Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety 9781472551085, 9780567651068, 9780567218483

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Abbreviations
Works by Abraham Joshua Heschel
Part 1 The Nature of Piety
Chapter 1 Introduction: Beginning with Piety
I Consulting the faithful
II Reclaiming piety
III Heschel’s deployment of piety
IV Piety as a theological subject
Notes
Chapter 2 The Idea of Piety
I Biblical piety
II Classical pietas
III Piety in contemporary usage
Notes
Part 2 Heschel’s Intellectual Foundations
Chapter 3 The Range of Heschel’s Theology
I Excursus: The Heideggerian backdrop
II The corpus and influence of Heschel’s work
III A variety of critical assessments
IV Implications of previous readings
V Defining an approach
Notes
Chapter 4 Beyond Rationalism to Understanding
I Heschel’s intellectual formation in Berlin
II An analysis of understanding: Dilthey
III Studies of prophetic consciousness
IV Pathos and sympathy: Scheler
Notes
Chapter 5 Polarity and Piety
I Polarity as a defining characteristic
II Heschel’s medieval and Torah studies
III The Hasidic roots of polarity
IV From the Kabbalah to an ontological category
V Polarity in religious discourse
VI Piety’s bisociative nature
Notes
Part 3 Heschel’s Studies of Piety
Chapter 6 A Phenomenology of Piety
I The personal dimension
II The pious consciousness: Four seminal essays
III From prophecy to piety: Husserl
IV The reversal of subjectivity
V Pathos and piety
VI Freedom, responsibility, and holiness: Shestov
Notes
Chapter 7 Piety as Understanding
I The analogy of music
II An intuition of meaning
III Mediating the universal and particular
IV An evocation of sapiential spirituality
Notes
Chapter 8 Piety as Virtue
I The contours of Heschel’s ethical thought
II Personhood as task
III Heschel’s positive moral realism
IV The constitutive role of indebtedness
V Piety as character
Notes
Part 4 The Pertinence of Piety
Chapter 9 Responding to the “Other”
I The priority of the ethical: Lévinas
II The constitution of the person
III God’s concern versus God’s trace: Our need to be needed
IV Who is man? Human being or being human
Notes
Chapter 10 Engaging Theology
I Prelude: A deductive evaluation of piety
II Theo-centrism: Piety as a moral act
III Participation in the divine concern: Piety as a spiritual act
IV Theo-logy: Piety as a reflective act
V Kenosis: Piety as an interpretive act
VI Coda: Piety as the enactment of hope
Notes
Conclusion: Indications of Piety for a Relational Theology
I Penetrating the pious consciousness: A recapitulation
II Making God credible
Notes
Bibliography
A Primary works by Abraham Joshua Heschel
B Secondary sources related to the life and works of Abraham Joshua Heschel
C Other works consulted
Index

Citation preview

Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety By Joseph Harp Britton

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2013 © Joseph Harp Britton, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Joseph Harp Britton has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.



ISBN: HB: 978-0-567-65106-8 ePDF: 978-0-567-21848-3 epub: 978-0-567-31196-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Britton, Joseph Harp Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety/Joseph Harp Britton p.cm Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 978-0-567-65106-8 (hardcover) 2012045678

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Karla

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Piety is justice toward the Gods. — Cicero, De natura deorum (I 41, 116)

Contents Acknowledgments Preface Abbreviations

x xi xv

Part 1  The Nature of Piety 1

2

Introduction: Beginning with Piety I Consulting the faithful II Reclaiming piety III Heschel’s deployment of piety IV Piety as a theological subject The Idea of Piety I Biblical piety II Classical pietas III Piety in contemporary usage

3 3 6 11 14

22 22 23 31

Part 2  Heschel’s Intellectual Foundations 3

4

5

The Range of Heschel’s Theology I Excursus: The Heideggerian backdrop II The corpus and influence of Heschel’s work III A variety of critical assessments IV Implications of previous readings V Defining an approach Beyond Rationalism to Understanding I Heschel’s intellectual formation in Berlin II An analysis of understanding: Dilthey III Studies of prophetic consciousness IV Pathos and sympathy: Scheler Polarity and Piety I Polarity as a defining characteristic II Heschel’s medieval and Torah studies

43 43 49 55 66 69 81 81 85 88 94 105 105 106

Contents

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III The Hasidic roots of polarity IV From the Kabbalah to an ontological category V Polarity in religious discourse VI Piety’s bisociative nature

110 118 122 129

Part 3  Heschel’s Studies of Piety 6

7

8

A Phenomenology of Piety I The personal dimension II The pious consciousness: Four seminal essays III From prophecy to piety: Husserl IV The reversal of subjectivity V Pathos and piety VI Freedom, responsibility, and holiness: Shestov Piety as Understanding I The analogy of music II An intuition of meaning III Mediating the universal and particular IV An evocation of sapiential spirituality Piety as Virtue I The contours of Heschel’s ethical thought II Personhood as task III Heschel’s positive moral realism IV The constitutive role of indebtedness V Piety as character

139 139 141 149 154

159 162 172 172 179 182 191 202 202 210 213 216 219

Part 4  The Pertinence of Piety 9

Responding to the “Other” I The priority of the ethical: Lévinas II The constitution of the person III God’s concern versus God’s trace: Our need to be needed IV Who is man? Human being or being human

10 Engaging Theology I Prelude: A deductive evaluation of piety II Theo-centrism: Piety as a moral act III Participation in the divine concern: Piety as a spiritual act

231 231 237 244 246 253 253 255 259

Contents IV Theo-logy: Piety as a reflective act V Kenosis: Piety as an interpretive act VI Coda: Piety as the enactment of hope Conclusion: Indications of Piety for a Relational Theology I Penetrating the pious consciousness: A recapitulation II Making God credible Bibliography Index

ix 263 266 271 276 276 281 289 303

Acknowledgments The poems “God Follows Me Everywhere” and “God’s Tears” are used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, Morton Liefman © 2004. Quotations from the Bible are from the Revised Standard Version.

Preface For persons engaged in a pastoral ministry, a frequently invoked truism is that when one becomes overwhelmed by the institutional aspects of such a vocation—ritual observances, social and educational programs, administrative tasks—the quickest way to re-establish a sense of priority and perspective is to make calls upon the faithful. Perhaps one visits an elderly shut-in in a nursing home, or goes to a hospital to pray with those who are ill or dying, or stops by a home to bless the newly born, or simply calls on some person of deep faith for conversation and a cup of tea. Over and over again, pastors find themselves renewed and refreshed by having laid aside the outward forms of religion, to be in the presence of those who live their religious faith in a quiet, unspectacular way, but whose deep personal piety reveals a great wisdom and insight into the meaning of God. Yet theologically, we seldom pay much attention to these moments: pastoral theology may urge them upon us as important aspects of ministry, and spiritual reflection may appreciate the power of prayer at work in these secluded spaces, but systematic theology remains largely untouched—at least in any overt way—by the insight of the individual, anonymous believer. This lacuna is significant, for it settles theological discourse (depending upon one’s religious identity) among such “authoritative” resources as scripture, tradition, the church’s magisterium, the teachings of wise sages, formal academic methodologies, or ordained ministers, while that discourse maintains a discrete distance from the ordinary experience of religious life. Although piety must certainly conform in some basic way to the received wisdom and insight of the authoritative religious tradition to which it adheres, yet surely the converse is also true, that the language of theological discernment must resonate with the lived experience evident in common piety. It will be the underlying contention of the current study that the theological method of Abraham Joshua Heschel affords an instructive example of how such a resonance may be constructed. This book is an elaboration and descendent of my doctoral dissertation, “Piety as Participation in the Divine Concern: The Mystical Realism of A. J. Heschel,” submitted to the Faculté de Théologie et de Sciences Religieuses at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 2002. I was guided toward the direction of pursuing doctoral studies by two faculty mentors at The General Theological Seminary, Professors J. Robert Wright and Fred Shriver, whose intellectual and personal friendship I have greatly valued. To have been an American Episcopalian, however, writing about a Jewish theologian of Polish origins, at the Institut Catholique de Paris, requires a word of explanation. I was first introduced to the theology of Heschel by Paolo Gamberini, SJ, in a graduate seminar on “The Passion of God” given in the spring of 1996 at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California. The theme of that seminar was that although Heschel was a theologian from a generation or two earlier, his work opened up fresh

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perspectives on a variety of important contemporary theological issues in the Christian context, especially the substructure of its continuity with the Jewish tradition, modes of apprehending God’s historical engagement with humanity, and the significance of a doctrine of creation in articulating our relationship to the cosmos. Indeed, the seminar stressed how Heschel’s work has been “received” into Christian theology as a fruitful source of reflection, citing as significant instances the work of such theologians as Jürgen Moltmann, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Eberhard Jüngel, and Walter Pannenberg. Taking Professor Gamberini’s lead, I began to read Heschel not with the eye of one interested in making a study in comparative religions, but in gaining insight into the questions of the systematic and moral theology of my own tradition—Christian in general, and Anglican in particular. Arriving at the Institut Catholique, I soon realized that Heschel’s grounding in a phenomenological method, as well as his contesting of certain core assumptions of Western philosophy (especially the priority given to ontology), gave him as allies many of the French thinkers who have similarly grown skeptical of the direction philosophy took in the occidental setting, especially Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion, as well as such thinkers in moral philosophy as Nathalie Sarthou-Lajus. To have discovered such an overlap with Heschel was at one level unexpected in a theologian whose working life was primarily spent in the United States, though perhaps in hindsight the convergence was predictable, given that Heschel’s intellectual formation was distinctly European and his underlying phenomenological method continued to manifest this accent throughout his life. Reading Heschel alongside these other authors thus had the fortuitous effect for me of opening his own work up to its larger philosophical implications, relating him to works to which it would not have been obvious to turn, except for the parallels which soon became obvious. To read Heschel, then, is to participate not only in the world of Jewish life and thought, but also to engage much that is at issue in contemporary philosophy and Christian theology, even while bridging the divide between continental and American patterns of thought. Moreover, I have found that Heschel’s specific emphasis on the synthetic nature of piety as a mediating concept between the disciplines of systematic, ascetical and moral theology has resonated deeply with my own formation in the “practices of piety” characteristic of classical Anglican spirituality. It was this breadth of perspective which justified, in my mind, the devotion of a period of time to try to unlock Heschel’s theology as viewed through the thematic lens of piety, with the larger goal of explicating the manner in which doctrinal commitments may be enacted in ordinary religious and moral life in mind. Since the writing of that original study, however, I have pursued the issue of piety in other contexts, realizing over time how rich a history the concept has had in both classical culture and Judæo-Christian theology. The specific examination of Heschel’s deployment of piety, therefore, has here been set in the larger context of its meaning and use in a variety of contexts. In that sense, this work is meant both to contribute a new reading of Heschel’s theology in particular, and also to suggest a wider avenue of research that might be done into the “theological uses of piety” in general. For the pursuit of this study, I am grateful for the warm and always cordial reception provided me by Professor Hervé Legrand, OP, director of the Cycle des Études du

Preface

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Doctorat at the time of my arrival in Paris. His ecumenical spirit and scholarly example made the beginning of this course of study not only possible, but also enjoyable. My gratitude is also extended to M. l’Abbé Henri-Jérôme Gagey, Doyen de la Faculté de Théologie et de Sciences Religieuses, who willingly took on the task of reading the text in English and offering his critique and comment as a member of the jury. I should also make obvious my gratitude to Fr. Paolo Gamberini, SJ, if it is not already evident, for having introduced me to Heschel, for having continued to advise and support my progress, and finally for having served himself as a reader and member of the jury as well as an on-going interlocutor on the subject of Heschel’s theology. To my thesis advisor, Professor Geneviève Médevielle, SA, I am deeply grateful for her openness, her understanding of an “American in Paris,” and her attentive reading and critique of the work, even while serving as director of the doctoral program. Not only did her own study of the concept of compromise in the theology of Ernst Troeltsch (L’ Absolu au cœur de l’histoire: La notion de compromis chez Ernst Troeltsch [Paris: Cerf, 1998]) influence the structure of my own study of piety, but also her enthusiasm for the project, as well as for the vocation of teaching and learning in general, provided me with encouragement and intellectual sustenance. Once returned to the United States, I found the willingness of new colleagues at Yale Divinity School, David Kelsey in particular, to read and comment on the text invaluable in shaping its content and broadening its context. I was also much stimulated in the pursuit of the project by conversations with Edward Kaplan and John Merkle, two of Heschel’s American interpreters who have done much to reveal the subtleties and richness of his thought. Comments received on the manuscript from Isabel Wollaston and Ted Vial were also very helpful in shaping the contours of the project. Deans Harold Attridge and Gregory Sterling of Yale Divinity School were generous in providing leave from my teaching and administrative duties in order to make the expansion and completion of the final text possible. And my appreciation goes as well to Anna Turton at T&T Clark, whose diligent work made publication of this book possible. On a more practical note, I must express my gratitude for the support of the Episcopal Church Foundation and its Dorothy Given Fellowship, which enabled me to pursue the original research and writing in a progressive and composed manner. The concluding theme of our human participation in the divine was also developed in my thinking during the time spent as a visiting student at the Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe St Serge, Paris, with the support of the Scaife-Anderson Fellowship from the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the Episcopal Church. Such a project as this always relies on the availability of both primary and secondary resources, and I must acknowledge my debt in this regard to the libraries of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, and The General Theological Seminary in New York City, as well as the library of the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. My appreciation goes as well to the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, Paris, where much of the manuscript was written. My filial indebtedness to my parents, Charles and Maxine Britton, is especially profound for the encouragement they have unfailingly given along the way—by believing in me, by taking an interest in my work, and by providing so much support both material and intangible.

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And finally, my deepest thanks go to my wife, Karla Cavarra Britton, to whom I dedicate this book. Her own scholarly example in unlocking the sometimes impervious reflections of a difficult thinker has inspired me at every level—intellectually, spiritually, and creatively. J. H. B. New Haven November 2012

Abbreviations Works by Abraham Joshua Heschel CBST

The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov

DP

Die Prophetie

EL

The Earth Is the Lord’s

GSM

God in Search of Man

HT

Heavenly Torah (Torah min Hashamayim)

ING

The Ineffable Name of God

IS

The Insecurity of Freedom

M

Maimonides

MGSA

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

MNA

Man Is Not Alone

PT

A Passion for Truth

QG

Quest for God

TP

The Prophets

TS

The Sabbath

WM

Who Is Man?

Unless otherwise indicated, translations included in the text are my own.

From time immemorial, piety has been esteemed as one of the more precious ideals of human character. At all times, and in all places, men have striven to acquire piety, and no effort or sacrifice has seemed too great if they could attain it. Was this a mere illusion on their part, a flight of the imagination? No! It was a real virtue—something solid, clearly to be seen and of real power. Thus, as a specific fact of existence met with in life, it is something which indisputably deserves examination. That it is commonly neglected or overlooked by scientific research is due partly to the methodological difficulties involved in an approach to such a subject, but more fundamentally to the fact that it has theological aspects, which are somewhat repellent to the modern mind. To some piety suggests escape from normal life, an abandonment of the world, seclusion, a denial of cultural interests, and is associated with an old-fashioned, clerical, unctuous pattern of behavior. To others the word suggests prudishness, if not hypocrisy and fanaticism, or seems symptomatic of an attitude toward life which is unhealthy and, indeed, absurd. They feel that such an attitude as that of piety is to be rejected in the interests of mental health and spiritual freedom. Yet the pious man is still with us. He has not vanished from the earth. Indeed, more frequently than is generally realized, situations in normal life are to be encountered which are full of the evidence of pious devotion. The presence of piety among us is thus an incontestable fact; so why should prejudice deter us from investigating this phenomenon and, at least, endeavoring to understand it? —Abraham Heschel, “An Analysis of Piety” (1942)

Part One

The Nature of Piety

2

1

Introduction: Beginning with Piety

The pious man is alive to what is solemn in the simple, to what is sublime in the sensuous, but he is not aiming to penetrate into the sacred. Rather, he is striving to be himself, penetrated and actuated by the sacred, eager to yield to its force, to identify himself with every trend in the world which is toward the divine . . . Piety is a life compatible with God’s presence. —Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone

I  Consulting the faithful Beginning, as the literary critic Edward Said points out, is a problem that confronts one on both a practical and theoretical level. The question of where to begin any literary work, whether it be a work of fiction, philosophy, theology, or anything else, immediately puts an author in an intense relationship of both continuity and separation from all that has preceded. To begin is a departure, not merely in the sense of embarking on a new work, but also in the sense of distinguishing and separating oneself from what else has been thought and written about a chosen subject. Moreover, the choice of a starting point is crucial, says Said, “not only because it determines much of what follows but also because a work’s beginning is, practically speaking, the main entrance to what it offers.”1 So, for example, in the case of a work of systematic theology, it is not unusual to begin with the question of how we know that there is a God, or even prior to that question, how we know anything at all. In such cases, the starting point is presumed to be an epistemological one: before considering the contours and shape of religious life and belief, we must first examine the warrant lying behind our presumed knowledge of God. Only once these patterns of knowing are established, do we have a justifiable reason for examining the implications of the awareness we claim to have of the divine. The consequence, of course, of adopting an epistemological starting point for theological inquiry is that it places a question mark over the whole of what follows. If our account of how we know what we claim to know is insufficient, or bears marks of certain inconsistencies or irregularities, then whatever else we have subsequently to say about God and the spiritual life is thrown into doubt and made shaky like the proverbial house built upon the sand. This is, in effect, the dilemma theology faced in

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the modern era: the emphasis upon warranted reason and establishing the foundation for its beliefs dominated the theological project, with the result that the concern for describing the shape of religious life that shaped much theology prior to the modern era (as opposed to a defense of its truth claims) has been lost.2 The postmodern, or postliberal, turn toward so-called thick description of patterns of religious conviction has presented itself as representing a step beyond this theological foundationalism, and as such has shaped the background against which much contemporary theological reflection is done. As a matter of where to begin, therefore, one may feel freer now to propose alternative starting points to the one suggested by the question of God’s existence. One such proposal, which becomes our own point of departure here, is piety—that is, the lived experience of ordinary believing men and women, observable in all times and places, that expresses the anterior reality of God’s presence. Our model for this proposal is the work of the American Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72), whose own phenomenological studies of piety were premised upon the idea that “while penetrating the consciousness of the pious [person], we may conceive the reality behind it.”3 In many ways, which we will explore in detail in due course, Heschel anticipated and even participated ahead of his time in the postmodern turn away from theology’s dominating concern for the ontological, so his mid-twentiethcentury examinations of piety are themselves significant from the point of view of historical theology. Yet what concerns us here is not only his own method and contribution, but also how his emphasis upon piety calls our attention to the ways in which piety itself has been a consistent if largely unrecognized theme of much theological reflection. The challenge of starting with piety as a primary datum for theological reflection, of course, immediately becomes how one is to approach such an inquiry from a methodological point of view. In the case of sources other than piety, the evidence for analysis is more obvious: liturgy is contained in sacramentaries and prayer books; the teaching of the church is contained in various official documents; the efforts of theologians and reflections of the rabbis are recorded in their respective works; and each of these sources makes reference to the canonical content of scripture itself. So to undertake an examination of the corpus of Heschel’s achievement will provide an opportunity not only to consider how piety plays a foundational role in his own method, but also how it has been treated theologically by others in the past, especially in its epistemological and ethical dimensions—and how it could be deployed more broadly in the future— leading to a generalized consideration of piety’s potential importance as a privileged site of theological reflection. So, to take one historically interesting example, in  1859 John Henry Newman published a short tract entitled On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, in which he made the case that “pious belief, and the devotion which springs from it, are the faithful reflection of the pastoral teaching [of the Church].”4 The occasion for this essay was Newman’s attempt to explain words published in the Rambler in May of that year, where it had said: “In the preparation of a dogmatic definition, the faithful are consulted, as lately in the instance of the Immaculate Conception.”5 Newman understood the laity to have a significant role in providing witness to the apostolic

Introduction: Beginning with Piety

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tradition of the church, so that while their advice, opinion, or judgment may not be asked regarding the definition of doctrine, “the matter of fact, viz. their belief, is sought for, as a testimony to that apostolical tradition, on which alone any doctrine whatsoever can be defined.”6 His analogy is the liturgy of the church, which although it may not “speak” is nevertheless consulted, that is to say, it is studied as one of the authentic repositories of the church’s faith, asking whether or not it bears witness to the doctrine in question. Neither the consensus fidelium nor liturgy is conclusive, yet each is one “branch of evidence which it is natural or necessary for the Church to regard and consult, before she proceeds to any definition.”7 Newman goes on to address the question of why the laity are so consulted: “the answer is plain, viz. because the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine, and because their consensus through Christendom is the voice of the Infallible Church.” The reason that this is the case is that there is what he calls a phronema, or instinct, that lies “deep in the bosom of the mystical body of Christ.”8 This instinct is shaped by the truths of the faith as they are communicated by the Holy Ghost through the eccelsia docens, and having been formed in the common conscience of the church, this instinct cannot be separated from the truths that it contains. Using a biological metaphor, he argues that the consensus fidelium does not easily tolerate any foreign substance: when anything new that cannot be assimilated is introduced, the system becomes irritated and disordered until the offending object has been expelled. So, he says, the religious life of the people tests any religious principle, pronouncing whether it is catholic or heretical, and responding appropriately. Then, for his argument not to remain at the level of a platitude, he gives the concrete historical example of the Arian controversies of the fourth century, when although it was the “age of doctors [of the faith],” nevertheless “in that very day the divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the faithful than by the Episcopate”: the ecclesia docta was far more conserving of the apostolic tradition than the ecclesia docens.9 In a small book entitled Consulting the Faithful, the Reformed theologian Richard Mouw revisits Newman’s emphasis on the strength of the theological instinct of the laity, urging academic theologians to take more into account the religious convictions of the laity.10 Following a study by Edmund Dobbin, he notes that Newman’s use of phronema to describe the laity’s spiritual instinct is an appeal to Aristotle’s concept of the virtue of phronesis, or prudence. This virtue is not determined by a theoretical knowledge of moral principles, but rather by the wisdom of moral discernment which knows how to apply such principles in concrete cases. Taken as a remark about moral deliberation, Mouw says, Newman’s meaning is fairly obvious: “There resides, deep in the bosom of Christ’s mystical body, a profound practical moral wisdom.”11 He goes on, however, to remind us that Newman’s remark is made in a theological context, so that it also means that there resides “a profound practical theological wisdom” which allows the laity to discern how “doctrines are to be lived out in the concrete realities of practical existence.” Neither Newman nor Mouw explicitly suggests the pious faith of the laity as a starting point for theological reflection. Yet Newman does rank it among the essential sources which are not to be left out of the process, which raises the possibility that there might

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be intriguing insights to be gained if such a point of departure were made the case—as we propose to examine here. How, from a formal methodological perspective, might we take fuller account of the depth of insight in the ordinary experience of prayer and worship among the larger community of the people of God? How could one describe the nature of such piety? What is its content, epistemologically speaking? What are its implications, from a moral point of view? What structure of relationship does it reveal between God and individual men and women? How is this relationship manifested in an ecclesial setting? And what consequences might these considerations have for the wider conduct of theological inquiry?

II  Reclaiming piety The notion of privileging piety as a subject of theological method should immediately bring to mind the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), whose own deployment of piety was in many ways a precursor to the later emergence of the phenomenological approach to the study of religion in the work of Scheler, Husserl, and Heidegger, and which formed the basis for Heschel’s own methodology.12 (Not unlike Heschel, Schleiermacher observed of his own background that “piety was the mother’s womb, in whose sacred darkness my young life was nourished and was prepared for a world still sealed for it.”13) As Richard Niebuhr observes, Schleiermacher (like Calvin before him) understood human being as having the seeds of piety sown within its consciousness by the creator, so that piety is a constitutive element of what it means to be human.14 But unlike Rudolf Otto’s later emphasis on the “numinous” as an inbreaking of the holy into human experience, Schleiermacher’s analysis of piety is based in the normal human condition, which when raised to the level of selfconsciousness, opens us to an idea of God.15 Before engaging Heschel’s manner of treating piety, therefore, it would be worth pausing here to examine Schleiermacher’s idea of it, for the centrality of piety in his theology—and the eclipse of such an emphasis in successive theologies—raises the question of how to situate Heschel’s own return to the theological significance of piety in relation to Schleiermacher’s definition of it as “a feeling of absolute dependence.” In his rhetorical work Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799, Eng. trans. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 1958), Schleiermacher challenged the basis for the objections of the “cultured despisers of religion,” arguing that their reasoned critique was in principle unwarranted due to the fact that they had neglected to take into account the interior, lived experience of pious persons, relying instead on a purely formal analysis of religious ideas and ecclesial systems. If one is to discover the authentic reality of religion, he counsels, one must examine the feeling for the transcendent which arises in the life of the religious person: “You must transport yourselves into the interior of a pious soul and seek to understand its inspiration.”16 Building from this foundation, Schleiermacher goes on to analyze mental life as containing three essential aspects: perception (which issues in knowledge), activity (which grounds moral behavior), and feeling (which

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is the faculty of religious life). Making a clear appeal to the notion of piety, he argues that only when scientific reason and morality are accompanied by this religious faculty—which issues from our self-consciousness—is human life constituted in its wholeness, and it is precisely this rapport which the “despisers” of religion have overlooked.17 The third of these three faculties, religious feeling (or piety), is characterized by “the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal.” It is not a fusion of the other two—certain ideas about God connected with guiding principles for acting in the world—but a unique component of human experience. “Only when piety takes its place alongside science and practice, as a necessary, an indispensable third, as their natural counterpart, not less in worth and splendour than either, will the common field be altogether occupied and human nature on this side complete.”18 In Der Christliche Glaube (1822/30, Eng. trans. The Christian Faith, 1948), Schleiermacher gave greater specificity to his own understanding of piety, defining it in relation to his paradigmatic notion of absolute dependence: “The common element in all diverse expressions of piety, by which these are conjointly distinguished from all other feelings, or in other words, the self-identical essence of piety is this: the consciousness of absolute dependence, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God.”19 Now while the identification of piety with the “feeling,” or consciousness, of absolute dependence is one which is often misinterpreted (conflating, for example, Schleiermacher’s broader understanding of religion with piety itself20), the essential point to be taken here is the emphasis placed on the subjective relational experience of the pious individual. As Niebuhr analyzes it, religion for Schleiermacher is not concerned with an authoritative objective knowledge of the Absolute. Rather, he says: [Religion] is the name for that universal problematic of human existence that can never be satisfied by concepts alone, even the purest and most encompassing, but only by an inwardly appropriated reconciliation of the two realities that press in upon the self-consciousness: the world-relation in which man finds himself and the relation to the power that posits him.21

In its presence to itself, the self experiences its own underivability, which is the source of this “self-consciousness of finding the self as absolutely dependent.” This feeling is coterminous with the identity of the individual, who experiences the self as having been posited (and hence absolutely dependent). As Schleiermacher puts it, then, religion does not first arise from an idea of God; rather, the “whence” of personal existence is what is indicated by the word, God. Piety is thus the human being’s affective response to an immediate (nonreflective) apprehension of its own relationship to that which posits him in-such-and-such-a-way (Sosein). While recent scholarship has made clear that an adequate understanding of Schleiermacher’s concept of piety has to be broadened to take into account its contingent nature as a phenomenon that is socially and ecclesially conditioned, the priority given to the individual’s own self-consciousness of absolute dependence

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nevertheless remains paramount. Indeed, it is this very priority that came under attack in Karl Barth’s critique, where he argued that Schleiermacher remained confined within an “anthropological horizon,” with attention focused on the believer, rather than on the God in whom one believes. In his lectures on Schleiermacher, Barth put it this way: To man, who shares absolute dependence with all being, there is given with this a self-consciousness of it which becomes the consciousness of God and clarifies itself in the concept of God. To the degree that this takes place we ascribe piety to the individual. One can say that “God is given to us in an original way in feeling,” but naturally no external givenness of God comes into consideration.22

Because the feeling of absolute dependence has no object, Barth argues, the content of the word “God” is rendered wholly impersonal, and therefore without any force that might evoke “unconditional reverence or the like.” As Barth put it in his 1956 lecture, “Die Menschlichkeit Gottes” (The Humanity of God), theology “had become religionistic, anthropocentric, and in this sense humanistic.”23 Theology, in other words, had lost sight of the deity of God, a God who is “absolutely unique in His relation to man and the world, overpoweringly lofty and distant, strange—yes, even wholly other.” Barth diagnoses the source of theology’s mis-directed attention as the fact that “an external and internal disposition and emotion of man, namely his piety . . . had become its object of study and its theme.” And here we come upon the familiar divide between religion and revelation that separates Schleiermacher from much of twentieth-century theology (and which has major ramifications for our situating of Heschel’s own theological project). As Niebuhr articulates it, this divide is based upon the assumption that “religion as a human phenomenon cannot be the vehicle of God’s self-disclosure, cannot be the means of communicating ‘saving truth,’ and therefore, by its very nature, lacks the power and authority of revelation.”24 The result of the assumed antithesis between personal religion and divine revelation is that for theologians such as Barth, the role of individual piety as a source for theological reflection simply dropped out altogether. In order to protect the indispensable Otherness of God’s utterly superior divine being, God had to be made the sole and unique agent in the act of revelation. Moreover, Niebuhr attributes the completeness of this shift to the change in attitude toward the human soul that was wrought by Feuerbach, Dostoevsky, and Freud, who brought to light the “tortuously involuted character of the human psyche . . . as a kind of ‘underground’ from which the dogmas and myths of religion arise.”25 Given the unreliability of the religious experience of the individual, the empirical, descriptive method of Schleiermacher could no longer be trusted to yield authoritative concepts and doctrines; that work could only be done by a method of knowing in which God is known only through the self-disclosure of God’s revelation—and hence the theologies of crisis generated by Barth and others. As Barth expresses this break, Until better instructed, I can see no way from Schleiermacher, or from his contemporary epigones, to the chroniclers, prophets, and wise ones of Israel, to those who narrate the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to

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the word of the apostles—no way to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Father of Jesus Christ, no way to the great tradition of the Christian church. For the present I can see nothing here but a choice. And for me there can be no question as to how that choice is to be made.26

As Clements puts it, the perceived choice between the two antitheses was this: “speaking of God in his own reality and glory as revealed in his Word, [or] speaking of man in his religious and moral potentialities.”27 So in an account such as the one we are sketching here of the theological trajectory streching from Schleiermacher into the twentieth century, piety loses its place in the equation (as it did in Barth) to the extent that theology takes a turn in the direction of prioritizing God’s unique deity and otherness, and away from considering the forms of religious life itself. Heschel himself might seem to a certain extent to be representative of this turn. Indeed, there are important ways in which the patterns of his thinking are, mutatis mutandis, much like the Barth of the Dogmatics.28 Contrary to Schleiermacher’s sense of piety as a subjective feeling of “absolute dependence,” for example, Heschel posits a piety which is sensitive to an “objective requiredness” in which knowledge of God and obedience to God’s purposes are united in that which is objectively required of human beings, and with which they identify through the sympathetic response of piety. Whereas Schleiermacher thinks of piety more in terms of a subjective feeling which is necessary to supplement the functions of knowing and acting, Heschel maintains much more emphatically its connection to an objective reality—a connection which we will see he makes through the phenomenological concept of prophetic sympathy which embraces the role of feeling without lapsing into an anthropocentric subjectivity. Yet Heschel also seems to have been aware of the outward convergence of certain aspects of his thought with that of Schleiermacher, for he is unusually careful to distinguish his own work, citing Schleiermacher by name if only to establish an intellectual distance from him. First in The Prophets, Heschel contends that despite Schleiermacher’s appeal to the role of feeling in religious awareness, he “remained entangled in many of the prejudices of the Rationalist [read: Spinozan] school in respect to the prophets.”29 Heschel acknowledges that Schleiermacher described Christianity not as “a body of doctrine but a condition of the heart, a mode of consciousness making itself known in devout feeling.” But, he argues, Schleiermacher failed to sense “any special consciousness in the prophets of Israel and limited their theological import to their universal ethical-religious convictions.” The consequence is that Schleiermacher misses, in Heschel’s estimation, the central experience of prophetic religion which is “an awareness of a God who helps, demands, and calls upon man.”30 Schleiermacher’s notion of absolute dependence, in other words, places the emphasis at the wrong point: religious feeling is not merely one of being utterly dependent on God, but of being challenged by God. As we shall also see, Heschel affects a reversal between our subjectivity and our objective relationship to God: in his way of thinking, God is the subject and human beings are the object of his transitive concern. God is, as the title of one of Heschel’s books suggests, “in search of man.” Heschel defines this “sense of being pursued” as an “anthropotropism,” that is a turning of God toward human beings.

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety

More than our turning toward God—or theotropism—religious feeling is evoked by God’s pursuit of human beings in the prophetic moment, to which the prophet (or pious individual) responds with engaged sympathy. Heschel takes up this same point again in Who Is Man?, where he writes, Ever since Schleiermacher it has been customary in considering the nature of religion to start with the human self and to characterize religion as a feeling of dependence, reverence, etc. What is overlooked is the unique aspect of religious consciousness of being a recipient, of being exposed, over-whelmed by a presence which surpasses our ability to feel.31

The implications of such an anthropotropism are, in Heschel’s understanding, that the divine is disclosed in the human: we are not merely to feel dependent upon God, but through the concrete manner in which we concur with God’s will by how we live, we are to make God known in creation. Unlike Schleiermacher’s piety of absolute dependence, therefore, Heschel’s piety is one of absolute requiredness. If we draw together the contrasting perspective of Heschel with the admittedly schematic account given here of Schleiermacher—and of reactions to him—the result is to bring into high relief the potential implications of Heschel’s own methodological stance: namely, in regard to the theocentric emphasis of a Barthian evangelical theology, he reasserts the theological relevance of how the content of divine revelation is received and enacted in the life of the pious individual; and in regard to the anthropocentric emphasis of Schleiermacher’s concept of absolute dependence, he insists on the priority of the divine initiative which evokes in the pious individual an objective sense of reverence and requiredness. So one might say that working from his distinctively Jewish perspective, where there is a necessary and instinctive stress on the requirements of religious and ethical life, Heschel does not so much insert piety into the theological discussion from the outside, as he reclaims it from within the tradition itself, following its systematic eclipse. Barth himself seems to have become aware, in his later years, of what he called the need for a “change of direction” (Wendung) in theology’s focus. In “The Humanity of God,” he acknowledges that his previous insistence upon the absolute otherness of God’s deity may have caused “it to escape us by quite a distance that the deity of the living God . . . found its meaning and its power only in the context of His history and of His dialogue with man, and thus in His togetherness with man.” In rather Heschelian terms, Barth admits that the “wholly other” God “continually showed greater similarity to the deity of the God of the philosophers than to the deity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Indeed, he goes so far as to say, “[God] exists, speaks, and acts as the partner of man, though of course as the absolutely superior partner.”32 So although Heschel might not have framed it exactly this way himself, the import of what he does in his own theology is to provide a model of how one might reconnect two theological trajectories that had come to be viewed as inalterably opposed: the absolute priority of God’s revelatory self-disclosure, and the corresponding religious and ethical significance of our pious response. As Heschel himself puts it, drawing these two trajectories together, “piety is the realization and verification of the transcendent in human life.”33

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III  Heschel’s deployment of piety At this point, however, an objection might be raised that the proposal to examine Heschel’s work theologically is already a misstep, given the ambiguous status of the very idea of “theology” in the Jewish tradition. Indeed, this may be the place where a non-Jewish reader of Heschel (like the current author) will be most prone to straying into misinterpretation, for the highly developed tradition of theological discourse in Christianity with its methodological standards and canonical authors bears little resemblance to the role theology has typically played in Judaism. As Jacob Neusner has observed, Jewish theological texts have tended to have two sorts of emphases: scholarly accounts of the mind of the rabbis, especially in halachic matters (“efforts at a historical account of what some interesting Jews have thought in the past”), and the philosophy of religion or “social thought.”34 To the extent that theological reflection has been done in a form more familiar to a Christian reader, it has been preoccupied with proofs of the existence of God or discussions on the nature of God. Even such commonly known Jewish thinkers as Martin Buber tended toward a secularized antinomianism in respect to observance of the law, thereby straying from a truly theological discussion. As Eugene Borowitz argues in A New Jewish Theology in the Making, this dominance of secular criteria over liberal Jewish thought set up a need for a new generation of “postliberal” thinkers to develop a theology which could give a foundation to the critical issue of observance as identity.35 The word “theology” therefore has a quite different connotation in Judaism than in Christianity, yet as Neusner observes, Heschel himself insisted on calling his work theology, “and bravely did so in the midst of secular and highly positivistic scholars, who measured the world in terms of philosophical learning . . .”36 Concurring with a reading of Heschel as having made a radical departure from previous Jewish theology, Lawrence Perlman observes, “Heschel’s theology does not possess the slightest parallel of style or method to anything written by any Jewish theologian at any time. There is no greater paradox than this. Heschel, himself a product of eastern European Jewry, whose work constantly utilizes references to all kinds of Jewish theologies, produced a thoroughly Jewish theology which is unlike any other in style and method.”37 Heschel’s work, read in this context, must be appreciated for its radical redefinition of the role of theology in Judaism—a role enlarged to include a wide variety of philosophical and theological resources, and therefore much closer to the considered examination of the warrants for and content of faith which characterizes Christian thought. Heschel’s radicalism within his own tradition hints at the challenges and insights his work has to offer to Christian theology, especially the manner in which he understands piety to be the site of human consciousness of God. More than proposing a reasoned argument for the possibility of God, Heschel explores the awareness of God that is manifested in pious persons. Beyond the primary theme of exploring through Heschel’s work a model for the broader theological implications of piety, therefore, the current study also has a correlative interest of contributing toward a more analytic and comprehensive understanding of his work by demonstrating how it is methodologically grounded as a

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety

rather complex and sophisticated theological schema. As a result, this study is intended not only as a contribution to the question of what a theologian might understand by piety in the fields of philosophical and moral theology, but also to the more particular task of understanding a theologian whose work, though widely read, has received relatively scant systematic analysis from either Jewish or Christian sources, and never from the perspective of the organizing principle of piety (the very perspective suggested by his position as a professor of both mystical and moral theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City). In fact, until recently Heschel’s work has received rather lax attention overall from the standpoint of academic theology: perhaps because of his aphoristic style, Heschel has been accused of lacking methodological strength in his writing, discouraging rigorous assessments of its contribution.38 Indeed, his style is in distinct contrast to much serious philosophical writing, often getting at the essential point from a variety of directions rather than moving linearly toward it. The style is deceptive, however, and it masks a depth of learning in both theological and philosophical sources which undergirds Heschel’s theological reflection.39 The current study will take the position that has become more common in recent scholarship, that Heschel’s aphoristic style obscures what is in fact a profound and provocative approach to the fundamental questions of theology. Moreover, as suggested above, our further argument will be that when viewed through the lens of piety, Heschel’s work anticipates by a generation many of the themes of so-called “postmodern” or “postliberal” theologies. To understand Heschel’s own use of piety—how it differs from the ambiguous modern connotations, and how he deploys it theologically—we might first take stock of what it is not in his way of understanding it. Contrary to the disapproving common associations with the term in contemporary usage, piety as Heschel analyzes it is a constructive concept situated at the heart of religious experience. It is not a rare trait of particularly saintly persons, but it is common to all religious life. Nor is it the mark of a sanctimonious pedantry, but rather it is a formative characteristic of authentic devotion. It is not just an emotive response to religious sentiment, nor is it primarily to be found in popularized religious images or practices. Rather, it refers to a specific manner of religiously structured living. It is not therefore an individualistic contemplative form of spirituality, for its identifiable content embraces the totality of everyday living and responsibility in human relationships. Moreover, piety is for Heschel more than strict observance of Jewish tradition and fulfillment of the halachic obligations, for it includes the full extent of our response to God’s will, both religious and ethical. It is not confined to routine religious formalities, nor is it relegated to the comfortable devotions sarcastically criticized by Kierkegaard as “a religion of quiet hours in holy places.”40 Stated in positive terms, then, piety is described by Heschel as “a life compatible with God’s presence.”41 Inevitably, so broad a concept as “piety” will receive a variety of definitions in a corpus of work as extensive as Heschel’s, and appear as a reprise in numerous contexts. Indeed, one is startled, reading Heschel, how often a sentence begins with the subject of “the pious man . . .,” followed by a predicate elaborating some further characteristic. Piety thus does not have a limited, technical meaning for

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Heschel, but is based (like his early studies of his Jewish mentors) in a larger matrix of associations and manifestations: piety is “a specific fact of existence met with in life.”42 It therefore becomes a dominant term in Heschel’s thinking, which he seeks to endow with a specific theological significance in addition to its more typical emotive connotations. Heschel’s method is particularly evident in an early essay which he published in 1942, “An Analysis of Piety,” which was later included as the final chapter of Man Is Not Alone. In it, Heschel emphasizes that piety is a pattern of living which responds to transcendence—a means of concrete response to the Other. Not surprisingly, this “Other” is, in Heschel’s case, identified with the divine, but as we shall see, it plays a similar role in problematizing the independence of the autonomous self as the more abstract “otherness” of the human face in the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Piety, Heschel says, “points to something beyond itself,” it is “the orientation of human inwardness toward the holy,” “faith translated into life, spirit embodied in personality.” And perhaps most significant for our discussion, piety’s “main interest is concern for the concern of God.” Heschel alludes here to the ethical dimension of piety, for more than being a strictly religious response to transcendence, it also involves an explicit engagement with God’s will—and this will is, for Heschel, the ultimate origin of ethical responsibility. Piety thereby becomes not only a mode of knowing, but the nucleus of ethical engagement, for it is the means by which an individual responds to the sense of obligation derived from the encounter with the Other. It shall thus be our intent to extract from the various appearances of “the pious man” a conceptual understanding of how piety engages both cognitive perception and moral behavior. To try to force onto Heschel’s concept of piety too exact a definition, however, would be inappropriate if not impossible, for Heschel himself uses it more as a refrain to a variety of themes than as a clearly developed concept. This variation in meaning is typical of Heschel’s prose (for which he has also often been faulted by critics looking for a more systematic treatment). Yet the variation is not accidental, for it reflects Heschel’s underlying phenomenological method of probing the consciousness of pious individuals, analyzing the complex content of their experience as a means of describing the divine Other which evokes it. Heschel’s method of talking about God, in other words, is to examine the effects of the divine presence in pious human living (whether the biblical prophets, historical exemplars of the faith, or fellow believers), extrapolating from the evidence found there of God’s engaged concern what may be said about the empathetic nature of the origins of that concern. It is in this sense that piety plays such a pivotal role in Heschel’s work, for it is the raw reflective data which provides the point of entry into what many commentators have observed is his larger theological program of describing God’s concern for humanity as divine pathos. Indeed, in a number of places, Heschel offers what might be a one-sentence summary of this overall methodology, to which we have already made reference: In penetrating the consciousness of the pious man, we may perceive the reality behind it. To explicate fully the layers of meaning in that one sentence might be taken as the governing objective of this study.

