Stillborn God reading notes

notes from
The Stillborn God" Religion, Politics, and the Modern West by Mark Lilla
15th c tele-microscope challenges xtian cosmology but physics does not imply any ethics, though many tried to weave rationalst (god as watchmaker, elegant, rational) theologies. By 17th c Human goodness=rationalty, reason (imitatio Dei) rather than blind faith. Leibniz's theodicy has natural order justifying god's goodness, god now needing justification.
Many felt this was no longer the god of abraham and st. Paul. Pascal, greatest mathematician of the age, considered rationalist theology an idol, a fetish of calculators. Pascal appealed to the tradition of St. Augustine, god within rather than without. Pascal didn't deny sciences, if anything he was more honest about these discoveries "the eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me" he confessed. Pascal confronted his God without mediation of the natural world, or by theology, or by church or politics.

17th c thought revived basic tension btw an immanent god manifest in his handiwork and a nearly absent god who communicates directly with the soul from beyond "infinite spaces" while rationalist theologians suggested politics could imitate order in creation, Pascal and others drew away from public life to inner piety, the modern equivalence to Sts. Paul and Augustine. In the end, neither a religious nor a secular coherent world picture emerge. It isn't true that we now take our bearings from a scientific cosmology, we have never lived in a Copernican, Newtonian, Darwinian or Einsteinian world. We have lost the "whole world" that Greeks and early Xtians once thot linked God and man. Instead, today's hypotheses will likely be inadequate tomorrow.

What is religion? Among Greeks...
Aristotle- born of wonder, it finds xpression in myth
Epicureans- born of fear and ignorance, it seeks protection
Euhemerists- born of heroism, it is cultural memory
Stoics- born of some universal, transcultural spermatikos logos
But Xtians see these replies as pagan (or even jewish) ritualism and narcissism. Protestants see the "whore of babylon" perpetuating these pagan tendencies

Rousseau-Kant-Hegel
Hegel splits diff btw Rousseau and Kant by reviving Plato's notion of "eros" (Cf."entelchy") or what Hegel called "negativity"
Where Plato conceived of Eros as a striving force propelling us to attempt understanding of the world, Hobbes inverted that to say the mind is esentially reactive as it copes with sensory bombardment. Plato assumes orig union of mind + "ideas" that make up reality, which we try to recover in thought. Hobbes assumes orig tension btw mind and world.
Hegel combines elements of both pictures but renders it dynamic, calling "negativity" a mental force that resists the world as alien, and BY resisting comes to understand all experience as "mediated," complex, intractable. No such thing as noble simplicity, but coming to realize this is cathartic, the "absolute knowing" that mind is the source of its own contradictions and alienations. Allowing for contradiction is the ultimate source of dynamism and the hard-won peace that comes with understanding: the Eros hidden in Agape.

Beyond individualism, Hegel says societies are subject to the same dynamism of negativity-alienation-reconciliation requiring historical development of consciousness in a society. The reconciling power of philosophy in individuals becomes the reconciling power of religion in society. He shared Rousseau's view that philosophy does nothing that religion can't do. Religion works thru feeling,thought and images, while philosophy works thru thought alone. Philosophy rationalizes the divine nexus, religion inculcates divine concepts to form members of a coherent ethical life. Since few can grasp the labor of philosophy, philosophy can understand a society, but never create one. Religion can.

The deepest grasp of religion is thru rational reflection or the philosophy of religion, a discipline Hegel created. 150 years after Hobbes, Christianity reacquires its status as central philosophical theme. Hegels late unpublished Philosophy of Religion aren't theology, nor moral arguments such as Rouseau and Kant, but an analysis on the social locus of religion, the "cult". Other thinkers had granted expedient worth to religion as civic cement, but Hegel was first to call it a carrier of some deep truth about man and society. He acknowledges religious conflicts but frames them as part of larger historical processes thru which societies develop. Religion is a representation of of truth as society understands it at every stage of development. In particular the reconciliation of political authority, as well as its art and science, to religious ideals is central to philosophy of religion. "That one spirit creates and informs them [predicates] the further truth that the history of religions coincides with world history."

But if Spinoza collapsed God into Nature, Hegel collapsed God into man and what man creates in history. His insistence on reconciliation with negativity, even barbarism, as necessary but temporary is a blind faith. Even Kant knew to deny self-satisfaction, fantasy, and megalomania. Hegel's view of culture as progressing from idol to the Protestant state lacks absolute condemnation of despots or idolators, the community can become a mob. Among his contemporary critics however, Hegel's greatest flaw was that he sanctified banality of bourgeois life, offering reconciliation on the cheap.

At the end of the Napoleonic Era jews struggle to assimilate by adopting a new 19th c theology inspired by Hegel which defined Protestant society as the advent and pinnacle of humankind. Judaism, which Hegel had deemed static and obsolete, tried to gain hold as the essence of monotheist ethics. Hermann Cohen saw the special fate of the state-less jew as symbol of the promise of messianic redemption, reconciliation and justice, ideals which can only be achieved in particular nations. So, Jewish messianism is a universal nationalism. Jews must practice in dispersed nations and should renounce hope of having their own state. Herman Cohen's liberal judaism was sadly naive. That messianic passions have often unleashed false prophesy, revolts, massacres was not spoken of in the "well-ordered" house Cohen and Troetsch built.

