Brain Egyptian Exlant

There's only one book here so finally I bought it, lucky it's got everything except when I open it, first thing missing is any letters from the alphabet. Makes for slow reading, after a few weeks here though you learn to give up and slow down. It does take weeks to quit splashin at the surface of your cerebrospinal fluid, quit looking for amusement and just let the particles and fish feces seesaw back to the bottom. Until then, touring the minimalism of muslimdom, I didn't too much get what was going on with the few million people around me.

It's kind of the same as first hearing music in quartertone scale. A westernear gallops in, dazzled by the exoticks then slumps in the saddle bored just as fast... because it's too complex to follow? or too boring with repetition to sit through? Or maybe something even more basic than that... So you do the galloping snooze a few times and finally give up, set your tell gallon hat on the fire and only later start hearing people humming bits of those quartertunes, that gets it in your ear small by small and unprepared, and also maybe you start wandering into more places, letting yourself into buildings where you have no business and climbing darkened marble staircases worn so smooth by shoes they seem to sag at the middle where really the edge gets so sharp it'll cut you
through your pants. Way above you hear a two-twenty volt buzz trigger a steel bolt and through the echo the groan of a two ton elevator dropping down from the dawn of elevators to take you up.

It stops a stair and half above the floor compacting the trash beneath it. Steel double doors that could easily crush your arm pull back on noisey hinges easy enough to open but once tipped past their springlocks come slamming shut. Fit yourself inside and after a sickening cachunk you're clattering toward the roof. Some older buildings still have elevators with no doors and no stops, a conveyor belt that if you don't hop off rides you over and back down the other side. Escape out onto any floor and you're facing enormous doors ten feet high fronted with paragraph-length plaques that even when they do include english don't give a clue about what ever or even still goes on there.The air wells that let light through interior windows you'd expect not to notice really, but in Cairo they're the most beautiful frozen falls of soaked trash piled and baked onto vent fans and ledges for decades lit by flickering green flourescents. Cairo has a centuries old tradition of throwing trash down instead of out and one wall of the city's old fortress has a trash heap fifteen stories high.

Inside every building just like in every ancient tomb, there's at least one living person that inhabits the place usually on the second floor either asleep or at prayer. We got at odds about whether it's a caste position with decent money or a shit job like begging around buildings and tombs as if guarding them.

"Guard" isn't the right word since the state sends its conscripts to stand up and sleep three deep behind heavy bullet-proof shields on every corner, inside buildings, and at checkpoints on completely desolate highways. I'm wrong about there being castes, there definitely aren't, not like in India, but there is a defined patterns of roles you start to recognize: the bareheaded
shopkeepers as distinct from the turbaned shop owners who drag one chair into the road in front of their shop to live large and puff the sheesha, or the little kid who blows the stove and pulls tiny wood charcoal with tongs to balance them on the bowls of sheeshas packed with tobacco stewed in molasses and apples. Hes not to be confused with the street kid staying out of his way asking for a bit of money til someone will think up a runner task that sends him truckin across the bazaar and back, or the guy without any shop who sells six hundred tangerines off a donkey cart where he sits cross legged next to a fulcrum scale, these the basic types of robes and roles, you see em over and over the same in Cairo as in any small town..

There are maybe six types of shop: food, coffee & sheesha, clothes, pharmacies, appliances and shops of each kind are stocked identically to others. Oh there are workshops where one thing and one thing only is made, and the bureaucratic highrises. A few days of this variety and you give up looking for entertainment and just puzzle the tanglings of a society that never really had a plan, just happened and kept happening. Cairo is so overpopulated families sleep in shifts.

I asked a cabbie how anyone got anywhere before they built this two mile elevated highway, he said "Highway? Oh you mean the bridge. No it was better before." And sure enough we come to a standstill on the "bridge" stranded above buildings. There are plenty of impressive mosques but really everyone gathers in cafes to smoke and sip. It may be an ancient way of living, probably permanent, there are no elections and no shifting ideology, the military runs things on
the totaltarian model ensuring absolute peace through a limited set of rock hard rules. The things that'll get your hands chopped off are plenty clear, and no one does them. Zero crime nationwide. Mobility, likewise zero.