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IV  Piety as a theological subject A concern might be expressed here that in choosing piety as our point of departure, we have substituted a secondary issue for Heschel’s primary concern with the concept of pathos. Indeed, when one thinks of the overall content of his work, the concept of pathos forcefully emerges as the essential unifying idea. While more will be said in due course about the full meaning of pathos for Heschel, suffice it to say now that the underlying concept is that contrary to the impassible God characteristic of much Western theological reflection, the God of the Hebrew Bible responds to human events passionately and reactively. This insight into God’s “transitive concern” for humanity is based on Heschel’s early phenomenological study of the prophetic consciousness in his 1936 doctoral dissertation Die Prophetie (later published in English as The Prophets), where he argues that what is disclosed in the prophetic experience is God’s personal and intimate relationship with human beings: God does not simply command and expect obedience; he is also moved and affected by what happens in the world and he reacts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath. He is not conceived as judging facts so to speak “objectively,” in detached impassivity. He reacts in an intimate and subjective manner, and thus determines the value of events. Quite obviously in the biblical view man’s deeds can move Him, affect Him, grieve Him, or, on the other hand, gladden and please him. This notion that God can be intimately affected, that he possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also feeling and pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God.43

While the theme of pathos expressed here has been the focus of many studies of Heschel, some of the more recent studies have especially emphasized its importance in his theology: one thinks for example of two works in Italian, Paola Ricci Sindoni’s Heschel: Dio è Pathos and Paolo Gamberini’s Pathos e Logos in Abraham J. Heschel.44 Gamberini in particular stresses pathos as the “pole” around which Heschel’s theology is constructed, and he summarizes his understanding of its role thus: In the course of our study, pathos will be specified as a passion for transcendent meaning, a sense that allows us to grasp the ineffable in experience, a passionate and at the same time dramatic impulse toward the ultimate meaning of existence. This pathos is based and ontologically rooted in the divine pathos. Pathos has both a human and divine dimension, as well as intentional and ontological.45

It is significant that in Gamberini’s analysis, pathos refers not just to the divine concern for human being, but also to the corresponding threefold human concern for ultimate meaning, for others, and for God—three objects of concern that collectively form our response to the divine concern. Heschel does in fact speak of how “human and divine pathos can be in accord,”46 and in The Prophets he describes how Hosea “experienced and shared in the privacy of his own destiny” the variety of divine pathos: “love, frustration, reconciliation.”47 John Merkle also notices this correspondence between divine and human pathos, writing in “Heschel’s Theology of Divine Pathos” that

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“only a God of pathos is worthy of the faith of human beings who themselves may express pathos for God.”48 So taken in this sense, pathos can legitimately be thought of as the central concept for Heschel, because of the way in which it comprehends both sides of the divine/human relationship. Piety would then be regarded as only the secondary religious expression of the human pathos for God, and not itself a distinctive category.49 The argument presented here, however, is that while it is true that in a number of places Heschel expresses the idea that pathos is a shared reality between God and humanity, there is nevertheless a critically important distinction to be made between the divine pathos and its human counterpart—a distinction which may best be maintained by the separate nomenclature of divine pathos and human piety. For instance, it has to be said that God’s pathos is ontologically prior to the human response it evokes; so human pathos is necessarily responsive rather than originary. Thus, divine and human pathos are conceptually distinct, and while the divine empathy is infinite and steadfastly faithful, its human counterpart in sympathetic response is always partial and corruptible. So while there may be an analogical correspondence between divine and human pathos, one should hesitate not to distinguish between them in some substantive way. A focus on piety maintains these distinctions, because even when thought of as the human participation in the divine pathos, it nevertheless has its own structures, expressions, and motivations that are quite separate from those of God’s concern for us. In fact, the need to make such a distinction is addressed by Heschel himself: as we will examine in detail later, he deploys the concept of “sympathy” (following Max Scheler) to explain how the divine pathos evokes in us a responsive alignment of our own will with that of God. Even in describing the prophetic consciousness, Heschel is at pains to distinguish between pathos and sympathy, and it is that distinctly human dimension which is captured by his appeal to piety. As he writes in the introduction to The Prophets: I have been led to distinguish in the consciousness of the prophet between what happened to him and what happened in him—between the transcendent and the spontaneous—as well as between content and form. The structure of prophetic consciousness as ascertained in the analysis was disclosed as consisting, on the transcendent level, of pathos (content of inspiration) and event (form), and on the personal level, of sympathy (content of inner experience) and the sense of being overpowered (form of inner experience).50

To assert the fundamental importance of piety for Heschel is not, then, to argue against the idea that pathos is his core theological concept, but rather to make room within that concept for a more careful analysis of the multiple dimensions which pathos has within the divine/human relationship. Moreover, methodologically speaking, we should remain mindful of the fact that pathos is not Heschel’s point of departure, but the result of having entered into a phenomenological analysis of the pious prophetic consciousness through which God’s pathos is disclosed. As Merkle notes, the prophet is, in Heschel’s description, a homo sympathetikos, a person who has a “sympathetic solidarity with God” as a result of being “moved by the pathos of God.”51 The divine

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pathos, in other words, is known only because of the pious sympathy it evokes; so while the former conceptually precedes the latter, it is in fact with piety that one must start if we are to reach the disclosive experience of revelation as it is registered in human experience. If we are correct that there is a conceptual differentiation to be maintained in Heschel’s concepts of pathos and piety, then this study intends to follow Heschel in exploring what it would mean to say that before theology can begin to consider the dogmatic content of faith (including pathos), it must first consider the very phenomenon of faith itself. Heschel does this through what he calls “depth theology”: the pretheological experience of the ineffable which opens humankind to the possibility of theological reflection. This “first-order” experience of the divine (to use the terminology of George Lindbeck’s much later work, The Nature of Doctrine52) is at the heart of Heschel’s understanding of religious life, and it is the purpose of the present study to explore how the piety which it evokes is a theologically complex and fruitful concept which has ramifications far beyond Heschel’s own use of the term. Found as it is in the concrete experience of religious men and women, piety forms a conceptual link between the private spirituality of individuals and the public discourse of theology, as well as between the dogmatic content of theology and its moral implications. This synthetic aspect which characterizes piety makes it a particularly important touchstone for the academic pursuit of theology, even providing grist for its reflective activity. In making so much of the importance of piety, this approach may be pushing Heschel’s use of the term beyond his original intention, especially given the particularity that “piety” has in the Jewish context, where it often denotes someone who is religiously observant rather than assimilated or secularized.53 Yet when the place of piety in Heschel’s works is carefully examined for its structural significance, the richness of the term’s theological importance stands out as a part of his contribution to the theological enterprise in general, and not only its Jewish expression. Written from within the Christian tradition, this study will draw many of its conclusions and seek wider implications which are avowedly oriented toward a consideration of these issues within the context of Christian theology, despite the use of Heschel as a primary point of reflection—a context which is summarized in the following chapter on the variety of uses to which piety has previously been put. Some reasons for the choice of Heschel to play this role, as well as the overall shape of the argument, need to be made clear from the outset. In the first instance, a study of Heschel is instructive because although he exhibits a typically Jewish emphasis on religious observance where personal piety is a delineating characteristic of authentic faith, his manner of articulating the nature of piety as the human response to God’s transitive concern for humanity is quite singular. In that regard, he is unique even within his own tradition, so as the third chapter on Heschel’s previous critics documents, it is perhaps not surprising that his work has been subjected to an unusually wide range of critical appraisals. Yet in the second instance, Heschel’s approach to piety specifically from a phenomenological perspective allows him to penetrate to the essence of its epistemological and moral implications, without having to establish the validity of religious faith a priori. Based on his intellectual formation in both German

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philosophy and Hasidic spirituality (which will be explored in the fourth and fifth chapters, respectively), piety for Heschel is a given aspect of human life, known in some form throughout all ages and in all cultures. Starting from this concrete reality of pious behavior, Heschel goes on to ask the larger questions of what one may learn about the experiential content of religious faith and the reality behind it through the phenomenological study of piety—an inquiry which will be the subject of Chapter 6. In the third instance, then, Heschel’s method suggests numerous issues to be explored in considering how one might include a response to and appropriation of the positive experience of pious men and women in theological inquiry more generally. As already mentioned, two of the most significant ramifications of such an appropriation are its epistemological and ethical consequences: issues which will be, in turn, considered in Chapter 7 on “understanding,” and Chapter 8 on “virtue.” An entire chapter will be given over to a perhaps unexpected, but particularly fruitful, comparison of Heschel’s work with that of Emmanuel Lévinas, drawing out the implications of their mutual emphasis on the “Other.” This dialogue reveals Heschel to have held an instinctual suspicion of the stress laid in Western philosophy and theology on ontological concepts of God (a stress which perhaps helps to account in part for the relative lack of interest on the part of theologians in the more “naive” insights of piety). Heschel posits instead the importance of human partnership with God in the divine purposes, thereby emphasizing God’s concern for humanity rather than abstract being, and the importance of our ethical response to it. Once we have accomplished the task of exegeting what Heschel understands the consciousness of the “pious man” to be, however, the study will then take the further step of exploring how the resulting insights and methodological strategies connect with and inform a variety of issues in contemporary Christian theology. In this sense, the study proposes piety as a primary datum of reflection which can influence theological concepts directly, rather than simply being on the “receiving end” of its articulation of the content of faith. In a chapter on the pertinence of piety in contemporary theology, various connections between Heschel’s work and other theological issues will be explored, not in a manner which is by any means exhaustive, but only to indicate how piety, theologically understood, can participate in a sophisticated manner in the fundamental debates of theology in a postmodern context. Four issues in particular will be explored as exemplary of the significance which piety can have for contemporary theological discourse, set in the context of postmodern philosophy’s “surrender of the subject.” First, there is the significance of piety for a theocentric conceptualization of ethics. When piety is understood in Heschel’s terms as embracing the whole content of human religious life (cognitive, spiritual, and moral), it connects especially closely with James Gustafson’s “theocentric ethics” in proposing a reorientation of moral discourse away from the specific fulfillment of human need and desire, to the fulfillment of God’s purposes for all of creation.54 In distinction from Gustafson’s roots in the Reformed tradition, however, Heschel avoids an exclusive emphasis on the absolute dependence of human beings on God, holding dependence in tension with the possibility of the positive engagement of human partnership with God’s purposes. Secondly, if piety describes a partnership with the divine purposes, it also provides a particular mode of articulating in what sense human beings may be said to

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“participate” in God. Whereas the notion of participation, as derived from its sources in Platonic philosophy, has taken several forms in Christian theology—including the tradition of “deification” in the Eastern church, or the more metaphysical emphasis in Western theology—Heschel’s own approach to the idea of participation through its moral dimension suggests an emphasis on the constitution of one’s moral and spiritual character in the presence of God. By locating human participation in God explicitly in the divine will, Heschel stresses a “mystical realism” in which the making of authentic moral choices, guided by a pious reverence for God, bridges the gap between the absolute otherness of God and the concrete embodiment of the divine image through the practicalities of human living. Individual spirituality is thereby directly incorporated into the demands of a communal ethical responsibility. Thirdly, Heschel’s development of piety around the core idea of participation in God’s will, rather than God’s being, is shown to intersect the questioning which has been made by Jean-Luc Marion (following in the tradition of Lévinas) of the ontological thematization of God. Marion suggests that a recovery of an awareness of the ineffable excess of divine love is a necessary corrective to the idolatrous enclosure of God within the metaphysical concepts of human reason. Alternatively, piety as the human engagement in the divine concern emphasizes through its response of gratitude and devotion the excess of the divine pathos. It thereby becomes itself a theological act in its disclosure of the nature of God’s concern for humanity, or in Marion’s terms, it is a “theo-logical” act that focuses on the disclosure of the ineffable excess of God. Finally, piety as the enactment of a underlying divine-human relationality may be thought of as opening the space for a new possibility for belief in light of what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has called the “weak ontology” of postmodernism. Vattimo argues that in the wake of the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics, being has come to be thought of more as an event in which we engage, than as a hard reality with which we collide. If this is the case, then the being of God must also be thought of more gently in relational rather than absolute terms. Piety, as a response to the possibilities for discovery and expansion which such relationality implies, can serve as an enacted hope to believe, even before there is an accompanying conviction of faith. As such, it grounds religious activity in an inherently ethical framework, for every pious act takes place within this expectant context between the divine and human persons. Piety, then, is here proposed both as a substantive theological concept as well as a spiritual ideal; as a primary datum for religious reflection and not only its consequence; and as a critical stance with respect to religious life rather than a mere conventional pattern of behavior. As the nexus where insight about God fuses with a response to God, and where spiritual contemplation is translated into conscientious practical engagement, piety plays a unique unifying role in the articulation of the relationships between spirituality, dogmatic formulation, and the intendant consequences for moral living. Yet despite the foundational importance of piety in Heschel’s thought, as his theology has been appropriated by other theologians, the significance of piety has not been overtly acknowledged, being overshadowed instead by the centrality of pathos. It is as if one side of an equation has been thoroughly factored to its simplest expression, while leaving untouched the complement on the opposite side of the equation. This oversight is not unique to those positively influenced by Heschel’s

Introduction: Beginning with Piety

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theology, however, but is characteristic of those who have made critical readings of his work as well. Before turning to a consideration of previous readings of Heschel, however, and of how they have failed to account for the role of piety in his work, we will first turn our attention to how piety has historically been deployed in Western, Judæo-Christian culture, in order to set the stage for a fuller consideration of how Heschel reintroduces it into the theological mix. Our task, as it were, is to amplify the meaning of what might be called “the theological uses of piety,” both to situate Heschel within a much broader intellectual tradition, and to indicate the amplitude of the ideal of piety.

Notes 1 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 3. 2 See, for example, Ellen Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3 Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 8. Heschel frequently repeats similar sentences to this one, sometimes with slight variation, as for example, a sentence from his other major philosophical work, Man Is Not Alone: “In penetrating the consciousness of the ineffable, we may conceive the reality behind it.” Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 60–1. 4 John Henry Newman, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, ed. John Coulson (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 72, quoting the Bishop of Birmingham. The essay was originally published in the Rambler in July 1859, and partly reprinted in 1871 as an appendix to the 3rd edition of The Arians of the Fourth Century. It should be noted that Newman’s argument was ill received by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. In his introduction to the reprint of the essay, Coulson notes that “publication of the essay was an act of political suicide from which his career within the Church was never fully to recover.” 5 Newman, On Consulting the Faithful, 53. 6 Ibid., 54–5. 7 Ibid., 55. 8 Ibid., 73. 9 Ibid., 75. 10 Richard J. Mouw, Consulting the Faithful: What Christian Intellectuals Can Learn from Popular Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994). 11 Mouw, Consulting the Faithful, 25. 12 Keith Clements, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Pioneer of Modern Theology (London: Collins Liturgical Publications), 39–40. 13 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper, 1958), 9. 14 Richard R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion: A New Introduction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 174. 15 Clements, Schleiermacher, 38. 16 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 18. 17 Ibid., 37–8.

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety

18 Ibid. 19 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Steward (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1948), 12. 20 Andrew Dole for instance has explored in his study of Schleiermacher how “religion” (Religion) and “piety” (Frömmigkeit) are more properly to be distinguished, being related to one another as are concentric circles: piety is the individual religious feeling which forms the basis of ecclesiastical communions, but religion encompasses the larger domain of historically conditioned practices within community. In a summarial slogan of his understanding of this relationship (which he offers reluctantly as being intrinsically too reductive), Dole asserts that “Religion, for Schleiermacher, is the social life of piety.” Andrew C. Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 184. 21 Niebuhr, Schleiermacher, 180–1. 22 Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24, ed. Dietrich Ritschel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982), 217. 23 Karl Barth, “The Humanity of God,” trans. by John Newton Thomas, Cross Currents X/1 (Winter 1960): 70–9. The lecture was originally given at the Swiss Reformed Ministers’ Association in Aarau, 25 September 1956. It later appeared with two other monographs in The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1960). 24 Niebuhr, Schleiermacher, 177. 25 Ibid., 178. 26 Barth, Schleiermacher, 271–2. 27 Clements, Schleiermacher, 64. 28 I am indebted to my Yale colleague David Kelsey for this observation. e-mail to the author, 11 November 2011. 29 Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), 411. 30 Heschel, TP, 440. 31 Abraham Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 75. 32 Barth, “The Humanity of God,” 74–5. Indeed, it has been suggested that Barth’s lecture may have been influenced by Heschel’s book God in Search of Man, which came out the previous year. See J. A. Sanders, “An Apostle to the Gentiles,” Conservative Judaism 28 (Fall 1973): 61–3. 33 Heschel, MNA, 281. 34 Jacob Neusner, Introduction to Abraham Heschel, To Grow in Wisdom: An Anthology of Abraham Joshua Heschel (New York: Madison Books, 1990), 7–8. 35 Eugene B. Borowitz, A New Jewish Theology in the Making (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1968), 148. 36 Neusner, Introduction to To Grow in Wisdom, 14. 37 Lawrence Perlman, Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 3. 38 cf. Sol Tanenzapf, “Abraham Heschel and His Critics,” Judaism 23/3 (1974): 276–86. 39 Glancing through the notes to Heschel’s book on the philosophy of Judaism one observes, in addition to his many references to the scriptural and rabbinic sources, the breadth of Heschel’s philosophical and literary references, among them: Spinoza, Plato, Kant, Dewey, Longinus, Whitehead, Aristotle, Hegel, Plotinus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Bacon, von Humboldt, Huxley, R. Niebuhr, Berdyaev, and W. James. Heschel, GSM.

Introduction: Beginning with Piety 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53

54

21

Abraham Heschel, A Passion for Truth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 149. Heschel, MNA, 284. Ibid., 273. Daß Gott nicht bloß gebietet und Gehorsam fordert, sondern auch bewegt und betroffen wird; daß er die Welt erlebt und nicht eindruckslos regiert. Er nimmt alles, was in der Geschichte vorgeht, innerlich und empfindend auf. Die Geschehnisse und Handlungen erregen in ihm Freude oder Leid, Wohlgefallen oder Mißfallen. Er urteilt also nicht bloß sachlich-objectiv, von den Tatsachen ausgehend, ob sie gut oder böse, falsch oder richtig seien, sondern reagiert auch persönlich-subjektiv, also von sich aus auf ihren Wert oder Unwert. Es scheint eben, daß die Taten des Menschen ihn angehen und bewegen, ihn berühren und betrüben, erfreuen und ergreifen können. Diese Annahme, daß sich Gott beeindrucken und affizieren läßt, daß Gott also nicht nur Verstand une Wille, sondern auch Gefühl und Pathos eigen sind, besagt, daß sie in ihrem Grunderlebnis den Herrn als den pathetischen Gott erkannt haben. Heschel, DP, 131. Excerpted in Abraham Heschel, “The Divine Pathos: The Basic Category of Prophetic Theology,” Part 3, Chapter 1 of Die Prophetie, trans. William Wolf, Judaism 2/1 (January 1953): 61. Paola Ricci Sindoni, Heschel: Dio è Pathos (Padua: Edizioni Messaggero, 2002) and Paolo Gamberini, SJ, Pathos e Logos in Abraham Heschel (Rome: Città Nuova, 2009). Gamberini, Pathos e Logos, 24. Heschel, GSM, 239. Heschel, TP, 51–2. John C. Merkle, “Heschel’s Theology of Divine Pathos,” in John C. Merkle, ed., Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 81. I am indebted to Paolo Gamberini, SJ, for having made this point in a critique of an earlier version of this study. Heschel, TP, xix. Merkle, “Heschel’s Theology of Pathos,” 81, quoting Heschel in The Prophets. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). Although Lindbeck wrote this work three decades later than Heschel’s books on the philosophy of religion, his work shares certain themes, especially the priority of firsthand religious experience over its dogmatic formulation: cf. Chapter 2, “Religion and Experience: A Pretheological Inquiry.” Note this description from an encyclopedia article on “Piety in Judaism” as indicative of the understanding of piety as observance: “Piety fills the life of every Jew and endows it with transcendent meaning. In all forms of Rabbinic Judaism, ancient and modern, piety overshadows faith as the central defining core of the religion. Thus the daily, weekly, and annual routines of the observant Jew as well as the rituals of the life cycle events—each with its own transcendent meanings ascribed within the system of faith—are the concrete signs of the individual’s achievement of the standards of piety demanded by Judaism.” The Encyclopedia of Judaism, s.v. “Piety in Judaism.” James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, vol. I: 1981, vol. II: 1984).

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The Idea of Piety

By Reading . . . in a Book called The Practice of Piety I found some Description, of the Misery of Men in Hell & of the Happiness of the Godly which somewhat stirred me. —John Brock, Autobiographical Memoranda, 1636–59

I  Biblical piety When one turns attention to the longer history of piety in the Judæo-Christian tradition, what becomes readily apparent is that piety has been a consistent—if often latent—theme of much theological reflection. Drawing out the variety of uses to which piety has been put thus situates the current study within a much broader tradition of inquiry that traces its roots to scripture itself, making Heschel’s own reintroduction of piety all the more instructive and suggestive of its potential significance for both Christian and Jewish theology. Piety itself is a complex and often ambiguous word, containing a variety of subtle variations in meaning. Despite its rich history, it is not a word much used in contemporary theology, especially outside of the Jewish context. Many encyclopedias or dictionaries of theology omit an entry for “piety” altogether, and those that include it often equate it with “spirituality.”1 As such, piety falls prey to the uneasy relationship which exists between the current practice of dogmatic and ascetical theology: in one such article, for example, Josef Sudbrack underlines the typical ambivalence to piety in systematic treatments of theology: The attempt to describe in an exhaustive manner the reality designated by the word “piety” (spirituality) is destined to fail not less than that of assigning it, in a precise manner, a systematic role. For piety traverses the whole Christian experience, and that is why it is inalterably linked to the situation of the persons or groups concerned. This difficulty perhaps explains why reflection concerning piety is a child fallen from favor in Christian theology.2

Piety has thus been pushed to the edge of theological reflection, and the unifying religious phenomenon which it describes remains predominantly unexamined from a more rigorous point of view. In spite of its theological neglect, however, piety is a conspicuous biblical concept which receives repeated use, both in the Hebrew scriptures and Greek New Testament.

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From the Hebrew scriptures, “piety” can be used to translate either yirat shamayim (fear of heaven) or yirat adonai (fear of the Lord); it is also often used to translate the word hèsed (steadfast love), which is descriptive of God’s relationship to Israel as well as the ideal aspiration for humanity’s relationship to God. So, for example, the Lord says to Hosea that “I desire steadfast love [piety] and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings” (Hos. 6:6), or Proverbs admonishes that “The fear of the Lord [piety] is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7). From the Septuagint, piety may be used to translate the Greek theosébia, etymologically meaning reverence toward or fear of God, as in Genesis 20:11, where Abraham rationalizes his behavior toward Abimelech by saying, “there is no fear of God [piety] in this place.” Similarly in New Testament usage, piety primarily translates eusébia, literally meaning worship that is rightly directed but more generally implying respect, faithfulness, or godliness. It is understood in the epistles to be the summation of the Christian life, especially in the pastoral letters to Timothy: “Train yourself in godliness [piety], for godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (I Tim. 4:7–8). Jesus himself makes use of the idea of piety as the fulfillment of the religious principles (and not just letter) of the law: in the gospel of Matthew in particular, Jesus warns of parading one’s piety before others in order to be seen by them (Mt. 6:1). In this case, “piety” is significantly used to translate the Greek dikaïosunè, which is the righteousness that comes from the fulfillment of divine statutes. Often translated alternatively as “justice,” dikaïosunè supports a larger appreciation of piety as religious and moral behavior done in accordance with God’s will—the same righteousness for which one may be persecuted, as Jesus reminds us in the Beatitudes (Mt. 5:10), and which he says must exceed the strictly legalistic observance of the scribes and Pharisees (Mt. 5:20). In contrast, from rabbinic Hebrew, piety translates the word hasidut, which can have a relatively narrow or very full meaning. In its more restricted sense, hasidut is what the eleventh-century French Talmudist Rashi declared to be the absence of a violation of the commandments; or in its fuller connotation, it can imply what the thirteenth-century Spaniard Nahmanide insisted is a pious religious fervor which goes far beyond the observance of the letter of the Law.3

II  Classical pietas The dictionary definition of the word “piety” indicates that in its etymological origins, piety means “habitual reverence and obedience to God” or “devotion to religious duties and observances,” coming from the Latin pietas, implying dutifulness to country and parents (as well as to gods).4 In its linguistic origins, then, piety is not only a religious term, but also describes the respect due to one’s cultural and familial origins as well. Piety is both a religious sentiment of reverence, and also a virtue through which one fulfills obligations to both divine and human progenitors. It has, for example, been invoked by the classicist Paul Woodruff in his study of reverence as a forgotten virtue, especially in a chapter in which he examines the sense of reverence that was engendered in Ancient China by the Confucian tradition of filial piety. He comments that “Filial piety expresses reverence within the family. . . . Genuine filial piety does not bend a

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child’s mind, but provides a structure for the expression of its natural feelings toward its parents. . . . Through filial piety, children cultivate a sense of their positions in the scheme of things, along with habits of reverence which they will apply as adults on a larger stage than that of the family.”5 In another cultural context, the poet Octavio Paz analyzes this filiative meaning of piety well, interweaving deep resonances both at a human and divine level: Filial, fraternal, paternal and maternal love are not love: they are piety, in the oldest and most religious sense of the word. Piety comes from the Latin pietas. It is the name of the virtue, the Diccionario de Autoridades tells us, that “moves and incites to revere, respect, serve and honor God, our parents, and our country.” Pietas is the devotion professed for the gods in Rome. Pietas also means pity, and for Christians it is an aspect of charity. French and English, distinguishing between the two meanings, have two words to express it: piété and pity [unlike Italian]. Piety or love of God springs, according to the theologians, from the feeling of abandonment: human beings, God’s children, feel that they have been flung headlong into the world and so seek their Creator. It is a fundamental experience, literally, because it is intimately associated with our birth. A great deal has been written about the subject. I confine myself here to emphasizing that it consists of the knowledge that we have been expelled from the prenatal whole and thrust into an alien world: this life. Thus the love of God, that is to say, of the Father and the Creator, bears a strong resemblance to filial piety.6

As Paz understands it, piety is derived from the formative psychological experience of separation, encountered at one level as separation from our parental origins, but at a more existential level as alienation from the creator who brought us into being. Piety is thus a type of homing instinct which draws us back to our origins, both with a feeling of gratitude and devotion, as well as safety and relief. As such, it influences our sense of well-being and security in the world, determining whether we feel adrift and at loose ends, or anchored in a meaningful web of relationship. One of the best known classical considerations of piety is Plato’s Euthyphro, in which Socrates probes his interlocutor’s assertion regarding piety (to hosion) that “what is pleasing to the gods is holy, and what is not pleasing to them is unholy.”7 Socrates carries the examination a step further, asking if the quality of being holy is given because the gods love it, or do they love it because it is holy? Or, put another way, Socrates wants to know whether holiness is a status derived from a divine approbation, or is its source located elsewhere and only appreciated by the divine? Euthyphro counters that piety (holiness) can be defined as a service rendered by human beings to the gods, to which Socrates asks the obvious rejoinder of whether the gods in some way benefit from this service. If so, then human beings are able to improve the gods (which Euthyphro is unwilling to concede), and if not, then the service of piety is unavailing. Euthyphro must again back away, and the dialogue ends inconclusively, except that during its course Socrates has effectively dislocated the holy from the domain of the gods and left open the possibility that holiness is conferred by human, rather than divine action, since Euthyphro is unable to describe how or why the gods appreciate the holy.8

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When taken up by Roman philosophers such as Cicero, the concept of piety reaches a more defined and politically charged resonance. The classical scholar Hendrik Wagenvoort, for instance, traced the development of the concept of piety in Cicero as being in parallel with the shift in Rome from Republic to Monarchy, providing a philosophical justification for Roman expansionism.9 Noting that in Cicero’s early writings, pietas had been applied to one’s country, parents, and relatives, Wagenvoort argues that in his later works Cicero shifts the application of piety to the gods. Behind this shift was the influence of the Greek stoic philosopher Posidonius, who argued that we find truth and happiness not by living as we please, but by responding to a calling that comes to human beings from the gods. This sense of responsibility allows us to fulfill the ideal of humanitas, which in Wagenvoort’s words includes “every property . . . which can drive the desire for dignity of the human being as such”: beneficence, magnanimity, disinterestedness, kindness, courtesy, gratitude, tact, love for wife and child, for parents and relatives, as well as elegance, joyfulness, wit, literary taste and education in general.10 By contrast, one who lacks piety—or, as Cicero puts it, “justice toward the gods”—will act purely out of self-interest. So, laments Cicero in De Natura Deorum, “It seems probable to me that if piety toward the gods disappears, also loyalty and the community of the human race—humanity—and that particularly excellent virtue, righteousness, will disappear.”11 The reason lying behind this shift from thinking of piety as related primarily to country and parents, to the gods themselves, is Cicero’s desire to come to terms with the moral consequences of Roman conquests, even as the Republic was shifting toward the principate of Augustus. The connection is this: if the Roman policy could be understood as a response to a divine calling, rather than the pursuit of self-interest, then it could be made defensible philosophically as an inescapable demand of pietas. It is not surprising, therefore, that this use of piety to justify human action became a unifying theme of Virgil’s national epic, the Aeneid, where Aeneas’ decision to leave Dido is explained by his sense of duty in which calling must outweigh self-interest. Yet from the time of this classical definition of the idea of piety, which regards it as the summation of all the virtues, a gradual transition occurs in its meaning as it was incorporated into Christian thinking, so that by the time the English poet John Dryden published his own translation of the Aeneid in 1697, he felt compelled to remark that the amplitude of the classical concept of piety had been lost: “the word in Latin is more full than can possibly be exprest in any Modern Language.” Offering his own attempt to define the classical pietas in English, he observed that “Piety alone comprehends the whole Duty of Man towards the Gods; towards his Country, and towards his Relations.”12 Yet such a definition, he notes, is an unavoidable multiplying of the words necessary to express the same idea that was once simply contained in pietas: by the seventeenth century, the idea of piety had lost its public dimension, becoming confined to the domain of private of religious experience. In Pietas from Vergil to Dryden, James Garrison’s meticulous study of the evolution of the meaning of pietas, he traces the gradual diminution of the meaning of piety as it culminates in Dryden’s own expressed regret at its narrowed significance. Garrison follows the evolution of the classical idea of piety as it interacts with Christian uses, noting that because of the differences in understanding, the word pietas “becomes a site

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety

of the encounter between classical education and Christian faith.”13 The permutations of this encounter are more complex and varied than can be traced here, but Garrison observes two essential tendencies—one to extrapolate from the more universal classical understanding of piety into Christian usage, the other to narrow and distinguish Christian piety. Garrison contrasts, for example, the attitudes of Ambrose and Jerome as representative of these two strands. Ambrose, he says, regarded Christianity as a perfection of classical culture, and so saw Christian pietas as an amplification of Cicero’s idea that it is the foundation of all virtue: “The piety of justice is first directed toward God; secondly, towards one’s country; next, toward parents; lastly, towards all.”14 In contrast, when Jerome comments on Matthew 10:37 (where Jesus says, “whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”), he notes that the piety that is due God may actually cause a rupture with one’s parents: Christian truth and the demands of religious piety force a separation from other claimants for one’s loyalty. As Garrison summarizes, “The pietas of Ambrose tends toward universal caritas, whereas that of Jerome serves to identify the orthodox or more often in the negative to point a finger at heresy.”15 Garrison argues that other than Cicero, who had laid the ground for Virgil’s understanding of piety as chief among the virtues, the next most influential exponent of the centrality of piety was Augustine. Yet more like Jerome than Ambrose, Augustine was intent to separate piety from its classical association with filial devotion, and to direct the object of its loyalty instead solely to God. Thus, in The City of God, he writes: The word “piety” (eusébeia in Greek) is generally understood as referring particularly to the worship of God. But this word also is used of a dutiful attitude towards parents; while in popular speech it is constantly used in connection with acts of compassion. . . . From this familiar usage comes the application of pius to God himself; . . . Hence in some passages of Scripture, to make the precise meaning clear, the word theo-sébia (God-worship) is preferred to eu-sébia (good worship). We have no one word in Latin to express either of these Greek words.16

Augustine therefore differentiates between pietas and vera pietas, the latter being the true worship that is due to God alone. This singularity of the object of piety is reflected in Augustine’s definition of it, which becomes definitive in Christian thinking up through the thirteenth century: “Piety is the true worship of the true God.”17 Thus, in his Enchiridion, Augustine announces the purpose of his manual on Christian living to be the exposition of such piety as that in which human wisdom consists. “This you have,” he writes, “in the book of the saintly Job, for there he writes that Wisdom herself said to man, ‘Behold, piety is wisdom.’ ”18 Augustine’s reference is to Job 28:28, which reads “The fear of the Lord [pietas] is the beginning of Wisdom.” Here pietas is used to translate theosébia from the Septuagint, or yiratadonai from the Hebrew Bible, and is noticeably lacking in any allusion to filial or patriotic piety. “No term,” Augustine says, “is better than theosébia, which clearly expresses the idea of man’s service of God as the source of human wisdom.” Significantly, piety becomes both the goal and the means of Christian life. Yet in Garrison’s estimation, the essential point is that Augustine’s narrowing of the meaning of pietas sets in motion a trend toward its identification

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solely with the domain of religious life, rather than also including the wider duties of civic virtue. As a result, the idea of piety becomes more inward, focusing on belief more so than on behavior. Fast-forwarding ahead then—as the two distinct realms of the civic and the religious become increasingly separated in early modern Europe, instead of expressing the epic heroism of an Aeneas, piety becomes vulnerable to satirical irony as it comes to be associated with various hypocrisies rather than sincere devotion to God. Garrison cites a passage from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels regarding the European colonial enterprise as an example of this drift toward the association of piety with the satirical: Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity: the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.19

This ironic usage of the word “pious” sets up one of the meanings most commonly associated with the word in contemporary usage today—namely, what the dictionary describes as an action that is “falsely earnest or sincere.”20 Rather than virtue, piety has been transformed into a vice; rather than expressing a sense of duty and obligation, it expresses a sense of entitlement and inauthenticity. Yet, the narrowing of piety to the religious realm has had other consequences as well: it also set up the emergence of the idea that piety is an experiential devotion which is both the source and content of a private, individual Christian faith. Ironically, it was in the very year that Dryden published his Aeneis that the word pietism was first recorded in English, a derisive term taken from the German referring to the seventeenth-century reform movement that widely influenced the development of evangelical Christianity.21 (Given the subject of the current study, one might take note of the contemporaneous development of Hasidism, that branch of pietistic Judaism from which Heschel himself was descended.) Twentytwo years earlier, in 1675, Phillip Jacob Spener had published his Pia Desideria as a preface to a new edition of John Arndt’s True Christianity (a collection of popular sermons, originally published around 1615). Since boyhood, Spener had read Arndt’s devotional work, and was impressed by its emphasis on the importance of a rigorous spiritual and moral life, as opposed to the doctrinal formulations of scholastic theology characteristic even of his own Lutheran tradition. Later, as the Senior of the ministerium in Frankfurt am Main, Spener began to encourage small circles of individuals to meet for Bible reading and prayer for the cultivation of the kind of holiness advocated by Arndt—groups which were known as collegia pietatis, or conventicles. The context of Spener’s effort was a church still weakened by the exhausting experience of the Thirty Years War, and at a low point in its spiritual vitality. Spener’s treatise, republished separately due to its popularity within a year as Pia Desideria: or Heartfelt Desires for a God-pleasing Improvement of the True Protestant Church, laid out a clear path by which Christian faith could be revivified. Against formalism in doctrine and worship, Spener asserted the importance of

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cultivating a personal appropriation of both “doctrine and piety,”22 in what Theodore Tappert describes as “a keener awareness of the present reality of God’s judgment and grace and the bearing which these were believed to have on personal and social life.”23 Thus, Spener writes, “The people must have impressed upon them and must accustom themselves to believing that it is by no means enough to have knowledge of the Christian faith, for Christianity consists rather of practice.”24 Spener’s call for a piety that would be the concrete and personal enactment of the consequences of the truths of Christian faith hearkens back to such classic Puritan texts as Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety: Directing a Christian How to Walk, that He May Please God (originally published around 1611). Spener had read various works of the English Puritans in German translation early in his life, and he found reinforced there the importance of the pursuit of holy living described by piety, over against dogmatic intellectualism. Bayly understands himself to be “extracting” the “old practice of true piety” which existed before the endless controversies occasioned by the medieval corruptions of the faith.25 In the book’s Epistle Dedicatory, he regards piety as the key that unlocks the “true and eternal joys of heaven.” Without it, we are unable to attain those benefits of true faith which are promised by the gospel: For piety hath the promise of this life, and of that which shall never end; but without piety there is no internal comfort to be found in conscience, nor external peace to be looked for in the world, nor any eternal happiness to be hoped for in heaven.26

In this regard, he appeals to Mary as the exemplar of true piety, for “what we spend, like Mary, in the practice of piety, shall remain our true memorial forever.” Bayly structures his understanding of the practice of piety—like his book—around a specific progression from the knowledge of God’s majesty, to an accounting of one’s own misery, to the glorifying of God aright. Piety properly encompasses all three elements, and so is understood as the summation in the lived reality of an individual of the knowledge of God, of repentance from sin, and of sanctification in living that is the core of the Christian religion. As the Puritan ethos was translated into the New England setting by the early colonists, it came to express a particularly intense allegiance to the practice of piety. Bayly’s book, which had been published in nearly 60 editions by the end of the seventeenth century, was but one of a flood of devotional books produced to support the formation of pious living. The essence of this practice was the use of scripture for study, prayer, and devotions; individuals, families, and groups all made the reading of scripture the central act of their religious life. As Charles Hambrick-Stowe describes it in his The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England, such Puritanism was in essence a devotional movement “intended to promote the experience of God and His grace individually and in social groups.”27 Behind these convictions was an essentially Augustinian theology emphasizing personal experience, human sinfulness, and divine initiative in salvation through grace. So while the study of Puritanism might necessarily be a study of people and their spiritual practices rather than ideas, nevertheless such experiential theology “is inseparable from those who believed in it”:

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It is important to understand that in Puritan spirituality God did not come because someone engaged in a certain exercise; but if God was going to come, He would do so through the means of that exercise. For Puritans, God provided both the content of the exercise (in Scripture) and the will to undertake it (through grace); human ability thus played no role.28

