical theory of religion and society, it would, of course, be bad logic to say that because Liberalism, Catholicism, and Fascism had in common their counter-revolutionary anti-socialism and anti-communism, they were, therefore, also identical: they are, indeed, very different, and even antagonistic in many ways. 27

Humanist and Theologian

According to the historical sources, Helding graduated with a BA in the liberal arts at the University of Tübingen at Pentecost 1527, and at Christmas 1528 with a MA.112 Helding then continued his studies at the University of Mainz. Helding became a lecturer at the Domschule, the school of the St. Martin’s Cathedral in Mainz, and finally its Director in 1531. Only then was he financially able to get married and have a family. Helding was married and had a son, 110 Ibid. 111 Mickey L. Mattox, The Catholic Luther, Then and Now. Lutheran Educational Journal. December 21st, 2017. https://lej.cuchicago.edu/faithlearning/the-catholic-luther-then-now/. 112 Rudolf J. Siebert, Die Anthropologie Michael Heldings, eines Humanisten und Theologen im Umkreis der Geistigen Neuordnung des 16, Jahrhunderts (1506–1561). Universitätsbibliothek Mainz. Universitätsarchiv. Sigmaringen: Hohenzollernsche Jahreshefte, 1965.

48

Siebert

named Theodosius, before he was ordained a priest, like Augustine before, on whom he based his later theology.113 Helding’s marriage may have lasted only four years. Augustine, whose Manichean concubinage lasted 9 years, had called his son Adeodatus.114 Both names, Theodosius and Adeodatus meant that the child was seen as a gift from God. Unfortunately, also Helding, like Augustine before, in patriarchal manner, never mentioned the name of his wife, the mother of his son, through whom he was given to him from God. In Mainz, Helding’s life long close contact with the Erasmian humanism started, which he shared not only with Erasmus of Rotterdam, but also with Thomas More – the new Socrates, Johann Reuchlin, and Ulrich von Hutten.115 Helding was a humanist before he became a theologian. He was never a naturalist or materialist. After being ordained a priest, Helding worked under Archbishop and C ­ ardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg in the Diocese of Mainz, the superior and opponent of Martin Luther, at the St. Martin’s Cathedral in Mainz, from 1533 onwards. Helding found great favor with the Cardinal, and was thus promoted fast. From 1533 on, Helding became a most outstanding preacher in the St. Martin’s Cathedral, despite the fact that his voice was a little bit weak. In his sermons, Helding, the humanist and theologian, was like Thomas Münzer, the theologian of revolution, very critical of the usury throughout all the higher estates, religious and secular, of the feudal system; of the early capitalist market, particularly the new import of luxury commodities into the domestic ­market, and their immoral consequences; the separation of work and wealth; the masses of new middlemen, who made more and more money, without adding value to the commodity, etc.116 Helding’s many sermons were printed and published in the city of Johannes Gutenberg, Mainz, and his new printing press. On October 18, 1537, Helding was selected to become Auxiliary Bishop of Mainz, and was ordained to that role in Aschaffenburg on August 4, 1538. He was also appointed by Pope Paul iii Titular Bishop of Sidon, in partibus infidelium, in the Near East, in remembrance of the former Catholic Diocese of Sidon, which became Muslim after the Islamic conquest of the Near East in the 7th century, and then again after the Crusades in the 13th century.117 At the same time, Helding received two canonical properties, mostly vineyards, around Mainz, for his remuneration for his services. He gave up this property 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid.; Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 27–28. 115 Lortz, Geschichte der Kirche; Siebert, Die Anthropologie Michael Helding. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

49

again as soon as he left Mainz in order to become Bishop of Merseburg: no wealth without work! In 1543, Helding graduated as doctor of theology at the University of Mainz. He served as a Roman Catholic Delegate at both the 1540– 1541 Diet of Worms, and in 1546 at the Diet of Regensburg. Helding also attended, as representative and substitute of Archbishop and Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg, the beginning of the Council of Trent as the only German bishop, and once more later on. Here in Trent during his first visit, Helding was very critical of the Pope, because he did not appear at the Council. Helding himself soon left the Council again, called back by Cardinal Albrecht’s successor. Since that first Trent-mission, Helding caught the attention of Charles v, who then tried to use him for his own church politics. Charles v used Heldings political-theological virtuosity particularly after his victory over the Protestant Schmalkaldic League, which endangered his Empire and his Church, when he tried to impose on the Protestants what they called a self-constructed State-Catholicism.118 Charles v called Helding, whom he had already made an ­Imperial Counselor, to the armored Diet of Augsburg of 1547–1548. Here he let Helding as Empire Preacher give sermons against Protestantism. He also asked Helding, in community with his friend Bishop Julius von Pflug and the Brandenburg Court Preacher Agricola, to prepare, as co-author, a new church order, the Augsburg Interim, or Interim Augustanum.119 It was promulgated on May 15, 1548. The Interim was to subordinate once more constitutionally Protestantism to the Pope, and the Bishops, and was to be brought again closer in dogma and cult to the Roman Catholic Church, from which it had departed. To the Protestant preachers, former priests, the Interim brought great misery. It left to them only marriage, and to the whole Evangelical community only the celebration of the last supper under both forms, bread and wine. Hundreds of Protestant ministers who did not want to conform to the Interim had to give up office and bread, and had to go into exile with their wives and children.120 In Augsburg, Helding drew harsh criticism and polemics from Mathias Flacius, or Flacius Illyricus (Yugoslavia) and other Protestants. While Catholic writers praised the good moral life of Helding, Flacius Illyricus criticized him for his massive sins of the flesh. In gratitude for the work he had done for the Interim, Charles v recommended Helding to the Cathedral Chapter of the Diocese of Merseburg for the office of bishop.121 In December 1550, Helding became the successor to the Protestant George iii, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid.

50

Siebert

as the last Catholic Bishop of ­Merseburg.122 Here Helding had to promise by oath to Prince Georg von Anhalt, that he would not make any changes in religious matters, and that he would in particular leave the married Protestant ministers in their offices. In his new Diocese, Helding was demonized by the people who had turned Protestant, by being connected with a devilish black cat sitting supposedly on his shoulder. Not only because the majority of the people in the diocese had become Evangelicals already, but because he was an Erasmian, humanist theologian, Yet, Helding behaved mildly and tolerantly in his administration of his diocese.123 But, to be sure, Helding’s attempt to restore Catholicism in his diocese was made very difficult by the resistance of the Protestant ministers and communities, and finally failed. In general, the main emphasize of Helding’s activity seemed not to have been on his diocese, but rather more and more on political–theological negotiation tasks, given to him by the Emperor. Helding was, therefore, more and more absent from his Bishops residence in Merseburg.124 Thus, he was present at the Council of Augsburg in 1555, and in Regensburg in 1556. In autumn of 1557, Helding was present at the Colloquial of Worms, where his questions concerning the theological splits among Protestant denominations caused internal conflict among the Lutheran theologians. In Worms, H ­ elding acted so skillfully as political theologian that Emperor Ferdinand I p ­ romoted him in 1558 to member in the Empire-Chamber Court in Speyer.125 Helding had really become a good friend of the whole House of Habsburg. In 1561, less than a year before Helding’s death, Ferdinand I appointed him first member and then head, or President of the Imperial Council in Vienna, the Supreme Court.126 During Helding’s absence from his Diocese of Merseburg, it was directed since 1558 by an administrative council, and finally fell through perpetual capitulation to the Protestant Prince of Saxonia. Helding died in Vienna on September 1561, age 55, and was buried in the Cathedral of St. Stephan. Helding is considered one of the most important proponents of Erasmian Catholic Reform of his time. He tried to use his many speeches and writings to maintain Christian unity and to contribute actively towards what he saw as a necessary reform of the Roman Catholic Church, e.g. a catechism, the Brevis institutio ad christianam pietatam secondum doctrinam catholicam, in both Latin and German; many sermons in several collections, including the 15 ­sermons 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

51

about the holiest mass, preached on the Diet of Augsburg of 1548; sermons about the Prophet Jonas 1558; a Postille of 1565; etc.127 Helding remained true to Catholicism, like Erasmus of Rotterdam, or Thomas More, but was still friendly to reform, and tolerant towards the Protestant denominations and other faiths. Through the 1530s, Helding tried together with other Catholic and Protestant Erasmian theologians to restore unity in Church and Empire, by settling the central religious issue of justification, and introducing reforms. For several years, the lay chalice was introduced and clerical celibacy was cancelled. Helding confidently represented assertions about the apostolic origin of the Roman cult actions, and the historical nature of ecclesiastical liturgy: the most mature of which was the writings of Matthias Flacius, or Flacius ­Illyricus, named Missa latina quae olim ante Romanam – in usu fuerit, which appeared in 1557, four years before Heldings death.128 Helding and his Erasmian friends, on the Catholic and Protestant side, failed in their reunion attempt. The political development had gone too far. The Jesuit Counter-Reformation set in, and reconquered Protestant territory for the Latin Church particularly in Southern Europe. The lay chalice was cancelled again for 400 years, and was allowed again only by the Second Vatican Council. It is still sabotaged sometimes by counter-reformation Catholic integralists. Celibacy was reinstituted again and continues up to the present. When I once drank wine at an inn in the vineyards above the Rhine River with the great Swiss theologian Hans Küng, a messenger came and told him that a young priest had committed suicide because he could not resolve his conflict between his celibacy and a woman he had met. Hans was silent for a long time. Then he called the forced clerical celibacy a “curse,” despite of the fact that he lived it faithfully. I had a similar e­ xperience when I taught in Meschede, Westfalia. Here a young priest hanged himself in the church tower before the Christmas mass, because he could not resolve his celibacy conflict. I had the opportunity to speak with the woman, because of whom the young priest had committed suicide: it was a great tragedy. In the view of dialectical religiology, it is time that the Latin Church, a monk Pope of which introduced forced clerical celibacy at the beginning of the second millennium, listens to and learns from the experiences of the Orthodox Church and of the Protestant Churches, not to speak of the Jewish and Islamic community concerning a married and unmarried clergy, particularly in the face of the massive clerical sexual abuse cases in the past 50 years. Nevertheless, Pope Benedict xvi still rejected the idea of a married priesthood, without adequate theological reasons.

127 Ibid. 128 Ibid.

52

Siebert

27.1 Panta Rei Helding’s humanism and theology contributed greatly to the formation and evolution of the critical theory of religion and society, by throwing light on the most important modern antagonisms, between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, state and church, Catholicism and Protestantism, farmers and feudal lords, workers and bourgeoisie, bourgeois and socialist revolutions, traditional and progressive political theology, reformation and counter-reformation, revolution and counter-revolution, humanism and theology, and their possible mediation and reconciliation.129 My Helding dissertation became the basis and foundation for many books and articles of mine in different languages, all promoting the evolution of dialectical religiology, and being directed by it.130 But at the time, in 1965, such work was not yet critical enough in order to be astonished about the contradiction that Helding discovered. Only later was the social criticism of the critical theory of religion and society sharpened through my deeper penetration into German idealism from Kant through Fichte, Schelling to Hegel, into German materialism from Marx and Engels to Lenin, and into Freud’s psychoanalysis, and into the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School, into which the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian Enlightenment movements and revolutions were concretely superseded. More than Helding, it was another Swabian and student in Tübingen, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose dialectical method influenced most deeply the further progress of my dialectical religiology: the power of negativity against all forms of positivism. I heard the name Hegel the first time in 1943, when I met at the corner of the housing project Friede (Peace) in Frankfurt for veterans from World War I, the communist, Mr. Müller, my neighbor, who had just come home from the concentration camp Dachau, near Munich.131 We listened to the thunder of the bombardment of Mainz by American bombers, 30 miles away. I told my much older communist friend that I wanted to bicycle to Mainz, in order to see what a bombed out city looked like. He told me wisely that this was not necessary, since Frankfurt would be bombed soon by American or British bombers as well. I could not imagine or believe it, but it happened a few weeks later. Mr. Müller, the communist, asked me suddenly if I had ever heard of Hegel. I said no. He was horribly upset and shouted at me; how it could happen that I, a leader in the Catholic Youth Movement and a student in the humanistic Lessing Gymnasium, had not ever heard of the greatest ­modern 129 Herman Schweppenhäuser, “Hegel aktuell.” Frankfurter Hefte 14. (January 1959), 73–76; Siebert, Die Anthropologie Michael Helding. 130 Lortz, Geschichte der Kirche; Siebert, Die Anthropologie Michael Helding. 131 Friedrich Heer, “Hegel und die Jugend.” Frankfuter Hefte 22, no. 5. (May 1967): 323–332; Schweppenhäuser, “Hegel aktuell,” 73–76.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

53

philosopher of history. It was a scandal! Hegel was repressed in National Socialist Germany as he was in liberal North America after the Great Depression, which should have taught even the most limited bourgeois to think ­dialectically, but did not. The reason for the repression was that Hegel was the Heraclitus of the 19th and 20th centuries, and that he, like his great teacher, emphasized Becoming as synthesis of Being and Nothing, with a strong emphasis on negativity in opposition to all forms of positivism: panta rei – everything flows; polemos pataer panton – war is the father of all things. War could also mean class struggle. The whole work of Heraclitus was contained in Hegel’s Science of Logic. In all systems of domination and exploitation – slavery, feudalism and capitalism – the masses of slaves, serfs, and wage laborers were conditioned to believe the ideology, that their masters and their systems were eternal. Hegel was dangerous, and thus a persona non grata in liberalism, fascism, and Catholicism, because he, a liberal himself, asserted, nevertheless, the dialectical, concrete supersession of all social power elites and systems from one revolution and social macro – paradigm to the next. Therefore, Hegel had already been charged posthumously in Berlin with high treason in the 1830s.132 From Hegel, the critical theory of religion and society received its dialectical method: determinate negation. Hegel’s school split into the Hegelian Left, which stood on the side of the working class, and was dialectical and revolutionary, and into the Hegelian Center, which stood on the side of the bourgeoisie, and was conservative, and was sometimes dialectical and sometimes positivistic, and was reformatory and counter-revolutionary, and into the Hegelian Right, which stood on the side of the bourgeoisie, and was conservative, positivistic, and counter-revolutionary. Today these three Hegelian-anti-Hegelian schools appear as praxis philosophy, deconstructionism and positivism.133 Dialectical religiology developed on the Hegelian Left, like the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School, from which it derived, and was sometimes reformatory and sometimes revolutionary, depending on the historical situation, and the stage of the national and international class struggle. 28

Dialectical Structure and Dynamic

The dialectical structure of our critical theory of religion and society, or ­dialectical religiology, which evolved out of the critical theory of society of the 132 Ibid.; Hans Küng, Menschwerdung Gottes: Eine Einführung in Hegel’s Theologisches Denken als Prolegomena zu einer künftigen Christologie. Freiburg: Herder Verlag. 1970. 133 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960.

54

Siebert

F­ rankfurt School from 1946–2019, has been determined by different influences from ancient Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, as well as modern Paris and Frankfurt am Main. These influences helped to shape the dialectical structure and dynamic of the critical theory of religion and society, as it traced the history of positive religions from the traditional, relative union of the religious and the secular, the sacred and profane in Antiquity and Middle Ages, through their modern disunion, to their possible, future, post-modern reunion. Dialectical religiology was fully aware of the relative harmony between religious revelation and secular reason in Antiquity and Middle Ages, but also knew that there was no return to it. The Lutheran philosopher Hegel saw the Medieval World of the Catholic theologian Helding fall apart for good.134 Thus, in dialectical religiology, following Helding and Hegel, we concentrated our analysis on the modern continually deepening disunion of the religious and the secular and the many culture wars, it produces daily, and their possible mediation and reconciliation.135 Traditional religious people believed in all their holy books that the sun turns around the earth. Modern enlightened people know that the earth moves around the sun. Religious people thought that the universe was 6000 years old; modern people know that it is 14 billion years old. Religious people are creationists. Enlightened people are evolutionists. Religious people think that man was created immediately by God. Modern people know that man derived from other animal species. Religious people lived in fear of the Gods, or of God. Modern enlightened people know of no such fear of God. Religious people believe in a soul independent from the body. Modern people see the soul as part and function of the body, the brain. Religious people believe in eternal life. Modern people know only of this earthly life: death leads into nothingness. Religious people believe in divine Fate or Providence. Modern people, like Napoleon or Marx, thought that politics or economics are man’s real and most powerful fate. Religious people believe in miracles, angels, spirits, and devils. Enlightened people only know of a material world and its laws. For religious people, love cannot be without pain. Enlighteners strive for a painless love. Religious people speak of sin. Modern people may still speak of guilt, but mostly talk about mistakes. The cruelest wars in Vietnam or in Iraq were not sins, but mistakes. Religious people are altruistic, and secular people are ­egoistic – preached to by Ayn Rand and fought against by Bertolt Brecht: the death of the egoist!136 Religious people think in terms of faith and ­tradition. Enlighteners 134 Heer, “Hegel und die Jugend;” Eugen Kogon, “Revolution und Theologie.” 135 Ibid.; Siebert, 2010. 136 Dustin J. Byrd, A Critique of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy of Religion: The Gospel According to John Galt. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

55

think in terms of analytical understanding, or autonomous r­ eason. Religious people take upon themselves their cross; modern people want to break it. Religious people consider blasphemy as a great sin to be punished by death. Modern civil society is proud to have the freedom of speech, and to be able to freely blaspheme.137 Religious people reject homosexuality as mortal sin. Modern enlightened people find gay marriage to be progressive and acceptable. For religious people divorce is only the result of men and women not being teachable concerning that what was in the beginning, and is essential, the nature or notion of things, e.g., the family. For modern people divorce has become an everyday affair, life becoming episodic. For religious people abortion is murder. For secular people abortion has become a matter of convenience. Religious people are guided by morality and virtues. Modern people follow science and technology. Believers become liberated by doing the Gods’ or God’s will. Modern enlightened people feel held captive by such heteronomy and thus get rid of it.138 Religious people spend much of their week with celebrating feast days, honoring their Gods, or God, their saints, and mysteries of faith, while secular people use most of their time for productive work and maximizing profit. Religious people have a theological ethics and morality, rooted in the beginning of creation, and in the notion of things. Secular people root their ethical and moral norms in nature or in human subjectivity, in the phenomenological dimension of the human potentials or evolutionary universals of language and memory, and the struggle for recognition, in love, or community, or work and tool. Religious people are idealists. Modern people are either bourgeois materialists of money, socialist, or historical materialists. For r­ eligious people, their date of death is predestined by God’s Providence. For secular people, their date of death is accidental, and can be postponed for some time by medical science and technology. For 500 years, the secular side has continuously and progressively overwhelmed the religious side: autonomous reason over faith and its morality.139 All religious rearguard struggles against the enlightenment movements and revolutions have been lost. The by now globalized modern antagonism between the sacred and the profane penetrates every still living positive religion and splits it into believers, who strictly hold on to their revelation and tradition on one hand, and other believers, who also want to be open to the modern enlightenment movements on the other. The two sides fight against each other. In Judaism, there may be tensions ­between orthodox groups, who 137 Dustin J. Byrd, Unfashionable Objections to Islamophobic Cartoons: L’affaire Charlie Hebdo. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017. 138 Heer, “Hegel und die Jugend,” 323–332; Kogon, Der SS–Staat, 305–319. 139 Ibid.

56

Siebert

emphasize revelation and tradition, and conservative and reformed groups, who are more open to the modern enlightenment movements, which allowed their emancipation from the ghetto in the first place, and great success in the modern world.140 In Kalamazoo, Michigan, there is one reformed synagogue, which is presided over by a woman Rabbi, who is also a Lesbian. She has a hard time to be recognized by the orthodox synagogues in Kalamazoo, or nearby Grand Rapids. In Christianity, Protestantism was the first attempt to adjust and adapt the former to Modernity, which was born out of and against Catholicism.141 Up to the present, 2019, Catholic countries, e.g. Spain, Portugal, Latin America, Denmark, etc., are less modern, i.e. less capitalistic, than Protestant countries, e.g. England, The Netherlands, Northern Germany, the United States, etc. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, where this chapter is written, and where our dialectical religiology was developed to a large extent in the past 54 years, the Catholic Borgess Hospital does not perform abortions, and does not prescribe and distribute birth control pills. Patients who want these procedures have to take a taxi to the Methodist Bronson Hospital in the same town. In Kalamazoo, the low-bourgeois Catholic Nazareth College closed, because of financial reasons, and the middle-bourgeois, Baptist Kalamazoo College survived in good financial shape, having the support of the Upjohn Company, which at the time still did very well. In Islam, there are groups who hold on to revelation, and who declare jihād (struggle) against the attacks from the West. We also have groups who are open to the West and its enlightenment movements and revolutions. In Islam, isis, which is fundamentalist, and closed to all modern enlightenment, has killed more Muslims, who were open toward the West, than Christians, who represent the West for it, as well as secular Europeans and Americans.142 Fundamentalism in all world religions is a modern phenomenon. A fundamentalist is a person who has been confronted and shocked by the modern enlightenment movements, and instead of walking through them toward a second naïveté, fled back to the religion of the fathers, and understood them literary, which the fathers may possibly never have done. The fundamental antagonism between the sacred and the profane, also divides secular, modern, or post-modern people into those who want to negate religion radically and completely as a non-contemporaneous, primitive, and archaic residual, and those, who are still open for progressive elements in it, e.g. the Golden Rule, and want 140 Küng, Das Judentum, 1991. 141 Küng, Das Christentum; Hans Küng, Grosse Christliche Denker, München: Piper Verlag, 1994. 142 Hans Küng, Der Islam: Geschichte, Gegenwart, Zukunft. München: Piper Verlag, 2004.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

57

to rescue them and translate them into the modern discourse of the expert cultures, and further, on the other.143 The trinitarian structure of dialectical religiology concentrates on this modern disunion, and its possible mediation and reconciliation.144 It is practical in the sense that it wants to help resolve the bloody culture wars, which continually originate out of the modern disunion between the religious and the secular, revelation and autonomous reason, religion and secular enlightenment. The critical theory of religion and society is not satisfied, like the Hegelian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, simply to make manifest the innumerable contradictions intrinsic to the determinate negation of the Antiquity and Middle Ages by and in Modernity, as well as intrinsic in the concrete negation of the Modernity, by and in Post-Modernity, be it Alternative Future i: the totally administered society, or Future ii – the entirely militaristic society, or Alternative Future iii – the mediated, reconciled society, but it also wants to help to resolve some of these discrepancies, particularly the disunion between the religious and the secular.145 While in the transition from Modernity to Post-Modernity, secular people functionalize religious elements for their progressive goals, religious people functionalize secular modern means in order to reach their conservative traditional purposes: Trump uses scripture, and isis uses modern mass media, propaganda, weapons, and science. Dialectical religiology has the task to clarify the confusion resulting from the mutual functionalization of the sacred and the profane. Such confusion breeds fascism. The critical theory of religion and society does this anti-fascist clarification by keeping open the discourse between religious and enlightened people, and by preventing it from being closed up fundamentalistically, naturalistically, or positivistically. It does this by showing what people of faith and people of autonomous reason may have in common, in order thus to promote their mediation and reconciliation. At this time, 2019, religious and secular people have a culture war about stem cell research. Secular scientists fertilize human eggs in order to harvest from the embryo stem cells, with which they can heal numerous degenerative illnesses. Scientists and religious people have in common the goal of healing. They also agree that the embryo is a human one, and not a Chimpanzee one. But they disagree in that religious people assert, that the embryo is a person from conception with human rights, and that its removal two weeks after its use, is murder, and in that scientists do not have that problem. 143 Theodor W. Adorno and Eugen Kogon, “Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft,” Frankfurter Hefte 13 (June 1958): 392–402; Theodor W. Adorno and Eugen Kogon, “Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft,” Frankfurter Hefte 13 (June 1958): 484–498. 144 Schweppenhäuser, “Hegel aktuell,” 73–76; Siebert Die Anthropologie Michael Heldings; Siebert, Manifesto. 145 Schweppenhäuser, “Hegel aktuell,” 73–76; Siebert, Manifesto, Vol. i–iii.

58

Siebert

Thus, at this time religious people and scientists must agree to disagree. But both sides are changing all the time. It could be possible that the natural scientists will rediscover again the causa finalis, which they eliminated during the great scientific revolution of the 17th century. In this case, religious people and scientists could agree that the same human entelechia is at work in the embryo from the start, and through the birth, and for the rest of life. In this case, the scientists would have to find stem cells from fully grown organisms, in order not to kill human embryos. The critical theory of religion and society applies the same dialectical method of ­mediation and reconciliation, in order to resolve other culture war problems as well, which arise from the fundamental modern antagonism of the religious and the secular, or also from the discrepancies of the different social classes, e.g. the bourgeoisie and the working class, or also from other social contradictions in modern civil society. Dialectical religiology sees the antagonism ­between the sacred and the profane in connection with all other discrepancies in modern family, society, state, history, and culture: gender, racial, generational, national, etc. Bibliography Abromeit, John. Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Achterberg, Erich. General Marshall Macht Epoche: Konferenzen, Gestalten, Hintergründe. Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein Verlag, 1964. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 1999. Adorno, Theodor W. Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse: Ein philosophisches Lesebuch. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997. Adorno, Theodor W., et al. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1969. Adorno, Theodor W., and Eugen Kogon. “Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft,” Frankfurter Hefte 13 (June 1958). Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity, translated by J.T. Swann. New York: Verso, 2009. Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Vol. i-iii. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985. Bloch, Ernst. Thomas Münzer: Als Theologie der Revolution. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1960. Bröckling, Ulrich. Katholische Intellektuelle in der Weimarer Republik: Zeitkritik und Gesellschafttheorie bei Walter Dirks, Romano Guardini, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Michel und Heinrich Mertens. Paderborn: W. Fink Verlag, 1993.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

59

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Byrd, Dustin J. A Critique of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy of Religion: The Gospel According to John Galt. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Byrd, Dustin J. “Blackwater Theology: On the Unholy Trinity of Sirico, Strauss, and Friedman” Islamic Perspective Journal, no. 8 (Winter 2012): 41–60. Byrd, Dustin J. Unfashionable Objections to Islamophobic Cartoons: L’affaire Charlie Hebdo. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017. Cornwell, John. Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius xii. New York: Viking, 1999. Dirks, Walter. Der singende Stotterer: Autobiographische Texte. München: Kossel Verlag, 1983. Dirks, Walter. “Die Entchristlichung der Arbeitswelt: Dokumentation zu Abschluss des Apostolats der französischen ‘Arbeiterpriester.’” Frankfurter Hefte 14, no. 12 (­December 1959). Dirks, Walter. Die Samariter und der Mann aus Samaria: Vom Umgang mit der Barmherzigkeit. Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus Verlag, 1985. Dirks, Walter. “Zwischen den Zeiten: Brief an Eugen Kogon.” Frankfurter Hefte 18, no. 2 (February 1963). Eckhart, Meister. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, translated by M ­ aurice O’C. Walshe. New York: The Crossroads Publishing Company, 2009. Engels, Friedrich. The German Revolutions: The Peasant War in Germany – Revolution and Counter-Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Fallert, Nicole. “President Trump’s State of the Union address: transcript.” February 5, 2019. https://www.vox.com/2019/2/5/18212533/president-trump-state-of-the-union -address-live-transcript. Fox, Matthew. The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How it can be Saved. New York: Sterling Ethos, 2011. Fromm, Erich. Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches: Eine Sozialpsychologische Untersuchung. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1980. Gorbachev, Mikhail. Perestroika. New Thinking for Our Country and the World. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985. Habermas, Jürgen. An Awareness that Something is Missing: Faith and Reason in a ­Post-Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2011. Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Heer, Friedrich. “Hegel und die Jugend.” Frankfurter Hefte 22, no. 5 (May 1967). Hegel, Georg W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Vol. ii: Determinate Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Hegel, Georg W.F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952. Hegel, Georg W.F. Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004.

60

Siebert

Higham, Charles. Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933–1949. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1994. Horkheimer, Max. Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Ein Interview mit Kommentar von Helmut Gumnior. Hamburg: Furch-Verlag, 1970. Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum, 2004. Horkheimer, Max. “The Jews and Europe.” In The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key ­Writings by the Major Thinkers, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, 225–241. New York: Routledge, 2005. Horkheimer, Max. Tradionelle und kritische Theorie: Vier Aufsätz. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Verlag, 1981. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Horowitz, Jason. “Pope Francis, in Plea for South Sudan Peace, Stuns Leaders by Kissing their Shoes.” New York Times. April 11, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/ world/europe/pope-francis-south-sudan.html. Jamme, Christoph, and Helmut Schneider. Hegel’s ältestes Systemprogramm: Des Deutschen Idealismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984. Jeffreys, Diarmuid. Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And other Writings, translated and edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. Kogon, Eugen. “Der Christliche Politiker.” Frankfurter Hefte 12 (November 1957). Kogon, Eugen. Der SS–Staat: Das System der Deutschen Konzentrationslager. Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1947. Kogon, Eugen. “Revolution und Theologie: Das Neue in unserem Zeitalter: Ein ­Symposion.” Frankfurter Hefte 9 (September 1967). Küng, Hans. Can we Save the Catholic Church? London: William Collins, 2013. Küng, Hans. Das Christentum: Wesen und Geschichte. München: Piper Verlag, 1994. Küng, Hans. Grosse Christliche Denker. München: Piper Verlag, 1994. Küng, Hans. Das Judentum. München: Piper Verlag, 1991. Küng, Hans. Der Islam: Geschichte, Gegenwart, Zukunft. München: Piper Verlag, 2004. Küng, Hans. Menschwerdung Gottes: Eine Einführung in Hegel’s Theologisches Denken als Prolegomena zu einer künftigen Christologie. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1970.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

61

LaFraniere, Sharon. “Seeking Truth, Mueller Exposes Culture of Lies Around Trump.” SeattleTimes. December 1, 2018. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/seekingtruth-mueller-exposes-culture-of-lies-around-trump/. Laudani, Raffaele, ed. Secret Reports of Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Leibniz, Gottfried W. Die Theodizee von der Güte Gottes, der Freiheit des Menschen und den Ursprung des Ubels, I and II. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996. Lortz, Joseph. Die Reformation in Deutschland. Band I. Vorraussetzungen. Aufbruch. Erste Entscheidungen. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1962. Lortz, Joseph. Die Reformation in Deutschland. Band II. Ausbau der Fronten. Unionsversuche. Ergebnis. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1962. Lortz, Joseph. Geschichte der Kirche. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1964. Lortz, Joseph. Katholischer Zugang zum Nationalsozialismus. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1934. Löwenthal, Leo. Falsche Propheten: Studien zum Autoritarianismus. Schriften 3. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990. Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 525–541. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978. Marx-Aveling, Eleanor, in Erich Fromm. Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981. Mattox, Mickey L. The Catholic Luther, Then and Now. Lutheran Educational Journal. December 21st, 2017. https://lej.cuchicago.edu/faithlearning/the-catholic-lutherthen-now/. Metz, Johannes Baptist. Jenseits bürgerlicher Religion: Reden uber die Zukunft des Christentusm. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1980. Metz, Johannes Baptist, and Elie Wiesel. Trotzdem hoffen. Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1993. Meyer, Thomas. “Identitätspolitik-worum es geht,” Neue Gesellschaft-Frankfurter Hefte 10 (2018). Morelock, Jeremiah, ed. Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism. London: University of Westminster Press, 2018. Morrow, Lance. “The Longest Day for Trump’s Adversaries.” Wall Street Journal. February 6, 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-longest-day-for-trumps-adversaries -11549497693. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, translated by Thomas Common. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008.

62

Siebert

Ott, Michael R. Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion: The Meaning of Religion in the Struggle for Human Emancipation. Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2001. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Read, Anthony. The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003. Rensmann, Lars. The Politics of Unreason. The Frankfurt School and The Origins of Modern Antisemitism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. Ross, Alex. “The Frankfurt School knewTrump was Coming.” NewYorker Magazine. November 5, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-frankfurt -school-knew-trump-was-coming. Schillare, Quentin W. The Battle of Aschaffenburg: An Example of Late World War II Urban Combat in Europe. Fort Leavenworth: Kansas, 1989. Scholem, Gershom. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, edited by Werner J. Dannhauser. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2012. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Aphorismen zur Lebensweischeit. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus Verlag, 1946. Schweppenhäuser, Herman. “Hegel aktuell.” Frankfurter Hefte 14. (January 1959). Searle, John R. Die Wiederentdeckung des Geistes. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996. Siebert, Rudolf J. “A German Experience.” At the Cross Road 5 (1966): 12–14. Siebert, Rudolf J. The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2001. Siebert, Rudolf J. Die Anthropologie Michael Helding: eines Humanisten und Theologen im Umkreis der Geistigen Neuordnung des 16, Jahrhunderts (1506–1561). Universitätsbibliothek Mainz: Universitätsarchiv. Sigmaringen: Hohenzollernsche Jahreshefte, 1965. Siebert, Rudolf J. Early Critical Theory of Religion: The Island of Happiness. New Delhi, Sanbun Publishers, 2014. Siebert, Rudolf J. From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and Universal Solidarity. New York: Peter Lang Inc., 2002. Siebert, Rudolf J. Future of Religion: Creator, Exodus, Son of Man and Kingdom. New Delhi, India: Sanbun Publisher, 2016. Siebert, Rudolf J. “Introduction.” In The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society, edited by Michael R. Ott, 1–68. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Siebert, Rudolf J. Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness, and the Rescue of the Hopeless. Vol. I-III. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Siebert, Rudolf J. “Marriage, Eucharist, and Socialism,” Cross Currents 39, no. 4 (1986). Siebert, Rudolf J. The World Religions in Idealistic and Materialistic Perspective: The Loss and the Rediscovery of the Idea. New Delhi, India: Sanbun, 2019.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

63

Speit, Andrea. Das Netzwerk der Identitären: Ideologie und Aktionen der Neuen Rechten. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2018. Tarrant, Brenton. The Great Replacement: Toward a New Society. Self-Published (online), 2019. Taylor, Mark Lewis. The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World. New York: Fortress Press, 2019. Thunemann, Fabian. “Kiran Klaus Patels: Bestandaufnahme Europas.” Neue Gesellschaft -Frankfurter Hefte 66 (January 2019). Trevor-Roper, Hugh. Hitler’s Table Talk. 1941–1944. New York City: Enigma Books, 2000. Tröger, Beate. “Etwas fehlt in der Pracht der neuen Frankfurter Altstadt,” Neue Gesellschaft -Frankfurter Hefte 66 (January 2019). Trump, Donald J. State of the Union 2019 Transcript. February 6, 2019. https://www.cnn .com/2019/02/05/politics/donald-trump-state-of-the-union-2019-transcript/index .html. Warren, Donald. Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin the Father of Hate Radio. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Weikart, Richard. Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. Washington d.c.: Regnery History, 2016. Weitensteiner, Hans K. Warum denn wir, immer wir? War diese Stadt Frankfurt schuldiger als London? Katholisches Gemeindeleben im Dritten Reich und während der ­ersten Nachkriegsjahre 1932–1950. Dokumente und Darstellung. Frankfurt a. M.: Haag und Herchen, 2002. Wiesel, Elie. The Forgotten. New York: Schocken Books, 1992. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Wiggerhaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1994. Wolf, Hubert. Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Zengerle, Patricia. “With eye on Afghanistan talks, Trump vow to stop ‘endless wars.’” February 5, 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-afghanistan/with -eye-on-afghanistan-talks-trump-vows-to-stop-endless-wars-idUSKCN1PV07M. Zentner, Christian. Illustrierte Geschichte der Ära Adenauer. München: Nebel Verlag, 1984. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492–2001. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999. Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. New York: Verso, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj, and Boris Gunjevic, God in Pain. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj, and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? ­Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 2008.

Chapter 2

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society: Union, Disunion, and Reunion of the Sacred and the Profane (1946–2019): Part ii Rudolf J. Siebert 1

Democratic Socialism

The present historical situation (2019), with the increase of authoritarian ­populism and extremism, Trumpism, fascism, and neo-fascism, demands a new modification of Horkheimer’s and Pollock’s humanistic, democratic, socialist life-plans, and of the critical theory of society, and also of dialectical religiology, which derived from them. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower prepared to leave the White House in 1961, he did so with an ominous message for the American people about the disastrous rise of the military-industrial complex. He also did not fund yet the nasa space program of SS Colonel Werner von Braun, because as a Nazi scientist he had sent rockets from Penemünde to London toward the end of World War ii, and who would later on as a good friend of President Kennedy launch successfully the American moon project. Fifty-eight years after President Eisenhower, the complex of capital and military, as well as of Congress, university, and Church has morphed into an unstoppable war machine, one that dictates American economic and foreign policy in a direct and substantial way.1 Big military has grown to envelope the nation’s political, cultural and intellectual institutions. After President Trump’s election, brexit, and the widespread rise of disaster capitalism, and far-right identity politics and political parties, in Europe and America, much public discourse has intensely focused again on right-wing populism, identitarianism, corporatism, fascism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism, and the religious Right. In the middle of the 20th century, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, and Herbert Marcuse, and other members of the early Frankfurt School prolifically studied and theorized on the subject of fascism, as well as anti-Semitism in Germany, and in the United States. According to  the  New Yorker, the Frankfurt School alone predicted Trumpism and the 1 Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_003

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

65

i­dentitarians in Europe and America.2 Already in the 1930s, Erich Fromm had spoken in Germany about the authoritarian, or fascist personality, as well as about its opposite, the revolutionary and democratic personality.3 In the 1950s, Adorno explored the authoritarian or fascist personality in America.4 One of Adorno’s studies about the authoritarian personality in the American labor unions was so disturbing that it could never be published. It is still hidden in Leo Löwenthal’s estate in California. In 1949, Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman published the Prophets of Deceit and meant with it nobody else than the authoritarian or fascist personalities in America and Europe.5 They studied Father Charles Coughlin, who was a priest in Kalamazoo, Michigan, before he, the friend of the anti-Semite Henry Ford, became the famous radio priest in Detroit, who told Dr. Goebbels that America was ripe for fascism, if only it would drop its anti-Christian tendencies.6 Goebbels relayed the message to Hitler, who recommended in the Reichstag that a change in propaganda was necessary in order to elicit support from Americans. Löwenthal and Gutermann explored Coughlin and other anti-socialist, counter-revolutionary rabble-rousers of the era, envisioning the possibility that a situation would arise in which a large number of people would be susceptible again to his manipulation, thus anticipating a prophet of deceit and “con-man” like Donald J. Trump. To be sure, Trump has neither the well-articulated party apparatus nor the full blown ideology, or the demonic intelligence of a Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, or even Pavelić, or other fascist leaders, and thus more resembles the phenomena of authoritarian populism or neo-fascism, which critical theorists of religion and society can use to explain Trump and his supporters. Presidential candidate Trump revealed his own and his followers’ authoritarian personalities when he stated in a press conference that even if he would shoot a person in Manhattan, his base would still follow him faithfully. Since 1965, we opposed here in Michigan those clergymen who followed in the footsteps of Father Coughlin, trying to bring together Catholicism and capitalism, such as Father Robert Sirico, in Grand Rapids’ Acton Institute, using for this purpose 2 Alex Ross, “The Frankfurt School knew Trump was Coming.” New Yorker Magazine. November 5, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-frankfurt-school -knew-trump-was-coming. 3 Erich Fromm, Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches: Eine Sozialpsychologische Untersuchung. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1980. 4 Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1969. 5 Leo Löwenthal, Falsche Propheten: Studien zum Autoritarianismus. Schriften 3. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990. 6 Donald Warren, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin the Father of Hate Radio. New York: The Free Press, 1996.

66

Siebert

even the Papal Social Encyclical Letters by distorting them ideologically beyond recognition, and even demanding the assassination of the socialist leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.7 Doing so, we used in the critical theory of religion and society a variety of Frankfurt School theorists, texts and ideas, to illuminate Trump and authoritarian populism, in family, civil society, political state, history and culture, particularly in American as well as German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, movies. Doing so, in our dialectical religiology we also engaged authoritarian populism on a global scale in various ways. We demonstrated the continuing relevance of the Frankfurt School as well as our dialectical religiology to critically engage key phenomena of the present historical moment, as well as the dangers inherent in Trumpism and in other authoritarian populist leaders and movements; dangers that the members of the Frankfurt School in exile from Hitler’s Germany had been all too familiar with in the light of their experiences of German fascism. At the time, when Hitler wanted to send the Jews to Madagascar, and could not because of the British fleet, American fascists wanted to deport them to Alaska. Hitler proved his thesis that nobody wanted the Jews, by a devilish, scientific experiment, which did not only include the Jews, but also the Cubans, Americans, and British. He sent a ship full of Jews to Havana, which at the time was still under u.s. control, and to New York, where it was promptly rejected. The German Captain from the old German navy took the ship full of Jews back to England, where he ran it against a rock. All Jews were rescued and interned in a camp in England. Later on, the Jews were send back to Holland and Belgium, where they were captured by German troops during the invasion and put into concentration camps. Today American fascists are not entirely happy with President Trump, because he gave his daughter to a Jew (Jared Kushner) and fervently supports the State of Israel. They wait for something better. One of the most famous messages from the Institute for Social Research is that liberal democratic societies tend to move toward fascism on the basis of their capitalist mode of production and economic metabolism, and its continual, chronic, always deepening crises, which should teach dialectics to everybody.8 With the recent surge of far Right populism throughout the West mainly against the so called “invasion” and “colonization” of other races into the ethnosphere of the white Aryan race, and supposedly trying to replace it, this Frankfurt School warning reveals its prescience and ability to predict, which is essential for any scientific theory. A wealth of insights pertinent to authoritarian and populist trends is contained 7 Dustin J. Byrd, “Blackwater Theology: On the Unholy Trinity of Sirico, Strauss, and Friedman” Islamic Perspective Journal, no. 8 (Winter 2012): 41–60. 8 Jeremiah Morelock, Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism. London: University of Westminster Press, 2018.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

67

in the critical theory of society as well as in our dialectical religiology. In view of everything that is engulfing Europe, the United States, and perhaps the whole world, the work of the early and later Frankfurt School and of dialectical religiology demands concerning revisiting and actual interest. Such is the purpose of the present chapter. 2 Insights Today, in 2019, leading European and American social science scholars, as well as the critical theory of religion and society, apply insights from the early Frankfurt School to present-day authoritarian and totalitarian populism, including the Trump phenomenon, or Trumpism, or corporatism, and fascism, and related developments across the globe: aspects like theories, historical foundations and manifestations via social media.9 They stress identity against identity politics of the identitarians and their pressure.10 The European and American scholars and dialectical religiology examine the vital anthropological, psycho-analytical, sociological, political-scientific theories of the early Frankfurt School thinkers, and how their insights could possibly be applied today amidst the chaos, insecurities, and confusions of twenty-first century life, particularly under Trumpism, or corporatism, in America, Europe, and around the globe. The leading American and European scholars include in their research on Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Löwenthal, Marcuse, Habermas, analyses of European and American Facebook pages, Trump tweets, theatrical and operatic media drama – with all of Trump’s Mussolini gestures – and speeches to the nation.11 The scholars seek a deeper understanding of right-wing populism’s resurgence, and resonance, in the age of digital capitalism, only a little bit more than seven decades after the first massive wave of fascism had been militarily defeated with enormous human sacrifices in World War ii. The first, mostly Jewish generation of critical theorists, could never speak about fascism, or corporatism, or war, without speaking about capitalism and corporatocracy, and in general about the modern, extreme commodity exchange society, and its crises.12 Already between World War i and ii, Horkheimer, Pollock, Fromm, Marcuse, and other critical theorists of society, leaning toward the Social ­Democratic Party, and its class conflicts and struggles in Germany, but never 9 Ibid. 10 Andrea Speit, Das Netzwerk der Identitären: Ideologie und Aktionen der Neuen Rechten. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2018. 11 Morelock, Critical Theory. 12 Max Horkheimer, “The Jews and Europe,” in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Routledge, 2005), 226.

68

Siebert

being members of it, hoped that there would be a socialist revolution in ­Germany, and that the workers would rise up against, and overthrow, the selfconfessed most conservative revolutionary, or better still anti-socialist, counterrevolutionary, Adolf Hitler, fascism, and the capitalist ruling class – Ford, Krupp & Thyssen, I.G. Farben, ibm, etc. – which supported and financed him, as well as his nsdap movement. The critical theorists were disappointed. According to Fromm’s research with 80,000 blue and white collar workers in Frankfurt am Main, shortly before Hitler came into power, only about 12% of the workers were revolutionary, or had democratic personalities, and supported the socialist revolution and the resistance against Hitler and fascism.13 Another about 12% were authoritarian personalities, who supported the counterrevolutionary fascist movement, and sometimes even joined Hitler’s nsdap, and had leadership positions in it, when he threw Jews, socialists, and communists into concentration camps, and then marched against the Soviet Union, the only socialist country in the world at that time. Most decisively, the majority of workers remained passive and indifferent, and thus simply let Hitler’s conservative counter-revolution happen without any resistance. 3

Being Alarmed

Most recently, the critical theory of religion and society noticed that President Trump’s discussion of the “danger” of socialism in his second State of the Union Address. On Tuesday, February 5, 2019, he said: Two weeks ago, the United States officially recognized the legitimate government of Venezuela, and the new interim President, Juan Guaidó. We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom – and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair. Here in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence – not government coercion, domination and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.14 13 14

Erich Fromm, Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches: Eine Sozialpsychologische Untersuchung. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1980. Donald J. Trump, State of the Union 2019 Transcript. February 6, 2019. https://www.cnn .com/2019/02/05/politics/donald-trump-state-of-the-union-2019-transcript/index.html.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

69

In his State of the Union, President Trump confessed openly that he was once more engaged in a regime change in Venezuela, replacing the legitimate socialist government of Nicolás Maduro by the bourgeois and capitalist Government of Juan Guaidó, in violation of the self-determination of the people of Venezuela. Besides this political objective, there is an economic one: the possession of the oil resources of Venezuela, the largest on earth today. There have been over twenty such American, mostly violent and brutal, regime changes since World War ii: Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Vietnam, etc. Venezuela is a new moment in the international class struggle between the American and global bourgeoisie on one hand, and the working classes. For the President, capitalism means independence and freedom in the Wall Street sense of money, and socialism means government coercion, domination and control. Capitalism is non-violent, and socialism is brutal. The President seemed not to be familiar with the usual, non-ideological, economic definition of capitalism as “private appropriation of collective labor or surplus value,” and of socialism as the “collective appropriation of collective surplus value”: the appropriation of the surplus value by its real producers, the workers. Maybe the socialist experiment of Venezuela would have been more successful if the country had not first of all been colonized and exploited by North American oil companies, and if later on it had not been strangled by sanctions through the American Government, being in the service of the oil and other capitalist oligarchs. Forgotten completely is socialist Venezuela’s help during the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, wherein Hugo Chavez pledged to support the u.s. with cheap gas supplies. His offer was rejected by then president George W. Bush. President Trump gave his State of the Union Address before Congress, within which was a small group of social-democratic Representatives, including the young Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, who resisted and alarmed Trump, since they represent the views of over half of the millennials. The corporate ruling-class supported Trump precisely for this purpose: to stop socialism in a country in which the antagonism between bourgeoisie and workers has become more acute in recent decades, and in which there is no end to urban and rural slums and homeless people, while abroad wars were lost in Vietnam and in the Near East, which costed millions of human lives and trillions of dollars, which stand for human labor, and appear as debts, despite of all the war profits. Traditionally, the Democratic Party functioned as the resistance to socialism, and the Republican Party resisted fascism. In 2016, the Democratic Party neutralized Senator Bernie Sanders and his social-democratic campaign, a la Scandinavian model, but the Republican Party was not able to stop authoritarian populism, Trumpism, and fascism. In

70

Siebert

his second State of the Union Address, President Trump emphasized that America would face down what the self-proclaimed conservative revolutionary, or better anti-socialist counter-revolutionary, President Ronald Reagan had called in a Manichean fashion, the Evil Empire, already before he had asked President Gorbachev to take the wall down, despite of the fact that the Russians had resisted the wall for five years, and the German Democratic Government in Pankow had finally built it, nevertheless, against their will, and America had triumphed over communism in the neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989.15 Like Reagan before, Trump is not able to see the dialectic of capitalism, and is convinced that there will be no great depressions any longer, and therefore he follows Milton Friedman over Lord Maynard Keynes, and continues to deregulate and to privatize, and thus to produce another and deeper financial crisis than 2008. The critical theory of religion and society, which predicted President Trump, also predicts with the help of the critical futurology, that if the President is correct, that the future will not belong to socialism, the present barbarism will continue, and deepen, and there will be no draining of the  swamp ever. If there will be no post-modern Alternative Future iii – a ­mediated and reconciled society, then there will be post-modern Alternative ­Future i – the totally administered signal society of skyscrapers and eight-lane highways, full of authoritarian, hording, automated and alienated individuals, following the fascist ethics of the aristocratic principle of nature, or post-­ modern Alternative Future ii – the totally militarized society, moving from one traditional regime change war or civil war after the other, to an abc war between the American and the Slavic World, embracing all civilizations, religious or secular.16 In the perspective of dialectical religiology, at this time, in 2019, in America, the new name for socialism is Green New Deal, which is more similar to the socialist Green Parties in Germany and Europe than to the Roosevelt New Deal or Clinton’s New Democrats. It connects the economic and political issues of traditional socialism to the environmental problem of climate change: the irrational, capitalist metabolism of civil society that has caused global climate change. There must be a revolutionary economic and political solution to this problem. The needs of the Many have priority over the greed and the unlimited profit hunger of the Few. To be sure, the Green New Deal movement is secular, but it is carried by fundamentally religious people and convictions: responsibility for the preservation of the creation, nature and 15 16

Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985. Rudolf J. Siebert, Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness, and the Rescue of the Hopeless. Vol. i–iii. Leiden, Brill, 2010.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

71

man, before the Creator God. Representative Cortez is not only a former bartender, as her Republican opponents mention repeatedly and most snobbishly (snob = sine nobilitate: “without nobility”), but is also a Catholic. Senator Sanders has a Jewish background. The critical theory of religion and society appreciates and recognizes very much the Green New Deal movement’s positive and optimistic religious worldliness, and the obligation it contains for believers and non-believers. 4

Military Industrial Complex

In the perspective of critical theory of religion and society, not only the undesirable post-modern Alternative Future i has come very close, but also the even more undesirable, post-modern Alternative Future ii has become more possible and probable.17 When President Dwight D. Eisenhower prepared to leave the White House in 1961, he did so with an ominous message for the American people about the disastrous rise of the military-industrial complex. Fifty-eight years later, the complex of capital and military, as well as of Congress, university, and Church, has morphed into an unstoppable war machine, one that dictates the u.s.’s economic and foreign policy in a direct and substantial way.18 Big Military has grown to envelope the nation’s political, cultural, and intellectual institutions. In his second State of the Union Address, President Trump promised to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, initiated by the Bush Administrations in retaliation for September 11, 2001, and thereby seemed to contradict the rise of the military industrial complex. According to the President, America’s brave troops have been fighting in the Middle East for almost 19 years. In Afghanistan and Iraq nearly 7,000 American heroes have given their lives.19 More than 52,000 Americans have been badly wounded. The u.s. has spent more than $7 trillion in the Middle East. Already as a presidential candidate Donald Trump pledged a new peaceful approach. According to President Trump, great nations do not fight endless wars. Of course, the Romans did precisely that, with the help of their weapon – producing, capitalist bourgeoisie. When President Trump took office, isis controlled more than 20,000 square miles in Iraq and Syria.20 Today, according to the President, we 17 Ibid. 18 Hedges, War is a Force. 19 Patricia Zengerle, “With eye on Afghanistan talks, Trump vow to stop ‘endless wars.’” February 5, 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-afghanistan/with-eye-on -afghanistan-talks-trump-vows-to-stop-endless-wars-idUSKCN1PV07M. 20 Ibid.

72

Siebert

have liberated virtually all of that territory from the grip of these bloodthirsty killers.21 Of course, in the view of the critical theory of religion and society, the Bath generals, who have joined isis, and who have been trained in dialectical warfare by the Soviet General Georgy Zhukov school like General Võ Nguyên Giáp in Vietnam before, have other plans, and may spread their Caliphate of Damascus and Baghdad into Africa, and elsewhere, and thus avoid the new positivistic Western Crusaders. The President also accelerated our negotiations to reach a political settlement in Afghanistan.22 According to the President, American troops have fought with unmatched valor, and thanks to their bravery, the government is now able to pursue a political solution to the long and bloody conflict.23 Of course, in the perspective of the critical theory of religion and society, the President fails to consider the underlying problem of the modern disunion between the still religious, Islamic Middle East, and the secular, enlightened West, which generates always new more or less bloody culture wars all around the globe. Precisely this is the main problem, the resolution and reconciliation of which is the very goal of dialectical religiology.24 But the President’s Administration does at least hold constructive talks with a number of Afghan groups, including the Taliban. The President also had some success in his talks with the communist leadership of North Korea. All that is, indeed, progress! As the President and his administration make progress in these negotiations, they will be able to reduce our troop presence and focus on counter-terrorism. Which, of course, means the end of discourse and the continuation of violence. Why should it not be possible to stop demonizing and invite isis and other Islamic fundamentalist groups to the United Nations Security Council, and let them express their grievances. Maybe some of these grievances are justified, and can positively be dealt with. The President still does not know whether we will achieve an agreement in the Near East. But after two decades of war, we do finally know that violence does ultimately not work, and that the hour has come to at least try discourse for peace. We can only hope that the Military Industrial Complex will not once more hinder or prevent the President’s “peace” efforts, and that the problem of the much deeper antagonisms between the religious and the secular, and the classes, will at least be considered in discourse, based on the ideal speech situation and mutual recognition and respect, and without violence, torture and killing, 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Mark Lewis Taylor, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World. New York: Fortress Press, 2019.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

73

and drone attacks, ­according to the Lex Talionis, which leads nowhere, and should, therefore, be replaced by the Golden Rule, which is shared by all still living world religions, and has also been translated into the secular categorical imperative, and communicative or discourse ethics of the unlimited communication community. In the view of the critical theory of religion and society, such discourse for peace may lead out of the present world-without-order toward post-modern Alternative Future iii: a more mediated and reconciled, and thus more orderly world. During a recent visit to the Industrial Park of Western Michigan University, my assistant Kenneth and I discovered a National Guard camp nearby. We were reminded of the Military-Industrial-and-University-Complex. In the Industrial Park we found a peculiar sculpture of Albert Einstein, close to the building of the wmu Engineering Department, amidst all the industrial research structures. The inscription on the Einstein sculpture said nothing about Albert Einstein sending his letter to President Roosevelt, informing him about the new colossal weapon possibilities in quantum physics, which made him co-responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for the 140,000 immediate civilian casualties, and for opening up the Pandora’s box of future atomic and hydrogen bombs and wars. It is true, that years later Albert Einstein sent another letter to President Roosevelt shortly before the latter’s death, in which he highly recommended that the bomb should not be used. It was too late! After my late friend, Ivan Supek, who was Werner Heisenberg’s student, and President of the University of Zagreb, had refused to build the bomb for socialist Yugoslavia, he stopped teaching quantum physics and started the InterUniversity Centre (iuc) in Dubrovnik (now Croatia). In doing so, he initiated a global peace movement, which brought him to Canada, the usa, and to wmu, where he invited it to become a member of the iuc. wmu became a member in 1975, and I founded an international course on the Future of Religion there, which has lasted for 43 years, and later on an international sistercourse on Religion in Civil Society in Yalta, Crimea, which has lasted for 20 years.25 Yearly, I travelled to both places with other faculty and students to meet with scholars from all around the globe. We discussed and promoted peace, particularly b­ etween the American and the Slavic World. It would be a good idea to put a statue of Ivan Supek besides the sculpture of Albert ­Einstein in the WMU ­Industrial Park. In the view of dialectical religiology, both sculptures could ­remind the students, faculty, and businessmen, of

25

Rudolf J. Siebert, Future of Religion: Creator, Exodus, Son of Man and Kingdom. New Delhi, India: Sanbun Publisher, 2016.

74

Siebert

President Roosevelt’s ­warning against the danger of what can be called: The Military-Industrial-Congressional-University-Church-Complex. 5

Identity Politics

After President Trump’s election, brexit, and the widespread rise of disaster capitalism, and far-right identity politics and political parties, in Europe and America, much public discourse has intensely focused again on right-wing populism, the religious Right, corporatism, fascism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. In the middle of the 20th century, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, and Herbert Marcuse, as well as other members of the early Frankfurt School, had prolifically studied and theorized about fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States.26 When after his second State of the Union Address, President Trump was reminded by journalists that particularly younger Americans turned to socialism, and that they did this out of idealism, he answered, that capitalism was also idealism. He was not aware of the difference between bourgeois materialism of money, in which he has been involved throughout his life, on one hand, and the historical materialism of many socialists, including the critical theorists of society, which being materialistic, nevertheless, concretely superseded idealism in themselves, which is not the case with Wall Street capitalism. When the President met with the socialist leader of North Korea, and established friendlier relationships, American journalists asked if the North Koreans would now become more materialistic like the Americans, namely in the sense of moneymaterialism. They were completely unaware that the North Koreans had become socialists and historical materialists decades and generations ago, following the Soviet model, and later on the Chinese communist model, and that as such they were already materialists, but, of course, not bourgeois, but historical, or dialectical materialists, preserving idealistic elements. Dialectical religiology has been fully aware of an identity politics that is willing to include the other, and one which excludes the other, and that the first is producing once more the second in the form of an authoritarian extremism and populism. The critical theory of religion and society aims at an identity politics that does justice to identity and non-identity, without provoking the radically exclusive identity politics, like seventy years ago, and now again under different circumstances.

26

Rolf Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson. (Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1994), 149–430.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

6

75

Principled Realism

The critical theory of religion and society has always taken most seriously not only the religious, but also the economic factors of history and social change, and vice versa. In his second State of the Union Address, President Trump called his theory not neo-liberalism, or compassionate conservativism, like his Republican predecessors, but rather principled realism, a new form of bourgeois materialism of money, which is to replace discredited social theories, like the Roosevelt New Deal or socialism, that supposedly have failed for decades to yielded progress. The President reported to Congress his great economic successes, which have been achieved on the basis of his principled realism: In just over two years since the election, we have launched an unprecedented economic boom, a boom that has rarely been seen before. We have created 5.3 million new jobs and importantly added 600, 000 new manufacturing jobs – something which almost everyone said was impossible to do, but the fact is, we are just getting started. Wages are rising at the fastest pace in decades, and growing for blue collar workers, who I promised to fight for, faster than anyone else. Nearly 5 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps. The United States economy is growing almost twice as fast today as when I took office, and we are considered far and away the hottest economy anywhere in the world. Unemployment has reached the lowest rate in half a century. African-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American unemployment have all reached their lowest levels ever recorded. Unemployment for Americans with disabilities has also reached an all-time low. More people are working now than at any time in our history – 157 million…… And just weeks ago, both parties united for groundbreaking criminal justice reform. Last year, I heard through friends the story of Alice Johnson. I was deeply moved. In 1997, Alice was sentenced to life in prison as a first–time non-violent drug offender. Over the next two decades she became a prison minister, inspiring others to choose a better path. She had a big impact on that prison population-and far beyond…. We’re also joined tonight by Matthew Charles from Tennessee. In 1996, at age 30, Matthew was sentenced to 35 years for selling drugs and related offenses. Over the next two decades, he completed more than 30 Bible studies, became a law clerk, and mentored fellow inmates. Now Matthew

76

Siebert

is the very first person to be released from prison under The First Step Act. Matthew on behalf of all Americans: welcome home…. Meanwhile, working class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration – reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools, and hospitals, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net… We passed a massive tax cut for working families and doubled the child tax credit…. On Friday it was announced that we added another 304 000 jobs last month alone – almost double what was expected. An economic miracle is taking place in the usa – and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations…. To help support working parents, the time has come to pass school choice for American children. I am also proud to be the first President to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave – so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child…. Everything that has come since – our triumph over communism, our giant leaps of science and discovery, our unrivaled progress toward equality and justice – all of it is possible thanks to the blood and tears and courage and vision of the Americans who came before. Think of this Capitol – think of this very chamber, where lawmakers before you voted to end slavery, to build the railroads and the highways, to defeat fascism, to secure civil rights, to face down an evil empire… We must keep America first in our hearts. We must keep freedom alive in our souls. And we must always keep faith in America’s destiny – that one nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world. Thank you. God bless you, God bless America, and good night.27 In the perspective of the critical theory of religion and society, such economic boom has been seen before, when in 1934, one year after taking power, Adolf 27

Nicole Fallert, “President Trump’s State of the Union address: transcript.” February 5, 2019. https://www.vox.com/2019/2/5/18212533/president-trump-state-of-the-union -address-live-transcript.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

77

Hitler and his defeated fascism created 6 million jobs in a country with a population of 60 million, by doing Keynesianism better than Lord Keynes himself had envisioned it. Following President Reagan, President Trump had cancelled Keynesianism and replaced it once more with Friedman’s neo-­liberal de-regulation and privatization policies, despite of the fact that they produced the financial crisis of 2008, which resulted in millions of workers losing their jobs and homes. The President was not aware that not the state, but civil ­society produces jobs, in order to satisfy the peoples’ needs. The President also forgot to mention that the 157 million American workers did not only produce their ­wages, but also the much larger surplus value for the capitalistic oligarchy, to which he himself belongs, if also on the lowest level, and that they provide also the soldiers who fight the foolish wars for the same oligarchs, in order to secure cheaper labor and resources – rubber from Vietnam, coffee from El Salvador, oil from Iraq and Venezuela, etc. – and to replace socialist regimes, which resist exploitation. When the wages are rising, so is the surplus value, the use of which the workers, who have produced it, cannot even co-determine. The American bourgeoisie is obviously more efficient in mobilizing and exploiting the labor force in war and peace than any of its counter-parts around the globe, not to speak of former slaveholders or feudal lords, and in lowering the social costs. Unemployment is even more costly for the bourgeoisie in terms of surplus labor than for the working class in terms of wages. Hitler cut the taxes for the working class through the exploitation of other countries, and added Kraft durch Freude (Power through Joy) in order to keep it subservient to the bourgeoisie, Krupp & Thyssen, I.G. Farben, etc., who gratefully supported him, and instituted massive family support and one-­family home building. Also, the defeated Hitler, Mussolini, Salazar, Franco and Pavelić, and their various forms of fascism, triumphed over socialism and communism at least for some time. The President’s progress toward equality and justice has not really changed the American class system, and is far from being classless, and thus remain an unequal and unjust society, while the slums and homeless people continue around him in Washington d.c. and every other city in America. It was most of all the work, blood and tears, and courage and dreams, of the farmers and workers that have made America great so far.28 The President does his best to make a labor party unnecessary. He can do things better, so he thinks. There are parts of the working class who do indeed see the President as a revolutionary rather than an anti-socialist counter-­ revolutionary, and trust in his promise that someday they also shall be rich as he is. The President stood before a Congress with two bourgeois parties, the Democratic Party, consisting of modified New Deal Liberals, and the Republican Party, 28

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–2001. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999.

78

Siebert

consisting of Neo-Liberals, who went back behind the modified Roosevelt liberalism. There was, of course, no labor party, which could represent the 157 million workers, and promote an adequate health care and educational system, and remove the many urban and rural slums all over the country, with about 50 million proletarians living in them. The possibility that the Democratic Party would evolve into a labor party, which would be d­ esirable, is prevented by the fact that most A ­ merican workers do not know that they are workers, but think that they are “middle class.” They have no class-consciousness, as do the oligarchs. The President mentioned prisoners from the working class, whom he had pardoned because they had been imprisoned on the basis of insufficient anti-drug laws, and because they had rehabilitated themselves, not through secular, humanistic socialism, but rather through reading the Bible and becoming ministers. The President did not see the enormous class antagonism between the working class on the one hand, and the middle and higher bourgeoisie, particularly the capitalistic oligarchy, which constitutes 1–10% of the population, but owns more than half of the country’s wealth, on the other. The President sees only the opposition between the working class and the political class, which is his socalled “enemy.” Wealthy politicians and donors push for open boarders, while living their rich lives behind walls, gates, and guards. According to dialectical religiology, mass legal migration cannot be made responsible for all social problems in the United States. It provides massive amounts of cheap labor. Thus, a Trump wall would not solve the problem. It certainly contradicts Christian ethics and morality, as Pope Francis has stated repeatedly. The Good Samaritan did not build walls between Jews and Samaritans, but, to the contrary, took down the ­in-group/out-group barriers, and precisely thereby was able to heal.29 The President spoke as if the class and distribution-problems had all been solved to a large extend already, and if there were only the cultural recognition – or identity – problems still left.30 He engages in exclusive identity politics.31 Thus, President Trump asked the two bourgeois parties to work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life and to affirm a fundamental truth: all ­children – born and unborn – are made in the holy image of God. In his principled realism, he spoke against abortion, but not against the death penalty, or the drone strikes, which kill a lot of innocent victims, who are also the ­children of God. Here, according to the critical theory of religion and society, religion is once more ­ideologically functionalized. In the face of the anti-socialist Trumpism, and its 29 30 31

Walter Dirks, Die Samariter und der Mann aus Samaria: Vom Umgang mit der Barmherzigkeit. Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus Verlag, 1985. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1994. Thomas Meyer, “Identitätspolitik-worum es geht,” Neue Gesellschaft.Frankfurter Hefte 10 (2018): 20–24.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

79

e­ xclusive identity politics and policies, the dialectical religiology emphasizes and fights for communitarianism and humanistic, or democratic socialism, in terms of a prudent and just inclusive identity politics and policies, on the basis of a continual realistic time-diagnosis and prognosis. There is no sufficient reason for the critical theory, why there should not be in time a strong labor party also in Washington d.c., as there is already one in Ottawa, London, Paris, or Berlin, etc. At the end of his second State of the Union Address, the President, who calls himself a Presbyterian Christian, turned from his principled realism to a theological idealism, and mentioned the name of God four times, despite of the fact that the u.s. Constitution, as an enlightenment document, never uses the name of God. The critical theory of religion and society finds the name of God in the u.s. Declaration of Independence, but it is the God of Voltaire’s and Rousseau’s deism, who admittedly created the world, but then left it to itself, and as God-less, as he was worldless, and thus of no relevance whatsoever for economics, or politics. The President’s religion is not one of protest, but rather one of harmonization and conformism: a Bourgeois civil religion.32 7

Counter-reformation and Counter-revolution

According to the critical theory of religion and society, Steve Bannon may very well be the main author of President Trump’s principled realism. He comes from a Catholic working class family in the usa. He went to Harvard University. He worked for Goldmann Sachs, where he became very rich. He used his wealth for his commitment to right-wing populism. He joined Trumpism and became the ideological strategist for the Trump White House for some time. He often visits the Vatican, where he negotiates with counter-reformation bishops, i.e. bishops who are against the reforms of Vatican Council ii, and Pope Francis i, who stand against the counter-revolutionary, authoritarian populist movements in Europe and America. Often some religious people support the old feudal or bourgeois system to its very end, and other religious people help to initiate a new post-modern, humanist – or democratic – ­socialist system. Counter-reformation and counter-revolution go very well together; so do reformation and revolution, or “provolution.” Bannon often appears on counter-­ reformation Catholic television stations and programs in the usa. Here, he reports about his work in Rome. There, in Rome, Bannon opposes Pope Francis’ open immigration policies. The Pope is supposed to set aside the Evangelium, the Sermon on the Mount, the story of the Good Samaritan, and become a 32

Johannes Baptist Metz, Jenseits bürgerlicher Religion: Reden uber die Zukunft des Christentusm. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1980.

80

Siebert

­ rincipled realist, like Bannon and Trump, when he deals with immigration in p Europe or America. The Pope should cease his criticism against President Trump and Wall Street, and capitalism in general, and join them. Bannon is as fanatically opposed to Chinese communism as the fascists 70 years ago were to Russian Bolshevism, and to Western European socialism, which however did not prevent them from entering the fraudulent Ribbentrop-Stalin Pact. Bannon supports the Catholic underground church in China and its counter-revolutionary anti-communism. The Pope has learned from the Church’s great mistake in the 1930s to conclude treaties only with fascist states, but not with the socialist states, and wants to correct it. Bannon opposes fanatically the Pope’s intent to conclude also a treaty with a communist state, China. Bannon has built and financed institutes to rescue the Christliche Abendland against the onslaught of foreign races, nations and civilizations, as the fascist nations tried to do in vain in the first half of the 20th century. Bannon has counter-reformation and counter-revolution followers in every European and American Catholic diocese. In the Diocese of Kalamazoo, where this essay is written, it was the late Father Robert Molino, later on Bishop in Wisconsin, who spread most fanatically the counter-reformation and counter-revolution by all means available – following in the footsteps of Father Charles Coughlin, the friend of Henry Ford, and Dr. Joseph Goebbels – having been first pastor in Kalamazoo, and then a famous fascist radio priest in Detroit. I had long discussions with Father Molino on-and-off television in the spirit of the critical theory. 8

Pathos of Distance

In the view of the critical theory of religion and society, an adequate understanding of Horkheimer’s fundamental novel L’île heureuse will neither deny, nor over-evaluate, the not only literarily, but also content-wise, questionable and problematic character of its Schopenhaurian, or Nietzschean, pathos of distance of a community, seemingly free from all prejudices, in opposition to the masses of hesitating working people. This pathos of distance later manifested in the writings of Horkheimer’s friend and cooperator, Theodor W. Adorno, who sometimes showed deep longings for the old aristocratic life of Corsica, where his family came from.33 Horkheimer was early on introduced by his friend Friedrich Pollock to Arthur Schopenhauer, the father of occidental-metaphysical pessimism, and his close friend and cooperator Theodor W. Adorno, who had learned more from Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s 33

Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

81

s­ tudent, than even from Hegel. In the 1960s, Adorno spent happy days with ­Herbert Marcuse in Sils Maria, where Nietzsche wrote his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. They even still met an old porter who carried Nietzsche’s luggage to his house near the village church. According to the porter, young boys put pebbles in Nietzsche’s red umbrella, so that when he opened it, they all fell on his head. They also bombarded Nietzsche with stones when he walked up the mountain behind his house. Adorno questioned if this experience may have given Nietzsche second thoughts about his idea of the transvaluation of all values in favor of the value of biological vitality. Not only did Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann turn to Schopenhauer, but also Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Hitler had carried Schopenhauer in his backpack during World War I and read him in between battles. Hitler and Goeb­ bels still discussed Schopenhauer during their last days in bombed out Berlin. For the critical theory of religion and society, it would be interesting to know which volumes they discussed of the World as Will and Representation: those about the workings of the will, or the one about the redemption from it through art, religion, or philosophy and science. Which part of the Schopenhaurian Richard Wagner ‘s music did they discuss: The Ring of Nibelungen, Walküre, or Tristan and Isolde? This Schopenhaurian and Nietzschean pathos of distance in the L’île heureuse originally characterized through consecrated and dedicated Jugendstil, or “youth style,” and rebellious and revolutionary expressionism, has practically been overcome through Horkheimer’s later philosophical and social-scientific work. There are present, nevertheless, already in his novel The Island of Happiness some central motives of Horkheimer’s later theoretical work: e.g. the critique of the isolated, independent principle of bourgeois selfpreservation for the price of the lives of the others. Horkheimer remained a disciple of Schopenhauer to the end of his life, in that he also believed like his teacher, that the teaching about the fall of man, the original and inherited sin, was one of the most significant teachings in religion.34 For Schopenhauer, combining Buddhist and Christian insights, the man who did evil, who with his will-to-life negated the will of the other individuals, who was seeking his happiness for the price of the happiness of the others, was to be born again in some mode, without he or she knowing about his or her former life. They must go through all the sufferings until for them, like for a true and genuine martyr, the suffering of the others was as close to them, as their own suffering, until they could feel with the others compassion and joy. Schopenhauer and Horkheimer called the original inherited sin such a 34

Genesis 3; Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorismen zur Lebensweischeit. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus Verlag, 1946.

