THE STILLBORN GOD: RELIGION, POLITICS, AND THE MODERN WEST

by Mark Lilla, Knopf, 2007

Review by Eugene B. Borowitz

TWO FORCES HAVE LONG contended for supremacy in society: religion and politics. Monotheism exacerbated this struggle in the West as it intensified the power of faith and sporadically engendered zealotry and fanaticism. Mark Lilla's stimulating new book The Stillborn God retells the story of thinkers' efforts to understand and tame these contesting dominions. Lilla deftly yet deeply reviews the critical books and abstract arguments that have guided discussion of the topic over the years and often still do. His concern is theory, but he brings a human touch to his analysis of the grand ideas that have proposed--but regularly failed--to settle this millennial conflict, and that lead us to our current theoretical impasse.

His small book pivots on what he calls "The Great Separation," the Hobbes-inspired notion that "church and state" must be kept apart if we are to contain human brutishness-what Lilla in other contexts connects with the Gnostics' itch to work a radical cure on this sick world. Despite his concentration on theory, Lilla never forgets the reality behind this problem: the wars of religion which for sixty years after the birth of Protestantism swept across much of Europe. Faith as a motive for inflicting human suffering seemed so self-refuting a notion that the daring call for a wall between church and state won many adherents. Writers are often so eager to glorify the post-Renaissance, early-Enlightenment empowerment of the human spirit on its own that they slide over the negative impetus to this unprecedented political arrangement, but not Lilla. The Jewish heart, with its old scars from this era of ghettoization and other forms of persecution, is particularly grateful for Lilla's emphasis on the political effect of the desire to relieve peoples' suffering. It knows that the daring idea of citizenship indifferent to church membership made possible the emancipation of our people after 1500 years of pariah status in Europe.

Lilla's impressive parade of the early separationists leads him to what many readers will surely find an uncommon shift of direction. He acknowledges that one might well follow what he calls the Anglo-American (practical) development of this grand idea, that is, how the great American "experiment," as he regularly terms it, has, in fact worked out. However, he is neither a political scientist nor a philosophical pragmatist. Rather, he seeks an encompassing theory of human self-government (in effect, an ahistoric "grand narrative," just what many postmodernists have come to disparage), and therefore turns his attention to the great nineteenth and early twentieth century German theoreticians in this field. He first leads us along Kant's rationalistic path of state glorification and then up the mental heights of Hegel's expansive apotheosis of the nation as we tremblingly get glimpses of the chasm of Nazism opening ahead.

In contrast to the many writers who make bumbling reference to the Hebrew Bible or its rabbinic development, Lilla's occasional comments about premodern Judaism are quite sure-handed. That, however, hardly prepares us for what now follows. Lilla breathtakingly insists that the German rationalistic effort to move beyond Kant and Hegel, and the subsequent post-World War I collapse of the old adoration of the mind importantly involved two Jewish theoreticians, Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig. (He also briefly discusses a third Jew, though one of a later period, Ernst Bloch, author of The Principle of Hope, an unrepentant Stalinist who had no use for Judaism.)

Lilla turns to Cohen and Rosenzweig because he believes they remedied what he considers the ultimate source of religion as a social pathogen, its notion of revelation--specifically its faith that we can know verbatim what God wants us to do--what he more expansively terms the "nexus" between God and "man" (Lilla unapologetically uses sexist language throughout the book). That is, the One, Absolute Power of the Universe relates to people by speech--revelation. Closely related to this teaching is the notion of redemption--that this revealed teaching instructs us how to bring humankind to a trans-historic realm of goodness. The combination of the two ideas has critical consequences. Knowing what God absolutely wants people to do authorizes us to do Whatever-is-Required for we are then acting on the basis of unimpeachable Authority. Moreover, the goal of such action is the greatest possible good, for God demands that we bring about the realization of God's rule in all human affairs. Either of these doctrines might well precipitate fanaticism but, particularly when united and catalyzed by the human satanic will to power, they can be explosively lethal. Thus the critical problem of West-ern political theology may be said to be how to "people-proof" the biblical religions' views of revelation and redemption.

Cohen's pre-World War I revival of Kantianism reversed the traditional nexus between God and people. With modernity equated with rationality, it was simply illogical to believe that we could rationally know a unique reality called "God" who/which utterly transcended us but, in a further nonrational manner, communicated verbally with people. Cohen's ingenious solution was to turn God into the most fundamental idea a rational person required since the unity of consciousness obviously overrode the three discrete modes of thinking--science, ethics, and aesthetics--that Kantians understood rational minds exhibited. (It should be emphasized that in Cohen's neo-Kantianism, ethics is the dominant mode of human rationality and thus the major expression of the God-human nexus.) Similarly, redemption could not rationally be the traditional messianic break with history to a new, post-historic order but only the always approaching but never achieved fulfillment of all our ethical-rational aspirations.