Lying behind these various appropriations of piety is an understanding of conversion as not a once-for-all moment in an individual’s life, but rather as a lifelong process that aims toward holiness of life, or sanctification. The influence of John Calvin’s theology is significant here, and indeed, it is the centrality of piety in his own interpretation of the Christian life that forms a unifying thread in Reformed appropriations of it. Calvin emphasized the recapitulative aspect of piety, subtitling his Institutes of the Christian Religion as a “summary of the whole of piety.”29 Defining piety as “that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces,” he posits that where there is no religion or piety, God is not properly known.30 This is so because since the fall, we can only recognize the fatherly goodness of God through faith, and having recognized that beneficence through the promises given to us in Christ, our natural response is reverence for God’s majesty and love of God’s goodness—or in other words, piety. Faith justifies us before God, reconciling fallen humanity to God where we would otherwise expect only God’s anger and judgment, but it leads through grace to the pursuit of a regenerated life of sanctification or holiness which is nothing less than piety. As Calvin writes, “The whole life of Christians ought to be a sort of practice of piety, for we have been called to sanctification.”31 Piety thus has two essential dimensions: it is on one hand primarily pastoral in nature, defining the development of the sanctified life to which the person of faith is called; and on the other hand, it has a regulative function in determining our knowledge of God in that only what is known through piety is capable of being known. To take up the first of these two dimensions—the pastoral function of piety: Calvin understands that at the core of the Christian life there is an awareness that we owe everything to God, that “[we] are nourished by his Fatherly care, that He is the author of [our] every good, that [we] should seek nothing beyond Him.”32 When a sinner comes to terms fully with who he or she is in regard to God’s holiness and judgment, and who the holy and merciful God is who forgives us and opens the way for us to be restored to our original likeness to God, then piety is the summation of the disposition that such an awareness evokes. (Note that piety so conceived—as reverence informed by love—has an essentially filial character, reflecting Calvin’s classical formation and his familiarity with the concept of pietas, especially as it was used by Cicero.) For Calvin, the Christian life, as B. A. Gerrish has put it, is “suffused with a profound awareness that Christians are not their own: they belong to God by right of creation and still more by right of redemption (an echo of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 6:19–20).”33 Piety is the acceptance of God’s claim upon us, and our duty to worship God as creatures of God, but it also leads to an awareness of our responsibility toward others. Piety in other words is the hinge between the first table of the Ten Commandments (defining our obligations to God) and the second table (defining our obligations to our neighbor): love of neighbor is the outward sign of

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our love for God.34 As Calvin himself puts it in chapter 7 of The Golden Book of the Christian Life: We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: insofar as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. Conversely, we are God’s: let us therefore live for Him and die for Him. We are God’s: let His wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God’s: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward Him as our only lawful goal (Rom. 14:8).35

Summarizing the import of these words, Calvin says that “There follows piety, which joins us in true holiness with God when we are separated from the iniquities of the World.”36 In addition to the ethical dimension of Calvin’s pastoral conception of piety, however, there is also the ecclesial. While piety shows itself as a personal disposition, it is formed in the community of Christ’s body the church, into which the individual is grafted by faith. The sense of joyous obligation to worship God, which is naturally theocentric in nature, includes both public and private worship. Prayer in all its forms thus becomes the “chief exercise of piety.”37 The union with Christ is not merely through an intellectual assent, but is a matter of the whole person—heart, body, and mind. As Serene Jones has argued, Calvin’s Institutes are rhetorically constructed to evoke just this sort of pious disposition, not merely explicating its contours but “enacting the conditions of its emergence.”38 With this holistic model of piety in mind, Elsie Anne McKee gives this descriptive definition: “Calvin’s piety is the ethos and action of people who recognize through faith that they have been accepted in Christ and engrafted into His body by the sheer grace of God. By this adoption, this ‘mystical union,’ the Lord claims them as belonging solely and wholly to God in life and in death, as God’s people and members of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.”39 The ethical and ecclesial dimensions of Calvin’s use of piety are ultimately grounded in his understanding that it is fundamentally a way of knowing. So, for example, the 1536 version of the Institutes opened with the sentence, “One might say that the whole of sacred doctrine (summa fere sacrae doctrinae) consists of these two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves (cognitione Dei ac nostri).”40 Piety is the intersection of these two essential parts of knowledge: when we realize our total dependence upon God, and respond with the true worship that is the duty of creatures such as ourselves, we manifest authentic piety. Given the nodal position of piety in the interrelationship of God and humanity, Gerrish has argued that piety in effect plays a regulative function in Calvin’s theology: it “functions to exclude inadmissible material and to control the treatment of what is admitted.”41 This “rule of piety” limits the individual to seeking knowledge of God in those places where God has chosen to reveal such knowledge (viz. scripture); by contrast, speculation that tries to go beyond such knowledge, refusing to acknowledge that God chooses that some things remain hidden and unknown to human beings, is to be avoided as a form of sinful presumption. So, for

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example, Calvin gives in Book I of the Institutes what Gerrish describes as a “general dogmatic rule”: Let us remember here, as in all religious doctrine, that we ought to hold to one rule of modesty and sobriety: not to speak, or guess, or even seek to know, concerning obscure matters anything except what has been imparted to us by God’s Word. Furthermore, in the reading of Scripture we ought ceaselessly to endeavor to seek out and meditate upon those things which make for edification. Let us not indulge in curiosity or in the investigation of unprofitable things.42

Here, the rule not only limits us to the Word as the only appropriate source of knowledge of God, but also limits us within that Word to those things which are conducive to the pious life. That piety is the basis for knowing God could not be made clearer than in Chapter II of Book One of the Institutes, in which the first section (entitled “Piety is requisite for the knowledge of God”) articulates that such knowledge is not only the way in which we conceive that there is a God, but also grasp “what befits us and is proper to his glory, in fine, what is to our advantage to know of him.” Jones points out the significance of the vocabulary of knowing here: beyond “conceiving” (concipere) and “knowing” (cognoscere), piety’s knowledge of God “grasps” (tenere) what is essential to be known in order for human life to be shaped and conformed to God’s will for us.43 In a comment anticipatory of Heschel’s own method of studying piety, she writes that “In contemporary treatments of this chapter, the peculiar quality of this knowledge has been assessed frequently through the lens of existential phenomenology. It is thus characterized as ‘deciding knowledge’ or ‘practical knowledge.’ ” Jones wishes to understand it in the rhetorical terms of Renaissance humanism, but either way, her conclusion is significant: “while this knowing intellectually conceives a propositional truth-content, it is also practically useful and purposeful. But most importantly, it is a knowing that involves the dispositional reorientation of the one who holds it.” Given that piety seeks such a comprehensive regeneration of the human person, whereby the individual discovers and lives into the purposes of God for humanity, Calvin closes the Institutes with this admonishment: “Let us comfort ourselves with the thought that we are rendering that obedience which the Lord requires when we suffer anything rather than turn aside from piety.”44

III  Piety in contemporary usage Despite the profound classical ideal of filiative piety or the Puritan embrace of its essential spiritual value, in modern usage the word piety often has a curiously pejorative connotation, hearkening back to the example of Swift’s satirical usage, as when we use it in the phrase “pious platitudes” to indicate a trite religious cliché devoid of a substantive connection to real human life. To speak of a pious person can refer to a devout and holy individual, but more commonly, it now implies a priggish person who is punctilious, even supercilious, in religious observance and often hypocritical in moral behavior. Aware of this ambiguity, Heschel himself writes,

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety To some piety suggests escape from normal life, an abandonment of the world, seclusion, a denial of cultural interests, and is associated with an old-fashioned, clerical, unctuous pattern of behavior. To others the word suggests prudishness, if not hypocrisy and fanaticism, or seems symptomatic of an attitude toward life which is unhealthy and, indeed, absurd. They feel that such an attitude as that of piety is to be rejected in the interests of mental health and spiritual freedom.45

Even in serious religious writing, the words “piety” and “pious” often refer disparagingly to some aspect of a faith tradition from which the author wishes to be distanced. Paul Tillich, for example, in his Systematic Theology, contrasts an authentic personal encounter with God and reunion with him from the distorted form this encounter takes when it is enacted as “piety.” Hearkening back to the pietistic tradition, he asserts that such piety “becomes a tool with which to achieve a transformation within one’s self.” Tillich faults such a tradition of self-salvation (perhaps unfairly) for “producing anxiety, fanaticism, and the intensification of the works of piety.”46 Yet even when piety is used less pejoratively in modern usage, it is still usually assumed to be a strictly individual activity, and not something that happens in or characterizes a larger community. An example of such a usage comes from the Christian Century, from the well-known American Reformed theologian Gabriel Fackre, who like Tillich warns of the dangers of individual “piety”: On piety: If the personal becomes all consuming, then evangelical worship, prayer and hymnody will dwell on “my story” instead of God’s story, and succumb to the very anthropocentrism it seeks to resist.47

Some authors charge individual piety with creating an environment in which the believer is shielded from the obligation to be engaged outside of his or her own spiritual life, or the community of the church. So, for example, a senior pastor of an American Methodist church wrote in an article on congregational life, again in the Christian Century: We cannot be, as so many congregations are, a group of prayer circles and Bible study groups that aren’t involved with and have no impact on the culture around them. In this regard, much of what now passes for vision in mainline Protestantism is simply a pious rationale for being ignored.48

Even in contemporary usage, however, piety has not always been regarded as having such negative connotations, and has frequently served as a significant component of theological reflection and moral aspiration. So, for example, the American Protestant theologian Edward Farley, in his Requiem for a Lost Piety, defined piety as “that which unifies the specific acts and attitudes of Christian life.”49 In other words, for Farley, the function of piety is to provide “a concrete and detailed pattern in which faith can express itself.” Without piety, the believing individual is unable to connect the lived experience of reality with faith commitments. As such, Farley describes each unique pattern of Christian piety as arising out of a specific interpretation of the gospel—and the overall concern of his book is that the patterns that made up traditional Protestant life have become meaningless in contemporary society. These patterns, having now

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“passed off the scene,” leave a vacuum in which the church is for the time being living in exile “by the waters of Babylon.” Echoing Farley’s concern, Donald Bloesch, of the Presbyterian Dubuque Theological Seminary, wrote in a series of essays entitled The Crisis of Piety, that “Modern sophisticated Christians are generally scornful of piety . . .”50 He lists as reasons for this scorn the association of piety with moralism; its use as a method of self-fulfillment by means of religious activities; its characteristic introversion; and its separation of the private and public spheres. Nevertheless, Bloesch argues that there is a need for the recovery of an authentic piety, which would be dependent upon “a renewed awareness of the transcendence and holiness of God.” Hearkening back to a Calvinistic understanding of true piety, Bloesch contends that it “presupposes a heart-felt conviction of one’s own unworthiness before God and a sincere trust and confidence in His mercy.” Yet it also includes “the pursuit of Christian holiness, a seeking after the perfection to which Christ calls us.” In Bloesch’s estimation, the combination of these two dimensions of piety is at the heart of Christian faith and life, both guarding against “too much familiarity” with God on the one hand, and too little confidence in the “salvation procured for us by Jesus Christ” on the other. An interesting recent usage of the unifying dimensions of piety is John Sheveland’s Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika.51 Sheveland suggests that piety may be understood in two ways. In the first instance, “it is the human subjective response, as a ‘Yes,’ to the religious experiences of finitude, vulnerability and being threatened.” Yet, piety also has a more explicit theological meaning, which Sheveland draws from Rahner as “a religious response to sin, guilt, and inauthenticity,” or from Barth as the response to “covenant infidelity, selfcontradiction, and ‘impossibility,’ ” or from Desika as a response to “the consciousness of mis-knowing one’s fundamental relationship to God consisting in absolute dependency and service.” These two construals of piety come together in the definition that Sheveland gives of piety as he deploys it: Piety is thus a disposition born from the consciousness of oneself as finite, sinful and receptive, a disposition which gives particular shape to one’s self-consciousness before God as vulnerable, dependent and grateful.52

Working from this definition of piety, the thesis that Sheveland advances is that Christian life must be understood as being constituted by two mutually inclusive dynamics, one vertical and the other horizontal. Piety is the vertical element—a response to God in God’s revelation—which must in turn be paired with the horizontal responsibility “to render that response consistent with life in the world with others.” For Sheveland, then, it is the unity of piety and responsibility that defines Christian life (a deliberate shift in vocabulary from the “faith and works” language of the Reformation), and he turns this primary analytical framework to bear on each of the three theologians under consideration, making them case studies of his thesis. A more overt deployment of the themes of piety is made by Rowan Williams, who repeatedly turns to the idea that religious life plays a critical role in both the method and content of theology. In his (coauthored) “General Introduction” to Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, for example, he talks about the “pragmatic” bent of classical Anglican writers, for whom “the coherence of their Christian worldviews

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depends less on system than on a sense of what a human life looks like when it is in the process of being transformed by God in Christ.” Williams continues, If holy lives are recognizable, there is a prima facie case for believing that some kind of unity in doctrine is being taken for granted; and the job of theology will be to draw out what that might be, rather than to clear up all possible controversies before anyone is allowed to recognize holiness.53

Williams argues that there is a distinctive type of Anglican piety, which he describes as being characterized by a certain “suspicion, reserve, pragmatism, and humility.” These markers of a particular religious ethos, he suggests, tell us more about what is distinctive to the Anglican tradition “than a good deal of past and current discussion of Anglican attitudes to authority or ministry or the sacraments.” In other words, Williams wants to define his own ecclesial community more by reference to its patterns of piety than its doctrinal coherence, behind which one can then detect a unity of doctrine which remains the task of theology to draw out in some more accessible way. (Whether this definition holds up as one moves from the Anglo experience to the more global scale of the Anglican Communion, however, is a matter which one would have to consider.) Piety also has a strong apologetic role to play in Williams’ theology: asked in an interview about the emphasis he lays on “the evidence of transformed lives in any account of the faith,” Williams responded that if he were to try to persuade someone of the coherence of Christianity, what would interest him most is “pointing people toward a Christian life and saying, ‘Now, what are the contours of that life? What’s the shape of it? What are the problems it poses?’ ”54 The question which arises for Williams out of the example of holy, or pious, lives is that in addition to the problem of evil, there is also the problem of good. Why should there be someone like a Dorothy Day, who in many ways lived a life of perpetual defeat? For Williams, her example of a particularly intense committed attitude to humanity of all sorts suggests a belief in God as the only adequate account of what could give rise to the overall shape of her life. Suggesting a further methodological interest in pursuing this train of thought, Williams suggestively asks, “How, by looking at a life like that, do you get a sense of what God meant? I don’t quite know how to do it yet, but I’d like to have a go.”55 The importance of individual holiness as a subject for theological reflection gets more rigorous attention from Williams in his essays that touch on the ecclesial nature of religious life. In “Theological Integrity,” for instance, he writes of the significance of prayer for an honest theology. The religious act of praying, he says, has the positive effect of resisting “the urge of religious language to claim a total perspective.” This resistance is so because by its very nature, prayer speaks of an incompleteness of the human understanding of God, keeping open a conversation that is not—and never can be—closed. Thus, writes Williams: Religious practice is only preserved in any integrity by seriousness about prayer; and so, if theology is the untangling of the real grammar of religious practice, its subject matter is, humanly and specifically, people who pray.56

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Theology itself is therefore a critical enterprise in that it seeks to make sense of the experience of prayer as a “dispossessed language” in which there is the inevitable potential of interruption and silencing as it confronts the lived reality of the penitent community that is the church. The importance of the ecclesial setting for the theological enterprise is further explored in Williams’ essay, “What is Catholic Orthodoxy?” Focusing as he often does on the linguistic dimensions of Christian faith, he here speaks of the cumulative nature of religious language as we come up against the limitations of one way of speaking about faith, and must seek to find new ways of speaking it. These new ways of speaking the faith are often the result of the lived experience of individuals and communities that find themselves confronted with new circumstances in which one can no longer “talk like that.” Christian tradition is therefore “a constantly expanding network of narratives, biographies.” Williams argues that if these biographies are seen simply as illustrations of a governing doctrinal structure (understood as the grammar of faith), then tradition will close in upon itself. If, however, the biographies of believing men and women are seen as “fresh statements (new metaphors?) in a common tongue,” then tradition “shows itself to be a living—and therefore an incomplete—thing.”57 Locating the engine of theological renewal in the ecclesial experience of a pious response to the real circumstances of human life, Williams understands these instantiations of Christian conviction to be “readings of Christ” that point away from themselves toward that which has caught them up.58 A related contemporary theological interest in piety might be said to be the concern of a number of theologians to hold up the importance of “practices of faith,” or as these practices are cumulatively described, “faith as a way of life.”59 Though the theologians who have written about such practices do not typically use the language of piety, the role which they understand practices of faith to have in Christian life is essentially the same in structure and content, and betrays the same kind of unifying intent as Sheveland’s interest in “piety and responsibility.” So, for example, Dorothy Bass writes in the introduction to Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life: Christian practices are patterns of cooperative human activity in and through which life together takes shape over time in response to and in the light of God as known in Jesus Christ. Focusing on practices invites theological reflection on the ordinary, concrete activities of actual people—and also on the knowledge of God that shapes, infuses, and arises from these activities.60

The practices that are explored by these authors include such things as hospitality, generosity, keeping sabbath, extending forgiveness, honoring the body, and dying well. Their interest in such activities, Bass says, is in part born out of a “postmodern” interest in the question of to what degree belief can be grounded in observable practices, and to what extent practices are themselves enactments of belief. Although “practices” may be a less conventional word to describe this interplay of belief and action than piety, the essential point is the same—that religious people do things together “to address fundamental human needs in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the life of the world.”61

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Finally, some attention must be given to the fact that in a Jewish context, the concept of piety is used in a rather different idiom from what we have been surveying in this chapter—a survey that has relied predominantly on classical and Christian sources. One might say that in Jewish usage, piety seems to be given both a more precise and a more ambiguous meaning than in Christian sources. Edward Kaplan, in a passing comment, gives indication of this ambiguity, saying that “standing before the living God” is the essence of Jewish piety—a comment that can contain a host of meanings.62 As Tzvee Zahavy observes in a reference article on “Jewish Piety,” Rabbinic sources rarely make philosophical generalizations about piety. From the perspective of Judaism, even the definition of the category or term “piety” is problematic. Piety is a classical category of western discourse regarding religious action and ethics (cf. Plato, Euthyphro) not a category drawn out of, or native to, classical Judaism.63

Zahavy does, however, enumerate certain characteristics of Jewish piety, saying that its essential meaning is “acting in one’s personal life primarily in accord with religious principles and values.” It is, in other words, associated with action more directly than with belief: “In  all forms of Rabbinic Judaism, ancient and modern, piety of action overshadows philosophical faith at the central defining core of the religion.” The overwhelmingly important consequence is that everyday life is endowed with a transcendent meaning and purpose, both those actions done for explicitly religious reasons as duties required by God (mitzvot) and by mere custom (minhag). Jewish usage of the word piety is nevertheless itself varied, but perhaps one can observe that overall it has a narrower frame of reference than in a Christian context, being focused more specifically on the individual’s conformity in deed to the will of God. Yet what the extent of that conformity must be is a matter of debate. As mentioned above, there is the contrast between Rashi’s argument that it is enough not to violate the commandments to be pious, and Nahmanides’ insistence that one must go further than mere observance (a position, one might add, i.e. closer to that  of Heschel).64 In an article on “The Character of Jewish Piety” by Jacob Agus, he explores the various permutations of what the idea of conformity means in various strands of Judaism, each of which he summarizes under the rubric of “a way of life” that is an emotional and volitional response to God’s will as it is perceived by the individual.65 On one hand, such conformity can be interpreted within a more Orthodox set of convictions as full observance of the commandments of the oral and written Torah; on the other hand, a Reformed point of view might interpret God’s will as being more readily expressed in the ethical conscience of human beings. In such a case, Agus observes, “Genuine piety is, therefore, akin to the satisfaction of ethics—a paradoxical mixture of joy, awe, humility, and pride, which man experiences when he complies with the Will of God.” We shall argue, however, that Heschel’s own concept of piety is rather more expansive than a mere conformity to God’s will; instead, for him piety is a passionate identification with the divine purposes. Indeed, for Heschel, piety has to be a more amplified idea, since the weight it has to bear is the full human response to the overwhelming pathos of God. One might say, therefore, that Heschel’s view of piety is in many ways unique

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within his own tradition—which is in part why it so readily opens itself for study from other theological viewpoints. In any case, despite significant variations in meaning between classical, Christian, and Jewish usages, we have seen how piety as descriptive of the structure of the consciousness of believing men and women can stand as a core datum for theological investigation. It is the arena in which an individual’s deepest convictions about the nature of God and humanity are given concrete expression, and so acts as a lived hermeneutic of the consequences of these convictions. Perhaps, given the relatively precise understanding of piety in the Jewish tradition as a conformity to God’s will, its theological significance is somewhat less apparent than in some of the other contexts which this chapter has explored—and that may account in part for why it has received relatively little attention in studies of Heschel. Yet, Heschel’s deployment of a phenomenological method in the study of piety has the explicit consequence of identifying it as at the core of an adequate account of the fullness of the divine/human encounter—a lead which we shall be at pains to pursue in all that follows. While the fluctuating interpretations of the content and meaning of piety sketched in this chapter indicate the wide variety of uses to which it has been put, a consequential common thread running through each of them nevertheless emerges. These variations demonstrate that piety is fundamentally a relational concept: it directs our attention outward toward something or someone beyond ourselves, an originary source having an existential claim upon our deepest loyalty and commitment. This essential relational quality is what gives piety the theological weight which we will observe as we explore its full implications for Heschel, as well as its affinities with more recent theological efforts. Most modestly, the claims of piety come from our own family; but used theologically, piety points to God’s claim upon us as creatures not of our own making, a claim that is both primal and inescapable. So it is here that we can begin to turn our attention back to Heschel’s own analysis of piety, for he directs us toward this question: if piety decribes the framework of our experience of God, then if we were to subject the nature of that experience to careful analysis, what might we learn of the actors on both sides of that encounter—God and ourselves?

Notes 1 Rather than “piety,” religious encyclopedic dictionaries such as The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church tend to emphasize “pietism,” the movement especially strong in German Lutheranism in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 2 Josef Sudbrack, “Piété/Spiritualité,” Nouveau dictionnaire de théologie, ed. Peter Eicher (Paris: Cerf, 1996), 733. 3 Dictionnaire encyclopedique du Judaïsm, s.v. “piété.” 4 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, s.v. “piety.” 5 Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 103–7.

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6 Octavio Paz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995), 132. 7 Plato Euthyphro 6, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). Similarly, the question of piety’s relation to the other virtues is taken up in Protagoras (330b6– 332a4), where Socrates probes to what extent the holy is just and the just holy, thereby raising the issue of how the virtues can be distinguished from one another if in so many respects they coinhere. 8 Heschel offers his own response to the question of whether the gods love the good because it is good or whether it is good because they love it in God in Search of Man: to make such an inquiry “would be just as meaningless as to inquire: is a particular point within a circle called the center due to its equidistance from the periphery or is its equidistance from the periphery due to its being the center? The dichotomy of the holy and the good is alien to the spirit of the great prophets. To their thinking, the righteousness of God is inseparable from His being.” Heschel, GSM, 17. 9 Hendrik Wagenwoort, Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980). 10 Wagenvoort, Pietas, 3–4. 11 Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I 2,4. Quoted in Wagenvoort, Pietas, 11. 12 James D. Garrison, Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press), 1. 13 Garrison, Pietas, 21. 14 Ibid., 33. 15 Ibid., 37. 16 Augustine, City of God, ed. David Knowles (London: Penguin, 1972), para. 10.1. 17 Augustine, City of God, 4.23.2, quoted in Garrison, Pietas, 12. 18 Augustine, Confessions and Enchiridion, ed. Albert C. Outler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), para. 2. 19 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, quoted in Garrison, Pietas, 3. 20 Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, New rev. edn, s.v. “pious.” 21 Garrison, Pietas, 4. 22 Philip Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria, Introduction by Theodore G. Tappert (Fortress Press, 1964), Sec. 2. 23 Tappert, Introduction to Pia Desideria, 1. 24 Spener, Pia Desideria, Sec. 3. 25 Lewis Bayley, The Practice of Piety, Directing a Christian How to Walk, that He May Please God (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1995; reprint of the 1842 edition), xxxiii. 26 Bayley, The Practice of Piety, xxxv. 27 Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 3. 28 Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 45. 29 John Calvin, On the Christian Faith: Selections from the Institutes, Commentaries and Tracts, ed. John T. McNeill (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957). 30 Calvin, Institutes, 1.2.1. 31 Ibid., 3.19.2. 32 Ibid., 1.2.1.

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33 B. A. Gerrish, preface to John Calvin, Writings on Pastoral Piety, ed. Elsie Anne McKee (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), xvi. 34 Lucien Joseph Richard, The Spirituality of John Calvin (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1974), 120. 35 Calvin, Writings, 272–3. 36 Ibid., 274. 37 Calvin, Institutes, III.20. 38 Serene Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 132. 39 Elsie Anne McKee, General introduction to Calvin, Writings, 5. 40 Richard, Calvin, 98. 41 B. A. Gerrish, ed., Reformatio Perennis: Essays on Calvin and the Reformation in Honor of Ford Lewis Battles (Pittsburgh: The Pickwick Press, 1981), 68. Gerrish makes his argument in reference also to Schleiermacher, who he argues uses piety in a similarly regulative manner to that of Calvin. Contrary to Calvin, however, Schleiermacher does not approach the question of the limitations of speculation from the problem of sin: “Speculation is to be rigorously excluded, not because it is perverse, or presumptuous, or futile, but because it arrives at its talk about God by a quite different route than does dogmatics. And the concept of piety functions as a dogmatic limit simply because a specific modification of piety is what dogmatics is all about: it is ‘the study of religious affections.’ ” Gerrish, Reformatio Perennis, 73. 42 Calvin, Institutes, quoted in Gerrish, Reformatio Perennis, 74–5. 43 Jones, Calvin, 124. 44 Calvin, Institutes, quoted in Garrison, Pietas, 48. 45 Heschel, MNA, 273. The same idea is also acknowledged in God in Search of Man, where Heschel writes, “A pious man is usually pictured as a sort of bookworm, a person who thrives among the pages of ancient tomes, and to whom life with its longings, sadness, and tensions, is but a footnote in a scholarly commentary on the Bible.” Heschel, GSM, 317. 46 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), vol. II, 86. 47 Gabriel Fackre, “Ecumenical Admonitions,” Christian Century 116/23 (28 August 1999): 818. 48 Kenneth W. Chalker, “Mainline Faith, with Passion,” Christian Century 116/28 (20 October 1999): 1003. Emphasis added. 49 Edward Farley, Requiem for a Lost Piety: The Contemporary Search for the Christian Life (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 17. 50 Donald G. Bloesch, “The Crisis of Piety,” in The Crisis of Piety: Essays Towards a Theology of the Christian Life (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1968), 37–48. 51 John N. Sheveland, Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2011). 52 Sheveland, Piety and Responsibility, 2. 53 Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams, Introduction to Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), xxiv. 54 Rowan Williams, “Belief and Theology: Some Core Questions,” an interview in God’s Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation, edited by Rupert Shortt (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 3–4.

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55 Williams, “Belief and Theology,” 23. 56 Rowan Williams, “Theological Integrity,” in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 13. 57 Rowan Williams, “What is Catholic Orthodoxy?” in Rowan Williams and Kenneth Leech, eds, Essays Catholic and Radical: A Jubilee Group Symposium for the 150th Anniversary of the Beginning of the Oxford Movement 1833–1983 (London: Bowerdean Press, 1983), 17. 58 Mike Higton, Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams (London: SCM Press, 2004), 71. 59 Representative publications of the interest in practices of faith include Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, eds, Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002); Dorothy C. Bass, ed., Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997); and Christian Scharen, Faith as a Way of Life (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008). 60 Bass and Volf, Practicing Theology, 3. 61 Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass, “A Theological Understanding of Christian Practices,” in Bass and Volf, Practicing Theology, 18. 62 Edward Kaplan, Introduction to Samuel Dresner, Heschel, Hasidism, and Halakha (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), xii. 63 Tzvee Zahavy, “Jewish Piety,” The Blackwell Companion to Judaism, edited by Jacob Neusner and Alan J. Avery-Peck (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 181–90. 64 Encyclopedia of Judaism, s.v. “piety.” 65 Jacob B. Agus, “The Character of Jewish Piety,” The Reconstructionist 8/5 (17 April 1942): 14–18.

Part Two

Heschel’s Intellectual Foundations

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3

The Range of Heschel’s Theology

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Politics

I  Excursus: The Heideggerian backdrop Heschel’s phenomenological study of piety is not, by any means, an isolated project, but takes its place in the broad currents of contemporaneous intellectual activity both in philosophy and the religious sciences. Conversely, the range of his influence is likewise strikingly extensive, reaching across disciplinary boundaries and faith traditions. Before examining in detail the development of piety in his theology, therefore, it will be helpful to take stock of the breadth of his own work, and the manner in which it has been received both appreciatively and critically, in both Jewish and Christian contexts. Perhaps most compelling for our purposes is that while Heschel’s phenomenological studies are grounded intellectually in the agnostic and even atheistic strains of early German phenomenology, he uses those methods to move toward an overt theism which becomes the ontological grounding for this method. In due time, we will examine more carefully the explicit sources of Heschel’s theological method in such thinkers as Dilthey, Husserl, and Scheler, and the theistic commitments which distinguish his approach. Antecedent to that consideration, however, it will be enlightening to take note of certain convergences and distinctions between Heschel and the thought of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) as a way of indicating the broader intellectual environment of the time, for the overlap of their respective projects is instructive both for understanding the breadth and significance of Heschel’s work, and for highlighting the particularity of the conclusions that he draws. It is clear that Heschel knew Heidegger’s own writings (he occasionally refers indirectly to such Heideggerian concepts as “being-in-the-world,” if only to refute them, especially in Who Is Man?), but he does not develop any sustained engagement with Heidegger nor acknowledge any direct influence. Moreover, given Heidegger’s infamous involvement with National Socialism in the 1930s, Heschel was evidently deeply suspicious of him intellectually, and so would have naturally felt a great reluctance toward making Heidegger an interlocutor.1 Beyond the unjust limitations that are often projected onto Heschel as being too much the polemicist or too little the theologian, what one in fact finds in a comparison

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with Heidegger is that there are key themes that establish a certain parallelism of concern—albeit limited—between the two thinkers. As David Novak remarks, having first observed that Heschel “detested Heidegger for both theoretical and moral reasons,” these two thinkers nevertheless “were mutatis mutandis attempting to come out from under what is now called ‘ontotheology’ and its whole legacy.”2 (Novak likewise notes that both thinkers were resistant to Husserl’s indifference to the phenomenologist’s existential situation: Heschel with his skepticism of its supposed “impartiality,” Heidegger with his insistence on the contextuality of In-der-Welt-Sein.) Such comparisons with Heidegger thus help to place Heschel in a broader context of cultural criticism, though one must remain aware that his theological commitments also result in certain major divergences from Heidegger. Our purpose here is not to analyze the contours of Heidegger’s thought in detail, but merely to draw out certain key elements that will help to establish its particular points of intersection with Heschel. In the first instance, Heidegger’s concern to examine the prereflective structure of religious life betrays a strikingly similar set of philosophical commitments to those of what Heschel would later call “depth theology.” In the larger arena of Heidegger’s thought, his principal concern was that Western philosophy—and the wider culture with it—had become preoccupied with the ontic question of what exists, at the expense of examining the ontological questions of what it means to exist. This was not, in his thinking, a merely academic distinction: the consequences of such a distortion are nothing less than a pervasive sense that life lacks meaning, that nothing really matters, and that the world has become “disenchanted” (to use Weber’s well-known description). As an antidote to such a sense of loss, Heidegger was interested to find a way to get at what he considered to be the primal network of meaning in human life that precedes any philosophical or scientific analysis: although philosophy had perhaps lost interest in or even awareness of it, human beings do enter into the world in specific culturally determined contexts that are laden with patterns of meaning which are experienced as a given rather than anything of our own creation. Resisting the theoretical impulses of modern philosophy, and especially its neoKantian and German Idealistic manifestations, Heidegger saw in the way human beings relate to the world a facticity, or “thrownness,” suggesting that even before we begin to reason about our existential circumstances, there is a structure of meaning that both precedes and follows us. This meaning is not, however, accessible to purely abstract reason, for it is experienced as immanent in a way that cannot be theorized, but must be approached as a phenomenon of life that is given and which therefore commands our response—hence the phenomenological approach, which seeks to understand the facticity of life as it is, unearthing and analyzing the structures of meaning as we receive and experience them. Heidegger’s seminal work, Sein und Zeit (1927, Eng. trans. Being and Time, 1962) is an attempt to explicate this dimension of human existence in concrete terms, exploring the nature of Being from the perspective of the one being for whom it matters, namely human being (obliquely designated as “Dasein,” which is at the same time not human being per se and yet nothing other than human being). It is interesting to note that this work appeared in the very year that Heschel arrived in Berlin to begin his own doctoral studies at the university: given the quick and influential reception the work had in continental philosophy, its philosophical

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and cultural critique certainly formed a part of the intellectual atmosphere in which Heschel pursued his own phenomenological interests.3 In any case, one of the key issues that Heidegger raises—namely, how Dasein in its being is connected to the existential question of whether to exist or not—does in fact become the occasion for one of the few direct responses that Heschel ever made to Heidegger. In Who Is Man?, Heschel explicitly quotes Heidegger’s rhetorical question, “Has the Dasein, as such, ever freely decided and will it ever be able to decide as to whether to come into existence or not?”4 Heschel’s raising of this question indicates the common concern between the two thinkers for grappling with the nature of human being more fully, in order to combat what Heschel goes on to describe in quite Heideggerian terms as “the loss of the sense of significant being.” The answer that Heschel gives to Heidegger’s question, however, is also demonstrative of the very different conclusions toward which their reflections lead—Heidegger in an essentially agnostic direction, and Heschel in a theocentric one. Heschel insists that the answer was given “long ago” in the act of creation: “It is against your will that you are born, it is against your will that you live, and it is against your will that you are bound to give account.” In another reference to Heidegger, Heschel says, “I was not thrown in to being. My being is obeying the saying, ‘Let there be!’ ” Such a responsiveness to the command to be, says Heschel, is a “cosmic piety” that, as will become apparent, results in the conclusion that “the ‘ought’ precedes the ‘is,’ ” which has important consequences for Heschel’s account of the ethical dimensions of living. Returning to Heidegger himself, we might move on to note that his concern for the concrete meaning of existing had a particular focus in his phenomenological studies of religion—and it is here that a strong convergence of interest with Heschel’s own work emerges, especially the concept of depth theology. In Heidegger’s lecture series on Paul from 1920–21, for example, he was at pains to demonstrate the importance of the apostle’s conversion as the precursor to any theoretical explication of what he had encountered. For Heidegger, as for Heschel, it is at this prereflective stage of religion, where one encounters the rawness and immediacy of God’s presence, that one finds the authentic reasons for ordering one’s life toward God, an intentionality upon which every other religious thought and commitment is ultimately based. The distinction between the “pre-faith-full” experience of the holy, and formally developed religious faith, is even more sharply drawn by Heidegger in “Phenomenology and Theology,” a lecture he gave in  1927. In this essay, he argues that while theology is, properly speaking, a positive science whose positum is “Christianness” (i.e. Christian faith), phenomenological philosophy has an entirely different object of study: the unbelieving (preconceptual) human experience of God that is sublated (aufgehoben) into the structures of faith.5 Although Heschel does not make the same technical differentiation between theology and philosophy as does Heidegger, his instinct is similar in that he too understands that for the fullness of religion to be grasped and appreciated, one must first attend carefully to its pretheological origins. As Paolo Gamberini notes in his study of Heschel, Pathos e Logos, “We find a parallel to what our author says in what Martin Heidegger called pre-believing existence.”6 So, for example, in a 1960 essay on “Depth Theology,” Heschel has this to say about such prebelieving religious experience:

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety Religion has become “religion”—institution, symbol, theology. It does not affect the pre-theological situation, the pre-symbolic depth of existence. To redirect the trend, we must lay bare what is involved in religious existence; we must recover the situations which both precede and correspond to the theological formulations; we must recall the questions which religious doctrines are trying to answer, the antecedents of religious commitment, the presuppositions of faith. . . . The primary issue of theology is pre-theological; it is the total situation of man and his attitudes toward life and the world.7

Moreover, in Heidegger, the emphasis on the givenness of structures of meaning reflects a larger program of cultural criticism that Benjamin Crowe has described as a general critique of the underlying “subjectivism” of modernity.8 For Heidegger, the truly distinctive characteristic of modernity is that human beings are thought of as subjects, meaning that we seek to understand the world by making ourselves the referential center, and the world exterior to us is regarded as an object whose value or meaning can only be established by an instrumental definition of its relationship to our own needs and purposes. Meaning and value, in other words, are subordinated to human interests. An effect of such an instrumentalism is that there is no room for a sense that any form of transcendence has a claim upon us. As Heidegger writes, All transcendence, be it ontological or theological, is represented relative to the subject-object correlation. Through the rebellion of subjectivity, even theological transcendence, and so the beingest of beings [das Seiendste des Seienden]—one says of it typically enough, “being”—moves into a kind of objectivity, namely, into that of the subjectivity of moral-practical faith.9

Of particular importance here is the contention that even theological meaning—that is, the nature of the divine/human relationship—comes to be understood as determined from the standpoint of human subjectivity, so that transcendence loses its power to lay claim upon our purposes and identity. Heidegger posits that such a focus is in effect a “deification [Vergötzung]” of human culture, making it an idolatrous substitute for the transcendent. Here again, a parallel with Heschel emerges, in that he will make much of a similar kind of analysis, and in fact one of his most pivotal arguments which we will explore at some length is that the commonly received subject/object correlation between humanity and God has to be reversed if it is to be faithful to the biblical revelation: human beings must come to know themselves as the object of God’s subjective concern, and to understand that they exist as objects of that concern and so are called into a relationship of accountability and responsibility.10 Suffice it to say for now, however, that the issue of accurately locating the locus of subjectivity in human existence is a critical issue for both Heschel and Heidegger, and represents a further point of intersection. The manner in which the two thinkers approach the ontological status of the phenomenality of religious life represents yet another convergence—in this case, an especially significant one for the current study since it supports the importance of piety in Heschel’s methodology. For Heidegger, lying behind his phenomenological study of religion is an affirmation of an ontological realism that is at the core of his method.