82

Siebert

grand religious teaching because the affirmation of one’s own self and the ­negation of the other individuals in bourgeois self-preservation was for both the very content of the demythologized original and inherited sin of all human beings. This great teaching of the original and inherited sin in its earlier religious and later philosophical form, which belongs to the dimension of the human spirit and freedom, contradicts, of course, the very fact, that in nature, the realm of gravity, on this 8 billion years old earth, or maybe also on other planets in the millions of sun systems in the 14 billion years old universe since the Big Bang, every organism, since life arose out of the oceans, from the smallest to the biggest ones, consisted of the trinitarian structure of form, assimilation, and species-process, and could therefore preserve itself and survive only by assimilating, i.e. eating and annihilating, other living organisms, which was a most painful process for the victim, as soon as the organisms developed a nervous system. Thus, man as spirit, consciousness and self-consciousness – gnoti se auton – ought not to be natural as the bourgeois enlightenment and the fascist ethics, the aristocratic principle of nature, suggested and taught.35 There remains for Horkheimer and Pollock also the feeling of a, so to speak, permanent emigration from the bourgeois class and culture, in which they grew up, as a whole. It needed only those in the later years appropriated, by Horkheimer in his novel L’île heureuse, so called professional insights in psychology and sociology, the knowledge of the complicated reality, in order still to entrust from the strived for and also initially and partially achieved starting points of L’île heureuse a Flaschenpost, or Message in the Bottle, to the stormy ocean of world history, which carries the name critical theory of society. Also dialectical religiology, which we developed out of the critical theory of society, is such a Flaschenpost in the prevailing antagonism between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, and the culture wars, which it continues to produce in America, Europe, the Near East, and beyond. The critical theory of religion and society has worked hard to overcome this pathos of distance, and has transformed it into a pathos of interconnection, and solidarity, and closeness. With the Marxist Bertolt Brecht, dialectical religiology has through the years celebrated the Decline and Downfall of the Egoist in modern civil society. 9

Cafe Marx

Many years before the start of the critical theory of religion and society, I grew up on the Westside of Frankfurt, in Bockenheim, the working class s­ection 35

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk. 1941–1944. New York City: Enigma Books, 2000; Siebert, Manifesto.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

83

of the city, where the first Institute of Social Research, commonly called “Cafe Marx,” was situated. The Falkstrasse 84, where I lived and grew up, was only ten minutes’ walk away from the Bockenheimer Warte, the Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, the Senckenberg Museum, which showed residuals of evolution around the globe, and the Institute for Social Research. Goethe came from the bourgeois center of Frankfurt. It was the city near which, in Homburg, Georg W.F. Hegel, Friedrich W.J. Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin had written their great Manifesto of Idealism.36 Marx visited Frankfurt in 1848 during the failed bourgeois revolution in the Paul’s Kirche.37 After he lost the competition with the so called “cursed optimist” Hegel, at the University of Berlin, the pessimist Schopenhauer moved into the bourgeois center of Frankfurt near the Main River, and worked on his book, The World as Will and Representation, and continued to hate women. During the revolution of 1848, Schopenhauer sided with the bourgeoisie, which allied itself with the nobility against the proletariat, and thereby prepared the fascist counter-revolution of 1933. Frankfurt was the hometown of the Jewish banker family Rothschild, part of the Jewish high finance, which Adolf Hitler made responsible for World War I, and because of which he, Heinrich Himmler, and the Schutzstaffel (SS) started the Shoah (Holocaust). Frankfurt was the city from which the Institute for Social Research and the critical theory of society received their name: Frankfurt School. The great critical theorists, Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno, had grown up on the other, the bourgeois eastside of Frankfurt, a generation earlier. Today, Frankfurt has an Adorno street and a public glass monument, which contains his desk, upon which he wrote his many critical essays and books. Whenever my parents, Bruno and Elli Siebert, who both worked in the Jewish shoe factory, I.C.A Schneider, took me and my brother Karl to the Palmengarten, we practically passed the old Institute of Social Research, which in 1944 was bombed out by American bombers. My Grandfather, Martin Bopp, a former baker and farmer in the Hessian village of Münzenberg, who had been attracted by the glitter of the modern city, conducted the street car, first drawn by a horse and later motorized, from the Bockenheimer Warte to the Opernplatz, and the bourgeois center of Frankfurt, on which after World War I the critical theorists of the Institute of Social Research travelled daily. However, my proletarian grandfather knew the

36

37

Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider, Hegel’s ältestes Systemprogramm: Des Deutschen Idealismus. Frankfurt a.M. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984; Beate Tröger, “Etwas fehlt in der Pracht der neuen Frankfurter Altstadt,” Neue Gesellschaft.Frankfurter Hefte 66 (January 2019): 69–73. Tröger, “Etwas fehlt,” 69–73.

84

Siebert

b­ ourgeois critical theorists as little as they knew him. My working class parents and grandparents belonged to the masses of the hesitating people, and they knew nothing of an Institute of Social Research, or a critical theory of society, the main purpose of which was to emancipate the proletariat. They voted for the Social Democratic Party, or out of religious reasons for the Center Party. There was a Nietzschean pathos of distance separating the Institute scholars from the masses of the people, the white and blue color workers, which Fromm studied in Frankfurt very scientifically before he emigrated to Chicago. In Frankfurt, in the Kristallnacht, I witnessed coming out of the downtown swimming pool the burning of the famous synagogue, the home of great scholars like Martin Buber, and the devastation of Jewish stores on the Zeil, and the imprisonment of many Jews at the occasion of the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish man in Paris. In Frankfurt, as a member of the Catholic Youth movement, I helped Jewish friends, long before I knew anything of the Frankfurt School. It took for me the imprisonment and reeducation in Camp Allen, Norfolk, Virginia, in order to find out the first time about the Institute of Social Research and the critical theory of society, from which I began to deduct the critical theory of religion, which also has its roots in the youthful spirit of Horkheimer’s novel L’île heureuse: its longing for the totally Other than the horror and terror of nature and history, the Unconditional, beyond all Schopenhaurian, Nietzschean, positivistic, Hitlerian, and Trumpist icy cold pathos of distance to the suffering of the working classes; its commitment to empathy, justice, equality, solidarity, subsidiarity, and friendly living together without walls; to the full Shema Yisrael, including the love of man and of the Eternal One!38 Motivated by the Cafe Marx, the critical theory of religion and society tried to overcome its bourgeois pathos of distance from the proletariat, and replace it by a pathos of closeness, interrelatedness, and solidarity through many years of interaction with working class youth in the German and American school system. I remained faithful to my working class background. When in 1965 I came to Kalamazoo, in order to teach for 54 years at Western Michigan University’s mainly working class students, I settled right away in the working class section of town, in the House of Peace, which became the home for many working class students. Wherever we worked and taught, we lived in working class areas: in the German Federal Republic in Dieburg and Meschede; in the German Democratic Republic in Rostock; in Canada in Waterloo, London, Fredericton; in Israel in Haifa and Jerusalem. 38

Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 5–7; Luke 9:51–56, 10:29–37.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

85

Dialectical religiology developed continually out of these working class contexts and environments. 10

Human Potentials

From its beginning in 1946, the critical theory of religion and society was ­rooted not only in Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity, Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, in Islam, the Religion of Law, and in Buddhism, the Religion of Inwardness, as well as in German idealism and materialism, but also in the five human potentials, or evolutionary universals, situated on the phenomenological level of human subjectivity: language and memory; work and tool; erotic love; struggle for recognition; and community. From its very start in World War I, Horkheimer’s critical theory of society, informed by the enlightener, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Georg W.F. Hegel (who discovered the dialectic of enlightenment over a century before Horkheimer and Adorno, and was thus also most critical not only of religion, but also of the bourgeois enlightenment itself), Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, emphasized mimetic and communicative rationality and praxis, rooted in the human potentials of language and memory, love, struggle for recognition and community, over instrumental and functional rationality and action, rooted in the evolutionary universal of work and tool, so overwhelmingly dominant in the modern capitalist civilization. This was done long before Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth discovered these potentials in Hegel’s early writings, and began building their own theory of communicative action on language and recognition, thus by-passing Hegel’s system, as well as preserving and retrieving progressive elements from it in their unsystematic theory of communicative action. Philosophical and theological systematization was under ideology – even idolatry suspicion. Dialectical religiology became as unsystematic as the critical theory of society, as this essay shows only too clearly, in order to avoid any kind of ideology and idolatry. At the same time, for dialectical religiology, the great idealistic systems remained a rich resource, from which still much could be learned. The critical theory of society was dialectical in the sense that it saw with Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Freud, the modern extreme commodity exchange society as being antagonistic, in that it generated and reproduced itself in its metabolism with nature, out of that what it repressed, its internal enemies: the biological instincts, women, the proletariat, etc. As stated before, from its very beginning, the critical theory of religion and society was ideology critique. For the critical theorists, ideology was

86

Siebert

s­ imply the untruth. They ­wanted to free people from the enslavement of fixed ideas, of ideologies, through enlightening them: enlightenment understood as the attempt to free people from their fears, and to make them masters of their fate; or as making c­ onscious, what was unconscious; or as placing Ego, where Id was.39 For the critical ­theorists, not all political or religious statements were ideological, as they happened to be, for example the bourgeois enlighteners Adam Weishaupt, Ex-Jesuit, and founder of the secret Anti-Christian Order of the Illuminati in the Electorate of Bavaria; or Max Stirner, pseudonym of J.K. Schmidt, one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, post-modernism, and individual, egoist anarchism, in contrast to the scientific, collective anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin, the great historical rival of Marx, who loathed him; and of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he both, nevertheless, influenced, up to the 1960s. Their actuality should not be exaggerated, but they should be remembered as moments in the bourgeois enlightenment, which in the meantime has been concretely superseded by the Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements. They fall prey to the dialectic of enlightenment. If the statement all religious and political statements were ideology was true, then also Stirner and Weishaupt would be ideologues, and their statement that all religious and political statements were ideology, would also be untrue whenever they made such statements: fake stories, enslaving people once more in modern civil society, even after God was supposedly dead, and they had killed him so completely, that he could never be resurrected and return, and thus could no longer and never again legitimate religion or state. Whoever said ideology had to know also of the truth. Ideology was the negation of the truth, and thus was presupposed. The critical theory was critical of any politics of unreason, with or without religious justification in the extreme modern commodity exchange society: racist, nationalist, Anti-Semitic, fascist, Trumpist politics and policies.40 As disciples of the German materialists, the critical theorists of society did not negate the German idealists abstractly, but concretely: they did not only critique them, but they did also retrieve them. As idealistic materialists they rediscovered the Idea, once discovered in the Greek Religion of Fate and Beauty, and in Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity, and in Buddhism, the Religion of Inwardness, and in Christianity as the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, which had been lost in the bourgeois materialism of 39 40

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Lars Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason. The Frankfurt School and The Origins of Modern Antisemitism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

87

money and in the historical ­materialism, as the imageless and nameless totally Other than the horror of ­nature and human history, as X-Experience, as Wholeness: the very opposite of realty. Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura both emphasized the ­Analogia Entis (analogy between God and creation) i.e., the similarity and dissimilarity between the Infinite Being and the finite beings. Hegel stressed in his panentheism the similarity and immanence, without however losing the Transcendence, and the critical theorists of society stressed the dissimilarity and non-identity, without however losing the similarity, identity, and immanence completely. It was from the critical theory of society of the International Institute for Social Research in New York, the former, and later, and present Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main, as I encountered it the first time in Camp Allen’s reeducation program for German prisoners, and followed it later on in all its moments, that I developed our dialectical religiology, and continued to do so with my friends through more than 72 years, up to the present, 2019, in order to find new translators in the world religions for a post-secular world, which still knows that something is missing, to use Habermas’ phrase.41 Like the critical theory of society, dialectical religiology has been ideology critique, opposed particularly to all forms of fascism. Since 1946, the new critical theory of religion and society found its expression in over 30 books and over 500 articles of my own, not to speak of all the articles and books produced by my friends during the same time in Europe and America. Our dialectical religiology has practiced ideology and idolatry critique through its participation in social movements, which have resisted the internal colonization of the lifeworld by the economic and political system: the revolutionary student movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the peace movement, the feminist movement, the pro-life movement, etc. 11 Discourse Like the philosophy of Leibniz and Hegel, Marx and Freud, and like the critical theory of society, the critical theory of religion and society has been from the very start a discourse about theodicy, which in its idealistic understanding had been the justification of the justice of God in the face of the horrendous injustices in his world, and in its materialistic understanding had been the science 41

Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness that Something is Missing: Faith and Reason in a PostSecular Age. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2011.

88

Siebert

of human suffering and pain. Theodicy after Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been the main motivation and content of our dialectical religiology, as we have developed it since 1946, in discourse among friends in the European, American, and Slavic World, most specifically in Germany, Yugoslavia, Russia, the usa, Canada, Israel, and Japan, as well as in writing, in many books and articles, and several movies. We understood our discourse as future-oriented remembrance of human suffering in different systems of the human condition, and social systems of domination and exploitation, slaveholder, feudal and capitalist societies, of slaves, serfs, and wage laborers, with the practical intent to diminish it in the present, and for the future. Our discourse was rooted in the human potential of language and memory and in the evolutionary potential of the struggle for recognition, without neglecting, however, the human potentials or work and tool as well as sexual and erotic love. As our discourse took place among subjects, it produced oral and written texts, with a dialectical structure, in an always changing political, and historical context, with the goal to mediate and reconcile through enlightenment the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane. Our discourse took place mainly in the American and Slavic World, as the present post-European forerunners of world history. We travelled through the European World between the American and the Slavic World, exploring their potentials and working for cooperation and peace between them. Particularly, in our international course on the Future of Religion in the Inter-University Centre of Dubrovnik, Croatia, for 43 years, and in our international course on Religion in Civil Society, in Yalta, Crimea, for 20 years, we developed our critical theory of religion and society in comparison and confrontation with other theories of religion on the Hegelian Right, in the Hegelian Center, and on the Hegelian Left, in positivism, deconstructionism, historicism, historical idealism, and materialism, and in the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School, from which we learned most, ­besides from the Abrahamic religions, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. From its very start, dialectical religiology was in its essence opposed to all forms of fascism and to their reactionary, counter-revolutionary, positivistic theories of religion, as well as to all forms of religion that ally themselves with fascism, and allow themselves to be ideologically instrumentalized and abused by it, as means for its anti-humanistic and anti-socialistic goals. While in Antiquity and Middle Ages, man’s being deserted and forsaken by the Gods, or God, was still overcome by faith, and a positive theodicy was still possible. In Modernity, it leads more and more to the loss of faith and to a mere negative theodicy, and to utter despair, which modern and post-modern situation dialectical religiology has taken most seriously. During its development from 1946 on to the present, the critical theory of religion and

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

89

society has been fully aware of the fact that while in Antiquity, in the Syrian Religion of Pain, the God Tamutz, or Adonis, the partner of Ishtar, died and was resurrected again, and while in the Egyptian Religion of Riddle the God Osiris, the partner of Isis, died and rose again to life, and while in Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, God was dead and rose again, in Modernity and Post-Modernity God is dead, and remains dead.42 In late Modernity, only the Dwarf theology is still remembered together with the Puppet historical materialism.43 What was once a tragedy turns into a comedy, or a farce. Thinkers remember Hegel and the shadow of historical materialism: less than Nothing.44 The monstrosity of Christ, forsaken by God, is still remembered by Christian theologians and Marxists as paradox, or better still, as dialectic: God suffers and is in pain.45 Hegel and the good, concrete Infinite, the Idea, are not yet entirely forgotten, or remembered again slightly in late M ­ odernity, or early Post-Modernity. 12 Longing The deep religious insights of the critical theorists of society, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, etc., climaxed in a definition of religion as the longing for wholeness, as the X-experience, or as the longing for the imageless, and nameless totally Other than the horror and terror of nature and human history, or for perfect justice, or for unconditional love, or that the murderer shall not triumph over the innocent victim, at least not ultimately, or as system of interpretation of reality, and orientation of action. Christians remember that the murderers did not triumph over the innocent victim, Jesus of Nazareth, and announce his resurrection and ascension as the greatest revolutionary event for all human beings.46 Dialectical religiology is the determinate negation, i.e. 42 43 44 45 46

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008), 103–104. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. New York: Verso, 2012. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 2008; Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjevic, God in Pain. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012. Matthew 26–28; Adorno and Kogon, “Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft,” Frankfurter Hefte 13 (June 1958).

90

Siebert

the retrieval as well as the critique of the religiological and theological ­elements in the critical theory of society, which climaxes in a new synthesis of the sacred and the profane, of Moses, or the Gautama Buddha, on the one hand, and Immanuel Kant, the greatest modern enlightener, on the other, on the basis of the radicalized bilderverbot (image and name of God prohibition). Dialectical religiology may also speak of a new synthesis between Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, on the one hand, and Bertolt Brecht, the greatest historical materialist play write, on the other, on the basis of the love of the neighbor, universal solidarity, and friendly living together. 13 Tragedies The critical theory of religion and society, or dialectical religiology, asked from its very start in 1946, and again later on, like Leibniz, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Marx, and Freud, or the critical theorists of society of the Frankfurt School had done before, how all these monstrous natural and historical tragedies could have happened, which cost the lives of millions of human beings, particularly in a religious perspective. The critical theory of religion and society contained from its beginning, and was driven by, the futurological question: How could all this human misfortune and misery – 10 million casualties in World War I, 70 million victims in World War ii – possibly be prevented from occurring again. There arose in modern form the most dramatic universal question of theodicy (theos: God; dikae: justice), the primordial shape of theology, of the goodness of God, the freedom of man, and the origin and continuation of relative and absolute evil.47 It was the religious problem of Moses, Odysseus, the Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, Job, the Psalmists, Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Freud, Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as his teacher and friend Walter Benjamin: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? How far from saving me, the words I groan! I call all day, my God, but you never answer, all night long I call and cannot rest.’48 After Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, no world religion can any longer answer, at least not 47

48

Job 1–3; Gottfried W. Leibniz, Die Theodizee von der Güte Gottes, der Freiheit des Menschen und den Ursprung des Ubels, i and ii. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996; Rudolf J. Siebert, From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and Universal Solidarity, (New York: Peter Lang Inc.), Ch. 2 & 6. Psalm 22:2; Matthew 26:46; Mark 15:34.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

91

t­ heoretically, this theodicy question, which to answer was once the purpose of all of them. Why is mankind in its most extreme pain and suffering finding itself deserted by their Gods, or their God. Nothing has driven deeper the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, than the intensifying theodicy problem, if also in different forms of culture wars, beginning with the burning of Savonarola and Giordano Bruno, the threat of torture to the 70-year-old Galileo Galilei, and the execution of Thomas Münzer. The Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm was the first Christian adaptation to Modernity, which had arisen out of the medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm and against it, and was later globalized, affecting and challenging all other positive world religions.49 The critical theory of religion and society takes most seriously these tragedies, and continues to look for answers in different civilizations, and their positive religions, as well as in art forms, philosophies, and sciences, refusing to take refuge in any form of positivism: it is as it is; the glass is still half full. 14 Spirit As from its very start in 1946, dialectical religiology traced the history of religions from the relative union of the sacred and the profane in Antiquity and Middle Ages, through their modern disunion, to their possible, post-modern reunion, and a consequent resolution of the theodicy problem, it looked particularly in Hegel’s subjective, objective, and absolute idealism, anticipating already German dialectical materialism, for an answer to the theodicy. After the greatest modern enlightener Immanuel Kant destroyed the classical proofs for the existence of God, and had consequentially denied the possibility of a philosophical theodicy, his greatest and most critical disciple, Hegel, was the last philosopher and theologian to developed a positive theodicy on the basis of the dialectically reconstructed Greek Religion of Fate and Beauty and the Abrahamic Religions, and the ontological proof for the existence of God of Anselm of Canterbury, as well as the consequent teleological and cosmological proves: his whole philosophy rested upon the theodicy problem. Already at the end of his foundational Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel stated, that its goal, the Absolute Knowledge, or the Spirit knowing Himself as Spirit, has for its way the remembrance of the spirits, the individuals, and nations, and religions, as they 49

Joseph Lortz, Die Reformation in Deutschland. Band ii: Ausbau der Fronten, Unionsversuche, Ergebnis. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1962; Hans Küng, Das Christentum: Wesen und Geschichte. München: Piper Verlag, 1994.

92

Siebert

were in themselves, and as they performed the organization of their realm.50 Their preservation, according to the side of their freedom, in the form of the accidentally appearing existence, was the history, and according to the side of their comprehended organization, however, the science of the appearing knowledge, the phenomenology.51 Both together, the comprehended history, formed and constituted the remembrance of Golgotha, Calvary, the slaughter bench, of the Absolute Spirit, the reality, the truth and the certainty of His throne, without which he would be the lifeless, lonely One.52 According to Hegel’s transformation of Friedrich Schiller’s poem Friendship, only ‘out of the chalice of this realm of spirits foams for him his Infinitude.’53 Positivists have made the so-called hubris of Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit responsible for Auschwitz. It was certainly not hubris when the Rabbis in Ausch­ witz prayed to Yahweh in his Spirit.54 But in the view of the critical theory of religion and society, the Shoah, happened rather because of the loss of the Idea, or the Spirit, and against him: the German nation and the European nations in general, instead of elevating themselves to the Spirit, collapsed into nature, into biology, into naturalism, into barbarism, into fascism, as the most extreme form of positivism. This occurred seventy years ago and now again in 2019: the most extreme form of theodicy in a world without order and security, torn apart by left-wing and right-wing populism, inclusive and exclusive identity politics and policies. However, even positivists, like John Searle, have ­started to look for and rediscover the spirit in the midst of an antagonistic ­bourgeois-materialistic civilization.55 The materialistic dialectical religiology presupposes and preserves, nevertheless, Hegel’s idealistic philosophy and theology of the Spirit. 15 Reconciliation In the perspective of the critical theory of religion and society, the Lutheran Hegel, who once wanted to become a minister and preacher, and even studied for the ministry in the Protestant Seminary in Tübingen, thought philosophy was theology and theodicy, in so far as it represented the reconciliation, or 50 Georg W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952), 564. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Elie Wiesel, Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1982; Elie Wiesel, The Forgotten. New York: Schocken Books, 1992. 55 John R. Searle, Die Wiederentdeckung des Geistes. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

93

mediation of God with himself, and with nature, that the nature, the being other of God, was in itself, in its origin divine, and that the finite spirit was, partially as individual person, in himself this to elevate himself from nature to the reconciliation, partially as nations, to come in world history to this mediation, not only in the realm of freedom and peace, but ultimately in the K ­ ingdom of God.56 For Hegel, this religious knowledge through the dialectical notion – the self-particularization and self-singularization of the universal, the dialectical movement of notion, judgement and conclusion – the discovery of German idealism, was according to its nature admittedly not universal in a sociological sense. It was also only again knowledge in the Christian community, in the Church. Thus, formed themselves in the Christian community, in respect to the realm of the Spirit, three steps, stages, levels, positions, stands, or classes: (1) The first step of the immediate, impartial, unprejudiced religion and faith. (2) The second stage of the analytical understanding, of the so-called educated people, of the reflection of the secular, bourgeois enlightenment. And finally, (3) The third level of the dialectical philosophy and theology. Modernity, the antagonism between the stand of believers and the stand of enlightened people, started in the Christian community, and turned against it, and finally against all positive religions.57 To help to heal this antagonism from one particular culture war to the next, not only for philosophers but also for the masses of the people, the workers, is the task of dialectical religiology. According to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, the goal of history was the realm of freedom on the basis of the necessity of nature.58 In the view of Hegel’ s Philosophy of Religion, the goal of religion was the Kingdom of Heaven, which was grounded and founded eternally, and the Holy Spirit, who as such lived eternally in his community, in the Church, which the gates of hell would not overcome.59 The critical theory of religion and society remains open with Hegel and Marx for the realm of freedom, and with Hegel also for the kingdom of God. According to our dialectical religiology, the latter religious goal cannot be replaced by the former historical goal: such replacement of the Divine by the human would be utter idolatry and blasphemy. Here lay the limits of the Christian/Marxist dialogue, and of any other discourse between believers and enlightened people.

56 Isaiah 11; 65–66; Matthew 5–7; Acts 17; Revelation 21–22. 57 Ibid. 58 Georg W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004. 59 Georg W.F. Hegel, Lectures in the Philosophy of Religion Vol. ii: Determinate Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.

94 16

Siebert

Divine Interference

According to the critical theory of religion and society, in Buddhism, the Religion of Inwardness, for Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), all life was suffering without much interference by the Gods: there was only self-redemption.60 In Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity, there was the horrible torture and death of Rabbi Akiva, a Pharisee from the lowest proletarian strata of the Jewish nation, by the Romans, without divine interference.61 In the Greek Religion of Fate and Beauty, Antigone knew from the greatness of her suffering how much she had sinned, when she was buried alive by King Creon, without being helped by the Gods of the family, or of the state.62 In Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, there was the God – and man – forsaken suffering of Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth: From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour [from 12.00 to 3.00 pm]. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you deserted me?’ When some of those who stood there heard this, they said, ‘The man is calling on Elijah,’ and one of them quickly ran to get a sponge which he dipped in vinegar (the rough wine drunk by Roman soldiers) and, putting it on a reed, gave it him to drink. ‘Wait!’ said the rest of them, ‘and see if Elijah will come to save him.’ But Jesus, again crying out in a loud voice, yielded up his spirit.63 Elijah did not come. The Parousia delay continues mercilessly. Dialectical religiology is open for the interference of the Gods or God, as well as for the lack of it, and the consequent atheism, as well as revolt, experimentation, utopia, and hope in the positive religions, and coming out of them, and being expressed practically in different forms of natural law or formal ethics, aiming at human dignity, and being inherited from generation, to generation. In April of 2019, Pope emeritus, Benedict xvi, regretted deeply in a letter about the causes of the clerical sex abuse crisis of the past 50 years, and the loss of the natural law and of moral theology, through self-appointed master theologians during Vatican Council ii. Over ninety of those outstanding theologians he threw out

60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Matthew 27:45–50.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

95

of office during his pontificate.64 In the perspective of the critical theory of religion and society, such merciless, anti-modernist, integralist Papal attacks will hardly be able to resolve the present crisis of the Latin Church. It will only deepen the modern antagonism between the sacred and the profane, and the conflicts arising from it in the religious communities, the Church, on the one hand, and in the secular, enlightened communities, on the other. 17 Deism The critical theory of religion and society remembers that in antagonistic, secular, modern civil society, the bourgeois enlightener Voltaire, together with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the inventor of deism, merely ridiculed in his Candide the all too optimistic theodicy of the still religious thinker Leibniz, who considered our present world to be the best of all possible worlds. The bourgeois deists resolved the theodicy problem by simply removing God from the world, which he had created, leaving behind merely a world-less God and a Godless world. Goethe’s Faust was, like Job in the Hebrew Bible, delivered by God to Satan, and immeasurable suffering, being redeemed by God through Mary, only at the very end of his long and most painful tragedy. After the first bourgeois revolution in England, which had still been religious – under the leadership of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell – the later French and other bourgeois enlightenment movements and revolutions tried to remove Satan altogether from secular history by ridiculing him, through giving him horns and a horseshoe, without, however, stopping relative or absolute evil. It prevailed as the bourgeois revolutions turned into fascist counter-revolutions against the totally secular socialist revolutions, which the former had provoked through their particularity and exclusiveness, and against the totally secular, psychoanalytical revolutions, which became connected with Western Marxism. As the secular bourgeois revolutions turned into fascism, the secular, Eastern-Marxist, socialist revolution turned into Stalinism and red fascism, and the secular Freudian revolution turned into the modern porno-society. Satan is gone, but evil prevails to the extreme of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the bombing of Dresden. Today, in secular and post-secular civil society, atheism is discovered in Christianity as the result of the unresolved theodicy problem.65 64 65

Matthew Fox, The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How it can be Saved. New York: Sterling Ethos, 2011; Hans Küng, Can we Save the Catholic Church? London: William Collins, 2013. Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, trans. J.T. Swann. New York: Verso, 2009.

96

Siebert

Christian theologians ask for revolutionary patience, as they search for and discover God in the garbage of Latin American cities and slums, and believe atheistically in the God beyond the God, who went under in despair, and find only in this way the courage to be, and to live, and to exist, and to work, and to fight in the late capitalistic world, surrounded and penetrated by landscapes full of human cries and screams. Our dialectical religiology finds deism and its continuation in civil religion, which today is threatened by fundamentalism in all world religions, as being entirely insufficient in order to overcome the present forms of evil and darkness. 18

The Trial

The critical theory of religion and society remembers that in Auschwitz, Jewish prisoners had put God on trial because he had supposedly broken the covenant.66 God was found guilty. After the trial, some Jews became atheists and never prayed again. Others put their hands on their hairless heads and walked humbly into the gas chambers. In fascist Germany, the mother of Max Horkheimer, the materialist founder of the materialist critical theory of society and the Frankfurt School, prayed Psalm 91, and her prayers were heard. A Catholic taxi driver drove her and her husband from Stuttgart to Switzerland, and thus rescued both from the Shoah. Reprimanded by the fascist Stuttgart city government for his noble deed of having driven two Jews to Switzerland, the taxi driver simply asked: Is there a law against it? The materialist Horkheimer himself prayed Psalm 91, which contains many divine names and images, after World War ii, and put its first verses on his parents’ and his own grave stone in a Jewish cemetery in Switzerland, in spite of all Mosaic and Kantian divine image and name prohibitions, and in spite of the monstrous tragedies of Auschwitz and Treblinka: If you live in the shelter of Elyon, and make your home in the shadow of Shaddai, you can say to Yahweh, ‘My refuge, my fortress, my God in whom I trust. He rescues you from the snares of fowlers hoping to destroy you; he covers you with his feathers, 66

Johannes Baptist Metz and Elie Wiesel. Trotzdem hoffen. Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1993.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

97

and you find shelter underneath his wings. You need not fear the terrors of night, the arrow that flies in the daytime, the plague that stalks in the dark, the scourge that wreaks havoc in the broad daylight. Though a thousand fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand. You yourself will remain unscathed, with his faithfulness for shield and buckler.67 While 70 percent of all Israelis in the State of Israel have become secular, ­because of Auschwitz, 30 percent remain religious, despite of Auschwitz.68 In all positive world religions, dead or alive, believers have continued to pray and to trust, despite of the fact that they often were not heard, or had been forsaken by their Gods, or their God. In the view of the critical theory of religion and society, which is very much aware of the fact that religions can die and have died, many positive religions are surviving, because the believers have experienced, despite of all trials, divine intervention and the solution of the theodicy problem: at least in praxis on their level of education and social evolution. 19

Offering the Other Cheek

In December 2018, we remembered with the Russian scholars and dissenters, Leo Semashko and Vladislav Krasnov, not only Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but also the life and peaceful influence of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whom his friends named the Mahatma or the Great-Souled One, whose non-violent philosophy and movement of passive resistance had become global, despite of the fact that the movement had been divided already before the Pakistani partition, and before his violent death at the hands of a Hindu nationalist. His influence reached not only all of India, but also Africa, and all other continents as well, even America. In the usa, Martin Luther King Jr. was deeply influenced by Gandhi. When King studied at Boston University, he met a teacher who 67

68

Psalm 91; Max Horkheimer, Tradionelle und kritische Theorie: Vier Aufsätz. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Verlag, 1981; Michael R. Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion: The Meaning of Religion in the Struggle for Human Emancipation. Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2001; Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Theodor W. Adorno, Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse: Ein Philosophisches Lesebuch. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997.

98

Siebert

i­ntroduced him to Georg W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History. From Hegel, King learned that Reason or Providence governed the world, and that freedom was the very goal of history. King applied this Hegelian teaching to the fate of the African-American population and community in the United States. However, King was critical of the fact that, according to Hegel, freedom in world history was often, or even always, fought for with violence. War, including class struggle, was the father of all things. The Baptist-Christian King could not find a nonviolent method of liberation in Christianity. There was in Western Christianity only Augustine’s Seven Point Just War Theory, which was considered to be valid up to World War i and ii, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan War, and even still the two wars against Iraq. Before Saint Augustine, the initiator of the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity, all wars were considered by the believers to be unjust, and no Christian was allowed to become a soldier or to participate in warfare.69 Far distant was still the time when the Church blessed and legitimated the murder weapons of both combatant armies, and Christians killed Christians, as it happened when the crusaders marched to Novgorod, and Napoleon and Hitler to Moscow. The four million Europeans, who launched Barbarossa, were mostly baptized Catholics or Protestants, who then killed 26 million Russians, many of whom were still baptized, like President Putin and his mother in the country of the great Christian writers Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and later Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A Catholic priest of Polish descend, an American Army chaplain, blessed the two atomic bombs, which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Christian pilots did not only kill Shintoists or Buddhists, but also Christians, teaching nuns and their school children, in Hiroshima, on August 8, 1945, and then a few days later in Nagasaki. In order to find a non-violent method of liberation for the African-American population of the United States, the Christian minister, Martin Luther King Jr., had to reach out to another world religion, to Hinduism, the Religion of Imagination, to the Hindu Mahatma Ghandi, and his philosophy of non-violence and his movement of passive resistance. Gandhi, when in the years after World War ii became the leader of the independence struggle against Great Britain, always wished that the Christians would become more Christian, be it in London, or elsewhere. Like Karl Marx a century earlier, so too did the Hindu Gandhi criticize the Christian bourgeoisie in England and elsewhere for not following Rabbi Jesus’ so-called Sermon on the Mount. Gandhi, the Hindu, had received from Christianity, from the Sermon the Mount, not only the Golden

69

Dirks, “Zwischen den Zeiten: Brief an Eugen Kogon,” Frankfurter Hefte 18, no. 2 (February 1963).

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

99

Rule, which all world religions have in common, but also the very core of his own philosophy of non-violence and his movement of passive resistance: You have learned how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth, But I say this to you; offer the wicked man no resistance. On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well; if a man takes you to law and would have your tunic, let him have your cloak as well, and if anyone orders you to go one mile, go two miles with him. Give to anyone who asks, and if anyone wants to borrow, do not turn away.70 The Christian Martin Luther King Jr. came to the Christian commandment of non-violent resistance through the mediation of the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi, and both practiced it, and both died for it a violent martyr’s death of freedom, like the one who preached the Sermon on the Mount in the first place, Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. Malcolm x, who wanted to liberate the African-Americans in the United States, like Martin Luther King Jr., converted in prison from Christianity to Islam, because he did not believe that holding up the other cheek could accomplish the liberation of the black man from the white man’s police dogs. He told his African-American followers: ‘Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.’71 The apostate and mass murderer, Adolf Hitler, the very opposite of Gandhi, would have preferred Europe to have become Islamic ­rather than Christian, because Islam follows the lex talionis, and does not demand the holding up of the other cheek.72 As the most fanatic fascist, Hitler, sacrificed, following the lex talionis, millions of people, in order to make Germany and Europe great again, through the destruction of Marxist communism, and through the colonization of Russia (lebensraum), as once Great Britain had colonized India, until Gandhi liberated it. The Cunning of Reason made Hitler, against his will and intentions, send Europe further into retirement, and open further the door for the Slavic World and the American World to move not only into the very heart of the European World, which they were to supersede, but also into world leadership, which once had been carried out by African nations, China, India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, and England, possibly towards a more peaceful world federation and global civil society, with only one army. The lex talionis may immediately look more natural than the offering of the other cheek. It will seem natural and most understandable 70 Matthew 5:38–42. 71 Ibid. 72 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943.

100

Siebert

when a Jew, who meets somewhere in Argentina the SS man, who murdered his parents in a German concentration camp, will shoot him down on the street. But on second, more reflected sight and thought, Mahatma Gandhi, remained right, like Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth before him, and Martin Luther King Jr. after him, when he stated: ‘The eye for eye, the law of violent retaliation, leaves all the world blind.’ This self-destructive blindness can only be ­overcome through the enlightenment by a non-violent philosophy or theology, and by a practical movement of passive resistance. According to Pope Francis, retaliation never leads to conflict resolution. Recently, in April 2019, Pope Francis held up the other cheek in another form. He prostrated himself before three politicians from Sudan and South Sudan, in order to persuade them to make and keep peace.73 Three right-wing Catholics on an American, counter-­reformation and counter-revolutionary, integralist Television station, ewtn, felt embarrassed by the humble peace gesture of Pope Francis. They worried that the Muslims would misunderstand it as a sign of weakness, which would make everything worse. They were willing and ready to set aside the Gospels, the Sermon on the Mount, in order to show strength and power in the name of a pagan principled realism a la Trumpism. Our dialectical religiology concludes that the holding up of the other cheek, or substitute gestures, can be done even on the level of state and history. In any case, any non-retaliation is moral progress in world history. To offer the other cheek needs more courage than the violent retaliation through taking the enemy’s eye. The offering of the other cheek contains the presupposition and intention that it may awaken in the opponent the residual of their humanity. That is a great risk. It may not happen, and the enemy may take violently the other eye, and more as well. Rabbis and Imams agree with the high moral value of the teaching of Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth on offering the other cheek, but they limit the commandment to the private sphere of the individual person, and exclude it from civil society, state, and history. In these latter spheres, the application and praxis of the commandment may even be dangerous, in that the opponent interprets the offering of the other cheek as a sign of weakness, and is thereby even encouraged to take the other eye, and more. There appears the deep antagonism between the Cross of the Present and the Rose of Reason, reality and the Idea, materialism, naturalism, and principled realism, on the one hand, and the higher morality of the Idea on the other. This antagonism provokes and makes necessary a courageous decision in the face of great dangers and risks. Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth 73

Jason Horowitz, “Pope Francis, in Plea for South Sudan Peace, Stuns Leaders by Kissing their Shoes.” New York Times. April 11, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/world/ europe/pope-francis-south-sudan.html.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

101

was right, when he said, while the police came from the Sanhedrîn in Jerusalem to seize him on the Mount of Olives, and after one of his disciples, Peter, the later leader of the Church, grasped and drew his sword and cut off the ear of the High Priest’s servant: ‘Put your sword back, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.’74 Indeed they do! The fascists, who drew the sword in Leningrad, were annihilated by the sword in Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. The critical theory of religion and society hopes the new fascists of today will remember and learn. While the fascists were the opponents of the developing critical theory after World War ii, to be avoided and resisted, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave guidance to the dialectical religiology. The explicit purpose of our dialectical religiology has been to honor such wise and peace-promoting people as Gandhi, Solzhenitsyn, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and several more. Dialectical religiology has been aware of the Pentagon advisor Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations, where, after the collapse of communism in the ussr and Eastern Europe, he predicted that in the future the fundamental source of conflict will not be primarily ideological or economic any longer. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. There is no reason to rejoice at the prospect of cultural – rather than economic or ideological – hostilities and possibly wars, especially now when such wars present a real risk of annihilating humankind. The critical theory of religion and society believes that public initiatives, such as Ossip Flechtheim’s critical futurology, Leo Semashkow’s Global Harmony Association, Rene Wadlow’s The Association of World Citizens, Andre Sheldon’s Global Strategy of Nonviolence.org, Sander Hicks’ newyorkmegaphone.com, and several others, offer a different, more promising and more harmonious paradigm for international relations, based on the need for all civilizations, no matter how different, to co-exist for the benefit of the common good of all. Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn strengthen further this new paradigm of international relations, embodied in the above organizations and individuals. Of course, our list of cultural heroes is far from being complete. We welcome any suggestion of outstanding men and women, who promote the idea of harmonious co-existence and co-­ operation of all civilizations and ethnic cultures, no matter how small. At a time, when ecologists affirm the need for bio-diversity, politicians should be nudged to do the same for all civilizational and cultural groups. Consistent with this purpose of peace, we join all others in encouraging people to speak and work particularly for a productive cooperation of the post-European, Slavic and American World. 74

Matthew 26:52–53.

102

Siebert

20 Provocation Throughout its development, the critical theory of religion and society was in discourse with the great Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who had rediscovered again the theologian of revolution, Thomas Münzer. Bloch agreed with the Protestant theologian of hope, Jürgen Moltman, in a radio symposium on Revolution and Theology in Stuttgart, Germany, on Easter Sunday 1967, that the Christian cross was a provocation, but he added, that the doubt concerning the cross was even more so a provocation.75 The cross had it in itself. Bloch was opposed already to the connected patience of the cross. Martin Luther had ­stated: ‘Cross-cross, suffering-suffering was the Christians share!’ Luther said this to the revolutionary farmers, so that they would remain in their place and under control of their feudal lords. The farmers had already without the Pauline theology enough of the cross. Also the Roman slaves, who were crucified along the Via Appia after the victory of the Roman army over Spartacus, did not need the Pauline theology in order to know what the cross was. None of those crucified Roman slaves were ever resurrected. Luther did not talk about the cross to the feudal lords, for whom suffering was not exactly overwhelming, i.e. the external suffering, which was the worst, and at least the most concrete for most human beings, who do not really come to the other, the spiritual ­suffering. Bloch was sick and tired, and had enough of the strongly counter-­ revolutionary, restorative, conformist eye-smearing and blinding use of patience. He had more than enough of the people who’s interest it was that the poor, exploited, and degraded social classes show patience, and not the fist. Here Bloch questioned if theologians and others could not at least become sensitive concerning those misunderstandings – which arise from the crosstheology-morality, not theology as theodicy, but as cross-theology-morality – which have been visible since Paul, who let slaves be kept under control. With this motive, that the slaves do not move under any circumstances, in difference from the Stoa and also from Aristotle, but certainly from the Stoa, Christianity has also recommended itself as Empire religion: that the slaves remained controlled. There was no talk at all about the other, the rest of Christianity: Martha said, ‘I know he [her brother Lazarus] will rise again at the resurrection on the last day,’ Jesus said: ‘I am the resurrection. If anyone ­believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and 75

Ernst Bloch, Thomas Münzer: Als Theologie der Revolution. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1960; Kogon, “Revolution und Theologie: Das Neue in Unserem Zeitalter; Ein Symposion,” Frankfurter Hefte 9 (September 1967): 616–630.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

103

believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ ‘Yes, Lord,’ she said, ‘I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was to come into this world.’76 Then the One sitting on the throne spoke: ‘Now I make the whole of creation new,’ he said.77 These words of the other Christianity, the protesting, nonconformist, revolutionary one, were nothing more than empty slogans, with which Christianity became an Empire religion under Constantine. According to Bloch, there were dangerous traces in the history of Christianity, which would have to make all of us sensitive. Bloch rejected the patience of the cross and the expression eschatologia crucis. So does our dialectical religiology, which emphasizes the protesting, revolutionary side of Christianity, and of all other world religions as well, wherever it surfaces and exists. The critical theory of religion and society always emphasizes the provocative character of Christianity, and of other positive world religions. On Sunday, June 22, 1941, on the day when Barbarossa started against the so-called atheistic bolshevism in Russia, I played with the Catholic Youth Movement in St. Albertus Church, Dornbusch, Frankfurt am Main, in the French socialist Andre Gide’s very provocative play The Prodigal Son, the younger revolutionary son, who after his return to his father’s house, told his still younger brother to imitate his provocative provolutionary behavior. We played the play only once before a large Catholic audience. The provocative revolutionary play was forbidden right away by a counter-reformation church and a counter-revolutionary state, both bound together by the Empire Concordat. 20.1 Theologia Crucis According to the Marxist Ernst Bloch, one did not have to be a theologian like Georg W.F. Hegel, Paul Tillich, Walter Dirks, Eugen Kogon, Jürgen Moltmann, Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, Johannes Baptist Metz, or Hans Küng, in order to comprehend Auschwitz. One must not have a theolgia crucis in order to comprehend Mauthausen or Treblinka. There was evil enough in this world. One must not only go to Golgotha. Calvary has very rich representatives on earth. The active hope ignited itself from the unbearable, undignified negative. It ignited itself in order – to use a medieval Catholic expression in the style of the Templer Order – to stick a blow into the back of Satan. 76 77

John 11:25–27. Revelation 21:5.

104

Siebert

In this direction things went for Bloch. The reaction, which otherwise the negative has brought about, e.g. in the theologia crucis in its Pauline form, had been that, that after all everywhere the negative had appeared in completely absurd form, as the totally Other supposedly, whereby the things moved out of the discussion – My thoughts are not your thoughts, and My ways are not your ways! – everywhere, where this resignation and abdication of the limited understanding of the submissive and humble subject that you do not comprehend! Everywhere there appeared after all the questions among simple people, where is God? In the view of the critical theory of religion and society, Bloch included in his theodicy the simple people, the proletariat, the plebeians, the poor, the precariat, who had often been excluded from Hegel’s high-level dialectical theodicy. Dialectical religiology learned, nevertheless, from Heraclitus, Hegel, and Marx, and then finally also from Bloch, about the power of the negative – the creative Mae on rather than the destructive Ouk on – as the source of the new, and of hope – including Christian hope, and the cross not as control for the slaves, but as protest against all slavery, and as sign of liberation, resurrection, ascension, redemption, the new heaven and the new earth. In the view of our dialectical religiology, all religions are ambiguous: so is Christianity, so is the cross, so is the Theologia Crucis! The murderers did not triumph over the innocent victim, at least not ultimately.78 21 Golgotha In reference to the Theololgia Crucis, Bloch remembered the Christian poet Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. Here a discourse took place between Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov in the tavern, where Ivan talks about the Golgotha of a farmer woman. Ivan narrates about a farmer woman, whose children had been torn to pieces by the bloodhounds of her gracious and merciful feudal lord, for no reason at all. The mother stands at the scene weeping, screaming, and shouting.79 If now, so says Ivan Karamazov, the Last Judgement comes and everything will become clear, and all sing, not only the angels, but all the redeemed are singing: Just are you, Lord, because manifest have become all your ways! Also the mother embraces the landowner – this beast who let her children be torn to pieces – because all has become manifest, and all serves for the best, and for the good, then I as a man of honor will not join in or take part in this jubilation.80 As man of honor, so Ivan Karamazov says, I shall reject the 78 Revelation 21–22. 79 Siebert, Manifesto, 344. 80 Ibid.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

105

e­ ntrance ticket to the Day of Judgement, because the children’s tears have not been purchased out, atoned for, and expiated.81 When all this misery, and cross, and blood, and murder was necessary as fertilizer and manure, in order to fertilize the harmony of Judgement Day, then I, Ivan Karamazov, say, that I do not consider this worth, because the children’s tears have not been bought out and atoned for.82 Dialectical religiology is aware that there were also innocent children already in Sodom, and that when Abraham bargained with the Angel concerning the rescue of the city, the innocent children were not even considered.83 There have also been the innocent children of Auschwitz and Treblinka, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of Dresden. Also their tears have not been made good yet, and atoned for and expiated. The critical theory of religion and society takes the great Protestant-Christian Dostoyevsky’s Golgotha most seriously in its ambiguity! 22 Satan For Bloch, there was also this reaction of the Christian Dostoyevsky, which went against harmonization, and which did not make peace with the cross. In general, so Bloch remembered, there was after all in the history of theology still another theology of the cross than the Pauline one, with Marcion and even with Gregory of Nyssa, a more perfect man.84 With them there existed a theology, which pointed in the direction that all that evil did not come from the Lord, from God, but that it has been sent by Satan.85 Here also again the light has been crushed under foot by the positive apologists. The critical theory of religion and society is very sensitive for such mistakes in the history of the Church, and of the dogma, and of morality. 23

Political Means

The Marxist Bloch rejected the positivistic “that maybe, but” – theology.86 It says, that it may not be beautiful, but think of the good that exists beside it. Maybe you become particularly worthy of the good, as you take the suffering 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Genesis 19:1–36. 84 Siebert, Manifesto, 344. 85 Matthew 4; Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Vol. i–iii. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985. 86 Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung.

106

Siebert

upon yourself. Maybe Golgotha, but after two days comes the resurrection is guaranteed.87 Calvary was necessary in order to mobilize the resurrection, because otherwise that would not exist. Admittedly, the crucified Christ walks through hell. But the punishments of hell are eternal. For Jesus, who came only to visit hell, they are not eternal. For the others, they are eternal. That is a dogma of the Church. Dialectical religiology has noticed that the Church fortunately no longer talks about Christ’s descent into hell. The eternity of hell was a great problem for my friend Walter Dirks. It would be too much even for Adolf Hitler. In any case, it would be the absolutization of the theodicy problem: it would never be solved, not even by God. Some people would never be mediated and reconciled with God and he with them, and would eternally remain alienated from him, and he from them. For Bloch, all these theological teachings were also always political means. Therefore, it was Bloch’s suspicion that they were taught such in order to gild something; in order to gloss things over; in order not to get to the bottom of things; in order not to call things by their name: in the apologetics, in the theodicy, in the apology of the negative, which is highly justified as means on the basis of an instrumental, functional rationality.88 When we cannot justify the negative by reason, then in the wholly Other the thing, the negative, dissolves in lemonade. Bloch was against lemonade. Also the critical theory of religion is against positivistic lemonade: it is as it is, the glass is still half full.89 24

Image and Name Prohibition

Throughout its evolution, dialectical religiology was in discourse with Theodor W. Adorno, the real genius of the Frankfurt School, the great, negative dialectician, who has developed its critical theory of society furthest, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, about revelation and autonomous reason, and who defined religion for Horkheimer and himself as the longing for the totally Other, which our dialectical religiology has taken over. Adorno, Kogon, and Dirks had a public colloquium about this theme revelation and autonomous reason in the Auditorium Maximum of the University of Münster, which was broadcast the WestGerman Radio on November 20, 1957. Here Adorno stated that because of the general neutralization of all spirit into mere culture in the last 150 years, the contradiction of the traditional revealed religion vs. empirical knowledge is 87 Siebert, Manifesto, 345. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

107

almost not felt any longer, but both exist as spheres of the culture industry side by side. The challenge of revealed religion to the modern consciousness has not declined since the bourgeois enlightenment, but has rather increased immeasurably.90 That nobody talks about this contradiction any longer comes from the position that modern people can no longer bring together revelation and reason. Attempts to carry over results of modern science into religion, as they are blooming particularly at the border of the quantum physics, are wrong conclusions. Adorno did not only think merely of the geocentric and anthropocentric character of the great positive religions, which stood in utter contradiction to the present state of cosmology. People like to use the term “crassness” in describing the ridiculous confrontation between religious teaching and natural science in order to make ridiculous the confrontation itself, because of its primitivism. Adorno still remembered that there was once a time when religion, with good reasons, did not take things so easily. Religion insisted on its truth also in the cosmological sense, because it knew that its claim to it could not be split off from the material reality without being damaged. As soon as religion gave up its content and became more and more formal, it was in danger of disappearing into mere symbolism, as happened to some extend in the theology of Paul Tillich, Adorno’s teacher. The critical theory of religion and society sees theologians again and again let symbols point to symbols, without ever reaching the symbolized: Divine Reality.91 For Adorno, such unlimited symbolizations threatened the very life of the very truth claim of religion. However, more decisive was for Adorno the break between the social model of the great world religions and the antagonistic civil society of today. They were once formed according to the visible and understandable conditions of the primary community, at best according to the simple commodity economy. Adorno remembered a Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, who wrote rightly that in Judaism and Christianity, as in other religions, it smelled like village air.92 It could not be abstracted from this social model without doing ­violence to the content of the religious teaching through reinterpretation. Christianity, like any other positive religion, was not equally close to all times. 90 91

92

Adorno and Kogon, “Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft,” Frankfurter Hefte 13 (June 1958); Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Rudolf J. Siebert, Die Anthropologie Michael Helding: eines Humanisten und Theologen im Umkreis der Geistigen Neuordnung des 16, Jahrhunderts (1506–1561). Universitätsbibliothek Mainz: Universitätsarchiv. Sigmaringen: Hohenzollernsche Jahreshefte, 1965; Siebert, Manifesto, Vol. i–iii. Adorno and Kogon, “Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft.;” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Heer, “Hegel und die Jugend,” Frankfurter Hefte 22, no. 5 (May 1967).

108

Siebert

Human beings are not timelessly hit by what had once been the “good news.” The notion of the daily bread, e.g., generated out of the experience of the lack of sufficient material production, could not simply be carried over into the world of the capitalistic bread factory, and of the overproduction, in which the starvation periods during economic depressions were natural catastrophes of antagonistic civil society, and no longer due to nature. Furthermore, the notion of the neighbor was related to groups in which people knew each other face to face. The help for the neighbor, as urgent as it remained again and again in civil society, which is devastated by its social natural catastrophes, like the capitalistic business cycles, or financial crises, as that in 2008, was small in comparison with the going of the praxis beyond every mere immediacy of human relations: in comparison to a change of the world, which once would finally stop the social/nature catastrophes. But would one abstract words like neighbor or love of the neighbor from the Evangelium as being irrelevant in the contemporary moment, and would trust oneself that one preserved the revealed teachings, and would, nevertheless, express them in such a way as they had to be understood hic and nunc.93 One would have to adapt the revealed contents to the ever-changing course of time, but, that would be incompatible with the authority of the divine revelation. Or one would present the present reality with demands, which could not be fulfilled, or would no longer reach the essential, the real suffering of the people. If, however, one would abstract from all those concrete, social-historically mediated determinations, and would literally obey the Kierkegaardian dictum, that Christianity was nothing else than the Nota Bene, that once God became man, the incarnation, without that moment as such, namely as also on its part concrete historical one, would enter the consciousness, then the revealed religion would disintegrate, in the name of paradoxical purity, into the complete indeterminateness, a nothingness, which could hardly be differentiated any longer from its liquidation. What would be more than this nothingness would lead at the same time to the unresolvable. It would then be a mere trick of the imprisoned consciousness, to transfigure the un-resolvability itself, the failure of the finite human being, as religious category, while it witnessed the present powerlessness of the religious categories. Therefore, Adorno saw no other possibility than an extreme asceticism toward any revelation faith, extreme faithfulness towards the image – and name – prohibition, far beyond that what it once meant for Moses and Kant.94 From its start, the critical theory of religion and society was obedient to the Mosaic, Jesuanic, and Kantian image and name prohibition (bilderverbot), in 93 94

Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 5–7. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 1999.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

109

so far as this is possible. Not only the simple people, but also the intellectuals and their analytical understanding and dialectical reason, need images and names in order to operate: philosophy and theology presuppose art. Dialectical religiology will continue to do so, and in addition will be devoted to the critique of ideology and idolatry, in such a radical way that the negative cannot dissolve into the Blochian lemonade, a false harmonization, in the imageless and nameless totally Other of the horror and terror of nature and history. Bibliography Abromeit, John. Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Achterberg, Erich. General Marshall Macht Epoche: Konferenzen, Gestalten, Hintergründe. Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein Verlag, 1964. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 1999. Adorno, Theodor W. Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse: Ein philosophisches Lesebuch. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997. Adorno, Theodor W., et al. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1969. Adorno, Theodor W., and Eugen Kogon. “Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft,” Frankfurter Hefte 13 (June 1958). Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity, translated by J.T. Swann. New York: Verso, 2009. Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Vol. i-iii. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985. Bloch, Ernst. Thomas Münzer: Als Theologie der Revolution. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1960. Bröckling, Ulrich. Katholische Intellektuelle in der Weimarer Republik: Zeitkritik und Gesellschafttheorie bei Walter Dirks, Romano Guardini, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Michel und Heinrich Mertens. Paderborn: W. Fink Verlag, 1993. Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Byrd, Dustin J. A Critique of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy of Religion: The Gospel According to John Galt. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Byrd, Dustin J. “Blackwater Theology: On the Unholy Trinity of Sirico, Strauss, and Friedman” Islamic Perspective Journal, no. 8 (Winter 2012): 41–60. Byrd, Dustin J. Unfashionable Objections to Islamophobic Cartoons: L’affaire Charlie Hebdo. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017. Cornwell, John. Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius xii. New York: Viking, 1999.

110

Siebert

Dirks, Walter. Der singende Stotterer: Autobiographische Texte. München: Kossel Verlag, 1983. Dirks, Walter. “Die Entchristlichung der Arbeitswelt: Dokumentation zu Abschluss des Apostolats der französischen ‘Arbeiterpriester’.” Frankfurter Hefte 14, no. 12 (December 1959). Dirks, Walter. Die Samariter und der Mann aus Samaria: Vom Umgang mit der Barmherzigkeit. Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus Verlag, 1985. Dirks, Walter. “Zwischen den Zeiten: Brief an Eugen Kogon.” Frankfurter Hefte 18, no. 2 (February 1963). Eckhart, Meister. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, translated by Maurice O’C. Walshe. New York: The Crossroads Publishing Company, 2009. Engels, Friedrich. The German Revolutions: The Peasant War in Germany – Revolution and Counter-Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Fallert, Nicole. “President Trump’s State of the Union address: transcript.” February 5, 2019. https://www.vox.com/2019/2/5/18212533/president-trump-state-of-the-union -address-live-transcript. Fox, Matthew. The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How it can be Saved. New York: Sterling Ethos, 2011. Fromm, Erich. Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches: Eine Sozialpsychologische Untersuchung. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1980. Gorbachev, Mikhail. Perestroika. New Thinking for Our Country and the World. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985. Habermas, Jürgen. An Awareness that Something is Missing: Faith and Reason in a PostSecular Age. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2011. Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Heer, Friedrich. “Hegel und die Jugend.” Frankfurter Hefte 22, no. 5 (May 1967). Hegel, Georg W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Vol. ii: Determinate Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Hegel, Georg W.F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952. Hegel, Georg W.F. Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004. Higham, Charles. Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933–1949. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1994. Horkheimer, Max. Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Ein Interview mit Kommentar von Helmut Gumnior. Hamburg: Furch-Verlag, 1970. Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum, 2004.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

111

Horkheimer, Max. “The Jews and Europe.” In The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, 225–241. New York: Routledge, 2005. Horkheimer, Max. Tradionelle und kritische Theorie: Vier Aufsätz. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Verlag, 1981. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Horowitz, Jason. “Pope Francis, in Plea for South Sudan Peace, Stuns Leaders by Kissing their Shoes.” New York Times. April 11, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/ world/europe/pope-francis-south-sudan.html. Jamme, Christoph, and Helmut Schneider. Hegel’s ältestes Systemprogramm: Des Deutschen Idealismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984. Jeffreys, Diarmuid. Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And other Writings, translated and edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. Kogon, Eugen. “Der Christliche Politiker.” Frankfurter Hefte 12 (November 1957). Kogon, Eugen. Der SS–Staat: Das System der Deutschen Konzentrationslager. Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1947. Kogon, Eugen. “Revolution und Theologie: Das Neue in unserem Zeitalter: Ein Symposion.” Frankfurter Hefte 9 (September 1967). Küng, Hans. Can we Save the Catholic Church? London: William Collins, 2013. Küng, Hans. Das Christentum: Wesen und Geschichte. München: Piper Verlag, 1994. Küng, Hans. Grosse Christliche Denker. München: Piper Verlag, 1994. Küng, Hans. Das Judentum. München: Piper Verlag, 1991. Küng, Hans. Der Islam: Geschichte, Gegenwart, Zukunft. München: Piper Verlag, 2004. Küng, Hans. Menschwerdung Gottes: Eine Einführung in Hegel’s Theologisches Denken als Prolegomena zu einer künftigen Christologie. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1970. LaFraniere, Sharon. “Seeking Truth, Mueller Exposes Culture of Lies Around Trump.” Seattle Times. December 1, 2018. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/seekingtruth-mueller-exposes-culture-of-lies-around-trump/. Laudani, Raffaele, ed. Secret Reports of Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Leibniz, Gottfried W. Die Theodizee von der Güte Gottes, der Freiheit des Menschen und den Ursprung des Ubels, I and II. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996.

112

Siebert

Löwenthal, Leo. Falsche Propheten: Studien zum Autoritarianismus. Schriften 3. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990. Lortz, Joseph. Die Reformation in Deutschland. Band I. Vorraussetzungen. Aufbruch. Erste Entscheidungen. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1962. Lortz, Joseph. Die Reformation in Deutschland. Band II. Ausbau der Fronten. Unionsversuche. Ergebnis. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1962. Lortz, Joseph. Geschichte der Kirche. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1964. Lortz, Joseph. Katholischer Zugang zum Nationalsozialismus. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1934. Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 525–541. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978. Marx-Aveling, Eleanor, in Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981. Mattox, Mickey L. The Catholic Luther, Then and Now. Lutheran Educational Journal. December 21st, 2017. https://lej.cuchicago.edu/faithlearning/the-catholic-lutherthen-now/. Metz, Johannes Baptist. Jenseits bürgerlicher Religion: Reden uber die Zukunft des Christentusm. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1980. Metz, Johannes Baptist, and Elie Wiesel. Trotzdem hoffen. Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1993. Meyer, Thomas. “Identitätspolitik-worum es geht,” Neue Gesellschaft-Frankfurter Hefte 10 (2018). Morelock, Jeremiah, ed. Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism. London: University of Westminster Press, 2018. Morrow, Lance. “The Longest Day for Trump’s Adversaries.” Wall Street Journal. February 6, 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-longest-day-for-trumps-adversaries -11549497693. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, translated by Thomas Common. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008. Ott, Michael R. Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion: The Meaning of Religion in the Struggle for Human Emancipation. Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2001. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Read, Anthony. The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003. Rensmann, Lars. The Politics of Unreason. The Frankfurt School and The Origins of Modern Antisemitism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017.

The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society

113

Ross, Alex. “The Frankfurt School knew Trump was Coming.” New Yorker Magazine. November 5, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/thefrankfurt-school-knew-trump-was-coming Schillare, Quentin W. The Battle of Aschaffenburg: An Example of Late World War II ­Urban Combat in Europe. Fort Leavenworth: Kansas, 1989. Scholem, Gershom. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, edited by Werner J. Dannhauser. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2012. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Aphorismen zur Lebensweischeit. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus Verlag, 1946. Schweppenhäuser, Herman. “Hegel aktuell.” Frankfurter Hefte 14 (January 1959). Searle, John R. Die Wiederentdeckung des Geistes. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996. Siebert, Rudolf J. “A German Experience.” At the Cross Road 5 (1966): 12–14. Siebert, Rudolf J. The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2001. Siebert, Rudolf J. Die Anthropologie Michael Heldings, eines Humanisten und Theologen im Umkreis der Geistigen Neuordnung des 16, Jahrhunderts (1506–1561). Universitätsbibliothek Mainz: Universitätsarchiv. Sigmaringen: Hohenzollernsche Jahreshefte, 1965. Siebert, Rudolf J. Early Critical Theory of Religion: The Island of Happiness. New Delhi, Sanbun Publishers, 2014. Siebert, Rudolf J. From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and Universal Solidarity. New York: Peter Lang Inc., 2002. Siebert, Rudolf J. Future of Religion: Creator, Exodus, Son of Man and Kingdom. New Delhi, India: Sanbun Publisher, 2016. Siebert, Rudolf J. “Introduction.” In The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society, edited by Michael R. Ott, 1–68. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Siebert, Rudolf J. Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness, and the Rescue of the Hopeless. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Siebert, Rudolf J. “Marriage, Eucharist, and Socialism,” Cross Currents 39, no. 4 (1986). Siebert, Rudolf J. The World Religions in Idealistic and Materialistic Perspective: The Loss and the Rediscovery of the Idea. New Delhi, India: Sanbun, 2019. Speit, Andrea. Das Netzwerk der Identitären: Ideologie und Aktionen der Neuen Rechten. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2018. Tarrant, Brenton. The Great Replacement: Toward a New Society. Self-Published (online), 2019. Taylor, Mark Lewis. The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World. New York: Fortress Press, 2019. Thunemann, Fabian. “Kiran Klaus Patels: Bestandaufnahme Europas.” Neue Gesellschaft-Frankfurter Hefte 66 (January 2019).

114

Siebert

Trevor-Roper, Hugh. Hitler’s Table Talk. 1941–1944. New York City: Enigma Books, 2000. Tröger, Beate. “Etwas fehlt in der Pracht der neuen Frankfurter Altstadt,” Neue ­Gesellschaft-Frankfurter Hefte 66 (January 2019). Trump, Donald J. State of the Union 2019 Transcript. February 6, 2019. https://www.cnn .com/2019/02/05/politics/donald-trump-state-of-the-union-2019-transcript/index .html. Warren, Donald. Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin the Father of Hate Radio. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Weikart, Richard. Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. Washington d.c.: Regnery History, 2016. Weitensteiner, Hans. K. Warum denn wir, immer wir? War diese Stadt Frankfurt schuldiger als London? Katholisches Gemeindeleben im Dritten Reich und während der ersten Nachkriegsjahre 1932–1950. Dokumente und Darstellung. Frankfurt a. M.: Haag und Herchen, 2002. Wiesel, Elie. The Forgotten. New York: Schocken Books, 1992. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Wiggerhaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1994. Wolf, Hubert. Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Zengerle, Patricia. “With eye on Afghanistan talks, Trump vow to stop ‘endless wars.’” February 5, 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-afghanistan/witheye-on-afghanistan-talks-trump-vows-to-stop-endless-wars-idUSKCN1PV07M. Zentner, Christian. Illustrierte Geschichte der Ära Adenauer. München: Nebel Verlag, 1984. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492–2001. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999. Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. New York: Verso, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj, and Boris Gunjevic, God in Pain. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj, and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 2008.

Chapter 3

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion: Aufhaben and Tajdīd, and the Potential for Renovatio and Renewal Dustin J. Byrd The Critical Theory of Religion, as initiated by Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal, and later developed by Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rudolf J. Siebert, has predominately remained concerned with what is commonly understood as the “Western” religions, i.e. Judaism and Christianity. However, the dialectical approach to those two traditions can also be applied to the youngest of the Abrahamic religions: Islam. In this essay, I will attempt to interrogate Islam, both its theology and history, through the critical lenses that have been developed by the Frankfurt School’s unique form of philosophy, Critical Theory, demonstrating that Islam can still serve as a source for critical and emancipatory semantic and semiotic materials, from which the “non-believing” modern citizen can still draw meaningful substance and sustenance. By demonstrating that Islam can be determinately negated (aufheben) without being destroyed, I address the critics of Critical Theory, ala Imam Hamza Yusuf, an esteemed American Muslim scholar, and the late conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton (d. 2020), who maintain that Critical Theory is solely about deconstruction (abstract negation), and therefore almost uniformly damaging to Western civilization. In this essay, I claim that they are both failing to see the dialectical logic in Critical Theory’s negativity, which includes both negation and preservation. The failure to see the Hegelian logic of aufheben, which is at the core of Critical Theory, distorts their picture of what Critical Theory is. Additionally, it distorts their perception of Critical Theory’s relationship to religion, thus blocking Islam’s contribution to the morally-formed democratic society that Imam Hamza Yusuf and Roger Scruton would certainly advocate. From the outset, I will admit I am a long-time student of Imam Hamza Yusuf, and still find his mission to bring tajdīd (renewal) – or “renovatio” – to contemporary Islam highly insightful and, from the perspective of the ummah (Muslim community), desperately needed. On the other hand, while at times I find myself in agreement with the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, especially his diagnoses of the ills of modernity and the dogmatism and

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_004

116

Byrd

e­ thnomasochism of certain forms of liberal-left thought, I find his reading of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, written primarily in his book Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, to be superficial, woefully inadequate, and at times dishonest. In his attempt to lump the Frankfurt School in with other leftist philosophies, especially post-modernism and deconstructionism, he ascribes certain positions to them that are mistaken, especially in the realm of religion. This essay is meant as a rebuttal to Scruton’s claims, showing clearly the dialectical – both negation and preservation – in the Frankfurt School’s philosophy of religion and how it can serve to further the goals of Imam Hamza Yusuf’s tajdīd of the sane society, especially in the West. 1

Delineating “Critical Theory”

In his book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, Scruton argues that his journey through the pantheon of Left-wing thinkers demonstrated to him that they actually produce no alternatives to the world as it is – “only negatives.”1 Under the meta-label “Critical Theory,” Scruton includes non-­ Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, such as Sartre and Foucault, Lacan and Gramsci. It is true that all these “Leftist” thinkers share certain influences, such as Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and even Friedrich Nietzsche, and in some cases they even influenced each other, it is wrong to assume that they all have the same basic underlying logic, especially when it comes to religion.2 On the face of it, the Frankfurt School, which he claims to be post-War Germany’s “new idol,” is portrayed as being wholly secular, following the Hegelian Left’s ­understanding that religion, whether psychologically (Ludwig Feuerbach), 1 Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016), 273. 2 As this is not a book review, but rather an attempt to critique the critic of Critical Theory, I will stick to a strict definition of Critical Theory – a school of thought that began with a cohort of German-Jewish intellectuals in between the two World Wars, as well as those scholars whose intellectual lineage follow directly from those original Frankfurt School thinkers, ala Jürgen Habermas and Rudolf J. Siebert. I understand that this definition of “critical theory” is not universally accepted, as non-Frankfurt School scholars have often placed themselves within the meta-label of critical theory. Nevertheless, for the sake of coherency in this essay, I must disregard their protests and remain steadfast in my delineation of what is and what is not Critical Theory, in the original sense. This is especially important when it comes to religion, as many other left-wing philosophers, sociologists, and intellectuals who often work under the title of “critical theory,” have a drastically different relationship to religion than the original Frankfurt School scholars.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

117

i­deologically (Karl Marx), or politically (Vladimir Lenin) is an impediment to mankind’s future emancipation.3 Ironically, Roger Scruton himself follows the anti-religion Left in thinking that all forms of left-wing thought continue the anti-religion tradition of Hegel’s left-wing students. While this is clearly untrue, and we intend to demonstrate how it is untrue, we must look at the allegations the conservative British philosopher levels against the Left in general. 2 The Tajdīd Imam and the Conservative Philosopher: a Conversation on the “Purely Negative” In a June, 2018, conversation between Imam Hamza Yusuf, the co-founder of Zaytuna College, the first Islamic college in the United States, and Roger Scruton, the conservative British philosopher, they discussed “what conservativism really means,” especially in an age of cultural liberalism and the decline of the West.4 Although Scruton is often accused of being “Islamophobic,” due to his belief that Islam and Muslims are a threat to Europe, which is suffering from an existential void left by the collapse of Christianity and traditional culture, he and the tajdīd Imam found many points of convergence in their friendly discourse, including a critique of “Critical Theory,” which they both agreed had a deleterious effect on Western society.5 Through his conversations with Imam Hamza Yusuf, as well as his various critiques of the “Left” (as vague as a term as that is) in his books, we will see that Scruton has two essential meta-political claims about “Critical Theory:” (1) that Leftist intellectuals are engaged in what he sees as an “purely negative” endeavor, which (2) because of its absolute negativity, fails to construct any alternative to the world-as-it-is, therefore leaving “real people” and their troubles in the dustbin of history. We will see in the following section, that his claims are both misleading, as he doesn’t explain the full nature of Critical Theory’s self-professed negativity, and false, as he either misrepresents the claims of Critical Theory or fails to adequately understand them. Imam Hamza Yusuf and Roger Scruton open their discourse with the topic of conservativism, explaining that the usual definition, as understood as economic liberalism plus cultural conservativism, is a distorted detraction. ­Explaining that conservativism is wrongfully reduced to “an apology for a 3 Ibid., 115. 4 “What Conservativism Really Means – Roger Scruton in Conversation with Hamza Yusuf.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iawSzFZg-vw&t=1321s Accessed 7/20/2018. 5 Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic (Widworthy, Barton Honiton Devon: Notting Hill Editions Lts, 2016), 172–194; Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2002.