In a lot of ways everything seems at first exotic then just as fast, too boring with repetition although it isn't boring like the mall. In fact to compare Egyptian cultural minimalism to American homogeny is kind of helpful. In homogeny there's an appearance of variety and change but every effort clings harder to conformity, emulation, rocksumers bangin heads on thin air. Which superstar, which cliche, is all that passes for variety.

In cultural minimalism the spectrum of material possibilities is cleavered at the wrist. So what actually plays is personality, style, skill. Variety appears in character: how hungry how funny how raspy how lucky how mean. Against a lat surface of sand and same, idiosyncracies pop like noise you never heard before. Instead of just another horse drawn carriage careening past your eye catches the young kid in a cobalt jelabiya and white head wrap sitting one knee up on
his seat easily snapping a length of string one inch from his horses' ear or you spot the badass in a red and white turban, tan scarf, full length black jelabiya with a fist against his knee jetting white smoke across a backgammon board. It's small, it's everything.

.

Retro 80's v retro 800AD. No one here needs convincing that progress is impossible, its how you survive the unlikely tangle of social accumulation that wins respect, but not reward. Efforts to overthrow or escap the heap are as meaningless as belief in progress. Whatever comes next won't replace anything, it'll buckle, ruin, stack, split, anything but replace what came before. 'The past isn't dead, it isn't even gone yet.' you might say. It is kind of an amazing comparison though, cultural minimalism v cultural homogeny. Where a purely materialist culture tries to sweep away the "old" to witness where the new comes from and sorta situate the void, a tidyless culture steeped in "not-so-fresh" feelings etch far fewer, far deeper cuts into a void they have no trouble detecting.

One thing I noticed early on but couldn't make sense of were so many men with big cigar burns on their foreheads. At three a.m. every night a dented bullhorn outside your window pointed at your pillow throws a few sparks and sputters the call to prayer at 200db. Unconsciousness is no excuse, God can't sleep, but really you can do your praying anytime so long as it's five times a day. That means five times dropping to knees to set your cranium against the ground then back to standing then back to your forehead over and over all the while whispering prayers into whatever absence gaves space for the matter you currently animate. Five times a day, it turns out, will leave a big prayer pad like a mono paw print on your forehead. Visiting idiots will think it's a cigar burn.

'Etching into' is a another idea worth ponder, etching is different from drawing whether its Koranic texts or heiroglyphic friezes, carvings don't depict a thing so much as they are an aspect of the thing itself, the footprint of. I'm not saying there a stronger connection between ancient Egypt and Islam than any other art or religion, but as examples of carving both Islamic d ecorative relief and ancient Egyptian friezes describe something Malinowski called the coefficient of weirdness in ritual acts as distinct from secular work such as Renaissance perspectival drawings. The stylistic difference between naturalism and classicism may express a conceptual difference and shows something about why irony, layering, and feedback matter in iterative western art but don't have much play in accumulative eastern art. The context of iterative art becomes stylistic development itself, for cumulative art context is the physical world. Western culture turns to fascism using progress as a lie for containing and controlling people's behavior, justifying its "progress" as manifest destiny or social evolution. But to do without notions of progress, sense requires another description of what happens when the world mutates and we age. Answering that the world "decays" is just the kneejerk rejection so not actually a different concept . Instead, if change is neither progress nor egress, it might be a cyclic stasis, that's
what science came up with to describe physical equilibrium, mathematical indeterminacy, stochastics, etc but that was centuries after the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Vedas described nonphysical or ontological change as the flow from genera to specifics and right back again.

Instead of "progressing" away from animal states Ancient Egyptians figured that consciousness in humans gaves them the unique role as conduit between things material and non-material (or temporal and atemporal, same diff). Human actions, they figured, inscribe the divine on the world that in turn spits out thinking humans. Except where do those principles come from and why do they repeat? Or, where did matter come from and why won't it go away? What is the world that it can be perceived by people, and what are people that they perceive subjectively.

Anyway, some sense like that is helpful if you're going to get at all happy about running around ruined temples not as pretty places or impressive objects of skill but as site specific locations of generic metaphysical principles. When you're standing inside the hypostyle hall at Karnak with more than a hundred stone pillars eighty feet high raised and perfectly aligned by no technology
discovered yet for raising that kind of mass you'll slump pretty quick unless you consider the temple doesn't just simulate the place where matter first jutted up from nothingness then started to grow and mutate as papyrus then paper then recorded thought, instead it really is that place, the beginning of the universe brought into being as sentient action. That matter exists at all is one thing, that it lives is another, that it's self aware and can pretend is just completely
fucked up.