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The realism in this case is not in regard to the being of God in and of itself (indeed, Heidegger remains essentially agnostic on that question). Rather, the realism is about the “a priori domain of meaning that structures human life.”11 To put it in quite simple terms, the phenomenon of believing individuals, living a religious life that is structured around a certain set of communally traditioned patterns and practices, is itself the existing fact upon which the analysis of religion is based. This realm of meaning is independent of specific individuals, and it is experienced as an objectively given gift in which the reality of God is tacit though not explicit. As Crowe summarizes, Heidegger’s realism is semantic rather than metaphysical; that is to say, the essential issue is not whether religion refers to a “mind-independent reality,” but that religious experience “embodies the fact that religious meaning is imparted or discovered, rather than created.”12 Such a realism is necessary to take account of the way in which religious faith is experienced immanently, and the internal structure of its underlying form. Or put negatively, the point is that any antirealist theory of religion simply has no way to make sense of the phenomenon of the human experience of transcendence or the conviction of faith. For Heidegger, such an ontological realism is properly understood as based in the phenomenology of religion and not the science of theology, because it brackets the question of God’s independent existence (see again his lecture, “Phenomenology and Theology”). An essential implication of this statement is that the philosophical articulation of the structure of the dawn of religious consciousness is not to be based on the study of doctrinal commitments (which is the realm of theology), but rather on the study of “exemplary phenomena” (religions’ attitudes, activities, and practices) that provide the route into analyzing the intelligibility of the system of meaning which they are meant to embody. Like his analysis of Dasein and its “being-in-the world” in Being and Time, Heidegger’s understanding of religious life is similarly founded upon the idea that it is characterized as a way of being (in this case, religiosity) which describes the inhabiting of a certain “nexus [Zusammenhang]” of meaning.13 This location of the core meaning of religious life can also be described as a “noetic context,” or it might also be termed a “habitus”: whatever the vocabulary and subtle distinctions between them, the essential thing to note is that what provides the source of religious meaning is a specific way of life, enacted within a defined behavioral context. The anticipation here of the emphasis we will see Heschel put on piety is significant, for it helps to indicate the formal methodological program that lies behind that emphasis: piety is a life lived within a nexus of religious activity in such a way that it discloses the content of that meaning. Piety itself has an “ontological realism” that presupposes the intelligibility and coherence of the religious orientation it establishes, and while Heschel will (unlike Heidegger) extend that realism to the existence of God, his route for doing so passes through a phenomenological analysis of piety. Moreover, a further significant overlap between Heidegger’s and Heschel’s methodological program is that having committed themselves to a phenomenological point of entry into studying the nature of religion, they each turn toward certain representative (and often mystical) exemplars of religious life as a focus for their investigations. For Heschel, it is not only the biblical prophets who serve this function, but also mentors from his own youth and the historic Hasidic masters such as the Baal Shem Tov or Kotzker Rebbe (cf. A Passion for Truth); for Heidegger, it is the lineage

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of Paul, Augustine, and Luther, or Christian mystics such as Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Meister Eckhart. (And, we might note, both thinkers share a great spiritual and intellectual indebtedness to Kierkegaard.) In the case of Heidegger’s subjects, an essential characteristic of each of their experiences is that religious life is received through a break in the pattern of their former existence, and then lived out through certain determinate attitudes and practices.14 What is of particular interest to Heidegger is the givenness or “objecthood” of God in such concrete religious experiences, a givenness that is encountered by the mystic as something exterior to his or her own being which asserts itself into the human arena, and to which the individual must respond. The living out of the consequences of such a mystical encounter becomes an enacted understanding of the immanent sense of religious life, such that God is made present within the beata vita: To interpret this as subjectivism is a misunderstanding. The issue is the conditions of access to God. God is not made, rather the self achieves the enactment conditions of the experience of God. In the effort regarding the life of the self, God is there. God as object in the sense of the facies cordis [face of the heart] exists [wirkt] in the authentic life of a human being.15

Now, if the conditions of the experience of God are enacted through religious behavior as Heidegger describes, then that behavior itself becomes the ground for thinking about what it means to be religious, because only such behavior gives access to the contours of what such a life is like. Here, then, is the anticipation of Heschel’s understanding of piety as both the context in which human beings encounter God’s pathos and their sympathetic turning to God which forms the basis for their spiritual and ethical lives. An essential point for both thinkers is thus the givenness of the content of religious life: it is not the product of our own reason or imagination, but is experienced as an external interruption of life that changes its direction irrevocably. Ironically perhaps, Heidegger himself also understands piety (Frömmigkeit) to have a decisive role in religious reflection—ironic because in his case, piety is not theistically focused, but philosophically. Heidegger once wrote, “Questioning is the piety of thinking.”16 By this statement, he wanted to get at the idea that rather than the concerns of speculative reason, the philosopher is more appropriately concerned with the “earlier” and “prior” facticity of human life. As beings who are thrown into a world that is neither of our devising nor our own choice, we must concern ourselves with that which shows itself to us as the world in which we live. Piety is the responsible and responsive interrogation of life about the meaning of that world (and not another), so pious questioning in this sense is a kind of intellectual obedience which directs us toward the real sources of meaning, and ultimately toward the holy. Indeed, in a study of Heidegger’s philosophy of religion, Ben Vedder describes piety as an organizing concept that “runs throughout the entirety of [Heidegger’s] work.”17 The sense in which piety appears, however, is not in any of its usual filial or spiritual associations. Rather, piety expresses an obligation in regard to the act of thinking: one  must be obedient to the necessity that thinking should take into account the world as it is actually given. Listening thus becomes the basic gesture

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of pious thinking, for it is what first engages us with the world and gives rise to our authentic questions about it. This brief excursus into Heidegger’s thought shows that although the primary issues are not identical with those of Heschel, they do overlap in ways that suggest Heidegger as an intellectual backdrop. As such, Heidegger’s work can provide a helpful point of reference in understanding the methodological stance that lies behind Heschel’s own program, encouraging as wide an attentiveness as possible to its philosophical significance. So, for instance, the cultural critique that was at the heart of Heidegger’s project—challenging the subjectivist assumptions of modernity and the resulting instrumentality of our sense of value—is also a fundamental element of Heschel’s own driving sense of purpose. And Heidegger’s insistence upon a realism in regard to religious life, in which religious meaning is given rather than created, is likewise a shared conviction, despite its ultimate mystery. Yet at the end of the day, important questions remain in Heidegger’s account of religion that Heschel will answer in his own deeply theistic way: questions of why there is something, rather than nothing; why we experience religion as commanding our response; and why the experience of God is ultimately an experience of ineffable transcendence. As Heschel himself wrote in response to Heidegger, “Being is obedience, a response. ‘Thou art’ precedes ‘I am.’ I am because I am called upon to be.”18

II  The corpus and influence of Heschel’s work Heschel exerted a profound influence on the American religious scene from his post at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City from 1945 until his death—an influence which is now documented through the recent deposit of his papers at the library of Duke University. To the broader community, he is perhaps best known for his active involvement in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, and for his more accessible books such as a collection of essays published as The Insecurity of Freedom (1959/1966) and Who Is Man?, originally given as the West Lectures at Stanford University in 1963. Within ecumenical and interfaith circles, he is often acknowledged as having exerted a significant influence at the Second Vatican Council, advocating many of the perspectives on Jewish-Christian relations such as the inviolability of the Jewish tradition which were articulated in Nostra Aetate (1965), the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions.19 Within more academic theological circles, Heschel is celebrated for having united the insight of his Hasidic roots in Eastern Europe with the intellectual rigor of modern western philosophy (especially Husserlian phenomenology), for having contributed a monumental study of biblical prophecy in The Prophets (1962), and for having produced the twin works on the philosophy of religion, Man Is Not Alone (1951) and God in Search of Man (1955). Within the Jewish community, Heschel is especially noted for the spiritual insight and inspiration of works which have been significant sources of renewal in contemporary Jewish life, such as The Sabbath (1951) and A Passion for Truth (1973); the many essays and lectures delivered throughout his life (many of which

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were collected by his daughter, Susannah Heschel, in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity20); and a monumental two-volume chronicle (in Hebrew) of rabbinic learning, Torah min Hashamayim (1962/65), only recently translated into English by Gordon Tucker as Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (2007). Nor is Heschel’s work limited to a primarily English-speaking audience, as various articles and books in the history of Jewish life and thought have also appeared in a number of languages (including German, Hebrew, and Yiddish), as well as translations of his works into Polish, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Japanese.21 Heschel’s stature is also noticeable within the Christian context, and he was included among the ranks of the most prominent theologians of his era. During his lifetime, for example, his international stature as a theologian led to his being included in Theologians at Work, a collection of representative interviews with contemporary theologians, selfconsciously modeled on the Paris Review conversations with well-known literary authors.22 Similarly, he was asked to participate in an international congress on the theology of renewal in Toronto in  1967, together with such theologians as Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Etienne Gilson, Henri de Lubac, Paul Ricœur, and Jaroslav Pelikan.23 Heschel’s theological contributions have been studied in numerous articles, books, and conferences, through which one can observe that his work has been a support for a renewed spiritual devotion, both within Judaism and Christianity. Many of his books are still in print some 50 years after their initial publication (especially Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, Who Is Man?, and The Sabbath), and his work on The Prophets continues to appear on course syllabi in both Jewish and Christian seminary courses on the Hebrew scriptures. His works are read by Christians and Jews alike: Pope Paul VI, for example, provoked some astonishment when he approvingly cited Heschel’s God in Search of Man in a general audience on 31 January 1973 shortly after Heschel’s death,24 having already commended them to be read by “everyone” in a 1971 audience (at which Heschel himself was present).25 His works continue to be quoted frequently in the context of sermons, newsletters from synagogues and churches, and devotional materials (as a brief search of the internet quickly illustrates),26 and the “Speaking of Faith” series on National Public Radio focused on Heschel’s legacy in a broadcast interview with Arnold Eisen (Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary) first aired in  2008.27 The occasion in  2007 of the centenary of Heschel’s birth sparked renewed interest in him as well, including two international conferences (one in the United States and one in Poland), whose published proceedings provided a fresh appraisal of his life and work.28 The year also marked the first paperback edition of The Ineffable Name of God: Man, an English translation of Heschel’s Yiddish poems written during his university years between 1927 and 1933. Beyond such general influences, however, one can note specific areas in which Heschel’s work has been incorporated into more formal academic theological reflection, which can be roughly grouped around the three themes of Jewish-Christian dialogue, biblical theology, and explorations of divine passibility. In regard to the first of these, Heschel is especially recognized for the contribution he made to JewishChristian relations, not only by his participation in the Second Vatican Council, but through continuing engagement in conferences, organizations, and publications

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which helped to usher in the new era of understanding between these two traditions. He maintained close ties with a number of Christian theologians (especially those at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, most notably Reinhold Niebuhr), and was appointed the Harry Emerson Fosdick Visiting Professor at Union Seminary in  1965, the first non-Christian theologian to be so named.29 During his activities in the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s, he was closely allied with other religious leaders, among them Martin Luther King, Jr. and Daniel Berrigan, SJ, participating in such interfaith organizations as “Clergy Concerned about the War.”30 Heschel developed and defended a belief in religious pluralism (including all religions, not just Judaism and Christianity), which he believed had to be identified as not just an accident of human history, but as the will of God: “We must insist upon loyalty to the unique and holy treasures of our own tradition and at the same time acknowledge that in this aeon religious diversity may be the providence of God.”31 As this quotation indicates, however, his idea of pluralism was not that there should be an undifferentiated melding of traditions into one another, but a resolute adherence to the piety of one’s own faith while regarding other traditions with openness and respect (which included, in his mind, an end to the idea of Christian mission to the Jews—hence his fervent participation in the development of Nostra Aetate). The sense of urgency he felt that each person should remain loyal to his or her own tradition was born, in part, out of his concern about a crisis common to all religions in respect to the loss of a sense of transcendence in human life, especially amid the pressing social issues of racial justice, world peace, and human rights: “Men all over the world have a dreadful sense in common, the fear of absolute evil, the fear of total annihilation. An apocalyptic monster has descended upon the world, and there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”32 Under such circumstances, it was Heschel’s position that the encouragement of godliness of any sort among the peoples of the world was essential to human survival, and that the need for interfaith cooperation in addressing problems common to all humanity far outweighed any sectarian particularity. A second area of Heschel’s influence is in biblical theology, especially his work on the prophets and development of the idea of God’s “pathos,” or transitive concern for humanity. The French scholar André Neher, for example, explicitly acknowledges his debt to Heschel in his L’Essence du prophétisme, borrowing heavily on the idea of pathos to describe the object of prophetic knowledge: “Biblical prophecy did not have for its object the decanting of the idea of God; it had for its purpose the knowledge of the pathos of God.”33 As Neher makes use of the idea of pathos, it describes a reality prior to the prophetic experience, which reaches out and apprehends the prophet. Unlike a soothsayer or magician, therefore, who conjures the divine presence into human experience, the biblical prophet encounters the divine call reaching into human life, seeking relationship with and imparting understanding to human beings. Clemens Thoma, making reference to both Heschel and Neher in A Christian Theology of Judaism, argues that the sense of partnership between God and humanity shared by these two scholars forms the strongest point of contact between Jewish and Christian theology, calling attention to “what is probably the most moving belief held in common by Jews and Christians: God is our partner, even in suffering, distress, and death.”34

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In addition to pathos forming a point of contact between the Jewish and Christian traditions, there is a more subtle convergence which also emerges out of Heschel’s biblical theology: the incarnational aspect of Judaism. Jacob Neusner, in a study of the character of divinity in formative Judaism, analyzes in what sense classical Judaism could be said to have an “incarnational” theology.35 Although his study is not directly related to Heschel, it does form a context in which to understand some of the “theomorphic” directions in which Heschel’s understanding of humanity’s relationship to God moves (and which were shaped by Heschel’s own study of the same classical rabbinic texts). Taking as his starting point the biblical affirmation that God created human beings in the “image and likeness” of God (Gen. 1:26), Neusner advances the thesis that to the extent that the rabbis treated God as a personality, they “represented God in the flesh by analogy of the human person—hence, accomplished for Judaism, from antiquity to modern times, the incarnation of God.”36 As a striking illustration of his point, he cites the following text from the midrash Genesis Rabba: Said R. Hoshaiah, “When the Holy One, blessed be he, came to create the first man, the ministering angels mistook him [for God, since man was in God’s image], and wanted to say before him, ‘Holy, [holy, holy is the Lord of hosts] . . .’ ” (Gen. R. VIII:X).37

The intense anthropological meaning which Heschel likewise assigns to the creation account, and the subsequent covenant which God establishes with human beings through the extension of God’s pathos, make a similar intimation of the intimacy which exists between the creator and creature, especially as it is expressed in the traditional concept of the Shekhinah, or Divine Presence. To the extent that Heschel emphasizes this mystical dwelling of God within the people of Israel, his theology may be said to exhibit an “incarnational” aspect. Michael Wyschogrod, in an essay on “A Jewish Perspective on Incarnation,” writes of this incarnational dimension: “It is not identical with Christian incarnation. It is a less concentrated incarnation, an incarnation into a people spread out in time and place, with its saints and sinners, its moments of obedience and disobedience. But I do think that he who touches this people, touches God and perhaps not altogether symbolically.”38 Although this idea is obviously not the same claim as is advanced about incarnation in the christology of Christian faith, yet it is not so dissimilar from the pneumatological claim of human sanctification by the indwelling of the Spirit, and it is in this sense that “incarnation” could be said to represent a rather unexpected convergence—if not an identity—between the two traditions, especially as it is represented in Heschel’s own theology. Ulrich Mauser, for example, argues in Gottesbild und Menschwerdung that there is a continuity of incarnational revelation between the two biblical testaments, grounding the comprehension of humankind as created in the image of God. Making reference to Heschel’s The Prophets, he draws out the anthropomorphic treatment of God throughout the Hebrew prophetic tradition, which he argues is an essential precursor to the explicit incarnational revelation in Christ.39 Of course, one would not want to push too far the idea that Judaism contains an idea of God’s incarnation, for clearly what is meant in Christian theology by this term is radically more developed and explicitly defined in the person of Jesus Christ. Yet at the same time, one should

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not enforce an absolute distinction either, for there is certainly an essential continuity between the God of Israel in the Hebrew covenants (even understood in Jewish terms) and the sanctification of the members of the church of the New Covenant. A third significant influence which Heschel’s biblical theology has had is its emphasis on the importance of the Sabbath as the meeting point of the eternal with the temporal. Heschel had a rather singular sense of the relation of human beings to time, arguing that it is in the realm of time rather than space that we must find God, for it is through the variations of time rather than the monotony of space that the holy enters into human life. Heschel describes this temporal importance as a “sacred architecture,” an idea which Pope John Paul II made use of in his 1998 Apostolic Letter on the observance of Sunday, Dies Domini. Considering the manner in which Sunday as a “day of rest” interrupts the often oppressive cycle of work, and thereby reminds us of the dependence of each person and of the whole cosmos on God, John Paul directly cites Heschel when he writes, “The ‘Sabbath’ has therefore been interpreted in a suggestive manner as a determining element in the kind of ‘sacred architecture’ of time which characterizes the biblical revelation.”40 A similar use of Heschel’s biblical theology of the Sabbath has been made in Jürgen Moltmann’s deployment of the idea in his studies of creation theology, in particular God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God. In this work, Moltmann uses Heschel’s idea of the Sabbath to structure a sensitivity for the “feast of creation,” taking the idea that “When the sabbath is sanctified, a time is sanctified which is there for the whole creation. When the sabbath is celebrated, it is celebrated for all created being.”41 Perhaps the most widespread use of Heschel’s theology is in relation to the possibility of God’s suffering with and on behalf of creation. Such references to Heschel are again based on his idea of the divine pathos, extended in this case to emphasize more fully its implication that God is directly affected by human affairs and responds passionately to them. The language of pathos, for example, figures prominently in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theodramatik, where he explores the dramatic soteriology enacted from within God’s pathos.42 Citing Heschel directly (especially from The Prophets), von Balthasar draws from him the idea of “God’s passionate initiative (his ‘pathos’) on behalf of his creation, his saving plan, his chosen ones.” Echoing Heschel, von Balthasar says that pathos is not an irrational emotion, but “identical with God’s ethos.” The prophet is one who is “sym-pathetically open, by divine design, to God’s divine pathos toward his world. What such a man experiences, thinks and utters comes from God to the world; it does not ascend from the world to God.” Hence, the prophet feels rent asunder in his mediatorial role.43 The divine pathos is more fully deployed by Moltmann in The Crucified God, where he appeals to Heschel’s concept of pathos to support his own description of God’s suffering for us.44 (One might note, however, than von Balathasar objects to the manner of Moltmann’s appropriation of Heschel, saying that “God’s pathos has nothing whatever to do with any mythological suffering, dying and rising God. .  .  . Rather, it is his ‘moral abhorance’ of the failure of his people to respond to his covenant.”45) Moltmann reports that as he was struggling with the theological implications of ascribing suffering to God, he came across a copy of Heschel’s doctoral dissertation (Die Prophetie) in the theological library of the University of Tübingen, which served not

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necessarily as a “foundational source” for Moltmann’s thinking, but as a “reinforcement” of his developing ideas.46 Reflecting in History and the Triune God on the influence of Heschel’s theology on his own work, Moltmann writes, “When I began to grapple critically with this axiom of impassibility, which is more philosophical than biblical, I discovered parallels that I would never have dreamed of. My first discovery was the Jewish conception of the pathos of God with which Abraham Heschel had interpreted the message of the prophets, and the rabbinic and kabbalistic doctrine of the Shekinah, the indwelling of God in the persecuted and suffering of the people of Israel . . .”47 The challenge, of course, was for Moltmann to situate his theology of a suffering God in relation to the classical axiom of a divine impassibility.48 In a section of The Crucified God on “The pathos of God and the sympatheia of men,” Moltmann describes Heschel’s position as a “dipolar” concept of God, in which God is both free and not subject to any fate, yet through pathos committed to Israel in the covenant. The freely given pathos of God is the means by which “God transfers his being into the history of his relationship and his covenant with man.”49 Moltmann stresses the covenant, then, as the means of understanding the historicity of God, founded as it is on the pathos of God reciprocated by the sympathetic identification of humanity with it. Moltmann later extended his reflections on the passibility of God, setting them in a larger trinitarian context in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God. In a chapter on “The Passion of God,” he again made explicit use of Heschel in a section on “The Divine Pathos.” Following Heschel, he distinguishes the capricious passions of pagan gods from the convenanted pathos of God for the people of Israel: “Creation, liberation, covenant, history and redemption spring from the pathos of God.”50 God’s freedom is described by the Bible as the free relationship of a passionate participation, an observation for which Moltmann credits Heschel as the one “who perceived for the first time that the divine pathos is the appropriate hermeneutical point of reference for the anthropomorphic utterances of God in the Old Testament.”51 In addition to his influence on Moltmann, Heschel has also been part of a larger examination of the question of God’s passibility in a wide variety of theological works.52 In the work of the Korean theologian Jung Young Lee, for example, Heschel’s biblical understanding of God’s active involvement in human affairs—even participation in suffering and sorrow—is used to demonstrate the incompatibility of a doctrine of creation with the idea of divine impassibility.53 Following Heschel, Lee argues that this divine passibility cannot be apprehended by an analogy with human being, but only through the divine engagement with human beings as it is revealed in scripture. A more skeptical position in relation to this “biblical” theology, however, is taken by Marcel Sarot, who argues that the supposed link between a biblical theology of creation and divine passibility (versus the supposedly Greek origins of the idea of divine impassibility) is overstated. He points out that there are a number of contemporary theologians (such as the Dominican, Herbert McCabe) who resist a divine pathos precisely on biblical rather than philosophical grounds.54 Whatever the theological arguments for or against a divine passibility, however, note that in Heschel’s understanding, piety is the human counterpart to God’s pathos, the means of our response to and engagement with the covenanted relationship desired by God. As a consequence, the essential relationality of piety both takes a specific form in

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each faith tradition, and at the same time is a universal dimension of religious life and consciousness. Hence, one could argue that in each of the areas of Heschel’s greatest influence—interfaith dialogue, biblical theology, and concepts of divine passibility— piety lies just beneath the surface, articulating a point of common human experience and response to the divine initiative.

III  A variety of critical assessments Despite the significant philosophical and theological influence of Heschel which we have observed up to this point and the pivotal role that piety plays in it, the previous critical assessments of Heschel’s work have been extraordinarily varied, even contradictory, in their reading of the substance of his work. This divergence is even reflected in the attitude of his colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he apparently held his position as a professor of both ethics and mysticism rather uneasily. We are told that the school, a leader of the Conservative Movement in American Judaism, seemed unable to accommodate fully either Heschel’s roots in the more extreme Hasidic tradition of Eastern Europe, or his more progressive attitudes toward understanding Jewish observance, and so prevented him from teaching the rabbinic theology which was his personal specialty.55 Even so, within the seminary Heschel developed a cadre of devoted students who willingly adopted the mantle of “disciple.” Indeed, many of these students later became his chief interpreters, and have championed his work through their studies of it: Fritz Rothschild, Edward K. Kaplan, Samuel Dresner, Harold Kasimow, and Maurice Friedman. Rabbi Chaïm Weiner, for example, writing in 1994 on Heschel’s poetic language, began his article by saying, “I consider Rabbi Heschel as my master. . . . Rabbi Heschel was the inspiration of a whole generation of rabbis and spiritual masters throughout the world.”56 Yet his work also received stinging, even dismissive criticism from other readers, and so one is left with the paradox of a writer who was lauded in some quarters as a master and vilified in others as a pretender. One senses the need, therefore, to take stock of the variety of critical assessments already made of Heschel’s work, in order to gain some perspective on how a more focused elucidation of the theme of piety might represent a significant departure from previous assessments. The description which follows makes a survey of how Heschel has been read in the past and by whom, indicating typical approaches through specific citations and demonstrating the diversity of both authors and viewpoints. The interest here is not merely to catalogue previous efforts to understand Heschel’s writing, but also to account for the extremes in perspective which those efforts have taken. The strength of reaction to Heschel is itself in need of understanding, for by untangling what is indicated by the critics’ responses, we may be able to situate Heschel himself more carefully in a larger theological discourse. Moreover, while a close reading of Heschel’s work reveals him still to be very much in tune with contemporary theological issues, his critics by contrast often seem dated, writing from within the limitations of the controversies of earlier decades. Heschel’s unique style is consistently identified as a key aspect of his theology, although what that style is and to what use it is put theologically itself become a

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matter of controversy. This style has in turn been described by such diverse terms as “poetic,” “devotional,” “radial,” “noncumulative,” “repetitive,” “nonempiric,” “elliptical,” “connotative,” “euphuistic,” “baroque,” “kerygmatic,” even “Whitman-esque”! Any reader of Heschel will immediately be struck by the provocative and elegant phrasing of many of his sentences, which achieve a refinement that makes him a very quotable author. We are told, in fact, that Heschel sometimes counted a good day’s work to have resulted in one good sentence. He evidently kept these sentences written on scraps of paper, and his manner of working often involved stapling together these previously crafted fragments into loosely structured paragraphs, and these paragraphs into sometimes even more loosely structured essays.57 (Indeed, many studies of Heschel seem unconsciously to imitate this style, bringing together numerous quotations from his works and interspersing them with interpretive comment.) Especially exasperating to an attentive reader is his tendency to reuse sentences, paragraphs, and even entire essays from one publication to another, making the discovery of logical consistency within a single work all the more difficult. As a result, however, Heschel is easily anthologized, including both serious attempts to provide an overview of his work (Fritz Rothschild’s Between God and Man, Jacob Neusner’s To Grow in Wisdom, and John Merkle’s Approaching God: The Way of Abraham Joshua Heschel), as well as more popular “spiritual” books (Samuel Dresner’s I Asked For Wonder), or celebratory works such as Morton C. Fierman’s Leap of Action: Ideas in the Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel, in which he collects in thematic groupings various “ideas” of Heschel, concluding with a “remembrance” given by his students at California State University, Fullerton. Yet another irritating characteristic of Heschel’s style is his reluctance to indicate his sources, or even to acknowledge with whom he is engaged in argument. Harold Stern called this an “irenic polemics,”58 but it leaves the referent of some of his rhetorical points sometimes quite obscure. It is hardly surprising, then, that from such an idiosyncratic style of writing should come a great diversity of interpretations: the challenge is to see beyond the eccentricities of style to the content beneath them. In approaching Heschel, most critics have searched for some unifying image by which they could understand his elusive style. Focusing on this more textual side of Heschel, many commentators have concluded that his work has a primary poetic or spiritual quality which defines its approach to theology.59 For instance, Maurice Friedman (a professor of philosophy, comparative literature and religious studies first at Temple University, then Sarah Lawrence College, and finally San Diego State University), writing in the journal Conservative Judaism, makes the unexpected comparison of Heschel’s style to some Christian devotional literature or religious poetry: “the prose of Thomas Traherne” or “the poetry . . . of Blake”; the imagery and paradox of “John Donne and T. S. Eliot.”60 Observing that Heschel’s logic is not therefore always perceptible, Friedman suggests the image of concentric circles moving out from a stone thrown into a pool as a model for understanding: rather than a unified system, there are larger insights from which Heschel’s central reflections radiate out. In a later article, Friedman describes Heschel as “the philosopher of wonder,”61 picking up on Hechel’s own argument that awareness of the divine begins with wonder. Friedman’s student at Temple University, Harold  Kasimow, echoed this emphasis in his dissertation on Heschel, published as Divine-Human Encounter, which seeks to

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provide an overall interpretive structure for Heschel through a study of the three paths to God described in his work: world, revelation, and holy deeds.62 Kasimow intends this treatment to be a placing of Heschel’s ideas within a “systematic framework” in order to bring greater clarity to the major works, implying a fundamental lack of structure within the works themselves. The emphasis on the literary dimension of Heschel’s work is amplified by some commentators in their description of him as an “edifying philosopher,” a term borrowed from Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.63 Theodore Weinberger, in a study focused on how to sustain religious commitment in modern secular society, went so far as to claim that Heschel was essentially “an artist” who had “the artistic ability to affectively predispose a person to accept the religious life as artful experience.”64 Similarly, in a brief overview of Heschel’s work as a resource for contemporary Jewish life, David Hartman argues, “Rather than attempt to persuade by clever argumentation, Heschel chose to enchant with a great melodic line that would haunt the soul of the sensitive reader.”65 Perhaps the most prominent of the readers who have emphasized the poetic dimension of Heschel’s work is Edward K. Kaplan, who came under Heschel’s influence while a doctoral student in French literature at Columbia University in the 1960s. Kaplan has written extensively on the use of poetic language and metaphor in Heschel’s work, much of which is gathered together in a book which intends both to make a careful scholarly reading of Heschel’s prose and to encourage wider popular study of his works: Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Poetics of Piety.66 Kaplan has emerged as one of the most sensitive readers of Heschel, based on his extensive biographical research (together with Samuel Dresner), which resulted only recently in the first biography of Heschel’s life, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (1998), tracing Heschel’s European roots, followed by a second volume entitled Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940–1972 (2007).67 While Kaplan by no means limits Heschel to being a poet, he does take the use of language to be a defining characteristic of Heschel’s method, which he describes as avoiding “ordinary denotative language” because it is incapable of expressing “the essence of man’s insights.”68 Poetry, on the other hand, is capable of providing “a direct experience of the ineffable, an ontologically valid intuition of the human and divine dimensions of man’s existence.” Relating Heschel’s style to the “phenomenological writing” of Husserl described by Nathalie Depraz, Kaplan argues that Heschel combines heterogeneous idioms to create a unity of effect, namely, the evocation of transcendent meaning.69 The writing, in other words, effects that which it describes. Given this intent, Kaplan emphasizes what he considers to have been Heschel’s “American mission,” which was to evoke religious experience among a Jewish community that had become assimilated and secularized.70 Language is the tool by which this evocation was to be accomplished, opening the reader to the divine presence through what Kaplan calls Heschel’s “rhetorical strategy meant to stimulate intuition.”71 Whereas Kaplan’s studies of Heschel emphasize the literary and evocative dimension of his prose, other studies have tried to discover within his overall work a more systematic treatment of theological issues. The first significant attempt to find a structure in Heschel which is not immediately obvious in the texts themselves was made

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by Fritz Rothschild, a student and later a colleague of Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism, Rothschild offered as early as 1959 a faithful reading “within the compass of a single volume, of the substance of Heschel’s work, hitherto available only in a number of books, articles, and addresses.”72 The book collects excerpts from Heschel’s work, organizing them according to a scheme meant to illuminate the principal themes. Rothschild later insightfully observed that Heschel operated on three essential levels, attempting to develop a synthesis of his roots in Eastern European Jewry and the secular scholarship of Western philosophy. First, he takes as his raw material the fundamental sources of the Jewish tradition (the Bible, rabbinic texts, and Hasidic spirituality in particular), as well as the concrete personal experience of religious individuals. Second, Heschel applies to these sources a fundamentally phenomenological description and analysis, not just to the prophets in his well-known study of them, but also to prayer, the Sabbath, the sanctification of time, and so forth. Finally, Heschel tries to demonstrate the universality of the values and attitudes which he has been at pains to disclose: they “are not merely the peculiar values and attitudes of the tradition of a peculiar people, but are in deepest accord with the value and attitudes of all intelligent and morally sensitive people.”73 In an edition of Conservative Judaism which was devoted to Heschel’s memory shortly after his death, Rothschild argued that contrary to what Heschel’s critics had observed, “there is more to Heschel than meets the eye: that he is a consistent thinker who offers a Weltanschauung which can be understood in terms of a set of basic concepts and categories.” Rothschild remarks, however, that when he set out himself 15 years earlier to find the skeleton of Heschel’s thought, “it took me a full year before I discerned the basic pattern underlying his many and diverse ideas on God and man, life and death, love and justice, time and space.”74 Rothschild thus understands Heschel as having achieved a modern interpretation of Jewish faith which both reinforces the tradition and makes it accessible to a larger audience, while acknowledging the difficulties in finding a structural unity in his work. Rothschild’s interpretation is, in fact, reinforced by some of Heschel’s own apparent statements of purpose. In The Insecurity of Freedom, for example, Heschel writes, “Many of the spiritual resources of the Jewish people in America have been depleted. Socialism, Hebraism, Yiddishism, which held an earlier generation in their spell, have lost their validity. This is the hour for the rediscovery of the grandeur of our tradition.”75 A similar appreciation of Heschel comes from another former student and colleague at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Samuel H. Dresner. For Dresner (later a professor of Jewish thought at Spertus College, Chicago), Heschel’s achievement is especially linked to the interior debate within Judaism in general and the Conservative Movement in particular over the place of halacha, that is, ritual observance of the law. Dresner argues that Heschel brought a depth of learning and breadth of perspective which was able to establish “an ideology of the vital center of Judaism,” holding a middle ground between nonobservance at one extreme, and a legalistic fundamentalism at the other.76 Dresner has also championed Heschel’s role as a scholar of classic Judaic sources, especially his studies of Hasidism, arguing that his chronicling of Eastern European Jewry opened a rich legacy for the renewal of contemporary faith.77 With a matching point of view, Joseph Lookstein (a rabbi and professor of sociology at Yeshiva University, New York

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City) has written appreciatively of Heschel’s renewal of Hasidic Jewish faith, which he argues is “the only genuinely Jewish existentialism.”78 Historically, Lookstein argues, Hasidism came into being during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in a similar period of spiritual crisis. Addressing a need for renewal and encouragement at a time of tragic suffering in the Jewish community, Hasidism provided a “triumph of the heart” through its inspiration of deep reverence. In Lookstein’s estimation, Heschel offers an analogous possibility to twentieth-century Judaism through his reopening of the resources of Hasidic spirituality. Emil Fackenheim, reviewing God in Search of Man, reinforces the notion of Heschel having provided a resource for spiritual renewal through rich theological reflection.79 Fackenheim distinguishes between two types of thinking: religious thinking on the one hand and reflective thinking about religion on the other. The first of these is based already on a religious commitment—it is a contextual form of thought—whereas the second is logically prior to any religious commitment, operating from a more objective stance. In Fackenheim’s estimation, Heschel was primarily engaged in the former mode of thought, seeking to elaborate from within the connections and convictions which shape a religious point of view. His work therefore speaks a religious message for and to the religious Jewish community, but it does not offer a philosophical defense of religion which any objective observer could readily engage. Heschel’s identity as a theologian of the Conservative Movement has been particularly emphasized in the European understanding of his work, notably by Geneviève Comeau and Hans Küng. Comeau (a lecturer at Centre Sèvres in Paris and a sometime student at the Jewish Theological Seminary), in making a comparative study between Roman Catholicism and Conservative Judaism, stresses their respective approaches to the subject of revelation.80 In Heschel she finds an exemplar of one who was committed to the Conservative ideal of maintaining Jewish identity in fidelity to the halacha, while allowing for the possibility of adaptation to modern circumstances. She nevertheless faults Heschel, for while he maintains a certain audacity in suggesting humanity’s partnership with God, she believes that in making the link with the practical adaptation of the commandments there is a “semi-absence of theological reflection on revelation.”81 She even goes so far as to remark, “Heschel is not at all a systematic thinker.”82 Küng similarly appreciates the Conservative aspect of Heschel’s theology, arguing that he charts a path between “fundamentalism” and “positivism.”83 Taking his clue from the three-part structure of God in Search of Man, Küng describes the movement from God to Revelation to Response as giving Heschel’s picture of Judaism a strongly practical dimension, rooted in a communal faith which is above all a “spirit of protest” against secular American society. He in turn faults Heschel, however, for inadequately dealing with the modern critique of exactly these three critical issues, saying that “the questions of critical history do not interest Heschel.” Küng therefore passes on rather quickly from Heschel, finding that one is quickly plunged into the problems of a modern philosophy of Judaism by his work rather than finding a way through them. Heschel’s relationship as a theologian to Judaism is by no means universally appreciated, however. Indeed, in a special edition of the Roman Catholic journal America dedicated to Heschel after his death, Jacob Neusner remarked, “I doubt

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that any important theologian has found so little understanding of his task, let alone of his achievement of it, as Heschel.”84 For example, Marvin Fox (an Orthodox Jew and professor of philosophy at Ohio State University) objected to Heschel’s effort to discover a new balance between the halachic and aggadic dimensions of Judaism.85 In his opinion, Heschel emphasized too much the need for spiritual enthusiasm, while undervaluing the essential Jewish conviction that “a Jew who lives in accordance with Halakhah has done all that can be asked of him.” Fox does not share Heschel’s conviction that spiritual fervor is a necessary accompaniment to the fulfillment of the divine commandments. Daniel Breslauer (who completed a dissertation at Brandeis University on Heschel’s role as a leader of the Jewish community) reinforces the perspective of Heschel’s uneasiness with halacha in an article on “Biblical Man,” arguing that while Heschel is attached to the Law, he “is ambivalent about its effectiveness in the modern world.”86 In Breslauer’s view, Heschel uses a notion of “Biblical Man” as a symbol of an inward spirituality which helps to generalize his concern beyond a more narrow Jewish particularity. Later, Breslauer went on to argue that Heschel was part of a reformulation of Judaism in light of modernity, seen in the context of an “ecumenical perspective” which embraces the creative possibilities of religious pluralism while emphasizing the essentially individualistic, though universal experiences described by “depth theology.”87 Breslauer asserts that Heschel’s strategy, like those of other Jewish thinkers of his day, was to make living Jewishly for Jews in America a part of a larger, communal search for religious renewal.88 Still later, Breslauer published The Charismatic Spirituality of Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mystical Teachings of an American Rabbi, where he explored the ways in which Heschel’s depth theology addresses what he regards as a spiritual crisis for all religions.89 Reading Heschel as an “ethical scholar,” he presses for the value of four virtues toward which he understands depth theology to point: a flexible self, compassion for the nightmare of history, cultural generosity, and skepticism of civilization. In contrast, Eugene Borowitz, a noted observer of twentieth-century Jewish theology, critically describes Heschel as a “traditionalist.” Borowitz is intent to develop a narrative thread for understanding the evolution of modern Jewish thinking, and within this narrative he places Heschel in the neoorthodox camp, or at least “at the right side of the Conservative movement.”90 He bases this placement in large part on Heschel’s supposed equal emphasis on the prophetic and rabbinic traditions. Borowitz is dubious, however, of Heschel’s project, charging him with a “sophisticated fundamentalism” which is unable to see the validity of questions coming from other perspectives. Heschel is, according to Borowitz, simply too convinced of his own faith to be able to take seriously the challenges of an authentic philosophical inquiry. A similar relegation of Heschel to the sidelines of serious theological reflection is made by Jakob Petuchowski (a professor of rabbinics at the Hebrew Union College). Writing on Heschel’s concept of faith, Petuchowski criticizes his use of the notion of faith as a “leap of action,” arguing that it is nothing but a sophism since it describes not a leap from nothing into something, but a leap from already acquired faith in God into an awareness that the Divine is revealed through right actions.91 Comparing Heschel’s writing with Evelyn Underhill’s description of “that rhythmic and exalted language which induces in sensitive persons something of the languid ecstasy of a dream,” Petuchowski argues

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that Heschel’s approach to God through the ineffable does not set out to find God, but assumes that God is already there. Like many other critics, therefore, Petuchowski resists what he perceives to be Heschel’s fundamental irrationalism, though also like many other critics, he fails to observe that this so-called irrationalism is in fact rooted in a sophisticated and multilayered deployment of phenomenological analysis rather than denotative argument. A third approach to Heschel has attempted to see him from the larger perspective of philosophical theology, analyzing his work less with an eye toward its specifically Jewish content and more toward its treatment of fundamental theological questions such as revelation, faith, and so forth. Ironically, these treatments of Heschel’s work have tended to come not from Jewish but from Christian theologians.92 One such thematic exploration is Byron Sherwin’s Abraham Joshua Heschel in the series, “Makers of Contemporary Theology.” From a Jewish perspective, Sherwin gives a sympathetic if brief survey of Heschel’s work, indicating the limited scope of the survey by noting that he has tried “to empty the water of the river of Heschel’s massive flow of ideas” into only a small book.93 Michael Chester, a Protestant (this time of English origin), authored a similarly appreciative study, Divine Pathos and Human Being, that surveys the basic facts of his life, goes on to present the essential contours of his thought (especially the concept of divine pathos), and suggests the extent of his influence.94 Focusing on Heschel’s theological anthropology, Chester argues that his understanding of what it means to be human in light of God’s concern for us “has a part to play in the survival of ‘humanity’, in  all senses of that word.” In a similar vein, a number of European authors have set out to draw together the principal themes of Heschel’s theology into a composite presentation of them. One such exposition, this time from a Roman Catholic viewpoint, is given by Albino Babolin of the Università degli Studi di Perugia. His work, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Filosofo della religione, not only sets forth Heschel’s thought, but also offers a survey of critical assessments of it.95 In the German-speaking world, Bernhard Dolna, who now teaches philosophy at the International Theological Institute, Gaming, Austria, published his doctoral dissertation on Heschel (written at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau) as An die Gegenwart Gottes preisgegeben: Abraham Joshua Heschel, Leben und Werk.96 As the first biographical and thematic exploration published in German on Heschel, this book offers a sustained presentation of the overall shape of Heschel’s work, stressing his formative intellectual ties to German culture thought while also engaging the distinctive American context of much of his work. Another Italian, Paola Ricci Sindoni, contributed a volume on Heschel to the “Tracce del Sacro nella Cultura Contemporanea” series, entitled Heschel: Dio è Pathos. A teacher of moral philosophy at the Università di Messina, Sindoni emphasizes the ethical implications of the biblical revelation, examining how the deposit of truth contained therein can continue to remain relevant in face of the scandalous evils of modern history. Similarly, Gianluca Giannini of the Dipartimento di Filosofia “A. Aliotta” dell’Università di Naploi Federico II, has explored in Etica e religione in Abraham Joshua Heschel the distinctive Hebraic dimension of Heschel’s ethical philosophy, contrasting it with Western patterns of thought and the question of the relationship between faith and reason.97 Yet another Italian exposition of Heschel’s

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theology is Paolo Gamberini’s Pathos e Logos in Abraham J. Heschel (mentioned above) in the “Contributi di Teologia” series. Gamberini, a Jesuit who teaches at La Pontificia Facoltà Teologica dell’Italia Meridionale, Sezione “San Luigi”, offers a detailed analysis of Heschel’s philosophical grounding, focusing on the manner in which pathos vivifies the divine/human relationship by its evocation of transcendent meaning and the ineffable nature of existence. As such, Gamberini argues that the theology of pathos (which he understands to be a radical departure from the tradition of Western thought going back to ancient Greece) opens the door for a unique ontology of being with both human and divine dimensions, distinct from more traditional metaphysical concepts, and with particular ethical demands as its consequence. A further effort to systematize Heschel’s work was made by another Jesuit, Donald Moore (Fordham University), who in The Human and the Holy approached the task from the aspect of spirituality. Strongly laudatory rather than analytical in tone, Moore’s work is organized around broad unifying themes, as opposed to a specific narrative or logical development. It is thereby meant to be an introduction both to the spiritual insights of Heschel and to the “kind of man he was.” Very recently, Shai Held has contributed another thematically oriented study, The Call of Transcendence, in which he focuses on the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness that he sees at the heart of Heschel’s work. In particular, this study helpfully engages a wider variety of interloctuors than many works on Heschel, both Jewish and Christian. An effort to systematize Heschel’s thought was made by another Roman Catholic scholar, John Merkle (College of St Benedict, St Joseph, Minnesota), who wrote his dissertation on Heschel at the Université catholique de Louvain. Published as The Genesis of Faith, Merkle’s work remains one of the most substantive book-length attempts to find within Heschel’s theology an interior structure which can be brought to light and analyzed methodologically. In a sense, Merkle imposes on Heschel an order which Heschel himself lacked: starting with a study of depth theology, Merkle carefully divides Heschel’s work into an examination of the “sources of faith” (sublime mystery, divine glory, and Jewish tradition) and the “antecedents of faith” (wonder and awe, indebtedness and praise, remembrance and mitzvot). Merkle himself acknowledges the interventionist aspect of his work: “While Heschel has explored these sources and antecedents of faith, his treatment of these is not strictly systematic or analytical. In fact, his insights about them are often scattered aphoristically amidst his various works. Therefore, one of the principal tasks of this study is to systematize and analyze Heschel’s insights . . .”98 Merkle takes Heschel’s development of the concept of depth theology (i.e. the study of the prereflective experience of the divine which opens us to faith) to be a major contribution to both Jewish and Christian thinking. In his estimation, therefore, it is Heschel’s analysis of the act of faith, rather than the content of faith, which is most significant. He credits Heschel with opening up theology to a more imaginative consideration of what the experience of believing entails, before rushing too hastily to the dogmatic expression of the substance of that experience. Although Merkle briefly considers the relationship of piety and faith in this context, he does not greatly elaborate piety’s more central place in Heschel’s thought. Beyond these synthesizing studies of Heschel as a religious philosopher, other critics have approached his work by searching out an essential methodological element which