118

Byrd

f­ ree-market economy,” Scruton attempts to show what he believes conservativism is truly about. He says, The typical conservative… is someone who looks around himself and he finds things that he loves, and he thinks those things are threatened, they’re vulnerable; I’ve got to protect them. It’s not often that you find on the Left someone who looks around and finds things that he loves. It’s always something that’s gone wrong. It’s even hateful, and you’ve got to mobilize against it. If you’ve lost any sense that actually the world is loveable, and that there are things therefore to be rescued in it, you have actually lost the sense of why there is such a thing as a community in the first place.6 For Scruton, this rendition of the word “conservativism” is primarily about the “fundamental cultural inheritances” of the West; the literature, art, music, architecture, religion, philosophy, folk culture, language, manners, and the intellectual foundations of the three “seedbed societies:” Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.7 These are things that must be protected and preserved amidst the radical changes of modernity, for they are the foundations of the civilization, and without them, the civilization will collapse. ‘If you can find that foundation,’ he says to Imam Hamza Yusuf, ‘one can start building again, to recapture those things that are jeopardized by the laxness of our modern society.’8 In a Manichean way, Scruton charges “the Left” as being pathological about destroying those things they find unacceptable in the Western inheritance. Such things must be excommunicated from modern society. There is a cult of “emancipation,” he claims, and this cult intends to liberate us and alienate us Westerners from our cultural inheritance. At the most basic level of democratic contestation concerning these inheritances, Scruton believes there is a quest for “power,” and this quest animates the Left’s relentless critique of ­society and Western cultural inheritances. It is not, as the pantheon of leftist thinkers often state, the bringing forth a more peaceful, just, and reconciled society, that ­motivates their critique, rather it is their determination to destroy all things that stand in their way to obtaining the power to determine the West in a way more suitable to their philosophical and political palate. Thus, in the Left’s “­destruction” of all things inherited, they are undermining and deconstructing the obstacles of tradition, custom, and cultural norms, which are the bulwark against such a “emancipated” society. In doing so, they display the very 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

119

c­ haracteristic that they accuse the totalitarian Right of: following of their own subjective “will to power” (der Wille zur Macht), so that they might obtain the ability to impose their worldview on others. In their search to unmask all inhibiting yet camouflaged powers, the Left, says Scruton, forces the individual to disappear. Under the grand inquisition of the Left, the power-interests that are assumed to be behind each individual, is unmasked. Thus, in a leftist worldview, the society becomes individual-less, as a personal non-power-interest perspective ceases to exist behind the powerinterest the individual is assumed to have. Society is thus thought to be a mere discordant chorus of competing power-interests, all vying to triumph over the other, locked in a totalen krieg (total war) that is inherently inescapable. The role of the Left therefore is to expose such hidden power-interests and eliminate them in the name of the “people,” “future emancipation,” “absolute freedom,” etc. In other words, ideology critique is universally applied to every utterance, every gesture, and attempt to communicate, for the other, no matter how innocent, is the agent of particular power-interests, and as such their motivations must be subject to critique. Because of this ideology-critique as weltanschauung and way-of-being, the Left is ever on-guard, using the power of critical thought to uncover hidden wrongs, unarticulated biases, “micro-aggressions,” and any other transgressions that go unannounced in the lifeworld (lebenswelt). Living within a state of perpetual-critique, wherein nothing can be taken at face value, but must rather be interrogated for hidden power-motivations, produces the kind of individual that can only ‘destroy things [and] punish people… [they] find ­classes who are to blame, the Jews, the Bourgeoisie, whoever it might be.’9 As this state of negativity becomes normalized, Scruton paradoxically argues, ‘you [never get] out of that negative structure,’ and therefore the same negativity will continue to reproduce the same society that calls for negativity. In such a negative worldview, one cannot see what is already true, good, and beautiful, and thus in need of preservation.10 All of history is “one single catastrophe” as the Critical Theorist Walter Benjamin saw it.11 But since there is no substantively different alternative than the world and society we now inhabit, the 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. In their conversation, Imam Hamza Yusuf likened the true, the good, and the beautiful to the Islamic concepts: Imam (truth that comes from faith), Islam (the praxis of doing good), and ‘iḥsān (making things beautiful). These three are also under attack in secularmodernity. See “Sacred Truths in a Profane World – Hamza Yusuf and Roger Scruton” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQoi9xPooKo (Accessed 8/23/2018). 11 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 257.

120

Byrd

­ ndermining and destruction of the already true, good, and beautiful, abanu dons us to the untrue, the bad, and the ugly. In other words, negativity didn’t deliver us to a truer, better, and more beautiful state-of-being, it only brought about their demise. Being so, ‘the purely negative approach to the status quo’ Scruton says, ‘is simply going to perpetuate this negativity.’12 In other words, the absolute negativity of “critical theory” undermines and makes impossible the very possibility of escaping such negativity, as negativity becomes a metaphysical totality. If all is untrue, bad, and ugly, then how do we escape that dysgenic totality? It seems that the absolute claim locks us into that which we wish to escape. Thus, this pessimistic fatalism dooms those who yearn for an exit from the unbearable barbarity of nature and history, especially in what is already a “totally dark world,” as Horkheimer described it.13 Because the purely negative nature of the critique becomes all engrossing, nothing is spared, including the critics themselves, who become negated into becoming the muselmänner (dead-not-yet-dead) of absolute critique – critique as way-of-being – never constructing but always pathologically deconstructing or destroying. The agent of pure negativity sees nothing to preserve, nothing to spare, nothing to live for other than a “not-yet” future reconciled society. Nothing is sacred and nothing transcends negativity. Therefore, the pure negativist is, in fact, a nihilist – aiming for nothing but furthering his critique, which never finds its endpoint, as a telos implies resolution, which cannot be in a world of perpetual negativity. Furthering this claim, Scruton writes in his book, Looking back across the bleak landscape that I have travelled… I witness only negatives. Occasional lip service is paid to a future state of ‘emancipation,’ ‘equality’ or ‘social justice.’ But those terms are seldom lifted out of the realm of abstractions, or subjected to serious examination. They are not, as a rule, used to describe an imagined social order that their advocates are prepared to justify. Instead they are given a purely negative application. They are used to condemn every mediating institution, every imperfect association, every flawed attempt that human beings might have made to live together without violence and with due respect for law. It is as though the abstract ideal has been chosen precisely so that nothing actual could embody it.14

12 13

Yusuf and Scruton, “What Conservativism Really Means.” Max Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 & 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 124. 14 Scruton, Fools, 273,

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

121

Due to the assumed totalizing negativity of the critique, Imam Hamza Yusuf argues that Critical Theory is less a useful lens through which to interrogate problems, and more of a “corneal transplant,” through which all things are viewed, with the assumption that things become horribly distorted if viewed through such clouded eyes. Additionally, he argues that the absolute negativity of Critical Theory makes responses by students influenced by Critical Theory predictable, as the assumed power-interests behind any claim, work of art, theology, philosophy, stands magically disrobed before their negativist gaze. While others have moved on past the obvious outdated power-interest of the author, creator, or composer, the Critical Theorist gets ensnared in his anachronistic critique – locked in the negativity that overcomes all other aspects of the work. Yes, Scruton would say, Hegel was misogynistic when he proclaimed that women were ‘not suitable for higher sciences, for philosophy and certain artistic productions which require a universal element,’ but that was in the 19th century; can we now deal with his extraordinary philosophy as opposed to his conventional (at the time) misogyny.15 While this is a legitimate critique of Hegel, an ensnarement on such a small island amidst an great ocean of work does not represent the general trajectory of the Frankfurt School’s vein of critical philosophy.16 While this may be the modus operandi of “virtue-signaling” graduate students, it can hardly be attributed to Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and the other Frankfurt School scholars. 3

The Labor of the Negative: Hegel and Dialectical Logic

Although Scruton considers himself a “great admirer of Hegel,” he never quite grasps Hegel’s dialectical logic.17 If we keep one eye closed when looking at 15 16

17

Georg W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 207. The perceived power that comes from the ability to attack the great, or “mock the great,” is, according to Imam Hamza Yusuf, very seductive for “marginalized and disenfranchised people.” While it is certainly true that the ability to critique the powerful is acutely empowering among those who have little to no social power to change their life-­ circumstances, it does not mean that the truth-claims of such critiques are undermined by their ability to empower. Rather, powerless communities, once having the tools of critique, can advance perspectives, thoughts, and critiques from the subaltern, that are rarely seen from positions of power or recorded in history. Yes, critique can be seductive, but it is also necessary, especially among the marginalized and disenfranchised. Yusuf and Scruton, “What Conservativism Really Means.” Roger Scruton, “Dismantling the Leftist Academy Complex, Liberty Law Talk.” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNhyttsko0 Accessed 7/22/2018.

122

Byrd

­ ritical Theory’s “labor of the negative,” as Hegel described it, then we may only C see the ‘application [of the] purely negative,’ as Scruton calls it.18 Yet, when the other eye is open, one can see the other side of Hegel’s dialectical logic. Scruton’s tendency for one-eyed thinking, i.e. his reliance on positivism and analytical philosophy, which often limits him to the realm of appearances, blocks him from seeing that which is equally true, the other side of “dialectical” negation: the preservation of those elements of our “fundamental cultural inheritance” that should continue into the present and into the future. This dialectical logic, which animates the critique of the Frankfurt School, is not abstract negation (“purely negative”) as Scruton claims time and time again, but rather aufheben, or determinate negation, as developed concretely by someone Scruton claims to be a great admirer of: Georg W.F. Hegel. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, he defines aufheben as such, All that is necessary to achieve scientific progress – and it is essential to strive to gain this quite simple insight – is the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much positive, or that what is selfcontradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content, in other words, that such a negation is not all and every negation but the negation of a specific subject matter which resolves itself, and consequently is a specific negation, and therefore the result essentially contains that from which it results; which strictly speaking is a tautology, for otherwise it would be an immediacy, not a result. Because the result, the negations, is a specific negation it has a content. It is a fresh Notion but higher and richer than its predecessor; for it is richer by the ­negation or opposite of the latter, therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself and its opposite. It is in this way that the system of Notions as such has to be formed – and has to complete itself in a purely continuous course in which nothing extraneous is introduced.19 This logic, wherein that which is negated is not totally or “purely” negated, but rather certain desirable, beneficial, revolutionary, or emancipatory, elements from the entity, idea, system of thought, theology, or philosophy, continues to live within the “fresh notion,” which is elevated above its “predecessor.” In other words, the particularity of the entity, as it was so constituted, was negated, 18 Scruton, Fools, 273. 19 Georg W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1969), 54.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

123

while that which was rescued from that entity is preserved in the “unity” of the new notion and its opposite. For Scruton, the negativity of the Left only comes in one form: abstract negation, wherein all that was negated dissolves into a “nullity, into abstract nothingness” – the totalizing destructiveness that comes about when the object of the negation is reduced to nothing: total annihilation. There is no preservation of the good, the true, and the beautiful in abstract negation. This nihilist logic is the logic of the “purely negative,” which he charges Critical Theory with. However, it is entirely untrue. Critical Theory, being rooted in the dialectical logic of Hegel, attempts to determinately negate that which confronts it, thus allowing certain elements of the entity to remain in the dustbin of history while identifying, preserving, and fulfilling in the newer, more truthful notion (or entity), those elements that were revolutionary, emancipatory, and truthful. Thus, Hegel’s “labor of the negative” is not simply about negation or destruction, for the “negative is just as much the positive,” and therefore the destructive is equally the constructive. Critical Theorists rummage through the ruins of the past in order to rescue those elements that can contribute to a future more-reconciled, justice-filled, truthful, and peaceful society.20 It is true that in the “fresh notion” those rescued elements do not appear as they did in the past, nevertheless, they are still identifiable within it, as they are preserved within the “fresh notion.” For example, the monastery that is now used as a private home is still identifiable as a monastery; it did not surrender its essential characteristics as a structure designed for monastic life as it became something other than a monastery. The monastic element is still preserved in its “new notion.” Therefore, dialectical logic, in its essence, just as much constructive as it is destructive, as they are equal sides of dialectical logic, and as such, cannot be “purely negative” as Scruton wants us to believe. 4

Adorno, Religion, and Utopia

One of the charges that Scruton makes against Critical Theory comes with his attack on Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy of religion.21 Scruton wants to undermine Adorno’s critique of capitalist society by saying that the “core of truth” that can be found in his critique is merely “downstream” of the Hebrew Bible’s 20

To see this process most poignantly in action, see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 21 Scruton, Fools, 144–145.

124

Byrd

critique of idolatry.22 However, as we’ll see, as Scruton explains the Hebrew Bible’s anti-idolatry position, he unwittingly testifies to my central thesis; that Critical Theory is rooted in dialectical logic, as opposed to the “purely negative” logic of abstract negation that he claims, and that dialectical logic is at work in Adorno’s critique of capitalist consumerism and his philosophy of religion. In both an attack on their “purely negative” philosophy and an admittance of Horkheimer and Adorno’s truth, Scruton writes, It is only fair to add that the Frankfurt critique of the consumer society contains an element of truth. It is a truth far older than the Marxist theories with which Adorno and Horkheimer embellish it. Indeed, it is the truth enshrined in the Hebrew Bible, reformulated time and again down the centuries: the truth that, in bowing down to idols, we betray our better nature. The Torah sets before us a vision of human fulfilment. It tells us that we are bound by the law of God, who tolerates no idolatry, and wishes for our absolute devotion. By turning to God we become what we truly are, creatures of a higher world, whose fulfilment is something more than the satisfaction of our wishes. Through idolatry, by contracts, we fall into a lower way of being – the way of self-enslavement, in which our appetites shape themselves as gods and take command of us.23 He continues, Of course, Adorno did not believe in God and had little time for the teachings of the Torah… But his attack on mass culture should be seen in the Old Testament spirit, as a repudiation of idolatry, a reaffirmation of the age-old distinction between true and false gods – between the worship that ennobles and redeems us, and the superstition that drops us in the ditch. For Adorno, the true god is utopia: the vision of subjects in their freedom, conscious of the world as it is, and claiming that world as their own. The false god is the fetish of consumerism – the god of appetite, who clouds our vision and confiscates our choice.24 There are a few salient points here: (1) Scruton admits there is a “core of truth” in Adorno’s critique of capitalism’s consumer society (which was shared by the rest of the Frankfurt School), (2) That Adorno’s “core of truth” is essentially a 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 144. 24 Ibid.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

125

“reaffirmation” of the same critique made against idolatry in the Hebrew Bible, and (3) that Adorno is not a believer in God (in the sense of the Hebrew Bible), but rather sees god as “utopia.” If I’m representing Scruton’s views faithfully, and I believe I am, then he has proven my point and undermined his thesis on Critical Theory’s supposed “pure negativity.” Consider the following arguments: First, Adorno’s critique of bourgeois consumer society, the culture industry, nationalism, fascism, and any other form of distorted reality that enslaves humanity and delivers them to a false-absolute is admittedly rooted in Judaism. In fact, according to Max Horkheimer, all of Critical Theory is rooted in this same aspect of Judaism. He writes, I tell you this in order to make Adorno’s complicated relationship to religion, to religious allegiance, comprehensible. On the other hand, may I say that the critical theory that we both had a hand in developing has its roots in Judaism. It arises from the idea: Thou shalt not make any graven images of God.25 The Hebrew commandment banning the production of “graven images” is the Bilderverbot (“image ban” in German), the 2nd Commandment of the Jewish Decalogue. It connotes that the absolute, the “totally other,” the uncreated, the extemporal, the infinite, cannot and should never be associated with the nonabsolute, the imminent, the created, the temporal, and the finite. To do so would create false idols, the worship of which would, as Scruton says, “drop us in the ditch.”26 Thus, the book of Deuteronomy says, Take heed to yourselves, lest you forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with you, and make a graven image in the form of anything which the Lord your God has forbidden you. For the Lord your God is a devouring fire, a jealous God.27 The first generation Critical Theorist, Leo Löwenthal, also confessed to the influence of Judaism in Critical Theory, saying it was “codeterminative” of all Critical Theory, and that the concept of Bilderverbot, ‘is a motif in our thought

25

Max Horkheimer, A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondents, ed. and trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 361. 26 Scruton, Fools, 144. 27 Deuteronomy 4:23–24.

126

Byrd

even today.’28 Along with Löwenthal, Adorno fully accepts the truthful essence of the theological command to ban all images of divinity (true and supposed), even if he doesn’t ascribe to the ancillary theological truth-claims about the divine expressed in the biblical passage. As it is so articulated, there are a couple problems with the commandment, especially if it is going to be preserved and fulfilled in a post-Enlightenment secular society. First, the language of the Hebrew Bible is inherently religious and premodern, as it speaks of a “jealous God” that has become unknowable since the Enlightenment, especially after Immanuel Kant delineated the limits of reason in his (1793) Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Therefore, in such a religious idiom, this command against false-idols cannot gain universal consent for two reasons: (1) it is in the form of a theological commandment, and not a rational argument, the mode of discursive consent-making necessary in democratic societies. (2) It is wholly written in the logic and the “closed semantic universe” of the Abrahamic religions, into which the non-religious citizen has no entry. If such a theological category is to be preserved and fulfilled in a social, political, cultural, and economic context, it must be translated into publically accessible reasoning, through which all members of the democratic body-politic can have ­access. Without such a translation, only those already within the closed semantic universe of the religious community can find legitimation for what is, as it is articulated in the Hebrew Bible, a theological commandment. If the hic et nunc (here and now) is to be addressed, such a biblical commandment must enter into language that is accessible to all those within the discourse community. How does Adorno treat this commandment in such a way that “truth core” is preserved, as Scruton begrudgingly suggests? In his dialectical philosophy of religion, Adorno translated this explicitly religious commandment against false-absolutivity into secular political philosophy, advocating “an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what [it] once originally meant.”29 In other words, that which is not God should never be augmented to the level of the absolute, for in false-absolutivity comes totalitarianism, the cult of personality, nationalism, and every other heteronomic and dysgenic force that demands obedience, compliance, and conformity. This is where Scruton comes close, but still misses the essential point of Adorno’s “truth core.”

28 29

Leo Löwenthal, An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 112, 245. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 142.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

127

Remember, Scruton claims that Adorno does not believe in God, but rather, ‘for Adorno, the true god is utopia.’30 This is not entirely true either. Certainly Adorno had a religious upbringing, exposed to Judaism as well as Catholic and Protestant Christianity. He wrote his dissertation on Kierkegaard under the direction of the Socialist Protestant theologian Paul Tillich,31 and even told Walter Benjamin that he’d gladly see his philosophy ‘dissolve’ into an ‘­inverse theology’ – a ‘position directed against natural and supernatural interpretation(s) alike.’32 So, Adorno’s personal relationship to religion and the “God” of the Hebrew scriptures was complicated at best. Whether or not he believed in God in a conventional way is not really in question: he did not.33 However, it would be untrue to say he was an atheist, especially a hard-atheist, for he never claimed that there is not now, never was, and never will be a divine being. Rather, he followed the Enlightenment’s ban on a cataphatic “knowing” of an apophatic and thus “unknowable God.” As such, Adorno remained favete linguis – he stayed silent. Nevertheless, the inherent and essential negativity of the Jewish Bilderverbot was an acute interest for Adorno, as it, and its inherent anti-idolatry nature, he thought could be rescued from the depth of the Jewish religion through the translation into a social-political category, i.e. ουτοπία (utopia).34 In Horkheimer and Adorno’s seminal work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, they explain the centrality and absolutivity of the Bilderverbot in Critical Theory, wherein they determinately negate it from the depths of the Jewish tradition and preserve its critical potential, i.e. its negativity, in their secular philosophy. In an interesting rebuttal of their own teacher, demonstrating how easy it is to fall into the trap of cataphatic theology, they harshly critique Hegel’s own retreat into political-theological idolatry using the very dialectical logic Hegel developed. They write, The Jewish religion brooks no word which might bring solace to the ­despair of all mortality. It places all hope in the prohibition of invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth. The pledge of 30 Scruton, Fools, 144. 31 See Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005. 32 Theodor W. Adorno in Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno: The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 66–67. 33 To quote Habermas, ‘what applies to Adorno here is a proposition by Horkheimer aiming at Critical Theory as a whole: “Knowing there is no God, it nevertheless believes in him” (Sie weiß, dass es keinen Gott gibt, und doch glaubt sie an ihn)’ See Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2003), 113. 34 For Adorno, art also help within it the utopian impulse.

128

Byrd

s­alvation lies in the rejections of any faith which claims to depict it, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion. Negation, however, is not abstract. The indiscriminate denial of anything positive, the stereotyped formula of nothingness as used in Buddhism, ignores the ban on calling the absolute by its name no less than its opposite pantheism, or the latter’s caricature, bourgeois skepticism. Explanations of the world as nothingness or as the entire cosmos are mythologies, and the guaranteed paths to redemption sublimated magical practices. The self-satisfaction of knowing in advance, and the transfiguration of negativity as redemption, are untrue forms of the resistance to deception. The right of the image is recued in the faithful observance of its prohibition. Such observance, “determinate negation,” is not exempted from the enticement of intuition by the sovereignty of the abstract concept, as is skepticism, for which falsehood and truth are equally void. Unlike rigorism, determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth. Language thereby becomes more than a mere system of signs. With the concept of determinate negation Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postulating the known result of the whole process of negation, totality in the system and in history, as the absolute, he violated the prohibition and himself succumbed to mythology.35 Later, in his equally important work, Negative Dialectics, Adorno concretely ­explains the connection between the Bilderverbot and utopia. He writes, The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology.36 35 36

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 17–18. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1999), 207.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

129

In this later passage, we can see clearly how Adorno conceives of the negativity of the Bilderverbot, the anti-idolatry of the apophatic divinity, and how it is brought into existence in “secular form” through the notion of utopia. “Utopia,” which ironically means “no place,” is the purely apophatic category of social-political thought. It is the secular translation via aufhaben of the religious Bilderverbot, wherein its original conceptual negativity is rescued from the theological realm, translated into secular language, and preserved and fulfilled in the social-political realm. Just as the image ban posits no positive articulation of the divine, thus allowing no false-absolute (idolatry), so too does utopia abolish any positive articulation of the false-absolute of a perfect society, wherein submission and conformity would inevitably be expected and enforced, for there is no desired alternative than the perfect. As the “sum-of-alloughts,” and therefore a wholly negative concept, the notion of utopia remains the perpetual “other” than what is the case in-this-world and in the hic et nunc, and in such a way acts as a grand inquisitor of the given society. It is not cataphatic (ala Saint Thomas More), in the sense that it produces a positive plan for, or vision of, a future society, for if it were to do so it would create a totalizing blueprint for future domination, as the heterodox non-identical would always resist the hostile absorption of itself into the prevailing identity and schema of such a blueprint. Thus, utopia, like its theological counterpart in the image ban, remains entirely negative (thus retaining its critical function), while in praxis it becomes a category through which aufhaben fulfills itself in the world. To claim a utopia, is to not have a utopia, for utopia is apophatic and unrealizable (by definition). Thus utopia, like the Bilderverbot, stands against all false idols – the false-absolutes of the given world-as-it-is. An incomplete reading of the Frankfurt School’s translation via aufhaben of certain religious categories into social-political concepts could lead some into thinking that they are engaged in a “purely negative” affair, as is the confusion of Roger Scruton. Talk of the Bilderverbot and utopia, both of which present themselves in their original form as wholly negative, and therefore totally “­other,” could easily render one’s judgment against the Frankfurt School and in agreement with Scruton’s claim of their “pure negativity.” Yet, it is important to note that despite the fact that these two concepts are wholly negative themselves, they are not aufhaben, and neither do they reflect that which is built in the world. Rather, they are but two critical mediums through which aufhaben acts upon the world. Indeed, the act (the verb) of translating the theological category of Bilderverbot into the secular concept of utopia is the act of aufhaben, and should not be confused with the concepts (the nouns) through which the work gets done. Additionally, every negation is an act to defend and preserve something against that which is threatening it. In defense of A, one must

130

Byrd

negate B, even if A cannot be positively articulated. To not differentiate these concepts and how they are deployed by the Frankfurt School can lead to confusion and ultimately to a misunderstanding of the constructive and deconstructive role of dialectical critique in Critical Theory. It is true when Scruton charges the Frankfurt School with not advancing their own positively articulated vision or blueprint for a future “utopian” society, an ‘imagined social order that their advocates are prepared to justify,’ to use Scruton’s language.37 Adhering to the Bilderverbot, far beyond what it originally meant as Adorno wrote, the first generation of Critical Theorists did not produce a new idolatrous – and thus static – schema for a future society, for fear that it would become another system of domination artificially imposed upon future citizens of the world, such was the case with the dogmatism of Soviet Marxism. Rather, they do speak in the language of what the future ought not to be, as opposed to what it ought to be. In other words, a future society, determinately negated from the society we have today, should avoid the same mistakes, prejudices, antagonisms, etc., of the already given society; it should aim towards reconciliation. In identifying and critiquing what those ills of the given society are, the Frankfurt School tacitly, via aufhaben, gives a constellational picture of what the future ought to be without positively articulating a social order that can be raised to the level of a political dogma, wherein a heteronomic submission is expected and/or demanded by a future power. While this may appear to Scruton as “purely negative,” it is not. That which is true, good, and beautiful in the given society is preserved in the “not yet” society that the Critical Theorists aim for: a “becoming” society beyond the realm of necessity, beyond unnecessary suffering, beyond entrenched inequality, and beyond injustice. Whereas a “purely negative” theory seeks to destroy the world as it is in its entirety, the Critical Theory discovers those micrological moments of justice, mercy, compassion, equality, and love, and attempts to preserve, ­fulfill, and augment them in a future society. However, to only preserve that which has been deemed the true, the good, and the beautiful, is to neglect the true and the good in the ugly: those non-identical elements of society that while disturbing and phobogenic, are nevertheless no less true and good than Beethoven’s symphonies, Shakespeare’s poetry, or Goethe’s Faust. It was Saint Francis of Assisi that saw the truthfulness and goodness in the ugliness of the lepers, and for that we call him a saint. One must bear in mind after Aus­chwitz, that it was the suppression of the ugly, the distorted, the imperfect, the discarded, and the “degenerate,” which led the Nazis to eliminate the “others” from their volksgemeinschaft (ethnic community), including their own mentally and physically 37 Scruton, Fools, 273,

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

131

impaired. In their praise of perfection, there was no space for the imperfect; they were a burden to be eliminated. Therefore, according to Critical Theory, the truthfulness and goodness of what has been deemed “ugly” by the “beautiful” must also be preserved via aufhaben, as not to make a new idol out of the true, good, and beautiful, but rather to remember the “ugly” indictments of the prevailing society that the worshippers of the beautiful attempt to annihilate in their false-deification of beauty. The beauty of the now must not be used to legitimate and justify the status quo with all its iniquities; that which is beautiful now must not be the ideological camouflage of the dark side of society – the ugliness that must be negated in order for a more fully-reconciled society, rooted in substantive truthfulness, goodness, and beauty, to come about. That is the ultimate danger of the false-deification of what has been already deemed the true, the good, and the beautiful; it potentially surrenders “becoming” to that which already is. In doing so, it unjustly condemns what the given society has already deemed the “ugly,” and consequently their truthfulness and goodness. Thus, the beauty of the now must not be the enemy of the future; rather it must be enlisted in the struggle for a truer, more good, and more beautiful future society. 5

Aufhaben and Tajdīd

In discussing Islam in the contemporary West, which according to Habermas is now in the conditions of post-Secularity, wherein religion remains in some meaningful form despite the overall demythologized conditions, we must ask a series of poignant questions: what is the importance of dialectical logic to Islam and Muslims? How could Hegel’s dialectical logic be of help to the cause of tajdīd (revivification) of Islam, both in the Muslim world and the West? How does the undermining of aufhaben by conservatives like Scruton undermine the “renovatio” of both the West and the Muslim world? First, as Horkheimer and Adorno stated in the above quote, dialectical logic, as applied to every image, discloses the dialectical nature of the image; it exposes those elements that under interrogation admit their falsity, their “positivist decay,” and it elevates those elements that prove to be enlightenment.38 From the perspective of the Critical Theory of religion, this dialectical interrogation is applicable to all forms of human activity, including religion. The history of religion shows that religions determinately negate each other: Judaism was determinately negated by Christianity, which both cancelled and 38

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 18.

132

Byrd

­ reserved aspects of Judaism in its own theology, morality, scripture, messianp ism, etc. Christianity also determinately negated numerous mystery cults of the Roman Empire, absorbing into itself many of their practices, holy days, theological concepts, etc., while letting other aspects move into the ash heap of history. Islam, seeing Christianity as having appropriated too much of the Greco-Roman world, especially certain pagan polytheistic aspects, determinately negated it in the name of strict monotheism – an attempt to return the Abrahamic tradition back to tawḥīd (radical monotheism). In doing so, it preserved certain aspects of Christianity, such as its adoration of Jesus of Nazareth, his mother the virgin Mary, and the belief in Jesus’ eschatological return, but not his divinity. Additionally, Islam preserved within itself certain aspects of Judaism; its dietary laws, its prohibition on creating “images” of the divine, and its emphasis on the divine’s intervention into the historical process. However, Islam negated Judaism’s tribalism, believing that the message of monotheism was a message for the world, not just the Banī Isrāʼīl (children of Israel). What was preserved, and never negated, in all three Abrahamic religions was their prophetic nature; they all saw themselves as theologically-rooted critiques of the world as it is. In other words, they were all contra mundum, but not in the sense of being anti-world, but rather being against the world as it is so constituted. The “fall” of mankind, which mythically attempts to explain the problem of theodicy, gives expression to why God’s world is saturated with corruption, barbarity, vice, suffering, theft, war, misery, and injustice; in other words, evil. In the face of such reality, each of the three Abrahamic religions attempt to determinately negate the world as it is in the name of the not-yet that ought-to-be, always knowing that the “utopian” impulse cannot ever be fully realized within history. The religions of the prophets attempt to preserve, protect, and elevate those aspects of the world that are true, good, and beautiful, while contesting those aspects that are false, bad, and ugly. In this sense, the three Abrahamic religions display an inherent dialectical nature in their substance and how they intend to relate to the world. They also display ­dialectical histories. In other words, they all have their moments of prophetic ­goodness, wherein they become identical to their prophetic and humanistic creeds, and they have their moments of criminality, wherein they become non-­ identical to those same prophetic and humanistic values, principles, and ideals. From the perspective of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory of Religion, it is the task of the critical-dialectical intellect to discover, identify, preserve, and fulfil those elements, both in religion’s substance and history, that can be remembered and revived, and brought to bear in the struggle for a more just, truth-filled, wholly reconciled and peaceful society. It is equally their task to discover, identify, preserve, and fulfil those elements in religion’s substance

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

133

and history that are dysgenic and deleterious to humanity, both for the present moment and for the future. To engage in a “purely negative” approach to religion, the Critical Theorist would join other non-dialectical thinkers, especially in the 19th and 20th century, who believed religion ought to be abstractly negated – thus left in the dustbin of history in their totality. As much as we may say that the determinate negation of religion seems not only plausible, but also desirable, we cannot dismiss Scruton’s accurate claim that we are living in an age that is dismissive or even hostile to religion.39 The modern world has been thoroughly secularized, and has very little tolerance for religiously-rooted critiques of the secular, atheistic, and neo-liberal world order. For good reasons, Westerners often remember the numerous wars of religion, the persecution of all things heterodox by the Catholic Church, the Inquisition and Crusades, and the Protestant legitimation of all things evil; all of which led to Christianity’s own self-imposed delegitimation.40 It may be the case, that in the secular West, those aspects of religion that are still truthful, good, and beautiful, may have to be translated into secular language so that they can enter into the public sphere for democratic discourse. This is precisely where aufhaben and tajdīd intersect. Both Imam Hamza Yusuf and Roger Scruton agree that the modern world has many dysgenic features. They both bemoan the loss of religion, religiouslyrooted culture, morality, and worldviews; they both agree that popular culture, the consumer society, and the cult of narcissistic individualism, have led to the devastating collapse of hochkultur (high culture), which was predicated on the noble qualities of beauty, high idea, strength, boldness, and refinement. Now, the once noble elites emulate the debased and cultureless practices of the masses in their language, their manners, the tastes, and their way-of-being-inthe-world, as opposed to being guides and examples for those same masses. The “inherited cultural foundations” of the West, as well as the high Muslim Civilization, have evaporated under the weight of modernity, and now belong in museums. Following the logic of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and Arnold J. Toynbee’s Civilization on Trial, Scruton sees the collapse of the West as following a similar pattern as the Roman Empire and later the Islamic ­civilizations, both of which fell due to inner-decay and outside pressures. For 39 40

Roger Scruton, The Face of God. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2012. This dynamic continues within the years of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, wherein the “poster boy” for the Seven Deadly Sins is lauded as a “God-fearing” Christian, despite the fact that he displays no sign of religiosity, has no sense of religious vocabulary and ideas, and when discussing religion continuously makes erroneous claims about the basic facts of Christianity. For an example of “Trump-as-religious-figure” political propaganda, see the book: Stephen E. Strang, God and Donald Trump. Lake Mary, FL: Frontline, 2017.

134

Byrd

S­ cruton, his conservative philosophy, which is a powerful critique of the overall ugliness and distortion of modernity, is an attempt to rejuvenate true creativity in the classical arts, architecture, literature, music, and other cultural inheritances, as well as traditional Western identity, as a way of having a second renaissance in the West: a “renovatio” of the still-standing but badly decayed Western house. Interestingly, Scruton does not seek the house’s total destruction, as some in Europe’s New Right do, but rather believes the Western house must be recreated from within and from its own badly neglected resources. The same is true for Imam Hamza Yusuf. He gazes back into history and witnesses what Islamic civilization used to be, when it was at the forefront of the world-historical process while Europe was still languishing in the “Dark Ages.” Additionally, he is convinced that Islam still retains the necessary resources for its own self-generated tajdīd. Thus, the Imam attempts to resurrect such resources via his traditional curriculum at Zaytuna College, including the classical Greek Trivium: logic, grammar, and rhetoric, which were also an essential part of traditional Islamic education (via Plato). Yet, as I said before, any attempt to resurrect religion in a society that is already thoroughly secularized is precarious at best, as the zeitgeist (spirit of the age), as well as the trajectory of history, disclose to us that secularization will continue to penetrate into every layer of modern life. Although certain aspects of religion are desperately needed, both in the Western and Islamic world, their rejuvenation will most likely prove to be entirely inadequate to the task of fixing the entrenched problems of secular modernity, at least on a civilizational level. In the Muslim world, religious revivalism in the form of Islamic fundamentalism has proven to be antithetical and therefore resistance to all things modern, including the positive aspects: international institutions, international law, human rights, and democracy. The West, for its part, continues on its sonderweg (deviant path towards complete secularization), as Jürgen Habermas calls it, which has engendered its own Traditionalist backlash.41 Nevertheless, the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory of Religion is not only sympathetic to such an endeavor, but is also at the forefront of the attempt to engage in such a “reloading” of religious ideals, as they forward that certain religious semantics and semiotics still retain their potentials to be emancipatory, liberational, restorative, and rejuvenating amidst modernity’s rapid decay. However, this does not mean that the Frankfurt School aims at a civilizational conversion to positive religion. That much is not possible, nor is it desirable. And yet, the calls for such an anachronistic return continue among some in the European Far Right. Why is it not possible? 41

Jürgen Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 61.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

135

According to Adorno, those who call for a retreat into religion do so not out of their sincere conviction in the truth of the religious claim, but rather out of personal and/or cultural need. Speaking of a “return to religion” attitude, that had gripped much of the West during the middle of the 20th century, he writes, In the best case, that is, where it is not just a question of imitation and conformity, it is desire that produces such an attitude: it is not the truth and authenticity of the revelation that are decisive but rather the need for guidance the confirmation of what is already firmly established, and also the hope that by means of a resolute decision alone one could breathe back the meaning into the disenchanted world under whose absence we have been suffering so long, as though we were mere spectators staring at something meaningless. It seems to me that the religious renaissances of today are philosophy of religion, not religion.42 If this claim is still true, and the real motivation for a contemporary return to religion is rooted in the needs of the individual, the nation, or the civilization, such as to reaffirm its identity, then such a return is a fraud, precisely because religion, if ‘accepted for the sake of something other than its own truth content… undermines itself.’43 Thus, the functionalization of religion to fulfill certain social and/or psychological needs undermines the very truth claims of the religion, its core foundations, as it is not the truth that makes it acceptable, but rather its “use” value. It is a mere tool in service to a certain end: the fulfillment of immediate social and political needs. And as a tool, it is not essential to the problem; it is merely instrumental, as it can be replaced by other instruments, such as the ersatz-religions of nationalism, fascism, Marxism, etc., or any other ideology that addresses those particular needs in a more efficient way. For ­example, in the United Kingdom, the Right-wing nationalist group Britain First, frequently calls for England to return to its roots in the Anglican church, as a way of combating the “Islamization” of Britain. However, such groups, usually made up of disaffected workers animated by racism and Islamophobia, are rarely religious. Or, as the critical theorist Roland Boer states, these calls to ­revive traditional religion emanate predominately from those who ‘only know what a church-building looks like from the outside.’44 They engage in “churchism,” not religion. This is the reverse image of the Nazi idea of 42 43 44

Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models, 137. Emphases added. Ibid., 139. Roland Boer, Criticism of Theology: On Marxism and Theology iii (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 38.

136

Byrd

­ ottgläubigkeit, wherein the fascists remained “believers in God” but abanG doned the church. Now, in the face of multiculturalism, those with fascist ­tendencies abandon God but strategically embrace the church. This is clearly not the renovatio that Scruton calls for, even though his calls for a return to Christianity as an “inherited cultural foundation” echoes much of the same sentiment that groups like Britain First articulate. From the perspective of the Critical Theory of Religion, ‘positive religion,’ at least in the West, has run its course, and has been thoroughly “neutralized” as a civilizational guiding force. After it was ‘emasculated in its profoundest claims,’ via science, autonomous reason, metaphysical positivism, industrialization, capitalization, i.e. the “death of God,” as Nietzsche proclaimed, what was left of religion, especially Christianity, was an empty shell – devoid of the substance of the religion that once animated it as a producer of culture, sittlichkeit (ethical life), and history.45 ‘The shell of Christian doctrine,’ Adorno writes in The Authoritarian Personality, ‘is preserved and “consumed” in a haphazard way as a “cultural good” like patriotism and traditional art,’ and therefore ‘rarely produce individual behavior that is different from what is to be expected from the prevailing patterns of civilization.’46 In other words, religion no longer creates meaningful differentiation between the believers and the non-believers; it is merely consumed and forgotten like any other inconsequential product. Just the same as the non-believer, the believers’ lifeworld and culture is determined more powerfully by non-religious social conventions, over which their “adherence” to religion hardly ever negates. In the West, the “devout” believer displays the same patterns of living as their non-religious counterparts; they are hardly distinguishable. When taken into account the thorough secularization of the West, and the decline of its inherited culture, we can see that religion is a mere shadow of what it once was; the churches that are scattered across the European landscape remain what Nietzsche already called them in 1882: the ‘tombs and monuments of God.’47 On its own, within its own skin, religion is unable to break back onto the stage of history in any meaningful way. However, the secular sonderweg of the West, and its continual export to the rest of the world via globalization, may not be the last word of religion. If religion can find a contemporary medium in order to once again be an influence in the lifeworld, it 45

Theodor W. Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 729. 46 Ibid. 47 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2008), 104.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

137

may be able to contribute to a renovatio in the West; but that is a big “if.” Likewise, with Islam, if Muslims in the West can find a contemporary medium in order to translate their Islamic values, principles, and ideals into secular language, it may also be able to contribute to the “renovatio” of the West as well as a tajdīd of Islam. Aufhaben, as understood as the determinate negation of an ideal and/or entity from its original being into another, ‘higher and richer than its predecessor,’ wherein certain elements are rescued and preserved within the “fresh notion,” is the key to both renovatio and tajdīd.48 Some aspects of religion will have to be abandoned, while the prophetic core will have to migrate from the depth of the sacred to a profane medium, and in doing so will be rescued from abstract negation. The Critical Theorist Jürgen Habermas, whom Scruton rails against in his Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, even though he admits to not understanding him, supplies us with a prime example of how a religious idea can migrate from the depth of the sacred mythos into political philosophy, wherein it becomes a matter of social policy, benefitting all mankind regardless of their cultural origins. Using an example from genetic engineering, Habermas writes, Many voices still evoke the first book of Moses, Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” In order to understand what Gottesebenbildlichkeit – “in the likeness of God” – means, one need not believe that the God who is love creates, with Adam and Eve, free creatures who are like him. One knows that there can be no love without recognition of the self in the other, nor freedom without mutual recognition. So, the other who has human form must himself be free in order to be able to return God’s affection. In spite of his likeness to God, however, this other is also imagined as being God’s creature. Regarding his origin, he cannot be of equal birth with God. This creatural nature of the image expresses an intuition which in the present context may even speak to those who are tone-deaf to religious connotation. Hegel had a feeling for this difference between divine “creation” and mere “coming from” God. God remains a “God free men” only as long as we do not level out the absolute difference that exists between the creator and the creature. Only then, the fact that God gives form to human life does not imply a determination interfering with man’s self-determination. He continues, 48 Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, 54.

138

Byrd

Because he is both in one, God the Creator and God the Redeemer, this creator does not need, in his actions to abide by the laws of nature like a technician, or by the rules of a code like a biologist or computer scientist. From the very beginning, the voice of God calling into life communicates within a morally sensitive universe. Therefore, God may “determine” man in the sense of enabling and, at the same time, obliging him to be free. Now, one need not believe in theological premises in order to understand what follow from this, namely, that an entirely different kind of dependence, perceived as a causal one, becomes involved in the difference assumed as inherent in the concept of creation were to disappear, and the place of God be taken by a peer – if, that is, a human being would intervene, according to his own preferences and without being justified in assuming, at least counterfactually, a consent of the concerned other, in the random combination of the parent’s set of chromosomes. This reading leads to the question I dealt with elsewhere: Would not the first human being to determine, at his own discretion, the natural essence of another human being at the same time destroy the equal freedoms that exist among persons of equal birth in order to ensure their difference?49 For Habermas, this example demonstrates that philosophy’s “translation” of religious semantics and semiotics is “non-destructive;” it does not empty the religious concept of its meaning via a ‘process of deflation [or] exhaustion.’50 Rather, it makes such material, which was once only available to those within the “closed semantic universe,” available to all through post-metaphysical reasoning, i.e. publically accessible thought. Habermas writes that such a translation ‘goes beyond the borders of one particular religious fellowship and makes the substance of biblical concepts accessible to a general public that also includes those who have other faiths and those who have none.’51 This process has the benefit of (1) extending a particular religious principle, one that may be foundational to the religion itself, to a non-religious community, in a way that they can find acceptable within their secular worldview, and (2) such a process leaves the concept itself unchanged within the religious tradition, so there is no sense that the believers have been forced to adapt their sacred concepts to secular modernity. (3) Both the religious and the secular can find common 49 50 51

Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 114–115. Ibid.; Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict xvi), The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, ed. Florian Schuller, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 44–45. Habermas and Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization, 45.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

139

grounds in the newly determinately negated (translated) concept, as the religious fellowship sees the essential religious notion within the secularized concept, and the secular citizens sees first, the valuable concept that still remains in religion, and second, that religion itself will not determine their secular lifeworld. For Habermas, the secularization of religious semantics and semiotics, into secular language is also promising for international relations. He writes, ‘if [the Western world] presents this complex image of itself to other cultures in a credible way, intercultural relations may find a language other than that of the military and the market alone.’52 This translation process, rooted in Hegel’s aufhaben and spearheaded by the Frankfurt School, beginning with the first generation’s translation of religious concepts into secular political philosophy, can contribute to both a renovatio of the West and a tajdīd of Islam, as it should do four specific things that are important to Roger Scruton and Imam Hamza Yusuf: (1) it alleviates Scruton’s concern that the West has to abandon its own “inherited cultural foundations” in order to appease non-Western nations and cultures, both in the West and abroad. (2) Rather than abandoning the Greco-Roman and Christian “foundations” of the West, such foundations can be translated into neutral language accessible to all, and therefore not in confrontation with other cultures. It can also reacquaint Westerners with the “inherited cultural foundations” that they have long forgotten (especially religion), in a language that is more appropriate to secular modernity. (3) Common moral and ethical grounds between Islam and the secular West, the latter of which has already translated much of the Christian tradition into its social-political norms (welfare state, human rights, freedom of the individual, etc.), can be found, as the particularities of the lexicon and worldviews of the “closed semantic universe” are no longer a disputed factor, but both find their essential truths in the now-secularized “fresh notion.” This can help to alleviate the tensions between the Western world and the dār al-Islām (Muslim world), as a common religiously-neutral (though genealogically religious) language becomes the medium of discourse. In other words, the common secular language allows both traditions to see their own shared religious substance in the secularized concept while not allowing the particularities of such substance to become barriers to discourse. (4) If such a discourse can be made fruitful, it may help to make space for the mutuallybeneficial cooperation and inter-fertilization of the traditions, cultures, and civilizations, as the Islamic civilization can reacquaint the West with the benefits of faith (or at least the intellectual and moral-ethical content legitimized by faith), and the West can offer the Muslim world an understanding of the 52 Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 114.

140

Byrd

benefits of modernity, i.e. international law, human rights, protection of individual rights, women’s rights, etc., most of which already have precedent within Islamic sacred history, especially the Al-sīra al-Nabawiyya (prophetic biography), ʿIlm al-Kalām (theology), Fiqh (jurisprudence) and ʿAqīdah (creed).53 Indeed, Islam can translate both its Thawābit and Mutaġayyīrāt (foundations and standpoints) into language that is accessible to the non-religious West, so that it may enter into the public sphere through democratic discourse – and thus distinguish for the non-Muslim that which is essential to Islam (Thawābit), and therefore constitutional to Islamic identity, and that which is transmutable (Mutaġayyīrāt). In this sense, the essentials of Islam are untouched within the religious tradition itself while being made available to the “other” through the secularized “fresh notion,” as disclosed by aufhaben. 6 Conclusion In a time where Muslims and secular Westerners, especially in Europe, are living with increased tension due to what the Far Right has called Le grand remplacement, Islamic colonization, and white genocide, it is always good to see that representatives of both cultures and civilizations can sit down and have a friendly discourse, such was the case with Imam Hamza Yusuf and Roger Scruton. However, participation in the discourse must not simply be open to both sides, but must also be true. In the public talk between Imam Hamza Yusuf and Roger Scruton, an incomplete understanding of the basic logic of aufhaben, as articulated by Hegel and adopted by the Frankfurt School and their specific form of Critical Theory, was on display. Their mutual misunderstanding of aufhaben has led both of them to hold fundamentally wrong positions on the function of dialectical critique. It is not, as we’ve shown, a “purely negative” form of critique, as Scruton maintained, and Imam Hamza Yusuf agreed to. Dialectical critique attempts to preserve within the “fresh notion” the truthful element of the expired, decaying, or stale notion, thus giving that what was still true in the expired notion a new and elevated life in the fresh notion. This form of dialectical critique, I argue, can aid in the process of renovating the West, as well as the tajdīd of Islam, both in the traditional Muslim majority countries as well as in 53

This is not to say that Westerners have no sense of religion and faith, and Muslims have no sense of secular modernity. Rather it is to say that those within the societies that remain reactionary, entrenched within their own fundamentalist attitude – both religious and secular – can find neutral language through which they can escape their restrictive beliefattitudes and engage the other in a non-threatening way.

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion

141

the West. As we discussed in this essay, such a dialectical translation (aufhaben) of the “inherited cultural foundations” into post-metaphysical, and therefore non-religious language, can bring such rejuvenating ideas, notions, and perspectives into the secular public sphere. Doing so, as Habermas explains, liberates them from the “closed semantic universe” of their particular religion, and delivers them to the universal discourse community. In this sense, the dialectical transformation of a stale religious idea into a vibrant “fresh notion” that is appropriate, and therefore applicable, to secular modernity, is a way of reviving religion in an age where it has proven to be too ugly and self-delegitimating to represent itself. Philosophy, as it has done in the past, must once again be the voice of religion, especially in our increasingly secularized age. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 1999. Adorno, Theodor W. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno: The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Adorno, Theodor W., et al. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Boer, Roland. Criticism of Theology: On Marxism and Theology III. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012. Habermas, Jürgen. Europe: The Faltering Project. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009. Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2003. Habermas, Jürgen, and Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict xvi). The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. Edited by Florian Schuller. Translated by Brian McNeil. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006. Hegel, G.W.F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood. Translated by H.B. Nisbet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1969. Horkheimer, Max. A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondents. Edited and Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

142

Byrd

Horkheimer, Max. Dawm & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 & 1950–1969. Translated by Michael Shaw. New York: The Seabury Press, 1978. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Löwenthal, Leo. An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. Adorno: A Biography. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Thomas Common. New York: Barnes & Nobles, Inc., 2008. Scruton, Roger. Confessions of a Heretic. (Widworthy Barton Honiton Devon: Notting Hill Editions Lts, 2016. Scruton, Roger. “Dismantling the Leftist Academy Complex, Liberty Law Talk.” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNhyttsko0. Scruton, Roger. The Face of God. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2012. Scruton, Roger. Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016. Scruton, Roger. The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2002. Scruton, Roger and Hamza Yusuf. “What Conservativism Really Means – Roger Scruton in Conversation with Hamza Yusuf.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iawSzFZg -vw&t=1321s. Scruton, Roger and Hamza Yusuf. “Sacred Truths in a Profane World – Hamza Yusuf and Roger Scruton” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQoi9xPooKo. Strang, Stephen E. God and Donald Trump. Lake Mary, FL: Frontline, 2017.

Chapter 4

Fomenting the Constellations of Revolutionary “Now-Time”: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Theory of Religion, Society and History Michael R. Ott Articulating the past historically means recognizing those elements of the past which come together in the constellation of a single moment. But knowledge within the historical moment is always knowledge of a moment. In drawing itself together in the moment – in the dialectical image – the past becomes part of humanity’s involuntary memory [Now – Time]. The dialectical image can be defined as the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity.1 … [the dialectical] image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. … Awakening.2 This chapter3 seeks to give expression to Walter Benjamin’s dialectical theory of religion/theology, society and history as he developed it from his earliest writings in 1910 to his last writing in 1940 on the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”/“On the Concept of History” and its “Paralipomena.”4 As this essay

1 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 403. 2 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999b), 462. 3 This essay is in honor and celebration of my beloved teacher, colleague, friend, and brother Professor Rudolf J. Siebert. 4 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–264; Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 389–411.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_005

144

Ott

will explain, this dialectic between the religious and the secular, between ­radical politics and messianic theology ultimately culminated in his notion of ­Jetztzeit (Now-Time) and the “dialectical image;” revolutionary notions that can explode the ruling class’s ideology of time and history as being nothing but an empty, homogenous, and ever progressing continuum of domination for the purpose of creating a more humane and reconciled future society.5 As Benjamin stated, in the very midst of this increasingly deadly class-war system and its barbaric history of domination, wherein its “victors” are privileged to run roughshod over the masses of their fallen victims, it is with the same resolve and “cunning” of an antique collector that one must press on with the defiance of hope, which is given “only for the sake of the hopeless ones,” and with prayerful “attentiveness” to the most minute, seemingly insignificant, fragmentary details of life in the search not for facts, data, or information about the immediacy of “what is,” but for the possible discovery of all but forgotten alternatives to the historical class-war systems of hegemonic domination.6 As will be explained, Benjamin’s theoretical search for truth, which dialectically transcends and thus, critiques the modern positivistic reduction of knowledge and of life into a utilitarian means for the reproduction of the dominant social system, is founded upon his determinate negation of a Jewish Messianic as well as Kabbalist theology that searches for the fragments or ciphers of past expressions of truth, which have been thrown on the dust heap of history as so much worthless trash by history’s ruling-class “winners.” The task was and continues to be the redemption of these historical fragments or ciphers of Truth that are to be remembered and then gathered together in the hope of fomenting an “awakening” of involuntary memories, epiphany-like “lightning flashes” of past historical struggles for justice, liberation, happiness, if not redemption that can become a possible source and power of resistance, solidarity, and hope in the present day class-war struggles. Benjamin’s methodology has no pre-established, progressively purposeful structure, except for its tireless process of reflective thought, which continually makes new beginnings by ‘returning in a roundabout way to its original object. … For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm.’7 As Benjamin stated, ‘Nothing could bear 5 Benjamin, Illuminations, 260–264; Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 394–397, 401–411; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 456–488. 6 Benjamin, Illuminations, 255–256; Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 356. 7 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, (London, and New York: Verso, 1977), 28–29.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

145

more powerful testimony to the transcendent force of the sacred image and the truth itself’ than this pursuit.8 1

Methodological Dispute

There have been many excellent scholarly works written about Benjamin’s critical theory of religion that have focused their attention on Benjamin’s latter works of 1940, mentioned above.9 In these “Theses” and their notes, Benjamin gave – in many ways for the first time – an explicit thematic outline of the revolutionary inter-relationship between an inverted, negative, prophetic, eschatological and Messianic theology – primarily that of Judaism and Christianity – being a hidden or sublimated theoretical force of historical materialism’s revolutionary class-war struggle against capitalism’s domination and perversion of modern society. Due to this “determinate negation” – the negation, preservation and furtherance – of the transcendent yet incarnational, revolutionary substance of the prophetic Abrahamic religions, ‘historical materialism is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.’10 In the early 1930’s, Benjamin appeared to shift his research from that of literary and Surrealism criticism of modernity to the methodology of historical materialism. Because of this, there was increasing concern among his friends that Benjamin was abandoning his former theological interest for that of the radical secularity if not atheism of Marxism. This idea still persists today in some scholarly circles that there was in fact a distinct methodological divide if not break in the methodology of Benjamin’s theoretical critique; a divide between the more bourgeois, and thus harmless metaphysical oriented notions of his youth to that of his more rational, critical, and thus mature understanding of his later years. This is a regrettable and a damaging misunderstanding of Benjamin’s dialectical method; one that positivistically destroys the dialectical movement in his entire oeuvre by pressing it into the dualistic paradigm of the modern divide if not antagonism between the ideal and the real, the religious and the secular, between theology and reason, between God and the world. 8 Ibid. 9 See especially Rudolf J. Siebert, Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness and the Rescue of the Hopeless. Volumes i, ii, iii. (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010). 10 Benjamin, Illuminations, 253.

146 2

Ott

Scholem’s and Adorno’s Concern

Benjamin’s closest friends, i.e., Gershom Scholem11 and Theodor W. Adorno12 were some of those who feared that he was falling into this positivistic, eitheror trap due particularly to his developing association with the historical materialist playwright Bertolt Brecht.13 From most decidedly different theoretical/ theological positions, both Scholem and Adorno warned their friend against falling victim to the atheistic “tyranny” of Brecht, whose writings appeared to them as being nothing but crass. Both friends complained to Benjamin that this association and particularly its influence on him would divert his attention from both the theological/metaphysical depth of his work [Scholem] as well as from the dialectical/revolutionary substance of the theological, which in Adorno’s words would allow the critical, emancipatory substance of theology [that will not last on its own] to migrate and be translated into secular form.14 Adorno particularly gave expression to his “most profound reservations” over what he saw as Benjamin’s apparent loss of the theological substance of his work as he became more expressive of the “materialist dialectics” of Brecht in his latest “Exposé” drafts of his Arcades Project; a project that he regarded as part of their shared contribution to prima philosophia.15 As Adorno stated, ‘the whole difficult problem is connected with the figure of Brecht [and his “atheism”] and with the credence you are willing to give him…’16 So as to guard against Brecht’s “crass” materialism, Adorno reminded Benjamin that any critical, philosophical theory finds its own dialectic only in the opposition between social and theological categories.17 By means of the consistent “reading” of these categories and their ensuing dialectical struggle, the truth of ­socio-historical phenomena is more accurately grasped than by their submission to pre-established Marxist concepts that prove to be too abstract and disconnected. Without the substantive dialectical movement between these 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. (Queen Square, London: Faber & Faber, 1981); Gershom Scholem, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem – 1932–1940. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Theodor Adorno & Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. 52–59, 60–65. Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). Theodor W. Adorno, “Reason and Revelation,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 136. Adorno & Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940, 52–53. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 84.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

147

o­ pposites, theory is in danger of collapsing into being a mere positivistic commentary on the established social status quo. For it is the unfolding of the critical theological concept within the hidden depths of society and history, particularly that of the “dialectical image” of which more will be said, that is found to be “laden with political dynamite.” The deeper such dynamite is buried, the greater its explosive force. According to Adorno, both he and Benjamin could perhaps one day salvage but not duplicate the Brecthtian atheistic “inverse theology,” possibly as a component of their own, shared, dialectical inverse theology into which Adorno said he ‘would gladly see our thoughts dissolve.’18 As such, Adorno cautioned Benjamin against Brecht’s crass materialism obtaining any influence on the development of his Arcades, which Adorno regarded as the very heart of Benjamin’s work and ‘the decisive philosophical word which must find utterance today.’19 For Adorno, any compromise of the deepest theological assertions of this work resulting in the rejection of its own distinct categories would be catastrophically damaging. Adorno encouraged his friend to continue without any fear or diversion ‘to realize every part of [its] theological content and all the literalness of its most extreme claims… one has to speak out loudly and clearly, and thereby reveal the undiminished categorical depth of [every] question, without neglecting theology.’20 Adorno adjured his friend to restore theology into his work… ‘or better still, [restore] a radicalization of dialectic introduced into the glowing heart of theology [which] would require the utmost intensification of the social-dialectical, and indeed economic, motives. Above all, these must be grasped historically.’21 3

Benjamin’s Defense

As Benjamin made clear to his friends, they had nothing to fear of his collapsing into a purely materialist approach of research. As he stated in a letter to Max Rychner, who too questioned Benjamin’s use of such a materialist approach to his topics, it was ‘the basic metaphysical tendency of my research’ that protected him from betraying his dialectical methodology and research into the antagonisms of modernity. As he stated:

18 19 20 21

Ibid., 67. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 108.

148

Ott

I have never been able to do research and think in any sense other than, if you will, a theological one, namely, in accord with the Talmudic teaching about the forty-nine levels of meaning in every passage of Torah. That is, in my experience, the most trite Communist platitude possesses more hierarchies of meaning than does contemporary bourgeois profundity, which has only one meaning, that of an apologetic.22 Thus, Benjamin asked his friend to think of him not as an advocate or a disciple of dialectical materialism as a dogma but as a scholar to whom the critical perspectives of historical materialism seemed both more scientifically and socio-historically productive than that of the bourgeois idealism than that of the bourgeois idealist in unfolding the depth critique of theology. The same defense of Benjamin’s incorporating historical materialism with his metaphysical insights in his research and writing was given by Scholem, who although he seriously disagreed with his friend’s turn towards Marxist materialism, gave honest expression of Benjamin’s own defense for his critical inclusion of the revolutionary materialist critique. According to Scholem, Benjamin said that his Marxism was not dogmatic but heuristic and experimental in ­nature, and that his transposition into Marxist perspectives of the metaphysical and even theological ideas he had developed in the years we had spent together was in fact meritorious, because in that sphere they could become more active, at least in our time [in the highly secular time of modernity], than in the sphere originally suited to them… The philosophical bond between the two parts of my study that you miss will be supplied by the revolution more effectively than by me. [Italics added by author.]23 In letters to both Scholem and Adorno, Benjamin explained his dialectical theory and methodology in the image of two opposing ends of a bow. One end of the bow represented the Ideal, the mystical, the theological while the other end symbolized the real, the political, and the secular/historical materialism. By this image, Benjamin explained his theoretical work as the attempt to reconcile dialectically the modern antagonism between the ideal and the real, between the mystical and political, the theological and the secular [in this case 22 23

Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910– 1940 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 371–372. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, 207.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

149

meaning “historical materialism”] as the attempt to draw back the string of the bow as far as possible in order to bring the conflicting ends of the bow ever closer together so as to let the revolutionary arrow of this antagonism’s resolution fly toward a new, more reconciled, humane, and peaceful future.24 4

An Enemy of the Capitalist Class System and Fascism

Benjamin was not a “bourgeois” thinker; nor was he a dilettante or a flânuer – an idle, carefree, wandering observer of the various developments taking place in modern society. Although he was raised in an upper-class, bourgeois “acculturated” if not assimilated German-Jewish family in Berlin,25 like all the other first generation members of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, Benjamin was a dialectical thinker and – as one who sought the socio-historical destruction of the capitalist system of domination – an enemy of the capitalist class, which was and is comprised of Etuí-Mensch who were and are only concerned with the advancement and defense of their own class position, wealth, power, and of the social system of hegemonic class-domination and war.26 From his earliest writings in 1910 to his last in 1940, Benjamin pursued ways to critique the increasingly reified, oppressive, and crises-laden social system of capitalism, which proverbially opened Pandora’s box for the rise of fascism.27 Although the historical relationship between the systems of capitalism 24 Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910–1940, 458; Scholem, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem – 1932–1940, 143; Adorno & Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940, 116–119; Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Correspondence 1930–1940 (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 153–156. 25 See the critical discussion of the difference between the assimilation or acculturation of Jews to the Enlightenment’s notion of Bildungsideal in early 20th century Germany: Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity. (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999); Anson Rabinbach, In The Shadow of Catastrophe. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1997), Chapter 1; Irving Wohlfarth, “Manner aus der Fremde:” Walter Benjamin and the “German-Jewish Parnassus.” New German Critique, no. 70 (Winter 1997): Special Issue on Germans and Jews, 3–85. 26 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999a), 541–542; Irving Wohlfarth, “No-Man’s Land: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Destructive Character,’” Diacritics, 8, no. 2 (1978): 47–65. 27 See the discussion of the complex relationship of capitalism and fascism in: Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It is and How to Fight It, (Atlanta: Pathfinder Press, 1996); Max Horkheimer, “The Lessons of Fascism,” in Tensions That Cause Wars: A unesco Conference Study. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1950) http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ horkheimer/content/thumbview/6591880; Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and

150

Ott

and fascism is quite complex and disputed, there is nevertheless an indisputable connection between the two in terms of the ‘organic character of fascism as a mass movement growing out of the collapse of capitalism’28 and the rise of the revolutionary class-consciousness and organization of the proletariat class as capitalism’s “grave diggers.”29 To restate Benjamin’s analysis of the 19th fin de siècle’s social imbalance between the development of technology and the latency of moral critique as a contributing factor for World War I, the issues of the relationship between various forms of capitalism and of fascism ultimately ‘are questions of imperialist war.’30 These “questions” are precisely what are being asked again today in 2018, particularly due to the military preparation for not only conventional but also nuclear war against Russia and its allies by the United States, England, and other member states of the European Union.31 As is all too clear today, neo-fascism is manifesting itself in the United States, and gaining ground once again in the European Union in response to the global capitalist system crises. As Max Horkheimer quite correctly stated in his 1939 article entitled, “The Jews and Europe,” ‘Fascism is that truth of modern society which has been realized by the theory from the beginning. Fascism solidifies the extreme class differences which the law of surplus value ultimately produce.’32 Today, the discussion about the globalization of the capitalist social system must take very seriously the dialectical inversion of a further statement of Horkheimer on the relationship between capitalism and fascism: ‘… whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.’33 Quite correctly, there is no abstract Archimedean point that can help us in understanding Benjamin’s dialectical philosophy. However, contrary Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 (New York & Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966); Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). 28 Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It is and How to Fight It (Atlanta: Pathfinder Press, 1996), 8. 29 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), 66. 30 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, 312–321, esp. 312; Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, edited by Ernst Jünger,” New German Critique, no. 17 (Spring 1979): Special Walter Benjamin Issue, 120–128. 31 See: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017, https:// www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12–18–2017–0905.pdf; Bill Van Auken, “Pentagon Unveils Strategy for Military Confrontation with Russia and China,” (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48646.htm, January 22, 2018); Robert Stevens, “British Armed Forces Chief Prepares for War with Russia.” (http://www.wsws.org/ en/articles/2018/01/25/cart-j25.html, January 25, 2018.). 32 Max Horkheimer, “The Jews and Europe,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 1989), 77–94. 33 Ibid., 78.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

151

to Jürgen Habermas as well as to various post-structuralist critiques, there most certainly is a “red thread” that dialectically connects the diversity of Benjamin’s writings into a powerfully creative force, which is his revolutionary critique of the modern social systems of domination and their ‘mythic apotheosis in the aura cruelty,’34 for the purpose of these systems’ destruction. 5

The Ringing “Alarm Clock”

The intention of this essay therefore is to make the case for the revolutionary relevancy of Benjamin’s dialectical theory of religion, society, and history today in the 21st century through its theoretical and materialistic ability to expose and radically critique the destructive power of the capitalist class and their hegemonic class-warfare system. Benjamin’s critique of the capitalist system – that was increasingly taking on the aura of and has become in affect a godless “religion”35 – and its reactionary political manifestations was also pointedly directed at the false consciousness-producing ideology of bourgeois culture, its intelligentsia and academe. It is this author’s hope that by increased exposure to Benjamin’s dialectical methodology and theory, the oppressed, dehumanized, and victimized classes – as well as members of the bourgeois ­intelligentsia – can be awakened self-consciously and thus, radically to the cruel, class war reality of their situation and thereby liberated from this barbaric system’s ideologically created phantasmagoria, which keeps them tightly enchained to the necrophilia of this globalizing class-war system. This emancipatory and humanizing intent of Benjamin’s developing critical theory was expressed in the imagery and words with which he ended his 1929 essay on “Surrealism.” At that time, Benjamin asserted that it was only the Surrealists who had understood the demands of the Communist Manifesto. Thus, it was the Surrealists who exchanged ‘the play of human features for the face of “an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.’36 Leo Löwenthal – another first generation member of Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research and the editor of the Institute’s Zeitschrift fur Socialforschung – referred to his own experience of this continuously ringing clock as he re-read Benjamin’s work in preparation for his writing his memorialization of Benjamin. 34

Leo Löwenthal, An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Löwenthal (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987), 221. 35 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 288–291. 36 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, 218.

152

Ott

Löwenthal said that he experienced ‘uninterrupted shocks in my mind’ and the demanding call to alertness by Benjamin’s ‘incessantly sounding an alarm’ about the unfolding emergency crisis of modernity and the increasing danger of ‘becoming a tool of the ruling classes.’37 Because we today live in the same capitalist class dominated system – only now much more “honestly” globally hegemonic and becoming more and more neo-fascist and thus more deadly, the socio-political-historical relevance of Benjamin’s work is directly connected to this effort of redeeming his revolutionary critical theory of resistance and hope. Benjamin’s work needs to be added to this revolutionary call to awaken and to arms, for his work too gives expression to this 24/7 incessant and unrelenting “alarm clock” that has the potential to awaken people out of their soporific and hopeless enchantment and melancholic conformity to the catastrophic, life-threatening danger of the hegemonic capitalist system. When Benjamin is understood not merely as an ­isolated intellectual and harmless literary critic but more correctly as a Messianic revolutionary theorist of class-struggle, it is then – using his own language – that his work can become for us today a living “dialectical image” of empowering remembrance of past struggles and hope-filled praxis for the creation of a more just [Gericht], happy, peace-filled, and “worthier human” future global-society.38 6

Modernity: “the Time of Hell”

Beginning with his intellectual development in 1905/06 as a young student of the charismatic teacher Gustav Wyneken until his death by suicide in 1940, Benjamin was in constant search for critical, epiphanal, emancipatory metaphysical and socio-historical expressions/ideas of that which “transcends” the increasingly reified, instrumentalized, dehumanized, oppressive, and empty “hellishness” of bourgeois modernity. For Benjamin, the modern age was not ‘a birth time, and a period of transition … [or] a break in the [historical] process, a qualitative change’ as it was for Hegel a century before.39 Rather, modernity was little more than the repetition of what has always been, only now in a new form; and what has been – only now newly packaged economically,

37 Löwenthal, An Unmastered Past, 216–217; Benjamin, Illuminations, 255. 38 Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940, 34. 39 Georg W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1967), 75ff.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

153

politically, technologically, culturally – is the ruling class’s domination of society to serve its own interests. As such, that which is modern is nothing but the ­continuation of history ‘as the time of hell.’40 This hellishness is not to be understood superficially as the repetition of the same thing over and over again. Rather, the hellishness of the modern is that in its newness, nothing changes. As Benjamin states, it is precisely this fact that nothing substantively changes in the so-called newness of modernity that ‘constitutes the eternity of hell and the sadist’s delight in innovation.’41 Such “innovation,” which has become the business model’s catch phrase for making “progress” in 21st century, is the technological proposition of making adjustments or patchwork reforms to what has been, which merely continues what has been into the present in a new form. Benjamin’s study of the Paris arcades as the ‘hollow mold from which the image of “modernity” was cast’ was his unfinished study of this new, 19th century form of hell as the insidious encroachment of capitalist class interests for wealth and power in the form of increasing commodity production for the enchanted consumer, who Benjamin called ‘the last dinosaur of Europe.’42 Although he did not identify modernity as the time of hell in his earliest preWorld War I writings, Benjamin did give expression to his developing protest against the stultifying loss of any “inexperienceable” metaphysical/theological values of “otherness” – of “the true, the good, the beautiful” of life and its creative, spirit-filled potentials – that were being systemically reduced to “Erfahrung” (the acquiescent experience of what is over time) and its transformation of life into Gewohnheit (habit) – into a philistine adaptation to the established class dominated status quo and the repetitive rhythm of machinery, which ‘transforms the historical event into a mass-produced article.’43 Already, in these earliest Romantic and idealistic writings of his youth, Benjamin was searching for ciphers of possible socio-historical, revolutionary, and emancipatory alternatives to the oppressive, modern class-dominated systems of the established society and its justifying positivist mythology of “things as they ­actually are”44 – repeated flippantly today as “It is what it is!” – and the histo­ ricist reductive notion of time and history as being an empty, homogenized,

40 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 842–843: G°, 17; 544: S1, 5. 41 Ibid., 843. 42 Ibid., 874: a°, 2 & 3. 43 Walter Benjamin, Early Writings: 1910–1917 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 116–119; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 340–341. 44 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972), x.

154

Ott

r­ epetitive and thus, life-killing continuum of the “ever-same.” Throughout his entire intellectual development, Benjamin – like a cunning antique collector or a ­selective rag-picker45 – searched for and gathered together into his theory those critical metaphysical and socio-historical ciphers of human protest and struggle against any and all systems of domination that degrade human beings into “work machines” and produce the horrifying suffering and death of its innocent victims. 7

The Beast and the Demon of Capitalism

In his 1921 essay on the “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin stated metaphorically that ‘the modern (capitalist) economy, seen as a whole, resembles… a beast that goes berserk as soon as its tamer turns its back.’46 Of course, the socio-historical tamer of capitalism is the working and precariat classes – those who have had their life-chances and potentials for happiness, creative “becoming,” freedom, and life itself denied – who cannot only tame this beast but can also destroy it. They, as well as those who act in solidarity with them, are the real revolutionary “agents” of such liberating socio-historical change. However, the negation of this global beast of capitalism has been prevented, for the time being, not only by the class controlled systems of economic production/reproduction and of the subservient political base structure, but also by the ideology (understood as “false consciousness”) producing “culture industry.”47 The German journalist and satirist, Karl Kraus – on whom Benjamin wrote a very important study in 1931 and with whose critique he strongly identified48 – expressed this capitalist ideology that creates the phantasmagoric, mythical enchantment that keeps these oppressed classes anesthetized in their own domination as the Demon. It thus, should come as no surprise that such remembered and revolutionary struggles for alternative social systems for a more humane historical future are precisely what are disavowed and, when need be, forcefully prevented by the hegemonic, crisis-filled system, and culture of neoliberal and neoconservative capitalism. This demonic system’s protocol of denying all alternatives to the marauding globalization of capitalism and its “shock doctrine”49 of the “creative 45 Benjamin, Early Writings 1910–1917, 66. 46 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 246. 47 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London/New York: Routledge, 1991. 48 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 440–447. 49 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

155

destruction”50 of all that stands in its way of usurping ever-increasing profit and geo-political domination for the global capitalist class was boldly proclaimed and justified by the former United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In 1980, Prime Minister Thatcher unabashedly declared to the members of the Press Conference for American correspondents that ‘there is no alternative,’ aka. T.I.N.A., to the continued advancement and destructive consequences of global capitalism.51 This acronym has become a justifying class-war shibboleth of neoliberal/neoconservative capitalism to this very day. 8

The “Myth” of the German-Jewish Parnassus/Assimilation52

In the 19th century, German Jews trusted that they were included in the work of realizing the educational and societal reforms that were being developed by the Prussian philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, et al.; reforms that were rooted in and expressive of the bourgeois Enlightenment’s “Bildungsideal” – the pursuit and attainment of the liberal, humanizing ideals of wisdom and virtue [Bildung],53 which seeks to unite theory and praxis, the individual and society for the purpose of creating a better, more reconciled and humane world.54 As von Humboldt stated: It is the ultimate task of our existence to achieve as much substance as possible for the concept of humanity in our person, both during the span of our life and beyond it, through the traces we leave by means of our vital activity. This can be fulfilled only by the linking of the self to the world 50 51 52 53

54

Werner Sombart, Krieg und Kapitalismus/War and Capitalism. North Stratford, NH: Ayer Co. Publishers, Inc., 1975; Joseph A. Schumpter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1950. Margaret Thatcher, 1980. Press Conference for American Correspondents in London. June 25. Margaret Thatcher Foundation. [https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document /104389]. For an excellent, critical theological and philosophical analysis of this 19th to 20th century “Jewish-German Tragedy,” see: Siebert, Manifesto of the Critical Theory, Volume 3, Chapter 24. The usual English translation of the German word Bildung to mean “education” does not grasp the word’s overall connotation of an ongoing, life transformation of humanity – both individually and societally – in terms of attaining wisdom that is translated into morality. Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism” New German Critique no. 34 (Winter, 1985): 78; Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, 27.

