Category: jacob taubes

Occidental Eschatology – Epilogue

In his brief and pointed Epilogue to Occidental Eschatology Jacob Taubes begins,

With Hegel on the one hand and Marx and Kierkegaard on the other, this study is not simply closed but is essentially resolved.  For the entire span of Western existence is inscribed in the conflict between the higher (Hegel) and the lower (Marx and Kierkegaard) realms, in the rift between inside (Kierkegaard) and outside (Marx). 191.

For Taubes this culmination or resolution is just that, an end.  This results in decision and crisis that is still (written in 1947) shaking the Western world.  Taubes sees this end as the trajectory that both classical (Greek) and Christian traditions have been weaving together and aiming towards.  With this end (which Taubes calls post-Christian) we are now entering a new age.

To all weak spirits longing for shelter and security, this age appears wanting.  For the coming age is not served by demonizing or giving life to what-has-been, but by remaining steadfast in the no-longer and the not-yet, in the nothingness of the night, and thus remaining open to the first signs of the coming day.  How many are liberated to what is to come is not important.  Who they are is the question that determines their position, for they are the ones who measure out existence by interpreting the signs of what is to come. (193)

What follows, in terms of what theological discourses we now reside in, strikes me as unexceptional.  The age has culminated the divisions of upper/lower and inner/outer.  What is to be done?  God.  God is higher than high, lower than low, etc.  God is everything and everything is in God therefore “everything has its center outside itself” (193).  Man forgets the divine measure and makes himself the measure (perhaps Taubes’s dated gender structuring is appropriate here).

By making himself as subject the measure of all things, man conceals the true correspondence of things and constructs fabrication; he fills the world with purposes and safeguards, fashions it into a protective shell, and wall himself in. (193)

This process pushes God into the realm of ‘mystery’.  This in turn makes the ‘intricate web things’ also a mystery and as such is more easily manipulated by human technology.

Taubes goes on to ask the question of why this error (of breaking with God) is prevalent.  Taubes does not really answer the question but states that this break reveals the essence of man as the ‘shadow of God’ and it is this shadow that moves to the center and creates the dark night.

Humanity then must look into this night and see it ‘for what it is’.  This form of sight will seemingly usher the dawn and humanity will again find its center in God and the measures of God will be established.  Taubes concludes,

The measure of God is the holy.  First of all, the holy is separation and setting apart; being holy means being set apart.  The holy is the terror that shakes the foundations of the world.  The shock caused by the holy bursts asunder the foundations of the world for salvation [being made holy].  It is the holy that passes judgement in the court of history.  History exists only when truth is separated from error, when truth is illuminated from mystery.  History is elucidated from the mystery of error to the revelation of truth. (194)

I could not help but be disappointed with this ending.  It reminded me of my hopes of ending sermons on a ‘strong note’.  You engage with these massive themes that try to account for immense swaths of human experience and engagement and somehow you begin to feel like you need to act accordingly even if the words are not there burning in your bones.  Reading this some 60 years on I can’t help but wonder if these de-centering accounts of theology have now run their course; they are increasingly common in how many areas are articulating theology as a dispossesive posture, but most accounts seem to be just that, a posture.   This may not have been the case when it was written but as far as a form of theological discourse or account goes I don’t know how much traction it has on its own.

This line remains suggestive for me however,

How many are liberated to what is to come is not important.  Who they are is the question that determines their position, for they are the ones who measure out existence by interpreting the signs of what is to come.

Who they are determines their position.  What is being asked for here in light of his engagement with eschatology and Hegel/Marx/Kierkegaard?  Also suggestive is the to what of liberation.  There is an inability to project liberation, not an inability to engage and work towards, measure, the present darkness and approaching dawn.  As I said though, this is suggestive, but not exactly moving or necessarily persuasive in light of his earlier grand claim of his work demonstrating the end of an age.

I am hoping to start his recently published collection of essays titled From Cult to Culture.  It will be interesting to see how some of these themes are or are not picked up there, particularly the notion of abandoning the oppositional space he articulated around Hegel/Marx/Kierkegaard.

Abandoning the oppositional territory

Jacob Taubes’s doctoral thesis-turned-manuscript Occidental Eschatology is immense in scope, trying to account for the presence and expression of eschatology in the West.  In this account it seem that the notion of the ‘end’ and history has not been able to rid itself of the forms of apocalyptic that continue to emerge.  According to Taubes it appears that apocalyptic emerges when a generation or segment of society is no longer able to abide by the current forms of totality, whether it is a totality of empire or thought (Rome or Hegel).  His work culminates in Hegel’s grand system of spirit and how to think something’s opposition within its whole (a thesis always functions with and somehow exists with the necessary presence of its antithesis).

So Hegel himself is rather unremarkable in his context or to put it positively, Hegel is adaptable for his time causing few waves.  But not so for those who cannot abide by his whole or those who further extend its implications.  Neither Marx nor Kierkegaard can abide by Hegel as it is (and of course in this way it could be argued that Marx and Kierkegaard are more Hegelian than the later Hegelians).

Both Marx and Kierkegaard want a return to accounting for actually as opposed to remaining in an abstracted ideal system.  But there is a massive difference between the two approaches.

“The difference between Marx and Kierkegaard lies in the positions of inside and outside.  Marx pins his hopes for a proletarian revolution on the economic situation of the masses, while for Kierkegaard it is the individual that underpins the religious revolution of the bourgeois Christianity.  This contrast corresponds to the difference in their interpretation of self-alienation.  Marx sees bourgeois society to be a society of isolated individuals in which man is alienated from his species; Kierkegaard sees in bourgeois Christendom a Christianity of the masses in which man is alienated from his individuality.  . . . Both critiques are grounded in the disintegration of God and the world, which is the original pre-condition for self-alienation, as has been shown in the studies of apocalyptic and Gnosis. . . . When Marx builds a society without God, and Kierkegaard places the individual alone before God, their common assumption is the disintegration of God and the world, the division of the divine and the secular.” (176, 184)

In this way Taubes positions Marx and Kierkegaard in a sort of ‘face-off’.

“Inwardness and outwardness are divided between Marx and Kierkegaard into worldly revolution and religious repentance.  Kierkegaard has made it absolutely clear that Christian life is inward and therefore must be acosmic and antiworldly.  Marx has replaces the truth of the world beyond with the truth of this world, and has shown that the atheistic roots of communism are constitutive.  The fusion of inside and outside can only be attained if one is prepared to abandon the territory which holds Marx and Kierkegaard, even in their opposition, captive.” (191)

What I was not prepared for was Taubes’s Epilogue following this statement, his account of abandoning the shared oppositional territory.  It is probably why I was attracted to his style in The Political Theology of Paul precisely because he did not rest or reside in that territory but in doing so he also did not abandon what was important to both Marx and Kierkegaard.  And he does this, I think, then without also trying to return to Hegel, but that is not a statement I am certain I could back up.

I will post some quotes from and thoughts on his Epilogue shortly.