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they believe pulls together the work with a greater systematic rigor.99 Of particular interest is Lawrence Perlman’s book, Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, which makes one of the only sustained attempt to analyze the phenomenological method and content of Heschel’s work.100 While other authors have acknowledged his roots in the phenomenological movement (especially in its Husserlian form, acquired during his university studies in Berlin), none before Perlman has probed with any depth the implications of this fact for understanding Heschel’s theology. Indeed, in the opening pages of his book, Perlman takes to task other works on Heschel for having ignored such a significant element, arguing that this oversight has consistently led to misunderstandings and false criticisms. Perlman’s overall conclusion is that Heschel must be understood to be dissimilar from much of Jewish theology in that he makes a conscious attempt to give “serious consideration to the broad range of problems that have been integral to the philosophical and theological traditions of western intellectual history.”101 Perlman’s enthusiasm for the “intellectualism” of this effort is that it uses “almost every conceivable facet of Judaism,” and although Heschel may not address the resulting philosophical questions in a strictly discursive manner, it cannot be said that it is in an unsystematic way. The substance of Perlman’s analysis is a perspective with which the current study will have to grapple in due course, when in Chapter 6 it takes up Heschel’s formal phenomenological studies of piety. A related tack to seeing Heschel as a philosopher of religion is to understand his work as recovering an authentic “biblical philosophy.” For example, the Protestant Edmond La B. Cherbonnier (professor of religion at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut) has advocated this interpretation, proposing that Heschel exposes “the latent philosophical implications” in the discourse of the Bible.102 This position is meant, in part, to counter criticism that Heschel’s work is fundamentally opposed to rational thought, relying instead on such furtive concepts as intuition. Cherbonnier claims (somewhat naively) that biblical philosophy is itself inherently rational, and that the prophetic concept of idolatry reveals that any system of thought which is not grounded in the CreatorGod will “inevitably issue in logical absurdities.”103 In his estimation, Heschel is able to reveal the “coherent philosophical outlook” of the Bible, making of it an open-ended source of insight for everyday living in which theory is not privileged over practice. Sol Tanenzapf (a graduate of Jewish Theological Seminary and professor of humanities at York University, Toronto) concurs in large part with Cherbonnier’s estimation of Heschel. Reviewing various criticisms made of Heschel’s work, Tanenzapf concludes that “Heschel’s achievement is to make the Biblical world-view explicit and to examine the implications of that world-view for religious thought.”104 Tanenzapf remains critical, however, of what he deems a too-quick “rejection of all attempts at philosophic justification,” charging that Heschel “often exhibits a lack of sympathetic understanding for the plight of the unbeliever.” Some of the more sophisticated of Heschel’s commentators, however, have refrained from trying to draw together a comprehensive understanding of his work, realizing that it is too multifarious to be subjected to such a critique. Rather, they have singled out specific concerns for closer examination, in particular, the rabbinic studies that formed the backbone of much of Heschel’s most scholarly work. Gordon Tucker, for instance (translator of Torah min Hashamayim), is an obvious example of just such

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a careful reader of Heschel’s rabbinic studies. Tucker is particularly interested in the theme of religious certainty as it runs through these works, beginning with The Quest for Certainty in Saadia’s Philosophy (1944). As Tucker observes, Heschel repeatedly sets up opposing dyads which hold the tension between such poles as reason and faith, transcendence and immanence, human ways, and divine ways.105 Tucker notes, however, that these are not merely intellectual questions for Heschel, but issues in which he was deeply involved personally. Indeed, the whole of Torah min Hashamayim is an extended exploration of two competing understandings of God, embodied by Rabbi Ishmael (representing God’s transcendence) and Rabbi Akiva (representing God’s immanence), two concepts which together have a biographical relevance to Heschel in that they express his own life history as he moved from the world of his Hasidic upbringing to the academic pursuits of his professional life. Heschel’s widest reputation, at least in the United States, is probably as a social activist and advocate for interfaith cooperation. A familiar photograph from the turbulent 1960s, for example, shows Heschel arm in arm with Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy during the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965; another photo shows him 3 years later, again with King and Abernathy, this time at an anti-Vietnam War protest at Arlington Cemetery.106 Many critical appreciations of Heschel, especially from Christians, have focused on this dimension of his life. At a conference on Heschel’s life and thought at the College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota, for example, the liberal Protestant theologian and ethicist from the Pacific School of Religion, Robert McAfee Brown, presented a paper entitled “ ‘Some are Guilty, All are Responsible’: Heschel’s Social Ethics.”107 While in many respects anecdotal, the article underscores a fundamental unity in Heschel, not only in his synthesis of scholarship and social activism, but also in his intellectual understanding of ethical questions. Brown argues that Heschel was able to see connections between biblical principles such as justice and human dignity, and the practical issues of politics and economics, even in advance of such movements as the liberation theologies of Latin America. Brown, who together with Heschel and the Roman Catholic Michael Novak jointly authored a small book which was openly critical of American involvement in Vietnam (Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience108), credits Heschel with forging a link between contemplative ethical reflection and activist moral outrage which makes his ethics truly “social.” Of related importance is Heschel’s engagement in Jewish-Christian dialogue. In another paper given at the Heschel conference at the College of St Benedict, Eva Fleischner (a Roman Catholic involved in Catholic-Jewish relations and professor of religion at Montclair State College, New Jersey) comments on the influence Heschel had on the rediscovery of the Jewish roots of Christianity.109 She argues that his ability to articulate the essence of Judaism to a non-Jewish audience was a significant component of this effect. While amply documenting Heschel’s opening up of Jewish faith to a Christian audience, however, Fleischner does not raise the question of how Heschel’s broader theological insights might already have been or in the future be used in Christian theology: Heschel remains for her a specifically Jewish thinker. Heschel’s influence on Christian theologians, therefore, is perceived to be limited to those whom he knew personally, such as Reinhold Niebuhr. A similar perspective characterizes the essays contained in a volume celebrating Heschel’s interreligious commitments, No

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Religion Is an Island. As Eugene Fisher wrote in the essay on Heschel and CatholicJewish Relations, “Heschel’s main influence was and will remain the impact of reading what he wrote about Judaism for his fellow Jews . . .”110 Ironically, this assessment seems to be in contradiction to what has emerged as a strong appreciation for Heschel’s contributions to interfaith relationships. Of the two centenary conferences mentioned above, for example, the one in Poland explicitly included interreligious dialogue as one of its three sections, and there were papers on both Christian/Jewish and Muslim/ Jewish relations. Writing in the introduction to the published proceedings, the editors note (especially in relationship to Heschel’s “landmark” lecture, “No Religion Is an Island”) that interreligious dialogue is “the area of theory and practice in which Heschel’s influence has been and will likely remain the strongest. Indeed, Heschel can be called the most outstanding, and possibly only, ‘prophet’ of interreligious dialogue.”111 Perhaps most curious among the responses to Heschel are several articles which are almost unaccountably hostile. The most striking in this genre is a series of articles by Meir Ben-Horin of the Hebrew Teachers College in Brookline, Massachusetts.112 Writing about Man Is Not Alone, Ben-Horin remarks that it is full of “voluminous vacuities” which are “intended to do duty as guides toward a reconstruction of life, public and private. As this writer sees it, they tend to reinforce current trends and realities in the Western and Eastern worlds which threaten democratic philosophy and institutions and undermine the faith in man and in the method that is human intelligence.”113 Ben-Horin’s operating assumption is that mysticism (of which he accuses Heschel) leads toward fascism: it “cannot escape the charge of having inspired gross immorality and perversion.”114 Fackenheim, in his review of God in Search of Man, refers obliquely to such virulent attacks: “Some of these criticisms must be dismissed out of hand, as mere sad evidence of the low estate of religious life and thought at the present time.”115 Yet what is more interesting is not the content of the attack itself, but that Heschel should have been its object, and what it is in his writing that strikes such a dissonant chord with certain zealots. It seems odd, for a writer whose efforts were directed in part toward a defense of the integrity of the individual person, that his work should be attacked as promoting the subjugation of the human. Suffice it to be said that Heschel’s unapologetic theocentrism challenges certain currents of secularizing thought, especially in more assimilated environments, which would view his call to religious observance as retrograde. Heschel also raised the ire of some commentators who resent his supposed violation of the prohibition of ascribing human characteristics to God. Appealing to Maimonides’ analysis of anthropomorphic language, for example, Eliezer Berkovits (professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew Theological College, Skokie, Illinois) objects to Heschel’s use of anthropopathic terms in describing God’s relation to humanity: “Dr. Heschel commits the unforgivable fallacy of equating the human ways of realizing a fellowman as a concrete fact with the way of God.”116 What is astonishing in this article are not the reservations themselves which the author expresses, which have some theological merit, but the stinging, dismissive language in which they are put. Another example is a curious charge leveled toward the end of the article, when Berkovits writes of Heschel’s concept of God’s pathos: “it does not take much perspicuity to realize that one has encountered these concepts in one’s readings—in Christian theology. . . . But

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while this concept is natural to a religion at whose focal point is the passion of a god incarnate, it is unheard of in Judaism.”117 Again, the question is raised of what is at stake in Heschel’s thinking that could arouse such defensiveness; presumably, it is Heschel’s more theological approach (in the full sense of the word) to questions of biblical interpretation, rather than more traditional textual study. A third example of the strength of reaction which Heschel can evoke is Arthur Cohen’s assessment in The Natural and the Supernatural Jew.118 Although Cohen is appreciative of Heschel’s place in American Judaism (“the most significant thinker which traditional Judaism has given to contemporary America”), he nevertheless wants to dismiss the philosophical value of Heschel’s work as merely “rhetorical.” In Cohen’s mind, while Heschel may be “a thinker of our times,” his relevance is purchased at the price of “maintaining the disunion of reason and faith, philosophy and theology, dialectic and rhetoric.” Cohen believes that at every crucial juncture in his exposition, Heschel abandons reasoned analysis, reverting instead to biblical sources and the example of the pious man: “Essentially Heschel is bored with argument. What need is there for argument in the presence of the pious and of him who lives before the ineffable?” As in the case of many other critics, however, Cohen’s attack on Heschel overlooks the fact that piety is not for Heschel something simply to be assumed, but to be analyzed for its content as a route into grasping the object of its consciousness. The order of his thought, unlike Cohen’s expectations for him, is not “Can there be a God, and if so, how might we act as a consequence?”, but rather, “Given that pious men and women act as if there were a God, who might that God be?

IV  Implications of previous readings The preceding overview of critical readings of Heschel reveals several interesting problems for consideration in the current study. One is that whereas many religious authors can clearly be identified as a “theologian,” or “historian,” or “philosopher of religion,” Heschel defies such categorization. In the eyes of the critics, whether there is sufficient rigor in his work for him to qualify as a practitioner of any of these disciplines is debatable. Indeed, as with any thinker who stands above narrowly defined norms and disciplinary expectations, it is probably this very independence and creativity of his thought which elicits such vituperative responses from those who dismiss him as a rhetorician. Yet the question is not simply one of independence from academic disciplines: Heschel himself consciously ranges broadly over the terrain of religious studies, writing works in historical theology, rabbinic literature, philosophy, spirituality, and biblical exegesis. The challenge, then, is not so much to define a particular angle from which to approach Heschel, as it is to take into account the actual interdisciplinary nature of his work. In fact, his ability to deploy so comprehensive a subject as piety as a cornerstone for his thought is ultimately dependent upon his ability to bring theological, anthropological, historical, and philosophical insights to bear. An implication for the current study is that an adequate strategy for understanding Heschel must itself be interdisciplinary in nature, seeking to reveal the connections Heschel makes between his sources rather than artificially imposing an overly narrow definition.

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A second observation based on the preceding sketch is the relatively parochial nature of many studies of Heschel—a pattern which is gradually being broken as the scope of his work is more fully appreciated. As already pointed out, numerous commentators have examined Heschel only in light of their own area of interest, Jewish thought and spirituality in particular. These studies have either failed to notice, or have left unmarked, the connections Heschel’s work might have to larger theological and philosophical issues. Even those critics who have argued that Heschel has a unique and potentially radical theology have been reluctant to consider its implications from a wider perspective. Indeed, there almost seems to be a reluctance on the part of some scholars to consider the potential implications of Heschel’s work outside of his specifically Jewish context. For example, Jacob Neusner (Heschel’s sometime student assistant), writes in his introduction to the anthology To Grow in Wisdom that the essays included therein “show us in action a religious thinker, a theologian working toward a systematic account of religion, a public figure—but above all, a human being, a very particular human being: a Jew, bearing in spirit and flesh the mark of standing in a covenanted relationship, through holy Israel, the Jewish people, with God who made heaven and earth and gave the Torah.”119 Neusner therefore enforces on Heschel’s thought a particularity which tends to resist engagement with a broader spectrum of philosophical and theological discussion, confining it to its specifically Jewish context. In contrast to this tendency, however, it must be said that a number of studies— often from outside the American context—have begun to evaluate the implications of Heschel’s work from a broader perspective. In two works already mentioned, for example, Paolo Gamberini explores the philosophical grounding of his concept of divine pathos in Pathos e Logos, while Gianluca Giannini in his Etica e religione is particularly interested in the ethical dimensions of Heschel’s thought. A related observation is that many studies of Heschel have remained relatively reluctant to make connections or even comparisons between his work and that of related thinkers—though again, some scholarship has also begun to correct this gap, connecting him to such figures as Gabriel Marcel, William James, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Emmanuel Lévinas, Edmund Jabès, and Henry Corbin.120 Even within the Jewish context, although Heschel has been frequently compared in the past to Martin Buber (whom he succeeded briefly at the Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt and with whom he maintained an active correspondence), Heschel’s other immediate predecessors or contemporaries such as Franz Rosenzweig, Will Herberg, Mordecai Kaplan, and Joseph Soloveitchik are usually mentioned only in passing or simply included with Heschel as separate articles in general surveys of modern Jewish thought (although a recent book by Alexander Even-Chen and Ephraim Meir, Between Heschel and Buber, offers a more extended comparative study of these two thinkers). And although Heschel is widely credited with having had a deep learning in Western philosophy, his responses to such interlocutors as Schleiermacher, Spinoza, Kant, and Kierkegaard are rarely studied in detail. (Once again, however, Perlman is the exception in an article on “Heschel’s Critique of Kant.”121) Some attention has been given to Heschel’s supposed similarity to the process theology of Charles Hartshorne, working in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead, but that link proves to be rather tenuous and unfounded.122 So it has to be said that many previous critics have simply

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failed to connect Heschel to larger theological themes (especially in Christian theology, some theologies of divine passibility being excepted), limiting their critiques to either a Jewish, or American, or simply Heschelian perspective—an oversight which it is the intention of this study to address by way of gaining a clearer appreciation of the significance of his understanding of piety, which is itself framed in reference to a wide diversity of sources. One is also struck by the polarity of the critiques offered of Heschel’s work. It is suggestive, for example, that to Orthodox Jews Heschel is often considered too liberal and insufficiently rigorous, whereas members of the Conservative Movement frequently find his appeal to observance too traditional. But this obvious divergence of opinion among the critics is not the only one: perhaps more significant is the disparity between those who find Heschel inherently opposed to philosophy and rational discourse, and those who regard his work as a breakthrough in Jewish thought to the intellectual mainstream of Western philosophy. In these conflicting readings, there is an indicative polarity of responses to his work that suggests a sometimes skewed understanding of fundamental aspects of his work—his relation to the rational discourse of philosophical theology in particular. This diversity of understanding encourages the current study to be particularly attentive to Heschel’s intellectual formation in order to account for the complexity of his response to basic theological questions. Only by recognizing the dynamic relationship in his thinking between traditional Jewish (and specifically Hasidic) spirituality, and formal academic (and specifically German) philosophy, can one grasp the actual sophistication of his conceptualization of  “the pious man.” Such variances in interpretation are not exclusively due to previous readers themselves, however, for Heschel often contradicts himself in many aspects of his thought. Merkle’s intensive effort to give a comprehensive systematization to Heschel’s work, for example, acknowledges from the beginning the lack of unity in Heschel’s use of key concepts. Merkle cites as an example: “Even an experience or act that Heschel speaks of in one context as the quintessence or climax of religious experience is referred to by him in another context as an antecedent of faith. How can an experience or act that is a constitutive element of faith, even a quintessential aspect of faith, be an antecedent of faith?”123 Indeed, many commentators have pointed out such inconsistencies in his work, and as a result, earlier critical approaches have been understandably reluctant to evaluate Heschel in light of his own intellectual formation and commitments, assuming that there is a basic disjointedness. Nathan Rotenstreich, professor of philosophy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, offered one attempt to address the general neglect of Heschel’s intellectual commitments, making some initial connections between Heschel and Husserl, Dilthey, Scheler, and Otto in an article entitled, “On Prophetic Consciousness.”124 And as already mentioned, Perlman is a major exception to the rule, for his study on Heschel’s phenomenological method is a clear effort to uncover how this methodology plays itself out in the studies on prophecy and revelation. (More recent essays by David Novak and Milan Lyčka have similarly advanced our understanding of Heschel’s phenomenological program.125) Yet Perlman is quite upfront in his acknowledgment that his study is only one step forward in revealing the intellectual subtlety in Heschel’s method: Heschel’s “reliance on Dilthey,” as well as the extent of Hasidic and kabbalistic influences,

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is left to be uncovered.126 Since the publication of Perlman’s book, a significant step forward has been made by the appearance of Kaplan and Dresner’s biography, which documents in detail many of the personal and intellectual influences which shaped Heschel’s formation. Perlman’s challenge to engage the subtlety of Heschel’s thought nevertheless remains, and shapes the underlying approach of the current study. The key, in recognition of Heschel’s complex personal formation, is not to force an artificial clarity or structure onto his work, but rather to try to hold within one’s mind the same sort of unresolved polarities and pressures which characterize Heschel’s intellectual mindset. In that sense, Heschel’s academic mind mirrors the piety which he studies, in that it is content to let stand otherwise irreducible tensions in order to preserve the richness of its conviction.

V  Defining an approach To define an approach to any author is to enter into dialogue with his or her own methodology. In the case of Heschel, however, an astute reader will perhaps stumble over the word “methodology,” for it may seem suggestive of a much too rigorous and clearly defined system. So it will perhaps be best to offer next some general observations about necessary parameters in approaching Heschel’s work that have yet to emerge, without trying to tie them too neatly together into a “methodology,” strictly speaking. One such theme that emerges from Heschel’s biography is the intensity of feeling he had for his work as a recorder and interpreter of the Jewish tradition. Raised in a devout Hasidic household in Poland, and descended from a dynastic family of community leaders, Heschel was groomed from an early age to take a place of responsibility as a rebbe. These early years gave Heschel a strong attachment to a particularly intense, even idyllic form of Jewish living which he tried to evoke in his first book in English, The Earth Is the Lord’s (1950). Yet during his life, Heschel also became separated from these roots, once by his own choice and a second time by exile. First, when he chose to leave his family household, initially for study in Vilna (1925–27), and then later at the Friedrich Wilhelms Universität in Berlin (from 1927 to 1935, when he received his doctorate), he irrevocably set himself on a course of intellectual encounters which would distance him from his Hasidic roots, though never sever the tie altogether. One senses in his writing both a great satisfaction in his decision to seek a broader engagement with Western culture, and at the same time a fond nostalgia for what he left behind. The second experience of separation, however, was much more painful, for he was forced into exile by the Nazis, first being deported from Germany to Poland in October 1938, then being forced to flee to London in July 1939, finally arriving in the United States in April 1940 to teach at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. While there, he learned during the war of the death of much of his family at the hands of the Nazis, and realized thereafter that the world in which he grew up had virtually ceased to exist. Heschel’s awareness that a tradition of great value—culturally, intellectually, and religiously—had been almost entirely annihilated seems to have driven much of his academic interest. He was a sort of documentarist, intent to record the evidence for a

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way of life which might soon pass from memory. In The Earth Is the Lord’s, for example, he attempts to portray the way of life of the Jewry of Eastern Europe, describing their attitudes toward life, their stories, their habits and customs, their scale of values. As he himself wrote at the end of this book, “A world has vanished. All that remains is a sanctuary hidden in the realm of the spirit. . . . We of this generation are still holding the key—the key to the sanctuary which is also the shelter of our own deserted souls. . . . We are either the last Jews or those who will hand over the entire past to generations to come.”127 Thus, not only in evocative works such as The Earth Is the Lord’s and A Passion for Truth, but also in more scholarly historical studies such as The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov, Heschel tries to preserve a record of how a certain people lived and what they believed. A striking example of this chronicling aspect of his work is the inclusion of an introduction by Heschel in the pictorial record by Roman Vishniac of the world of the Polish Jew before World War II.128 Although the experience of the Holocaust itself does not figure prominently in Heschel’s theology, this perceived need to pass on a record of a certain form of piety seems to have been a motivating factor in much of Heschel’s work—and may account in part for the observable centrality of piety in his methodological approach to the study of religion. The personal dimension of Heschel’s work thus emerges as a significant influence on his mode of working because it forms the grist for his theological reflection. Heschel himself acknowledged that his seminal 1942 essay on piety was based on the example of his uncle, the rebbe of Novominsk, Rabbi Alter Israel Shimon Perlow, and he was known to have remarked that he used the phenomenological method “to analyze my own consciousness and that of those I respect.”129 In fact, those who were personally close to Heschel have remarked on the tight correlation between his academic work and his personal life. His daughter, for example, in a commemorative essay about her father, wrote, . . . [My] father spoke very much from his heart. The descriptions he gives of the religious life are genuine to him. He doesn’t speak in a removed, analytic way, but very much out of his own, personal experience. . . . We can get to know my father by reading his books, because they are a window into his own soul, into the life he led and the kind of person he was.130

In approaching Heschel’s work, therefore, one must take into account that he is not merely trying to grapple with questions of faith in a form amenable to the discourse of academic theology, but that he is also trying to make sense of, or even to open to public examination, his own personal experience of faith. Elsewhere, Susannah Heschel writes of her father’s deep awareness of having grown up surrounded by “people of religious nobility,” and that he always carried them in his heart.131 His writing thus has a deeply meditative and confessional quality. The challenge, then, is to perceive to what purpose Heschel puts this strongly personal dimension of his theology. One could, of course, make the argument that as a consequence of this personal introspection, his writing ought to be approached essentially as a type of spiritual autobiography, analogous to other classical works of spirituality. Indeed, as already observed, some commentators have limited Heschel’s work to this genre, thereby eliminating him from serious consideration as a

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“systematic theologian.” Yet the very form of Heschel’s work resists this interpretation: he did, after all, write works deliberately subtitled “philosophies of religion” or of “Judaism,” and so one must take him at his word that he at least attempted to engage in rigorous philosophical discussion. To read his work astutely must therefore include a consideration of his philosophical influences and positions. And yet, one will not simply be able to ignore the mystical dimension to Heschel’s work, either, for clearly he is deeply influenced by such strands in Jewish thought as the thoroughly mystical elements of the Kabbalah. So one has to seek the substance of Heschel’s theology by paying careful attention to the exploration he makes of personal experience as it yields generalized conclusions, which are shaped into an intellectually accessible form. Another crucial task in understanding the role of the personal dimension in Heschel’s theology is to take into account the content of his intellectual formation in Berlin in the 1930s, where the philosophical anthropology of Wilhelm Dilthey and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl were strong currents in the university environment in which he studied. As Kaplan and Dresner have amply documented, Heschel arrived in Berlin a deeply devout young man, who in his own words came “with great hunger to study philosophy.” As his biographers note, “Although his basic beliefs had taken shape—a certainty of God’s attachment to humankind—he hoped to reconcile them with Western categories of thought.”132 In this self-reflective frame of mind, interested in relating academic discourse to personal experience, Heschel encountered the phenomenological school of thought that promised to provide a methodologically rigorous way of relating the two. The intellectual environment of the university opened to him the study of consciousness as the organizing principle around which he could structure his investigations. Although Heschel had reason to resist many of the humanistic dimensions of Dilthey’s anthropology, nonetheless in Dilthey’s effort to understand human consciousness as a multidimensional form of knowing and responding to the world, Heschel found a program for refuting the Kantian critique of reason which looms in his thought as the bane of religious insight. In approaching Heschel, therefore, one must also examine his own religious thought as derived from and participating in this study and analysis of consciousness in all of its complexity, beyond merely empirical or rational forms of knowing. As already noted, some readers of Heschel have found frustrating his apparent assumption that God’s existence is self-evident, complaining that he is thereby simply unable to connect with the nonbeliever. Yet set against the background of his academic formation, this observation seems unfounded, for it overlooks his embrace of the phenomenological suspension of the question of the independent reality of the objects of consciousness. This method, in other words, allows him to consider the manner in which men and women live out their belief in God, without having first to justify the fact that they believe. This suspension leads Heschel directly to focus on the examination of religious consciousness, prior to the ontological questions about God: the result in Heschel’s mind is that we can perceive the reality behind religious experience through an examination of the consciousness of the experience itself. In relation to the subject of this study, this element is especially significant, for it makes of piety not merely the result of an encounter with God, but the locus for that encounter with God.

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Another significant aspect of Heschel’s intellectual formation to which it is important to attend is its expansive nature. It is striking, for example, that even while Heschel was studying philosophy at the university in Berlin, he was simultaneously engaged in biblical and rabbinic studies at the seminary. His academic life was therefore a bridge between varying disciplines which he attempted to synthesize in his doctoral thesis on the prophets, combining psychology, biblical exegesis, rabbinic theology, linguistics, and philosophy. Heschel continued to use this method—which Kaplan has aptly called “polyphonic”133—throughout his career, so that far from making an effort to develop a single systematic work, he allows a variety of perspectives to develop and interplay in his theology. In crafting an approach to Heschel’s work, therefore, one must be willing to peal back these various layers of analysis, not seeking a linear development among them but rather embracing a montage of perspectives, each contributing in a different way to the overall point. Heschel’s work must be seen as a dynamic assemblage of components which are in motion around one another, and the reader must be willing to shift ground as these elements interact. Moreover, Heschel uses these elements to construct a distinctively polarized form of argument. Although paradox is a stock in trade for many forms of theology, Heschel observes that “polar thinking” is a particularly Jewish mode of reflection. In God in Search of Man, for example, he explicitly identifies this polarity as a defining characteristic, and in his great work in rabbinic studies, Torah min Hashamayim, he develops the polarity between immanentalism and transcendentalism as a hermeneutical principle for understanding rabbinic thought and teaching. Other tensions abound, as well—that of the restrictive halacha and interpretive aggada chief among them. So in reading Heschel, one must simultaneously search for his meaning in the middle ground between such tensions, and at the same time leave unresolved the tension created by the two poles which help to define it. In short, one will not discover with any definitive precision Heschel’s meaning on many key points, but rather must seek to discover the dynamic tension which he is willing and able to sustain. Furthermore, given the variety of perspectives and the polarized shape that characterize Heschel’s writing, one must learn to pay particularly close attention to his use of language itself. Kaplan’s valuable interpretive work, Holiness in Words, has already demonstrated the rich results that can be achieved by a careful textual analysis of many key passages in Heschel’s work. Working from the perspective of one trained as a literary critic, Kaplan points out that Heschel both analyzes language as metaphor, and in turn himself uses language rhetorically to “combine abstract categories with imagery and vivid comparisons.” As Kaplan observes, “Theological and philosophical categories provide points of reference, not the goal.”134 In reading Heschel, therefore, one must not simply search for an underlying structure to the argument, but also engage the text itself as it seeks to guide the reader to unexpected insights or to move one away from more typical, clichéd arguments. Finally, in developing an approach to Heschel, it will be the intention of this study to introduce for comparison other theological thinkers as a way of clarifying the sometimes opaque quality of his work, and setting it in its larger theological context. One of the surprising characteristics of many previous studies of Heschel is the absence of serious comparisons of his work with that of other philosophers and theologians, with the

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net result of a certain isolationism in understanding the implications of what he was getting at in his own work. Some intended interlocutors have already been mentioned: Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and James Gustafson. Other potential points of comparison are relatively obvious, such as Heschel’s contemporary colleagues in New York City, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Still others, however, are less obvious: Rudolf Otto as a precursor to Heschel’s development of the emotive significance of our response to the ineffable; Max Scheler as the source of Heschel’s idea of the sympathetic prophetic response to God’s pathos; Lev Shestov as a comparable opponent of Greek influences on concepts of freedom; Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas as later advocates for a recovery of a sense of classical virtue; George Lindbeck as a postliberal whose notion of the regulative roll of doctrine in religious communities helps to explain Heschel’s embrace of polarity as a governing principle; Nathalie Sarthou-Lajus as a contemporary French philosopher whose analysis of the moral significance of indebtedness parallels in many ways Heschel’s own use of the concept; the theologians of the “radical orthodoxy” movement (John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward) whose work represents a concern similar to Heschel’s to recover an awareness of the constitutive aspect of human participation in the divine; and the postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo, whose “weak thought” shares certain commonalities with an attentiveness to the structures of piety. By deploying these other thinkers in a study of Heschel, one can forge a comparison of their approaches to similar issues as they are raised in his work, bringing into sharper focus what is at stake in Heschel’s own project—and especially in his concern for the centrality of piety—and how it anticipates and interacts with much contemporary theological and philosophical discourse.

Notes 1 See Maurice Friedman, “Buber, Heschel and Heidegger: Two Jewish Existentialists Confront a Great German Existentialist,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 51/119 (2011), published online 17 May 2010 at jhp.sagepub.com/content/51/1/129. 2 David Novak, “Heschel’s Phenomenology of Revelation,” in Stanislaw Krajewski and Adam Lipszyc, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Philosophy, Theology and Interreligious Dialogue (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 38n. 10. 3 See, for example, this description of the intellectual impulses that brought Heschel to Berlin, based on Heschel’s own The Earth Is the Lord’s (1945) and Pikuach Neshamah (1949): “He, like many Jewish intellectuals at the time, had turned to Berlin, the capital of the Jewish Enlightenment, and was taken by the city that had symbolized, for that generation, the ‘cosmopolitan breeze blowing from the West.’ It was for the sake of finding the metaphysical truth in the writings of ‘leading German intellectuals’ that his soul yearned to be there. It was his generation . . . that sought, like him, to exchange the world of Berdichev and Ger with the world of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger . . .” Einat Ramon, “Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Critique of Modern Society,” The Journal of the Academy for Jewish Religion 6/1 (2010): 28–41. 4 Heschel, WM, 97–8. John Merkle, in The Genesis of Faith, makes passing reference to Heschel’s response in this passage to Heidegger. John C. Merkle, The Genesis of Faith: The Depth Theology of Abraham Heschel (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 176–7.

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5 Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, eds, The Piety of Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 18. 6 Gamberini, Pathos e Logos, 119. 7 Abraham Heschel, “Depth Theology,” Cross Currents X/1 (Winter 1960): 317. 8 Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 29–31. Crowe’s description of Heidegger’s studies of religion is admirably concise, and forms a frame of reference for the current excursus. 9 Martin Heidegger, “Das Wesen des Nihilismus” (1946–48), quoted in Crowe, Heidegger, 35. 10 Einat Ramon offers an interesting survey of the young Heschel’s concern for the decline of Western society in general and Jewish culture in particular in “Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Critique of Modern Society,” op. cit. Commenting on Heschel’s intellectual motivations during his studies in Berlin, Ramon notes, “Western culture, which prides itself on its scientific sophistication and aesthetic achievements, concealed, according to Heschel, the most vicious grains of evil and dehumanization, not despite but because of its overly rationalistic, utilitarian culture.” 11 Crowe, Heidegger, 14. 12 Ibid., 59. 13 Ibid., 65. 14 Ibid., 88. 15 Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of the Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferenci (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), quoted in Crowe, Heidegger, 93. 16 Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, I (Pfullingen: Neske, 1967), quoted in Hart, Piety of Thinking, ix. 17 Ben Vedder, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion: From God to the Gods (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007), 5. 18 Heschel, WM, 98. 19 See, for example, the accounts given by Eva Fleischner in “Heschel’s Significance for Jewish-Christian Relations” in Merkle, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 142–64; and by Donald Moore, SJ, in The Human and the Holy: The Spirituality of Abraham Joshua Heschel (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 1–19. 20 Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, edited by Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996). 21 For bibliographies of Heschel’s published work, see especially Fritz A. Rothschild, Between God and Man (New York: The Free Press, 1975), and more recently, Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) and Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America: 1940–1972 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 22 Patrick Granfield, Theologians at Work (New York: Macmillan, 1976). The collection, in addition to Heschel, also included such figures as Karl Rahner, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Meyendorff, Henri de Lubac, and Yves Congar. 23 The proceedings of the conference were published as Laurence K. Shook and Guy-M. Bertrand, eds, La théologie du renouveau, Cogitatio fidei 34 (Paris: Cerf, 1968). 24 Fleischner, “Heschel’s Significance,” 159. 25 Moore, The Human and the Holy, 15.

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26 One example is Heschel’s inclusion as the daily reading for 23 December (the anniversary of his death) in Robert Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 559–60. 27 Krista Tippett, “The Spiritual Audacity of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel,” an interview with Arnold Eisen on Speaking of Faith, National Public Radio, first aired 5 June 2008. 28 See the proceedings of a conference held at Brandeis University, 11–12 March 2007, published as Edward Kaplan and Shaul Magid, eds, “Pushing the Boundaries: Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Centenary Conference,” Modern Judaism 29/1 (February 2009); and the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Warsaw, 25–7 June 2007 published as Krajewski and Lipszyc, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Philosophy, Theology and Interreligious Dialogue, op. cit. A similar conference was held a number of years ago at the College of St Benedict, St Joseph, Minnesota in 1983, whose proceedings were published as Merkle, ed., Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought, op. cit. 29 John Bennett, “Heschel’s Significance for Protestants,” in Harold Kasimow and Byron L. Sherwin, eds, No Religion Is an Island: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interreligious Dialogue (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 124. 30 Daniel Berrigan, “My Friend,” in Kasimow and Sherwin, No Religion Is an Island, 69. 31 Abraham Heschel, “The Ecumenical Movement,” in The Insecurity of Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959/66), 181. 32 Heschel, “The Ecumenical Movement,” 179. 33 André Neher, L’Essence du prophétisme (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1972), 95. 34 Clemens Thoma, A Christian Theology of Judaism (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 133. 35 Jacob Neusner, The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992). 36 Neusner, The Incarnation of God, 2. 37 Ibid., 222. 38 Michael Wyschogrod, “A Jewish Perspective on Incarnation,” Modern Theology 12/2 (April 1996): 208. 39 Ulrich Mauser, Gottesbild und Menschwerdung: Eine Untersuchung zur Einheit des Alten und Neuen Testaments (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1971), 41–4. 40 John Paul II, Dies Domini 15. The reference to Heschel is given as “cf. A. J. Heschel, The Sabbath. Its Meaning for Modern Man (22nd Edition, 1995), 3–24.” 41 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 284. 42 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Action, vol. iv of Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 205–426. 43 Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. iv, 343–4. 44 Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). See especially section VI.9. For a broader examination of Heschel’s influence on Moltmann, see John Jaeger, “Abraham Heschel and the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 24/2 (Summer 1997): 167–79. 45 Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. iv, 343n. 20.

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46 Jürgen Moltmann, conversation with the author at the Institut Catholique de Paris, 8 June 1999. 47 Jürgen Moltmann, History and the Triune God: Contributions to Trinitarian Theology, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1991), 172. 48 For a discussion of Moltmann’s attempt to articulate the nature of the divine passibility, see the section on “Divine Impassibility in a Trinitarian Theology of the Cross according to Jürgen Moltmann,” in Amuluche Gregory Nnamani, The Paradox of a Suffering God (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), 159–73. 49 Moltmann, The Crucified God, 271. 50 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 25. 51 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 26. 52 Warren McWilliams, in his study of the idea of God’s passion in contemporary Protestant theology, examines six theologians who develop the idea in one way or another. Of these six, four are observed to have used Heschel’s idea of pathos: the German Lutheran Jürgen Moltmann, the Japanese Lutheran Kazoh Kitamori, the American Congregationalist Daniel Day Williams, and the Korean Methodist Jung Lee. Warren McWilliams, The Passion of God: Divine Suffering in Contemporary Protestant Theology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985). Another example of a work that cites Heschel in arguing for a divine suffering is Joseph M. Hallman, The Descent of God: Divine Suffering in History and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 19. Still further, Edward Farley mentions Heschel in passing in his Divine Empathy, citing Heschel’s eloquent communication of the “as such element of prophetic faith.” Edward Farley, Divine Empathy: A Theology of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 258. 53 Jung Young Lee, God Suffers for Us: A Systematic Inquiry into a Concept of Divine Passibility (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 48. 54 Marcel Sarot, God, Passibility and Corporeality (Kampen, The Netherlands: Pharos Publishing House, 1992). Similarly, Paul S. Fiddes notes that while Heschel attempts to avoid the epistemological complications of claiming to “know” that God suffers by saying that it is modal rather than essential, he does not “make much attempt to reconcile the two dimensions.” Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988), 111–12. 55 Jacob Neusner, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Man,” introduction to Heschel, To Grow in Wisdom, 7. 56 Chaïm Weiner, “Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: Une vue personnelle,” SIDIC 27/3 (1994): 2. 57 Maurice Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel: You Are My Witnesses (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987), 9. 58 Harold Stern, “A. J. Heschel, Irenic Polemicist,” The Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly 45 (1983): 169–77. 59 In a doctoral dissertation completed at Emory University, for example, Alvin Sugarman complains that one of the weaknesses of Heschel’s theology is that his “poetic language makes it difficult to ascertain the substantive content of his theology.” He goes on to remark sarcastically that “there are times when Heschel’s use of language becomes almost as ineffable as the ineffable itself.” Alvin M. Sugarman, “God and Finitude: Toward A Covenant of Mutual Affirmation” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1988), 196. 60 Maurice Friedman, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Toward a Philosophy of Judaism,” Conservative Judaism 10/2 (1956): 1–2.

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61 Maurice Friedman, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Philosopher of Wonder,” Congress Bi-Weekly (18 December 1967): 12–4. 62 Harold Kasimow, Divine-Human Encounter: A Study of Abraham Joshua Heschel (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979). 63 It was Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, now a scholar of Jewish feminist studies at Dartmouth College, who applied the term to her father. Rorty contrasted systematic and edifying philosophies as, in the first instance, strictly scientific, and in the second, “open for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause . . ., something which [at least for the moment] cannot be explained and can barely be described.” Susannah Heschel, “Heschel as Mensch: Testimony of His Daughter,” in Heschel, To Grow in Wisdom, 210. Also cited in Edward K. Kaplan, “Abraham Joshua Heschel,” in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Steven Katz (Washington: B’nai B’rith Books, 1993), 142. 64 Theodore Weinberger, Strategies for Sustaining Religious Commitment: The Art of the Religious Life (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). 65 David Hartman, “Heschel’s Religious Passion,” in Conflicting Visions: Spiritual Possibilities of Modern Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), 174. 66 Edward K. Kaplan, Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Poetics of Piety (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). French edition La saintété en paroles: Abraham Heschel, piété, poétique, action, trans. Paul Kessler (Paris: Cerf, 1999). 67 A short survey of Heschel’s life for young readers is available in Or N. Rose, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Man of Spirit, Man of Action (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003). Personal remembrances of Heschel are also collected in Kasimow and Sherwin, No Religion Is an Island, op. cit. 68 Edward K. Kaplan, “Language and Reality in Abraham J. Heschel’s Philosophy of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61/1 (1973): 98. 69 Edward K. Kaplan, “Heschel as Philosopher: Phenomenology and the Rhetoric of Revelation,” Modern Judaism 21/1 (2001): 1–14. 70 Edward K. Kaplan, “The American Mission of Abraham Joshua Heschel,” in The Americanization of the Jews, eds. Robert Seltzer and Norman Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1995). 71 Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 13. 72 Rothschild, Between God and Man, 5. 73 Fritz A. Rothschild, “The Religious Thought of Abraham Heschel,” Conservative Judaism 23/1 (1968): 23. 74 Fritz A. Rothschild, “Architect and Herald of a New Theology,” Conservative Judaism 28/1 (1973): 56. 75 Heschel, IF, 192. 76 Samuel H. Dresner, “Heschel and Halakhah: The Vital Center,” Conservative Judaism 43/4 (1991): 18. 77 Samuel H. Dresner, “The Contribution of Abraham Joshua Heschel,” Judaism 32/1 (1983): 57–69. Later published as the introduction to Abraham Heschel, The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov: Essays in Hasidism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 78 Joseph H. Lookstein, “The Neo-Hasidism of Abraham J. Heschel,” Judaism 5/3 (1956): 251. 79 Emil Fackenheim, review of God in Search of Man by Abraham Heschel, Conservative Judaism 15/1 (1960): 50–3.