156

Ott

to achieve the most general, most animated, and most unrestrained interplay. This alone is the yardstick by with each branch of human knowledge can be judged.55 From the 18th to the first decade of the 20th centuries, these ideals were being negotiated in the discourse between Germans and Jews on the assimilation of the Jews into the modern, secular society of the German Second Reich. The professed intention of this discourse was to find a way by which the Jews’ traditional religious culture and identity could be integrated with the modern, bourgeois Enlightenment’s paradigm that emphasized the autonomous secular norms of Vernunft (Reason), Kultur (a secular humanistic culture), and Bildung (a modern, enlightened humanizing education). This was the enlightened, secular ideal of the assimilation discussions, which began in the 18th century with the German Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn’s attempt to bridge the divide between the modern bourgeois, secular enlightenment and the Jewish religious identity. Through his philosophical attempts at finding common ground for the Jews’ assimilation into secular German society, Mendelssohn became known as the father of the Haskalah – the Jewish Enlightenment, which took as its model the Bourgeois Enlightenment and its paradigm of human Reason as the modern power for the creation of a world of “freedom, equality, and fraternity.” Within the Haskalah, the study of religion was now characterized by the modern, analytical, scientific approach in which secular culture and philosophy became dominant. As such, enlightened Reason became the paradigm and measure of all things. Mendelssohn and the Haskalah began the modern renovation of Judaism into a non-dogmatic, rational faith, by combining the sacred, revealed texts of the Jewish Torah and the Prophets with the Kantian “transcendental” model of a modern religion. Judaism was now to be the “religion of Reason” and the universal embodiment of morality for all humanity. Of course, this required the ancient Jewish religion to abandon its theologically essential and community forming memories and narratives of Jewish oppression, enslavement, and suffering.56

55

56

Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Theory of Bildung,” in Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 58–59; Christoph Lüth “On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory of Bildung” in Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition. (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 63–85. Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” 78f; Wohlfarth, “Manner aus der Fremde,” 3–85; Alexander Gelley, “On the ‘Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue:’ Scholem and Benjamin,” in Religion Between Culture and Philosophy: Special Double Issue, Vol. 3: 1&2. 1999; Mendes-Flohr, German Jews; Leo Baeck, Essence of Judaism. (New York: Schocken

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

157

However, as Paul Mendes-Flohr has stated, the social reality of this assimilation fell far short of its ideal for the majority of German Jews as the “soul” of the German Jew became divided in their attempt to assimilate into the secular German society while still trying to maintain their loyalty and faith to their traditional religious heritage.57 Benjamin too gave expression to this antagonism as a bifurcation or a two-sidedness (zweiseitig) that characterized the German Jew.58 The German Jewish Kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem, who along with Benjamin experienced the consequences of this attempted assimilation, critiqued this professed attempt in the strongest of terms. In 1964, Scholem wrote a Festschrift article for Margarete Susman, which he entitled “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue.”59 Here, he denied that there was ever such a German-Jewish dialogue in any real, historical sense. ‘It takes two to have a dialogue… Nothing can be more misleading than to apply such a concept to the discussion between the German and the Jews during the last 200 years.’ The myth, or even lie, of this Parnassus ideal was manifesting itself through the increasing anti-Semitism that was developing among the German upper class. As Mendes-Flohr states, at best Jews were being “acculturated” by their required acceptance of German culture, but they were not really being allowed to “assimilate” into the German society of the Second Reich.60 At the turn of the 20th century, however, this so-called “German-Jewish Parnassus” began to be seriously question by educated Jews. It was directly against this assimilation pretense that Moritz Goldstein, a Jewish author and editor of the influential cultural journal Der Kunstwart, published his explosive article in 1912 entitled Das Deutsch-jüdischer Parnaβ (the German-Jewish Parnassus), in which he called this assimilation movement a lie. In this article, Goldstein called for the creation of a “new bravado” in being a Jew.61 Because of this experience of their Jewish heritage and identity being erased by their supposed assimilation into the German enlightened society, a new yet very ancient Jewish prophetic spirit began to develop in the new generation of young German

Books, 1987); Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 57 Mendes-Flohr, German Jews. 58 Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 51 & footnote; Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” 78f; Wohlfarth, “Manner aus der Fremde,” 114f. 59 Gershom Scholem, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews & Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 61–64, 65–70. 60 Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, Chapter 1. 61 Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” 89.

158

Ott

Jews.62 This young generation’s response – of which Benjamin was a member – was their dialectical return to their theological origins, not as a reactionary return to the “fathers” but rather as a radical, secular interpretation of the Jewish faith’s negative and thus, revolutionary, apocalyptic Messianism. This new/old Messianism rejected the compromising religiosity of the Jewish middle class as well as the Jewish theologian Martin Buber’s call for a new existential experience of the faith. This return to a secularized notion of Jewish Messianism was the return to the faith’s original rejection of the world and its history as being “fallen,”63 as a “slaughter-bench” upon which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, the poor, oppressed, and the innocent are routinely sacrificed.64 As such, this new Jewish spirit also was the radical rejection of the modern bourgeois and scientific reduction of life and history to an empty, homogenous, progressively evolving, and meaningless chronological continuum; one in which there is no past, no memory, no hope because there is really no future. Jewish [and Christian] Messianism hopes and lives for the new redeemed ­creation of God, which will completely destroy the old order of domination, suffering, and death. It was within this increasing fin de siècle context of 62

63 64

This radical – anamnestic and modern – return to the Messianic substance of Jewish identity was developed through the “immanent critique” of the Jewish religion and its “call” for the creation of a faithful people” – “Israel:” those who ‘wrestle with God and ­humanity/world and prevail’ by living for God’s New Creation (Genesis 32:28), those who are to be ‘a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness’ (Isaiah 42:6–10); those who ‘loose the bonds of injustice, who undo the thongs of the yoke, and let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke? [A people who] share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of Yahweh shall be your rear guard’ (Isaiah 58:6–8); those whose Messianic life is ‘to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of Yahweh’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion — to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit’ (Isaiah 61:1–4); who ‘shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of Yahweh of hosts has spoken. For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of Yahweh our God forever and ever’ (Micah 4:3–5). (All scriptural references in this paper are taken from The Jerusalem Bible and The New Revised Standard Version.). Genesis 3; John 1; Revelation 21. Georg W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), 21; Marx, The Communist Manifesto.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

159

antagonism­between the religious and the secular, between the Jewish theological spirit and the “Bildungsideal” of the German society that Benjamin began to wrestle with his being both German and Jewish and thereby developed his distinctly Jewish Messianic, negative, inverse, cipher critical theory of religion, society and history. 9

Youth Protest Movements and Social Crises The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.65

The interest in the relevancy of this once all-but forgotten critical theorist appears to peak during the times of increasing social crises that produce the mass if not global protest movements against the systems of domination as happened in the late 1960’s and are happening again in the 21st century’s anticapitalist, anti-war, students, women’s, labor unions, environmentalists, glbtq, et al., protests. This seems quite fitting since as a student of Gustav Wyneken a leading European educational reformer and founder of the antiauthoritarian Freie Schulgemeinde (Free School Community) movement in the Wickersdorf district of Thuringia, Germany, Benjamin became a vocal leader of the first youth protest movement of the early 20th century. Wyneken brought together the study of German literature with that of a Nietzschean tragic philosophy in his effort to radically reform the system of education, whose focus was then, as increasingly is today, on the mechanics of vocational and professional training, as well as culturally breaking free from the autocratic constraints of Prussian conventionalism.66 It was from Wyneken that Benjamin 65 Benjamin, Illuminations, 256. 66 Today, in the first decades of the 21st century, the class warfare of the hegemonic neoliberal and neoconservative corporate capitalist system is succeeding in destroying the universal, humanistic purpose of the public educational institutions of the West [and particularly those of the U.S.A.] by emphasizing the systemic requirement for students to focus their academic and thus, life pursuit primarily on the positivistic fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, aka. S.T.E.M. As Benjamin stated already in 1912, such instrumentalization of education turns [human beings] into nothing more than work-machines/cybernetic automatons [Benjamin, “Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present,” in Early Writings, 66; See the Bibliography for the works of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, both of whom addressed this dehumanizing technological mimesis.] This capitalist driven requirement for students of all ages to be prepared to transition into

160

Ott

encountered an idea that would become a central pillar of his later philosophical work: that of a ‘historical-minded and consciously nihilistic messianism.’67 In 1912, in the midst of the emerging German-Jewish Parnassus awakening-crisis, Benjamin entered into a very intense four-letter discourse with fellow GermanJewish student and gifted poet Ludwig Strauss, which gave expression to the self-conscious development of his own Jewish identity.68 Strauss had invited Benjamin to help him establish a new journal that would be dedicated to giving voice to German-Jewish intellectuals and the dawning Jewish Renaissance, which asked the German Jew: ‘Are you in the first instance a German or a Jew?’69 However, this journal never materialized. As Martin Buber, his future father-in-law, so Strauss emphasized the need for German Jews to return existentially to the spiritual, inner, felt, essence or soul of being Jewish, which had been sacrificed in the attempt of assimilating to the German culture. Strauss felt that from this Jewish spiritual rebirth, a new and specifically Jewish culture could be created within Germany. In his letter of September 12, 1912, Benjamin concurred with Strauss that Jews now needed to see and experience life in Germany from the perspective of Judaism. However, in a following letter of October 10, Benjamin stated that he discovered his Jewishness not from an inner, faith experience [Erlebnis] – via Buber’s existentialism, but rather ‘solely through the experience [Erfahrung] of ideas in relation to the world… from Wickersdorf’ and the Wyneken secular school’s ethical universalism of cultural resistance.70 It was from his experience at Wickersdorf, where the majority of students were non-religious Jews like himself, that led Benjamin to the conclusion: ‘I am a Jew and if I live as a conscious human being, I live as a conscious Jew.’71 It was particularly through his relationship with Wyneken that Benjamin began to develop his very strong dialectically idealistic and, as he says, a ‘very powerful and dangerous’ romantic critique of what was experienced as the ­repressive German educational system that narrowed the lives of everyone the corporate world as “trained workers” is the systemically created result of the humanizing notion and social structures of education being reduced into a autopoetic “feeder” system of the hegemonic corporate capitalist class social system. This authoritarian, antiEnlightenment program is the fundamental plan of the current U.S. Secretary of Education’s [Betsy DeVos] privatization of education agenda. 67 Benjamin, Early Writings, 2. 68 Ibid; Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, Part I, Chapter One; Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 45–65; Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), Chapter Two. 69 Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 50. 70 Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, 40. 71 Ibid.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

161

down to accepting the convention and monotony of ‘the eternal Yesterday that always was and always returns and is the worst enemy of everything great.’72 The student revolt, however, was not only directed at academia but also at the entire social system, which in their terms had become philistine/barbaric. The school and curricular reform that was being demanded by students for the realization of their human potential was far beyond the “scientific theses of specialists” and could not be reduced to such dehumanizing positivism. The student revolt was also an ethical, cultural movement for a new, socio-ethical way of thinking and living. This pre-War idealistic confidence was expressed by Benjamin in the opening of his 1911 “Sleeping Beauty” essay: ‘We live in an age of socialism, of the women’s movement, of traffic, of individualism. Are we not headed toward an age of youth?’73 This first youth protest movement of the 20th century was expressive of the liberal ideals of the bourgeois Enlightenment’s focus on creating a better future world by the moral transformation of people into a new ethical community. This was the principle of Wyneken’s Free School Community’s curricular and community building emphasis on “moral education,” which assumed the form of a ‘religiosity… that awakens religious contemplation’ of and the freedom to live according to the Kantian moral law.74 It was the age of the new, sober, and romantic youth, who possessed the will to beauty, the will to truth, and the will to action for cultural social change. How radically different is the cause and the goal of the youth protest movement in 2018, as they fight ethically, socially, and politically for their lives against the National Rifle Association and for the banning of the public sale of military grade semi-automatic weapons of the kind used time and time again in the slaughter of children attending their schools.75 During the first decades of the 20th century, Benjamin did not speak of revolutionary social change but rather of a radical evolutionary mission of youth,76 which included all those 72 Benjamin, Early Writings, 101–106, 41. 73 Ibid., 26. 74 Ibid., 109. 75 See: Alan Blinder and Daniel Victor, “School Shooting in Kentucky Was Nation’s 11th of Year. It Was Jan. 23,” The New York Times, (January 23, 2018). https://www.nytimes.com/ 2018/01/23/us/kentucky-school-shooting.html. Lois Beckett, “How many US school shootings have there been in 2018 so far?” The Guardian, (February 15, 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/14/schoolshootings-in-america-2018-how-many-so-far. Lois Beckett, “Furious Florida survivors assail nra and politicians and urge action on guns,” The Guardian, (February 22, 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/ feb/21/florida-school-shooting-town-hall-cnn-students-nra-what-happened. 76 Benjamin’s cautious conservatism – and that of the student protest movement as a whole – is heard here. He was not and really never became a social revolutionary that sought the

162

Ott

young or old ‘who have not yet altogether converted their ideal into reality,’ which was ‘to waken in themselves a sense of community, a consciousness of themselves as the ones who, not without glory [or sacrifice], will weave and give form to world history.’ The young were those ‘who have come into the world to make the world better and to set it right.’77 The expressed task of this movement was to “awaken” people from their apathetic capitulation to the spiritless [Geistlosen] and hopeless system and structures of the ruling class dominated status quo. Through his writing and the publishing of essays, public speaking and organizing discussions, and finally becoming the President of Berlin University’s Independent Student Association in February 1914, Benjamin became an enthusiastic advocate and a leader of this new movement and its striving for an ‘unceasing spiritual revolution.’78 However, the beginning of World War I in August 1914 and its unbelievable horror brought an abrupt end to this German Youth Movement and its idealistic, romantic struggle for a new humanity and a better moral future society and world. It was precisely this capitalist class-war system and its need of everfurther global expansion in pursuit of increased profits, dominating power, and the acquisition of territories/colonies and the cheap recourses and slave labor it would provide the “winners” that was the cause of the international, imperialist carnage of 1914–1918; the “Great War” that was to be the “end of all war;” the war that for the first but not last time pitted the global working c­ lasses against each other in the scientific and technologically produced horror of combat. For Benjamin, the barbaric butchery of this First Bourgeois World War was brought home crushingly by his close friends Christoph Friedrich Heinle [Fritz] and Rika Seligson double-suicides in romantic protest against the war. With these catastrophes, Benjamin ended all social activism but intensified his scholarly work of critique of the social system that produced this modern, ­exponentially greater continuance of hell. In a letter to his friend Ernst Schoen on October 25, 2014, Benjamin wrote that their former student radicalism was little more than a mere gesture that accomplished little. What was now

77 78

overthrow of the existing social system of capitalist production. Yet his prioritizing of a cautious, evolutionary mission was qualified to a degree: ‘Given the state of our culture, the work of society should and must be aligned with an evolutionary course of action rather than with heroic-revolutionary aspirations. But I say this to you: Woe to him who loses sight of the goal in all such work, and who confidently entrusts himself to the crablike advance of evolution. For that is what’s happening. Hence, it is not ever in the name of development but in the name of the goal that we emerge from the present state of affairs.’ (Benjamin, Early Writings, 70). Ibid., 28. Ibid., 43.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

163

d­ emanded, as the axiom for critical, revolutionary social change, was the determinate negation of his enthusiastic form of Wyneken ethical universalism into now ‘a harder, purer, more invisible radicalism’ in the development of a critical theory.79 Benjamin now applied what he stated to Ludwig Strauss in his letter of November 21, 1912 – about his refusal to become actively involved in the political struggle for Zionism – to the wider historical struggle against the necrophilic, phantasmagoric systems of domination and war: ‘…politics are the consequence of intellectual principles no longer carried on by the intellect.’ The substantive, universal idea that dialectically penetrates into and yet transcends its particular embodiment becomes lost through such a narrowed political focus and thus becomes a fetish: ‘out of God develops a fetish.’80 This commitment to a harder, purer, invisible radicalism was an essential principle and goal of Benjamin’s entire life’s work. He expressed this directly in his December 6, 1937, letter to Horkheimer concerning the submission of his commissioned essay on Eduard Fuchs, who was ‘a materialist collector’ and ‘the pioneer of a materialist consideration of art.’81 In the face of the censuring dominance of fascist cultural thinking, Benjamin strategically sought to stress aesthetics as being formally unthreatening while yet being politically significant, especially to those who knew how ‘to read between the lines.’ Löwenthal, who was the managing editor of the Institute’s journal, the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, tells of Benjamin’s communication about his approach to his Fuch’s article in which he wanted to introduce, ‘through the back door so to speak, the radical critique of the present that informed the Zeitschrift.’ Benjamin wrote: ‘The closest we might come to it [the sphere of actuality – and thus truth] would be to approach the radical critique in aesthetic disguise…’82 This harder, purer, more invisible radicalism can be heard in what could be called his “guerilla-warfare” admonition some twenty-six years in Thesis iv of his essay “On the Concept of History,” in which he said: The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt 79 Scholem and Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 74. 80 Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Castrophe, 42. 81 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 260–302. 82 Löwenthal, An Unmastered Past, 222.

164

Ott

in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.83 10

Early Statements on Religion/Theodicy

An essential, dynamic element of this existential, socio-historical awakening for Benjamin was also to be found in the hope and longing contained in what he called “a future religiosity” – “the heroic age of a new religion.”84 During these preWorld War I years of the youth protest movement, religion was a topic in many of Benjamin’s essays. During this time, Benjamin spoke of religion as an expression of human longing for that which is “other,” for that which is life giving and redemptive and lies beyond the mundane routine of life in the established German society.85 For Benjamin, religion was theodicy [the justification of God’s Being, Truth, Will, and Justice over and against the horrors of life] that can produce hostility toward the established status quo and the powerful longing and will that all things will change; that they will become “unmoored.”86 Although Benjamin did not directly address the topic of religion and theodicy in terms of its good and bad social effect, as did Marx87 or would Horkheimer88 and Adorno,89 he did identify the consequences of modernity’s positivistic loss of transcendence and hope of a “wholly Other.” In his 1921 essay, “Capitalism as Religion,” Benjamin stated that capitalism functions as a type of religion in addressing the theodicy, not in terms of justifying the transcendence of God in the 83 Benjamin, Illuminations, 254–255. 84 Benjamin, Early Writings, 73. 85 Ibid, 18–21. 86 Ibid, 72. 87 Karl Marx, Marx on Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 171–172. 88 Max Horkheimer, “Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Gespräch mit Helmut Gumnior,” in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 7: Vorträge und Aufzeichnungen 1949–1973 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 385–404; Max Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969 (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973) 163; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 129–131; Michael R. Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion: The Meaning of Religion in the Struggle for Human Emancipation (Lanham, New York, Oxford: University Press of America, 109–110. 89 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), 207; Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 23; Michael R. Ott, “Something’s Missing: A Study of the Dialectic of Utopia in the Theories of Theodor W. Adorno & Ernst Bloch,” Heathwood Journal of Critical Theory, 1, no. 1 (Summer 2015): 133–173. http://www.heathwoodpress.com/somethings-missing-study-dialectic-utopia-theories-theodor-wadorno -ernst-bloch/.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

165

face of an evil society but of systematically rationalizing the socio-historical horrors and torments of people, which, in taking away all hope for that which is “other” than what is, supposedly has the cynical ability to console and comfort people in the midst of their suffering.90 It is quite interesting that Benjamin’s analysis of capitalism’s “religious” function of offering consolation to the very people it oppresses and condemns to suffer and die, also drags God into this system’s guilt for not intervening to end the horror. Until God acts, capitalism and its religiously sanctioned horror is all that there is.91 To use Karl Kraus’s imagery, this demonic theodicy follows the same logic used by Satan in the temptations of Jesus to jump from the pinnacle of the Temple and rely on God to save him. If God doesn’t act, the guilt is on God. To this blasphemy, however, Jesus replied that one is “not to put the Lord God to the test; to not merely cry out “Lord, Lord”… but to do the will of my Father in heaven.’92 In terms of the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, with religion and particularly Christianity being removed as a guiding moral force of the modern world, capitalism as the new cult of modernity has replaced Christianity as the Absolute Religion. The ideology of capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity, destroying the truth content of the faith and fillings its form with its own poison until the history and role of Christianity becomes that of capitalism. For Benjamin, religion and the theodicy question was also not to be reduced merely to the concern of the isolated bourgeois individual.93 Such a privatized and spiritualized reduction of the theodicy question ‘lacks all religious objectivity.’ It lacks the Hegelian “objective spirit” comprising the socio-historical ­context – the social structures, systems, and history – in which such suffering occurs.94 It lacks the relationship with others and community, who suffer too and/or stand in solidarity with the victim. It thereby also lacks “accountability” of those individuals, structures and/or systems that produce such suffering. And most destructively, such a bourgeois, privatized notion of God/the Divine, of religion, of the theodicy and of hope lacks the theory and the praxis of any eschatologically “other” than what is; of changing the social conditions that   have caused the suffering. As such, true/critical religion as theodicy is ­understood quite rightly by Benjamin to arise from what is enslaved: from the 90 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 288–291. 91 Ibid. 92 Matthew 4:5–7; Luke 4:9–12; Deuteronomy 6:16; Matthew 7:23, Luke 6:46. 93 Benjamin, Early Writings, 168; See also: Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History & Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. New York: The Seabury Press, 1980. 94 Georg W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology; G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 241–291.

166

Ott

poor, the exploited and oppressed, the dehumanized, the outcast, tortured, innocent victims of the horror of both nature and history.95 Sounding like the biblical Jewish prophets, Jesus of Nazareth, and the early writers of the Church, these wretched of the earth along with the historically awakened “young” will be the bearers of this religious spirit in the struggle for a more humane future society. Benjamin particularly gave expression to these ideas on religion in an essay entitled “Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present,” which he wrote in September-October 1912 in the midst of the “Parnassus” debate crisis in Germany.96 In a letter of September 11, 1912, to Ludwig Straus, who was deeply involved in this debate, Benjamin further determined the agents of this new religious spirit to include also ‘the Jew [who] is called [according to the] new social consciousness, [to be what] the poor in spirit, the enslaved and the meek [were for the first Christians].’97 This theological concern for the systemically enslaved classes as being the potential actors of radical social change in the midst of an increasingly instrumentalized, technologized, ruling class dominated, and dehumanizing secularity is a notion that critically continued to unfold itself throughout Benjamin’s life and writings. 11

Benjamin’s Dialectical Methodology

In his diary notes from June 1916, Scholem related that he and Benjamin spent the entire afternoon discussing Benjamin’s interest in the philosophy of history. This statement reveals that Benjamin’s concern with the philosophy of history was not a late development that produced his 1940 “On the Concept of History” but was a determining factor of his developing theory, which informed and was the dialectical context of all of his other studies.98 In the ­context of 95 Benjamin, Early Writings, 78. 96 Ibid., 62–84. 97 Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, 40. 98 This concern with the philosophy of history as the overall context within which particular issues find their meaning and telos was already expressed in Benjamin’s letter on August 4, 1913 to his friend Carla Seligson, who one year later committed suicide with Christoph Friedrich “Fritz” Heinle in protest to the outbreak of World War I. (See: Scholem, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910–1940, 49–53). In this letter, Benjamin sought to clarify his understanding of the revolutionary “new youthfulness” that was being demanded by the new youth protest movement of which they were both members. Benjamin expressed this movement’s call for the rebirth of freedom, creativity, vision, and hope in the form of a universal youthfulness, which will create a new community of people who are “religiously” committed to the idea of such liberation and its historical praxis toward realization. The struggle for the historical realization of this idea of youth is the “metaphysical” telos of his developing philosophy of history.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

167

their ­discourse, Scholem reported a very important and revealing statement made by Benjamin: ‘If I ever have a philosophy of my own, he said to me, it ­somehow will be a philosophy of Judaism.”99 Since, as Scholem said, Benjamin sought to comprehend the construction of history within the structure of language and commentary, it can be said that the truth of Benjamin’s entire philosophy is to be found in his dialectical, mystical, and secular commentary on the inverse, cipher, Messianic theology of Judaism, its translation into Marxist theory, and its relevance for modernity.100 Since such “theology” in scientifically driven modernity is viewed as an embarrassing and meaningless anachronism that at best needs to remain hidden, Benjamin’s theologically influenced commentary could not be expressed in unmediated theological concepts.101 Yet, for Benjamin, history cannot be reduced to a mere scientific narrative, one that disembowels it of all meaning and purpose. The telling of history is also the task of remembrance (Eingedenken), which can keep history open to the possibility of redemption, wherein the sufferings and injustice experienced by the innocent even of the past can be vindicated.102 This is the hope and longing of Benjamin’s theology as remembrance, ‘which forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally a-theological.’103 As he stated, his writings are saturated with the “ink” of theology, yet not in an immediately legible form but more in terms of a “blotting pad” that only indicates the presence of theology in its blur.104 Benjamin’s non-linear, non-“progressive,” anti-system, anti-positivism, anti-historicism, dialectical methodology of montage- or constellation-­ construction in the pursuit of the manifold levels or shards of interpretation and meaning that make up a single topic literally makes selective interdisciplinary and chronological “tiger-leaps” in the pursuit of the ‘haggadic [anamnestic narrative] consistency of truth’ – the narratives of humanity’s class-war ­struggles against the barbaric domination by the ruling-elite.105 As Benjamin

99 Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, 31–32. 100 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460, 461. 101 Benjamin, Illuminations, 253. 102 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 471. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 471; Adorno expressed this hiddenness as an “inverse theology” that they both shared and into which he ‘would gladly see our thoughts dissolve.’ Theodor W. Adorno & Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 66–71; Gerhard Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing Plc, 2016), Chapter 3. 105 Benjamin, Illuminations, 143–144, 261; Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 27–56, 83–109; Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 62–74; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 456–488; Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3, 260–302.

168

Ott

states, the historicist’s empty conception of history is filled with subjectively chosen events that are woven into a causal narrative.106 However, because the structure of history is not that of an empty, homogenous, endless time of chronological progress but rather presents the ‘idea of the fundamental citability of its object, this object must present itself, in its ultimate form, as a moment of humanity.’107 To grasp this moment, which flashes up as an instant out of the historical context of danger before it disappears forever and is forgotten, demands that time be brought to a stop, which thereby blasts open the empty and meaningless continuum of history.108 ‘Articulating the past historically means recognizing those elements of the past which come together in the constellation of a single moment. Historical knowledge is possible only within the historical moment.’109 These single historical moments of humanity are what Benjamin named dialectical images, which when gathered together to form a constellation of history become part of humanity’s “involuntary memory.”110 As shall be seen in the discussion below, these epiphanal, gathered, and thus, remembered dialectical images are the secular, determinate negation of Jewish covenantal, Messianic theology and its construction of history. What Adorno says of the dialectical method in general, applies directly to the construction of the constellation of history: ‘Its truth or untruth… is not inherent in the method itself, but [is found] in its intention in the historical process.’111 As both Benjamin and Adorno make clear, the dialectical, constellation construction methodology can become an instrument of liberation or of domination. What it becomes is determined by its use in the historical process. With the intention of critique, of “cunning” protest and resistance against the socio-historical powers of domination, and of destructive liberation112 (which is distinctly different than the capitalist method of “creative ­destruction!”), Benjamin’s dialectical, epistemological methodology is that of “digression” – of 106 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 403. 107 Ibid., 395, 403; Benjamin, Illuminations, 261. 108 Ibid.; Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk,” in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 929–945. 109 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 396, 403. 110 Ibid.; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 456–488; Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 395– 400; Benjamin, Illuminations, 201–215, 261–264; Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 237–247; Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Volumes i–vi. (New York: The Modern Library, 2003). 111 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: nlb, 1974), 244. 112 See Benjamin’s articles: “The Destructive Character,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999a), 541–542; “Karl Krauss,” Ibid., 433–458; Benjamin, Illuminations, 254–255.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

169

reflectively returning again and again to the originating idea of a work in the hope that ‘by a displacement of the angle of vision but not of the criteria!’ a possibly new, critically creative, and thus, relevant insight can be attained that can open the door to emancipatory alternatives to the increasing socio-historical crises that were rapidly unfolding in the early 20th century as they continue to do so today in the early 21st century.113 As Benjamin stated, all that is needed for construction of the constellation of awakening is a ‘slender, sturdy scaffolding – a philosophic structure – that draws the most vital [liberating and redeeming] aspects into its net.’114 This dialectical, constellational, montage, riddle-solving, anarchistic methodology was developed as a radical critique of the positivistic and historicist epistemological methodology that replicates the instrumental operation of machinery through the reduction of nature, humanity, and history into nothing but lifeless facts, numbers, data, things. This is positivism and historicism as the scientific expression of the myth of the eternal return, the ‘myth of things as they actually are.’115 As has already been said and is quite clearly demonstrated in the collected materials of his Arcades Project, almost everything can become a selective component within this constellation construction. In what follows, I will focus on the importance of Jewish Messianic and Kabbalist Theology in the development of Benjamin’s critical theory of religion, society, and history. The ciphers of historical critique and revolutionary struggle for a more humane and reconciled future society included his youthful efforts of awakening humanity from its hopeless adaptation to a reified, class dominated status quo; e.g., his artistic and literary studies of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Romanticism, Surrealism, Baudelaire’s poems, German Tragic ­Drama, Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater plays, Franz Kafka’s novels, Marcel Proust, Nikolai Leskov [“The Storyteller”], Karl Kraus, Eduard Fuchs, et al.; as well as his philosophical appropriation of historical materialism. In his May 31, 1935, letter to Adorno, Benjamin explained that he was disturbingly awakened to what would become his anarchistic and cunning methodology through the revolutionary writings of the Surrealist movement, particularly those of Louis

113 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 28–29. Adorno made a similar analogy in his interpretation of Kafka as representing a ‘photograph of earthly life from the perspective of a redeemed life, one which merely reveals the latter as an edge of black cloth, whereas the terrifyingly distanced optics of the photographic image is none other than that of the obliquely angled camera itself.’ Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940, 66. 114 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 459. 115 Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, x.

170

Ott

Aragon, André Breton, and Guillaume Apollinaire.116 Benjamin determinately negated, i.e., annulled, preserved, and furthered, this secular Surrealist cultural methodology into the creation of his own revolutionary constellation constructing methodology and its nihilistic theory of history and redemption. However, the most substantive and thus, revolutionary component of his critical theory constellation of resistance and hope was his non-religious, negative, inverse, cipher interpretation of Jewish Messianic and Kabbalist theology; the very materialist “image of theology” into which Adorno said he ‘would gladly see our [Benjamin’s and his] thoughts dissolve.’117 This was this Jewish Messianic and Kabbalist theology of the wholly “Other” than that which is the case, the Kabbalist’s infinite and ineffable Ein Sof, who in Christian mystical terms is the unknown God beyond all human notions of god,118 through whose “Name” all things are created and are thereby named. All creation therefore has the truth of the sacred in itself as its name and its purpose of life. This relation between the infinite and the finite is biblically expressed in the creation stories found in Genesis 1–3, and in the Gospel of John 1. James McBride has stated ‘what impressed Benjamin about the Kabbalah was that all creation is a variation of the primordial Torah, i.e., divine language.’119 According to this conception, language is the “mental entity” of not only human beings but is the cipher all creation. ‘Human beings are the knower in the same language in which God is the creator… In the word creation took place and God’s linguistic being is the word.’120 There is thus an intimate relationship between divine and human language.121 In his 1916 “Language as Such and the Language of Man” article, it

116 Adorno & Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940, 87–92; Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant. (Boston: Exact Exchange, 1994). Louis Aragon, Nadja. (New York: Grove Press, 1960); Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism. (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1972); Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Writings. (New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1971); Michael Löwy, “Walter Benjamin and Surrealism: The Story of a Revolutionary Spell,” in Radical Philosophy 80. (Nov./Dec. 1996): 17–23. 117 Adorno & Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940, 66–73, 104–116. 118 Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1941), 169. 119 James McBride, “Marooned in the Realm of the Profane: Walter Benjamin’s Synthesis of Kabbalah and Communism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57, no. 2 (1989): 241–266. 120 Ibid. 121 This mystical theology is expressed by the late Leonard Cohen in his song, “Hallelujah:” ‘You say I took the name in vainI don’t even know the name But if I did—well, really—what’s it to you? There’s a blaze of light in every wordIt doesn’t matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah …’.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

171

can be read how Benjamin determinately negated the mystical religious form of this theology into the critical substance of language itself.122 The Jewish creation story, however, also contains the story of creation’s Fall from its created truth. In terms of Lurianic Kabbalist theology, this catastrophe is depicted as the Breaking of the Vessels – the Shevirat ha-Kelim – ten vessels that were to contain the Sefirot, the emanations of God’s light and the truth through which all things were created. Six of the ten vessels – containing the spiritual, moral, aesthetic, and material values – were completely shattered and the shards of these vessels were strewn throughout creation. It is the work of the Messiah and also of humanity to gather these shards together in order to redeem creation from the Hell into which it has fallen and thereby repair what has been broken. This is the eschatological, redemptive work of Tikkun olam.123 As Benjamin says of much of his writing, the meaning is to be found by “reading between the lines.” This theology is also to be read “between the lines” as an essential constructive element of Benjamin’s entire critical theory, particularly in his “Theologico-Political Fragment” and his “On the Concept of History.”124 In the “Fragment,” there is an unbridgeable chasm between the sacred and profane, between the infinite and finite, between creation and the Messianic realm. Only the Messiah can redeem creation through the coming of the Messianic realm and the Last Judgment, which will end the hellishness of history. The kingdom of God therefore is not the goal of world history and thus, the notion of a political theocracy is blasphemous. Rather, the purpose of humanity and of history is to be the universal creation of happiness. However, there is a dialectical relationship between this historical striving for happiness and solidarity and the hoped for coming of redemption in the Messianic realm. The more the profane world seeks its goal of happiness the more the fallen history is brought to its end, which thereby opens itself up to the coming of the Messiah and redemption. All of Benjamin’s “Theses” express the determinate negation of this Jewish Messianic, negative, cipher theology. Scholem made this very point when he 122 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 314–332. 123 Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah. (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1974); Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. (New York: Schocken Books, 1965); Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. (New York: Schocken Books, 1991). 124 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3, 305–306; Benjamin, Reflections, 312–313; Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 389–400; Benjamin, Illuminations, 253–264.

172

Ott

said that the last paragraph of Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” – “Thesis B” – ‘reads like an apotheosis of Judaism.’125 According to Scholem, Benjamin introduced and held on to the Jewish categories of the Messianic idea and of the idea of Remembrance: Zakhor.126 As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi states, the biblical command to “Remember!” is binding upon both God and God’s people.127 The Jewish notion of remembrance and of history is radically different from the commonly accepted, nostalgic and progressive notions of these terms. Jewish memory is anchored in the sufferings of the past. Unlike the bourgeois subjectivized and demeaned modern notions of these terms, an act that was condemned by the great Jewish rabbis of the past as philistine and “Epicurean,” Jewish memory is not understood merely as lamentation and thus, of being trapped in the past.128 Rather, such memory of past suffering holds the victims of such debasement up in honor with whom the living stand in solidarity to prevent such victimization and suffering from happening again. Horkheimer also expressed this same point: ‘Through millennia of persecution, the Jews held together for the sake of justice… Jewry was not a powerful state but the hope for justice at the end of the world. They were a people and its opposite, a rebuke to all peoples.’129 This memory of past suffering is the truth and sacredness of the Jewish Passover ritual in which the living identify themselves with and as being the ones who were enslaved and tortured by Pharaoh and who were liberated and redeemed by “I AM” – “eheyeh asher eheyeh.”130 The Jews are commanded to remember their God who liberated them from their Egyptian slavery and who made a Covenant with them that if they keep God’s commandments, they shall be God’s people and the Holy One will be their God. It is the actions and covenant with this liberating God that is to be the highly selective purpose of life and of the people’s history. All else is meaningless and is to be forgotten. It is due to the command of God to faithfully remember the Covenant between Israel and God that this remembrance of the past suffering of the innocent is central to the identity and life of the 125 Gershom Scholem, On Jews & Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 197; Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 397, 403; Benjamin, Illuminations, 264. 126 Scholem, On Jews & Judaism in Crisis, 197; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996). 127 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 5ff. 128 Ibid., xiii-xiv. 129 Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline, 207. 130 Exodus 3:14; Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and its Tradition (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1966), Chapter 2, esp. 26–28.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

173

Jews. As will be seen in the following discussion of Thesis ii, Benjamin inverts this religious form of remembrance and its identifying commitment of solidarity with those who have suffered in the past into a secular, historical materialist revolutionary remembrance of past suffering of the innocent victims of class domination that carries with it the same identifying commitment to stop it from ever happening again. As Benjamin states, the Torah and the prayers instructed the Jews in remembering the living past, which is their compass for living in the present. Concern for the future is prohibited since the future belongs to God and is not to be humanity’s concern. The enchantment and lure of the future is thereby eliminated in Judaism. Horkheimer and Adorno also stated that in the idea of the patriarchate, the Jewish religion destroyed myth and the enchantment of the world in the idea of God. This apophatic theology of the Jewish religion allows no word that would alleviate the despair of all that is mortal. It associates hope only with the prohibition against calling on what is false as God, against invoking the finite as the infinite, lies as truth. The guarantee of salvation lies in the rejection of any belief that would replace it… it is knowledge obtained in the denunciation of illusion.”131 Yet, as Benjamin states, this ban on the Jews for having any concern about the future did not reduce history to the bourgeois empty notion of homogenous, chronological, endless time. For now, with the dialectical focus on remembering their God and the Covenant, which in Hebrew zakhor also means doing, acting or living the memory – every second of time could be a strait gate through which the Messiah might come. Thus, in terms of this theological remembrance of the past, Benjamin states in his Thesis ii that the past carries with it a temporal index that refers it to redemption.132 Just like an index in the back of a book that lists its important names and events, so history has such an index now translated in terms of the remembrance of the class war struggles of the oppressed for liberation, justice, happiness, and shalom/wholeness. As the Jews were to focus on and remember their covenant and history with God, so human beings today are to remember­and learn the history of the poor and the struggles of the oppressed for liberation because the past has a claim upon the present. There is thus a secret agreement/a covenant between the past generations of the oppressed 131 Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 23. 132 Benjamin, Illuminations, 254.

174

Ott

and the contemporary one; a covenant that endows people today with a “weak Messianic power” to continue the fight for liberation on their behalf and for today’s innocent victims of the barbaric capitalist class war. Like the Angelus Novus of Thesis ix, human beings do not have the power to redeem the dead. This is the task of the Messiah. However, by means of remembering the innocent victims of the past barbarism in the lives of those suffering the same today, humanity does have a “weak” power to redeem them in the contemporary fight for justice. This power must not be taken lightly. A closing example of the translation of the Jewish Messianic, negative, inverted theology into its modern secular form in the contemporary struggle for human liberation is found in Benjamin’s Thesis vi.133 In this Thesis, Benjamin unambiguously identified the difference between historical materialism’s theologically informed notion of history and its modern covenantal commitment to the victims of the past and present against that of a value-free bourgeois historicism. The selective, non-arbitrary identity producing remembrance of and solidarity with the past innocent victims, which again is inherited from Jewish Covenantal and Messianic theology, is expressed as the act [zakor] of seizing “hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” This existing danger that has produced this epiphanal memory is the same danger that destroyed the past: namely, ruling class domination that makes people into its own objects/tools. Making the tiger-leap connection with Benjamin’s earlier cry for people to awaken from their hallucinatory dream that keeps them enslaved, the contemporary fight for the innocent victims of the past and for those of the present is to vigilantly battle against the insidious power of the ruling elite poisoning the memory and traditions of liberation into a justifying ideology for the status quo. In distinctly religious, Messianic language, Benjamin puts the dangerous, apocalyptic teeth back into the mouth and Word of the Messiah, who not only comes to heal and redeem what has been broken, but who also comes with a “sword” to end the reign of the Antichrist – that of the bestial ruling class and their systems of destruction.134 Benjamin ends his Thesis vi with similar admonition that it is only the historian – but more generally, it is only the historically awakened, conscious, and outraged people in solidarity who can keep alive the hopes of the past for justice and are convinced that even the dead innocent victims of the past will not be vindicated if the enemy – the ruling classes – continue to win. Benjamin ends this Thesis with the warning: ‘And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.’

133 Ibid., 255. 134 Matthew 10:34–36; Benjamin, Illuminations, 255; Revelation, 21–22.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

12

175

Jewish Messianic Theology and Historical Materialism In the idea of classless society, Marx secularized the idea of messianic time. And that was a good thing.135 A genuinely messianic face must be restored to the concept of classless society and to be sure, in the interest of furthering the revolutionary politics of the proletariat itself.136 At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology. Its great desire would be the resurrection of the flesh… The perspective vanishing point of historic materialism would be its self-sublimation, the spirit’s liberation from the primacy of material needs in their state of fulfillment.137

Benjamin’s critical theory of religion, society, and history was and is no abstract, theoretical, and thus, harmless bourgeois academic waste of time. Its entire intention from its very beginning was the effort to awaken humanity out of its systemically induced hallucinatory sleep for the purpose of reclaiming humanity’s potential of freedom, happiness, and life through the theologicalpolitical-historical work of creating a more reconciled future society. Benjamin’s critical theory is a call to revolutionary action, but not an idea-less, romanticized, idealistic charge into the historically grounded and overwhelming power of ruling class domination. Such thoughtless, immature action does not produce real revolution, meaning the end of history as the class-war slaughterbench or Golgotha upon which humanity and nature has been sacrificed.138 Such passionate and outraged action against the rule of the power-elite, as idealistically right and good as it might be, only further empowers the established system of the ruling class domination of the established class-war system. To state this allegorically, “Chronos” – the mythical Greek god personification of empty time, who in order to protect himself against being overthrown by his children devours them as soon as they are born – once again, devours “Kairos” – the strategically, revolutionary, lightening flash “right time” for that which is truly “New” to appear: the in-breaking yet eschatological “New Creation” of the Abrahamic religions; the Messianic time, the “classless society.”139 135 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 401. 136 Ibid., 403. 137 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 207. 138 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 21; Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 808; Matthew 27:33; John 19:17. 139 cf. Isaiah 9, 11; Jeremiah 31:31–34; Micah 4; Romans 12:1–2; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Revelation 21:1–5.

176

Ott

As has been stated, Benjamin’s critical theory is the absolute rejection of history’s systems of ruling class domination and war. For him, there is not a moment in history that does not carry with it its own revolutionary chance, but that chance takes its cue from the given historical moment and its political situation. To see, experience, and thus, become active in these particular chances of Kairos – these historical dialectical images that flash up at the moment of danger and opportunity – is the very telos of his dialectical methodology that gathers together the scattered yet defiant fragments of revolutionary resistance from the past and present into a constellation of historical awakening. In 1940, with the global rise of fascism and its horror of protecting the capitalist class system from collapsing, Benjamin’s call for political, revolutionary theory and praxis was the dialectical development of his earlier rejection of a particularized, patch-work action, i.e., for the creation of Zionism, that merely takes place within the changeless continuum of what is. However, the beginning of World War ii was the time for “epiphany eyes” in search of the historical explosive moment of Kairos and its resulting political action. As he stated, this political action, no matter how destructive, reveals itself as being messianic. Benjamin now considered it to be the historical materialist who determines the presence of the messianic force in history.140 Thus, as Adorno correctly stated, Benjamin’s theory was loaded with political, historical dynamite; the deeper it is cunningly buried down into the horror of the given the greater its explosive force to blast open and destroy the historical continuum of domination.141 As expressed in his Theses on history, but also in other earlier writings, such as his articles on Franz Kafka,142 Karl Kraus,143 Eduard Fuchs,144 and throughout his Arcades Project, Benjamin dialectically incorporated historical materialism with his messianic theology to give real, revolutionary teeth to his critical theory of religion, society and history. Yet, this inclusion of historical materialism into his theoretical constellation of historical revolution and hope produced increasing confusion and consternation among his friends. They did not grasp this construction that allowed the determining substance of his theological methodology to migrate into this new materialist approach. It was

140 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 402. 141 Adorno & Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940, 54, 66–71, 104–114. 142 Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer,” Selected Writings, Volume 2, 494–500; Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” Selected Writings, Volume 2, 794–818. 143 Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” Selected Writings, Volume 2, 433–458. 144 Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” Selected Writings, Volume 3, 260–302.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

177

­ recisely his bridging of the religious and secular divide through the dialectical p migration of the religious into the secular and the secular into the religious that ultimately gave Benjamin’s work the appearance of being “esoteric.” In response to this, Benjamin’s very diplomatically responded to their concerns through letters that sought to explain his actions. In a letter of March 7, 1931, to Max Rychner, Benjamin explained that from the perspective of his Kabbalist approach to the philosophy of language, he saw a bridge to the way dialectical materialism looks at the world.145 He found no such bridge to the complacency of bourgeois scholarship. In the attempt to assure his friends that he was not becoming a dogmatic communist, Benjamin said that the real catalyst of his materialistic approach came to him, not from communist propaganda, but from his studies on “representative works” of bourgeois authors over the last twenty years. This critical insight came from the metaphysical tendency of his research. The inclusion of the historical materialist approach with his messianic theological one was better than appealing to co-opted bourgeois scholarship in order to understand ‘the true condition of our contemporary existence,’ which could no longer be reduced to “eternal ideas” or “timeless values.”146 As he stated, he was never able to do research and to think in any other way than a theological one that was in accord with the Talmudic teaching about the forty-nine levels of meaning in every passage of Torah. In accord with this theological epistemology, for Benjamin, the most clichéd communist platitude possesses more levels of meaning than any contemporary bourgeois profundity, whose sole purpose was/is to provide an apology for the horror status quo.147 In his response to Scholem’s harsh criticism of his turn to Marxism, Benjamin replied that his incorporation of historical materialism with his messianic theology was heuristic and experimental in nature. He stated that he found the translation of his metaphysical and theological ideas into a Marxist form, which was already happening in 1926, extremely worthwhile as it allowed them to become more concretely active and relevant to the emergency issues of the day than that of a purely religious form. As such he did not concede to his friend that there is a difference between the theological and historical materialist forms in terms of their quintessential being. I have gotten ‘behind’ this one [principle] above all: anyone of our generation who feels and understands the historical moment in which he

145 Scholem & Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910–1940, 371–374. 146 Ibid., 372. 147 Ibid., 372–373.

178

Ott

exists in this world, not as mere words, but as a battle, cannot renounce the study and the practice of the mechanism through which things (and conditions) and the masses interact… radical politics that are ‘just’ and, precisely for this reason, are intended as nothing but politics will always work on behalf of Jewry and, what is infinitely more important, will always find Jewry actively in support of them.148 Yet, knowing his friend’s resistance to and ultimate rejection of his “deceitful” and Janus-faced betrayal of his metaphysical work, Benjamin quite directly told Scholem that ‘the philosophical bond between the two parts of my study that you miss will be supplied by the revolution more effectively than by me.’149 13 The Angelus Novus as the Destroyer: the “Monster” Benjamin Sax stated that Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay on Karl Kraus expressed a transition from his youthful writings to that of his more mature Marxist period.150 As such, I end this essay with Benjamin’s early interpretation of Paul Klee’s 1920 painting entitled Angelus Novus that calls us to revolutionary action. Benjamin’s writing on the New Angel is most commonly known from Thesis ix of his essay “On the Concept of History.” In his Kraus essay, however, the image of this Angel is quite different from the one of the Thesis that tells of the angel being blown helplessly backward away from Paradise by the mighty historical wind of “progress” that piles wreckage upon wreckage up to heaven. Benjamin begins his Kraus essay by describing an old engraving that depicts a messenger, a herald, who rushes toward the viewer with a sheet of paper in his hand that tells of war and pestilence, of cries of murder and pain, of danger from fire and flood; news of betrayal, earthquakes, poison and fire.151 As Benjamin explains, for the satirist Kraus, this horror of history is the work of the Demon, who is in command of fallen creation. This Demon is the metaphor for the catastrophe or hell known as capitalism and ‘the dehumanized brood of owners of property and blood, and to all their followers.’152 However,

148 Ibid., 300–301. Emphasis added. 149 Scholem, The Story of a Friendship, 207. 150 Benjamin E. Sax, “Walter Benjamin’s Karl Kraus: Negation, Quotation, and Jewish Identity,” Shofar 32, no. 3 (2014):3. 151 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 433. An example of this “messenger” is: Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 152 Ibid., 456.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

179

Kraus/Benjamin also tells of a Monster, the Unmensch, who will come [if it is not already present among humanity] ‘as the messenger of a more real humanism… [one] that proves itself by destruction;’ the destruction of the Demon. In terms of his apocalyptic, apophatic, Messianic, Kabbalist theology, Benjamin writes that human attempts of moral purity and sacrifice have had no effect in overcoming the barbarism of the Demon. It is only where “origin” – the creative Name/Word of Ein Sof – the wholly “Other” – and apocalyptic “destruction” come together that the Demon’s reign is over. This Monster of destruction and redemption – the one who ‘brings about a real state of emergency’ in the destruction of the systems and history of class domination and its horror; the one who ends history as the deadly continuum of hellish hopelessness by activating its emergency brake in order to brush history against its grain153 – this Monster is the messenger in the old engraving, who is the Angelus! The real meaning of this allegory is that the struggling, oppressed, dehumanized, and suffering victims of history’s horror are to be this Monster in solidarity with their fallen brothers and sisters in history – the dying and dead. It is they/we who are to be and become the Angelus Novus “Monster;” for it is we who have what Benjamin called a “weak Messianic power” to redeem the hopes of the past and of the present for justice; and it is we who are called to create the conditions for a more reconciled, just, equitable, happy, liberated, and peace-filled future society. As Benjamin stated in his “Theologico-Political Fragment,” it is only the Messiah who brings history to its end.154 The New Creation of God is not and cannot be the goal of history, for the promised and hoped-for New Creation is that which puts an end to the Old world and its necrophilic history, which the Angelus Novus stared/s helplessly at in horror.155 Echoing the story of the Tower of Babel,156 humanity and its secular order cannot build a tower or “stairway” to heaven. Humanity and its social systems cannot redeem this world and thus, cannot create the transcendent, infinite Kingdom of God. The final Kairos of this New Creation is the eschatological act only of the totally “Other” and the Messiah. However, as expressed throughout this paper, the relationship between these two realms – between the sacred and the profane, the Infinite and finite, the secular and the ­Messianic – is dialectical in both theory and praxis. Like the Hebrew prophets Isaiah, Malachi, and John (the Baptist), who were called to “prepare the way” 153 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 402, 407. 154 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3, 305–306; Benjamin, Reflections, 312–313. 155 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 392; Benjamin, Illuminations, 257–258. 156 Genesis 11:1–9.

180

Ott

in the wilderness of this world for the coming of God,157 humanity’s part in this dialectic – if they have eyes to see and ears to hear – is the same prophetic/religious/theological-socio-political-historical task and responsibility of living to create a world of life and “happiness” for all, which necessitates the life commitment and work to end at all costs the needless fear, oppression, domination, suffering and death of the innocent. This concrete, finite work in both theory and praxis is the hope-filled act of promoting and preparing the way for the coming of the restitutio in integrum – the redemption of God’s New Creation. Benjamin gave allegorical expression to this dialectic in terms of two arrows flying against each other. One flies toward the finite secular telos, while the other flies toward the future of the hoped-for Messiah and the New Creation. Although moving in opposite if not confrontational directions, Benjamin appealed to Newton’s Third Law of Motion and stated that the movement of one force can increase the movement and speed of the opposing force.158 Thus, human existential, socio-political, historical actions promoting happiness, increased reconciliation and equality, and the elimination of suffering and misery in the secular realm can increase – at least theoretically – the coming of the Messianic realm. Yet, it must be remembered that Benjamin was not advocating lifting our gaze from the present to that of the distant, mystical future. Like that of the Torah and the Talmudic and Kabbalist teachings, Benjamin’s dialectical writings and concerns were not turned toward the future but were ever more deeply focused on the past and on the present; on the solidarity of past and present struggles for happiness and shalom; and thus, on what needs to be said, written, and put into praxis in this dialectical Now-Time in the present struggle to create possibly a happier world in the hope for the coming Messiah. As Benjamin stated in the last section of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the last of his known writings before his suicide on September 26, 1940, in Portbou, Spain, it was/is the Kairos of the anamnestic and present Now-Time that held out the dialectical possibility ‘for every second of time [to be] a small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.’159

157 Isaiah 40:3–5; Malachi 3:1–2f; Luke 3:4–6. 158 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3, 305; Benjamin, Reflections, 312. 159 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 397; Benjamin, Illuminations, 264.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

181

Bibliography Adorno, Gretel, and Walter Benjamin. Correspondence 1930–1940. Edited by Henri Lonitz and Christoph Gödde. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008. Adorno, Theodor W. “Reason and Revelation.” In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London/ New York: Routledge, 1991. Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. London: nlb, 1974. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: The Seabury Press, 1973. Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benjamin. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928 – 1940. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Apollinaire, Guillaume. Selected Writings. Translated by Roger Shattuck. New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1971. Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Exchange, 1994. Aragon, Louis. Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Baeck, Leo. Essence of Judaism. New York: Schocken Books, 1987. Beckett, Lois. “Furious Florida survivors assail nra and politicians and urge action on guns,” The Guardian, February 22, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2018/feb/21/florida-school-shooting-town-hall-cnn-students-nra-what -happened. Beckett, Lois. “How many US school shootings have there been in 2018 so far?” The Guardian, February 15, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/14/ school-shootings-in-america-2018-how-many-so-far. Benjamin, Walter. Early Writings: 1910–1917. Walter Benjamin. Translated by Howard Eiland, et al. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Others. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott Howard Eiland and Others. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.

182

Ott

Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996. Benjamin, Walter. “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, edited by Ernst Jünger.” New German Critique no. 17 (Spring 1979). Special Walter Benjamin Issue: 120–128. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London, and New York: Verso, 1977. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Blinder, Alan, and Daniel Victor. “School Shooting in Kentucky Was Nation’s 11th of Year. It Was Jan. 23,” The New York Times, January 23, 2018. https://www.nytimes .com/2018/01/23/us/kentucky-school-shooting.html. Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1972. Cohen, Hermann. Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Eckhart, Meister. Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation. Edited by Raymond. B. Blakney. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1941. Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973. Fromm, Erich. You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and its Tradition. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1966. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon Books, 1965. Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1955. Gelley, Alexander. “On the ‘Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue:’ Scholem and Benjamin.” In Religion Between Culture and Philosophy: Special Double Issue, Vol. 3: 1&2, 1999.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

183

Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Translated by William Wallace. Together with the Zusatze in Boumann’s Text (1845). Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J.B. Baillie. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1967. Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956. Hegel, G.W.F. “Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Gespräch mit Helmut Gumnior.” In Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 7: Vorträge und Aufzeichnungen 1949–1973. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985. Hegel, G.W.F. Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969. Translated by Michael Shaw. New York: The Seabury Press, 1978. Hegel, G.W.F. “Lessons of Fascism.” In Tensions That Cause Wars: A UNESCO Conference Study. Hadley Cantril [Ed.]. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1950. http:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/horkheimer/content/thumbview/6591880. Horkheimer, Max. “The Jews and Europe.” In Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. Edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cummings. New York: The Seabury Press, 1972. Jerusalem Bible (The). Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2007. Kraus, Karl. The Last Days of Mankind. Translated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2015. Löwenthal, Leo. An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Löwenthal. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987. Löwy, Michael. “Walter Benjamin and Surrealism: The Story of a Revolutionary Spell.” In Radical Philosophy 80 (Nov./Dec. 1996): 17–23. Lüth, Christoph. “On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory of Bildung.” In Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition. Edited by Ian Westbury, Stefan Hopmann, and Kurt Riquarts. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Marx, Karl. Marx on Religion. Edited by John Raines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. Edited by Frederic L. Bender. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988.

184

Ott

McBride, James. “Marooned in the Realm of the Profane: Walter Benjamin’s Synthesis of Kabbalah and Communism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57, no. 2 (1989): 241–266. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. German Jews: A Dual Identity. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999. Metz, Johann Baptist. Faith in History & Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. Translated by David Smith. New York: The Seabury Press, 1980. National Security Strategy of the United States of America. 2017. https://www .whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf. Neumann, Franz. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944. New York & Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966. New Revised Standard Version Bible, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Co., 1989. Ott, Michael R. “Something’s Missing: A Study of the Dialectic of Utopia in the Theories of Theodor W. Adorno & Ernst Bloch.” Heathwood Journal of Critical Theory 1, no. 1 (2015): 133–173. http://www.heathwoodpress.com/somethings-missing-study -dialectic-utopia-theories-theodor-wadorno-ernst-bloch/ Ott, Michael R. Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion: The Meaning of Religion in the Struggle for Human Emancipation. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001. Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Volumes i–vi. New York: The Modern Library, 2003. Rabinbach, Anson. In The Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1997. Rabinbach, Anson. “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism.” New German Critique, no. 34 (Winter, 1985): 78–124. Richter, Gerhard. Inheriting Walter Benjamin. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing Plc., 2016. Sax, Benjamin E. “Walter Benjamin’s Karl Kraus: Negation, Quotation, and Jewish Identity.” Shofar 32, no. 3 (2014): 1–29. Scholem, Gershom, ed. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem – 1932–1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Scholem, Gershom. On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. New York: Schocken Books, 1991. Scholem, Gershom. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Queen Square, London: Faber & Faber, 1981. Scholem, Gershom. “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue.” In On Jews & Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.

Fomenting the Constellations of REVOLUTIONARY “Now-Time”

185

Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1974. Scholem, Gershom. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. New York: Schocken Books, 1965. Scholem, Gershom, and Theodor W. Adorno, eds. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910–1940. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Schumpter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1950. Siebert, Rudolf J. Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness and the Rescue of the Hopeless. Volumes i, ii, iii. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010. Sombart, Werner. Krieg und Kapitalismus/War and Capitalism. North Stratford, NH: Ayer Co. Publishers, Inc., 1975. Stevens, Robert. “British Armed Forces Chief Prepares for War with Russia.” January 25, 2018. http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/25/cart-j25.html. Thatcher, Margaret. Press Conference for American Correspondents in London. Margaret Thatcher Foundation. June 25, 1980. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document /104389. Tiedemann, Rolf. “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk.” In Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, 929–945. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Trotsky, Leon. Fascism: What It is and How to Fight It. Atlanta: Pathfinder Press, 1996. www.pathfinderpress.com. Van Auken, Bill. “Pentagon Unveils Strategy for Military Confrontation with Russia and China.” January 22, 2018. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48646.htm. von Humboldt, Wilhelm. “Theory of Bildung.” In Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition. Edited by Ian Westbury, Stefan Hopmann, and Kurt Riquarts. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Wizisla, Erdmut. Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. Wohlfarth, Irving. “Manner aus der Fremde:” Walter Benjamin and the “German-­Jewish Parnassus.” New German Critique no. 70 (Winter 1997): 3–85. Special Issue on Germans and Jews. Wohlfarth, Irving. “No-Man’s Land: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Destructive Character.” Diacritics 8, no. 2, (1978): 47–65. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996.

Chapter 5

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity: PoliticalTheological Reflections Edmund Arens ‘Just as community collapses, identity is invented.’1 This has been stated by Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Two years older than Rudi Siebert, Bauman, like Siebert, had been a left wing thinker and a political activist for decades. Bauman, notwithstanding his old age, until his death on January 9, 2017, had been engaged admirably in writing and speaking out in public.2 Bauman was a Jewish thinker considerably influenced by his friend Emmanuel Levinas and also by the Frankfurt School.3 A long time before the upcoming Brexit, the Polish-British scholar saw identity as a surrogate of community. He called identity a ‘cosy shelter of security and confidence’4 in an unsecure world. For Bauman, the search for identity is a highly problematic attempt and he makes the proposal to long for neither a fluid nor for a rigid identity, but to work for a new ethical community instead. First, following Bauman, I would like to point out two different orientations of identity, one seemingly in accordance with liquid modernity, and the other 1 Jock Young, The Exclusive Society (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 164; quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001), 15. 2 Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013; Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Doors. Cambridge (UK): Polity Press, 2016; Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Liquid Evil. Cambridge, UK, 2016; cf. Rudolf J. Siebert, Early Critical Theory of Religion: The Island of Happiness, ed. by Karen Shoup-Pilarski and Dustin J. Byrd. New Delhi: Sanbun, 2014; Rudolf J. Siebert and Michael R. Ott, Future of Religion: Creator, Exodus, Son of Man, and Kingdom. New Delhi: Sanbun, 2016. 3 Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991. The life-long influence of the Frankfurt School on Rudi Siebert’s thinking, teaching, and writing is obvious in almost any of his many books and articles. Cf. pars pro toto his “works in progress”: idem, Walter Benjamin’s Critical Theory: From Mysticism to Historical Materialism; idem, Religion and Revolution: Liberation and Redemption; idem, The Moral Revolution in Christianity, and the World Religions. Cf. The Influence of the Frankfurt School on Contemporary Theology: Critical Theory and the Future of Religion. Dubrovnik Papers in Honour of Rudolf J. Siebert, edited by A. James Reimer. Lewistown/Queenstown/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. 4 Bauman, Community, 16.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_006

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity

187

obviously much more rigid. Then, in a second step, two kinds of Political Theology shall be sketched. On the one hand, there is the Political Theology promoted by German law scholar Carl Schmitt. Against this authoritarian politics of identity, which is considered to be homogeneity, the New Political Theology developed by Johann Baptist Metz pleads for compassionate politics of solidarity with the suffering others. Then, taking into account studies by Robert Schreiter and Miroslav Volf, some reflections on reconciliation shall follow. Finally, relating to Helmut Peukert, a concept of identity in universal solidarity will be proposed. 1

Shapes of Identity

In premodern times, identity seemed to be something “natural,” connected with the natural and cultural environment. It seemed something “given” by and “taken” from the community, to which people belonged. According to Zygmunt Bauman, identity then had a local character. It meant belonging to and being embedded in a community of restricted chances. Thus, it meant a narrow frame of obligations and expectations. However, these bonds of solidarity provided security and they enabled people to lead a decent life. In the Christian World of Western cultures, the telos of life lay far beyond daily survival. The telos, in fact, was eternity, and life on earth was seen and led as a pilgrimage towards eternity. Premodern communities cultivated identities with strong bonds and responsibilities, accompanied by clear-cut duties. These identities were derived from and also enforced by divine commandments and sanctions. At the same time, premodern identities were rooted in shared memories. According to Bauman, the image of the “pilgrim” also played a decisive role in modernity. However, the restless longing for eternity was more and more replaced by the restless working for a better future. The “pursuit of happiness,” that is the striving for emancipation and freedom, stimulated secular pilgrimage. Thus, identity became both a project and a process of perfection. In the course of industrialization, the establishment of nation-states, and the concentration of labour in the big cities, local communities dissolved. As a consequence, the problem of identity became explicit and manifest. The answer to the question of “who we are” was no longer found in common memories of the past. At that time, it was discovered in the “imagined communities” of the nation.5 The national community forged the “we” of the citizens over the “they” 5 Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

188

Arens

of those who didn’t belong to us: the others, the strangers, the outcasts, and/or enemies. The patriotic “we”-feeling rested on the presupposed homogeneity of the people: one nation, one people. At the same time, the identity of the “we” implied the exclusion of the others. Bauman maintains that the peak of exclusion was reached in the annihilation of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, which he calls “categorical murder.”6 In the meanwhile, the industrialized nation-state of “solid modernity” came under severe pressure and has been replaced by “liquid modernity.”7 In the course of globalization, deregulation, privatization, and technological revolutions, the nation-states have lost much of their former power. The people have gained or are forced to acquire mobility and flexibility.8 According to Bauman, in a “hurried life” of uncertainty, the new formula for happiness is “shifting from Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité to Sécurité, Parité, Réseau (Security, Parity, Network).”9 In individualized societies, the majority of the people develop an instable and precarious consumers’ identity. They eagerly try catching up with fastmoving events; they are saddled with worthless possessions and they are filled with fears of being left behind. In the meanwhile, the rich and privileged find their home in “gated communities,” and they find their pleasures in “aesthetic communities.” Fundamentalist identity is one option available in liquid modernity. Even if they don’t think so, fundamentalists also make a choice. They choose to hold to inherited identity. They opt for the nostalgia of pre-uncertainty and for voluntary servitude. Fundamentalism, according to Bauman, puts security and certainty first and condemns everything that undermines that certainty. Fundamentalists, whether religious or secular, ‘resort to indubitable supreme authority.’10 In its totalitarian or proto-totalitarian escape from “fugitive modernity,” fundamentalism offers an alternative that is rigid identity. It can be found in strictly hierarchical structured communities ‘for those who find the burden of individual freedom excessive and unbearable.’11

6

Zygmunt Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 78ff. 7 Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000. 8 Cf. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character. London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998. 9 Bauman, Does Ethics, 118. 10 Zygmunt Bauman, “Postmodern Religion?” in Religion, Modernity, and Postmodernity, ed. by Paul Heelas. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 55–78, 74. 11 Ibid., 74.

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity

2

189

Two Kinds of Political Theology

Nowadays, Political Theology is a much debated topic within a variety of ­academic disciplines, including theology, philosophy, political sciences and others. At the beginning of the twentieth century, German law scholar Carl Schmitt reintroduced the term. It dates back to antiquity. Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 b.c.) spoke of a tripartation of theology, in which political theology, mythical and cosmological theologies were distinguished. However, the Christian theologian, St. Augustine, in his City of God, strongly criticised this tripartation. He argued, that so-called “political theology,” is no theology at all, because it doesn’t lead to salvation. Carl Schmitt, a devout Catholic, who later on became the “crown jurist of the Third Reich,” reintroduced this term in his most influential book Political Theology in 1922. Political theology thus became a concept related to the theory of the state. The law scholar claimed: ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.’12 According to Schmitt, the terminological secularization can be shown for example by the process in which the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver. In his view, for jurisprudence the “state of exception” can be regarded as analogical to what divine miracle is for theology. In the state of exception, decision in absolute purity is necessary. Schmitt’s book Political Theology starts with the key sentence: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.’13 Schmitt’s decisionistic concept of sovereignty is part and parcel of his deeply antidemocratic and anti-liberal political theology. For him, the absolute monarch is the true sovereign. He personally represents the absolute state. After the modern fragmentation and destruction of the strong state by the forces of liberalism and economy, Schmitt in his early years considered the Catholic Church as a political power against modern secularization and liberalism. For him, the Church was a ‘concrete personal representation of a concrete personality;’ it was also ‘the absolute realization of authority.’14 Some years later, Schmitt opted for the “Führer” of the Third Reich and for sovereign dictatorship and he himself became the “crown jurist” of German Fascism.15 12 13 14 15

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Ibid., 5. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 18. Cf. Rudolf J. Siebert, The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press Inc., 1985; Rudolf J. Siebert, Recht, Macht und Liebe: Georg W. Rudolphi’s Prophetische Politische Theologie. Frankfurt: Haag & Herchen, 1993; Rudolf J. Siebert, From

190

Arens

Carl Schmitt’s work, The Concept of the Political, is most relevant in order to make clear the controversial orientation of his Political Theology. For him, ‘the specific political distinction (…) is that between friend and enemy.’16 Whereas in the realm of economy there are only competitors but not enemies, the criterion of the political consists in the distinction of friend and foe. This distinction implies ‘the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.’17 The friend-enemy distinction draws the line between those who are part of a political community and those who are outside. This basic distinction constitutes the political identity of the people and determines who belongs to the people. It is a thoroughly polemic distinction and it enables the state to reach the decision of who the concrete enemy is in order to fight against him. Enmity both leads to identification within the people and to war against others. For Schmitt, war is just the utmost realization of enmity. Identifying the common enemy outside one’s own political community corresponds with homogeneity inside the community. The latter demands, ‘if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.’18 Jürgen Habermas called Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology “clericofascist.”19 It is based on an authoritarian concept of sovereignty. This is combined with a xenophobic concept of homogeneous political identity. In contrast to Schmitt’s view, the New Political Theology of German fundamental theologian Johann Baptist Metz precisely focuses on the suffering others. In his book Faith in History and Society, Metz unfolds his approach as a political theology of the subject in history and society. All human beings are called to become subjects in solidarity. Metz sees this political ideal indicated by the Christian idea of God, who created men and women. Metz conceives Christian faith as praxis, namely ‘as hope in solidarity in the God of Jesus as the God of the living and the dead.’20 For Christian faith, memory first is the memoria passionis Jesu Christi, the memory of his suffering and death. According to Metz, this is both a dangerous Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and Universal Solidarity. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. 16 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26. 17 Ibid. 18 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1988), 9. 19 Jürgen Habermas, “‘The Political:’ The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 15–33, 23. 20 Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1980), 73. Metz’ work has been often and thoroughly discussed by Siebert. See Siebert, From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology.

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity

191

and a liberating memory. It evokes the history of the suffering of those who have failed and have been annihilated. Faith mediated through remembrance of suffering hopes, that the dead, those who have been defeated and forgotten, have a claim that has still to be settled. Hope for the deliverance of the dead is made concrete by living in the apocalyptic expectation of an imminent end. According to Metz, this expectation breaks the spell of evolutionary timelessness and it enables people to engage in radical discipleship. The concepts of memory, narrative, and solidarity have become the leading categories of Political Theology as ‘practical fundamental theology.’21 Metz especially drew attention to the history of Jewish suffering. The horrific suffering of the Jews has to be remembered together with the shameful history of Christian guilt. Christian anti-Judaism has to be overcome once and for all. Both Jewish suffering and Christian guilt are indissolubly bound up with the name “Auschwitz.” Auschwitz is a key factor for the Political Theology of Metz. He recognizes in this catastrophe the end of all abstract God-talk and of all idealistic reconciliation. After Auschwitz, theology has to begin with the question of theodicy. This means: ‘Discourse about God as the cry for the salvation of others, of those who suffered unjustly, of the victims and the vanquished of our history.’22 In the face of the incomparable horror of Auschwitz, theology also needs to talk of suffering unto God. New Political Theology pleads for a culture of remembering, considered as a counter-force to the spread of cultural amnesia that wants to forget Auschwitz. First of all, memory has to take place by thinking of the suffering of the others. Universalism is an ineradicable part of belief in the one God. It is born out of the memory of suffering. Theology has to bring to bear a universalism of responsibility that is sensitive to suffering. According to Metz, it does so by striving for a culture that gets rid of its obsession with identity. It opts for a culture, moved by memoria passionis, articulated in compassion and acknowledging others in their otherness. In his recent work, Metz unfolds the meaning and relevance of compassion. In line with the Biblical tradition, he claims that compassion is not just a vague feeling, but a participating and active political passion for others. According to him, the spirit of compassion is able to break compulsions of enmity. The spirit of compassion may motivate and even lead to a politics of acknowledgment. 21 22

Cf. the subtitle of Metz, Faith; Edmund Arens, Ottmar John, and Peter Rottländer, Erinnerung, Befreiung, Solidarität: Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas und die politische Theologie, Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1991. Johann Baptist Metz, A Passion for God. The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998), 55.

192

Arens

For Johann Baptist Metz, “ecumenism of compassion” is called to resist against any racism and ethnic-religious nationalism.23 It has to resist xenophobia and any globalization driven and dominated by economy. 3

Reflections on Reconciliation

Within a world filled with exclusion, enmity, and war, reconciliation becomes a most relevant theological topic. It also becomes an urgent practical-political task.24 Exclusion and enmity on a social, ecclesial, national or international level are closely linked with identity and history. In order to overcome violent and victimizing clashes of convictions and practices, people need to enter into a process of social and political transformation. American theologian Robert Schreiter describes the necessary process of transformation as “healing.” Croatian-American theologian Miroslav Volf makes use of the metaphor of embrace in order to point out how to break out of a system of exclusion. He differentiated among four steps towards reconciliation. The “drama of embrace” begins by opening the arms showing one’s desire for and invitation to the other.25 The second step is waiting for the other’s free and unforced response. Waiting indeed illuminates the risk of embrace. It can be rejected. The third step of closing the arms points at the reciprocity of embrace. The drama of embrace is completed by opening the arms again. Volf conceives embrace as a circular movement, in which ‘the actions and reactions of the self and the other condition each other and give the movement both meaning and energy.’26 While Volf primarily deals with the existential dimension of interpersonal reconciliation, Schreiter also addresses the social and political realm. He points out the task of what can be called social healing. ‘To take into account the lingering, toxic presence of the past in society, it must diagnose and mobilize the energies of the present and it must sketch out a vision for the future.’27 Social healing thus includes remembering the horrors of the past, healing the 23

Johann Baptist Metz, Memoria Passionis: Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft, (Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 2006), 174. 24 Cf. Rudolf J. Siebert, The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society, ed. by Michael R. Ott. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007. 25 Cf. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 140ff. 26 Volf, Exclusion, 145. 27 Robert J. Schreiter, “A Practical Theology of Healing, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation,” in Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis, ed. by Robert J. Schreiter, R. Scott Appleby, and Regard F. Powers. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 366–397, 377.