WWI brought crashing down all claims of the modern state as the historic culmination of humanism. Assimilationist liberal theology became suspect, an embarrassment, for both Protestant and Jew. Kaiser Wilhelm defended his declaration of war on Russia and France with aid of liberal theologians like Adolf von Harnack who wrote gracious defenses and signed petitions reading "we shall fight to the end" to defend "the legacy of a Goethe, Beethoven, a Kant..." thus muddying any distinction btw reason and revelation, state and church, speaking only implicitly of God's word and bestowing implied divinity to political action and cultural life. Here faith supplants thought. Men like Troeltsch were unprepared to see a breakdown of liberal theology that would revive eschatological dimensions of biblical faith allowing passion for messianic redemption to once again infiltrate the political life of Europe.

Messianism, apocalypticism, chiliasm, political eschatology all seek the allure of imminent gnostic redemption, the dissolution of history, the rule of God restored. They envision the mysterious and personal God, not the God who gave Moses the ten commandments.

It was the revelator Hobbes feared most. While the Great Awakenings defined America, europe were unprepared for the hybrid influence of Neitzsche and Kierkegaard, Rufolf Otto's influential "The Idea of the Holy"(1917) along with popular anthologies of world mythologies were read alongside expressionistic novels. Xtians and jews alike explored the margins of religious experience-- theosophy, yoga, nudism, vegetarianism-as escape from soulless civilization. As in Wagner's music images of Christ and Dionysus blend harmoniously and fin-siecle Germany

As cooperation btw church and state led to beourgois passivity, complicity and, in the case of Germany after WWI, poverty, shame and defeat, religious sentiments sought out radical new ground. Mystic and messianic impulses rooted in biblical exegesis survived in both xtian and jewish believers.

The heterodoxy to nationalist religion is gnosticism. In biblical traditions, there are rival tendancies to figure God either as close to our world and personal experiences or as remote, beyond speech and reason. Christianity is especialy susceptible to gnostic reinterpretation. Having been visted by the son of God and after to be abandoned for millenia makes one apt to seek signs in mysteries that impart knowledge to God's Chosen. Such believers are impatient with existing settled dogma and law which they suspect of blocking access to the divine. They see creation as a battlefield of good and evil where a final victory will render the law superfluous. Theirs is the arbitrary God who preferred Jacob to Esau, who smites enemies and redeems his Chosen. But gnosticism can still inspire political theologies. God is remote, except in his Chosen where he is near to whom he imparts commands inscrutable to the outside world. This mindset can inspire radical possibilities in the theological imagination: Messianism, chiliasm, political eschatology and these can take political form. When they do, believers may seek the "end times" or they may celebrate God's "last emperor" as a final the ruler of mankind, or follow revolutionary prophets urging the fall of the present satanic order, or to bring apocalypse by embracing sin. All these forms share a belief in the redemptive promise of a new earth and a new heaven. Orthodoxy recognizes these hopes and seeks to channel them in productive ways. The gnostics await imminent redeption. They are ready. It was these hopes that most worried Hobbes, fanatic armies following a mountebank prophet. He had hoped to forever render these hopes politically impotent in the West. But mystic and messianic did survive Hobbes "Great Separation".

In America the "Great Awakening" led to a constitution strucutured to resist messianic influence, in effect institutionalizing Hobbe's "Great Separartion". Even if messianic influences did shape American religious life more than in Europe, it remains true that europe is less well equipped now to deal intelectually with religious passions when they do arise as a political force. That was certainly the case in modern Germany as a diffuse revival of ecstatic religiosity arose at the turn of the 20th c. Paradoxicaly, German intellectuals absorbed in Nietzsche's atheism were also immersing themselved in Kierkegaard's faith. Legends, fairy tales, Norse sagas, Indian myths and Sufi poetry were read alongside expressionistic novels and poetry. Germans whether xtian or jewish explored the occult, theosophy, yoga, nudism, vegetarianism in hopes of escaping a soulless modern civilization. As in Wagner's music, images of Christ and Dionysus blended harmoniously.

In this era, a young Martin Buber who would later become the Jewish sage preaching interfaith understanding, was at this time promoting an electrifying zionist chauvanism that preferred "a beautiful death in a final effort at life" to a "comfortable, unproductive happiness." Buber didn't await a messiah but Zion, self-made. His early calls for upheaval are chilling given the genuine apocalypse in store for European Jewry. A young Protestant firebrand Friedrich Gogarten (who studied under Ernst Troeltsch) shared Buber's hopes. Gogarten felt betrayed by his liberal teachers and the outcome of WWI. He preached "a religion that attacks culture as culture... that attacks the whole world."