Lilla concedes that Cohen's notion of God as our root concept and its ethically dominant reinterpretations of revelation and redemption might well inhibit peoples' Gnostic itch to create the absolutely good social order. But this is precisely the God Lilla calls "stillborn." It could not, he contends, ever create much conviction in people nor answer why anyone should ever be a Jew rather than a mythical neo-Kantian person-in-general. Even if those theoretical objections to Cohen's neo-Kantian Judaism were debatable, the carnage of World War I effectively refuted the idea that people are or long can be rational. Thus, though Cohen's ethical revision of revelation and redemption may have theoretically resolved the problem of religions proclivity to create zealots, Lilla believes that people cannot long take his rationalistic Judaism very seriously.

By contrast, Lilla interprets what he modestly calls Rosenzweig's "enigmatic" great book, The Star of Redemption, more positively. Rosenzweig simply asserts God's reality because death clarifies that we are not permanent and the world will survive us. But, taken on its own, the world is value-free. Therefore, there must be a third reality--God--which, as the Bible teaches, establishes the value-full reality that all human beings experience in the world. Revelation, the creative interaction-nexus--between God and people, happens, in grand ways once, in small ways today. But Rosenzweig ingeniously avoids the perils of our seeking to redeem the world right now by splitting the task between Judaism and Christianity. Jews, having the Written and Oral Laws God gave at Sinai, withdraw from history to live in relative isolation according to this revelation, thereby safeguarding the eternal truth until the End of Days. By contrast, he envisions Christianity as having dedicated itself to the redemptive task of converting the world to God's service and thereby inevitably compromising its biblical faith by its transformation in the cultures it infiltrates. Together then, Judaism and Christianity, in eternal difference, collaboration, and conflict, move toward the redemption neither can achieve alone but both anticipate. While Rosenzweig's God might well elicit more conviction than Cohen's God-idea and, in the process, erect serious safeguards against Jewish fanaticism by its redefined notions of revelation and redemption, Lilla judges Judaism's corollary retreat from history too monastic a regimen to ever become widely acceptable.

That, and some rueful pages on our present floundering, is about as far as Lilla can take his elegant analysis of our Western great-book/grand-theory efforts to defuse the ever present danger of religious fanaticism. But what might have he discovered if, instead, he had explored what liberal Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish believers had learned from living, as Americans have, in a society still experimenting with a strong-ish legal tradition of separating church and state?

I shall say something about the Christian development below but my primary purpose here is to say something about how believing non-Orthodox Jews have largely come to affirm revelation and redemption in ways that make liberal Jewish zealotry most unlikely.

To begin with, Lilla, in the course of his otherwise astute treatment of Cohen and Rosenzweig, misses two developments in later Jewish life which are critical to his theme. The first of these has to do with Cohen's legacy. Lilla is correct in his judgment that Cohen's God did not long evoke great conviction among liberal Jews though there are, of course, still believers in Jewish philosophic rationalism in our community. But Cohen's teachingthatuni-versalistic ethics is the heart of Jewish belief is close to being a dogma among us. It is the reason why, believers or not, an uncommon proportion of Jews vote in American elections and why, more astonishingly, despite their high economic status and the leadership Jews have given to neo-conser-vatism, they persist in not "voting their pocketbooks." It is also the reason that, despite the Law, pace Rosenzweig, feminine clergy are now widely accepted in the Jewish community and much of what used to be called "modern Orthodoxy" has sought justification for women's study of rabbinic texts and increased leadership roles in their community. That, too, is why almost all contemporary teachers of Kabbalah have abandoned the Zohar's classic teaching of women's association with evil in the universe and the inferiority of gentile souls. Cohen's God-concept may not inspire many Jews today but most Jews nonetheless have adopted his teaching that ethics is the essence of all worthwhile religions. That belief, to put it mildly, is not a likely foundation for Jewish political fanaticism.