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity

193

memories of violence and victimization. First and foremost, this process is initiated by telling the truth about the past. For Schreiter, truth-telling is a presupposition of doing justice and social healing, because it breaks the culture of silence. Thus it is able to reach toward the restorative truth of the past. Volf rightly insists that memory is closely tied to the question of identity. Memory plays an identity-shaping role, and memory can be used either in an exclusive or in a salutary way. Remembering rightly implies to remember truthfully. Truthfulness is best accompanied by a “double vision” of those who put themselves into the other’s shoes and who see themselves with the eyes of the other.28 There is no reconciliation without forgiveness. Forgiveness implies distinguishing between the evil deed and the wrongdoer. To forgive does not mean to forget, but to reframe the awful deeds in view of a common future. Volf convincingly argues that forgiveness is a gift, of which God is the primary giver. This gift can only bear fruit together with an obligation of gratitude in which we ‘join God in forgiving.’29 According to Volf, forgiveness comprises not only the condemnation of the wrongdoing, but also the release from punishment and guilt, and finally the slipping of the memory of guilt into oblivion. The last element seems at least misleading. I rather follow Schreiter by underlining that to forgive does not mean to forget, which I think would be both unrealistic and undesirable. Schreiter points out that forgiveness, on the one hand, is a divine grace, and on the other hand ‘is a decision by the victim to no longer be controlled by the effects of past deeds done, and to choose freely for a different kind of future.’30 Schreiter regards social forgiveness as a repairing and transformation of relationships. Such processes involve first, that a group, community, or state, acknowledge their wrongdoing; secondly, an apology is necessary, and thirdly, there has to be atonement. This recognizes ‘a moral liability in that it attests to the moral failures in the past.’31 Both Schreiter and Volf convincingly affirm that rituals and liturgies play an important part in processes of reconciliation. Ritual acts not only give people a sense of belonging but they are able to create a new reality of ‘solidarity and

28

Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), 57. 29 Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005), 211. 30 Robert J. Schreiter, The Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality and Strategies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 124. 31 Schreiter, A Practical Theology, 392.

194

Arens

new forms of social cohesion.’32 Commemorative rituals and liturgies shape and reshape identity, and they can contribute to creating a new reality for former enemies. They can be considered public performances of remembering, forgiving, of telling the truth, and of healing. Commemorative rituals, rituals of forgiveness, and rituals of healing, contribute to the coming to terms with the cruel past and to opening ways to a common future.33 4

Identity in Universal Solidarity

“Identity in Solidarity” is a term introduced by Helmut Peukert.34 This German Catholic theologian and priest, student of Karl Rahner and collaborator of Johann Baptist Metz, after his marriage, was forced to leave The Theological Faculty at the University of Muenster. Finally, he got a chair for Systematic Educational Science. Peukert intended to point out that identity does not simply mean self-assertion. On the contrary, he asserted that identity is related to the otherness of others.35 Peukert, like Habermas, is convinced that identity is an intersubjective item. Identity has to be conceived of in an interactionist way, and at the same time, it is directed at an utmost reciprocity of interaction and solidarity. Identity in solidarity does not only concern the basic structure of pedagogical processes of education and formation. After two bloody World Wars and after the Holocaust, in Peukert’s mind, identity also represents a social scientific and politically ambitious project of “European self-reflection.” According to him, this self-reflection should have ‘the aim of reaching “unity while acknowledging diversities and prevent any exclusion.”’36 32

Robert J. Schreiter, “The Catholic Social Imaginary and Peacebuilding,” in Peacebuilding. Catholic Theology, Ethics and Praxis, ed. by Schreiter et al., Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 225; cf. Edmund Arens, “Religion as Ritual, Communicative, and Critical Praxis,” in The Frankfurt School on Religion. Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Routledge, 2005), 373–396. 33 Cf. Myroslava Rap, The Public Role of the Church in Contemporary Ukrainian Society: The Contribution of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church to Peace and Reconciliation. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2015; cf. my review of the book in: Theologische Revue 112 (2016), 235–236. 34 Cf. Helmut Peukert, “Identität in Solidarität. Reflexionen über die Orientierung humaner Bildungsprozesse,” in idem, Bildung in gesellschaftlicher Transformation, ed. Ottmar John and Norbert Mette (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh GmbH, 2015), 83–99. Rudolf J. Siebert regularly refers to Peukert’s works; cf. e.g. Siebert, The Critical Theory, 335–444; Siebert, From Critical Theory, 271–315. 35 Cf. Edmund Arens, ed., Anerkennung der Anderen. Eine theologische Grunddimension interkultureller Kommunikation. Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder Verlag, 1995. 36 Peukert, Identität, 87.

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity

195

Peukert precisely points out the intention of what he calls ‘the theological theory of the subject:’ ‘Interaction as a temporal, creative, innovative process, surpassing limitations and defining one’s own world and a common world, would then be the condition of possibility of the identity of subjects.’37 Identity in solidarity including religious identity in solidarity, first of all, comes into being within the intersubjective web of face-to-face interaction inside the family. Identity consists in some “constitutive attachment to others.”38 Indeed, it is routed in the closeness between parents and their children and among siblings. For the weaker, the family should form a reliable room of security and development in which the children are enabled to act in solidarity. This is made possible through affection, care, and support. Within a religious context, those capacities are stimulated within the horizon of a reality of unconditional love, solidarity, and compassion.39 These capacities are introduced by way of stories and everyday ritual practices.40 On the level of intermediary interaction, religious identity in solidarity is formed and articulated in groups and communities that are oriented both inwards and outwards. These groups and communities are formed and ­ ­maintained through religious socialization and through common religiouscommunicative praxis. Additionally, they establish a certain profile that ­combines reciprocal empowerment with commitment to others. Perceiving the discrimination or exclusion of others goes together with confidence and hope in a creative, liberating, and rescuing reality. The notion of solidarity, first of all, was used by the workers’ movement of the nineteenth century. “Solidarity” replaced the Christian-bourgeois notion of brotherhood, which the early socialists still used.41 The Marxists struggled 37 38 39

40

41

Helmut Peukert, Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of Communicative Action, trans. James Bohman. (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1984), 242. Konrad Hilpert, “Solidarität,” in Neues Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe, ed. Peter Eicher (München: Kösel-Verlag GmbH & Co., 2005), 152. Cf. Werner Jeanrond, A Theology of Love. London: T & T Clark International, 2010; Rudolf J. Siebert, Recht, Macht und Liebe; idem: “Kommunikatives Handeln und Transzendenz. Gerechtigkeit, Liebe und Versöhnung,” in Habermas und die Theologie. Beiträge zur theologischen Rezeption, Diskussion und Kritik der Theorie kommunikativen Handelns, ed. Edmund Arens (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag GmbH & Co., 1989),65–95. Cf. Edmund Arens, Gottesverständigung: Eine kommunikative Religionstheologie, Freiburg/ Basel/Wien: Herder Verlag, 2007; idem, “Religion as Communication,” in The Social Psychology of Communication, ed. Derek Hook et al. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 249–265. Cf. Edmund Arens, “Internationale, ekklesiale und universale Solidarität,” in Orientierung 53 (1989) 216–220; idem, Christopraxis: A Theology of Action (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 158–169; Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

196

Arens

­ nder the proletarian parole of “international solidarity.” In fact, the notion of u international solidarity could be adopted by Christian solidarity groups. This can be done in view of a world ecclesial solidarity. Of course, identity in solidarity does not only exist in religious shape, but in secular shapes as well.42 In the “Ego-Society” of affluent late modernity or post-modernity, solidarity seems to get lost in consumption. Religion becomes just another consumer item.43 Religious identity in solidarity both comprises communal “bonding,” which is solidarity among the members of the group, and “bridging,” which is solidarity with the foreign and excluded others.44 Yet, this kind of identity furthermore includes a fundamental religious habit that transcends any “bonding” and “bridging” aiming at mutual benefit. There is a universal trait in religious identity in solidarity. To be sure, it aims at worldwide solidarity. Over and against a “globalization of indifference,” Pope Francis pleads for a “globalization of solidarity.”45 The present pope urges for a radical redistribution of resources and riches, for a praxis of sharing and of mutual caring that stems from the insight into the fundamental equality and need of all people, created by God in his own image. Helmut Peukert, whom Rudi Siebert very often refers to and reflects on, has shown that Jürgen Habermas’ impressive theory of communicative action does not give attention to the temporal dimension of communicative action. This also applies to his most important principles of communicative action: equality, reciprocity, and solidarity. Peukert insists that these principles have to be conceived of as strictly and radically universal. In view of his concept of universal solidarity, Peukert goes back to a famous debate between the Frankfurt School Marxist scholars Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer. The debate took place in 1937 and it was a controversy about the closed or unclosed past. Benjamin claimed that ‘the work of the past is not closed for the historical

42 43 44

45

Cf. Zygmunt Bauman and Stanislaw Obirek, Of God and Man (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015), 31ff. Cf. Graham Ward, True Religion. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003; Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith in a Consumer Culture. New York: Continuum, 2013. Cf. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Touchstone Books, 2000; idem and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010; Edmund Arens, Martin Baumann, Antonius Liedhegener, Integrationspotenziale von Religion und Zivilgesellschaft. Theoretische und empirische Befunde. Baden-Baden/Zürich: Nomos, 2016. Cf. Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium, Vatican City, 2013; idem, Laudato si, Vatican City, 2015.

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity

197

materialist.’46 Horkheimer called the ‘supposition of the unclosed past idealistic’ and he insisted that ‘past injustice has occurred and is closed. Those who were slain in it were truly slain.’47 Finally, Horkheimer wrote about Benjamin’s position: ‘In the end, your statements are theological.’48 Helmut Peukert tried to face what he unfolds as “the paradox of amnestic solidarity.”49 He insists that a truly universal solidarity has to encompass both the past generations and the future ones. Religious communities and traditions do this by their texts and by their praxis. Religious identity in solidarity would be a solidarity that addresses past and present injustice by means of lamenting, remembering, and encompassing this injustice. It would be an identity that in a prophetic way urges for and performs solidarity with strangers and excluded others. It would be an identity that opts for humane life for all. It would be an identity that strives toward global responsibility, just redistribution, and transformation of a divided world. It would be an identity that aims at a society that provides possibilities of living in dignity for all. In spite of the fact that the economic, social, and political realities of “liquid modernity” seem to contradict these expectations and aims, religious identity in universal solidarity still remains a viable option. Within liquid modernity, so vividly and critically analysed by Zygmunt Bauman, and after the “Age of Extremes,” questions of basic normative orientations of human life seem to have become almost unanswerable.50 In view of these challenges, one may keep in mind Peukert’s insight: ‘The radical limit questions of ethical and religious traditions as questions for the possibility of a universal solidarity that encompasses both past and future generations are of utmost relevance for Pedagogics, for Philosophy, and for Theology. These questions must neither be left to speechless silence nor to fundamentalist and esoteric currents outside of any public and scholarly debate.’51

46 47 48 49

50 51

Walter Benjamin, Ausgewählte Schriften ii, Frankfurt, 1955, 311: quoted in Peukert, Science, 206. Max Horkheimer, letter to Benjamin, March 16, 1937, quoted in Peukert, Science, ibid. Max Horkheimer, letter to Benjamin, March 16, 1937, quoted in Peukert, Science, 207. Cf. Peukert, Science, 208–210; cf. the critique of Max Pensky, “Solidarity with the Past and the Work of Translation: Reflections on Memory Politics and the Postsecular,” in Habermas and Religion, ed. Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), 301–321. Cf. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Vintage, 1994. Helmut Peukert, “Pädagogik,” in idem, Bildung, 62–70, 69.

198

Arens

5 Afterword Dear Rudi: friend, supporter, and inspirator for decades. Both of us regularly write and reflect about reconciliation and justice, recognition of the others and solidarity, the past and the future of religion, and the longing for a better world where peace flourishes and justice reigns. Both of us know that the praxis of reconciliation, recognition, and solidarity takes first place. Both of us know from painful experiences that persons whom we deeply loved prematurely died. You lost your beloved wife Margaret (+ October 20, 1978), mother of your seven children, when you were fifty-one; I lost my beloved wife Brigitte (+ October 21, 2011) when I was fifty-eight. And we both lost our dear Canadian Mennonite friend A. James Reimer (+ August 28, 2010). We spent a number of iuc-Courses on “The Future of Religion” in Dubrovnik together with Jim, we enjoyed lots of mutual visits and we shared lovely table-fellowships with each other. Dear Rudi: While your friends, students, and colleagues are celebrating your ninetieth birthday, we remember those whom we owe so much and whose community we miss. In anamnestic solidarity with them and in the eschatological hope of absolute justice and universal solidarity we remember Margaret, Brigitte, and Jim who lived toward universal and ultimate reconciliation and liberation. Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Arens, Edmund, ed. Anerkennung der Anderen. Eine theologische Grunddimension interkultureller Kommunikation. FS Helmut Peukert, Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder Verlag, 1995. Arens, Edmund. Christopraxis: A Theology of Action. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995. Arens, Edmund. Gottesverständigung: Eine kommunikative Religionstheologie. Freiburg/ Basel/Wien: Herder Verlag, 2007. Arens, Edmund. “Internationale, ekklesiale und universale Solidarität.” Orientierung 53 (1989): 216–220. Arens, Edmund. “Religion as Communication.” In The Social Psychology of Communication, edited by Derek Hook et al. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Arens, Edmund. “Religion as Ritual, Communicative, and Critical Praxis.” In The Frankfurt School on Religion. Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, edited by Eduardo Mendieta. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity

199

Arens, Edmund, Martin Baumann, and Antonius Liedhegener. Integrationspotenziale von Religion und Zivilgesellschaft: Theoretische und empirische Befunde. BadenBaden/Zürich: Nomos, 2016. Arens, Edmund, Ottmar John, and Peter Rottländer, Erinnerung, Befreiung, Solidarität. Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas und die politische Theologie. Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1991. Bauman, Zygmunt. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001. Bauman, Zygmunt. Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991. Bauman, Zygmunt. “Postmodern Religion?” In Religion, Modernity, and Postmodernity, edited by Paul Heelas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Bauman, Zygmunt. Strangers at Our Doors, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016. Bauman, Zygmunt, and Leonidas Donskis. Liquid Evil. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016. Bauman, Zygmunt, and Leonidas Donskis. Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013. Bauman, Zygmunt, and Stanislaw Obirek. Of God and Man. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015. Benjamin, Walter. Ausgewählte Schriften II, Frankfurt, 1955. Habermas, Jürgen. “‘The Political:’ The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology.” In The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Hilpert, Konrad. “Solidarität.” In Neues Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe, edited by Peter Eicher. München: Kösel-Verlag GmbH & Co., 2005. Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Vintage, 1994. Jeanrond, Werner. A Theology of Love. London: T & T Clark International, 2010. Metz, Johann Baptist. A Passion for God. The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998. Metz, Johann Baptist. Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1980. Metz, Johann Baptist. Memoria Passionis. Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 2006. Miller, Vincent J. Consuming Religion: Christian Faith in a Consumer Culture. New York: Continuum, 2013. Peukert, Helmut. “Identität in Solidarität. Reflexionen über die Orientierung humaner Bildungsprozesse.” In Bildung in gesellschaftlicher Transformation, edited by

200

Arens

Ottmar John and Norbert Mette. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh GmbH, 2015. Peukert, Helmut. Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of Communicative Action. Translated by James Bohman. Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1984. Pope Francis. Evangelii Gaudium. Vatican City, 2013. Pope Francis. Laudato si. Vatican City, 2015. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Touchstone Books, 2000. Putnam, Robert D., and David E. Campbell. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Rap, Myroslava. The Public Role of the Church in Contemporary Ukrainian Society: The Contribution of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church to Peace and Reconciliation. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2015. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Schmitt, Carl. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1988. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Schmitt, Carl. Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Schreiter, Robert J. “A Practical Theology of Healing, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation.” In Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis, edited by Robert J. Schreiter, R. Scott Appleby, and Regard F. Powers. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010. Schreiter, Robert J. “The Catholic Social Imaginary and Peacebuilding.” In Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics and Praxis, edited by Schreiter et al., Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010. Schreiter, Robert J. The Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality and Strategies. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character. London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998. Siebert, Rudolf J. The Critical Theory of Religion. The Frankfurt School. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1985. Siebert, Rudolf J. Early Critical Theory of Religion: The Island of Happiness, edited by Karen Shoup-Pilarski and Dustin J. Byrd, New Delhi: Sanbun, 2014. Siebert, Rudolf J. From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and Universal Solidarity. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Siebert, Rudolf J. The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society, edited by Michael R. Ott. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007. Siebert, Rudolf J. “Kommunikatives Handeln und Transzendenz. Gerechtigkeit, Liebe und Versöhnung.” In Habermas und die Theologie. Beiträge zur theologischen Rezeption, Diskussion und Kritik der Theorie kommunikativen Handelns, ed. Edmund Arens. Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag GmbH & Co., 1989.

Identity, Reconciliation, and Solidarity

201

Siebert, Rudolf J. Recht, Macht und Liebe: Georg W. Rudolphi’s Prophetische Politische Theologie. Frankfurt: Haag & Herchen, 1993. Siebert, Rudolf J. and Michael R. Ott. Future of Religion: Creator, Exodus, Son of Man, and Kingdom. New Delhi: Sanbun, 2016. Stout, Jeffrey. Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Volf, Miroslav. The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006. Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996. Volf, Miroslav. Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005. Ward, Graham. True Religion. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Young, Jock. The Exclusive Society. London: Sage Publications, 1999.

Chapter 6

Siebert on Nationalism as Pathology Denis R. Janz A renewed discussion on the theme of nationalism is currently getting underway across a whole spectrum of academic contexts: the political, the social, the cultural, the religious, and so forth. This topic, much debated in the last century, has been given new life and urgency by the European Union’s identity crisis, by Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis, by Trump’s election to the presidency of the u.s., and in fact by various developments worldwide. Once again the issue demands our attention. The conversation will not and should not take place in a vacuum. What I want to suggest is that we take as our starting point the provocative, perhaps even profound, foundation laid by Rudolf J. Siebert in his lifetime of reflection on the subject. This paper is an overture and invitation to this end.1 Perhaps the most succinct way of introducing newcomers to the life and work of Rudolf J. Siebert is to characterize him, as some of his admirers have, as “the Theologian of the Frankfurt School.”2 He has devoted much of his career to explicating how the critical theory – a largely secular and enormously influential intellectual current of the 20th century – can be understood from a Christian perspective. As an author Siebert has been prolific: dozens of books and hundreds of shorter works explore all the greatest minds of the Frankfurt School and every aspect of their work. Running throughout this rich tapestry from beginning to end are several golden threads – topics which constantly recur with ever greater elaboration and increasing nuance: e.g. his futurology, the theodicy problem, as so forth. One of these is the phenomenon of nationalism.3 What follows is my attempt to unfold the basics of Siebert’s approach to this contentious theme. 1 Very recently, the American philosopher Samuel Freeman has suggested that in view of the Trump phenomenon, the Frankfurt School’s critical theory has a “new timeliness.” See his essay “The Headquarters of Neo-Marxism,” in The New York Review of Books, 64 (March 23, 2017), 63–65. 2 E.g. Gregory Baum in “A Tribute to Rudi Siebert,” in The Influence of the Frankfurt School on Contemporary Theology: Critical Theory and the Future of Religion: Dubrovnik Papers in Honour of Rudolf J. Siebert, ed. A. James Reimer (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), xv. 3 See my essay “The Siebert Manifesto of the Critical Theory: An Appreciation,” in The Dialectics of the Religious and the Secular: Studies on the Future of Religion, ed. Michael R. Ott (Leiden: Brill, 2014), ix–xiv. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_007

Siebert on Nationalism as Pathology

203

Siebert’s personal story provides a helpful backdrop. Born to a Catholic family in Frankfurt am Main in 1927, Rudi was a six-year-old child when Hitler came to power in 1933. He recalls learning from his parish priest that to be Catholic means to be anti-fascist. This combination, unusual at the time, became a life-long commitment. He participated in the Catholic underground youth resistance and served in the German army during World War ii until he was captured by the Americans. After the war he was sent back to Germany to participate in the Allied de-Nazification efforts. And here, in furthering his education, he encountered the highly productive writers of the Frankfurt School. This group, led by thinkers like Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, had coalesced in the aftermath of World War I to try to fathom what had happened, in all its utter senselessness and naked horror. With the help of philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, they were determined to understand and thus prevent a recurrence. In 1923 they founded an Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt. And they took it as part of their task to analyze the historical/cultural causes and consequences of nationalism. This effort continued until 1933, when they were driven into exile by Hitler. Their work then continued in Switzerland, France, Great Britain and the United States. Here they produced the body of writing that helped Siebert understand his wartime experience: here the autobiographical merged with the philosophical, historical, and theological to develop into Siebert’s distinctive vantage point. Throughout most of the 1980’s and 1990’s Siebert characterized his comprehensive intellectual project as a “critical political theology.”4 His starting assumption was that Christian faith is political; in short, it chooses sides. It can be politicized on the right, as it has been in the long tradition stretching from Eusebius, the 4th century court theologian of the Roman Emperor Constantine, to Carl Schmitt, the philosopher and political theorist of the Third Reich. Or the Christian faith can be politicized on the left, as it was in the 16th century leader of the Peasant War Thomas Münzer.5 When politicized on the right, this religion, Siebert says, ‘fights for the interests of the dominant class’ in capitalist society, the producers and the owners. And in this form it ends up legitimizing the unconditional claims of the state… up to the present in the Christian Falange in Lebanon and in Christian fascism in South Africa, Germany, [and] the 4 See his essay “From Conservative to Critical Political Theology,” in Reimer, ed., The Influence of the Frankfurt School, 147–219. 5 Rudolf Siebert, “Theology of Revolution versus Theology of Counter-Revolution,” in The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society, ed. Michael Ott (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 419–457.

204

Janz

u.s.a…’6 Politicized on the left, this religion follows the Hebrew prophets, Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, and the Good Samaritan parable, fighting for the interests of those at the bottom of society. The widest conceivable gulf separates these two: fascism, as a system favoring an elite while enslaving or oppressing or subordinating all others, is diametrically opposed to the radical inclusivity at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. A “critical political theology” has this assumption as its fundamental presupposition. One further constant that has anchored Siebert’s thought throughout his career is what we might call his “futurology.”7 While there may be many levels and variants, there are fundamentally three possible futures for humanity. ­Alternative Future i is the “totally administered society,” and Alternative Future ii is the “entirely militarized society.” A critical political theology is acutely conscious of these totalitarian dangers, looks for signs portending such a future, and struggles to mitigate what sometimes seems like a steady descent into such a fate. But a critical political theology also affirms a third possibility for our collective future: “The Reconciled, Free and Just Society.” This is defined as, ‘a good state of decent citizens who, in public discourse, come to an understanding with each other concerning their vital interests in mutual recognition of each other’s autonomy, dignity, and freedom.’8 In religious terms, this is ‘the messianic realm of redemption’ (though this has nothing to do with theocracy).9 All forms of nationalism hasten our descent towards Futures I and ii, whereas Alternative Future iii is by definition “transnational.”10 Against the background of these basic assumptions, we can now sketch the profile of nationalism from Siebert’s perspective. The first and most obvious thing to say about it is that it is ‘one of the main diseases of modernity,’ as Siebert wrote in his seminal 2010 essay “The German-Jewish Tragedy”.11 Even in its milder forms, he insists, ‘I personally have never seen a healthy racial or ethno-nationalist: be it in Germany, in the United States, in Canada, in Poland, in Russia, in the Ukraine, in Croatia, in Serbia, in Israel, or elsewhere.’12 These statements come from some of Siebert’s more recent work, but they are representative of his work as a whole. Nationalism in all its forms is pathological. 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Siebert, “From Conservative to Critical Political Theology,” 162. On this, see his “Appendix G” in Rudolf Siebert, Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness and the Rescue of the Hopeless, 3 vols., (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Vol. 1, 423. Siebert, “From Conservative to Critical Political Theology,” 202. Siebert, “Theology of Revolution,” 449. Siebert, “The German-Jewish Tragedy,” in Manifesto of the Critical Theory, vol. 3, 1111–1182; 1115. Ibid., 1136. Ibid., 1121.

Siebert on Nationalism as Pathology

205

Critics of this position have not been in short supply. One of the more thoughtful of these has been Gregory Baum, the Canadian Roman Catholic theologian and social thinker at McGill University in Montreal.13 His view is that nationalism in some of its forms can be healthy and can serve very important functions. One such variety, he thinks is Quebecois nationalism: in this case, nationalism undergirds and grounds the struggle of a people for equality and independence against a much more powerful oppressor. Siebert, a friend of Baum’s, does not respond to this directly in his writings, but one can easily infer the gist that his reply would take: he calls this type of rationale ‘the attempt to drive out the devil of imperialism though the Satan of nationalism.’14 It is not difficult to find examples of nationalism’s genocidal excesses! Another dissenting position is represented by the late James Reimer, a Canadian Mennonite theologian and also a good friend of Siebert’s. In an older essay, Reimer attempted to rescue some milder forms of nationalism, or at least some elements of nationalism, from Siebert’s rather sweeping indictment.15 Basing his argument on Paul Tillich’s thought, he focused above all on “myths of origin” – foundational elements in all developed nationalisms. Such narratives revolve around nature, soil, blood, family, tribe and nation, which are ‘positive and defining characteristics,’ Reimer said, ‘of what it means to be human.’16 Often archaic, they are primitive ways in which social groups understand and explain their origin, and thus their identity. Myths of origin are narrative answers to the question, ‘Who are you?’ When these stories function in this way, Reimer thought, they are positive aids on the way to a group’s selfunderstanding; they articulate a people’s grasp of meaning and values and destiny. As a warm, loyal and generous friend, Siebert of course never attacked ­Reimer. Nevertheless, there is no mistaking Siebert’s alternative point of view. Already in his programmatic 1992 essay outlining his overarching approach, he argues that critical political theology takes it as one of its tasks to ‘­demythologize the myth of the nation.’17 Later, in a 2007 essay, he explained why: re-awakened nationalisms are inevitably accompanied by ‘right-wing extremism, often steered by the myth of origin in one form or the other to an always increasing extent, the anti-Semitism and other forms of racism,’ which inevitably leads to ‘hate crimes’ and ‘anti-Marxism and anti-democratism, and the revolutionary, 13 14 15 16 17

Baum, “A Tribute to Rudi Siebert.” Siebert, “The German-Jewish Tragedy,” 1139. A. James Reimer, “Nation and the Myth of Origin in Paul Tillich’s Radical Social Thought,” in Reimer, ed., The Influence of the Frankfurt School, 283–295. Ibid., 283. Siebert, “From Conservative to Critical Political Theology,” 219.

206

Janz

state, or nihilistic terrorism at home and abroad.’18 In short, a growing ­nationalism, with its “re-mythologization” and “re-enchantment,” inevitably entails a “re-barbarization.”19 One could think of this, I suggest, as a regression into tribalism. This is a social system in which the tribe is the dominant social unit by which people define themselves, subordinating their individual identity to that of the family, or the extended family, or the clan. There are sharply defined identity markers: language, taboos, diet, customs, and so forth. The in-group/out-group distinction is all-important: insiders regard outsiders as inferior, enemies, evil, almost sub-human. Tribal members worship “their” god, the only “real” one, or the most powerful one. The moral rules for how to treat others apply to tribal members, not to “foreigners.” While our ancient and pre-historic ancestors saw the world in this way, most of us, at least since the Enlightenment, do not. And we use words like “primitive” and “barbaric” to describe it. Nationalisms in their various forms bear an unmistakable resemblance to this. They are, ­according to Siebert, regressions into archaic and “barbaric” social/cultural forms. Another perspective from which Siebert views nationalism as being pathological begins with Hegel’s understanding of insanity. In its most basic sense, Hegel thought, insanity is alienation. While one can differentiate degrees and levels of alienation, Siebert explains, “insanity” is the name for the complete alienation of the individual from the species. The truly insane person in this sense has no interest in, and nothing in common with, others.20 On a collective level, this applies to nations. A nation can become utterly alienated from the world community of nations, opposed to all international institutions, seeing itself as having nothing in common with others. In its extreme form, this kind of alienation is also a kind of insanity called “nationalism.”21 As Siebert explains, ‘In modern nationalism, alienation – among individuals and nations, and from international organizations, and from humanity… returns again to its original meaning of insanity.’22 Understood in this way, nationalisms are often ‘religiously based and legitimated.’23 When they are, their insanity inevitably deepens. Examples are not hard to find: Russian nationalism aligns itself with Russian Orthodoxy; Chechen nationalism with Islam; Polish with Roman Catholicism; Serbian 18

Siebert, “The Development of the Critical Theory of Religion in Dubrovnik from 1975 to 2007,” in Ott, ed., The Future of Religion, pp. 1–68, 7. 19 Ibid., 6. 20 Siebert, “The German-Jewish Tragedy,” 1116. 21 Ibid., 1120. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.

Siebert on Nationalism as Pathology

207

with Serbian Orthodoxy; Croatian with Roman Catholicism; Israel with Judaism; Palestinian with Islam; and so on. Inevitably the form that these religions take is highly ideological.24 This means that they are distorted versions of the religion that support and stabilize and legitimize the stubborn national particularism in every case. Very often too, nationalisms attach themselves to religions in their fundamentalist forms. Siebert understands fundamentalism as stemming from a fear of modernity, of secularism, and of enlightenment. This fear leads to an a­ ttempt to ‘escape backwards into the religion of the fathers, and take the sacred writings literally.’25 The consequences pose dangers: from re-Christianizing Europe, to re-establishing theocracies, to certain forms of Zionism, to re-­establishing a Caliphate, and so on. This whole cluster of ideas (insanity, alienation, ideology, fundamentalism) is tangentially related to an even more basic critique of nationalism in Siebert, and it is a religious one. For this he reaches back to the ancient Hebrew prophets and their teaching on idolatry. The prophets held that this sin, perhaps the most fundamental of all sins, was the breaking of the first commandment. As Siebert explains, ‘What is wrong with idolatry is that the finite, natural, social, economic, political, and historical forces are hypostasized and reified into something infinite.’26 In other words, the God of Israel prohibits the absolutizing of the relative, the mistaking of the finite for the infinite. And nationalism is an instance of this, one with particularly horrific consequences in the 20th century, as it reached its final, most murderous form in fascism.27 As a collective neurosis, growing from time to time into a psychosis, nationalism has as one of its dire consequences an extreme “subjectivism.” Siebert describes it succinctly: a nation escalates idolatrously its own national consciousness and subconsciousness to the point where it concentrates on its particularity to such an extent that it loses contact and rapport with the general historical reality, and considers itself to be above other nations and even above humanity, and becomes unilateral, and turns against them in terms of an extreme nationalistic subjectivism: right or wrong my country; love it or leave it.28 24 25 26 27 28

Ibid., 1121. Ibid., 1122–1123. Ibid., 1145. On the idolization of nation, see also Siebert, “The Development of the Critical Theory,” 32. Siebert, “The German-Jewish Tragedy,” 1136.

208

Janz

In the u.s.’s historical/political context, this “subjectivism” is often referred to as American “exceptionalism.” It entered the national self-understanding by way of the Puritans who believed that God had chosen this people for greatness – to be a ‘shining city on a hill’ – an example of all that is best, for all other nations to emulate. Presidents repeat this endlessly in moments of crisis and moments of triumph. And presidential candidates repeat this because voters like to hear it. Here is the most obvious example of religion used in the service of a collective egoism. But such religion is obviously ideological. In Germany during the National Socialist period, German exceptionalism was grounded on Christian theology, particularly in its fascist form. Siebert points out how a good number of “Hitler’s theologians” (Emmanuel Hirsch, Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, Carl Schmitt, Joseph Lortz, etc.) used the Christian concept of providence to ground this blatantly self-serving subjectivism.29 On the other hand, and at the same time, National Socialist racial exceptionalism was grounded on the utterly phony “science” of racial anthropological theory.30 Siebert points out that it is this subjectivism which lies at the heart of a worldwide linguistic confusion: those who are “war heroes” for some are called “war criminals” by others. Our dead are “martyrs,” while theirs are “terrorists.”31 More importantly Siebert argues that one of the consequences of heightened nationalistic sentiment is what he calls the ‘violent destruction of the normative.’32 When groups absolutize their national interests, conventional morality is quickly set aside. Other lesser nations should certainly abide by these norms, but the interests of my nation supersede these norms. With this kind of thinking, everything becomes possible. What was once unthinkable – genocide, war crimes, torture, and so forth – these things are now justified. And thus begins the descent into the demonic. Thoughtlessly setting aside conventional moral norms for nationalistic reasons can also take milder forms. And here the United States comes in for pointed criticism on the world stage. All too often the u.s. operates on the implicit assumption that international law applies to all nations except itself. What the worldwide community of nations accepts as normative, the u.s. ignores when its interests are at stake, while at the same time censuring others for such behavior. Here we might add that nationalism brings with it a peculiar myopia:

29 30 31 32

Siebert, “Theology of Revolution,” 425. Siebert, “The German-Jewish Tragedy,” 1137. Ibid., 1136. Siebert, “From Conservative to Critical Political Theology,” 219.

Siebert on Nationalism as Pathology

209

the world community of nations can clearly see the contradiction and hypocrisy, which the u.s. remains oblivious to. For example, according to the existing body of international law, a country may not use force unless it has been attacked or unless force has been approved by the UN Security Council. On this basis the u.s. denounces Russia for arming rebels and conducting air strikes in Ukraine. But the u.s., not in selfdefense and not approved by the Security Council, arms rebels and conducts air strikes in Syria. So too, u.s. drone strikes around the world are all contrary to international law. Yet the norms, which the u.s. expects other countries to abide by, are deemed irrelevant when its interests are at stake.33 Very closely related to this “destruction of the normative” is what Siebert calls “the identity principle.” It too rests on the assumption of a nation’s special, privileged status, its exceptionalism, and so forth. It assumes that one nation represents the pinnacle of humanity, that it offers the world the ultimate exemplar of what it means to be human. And on the basis of this massive – truly psychotic – egoism, it concludes that what is done by individuals for the good of this nation is ultimately done for the good of all humanity. Our efforts to make ourselves the wealthiest, or the most powerful, will ultimately benefit the entire world. Fritz Haber, the German inventor of poison gas, argued in 1915 that it should be used on enemy troops to help Germany win the war, but also to save lives, and thus it was for the good of humanity. The u.s. President Truman used the same argument in ordering the first atomic bombs to be dropped on civilian targets.34 So for Hitler, who represents the most fanatical form of this insanity, the annihilation of six million Jews was for Germany’s good and at the same time for the good of the world.35 It is appropriate that this overview of Siebert’s treatment of nationalism ends precisely here, on the subject of Hitler. For Siebert, there can be no serious discussion of nationalism without eventually coming around to Hitler. From the time of World War ii and now on into the foreseeable future, Hitler and all his name represents is the specter hovering behind every discussion of nationalism, the ultimate warning that we are not dealing here with some harmless, collective self-affirmation or some benign statement about one’s collective identity. Hitler represents the potential depth and horror of this insanity, and the power of this disease to unleash immeasurable human suffering. No analysis of nationalism goes far enough if it leaves Hitler out. And Hitler’s fanatical insanity ultimately ends in what Siebert identifies as his “aristocratic 33 34 35

Cf. Margot Patterson, “Outlaw Nation,” in America, 24 (October 2016), 12. Siebert, “The German-Jewish Tragedy,” 1131–1133. Ibid., 1134.

210

Janz

principle of nature.”36 In nature, Hitler believed, there must be predators and prey, and so too in the human species. And the predator is fully justified in fulfilling its providential role. Nationalism, Siebert thinks, is pathological in that it portends this ultimate “regression into barbarism.”37 Bibliography Baum, Gregory. “A Tribute to Rudi Siebert.” In The Influence of the Frankfurt School on Contemporary Theology: Critical Theory and the Future of Religion: Dubrovnik Papers in Honour of Rudolf J. Siebert, edited by A. James Reimer. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Freeman, Samuel. “The Headquarters of Neo-Marxism.” The New York Review of Books, 64 (March 23, 2017), 63–65. Janz, Denis. “The Siebert Manifesto of the Critical Theory: An Appreciation.” In The Dialectics of the Religious and the Secular: Studies on the Future of Religion, edited by Michael R. Ott, ix-xiv. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Patterson, Margot. “Outlaw Nation,” in America, 24 (October 2016), 12. Reimer, A. James. “Nation and the Myth of Origin in Paul Tillich’s Radical Social Thought.” In The Influence of the Frankfurt School on Contemporary Theology: Critical Theory and the Future of Religion: Dubrovnik Papers in Honour of Rudolf J. Siebert, edited by A. James Reimer, 283–295. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Siebert, Rudolf J. “The Development of the Critical Theory of Religion in Dubrovnik from 1975 to 2007.” In The Future of Religion: Towards a Reconciled Society, edited by Michael R. Ott, 1–68. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Siebert, Rudolf J. “From Conservative to Critical Political Theology.” In The Influence of the Frankfurt School on Contemporary Theology: Critical Theory and the Future of Religion: Dubrovnik Papers in Honour of Rudolf J. Siebert, edited by A. James Reimer, 147–219. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Siebert, Rudolf J. Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness and the Rescue of the Hopeless, 3 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2010. Siebert, Rudolf J. “Theology of Revolution versus Theology of Counter-Revolution.” In The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society, edited by Michael R. Ott, 419–457. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

36 37

Siebert, “Theology of Revolution,” 425; “The German-Jewish Tragedy,” 1136, 1141, and 1150. Siebert, “The Development of the Critical Theory,” 6–7.

Chapter 7

April 1945 – the War is Over in Frankfurt am Main Hans K. Weitensteiner On Good Friday, 1945, an American military pastor came to see Pastor Rudolphi and requested that the following day, in the church of Sta. Familia, the Chaplain read Holy Mass at four o’clock, on Holy Saturday.1 Pastor Rudolphi reported: Almost with an apology, he accepted our paraments (liturgical garments), which I gave to him because his wrinkled garments did not fit the high altar, which was adorned with festive Easter decorations: dazzling white linen, the snowy silk of the suspension throne, and other floral decorations. There followed a silent Mass, in which neither a song, a joint prayer, nor a sermon interrupted the silence. Even the communion was not distributed, but it was followed by many confessions.2 On Easter morning, an American soldier entered the sacristy after the High Mass and asked Rudolphi, ‘in an almost unadulterated Bajuvar,’ to read a “measure” for him and his comrades. Pastor Rudolphi finally offered the “Bavarian” and his 20 comrades general absolution, in order to persuade them to go to communion on Easter. The Americans, who had initially appeared rather reserved, finally became quite accessible. They would have liked to sing a song if they had a common one. The hymn must be even worse in the United States than in Germany. ‘We were raised with a different language,’ explained my red-cheeked interpreter… They also did not find the courage to pray. And yet it was a beautiful, very edifying, and comforting hour for me. [It was] comforting for the soldiers as well. Before communion, I [told them] I had somewhere to go and solemnly proclaimed, ‘I give general absolution for you all.’ In any case, after I had spoken the confiteor [prayer to confess sins] and ­absolution, everyone came to the communion bank. The “Bavarian,” who 1 Translated from the original German by Dustin J. Byrd, Ph.D. 2 Chronicle of the Congregation of Sancta Familia (Chronik der Gemeinde Sta. Familia), 359. Sancta Familia (Sta. Familia) is a church in Ginnheim, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_008

212

Weitensteiner

a­ fterwards thanked his comrades, had a childlike joy in the Easter picture [we took], which he wanted to send to his “Mamman.” When I told him it was nice to be Catholic, he enthusiastically gave his approval. I myself have been very much affected by the experience of this hour in which these Catholic “enemies,” after all the war experiences, after all the hate propaganda, and with all the blind anger they have against the Germans, are like faithful boys from pastor Diehl, who is indeed a German, but also a priest of the Church of Jesus Christ.3 On the 15th of April, 1945, Pastor Rudolphi commemorated the inauguration of the Albertuskirche, which occurred seven years ago, in a Sunday sermon. His remarks about the sermon that he gave for the inauguration are interesting. His request to the faithful, that ‘We should sacralize the whole life,’ had garnished him a hearing with the Gestapo. He was questioned by a former Catholic priest, who in 1938, had been the leader of the Alfred Rosenberg organization in southern Germany. The former priest did not know then that he, Rudolphi, knew his identity. The saying: ‘We want to sacralize the whole life’ had been used by his “Inquisitor” in a major speech in Göttingen, and later in the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly). They wanted to know the source of that phrase, and accused him of knowingly politicizing Catholicism from the pulpit. He said, ‘If you were a Catholic, you would know that we teach our children to pray, and “to honor all things from God.” In plain words, that is what this phrase means.’4 With that, the interrogation was canceled. Rudolphi added: ‘Seven years have passed since then. Even today and at any time, the Christian demand can only be: to sacralize life. Because this totalizing claim of Christian thought stood in defiance to the totalizing claims of National Socialism, there could only be relentless hatred of Christianity on its part.’5 1

The Question of Guilt

On May 1, 1945, the Führer Headquarters reported: ‘The leader Adolf Hitler this afternoon at his command post in the Reich Chancellery, fighting to the last

3 Chronicle of the Congregation, 360. 4 Ibid., 361. 5 Ibid., 362.

April 1945 – the War is Over in Frankfurt am Main

213

breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany.’6 Thus ended the Third Reich, just as it had begun: with a propaganda lie. When the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich came into effect on May 9, 1945, the Second World War, instigated by Hitler, had cost at least 36 million lives. There are statistics indicating the death toll to be closer to 55 million. Almost as many people suffered from war injuries and over 3 million were missing. The economic consequence of this bankruptcy was not yet foreseeable. It was estimated at $150 billion. Europe lost its hitherto economic and political leadership and was divided into two distinct political and economic zones of influence. In the West, the United States, and in the East, the Soviet Union, both having rose to undisputed leadership positions, which established a new world order on the basis of opposing ideologies. With the rise of the Soviet Union to a global power, and the expansion of the Soviet satellite system, the East-World conflict emerged, which finally led to the Cold War and its first major event: the Berlin blockade. Immediately after the occupation of Frankfurt by the Americans, Father Rudolphi began to openly examine the question: who was to blame for the catastrophe that put Germany before the world court of history? Days after the defeat, the monstrous things that happened in the concentration camps were revealed. If you remember how close the danger was to yourself, then you must be horrified. Yet, how can one seriously blame the whole German people for these things? It is precisely the incalculable number of inmates in the camps that proves that the hardened fists of the Nazis machinery reached into every organ and terrorized the people. A considerable percentage of the entire German population was in imminent danger of ending up in a concentration camp. This ever-­ present threat was a horrible shock to all human beings. This morning I spoke in Holy Mass about the evangelist Mark. He had been guilty [of many sins] in his youth, even cowardly. We too have become guilty. But not as Churchill, the Americans, and the Russians, declare us guilty. We are carrying the guilt of our weakness in matters of faith, and our confusion of mental attitude. If in 1933 the bishops had called for a broad opposition to fascism, then this demand would have been ineffective, because the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles Treaty created a fever within a damaged people, which had confused the minds of Catholics; they only knew their political hopes and their 6 Ibid., 376.

214

Weitensteiner

d­ isrespected religious and moral conditions. We have a burden to carry, we who stayed home and faced the terror.7 As we have seen, Pastor Rudolphi was among those who faced National Socialism in the 1930s. He had welcomed Hitler’s foreign policy achievements in the 1930s, and in 1941 had spoken of the fact that Hitler alone was capable of defending Europe against the onslaught of Soviet communism. He understood too late that it was not a matter of revising the Versailles Treaty, nor of rescuing Western Europe from Bolshevism, the “demon of the peoples.” As late as August 1941, he had confided to his chronicle, ‘that only Hitler could accomplish the monstrous achievement of creating an army capable of encountering this Mongol storm.’8 Now he was filled with disappointment and guilt. On May 9, 1945, Pastor Rudolphi writes: Now the surrender is perfect. A tremendous victory rush goes through England, America, and maybe even Russia. The Third Reich has found a shameful end. So much hubris, so many crimes, and so much cowardly wretchedness. The lads who propagated the Third Reich on the radio without end; people who, according to their worldview and behavior, have only had the opportunity to end their own lives, have resorted to giving degrading speeches alongside the enemy in the deceptive hope (everyone seems to know this except for themselves) to find grace there. And we, the German people, face a catastrophe without scale. Things are still going their way. The potatoes of the last harvest are still in the cellar. In the ruined cities you can still find a little wood to cook the soup. But what will the situation in the coming months be; what will happen when December and January arrives: nobody knows. I myself express a heavy, almost painful, fear of the coming days. I see all the destroyed barges and ships on the Rhine; the destroyed bridges; the fairways blocked by the enemy’s temporary bridges; the destroyed factories; the captive men: how many millions could it be? Nowhere do I see even the smallest attempt of a new beginning. It is only this gigantic calamity of our war opponents that make the entire German nation responsible for the crimes of the past years so outrageous, because after all, one knows the untruths. Of the ten inmates from the concentration camps of the district X, eight were convicts or criminals.9 7 Ibid. 377. 8 Ibid., 378. 9 Ibid., 380.

April 1945 – the War is Over in Frankfurt am Main

215

Pastor Rudolphi could not break from the shock of May, 1945, that Germany of 1918 had now been overcome in 1945 by its “enemies.” The idea that Germany had to lose the war in order to exterminate National Socialism was not alien to him, yet he speaks of our “enemies.” Millions of people were killed or wounded in the fight against Germany. Could anyone who sowed hatred expect understanding and helpfulness in the first few days after the collapse? German guilt was bottomless. Revenge and retribution, which subsequently broke over Germany, was the price she paid. However, Rudolphi’s remark that eight of the ten prisoners from the X-area concentration camp had been convicted, is particularly unacceptable. Should this statement be used to assert that, after all, a large number of concentration camp inmates were tormented for a legitimate reason? The first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, views the question of the guilt of the German people quite differently. On February 23, 1946, he writes the following in a letter to the pastor of the Elisabeth Church in Bonn, Bernhard Custodis: In my opinion, the German people carry the blame, along with the bishops and the clergy, for what happened in the concentration camps. It may be true that afterwards not much could have be done. The blame is earlier. The German people, including the bishops and clergy to a large extent, joined the National Socialist agitation… For the rest, however, it has been known – even though the camps were not known to such an extent that their personal freedom and legal principles were trampled on – that in the concentration camps great atrocities were perpetrated; that the Gestapo, the SS, and in part also the troops in Poland and Russia, proceeded with unprecedented cruelty against the civilian population. The Jewish pogroms of 1933 and 1938 took place in public. The hostage murders in France were officially announced. So it really cannot be said that the public did not know that the National Socialist government and army command were constantly violating natural law, Hague Conventions, and the simple commandments of humanity. I believe that if the bishops had been sent to prison or to the concentration camps, it would not have been any harm done, on the contrary. But that did not happen, and that’s why it’s best to keep silent.’10

10

Welche Kultur soll die Deutschen leiten? Konrad Adenauer über sein Volk, die Vergangenheit und Grundzüge einer christlich begründeten Politik. (Zum 125 Geburtstag des ersten Kanzlers der Bundesrepublik) in the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, January 5, 2001, 4.

216

Weitensteiner

Pastor Rudolphi could not break with his beliefs even after the surrender of his German nationalist worldview. His complaints, however, were not unjustified in all respects. In order to be able to correctly assess the situation in May of 1945, one must include American foreign policy. At that time, the American side lacked a convincing answer to the question of how Germany should proceed after the war. The American military governor, Dwight Eisenhower, and his deputy, General Clay, were therefore dependent on the 1944 amended Directive jcs 1067, of 26 April, 1945. It said: It must be made clear to the Germans that Germany’s reckless warfare and Nazi fanatic resistance have destroyed the German economy, making chaos and suffering unavoidable, and that they cannot escape responsibility for what they themselves harbor… Germany is not occupied for the purpose of liberation, but as a defeated enemy state.11

Bibliography Adomeit, Hannes. Imperial Overstretch: Germany Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998. Balser, Frohlinde. Geschichte der Stadt Frankfurt am Main 1945 – 1989: Aus Trümmern zu eine europäischen Zentrum. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1995. Blet, Pierre. Papst Pius XII und der Zweite Weltkrieg: Aus den Akten des Vatikans. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000. Bullock, Alan. Hitler und Stalin: Parallele Leben. Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1999. Clay, Lucius D. Entscheidung in Deutschland. Frankfurt a.M., 1950. Cornwell, John. Pius XII. Der Papst, der geschwiegen hat. München: C.H. Beck, 1999. Corsten, Wilhelm. “Kölner Aktenstücke zur Lage der Katholischen Kirche in Deutschland 1933 – 1945.” In Dem Führer gehorsam: Wie die deutschen Katholiken von ihrer Kirche zum Kriegsdienst verpflichtet wurden: Dokumente, edited by Thomas Breuer. Oberusel: Publik-Forum, 2000. Darnstädt, Thomas, and Klaus Wiegrefe. “Vater erschieß mich,” Der Spiegel, March 25, 2002, 13. Darnstädt, Thomas, and Klaus Wiegrefe. “Lauft, ihr Schweine,” Der Spiegel, March 30, 2002, 14.

11

Ernst Duerlein, Das Einheit Deutschlands. (Frankfurt a.M./Berlin: Metzner Verlag, 1961), 27.

April 1945 – the War is Over in Frankfurt am Main

217

Denzler, Georg. Widerstand ist nicht das richtige Wort – Katholische Priester Bischöfe und Theologen im Dritten Reich. Zürich: Pendo Verlag, 2003. Deuerlein, Ernst. Die Einheit Deutschlands, Bd.1. Frankfurt a.M. /Berlin: Metzner Verlag, 1961. Diamant, Adolf. Gestapo. Frankfurt a.M., 1988. Fest, Joachim. Der Untergang und das Ende des Dritten Reiches: Eine historische Skizze. Berlin: Rowholt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002. Goebbels, Joseph. Tagebücher 1924 – 1945: Erweiterte Sonderausgabe. München: Piper Verlag, 2000. Horchem, Hans Josef. Überzogene Anklage, Anmerkungen zur neuen Diskussion über Pius XII in Herder Korrespondenz. 54 3/2000 S.129–135 Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889–1936: Band 1. München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1936 – 1945: Band 2. München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000. Kropat, Wolf Arno. Kristallnacht in Hessen: Der Judenpogrom im November 1938: eine Dokumentation. Wiesbaden: Kommission für die Geschicht der Juden in Hessen, 1988. Lapide, Pinchas E. Rom und die Juden. Ulm/Donau: Herder Verlag, (1967) 1998. Rißmann, Michael. Hitlers Gott: Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewusstsein des deutschen Diktators. Zürich and München: Pendo Verlag, 2001. Rudolphi, Georg Wilhelm. Heilige Kirche, Kirche der Heiligen. Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht Publishers, 1949. Welche Kultur soll die Deutschen leiten? Konrad Adenauer über sein Volk, die Vergangenheit und Grundzüge einer christlich begründeten Politik. (Zum 125 Geburtstag des ersten Kanzlers der Bundesrepublik) in the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, January 5, 2001, 4.

Chapter 8

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach: the Foundation of a New Spirituality? Francis Brassard The purpose of this chapter is to suggest, based on Bošković’s epistemological approach, a middle way between a scientific activity aiming at the discovery of the realities of the objective world and a mystical endeavour whose ultimate goal is to bring about a complete transformation of the subject. These two forms of human creativity could be seen as the two ends of a spectrum with regard to what they produce in terms of ideas related to, among other things, the status of the material world and the existence of a spiritual Being. Indeed, in the first case, as it is believed that our development and autonomy depend exclusively on our ability to understand and manipulate the world as it is presented to our senses, there is a tendency to evacuate from our discourses any reference to transcendental realities. In the second case, as our ultimate happiness hinges on the ability to dissolve any link to the objective world, there is a propensity to portray that world as entirely negative or even to deny it any form of real existence. In short, for some scientists, God is a delusion; for some mystics, the world is an illusion. Thus, between these two extremes leading humanity to a state of some kind of schizophrenia, there should be room for a path of reconciliation that reunites the aspiration for subjective transformation with that for the discovery of objective realities. Ruđer Josip Bošković (1711–1787) was a Jesuit priest and a scientist from the former Republic of Dubrovnik in today’s Croatia. He published many works in such fields as mathematics, physics, astronomy, geodesy and even archaeology. He is also known as being the first natural philosopher to have formulated a unified theory of forces in order to explain all the phenomena of the observable universe. It is said that he anticipated many of the modern models of physics and chemistry. In this regard, Werner Heisenberg, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, said: The remarkable concept that forces are repulsive at small distances, and have to be attractive at greater ones, has played a decisive role in modern atomic physics: In chemistry, in the constitution of matter out of atoms, Bohr’s quantum theory of atomic structure can be related precisely to

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_009

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

219

this concept, and the study of the atomic nucleus over the past thirty years has taught us that the particles which make up the atomic nucleus, protons and neutrons, are held together precisely by such a force.1 And to underline the fact that Bošković has been one of the great visionaries of modern science, Heisenberg added: ‘His main work, Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, contains numerous ideas which have reached the full expression only in modern physics of the past fifty years, and which show how correct were the philosophical views which guided Bošković in his studies in the natural science.’2 The question we may legitimately ask at this point is what gave Bošković the ability to formulate, without the support of modern instruments of observation, ideas that anticipated those of modern physics as well as the confidence to stand up for them, taking into consideration the fact that he did not have the means to perform sophisticated experiments for their validation. We have a similar situation with Einstein, who was convinced about the validity of his theory of general relativity before it was confirmed by Arthur Eddington’s observations in 1919. There must be some subjective experience that serves as an internal means of validating our newly generated views of reality. Such an experience may not guarantee the factuality of an idea, something that ought to be confirmed by external means of validation like experimentation and measurement, it could nevertheless provide a more or less tacit reference point that guides the ways we formulate our research questions and hypotheses, how we interpret the description of our past observations, how we design new experiments, etc. Our exploration of Bošković’s epistemological approach will consequently focus on identifying the internal factors that allowed him to anticipate some of the developments of modern physics. It will also enable us to demonstrate one intimate connection between religion and science. Indeed, if it is possible to argue that these two types of activity are producing entirely different views of reality, they nevertheless converge when it comes to generating the type of mental disposition necessary for creating these views, views that, taken in their respective fields, are able to produce profound and lasting meaningful experiences. Thus, what is of interest is not only one person’s experience of making sense of the world, but how she is, so to speak, being fused with the world she is making sense of, so that she is capable of establishing, through her observations and actions, new relations with that world. Whether we call this 1 Žarko Dadić, Ruđer Bošković, iii. Izdanje. (Zagreb: Školska Knjiga, 1998), 126. 2 Dadić, Ruđer Bošković, 127.

220

Brassard

process of fusing between an observing subject and an observed object “adaptation to the environment” or “reconciliation with God’s creation,” in the end, we may be dealing with only one single process, a process that is itself a reconciliation between two aspirations, namely, that of comprehending the world in its entirety and that of transforming it to make it, hopefully, a better place to live. Let’s start our exploration by analyzing how Bošković defined and used one of the classical mental tools for the validation of one’s conclusions, namely inductive reasoning. The first person to look into that question was probably James Mark Child, who translated in 1922 Bošković’s Theoria into English. First of all, for Child, what Bošković is offering us is not so much a theory, but rather a ‘logical exposition of the results that must follow from the acceptance of certain fundamental assumptions, more or less generally admitted by natural philosophers of the time.’3 In other words, Child is telling us, as an opening statement of his own analysis, that Bošković’s work is a kind of exercise in deductive reasoning as opposed to a formulation of a view that can stand on its own so that it may be considered as an original inspiration for new ways of interacting with reality. Child then continues his analysis of Bošković’s approach by quoting Clark Maxwell who said, regarding the validity of one of Theoria’s fundamental assumptions, that is, the axiom of impenetrability or the idea that no two material points can simultaneously occupy the same spatial point, that it is ‘an unwarrantable concession to the vulgar opinion,’4 a prejudice founded on the experience of large-scale objects. Contrary to Maxwell’s assertion, Child believes that it is hardly warranted since ‘Boscovich, in accepting the truth of the axiom, has no experience on which to found his acceptance.’5 More explicitly, he adds: His material points have absolutely no magnitude; they are Euclidean points, “having no parts.” There is, therefore, no reason for assuming, by a sort of induction (and Boscovich never makes an induction without expressing the reason why such induction can be made), that two material points cannot occupy the same local point simultaneously; that is to say, there cannot have been a prejudice in favour of the acceptance of this 3 J.M. Child, A Theory of Natural Philosophy put forward and explained by Roger Joseph Boscovich, S.J., Latin-English edition from the text of the first Venetian edition (1763) (Chicago & London: Open Court Publishing Company, 1922), xi. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. Italics are from Child.

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

221

axiom, derived from experience of bodies of sensible size; for, since the material points are non-extended, they do not occupy space, and cannot therefore exclude another point from occupying the same space.6 He concludes his analysis by saying that Bošković must have accepted this axiom purely on a theoretical basis because ‘there are no readily apparent grounds for the acceptance of the axiom; and no serious arguments can be adduced in its favour.’7 However, perhaps as an attempt not to completely invalidate the work he is about to present, Child, who considers that the acceptance of this axiom ‘constitutes practically the whole of the theory of Boscovich,’ and, by the same token, as a means to rescue some credibility for Bošković, who obviously does not abide to the sound principles of positivism, adds that this axiom may have been the result of an unwarranted generalization. Indeed, Bošković was aware that if only Newton’s law of gravity was at work in the universe, all the stars would collapse in on themselves. To overcome that discrepancy, he postulated that there is a departure from the gravitational force when the distance between two objects changes so that, at very close range, that force becomes even repulsive. That force would produce an oscillation similar to what we observe in the specific case of an elliptic orbit. Thus, according to Child, it was this consideration that led Bošković to formulate the principle of impenetrability, a principle that was generalized, in his Theoria, to apply to all phenomena. It appears that, also judging from his reaction to Maxwell’s comments, Child assumed that what constitutes a valid ground for induction is something that can accept the entire burden of the experience of meaning. From this perspective, inductive reasoning, as a simple progression from specific observation to the formulation of a general principle, is the inversion of deductive reasoning, which derives specific cases from general rules. But the direct progression from a concrete perception to the formulation of an abstract idea may not be the only type of connection involved in the experience of meaning. Unrelated phenomena may be brought together by analogy or by presupposing a common structure to these phenomena. Thus, elliptic orbits may be related to the fact that two points of matter cannot occupy the same space in the same way that the stability of intense magnetic fields found in neutron stars is connected to the behavior of electrons. To some extent, the principle of analogy is a kind of guide similar to the one which helps lawyers to search for court cases as precedents in order to strengthen their defense. It is when such precedents have 6 Ibid. Italics are from Child. 7 Ibid.

222

Brassard

been influential in bringing about a decision favorable to that defense that the court cases assume the label “precedents.” Similarly, the belief that some phenomena may serve as analogies to identify a common structure is going to feed a process leading to an experience of meaning which consists in the discovery of that common structure, and only when that discovery has been considered satisfactory that the gathered phenomena will assume the label “analogy.” This process is obviously dialectical and its aim is to find the ultimate key that will help us decipher the language with which the book of Nature has been written. Bošković discusses the validity of induction and its use in physics at article 40 of his Theoria. First of all, regarding its general value, Bošković is convinced that, when it comes to the investigation of the general laws of Nature, this means of establishing valid knowledge has great power and as such, it is hardly superseded by any other methods. Using this method, ancient philosophers attributed to the material bodies such properties as extension, the ability to take any shape, mobility, and impenetrability; later philosophers added in the same way the properties of inertia and general gravitation. Secondly, Bošković discusses the nature and, more importantly, the limits of the power of induction in establishing valid knowledge. He is fully aware that ideally for induction to have the power to prove the truthfulness of an idea, it should include all possible cases pertaining to that idea. Because it is logistically impossible to observe everyone of these cases, Bošković not only confirmed the usual assumption regarding induction, namely the fact that it is probabilistic, but also that all knowledge regarding the observable world, including the scientific laws that account for its regularities, can never be considered as absolute certainty. At this point, it may be important to make a distinction in order to avoid some confusion regarding the validation of a theory. Stephen Hawking, following Karl Popper’s idea of a good theory, said: ‘Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.’8 But, if we accept Bošković’s induction, we have to assume that it will be more resilient than what Hawking believes to be true about any theory. Indeed, if there is some resistance as to maintaining a wrong or deficient theory, most modern scientists would agree with Hawking’s remark that one ‘can always question the competence of the person who carried out the observation.’9 However, if an induction is to be used as a means to 8 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Books, 1988), 11. 9 Ibid.

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

223

c­ hallenge some of our usual interpretations of the phenomenal reality including the results of previous experiments, it has to be able to maintain its ground in the face of contradictory observations. Here, the cause of the resilience to give up an idea appears to be of a different order and the resilience itself is even justifiable whereas in the first case, it is not. Are we thus dealing with a contradiction or with two different but perhaps complementary epistemological approaches? Let’s try to explore the presuppositions on which these two approaches rest to see in what way they can be distinguished. What Hawking has in mind when using words like “experiment,” “prediction” and “observation” is the idea that a scientific theory is just a mental model that needs not be a representation of the objective reality.10 If it is said that the first requirement of a good example of such theory or model is to accurately describe a large class of observations, we should understand that the description pertains to the question how phenomena occur and evolve. The question why is of no significance here. Put differently, we are dealing with the instrumental dimension of our experience of reality without being concerned about its ontological dimension. The second requirement, which is a consequence of the first one, is to say that the satisfying model should make definite predictions about the results of future observations. This second requirement is in fact more important than the first one, since it is easy to be fooled with nice ideas, as Aristotle did with his theory of the four elements, ideas that do not yield any definite predictions. The way reality behaves is thus what we are paying attention to in order to validate the models we adopt. And that behavior is very much understood in terms of a cause and effect succession of events. When that succession of events is missing the anticipated mark, we have to rethink the path, or part of it, it followed. Because there is a pressure to break down that succession of causal events to something clearly distinguishable, it is relatively easy, if we are dealing with competent people as Hawking mentioned, to reach a decision as to whether we have indeed identified an object that does what is expected. I believe that it is where the power of mathematics lies: together with accurate measurement, it strengthens our confidence in our ability not so much in validating good theories, but rather in eliminating bad ones. As such, the present epistemological approach is a form of via negativa and it is in this context that I would argue that Popper’s principle of falsification acquires all its force. If the previous epistemological approach is a form of via negativa, Bošković’s induction is a perfect example of the via positiva where a principle, an idea, or 10

‘It exists only in our mind and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean).’ Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 10.

224

Brassard

anything that can be seized and held on to by the mind is projected onto the observable reality. In this context, we are looking at the world of objects with the expectation that these objects will reflect in one way or the other the positive principle directing our observation of the world. In fact, this positive principle regulates not only the way we look at reality, but also our imagination as to its evolution. As such, a positive principle is the basis of all thought experiments (Gedankenexperiment) that have been very useful in constructing our models of reality on the basis of which hypotheses are formulated and real experiments are conducted. If it has been argued that these models are just in our minds, we cannot say that much for principles that reveal in a meaningful way hidden realities like the essential properties of the objectified world. Put differently, these models may be in our minds, but our minds themselves are in our bodies, which interact with the world we try to understand. Regarding the distinction to be made when proposing criteria for the validation of a theory, I would like to add that the idea that a theory may be a refinement of another theory, like Einstein’s general relativity was for Newton’s gravitational laws, could be better synthesized by saying that theories form a kind of hierarchy where a more refined theory fixes the limits of applicability of the less refined one. To explain the nature of this hierarchy, I would like to draw a parallel with the structure of human language. Here, we also have a hierarchy of levels of meaning, namely, the level of the letters, of the words, of the sentences, of the text and finally, the level of the context which can also be layered when considering psychological, social, and historical factors, just to name a few of these layers of context in which a text has been produced or interpreted. Like a word that limits the range of how a letter is allowed to be pronounced or a sentence that defines the proper meaning of a word, each level of meaning is limited by the level that encompasses it while it is setting the limits of the one it is encompassing. Thus, whatever is being identified and accepted as valid explanation of reality may be, in addition to its ability to include a wide range of phenomena and making predictions about their evolution—that would be a type of horizontal validation—further validated by determining, on the one hand, how well it regulates the activity of the principles it includes and, on the other, how well it allows itself to be regulated by the principles that are including it. That would be a type of vertical validation. It may be possible to combine these two types of validation by saying that the principles revealing a property of reality or a law by which that reality evolves are like centers of gravity that have been seized by the mind. And it is when they have been firmly seized that they become interpretative matrices as well as generators of successful actions. This is similar to when we have understood the meaning of the letter “a”: we are then able to recognize all its past,

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

225

present and future manifestations as well as to create new ones recognizable by those who also have understood the meaning of that letter. To some extent, a community of letter-“a” knowers is created in the process and those who joined that community are being so to speak universalized by submitting themselves to what has been validated by other people. Finally, it is to be noted that this individual act of holding tight or of submission to a principle revealing parts of reality would not be possible to maintain in the long run if the principle itself was not revealing something true about that reality in which we, as observers, are anchored. Again, contrary to what many scientists like Hawking are arguing, we can say that our models of reality and the principles on which these models rest are not just in our mind. After having presented the nature of his induction, Bošković proceeds by giving an example of how we could arrive at such an induction. Thus, still dealing with the notion of impenetrability, he says that as we see how bodies around us are preventing other bodies from occupying their position or are yielding that position when they are not capable of resisting so that no body could occupy the same place at the same time, we conclude that impenetrability is a property of matter. And when we do see how certain bodies are penetrating into others, like oil into marble or light into crystals, we still hold to the principle of impenetrability by supposing that bodies are made of empty pores that allow some of them to pass through others. With this simple example, is Bošković not confirming Maxwell’s judgment quoted at the beginning of this discussion, namely the idea that impenetrability is merely ‘an unwarrantable concession to the vulgar opinion’? As will be seen later, Bošković is quite aware of the risk of entertaining a prejudice based on sense perception. So, his example cannot be taken as such. Instead, he is resting his case using a principle of investigation (principium investigationis), which is in the present context a version of the null hypothesis or the default position. Indeed, after presenting his analogy with large-scale objects, he adds that, when dealing with absolute properties, properties that have no relation with our senses, we may assume that, if such a property is found in sensible masses of bodies, the parts constituting these bodies will also be endowed with that property, unless there is a positive reason against that assumption.11 To some extent, it is Maxwell—based on Child’s account—that is entertaining a prejudice by presuming a break in a continuity from large objects to tiny particles. Without being given any reason why there should be such a discontinuity, we are bound to say that Maxwell is here assuming that being large or being small refer to absolute properties of nature and not to 11

Theoria, §40. The italics are mine.

226

Brassard

r­elative ones like the colors we attribute to certain objects, but not to their parts. It is important for Bošković to make that distinction, because it tells us whether we are dealing with a principle that only applies to one level of meaning or whether it can be considered valid across all levels. In the first case, the induction should not be extended beyond its limits of applicability whereas in the second case, the induction remains valid as long as no real evidence is brought against it. This principle of investigation is not infallible, especially when the evidence is negative or when there is no positive reason to abandon an induction. However, probably as an attempt to strengthen the force of persuasion of the principle of investigation itself, Bošković says that, if there is a positive reason not to transfer an induction we assume to be pertaining to an absolute property, it is likely to reveal itself within the range of what is observable. Why should it be so? If we consider that an object as a whole is a structure corresponding to one level of meaning and the parts that constitute it—which are here beyond the reach of the senses—as a second level of meaning, the concept of analogy implies that what is observable pertains, as far as our experience of making sense of objective realities is concerned, to one such level of meaning. In other words, to say in the present case that we have a violation of the analogy (analogiae laesio) means that the principle revealed by the induction failed to completely embody itself in the reality or in the class of cases under observation. And it is this lack of pervasion that should become obvious if we carefully pay attention to what we are observing. Consequently, if it does not manifest itself, we have no reason not to extend the induction formulated as a result of observing one class of events to another class, which is here beyond the limits of the senses. To some extent, the null hypothesis that Bošković adopted as principle of investigation follows our “instinct” to look for encompassing principles of explanation. Thus, an analogy is for Bošković more than just a superficial comparison between phenomena, but rather, as a concept intimately related to the principle of induction, the way a principle or a property is incarnating itself within a group of phenomena. And if an induction is comparable to a centre of gravity that puts into relation various phenomena within a field of many, an analogy would be that which delimits the boundaries of what has been put into relations. Another way to illustrate the intimate relation between an induction and an analogy in the context of Bošković’s epistemological approach could be by looking at it as a form of dialectics between a referent and a reference. Not only should we evaluate whether a principle totally pervades a specific group of phenomena, but also whether a group of phenomena that we have more or less delimited arbitrarily points in the direction of a single principle. This form

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

227

of dialectics should consequently force us to isolate and refine the principles organizing the phenomena under observation as well as to guide us in selecting what ought to be included in the group of phenomena organized by these principles. That takes care of the horizontal plane of validation of an induction and its analogies or field of application. As for the vertical plan of validation, it is a little bit trickier as for each level of meaning or class of phenomena corresponds a specific mode of how a given principle manifests itself. For example, one may assume that simplicity, not only as an esthetic principle, but also as an economy of explanation, is organizing reality at all its levels. But what would account for a true manifestation of this principle at the level of the particles that constitute a mass? What would it be for the mass itself? If a sphere has often been viewed as the most economical way to organize its elements, does “being a sphere” mean anything for these elements? Perhaps, at their level, it is just maintaining a specific distance between each other that incarnates the principle of simplicity. It is to be noted that, in this context, a reductionist explanation is the attempt to transfer the idea “being a sphere” to all levels of meaning, not the principle of simplicity unless, as already mentioned by Bošković, this idea is an absolute propriety of matter and not just a relative one like the color of an object. Thus, the reason why the vertical plan of validation is a trickier form of validation lies in the fact that we venture here with an idea into a class of phenomena—that class may not even be properly defined—that is likely to be very different from the class of phenomena on the basis of which that idea was generated. This concludes our discussion of Bošković’s understanding of the principle of induction, a principle that he believed to be the only one that can really help us be successful in our exploration of nature and on which depends our abilities, which are based on observations, to study such sciences as medicine, anatomy, optics, astronomy and many others.12 The next part of this chapter will try to see how an idea, a principle or a discovery generated by such an induction fits within a wider cognitive structure, a structure layered in such a way that it is very much likely to correspond to Nature’s own levels of organization. If we take that cognitive structure horizontally, the validation of each layer depends on the historical context in which we find ourselves. For example, the accuracy and reliability of our observations of the phenomena confirming or negating a hypothesis will depend on the greater part on the quality of the instruments at our disposal, on our ability to set up good experiments, on the precision of our measurements, etc. It is certainly not a coincidence 12

Ruđer Bošković, De continuitatis lege (1754), bilingual edition Latin-Croatian, ed. Josip Talanga (Zagreb, Školska Knjiga, 1996), §136.