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80 Geneviève Comeau, Catholicisme et Judaïsme dans la modernité: Une comparaison (Paris: Cerf, 1998). 81 Geneviève Comeau, “Le Judaïsme dans le monde moderne: L’exemple du Conservative Judaism,” Recherches de science religieuse 85/2 (1997): 213. 82 Comeau, Catholicisme et Judaïsme, 103. 83 Hans Küng, Judaism, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 406–13. 84 Jacob Neusner, “Faith in the Crucible of the Mind,” America 128/9 (1973): 207–8. 85 Marvin Fox, “Heschel, Intuition, and the Halakhah,” Tradition 111/1 (1960): 5–15. 86 S. Daniel Breslauer, “Abraham Joshua Heschel’s ‘Biblical Man’ in Contextual Perspective,” Judaism 25/2 (1976): 342. 87 S. Daniel Breslauer, The Ecumenical Perspective and the Modernization of Jewish Religion (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978). 88 Another critical reading of Heschel is the argument advanced by Arnold Eisen (Stanford University), that Heschel’s principal aim is to inspire his readers’ teshuva, that is, their return to God and the performance of mitzvot (good deeds). Eisen attempts to take a wide view of the totality of Heschel’s work, looking beyond the most commonly read works (God in Search of Man and Man Is Not Alone), finding the unifying theme to be an “apologia for the mitzvot.” He criticizes Heschel’s project in the end as falling “victim to its own assumptions and hesitations,” especially because it is unable to connect with anyone not already convinced of faith, and because his potential radicalism in describing how mitzvot relate us to ultimate meaning fails to materialize. Arnold Eisen, “Re-reading Heschel on the Commandments,” Modern Judaism 9/1 (1989): 1–33. 89 S. Daniel Breslauer, The Charismatic Spirituality of Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mystical Teachings of an American Rabbi (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011). 90 Eugene Borowitz, A New Jewish Theology, 156. 91 Jakob J. Petuchowski, “Faith as the Leap of Action: The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel,” Commentary 25/5 (1958): 396. 92 One such effort by a non-Jewish writer to make a more systematic presentation of Heschel was an unpublished doctoral dissertation by the Protestant Robert Earl Clarke, “The Biblical Philosophy of Abraham Heschel.” Clarke attempts “to present an orderly content analysis of Heschel’s philosophy of religion,” which both sets it in philosophical context and imposes an external order onto his thought—an effort which is helpful in revealing the unifying themes, yet ultimately artificial in that it overly systematizes Heschel’s work. Robert Earl Clarke, “The Biblical Philosophy of Abraham Heschel” (Ph.D. dissertation, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1965). 93 Byron L. Sherwin, Abraham Joshua Heschel (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979). By way of comparison, and indicating the esteem in which the editors held Heschel, the other theologians in the “Makers of Contemporary Theology” series include Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger, Soren Kiekegaard, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. 94 Michael A. Chester, Divine Pathos and Human Being: The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005). 95 Albino Babolin, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Filosofo della religione (Perugia: Editrice Benucci, 1978). It is interesting to note that there has been a special interest in Heschel’s work in Italy, perhaps due to Pope Paul VI’s personal promotion of his books in the wake of Heschel’s participation in the Second Vatican Council.

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96 Bernhard Dolna, An die Gegenwart Gottes preisgegeben: Abraham Joshua Heschel, Leben und Werk (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2001). 97 Gianluca Giannini, Etica e religione in Abraham Joshua Heschel: Lineamenti di una filosofia dell’Ebraismo (Naples: Guida, 1998). 98 Merkle, The Genesis of Faith, xviii. 99 One such example of an effort to understand Heschel through the lens of an organizing theme is James Hyman’s “Abraham Heschel: Alienation and the Trope of Meaning,” an unpublished dissertation at Stanford University. Hyman argues that Heschel organizes his “traditional interpretation of Jewish religion” around the modern idiom of meaningfulness. His strategy, Hyman believes, is to relate the personal religious experience of the individual to the authoritative teaching of the rabbis through the issue of meaning: that is, the validity of the tradition is confirmed to the extent that it can provide an experience of contemporary meaningfulness through an encounter with the infinite. Hyman finds that Heschel was ultimately unsuccessful in achieving the specific goal of validating rabbinic authority. He does, however, believe Heschel to have contributed significantly to theological discourse by “identifying a crucial means by which moderns establish authority for belief and practice.” James Hyman, “Abraham Heschel: Alienation and the Trope of Meaning” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1996). 100 Perlman, a onetime student of Heschel in New York, himself laments the relative paucity of serious systematic treatments of Heschel’s theology, even while acknowledging the contribution of Fritz Rothschild in his seminars on Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary and his introduction and editing of Between God and Man, as well as Merkle’s Genesis of Faith, as the most serious treatments of Heschel from a philosophical point of view. For another treatment of Heschel’s phenomenology, see Alexander Even-Chen, Voice Out of the Darkness. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Phenomenology and Mysticism, in Hebrew (Tel Aviv: Mekhon Sheckhter, 1999). 101 Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 165. 102 Edmond La B. Cherbonnier, “Heschel as a Religious Thinker,” Conservative Judaism 23/1 (1968): 27. 103 E. La B. Cherbonnier, “A. J. Heschel and the Philosophy of the Bible,” Commentary 27/1 (1959): 23. 104 Tanenzapf, “Abraham Heschel and his Critics,” 277. 105 See Gordon Tucker, “Heschel’s Torah min ha-shamayim: Ancient Theology and Contemporary Autobiography,” Conservative Judaism L/2-3 (Winter/Spring 1998): 48–55; and “A. J. Heschel and the Problem of Religious Certainty,” Modern Judaism 29/1 (February 2009): 126–37. 106 Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 95–6. 107 Robert McAfee Brown, “ ‘Some are Guilty, All are Responsible’: Heschel’s Social Ethics,” in Merkle, Abraham Joshua Heschel. 108 Robert McAfee Brown and Michael Novak, Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967). 109 Fleischner, “Heschel’s Significance.” 110 Eugene Fisher, “Heschel’s Impact on Catholic-Jewish Relations,” in Kasimow and Sherwin, No Religion Is an Island. 111 Krajewski and Lipszyc, introduction to Abraham Joshua Heschel, 2. Heschel delivered the lecture at his inauguration as the Harry Emerson Fosdick Visiting

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113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety Professor at Union Theological Seminary on 10 November 1965 and it was published in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review 21/2 (January 1966): 117–34. Reprinted in Heschel, MGSA, 235–56. Meir Ben-Horin, “The Ineffable: Critical Notes on Neo-Mysticism,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 46/4 (1956): 321–54; “The Ultimate and the Mystery: A Critique of Some Neo-Mystical Tenets,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 51/1 (1960): 55–71 and 51/2 (1960): 141–56; “Via Mystica,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 45/3 (1955): 249–58. Ben-Horin, “Via Mystica,” 254. Ben-Horin, “The Ineffable,” 322. Fackenheim, review of God in Search of Man, 50. Eliezer Berkovits, “Dr. A. J. Heschel’s Theology of Pathos,” in Major Themes in Modern Philosophies of Judaism (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1974), 205. Berkovits, “Dr. A. J. Heschel’s Theology of Pathos,” 220. Arthur Cohen, The Natural and the Supernatural Jew (New York: Pantheon, 1962). Neusner, Introduction to Heschel, To Grow in Wisdom, xii. See, for example, various papers presented in Krajewski and Lipszyc, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the special number devoted to Heschel as a 25th yahrzeit tribute of Conservative Judaism L/2-3 (Winter/Spring 1998). Lawrence Perlman, “Heschel’s Critique of Kant,” From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism, eds. Jacob Neusner, Ernest Frerichs, and Nahum Sarna, vol. 3 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). The suggestion was made by Sol Tanenzapf as part of his response to Berkovits in “Abraham Heschel and his Critics.” Tanenzapf argues that because in Hartshorne’s theology, change is a pervasive feature of reality, it need not be denied of God. To do so would make God’s being in some respect more restricted than the openended aspect of human becoming. This connection with Heschel’s concept of pathos, however, was resisted by Harold Schulweis, who observes that Hartshorne’s metaphysical commitments to “process” rule out the God of goodness, love, suffering, and concern which is crucial to Heschel’s conception. Harold Schulweis, “Charles Hartshorne and the Defenders of Heschel,” Judaism 24/1 (1975): 58–62. Merkle, The Genesis of Faith, xviii–xix. Nathan Rotenstreich, “On Prophetic Consciousness,” Journal of Religion 54/3 (1974): 185–98. See David Novak, “Heschel’s Phenomenology of Revelation” and Milan Lyčka, “Abraham Heschel’s Philosophy of Judaism as a Phenomenology of Religion,” in Krajewski and Lipszyc, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 1. Abraham Heschel, The Earth Is the Lord’s (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1950), 107. Abraham Heschel, “The Inner World of the Polish Jew,” introduction to Roman Vishniac, Polish Jews: A Pictorial Record (New York: Schocken, 1965), 7–17. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 55. Susannah Heschel, “Heschel as Mensch,” 195. Susannah Heschel, Introduction to Abraham Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 19. Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 108. Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 14. Ibid., 45.

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Beyond Rationalism to Understanding

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant . . . —Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences

I  Heschel’s intellectual formation in Berlin As a deeply devout and intellectually gifted young man, Heschel arrived in Berlin to begin his university studies in 1927. He was eager to find a means to synthesize the realms of an intense spirituality and academic rigor in his own person, and quickly embraced a wide range of disciplines and sources in his search. He soon realized, however, that his personal religious conviction ran counter to the highly rarefied atmosphere of German academic life—a discovery which sent him looking for a means by which he could sustain both sides of his complex interior life. In his introduction to The Prophets, Heschel later wrote of the agonizing dimensions of this search: In the academic environment in which I spent my student years philosophy had become an isolated, self-subsisting, self-indulgent entity, a Ding an sich, encouraging suspicion instead of a love of wisdom. The answers offered were unrelated to the problems, indifferent to the travail of a person who became aware of man’s suspended sensitivity in the face of stupendous challenge, indifferent to a situation in which good and evil became irrelevant, in which man became increasingly callous to catastrophe and ready to suspend the principle of truth. I was slowly led to the realization that some of the terms, motivations, and concerns which dominate our thinking may prove destructive of the root of human responsibility and treasonable to the ultimate ground of human solidarity. The challenge we are all exposed to, and the dreadful shame that shatters our capacity for inner peace, defy the ways and patterns of our thinking. One is forced to admit that some of the causes and motives of our thinking have led our existence astray, that speculative prosperity is no answer to spiritual bankruptcy. It was the realization that the right coins were not available in the common currency that drove me to study the thought of the prophets.1

Heschel began his university studies fresh from 2 years’ preparatory work in Western philosophy, literature, and language in the secularized, pluralistic Jewish community of

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Vilna in Lithuania.2 He had chosen to go there under the influence of Fishl Schneersohn, a modern writer and religious thinker whom Heschel encountered as a young man in Warsaw. Schneersohn, himself of Hasidic background, recognized Heschel’s intellectual capabilities and encouraged him to broaden his educational experience beyond religious studies. Despite the reluctance of his family, therefore, Heschel left home for Vilna at the age of 18, broadening though not separating himself from his immediate cultural environment: even in secularized Vilna, Heschel remained rigorously observant. Heschel spent 2 years there studying at the Real-Gymnasium, years which he found exceptionally stimulating and which helped shape his commitment to an extensive background of knowledge upon which he drew throughout his later works. Over 40 years later, a deeply nostalgic Heschel wrote of the city, “Jewish Vilna was an environment whose walls, corners and cellars breathed memories of gigantic intellects, reminiscences of self-sacrifice for Jewishness, of reverence of God and man, of charity and the thirst for knowledge.”3 Having prepared himself for matriculation at a German university, Heschel left Vilna for Berlin. Once there, he enrolled in the faculties of philosophy and theology at the Friedrich Wilhelms Universität (later named the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), as well as at the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (including preparation for ordination as a rabbi). Heschel also established a relationship with the more conservative Rabbiner-Seminar für das Orthodoxe Judentum (also known as the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary), so that he had contact with a wide range of scholarship and religious orientation. At the university, Heschel chose philosophy as his major subject, studying with a Kantian specialist, Heinrich Maier, and also Max Dessoir, who combined the disciplines of aesthetics, phenomenology, and psychology (and eventually served as Heschel’s dissertation advisor). Within theology Heschel concentrated on biblical studies, especially the Hebrew prophets, in an environment which was dominated by the emerging historical-critical method of Protestant biblical scholarship. His second dissertation advisor was a Swiss Protestant pastor drawn from this faculty, Alfred Bertholet, a specialist in Old Testament research, with an interest in Religionsgeschichte (phenomenology of religion).4 As a minor subject within the faculty, Heschel chose Semitic philology, and to complete his distribution requirement he added a second minor in the history of art—all this in addition to continuing an active prayer and synagogue life, writing Yiddish poetry, and making advantage of the cultural life of Berlin. Several important influences stand out in this range of studies and professors. One is that Heschel encountered an intellectual environment which was dominated by neoKantianism; indeed the chair of the philosophy department was the Kantian Professor Maier, Heschel’s own teacher. This “reigning intellectual ideology of the time,”5 however, would in the end become the orthodoxy against which Heschel rebelled, as he turned instead to the influences of a cadre of mentors at both the University and Hochschule whose intellectual interests sought to embrace a more multidisciplinary approach. This group, having been intellectually formed in the 1900s, was strongly influenced by the philosophical anthropology of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), many of them having studied with him personally. Dilthey thus became a pervasive influence on Heschel, for many of the young student’s closest academic advisors were

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Dilthey’s intellectual descendants. Dessoir, for example, had studied with Dilthey in Berlin, and went on to develop his own related notion of personality in which multiple “spheres” of consciousness are united by a “string of memories.”6 At the Hochschule, the philosopher and rabbi Leo Baeck, who taught homiletics and Midrash, was also a significant mentor: Heschel described him as “the most educated man” he ever met.7 Baeck was likewise a former student of Dilthey, aspiring to the development of a comprehensive philosophical anthropology. Among other teachers, Heschel was particularly influenced by a scholar of Jewish philosophy, Julius Guttmann, who was himself a student of phenomenology and worked to bridge the perceived gap between philosophy and religion. Ironically, the strongest influence on Heschel during his university years was not a member of the academy at all, but an independent intellectual named David Koigen. A sociologist by temperament, Koigen had also been a student of Dilthey, adapting his analysis of cognition into a theory of “the culture act,” which brought a range of data from disparate sources into one cognitive insight.8 Drawing on Husserlian phenomenology, Koigen went on to develop an anthropology based on neo-Hasidic concepts of the human being, the common foundation being the holiness conferred on every person by virtue of being a creature made in the image of God. This synthetic approach appealed to Heschel, and he actively participated in a philosophical seminar called a Philosophische Arbeitsgemeinschaft led by Koigen from 1930 until 1933, in which he began to explore the ethical dimensions of his own work at the university. In particular, the participants in the seminar were interested in the renewal of religious life, and it was here that Heschel began to sort out the emotive and rational dimensions of his interest in prophetic inspiration that eventually resulted in his dissertation.9 Although he did not personally study with him, Heschel was also attracted to the synthetic approach of Ernst Cassirer, who as a sometime student of Dilthey (as well as Husserl) emerged as a dominant leader in the next generation’s efforts to continue the development of a philosophical anthropology. Cassirer’s three-volume Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923–29, Eng. trans. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1955) sought to apply Dilthey’s concept of cognitive unity to the full range of human experience: there was a volume each on language, knowledge, and mystical thought. Heschel made copious notes from Cassirer’s works, though in the end he found little room in Cassirer’s thought for his own personal conviction of the importance of holiness as a dimension of life. Certain aspects of this range of academic influences are especially significant in trying to develop an understanding of Heschel’s later approach to theology. The first is the shear range of influences which filled these intellectually formative years. Their extent is all the more remarkable considering that Heschel had only a few years earlier been thoroughly immersed in the Warsaw Hasidic community of his youth, where his intellectual exposure in the shtiebl (small school) was to the intensive Talmud and Torah study and intellectual theatrics (pilpul) characteristic of traditional Hasidism. Although Heschel never actually broke with this background, his decision to move beyond it into the larger world of Jewish intellectual life in Vilna, and then to the scholarly world of the University and Hochschule in Berlin is an extraordinary evolution. And in this development, Heschel’s special ability was never to lose anything, but to continue

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acquiring varieties of perspective and building on previous experience—an ability which strongly affected and supported his later theological efforts. A second significant aspect of this intellectual matrix is Heschel’s search for a means whereby he could come to terms with the gap between his own personal certitude of the reality of the religious dimension of life, and the prevailing skepticism and secularism which he encountered in the academy. This is the anxiety to which Heschel alluded in the quotation from The Prophets given above: how to respond to what he considered philosophy’s destructive preoccupation with doubt and the restriction of human knowing to rational thought. When he remarks, “some of the causes and motives of our thinking have led our existence astray,” he reveals his own emerging doubt of doubt itself. This suspicion, which while he was a student seems to have been instinctive, shaped his search for a new way of knowing when he began to mature intellectually. As he would later write in God in Search of Man, “Doubt is an act in which the mind inspects its own ideas; wonder is an act in which the mind confronts the universe. Radical skepticism is the outgrowth of subtle conceit and self-reliance. Yet there was no conceit in the prophets and no self-reliance in the Psalmist.”10 For this reason, as we shall see, Kant becomes the target of Heschel’s intellectual efforts at resistance, and behind him Spinoza. Hence comes the third aspect, which is the role Dilthey plays as a sort of common denominator among Heschel’s academic influences, an influence which is not just limited to Dilthey’s own work but which radiates out through his immediate successors as well, Max Scheler in particular. Heschel turns to this foundation in Dilthey as the principal resource for addressing his dissatisfaction with the prevailing philosophical ethos of the academy. Clearly Heschel was surrounded by teachers who were directly influenced by Dilthey—most of them on a personal level—and many of whom were actively engaged in furthering the project of a comprehensive approach to the human sciences which Dilthey began. This point is somewhat to the contrary, however, of the usual critical assessments which have paid attention to the philosophical underpinnings of Heschel’s work. The more usual attitude is that it was the writings of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) which were “of decisive influence on Heschel in his student days in Berlin.”11 Clearly Heschel’s study of the prophetic consciousness in his doctoral dissertation does in fact owe a direct debt to Husserl, and many of Heschel’s most influential teachers were also well versed in Husserl’s method. Yet even before Heschel could begin to apply an Husserlian phenomenological method to his subject, he first had to adopt an attitude of resistance to the Kantian restriction of human knowing to reason alone—in short to find an alternative epistemology. It is this alternative which Dilthey provides, or at least gives the impetus for exploring, and so it is his work which forms a prior intellectual foundation for Heschel’s inquiry into religious consciousness, even before his attention turns to the prophets. It would seem more appropriate, therefore, to understand Dilthey as providing the outline of Heschel’s program, and Husserl the tool for its execution, rather than focusing too narrowly on an exclusively Husserlian analysis of Heschel’s work. If we turn to the manner in which Dilthey’s study of the human sciences provides a foundation for Heschel’s program in his early works, written while he was still in Germany, we will find that nascent therein is a method of approaching human consciousness in general, and its religious

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dimension in particular, which shaped Heschel’s program overall. Dilthey’s influence has dimensions which were played out contrapuntally over time in the development of Heschel’s theology, forming what can be identified as the intellectual basis for Heschel’s search to understand “the pious man.”

II  An analysis of understanding: Dilthey At its core, Dilthey’s challenge to Kant’s “pure reason” with his concept of “historical reason” is central to Heschel’s program, and determines Heschel’s own understanding of the fullness of human consciousness. It is not our purpose here to engage in a detailed analysis of Dilthey’s philosophy, but rather to extract from it those elements that are of particular importance in understanding Heschel’s foundational concepts. Nor would it be appropriate to try to draw too close a parallel between the two thinkers, for if one pursued Dilthey’s humanistic thought rigorously enough, one would soon come across impulses which would be antithetical to Heschel’s own religious thinking. Dilthey’s overarching concern was to develop a comprehensive foundation for the Geisteswissenschaften, which we would understand today as the humanities and social sciences. His project included both the development of an approach to these human sciences, as well as a definition of the limits of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). His primary insight was that human studies must inevitably have a historical orientation, for society is itself a human creation and must be studied from the viewpoint of the purposeful activity which has shaped it over time. Unlike the natural sciences, which rely upon the discovery of objective, universally applicable laws, there is a purposiveness and historicity to human activity which cannot be reduced to such formulae: human events unfold through time, with unique and unpredictable changes in direction which are the content of history. In his principal theoretical work, Einleitung indie Geisteswissenschaften (1883, Eng. trans. Introduction to the human sciences, 1989), Dilthey argues that the source of reality is not a phenomenal abstraction from sense experience, but rather a more inclusive “life-nexus” (Zusammenhang des Lebens) which takes into account both the fullness and individuality of human experience (what Rudolf Makkreel nicely calls “an appreciation of the pervasiveness and profundity of life”12). Dilthey’s philosophical system is often casually summarized as a “philosophy of life,” embracing the totality of and uniqueness of human knowing. As Hans-Georg Gadamer points out, Dilthey is at this point already in contrast to Kant, for whereas Kant sought to define human knowing in relation to the natural world, Dilthey seeks to establish its relation to the historical world.13 The “Nature” of pure reason and the natural sciences is deemed by Dilthey to be too narrow a category for understanding humanity: it must be replaced by “life” which takes into account the wholeness of human experience and makes possible the human sciences. In order to make sense of the life-world, Dilthey had to seek a means of understanding the concrete, historical human being whose basic unit of consciousness is already experiential, that is the “lived experience” which he called Erlebnis. Whereas Kant had defined experience as “a conceptual ordering of inert sensations” (Erfahrung), Dilthey

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understood Erlebnis to be a “real” rather than “phenomenal” construct because there is nothing ultimate to it.14 To Dilthey, Kant’s Erfahrung never did fully overcome its partly inferred character as an external experience (noumena), and so remained intrinsically ambiguous, epistemologically speaking. Erlebnis, on the other hand, is a phenomenon given with certainty because it is a unit of meaning rather than of sensation. That is to say, the fundamental aspect of consciousness which requires analysis is not our encounter with the noumena of the external world, but the meaning we attach to experience in the process of becoming aware of it (regardless of what the actual objective reality behind that meaning may or may not be). As Gadamer analyzed it, Erlebnis is “the permanent content of what is experienced . . . a residue that acquires permanence, weight and significance from out of the transience of experiencing.”15 It has, therefore, an immediacy which precedes interpretation, based on an inner historicity which belongs to experience itself: “a world that is constituted and formed by the human mind.” The epistemological challenge of trying to justify a correspondence between our inner ideas that are based on an encounter with the external world, and the external world itself, is thus shifted (a move which Dilthey makes following Vico). The question now becomes how to understand the historical fact of the individual human being, and it is this very “homogeneity of subject and object that makes historical knowledge possible.”16 And thus we have Dilthey’s surprising conclusion that it is a fact of our consciousness which is epistemologically essential, and not an objective referent outside of it. He demonstrates this insight with the following example: The noise which a feverish person assigns to an object behind him constitutes an Erlebnis which is real in  all its components, namely, the taking place of the sound and its reference to the object. The reality of the fact of consciousness will be unaffected even if it turns out that the assumption of an object behind the patient’s bed is false.17

It is, in other words, the content of consciousness which is epistemologically significant, and not the supposed objectivity of its external referent. Dilthey nevertheless argues that already embedded in consciousness is a reflexive awareness (Innewerden) which contains a reference to things beyond consciousness, an awareness which is confirmed by our experience of the resistance of the external world to our purposes. As Makkreel puts it, “Lived experience . . . involves our attitude to, and thus awareness of, external reality.”18 But because Erlebnis is fundamentally an act of consciousness, the psychic structuring of these experiences becomes the focal point of Dilthey’s investigations. He posits that phenomena are related by an inner connectedness, as parts to a whole, through an “acquired psychic nexus” which becomes the intersection of the psychological and historical. This is so because as human beings, we discover through reflection a continuity in “indivisible consciousness” between inner and outer experience, between past, present, and future, which relates seemingly isolated experiences to the uninterrupted flow of historical time. This location of the basic element for study in a psychological structure implies a radical shift from Kant’s preoccupation with pure reason. For if consciousness in its wholeness is the seat of human knowing—the realization of what we are doing and thinking—then one

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must understand not only the universal experience of sense perception, but also the individual experiences of feelings, drives, and purposes that make up a real historical person.19 Dilthey thus hoped to overcome Kant’s dualism between the psychological and epistemological through an anthropology which takes into account the totality of psychic experience.20 Dilthey’s emphasis upon consciousness led him to posit a principle of phenomenality (Phänomenalität), according to which “everything existing for me must be a fact of my consciousness.”21 This principle resists its close relative, phenomenalism, which would see everything as a synthetic mental construction—the difference being that the first simply holds that everything which I experience as real will be experienced through a consciousness of it, whereas the latter makes the claim of an intervening metaphysical structure of knowing which Dilthey believes limits without warrant our forms of knowing. I know through an act of consciousness, but what I know is not merely an act of consciousness. Dilthey is able to make this claim because he does not rely upon a concept of the ego as distinct from the world: consciousness is known through the historical experience of it, and does not rest upon an a priori transcendental ego. He therefore tries to overcome any sharp delineation between the empirical and a priori: we are part of life and can know it only from within.22 This principle leads us to a key concept in Dilthey: the analysis of understanding (Verstehen). The concept has for him a technical meaning beyond the more casual use of the word to mean any sort of comprehension. It refers rather to the “comprehension of some mental content—an idea, an intention, or a feeling—manifested in empirically given expressions . . .”23 In Erlebnis, we experience the world as already structured and meaningful: it does not confront us as a chaos of unrelated phenomena. Based upon this intuitive insight, human beings give expression (Ausdruck) to their experience of the meaning of the events they experience, and this expression as it is received in the human community gives rise to the understanding, or Verstehen, of experience. Dilthey writes, Even the psychophysical unit, man, knows himself through the same mutual relationship of lived experience and understanding; . . . but, when he tries to hold fast and grasp his states of mind by turning his attention upon himself, then the narrow limits of such an introspective method of self-knowledge show themselves; only his actions, his formulated expressions of life and the effects of these upon others, teach man about himself. Thus, he comes to know himself only by the circuitous route of understanding. . . . Briefly, it is through the process of understanding that life gains illumination about its depths, and yet we understand ourselves and others only by putting what we have actually experienced into every kind of expression of our own and others’ lives. So mankind becomes the subject matter of the human studies only because the relation between experience, expression, and understanding exists.24

Our ability to understand the world through lived experience is premised upon a set of categories, a word reminiscent of Kant but used by Dilthey in a completely different mode. Whereas for Kant, the categories are strictly formal as the intellectual conditions for our experience of the natural world (e.g. the category of causality), Dilthey develops

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what he calls the “life-categories” which “bring out the structures of the cognitiveaffective-volitional breadth of life itself.”25 These categories are related to our intuitive sense of the world as meaningful, and help to structure and give expression to that basic insight. Examples would be the relation of inner mental content and outer physical expression; part and whole; means and ends; development; value; time; and purpose.26 In applying these categories to our experience, the results may be a form of discursive understanding, but not necessarily so: understanding may be intuitive as well. Cumulatively, however, the categories allow for a range of cognitive experiences which make understanding a comprehensive outgrowth of human experience, rather than purely the product of our reasoning faculty. It is this core position which Heschel appropriates to support his own investigation into the epistemological dimensions of religious consciousness.

III  Studies of prophetic consciousness Heschel’s appropriation of many key elements of Dilthey’s philosophical anthropology is immediately evident in his doctoral dissertation, Die Prophetie (Prophecy).27 This intellectual foundation, upon which he builds throughout his career, can first be outlined in reference to this seminal early work; in due course we will see how Heschel deploys these concepts in his later works to develop analogously his notion of piety. Heschel began the dissertation in  1930 and finished it 2  years later in November 1932, finally publishing it in 1936 in order to receive his doctorate.28 Significantly, it was originally entitled in the manuscript as Das prophetische Bewußtsein (Prophetic consciousness); when it was revised, expanded, and translated into English years later, it appeared under the more expansive title, The Prophets (1962). As Perlman points out, Heschel is more explicit about his methodology in the introduction to his dissertation than in almost any other place in his writings (despite the fact that it has been almost totally ignored by other critics, with the exception of Henry Corbin, who in his introduction to the excerpts published in Hermès, notes the phenomenological character of the work, describing it as “an extension of the work of Max Scheler”29). Curiously, when the revised and expanded English version was published, Heschel omitted some of this explanatory material, referring his readers back to the introduction of the German version “for further details of the method employed.”30 Perlman summarizes: Heschel’s purpose in that introduction was to distinguish his own explanation of prophecy from the psychological, political, ethical and dogmatic explanations popular at that time. In so doing, Heschel lays the foundation necessary for an understanding of a prophetic self and a unique prophetic consciousness.31

As Heschel himself writes, the inner world (Innenwelt) of the prophets had, up to that time, remained “eine terra incognita,”32 a terrain which he now proposes to explore. As he opens the foreword, “The present investigation concerns itself with the knowledge and particularity of the essence and structure of the prophetic consciousness.”33

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Perlman, in a chapter of his book entitled, “The Methodology That Unifies Heschel’s Thought,” argues that the “foundation” for this exploration is directly derived from Husserl’s phenomenology, most specifically the noetic-noematic correlation (i.e. the relation between the noetic act of knowing, and the noematic object which is presented to consciousness through that act, such that there is a correspondence between them). As Perlman observes, Heschel starts from the fundamental conviction of the objective character of the prophetic experience. As Heschel writes in Die Prophetie, It was already intimated that for the consciousness of the prophet the prophetic phenomenon possesses a real objective reality, to which a subjective emotional reality is attached. . . . Both in the objective sphere as in the emotional sphere the two essential components may be distinguished, which may be defined as content and form.34

The phenomenological method, which takes as its starting point the fact (or “phenomenon”) of human encounters such as prophecy, subsequently inquiring into their nature as they are experienced by human beings, allows Heschel to bracket the question of the reality behind the prophetic experience, and to concentrate instead on the form and content of prophecy itself: “Our task is not to judge the truth of the prophetic statements, but to describe their essence, we merely wish to obtain clarity and illumination thereof.”35 Heschel then goes on to describe the noetic character of the prophetic experience, which forms the viewpoint from which his investigation proceeds: But the act of inspiration must also be adequately comprehended. Without the difficult problem of the limit of revelation ceasing to exist, the noetic character of the content of inspiration can be proven, that also inspiration itself leads into the general relation of consciousness, that also content, which is not original consciousness, that becomes a revelation to the enduring consciousness.36

Having employed this method, Heschel offers as the conclusion of his study the following: in prophetic consciousness, one may distinguish between what happened to the prophet (the transcendent), and what happened in him (the spontaneous), as well as between the content and form at both levels of the prophetic event. On the transcendent level, prophecy has pathos as its content and an ecstasy of God as its form; on the personal level, the content is of sympathy for God’s pathos (a point to which we shall return), and the form is the sense of being overpowered.37 Perlman concludes, “It should be minimally clear, without even explaining the noetic-noematic relationship of prophetic consciousness, that it forms the basis of Heschel’s theological method.”38 Although Heschel is less explicit in the introduction to The Prophets, he does also acknowledge there a debt to the phenomenological method: “I still maintain the soundness of the method described above, which in important aspects reflects the method of phenomenology.”39 In making this comment, Heschel is referring back to the preceding discussion of his intentions, in which he proposes to view the phenomenon of prophecy “from within,” seeking not just “explanation” but also

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“understanding.” He is resistant to studies of the prophets which start from the principle “that nothing is to be recognized as a datum unless it can be qualified a priori as capable of explanation,” arguing that such an assumption “obstructs the view of much of reality and seriously affects our power to gain a pristine insight into what we face.”40 Rather, he will seek to unveil “the categories or the structural forms of prophetic thinking,” having suspended personal beliefs about “whether the event happened in fact as it did to their minds.” Then, in a summary remark that is quintessentially phenomenological in its bracketing of the objective reality beyond experience, Heschel claims that “regardless of whether or not their experience was of the real, it is possible to analyze the form and content of that experience.”41 Moreover, as Perlman points out, once Heschel has trained the phenomenological method on prophetic consciousness and established its connection with the idea of revelation through the correlation between God’s pathos and prophetic sympathy, in his later work it becomes a means of approaching all the components of religious experience which form the primary content of his theology: God, human being, deeds, prayer, the Sabbath—and, I would add, piety.42 This is an essential point, for Heschel’s anthropology (which plays a significant role in the development of his overall theology) is largely shaped by a continuing application of phenomenological concepts, particularly the adoption of Husserl’s eidetic understanding of experience through his idea of intentionality. In this concept, Husserl argued (following Franz Brentano) that what we perceive sensorially is not just a sensation, but something which is already endowed with a value or incipient meaning. In Who Is Man?, Heschel explicitly deploys this understanding of consciousness en route to positing his own analysis of self-consciousness, briefly citing Brentano and Husserl in the process.43 Yet one must be cautious of drawing too close a correlation between Husserl and Heschel, even when Heschel specifically invokes Husserl’s name. In a conversation with Maurice Friedman (recorded by Friedman in a highly personal account of his relationship with Heschel), Heschel stressed that in contrast to Husserl’s “transcendental ego,” he emphasizes exactly the opposite perspective: “knowing myself as known by the other rather than knowing the other as known by myself.”44 Heschel argued that rather than consciousness being given meaning by the ego’s self-consciousness, the “I” is itself in need of meaning. This whole question of the relation of subjectivity and objectivity, the famous “I-Thou” debate, is an issue to which we shall return later, but while discussing Heschel’s debt to Husserl, it is important to note such a significant distinction between the two. While Perlman has thus very helpfully isolated certain elements of Heschel’s approach to the prophets and correctly identified them as derived from Husserl’s phenomenological method, he nevertheless overlooks—or at least chooses not to explore—a deeper layer of methodological references in both Die Prophetie and The Prophets which suggests a different kind of engagement with the subject. Indeed, Heschel himself alludes in the later work to a distancing of himself from a strict phenomenological method, saying, “I have long since become wary of impartiality, which is itself a way of being partial. . . . Reflection may succeed in isolating an object; reflection itself cannot be isolated. Reflection is part of a situation.”45 Perlman notices this disclaimer, but chooses to gloss over it: “we may assume that in his own mind, Heschel was altering the emphasis of the method but not the method

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itself.”46 It would be peculiar, however, if Perlman’s insistence on the centrality of Husserl were in fact correct, that Heschel does not cite Husserl directly either in the dissertation or the expanded English version, although reference is made to numerous other contemporary thinkers (for example, Heschel’s advisors, Bertholet and Dessoir; Martin Buber; his mentor Koigen; Scheler; and Dilthey). Indeed, in a suggestive footnote in the key chapter of the dissertation on “Die pathetische Theologie” (Theology of pathos), Heschel makes this remark: “The idea of Verstehen, introduced in the human sciences by Dilthey, Spranger, [and] Jaspers, can be extremely fertile as a category of theological systematization.”47 The footnote alludes to a broader intellectual background for his work than the specifically Husserlian form of phenomenology, which Perlman, like most critics, has neglected. Indeed, Rotenstreich appears to be the only one who has noticed in any detail this expansion of Heschel’s sources, offering a somewhat different list of sources: “The impact of some trends of German philosophy on the analysis of prophetic consciousness is visible in Heschel’s absorption of a notion of Dilthey and his theory of ‘Verstehen,’ of Spranger and his typology of forms of life and attitudes (Lebensformen), and of Scheler and his analysis of different human emotions.”48 Following Heschel’s own indications, then, how do we detect this larger philosophical influence in his work, especially that of Dilthey? I have already pointed out that for Heschel, Kant and behind him Spinoza represent the forces to be resisted, and it is to this purpose that Heschel puts Dilthey’s studies of consciousness. Spinoza’s deductive, rationalistic philosophy held that the relation of revelation between God and humanity is impossible, specifically because of the nonspeculative nature of spiritual knowledge. The content of the Bible for Spinoza was therefore legalistic and political, but not distinctly religious—adding nothing more than a manifestation of a natural religion which is already accessible by the exercise of reason. Heschel is deeply conscious of this critique throughout his study of the prophets: in a passage summarizing Spinoza’s perspective, Heschel caustically writes, “It is one thing to reject the prophets’ claim to inspiration; it is quite another to conclude from the prophets’ own words that what they called inspiration was really an act of their own imagination. Stealthily this is what Spinoza did in advancing his own theory of prophecy . . .”49 Heschel observes that Spinoza accomplished this dismissal of revelation in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), first by expanding the concept to include all ideas, inasmuch as all knowledge is from “God.” Ordinary knowledge can then be called divine, just as much as any prophetic knowledge. Heschel concludes for Spinoza: “The prophet has no peculiar source or means of knowledge, and there is nothing supernatural about prophecy. A revelation consists of the prophet’s own thought, and is from ‘God’ only in the sense that the prophet himself is ‘God,’ namely a part of deus sive natura.” Heschel further blames Spinoza, at least in part, for the fact that serious theology is thought to be un-Jewish: In the spirit of Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, many of those who take the law seriously, as well as those who pay lip service to it, maintain that the science of the law is the only authentic expression of Judaism. . . . Theology, it is claimed, is alien to Judaism; the law, “An ox who gores a cow,” is Jewish theology, for Judaism is law and nothing else.50

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And while successive thinkers such as Kant may not have incorporated Spinoza’s metaphysics, Heschel argues that they essentially adopted his attitude toward the Bible. This “disparagement of inspiration” is again examined in another section of The Prophets, this time in relation to the Deists of the seventeenth century, as Heschel tries to document further the development of the “speculative prosperity” but “spiritual bankruptcy” which he encountered in the academy in Berlin.51 The motivating question for Heschel thus becomes how to turn around this impoverishment of human knowing; for, as he writes in the introduction to The Prophets, “it became clear to me that the most important philosophical problem of the twentieth century was to find a new set of presuppositions or premises, a different way of thinking.”52 Broadly speaking, therefore, Heschel’s program is to recover a means of approaching fundamental human questions which takes into account the totality of their experience and understanding. As he describes the challenge in Die Prophetie, “Here it is a question of an all-encompassing problem, of mind and essence, not just of a fact and set of circumstances.”53 This program of a comprehensive understanding of human knowing is what Heschel inherited from Dilthey, as well as the initial response he makes to it in the form of his analysis of consciousness. The key indicator for this observation is that Dilthey’s notion of Verstehen becomes a sort of leitmotiv for Heschel’s thesis, for it gives him a means of describing prophecy in terms of a broader concept of human knowing than the strictly Kantian forms of rationalism, which (following Spinoza) would reject out of hand the idea of revelation. Like Dilthey’s concern for taking into account our cognitive unity, Heschel is concerned that the psychological complexity of our consciousness and its relation to the world not be limited by a strict separation of reason from the other modes of cognition. Emotion, for example, is highlighted by Heschel as an essential element of religious thinking which has been thus neglected: We have been trained to draw a sharp contrast between reason and emotion. The first is pure spontaneity, the drawing of inferences, the ordering of concepts according to the canons of logic. Emotion, on the other hand, is pure receptivity, and impression involving neither cognition nor representation of the object. Such a contrast, however, is hardly tenable when applied to religious experience. . . . True, if emotion is unreasonable, it tends to distort a person’s thinking. But emotion can be reasonable just as reason can be emotional, and there is no need to suppress the emotional roots of one’s life in order to save the integrity of one’s principles. Receptivity and spontaneity involve each other; the separation of the two is harmful to both.54

In language taken more explicitly from Dilthey, one might say that the Erlebnis of religious experience as it is assimilated by the psychic nexus includes various layers of sensation, feeling, and reflection, all of which are part of the phenomenon itself. In religious acts and statements, we give expression to our intuitive sense of the meaning of such events, through which we come to some degree of understanding of what we have experienced. Again contrary to Kant, Heschel notes that even the content of what we experience sensorially is dependent not merely upon supposedly objective sense data, but a person’s “assumptions, categories of thinking, degree of sensitivity,

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environment, and cultural atmosphere. A person will notice what he is conditioned to see.”55 This contextual view of cognition, including not only emotion but cultural and environmental factors as well, is radically opposed to the supposed objectivity of the “knowing subject” of Kant. Hence we come to Heschel’s use of Dilthey’s concept of understanding, Verstehen: “By contrast to speculative knowledge, the pensive-intuitive attitude of the prophet to God, in which God is apprehended through His sensible manifestations, is to be characterized as understanding.”56 Heschel is aware of introducing into prophetology a new term here, replacing the traditional idea of knowledge of God (Erkennen) with the concept of understanding God—a change of vocabulary he directly attributes to Dilthey and Spranger in a section of Die Prophetie entitled “Gotteserkenntnis und Gottesverständnis” (Knowledge of God and Understanding of God).57 He takes as an analogy the relationship between two individuals: their experience of one another is dependent upon bodily actions and expressions, and yet through these actions and expressions they are known to one another with the same immediacy with which they experience their own selves. The expressions of love between persons nuance this argument: a neutral observer will often be unable to understand them, for the expressions are not perceived apart from the beloved—the beloved is sensed in that person’s expressions. Thus, “the intuitive knowledge which the beloved person possesses is a primary factor in the act of understanding.”58 That is to say, there can be between two individuals an immediacy of experience such that there is a peculiar act of apprehension which does not require or allow analogy. For the prophet, such is the case with God: Verstehen [understanding] makes possible, as opposed to Erkennen [knowledge] a multiplicity of relationships with the “understood” person. The prophet experiences emotional and intellectual situations, he makes demands, he prays.59

While it is not our purpose here to analyze in detail Heschel’s theology of revelation, the key point is already evident: that the program supporting his analysis is the opening up of dimensions of cognition which had been closed by Spinoza and Kant, and that he does so by deploying elements of Dilthey’s theory of a “cognitive unity” which make that recovery possible. Through Verstehen, one does not merely acquire rational concepts about the nature of God; one becomes open to the presence of God and to the possibility of a divine-human relationship: The point of departure of the comprehension is every event as it is experienced as “expression” of God; its realization consists in becoming conscious of the meaning of that expression—its result is a comprehension by God (not an impersonal knowledge). The highest degree of prophetic intercourse with God is the agreement of understanding (not unifying fusion).60

One notes here that Heschel is making use of Dilthey’s principal hermeneutical concept that an expression (Ausdruck) of a lived experience (Erlebnis) makes possible its understanding (Verstehen). In this case, the experience is the ecstasis of God, which receives prophetic expression and ultimately sympathetic human understanding.61

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Heschel’s program of expanding the terrain of human cognition is, in certain respects, articulated in his appropriation of the notion developed by Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) of “situational thinking” (Gelegenheitsdenken), or “life thinking,”62 which is comparable in many ways to Dilthey’s “philosophy of life.” In typical Heschelian style, he does not explicitly acknowledge the intellectual influence of this thinker who preceded him by a generation, although he clearly encountered Rosenzweig’s thought through debate with his teacher Julius Guttmann (who argued against Rosenzweig for an objective “thinking inside Judaism”63), and through his contact with David Koigen, whom Heschel regarded as an example of a “situational thinker.”64 As Heschel later explained in God in Search of Man, he understands there to be two types of thinking: conceptual and situational.65 The first type is an act of detached reasoning—the subject facing an independent object—which is the attitude one adopts in trying to understand better the natural world. Situational thinking, however, begins with involvement and inner experience, and deals with “the issues on which we stake our very existence.” Such thinking is concerned to understand the life situation in which one finds oneself, focusing on the pressing historical and existential questions which philosophy must try to answer. In Heschel’s estimation, if one loses sight of the circumstances in which crucial questions pose themselves as problems to be faced, then one’s thinking about the problem will become distorted through speculative distance from its originating motivation.66 So, for example, “it would be false to deal with the idea of God regardless of the situation in which such an idea occurs.”67 This is Heschel’s challenge to the “isolated, self-subsisting, self-indulgent” philosophy which he found in the academy, and it helps to explain his attraction to the Hebrew prophets who were, above all, deeply engaged in the concrete acts and events of religious experience. Heschel found in the prophets and their spiritual heirs such as Maimonides examples of situational thinking in which ultimate issues of human living such as uncompromised justice, community identity, and individual integrity were at stake—commitments which were motivated not just by a rational analysis, but a fervent attachment to their importance. Seeking to nuance his understanding of how and why the prophets responded so passionately to God’s concern for human life, Heschel turned to the thought of Max Scheler, where he found an appropriate explanation in the notions of sympathy and ethical personalism.