Similarly, what Lilla misses in Rosenzweig's reinstatement of God's revelation is that it is contentless, that all God gives to us is Presence and the sensitive human beneficiary of that Presence then turns that meeting into specific laws or poetry or story. That is why most Jews today find the Bible so palpably stated in the language and idiom of its culture, even occasionally giving its revised versions of tales told by nearby idolatrous communities. The authority of the One, Real, God of the Universe stands behind the Bible, as many of us know today when we open our hearts to God's Presence beyond the text. Rosenzweig's theory of contentless revelation makes it improbable for anyone to say "God said so" and not be de-fanaticized by our immediately translating this into "as I, or some ancient tradition, perceive it." This God-human nexus cannot guarantee that no liberal Jewish believer will ever become a religious zealot, but it certainly rejects the absolutism that normally underlies crusades.

Rosenzweig's own political safeguard, as we have seen, came from exiling the Jews from present-day history. That makes it all the more unfortunate that Lilla only discusses Martin Buber in terms of his pre-I and Thou days as an emotive, mystic nationalist. The mature Buber turned his back on the solipsism of his prior teaching when, about the same time as Rosenzweig's great book appeared, he published his small but path-breaking work on dialogue, I and Thou. Buber's independent version of contentless revelation not only did not keep him from active participation in political life, but impelled him to it, first as a leader of religious socialism in Weimar Germany and then, most audaciously, as an advocate of a bi-national Arab-Jewish state in Palestine. Lilla's attention to classic single books--though he often quotes from others of his chosen authors' publications-may have diverted his attention from Buber. I and Thou, for all its universal genius, is only a treatment of relationships, climaxing in its third part in the nexus-encounter with the incomparable One (who never reverts to a dialogical "it"), God, the Eternal Thou. To see how this plays out with nations and in history Lilla would have had to discuss, for biblical times, books like Moses, The Prophetic Faith, and The Kingdom of God, or for contemporary history, the speeches contained in books like Israel and the World. He might not have found a tidy doctrine there. He would, however, have seen the political implications of realizing that the Eternal Thou is present in every genuine encounter and that people ought to live by its corollary commandment: try never to treat "the other" as an "it." As my dear friend Steven Schwarzschild once admitted, despite his staunch intellectual adherence to the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen, he knew of no one whose politics during the hellish decades of his lifetime he more agreed with than those of Martin Buber.

If Buber is the great missing voice of twentieth century Jewish political theology then surely his somewhat later Protestant counterpart is Reinhold Niebuhr. Again, no single book gives us his political theology but no mid-twentieth century voice more clearly articulated what Christian faith demanded of those who brought their religiosity into the public square. His version of the Jewish contentless revelation was summed up in his epigram, "We must take the Bible seriously but not literally" in itself a great deterrent to religious fanaticism. He amplified this stand in two other pertinent theses. The greatest danger to democracy, he asserted--one that he exemplified by refusing to become an ally with communists on any public issue--was seeking to bring The Absolute (in any of its forms) into political affairs. And its corollary was the need for his fellow neo-liberal believers to never forget the central teaching of Christian ethics, that pride in our accomplishments or character is the abiding, pervasive sin of humankind. These critical stands may not qualify as an academically worthy political theology but they go to the heart of what believers must affirm and do lest they become their generation's zealots

Can the contemporary versions of the post-liberal faiths of Buber and Niebuhr sustain the religious conviction Lilla found so missing in the "stillborn" Gods of univer-salistic rationalists like the Protestant Ernst Troeltsch and the Jewish Hermann Cohen? Sociologists tell us that the evidence about the groups most likely to espouse such beliefs today is not encouraging. Mainline Protestant denominations are continually losing members and their Jewish counterparts face a diminishing involvement with each younger cohort. The researchers also report, contrastingly, that doctrinal and demanding Christian churches are growing significantly, although in this regard, the same is not true in the Jewish community. Perhaps Jews differ in this because of the American Jewish proclivity to reserve one's right to think for oneself regardless of what sort of synagogue one joins. We shall have to wait and see how much and what sort of conviction the current wave of Jewish spirituality engenders. The large numbers of Jews involved in synagogues which welcome intermarried families do provide a basis for enthusiasm about the fate of Judaism in our time. But the research unambiguously indicates that the present gains come at the cost of any significant Jewish future. Against these lachrymose statistics Jewish counter-wisdom suggests that, as Simon Rawidowicz argued in his essay of two generations ago, "The Ever Dying People," the salient fact about Jewish existence over the years has been that, against all ancient prognostications and contemporary nay saying, the people of Israel lives.

Review by Eugene B. Browitz

Eugene B. Borowitz teaches education and Jewish religious thought at HUC-JIR, New York. He recently authored, with Francis Schwartz, A Touch of the Sacred, a Theologian's Informal Guide to Jewish Belief (Jewish Lights).