However old or ugly, the hypostyle hall at Karnak is amazing as an attempt to model subjectivity. Spend an hour wandering in there looking along or across or up the rows of columns and you start to perceive a single tableaux of your perspective perforated with blind alleys. Carvings from one column appear side by side with carvings from another because of your physical position, then other people can be seen stitching through though you can't see what they see and they move and are occluded an you move and see a changed vantage carrying your memory of the previous place marked by seconds. You're free to roam and remember, but what path would it take to see the whole thing, sight every surface and every distance there? A stretch, an abstraction, parallel processing.. I'm sure I'm wrong about what it meant back then, it'd be uncanny to guess it right. Evidence is slim, but that is what it's like there.

Egyptologists stare down the tiniest clues but it seems like their credo is not to pounce at what they find, they keep a far away view. Shrankenass got us special contacts with his Uncle Edicktologist's old friend, Mahmoud egad thanks! who drove us around to see first dynasty mastabas and third dynasty pyramids at Saqqara ending with the Djoser pyramid that's the very oldest man made structure known. 5000 years, that's exactly halfway between cave paintings and Caroliner and it stands between the pyramids at Giza and the bent pyramid at Saqqara.

Pharaohs wanted to to be physically proximate to earlier pharaohs and their priests who were buried in underground corridors near each pyramids would have extra tunnels dug to tap them into the tombs of other priests sort of suggesting a belief that physical connections created nonphysical connections as well. One thing our guide explained was how the pyramids used to have highly polished facing stones (that since slid off) acting as mirrors that reflected the sky,
sun, and clouds. You can still see the fast changes in light and shadow even on the rough surface and see how it would've been like movies before cameras.

Seeing a photo of the pyramids is just about useless, going there though... you're aware of your exact position on the face of the earth like no place else, move a few steps and it's like those portraits that seem to watch you but these ain't portraits, they're portals through the bottoms of your feet, it's completely goofy. Then you climb up and into the Cheops pyramid, the biggest one, and the opposite happens; you're instantly vanished from creation, dead, lost climbing up instead of down into the ground through a steep narrow shaft that opens into another corridor with a stepped ceiling that gets narrower at the top and you haul yourself up to another passage at the end of which you then have to duck under a huge stone then slide a few feet before you can stand a three foot space where the roof is high again but forces you to duck down and shuffle into the
burial chamber where a thick sarcophagus was built in place impossible to take out. The burial chamber is huge, built on the proportion of the golden mean and above it out of sight are several granite slabs with a couple feet of space between them that never would've been discovered except for a strange natural reverb that tipped someone off. Something maybe messed up happened to us in there, I'm not sure but Porest convinced me later that it was pretty fuckin
odd. We had the burial chamber to ourselves and everyday we'd been traveling with these walkie-talkies but mine started picking up interference inside the chamber where there's no way a radio signal could penetrate. I thought for sure it was him leaning on his transmit button but his was picking it up too, and after switching off one radio the other kept picking up a pretty mean sound, it was really really faint. Porest swears there was a voice, I think it was
a static tone, I did boot up my recorder so once I get back I'll amplify and ask for ears.

inside_pyramid_video (9MB)

outside_pyramid video (2MB)

Anyway, wrapping up human history here, the condition of ancient ruins in Egypt is really surprising. Besides the statues, jewels, sarcophogi, displayed in Cairo and Luxor museums the ruins themsleves are in amazing shape. Free standing temples did tend to tip over in earthquakes but the pyramids and tombs dug into mountains have perfect superfine relief carvings with paint still in tact. Even so, every tomb sorta seemed to show the same exact thing. There's a lot of repetition, but if carving serves to show how one living person belonged to and acted within a timeless unchanging context, then repetition makes sense, and you learn to seek the details in that repetition. But that's true whether its a row of fifty exact sphinxes or minimalism in music, repetition tunes in subjective sensibilities by overloading the function of intellect so that it can't locate an object for its lethal rational analysis. Which reminds me to shut up. Finally got photos out of my camera to supplement this phlegmy rant as photoproof of zero progress hundred percent crime.

zero progress . . . hundred percent crime

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.