IV  Pathos and sympathy: Scheler Beginning in 1934, while still at work on his dissertation, Heschel established a contact with the publisher Erich Reiss, who invited Heschel to join the editorial staff of his firm. Realizing that the 800th anniversary of the birth of Maimonides in  1135 was approaching, Reiss asked Heschel to write a biography of the medieval philosopher and theologian, a task which Heschel readily accepted, and completed in only 7 months. The book was published under the title Maimonides: Eine Biographie by the Erich Reiss Verlag in 1935, and enjoyed a quick critical and popular success in the Jewish community. In fact, a French translation appeared just one year later, bearing the title Maïmonide.68

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The biography is interesting to compare with Heschel’s other work in progress at the time, namely his thesis on prophetic consciousness. The study of Maimonides, while evoking the historical period of his life and providing the essential details, is most notable for its examination of the philosopher’s thinking processes—another example of “situational thinking.” Heschel strives in the book to describe the evolution of Maimonides’ interior attitude toward God, which he organizes around the theme of a gradual transformation from contemplation to action. For many years of his life, Maimonides was concerned not only with the development of his well-known approach to God through a negative theology, but also with the question of whether prophetic inspiration continued after the close of the biblical period. Heschel argues that Maimonides concluded that it did, and that moreover the philosopher felt himself capable of such spiritual sensitivity.69 From a preoccupation with the contemplative, however, Heschel understands Maimonides to have evolved through his prophetic awareness to another stage in which the active imitation of God replaced his intellectual concerns, as evidenced by his devotion to medical service in the last 15 years of his life. “This was Maimonides’s last transformation: from contemplation to practice, from the knowledge to the imitation of God. God was not only the object of knowledge. He was the Model one should follow. . . . The imitation of God now meant service for individuals.”70 As in his study of prophetic consciousness, so too in his biography of Maimonides Heschel endeavored to discover the interior structure of a mind which is deeply attuned to the holy. In the case of Maimonides, Heschel described this consciousness as an “active intellect,” which through its awareness of the proximity of the divine in human reflection, becomes itself the bond between God and humanity.71 Following Koigen’s idea of “the culture act” (itself an extension of Dilthey’s theory of cognition), Heschel sees in Maimonides one who not only was able to synthesize a wide diversity of biblical, Talmudic, and philosophical sources in a specific historical context, but also to see that thinking itself is in contact with holiness: “The love of thinking was the fundamental motif of his life. He related to thinking as to something personified. Every act of thinking was the reception of a revelation for him.”72 Heschel’s portrait of Maimonides, and especially his argument for the continued expression of the prophetic experience in this “crypto-mystic” (as Kaplan calls him), leads him to a consideration of a stage beyond understanding in the prophetic consciousness: namely, the prophet’s “sympathetic” response. In an indirect appeal to Spranger’s typological analysis of human personality (Die Lebensformen, 1914),73 Heschel notes in a chapter of The Prophets entitled “Religion of Sympathy” that the prophet “represents a type sui generis”: the homo sympathetikos.74 The sympathy that Heschel is trying to explicate is the identification of the prophets with God’s pathos, “a feeling which feels the feeling to which it reacts,” which Heschel holds is the key to a psychological understanding of the prophetic zeal and anger. In his discussion of Hosea, Heschel had already made the point that a frequently used phrase in this prophetic book, daath elohim (usually translated as “knowledge of God”), “means more than the possession of abstract concepts. Knowledge encompasses inner appropriation, feeling, a reception into the soul.”75 In Die Prophetie, Heschel had argued that a more

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suitable translation for the words would be sympathy for God, an attachment of the whole person to God: We understand the person enflamed with prophetic zeal, who knows himself to be in emotional agreement and harmony with God. We understand the power of Him enflamed with anger and who turns away from his people. That overwhelming knowledge [erschütterndes Wissen] of the concern and suffering that God experiences for the world, and the prophet’s sharing that lived predicament and that suffering, is of such power, of such obvious value, so unique, that even today this idea acts as a summons carrying distinct shapes and possibilities. Perhaps that is the final meaning, the ultimate value, and the ultimate dignity of an emotional religion. The depths of the individual soul thus become the place where the comprehension of God [Verständnis für Gott] flowers, the harmony of agreement [Einverständnis] with the transcendent pathos.76

As Bernhard Anderson points out, Heschel’s idea of understanding God (Verständnis) thus also becomes a harmony of intention with God (Einverständnis), a wordplay which cannot be reproduced in English.77 The identification with God’s intention is to be contrasted with a mystical union, however, for to the prophets it is not a sense of ecstasy which they experience with God, or a dissolution of the self, but “a sense of challenge, a commitment, a state of tension, consternation, and dismay.”78 Consequently, the prophetic experience is not a yearning for a mystical illumination apart from the world, but for the tangible advancement of “historical justice” through the disclosure of God’s will.79 Most importantly, therefore, the result of prophetic insight is not an isolated feeling of personal union with God, but a communal identification with God’s pathos: “The culmination of prophetic fellowship with God is insight and unanimity— not union.”80 Prophetic sympathy as a unio sympathetica is thus differentiated from the unio mystica as a response, rather than a merger. It is, one might say, the state of seeing the world as God sees it, and responding with God’s concern. Heschel uses the analysis of sympathy given by Max Scheler (1874–1928) to explicate this key aspect of prophetic consciousness, which he claims is the first such usage of sympathy as a religious category. In a rare direct acknowledgment of a methodological source, Heschel writes, “. . . following Max Scheler’s classification, we may distinguish two types of sympathy: (1) community of feeling, or sympathy with God; (2) fellow feeling, or sympathy for God.”81 There are, according to Scheler, two types of sympathy: joint feeling with others (Miteinanderfühlen) and fellow feeling (Mitgefühl),82 or as Heschel calls them, “community of feeling” and “fellow feeling.” The first type is that shared feeling when two parents stand beside the coffin of their child: they feel the “same” sorrow and anguish, there is a feeling in common that is one and identical. The second type of sympathy would be characterized by the sorrow felt by a close friend entering the room: his grief would refer to the parents’ own sorrow, and would be truly and vicariously felt, but remain distinct from that of the parents. It is the second type of sympathy which the prophets feel for the pathos of God. In this structure of sympathy, the divine evokes in the prophet a similar, though distinct pathos, so that phenomenologically the prophet’s sympathy and God’s pathos are two different facts. The prophet is guided by what God feels, and his declarations are made from the point

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of view of God, yet the reference is only to the divine pathos and not to the divine essence. Despite Heschel’s unusually blunt appeal to an intellectual precursor, most commentators have not picked up on the importance of Scheler’s phenomenological analysis of sympathy in Heschel’s construction of prophetic consciousness.83 Perlman gives surprisingly superficial treatment to this important aspect of Heschel’s theology, despite his intention to explicate the phenomenological dimension of Heschel’s theology, relegating to a footnote a long quotation which includes without comment the citation of Scheler.84 Rotenstreich is again a notable exception, making a helpful if limited examination of Heschel’s use of Scheler.85 Identifying the divine pathos as the objective correlate of the prophetic sympathy, he summarizes Heschel’s use of the term: “The meaning of sympathy lies in that particular feature of the prophetic consciousness, that is, that consciousness feels the divine pathos as its own situation.” In his estimation, however, Scheler’s influence on Heschel has to be seen as limited by the fact that for Scheler, sympathy results in a kind of fundamental identity between human beings which is contrary to Heschel’s use of the term to indicate a continued distance and absence of unity between consciousness and the divine pathos. If one more carefully compares the essential elements of Heschel’s program with Scheler’s thinking, however, one can detect a stronger correlation than Rotenstreich has found. This is not necessarily to say that there is a direct debt on all points between Heschel and Scheler (although the concept of sympathy continues to appear in Heschel’s work), but that there is at least a continuity of concern which is indicative of the intellectual climate in which Heschel was working, and which helps to complete an adequate description of the presuppositions which shaped his thinking. Moreover, we know that Scheler was actively studied and debated in the Jewish intellectual circles in which Heschel moved in Berlin. For example, one of the four professors at the Hildesheimer Seminary, Josef Wohlgemuth, published an already widely circulated paper in 1931 on repentance in Scheler’s philosophy of religion.86 Also, the future theologian and rabbi Alexander Altmann, another of Dessoir’s advisees and an acquaintance of Heschel’s, submitted his dissertation in 1930 on Scheler’s phenomenology of religious cognition, in which he studied the cognitive value of emotions, both for ethics and religion.87 One notices in Scheler’s work—which in certain ways is once again an extension of Dilthey’s own—another example of the broader intellectual currents in German philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century: namely, an attempt to move beyond the epistemological impasse imposed by Kant. The phenomenological movement can be, at one level, understood as a reaction to this stalemate, an attempt to reconsider the nature of human consciousness in order to broaden its base of experience. Like Husserl, who saw philosophy in the early twentieth century as in critical disarray because of this situation, Scheler also perceived a crisis which he interpreted as a désordre du cœur which left the human individual “stranded on the shoals of Reason’s self-governing and self-limiting principles and functions.”88 Heschel’s own recognition of a need to find a “new way of thinking” about religious questions is by no means an isolated endeavor, therefore, but part of this larger intellectual trend. Scheler’s own critique of Kant originates in his attempt to find another basis for ethics, other than the formalism of the categorical imperative. His endeavor is based

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on a conviction that Kant’s portrayal of the individual as an autonomous rationality distorts human nature even before launching into a consideration of the ethical implications.89 The title of his major work on ethics makes immediately clear this program: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik: Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethisen Personalismus (1916, Eng. trans. Formalism in ethics and nonformal ethics of values: A new attempt toward the foundation of an ethical personalism, 1973). In his foreword to the book, Scheler describes his critique of Kant as of only marginal interest: it is merely the starting point for his larger intention of determining the nature and function of values themselves.90 Indeed, he is convinced that once he has escaped Kant’s rational presuppositions, he will be able to perceive the a priori values that are not added to, but part of our most immediate experiences. He begins by reasserting the place of feeling in the human determination of value: however reasonable moral imperatives may appear to the mind, they cannot adequately account for the valuation which human beings attach to things, which is often based on an emotional response (beauty, ugliness, holiness, and injustice). Emotions are not to be understood as purely subjective, but as also in many cases having objective referents which make them intentional acts parallel to perception: emotion has a cognitive dimension. The perception of value through these “value-phenomena” resists any strict formalization, for they must constantly be studied in reference to the existential, historical, religious, and social dimensions of the person who bears these values. Nor can they be analyzed through the principles of logic, for their derivation in human feeling prevents them from behaving according to a strict pattern of consistency. As Scheler’s subtitle suggests, the idea of the person emerges as a key foundational concept for his ethical system. In this regard, he is sharply opposed to the transcendental ego of Husserl, which is conceived of as a state of “pure” consciousness. Scheler insists that such a construct is a fiction which bears no relationship to the reality of our experience of consciousness as always linked to a person.91 Whereas in formal ethics, according to Scheler, the Person is always described only in terms of rationality (Vernunftperson), he insists that there has to be behind our rational faculty a unifying agency which holds together the whole panorama of human expression. Personality cannot be rendered as a static abstraction, but rather is a fluid and indeterminate structure which is known only as it acts. Yet our actions as human beings are not perceived to be random and unrelated, but have some underlying unity. The Person is that which accounts for such a unity, holding acts together not as a distinct entity in itself, but as the condition for such a unity. As Perrin summarizes Scheler’s position, “the Person (or better, ‘personality’) is that universal and necessary ontological condition which grounds our experience of ourselves and others as integrated human beings.”92 What is important for our purposes in this analysis is that in a convergence with Scheler’s own personalism, Heschel himself attaches a strong significance to the concept of the person (a convergence with personalist philosophy that has generally been overlooked). As we shall see in Chapter 8, this stance has important implications for his anthropological and ethical positions, since his development of the purposefulness and integrity of human living is based upon it. Scheler’s approach to the phenomenology of religion is also strongly suggestive as a foil to Heschel’s own method. Scheler was, of the major figures of the first generation of

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phenomenologists, the only one to give any extended attention to religion. He explicitly ruled out a philosophical treatment of God, however, focusing his interest purely on the phenomenological investigation of the nature of religious acts.93 In Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1921, Eng. trans. On the eternal in man, 1960), Scheler argues that the content experienced in religious acts is both immanent and nonsensory; that is, there is nothing empirically observable, yet there is something given in consciousness which has a correlation with the ineffable. A religious act therefore has a unique quality: it is a “receiving act” in which the individual opens to the “totally different,” which itself gives content to the experience as it “bends down” and “reaches into” the religious moment.94 Somewhat paradoxically, then, as Frings puts it, “the end point of the experienced value of the Divine in the region of the Absolute is at the same time its cause in the person.”95 The experience of divine forgiveness would be an example: it is the experience of God’s love coming from the Divine that is the content of the experience, not something which results from any rational act of the individual. The resonance between this description and Heschel’s own analysis of the prophetic experience is obvious: prophecy is an ecstasy of God which the prophet receives not by any will of his own, but as his sympathetic response to the “totally different Absolute.” How this basic structure of God-encounter plays itself out when Heschel turns his attention to common piety will be a principal element of our examination, demonstrating how his analysis of piety is an extension of the central principles of sympathetic understanding which he constructed from his encounters with Dilthey and Scheler. As in Heschel’s intellectual mentors, so too there is in his own theology a continual concern to defend the fullness of human experience, to resist any foreshortening of its depth by an artificial attenuation of feeling, knowing, imagining, and responding. In the foregoing discussion of the intellectual sources of this theology—the formative academic influences which shaped Heschel’s thinking and equipped him with the tools by which he carried out his program—one theme especially stands out: human consciousness is multilayered and richly complex. Its very complexity (a “disclosure of possibilities” as Heschel remarked) is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human. From this background of concern, Heschel set out to study not only what a human being is in relation to God, but also what is the very meaning of being human. His theology is not just a defense of the divine against secular and atheistic currents, but also of the human against the depersonalization and spiritual reductionism of modern society. His conviction of the importance of making this defense relied on the intellectual apparatus of German philosophy for its execution, yet it was largely the product of his early development in Hasidic spirituality. So having examined the philosophical means of his embrace of the breadth of religious consciousness, we now turn to the contrasting mystical sources of its inspiration.

Notes 1 Heschel, TP, xviii–xix. 2 For detailed documentation of Heschel’s university career, see Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, Part Three.

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3 Abraham Heschel, preface to Jerusalem of Lithuania, ed. Leyzer Ran (New York: 1974). Quoted in Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 95. 4 Susannah Heschel, Introduction to Heschel, MGSA, xii. 5 Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 109. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 116. 8 Ibid., 124–5. 9 Edward Kaplan, “Readiness Before God: Abraham Heschel in Europe,” Conservative Judaism L/2-3 (Winter/Spring 1998): 22–35. 10 Heschel, GSM, 98. 11 Rothschild, “The Religious Thought of Abraham Heschel,” 22. The strongest advocate of the position that Husserl was the decisive influence on Heschel is Lawrence Perlman, whose study of revelation in Heschel rests on the premise that his depth-theology is “based on a serious philosophical doctrine—Husserlian phenomenology.” Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 4. 12 Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 427. 13 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garret Barden (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 195. 14 Makkreel, Dilthey, 8. 15 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 55. 16 Ibid., 196. 17 Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in de Geisteswissenschaften (1927), in Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914–90). Quoted in Makkreel, Dilthey, 284. 18 Makkreel, Dilthey, 148. 19 Ibid., 55. 20 Ibid., 223. 21 Ibid., 216. 22 Makkreel argues that in this respect, Dilthey can be distinguished from Husserl since he more strongly insists upon the objective content of experience. In Husserl’s understanding of intentionality, the objective referent of consciousness is “reduced to an abstract horizon.” Makkreel, Dilthey, 285. 23 H. P. Rickman, “Wilhelm Dilthey,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. II, 405. 24 Dilthey, Der Aufbau, quoted in Makkreel, Dilthey, 293–4. 25 Rudolf A. Makkreel and Jacob Owensby, “Wilhelm Dilthey,” Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 144. 26 Rickman, “Dilthey,” 404. 27 The dissertation is written in three parts: the first and second explore the four preexilic prophets (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah), arguing against any psychological reductionism of the phenomenon of prophecy. In the third part, Heschel goes on to elaborate his theology of God’s pathos, and of the sympathetic human response to it. 28 Before receiving his degree, Heschel had to publish the dissertation, which became increasingly difficult, given the political situation in Germany. He was finally able to publish it in Kraków through the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (1936), receiving his doctorate officially in December 1935, in anticipation of the actual publication and a full three years after completion of the text. Kaplan and Dresner,

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Prophetic Witness, 163–4 and 215–17. Portions of the dissertation were also published in Brussels in French as “La prophétie,” trans. Henry Corbin, Hermès 3/3 (November 1939): 78–110. Corbin, introduction to Heschel, “La Prophétie,” 79. Heschel, TP, xvi. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 13. Heschel, DP, 2. Die vorliegende Untersuchung müht sich um Erkenntnis und Auskunft über Wesen und Aufbau de prophetischen Bewußtseins. Heschel, DP, 1. Daß das prophetische Phänomen für da Bewußtsein des Propheten eine reale Gegenstandswirklichkeit besaß, an die eine subjektive Gefühlswirklichkeit sich anzuschließen pflegt, wurde bereits angedeutet. . . . Sowohl in der Gegentands wie in der Gefühlssphäre ließen sich zwei Grundbestandteile unterscheiden, die als Inhalt und Form bestimmt werden durften . . . Heschel, DP, 5, trans. by Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 14. Unsere Aufgabe ist nicht über die Wahrheit der prophetischen Aussagen zu urteilen, sondern das Wesen zu beschreiben, lediglich darüber wollen wir Klarheit und Aufschluß gewinnen. Heschel, DP, 2. Aber auch der Akt der Eingebung muß adäquat gefaßt werden. Ohne auf das schwer lösbare Problem der Offenbarungsgrenzen eingehen zu wollen, konnte aus dem noetischen Charakter der Eingebungsinhalte bewiesen werden, daß auch die Eingebung selbst in den allgemeinene Bewußtseinszusammenhang hineingehörte, daß auch Inhalte, die nict Bewußtseinsbestand wurden. Heschel, DP, 3, trans. by Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 13. Heschel, TP, xix. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 15. Heschel, TP, xvi. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., xvi. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 4. This point was also made earlier by Rothschild, who writes that “some of the most solid and enduring achievements of Heschel’s work, which have become classics of their kind, are the results of his phenomenological research,” naming specifically his studies of prophetic consciousness, the awareness of God, the Sabbath, and prayer. Rothschild, “The Religious Thought of Abraham Heschel,” 22. Heschel, WM, 106. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 55. Heschel, TP, xvi. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 15. Kaufman, however, does take note of this changed approach, but overshoots the mark by concluding that Heschel “eventually abandon[ed] this method,” choosing instead to pursue “situational thinking” which would “evoke in man an awareness of the religious situation.” William E. Kaufman, “The Meaning Beyond Mystery,” Contemporary Jewish Philosophies (New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1976), 146–7. Die Idee des Verstehens, die von Dilthey, Spranger, Jaspers in die Geisteswissenschaften eingeführt wurde, kann als systematishce theologische Kategorie äußerst fruchtbar wirken. Heschel, DP, 129n. 2., trans. by Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 165. Rotenstreich, “On Prophetic Consciousness,” 187.

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49 Heschel, TP, 410–11. 50 Heschel, GSM, 322–3. 51 Heschel also faults Spinoza for creating the climate in which the integrity of Jewish theology languished. In The Insecurity of Freedom, Heschel argues, “In his effort to discredit Judaism, Spinoza advanced the thesis that the Bible has nothing to say to the intellect. It was in the spirit of Spinoza that the slogan was created: Judaism has no theology.” Heschel, IF, 217. 52 Heschel, TP, xix. 53 Hier handelt es sich um ein Totalitätsproblem, um Sinn und Wesen, nicht um Tatsachen und Umstände. Heschel, DP, 4. 54 Heschel, TP, 256. 55 Ibid., 222. 56 Ibid. This vocabulary is rendered as the contrast between “connaître” and “comprendre” in the French excerpts published in Hermès. The same point is again made in a section entitled “Knowledge or Understanding” of MNA, 133, which will be examined more carefully in Chapter 7. 57 Heschel, DP, 128n. 1. 58 Heschel, TP, 223. 59 Das Verstehen ermöglicht im Gegensatz zum Erkennen eine Vielfalt der Beziehungen zur »verstandenen« Person. Der Prophet verhält sich emotional und intellektuell, fordernd und bittend. Heschel, DP, 129, trans. by Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 165. 60 Der Ausgangspunkt des Verstehens ist jede Gegebenheit, die als »Ausdruck« Gottes erfahren wird, sein Verlauf ist eine Besinnung auf die Bedeutung dieses Ausdrucks und sein Ertrag—ein Verständnis für Gott (nicht ein unpersönliches Wissen). Der höchste Grad des prophetischen Umganges mit Gott ist das Einverständnis (nicht eine Einung). Heschel, DP, 128, trans. by Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 334n. 4. 61 Some previous critics have noticed Heschel’s distinction between “understanding” and “knowledge,” but without identifying its source in Dilthey. See, for example, Merkle, The Genesis of Faith, 163–4, and Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 35–6. 62 Seymour Siegel, “Contemporary Jewish Theology: Four Major Voices,” Journal of Church and State 13/2 (1971): 262. 63 Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 114–15. 64 Ibid., 196. 65 Heschel, GSM, 5–6. 66 Merkle is the commentator who has made most of Heschel’s adoption of the notion of situational thinking. In his schematic rendering of Heschel’s methodology, he places it as a second step following the phenomenological suspension of judgment, thereby allowing Heschel to transcend the detachment of the latter. This analysis seems mistaken, however, in that it tries to impose a process that is too sequential: situational concern for ultimate questions is as much a motivation for employing a phenomenological reduction in order to gain insight, as it is a response to the necessary detachment therein. Situational thinking may be better understood in reference to my contention that Heschel’s program is to overcome the limitations imposed on philosophy by speculative restraint, for which he chooses to deploy various methodological tools. See Merkle, The Genesis of Faith, 34–7. 67 Heschel, GSM, 7.

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68 Abraham Heschel, Maïmonide, trans. Germaine Bernard (Paris: Payot, 1936). English edition Maimonides, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). 69 Heschel’s reading of Maimonides’ relationship to prophecy was controversial, but Heschel continued to press the point in later studies which provide copious evidence for the medieval conviction of the continuation of prophecy. See Abraham Heschel, Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets: Maimonides and Other Medieval Authorities, ed. Morris M. Faierstein (Hoboken: Ktav Publishing House, 1996). 70 Heschel, M, 243–4. The point that Maimonides evolved from contemplation to action is even more forcefully made in an essay based on Heschel’s original work with Erich Reiss in 1935, published in another form as “The Last Days of Maimonides” in The Insecurity of Freedom: “The tendency of neo-Platonism toward gnosis, stressing the total absorption in the contemplation of God as man’s chief and, indeed, only goal—and which often leads to the disparagement of life and flight from the world—had in earlier days created in Maimonides a tension with the biblical and rabbinic emphasis on ethos, on the primacy of the sacred deed. This has now been resolved. The meaning of his last years is found in overcoming the tension of these tendencies. Contemplation of God and service to man are combined and become one.” Heschel, IF, 290. 71 Kaplan reads Heschel’s portrait of Maimonides as being in many ways autobiographical, implying that “Heschel, too, considered himself sensitive to sacred intuitions.” Whether or not this is true, there is an intensity to Heschel’s biographical style which suggests to some degree a personal identification with his subject. See Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 202–7. 72 Heschel, M, 244. 73 Eduard Spranger (1882–1963), a student of Dilthey, sought especially to further two of his teacher’s projects: the use of Verstehen as a psychological concept, and a normative interpretation of the Geisteswissenschaften. His six typological forms of human life—the theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious— center in corresponding values rooted in the historical and cultural order, around which one’s life choices are made. Heschel, as noted above, cites him specifically in reference to his continued amplification of the idea of Verstehen, which he made in the process of developing this typology. See L. E. Loemker, “(Franz Ernst) Eduard Spranger,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 7, 1–2. 74 Heschel, TP, 308. 75 Ibid., 57. 76 Wir verstehen den prophetischen Eiferer, der sich in emotionaler Ähnlichkeit und Eintracht mit Gott weiß. Wir verstehen die Kraft des Zürnenden, der sich von seinem Volke abwendet. Er wirkt nicht nur durch sein Wort und seine Tat, sondern durch die Leidenschaft seiner Haltung, die durch ihre Ähnlichkeit mit dem göttlichen Pathos legitimiert ist. Dieses erschütternde Wissen von der Sorge und den Leiden Gottes um die Welt, dieses Miterleben und Miterleiden des Propheten ist von so evidenter, einzigartiger Gewalt und Gültigkeit, von einer so vollkommenen Ergebenheit und Hingabe, daß seiner Idee noch heute eine Berufung innewohnt, als Gestalt oder Möglichkeit wegweisend zu sein. Vielleicht is hier de letzte Sinn, Wert und Würde einer emotionalen Religion gegeben. Die Tiefe der eigenen Seele wird dann der Ort, wo das Verständnis

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety für Gott, wo das Einverständnis mit dem transzendentum Pathos zustandekommt. Heschel, DP, 171, trans. by Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 135. See Heschel, DP, 128, and TP, 222. Bernhard Anderson, “Confrontation with the Bible,” Theology Today 30/3 (1973): 271. Heschel, TP, 309. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 223. The citation is of Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy. Heschel, TP, 313. Manfred S. Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997), 91–2. One exception is James Hyman’s dissertation on Heschel, which suggests the connection between Heschel’s focus on intuition and Scheler’s understanding of phenomenological facts arrived at through the eidetic reduction. Hyman, “Abraham Heschel,” 101–2. Hyman later makes the rather stretched connection, however, between Scheler’s notion of sympathy and the “sympathetic bond” he thinks we are meant to form with Heschel himself, “and then intuit his feelings regarding Judaism and the ineffable, appropriating them and actually feeling them ourselves.” Hyman, “Abraham Heschel,” 153. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 85 and 90n. 55. Rotenstreich, “On Prophetic Consciousness,” 190–2. Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 105. Ibid., 119. Ron Perrin, Max Scheler’s Concept of the Person: An Ethics of Humanism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), x. Perrin, Max Scheler’s Concept of the Person, x. Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler, 21. Ibid., 22. Perrin, Max Scheler’s Concept of the Person, 91. Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler, 121. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 137.

5

Polarity and Piety

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still to retain the ability to function. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

I  Polarity as a defining characteristic An advantageous point of entry into Heschel’s mystical inclinations is his own use of polarity as a summation of the influence on his thinking of the Hasidic and kabbalistic traditions, with specific reference to his scholarly historical studies of rabbinic and Hasidic Judaism. The underlying question to be explored is how Heschel’s understanding of piety is interwoven with his interest in the various strands of Jewish thought, mysticism in particular. As we shall see, various interpreters have come to quite different conclusions on the question of to what extent Heschel was influenced by the mystical traditions, some understanding him to be working inextricably out of them, while others have argued that his work is itself far too rational to support such a conclusion. To address this question is significant for the current study because it begins to give additional definition to the role played by piety in Heschel’s thought, specifically because piety becomes the bridge between his mystical and rational tendencies. Taking a clue from Maurice Friedman, who remarked that the whole of Heschel’s polar thinking “was held together by the tension of his piety,”1 we shall argue that not only at this personal level, but also at the more formal level of his theological strategy, piety serves as the unifying link between what might otherwise seem like disparate and even contradictory elements. In an interview that Heschel gave in  1967 at Notre Dame University to Patrick Granfield for inclusion in the book, Theologians at Work, he made the following extended comment on the dialectic pattern of Jewish thought: Jewish thinking and living can only be adequately understood in terms of a dialectic pattern, containing opposite or contrasted properties. As in a magnet, the ends of which have opposite magnetic qualities, these terms are opposite to one another and exemplify a polarity that lies at the very heart of Judaism, the polarity of ideas and events, of mitsvah and sin, of kavanah and deed, of regularity and spontaneity, of uniformity and individuality, of halacha and aggada, of law

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and inwardness, of love and fear, of understanding and obedience, of joy and discipline, of the good and the evil drive, of time and eternity, of this world and the world to come, of revelation and response, of insight and information, of empathy and self-expression, of creed and faith, of the word and that which is beyond words, of man’s quest for God and God in search of man. Even God’s relation to the world is characterized by the polarity of justice and mercy, providence and concealment, the promise of reward and the demand to serve Him for His sake. Taken abstractedly, all these terms seem to be mutually exclusive, yet in actual living they involve each other; the separation of the two is fatal to both.2

Numerous critics have noticed that the “polar thinking” which Heschel argues is a defining characteristic of Jewish thinking becomes descriptive of his theology as well. Friedman, for example, has several times stressed that polarity is one of the complicating factors in trying to understand Heschel, making his thought “even paradoxical in nature.”3 Fritz Rothschild includes polar concepts as one of the identifying characteristics of Heschel’s theology in his article in the edition of Conservative Judaism which celebrated Heschel’s life and work shortly after his death. Rothschild notes, “His thought abounds in polar concepts and the fields of forces created by them. . . . He often used the language of paradox; not because he denigrated logic and reason, but because reality is too complex and subtle to be caught in univocal concepts.”4 Similarly, Byron Sherwin includes a section on “Polarity” in his short survey of Heschel’s theology in the “Makers of Contemporary Theology” series. Sherwin observes that polarity is not just a religious concept for Heschel, “but is a vehicle towards structuring our perception of reality.”5 Heschel himself contrasts the Jewish embrace of the paradoxical with other religions and forms of thought which seek “to present the world and life as a unified whole and to regard all discord and incongruities as provisional or illusory.”6 Rather, he observes that in Jewish thinking such paradoxes are understood to be embedded in the very nature of reality, preserving faith from falling either into too simplistic an understanding, or into the paralysis of meaninglessness: “The final irrationality of the givenness of things,” he remarks, “is frankly accepted.” One could interpret this existentially precarious position as a source of human anxiety or numbness, yet for Heschel it leads humanity beyond itself to its ultimate meaning: the pursuit of holiness. The question is not to resolve or eliminate the tension between these opposites, but to live within them while remaining aware of the ultimate divine concern. Polarity is thus a dynamic force at work in Heschel’s thought, promoting both spiritual maturity and purposeful engagement in life despite its ambiguous complexity.

II  Heschel’s medieval and Torah studies From where, then, did Heschel derive the notion of polarity as such a significant mode of thought? In a preface to Heschel’s Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets, Moshe Idel writes that Heschel attempted, through the breadth of his studies of all periods and aspects of Jewish thought, “to present his view of the continuum of Jewish

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religious consciousness, starting from the Bible and ending in the modern period.”7 Extrapolating from this observation, one might add that through these studies Heschel tries continually to reveal the variety of the governing polar tensions which he believed were at all times characteristic of Jewish thinking, and at no time collapsed into a synthetic unity, even though at any given time one aspect might dominate a particular individual’s approach to theological questions. This theme is especially evident in Heschel’s studies of medieval thought, which are generally less well known than his other works, for the most part having been written early in his career. Some of them (such as the essays in Prophetic Inspiration) appeared only in Hebrew until they were published posthumously in English, while others (such as The Quest for Certainty in Saadia’s Philosophy8 and Don Jizhak Abravanel9) are short and relatively hard-to-find books. (We will consider Heschel’s magnum opus of rabbinic studies, Torah min Hashamayim, later in this chapter.) Yet within these various works Heschel began to explore the themes of polarity (which are more clearly established in his later theological writings), providing a base of historical documentation for his theological stance on the centrality of polar thinking. Writing on the philosopher Saadia Gaon (882–942), for example, Heschel explores the relationship between faith and reason as it is articulated by this Babylonian scholar. Heschel takes as a governing theme for Saadia’s thought the attempt to come to certainty in matters of knowing. Responding to the skepticisms of the “Materialists,” the “Relativists,” the “Agnostics,” and the “Ephectic school,” Saadia explored the nature of objective truth and its subjective correlative, certitude. Searching for a solid basis for knowledge, he appealed to sense perception supplemented by reason, which is shaped by self-evident propositions such as “truth is good and falsehood despicable.” Saadia expanded the accepted standard for truth as a mere correspondence between ideas and reality, supplementing it with the notion of coherence: “A true proposition is a significant whole, in which all constituent elements reciprocally involve each other.” Truth is not, in other words, a simple correlation between an object and the perception we have of it, but of the whole idea we form of its nature and reality. Error, then, does not enter in merely through false sensual perceptions nor through faulty reasoning, but through the will which introduces irrational factors in the act of cognition, disturbing the overall coherence of our thinking. For Saadia, therefore, while religious belief flows out of revelation and tradition, it must be verified through reason, even though reason itself is unable to discover revealed truths. In short, the truths of revelation may be assimilated, though not attained, by reason. Reason cannot be substituted for faith, but operates in tandem with it: as Heschel observes, Saadia set up “a system of co-ordinates, with faith as the abscissa and reason as the ordinate, which should determine the validity of any thought, religious or secular.”10 Heschel, however, offers a strongly dissenting critique of this “quest for peace, for a reconciliation between reason and revelation,” arguing that contrary to the harmonious symbiosis which Saadia tried to establish between faith and reason, “Religious faith precedes and transcends knowledge.”11 Implicitly referring to his phenomenological approach to the study of piety (which will be the object of our investigation in the next chapter), Heschel insists that for a religious person, the question of certainty as it is framed by Saadia is not significant:

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“The believing man is usually indifferent to the origins or foundations of his faith. He often shuns demonstrations or perception of what is hidden from the natural eye and prefers the loyalty of faith to the clarity of knowledge.” In Heschel’s resistance to Saadia’s quest for a synthetic relationship between revelation and reason, one can see at work his opposition to the collapsing of polarities into any single resolution or explanation. Whereas Saadia tried to map reason and revelation onto the same plane, with both providing a coordinate for any objective statement, Heschel insists in his critique of Saadia that there are realities known to the person of faith which cannot be charted in reference to reason. In the polarity of reason and faith, faith retains a unique identity in which matters of rational certainty are not phenemenologically significant. To collapse faith into a revelation assimilated through reason does not do justice, in Heschel’s view, to the priority of a direct experience of the divine which exists authentically in its own right. This position, taken early on by Heschel in his studies of medieval sources, anticipates his later elaboration of depth theology, and clearly identifies him with a mystical tradition to the extent that it insists on the possibility and reality of such experience. Heschel continued to explore this line of inquiry in two subsequent articles, gathered together in Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets. The question which he takes up in these works (expanding on the earlier biography of Maimonides) is whether in the medieval Jewish tradition, there was a continuing experience of prophecy (or at least the expectation of its possibility), or whether there was an assumption that the age of prophecy had closed with the end of the biblical era. Formally, the Sages assumed that prophecy had ceased, but Heschel argues that “the thirst for prophetic inspiration, the yearning for the sublime experiences of the supernatural has never died among us.” (He seems, in these essays, almost to equate prophecy with mystical experience.) Heschel’s aim is to establish that the anticipation of prophetic/mystical experience has remained a constant of Jewish life, a point which is made all the more strongly in these two essays in that they attempt to document explicit mystical intentions among the medieval Jews whose life is assumed to have been dominated by a purely halachic formulation, prior to the emergence of the more obvious mystical traditions of the Kabbalah. In the first essay, “Prophetic Inspiration in the Middle Ages (Until the Time of Maimonides)”, Heschel explores the evidence for a continuing prophetic expectation in the early medieval period based upon a sense of divine communication through a variety of metaphors: the “bat kol [heavenly echo],” dreams, or the gift of the Spirit. Acknowledging that the evidence for such experience is muted (which he attributes partly to their deeply personal nature), Heschel nevertheless remarks that, “whoever seeks diligently will find sufficient material with regard to the attainment of this level of spirituality.”12 He goes on to document the existence of such material, providing abundant examples of this early medieval mystical tradition. He concludes by observing, “One cannot grasp the innermost thought of the holy men of Israel without remembering that in their eyes, prophetic inspiration hovered over human reason, and, at times, heaven and earth would meet and kiss. They believed that the divine voice which issued from Horeb was not stilled thereafter.”13 Heschel’s effort to document the continuity of prophetic (mystical) experience in Jewish experience continues in the second essay in the book, “Did Maimonides Believe

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that He Had Attained the Rank of Prophet?” Resisting the more typical understanding of Maimonides as a rationalist who had united Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish faith, Heschel argues that Maimonides relied extensively on prophecy as a “cognitive power,” and that through his lifelong quest for the divine he believed himself to have reached the rank of prophet. Maimonides admits in the Guide of the Perplexed that he has reached the “ultimate felicity.” Heschel asks, “What is the nature of this ‘perfection’? This is the rank of ‘whoever has been permanently and thoroughly influenced without interruption by God,’ the rank of that person ‘to whom are revealed the secrets of the Torah from Heaven.’ ”14 This, Heschel concludes, is clear evidence that Maimonides considered himself to have achieved the prophetic rank. Interestingly enough, Heschel contrasts Maimonides’ interest in prophecy with that of Saadia: whereas Saadia searched for the purpose of prophecy (in relation to reason), Maimonides’ interest was in its nature as a “phenomenon.”15 This choice of words is a clear echo of Heschel’s own methodological approach to the study of religious experience, and again reasserts the polar relation contained within piety of personal insight and experience with reason itself. Yet, Heschel also offers a contrast with the search for mystical experience which he is at pains to document in Prophetic Inspiration: namely, his short biography of Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1509). Commissioned by the Prussian Jewish Community on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Abravanel’s birth, this short biography, which appeared both in German and a Polish translation, was intended by Heschel to offer encouragement to Jews facing increasing hostility from the Nazis by drawing parallels with the experience of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in  1492, to which Abravanel was witness. More significant for our purposes here, however, was Heschel’s contrast of Abravanel’s pragmatic understanding of religious life with the contemplative dimension emphasized by Maimonides. “What moved him most was not a mystical beatitude within God, or within an active intellect emanating from Him, but the historical betterment of mankind.”16 In this case, the tension to be drawn with mystical insight is not merely with rational thought, but also with active moral engagement in the pragmatic concerns of daily life. Throughout his writing on medieval Jewish philosophers, then, Heschel is at work demonstrating either that there is an ongoing awareness of the polarities which shape the content of their reflection or that in other instances there is at the core of their reflection a fault which is an overzealous attempt to harmonize these same polarities. Saadia was too determined to conflate faith and reason; the rationalist Maimonides, on the other hand, maintained an appropriate appreciation of the ultimately mystical nature of the human encounter with the divine; yet the pragmatist Abravanel reminded those prone to flights of mystical ecstasy of the inherently practical dimension of God’s concern for human affairs. In the issues which Heschel explores in these studies of medieval thought, therefore, one can again perceive what are to him the two essential polarities which shape his overall theological enterprise. On one hand, there is the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of God, which make God both accessible to human beings and make them ultimately responsible to God as the supreme being. And on the other hand, there is the human yearning for a contemplative union with this God, held in tension with the moral obligation for the practical well-being of others.