228

Brassard

that modern science really took off the moment we were able to build dependable clocks. Other concrete factors are also likely to facilitate or hinder our ability to validate our ideas, factors that are related to the degree of social and economic development at a given time and location. In short, this horizontal validation depends on the extent of the community of people dealing with the problems it tries to solve. The wider the community, the greater the chances of having a universal or stable solution. When it comes to a vertical validation, however, scientists are very much on their own. This is where they enter unchartered territories by formulating inductions on the basis of other inductions. This is where the encompassing layer of meaning, for example, Einstein’s relativity with respect to Newton’s laws of mechanics, is often perceived as pure speculation or as something that resembles metaphysics. It is so, not so much on account of a deficiency in observable phenomena, but because there is an already established and often dominating way to arrange these observable phenomena in a significant relation. It is in this context of uncertainty, novelty and very often absence of support by a community, either on account of indifference, marginalization or even an outright antagonism that scientists have to draw their confidence in the validity of their ideas from an experience that has to be highly subjective. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, despite its subjective nature, that experience has allowed a Bošković to anticipate the development of modern physics, at least in terms of models to explain the structure of the observable reality. What is the nature of this subjective experience and why may it be considered a reliable guide in our exploration of reality? These are the questions I would like to explore in the remainder of this chapter. Bošković gives us a summary of his epistemological approach in the dedication of his Theoria to the Count of Migazzi. After having introduced his work as ‘a new kind of Universal Natural Philosophy’13 that ought to be viewed as a synthesis between Leibniz’s notion of simple non-extended elements and Newton’s concept of forces, he stresses the fact that his model is not just a patchwork of different popular scientific and philosophical ideas of his time or just the product of an ars combinatoria.14 On the contrary, these ideas are interlocking and as it were cemented together in a truly marvelous way.15 In view of this, the summary of his approach goes as follows:

13 Bošković, Theoria, x. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid.

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

229

I put on one side all prejudice, and started from fundamental principles that are incontestable, and indeed are those commonly accepted; I used perfectly sound arguments, and by a continuous chain of deduction I arrived at a single, simple, continuous law for the forces that exist in Nature. The application of this law explained to me the constitution of the elements of matter, the laws of Mechanics, the general properties of matter itself, and the chief characteristics of bodies, in such a manner that the same uniform method of action in all things disclosed itself at all points being deduced, not from arbitrary hypotheses and fictitious explanations, but from a single continuous chain of reasoning.16 Let’s look at this approach starting with the notion of prejudice. A prejudice is usually defined as a preconceived opinion that is not based on actual experience. One can think of it as an idea that distorts our observations of the phenomena. The Indian mystics often use the experience of seeing a snake when it is actually a rope to explain the nature of the mistake involved in a prejudice: the substratum of our experience is real, but our interpretation of it is off the mark. To be more precise, we could say that the error consists in, very much like a wrong induction, extending a meaning over its legitimate boundaries. As examples of this overextension of meaning of an interpretive principle in the context of scientific discourses, we have Aristotle’s confusion between weight and speed of fall based on the idea of an object’s “eagerness” to reach its “natural” position or Copernicus’s circular orbits as a projection of the belief that circles are more “perfect” than any other trajectory. We can be more precise in our understanding of the notion of prejudice if we assume that successful actions are the only means of validating knowledge. In this context, a prejudice is a misconceived idea about the cause of a phenomenon. For instance, realizing that a rain dance, no matter how sophisticated and spectacular it might be, is not going to cause rain to fall. A magic formula is not going to cure a person either. And the way to reveal an idea as a prejudice—or a superstition, a belief or a myth, depending on the context—is to force its hand to see if it fulfills its promises. Put differently, to test it by doing experiments, observing and measuring the results. Here, accurate sense perception is of vital importance in establishing the validity of a causal relationship between a specific action prompted by an idea and the consequences of that action. We may doubt the validity of our ideas, the relevance of our experiments, but never are we allowed to question the reality of the experience itself 16

Theoria, x; Child’s translation.

230

Brassard

of being a witness to the occurrence of an event. Without this “blind” confidence, it would be impossible to do any action. However, as just alluded, that blind confidence in the reality of our sense experience may play tricks on us. A sense perception is never a raw experience: it is suggestive of ideas. For example, seeing a sunrise, we say that the sun is moving around the Earth. For Bošković, as a philosopher who wants to see reality for what it is and not for what it ought to be in order to generate successful actions, the ideas directly suggested by our sense experience—Bošković called them primary ideas—are likely to be wrong because their validity has not been properly examined.17 These ideas are prejudices and it is easy to be attached to them as some of them have been reinforced from our childhood if not from the time we were in the womb of our mother. In other words, because these primary ideas or prejudices are so much fused with our successful actions on the environment, they are going to distort our vision of reality, especially so long as these actions are fulfilling our desires.18 Because we are now searching for an ontological dimension of our experience of meaning—and not just being contented with an instrumental truth— we are moving into a mode of thinking that requires a certain degree of renouncement: firstly of certain desires, then of the actions fulfilling these desires and finally, of the ideas validating these actions. That last type of renouncement is accomplished by a systematic doubt of the validity of what is given by sense experience. Thus, Bošković has somehow liberated us, as ­Nietzsche put it, from the hold of our senses.19 However, as will be seen quite soon, Bošković is not going to advocate a complete liberation as most Eastern mystics do, but just request some slack for an important activity to occur, namely, that of reflexion (reflexio). Before moving to what is at the centre of the subjective dimension of Bošković’s epistemological approach (induction being its objective dimension), I would like to further investigate the implications of this difference between instrumental or practical knowledge and ontological truths for our understanding of the notion of prejudice. If we argue that the acquisition of ontological truths require some degree of disconnection from our sense experiences, are we not preparing a platform for an idealistic theory of meaning where all our realities are mentally constructed? It would be so if Bošković were to deny the instrumental validity of our sense experiences, something that he definitely does not do as he considers 17 18 19

Theoria, §160. Theoria, §163. While commenting on Bošković’s Theoria, he said, in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1895), that it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has been so far obtained on Earth.

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

231

that observations and experiments are important components of the process of generating new inductions as well as refining old ones. What should be asked instead is what is the nature of the relationship between an induction as an abstract piece of information and primary ideas provided by our direct observation of the phenomenal reality? To explain what he meant by forming an idea or arriving at an induction by the process of abstract reflexion, Bošković gives the example of how we can conceive the notion of a hole by negating the existence of matter that may be present at the location of a hole.20 We can break down this example by saying that firstly one has to see matter or imagine it as though it would be directly seen by observation, then, as a mental act, we have to negate it by realizing that what is given by the senses is not there. This mental act forces a state of detachment that makes it possible, as a final stage, for the idea of a hole to emerge. The question that has not been resolved is to know what happened then to that sustained negation of seen matter? Is it completely gone? To answer that question, I would like to resort to a model formulated by Michael Polanyi, a scientist and philosopher, who tries to reconcile the two types of knowledge involved in the formulation of an induction. Thus, Polanyi says: Consider the act of viewing a pair of stereoscopic pictures in the usual way, with one eye on each of the pictures. Their joint image might be regarded as a whole, composed of the two pictures as its parts. But we can get closer to understanding what is going on here if we note that, when looking through a stereo viewer, we see a stereo image at the focus of our attention and are also aware of the two stereo pictures in some peculiar nonfocal way. We seem to look through these two pictures, or past them, while we look straight at their joint image. We are indeed aware of them only as guides to the image on which we focus our attention. We can describe this relationship of the two pictures to the stereo image by saying that the two pictures function as subsidiaries to our seeing their joint image, which is their joint meaning.21 So, applying this description of the emergence of an induction as a joint meaning, we would say that the negation of the seen or imagined matter has now been shifted to a status of subsidiaries, that it is now implied or tacitly known in the experience of mentally seizing the hole. To avoid the confusion that we 20 21

Theoria, §133. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago and London: The University of ­Chicago Press, 1975), 34.

232

Brassard

are not dealing with two different objects of knowledge, Polanyi prefers using the notion of awareness to distinguish between two different cognitive and affective experiences of the same thing, namely, the subsidiary awareness that refers to what is directly given by sense perception and the focal awareness for the abstract induction as a synthesis of what is given by sense perception. Not only Polanyi’s model reconciles two different ways of seizing the same reality, but also the apparent incompatibility between a vision of reality and actions. Indeed, he says with regard to how we perform a task successfully: When I use a hammer to drive a nail, I attend to both, but in a different way. I watch the effects of my strokes on the nail as I wield the hammer. I do not feel that its handle has struck my palm but that its head has struck the nail. In another sense, of course, I am highly alert to the feelings in my palm and fingers holding the hammer. They guide my handling of it effectively, and the degree of attention that I give to the nail is given to these feelings to the same extent but in a different way. The difference may be stated by saying that these feelings are not watched in themselves but that I watch something else by keeping aware of them. I know the feelings in the palm of my hand by relying on them for attending to the hammer hitting the nail. I may say that I have a subsidiary awareness of the feelings in my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving the nail.22 In an earlier version of this analogy, Polanyi said that the fact of not watching the feelings in themselves makes them instruments of our attention.23 Thus, the instrumental value of our sense experiences is confirmed, not only as a guide of our actions, but also as support of our abstract syntheses of reality. Moreover, we can now better understand why inductions as objects of our focal awareness are like centers of gravity: all sensations produced by the different parts of a material object are merged into one point that “computes” simultaneously all their variations. Let’s now return to Bošković’s summary of his epistemological approach. After having put on one side all prejudices, Bošković tells us that his investigation of Nature starts from incontestable fundamental principles that are commonly accepted and not from arbitrary hypotheses and fictitious explanations. At this point, as he will be doing at many places in his Theoria, Bošković is 22 23

Ibid., 33. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), 55.

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

233

a­ ppealing to the community of serious scientists, especially Newton and his disciples, as external criteria for the validation of his own ideas. It is not so much to come to the same explanations of reality as for recuperating all the observations and measurements that accurately trace the structure and evolution of certain phenomena. For example, we know that if the centers of gravity of many masses are on the same line, then the centre of gravity of the entire system has to be on that line. We can also predict the new trajectories of two bodies that collide obliquely by using Newton’s well proven second law of motion and a simple geometrical rule for the resolution of forces. These are facts of experience that cannot be denied. But, when it comes to explaining why these events can be observed, Bošković provides a different ontological explanation than that which has been hitherto suggested by his predecessors and contemporary colleagues. As a matter of fact—this has to be made clear— Bošković did not observe anything that has not been seen by other scientists of his time, he did not perform experiments that would reveal new phenomena or behavior of Nature, but he just provided a different model to make sense of what was already known and attested as actually occurring. However, when assuming general principles like that of continuity, an idea that has been proposed by Leibniz, Bošković felt that he could not only rely on the reputation of his colleagues and so he had to provide deductive, inductive and metaphysical arguments for their support. But these arguments are not proofs; they are to be seen as justifications for engaging his exploration of reality at the points from which he believes that exploration should proceed. The experience of their validation is yet to come. That experience occurs in the context of what Bošković calls the chain of deduction or chain of reasoning. He also says that this chain is continuous and single. These two adjectives suggest, together with the image of a chain, that we are dealing with a kind of path with stages to go through before arriving at a specific goal. What Bošković seems to be hinting at is that his exploration of reality resembles that of the various paths of spiritual transformation. If it is so, then we have a well-established model of explanation that will allow us to contextualize what Bošković understood by his notion of chain of deduction. If this appears to be an unwarranted assumption, I would say that the alternative model is, in the light of what has been said so far about the experience of induction, less probable. Indeed, if it is understood that the essence of the transformative model consists in saying that we arrive at a new induction or the discovery of a new principle of explanation by bridging logical gaps, the alternative model consists in moving through a series of syllogisms where there is no such gaps. Moreover, in the first case and as will be made explicit, one is so to speak going through an existential roller coaster whereas in the second case,

234

Brassard

one is smoothly floating over a progression of ideas that are, in the end, only an articulation of the same logical rules or principles. This is usually the type of experience we get by following algorithms. Perhaps there is a surprise at the end of the line, but nothing really exciting happens in the process of reaching that end. Consequently, if we are looking for something that could serve as an internal means of validation, we have more chance to find it in a process that is existentially engaging than in one that is emotionally neutral. There is another reason why I think Bošković assumed that his chain of deduction had something in common with a process of subjective transformation. The exposition of his epistemological approach is preceded, as a reference to what the dedicatee of his Theoria, the Count of Migazzi, is very likely to be familiar with, by a eulogy that highlights the main elements of a person’s moral development. Thus, Bošković says: Of a truth, that well-known old saying, “What you do, DO,” which from your earliest youth […] had already fixed itself deeply in your mind, has remained firmly implanted there during the whole of the remainder of a career in which duties of the highest importance have been committed to your care. Your strict observance of this maxim in particular, joined with those numerous talents so lavishly showered upon you by Nature, and those virtues which you have acquired for yourself by daily practice and unremitting toil, throughout your whole career, forensic, courtly, and sacerdotal, has so to speak heaped upon your shoulders those unusually rapid advances in dignity that have been your lot. It has aroused the admiration of all, both peoples and princes alike, in every land and at the same time it has earned for you their deep affection.24 Let’s now look at these elements in order to flesh out his chain of deduction. If a spiritual transformation, the acquisition of a moral virtue or the discovery of a new principle of explanation are understood as passages from a given affective and cognitive mental structure to another, we know, mostly by experience, that this first structure exerts a restraint on our efforts to move toward the desired state of being. Such efforts always require a steady commitment, which usually consists in a repeated decision of sticking to an original project. As this commitment has been clearly highlighted in the description of the Count of Migazzi’s attitude, I believe that we may assume that Bošković also implied it in his continuous chain of deduction. 24

Theoria, vii; Child’s translation.

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

235

In general, commitment refers to the ability to harness the necessary energy to accomplish a task or to achieve a goal. That energy cannot by itself move anything in a given environment; it needs objects that can directly interact with the other objects within that environment. These objects are like levers that not only allow the circulation of energy between a desiring structure and the world to be acted upon, but may also increase the power of that energy. As such, these objects are operators that can be validated by the effects they produce. In the context of spiritual transformation, the power of ideas, views, teachings or philosophies is well attested. When the Buddha is arguing with other spiritual masters, what is at stake is never the ontological value of an idea, but rather its efficiency in concentrating one’s energy to achieve in the most efficient way the transformation of one’s mental structure. For the Count of Migazzi, that lever was the maxim What you do; for Bošković, it is the fundamental and incontestable principles. Because the validity of these principles as starting points is relative to the results they produce, we now have a different context to understand the significance of a priori statements. Indeed, instead of considering them as arbitrarily chosen or as hypotheses yet to be demonstrated by experiments, we can build up our confidence in their validity from the type of cognitive activity they generate as well as the kind existential ­experiences they bring about. That finally brings us to discuss the notion of reflexio. According to Peter Henrici, reflexio is not to be understood in terms of the ‘psychologically reflective ability with which the consciousness (the mind) can perceive its own operation,’25 but rather in the sense of ‘active thinking: “meditatio quaevis” or “rectae rationis usus”“26 In this meaning, reflexio has above all the function of a critical examination and the correction of ideas. It is also the ability to realize ‘the limits of our sensitive knowledge and thus also to think beyond these limits.’27 It is precisely this last function that makes reflexio, still according to Henrici, ‘the most important faculty of cognition’ for Bošković.28 As such, the cognitive activity generated by the practice of reflexio is not without precedents in the spiritual traditions of the East. For example, we have the notion of tarka (a Sanskrit word), which, according to one of the Hindu mystical schools of Hinduism, Advaita Vedānta, ‘is needed (i) to ascertain the purport of scriptural passages, (ii) to remove doubts (saṃśaya) and contrary 25

Peter Henrici, “The Theory of Knowledge of Ruđer Bošković in His Time,” in The Philosophy of Science of Ruđer Bošković, Proceeding of the symposium of the Institute of ­Philosophy and Theology, S.J. (Zagreb: Institute of Philosophy and Theology, 1987), 35. 26 Ibid., 36. The two expressions are from the Theoria, §534 and §160 respectively. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 31.

236

Brassard

­beliefs (viparyāsa), and (iii) to convince us of the probability of the existence of what is to be known, i.e. Brahman [the Ultimate Reality].’29 Similarly, we find in many mystical discourses of India, including Buddhism, the term vicāra. This Sanskrit term has been defined, among other things, as deliberation, consideration, examination, or discussion; conflicting judgment; hesitation; and knowledge.30 According to the Bodhicaryāvatāra, a Buddhist manual of meditation composed by Śāntideva (7th – 8th century), vicāra is considered to be an antidote to one’s feelings resulting from attachment to false ideas and for this reason, what it generates is the food of the yogin’s meditative absorption.31 Thus, tarka and vicāra, as it is the case with Bošković’s use of reflexio are designating a mental operation that is characterized by a constant critical examination of reality on the basis of accepted ideas. This critical examination should bring about, on the one hand, a sense of doubt as to the validity of the primary ideas derived from the senses and, on the other hand, a strengthening of our conviction in the validity of these accepted ideas as instruments preparing the ground for their full realization. Put differently, the development of a sense of doubt and the strengthening of one’s conviction are the two sides of a single thrust that finds its points of support in ideas that have been assumed as a priori. Let’s look at these two sides individually in order to further explicit Bošković’s epistemological approach. As alluded to above, an a priori idea or principle functions like a lever on which it is possible to lean in our exploration of reality. We might also say that it works like a wedge that we insert between an interpretation of an observed phenomenon, a primary idea, and the automatism of action that is consolidating that interpretation. It is this mental action that simultaneously brings us in a state of inhibition of action and that forces us to step back or take a distance from what our sense experiences are suggesting to us. However, one should be reminded that this relativization of sense experiences is not the product of following some kind of methodological diktat like ‘We should always doubt what we see’ or, as the mystics used to say: ‘The world is just an illusion,’ but rather, through the practice of reflexio, it is the result of adding another sense of perception, a sense that is in the present context exclusively mental. Thus, the experience of detachment is not accomplished by subtracting something from our usual experiences of the phenomenal reality, but by adding a new way to relate to it. 29

Satchidananda Murty, Revelation and Reason in Advaita Vedānta (Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 1974), 149. 30 Apte’s Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary, p. 1459. 31 Verse 93 of the 9th chapter.

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

237

Imagine, for example, that, while watching a sunrise, we say that the sun is moving around the Earth. Based on a common sense resulting from our day-today experiences in the world, that statement is legitimate. However, because of the automatism of thinking we developed by our actions in this day-to-day world, it would be very difficult to directly negate the idea that the sun is moving around the Earth at the moment we are watching the sunset. It is, in fact, existentially very upsetting to withdraw from our sense experiences by the sheer force of negation. But, if we accept a priori the idea that the sun is fixed in the sky and that it is the Earth that is pivoting on its axis, we have the possibility of redirecting the energy of our sense experiences into the cultivation of a different awareness or way of interpreting what we actually see. It is in this sense that we have acquired a new sense of perception. This new sense also enables the development of new skills, if we consider perspicacity in the act of observing a skill. Thus, an a priori statement, as understood in the context of Bošković’s continuous chain of deduction, is not just an idea that fits with other ideas like the pieces of a puzzle or that force a series of syllogisms to go in a specific direction, but an information that can be converted into an instrument of observation. Like any other such instruments, for example, a microscope or a telescope, we appreciate their worth by evaluating their ability to increase the range of our senses and by our own ability in formulating far-reaching inductions. Again, similar to neophytes using for the first time sophisticated instruments, there is a period of trial and error in getting these instruments do perfectly what they should be doing for us. This trial and error period corresponds to the reflexio. To illustrate this process of gradual construction, where our expectation is refined through constantly trying to make sense of an a priori idea or to handle an instrument as it is meant to be, imagine that you have asked to go to a city and that the only guide you have is a postcard of that city. Assuming that you have no limits as to the material resources necessary for accomplishing your task, you are likely to move from one city to another in order to see the environment that matches the postcard that has been given to you. The postcard should already give you clues about where to look for that city. It may, for example, depict oriental-style buildings or a desert-like background landscape. That should be sufficient to make intelligent guesses as to where you should go. The more you move around looking for the city, the more you are going to pay attention to the little details on the postcard and the more you are able to imagine what is to be expected to find at the city you are looking for. That imagination expands in an abstract way the range of what is explicitly shown on the postcard making it thus a better instrument for making intelligent

238

Brassard

guesses. This accumulative process is going to lead you to a point of saturation where, stuck between looking either at the postcard or at the actual city itself, you have to give up the postcard so that you may enjoy the fruit of having finally reached the place you have been looking for. We can further use the metaphor of the guiding postcard to understand the intimate relations between the ontological, instrumental and existential dimensions of an idea. Indeed, what is depicted on the postcard corresponds to the ontological aspect of our experience of meaning, the fact that it guides us in our decisions is its instrumental aspect and, finally, the experiences of failure as well as the ones of success that are generated by our moves give it its existential reality. It also allows us to see how an object that has been firstly looked at becomes something that is seen through, if we imagine how the postcard, at the moment of reaching our destination, becomes confounded with what it represents, in a way similar to what we see at the beginning of some movies where the first scene is a still picture that gradually animates itself or fade away so that we move, as a spectator, into the story. That experience of fading away or becoming transparent is a confirmation that we are now using an instrument as it should be. In this regard, Polanyi uses the example of a blind person’s stick that has become an extension of his sense of touch by “disappearing” as an object of perception.32 Like the hammer of his previous example, the stick, when used properly, is now perceived in a subsidiary way. I would thus argue that, in the context of Bošković’s continuous chain of deduction, it is because an a priori accepted idea has become so to speak transparent at some point in this chain that it is considered valid. One may note that, in the context of a series of syllogisms, it is exactly the other way round. Indeed, at any point in the development or expansion of this series, we always see the starting a priori affirmation to a point where we wonder if the whole exercise has generated anything new or just repeated, in an unexpected way sometimes, what we already know. To bring this chapter to a close, I would like to specifically apply this general explanation of the mechanism of subjective validation to Bošković’s continuous chain of deduction. This will allow us to have a glimpse at the various steps leading to the formulation of his theory of forces and, most importantly, to understand why Bošković’s epistemological approach may be seen as a new form of spiritual endeavor. According to Ivica Martinović, the deductive chain, or the line of reasoning that led Bošković to his original concept of forces acting between particles of matter, consists of four distinct elements: (1) analogy and simplicity in nature; (2) a critical approach to the results of experiments and to the capacities of the 32

Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning, 36.

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

239

senses; (3) the distinction between mathematical and physical contact; and (4) the principle of continuity in nature.33 The acceptance of the principle of simplicity as an a priori is likely to challenge the idea that there are two ways of creating movement in nature, one that regulates at a distance the planets and the stars and a second that explains through the notion of contact the interaction of objects of the sub-lunar world, a notion that somehow imposed itself as a result of our direct experiences with reality. Thus, the acceptance of the principle of simplicity forces us to take a distance toward what is given by our senses. This experience of detachment will translate itself here into a realization, which says that mathematical contact, as a negation of distance between objects, has to be a prejudice. This means that even if we “see” some form of contact between objects, they are not in reality touching each other and consequently, there must be a distance between them. Consequently, this realization has two components: the first component is, as just mentioned, a denial of a prejudice and the second is a question that forces us to formulate a principle that explains why there is always a distance, as it is the case with astral bodies, between the objects that surround us. For Bošković, that principle was that of continuity, a principle that was already formulated by Leibniz, but is now the result of an experience of resolution brought about by reflexio. In other words, the notion of contact, as an expression of the idea of discontinuity, having been refuted, has now given room to that of continuity. We may assume that this experience of resolution had to involve the bridging of a logical gap since there is no obvious connection between absence of contact, as a critique of a primary idea produced by sense perception, and the formulation of the general principle such as that of continuity. The principle of continuity is now a new induction that could be used as a cognitive tool like that of the conservation of energy for the investigation of the phenomenal world. As a matter of fact, going beyond the limits of the chain of deduction as presented by Martinović, Bošković will apply it as the starting point of another cycle of investigation that will finally lead him to formulate his famous law of forces. Indeed, the principle of continuity is going to cause its own experience of detachment that forces the realization of a new prejudice, which consists in believing that sudden change of movement is due to a collision between objects. If we negate the existence of sudden changes, 33

Ivica Martinović, “The Fundamental Deductive Chain of Bošković’s Natural Philosophy,” in The Philosophy of Science of Ruđer Bošković, Proceeding of the symposium of the Institute of Philosophy and Theology, S.J. (Zagreb: Institute of Philosophy and Theology, 1987), 67.

240

Brassard

then we have to ask, what exactly accounts for the changes of trajectories? The answer that came to Bošković was that there must be, in addition to Newton’s notion of attractive force, a repulsive force acting between objects. It is the principle of simplicity again that forces Bošković to assume that we are not talking about two forces, but a single one. And it is the principle of continuity that brings him to accept that the changes in the distances between objects take place in a continuous manner or without jumps. Thus, referring to Polanyi’s two types of knowledge, we can say that the principle of simplicity was first used as a cognitive instrument, which is perceived objectively, to become a subjective reality through which the principle of continuity has been realized. Put differently, the principle of simplicity is now seen subsidiarily while the principle of continuity is the focus image. Then, it is the principle of continuity that has been transformed into an instrument by which the notion of single force acting in the universe has been realized. This means that, Bošković’s deductive chain is a kind of succession of cycles, where one moves from grasping an idea as an object of the mind to having it transformed into the content of a subsidiary awareness through which it will be possible to see or discover a new idea. The latter can in turn be seized to start a new cycle leading to another realization. As previously discussed in relation to the experience of validation of one’s instruments of observation, each cycle of realization validates the finding of the previous ones. It is like constructing a building where each additional floor confirms the solidity of its foundations. By this process of validation, each floor in the structure, except the first and the last, has a double nature: it is a product of the preceding one as well as an instrument for the subsequent one. This process of successive validation is, I believe, that which accounted for Bošković’s confidence in his theory of the continuous curve of forces. Whether his theory has some validity for the progression of modern physics, this will be ascertained only by using external means of validation. However, one may wonder whether the process of subjective validation can occur if it were not corresponding to something real in the external world as both types of reality have to reconcile themselves in one way or the other when we assume that any observing subject has to be an extension of the observed world. Moreover, as each new realization about our reality seems to project us further away from it as observers and, at the same time, to increase our sense of intimacy with it as actors, I would say that the process of discovery, as implied by Bošković’s epistemological approach, is a kind of spiritual path in which a person is so to speak consuming the world and becomes, by this process, more universalized. Indeed, each new discovery, when integrated into a person’s mental structure, allows that person to have a wider range of sensitivity for

Bošković’s Epistemological Approach

241

comprehending the realities of this world as well as to give her a greater potential for creativity. Put differently, through this process of integration of ideas that are capable of grasping the nature of the many phenomena of this world, a person is allowed to expand her own autonomy with regard to these phenomena as well as, through her gain in intimacy with parts of her environment, is capable of transforming them into instruments for her own creations. In the end, it is the enjoyment and, especially, the articulation of this potential into other realities that are the ultimate criteria for the validity of the knowledge that has been first discovered by induction, and then objectively refined through a process of critical thinking like that of reflexio to be subjectively integrated or consumed. To some extent, through the path of scientific discovery and creativity, a person is learning how to melt into the world while fully retaining her sense of individuality and uniqueness. It is because it brings about a personal transformation that we may designate that path, following the motivation behind many religious discourses, as spiritual. However, the present spiritual path distinguishes itself from the predominantly mystical paths of subjective transformation in which the subject comes to be fully dissolved into the awareness of his all-encompassing vision of the phenomenal world. These paths are aiming at the annihilation of the self whereas, as just seen, the path of discovery and creativity seeks to expand it so that it embraces as much of the world as possible. Similar to the centre of gravity that becomes more and more identifiable as the mass, of which it is a centre of gravity, is expanding in a field of forces like the gravitational field, a person, whose mind is being expanded by the process of discovery and integration, becomes more salient in whatever environment she happens to find herself. That spiritual path, based on a reaffirmation of the value of the material world, ought to be, according to Bošković, following the intuition of Augustine, one of the major ways for Christians to know God and, more importantly, to play an active and conscious part in His project to transfigure the world. Bibliography Bošković, Ruđer. De continuitatis lege (1754), bilingual edition Latin-Croatian, ed. Josip Talanga. (Zagreb: Školska Knjiga, 1996). Bošković, Ruđer. A Theory of Natural Philosophy put forward and explained by Roger Joseph Boscovich, S.J., Latin-English edition from the text of the first Venetian edition (1763). Translated by J.M. Child. Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing Company, 1922. Dadić, Žarko. Ruđer Bošković, III. Izdanje. Zagreb: Školska Knjiga, 1998.

242

Brassard

Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. London: Bantam Books, 1988. Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books, 2010. Henrici, Peter. “The Theory of Knowledge of Ruđer Bošković in His Time” In The Philosophy of Science of Ruđer Bošković, Proceeding of the symposium of the Institute of Philosophy and Theology, S.J. Zagreb: Institute of Philosophy and Theology, 1987. Hétu, Jean-Luc. Psychologie de l’expérience intérieure. Montréal: Éditions du Méridien, 1983. Martinović, Ivica. “The Fundamental Deductive Chain of Bošković’s Natural Philosophy” In The Philosophy of Science of Ruđer Bošković, Proceeding of the symposium of the Institute of Philosophy and Theology, S.J. Zagreb: Institute of Philosophy and Theology, 1987. Murty, Satchidananda. Revelation and Reason in Advaita Vedānta. Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 1974. Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1962. Polanyi, Michael, and Harry Prosch. Meaning. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1975. Smolin, Lee. The Trouble with Physics. London: Pinguin Books, 2006. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Le milieu divin. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957.

Chapter 9

The Power of Ideas and Life: Alexander Herzen and the Russian Intelligentsia – an Outline Gottfried Küenzlen 1

About the Power of Ideas1

Seen from the perspective of cultural and social science, “ideas” – insofar as they do not only crop up as fleeting mental constructs but last for a certain length of time – can develop into effective forces in cultures and societies. Ideas are certainly not “eternal;” they can become lost, change or transform themselves in the course of history, and with them cultures also transform themselves, change or become lost. However, where “ideas” prevail they can – albeit not always and everywhere but in a certain “chain of circumstances” – as Max Weber describes it – come to influence a culture and play a crucial role in the way cultures and societies develop. Such power in “ideas” can become particularly effective in the field of politics. For political action is always embedded in a network of interests and ideas. As surely as politics have a direct bearing on the pragmatic nature of economic, social, security-political, power-political and all other interests and needs, and as surely as the primary political task is to secure life’s external circumstances, the following is also true: Like all human actions, political activity is always integrated in pre-existing spiritual and cultural conditions. Even the dominance of pure utilitarianism and economism, which nowadays seems to determine almost all areas of politics, is in itself an expression of intellectual conditions and a view of the world – the view that economism and utilitarianism are the sole deciding factors in the formation of socio-political relations. It is therefore important to keep the following in mind: A realistic analysis and diagnosis even of current politics and their foreseeable tasks and challenges will always have to raise the question of their explicit or implicit spiritual and cultural presuppositions as well. Likewise – as Max Weber also argues – the actions of the politician himself and the power for which he is striving and which he is exercising, always serve 1 In deep gratitude this text is dedicated to Rudolf J. Siebert: the great scholar, the inspiring thinker, and the good friend for so many years.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_010

244

Küenzlen

a cause or a belief, regardless of the nature of the goals and contents of his actions. Otherwise, because it lacks “inner stability,” the political action becomes lost in the undetermined and is bound to fail in the long run. Exactly what the cause, in the service of which the politician strives for power and uses power, looks like is a matter of faith. The politician may serve national, humanitarian, social, ethical, cultural, worldly, or ­religious ends. The politician may be sustained by a strong belief in “progress” – no matter in which sense – or he may coolly reject this kind of belief. He may claim to stand in the service of an “idea” or, rejecting this, he may want to serve external ends of everyday life. However, some kind of faith must always exist.2 Self-evidently, such a reflection on the relation between “ideas” and political action – which is only suggested here – has nothing to do with some form of “idealistic” concept of the political! Again, it is always rather a network of interests and ideas. The following applies in this context: You cannot explain Marxist or sociologistic ideas by reducing them to mere derivatives of social structures and interests, but neither is it possible to regard ideas – even where they develop into guiding “cultural concepts” – as detached from individual and socially communicated interests. A cultural science approach that goes far beyond the contradistinction of “ideas” or “interests” or of “culture” and “society” can again be found in Max Weber, although there is no version of this view in his more or less fragmental work that can be traced back to a readily accessible “theory.” In this case, the following information must suffice: the aforementioned Weber quotation about “ideas and interests” from the introduction of his book Economic Ethics of the World Religions (Wirtschaftsethik der Weltregionen) contains the basis of Weber’s insight into the relationship between culture and society: Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the “world images” that have been created by “ideas” have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. ‘From what’ and ‘for what’ one wished

2 Max Weber, Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 117.

The Power of Ideas and Life

245

to be redeemed and, let us not forget ‘could be’ redeemed, depended upon one’s image of the world.3 Without entering into a precise exegesis of this quotation and its place in the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions,’ we can maintain that for the cultural scientist and sociologist Weber, ideas are not merely stocks of a special empire within the mind, but rather are always bound as a matter of course to the “dynamic of interest.” The interests are therefore the immediate impetuses behind the action and are always co-determined by the historical social situations. Indeed, ideas on their part guide people’s interests (be they material or ideal) into their tracks, albeit not always and everywhere but in particular where they have grown into world images, and thus influence how societies develop. Regardless of what exactly the relationship between ideas and interests or between culture and society looks like in the respective steps and stages of a historical development, without the society-determining power of governing cultural ideas, the development of societies and their real situation cannot be understood. After all, we are dealing with culture, including the ideas and world images it contains, and its role in at least co-shaping how societies develop. This would also obstruct one’s insight into the potential political power of ideas if one wanted to ascribe it fully to the “pre-political” area. Certainly not all ideas, and the human and existence perceptions based on them, must demand being implemented politically. Yet, where “ideas” as lifestyles significantly influence political action, they assume a highly realistic significance and effect, which, to deny in terms of political science, prevents a real understanding of cultural, social and, more precisely, political situations that actually ­prevail. But how can ideas – particularly those that develop into world images – gain cultural, and in turn, political power? It will not be possible to go into more detail about this far-reaching issue here, but I would like to briefly mention one finding that can help to understand our chapter: the position of cultural intelligence and its own meaning in the secular culture of the modern world. There is no doubt that pre-modern culture was also dependent in all its different development stages on producers, preservers and heralds of cultural meaning. As priests and prophets or as scribes and sages, for example, these individuals delivered central cultural messages and cultural powers, used their authority to secure their reliability and to put them in words, thus making them communicable in the first place. However, one of the specific features of 3 Ibid., 280.

246

Küenzlen

the secular culture of the modern age is that, along with the emergence of secularity, this-worldly interpretations of life and its associated tenets and promises, the former interpretation of existence – preserved in religion and myth and institutionally administered by the church – lost its significance or was at least relativized. In what at least tends to be the immanently autonomous culture of modern societies, an equally autonomous and secularly comprehending cultural intelligence is now gaining the status and authority to interpret the new reality, to deliver its cultural messages and powers, and to give voice to them. Ultimately, it was the responsibility of the secular intellectual classes in the field of political-secular religions of the modern age to translate their ideas into political agenda. The task was: How do ideas become slogans? The fact that they become slogans and have been able to significantly determine the course of the history of our modern age is not least the work of a secular cultural intelligence. However, the fact that ideas, regardless of their content and historical value, have the ability to gain social and cultural power at all, is based in the final analysis on a certain anthropological state, i.e. that humanity, without the “guidance of nature” (as Arnold Gehlen would say), is dependent on culture: ‘Since man does not feel that he can survive with the guidance of nature, he is always a practical task for himself and, as a result, an object of reflection. For he only comes to terms with himself and the world without nature’s guidance because he does not act reactively but meaningfully.’4 “To act meaningfully,” however means that human actions are always and inevitably tied to interpretations, perceptions of existence and world views contained in ideas, and possibly to shaped views of the world. In a nutshell: The power of ideas has its roots in the fact that ideas can gain power over people. Of course the pragmatism of the action is not only – and possibly only rarely – determined by the power of ideas to provide meaning, but is oriented towards all kinds of interests, needs, and “value spheres.”5 And so as certainly as the network of very different incentives in which material and ideal interests coalesce represents the “normal case” of human lifestyle, a look at history shows that there has always been the non-everyday “special case” in which people 4 ‘Weil der Mensch sein Überleben nicht von Natur gesichert findet, ist er sich selbst stets eine praktische Aufgabe und deshalb ein Gegenstand des Nachdenkens. Denn mit sich selbst und der Welt kommt er ohne die Leitung der Natur nur deshalb zurecht, weil er sich nicht reaktiv verhält, sondern sinnhaft handelt.’ Friedrich H. Tenbruck, Die kulturellen Grundlagen der Gesellschaft: Der Fall der Moderne. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989), 46. 5 Max Weber: “In almost every important attitude of real human beings, the value-spheres cross and interpenetrate,” in Max Weber, Max Weber: Methodology of Social Sciences, ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949), 18.

The Power of Ideas and Life

247

lived their lives entirely or almost entirely out of the force of ideas, or even a single idea. This is demonstrated, for example, by the history of the saints, prophets and other “religious virtuosos,” the brotherhoods and communities of convictions. However, even essential streams and development stages of the modern secular culture are accompanied by secular-religious ideas, hopes of salvation and promises of redemption that augur salvation, redemption and comprehensive meaning of life in the here and now.6 And so even the secular religious history of the modern era has its priests, prophets, saints and martyrs, its brotherhoods and communities of conviction. An impressive e­ xample of such a secular religious community of convictions is a small group of intellectuals in Russia around 1850: the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. 2

The Russian Intelligentsia

The term “intelligentsia” refers to a group of Russian thinkers, authors and publicists in the pre-revolutionary Russia of the 19th century. Following Isaiah Berlin, whose studies we will be drawing on repeatedly in the following, the history of the impact of the Russian intelligentsia can hardly be appreciated highly enough.7 Without the ideas of the intelligentsia, without their moral, political, and social structure and effect, it would have not been possible to take the path towards the Russian Revolution, as this path was fed by various incentives. Certainly, the 1917 revolution and its consequences could not have been foreseen by the intellectuals around 1850, and for some it certainly didn’t materialize in a way they would have wished it to. ‘Revolutions are preceded by a long historical path, and they reveal the specific characteristics of a nation… Every people brings about revolution with the baggage it has gathered in its past.’8 The ‘souls of the Russian Revolution’ primarily include the Russian thinkers, authors and intellectuals of the 19th century ‘who came up with ideas that were to have a revolutionary impact not only in Russia itself but also well

6 See Gottfried Küenzlen, Der Neue Mensch. Zur säkularen Religionsgeschichte der Moderne. München: 1994 Neuaufl. Frankfurt a.M., 1997. 7 See Isaiah Berlin, Russische Denker. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1981; Isaiah Berlin, Wider das Geläufige. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Wissenschaft, 1982. 8 ‘Zu Revolutionen führt ein langer geschichtlicher Weg und in ihnen enthüllen sich die nationalen Eigenarten… Jedes Volk macht Revolution mit dem Gepäck, dass es in seiner Vergangenheit angesammelt hat.’ Nikolaj Berdjaev, Die Geister der russischen Revolution (Salzburg: Stifterbibliothek, 1977), 9ff.

248

Küenzlen

beyond its borders.’9 But what was the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia, its intellectual and social uniqueness and character, and to what ideas was it committed?10 At this point, a few brief details need to be given about the historical and mental landscape in which the intelligentsia existed. The first aspect that needs to be looked at is the relationship between Russia and the West, i.e. Western Europe. The reforms of Peter the Great, carried out in an act of brute despotism, brought Russia into contact with the West, mainly with its technical achievements but also with the world of its ideas.11 With the victory over Napoleon and the march to Paris, Russia as a big power had advanced to the center of Europe, and relations between Russia and Western Europe now assumed new historical dimensions.12 In the interior of Russia, the period following Peter the Great, particularly under the power of Catherine ii and Alexander i, was a period during which progressive Western and despotic traits mingled in a strange way. Then, however, came Czar Nicholas I (1825–1855), whose rule forms part of the period in which the intelligentsia lived. The empire of Nicholas I was one of very dark despotism. The Czar’s idea of a state was a police state – a termite state, and he very nearly actually achieved this. Such a state also included the idea that anything intellectual – any form of intellectual culture (e.g. philosophy) – was regarded as suspicious from the outset, as a dangerous or at least utterly superfluous outgrowth on the body of the state. The consequence was an omnipotent and omnipresent system of censorship and spies that put an end to all freedom of public expression, creating an atmosphere of political and intellectual oppression.13 Virtually the only choice for the intellectuals, most of whom were descended from the sophisticated aristocracy, was inner emigration, quietism, or cynicism. One of the main attitudes towards life amongst the educated of the period was the feeling that they belonged to a generation of “superfluous people” (Lišnie Liudi) – a genre of people that is encountered again and again in the literature of the time, e.g. in Pushkin’s Onegin, in Lermontov’s Pechorin or in Turgenev (The Diary of a Superfluous Man, 1850).

9

‘die Ideen aufgebracht haben, die nicht nur in Russland selbst, sondern weit über seine Grenzen hinaus umwälzend wirken sollten.’ Berlin, Russiche Denker, 166. 10 A general overview can be found in Richard Pipes, Die russische Intelligentsia. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962. 11 On this subject and on the following, see Dimitrij Tschižewskij, Russische Geistesgeschichte (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1974), 155ff. 12 Berlin, Russische Denker, 168ff. 13 Tschižewskij, Russische Geistesgeschichte, 210–213.

The Power of Ideas and Life

249

It was in this situation that the intelligentsia was born. It was the “memorable century” (Isaiah Berlin) from 1838 to 1848, which saw the formation of that unique intellectual, cultural and social structure henceforth associated with the term “intelligentsia.” Its most influential representatives were the “young radicals” Belinsky, Turgenev, Bakunin, and Herzen. They all had a common incentive, which was to come out of the situation of “superfluous people” and to avoid developing an attitude characterised by quietism, indifference, and cynicism, the fate of the educated of their time. Yet, how was it possible to overcome this situation? In brief: It was the overwhelming power of ideas – maybe exclusively – that captured this group of intellectuals and determined their innermost thoughts. ‘Imagine, then, a group of young men, living under the petrified regime of Nicholas I – men with a degree of passion for ideas perhaps never equalled in a European society, seizing upon ideas as they come from the West with unconscionable enthusiasm, and making plans to translate them swiftly into practice and you will have some notion of what the early members of the intelligentsia were like.’14 The ideas and messages that captured them were those of the West: English and, above all, French enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau, St. Simenon, Fourier, Proudhon, but also the influences of German philosophy, Kant, Herder, Fichte, and most importantly Hegel, not to mention Goethe and, in particular, Schiller. That they were able to gain such a life-determining power was partly the result of the fact that they emerged “late,” and at the same time met with a culture that knew neither Renaissance nor Reformation, and in fact had no legacy of social ideas of its own. ‘They appeared suddenly and all at once, so to speak, before Locke, Hume and Adam Smith, before Voltaire, Rousseau and Condorcet, before Kant, Herder and Hegel, Saint Simon, Comte, Fourier and all the other ideological and scientific teachings, and also before all the liberalistic or socialistic movements that made a name for themselves.’15 And so Western ideas provided a sense of direction for their own existence and also provided a reason to incorporate these ideas into their own Russian culture and society. The intelligentsia thus constituted itself as a community. Its members regarded themselves as the bearers of a message of liberation from the chain of ignorance, superstition, and the fear of tsarist suppression; they knew that they 14 15

Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 144. ‘Man trat sozusagen auf einmal und zugleich vor Locke, Hume und Adam Smith, vor Voltaire, Rousseau und Condorcet, vor Kant, Herder und Hegel, Saint Simon, Comte, Fourier und all die sonstigen weltanschaulichen und wissenschaftlichen Lehren, wie auch vor all die liberalistischen oder sozialistischen Bewegungen, die nun eben von sich reden machten.’ Friedrich H. Tenbruck, Die unbewältigten Sozialwissenschaften oder die Abschaffung des Menschen. (Graz/Wien/Köln: Styria, 1984), 145ff.

250

Küenzlen

were the only people in Russia that were captured by the enlightened and emancipatory ideas of Western Europe, and the task of carrying the light of those ideas into Russian darkness was not only their main mission but also the basis for the solidarity that prevailed within their group. Only against this background is it possible to understand the unique character that shaped the Russian intelligentsia and that has been associated with the term ever since: the intelligentsia was driven by a secular set of beliefs.16 Political issues always became questions of attitude, on which “shore” its members stood determined whose friend they could be, and the biographies of its players are characterised by true conversion experiences. The intelligentsia was a secular-religious community. The term ‘intelligentsia’ must not be confused with the term ‘intellectuals.’ Its members felt that they were unified by more than an interest in ideas. They regarded themselves as an order that was committed to its beliefs, almost as a worldly priesthood that devoted itself to spreading a certain outlook on life, a gospel, as it were.17 Although the streams of ideas imported from the West were so varied in terms of origin and content, for the intelligentsia they merged to form a message of existential liberation from the bleak Russian present, but at the same time to also form an eschatological message of political-revolutionary hope, the hope of a new Russia populated by a new type of person. 3

Alexander Herzen: The Power of Ideas and Life I dedicate this book to you… as a monument to a struggle in which I have sacrificed much, but not the courage of knowledge. Do not look for ­solutions in this book—there are none; in general, modern man has no solutions… We do not build, we destroy; we do not proclaim a new revelation, we eliminate the old lie. Modern man, that melancholy Pontifex Maximus, only builds a bridge – it will be for the unknown man of the

16 17

See also Richard Billington, “The Intelligentsia and the Religion of Humanity,” The American Historical Review lxv, no. 1 (1959). ‘Der Begriff der Intelligenzija darf dabei nicht mit dem der Intellektuellen verwechselt werden. Ihre Angehörigen glaubten sich durch mehr geeint als nur durch ein Interesse an Ideen, sie verstanden sich als einen seiner Sache ergebenen Orden, fast als eine weltliche Priesterschaft, die sich der Verbreitung einer bestimmten Lebenshaltung, gleichsam eines Evangeliums, widmete.’ Isaiah Berlin, Russische Denker, 167.

The Power of Ideas and Life

251

future to pass over it. You may be there to see him… But do not, I beg, remain on this shore… Better to perish with the revolution than to seek refuge in the almshouse of reaction. The religion of the coming revolution is the only one that I bequeath to you. It has no paradise to offer, no rewards, except your own awareness, except conscience… When the time comes go and preach it amongst us at home; my language was once loved there and perhaps they will remember me.18 With these sentences, written while in British exile, Alexander Herzen (1812– 1870) dedicates his book Vom anderen Ufer (“From the Other Shore”), written between 1847 and 1850, to his son. This quotation reveals what, as cantus firmus, determined the life of Alexander Herzen: the belief in the revolution as the ‘religion of the future transformation of society’ and in the man of the future; but at the same time also the idea that this hope could deceive and that the man of the future could perish just as all utopian concepts have led to their own destruction because history, in the final analysis, does not have any ultimate “solutions.” This is exactly what to this day has caused the fascination with Alexander Herzen, who was the central figure of the Russian intelligentsia in its early stages: a radical, driven by the power of ideas of revolutionary-utopian socialism, which he came across in his youth and to which, in his own way, he adheres through all alienations, disappointments, and confusions in his life, but also a sceptic who does not trust the promises of progress in his time, a herald of individual freedom that must never be sacrificed to political objectives, a preacher of humanity who confronts all tyranny of abstract ideas about individuals and who knows that the “flow of life” eludes political and ideological absolutisms and for whom it becomes the highest and final goal to consolidate the freedom of the individual in his present. In the following it can only be possible to give a brief outline of the essential basis of the ideas and views on life that Herzen pursued. An account of his biography cannot be given either, nor can an accurate summary and literary appraisal of the writings of this brilliant stylist, whose literature, according to Isaiah Berlin, even excels Tocqueville.19 The following outline also faces the problem that Herzen was no systematic thinker and that his train of thought was not always consistent. Accordingly, his two main works, which we have taken as a basis here, are colourful ­mixtures, 18 19

Alexander Herzen, Vom anderen Ufer (München: Rogner und Bernhard, 1969), v. There is no comprehensive, historically critical biography of Herzen. A biographical outline can be found in Isaiah Berlin, Wider das Geläufige.

252

Küenzlen

collages and montages, in which reflections, travelogues, political and literary commentaries, portraits of contemporaries and much more converge – an almost “postmodern” writing technique.20 For this reason, but also in order to provide a first impression of Herzen as a writer and of his stylistic brilliance, his intellectual ingenuity and existential forcefulness, the following brief account will repeatedly draw on quotations, some of which are quite extensive. 3.1 Early Influences One of the very early experiences that had a lasting effect on Alexander Herzen – when he was only 14 years old – was the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. The then new tsar, Nicholas I, ordered the execution of the noble leaders of the revolt, who opposed the despotism of tsarist autarchy and advocated the freedom of a constitutional monarchy, and sent hundreds of noblemen into exile. This had a great impact on Herzen’s life – at least according to his own retrospective account. The account of the armed uprising, of the trial and the horrors of Moscow aroused my fantasy to the utmost; a new world was emerging in front of me, a world that assumed an increasingly central role in my moral existence; I do not know how it came to pass, but, though I had no understanding, or only a very dim one, of what it all meant, I felt that I was not on the same side as the grape-shot and victory, prisons and chains. The execution of Pestel and his contemporaries [leaders of the Decembrists] tore me for good out of the infantile sleep of my soul.21 Special mention also deserves to be given to the “Oath on Sparrow Hills”. ­Fourteen-year-old Herzen and his (then lifelong) friend of the same age, Ogarev, swore to each other on Sparrow Hills in Moscow that they would devote their entire lives to continuing the work of the Decembrists and to liberating 20 Herzen, Erinnerungen i & ii; Herzen, Vom anderen Ufer, cf. note 16. 21 ‘Die Erzählung von der bewaffneten Erhebung, vom Gericht und den Moskauer Schrecken erregte meine Phantasie auf das lebhafteste; eine neue Welt tat sich vor mir auf, eine Welt, die immer mehr und mehr zum Mittelpunkt meines sittlichen Daseins wurde; ich weiß nicht mehr wie das kam; ich verstand noch kaum oder doch nur dunkel, worum es sich handelte, aber ich fühlte, daß ich nicht auf der Seite stand, wo die Kanonen und Siege, die Gefängnisse und die Keller waren. Die Hinrichtung Pestels und seiner Genossen [Anführer der Dekabristen] schreckte mich endgültig aus dem kindlichen Schlaf meiner Seele auf.’ Herzen, Erinnerungen I, 51f.

The Power of Ideas and Life

253

the Russian people. The common intellectual incentive that drove the two to make this vow was the dramas and ballads of Friedrich Schiller – with the message “in tyrannos.”22 In addition, came the influence of liberal and, secretly, even revolutionary tutors and of the writings in his father’s home library, which familiarized young Herzen with Pushkin’s message of freedom, with the ideas of French enlightenment and, most importantly, with the ideas and trajectory of the French Revolution.23 3.2 Saint-Simon His encounter with French Utopists such as Fourier, followed by Proudhon, but above all with the writings of Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonianism movement, led to an initial “theoretical” formation of what had thus far been an only existentially documented radicalism and socialist Utopianism. Herzen, who was meanwhile a student at the Natural Sciences Department of the university, formed a secret circle together with Ogarev and a few other individuals. There, the writings of Saint-Simon were not only read but, as Le Nouveau Christianisme (Saint-Simon), became the agenda of political religion. In this period of disquiet, anticipation and efforts to solve the doubts that alarmed us, we came across the pamphlets of Saint-Simon, the sermons and the Saint-Simonian process. We were astounded and most deeply affected… These enthusiastic young men [Saint-Simonians], with their buttoned-up waistcoats and long beards, were solemnly and with a poetic gesture entering the world of the Philistines. They heralded a new belief, they had something to say, and they had an idea, in whose name they could expose the faults of the old order… A new world was about to arrive, and we welcomed it warmly with our souls and hearts. Saint-­ Simonianism became the basis of our convictions and always has been in its vital moments.24 22 Ibid., 55f. 23 See Herzen, Erinnerungen I, 55f. 24 ‘In dieser Zeit der Gärung, der Ahnungen und Bemühungen, die Zweifel zu lösen, die uns erschreckten, fielen uns die Broschüren Saint-Simons, die Predigten und der Prozess der SaintSimonisten in die Hände. Wir waren erstaunt und aufs stärkste betroffen… Diese begeisterten Jünglinge [Saint-Simonisten], mit ihren geschlossenen Westen und langen Bärten, traten feierlich und mit einer poetischen Geste in die Welt der Philister. Sie verkündeten einen neuen Glauben, sie hatten etwas zu sagen, sie hatten eine Idee, in deren Namen sie die alte Ordnung vor Gericht fordern konnten… Eine neue Welt pochte ans Tor und unsere Seelen, unsere Her-

254 4

Küenzlen

Hegel: “Algebra of Revolution”

Alongside the French prophets of a Utopian Socialism, it was a German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who captivated the early intelligentsia. The intelligentsia – including Herzen – were captured by a true Hegel fever. Hegel was regarded as the liberator of the suppressed soul. He was the solution to all things. This Hegel ecstasy gave rise to strange developments: Efforts were made to convert Hegel texts into verses, and communication only took place in Hegelian, in partly absurd and attempted Hegelian abstractions. Every Hegel pamphlet one got hold of was read out amongst the members. They had their agents in Berlin, all reprints were asked to be sent immediately, etc. Herzen looks back at this period with a touch of irony. They discussed [the Hegelian philosophy] incessantly; there was not a paragraph in the three parts of the Logic, in the two of the Aesthetic, the Encyclopaedia, and so on, which had not been the subject of desperate disputes for several nights together. People who loved each other avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition of ‘all-embracing spirit,’ or had taken as a personal insult an opinion on ‘the absolute personality and its existence in itself.’25 No matter how factually founded the intelligentsia’s perception of Hegel’s work was or to what degree it (undoubtedly) distorted Hegel’s work, in Herzen’s opinion its lasting significance lay in the following: Hegel held a philosophy that emerged together with the right to an all-embracing interpretation of reality for which the intelligentsia sought. Above all, however, Herzen regarded Hegel as a thinker of the Revolution: If the existing political order was reasonable in Hegel’s terms because it existed, this also had to apply for the negation of this order as soon as it became reality as part of the revolutionary change. ‘The philosophy of Hegel is the algebra of revolution; it emancipates a man in an unusual way and leaves not one stone upon another of the Christian world, of the world of tradition that has outlived itself.’26

zen öffneten sich weit vor ihr. Der Saint-Simonismus wurde zur Grundlage unserer Überzeugungen und ist es in seinen wesentlichen Momenten immer geblieben.’ Herzen, Erinnerungen I, 93f. 25 Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, 232. 26 Ibid., 237.

The Power of Ideas and Life

5

255

The “Powerlessness of Ideas” and Life

Herzen, just like Bakunin, Belinski and the whole of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, was full of hope for a new realm of freedom created by revolutionary upheaval, a hope that grounded in the ideas of Saint-Simon, Proudhon, Fourier and the “Algebra of Revolution,” as they perceived the philosophy of Hegel. To the intelligentsia, those ideas were not merely theoretical constructs or instructions, but messages of secular religion. But then came 1848. Revolutionary movements that had started in many parts of Europe, especially in Italy and France, were forcibly suppressed in 1848–49. In June 1848 Herzen witnessed the events as an emigrant in Paris and saw the uprising being crushed ‘in a massacre that went on for a full four days.’27 It was a traumatic experience for the socialist radicals of Europe, notably for the intelligentsia, when the reactionary prevailed in 1848–49, worst of all in Paris, the city that represented their hopes and dreams.28 However, 1848 had an even greater impact: It destroyed his dream that a world of the kind Saint-Simon and the Utopian Socialists had imagined could be created by revolution. Immediately after the events of 1848, Herzen wrote: ‘Dawn broke on our souls and threw light on terrible destruction. Our hopes and beliefs were shattered. No living man remains unchanged after a trauma like that.’29 This is not the place to decide if it is true that Herzen showed signs of scepticism and alienation from deterministic theories of progress already before 1848, as Isaiah Berlin suggests. There are indications which imply that his earlier commitment to Hegel already gave him the insight that a single doctrine or theory to explain reality cannot and does not exist and that instead, reality and thus life itself elude any doctrine of that kind. Now, after 1848, Herzen took a new tone. He, who like the rest of the intelligentsia had not only advocated ideas but internalized them as an existential part of his life, now spoke of the ‘powerlessness of ideas’ and the absence of a ‘forceful power of thought over the real world.’30 Herzen declares the 27 28 29 30

‘in einer Metzelei, die volle vier Tage dauerte.’ Herzen, Vom anderen Ufer, 84. For an account of the events, see Vom anderen Ufer, 81–90. For more detailed information, see “Rußland und 1848” in Isaiah Berlin, Russische Denker, 27–50. ‘Ein… Morgengrauen ist jetzt in unserer Seele aufgezogen, es beleuchtet eine furchtbare Verwüstung… worauf man gehofft, woran man geglaubt hatte war zerschlagen… Nach solchen Erschütterungen bleibt kein lebendiger Mensch der alte.’ Herzen, Vom anderen Ufer, 85. See Herzen, Erinnerungen ii, 142.

256

Küenzlen

“­ powerlessness of ideas” not only because for example political ideas often fail when facing the real structures of power. His analysis is more profound: The powerlessness of ideas is principally constituted of the fact that they are mere ideas, blind to life itself, empty abstractions brutally trying to form the world according to themselves, which makes their failing inevitable. Including himself in his accusations, Herzen wrote in 1849: I blush for our generation; soulless rhetors – that is what we are: our blood is cold, hot is just our ink. We are merely committed to the universal, to the idea, to humanity. We have deadened our souls in the spheres of the abstract and the universal. We have lost our interest in reality as we went upwards and left it behind, while the philistines went downwards and left it as well.31 Herzen nonetheless remains a revolutionist, if only one who had lost his eschatological faith in the distant bliss of universal liberation of men and humanity. Change and even revolution will remain to exist, and they must do so. Still under the impression of the 1848 uprising being drowned in blood, Herzen wrote: Paris executed without any verdict. What will arise from this blood? Who knows – but whatever it is that comes, it will, amidst this raging frenzy of madness, vengeance, discord and revenge, put an end to a world that confines the new man, prevents him from living and obstructs his view into the future – which is good, very good indeed, so: Long live chaos and destruction! – Vive la mort! – To the triumph of what is to come!32 Those sentences must of course not be seen as the expression of a utopian faith in the creation of prospective universal bliss, but as the comprehension 31

‘Ich erröte… für unsere Generation; was sind wir doch für seelenlose Rhetoren: unser Blut ist kalt, heiß ist nur unsere Tinte… Wir beschäftigen uns lediglich mit dem Allgemeinen, mit der Idee, mit der Menschheit… Wir haben unsere Seelen in den abstrakten und allgemeinen Sphären… betäubt… Wir haben den Geschmack an der Wirklichkeit verloren, sind nach oben aus ihr herausgegangen, wie die Spießer nach unten hinausgingen.’ Herzen, Vom anderen Ufer, 162. 32 ‘Paris hat ohne Urteil füsiliert… Was wird aus diesem Blut hervorgehen? Wer weiß es – aber was es auch sein wird, es genügt, dass in diesem entfesselten Taumel von Tollwut, Rache, Zwist, Vergeltung eine Welt zugrunde geht, die den neuen Menschen beengt, ihn hindert zu leben, und den Einblick in die Zukunft behindert – und das ist sehr gut, und deshalb: Es lebe das Chaos und die Zerstörung! – Vive la mort! – Und auf den Sieg des Kommenden!” Ibid., 90.

The Power of Ideas and Life

257

of the necessary and constant change of history that often comes in the shape of chaos and destruction. History itself, however, does not have a distant aim where providential progress would inevitably lead. If progress is the aim, then who is it we work for? Who is this Moloch that, as they approach, falls back before the workmen instead of rewarding them? To the moribund and weary masses who cry their “morituri te salutant,” he offers no consolation but the scornful response that the world will be marvellous after their death.33 To act on promises of progress and future universal bliss means to worship Moloch and to sacrifice to him the present with all its possibilities. We must, however, note: ‘Every generation represents its own purpose.’34 The function and purpose of life is life itself, just like the function of a singer is singing: What is the function of the song a singer sings? If you expect anything else from it but delight, if you seek another function in it, you will feel futile remorse as soon as the singer stops, because you were waiting for something else, instead of just listening. Categories unsuited to grasp the flow of life throw us into a state of confusion. What is the purpose you [he addresses Mazzini and the liberals and socialists] are looking for – is it a programme, an order? Then who gave it, who received it? Is it something inevitable or not? If it is, are we just puppets? Are we morally free or are we gearwheels in a machine? I would like to see life and thus history as rather a purpose fulfilled than a means to other ends.35 33 ‘Wenn der Fortschritt Ziel ist, für wen arbeiten wir denn? Wer ist dieser Moloch, der in dem Maße wie die Werkleute sich ihm nähern, statt sie zu belohnen, zurückweicht und, um die zu Tode erschöpften und dem Untergang geweihten Massen, die ihm Morituri te salutant zurufen, zu trösten, nur den bitteren Hohn als Antwort übrig hat, nach ihrem Tode werde es auf der Erde herrlich sein.’ Ibid., 73. 34 ‘Das Ziel jeder Generation ist sie selbst.’ Ibid., 74. 35 ‘Was ist der Zweck des Liedes, das die Sängerin singt? Wenn Sie außer ihrem Vergnügen darin noch etwas anderes erwarten, nach einem anderen Zweck suchen, dann wird der Moment kommen, in dem die Sängerin aufhört und Sie werden… vergebliche Reue fühlen… weil Sie, anstatt einfach zuzuhören, auf etwas anderes gewartet haben… Wir werden durch Kategorien, die ungeeignet sind, den Fluss des Lebens zu fassen in Verwirrung gestürzt. Was ist das Ziel, nachdem ihr [gemeint sind Mazzini und die Liberalen und Sozialisten] sucht – ist es ein Programm, ist es ein Befehl, wer hat ihn ausgefertigt, wem wurde er erteilt? Ist es etwas Unvermeidliches oder nicht? Wenn ja, sind wir bloß Marionetten? Sind wir moralisch frei, oder sind wir Räder in einer Maschine? Ich würde im Leben und daher in der Geschichte eher ein erreichtes Ziel und nicht ein Mittel sehen, das etwas anderem dient.’ Ibid. German quotation based on Isaiah Berlin’s translation in, Isaiah Berlin, Russische Denker, 263.

258

Küenzlen

And, Just like purpose and function of life are in itself, the purpose and function of history are in itself as well. As part of the eternal game of life, history presents a perpetual sequence of existence, change and revolutions. It is very likely that the future generations will be even more degenerate, become even shallower and even poorer in mind and heart. And then what? Then spring arrives and new life blossoms on their grave mounds. We can already perceive its key note. It belongs to the social ideas. In all its stages, socialism will evolve up to its ultimate consequences and absurdities. The outcry of negation will erupt from the titanic body of a revolutionary minority, and again a fight to the death will begin in which socialism will take the place of today’s conservatism and be defeated by a new revolution that we do not know yet. This is the eternal game of life, merciless as death itself, inescapable as birth, the corsi e ricorsi of history, the perpetual motion of a pendulum.36 Once again: Herzen was and remained a revolutionary throughout his life, driven by his hatred of the suppressors. Until his death, the ultimate force of his hopes was that he hoped for the strength of the Russian people to reform history. He did, however, not share the messianic belief in revolutionary action leading to a final solution anymore. He remained a propagandist of freedom, who, when his illusions collapsed, however learned that there can only be as much external freedom as man attains internally; without that, revolution will only be followed by a new despotic regimen, erected over the debris of the old one. One must hate the suppressors, but one must also fear the “liberators.”37 Free men do not arise from revolution; on the contrary, free men may change 36

37

‘Es ist sehr wahrscheinlich, dass die kommenden Generationen noch mehr entarten, noch seichter werden, noch ärmer an Verstand und Herz… Und dann? Dann zieht der Frühling ein, junges Leben erblüht auf ihren Grabhügeln… Seinen Grundton können wir schon jetzt verstehen. Er gehört den sozialen Ideen an. Der Sozialismus wird sich in allen seinen Phasen bis zu den äußersten Konsequenzen, bis zu Absurditäten entwickeln. Dann wird von neuem aus der titanischen Brust einer revolutionären Minderheit der Schrei der Negation hervorbrechen, und von neuem wird ein Kampf auf Leben und Tod beginnen, in dem der Sozialismus den Platz des heutigen Konservatismus einnehmen und von einer kommenden, uns unbekannten Revolution besiegt werden wird… Ewiges Spiel des Lebens, unbarmherzig wie der Tod, unabwendbar wie die Geburt, die corsi e ricorsi der Geschichte, das Perpetuum mobile eines Pendels.’ Herzen, Vom anderen Ufer, 164. Bakunin, Herzen’s long-time companion, was in danger of becoming this kind of “liberator,” which is why Herzen broke with him. See “Briefe an einen alten Freund” in Herzen, Erinnerungen ii, 311–336.

The Power of Ideas and Life

259

the world according to their ends as soon as they liberate themselves from the dangerous illusions of eschatological political abstractions, theorems and ideas. ‘If men, instead of saving the world, would finally save themselves, if they liberated themselves instead of humanity, they would do so much more for the salvation of the world and the liberation of humanity.’38 Bibliography Berdjaev, Nikolaj A. Die Geister der russischen Revolution. Salzburg: Stifterbibliothek, 1977. Berlin, Isaiah. Russische Denker. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1981. Berlin, Isaiah. Russian Thinkers. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Berlin, Isaiah. Wider das Geläufige. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Wissenschaft, 1982. Billington, Richard. “The Intelligentsia and the Religion of Humanity” The American Historical Review lxv, no. 1 (1959). Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Alexander Herzen: Über die Verfinsterung der Geschichte. Zwei Dialoge aus dem 19. Jahrhundert, eingerichtet für das Jahr 1984. Berlin: Friedenau Presse, 1984. Herzen, Alexander. Erinnerungen I u. II. Berlin: Wiegandt & Grieben, 1907. Herzen, Alexander. My Past and Thoughts. Edited by Dwight McDonald. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1982. Herzen, Alexander. Vom anderen Ufer. München: Rogner und Bernhard, 1969. Küenzlen, Gottfried. Der Neue Mensch. Zur säkularen Religionsgeschichte der Moderne. München: 1994 (Neuaufl. Frankfurt a.M.: 1997). Küenzlen, Gottfried. “Was heißt Kultur?” Synthesis philosophica 46, no. 2 (2008). Liebich, André. From The Other Shore, Russian Social Democracy After 1921, 1948. http:// books.google.de/books/about/From_the_other_shore.html?id=TVFpAAAAMAAJ &redir_esc=y. Malia, Martin. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Pipes, Richard. Die russische Intelligentsia. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962. Scheibert, Peter. Von Bakunin zu Lenin. Leiden: Brill, 1956. Tenbruck, Friedrich H. Die unbewältigten Sozialwissenschaften oder die Abschaffung des Menschen. Graz/Wien/Köln: Styria, 1984.

38 ‘Wenn die Menschen endlich, statt die Welt zu retten, sich selbst retten, statt die Menschheit zu befreien, sich selbst befreien möchten – wieviel würden sie zur Rettung der Welt und zur Befreiung des Menschen tun.’ Herzen, Vom anderen Ufer, 175.

260

Küenzlen

Tenbruck, Friedrich H. Die kulturellen Grundlagen der Gesellschaft: Der Fall der ­Moderne. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989. Tschižewskij, Dimitrij. Russische Geistesgeschichte. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1974. Weber, Max. “In almost every important attitude of real human beings, the valuespheres cross and interpenetrate.” In Max Weber: Methodology of Social Sciences. Edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949. Weber, Max. Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948. Weber, Max. “Politik als Beruf.” In Gesammelte Politische Schriften. Tübingen: Mohr, 1971. Weber, Max. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Bd. I. Tübingen: Mohr, 1972. Weber, Max. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: Mohr, 1977. Weber, Max. Methodology of Social Sciences, 1949. http://books.google.de/books?id=TY vRby1ic6AC&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=%22in+almost+every+important+attitude %22&source=bl&ots=fTc3U-aCGC&sig=MrTaqPryS-YWGsKXvb2G9rZ433M&hl=­ de#v=onepage&q=%22in%20almost%20every%20important%20 attitude%22&f=false. Weber, Max. “The International Library of Sociology.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 1948. http://books.google.de/books?id=e6m4xrnnDPgC&printsec=frontc over&dq=From+Max+Weber:+essays+in+sociology&hl=de#v=onepage&q=Fr om%20Max%20Weber%3A%20essays%20in%20sociology&f=false.

Chapter 10

kjv in the usa: the Impact of the King James Bible in America Brian C. Wilson When King James gave his approval for a new English translation of the Bible at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, it is doubtful he was expecting the production of a literary masterpiece that would exert a profound influence on the English language and English culture for generations to come. And we can be certain that he was not thinking about the impact the Bible might have on the English Colonies of America, the first permanent English settlement of which – Jamestown – was still three years in the future. James’ goals in approving the new translation were altogether more modest: if it helped reduce a modicum of the tension between his fractious Puritan and Anglican divines, and if the new translation supplanted the Geneva Bible with its subversive marginal notes, then it would have done its job. In terms of the latter, it succeeded admirably; in terms of the former, not so well.1 And yet, we probably wouldn’t have been celebrating the 400th anniversary of the 1611 publication of the King James Bible back in 2011 if the King’s immediate goals had indeed been met. It is the unintended and unexpected consequences of King James’ decision that command our attention. For one, there is the wholly unexpected consequence that an unwieldy committee of some forty-seven-odd scholars would manage to create a literary work that no less a critic than Matthew Arnold would call ‘the perfect book.’2 Another unintended and wholly ironic consequence was that the King James Bible would become the literary touchstone for the United States, a new nation that was initially desperate to jettison all things English in an effort to create a culture all its own. Indeed, the career of the King James Bible in the United States is actually replete with ironies of this kind, and by tracing some of the influences of the King James Bible on the social and cultural history of the United States I will 1 For good overviews of the production of the King James Bible, see Alister E. McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2001), and Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003). 2 Quoted in McGrath, In the Beginning, 218.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_011

262

Wilson

highlight some of the interesting twists along the way. If, as Reinhold Niebuhr argued, American history is best understood in the ironic mode, then no better example of this is the rise and fall of the King James Bible in the United States.3 1

The King James Bible as Consensus Text

Although the first English Bible brought to America was most likely the Bishop’s Bible, it appears that the Geneva Bible was the translation most widely used by English colonists in the first decades of English colonization. As mentioned above, the founding of Jamestown in 1607 antedated the appearance of the King James Bible by some three years, and, as a colony dominated at first by Puritans, the Bible used for services in Jamestown’s original wattle-and-daub church was probably the Geneva Bible.4 Only after Virginia became a royal colony in 1624 did the King James Bible (or Authorized Version as it was also known) become the Bible of choice there, as it would become throughout the Southern and Middle colonies in the coming years.5 The history of the Bible in Puritan-dominated New England was very different, but ended in the same result. The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620, were Calvinists of the old school and preferred the Geneva Bible.6 Their leader, William Bradford quoted exclusively from the Geneva Bible in his classic history of the settlement, Of Plymouth Plantation.7 In the much larger Massachusetts Bay Colony, centered on Boston and founded in 1630, the Geneva Bible competed with the King James Bible. In his Modell of Christian Charity (1630), a document that became something of an unofficial charter for Massachusetts, John Winthrop took his biblical citations from both the Geneva Bible and the Authorized Version.8 However, in 1637, a theological crisis with grave political consequences for the Puritan colony led to a concerted effort on the part of the leadership, including John Winthrop, to make the King James Version the Bible of choice in Massachusetts.

3 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952). 4 Paris Marion Simms, The Bible in America: Versions That Have Played Their Part in the Making of the Republic (New York: Wilson-Erickson, Inc., 1936), 72, 74–79, 89–90. 5 Simms, The Bible in America, 78, 93. 6 Harry S. Stout, “Word and Order in Colonial New England,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 29. 7 Simms, The Bible in America, 90. 8 Stout, “Word and Order in Colonial New England,” 28.