The Weimar period in Germany arose in reaction to the simultaneous collapse of liberal theology and the civilization it had extolled. It was a revolt against their emaciated conceptions of the spiritual life and of theological traditions that began with Rousseau. As such, a new conception of God's relation to man and world was needed. Karl Barth's "Epistle to the Romans" (2nd ed, 1922) and Franz Rosenzweig's "The Star of Redemption" spoke anew of the Bible's promise of immanent redemption. Though neither Barth nor Rosenzweig contemplated redemption in political terms, others adopted their very same language to speak of the political crisis of Weimar. Barth reinvigorated Christianity with clear existential alternatives laid out by Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin and also Kierkegaard. He attacked every form of liberal humanism that defined religion as human culture (Hegel, Troeltsch), the highest expression of sentiment (Rousseau, Schliermacher), highest development of human morality (Kant, Ritschl) Liberal humanism forgot that man is fallen, sinful, prideful. Barth condemns the chaos, irrationality, and perversity of the world man had created for himself. Barth writes a masterpiece of antimodern, antihumanist rhetoric that he later regrets because it keaves a false impression that he idealizes the simple orthodoxy of an earlier era. In fact, he accepts Kant's refutation of proofs of God and recent biblical crticism. Barth's central notion is that there is an "infinite qualitative distinction" between time and eternity, and therefore between God and Man God "wholly other" a deus absconditus. But Barth's writings were shot through with "esoteric gnosticism" "paradox" and "crisis" that Weimar readers loved and that Barth later regretted. He compares revelation to a crater left by an exploding shell, a void left by a departed force. When God and man do meet, and they do, it occurs outside time and transforms our lives into permanent xrisis, a trial forcing us to countenance the paradox of faith in the unknown. There is nothing rational or comprehensible in God's decisions, this not Rousseau's benevolent creator, Kant's moral law-giver or Hegel's self-developing spirit. God commands certain of us and leaves us to struggle with our sinful selves. This a God calling man to the battle between Good and Evil.

Rosenzweig believed history itself could not be understood apart from God. He described a reciprocal human and divine activity that coukd take two forms, equally valid, one redeems the world through temporal activity (christian) the other through ritual awe (judaism). Neither Barth nor Rosenzweig apealed dogmatically to miracles or fanciful cosmologies. A "wholly apart" God required "new thinking," a contnuous revelation in what is most near to us, to learn to let the world, and history, be. These are not optimistic beliefs, they are perhaps the first postmodern works of theology. Where Barth calls for crisis at every moment to avoid reconciling himself to the material world, Rosenzweig seeks to reconcile Jews to the given world as a way of then getting beyond it, to focus on redemption as symbolized in ritual. Disowning the material world was commensurate with the jews having no nation, they shouldn't strive for a temporal state when they have already attained eternity as God's Chosen.

Rosenzweig recognized that the Jewish vocation of awaiting the Messiah must root itself in the anticipation that the redemption will actually occur. They "wait" by living within the strictures of the unchanging Jewish Law. Without that law, Christians turn to the world, working to realize divine promise progressively. Jews expect a sudden transformative redemption, through the eyes of Jewish Law they become utopians. The liberal humanist assimilation surrendered this ambition to a promise of cultural assimilation and in so doing departed from the essence as jews, in effect rebelling against God.

If Barth and Rosenzweig are right, that no human can mediate between time and eternity, then there can be no constructive political theology, no social blueprint inscribed in scripture. Here they are in accord with Hobbes. Yet Rosenzweig also recognized the psychological power of messianic expectation. The promise of redemption sows anticipation which can take political form out of desire to escape a world governed by sin. How to prevent those desires from enflaming religious communities especially in moments of historical crisis where pious withdrawal can simmer to a boil of untamed action and faith in the Messiah be transferred to a profane political idol. Language like "shock" "crisis" "upheaval" and "utopia" may serve to liquidate cares for the present but they also mapped onto non-theological events such as the "shock" of WWI, the "upheaval" of the Russian Revolution, the promised "redemption" of the working classes, and "utopia" if only it were willed. Barth and Rosenzeig stood aghast as Weimar Germany daily became more poisonous and the last shred os liberal democratic decency disappeared. When Hitler came to power, a group of Protestant theolgians calling themselves the German Christians had already come out in support of Nazi ideas including the need to purge the "Jewish" elements from Christian doctrine. Barth railed against the perversion of Protestant theology, denounced hateful theology, and warned against bowing to any earthly leader. He called them "the last, fullest and worst monstrosity of neo-Protestanism" the bastards of liberal theology. Among Barth's progeny was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was involved in the plot against Hitler's life. Also, Paul Tillich who rejected Nazism but then argued for religious socialism as a necessity, a divine intervention at a decisive historic moment. But such a rationalization could just as easily justify the political-theology of the Nazi's as the nationalist, racist theologian Emmmanuel Hirsch did.

Barth and Rosenzweig had no taste for compromise with the culture their liberal teahers celebrated and that committed suicide in WWI. They wanted to confront the unknown God, to live in the paradox, feel the eschatological tension embedded in creation. They wanted to experience the moment of absolute decision that determined their whole existence. Well! They did experience it.