Kjv In The Usa: The Impact Of The King James Bible In America

263

The Antinomian Crisis, as it came to be called, centered on Anne Hutchinson, a woman of formidable intellect who, among other things, taught that the Puritan notion of a new National Covenant – the founding ideology of the Massachusetts Bay Colony – was nothing more than a covenant of works. When brought to trial and questioned about the origins of her doctrine and her right to teach it, Hutchinson referred instantly to the text of the Geneva Bible and to its marginal notes, both of which insistently focused on the individual Covenant of Grace unalloyed with any mention of a theocratic national covenant. Her opponents countered with citations from the King James Bible and thus, unconstrained by any textual apparatus, were free to interpret the text in line with the notion of a dual covenant, personal and national. As historian Harry S. Stout writes, the Antinomian Crisis could in a sense be characterized as a clash of translations, between the Geneva Bible and the King James Bible. For decades, the Puritans in Old England had cited the Geneva Bible’s commentary as warrant for their insubordination against the Crown; now in power in New England, the Puritans found themselves facing precisely the same problem as the King: how to keep aggressive Puritans from using the Geneva Bible to threaten the political structure. In the end, both Anne Hutchinson and, by implication, the Geneva Bible with its troublesome notes, lost, and both were banished from the Colony.9 I think King James, had he lived to learn about it, would have enjoyed the irony. By the 18th century, the King James Bible reigned supreme in America.10 Since printers in Great Britain could manufacture and export Bibles much more cheaply than they could be produced in the New World, no English Bibles were printed in the Colonies until after Independence. Once the Revolutionary War disrupted the supply of Bibles, a couple of printers in the u.s. tried to produce one, but with little financial success.11 The first successful producer of Bibles was an Irish-Catholic printer from Philadelphia named Mathew Carey. Carey first printed the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible, but the shrewd printer quickly understood the limited market for this translation and, under the prompting of his most successful itinerant book agent, Parson Mason Weems, later famous for his celebrated biography of George Washington, Carey shifted

9 10

11

Ibid., 31, For an interesting discussion of the use of the King James Bible in the political rhetoric of the American Revolution, see Bernard M. Levinson and Joshua A. Berman, “The King James Bible at 400: Scripture, Statecraft, and the American Founding,” History Channel Magazine (November 2010): 1–11. Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1770–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 20–23.

264

Wilson

to the King James Version in 1801. For the next twenty years, Carey would be the largest printer of Bibles in the country.12 Carey’s dominance in the Bible market would be challenged not by another commercial printer, but by a charitable organization founded in 1816 in the wake of the Second Great Awakening by a former president of the Continental Congress, Elias Boudinot. Modeling his organization on the British and Foreign Bible Society, Boudinot’s American Bible Society (abs) had two goals: printing the ‘Holy Scriptures without note or comment’ – that is, the King James Bible – and broadcasting these to every corner of the Nation. The abs did so through a far flung network of auxiliary organizations and through periodic massive campaigns called General Supplies, the first of which, in 1829, aimed at getting a copy of the King James Bible into every household in the u.s. It failed, of course, but the number of King James Bibles distributed was phenomenal, an estimated 500,000.13 The abs was among the first publishers in the country to embrace stereotype printing and steam presses; by 1860, the abs was producing and distributing, either for a small fee or gratis, over a million Bibles a year. It is for this reason that the King James Bible became one of the most generally available and widely read books from the Eastern seaboard to the Western frontier.14 We can say with confidence that the King James Bible was indeed widely read not only because it is a ubiquitous presence in the writing of the common people of the period, but also because of its exceptional influence on the development of American political rhetoric and American literature in the 19th century.15 The examples one could choose are legion, but I will focus on two, Abraham Lincoln and Herman Melville. I pick these two not only because they were masters of the biblical idiom, but because they deployed their knowledge of the King James text to essay and defend positions that, ironically enough, are surprisingly modern. Raised on a 1799 spck printing of the King James Bible, Abraham Lincoln imbibed the language and style of the Authorized Version from boyhood and he developed a remarkable ability to cite passages of Scripture at length. As a young man, Lincoln also learned to incorporate creatively these elements into

12 Gutjahr, An American Bible, 23. 13 Ibid., 19. 14 Ibid., 11, 19, 32–35. 15 See Lewis O. Saum, The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); and Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Kjv In The Usa: The Impact Of The King James Bible In America

265

his writing, even to point of using them for some of his comic stories.16 When, however, as President it came time to be serious and to communicate to the nation the transcendental implications of the Civil War, he did so by drawing on the Bible. The Gettysburg Address (1863), for example, is, according to one Lincoln scholar, ‘utterly suffused with the style, cadence and archetypes of the King James Bible.’17 In its opening line – ‘Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth,’ etc. – Lincoln draws heavily on the language of the Psalms and the Gospels, and the last phrase from the Address – ‘shall not perish from the earth’ – is a direct citation of a phrase that appears in the King James Version of Job, Jeremiah, and Micah.18 It was in his Second Inaugural Address, however, as the Civil War wound down and Northern victory was inevitable, that Abraham Lincoln demonstrated the full brilliance of his use of the biblical idiom. Called by some Lincoln’s greatest speech, the Second Inaugural is unlike any such presidential address before or after.19 Those in the audience in front of the Capitol building on that rainy March afternoon in 1865 probably expected some kind of celebration of the expected Northern triumph and an optimistic paean to the power of the American Union. However, what they got instead was a sophisticated and ultimately ironic meditation on the theological meaning of the Civil War. ‘Both read the same Bible,’ Lincoln observed, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued 16

17 18 19

William J. Wolf, The Almost Chosen People: A Study of the Religion of Abraham Lincoln (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1959), 36, 38–39. For an extended discussion of the King James Bible’s influence on Lincoln’s literary style, see Roy P. Basler, “Abraham Lincoln’s Rhetoric,” American Literature 11, no. 2 (May 1939): 167–82. Joseph R. Fornieri, Abraham Lincoln’s Political Faith (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 48. Glen LaFantasie, “Lincoln and the Gettysburg Awakening,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 16, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 73–89; Alter, Pen of Iron, 14. Ronald C. White, Jr., Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).

266

Wilson

through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’ The King James Bible pervades this second section of Lincoln’s text. Not only does he quote or paraphrase passages from Genesis, the Gospel of Matthew, and the 19th Psalm, but Lincoln’s choice of vocabulary and grammar also consciously echoes the Authorized Version’s archaic Hebrew style. It is doubtful that this was the message that, after four years of bloody civil war, the President’s audience most wanted to hear, but Lincoln felt it was necessary to convince his audience of the ambiguities of the war in order to persuade them to embrace his hope for charity to the vanquished and healing for the nation, in place of the vengeance and malice he feared. And to do so he invoked the one text that he knew was both instantly familiar to most, but would also instantly command their respect and reverence: the King James Bible.20 Herman Melville, now recognized as one of the premier novelists of the 19th century, also knew and used the King James Bible. Melville’s Bible, an 1846 E.H. Butler & Co. printing of the Authorized Version, still exists, heavily annotated with pencil marks, check marks, underlining, and marginal exclamations of all kinds in many of the sections of the text.21 We can see the influence of Melville’s Bible study throughout his work in his choice of imagery, names of characters (Israel, Gabriel, Ishmael, Ahab, Bildad, etc.), themes, and overall, in his prose style.22 As Robert Alter observes in his book, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010), There is… a variety of ways in which that old tongue of the King James Version of the Bible makes itself heard in Melville’s prose. At times, he 20 Alter, Pen of Iron, 11–19. 21 Ilana Pardes, Melville’s Bibles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 13. 22 For a straightforward account of Melville’s use of the Bible, see Nathalia Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible (New York: Octagon Books, 1969).

Kjv In The Usa: The Impact Of The King James Bible In America

267

adopts the diction of the Bible, moving from actual quotation to pseudoquotation to biblicizing turns of speech. At other moments, whether consciously or not, he picks up in the formal patterns of his prose the semantic parallelism that underlies biblical poetry, using it as an alternate or simultaneous model for epic language along with the dominant English model of blank verse. At a good many junctures, a biblical image or symbol is taken up with no explicit signal pointing to the scriptural text in which it originates and usually with a surprising new spin given to the biblical idea.23 Moby Dick (1851), undoubtedly, is the novel in which Melville’s incessant biblicizing is most evident. Indeed, the work is bounded by Father Mapple’s sermon on Jonah and the Whale near the beginning and, near the end, Ishmael’s marvelous characterization of a sounding harpooned whale as Job’s Leviathan: As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the sea was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said-‘Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fishspears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart nor the habergeon; he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!’ [A direct quotation from portions of Job 41 (kjv).] This the ­creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan has run his head under the mountains of the sea to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears!24 But, of course, as we know, Ishmael spoke too soon: The Pequod and all her men save one are destroyed by Leviathan, and Ishmael is saved only by a coffin 23 Alter, Pen of Iron, 70–71. 24 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or the White Whale (Boston: The St. Botolph Society, [1851] 1892), 336–37.

268

Wilson

that floats up from his wrecked ship. The epigram for the last chapter of Moby Dick is, significantly enough, another citation from Job: ‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’ This is perhaps one of the dourest endings of all American literature, but the key thing to understand here is how Melville’s use of the ­Bible made it even more shocking. The Bible, as Robert Alter reminds us, was for most of Melville’s readers, ‘a safe and reassuring book,’ offering ‘God’s ­providential concern for humankind and the delineation of an orderly plan of ­redemption history.’25 Melville implies, however, that God’s creation, and therefore God himself, were far more mysterious and uncompromising than sentimental 19th-century Americans so optimistically believed them to be. It is no wonder that Moby Dick sank like a stone after it was first published: not only did readers dislike its pessimistic message, but they perhaps resented the fact that he used the King James Bible to convey it. Only in the following century and after several bloody wars and massive social upheaval, would Americans be in a mood to embrace Melville’s dour vision of God and the universe in what is now recognized as the American novel. I could go on listing 19th-century writers who were decisively influenced by the Authorized Version. As a scholar of American religion and new religious movements specifically, one of my favorite examples is that of Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Mormons. Although a relatively uneducated farm boy from Upstate New York, Smith nevertheless knew his Bible, and the Bible he knew was the King James Version, probably through copies supplied by the American Bible Association. When it came time for him to translate the Book of Mormon from the gold plates dug up on the Hill Cumorah at the behest of an angel, or as his detractors contended, create the volume from whole cloth, Smith chose to do so, naturally enough, using the idiom of the King James Bible. This, after all, was the language of Scripture, and in some ways Joseph Smith perhaps overused it to prove his work’s scriptural credentials: for example, while the phrase it came to pass appears some 396 times in the 21,000 verses of the Authorized Version, it appears some 1,168 times in the 6,604 verses of the Book of Mormon.26 And while it appears that Joseph Smith himself never claimed anything more for the idiom of the Book of Mormon then as a translation choice, some of his latter followers, struck by the linguistic congruence between the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon, assumed that when God

25 Alter, Pen of Iron, 73. 26 Philip L. Barlow, “Before Mormonism: Joseph Smith’s Use of the Bible, 1820–1829,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57, no. 4 (Winter 1989): p. 756–57.

Kjv In The Usa: The Impact Of The King James Bible In America

269

spoke, he spoke in Jacobean English.27 No doubt this was an assumption shared by many orthodox American Protestants as well. The 19th Century was the heyday of the influence of the King James Bible on the United States. It would continue to be a literary touchstone well into the 20th century, for authors as diverse as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemmingway, Saul Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy.28 Political rhetoric in this country reached an apex with Lincoln, but there are still echoes of the King James Bible at least as late as 1963 in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” Speech, delivered, appropriately enough, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.29 Yet, for the most part, except in certain religious subcultures that I will discuss below, the overwhelming influence of the King James Bible waned, and in some ways – again the irony – the kjv evolved from a text of consensus to a text of dissensus. 2

The King James Bible as Dissensus Text

Beginning in the 1840s with the Great Irish Potato Famine and the failed revolutions of 1848, millions of Roman Catholics, primarily from Ireland and Germany at first, immigrated to the United States. This new migration swelled the ranks of the small population of English Catholics that had been established here since colonial times. Colonial Catholics used preferentially the DouayRheims Version and, obedient to the 1546 decree of the Council of Trent that proscribed Bible translations not made from the Latin Vulgate, endeavored to avoid using the King James Bible.30 This became increasingly difficult during the early National Period since the American Bible market came to be overwhelming dominated by the Authorized Version. Mathew Carey, the Philadelphia printer who, as mentioned above, was so successful printing the King James Bible, also printed in 1790 a Douay-Rheims Bible with the support of Bishop John Carroll. It couldn’t compete in popularity with the Authorized Version, however, and Carey took a loss on the project. Throughout the 19th century, the American Catholic hierarchy would continually work to wean their parishioners from the King James Bible (which often could be had for free 27

Philip L. Barlow, “Why the King James Version? From the Common to the Official Bible of Mormonism,” Dialogue 22, no. 2 (1989): 28. 28 For discussions of each of these authors and their works, see Alter, Pen of Iron. 29 D.W. Hansen, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation (New York: Ecco, 2003), 8, 104–20. 30 Simms, The Bible in America, 98; Gutjahr, An American Bible, 126.

270

Wilson

from the bible societies) by providing them with inexpensive copies of the Douay-Rheims Bible.31 Why, exactly, was this such an issue? There are several substantial differences between Catholic and Protestant Bibles. For example, the Apocrypha, which contain, among other things, an important biblical warrant for the doctrine of Purgatory,32 were routinely deleted from many printings of Protestant Bibles, or at least relegated to an appendix as non-canonical texts. The American Bible Society in 1826 dropped the Apocrypha from the Bibles they circulated, a policy only overturned in 1964.33 In the Douay-Rheims Bible, the Apocrypha are always found integrated into the Old Testament because the Catholic Church considers them fully canonical. Translation differences, too, distinguish Catholic from Protestant Bibles: for example, I Corinthians 11:27 reads in the Douay-Rheims version, ‘Whosoever shall eat this bread or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord,’ while the King James Bible substitutes and for or, thus undercutting the Catholic argument that communion consisting of just the bread or the wine is legitimate, a teaching Protestants reject. Several other differences could be instanced.34 Both Catholics and Protestants saw the doctrinal consequences of these differences as so potentially dangerous, that both warned against the reading of each other’s Bibles. Perhaps in order to make this point, in 1842 a Catholic friar in Upstate New York went so far as to stage a public burning of abs-distributed King James Bibles, an act excoriated by anti-Catholic Nativists but approbated by some in the Catholic press: ‘To burn or otherwise destroy a spurious or corrupt copy of the Bible, whose circulation would tend to disseminate erroneous principles of faith or morals,’ wrote the editor of the New York Freeman’s Journal, ‘we hold to be an act not only justifiable but praiseworthy.’35 The place where this clash of Bibles became most acute was in the public schools. Since colonial times, mandatory Bible reading was a part of curriculum; indeed, the whole purpose of public education, at least according to the 31 Gutjahr, An American Bible, 126–27; Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J., “The Quest for a Catholic Vernacular Bible in America,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 166–67 32 2 Maccabees 12:43–46. 33 Edgar J. Goodspeed and Moses Hadas, The Apocrypha: An American Translation (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xxiii; Melton, J. Gordon, Encyclopedia of Protestantism (New York: Facts On File, 2005), 38. 34 See Charles B. Dalton, “The Origin of the Version Authorized by the Roman Catholic Church, and the American Revised Version,” in Roman Catholic and Protestant Bibles Compared, ed. M.W. Jacobus (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 278, n. 96. 35 Fogarty, “The Quest for a Catholic Vernacular Bible,” 165; Gutjahr, An American Bible, 124.

Kjv In The Usa: The Impact Of The King James Bible In America

271

Massachusetts statute of 1647, was to defeat that ‘old deluder, Satan’ who wished ‘to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures.’36 And as literacy for secular purposes superseded the ability to read the Scriptures as the overriding concern of public education by the end of the 18th century, the King James Bible nevertheless continued to be the textbook of choice in many a one-room frontier school house, simply because in the early days that was the one text that most children could be assumed to have in their homes. Moreover, even in those school districts wealthy enough to afford secular textbooks (roughly from the 1820s on), mandatory reading from the King James Bible often continued in some form.37 This became an extremely divisive issue as more and more Catholic children enrolled in public schools and were forced to read the King James Bible. Catholic parents and the Church hierarchy decried the practice as a key example of the pervasive Protestant bias in public education. They demanded that children be allowed to read from the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible, or, failing that, that Bible reading be dropped from the curriculum and left to the churches.38 In Philadelphia, the reaction of anti-Catholic Nativists to such a request was swift and intense. In 1844, in response to Bishop Francis P. Kendrick’s plea to the school board that Catholic children be allowed to read from any version of the Bible their parents’ approved, riots broke out pitting Irish Catholics against Nativist mobs. The result was the burning of two Catholic churches and a convent, and several deaths. Two months later, the state militia had to be mobilized to control continued rioting in which thirteen died, including George Shifler, who became a martyr for the Nativist cause.39 An official investigation into the violence ruled that it was entirely due to ‘the efforts of a portion of the community to exclude the Bible from our Public Schools.’40 Similar riots were only narrowly averted in Cincinnati, but the result was the same: the school board there ruled in 1852 that the King James Bible was fit for use in the public schools since it was common to all Christians.41 Faced with a situation they felt 36

See Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: Norton, 1974), 50. 37 Gutjahr, An American Bible, 118–19. See also R. Laurence Moore, “Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling: The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Public Education,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 4 (March 2000): 1581–1599. Moore points out that one of the most popular secular textbooks of the day, The McGuffey Readers, quoted liberally from the King James Bible (1591–92). 38 See Tracy Fessenden, “The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars and the Separation of Church and State,” Church History 74, no. 4 (December 2005): 784–811. 39 Fessenden, “The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars,” 795. 40 Fogarty, “The Quest for a Catholic Vernacular Bible,” 166. 41 Fessenden, “The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars,” 799–80.

272

Wilson

powerless to change, the Catholic Church in the United States launched a major campaign to create parochial schools.42 It was not until 1872 that a state, in this case Ohio, banned mandatory Bible reading in public schools, and the u.s. Supreme Court only banned the practice nationally in 1962. By this time, however, most school districts had long dropped mandatory Bible reading in an effort to avoid the continuing controversy.43 While the sectarian tensions that led to the eventual banning of Bible reading in the public schools were one factor for the declining influence of the King James Bible in the 20th century, an equally important factor was simply the explosion of new English translations of the Bible, although loyalty to the old Authorized Version died hard. In 1881, the first major revision of the King James Bible, the English Revised Version New Testament was released, followed by the RV Old Testament in 1885; these new translations made use of the advances in biblical scholarship, especially the increasing availability of older Hebrew and Greek manuscripts than were used in the King James Version. The English Revised Version sold poorly in the United States and failed to supplant the Authorized Version, and an effort to create a truly American Bible, the American Standard Version (asv), was launched. The asv was released in 1901. This, too, met with limited success and was followed by yet newer translations, the Revised Standard Version (rsv) in 1947 and the New Revised Standard Version (nrsv) in 1971. The last of these was an explicitly ecumenical translation meant to appeal to Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians alike.44 For many Evangelicals, nsrv was viewed as giving up too much ground to liberals and ecumenists. The New International Version (niv), released in 1973, was designed to return to the Protestant distinctness of the kjv while using the latest advances in Biblical scholarship. What was produced was one of the most popular Bibles ever with the American public; whereas all other versions up to this point had attempted word for word accuracy, the niv was less dependent on previous translations, including the kjv. It aimed at a freer translation that would be easier to comprehend for the average reader who now, more 42

43 44

Eventually, the need for Catholic parochial schools would be seen as so urgent, that the 1884 Third Plenary Council of Baltimore mandated that school buildings should have priority over church buildings in new parishes. See Peter W. Williams, America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 301. Fessenden, “The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars,” 796; Moore, “Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling,” 1581, 1585, 1599. For a good overview of the history of modern Bible translations in Europe and the United States, see Peter J. Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles Over Translating the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Kjv In The Usa: The Impact Of The King James Bible In America

273

than likely, had not been raised since childhood with the kjv. In time, the niv would become the best-selling Bible in America.45 Despite the continuing popularity of the niv (or perhaps because of it), some conservative Evangelicals, mostly Baptist independents but others as well, argue still for the superiority of the King James Bible. In fact, some have made acceptance of the kjv a mark of orthodoxy. When I first encountered King James Onlyism about a decade ago, it was represented to me rather facetiously as, ‘If the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!’ Now there are some who are that naïve, but many of the leaders of the movement are better historically informed and have developed a variety of arguments to support their position. In fact, King James Onlyism is not a monolithic movement, but a spectrum of opinions that range from conservative to ultra-conservative. Taking a typology from Baptist theologian James R. White, the King James Only movement can be divided along a continuum from those whose loyalty to the Authorized Version is primarily aesthetic (Group #1: I like the kjv best); to those who believe that the Greek texts, the so-called Textus Receptus, used by the King James translators to translate the New Testament are still superior to manuscripts discovered subsequently, even if these are older (Group #2: The Textual Argument); to those who believe the Textus Receptus was divinely preserved (Group #3: Received Text Only); to those who believe the King James translators were inspired by God and produced an inspired translation (Group #4: The Inspired kjv); to those who believe the King James translation actually represents a new revelation from God (Group #5: The kjv as New Revelation).46 Again, except for the relatively tolerant Group #1, King James Onlyism is found primarily in the Baptist and Independent Bible Church tradition, along with such sectarian traditions as Seventh-day Adventism, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and those dispensational premillennialist groups that rely on the 1917 Scofield Reference Bible.47 What is now called the King James Only Movement or King James Onlyism finds its roots in work published in 1930 by a Seventh-day Adventist named 45 46 47

See the Christian Booksellers Association statistics on bestsellers (www.cbaonline.org/ nm/BSLs.htm; accessed February 1, 2011). James R. White, The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1995), 1–4. See also D.A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1979). See Theusen, In Discourse with the Scriptures, 62–65; Barlow, “Before Mormonism” and “Why the King James Version”; and R. Todd Magnum and Mark S. Sweetnam, The Scofield Bible: Its History an Impact on the Evangelical Church (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2009).

274

Wilson

Benjamin G. Wilkinson entitled Our Authorized Bible Vindicated.48 Wilkinson’s ideas and arguments were subsequently picked up in the 1950s and ‘60s by Baptist writers, J.J. Ray and Peter Ruckman.49 King James Onlyism really takes off, however, in the 1970s and ‘80s, probably in light of the phenomenal success of the niv, which now seriously challenged the status of the King James Bible as the preferred Bible of American Evangelicals. In response to the popularity of this new translation, authors such as Gail Riplinger, whose 1993 book, New Age Bible Versions, became a bestseller, repeated the arguments of the earlier authors, adding in a heavy dose of conspiracy thinking linking liberal Christians, Catholics, and New Agers in a Satanic plot to undermine the Word of God.50 These books had their impact. King James Onlyism has now become an important marker for a portion of the fundamentalist subculture within the larger world of conservative evangelicalism; and because of this, whether or not one uses the King James Bible exclusively has become an exceedingly divisive issue in some congregations. Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are confronted with the irony of ironies: The King James Bible, originally intended by King James to unite the various factions of fractious English-­speaking Christians, now serves as a bright-line marker of exclusion for a fractious subset of English-speaking Christians. 3

The King James Bible in a Post-biblical America

The rise and fall of the King James Bible in America is, of course, part of the larger story of the rise and fall of the Bible in America. For the most part, the United States is a post-biblical country.51 While sales of the Bible, including the King James Version, remain high, and despite the fact that opinion polls show that rudimentary knowledge of the Bible remains relatively high, the kind of deep knowledge of the text that was once so common is now a thing of the past.52 Echoes of the King James Bible do, of course, linger. Anyone who 48 49 50 51 52

Benjamin G. Wilkinson, Our Authorized Bible Vindicated (Washington D.C.: NP, 1930). Jasper James Ray, God Wrote Only One Bible (Junction City, OR: Eye Opener Publications, 1955); Peter Ruckman, The Bible “Babel” (Pensacola, FL: Pensacola Bible Institute, 1964). Gail Riplinger, New Age Bible Versions (Munroe Falls, OH: A.V. Publications, 1993). Grant Wacker, “The Demise of Biblical Civilization,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 121–38. For sales statistics, see note 44 above. For statistics on current biblical knowledge in America, see the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life (September 2010), available at http://pewforum.org.

Kjv In The Usa: The Impact Of The King James Bible In America

275

has watched the annual Easter showing of The Ten Commandments (1956) has been exposed to the influence of the kjv since the screenwriters consciously ­attempted to reproduce the cadence and vocabulary of the Authorized Version. According to one of the screenwriters, Jesse Lasky, Jr., ‘As to how our Moses “talked,” we had no hesitation: the King James Version of the Bible – the Bible DeMille had learned as a child – became the direct source of a great deal of the movie’s dialogue.’53 And, of course, when in the movie Moses receives the actual Ten Commandments, God quotes directly from the King James Bible. My first encounter with the King James Bible, as it was for many of generation, came from another television ritual: A Charlie Brown Christmas, first broadcast in 1965. In a pivotal moment in the animated special, Linus explains the meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown by quoting from the King James Version of Luke’s Gospel (2: 8–14). Even today, kjv references still occasionally appear in popular culture, most notably (and frequently) on The Simpsons.54 And yet, despite these survivals in the popular culture, I doubt references to the King James Bible carry much resonance in America today beyond sounding vaguely churchy. Ultimately, what is the significance of the eclipse of the King James Bible in the United States? Societies do need their unifying cultural symbols, and as we have seen, the King James Bible did serve as a consensus text for generations in the United States, its language and imagery providing instantly recognizable symbols that could unite millions. Today, though, it remains popular most likely not because of any literary merits, but because of a lingering nostalgia for the consensus it once represented, a nostalgia that conservative Evangelicals feel the most acutely. And yet, as the Bible of English-speaking Protestant America, the King James Bible also provoked profound dissensus from those who were American but not Protestant. And as America grows even more pluralistic, it isn’t likely that a single sacred text like the King James Bible – no matter what its literary merits – will ever play the same kind of cultural role again. Given the relative religious homogeneity of 17th-century Britain, King James could reasonably hope that a nation might unite behind a single translation of the sacred text. 53 54

Quoted in Katherine Orrison, Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic: The Ten Commandments (Lanham, MD: Vestal Press, 1999), 36. For examples in The Simpsons, see www.snpp.com/guides/religion.html#b. See also, Lisle Dalton, Eric Michael Mazur, and Monica Siems, “Homer the Heretic and Charlie Church: Parody, Piety, and Pluralism in The Simpsons,” in God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, ed. Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 231–248.

276

Wilson

Such a hope in the face of the heterogeneity of 21st-century America would be forlorn indeed. Of course, there is no danger of the King James Bible disappearing any time soon. In fact, the final irony is that the kjv now exists in a larger variety of forms than ever before: in addition to a myriad of print versions, there are now dozens of recordings of the King James Bible on dvd, CD and for MP3 players, and it can now be downloaded to be read on a Kindle or other e-reader, fully searchable and replete with engravings by Doré. The idea that the kjv can now be carried around in your pocket and read on your cell phone would undoubtedly astonish King James’ company of translators – astonishing perhaps not only because of the technology, but because, after four hundred years, their translation still remains in print. Bibliography Alter, Robert. Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Barlow, Philip L. “Before Mormonism: Joseph Smith’s Use of the Bible, 1820–1829.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57:4 (Winter 1989): 739–771. Barlow, Philip L. “Why the King James Version? From the Common to the Official Bible of Mormonism,” Dialogue 22:2 (1989): 19–43. Basler, Roy P. “Abraham Lincoln’s Rhetoric.” American Literature, 11:2 (May 1939): 167–82. Carson, D.A. The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1979. Dalton, Charles B. “The Origin of the Version Authorized by the Roman Catholic Church, and the American Revised Version.” In Roman Catholic and Protestant Bibles Compared, Edited by M.W. Jacobus. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915. Dalton, Lisle, Eric Michael Mazur, and Monica Siems. “Homer the Heretic and Charlie Church: Parody, Piety, and Pluralism in The Simpsons.” In God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, Edited by Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy. New York: Routledge, 2001. Fessenden, Tracy. “The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars and the Separation of Church and State.” Church History 74:4 (December 2005): 784–811. Fogarty, S.J., Gerald P. “The Quest for a Catholic Vernacular Bible in America.” In The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, Edited by Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Kjv In The Usa: The Impact Of The King James Bible In America

277

Fornieri, Joseph R. Abraham Lincoln’s Political Faith. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Goodspeed, Edgar J., and Moses Hadas. The Apocrypha: An American Translation. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Gordon, Melton J. Encyclopedia of Protestantism. New York: Facts On File, 2005. Gutjahr, Paul C. An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1770–1880. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Hansen, D.W. The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation. New York: Ecco, 2003. LaFantasie, Glen. “Lincoln and the Gettysburg Awakening.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 16:1 (Winter 1995) pp. 73–89. Levinson, Bernard M., and Joshua A. Berman, “The King James Bible at 400: Scripture, Statecraft, and the American Founding,” History Channel Magazine (November 2010): 1–11. Lockridge, Kenneth A. Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West. New York: Norton, 1974. Magnum, R. Todd, and Mark S. Sweetnam. The Scofield Bible: Its History an Impact on the Evangelical Church. Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2009. McGrath, Alister E. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick or the White Whale. Boston: The St. Botolph Society, [1851] 1892. Moore, Laurence R. “Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling: The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Public Education.” The Journal of American History 86:4 (March 2000): 1581–1599. Nicolson, Adam. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2003. Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952. Orrison, Katherine. Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic: The Ten Commandments. Lanham, MD: Vestal Press, 1999. Pardes, Ilana. Melville’s Bibles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Ray, Jasper James. God Wrote Only One Bible. Junction City, OR: Eye Opener Publications, 1955. Riplinger, Gail. New Age Bible Versions. Munroe Falls, OH: A.V. Publications, 1993. Ruckman, Peter. The Bible “Babel.” Pensacola, FL: Pensacola Bible Institute, 1964. Saum, Lewis O. The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.

278

Wilson

Simms, Paris Marion. The Bible in America: Versions That Have Played Their Part in the Making of the Republic. New York: Wilson-Erickson, Inc., 1936. Stout, Harry S. “Word and Order in Colonial New England.” In The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, Edited by Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Thuesen, Peter J. In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles Over Translating the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. u.s. Religious Knowledge Survey, Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life (September 2010). http://pewforum.org. Wacker, Grant. “The Demise of Biblical Civilization,” In The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, Edited by Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. White, James R. The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1995. White, Jr., Ronald C. Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Wilkinson, Benjamin G. Our Authorized Bible Vindicated. Washington d.c.: NP, 1930. Williams, Peter W. America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Wolf, William J. The Almost Chosen People: A Study of the Religion of Abraham Lincoln. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1959. Wright, Nathalia. Melville’s Use of the Bible. New York: Octagon Books, 1969.

Chapter 11

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “Wretched”: On the Ideology of Alt-Fascism Dustin J. Byrd Whichever way we look at the problem, the fact remains that one people had a country which it could call its own, and so it did; and now it has to share it with other peoples, not particularity friendly ones, and who look like they will in turn call it their own, as soon as they are able to muster enough strength and host enough force to put their claim on it. In any other country, and at any other time in history, those responsible for this loss and humiliation would be indicted as traitors. The word seems to have gone out of ­fashion – one would not know what to betray. ~ Renaud Camus1 There is a perverse dialectic afoot; former colonial powers are being quietly colonized by their former subjects, at least that is the claim by a growing number of voices, both in intellectual circles and the halls of political power in the capitals of Europe. For example, when the u.s. President Donald J. Trump visited the United Kingdom in July of 2018, he was asked about immigration and Europe, to which he replied “I just think it’s changing the culture, I think it’s a very negative thing for Europe. I think it’s very negative.”2 Although Prime Minister Theresa May rebuffed Trump’s claims by reminding Britons of their long and proud history of welcoming refugees and immigrants, it was Trump’s incendiary statements which ignited a political firestorm to the delight of the European and Euro-American Far Right. By connecting immigration to the 1 Renaud Camus, Le grand remplacement (Chez l’auteur, 2017), 34–35. 2 The following is Donald Trump’s full answer: “I think it’s been bad for Europe. I know Europe very well and it’s been tough. We’ve seen some terror attacks. I just think it’s changing the culture and is very negative for Europe and Germany — I have a great relationship with Angela Merkel, but it’s hurt Germany and other parts of Europe. It’s not politically-correct to say that, but I’ll say it and say it loud. Look at what’s happening to different countries that never had problems — it’s a very sad situation. It’s not good for Europe and it’s not good for our country. We have very bad immigration laws. We’re doing incredibly well considering we virtually don’t have immigration laws — I don’t even call them laws, you just walk across the border and then you’re tied in a lawsuit for five years.” Full Text: Donald Trump-Theresa May Press Conference. July 13, 2018. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/13/full-text-theresa -may-trump-visit-transcript-718569.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_012

280

Byrd

white nationalists’ mantra of “losing our culture,” Trump bolstered the claim that Europe was being “colonized” by hordes of immigrants, mostly Muslims, and that if left unchecked, this “settler” movement would one day end in a complete transformation of Europe. For the Far Right, including White Nationalists, Occidentalists, and “identitarians,” immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are the new “occupation forces,” determined to remake their once colonial masters in their own image. As Europeans stand in horror of the millions of “others” that “invade” their lands, the haunting image of Europe’s conquest of the world, especially Africa and the Middle East, impinges on the collective unconscious. The descendants of the European colonists remember what their ancestors did to brutalize, enslave, and extract the wealth of nations in the name of European-led “progress.” They remember the stories they were told by their history teachers of European conquests of nations and tribes whom they thought at the time to be humanly “lesser” – if human at all; they remember the burden of the European was supposedly to bring civilization to the uncivilized, but that once the gift of civilization was bestowed, the ungrateful “others” turned on their benevolent European “fathers” and engaged in an unjust patricide – forcibly removing the benevolent invaders from the native’s “patria.” Now, it seems that the descendants of the colonized, both in Africa and the Middle East, have returned to claim something that doesn’t belong to them: Europe itself. This process has been dubbed Le grand remplacement (The Great Replacement) by members of Europe’s far right, especially in France, where the descendants of the formerly colonized roughly make up approximately 10% of the population – alarming many who are troubled by such demographic shifts. In the end, many in Europe fear that they will become the new “wretched of the earth.”3 Amidst this situation, I argue that the language and concepts of colonization, that were initially developed by Frantz Fanon and other decolonization theorists, have been appropriated by critics of Europe’s immigration policies, and have thus turned the tables on the formerly colonized; the “others” in Europe are, it is claimed, the new colonists, and Europe is the new target of colonization. Paved with good intentions, derived from post-colonial “ethnomasochism” and “white guilt,” the Far-Right claims that Europe is being delivered to those who do not belong to her “ethnos” nor to her “natio,” with the logical conclusion that Europe will become something other than Europe – a Bantustan of Muslims from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, governed by Arabs and Turks, and thus forcibly “deculturated” from its Greco-Roman, Christian, and 3 Camus, Le grand remplacement.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

281

Enlightenment heritage.4 It is proclaimed that the White “Christian” population will not only find itself the minority in its own countries, but also powerless, just as natives were in theirs under colonial rule. Thus, in the spirit of Fanon’s critical philosophy, I will attempt to explore key ideas pertaining to the “new” colonialism, and demonstrate how such concepts are being distorted to fit the Far Right’s ideological claim that Europe is rapidly being colonized, in general by the tiers monde (Third World), and specifically by the dār al-Islām (abode of Islam). From the onset of this chapter, I think it’s important to note that I do think Europe has a vexing immigration problem, one that, as it currently stands in 2019, is beyond what the European states, and their liberal establishment politicians, are capable or willing to address with solutions that balance sovereignty with compassion, cultural preservation and cultural dynamism. Thus, this perceived “soft colonization,” wherein Europe is overtaken by the global South through “undeclared” and hidden “appeals to solidarity, the right of asylum, and equality,” creates an unsustainable situation that has begun to deliver many otherwise rational Europeans to neo-fascist political groups, who demagogically promise to slay the cultural, political, and economic chaos of mass immigration.5 However, even if this is true, it is, in my estimation, a long-stretch to claim that Europe as a whole is subject to colonization, which I see as an extreme exaggeration. Nevertheless, a kernel of truth often resides within the exaggeration, and that truth, no matter how seemingly insignificant, must be addressed before it becomes a civilizational neurosis calling for aggressive – and possibly violent – treatment. Despite these growing perceptions of an imminent takeover of Europe by foreigners, I claim that Europe is under no threat of being colonized (if European colonization is our model), but rather Europe is under serious threat of severe destabilization, due primarily to (1) mass immigration (and its heterotelia), and (2) the palingenetic ultranationalist backlash that mass 4 Furthermore, Guillaume Faye defines “ethnomasochism” as the following: ‘the masochistic tendency to blame and devalue one’s ethnicity, one’s own people.’ He continues, ‘Ethnomasochism comes from shame and self-hatred. It’s a collective psychopathology, provoked by a concerted propaganda campaign to make Europeans feel guilty about how they’ve treated other peoples and to make them see themselves as “oppressors.” They are made, in this way, to repent and pay their alleged debt. A veritable historical imposture, their repentance, no less, is urged by the churches and the state.’ He goes to say that ethnomasochism is a form of “self-racism,” which inevitably will lead to “ethno-suicide” for Europeans. See Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance, trans. Michael O’Meara. London: Arktos, 2011. 5 Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age. trans. Sergio Knipe. (London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2010), 65.

282

Byrd

i­mmigration engenders. The demographic shifts of Europe, wherein millions of non-­European “others” have taken up residency in already economically and politically fragile European countries, and the failure of multiculturalism amidst affluence in “tolerant” liberal societies, has created a situation wherein parallel societies live in opposition to each other – both claiming victim status. These parallel victim groups have created toxic environments, wherein intersubjective­discourses between communities becomes all but impossible, for neither can speak authoritatively for their own collectives, nor do they trust the other to speak openly and honestly. As such, the meta-narrative of a “colonial invasion” of Muslims and migrants continues, resulting in millions of Europeans turning to racist, xenophobic, and neo-fascist political parties to slay the chaos brought on by seemingly unchecked immigration. 1

Defining our Subject: Colonialism – Old and “New”

Historians and anthropologists tell us that groups of peoples forcibly removed other groups of people from their lands since pre-recorded history. Scholars of decolonization theory, on the other hand, have a clear understanding as to what is meant by “colonization,” and it has little to do with Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals, etc. The political-cultural term “colonization” in decolonization theory refers to the specific period beginning in the 15th century when European peoples broke out of their peninsula and conquered foreign territories, especially in the American “New World,” Africa, and Asia. For the most part, these Europeans weren’t simply looking for resources and markets to exploit, as was the case with the British in China, but were rather looking to establish permanent presences in new lands. Colonies, in this sense, were deliberate attempts to “settle” the lands of others in order to reproduce European civilization outside of Europe. The European metropoles, forcibly bound all their colonies to itself, thus creating the empires of Europe. As such, the spread of tens of millions of Europeans outside of Europe had the effect of disseminating their cultural norms, languages, and religion around the world, while permanently altering and/or disfiguring the cultural norms, languages, and religions of the conquered. While in some places colonization created permanent new societies, such as in the Americas, in other places, where inter-racial mixing was less common, colonials were eventually pushed out of their conquered territories, such as in North and West Africa in the mid-20th century. In the worst cases, native peoples were decimated by superior weaponry and inferior morality, as well as the spread of diseases, while in other places the native populations were the

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

283

target of genocide via breeding, thus absorbed into a new “whitened” racial mix. Universally, the Europeans reigned over their new subjects with varying degrees of brutality, as the natives became vassals in their own homelands, or were kidnapped from their land-of-origin due to colonial slavery. This form of domination was direct, immediate, and top-down. The colonial subject knew clearly who their enemy was; they witnessed his brutality every day, and every day they were reminded by the hegemonic colonial system that they were subjects of another’s will and a product of their making. The effects of such a social, political, economic, and culture situation is well documented, none the more brilliant than by the Maritician psychiatrist and philosopher, Frantz Fanon, who wrote most poignantly about colonialism and its lasting effects in his four most important works: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1959), The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and Towards the African Revolution (1964). Through these works, Fanon’s influence as a philosopher of the Third World, a prophet of emancipation, and an advocate of socialist revolution, helped propel many Third World nations to their political independence. It also gained influence in the “1968” generation in Europe and America, which attempted to undermine the “demotic” nation-states of the post-World War ii West.6 Fanon was especially influential on the Black Power Movement in the United States, wherein his argument for the emancipatory potential of revolutionary violence echoed their own experiences with slavery, Jim Crown, lynching, segregation, and systematic white supremacy, both in the North and the South. Fanon’s works reminded many people in the Black Power Movement of how Frederick Douglass found his own manhood – and thus his intellectual and spiritual emancipation – in his defiant brawl with the slave master Edward Covey, the “negro breaker.”7 For Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and other members of the Black Panther Party, reading Fanon’s work on revolutionary violence amidst the Civil Rights movement delivered politically-frustrated ­African-Americans back to the “Black tradition” of armed defense, which was rooted in the slave rebellions of Denmark Vesey, “Gabriel,” Nat Turner,

6 The term “demotic” denotes governments that rule in the “name of the people” without the people (demos) having actual power. Although the following books do not specifically address Fanon’s influence on the ’68 Generation, they are excellent studies of that ­movement. See Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008; Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 7 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 165–199.

284

Byrd

and other rebellious “propertied” people.8 Such a militant Black tradition of armed defense had in the Civil Rights struggle been excommunicated by the “Black dogma” of non-violent resistance (satyagraha), advocated by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.9 To many revolutionaries, King’s Gandhi-inspired nonviolent resistance seemed a woefully inadequate answer to the problems of the ­perpetually-wretched in the Black ghettos – the “internal colonies” of America.10 Reading the revolutionary and Black-affirming works of Fanon, especially in the late 1960’s, when the reformist limitations of the Civil Rights Movement were becoming painfully apparent, was a shot of revolutionary geist into the veins of a people who had become tired of being promised the full rights of citizenship whilst still being treated as the obstinate residue of a colonial age. Yet, Fanon’s insights concerning colonization have been perverted by the European Far Right, as it pertains to Europe’s three most intractable problems: (1) its post-modern identity crisis, (2) its declining ethnic demographics, and (3) its difficulties accommodating, enculturating, and integrating the influx of refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers, primarily from Middle East and North Africa (mena), as well as West African countries.11 To most observers, the wealthy and stable democracies of Western Europe, most of whom were once imperial powers – and as such had extracted great sums of wealth from those colonies (and in some cases still do) – have a historic and humanitarian obligation to help the desperate masses fleeing to Europe. Yet, since the rise of isis (ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī ‘l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām – daesh), the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, the collapse of the Libyan state, and the continuing ­destabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan, all happening congruently, the numbers of refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers has blossomed well beyond what most of the European states are willing to accept. What was once a 8 9

10 11

Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 2013. Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms. (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014), 31–67. Also see Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns. New York: Marzani & Munsell, Inc., 1962, which was highly influential on Huey P. Newton’s philosophy of violent resistance to white supremacy. Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2016), 4. The recently deceased right-wing intellectual Guillaume Faye calls such congruent disasters the “convergence of catastrophes,” which he would also include matters of economy, terrorism, ethnic strife, civil war, and environmental collapse. These catastrophes, which are the inevitable heterotelic outcomes of liberal modernity, especially its globalized mass-produced “pop” culture, reign of money, crass materialism, and utopian egalitarianism. Such a convergence will push Europe to reassert itself politically, economically, and culturally, through what he calls “Archeofuturism” as a means to survive such a total catastrophe. There will be more on that later in this chapter.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

285

“­humanitarian crisis” now appears to them to be a “colonial project,” only this “invasion” doesn’t appear to be top down, as the European colonial invasions were; this comes from the bottom up – from the poor, destitute, and/or discarded others: an ad hoc invasion force without a centralized metropole giving orders. However, from the perspective of the Far Right, this “invasion” doesn’t deliver the benefits of a superior civilization to an inferior one, as the old imperialists believed was the case during European colonization, but rather drags the superior into the problems of the wretched inferior. Thus, this “invasion” has bred an infectious form of resentment in Europe, wherein the Far Right narrative of the invading others seeks to portray the situation as a plague of locust rather than a humanitarian crisis. Treated like the immigrant nations of North America, the history of immigration to Europe has demonstrated that the post-World War ii standard-ofliving and robust welfare state have proven to be powerful reasons for such immigrants to stay in Europe, never to return to their homelands.12 With this in mind, for many Europeans, not just the Far Right, this influx of others is perceived to be a stealth attempt to repopulate Europe with another people and culture: Le grand remplacement. Guillaume Faye, one of the most influential voices of the European New Right championing the idea of the “colonial invasion” of Europe, defined this perceived colonization project as the following: The occupation and permanent installation of a people (or several peoples) on another people’s homeland. This term is preferable to that of “immigration.” This is what Europe is presently suffering: a massive colonisation by alien peoples, which makes it the greatest tragedy in her history, because it threatens to destroy her ethnic stock. This colonization is far more serious than a military occupation, because it’s potentially irreversible. At the same time, this colonisation threatening an Islamic conquest of Europe is carried out with the complicity of the United States.13 He continues, From a tactical perspective, it’s necessary to speak of colonists rather than immigrants, and to stop affirming that the latter are victims of “exploitation.” Just the opposite, these colonists have come to Europe to live 12

Akbar Ahmed, Journey to Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity (Washington D.C.; Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 175–248. 13 Faye, Why We Fight, 94.

286

Byrd

at our expense. Their invasion comes from both the maternity wards and porous borders… We are suffering “a colonisation from below,” very different from the former European colonisation of the Third World. The gravity of the phenomenon has been compounded by Europe’s demographic collapse.14 Faye ends by writing, European colonisation was civilizing: it brought many things to the countries involved and, contrary to the dogmas of the xenophilic Left… it had little effect on native culture. Rather, it (stupidly) reinforced Islam, laying the basis for its current historical assault on Europe. In every realm, resistance to this colonisation and reconquest constitutes the single overriding objective of every European political project of the Twenty-first century.15 Although distorted, one can see in Guillaume Faye’s critique of Europe’s immigration crisis, that he has an understanding of what historical colonization is. If the brutalizing and lasting effects of colonization were unknown to him, such immigration to Europe by non-Europeans would surely not be presented by him as being so troubling, but would rather be presented as relatively benign. However, Faye is a student of history, as well as decolonization theory, and knows full well what it means to be colonized, to have one’s own culture disfigured, to have one’s traditions evaporate, to have one’s sense of self and belonging severed from its historical origins. If he didn’t understand the devastating effects, he would not explicitly appropriate the language of colonization to describe what’s currently going on in Europe with its immigration troubles. The term “colonization” deliberately congers up the ghosts of the past, which are eternally present specters in the minds of many Liberal/Left Europeans, and, according to Faye, a constant source of their suicidal ethnomasochism. Additionally, Faye, being a founding member of the New Right, knows precisely the existential troubles Europe is currently entrenched in; ‘what does it mean to be European’ is the perpetual question asked within the context of a globalized post-modern consumer society, which emphasizes cultural uniformity, internationalism, and “globalism” over traditional culture and “localism.” Indeed, in his book Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age, which was first published in French in 1997, Faye lays out the

14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 94–95.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

287

associated dysgenic cost of modernity, or the “Third Worlding” of Europe. He writes that there is a, widespread metastasis of the European social fabric. The demographic colonisation of the northern hemisphere by people from the South is becoming an increasing problem – despite all the reassuring statements of the part of the media – and one fraught with explosive consequences, associated in particular with the collapse of the Churches in Europe, which has become a land of conquest for Islam; the failure of multiracial society, which is increasingly racist and neo-tribal; the progressive ethnoanthropological metamorphosis of Europe, a veritable historical disaster; the return of poverty in both East and West, and the slow but steady increase in crime and drug consumption; the ongoing disintegration of family structures; the decline of the educational system and the quality of school curricula; the disruption of the passing down of cultural knowledge and social disciplines (barbarization and incompetence); the disappearance of folk culture and its replacement by the brutishness of masses rendered passive by audio-visual technology… the progressive decay of cities and communities in favour of sprawling suburbs devoid of all transparency and coherence, where there is no law or safety; endemic urban revolts…16 He continues, Meanwhile, nation-states witness their own sovereignty decline and prove incapable of facing poverty, unemployment, crime, illegal immigration, and the growing power of mafias and the corruption of the political class; the creative and productive elites, hit by taxation and increasing economic control… an increasingly egotistical and savage society on the road to primitivism, paradoxically concealed and counterbalanced by the naïve and pseudo-humanistic discourse of ‘hegemonic morality’: this is what is emerging, year after year, and will soon reach a breaking point.17 These and other pressing issues have created toxic conditions into which the new immigrants and refugees squarely find themselves. Indeed, as the problems Faye identifies continue to metastasize; destabilizing fear and resentment breed exponentially, and in the process cultivate fertile grounds for both 16 Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism, 59–60. 17 Ibid.

288

Byrd

Islamophobia and xenophobia: the preconditions for the widespread acceptance of the “colonial invasion theory.”18 In light of this, we must explore what has made Europe once again so susceptible to Right-Wing ultranationalist politics, so much so that many otherwise decent and compassionate people turn to nationalist-populist parties promising the end of the “Islamic invasion” and “colonization” of Europe. 2 Aetiology i: History Post-World War ii, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, Western Europe resigned itself to playing a supporting role in history. It was no longer at the forefront of the historical process. As this painful realization began to sink in, the once great colonial masters began to relinquish what was left of their colonial territories, or at minimum give them relative autonomy. Europe went into a welldeserved retirement, leaving the United States of America and the Soviet Union to determine the fate of the world. With its territorial expansiveness diminished, the former colonial states became ancillary to the United States, and the tiers monde was, often by necessity, ancillary to the Soviet Union, as the Soviet Union was the only effective countervailing force to aggressive American-led liberalism and neo-colonialism. Nevertheless, the triumph of liberalism over Soviet Communism in 1989 and 1991 brought about a new world order, one determined by a hegemonic neo-liberalism – an unencumbered expansion of corporate capitalism and western cultural modernity. This expansion and domination of neo-liberalism, wherein the values of the market would determine nearly all aspects of life, both in the West and increasingly in the nations of the “Rest,” and enforced by American military might, would come to continue colonialism’s destabilization of traditional ways-of-being and localized economies, to the point of collapse in many areas of the world. Indeed, globalization of neo-liberal economics as well as the increased dominance of western liberal culture proved to be greatly beneficial to ruling liberal elites, both in Western Europe and North America (the Davos class), as well as the elites in the post-colonial societies, who, as Frantz Fanon had predicted, b­ ecame the mirror image of their former colonial masters, extracting and accumulating the wealth of their societies while leaving the masses in the same wretchedness 18

In most cases, Faye refers to Muslim immigration to Europe as an “invasion,” but at other times he reserves the term of “invasion” for a direct assault on Europe by Muslim majority countries, their “home bases,” which he sees as a possibility in the future if the Muslim colonials in Europe gain a certain level of demographic power. See Faye, Archeofuturism, 76.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

289

that their former colonial masters left them in, i.e. the perverse black skin, white minds. After World War ii, the great Western European cities were left devastated. London, Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, and other industrial cities laid in ruin; the men that once populated them now rested disfigured in shallow graves throughout Europe. Rebuilding their destroyed cities was not the only concern for the Allied powers; some attempted to hold onto geopolitical and economically valuable colonies. Although some tried to resist the inevitable, especially France, many colonies took advantage of the metropole’s post-war weakness, and fought for their independence. As Fanon attested to, the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962), with its recalcitrant pied noir, was especially bloody, vicious, and brutal, leaving approximately 1.5 million Algerians dead and another 400,000 French dead.19 France’s feeble attempt to maintain its Southeast Asian colonies, which led to the American-led Vietnam War, was equally brutal, leaving approximately 58,000 u.s. soldiers dead and 1.1 million Vietnamese in shallow graves. Thus the middle of the 20th century, marked by the struggle against Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, and Franco’s fascism, as well as the old and crumbling European empires, was a vicious and deadly age. However, the dialectic of history – history as “slaughterbench” to use Hegel’s term – continued unabated, and as such the “resolution” of the mid-20th century’s political problems established the very antagonistic conditions that would serve as the fertile soil for the 21st century’s burgeoning crises. 3 Aetiology ii: Nihilism, the Last Man, and Immigration Europe’s retirement from being the forerunner of history led not only to a stable and integrated European society, via the European Union (EU) and leftleaning socially-modified liberalism – the robust welfare state – but it also ended, on a metaphysical level, the last transcendental project of Europe. Europe’s Faustian aggressiveness, its civilizational imperative to drag the rest of the world into “civilization,” by which it meant to create the world in its own image (and profit from it), ended when Europe lost the last remaining subjects of its civilizational imperative: the non-European others. Without the other to cast its shadow upon, Europe turned to itself, and on itself, having now to face the nihilistic conditions it created when it, to use Nietzsche’s words, “killed

19

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

290

Byrd

God,” and became a people untethered by tradition, religion, and inherited culture.20 As long as the transcendent project – colonialism – could distract European peoples from the inner and spiritual collapse it had brought upon itself since the Bourgeois French Revolution, with its Apollonian demythologization of the world via the Enlightenment, it could avoid gazing critically at the existential emptiness it attempted to distract itself from. This collapse of seele (life) at the hands of geist (mind) is not unknown to the New Right.21 In the words of Guillaume Faye, ‘Western civilization [had] despiritualized itself,’ and had ‘destroy[ed] all transcendental values.’22 And with the collapse of its colonies, it had nothing but contempt for itself. After the forfeiture of the colonial project, Europe could no longer ignore what had become its reality. Despite post-colonial affluence and abundance, Europe had become saturated with metaphysical emptiness: the triumph of nihilism, crass materialism, and the subsequent plague of meaninglessness: Europe as a thermometer as opposed to a thermostat of world history.23 The Dionysian colonial project had for a time filled that void, but that no longer served as a compelling reason to avoid the void. God was dead, and Europe had become a “godless” and therefore a dysgenic society – having only the opium of material abundance to sooth its sorrows. Inherent meaning no longer existed in Europe (as it did in the “museum-like” colonial territories). Values, that once served as the basis for a common morality, were now cast as mere constructions of opinions, tastes, and self-serving preferences. Reflecting the pessimism of the given situation, beauty was replaced by intentional ugliness in art and music, and function replaced aesthetic pleasure in modern architecture.24 Joy was replaced by amusement, Eros was replaced by pornography, and spiritual contemplation by the mindlessness of mass distraction. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche heralded such a civilizational collapse in his “parable of the madman.”25 Without inherent meaning and values, all is capricious, the reality of which led to the domination of nihilism, and from 20

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008), 103–104. 21 Ludwig Klages, The Biocentric Worldview, trans. Joseph D. Pryce. London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2013. Although the commentators of this book translate geist as “spirit” and seele as “soul,” I prefer “life” and “mind,” as I think what these terms denote in English is closer to what Klages meant in German. 22 Faye, Archeofuturism, 87. 23 Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000. 24 Roger Scruton. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 139–161. 25 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 103–104.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

291

this nihilism the self-centered egoism, greed, and necrophilia that animates social atomization. To avoid metaphysical pessimism, on the scale of Arthur Schopenhauer, capitalism attempted to fill the void with boundless commodities; Marxism attempted to fill the void with a cult of spiritually-charged yet secularized critique: a being-towards utopia – the Kingdom of God on Earth. Colonialism had once attempted to fill the void with a project that convinced many that, despite the rising flood of nihilism they were confronting at home, European civilization was still superior to other “primitive” and therefore “barbaric” civilizations. However, many Europeans quietly envied the meaning and value-filled societies they conquered, especially men like René Guénon, Julius Evola, and Carl Jung, and the “Traditionalist” school of anti-modern thought they inspired, who dreamt of the “wholeness of existence” (Ganzheit des Daseins) that still animated traditionally religious societies.26 Now, after World War ii and the collapse of the colonies, Europe had to face its 18th and 19th century demons. It was knee-deep in the throes of dysgenic forces: It’s religious traditions either evaporated or were so hollowed out that they became automaton habits without meaning; its families were disintegrating due to extreme individualism and narcissism; its hochkultur (high culture) had given way to cheap mass-produced pop culture, and the warrior thumos (spiritedness, passion), which had made colonization possible, had been forcibly replaced with the tyranny of egalitarianism and telluric mediocrity. Truly Europe had moved into a new metaphysics of being. But what was this growing darkness? In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche, in an attempt to invoke disgust in his audience, described this new metaphysical state as the “Last Man” (Letzter Mensch), calling it the “most contemptable thing.” He writes, Alas! There cometh a time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man – and the strong of his bow will have unlearned to whizz! I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you. Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh

26

René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, trans. Marco Pallis, Arthur Osborne, and Richard C. Nicholson. Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004. Also see Julius Evola, Revolt against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995. For an overview of the Traditionalist school of thought, see Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

292

Byrd

the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself. Lo! I show you the last man!27 In the conditions of the “Last Man,” a diminished Western man is locked within the jaws of a flattened modernity that he created; this is a man tired of living, who will not risk anything for greatness; he is content to live a life of mere comfort and security. For the “Last Man,” there is no transcendental project that provides him meaning; there is no reason to go beyond the confines of the given; he is satisfied by his own comfortable material existence, despite the fact that he has no compelling reason to exist. The “Last Man” is a man in perpetual retirement – having withdrawn into himself and his palatial yet secluded private space. He is indeed the “lesser man” compared to his Faustian forbearers. However, For Nietzsche, the danger isn’t that given individuals of Western society will spiritually hibernate and retire their thumos, for the masses are always untermenschen, those too weak of mind and spirit to conquer and overcome, but who rather prefer safety and security over tragedy, triumph, and chaos. No, for Nietzsche, the catastrophe is civilizational; the West, having stared the ugliness of nihilism in the face, retreated from its grand narratives into a stagnant one-dimensional being, unwilling to overcome the nothingness he created with boldness, manliness, strength, ambition, and determination, i.e. “the will to power” (der Wille zur Macht).28 Colonialism, which began prior to the “Last Man,” exemplified the strength of Europe before its masochistic self-crippling. As the colonies began to wither, and the conditions of the Last Man began to set in at home, the West tried to overcome its “Last Man” syndrome by brutally hanging on to its colonial territories. The more desperate it got, the more brutal they became. Nevertheless, post-World War ii, the whole of Western and Central Europe were eventually forced into the safety and security of its post-colonial retirement, happy to draw an ill-gotten yet lucrative pension from its former colonies via a technological-driven neo-colonialism. But long gone were the days where the nation-states of Europe directly showed their imperial prowess over their colonial subjects. From now on, the job belonged primarily to the United States and international institutions: The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and other NonGovernment Organizations. 27 28

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1954), 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006), 409–463.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

293

Nevertheless, Europe’s relinquishment of its colonial territories and its retreat into its mediocracy, wherein it transcends nothing, produced a new set of problems echoing from one central question: ‘what does it now mean to be European’ in a post-colonial, neo-liberal, and culturally-harmonizing Americanled “globalist” age? There is no surprise today that the question of what it means to be “European” is under intense scrutiny. Public debates on this questions are widespread in those European countries that have seen high levels of immigration since the World War ii.29 Liberal Bourgeois republics like France, with its Enlightenmentinspired jus soli (birthright citizenship), grant citizenship to anyone born within its borders – as it is in the United States, which adopted the policy after its own devastating civil war in the mid-19th century. Thus, the basis of citizenship within the national community is the individual’s birth and/or sworn commitment to political principles and ideals, i.e. the “naturalized” citizen. According to the Critical Theorist, Jürgen Habermas, unlike the nation-state before the Enlightenment and modernity, the modern nation-state consciously determines the conditions of the “intentional democratic community” (willensgemeinschaft), which is no longer predicated on the “pre-political foundations” of race, shared geographic location, common language, customs, religion, and tradition.30 Thus, following the French Revolution, the modern “nation” is no longer a “community of descent,” but is “nation of citizens,” wherein “ascribed nationality [gives] way to an achieved nationalism, that is, to a conscious product of one’s own efforts.”31 However, such a “conscious product” born out of the free will of citizens, does not automatically secure tranquility amongst the various ethno-communities that comprise the demos. Consequently, the abiding pressures and antagonisms born of ill-defined multiculturalism and a pluralistic citizenship have compelled many to rethink the idea of the merits of birthright citizenship, including many influential voices on the New Right, including Guillaume Faye, who advocates for a return to jus sanguinis (the right of blood) in order to avoid the demographic shifts that would inevitably end in European “ethnocide.”32 Those who find themselves included in the “demos” of a given European nation without being a part of the historical “ethnos” of that nation, are being questioned as to whether or not they are really French, German, 29 30 31 32

See Alain Badiou and Alain Finkielkraut, Confrontation, trans. Susan Spitzer (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), 1–36. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg. (Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1996), 494–495. Ibid., 495. Guillaume Faye, The Colonisation of Europe, trans. Roger Adwan (London: Arktos Media, 2016), 1–51.

294

Byrd

I­ talian, Dutch, etc. Is it really possible, they ask, to become full members of a historically-constructed demos – which is rooted (at least partly) in ethnos – or will such people always remain on the margins of societies, even if they are full members of the political demos? Or, even more sinister, are they just the spearhead of a “settler” movement intent on subjugating and colonizing the land and peoples, with the clear intent to engage in ethnocide?33 The Senegalese poet and politician, Léopol Sédar Senghor, famously stated, ‘in order to be colonized, one must first have been colonizable.’34 For many in the New Right, especially the aforementioned Guillaume Faye, but also including the Swedish thinker Joakim “Oskorei” Anderson, Alain de Benoist, Tomislav Sunic, Kevin MacDonald, and the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, Europe is ripe for colonization. Through the guise of “immigration,” xenophilic and ethnomasochistic liberals, progressives, and socialists have created an unholy alliance with foreign invaders, especially the Muslims from mena as well as sub-Saharan Africa. This wholesale importation of others from culturally “inferior” societies has contributed to what the Far Right calls the “great worsening,” i.e. the continual degeneration of Western culture, ethnicity, language, economy, politics, and even intelligence, by outside invaders. Additionally, since most of the refugees and immigrants are Muslims, the generous immigration policies of Europe, either willfully or unwittingly, aid in the déculturation of European culture, which opens a space for Islamization, especially since all cultures, from the post-modern perspective, are equal in value, truth, and beauty, and therefore must be respected as being intrinsically good. In other words, as European culture weakens under the weight of liberal laxity, xenophilia, and multiculturalism, the stronger culture of Islam, which the Far Right claims is imperial by nature, will eventually usher in the age of “Eurabia.”35 33

34 35

The history of the Dutch and English presence in South Africa is enlightening for this question. Clearly, as the Dutch and later the English arrived in South Africa, there was no question as to whether or not they were colonial settlers. However, after Apartheid, the question once again became relevant: is the white Afrikaner population really African, since they do not share the historical ethnos of Black South Africa, whilst enjoying full membership in the political demos? Regardless of what the nation’s law says, the continuing question of whether or not the minority group can ever be a full member of the demos due to its lack of the historical ethnos furthers the instability among racial groups, just as it does in Western and Central Europe. Joakim Andersen, Rising from the Ruins: The Right of the 21st Century, trans. Gustav Hörngren (London: Arktos Media, 2018), 233. “Eurabia” is a term first coined by Gisèle Littman, also known as “Bat Ye’or” (Daughter of the Nile). It is a theory that certain elements within Europe, especially the French-Left, will form an alliance with Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa to construct a super-state extending from the horn of Africa to Scandinavia; from Portugal and Morocco

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

295

Once again, the displacement of European cultural markers, especially those that are connected to Europe’s Greco-Roman and Christian heritage, with markers that are “foreign” to Europe, i.e. hijabs, burkinis, minarets, the ‘adhān (call to prayer), open displays of religiosity in a post-secular society, contributes the intensity of the debate about what it means to be European in the post-Christian age of nihilism and necrophilic consumerism. 4

The Cross without the Crucified

While some intellectuals advocate a return to pre-Christian paganism, such as the New Right intellectual Alain de Benoist, many others believe that the only way to effectively fight against the Islamization of Europe is to reassert its premodern “Christian identity.”36 Although this identity is a mere shadow of what it once was, for reasons we’ve already explained, it is believed that when Europe was anchored in and defined by Christianity, before the “universalism” and “formalism” of the Bourgeois Enlightenment and the French Revolution took hold, Europe was capable of defending itself and its identity against those who attempted to invade it, especially the Muslims. Christianity, acting as an adhesive that bound the otherwise fractious European subcontinent into a super-tribe, provided the Europeans a common identity, a common worldview, and a common cause to rally behind. Men like Charles Martel, who successfully halted the 8th century Arab and Berber conquests of Western Europe, and the King of Poland, John iii Sobieski, who was instrumental in the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in the Siege of Vienna in 1529, are invoked as the kind of Warrior-Christians needed to defend Europe today from the “axis” powers of the anti-European Left and their agent of revenge: immigrant Muslims. Although Nietzschian contempt for Christian “slave morality” is common among those in the European New Right, they nevertheless believe that Christianity as an “identity,” and specifically a Greco-Roman derived identity, is worth ­preserving, as such an

36

in the West to Arabia in the East. See Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan, trans. Jon Graham. Atlanta: Ultra, 2018; Andrew Fraser, Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology. London: Arktos, 2017. It’s interesting to note that, following the Russian Traditionalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, President Vladimir Putin has also encouraged the Russian peoples’ “return” to their Orthodox faith, as a way of defending against the decadence of the liberal West. Having made a political alliance with the Russian Orthodox church, Putin has benefited greatly from the support of his neo-Czarist and culturally conservative palingenetic regime.

296

Byrd

identity can once again be functionalized to unite Europe against the invasive other. Whereas an emphasis on the substance of Christianity, i.e. its call for compassion and mercy towards the others, especially foreigners and refugees, would lead Christians devoted to the moral substance of Christianity to embrace the outcasts, the discarded, and the wretched, these identitarian “whitened sepulcher Christians” merely wish to resurrect a “tribal” form of Christianity, or “cultural Christianity,” wherein the ethical and moral substance of the religion can be wholly ignored as long as the outward appearances remain steadfast, ethnocentric, and radically distinguishable from the others. This is an appropriation – yet reversal – of the Nazi-era Gottgläubigen, who were the fascist “believers in God,” but who had nevertheless left the world of the church and/or organized religion. Now, for the 21st century Christo-fascists in the New Right, the reverse is true: it is the basilica of the ethnocentric church that is important (churchism), and the fides (faith) that is optional. One need not believe in the substance; it is the form that must be asserted. However, in an age of nihilism, relativity, individualism, extreme narcissism, as well as egalitarianism and multiculturalism, wherein there is no longer any universal truth or moral imperatives (post-truth), a surface embrace of Christianity without its critical moral substance, its humanism, can only contribute to the very dysgenic trends that the New Right abhors.37 Social and psychological “needs” drive such a return to religion; it is not that religion has convinced individuals of its central claims.38 Therefore, Christianity without its primordial prophetic geist is just as empty as the consumer society and culture industry, for it too is a mere façade: image without meaning, marketing without truth, and false needs as necessities, i.e. form without substance. To fall back upon a surface appropriation of a traditional religious worldview within a society that has already thoroughly abandoned such a worldview, or at best determinately negated (aufheben) some moral aspects of it into post-metaphysical language and legislation, is beyond reactionary, it is folly, and doomed to fail. A false return to a “neutralized” religion as a reactionary defense against demographic and cultural change will not abate the assumed “Islamization” of Europe, as it travels against the trajectory of history – a fanciful “reverse dialectic.” Such attempts have already proven impotent, for the core claims of Christianity are hardly believed in, especially in light of the modern materialist metaphysics. This is even true for most of the committed Christians in the West, who cling 37 38

To see how the Far Right uses the conditions of post-modern relativism, see Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2017. Theodor W. Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 733.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

297

to the tradition due to their needs, not their theological convictions. Additionally, such a resurrection of Christian aesthetics will further bind the remanences of Christianity with the ugliest parts of its own history: the persecution of all “heretical” others, thus further sacrificing what’s left of its prophetic geist. One of the reasons why many in the New Right advocate for a return to ­religion – as a defense mechanism – is precisely because they remember that Christianity was weaponized during European expansion; It was used as an offensive tool against those the Europeans wished to conquer, exploit, and remove (if possible). Malcolm x, in speaking to Black Christians, was often fond of reminding them of the connection between religion and colonialism, saying that when Europeans came to Africa, the Africans had the land and the Europeans had the Bible. Now, the Europeans have the land and the Africans have the Bible. The fear for many in the New Right is that the Muslims learned the lessons of colonization and have retooled Islam to become the ideological spearhead in a demographic colonization. It is as if to say, ‘when the Muslims came to Europe, they had the Qurʾān and you had the land, now they have the land and you have the Qur’ān.’ For the Far Right, knowing painfully the emptiness of European nihilism, they fear that Islam will conquer via the heart first, as conversion to Islam by native Europeans is growing increasingly.39 A retreat into the existential security provided for by a dogmatic Islam, it is assumed, is tempting within the nihilistic, narcissistic, and materialistic conditions that define Western modernity, the very conditions that the New Right wants to overcome. Islam has, according to Guillaume Faye, already made ‘inroads through the breach, offering to fill the spiritual void of Europe.’40 Indeed, some philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas, have even claimed that Europe could relearn communicative reason – or the reason of family, community, and social solidarity, which has been under the domination of instrumental reason – from these “new Europeans,” thus making the “colonizers” (in the New Right’s language) the teachers of what Europeans have forgotten. However, any widespread acceptance of Islam in Europe, either through the normalization of the Muslim presence or mass conversion, is absolutely rejected by the New Right. Another way, rooted in “authentic” European history and identity, must be formulated to address the social and spiritual inadequacies of Western ­ ­modernity. It cannot be through a capitulation to Islam, nor through the resources of any other non-Western civilization.41 39 Ahmed, Journey into Europe, 304–355. 40 Faye, Archeofuturism, 88. 41 It is interesting to note that Adolf Hitler believed it would have been better for Europe to be conquered by Islam than to remain Christian, because he believed Islam was a

298

Byrd

This “return to Christianity” is a hollow attempt to resurrect a one-time world-historical force and sublimate its residual energies within a palingenetic ultra-nationalist project: a future-oriented remembrance of the roots of Europe, especially in the “seedbed societies” of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, as well as the pre-Christian Nordic territories, with the practical intent to (1) slay the inherent spiritual and identitarian chaos brought on by the “globalist” plague of modernity, and (2) to neutralize the colonial threat of Islamization. It does not take moral-practical elements of Christianity seriously. Rather, it attempts to functionalize the memory of Christianity (and its residual force) as a weapon in their war against a dysgenic multiculturalist modernity. 5

Archeofuturism as Palingenetic Dialectics

The New Right philosopher Guillaume Faye has dreamt up an entire, albeit vague, program for a future world post-global catastrophe. He describes such a philosophy and strategy for overcoming the collapse of European civilization as “Archeofuturism,” and has written extensively about. For the sake of time, I will refrain from summarizing the entirety of this idea, but will rather highlight only those parts pertinent to the discussion of what he sees as the Islamic “colonization” of Europe.42 Faye believes that the West is currently in an interregnum – a transition period between the decline and fall of a great age and the birth of a new age, wherein “new ideas and worldviews struggle to become hegemonic.”43 The essence of this idea is that, in this case, Europe, which was at the forefront of history, is in a civilizational freefall. Having lost its transcendental project, having lost its religious roots, having lost the ties of ethnos, and suffering from post-colonial guilt (and all that it brings: multiculturalism, pluralism, atomization, alienation, post-truth relativity, etc.), Europe is hurling itself towards

42 43

stronger and therefore more suitable religion for the Germans. Additionally, according to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and minister of armaments, Hitler believed that since the conquering Arabs were racially inferior to the Germans, and would not have survived in the harsh weather of Europe, nor ultimately subdue the Germans, that “not Arabs but Islamized Germans” would have “stood at the head of [the] Mohammedan Empire.” See Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970), 114. Additionally, I do not want to box Faye into a corner, for he is clear in his book that his Archeofuturism is dynamic, and therefore will change appropriately due to time, context, and circumstances. Daniel Friberg, The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True Opposition (London: Arktos Media, Ltd., 2015), 93. Also see Faye, Why we Fight, 178.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

299

s­ uicide. However, for the New Right, the death of the modern status quo is the precondition for the rise of a new Europe, one that has thrown off “Americanism,” returned to its ethnic roots while charging forward into a new history. This idea isn’t new; it echoes the “Fourth Turning,” as developed by William Strauss and Neil Howe, and popularized by the Alt-Right guru Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former political advisor, wherein history moves through four states of development, determined by the geist of the generation that defines such a development. The last stage being the “winter,” is defined by decay, degeneration, chaos, civil violence, secessionism, and ultimately collapse (the interregnum age), which then provides the geography from which a new “spring” will begin.44 Oswald Spengler’s theory of the “decline of the West” is also afoot within these dysgenic theories.45 Traces of Hinduism’s notion of cyclical time, especially the Kali Yuga, the “dark age” of stagnation, wherein tradition is abandoned, as well as the Norse Apocalypse myth of Ragnarök, can be heard in both these dystopic theories.46 Indeed, the spiritual basis for most of these theories deepens the idea that Europe is not faced with a material crisis, but rather an existential one – a crisis anchored in the awareness that something vital to the human spirit is missing in modernity. The logic of Guillaume Faye’s political philosophy isn’t new; it is Hegelian in essence, as it relies on Hegel’s dialectical logic of aufhaben, preservation and negation.47 However, the specific content of history that Faye attempts to 44 45 46 47

William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History tell us about America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: An Abridged Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguins Press, 2017), 205; Anderson, Rising from the Ruins, 3–14. Hegel defined “determinate negation” (aufheben) as such: All that is necessary to achieve scientific progress – and it is essential to strive to gain this quite simple insight – is the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much positive, or that what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content, in other words, that such a negation is not all and every negation but the negation of a specific subject matter which resolves itself, and consequently is a specific negation, and therefore the result essentially contains that from which it results; which strictly speaking is a tautology, for otherwise it would be an immediacy, not a result. Because the result, the negations, is a specific negation it has a content. It is a fresh Notion but higher and richer than its predecessor; for it is richer by the negation or opposite of the latter, therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself and its opposite. It is in this way that the system of Notions as such has to be formed – and has to complete itself in a purely continuous course in which nothing extraneous is introduced. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1969), 54.

300

Byrd

d­ ialectically preserve and negate is what gives it its peculiarity, for it is, in many cases, the archaic content of pre-modernity that Faye identifies as being essential for the resurrection of Europe post-interregnum. We can thus summarize Faye’s “Archeofuturism” as such: a determinate negation of the European cultural heritage and intellectual history in order identify, retrieve, and revivify primordial Western ethnos-rooted values and principles that can serve as the basis for the resurrection of a tradition-rooted yet modern European identity and way-of-being-in-the-world. For Faye, this retrieval of past ideas, values, principles, and the fulfillment of them in the present, in preparation for the future, is a combination of Cartesian classicism (the principles of reason, actual possibility, permanent examination and critical voluntarism) and romanticism (a dazzling thought appealing to emotions and aesthetics, along with daring perspectives), in such a way as to unite the virtues of the idealist philosophy of affirmation with the critical philosophy of negation through a coincidentia oppositorium (coincidence of oppositions), as Marx and Nietzsche did with their methods on the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (i.e., the indictment of ruling ideas) and the “positive reversal of values.”48 In other words, the philosophy of the future is a paradoxical reconciliation of the (Cartesian) rational, (Nietzschian) romantic, and (Hegelian-Marxian) critical. Faye also contends that Archeofuturism represents a paradoxical alliance of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian ways-of-being. He states that ‘Archeofuturism is telluric in its appeal to timeless forces and conformity to the archè, but it is also Apollonian, for it is founded on wisdom and the endurance of human order.’49 In order to supply Archeofuturism with its philosophical content, Faye calls for the restoration of numerous anti-modernist and nationalist vordenker (thought leaders), including Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Evola, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. The revivification of such ‘radical and ­resolute’

Additionally, Hegel defines “sublation” as having a “twofold meaning,” writing that ‘on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to. Even “to preserve” includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its immediacy and so from an existence which is open to external influences, in order to preserve it. Thus what is sublated is at the same time preserved; it has only lost its immediacy but is not on that account annihilated.’ See Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, 107. 48 Faye, Archeofuturism, 56–57. 49 Ibid., 73.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

301

thinkers allows the European of the future to engage in what Nietzsche called an unwertung – the ‘radical overthrowing of modern values’ through a comprehensive reversal of modernity’s “inversion.”50 With the help of these philosophers, elements of the European past can be identified as being potential resources for a new and resurgent Europe, one rooted firmly in archè, the “foundations,” “beginnings,” or primordial impulses upon which Western civilization was built. Although Faye shares the same romantic impulse as the Traditionalists René Guenon, Julius Evola, and Martin Heidegger, Faye does not entertain all forms of anti-rationalism. Technological modernization, despite the instrumental reason that animates it, is preserved within Faye’s central concept. There can be no regression into a past period prior to industrialization and modern technology, for that would leave Europe vulnerable to those more technologically advanced. However, technology must not be “deified” and/or turned into an end-in-itself. Rather, it must remain ancillary to the ethnocentric society, never coming to dominate the Europeans’ existence. Since the lure of technocracy is so great, and the forces of futuristic thinking are so tempting and powerful, Faye believes that “futurism must be tempered with archaism… archaism must cleanse futurism.’51 Once reconciled, this radical and futuristic lebensphilosophie of archaic values and principles married to modern technology may restore and augment the West’s thumos and its Faustian nature; in effect, liberating it from the clutches of nihilism and the stagnation of its telluric and “Last Man” conditions.52 While Faye’s philosophy appears to solve many of the problems of Western civilization, it is in its essence a palingenetic ultranationalist philosophy, which, according to Roger Griffin, is the essential nature of fascism. Griffin, one of the foremost experts of fascism, defines fascism as such: ‘Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.’53 Furthermore, he writes,

50

51 52 53

Ibid., 55, 74. “Inversion” refers to the anti-modernists’ idea that the “all-pervasive characteristic of modernity” is its “inversion” of all that really matters. Instead of seeing national, ethnic, and social decline, those trapped in the snares of modernity see “progress.” Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 24–25. Also see E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition. Wilmington, DE: isi Books, 2001. Ibid., 72. Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age. London: Arktos Media, Ltd., 2017. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1991), 26. Griffin’s work on fascism is exhaustive and extremely well documented, and serves as the basis of many other scholars’ definitions of fascism, including my own.

302

Byrd

The fascist mentality is characterized by the sense of living through an imminent turning-point in contemporary history, when the dominance of the allegedly bankrupt or degenerate forces of conservatism, individualistic liberalism and materialist socialism is finally to give way to a new era in which vitalistic national will triumph… The destruction which is necessitated both in theory and in practice by fascist revolution is seen by its activists not as an end in itself but as the corollary of the regenerative process by which society is to be purged of decadence. As this process gains momentum the masses are to be gradually forged into a new national community, one drawing where possible on traditions which have supposedly remained uncontaminated by degenerative forces, but whose cohesion is assured by new institutions, organizations and practices based on a new political hierarchy and a new heroic ethos which uniquely equip its members to thrive in the modern age.54 With Griffin’s analysis as our theoretical understanding of the essence of fascism, we can see what precisely we are dealing with when discussing the New Right’s philosophy for the future: a new form of fascism, or, what we can now call, Alt-Fascism – the Fascism of the Third Millennium. Alt-Fascism has – at its core – the desire for the “rebirth” (palingenesis) of the “nation,” hence defined by blut und boden (blood and soil), ethnos, and the principle of ethnopluralism (the right of difference). As we’ve discussed, Faye believes the West is currently ensnared in the bog of the “interregnum,” the ‘imminent turning-point in contemporary history’ that Griffin identifies, wherein the established forces and ideologies that currently define the contours of modernity are failing to protect the volk from the dysgenic forces within neoliberal modernity. This ultimate failure of the status quo – the “Establishment” – is, to quote Griffin, the ‘corollary of the regenerative process by which society is to be purged of decadence.’ Archeofuturism, through its identification, resurrection, and fulfillment of past ‘traditions which have supposedly remained uncontaminated by degenerative forces,’ will ‘forge’ a ‘new national community,’ one rooted in ethnoconsciousness, as well as the abandonment of ethnomasochism and the ever-pervasive white guilt. Once Archeofuturism is ideologically engrained within the heroic Phoenix-like Faustian Europeans, “rising from the ruins” of modernity, it will produce, in a Nietzschian übermensch way, ‘new institutions, organizations and practices based on a new political

54

Ibid., 44–45.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

303

hierarchy and a new heroic ethos,’ which will ‘uniquely equip its members to thrive in the modern age.’55 Ever racist and xenophobic like its historical predecessors, Alt-Fascism is a form of totalitarian philosophy and ersatz-religion that corresponds to the needs, aesthetics, and problems of the contemporary environment in the West. While it often appears to be something other than the fascism of Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, as those forms of fascism corresponded to their particular cultural context and zeitgeist, this new form of fascism is tailored specifically to the 21st century, a century of global neo-liberal economy collapse (as opposed to the collapse of liberal capitalism of the early 20th century), advanced computer technology (as opposed to the age of machines), the influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe (as opposed to the Jewish presence), globalization of American “pop” culture (as opposed to the “decadence” of avant-garde modern art), and the hegemony of American neo-colonialism (as opposed to the beginning of the collapse of European colonialism), etc. Nevertheless, ­despite the differences in appearances, the essence of fascism continues from its 20th century stifters (initiators) to those who have refashioned it into the New Right, Alt-Right, White Nationalism, Identitarians, etc. Thus, what Guillaume Faye and others on the New Right advocate is a reloading of an old weapon with new ammunition; an alternative and updated form of fascism as the weapon of choice against the so-called “Islamic invasion” and “­colonization” of Europe.56 6

Alt-Fascism against Islamic Colonization

The West in the interregnum is in the midst of an ernstfall (emergency ­situation) – one that calls for a radical solution, an umsturzsituation (to use a Heideggerian term): a revolutionary situation calling for immediate and radical action. Although his future Alt-Fascist ruling ideology is set against a whole array of “fracture lines” embedded deeply into the fabric of the West, Guillaume Faye sees the “subversive idea” of Archeofuturism as the antidote to the problem of “Islamic colonization” and the “chaos of the South,” the virus that he claims has infected the global North.57 Part of the New Right’s appeal in Europe is that it is speaking directly to the unbehagen (uneasiness) that is prevalent in those nations that are witnessing a rapidly changing demographic landscape. While the cultural-Left continues

55 Ibid. 56 Anderson, Rising from the Ruins, 73–107. 57 Faye, Archeofuturism, 53–89.

304

Byrd

to “eat itself,” continuously creating new identities to defend, creating lists of words and topics that free people cannot discuss in public, and forever searching for the next victim of “micro-aggressions,” the Far Right has taken the opportunity to speak bluntly about the plight and predicament of the working masses, pointing out dysgenic trends of globalization, extreme capitalism, and the nation-states’ lack of sovereignty within the context of multilateral agreements and sovereignty-reducing “globalist” institutions, such as the European Union. Indeed, the issue that the political Left historically occupied itself with, i.e. class exploitation, has become the realm of the Far Right. While Europe is still affluent, safe, and maintains a high standard of living, economic, political, and cultural destabilization is occurring at a fast pace, and it is felt especially amongst the middle classes. Yet, it is the Far Right, especially Lega Nord (Northern League) in Italy, Golden Dawn in Greece, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, The Front national and Marine Le Pen in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria), or even Tommy Robinson and the English Defense League, Génération Identitaire, Identity Evropa, and the broader Alt-Right in the United States, that are monopolizing the discourse centered around the challenges impacting the lives of the (white) working masses in the West.58 While liberals and leftists talk about modest reforms, the reactionary Right demands revolutionary change in the name of the volk. Yet, part of that conservative revolutionary change is rooted in the resurrection of a fascist theologian and jurist, Carl Schmitt, and his “identification of the enemy” as the essence of politics.59 The resurgent Right has identified the enemy and has given the disaffected Europeans who are – before their own eyes – “becoming-wretched” within their own countries, a simple narrative: you are losing your life and culture to Islamic invaders and colonists; the umsturzsituation has arrived, and it is now time to act against the “threat.” The New Right harkens back to Europe’s uranic past in order to resurrect fascist vocabulary, concepts, and ideas that were developed in between World War I and World War ii. For example, during the Weimar Republic, the fascist notion of umvolkung (process of re-Germanization) served as an ideological justification for the forceful assertion of eigentlichkeit (authentic) German 58

59

In the United States, such racial resentment has led to declining lifespans, declining income, poor health outcomes, declining public education, a sharp increase in suicides, etc., especially for middle class white males. See Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

305

c­ ultural and ethnic identity upon a population that was convinced that they were living through a cultural crisis, wherein German culture was threatened by the ‘cursed values of a rationalist, bourgeois, materialistic, superficial, optimistic civilization,’ that was ‘blind to the abysses of the human soul, the mysteries of Kultur, the treacherous seductions of the theory of progress, [and] the pitfalls of democracy.’60 This was the age wherein politics thoroughly corrupted the traditional ‘spheres of culture and the spirit,’ the fruits of which, it is argued, now appear in full bloom in the multicultural 21st century.61 A characteristic of neo-liberal modernity is the need to undue the recent past, specifically the umvolkung process, which attempted to stabilize traditional culture within its traditional ethno-geographical borders. However, in order for neoliberalism to flourish, there must be a severing of the volk from their historical identity (déculturation in French). National identity must be subordinate to capitalist demands. The reality of this antagonism, between traditional identity and the dictates of capitalism, has recently made its way back into the public sphere, wherein modern Europeans once again fear the collapse of their national identity in regards to mass immigration; the insider increasingly experiences themselves  as the outsider as the “others” continue to “colonize” space within the West. For the Far Right, umvolkung is the natural result of überfremdung (over-foreignization, or excessive immigration), which, from the perspective of the nationalist, has weakened the bonds between the European ethnos and its geschichte und Kultur (history and culture), which, as we’ve already stated, is already tenuous due to extreme atomization, metaphysical nihilism and the prevailing Last Man conditions.62 Beyond just a matter of an evolving culture, überfremdung takes concrete form in what Faye calls the “settlements,” territories in Europe that surrender all outward signs that they are still Europe, but rather appear to be colonies of the Third World. The unbehagen caused by such enclaves of foreignness is heightened when terrorist strikes are found to be designed in immigrant dominated suburbs, such as Brussels’ Molenbeek municipality, from

60

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), 74. While Gay uses this sentence to describe Heinrich Mann, it fits perfectly to describe the beliefs of those with anti-Weimar Republic sentiments, which sound resoundingly familiar to today’s anti-modernists. 61 Ibid. 62 Etymologically, the term überfremdung hints at an “alienation” that is imposed from an outside agent. In this case, it is the normalization of the presence of Islam and Muslims that separates Europeans from their traditional roots, thus “alienating” them from themselves and what remains of their völkisch pre-political foundations.

306

Byrd

which the 2015 isis inspired terrorist attacks on Paris were planned.63 Such immigrant-dominated “autonomous” regions appear to many critics to be “forward operating bases” for the eventual colonization of Europe. It is argued by many within the Far Right that the weakened bonds between volk and kultur are the avenues through which the slow Islamization of Europe is normalized, as there is no strong countervailing cultural force – thanks to multiculturalism and the tyranny of political correctness – that can resist Islam’s own strong identity markers, which continue to creep into the daily existence of a civilization suffering from identity loss. Thus, for theorists like Faye, the normalization of Islam in Europe, through accommodations to Islamic laws, cultural sensibilities and practices, and the inherent needs of immigrants, only furthers the decoupling of European kultur from the European volk, i.e. the split between European ethnos and European identity. Within this reactionary weltanschauung, the mosque, which has in many places replaced the church, appears as another “forward operating base” for the complete and total Islamization of Europe. Thus, just as the slow tolerance of European colonials – especially its religious missionaries – in the Third World prepared the way for European colonialism, peaceful immigration to Europe is seen as camouflage for the eventual Islamic conquest of the metropole continent. Liberal tolerance and acceptance of the other is suicide; it is the precondition for Europe’s eventual takeover by “others,” as it initiates and encourages a “racial and ethnocultural rupture,” the precondition for “territorial colonization,” which, according to Islamophobes, was the dream even of Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century.64 In his Archeofuturism, Faye weaponized Europe’s Uranic, Dionysian, and Faustian past through a dialectical process of determinate negation (Hegelian aufhaben), and marries what he rescues to futuristic technology, although such technology will remain ancillary to his ethno-lebensphilosophie (ethnic philosophy of life). He believes this is the most effective strategy to arrest Islamic ­expansion on the European content. Yet in light of the barbarity of the 20th century, we must ask: how does his form of Alt-Fascism fight against the ­so-called “colonization” of Europe outside the realm of violence? In other words, how do the “becoming-wretched” of Europe preserve their ­civilization 63

64

Faye says of these areas that they are ‘not ghettos but territories which have been conquered and colonized… to talk about ghettos is to present immigrants as being victims, while they are, quite to the contrary, voluntary agents involved in the creation of their autonomous spaces.’ Guillaume Faye, The Colonisation of Europe (London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2016), 36. Ibid., 36. Also See Guillaume Faye, Understanding Islam (London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2016), 1–50.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

307

against the I­slamic “barbarians” and “hordes” without initiating a policy to physically exterminate Islam and Muslims from Europe, i.e. the process of making all of Europe Moslemfrei (Muslim free)? 7

Alt-Fascism as Ersatz-Religion

Psychologically, the Alt-Fascist struggle against the so-called “colonization” of Europe by Islam via Archeofuturism and other forms of Alt-Fascism provides (1) a transcendental project, one that “overcomes” or “transcends” the pervasive nihilism of the Last Man condition and the pyrrhic victory of neo-liberalism. In sacrificing for a transcendental cause, one that is defined as having existential importance, the alienated individuals of Europe find a powerful reason to live, to fight, and to die if needs be. Indeed, being a “woke” person amidst the crisis situation, the Alt-Fascist devotee believes himself to be among the “vanguard” in this struggle – thus placating his megalothymia (compulsion to be seen as superior to others). Even more powerfully, this new transcendental project connects the participant to Europe’s supposed anti-Muslim history, a history that has been “suppressed” in the contemporary Western education in the name of modern multiculturalism. (2) The struggle against “colonization” provides the individual with a sense of meaning; their life is once again infused with justifiable reasons to exist. Metaphysically speaking, the reconnection to powerful forces, be they social and/or spiritual, fills this meaning-void. The sentiment Deus Vult, (God Wills it) is resurrected, and since “God wills it,” it is metaphysically right. (3) Following the logic of Carl Schmitt, Alt-Fascism provides a convenient object of hate – an absolute “other” that is both cunning and threatening: the “fox” and the “lion” in Machiavelli’s The Prince.65 The presence of the fox-lion is a strong motivational factor for not only hating the other, but also for mobilizing the masses in a collective cause against the threat. This collectivity instills a sense of wholeness and togetherness – a “being-with-and-for” ethic that binds the otherwise atomized, fractured, and disintegrated individual to a primordial unit, who in their collectivity, is far greater and more powerful than the isolated individual. The image of ancient Rome’s and Mussolini’s “fasces” comes to mind. In other words, the absorbed individual loses their ego (in the Freudian sense) in the ascendant collective, and in doing so willfully abandons their already-fragile individuality and becomes lost within the group identity. In a form of “mystical union,” they become indistinguishable from the whole – a perverse E Pluribus Unum. (4) The nationalist element gives the individual an 65

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 74.

308

Byrd

absolute sovereign, a replacement deity, for the one lost with Nietzsche’s “Death of God.” Whether it is the volk, the ethnos, or the nation (however defined), total submission to this absolute sovereign eradicates the need to think independently, act autonomously, and be-for-oneself. It is the ultimate “automaton conformity,” as theorized by the psychologist and critical theorist Erich Fromm.66 This total submission to the absolute sovereign also makes clear who the enemies are; they are those that do not submit to the sovereign: the non-identical. Just as the Christians in the Roman Empire refused to bow in submission to the Caesars, thus remaining faithful to the “Kingdom of Heaven” as opposed to the “Empire of Rome,” so too do the modern “colonials” refuse to submit to the idolatry of ethno-nationalism. In this sense, the Muslims of today’s Europe are Rome’s new “Christians” – the recalcitrant “other” that threatens the fragile status quo.67 (5) Last but not least, Alt-Fascism provides a weltanschauung (comprehensive worldview) that trans-valuates all the hated telluric (feminine) values of modernity while simultaneously preserving those uranic (masculine) elements that can still be found. This comprehensive worldview legitimates and sanctifies the hate, the fear, and the desire to eradicate that which has damaged the imagined idyllic life, and justifies all the misogenic (hate producing) and phobogenic (fear producing) experiences with the “others.” When we take a meta-political perspective at what Archeofuturism and other forms of Alt-Fascism do for the individual, it becomes clear that we are witnessing the construction of another comprehensive ideology that functions as a defensive ersatz-religion. As we said, it provides a complete and comprehensive interpretation of reality and an orientation of action. It connects the alienated believer to a greater force that is both infused with social power as well as spiritual power. It slays the nihilistic meaninglessness of modernity. It provides the adherent with powerful spectacles and rituals (rallies, protests, training camps, etc.); it provides them with a pantheon of sacred figures, such as Julius Evola, Ludwig Klages, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Guillaume Faye, Alain de Benoist, Alexander Dugin, and Dominique Venner (the martyr for the anti-immigrant cause), not to mention Charles Martel, who fought against the 66 67

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1994), 1–22, 135–204. On a historical note, Hitler accused the Christians of being the “Bolsheviks of the Roman Empire,” as their religion insisted upon the undermining of the unjust status quo. It was their egalitarianism that threatened Roman greatness. For Hitler, the 20th century was the time of Jewish Bolshevism, which also threatened European greatness with egalitarianism. Now, for the 21st century Alt-Fascists, it is the Muslims’ egalitarianism that threatens the superior European culture, which is rooted in the “aristocratic law of nature.” See Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk: 1941–1944, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 7, 51, 75–76, 78, 145–146, 606–607.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

309

Muslim invasion of France in 732 CE, and John iii Sobieski, who fought off the Turks in Vienna during the battle of 1683 CE. It provides them with sacred texts, such as Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and his anti-Semitic black notebooks, as well as the voluminous writings of Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West), Ernst Jünger (Storm of Steel, On Pain), and even Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It provides sacred space, such as the tomb of Mussolini in San Cassiano Cemetery, Predappio and other areas connected with Mussolini in Rome. It supplies them with myth, especially of the ancient Spartans, who defended Europe twice against Asian invasions, and the Nordic pantheon, who resisted the telluric and egalitarian “slave” values of Jewish-Christianity. It even supplies them with an ecological philosophy, a primordial and spiritual connection to the land, which rejects the modern corporate farming and the global food networks it’s connected to. Food grown by the ethno-agriculturalists should feed the volk, not the others, and ethno-conscious agriculture does not destroy the land that is central to the identity of the volk, but rather safeguards the boden (soil) that gave rise to and safeguards the blut (blood). In a time and place where the religious resources of a given people, in this case the Europeans, has all but been entirely exhausted, and where there is a widespread acknowledgement that “something is missing” (even among the Left),68 and the “missing something” has not been adequately replaced by secular modernity, it would be derelict to think that there wouldn’t be a powerful temptation to retreat into a new religion, an “ersatz-religion” that promises to slay the chaos and metastasis that has been caused by the destruction of traditional ways-of-life and worldviews; an ersatz-religion that can cure the ills of European nihilism and its epiphenomena – ethnomasochism and white guilt, which have, according to the Far Right, entered into the world of policy as pluralism, multiculturalism, political correctness, and unchecked immigration. There have been ersatz-religions before, such as dogmatic Marxist-Leninism, Soviet Communism, and the Fascism of Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, and other forms of ersatz-religions are still with us, such as necrophilic consumerism and substance-devoid pop-culture, accompanied by pervasive pornography and drug use. Such ersatz-religions have failed to fill the spiritual and existential void of modernity – the “crisis of faith” that Nietzsche’s Madman predicted. Into that existential crisis there appears the crisis of the immediate, the so-called “colonization” of Europe. Is it no wonder that an ersatz-religion, a fetishistic panacea for all the problems of modernity, would be sought with great haste? 68

Jürgen Habermas et al., An Awareness of What is Missing, trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

310

Byrd

8 Flaschenpost Because the current crisis situation occurs within a society wherein masses of people find themselves spiritually and philosophically rudderless, without cultural moorings, afflicted by civilizational dysthymia; and because the Left has abandoned the intellectual heritage of the West for extreme relativity, postModernism, pathological xenophilia, and an ideology that privileges no truth claim above others, no matter how ridiculous or irrational, the social, psychological, and political conditions for a retreat into an absolutist and totalitarian ideology are ripe.69 This inner-dystopia amidst the material-utopia of the affluent society is the great danger of the early 21st century, for it sets the stage for a Ragnarök, through which a palingenetic Europe will arise from its post-­modern ruins. Against Oswald Spengler, who thought the decline of the West was inevitable, and the inability to accept such a fate was not courage, but cowardliness, the Faustian Men of the West intend to fight against such a decline, with the hope that a purifying apocatastasis (rebirth) can happen after the ekpyrosis (conflagration). Yet, regardless of the claims of the Alt-Fascists, it is clear that Islam has become part of Europe, even if it is an uneasy residency. Muslims are European, and Europeans will, at least in the long run, have to accept those facts.70 However, within the supposed “interregnum” – between the retirement of Europe and its longed-for rebirth, Islam will remain the great spectre haunting the West. As such, the Left, which has already determinately negated and preserved certain Christian values into secular socialistic language, policies, etc., even though it has forgotten the source of such semantic and semiotic materials, must find ways of adequately addressing the following problem: The Western tradition itself must be reevaluated and reconsidered by the Left. There must be a reckoning with the past, which attempts to construct a progressive and isothymic (but not identical) “Eurocentricity” that does not abandon the intellectual and civilizational heritage of the West to the Alt-Fascists. Pathological xenophilia at the expense of Western identity hands the heritage of the West, which is a powerful heritage, to those who would destroy the heritage in the name of preserving it, and that does not serve Europe well, nor those who immigrate to it. A weak European identity only serves the perverse shadow of Europe: it’s fascist tendencies. What is needed is a strong European identity – one that is not threatened by “others” who are Becoming-Europeans and/or Europeans who bear non-European pre-political foundations. 69 Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World, 3–37. 70 Ahmed, Journey into Europe, 175–355.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

311

The original meaning of the phrase E Pluribus Unum must be made real, that is, regardless of their pre-political foundations, immigrants to the West also become the inheritors of the Western tradition, and they must be treated as equal inheritors. They must be allowed to influence the West through the infusion of their native traditions, values, and principles, as well as their own autonomous thought – as equal citizens. Without such a reality, immigrants will perpetually remain the “near-other,” and a constant fracture line in Western society. Yet, they too must understand that they have inherited their westernality, and must attempt to sublate their “home-culture” within that westernality. Sublation does not mean forgetting, but rather means determinate negation in order to find a synthesis. The heritage of the West must become theirs, not against their home-culture, but with it and through it. In conclusion, we must recognize that immigration, although a vexing problem, is not the Trojan Horse of “colonization” as the Alt-Fascists claim it to be, and that despite demographic changes, there is no Le grand remplacement or “white genocide” occurring in Europe and North America. Rather, it is not the dysgenic others that will ultimately destroy the city; it is the Alt-Fascist iatrogenic lebensphilosophie that is threatening to tear apart Western society and heritage – for it provides no realistic answers to the true problems of mass immigration, demographic change, and déculturation. Rather, it provides only illusions of idealized pasts that we cannot return to, or overly optimistic thoughts about reconciling the communicative rationality of the past with the instrumental rationality of the present, while not understanding that one will always undermine the other. Such confusion about our past, present, and near future only creates the conditions for future forms of Alt-Fascism: the return of barbarity. Bibliography Abu-Jamal, Mumia. We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2016. Adorno, Theodor W., et al The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950. Ahmed, Akbar. Journey to Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity. Washington d.c.; Brookings Institution Press, 2018. Andersen, Joakim. Rising from the Ruins: The Right of the 21st Century. Translated by Gustav Hörngren. London: Arktos Media, 2018. Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 2013.

312

Byrd

Badiou, Alain, and Alain Finkielkraut. Confrontation. Translated by Susan Spitzer. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014. Camus, Renaud. Le Grand Remplacement. Chez l’auteur, 2017. de Benoist, Alain. On Being a Pagan. Translated by Jon Graham. Atlanta: Ultra, 2018. Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Duchesne, Ricardo. Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age. London: Arktos Media, Ltd., 2017. Evola, Julius. Revolt against the Modern World. Translated by Guido Stucco. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Faye, Guillaume. Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age. Translated by Sergio Knipe. London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2010. Faye, Guillaume. The Colonisation of Europe. Translated by Roger Adwan. London: Arktos Media, 2016. Faye, Guillaume. Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance. Translated by Michael O’Meara. London: Arktos, 2011. Faye, Guillaume. Understanding Islam. London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2016. Fraser, Andrew. Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology. London: Arktos, 2017. Friberg, Daniel. The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True Opposition. London: Arktos Media, Ltd., 2015. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1994. Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001. Green, Joshua. Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. New York: Penguins Press, 2017. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. New York: Routledge, 1991. Guénon, René. The Crisis of the Modern World. Translated by Marco Pallis, Arthur Osborne, and Richard C. Nicholson. Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004. Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 1996. Habermas, Jürgen, et al. An Awareness of What is Missing. Translated by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1969. Hitler, Adolf. Hitler’s Table Talk: 1941–1944. Translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens. New York: Enigma Books, 2000. Horn, Gerd-Rainer. The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976. New York: Oxford, 2008.

“Islamic Colonization” and the Coming European “WRETCHED”

313

Johnson, Nicholas. Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms. New York: Prometheus Books, 2014. Klages, Ludwig. The Biocentric Worldview. Translated by Joseph D. Pryce. London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2013. Kopff, E. Christian. The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition. Wilmington, DE: isi Books, 2001. Kundnani, Hans. Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Metzl, Jonathan M. Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Thomas Common. New York: Barnes & Nobles, 2008. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” in The Philosophy of Nietzsche. New York: The Modern Library, 1954. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006. Rosen, Stanley. Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Scruton, Roger. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West: An Abridged Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History tell us about America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997. Wilber, Ken. Trump and a Post-Truth World. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2017. Williams, Robert F. Negroes with Guns. New York: Marzani & Munsell, Inc., 1962. Ye’or, Bat (Gisèle Littman). Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005.

Chapter 12

Globalization Challenge: Economic Unification vs. Cultural and Religious Differences Mislav Kukoč Globalization is one of the most widely spread recent cultural, social, economic, and political phenomena that has strongly marked the discourse of the humanities and social sciences at the beginning of the third millennium, a new era observing the end of the old and the birth of a new not-yet-defined world. Much like other concepts and phenomena marking the current age, the concept of globalization has only recently been widely adopted. The recent popularity of this new concept has resulted in its innumerable contradictory definitions. While, normatively speaking, some have associated globalization with progress, prosperity and peace, others consider it to be deprivation, disaster, and decay. No one is indifferent but many are confused. Confusion concerning an understanding of globalization is not unusual. The word “international” suffered a similar misunderstanding when it was coined by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780’s, in the age of not yet developed crossborder relations between nation states. In the similar way, we are living now in not-yet-defined transnational relations in which nation states, as well as other political units, are losing their significance on a global scale. Multi-dimensionality of the concept and the phenomenon of globalization points to the need for both an interdisciplinary analysis, and primarily, as the conditio sine qua non, a philosophical reflection. The processes of globalization have already been ruling the world in a number of ways, and have already conclusively determined the structure of the new epoch, which is why Minerva’s owl must not stand still. 1

Philosophy and Globalization

Within the context of globalization, the principal task of philosophy is to conceptualize and differentiate between the diverse dimensions of the intricate and complex processes and problems of globalization, to conduct a proper conceptual analysis, to distinguish between the various approaches to globalization and its dimensions, and to make appropriate judgments about its normative aspects. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_013

Globalization Challenge

315

In this sense, philosophy, and its fundamental branches and disciplines, such as social and political philosophy and particularly ethics, as well as bioethics, are presented with an opportunity to develop – together with social sciences, as well as natural and technological sciences, i.e. from an interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary perspective – their own individual and social consciousness and conscience concerning not only the ethical implications of globalization, but also the corresponding epistemological and methodological questions. 2

Globalization in the Philosophy of History

After the collapse of communism, the old bipolar world of the clash of ideologies and two mutually confronted economic, political, societal, military systems, i.e. the old “cold war” world came to the end. The new emerging epoch was first defined in a negative sense by a set of various post-isms: post-modernism or post-modernity, post-industrialism or post-industrial society, post-capitalism, post-historicism or the end of history, post-communism etc. All these “post-isms” do not designate anything new that could be defined positively. However, the negative signification of the prefix “post” is a characteristic distinction indicating the identity crisis of the new epoch; a period following the end of a fully defined segment of historical reality, but one whose new distinguishing markers and determinants were not yet clearly defined. The identity crisis theory is not specific to our time, primarily because the theory of a crisis as the determinant of a given epoch is a theme running throughout the 20th century, beginning with Edmund Husserl (The Crisis of European Science). A general criticism of the current post-isms can be directed to all historical phenomena of this kind, all historical epochs that attempt to define themselves prematurely, before reaching their full fruition and achievement. As G.W.F. Hegel writes in the Preface to The Philosophy of Law: ‘Philosophy appears like the world’s thought only once reality completes its developmental process and comes to an end… The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.’1 The epochal collapse of communism at the end of the 20th Century has disturbed the Hegelian-Marxist conception of the philosophy of history with communism as the final eschatological everlasting phase of history. Francis Fukuyama converted this conception, building the optimistic liberal utopia based on the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history. The consequence of the 1 Georg W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1821 & 1986.

316

Kukoč

breakdown of communism is, according to Fukuyama, the final and lasting ­victory of the capitalistic market economy and liberal democracy.2 3

Globalization as the New Stage of the Philosophy of History

The globalization paradigm seems to be generally accepted as the fundamental mark of the new emerging contemporary epoch, as the new stage of the philosophy of history. In the similar sense, some authors believe that globalization is not only an all-embracing process of transformation, but is rather a process of transition to global society or the beginning of the global age. However, Hans Lenk argues that the present-day “globalization” seems to be a rather general construct, an abstract conceptualization of thoughts that deal with general processes characterizing the dynamics of our common world at present and for the future. It seems to be, and to function as, an ideological concept that hypostatizes general dynamics derived from a partial sector, namely the economic one, towards general social phenomena and the state of the world at large.3 Contrary to Lenk, I would rather identify and define globalization as a valuefree phenomenon, an objective present-day reality, a complex phenomenon with its positive and negative sides, characteristics, and effects. Globalization is, thus, a complex and controversial process of the building of the world as a whole by the creation of global institutional structures and global cultural forms, i.e. the forms that have been produced or transformed by globally accessible means. It is disclosed as 1) the free market-economic unification of the world with uniform patterns of production and consumption; 2) democratic integration of the world based on common interests of humankind, such as equality, human rights protection, rule of law, pluralism, peace and security; 3) moral integration of the world concerning some central humanistic values, essential for sustainable development of humanity.4 Globalism is a related concept, which is frequently used as a synonym for globalization. However, while the concept of globalization terms a value free objective phenomenon, globalism principally connotes a subjective, voluntaristic, and ideological standpoint – much like all the other “isms” do – and 2 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books, 1992. 3 Hans Lenk. “Perspectives and Dimension of Globalization – With Special Regard to IT, Science and Economics,” in Interim World Philosophy Congress (New Delhi, 2006). 4 Mislav Kukoč, ed., Filozofija i globalizacija / Philosophy and Globalization (Zagreb: Hrvatsko filozofsko društvo, 2011), 11–12.

Globalization Challenge

317

represents a viewpoint, doctrine, and ideology that promotes the principles of inter-dependence and unity of the whole world, including all nations and states, over-and-above all national and state particularism. In contrast to the cognate concepts of cosmopolitanism, which places emphasis on the cultural identity of the pre-national “citizen of the world,” and internationalism, which promotes the ideology of revolutionary “brotherhood” amongst nations, the idea of globalism rests on post-national economic, informational, and intercultural planetary binding and inter-dependence. Concerning the above mentioned definition of globalization, it is necessary to conceptualize the diverse dimensions of globalization’s processes, or kinds of specific globalizations, such as: human, ethical, institutional, cultural, religious, way of life, environmental, economical, non-official, political, social, legal, scientific, technological, etc. Methodological problems arise concerning the fact that there is no conceptual and theoretical differentiation between the different kinds of globalization processes. On the contrary, there is a generalization of economic globalization of capital and advanced industry, which tends to reduce all other globalization processes to just this economistic pattern.5 Neoliberalism has generally prevailed as the reigning policy framework in such economistic pattern of globalization.6 Neoliberalism as philosophy, ideology, political or economic theory has, indeed, an awful reputation in the context of the dark side of globalization; moreover, it is blamed for all evils of globalization. Can we, however, condemn philosophy of liberalism in general, even the genuine idea of liberty, of freedom? On the other hand, there is also significant theoretical differences between the philosophy of liberalism, economic theory, and the practice of neo-liberal globalization / or globalism. Liberal philosophy generally emphasizes a set of principles, including individual rights, extensive freedom of thought and speech, limitations on the power of governments, the rule of law, the free exchange of ideas, equality of opportunity, a market economy, and a transparent system of government. However, different sorts of liberal philosophy may represent very different ideas, depending on the predominant role of a particular liberal principle. In that sense, we can distinguish between classical (or economic liberalism), cultural liberalism, political liberalism, social liberalism, (left and right) libertarianism, etc. Neo-liberalism originated from classical or economic liberalism, which is based on the conviction that the only real freedom is the freedom 5 Lenk, “Perspectives and Dimension of Globalization,” 2006. 6 Jan Aart Scholte. Globalization: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 29, 35, 40, 242.

318

Kukoč

from coercion. As a result, it opposes the welfare state, understanding state intervention in the economy as a coercive power that restricts the economic freedom of individuals and favors a laissez-faire economic policy that has prevailed in financial and economic globalization. However, as I already mentioned, globalization has different dimensions; one of the most important is the cultural aspect of globalization. 4

The Role of Religion in the Age of Globalization

Contemporary globalization has caused intercultural tensions and conflicts. It has given stimulus to transnational cultural and religious bonding, particularly in universalistic religions. Globalization has caused the expansion of confessionally founded supra-territorial communities. Some contemporary examples of religious revivals have given explicit priority to religious feelings instead of territorial state or nationality. On the other hand, accelerated globalization has stimulated supra-territorial religious connections, particularly in universalistic religions, such as Christianity and Islam. At the same time, the growth of cultural and religiously-rooted collective identities have often been a defensive reaction to secular globalization, developing into a sort of supra-territorial cultural protectionism.7 Pro-globalist social and intellectual elites generally assumed that economic and social modernization was leading to the withering away of religion as a significant element in human existence. Modernized secularists hailed the extent to which science, rationalism, and enlightenment were eliminating the superstitions, myths, irrationalities, and rituals that formed the core of existing religions. The emerging society would be tolerant, rational, pragmatic, progressive, humanistic, and secular. Economic and social modernization became global in scope, and at the same time a global revival of religion occurred. Yet, this revival – “la revanche de Dieu” [the Revenge of God] process, as Gilles Kepel named it – has not ­pervaded the whole world but only some non–Western civilizations.8 The West, particularly Europe, under the influence of Enlightenment rationalism, materialism, and secularism, has not generally accepted this sort of religious 7 Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 187–189. 8 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 95–96; Gilles Kepel, Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 2.

Globalization Challenge

319

e­ xpansion. On the other hand, incoming immigrants, belonging to non-European civilizations and non-Christian confessions, particularly to Islam, do not intend to adopt western secular values but to import to Europe their own religious approach. In the Western civilization, however, globalization, with its crucial effects (liberalism, rationalism, secularism, scientism, etc.), has replaced the resurgence of religion. Although numerous forms of New Age ­spirituality have recently spread across Europe, Gilles Kepel’s announcement of ‘the second evangelization of Europe’ seems to be overestimated and unfounded.9 5

The Role of Globalization in the Clash of Civilizations

All political ideologies of the 20th century are products of Western civilization. No other civilization has generated a significant political ideology. The West, however, has never generated a major religion. The great religions of the world, even the major Western religion Christianity, originated from non-Western civilizations. Therefore, culture and religion have become significant instruments of resistance to Western dominance used by non-Western civilizations, especially Islam, in order to abandon Western ideologies including the brand new one: neo-liberal globalism. Consequentially, religious revival movements are anti-secular, anti-universal, anti-globalist, and, except in their rare Christian manifestations, anti-Western. They also are opposed to the relativism, egotism, and consumerism, but they do not reject modernization, science, and technology. They don’t accept Western ideologies. Much more than the ideology of neoliberal globalism, religion provides meaning and direction for the rising elites in modernizing societies. More than anything else, reaffirmation of Islam means the repudiation of European and American influence upon local society, politics, and morality. In this sense, the revival of non-Western religions is the most powerful manifestation of anti-Westernism in non-Western societies. In the present moment, the West tries to preserve its dominant world position through the instruments of globalization. Three issues involve such efforts of the West: (1) to maintain its military superiority and to provoke conflicts between Muslim countries; (2) to promote Western social and political values as universal by pressing other societies to accept the Western image of human rights and democracy; and (3) to protect the cultural, social, and national ­integrity of Western societies by restricting the number of non-Western 9 Kepel, Revenge of God, 2.

320

Kukoč

i­mmigrants or refugees. In all three spheres the West has had difficulties defending its interests against those of non-Western societies. First, non-Westerners do not see civil rights and democracy as universal human values but as distinctive Western values that have been used as the source of Western hegemony. Second, concerning these values, hypocrisy and double standards are the lasting characteristic of the Western behavior, i.e. gaps between Western principles and Western action.10 The level of violent conflict between Islam and Christianity over time has been influenced by demographic growth and decline, economic developments, technological change, and intensity of religious commitment. A comparable mix of factors has increased the conflict between Islam and the West in the beginning of 21th century. First, Muslim population growth has generated large numbers of unemployed and disaffected young people who become recruits to Islamist causes and migrate to the West and vice versa: radical Islamists from the second and third generation of Muslim immigrants have moved from Western countries to the battle fields of the Middle East. Second, the Islamic Resurgence has given Muslims renewed confidence in the distinctive character and worth of their civilization and values compared to those of the West. Third, the West’s intentions to universalize its values and institutions, to maintain its military and economic superiority, and to provoke conflicts in the Muslim world, generates intense resentment among Muslims. Finally, within both Muslim and Christian societies, tolerance for the other declined sharply, particularly in the beginning of the new millennium: first, after September 11, 2001; second, after various terrorist attacks in different Western European countries, and third, amidst the recent pressure caused by the great number of immigrants and refugees, mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa, who try to settle illegally in rich European countries. 6

Reconceptualization of Globalization

The present-day culture based conflicts have to be replaced by an inter-­cultural dialogue, which can offer a reconceptualization and transformation of globalization, shaping a more humanized image of globalization. The globalization of neo-liberal economics should be accompanied by a clear conceptual ­analysis and a normative (socio-political and moral) requirement of a globalization of responsibility in order to protect the global future of humankind and global commons, i.e. global public goods (from clean drinking water to a clean 10 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 183–206.

Globalization Challenge

321

environment and the ozone layer, from a rich biodiversity to a rich cultural diversity). Moreover, the social traps that accompany the ideology of the current neo-liberal globalism promoted by corporations and the dictates of the free market must be exposed, particularly today, in a time of global economic crisis. The recent global economic crisis draws attention to proposals for radical transformation of globalization in the direction of its humanization. 7

Transformation of Globalization

More than twenty years ago, Hans Küng predicted the global economic crisis as an unavoidable consequence of uncontrolled neo-liberal globalization. ‘Should the supreme criterion in the process of globalization prove to be the maximization of profit – he wrote – we must be prepared for future serious social conflicts and crises. An uncontrolled world economy will finally lead to world chaos through another world economic crisis.’11 Therefore, he proposed a sort of neo-Keynesian reform of globalization, better sooner, before the global crisis, than later, after the crisis. As a conclusion, Kung exposed his conditio humana: ‘Primacy of politics over the economy; the primacy of ethics over the economy and politics.’12 The counter-model to the widely prevalent economic system should be ‘a global market economy which is politically obligated to humane and social goals.’13 Other theorists have advocated for a global supra-territorial Keynesianism and progressive redistribution of the world’s wealth through the so-called “Tobin tax,” cancellation of debts, and the reorientation of international financial institutions toward domestic economic growth and full employment, rather than export-led growth.14 Philosophy certainly cannot solve all the problems of the present-day ­neo-liberal globalization and global crisis caused by the same. It can only ­conceptualize and differentiate the respective sides of the intricate complexes of globalization by distinguishing and differentiating the relevant specific 11

Hans Küng, A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics (London: scm Press, 1997), 160–169; 211, 214–215. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ingomar Hauchler, “Weltordnungspolitik – Chance oder Utopie? Thesen an Steuerbarkeit globaler Entwicklung,” in Globale Trends 1996. Fakten, Analysen, Prognosen, ed. Ingomar Hauchler (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), 10–32; Berger, “The Threat of Globalism;” Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization: Contending visions of a New World Order. New York and London: Routledge, 2000; Scholte, Globalization.

322

Kukoč

­ rocesses, phenomena, and dynamics, in order to give a clear understanding, p expression, and perspective in relation to the different processes and dynamics and to general ethical insights and intuitions. Intercultural globalization of ethical and common religious aspects and perspectives, like humanitarian goals, human rights, and international globalization of responsibilities, requires a sort of applied philosophy and ethics in a globalized intercultural realm. Specific ethical globalization requires sophisticated and sensitive intercultural philosophical analysis in order to avoid patronizing pressure that would inevitably come through the imposition of ­moral values from one culture onto another. Bibliography Berger, John. “The Threat of Globalism.” Race & Class 40, no. 2–3 (1999). Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books, 1992. Hauchler, Ingomar. “Weltordnungspolitik – Chance oder Utopie? Thesen an Steuerbarkeit globaler Entwicklung.” In Globale Trends 1996. Fakten, Analysen, Prognosen, edited by Ingomar Hauchler, 10–32. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995. Hegel, G.W.F. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1821 & 1986. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate, with responses by: F. Ajami et al. New York: A Foreign Affairs Reader, 1993. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Husserl, Edmund. Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie. Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gessamelte Werke, Band 6. Berlin: Springer, 1976. Kepel, Gilles. Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Kukoč, Mislav. “Liberal Philosophy and Globalization.” Synthesis philosophica 47, 24 fasc. 1, (2009): 65–78. Kukoč, Mislav. “Controversies of Liberalism in the Age of Globalization.” In Philosophy in the Dialogue of Cultures: World Philosophy Day (Moscow – St. Petersburg, November 16–19,). (Moscow: Russian Academy of Science – Institute of Philosophy, Progress-Tradition, 2010), 395–402. Kukoč, Mislav. “Liberale Demokratie versus neoliberale Globalisierung.” In Religion als Lebensmacht, edited by Joachim Bohn und Thomas Bohrmann, (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2010), 181–194.

Globalization Challenge

323

Kukoč, Mislav, ed. Filozofija i globalizacija / Philosophy and Globalization. Zagreb: Hrvatsko filozofsko društvo, 2011. Kukoč, Mislav. “Religion in the Trap of Globalization.” In The Dialectics of the Religious and the Secular: Studies on the Future of Religion. Edited by Michael R. Ott (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 184–193. Küng, Hans. A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics. London: scm Press, 1997. Lenk, Hans. “Perspectives and Dimension of Globalization – With Special Regard to IT, Science and Economics.” In Interim World Philosophy Congress. New Delhi, 2006. Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: sage, 1992. Robertson, Roland, and Jan Aart Scholte, eds. Encyclopedia of Globalization, Vol. 1–4. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. Rupert, Mark. Ideologies of Globalization: Contending visions of a New World Order. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Scholte, Jan Aart. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

Chapter 13

Laudato Si’ Gregory Baum Dear Rudi,1 we have been friends for a long time. If I remember correctly, we met in the 1970s at a conference of the Catholic Theological Society of America. After that we met many times in Kalamazoo, Toronto, London (Ontario), Dubrovnik, Montreal Airport and most recently Notre Dame University. I have a wonderful memory of your lovely wife! In long conversations and in your books, you introduced me to the practical thinking of the Frankfurt School. I came to be fully persuaded by your presentation of Critical Theory, made it part of my own thinking and applied it in my theological studies. I have recognized my debt to you in my writings. In 2006, the Canadian publishing company Novalis decided to republish my book Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology (Paulist Press, 1975), asking me to add a chapter on my dialogue with the social sciences since the book’s first publication in 1975.2 In the new chapter I offer several pages on Critical Theory. Since our taken-for-granted world is ideologically distorted, the search for the truth begins with negation – an idea, I argue, that has an affinity with St. Augustine’s theological proposal that the Gospel is judgment on sin before it mediates new life. I insisted, in line with your thinking, that the negation of a philosophy or a culture must be dialectical: that is to say, it must retain the insights or achievements of the negated set of ideas and retrieve these positive points in a new key to become relevant to the present. Reflecting on negation and retrieval, I became aware that I had applied this method of thinking in my previous work. In recalling the new chapter (on page 1 Editor’s Note: Before he died on October 18, 2017, Gregory Baum, agreed to write a “laudatio” (Praise) for his long-time friend Rudolf J. Siebert. He originally entitled his essay “A Love Letter to Rudi Siebert.” I have taken the liberty of renaming it “Laudato Si’,” (Praise be to you), the first line of Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures. Gregory Baum served as the peritus (theological advisor) for the writing of Vatican ii’s most important documents, including Nostra Aetate (In our Time), which attempted to improve relations between the Catholic Church and non-Christian religious communities, especially Jews and Muslims. Nostra Aetate was publicly declared by Pope Paul vi on October 28, 1965. Gregory died just days away from the 52nd anniversary of its proclamation. 2 Gregory Baum, Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology. Ottawa: Novalis, 2006.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419049_014

Laudato Si’

325

230), that in my theological studies I repeatedly critiqued the ideologicallydistorted ecclesiastical theology and then retrieved insights from Scripture and the early Church to formulate a theology promising redemption in today’s world. The example I cite on page 230 is my critique of the Church’s exclusively person-centered preaching of the Gospel and my retrieval from the Scriptures of its liberating social meaning. I also mention my work critiquing the antiJewish rhetoric of Christian preaching and retrieving from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chapter 11, the affirmation that the Jews remain dear to God, ever faithful to the divine promises. In my autobiographical essay The Oil has not Run Dry, I have a chapter (Chapter 18) explaining what I have learnt from the Frankfurt School.3 I confess that I find the writings of Horkheimer and Adorno difficult to understand; they presuppose a close acquaintance with Hegel, which I do not have. My understanding of the Frankfurt School, I write on page 136, comes from “listening to my friend Rudi Siebert, professor of religion at Western Michigan University, a creative follower of the Frankfurt School, who has used the method of Critical Theory to understand the complex role of religion in human history.” I wanted it known that you were my teacher. Let me confess that I find the difficult prose adopted by Horkheimer and Adorno problematic; it seems to me an uncritical embrace of an academic arrogance widely spread at German universities, an elitism that excludes intelligent people outside the university from learning important ideas and prevents professors from hearing the protesting voices of the people. The Frankfurt philosophers remained abstract; they were never part of a social movement; their solidarity with the victims of society was purely literary. By contrast, Rudi, you wrote a prosaic essay that addressed a wider audience than the university. Dialectical negation is a central procedure of Critical Theory. Well known is the lament of the Frankfurt School philosophers that the Enlightenment has become the great obstacle to the humanization of humankind. Of course, as you insist, their negation of the Enlightenment was dialectical. They argued that the 18th century Enlightenment trusted two dimensions of human reason: “substantive reason” dealing with ends, such as liberté, égalité et fraternité, and “instrumental reason” dealing with means, such as science and technology. In the 19th century, they argued, the Enlightenment dropped its attention to substantive reason and relied almost exclusively on instrumental reason. Technoscience alone was expected to solve the problems of human existence, and ethical reason became disqualified as pure sentiment. In the 20th century, thanks to the cultural domination of instrumental reason, the Enlightenment 3 Gregory Baum, The Oil has not Run Dry. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016.

326

Baum

became the great impediment of the humanization of society. Writing after World War ii, Horkheimer and Adorno even argued that the Holocaust was not a return to ancient barbaric practices; it was in fact a manifestation of the sinister side of modernity: the techno-scientific control of people, and if need be their elimination, to promote the interests of a powerful minority. The Frankfurt School’s negation of the Enlightenment, I repeat, was dialectical: it denounced the domination of instrumental reason and sought to ­retrieve the substantive reasoning and ethical concern that characterized the 18th century Enlightenment, especially in Germany, where Herder, Lessing, and Mendelssohn invoked Humanität as an ethical norm, and Kant produced a rational ethos of universal responsibility. Yet the Frankfurt School philosophers doubted that modern society had the cultural resources for retrieving an ethics that protected human well-being. This doubt was the source of their pessimism. It never occurred to them that the religious traditions could become cultural resources for the promotion of human flourishing. It is important to remember that the Frankfurt School rejected all non-­ dialectical negations of the Enlightenment proposed by Heidegger and other existentialists and, for different reasons, by fascists and some conservatives. The Frankfurt philosophers defended human rights and affirmed the social virtues of liberté, égalité et fraternité. They thought it was a tragedy that Marx had rejected the liberalism of the French Revolution non-dialectically, that is to say without retrieving its great achievement, the Rights of Man. Marx mocked those rights; they were Klassenrechte, he wrote, not Menschenrechte, an interpretation that led to the non-recognition of human rights in the various communist movements. In Antiquity, the Catholic Church rejected dialectically various versions of Platonism, and in the Middle Ages it did so in regard to Aristotelian thought, retrieving their insights and interpreting them in the light of the Gospel. It was only in response to modernity that the Catholic Church rejected non-­ dialectically the new philosophies – until Vatican Council ii. While negating the materialism, scientism, individualism and vulgar utilitarianism characteristic modernity, the Council retrieved the values generated by the Enlightenment such as freedom, equality and fraternity. Reflecting on dialectical negation, theologians became aware that the Catholic Church has always rejected heretical currents non-dialectically, refusing to retrieve the grains of truth in the heterodox currents and thus impoverishing its own understanding of the Gospel. Again, Vatican Council ii was not afraid to be taught by the insights of Orthodox and Protestant Christians. To refine the idea of non-dialectical negation, the Frankfurt School introduced the dictum ‘the end of innocent critique.’ The negation of a p ­ hilosophical

Laudato Si’

327

or political system is “innocent” if it does not retrieve the truths contained in this system and, second, if it does not ask what the social impact would be if it, the critique, were to become the ruling idea of society. Implicit in this dictum is the obligation of a liberation movement that succeeds in freeing society from colonial domination to rethink its political message and public discourse, for otherwise an oppressed group achieving political power is likely to become an oppressor. Words uttered by a powerless minority change meaning when repeated by a powerful institution. “Deutschland Deutschland über Alles” was the revolutionary song of German liberals, gathered in Frankfurt in 1848, calling for the end of the feudal order and a unified Germany, abolishing the regional kingdoms, principalities, duchies and palatinates that had fragmented the German-speaking people over the centuries. But when “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” was sung half a century later when Germany had become an Empire, the song sent an aggressive political message to the world. If liberation movements in the hour of their success do not rethink their aim and their public discourse, they are likely to produce an authoritarian society. Clinging to its truth without compromise is the heroic stance of a colonized people struggling for freedom, but if a government, now liberated from the colonizer, clings to its truth without compromise, it will curtail the free public debate of the citizens. The Afrikaner people struggled against the domination of British imperialism, yet when they became the ruling party in South Africa, they still saw themselves as a people threatened by outsiders and thus imposed an apartheid legislation on Black people, the majority in their country. Zionism, a Jewish liberation movement, represented the struggle of a persecuted people to survive and flourish, yet after the foundation of the Jewish state, the Zionist government, still thinking of Jews as victims, refused to recognize the human rights of the Palestinian people. Implicit in the Frankfurt School dictum “the end innocent critique” is great political wisdom. Dear Rudi, I will now tell you a puzzlement for which I have no clear answer: In the 1990s I visited in Potsdam, Germany, a philosopher I admired, Susan Neiman, an American scholar, the author of Evil in Modern Thought and Moral Clarity.4 She had got her doctorate at a German university, then taught at several American colleges, and was eventually invited to return to Germany as director of the Einstein Forum at Potsdam, a government-sponsored centre for public debate on issues of national and international importance, Susan ­Neiman has great trust in ethical reasoning. She cherishes Enlightenment 4 Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015; Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

328

Baum

thinkers for whom reason dealt not only with means, but also with ends, with virtues, with the flourishing of human beings. What surprised me in our conversation was the critical remark she made about the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. She complained that their negation of the Enlightenment undermined all trust in human reason. She had read their works carefully, she said, and had taught university courses on their Dialectic of Enlightenment. I replied to her that their negation of the Enlightenment was dialectical; they were in fact opposed to all non-dialectical negations. I took a few minutes to summarize the understanding of Critical Theory that I had learnt from you, Rudi, and that had shaped my own thinking. Oh, she said, “a charitable interpretation!” This is not the end of it. I just read two fascinating books, Grand Hotel Abyss: the Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries, and Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernity by Ehrhard Bahr, both learned studies, profound and enjoyable.5 To my great surprise, both of them argued that Horkheimer and Adorno rejected the Enlightenment, regarding it in the long run as the source of the dehumanization experienced in the 20th century. Neither of the two books mention the expression “dialectical negation.” I am puzzled by these conflicting interpretations. Rudi, I love your interpretation of the Frankfurt School, which, as I mentioned, has greatly influenced my own theological thinking. At the same time, I wonder why other students of the Frankfurt School arrive at such a different evaluation. I am unable to resolve this question for two reasons, a) because my inadequate background in German philosophical thought prevents me from understanding Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s writings, and b) because being 93 my strength is declining. It occurs to me, Rudi, that you may be the creative thinker who read the Frankfurt School in the light of your Christian hope and raised its wisdom to a higher level, making it serve the mystery of rescue and redemption operative in human history. Perhaps you made ‘die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen,’ which Horkheimer confessed to at the end of his life, the principle for interpreting the entire work of the Frankfurt School.6 Your work reveals you as a truly original thinker, not just as a commentator of Critical Theory. To you, Rudi, my good Easter wishes of 2017, herzlich, Gregory. 5 Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. New York: Verso, 2017; Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 6 Max Horkheimer, “Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Gespräch mit Helmut Gumnior,” in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 7: Vorträge und Aufzeichnungen 1949–1973. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985.

Laudato Si’

329

Bibliography Bahr, Ehrhard. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Baum, Gregory. The Oil has not Run Dry. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. Baum, Gregory. Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology. Ottawa: Novalis, 2006. Horkheimer, Max. “Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Gespräch mit Helmut Gumnior.” In Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 7: Vorträge und Aufzeichnungen 1949–1973. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985. Jeffries, Stuart. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. New York: Verso, 2017. Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Neiman, Susan. Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Index Adorno, Theodor W. x, 11–21, 27, 31, 64–65, 67, 74, 80–85, 89–90, 97, 106–108, 115–116, 12, 123–131, 135–136, 146–149, 164, 168–170, 173, 176, 203, 325–326, 328 Allen (Camp) 1, 3–5, 9–11, 19, 40, 84 Alt-Fascism 279, 302–303, 306–309, 311 Althaus, Paul 208 Anderson, Joakim 294 Angelus Novus 174, 178–179 Aquinas, Thomas 22, 26, 87 Archeofuturism 284n11, 286, 288n18, 298–303, 306–308 Aristotle 102, 223 Aufhaben ix, 299, 306, 129–131, 133, 137, 139–141 Augustine (Saint) 98, 189 Auschwitz-Birkenau 17–18 Bannon, Steven K. 79–80, 299 Barth, Karl 26, 103 Baum, Gregory 37, 205 Bauman, Zygmunt 186–188, 197 Benjamin, Walter x, 14, 20–21, 89–90, 119, 121, 123n20, 127, 196, 203, 144–180 Berg, Alban 11 Bilderverbot 90, 108, 125, 127–130 Bilz, Dr. Alois 33–34 Black Panther Party/Movement 283 Bloch, Ernst 45–46, 103–106 Bolshevism 2, 30–31, 80, 103, 213–214, 308n67 Bonaventura 22, 26, 87 Bopp, Martin 83 Bošković, Ruđer Josip 218–241 Braun, Eva 4, 14 Braun, Werner von 64 Brecht, Bertolt 14, 20–21, 54, 82, 90, 146 Breivik, Anders Behring 294 BREXIT 64, 74, 186 Brück, Dr. Anton 47 Bruno, Giordano 91 Buber, Martin 12, 84, 158, 160 Buchenwald 16–17, 19, 30, 36 Buddhism xvi, 16–17, 85–86, 94, 128, 236

Camus, Renaud 279 Catholicism 14, 16, 40–41, 46–47, 49–53, 56, 65, 206–207, 212 Catholic University of America 11, 40–41 Chavez, Hugo 66, 69 Christianity 2, 6, 9, 16–17, 19–22, 26–35, 38, 40–41, 56, 85–86, 89, 94–95, 98–99, 102–104, 107–108, 115, 117, 127, 131–133, 136, 145, 165, 212, 295–298, 318–320 Communist Manifesto 151 Constantine, Emperor ix, 103, 203 Copernicus, Nicolaus 229 Coughlin, Charles (Father) 65, 80 Cromwell, Oliver 27, 95 Dachau 52 Daoism 26 De Benoist, Alain 294–295, 308 Der SS Staat 16 Dirks, Walter x, 11, 13–20, 30–31, 103, 106 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 90, 98, 104–105 Douay-Rheims Bible 263, 269–271 Douglass, Frederick 283 Dresden 17, 95, 105, 289 Dugin, Alexander 295n36, 308 Eckhart, Meister 22, 26–27 Einstein, Albert 73, 219, 224, 228, 327 Eisenhower, Dwight (U.S. President) 64, 71, 216 Erasmus of Rotterdam 46, 48, 51 Eurabia 294 Evola, Julius 291, 300–301, 308 Falk, Arthur 42 Fanon, Frantz 280–281, 283–284, 288–289 Fascism xi, 5, 13–14, 18–20, 27, 30, 37, 47, 53, 57, 64–69, 74, 76–77, 87–88, 92, 95, 125, 135, 149–150, 176, 189, 203–204, 207, 213, 289, 301–303, 309 Faye, Guillaume 281n4, 284n11–288, 290, 293–294, 297–303, 305–306, 308 Feuerbach, Ludwig 116 Flechtheim, Ossip 101, 116 Francis (Pope) 78–79, 100, 196

332 Franco, Francisco 2, 19–20, 65, 77, 303, 309 Frankfurt School x–xiii, 5–6, 8, 16, 52–54, 64, 66–67, 74, 83–84, 88, 90, 96, 106, 116, 121–122, 124, 129–130, 134, 139–140, 186, 196, 202–203, 324–328 Frankfurter Hefte 13–18 Freud, Sigmund 16, 18, 25, 27, 52, 77, 841, 85–88, 90 Friedman, Milton 70, 77 Fromm, Erich x, 5, 13, 20–21, 30, 64–65, 67–68, 74, 83–84, 89, 115, 159n66, 308 Fuchs, Eduard 163, 169, 176 Fukuyama, Francis 315–316 Galen, Graf von (Bishop) 4, 47 Gandhi, Mohandas 97–101, 284 Gestapo 212, 215 Giáp, Võ Nguyên 12, 72 Goebbels, Dr. Joseph 12, 14, 65, 80–81 Griffin, Roger 301–302 Guardini, Romano 11, 13, 32 Guenon, René 301 Haber, Fritz 209 Habermas, Jürgen 14, 16, 67, 85, 87, 89, 115–116, 131, 134, 137–139, 151, 190–191, 194, 196, 293, 297 Hawking, Stephen 222–223, 225 Hegel, Georg W.F. ix–x, 11–12, 21–22, 26–27, 46, 52–54, 81, 83, 85, 87–93, 98, 103–104, 116, 121–128, 137, 140, 152, 206, 249, 254–255, 299n47, 315, 325 Heidegger, Martin 300–301, 308–309, 326 Heine, Heinrich 107 Heisenberg, Werner 73, 218–219 Helding, Michael 44–52, 54 Herzen, Alexander 249–256, 258n36 Hinduism 26, 98, 235, 299 Hiroshima 17, 36–37, 73, 88, 90, 95, 98, 105 Hirsch, Emmanuel 208 Hitler, Adolf 2–4, 10–12, 14–15, 19–20, 30, 46–47, 65–66, 68, 77, 81, 83, 89, 98–99, 106, 203, 209–210, 212–214, 297n41, 303, 308n67, 309 Holocaust / Shoah 83, 188, 194, 283n6, 326 Honneth, Axel 16, 85, 115 Horkheimer, Max x, 5–9, 11–21, 27, 31, 34, 64, 67, 74, 80–82, 85, 89–90, 96–97, 106, 115,

Index 120–121, 124–125, 127, 131, 150, 163, 172–173, 196–197, 203, 325–326, 328 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 155–156 Hutchinson, Anne 263 ibm 68 Idealism 1–1, 6, 8, 23–24, 28, 38, 74, 79, 85, 88, 91, 93 I.G. Farben 68, 77, 15–16, 36 isis (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) 1, 12, 56–57, 71–72, 89, 284, 306 Islam 6, 16, 56, 85, 99, 115, 117, 119n10, 131–132, 134, 137, 139–140, 206–207, 281, 286–287, 294, 297, 305n62, 306–307, 310, 318–320 Jesus of Nazareth ix, 6, 11, 17, 21, 25–26, 29–30, 34–36, 38–40, 89–90, 94, 98–100, 102, 106, 132, 165–166, 190, 204, 212, 273 Jetztzeit (Now-Time) 144 John xxiii (Pope) 33 John Paul ii (Pope) 47 Judaism 6, 9, 16–17, 20–21, 40, 55, 85–86, 94, 107, 115, 125, 127, 131–132, 145, 156, 160, 167, 172–173, 191, 207 Jünger, Ernst 309 Kafka, Franz 169n113, 176 Kant, Immanuel ix–x, 11–12, 21, 26–27, 46, 52, 85, 88, 90–91, 108, 116, 126, 203, 249, 326 Kennedy, John F. (U.S. President) 64 Keynes, Lord Maynard 70, 77 Kierkegaard, Soren 20, 127 King, Martin Luther Jr. 97–101, 269, 284 Kirchheimer, Otto 5 Kittel, Gerhard 208 Klages, Ludwig 308 Kogon, Eugene 11–21, 30–31, 103, 106 Kraus, Karl 154, 169, 176, 178–179 Krupp & Thyssen 68, 77 Küng, Hans x, 37, 51, 77, 91, 103, 321 Kushner, Jared 66 Last Man 289–295, 301, 305, 307 Le grand remplacement (The Great Replacement) 140, 280, 285, 311 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 87, 90, 95, 233, 239

333

Index Lenin, Vladimir 52, 85, 117 Leskov, Nikolai 169 Lessing Gymnasium 10, 15–16, 52 Levinas, Emmanuel 186 Liebknecht, Karl 20 Lincoln, Abraham 264–266, 269 Lortz, Joseph 45–48, 208 Löwenthal, Leo x, 5, 64–65, 67, 74, 115, 125–126, 151–152, 163 Luther, Martin 45–46, 48, 102 Luxemburg, Rosa 20 MacDonald, Kevin 294 Mann, Thomas 46–47, 81 Marcuse, Herbert x, 64, 67, 74, 81, 89, 115, 159n66 Marx, Karl ix–x, 13, 18, 27, 29–30, 45–46, 52, 54, 82–83, 85–88, 90, 93, 98, 104, 116–117, 163, 175, 300, 326 Marxism 14, 21, 30, 95, 130, 135, 145, 148, 177, 205, 291 Materialism x, 1, 6, 8, 23–24, 28, 52, 74–75, 85–89, 91, 100, 128, 145–149, 169, 174–177, 284n11, 290, 318, 326 May, Theresa (British Prime Minister) 279 McGovern, George (Senator) 43 Melville, Herman 264, 266–268 Metz, Johannes Baptist x, 31, 37, 103, 187, 190–192, 194 Michels, Ernst 12 Molino, Robert (Father) 80 Moltmann, Jürgen 103 Münzer, Thomas 45–46, 48, 102 Mussolini, Benito 2, 19–20, 30, 65, 67, 77, 303, 309 Nagasaki 17, 36–37, 73, 88, 90, 95, 98, 105 Napoleon 54, 98, 248 National Socialism 46, 212, 214–215 Nazareth College 56 Negative Dialectics 128 Neiman, Susan 327 Neuman, Franz 5 Neuss, Karl Henry 41 New Deal 70, 75, 77 Nicolas ii, Tsar 252 Nietzsche, Friedrich ix, 80–81, 86, 88, 116, 136, 203, 230, 290–292, 300–301 Noyes, Margaret “Margi” (Siebert) 41, 198

Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria (U.S. Representative) 24, 69 Omar, Ilhan (U.S. Representative) 24 Operation Barbarossa 29, 31 Patton, George (General) 2 Paulus, Friedrich (General) 12 Pavelić, Ante 2, 19–20, 65, 77 Pétain, Philippe 2, 19–20 Peter the Great (of Russia) 248 Peukert, Helmut 187, 194–197 Pius xi, Pope 4 Pollock, Friedrich 5–9, 67, 80, 82 Pontius Pilatus (Pontius Pilate) 38 Popper, Karl 222–223 Proust, Marcel 169 Rand, Ayn 54 Ratzinger, Joseph (Cardinal)/ Pope Benedict xvi 47, 51, 94 Reich’s Concordat 4 Reimer, A. James 198, 205 Reuss, Regens Joseph Maria 31–32, 41 Rudolphi, George W. (Pastor) 30, 36–37, 211–216 Russian Revolution 247 Saint-Simon, Henri de 249, 253, 255 Salazar, António 2, 65, 77 Sanders, Bernie (U.S. Senator) 24, 69, 71 Savonarola 91 Schlachter, Hermann 34, 36 Schmitt, Carl 31, 187, 189–190, 203, 208, 300, 304, 307–308 Scholem, Gershom 14, 20–21, 146, 148–149, 156–157, 166–167, 171–172, 177–178 Schopenhauer, Arthur 12, 80–81, 83, 85, 88, 90, 203, 291 Scruton, Roger 115–127, 129–131, 133–134, 136–137, 139–140 Shakespeare, William 130 Siebert, Bruno 83 Siebert, Elli 83 Siebert, Steve xi, 44 Smith, Adam 249 Smith, Joseph 268 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 97, 101 Spartacus 20, 102 Spengler, Oswald 133, 299, 309

334 Stauffenberg, Graf Claus von 3 Stohr, Albert (Bishop) 32, 46 Strauss, Ludwig 160, 263, 299 Sunic, Tomislav 294 Supek, Ivan 73 Surrealism 145, 151, 169 Tarrant, Brenton 1 Thatcher, Margaret (British Prime Minister) 155 Theodicy xi, 17–19, 27, 35, 37–38, 87–88, 90–92, 95, 97, 102, 104, 106, 132, 164–165, 191, 202 Tillich, Paul 12–13, 20, 103, 107, 127 Tlaib, Rashida (U.S. Representative) 24 Tocqueville, Alexis de 251 Toynbee, Arnold J. 133 Treblinka 18, 34, 88, 90, 95–96, 103, 105 Trump, Donald 23, 57, 64–71, 74–80, 84, 133n39–40, 202, 279–280, 296, 299 Turner, Nat 283 Überfremdung 305 Vatican Council ii 13, 22, 26, 32, 51, 79, 94, 326 Venner, Dominique 308

Index Vesey, Denmark 283 Volf, Miroslav 187, 192–193 Volksgemeinschaft 33, 130 Washington, George 263 Weber, Max 243–245 Weil, Felix 10 Western Michigan University xii, 42–43, 73, 84, 325 Willensgemeinschaft 293 Winthrop, John 262 X, Malcolm xii 99, 297 X-Experience 17, 87, 89 Xenophilia 190, 192, 282, 286, 288, 294, 303, 310 Yalta, Ukraine/Russia xii–xiii, 43, 73, 88 Yusuf, Hamza (Imam/Shaykh) 115–121, 133–134, 139–140 Zaytuna College 117, 134 Zhukov, Georgy (General) 12, 72 Zionism 163, 176, 207, 327 Žižek, Slavoj 57 Zyklon B 15–16