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III  The Hasidic roots of polarity The polarities of divine immanence/transcendence and mystical contemplation/ responsibility, which we have just seen are leitmotifs for Heschel’s thinking, are deeply evocative of his own personal spiritual and intellectual formation in the Hasidic tradition of Eastern European Judaism. These biographical roots are obvious and frequently remarked upon: Friedman uses the apt phrase that Heschel was a “scion of Hasidism,”17 given the fact that he was heir on both sides of his family to prominent dynastic leaders of the Hasidic community, and was intended to succeed them. In their biography of Heschel, Edward Kaplan and Samuel Dresner emphasize that although he went through several “metamorphoses,” he always retained an essential loyalty to the precepts of (if not the absolute observance of) Hasidic traditions.18 Indeed, they argue that his “spiritual radicalism” was an enlightened, modern form of Hasidism which had shed its anachronistic culturally specific elements while retaining the essential meaning.19 The extent to which Heschel relied upon insights he gained from this early formation in his life is indicated by his inclusion of this story in a chapter on depth theology in The Insecurity of Freedom: A story is told of a Hasid who was listening to an expert in medieval Jewish scholasticism, holding forth upon the attributes of God, setting forth with logical exactness which statements may be predicated of God. After the discourse came to an end, the Hasid remarked: “If God were the way you described Him, I would not believe in Him . . .”20

The story is illuminating because it suggests how attached Heschel was to the realness and immediacy of the experience of God—a typically Hasidic attitude—and to what extent he was dissatisfied with a formalistic approach to theology. As he remarked later in the same book, “I grew up in a house of worship where the spiritual was real. There was no elegance, but there was contrition; there was no great wealth, but there was great longing.”21 Heschel’s debt to Hasidism is manifested in his lifelong scholarly effort to document the origins and development of the movement, giving it an intellectual respectability which it had not usually been accorded. As Dresner notes, Hasidism had usually either been romanticized (as in the case of Buber’s interest in it), or maligned as fundamentally un-Jewish.22 Yet as Steven Katz comments, as a scholar of Hasidism “Heschel was different,” uniquely able to take both an objective stance in relation to the tradition since he had stepped outside of it—an impressive “historic contextualism”—even while retaining a strong personal affinity for its central tenets.23 Heschel himself noted the lack of previous serious scholarly attention to this subject in an article entitled, “Unknown Documents in the History of Hasidism,” in which he wrote, “in the field of Jewish scholarship there are few subjects about which so much has been written in so dilettantish a manner as the history of Hasidism.” He goes on to complain that some researchers “paid more attention to the opponents of Hasidism, the Mitnagdim, than to Hasidism itself . . .”24 Aware of the lack of substantial documentation of the history of this aspect of Judaism, Heschel founded in 1949 the YIVO Hasidic Archives in New York to collect

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and preserve as much information as could be found after the war. Also to this end, he wrote several significant studies, some of which remained unfinished at his death. An early work, not of a scholarly nature but deeply evocative of Heschel’s ancestral roots is The Earth Is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in East Europe (1950), elegantly illustrated with wood engravings by Ilya Schor. The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov: Studies in Hasidism (published posthumously with an extensive introduction by Dresner, later included as one of three chapters in his own Heschel, Hasidism, and Halakha) explored the role played by various supporters of the movement’s founder, Reb Israel ben Eliezer (ca. 1690–1760), who became known as the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the good name). A Passion for Truth (1973), which Heschel submitted to the publisher just before his death, explores the relationship between the methods of the Baal Shem and Reb Menahem Mendl of Kotzk (1787–1859). This work incorporates some material from Heschel’s larger work on the Kotzker Rebbe, published the same year in Yiddish under the title Kotzk: In Gerangel far Emesdikeit (Kotzk: The struggle for integrity). Finally, Heschel left unfinished at his death his largest planned work on Hasidism, a biography of the Baal Shem Tov himself (for which he had won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship). He had begun to work on the project while in Cincinnati at the Hebrew Union College (1940–45), but other projects seemed always to postpone its completion and it was never finished. Dresner summarizes Heschel’s significant output of scholarly research on Hasidism in this way: For Heschel, Hasidism was neither romanticism, rebellion, nor an affirmation of orthodoxy. . . . Indeed, in his understanding of Hasidism, Heschel had no peer. His grasp of the entire range of Jewish literature—biblical, rabbinic, philosophic, and mystical—enabled him to discern in what sense Hasidic writings were a continuation of or a departure from the past, where they were original, what elements of earlier Jewish thought they accepted or rejected, and what problems they attempted to address.25

Less frequently, however, has there been an attempt to understand the links between Heschel’s own Hasidic origins and historical scholarship, and the explicit content of this theology.26 Dresner identifies certain phrases and ideas in Heschel’s work that are “clear echoes of Hasidic concepts and concerns,” although he doesn’t go much further in exploring them. His list includes “Heschel’s excursions upon the Sabbath as a bride, upon ‘divine pathos,’ the ‘ineffable,’ ‘radical amazement,’ the illusion of God’s absence, the ‘holy dimension’ of all reality, the ‘primacy of inwardness,’ the criticism of ‘panhalachism,’ the centrality of prayer, the ‘dignity of words,’ and the ‘endless yearning.’ ”27 Perhaps the most direct attempt to identify Hasidic sources in Heschel’s work is the previously mentioned article by Joseph Lookstein, “The Neo-Hasidism of Abraham J. Heschel.” Lookstein identifies four characteristics of Hasidism which he finds in Heschel: priority given to piety rather than study, an emphasis on “life” rather than the “book”, an assertion of the proximity of God, and an affirmation that humanity is basically good and that God dwells with each individual. Lookstein’s analysis, however, is rather schematic and most keen to make the rhetorical point of the relevance of neo-Hasidism to contemporary concerns.

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Various other commentators have, of course, noted in passing certain Hasidic themes in Heschel’s work, but an explicit identification of how these themes are incorporated into his larger theological scheme is unusual. In route to understanding how piety acts as a bridge between the polarities of Heschel’s thought, therefore, we must first describe how his theology is shaped by these formative influences. As a means of organizing a rather complex subject, the penetration of Hasidic influences and their influence on Heschel’s way of thinking may be grouped into four categories: mystical insight, the holiness of the individual, personal responsibility, and the power of the word. The manner in which Hasidism is itself “mystical,” and so a source of mystical insight, is a matter for debate, since it incorporates both concepts of God’s immanence, as well as God’s hiding and absence. One notes, for example, Heschel’s expression of the idea of God’s hiddenness in God in Search of Man: “The will of God is to be here, manifest and near; but when the doors of this world are slammed on Him, His truth betrayed, His will defied, He withdraws, leaving man to himself. God did not depart of His own volition; He was expelled. God is in exile.”28 In considering the “mystical” aspect of Heschel’s Hasidic influences, therefore, it is perhaps advisable to give a specific definition to what constitutes mystical experience in order to clarify exactly what we might mean by saying that the type of ordinary yet intimate awareness of God’s presence—or absence—in Hasidic spirituality is in fact “mystical.” Bernard McGinn, in his history of Christian mysticism, The Presence of God, defines mysticism as that part of belief and practice “that concerns the preparation for, and consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God.”29 Such a definition is helpful because it does not limit mystical experience to the ecstatic or atypical, but places it within a larger pattern of behavior and awareness of the divine immanence that is open to all. Indeed, as McGinn continues to develop the meaning of this definition, he stresses mysticism as the divine grounding of consciousness, which is a deliberate step away from the language of “union” with the divine (which he fears may be perceived in too static a manner). To be grounded in God is to find in the divine-human encounter a continual source of life and insight: mysticism is then understood as a process and conscious way of life, what could be described as a heuristic understanding of the mystical experience, such that it informs the conduct and meaning of every part of ordinary life. In this regard, McGinn’s definition of the mystical dimension of life is particularly applicable to Hasidism, where the embrace of every worldly detail as having the potential to make the divine present is so evident (one thinks, for example, of the extreme interest by the Hasidim in every action of the rebbe—even the lacing of his shoes—which was “full of wonder,” as Heschel recounts30). Yet at the same time, Hasidic mysticism keeps a distance from a specifically unitive idea of contemplation of the divine presence—an attitude for which McGinn’s definition also makes room, but which still stands in contrast to many other strains of ecstatic spiritual experience. Furthermore, the Hasidic experience of the nearness of God simultaneously includes the perception of the divine absence: beyond its celebration of life, Hasidic spirituality also embraces the tragedy and suffering of life as the sector where God seems most distant. This absence is not simply the apophatic denial of a positive knowledge of God, but an actual consciousness that God cannot be found (in the manner of Psalm

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22’s lament, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”). Thus, while Hasidism manifests clearly recognizable mystical strains, it also brings certain unique features to this type of experience which distinguish it from more common assumptions that the mystic is always contemplatively or ecstatically united with a divine presence. In an article published in 1972, “Hasidism as a New Approach to Torah,”31 Heschel gives some amplification of this enigmatic quality. The essential point, he argues, is to realize that Hasidism is founded upon the desire “to be attached to God Himself.” Whereas traditional rabbinic Judaism had emphasized Torah study and observance as the means whereby one can “sit in the halls of the glory and luster of the divine,” for the Hasid, these aspects of Jewish life are “liquefied” in that they are understood to bring exaltation to the human spirit through proximity to the divine itself. The Baal Shem, Heschel observes, “brought God to the people” through an emphasis upon being in love with God, and even with God’s world. The Baal Shem was himself immersed in meditations derived from Lurianic mysticism.32 Heschel argues, however, that for the Baal Shem the important thing was to live the insights gained, rather than simply to know them.33 Hasidism therefore stresses the importance of the cultivation of one’s inner spiritual life, for it is there that one experiences this enthusiasm of being in love. This interior quality is meant to bring to life “hope and exaltation,” celebrated in a concrete manner in everyday existence—and hence the caricatured reputation that being a Hasid “means to be gay, to drink a little vodka.” So the mystical dimension of Hasidism has a this-worldly orientation; rather than being an ascetic discipline, it springs from an embrace of the world as a “parable” of God. In Hasidic piety, mystical insight leads to the joy of knowing God’s presence in the world, and conversely joy in the world is a prerequisite for insight into the holy dimension of life. Thus, Heschel tells us, the Baal Shem “banished melancholy from the soul,” proclaiming “joy to be the very heart of religious living.”34 And yet, in contrast to this admonition, Heschel tells the following story: The grandchild of Rabbi Baruch was playing hide-and-seek with another boy. He hid himself and stayed in his hiding place for a long time, assuming that his friend would look for him. Finally, he went out and saw that his friend was gone, apparently not having looked for him at all, and that his hiding had been in vain. He ran into the study of his grandfather, crying and complaining about his friend. Upon hearing the story, Rabbi Baruch broke into tears and said: “God, too, says, ‘I hide, but there is no one to look for me.’ ”35

One can see emerging from this illustration one of the distinctive polarities which Heschel incorporated from the Hasidic tradition into his understanding of piety: namely, the joy of knowing God’s intimate presence even in the midst of the anguish of God’s absence. It is this same tension which Heschel consciously sets up between his two protagonists in A Passion for Truth: the generous spirit of the Baal Shem, contrasted with the anguished rigor of the Kotzker Rebbe. But more significantly, it is a tension which pervades Heschel’s theology, for he wishes both to articulate the immediacy of the experience of God through concepts such as the “ineffable,” and to preserve the absolute transcendence of God through his analysis of revelation as the disclosure of the will, but not the essence, of God. Heschel comments that while this

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holding together of God’s nearness and absence has always been typical of Judaism, nevertheless there is in the Hasidic reform inspired by the Baal Shem Tov a particular stress on the immanent presence and indwelling of God in the world—the Shekhinah— an aspect which had been too much neglected by medieval philosophy: More than anyone else, the Baal Shem instilled the thought of the Shekhinah in men’s hearts and souls; God’s nearness became the most important aspect of Him that a human being could attain. Keeping His distance was seen as a game that God played with man, His perennial child, like any father with his child.36

Kasimow points out that a distinctive feature of Heschel’s theology, in comparison to rabbinic Judaism, is its confidence based in these Hasidic origins that one can approach God through this world. The restoration of a natural dimension to Jewish theology, he argues, is somewhat paradoxically derived from the essentially mystical Hasidic perspective on the immediacy of God in all of creation, and is a substantial contribution to the renewal of Jewish theology.37 After the appreciation of the divine potentiality in the ordinary, a second major influence of Hasidism on Heschel is its emphasis on the holiness of the individual as a bearer of the divine. “Classical Hasidism,” he writes, “stressed the idea that man’s soul was ‘a part of God from above.’ Reb Shlomo of Karlin said, ‘The greatest sin a Jew can commit is to forget that he is a prince.’ ”38 And, to give another example, in his study of Rabbi Pinhas of Korzec, Heschel observes that Pinhas’ grandfather (one of those who prepared the way for the Hasidic movement) taught that “whoever discovers some virtue in God’s creatures has in him something of the Messiah,” the implication being that wisdom lies in being able to perceive the divine dignity in even the most wicked of human beings.39 Of course, this idea is not unique to Hasidism, but Heschel argues that to the oppressed Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, for there to be someone like the Baal Shem Tov who spoke to the people of their dignity before God and of their immense, even infinite importance—that was a relief of profound proportions. The Hasidic renewal of the eighteenth century is not merely attributable to the content of its ideas, then, but also to the fact that it held out a lifeline to a people who had “nearly expired.”40 Kaplan and Dresner point out that although this idea of the “princely” quality of each individual is particularly associated with the revival of Eastern European Jewish life, its universalism attracted the interest of some of Heschel’s own twentieth-century intellectual mentors, David Koigen in particular. Koigen developed an anthropology based on a neo-Hasidic definition of being human (which helped to shape Heschel’s own ideas), with its foundation the holiness of every person as created in the image of God.41 Heschel argues that an important implication of this stress on the dignity of the individual is a shift in emphasis to the subjective actor—to the person who has beliefs or performs ritual obligations—and away from the objective content of those ideas or form of the actions. He likens this shift to what he understands to be a similar shift in Western (Christian) philosophy made by Kierkegaard: “For both Kant and Descartes the self, the subject, was merely an abstract, thinking self, and all significance was derived from the objective system. To Kierkegaard, the subject is the concrete, the whole person.”42 In Kierkegaard, the emphasis lies on the interiority of the individual in

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relation to deeds and beliefs: “what goes on in one’s inner life is of decisive importance.”43 Here, then, emerges another of Heschel’s key polarities: the tension maintained by the pious person between interior intention and exterior performance. Heschel argues that an assertion of the importance of interiority was at odds with the accepted view prior to the Hasidic renewal that Jewish living is simply in the doing—that as long as one maintains outward obedience, the nature of the interior disposition is not essential. Hasidism, in his view, defied this perspective, replacing it with interiority “as the very core of living.” The intentional nobility of character which makes one worthy of the princely status of humanity before God is not only desirable, but also existentially essential. A third Hasidic influence on Heschel is the concern for personal responsibility, an issue which he particularly explored early in his intellectual formation in Berlin. As we have previously noted, during his third year there, Heschel joined a private seminar group led by David Koigen, the purpose of which was to explore a variety of Jewish issues in the context of the various academic disciplines represented by its members. Heschel used the seminar to react against the prevailing neo-Kantianism at the university, drawing more directly on his Hasidic roots in addressing contemporary questions of Jewish life, such as the purpose of mitzvot, the cognitive status of emotion in religion, and the role of individual experience (particularly in reference to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience). These discussions naturally turned to a consideration of the ethical dimension of these questions, and Heschel asserted a typically Hasidic link (taken from the Zohar) between mystical insight and moral action which would characterize his thinking for the rest of his life: “An ethical action on our part causes a metaphysical result. Not only is God necessary for us, but we are for God. God acts through us.”44 This intertwining of the divine and human purposes is frequently expressed in the Yiddish poems that Heschel wrote during this period, published as Der Shem Hameforash: Mentsh. Lider. In one entitled, “God Follows Me Everywhere” (dedicated to “my teacher David Koigen”), we read, in part: God follows me everywhere— spins a net of glances around me, shines upon my sightless back like a sun. God follows me like a forest everywhere. My lips, always amazed, are truly numb, dumb, like a child who blunders upon an ancient holy place. God follows me like a shiver everywhere. My desire is for rest; the demand within me is: Rise up, See how prophetic visions are scattered in the streets. . . .45

What is remarkable in this perspective is another core polarity in Heschel’s thought: the power and responsibility of human beings to act as the necessary participants in the divine purposes. It confers upon them the ability both to advance and to thwart the process of redemption, for God is dependent upon the human realization of the good. This idea, which is typical of the Lurianic preoccupation with the connection between earthly redemption and cosmic restoration, is also central to an Hasidic understanding

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of the relation between good and evil. In A Passion for Truth, Heschel describes how for classical Hasidism, one did not resist evil directly, but indirectly through an attachment to the good: evil was defeated by bypassing it. “The Psalmist’s injunction, ‘Depart from evil and do good’ (33:15) really means: by doing good you will depart from evil. Be involved in what is good; turning away from evil will follow. As Reb Shlomo of Karlin said, this is the way of teshuvah, of returning to God: turn away from evil by doing good.”46 Heschel takes this concept of human participation in the divine redemption to an almost extreme degree in The Earth Is the Lord’s, where he writes, The meaning of man’s life lies in his perfecting the universe. He has to distinguish, gather and redeem the sparks of holiness scattered throughout the darkness of the world. This service is the motive of all precepts and good deeds. Man holds the key that can unlock the chains fettering the Redeemer.47

Given this weighty responsibility, the integrity of the individual becomes paramount, which explains in large part the importance which Heschel attaches to individual piety. He argues that this insistence upon personal integrity is a turn away from the preoccupation with mystical insight more typical of medieval Judaism: it was a revolutionary shift to a reflective self-critical discipline. As he explains the teaching of the Baal Shem, “the essential goal is living in attachment to God,” so that “the central issue is not Truth in terms of a doctrine, but veracity, honesty, or sincerity in terms of personal existence.”48 Thus, even while Hasidism has clear mystical overtones, it consciously balances those against a personal responsibility to fulfill the pious requirement to participate in the redemption of the world through attachment to the good desired by God. The possibility that human beings may be direct participants in God’s redemption of the world becomes for Heschel an organizing principle around which many of his central concepts revolve. The idea of God’s pathos, for example, is a more precise way of describing how it is that human beings are endowed with such a dignity: the revelation of God’s concern for us requires the counterpart of our sympathetic response to that concern. Robert McAfee Brown points to the stress on the cosmic importance of human deeds as an important source for Heschel’s later social ethics, arguing that the “Hasidic concern with the everyday, the exaltation of the here and now” was “so much in the marrow of Heschel’s bones that it is almost impossible to separate who he was from the heritage he embodied.”49 It also helps to explain why Heschel pays relatively scant attention to the problem of evil, theologically considered: his instinct is the Hasidic emphasis on the positive potential of human deeds rather than the equal possibility of their evil consequences (though Heschel is by no means forgetful of this aspect). Friedman, following Dresner, complains of this outlook: “If Heschel’s treatment of Hasidism may be faulted, . . . ‘it is in his tendency toward Hasidic apologetics and his preference to stay clear of the ignoble and dark features which are inevitable in a world which included millions.’ ”50 Yet Heschel’s response to the concern for evil is not simply to ignore it, but to reassert its polar counterpart in the redemptive potential of a truly pious life lived in partnership with the purposes of God. Yet another strong Hasidic characteristic that is evident in Heschel is his conviction of the power of the word. More than doctrines and ideas, Hasidism relies upon charismatic

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personalities and narrative tales to convey its message. Heschel himself believed that it is essentially an oral tradition which can be lived but not very easily analyzed. Thus, despite his own scholarly interest in the subject, Heschel is quick to express the elusiveness of the spirit of Hasidism: “Hasidism is not given to be an object of lecturing. One can be a witness to it but one cannot lecture about it. In other words, Hasidism has a very personal dimension, it is a very personal experience, it cannot be made the theme of a report.”51 Indeed, in this same paper, Heschel responds to the central “enigma” of Hasidism (the extent of the influence of one man, the Baal Shem, on “the majority of the Jewish people . . . for generations”), not with sociological or historical analysis (though he acknowledges that such answers are sometimes given), but with an “Hasidic answer to this Hasidic riddle”: a story originally told by Rebbe Hirsh of Zydathov. The gist of the story is that in a country where the king was elected directly by the populace, it was the candidate whose representative actually presented him in person to the people who was elected. The Baal Shem, Heschel infers, was like that representative, presenting God directly to the people.52 As Friedman observes, “stressing truthfulness and wholeheartedness, Hasidism placed the aphorism and the parable at the center of Hasidic thinking and transformed doctrines into attitudes and facts.”53 The Hasidic predilection for narrative, evocation, and suggestion (rather than discursive argument) is an attitude which deeply marked Heschel’s own mode of thought, and which allowed him to deploy the sort of polar thinking which relies on allusion and illustration more than on exposition. Franklin Sherman comments that this tradition “stressed life rather than doctrine; personal faith rather than mere assent to the tradition.”54 Indeed, to understand Heschel’s own theological style, it is essential to consider it with this background in mind, for only then does one recognize that rather than simply hiding faults of logic, his evocative style has the Hasidic oral tradition as its subtle cultural referent. So more than providing a systematic approach to theological questions in the traditional sense of the term, Heschel’s program is to bring to bear the intuitive, personal dimension of Hasidic piety on subjects usually treated more abstractly and impersonally. Moreover, the Hasidic emphasis on the centrality of prayer marks Heschel’s work with a meditative quality which must be accepted on its own terms. In “Hasidism as a New Approach to Torah,” Heschel observed that whereas medieval Judaism had exalted the role of Torah study (“when you study Torah, God speaks to you”), the Baal Shem exalted the corresponding role of prayer (“when you pray you speak to God”).55 Heschel documents in his chapter on Rabbi Nahman of Kosow, a companion of the Baal Shem, that the teaching of prayer was a pillar of the Hasidic renewal movement. Asserting this centrality, the Baal Shem himself summarized Nahman’s many travels, teaching the art of prayer, with these words: “Where R. Nahman has traveled, people know what prayer is, and wherever R. Nahman has not traveled they do not know what prayer is.”56 Kasimow notes that in the history of Judaism, such a reversal of emphasis—or perhaps more accurately, such a balancing of emphasis—on the human address to God corresponding with God’s address to human beings, must be considered unusual. Citing an earlier study of Hasidic prayer, he concurs that in this sense, the Hasidim were “innovators,”57 and Heschel clearly wishes to stay within the spirit of this innovation.

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Furthermore, Heschel reads more than an innovative spiritual exercise into this Hasidic emphasis on the centrality of prayer, for he understands an affirmation of prayer also to be an affirmation of the importance of speech and words. This emphasis, heavily weighting the significance of the human side of the divine-human encounter, sets up the basic dynamic of piety which we are here trying to understand: piety embraces the Hasidic call to prayer in the sense that it valorizes a specific human response to the extension of God through revelation. This perspective is especially evident in Heschel’s Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism.58 In it, he describes prayer as an answer to the surprise of living, “an event that starts in man and ends in God.” The holy nature of prayer dignifies words, and only when one has a sense of the power of words to give expression to holiness and to make commitments in response to it can one understand the depth of prayer itself. Moreover, this inherent dignity of the word supports and validates the overall polarity of Heschel’s Hasidic notion of spiritual reflection, for as words such as “transcendent” and “immanent” are held in dynamic tension within a prayerful piety, the realities to which they refer remain distinct yet without contradiction in the interior life of the individual who mystically participates in them both.

IV  From the Kabbalah to an ontological category Although, as we have just explored, Hasidism incorporates a variety of mystical elements which were formative of Heschel’s particular theological approach, the overt mysticism of the Kabbalah is an identifiably separate influence on Heschel. Indeed, Heschel’s relation to kabbalistic mysticism has raised for many readers the consideration of whether Heschel’s work should itself simply be considered a part of this mystical genre—responses to this question have been divided. Petuchowski, for example, commenting on the elusive quality of Heschel’s evocative language, has this to say: “There is another and more sympathetic way of viewing his constant harping on the ‘ineffable,’ his almost compulsive return to the theme of awe and wonder, his frequent disquisitions on the sublime. And that way is to recognize Heschel as a mystic.”59 Petuchowski argues that Heschel primarily works out of the kabbalistic tradition, and places his work squarely in that context. Cherbonnier, on the other hand, gives quite a different reading, arguing for Heschel’s fundamentally rationalist approach in his appropriation of a “biblical philosophy.”60 Kasimow takes a more middle-of-theroad approach, crediting Heschel with the retrieval of the mystical tradition in Jewish reflection without necessarily stating that Heschel was himself a mystic.61 The disparity in these readings suggests that there is more to be said on the subject of Heschel’s mystical tendencies. Heschel’s most direct attention to the subject is in an essay entitled “The Mystical Element in Judaism” (1949).62 The essay revolves around interpreting the Zohar, the basic text of the Jewish mystical tradition. In it, Heschel defines the Kabbalah (which literally means “received lore”) as a “tradition of wisdom, supposed to have been revealed to elect sages in ancient times and preserved throughout the generations by a select few.” The goal of this tradition is “the elevation and expansion of existence”

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through an exaltation of all being. This is achieved through a continual return to the idea of the union of all reality with God: this union is that toward which all creation yearns, and it is the responsibility and privilege of every human being to be part of its accomplishment. Individual salvation, therefore, is secondary to the larger goal of the final union of all things: “The ultimate goal of the kabbalist is not his own union with the Absolute but the union of all reality with God; one’s own bliss is subordinated to the redemption of all.” Thus, Heschel observes in a memorable phrase, “man’s life can be a rallying point for the forces which tend toward God.” The achievement of this unity, however, is prevented in the present day by the separation of God from creation brought about through the trespass of Adam: that trespass separated male from female, humanity from God, creation from Creator. Yet God is not completely withdrawn, for a residual presence, the Shekhinah, followed Adam out of the garden and continues to dwell with human beings.63 The Torah is the primary source by which humanity can regain insight into how to achieve the reunion of these separated elements. Heschel argues, however, that the Torah is conceived in the Kabbalah as a dynamic source of inspiration and not as a fixed reference point. Its central insight is that in meditating upon the mysteries of life while performing the divine precepts, “we act toward unifying all the supernal potencies in one will and bringing about the union of the Master and the Matrona.” The yearning for a life compatible with this destiny, “the awareness of the ubiquitous mystery,” is the soul of religious life. Heschel summarizes this mystical perspective thus: This is the pattern of Jewish mysticism: to have an open heart for the inner life of God. It is based on two assumptions: that there is an inner life in God and that the existence of man ought to revolve in a spiritual dynamic course around the life of God.64

Kaplan, opening a chapter on “Mysticism and Despair” in his study of Heschel’s poetics, describes the essay on the Zohar as “Heschel’s blueprint for modern theology.”65 Acknowledging that Heschel himself denied the “mysticism” of his works, Kaplan nevertheless persists in applying the label, arguing that it is translated by Heschel into a prophetic ethics. Interestingly for our purposes here, Kaplan makes this claim based on an equation of the “pious person” with the “mystic.” He does so by pointing out that for Heschel, mysticism is not to be conceived as “a human striving to absorb the personality into the Godhead.”66 Rather, mysticism is equated with a prophetic ethics through which the individual cooperates with the purposes of God. In a short section on “The Life of Piety,” Kaplan sketches what he means by this synopsis in reference to the doctrine of the Shekhinah: the pious person, mystically aware of the exiled presence of God, seeks to renew its presence through “a complete and spontaneous . . . recentering of subjectivity to God.” One seeks to make of one’s life a realization of transcendence, which governs both one’s relationship to the divine and to other human beings. Elsewhere, Kaplan suggests that this orientation shapes the whole of Heschel’s thought, or at least his two principal works on religious philosophy, Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man: “Both books sweep through Western philosophy and Judaic tradition from the author’s kabbalistic perspective. Their opening chapters explore the sense of the ineffable, stimulate the reader’s capacity for awe and wonder, and lead us

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to a subtle awareness of living as objects of God’s concern.”67 In short, Kaplan argues that in Heschel, there is “no intrinsic antagonism between the mystical, the rational, and the prophetic perspectives.” Indeed, Heschel himself makes frequent reference to and use of mystical ideas. In his essay on depth theology, for example, he insists that the antecedent experience of mystery is the root of our most significant questions, God in particular. “Not speculation, but the sense of mystery precipitated the problem of all problems. Not the apparent, but the hidden within the apparent; not the design of the universe, but the mystery of the design of the universe; not the definable issues, but the indefinable enigmas, the questions we do not know how to ask, have always poured oil on the flames of man’s anxiety.”68 He goes on to say that by mystery he does not simply mean those aspects of reality which we have not yet been able to measure or understand: mystery is not the unknown, but the unknowable. And, he believes, mystery is a dimension which is given with reality; it is not experienced separately from other aspects of existence, but is embedded in the structure of all reality and experience: “By the mystery I mean a dimension of all beings, including the measurable aspects of beings and the act of measuring itself. It is given with and within experience.” Assuming this inescapable and constitutive aspect of reality, therefore, to be truly human is to attend piously to the mystical dimension, for otherwise one is diminished and out of touch with the depth of human life: “Sensitivity to the mystery of living is the essence of human dignity.” It would be easy to let slide these explorations of the mystery with which Heschel says all things are laden, taking them as primarily a poetic evocation. Yet in God in Search of Man (which predates the depth theology essay by 5 years), there is a chapter entitled “The Sense of Mystery” which considerably raises the stakes. He there distinguishes between mystery as an exceptional event, and as an “ontological category” that “may be experienced everywhere and at all times.”69 He continues, “In using the term mystery we do not mean any particular esoteric quality that may be revealed to the initiated, but the essential mystery of being as being, the nature of being as God’s creation out of nothing, and, therefore, something which stands beyond the scope of human comprehension.” Yet the mystery also remains hidden: its status is best expressed by a Midrash of Psalm 46 which understands it to express that “hidden are the things that we see.” The nature of all reality is thus both “known and unknown, plain and enigmatic, transparent and impenetrable.” Later in God in Search of Man, however, Heschel cautions against too simple an equation of mystery with the unknown: mystery is not merely that which is unknown and unknowable, but a name for a categorical “meaning which stands in relation to God.”70 Again, mystery is a quality embedded in reality, a meaning which is attached to all that is perceived, but which remains open and known only to God. Gamberini has written of what he calls a distinctive ontologia hescheliana (Heschelian ontology), taking into account the very clear signals which Heschel gives of what he believes are the ontological implications of mystery.71 As Gamberini frames it, the essential contours of this ontology are, first, that the foundation of all being is the divine concern which is manifested as God’s pathos; second, that the world is only a representation of the ultimate transcendence of reality; third, that because God is the source of the concern which brings all things into being, we can understand creation only in its relationship to God; and so, finally, human beings find their own meaning

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through a sympathetic union with God’s pathos, which is not a mystical union, but a holding together of God and the world in the apprehension of a single mystery. As Heschel himself puts it, “Everything holds the great secret. For it is the inescapable situation of all being to be involved in the infinite mystery.” A fuller exposition still of this “Heschelian ontology” is the chapter on “The Philosophy of Pathos” in The Prophets. Referring to the Eleatic philosopher, Parmenides (ca. 515–449 BCE), Heschel observes that in his thought being has an ultimacy that is derived from the idea that being can only be one. This is so because it is impossible to conceive of not-being: if being were manifold, however, this would imply change and motion, so that new forms of being could come into existence. But this would contradict the principle that not-being cannot be, and with it potentiality. True being must therefore be regarded as unitary, static, and unchangeable. Heschel, of course, takes issue with this premise, first of all because such an idea can only reasonably be applied to being as it is reflected in the mind: “Being in reality, being as we encounter it, implies movement.” More important to him, however, is that this abstracted idea of being substitutes itself for what is in fact a prior and more ultimate question. “The supreme and ultimate issue is not being but the mystery of being. Why is there being at all instead of nothing?” Contrary to Parmenides, Heschel argues that it is entirely possible to conceive of the possibility of not being; we are exposed to presence and absence all the time. So rather than the single issue of being, we also have the experience of not-being, both of which are “transcended by the mystery of being.” Thus, the mystery of being—the surprise that there is something rather than nothing— establishes the contingency of being by asking what transcends being. This, Heschel insists, is the larger problem: “The act of bringing being into being, creation, stands higher in the ladder of problems than being. . . . Creation is a mystery; being as being an abstraction.” So then, from the mystical experience of awe and wonder, Heschel has brought us to an ontology of contingent being which makes space for the “ultimate question”: Why is there being at all? The biblical answer to this question leads us away from a concern for being as being, to an engagement with being as creation. An important distinction between the two is that to regard being as creation necessarily implies an idea of coming-into-being, or in other words, of activity. The biblical God, Heschel insists, is not thought of as “true being,” but as semper agens: “Here the basic category is action rather than immobility. Movement, creation of nature, acts within history rather than absolute transcendence and detachment from the events of history, are the attributes of the Supreme Being.” The experience of mystery, upon which all this ontology is based, thus leads to a dynamic understanding of being in which change is not only possible but also necessary. Heschel presses further with this point in Who Is Man?, arguing that being in itself is an inadequate category by which to understand humanity.72 One must also ask what is the responsibility we have in living that endows being with meaning (this is where Heschel himself is most aware of the Heideggerian overtones of much of what he has to say). So, for example, while a dead horse may be said to have being, human being must be described by “the fruits of living.” So, against Heidegger (and perhaps unfairly), Heschel argues that if we were to “surrender to being,” we would abdicate

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the possibility for meaning which comes from living, having been reduced to mere being. We will have occasion in later chapters to attend to the phenomenal structure of living as Heschel describes it (requiredness, indebtedness, embarrassment, and so on). Here though it is important to observe that as the ongoing response to God’s creative involvement in history, our individual living is shaped by unique temporal events that become determinative for our experience of being human, such that human being has a historical dimension that is only revealed through time. Being and action are inextricably linked: as Heschel remarks in The Prophets, “Biblical ontology does not separate being from doing. What is, acts.”

V  Polarity in religious discourse We will return to the consequences of positing mystery as an ontological category, especially in regard to the epistemological and ethical implications of understanding being as creation. Yet we should note here that the debate over whether Heschel is or is not a mystic, from the point of view of the current study, is ultimately skewed in that it fails to take into account that mystery is, for him, a fundamental attribute of all reality which has to be taken into account in any consideration of the nature of being. The way in which he frames the issue in the essay on “Depth Theology”—as a world with two faces, one an open and accessible reality, the other hidden and ineffable—indicates the fundamentally polarized structure of his thought, as it is held together in piety. Kaplan introduces “amalgam” as a suggestive word for getting at this dynamic in the context of discussing Heschel’s style, and again in discussing Heschel and the problem of evil. He writes, “Antitheses or logical aporia cannot encompass the reality of evil. Heschel’s prophetic ethics introduces a further distinction. Beyond the duality of good and evil, existence comprises a mixture, an inseparable amalgam.”73 Amalgam, Kaplan suggests, is a more useful “tag” than the idea of “antitheses” for Heschel’s “attempt to embrace the complexity of religious consciousness.”74 Indeed, Kaplan would even prefer the word “amalgam” to Heschel’s own use of “polarities” to describe such oppositions as halacha and aggada. In an amalgam, such strict binary oppositions break down and become intermingled. Kaplan argues that this convergence is the true motivation behind Heschel’s deployment of poetic devices, for they are able to express this mixture where logical, discursive prose is not.75 The point that needs to be made and emphasized about Heschel’s work, however, is that even the word “amalgam” is insufficient to describe the dynamic structure of reality which he is trying to accent by his repeated evocation of “polarity.” The concept of an amalgam, as an alloy or mixture, runs the risk of reducing the distinctive participation of each component, collapsing the two into some third unitive element. (Christians would, for example, hesitate to say that Jesus was an “amalgam” of divinity and humanity.) Heschel himself alludes to the importance of maintaining such a dynamic tension between fundamentally opposing polarities in his essay on depth theology, referring to the unfortunate collapse of knowledge into mere empiricism: “The delicate balance of mystery and meaning, of reverence and action, has been perilously upset.”76 The world exists as a multipolar reality, and while these poles of meaning and insight

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interact with one another, they also retain independent pulls on our perception and conscience. This polarity cannot be harmonized without risking a dissolution of its dynamic, creative tension. In the case of religion, for example, its vitality “depends upon keeping alive the polarity of doctrine and insight, of dogma and faith, of ritual and response, of institution and the individual.”77 The irresolvable tension of opposites is brought into high relief in the polarity of human nature itself: we are made of dust, yet fashioned in the image of God. As Heschel puts it in “Sacred Image of Man” (another essay in The Insecurity of Freedom), “[Human being] is formed of the most inferior stuff in the most superior image.”78 That these two dichotomous elements cannot be collapsed into one another is evident in the holiness to which humanity is called. Holiness remains an essential attribute of God, but it may be imputed to human being even while its source remains firmly established in God. Humanity realizes its full potential by living into its divine likeness, but the resemblance is always in reference to the divine. Jewish piety, Heschel writes, may be expressed in terms of this dynamic, which expresses itself as a supreme imperative (and, one might add, as a supreme polarity): “Treat thyself as an image of God.” Based on his roots in Jewish mysticism, Heschel also remains always aware that the demarcation of good from evil is seldom unambiguous and that living in the presence of both is living in the face of an irreducible polarity. In an essay reflecting on the ethical insights of his close personal friend, Reinhold Niebuhr, Heschel notes, “In Jewish mysticism we often come upon the view that in this world neither good nor evil exists in purity.”79 This awareness means that the right and wrong deed “are two poles of piety,” and that rather than seeking perfection by dwelling exclusively at the pole of righteousness, “the pious man” feels himself always somewhere between the two.80 Yet this is no reason for despair, for perfection is not the goal, “but only to rise again and again.”81 Thus, even while “the pious man” participates in the redemption of the world through the performance of mitzvot, these good deeds alone cannot redeem history since it is always enmeshed in this ambiguity between good and evil. In an elegant passage from The Earth Is the Lord’s, Heschel writes of the Askenazic Jews: To them, life without the Torah and without piety was chaos, and a man who lived without these was looked upon with a sense of fear. They realized quite well that the world was full of ordeals and dangers, that it contained Cain’s jealousy of Abel, the cold malevolence of Sodom, and the hatred of Esau, but they also knew that there was in it the charity of Abraham and the tenderness of Rachel.82

In the end, therefore, “it is obedience to God [or in other words, piety] that will make us worthy of being redeemed by God.”83 History, Heschel concludes, “is not sufficient to itself,” for while mitzvot are an instrument for dealing with evils one by one, “at the end of days evil will be conquered by the One.”84 In the meantime, we live within the dynamic tension of the polarities of good and evil. Yet again, the principle of polarity is further asserted in a section of Quest for God on “The Polarity of Prayer,” where Heschel observes that Jewish prayer is guided by two opposite instincts, expressed in a binary series: “order and outburst, regularity and spontaneity, uniformity and individuality, law and freedom, a duty and a prerogative, empathy and self-expression, insight and sensitivity, creed and faith, the word and

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that which is beyond words.”85 The health of one’s prayer life, both individually and corporately, is determined by the extent to which prayer revolves around each of these two poles: both pull in an opposite direction, and an equilibrium is possible only if the vectors are of equal force. This dynamic tension, however, can only be maintained when the two poles remain separate and distinct; to collapse them into an alloy of the two would make of them an inertial system rather than a dynamic tension, ignoring such expressions of the underlying tension as the particularity of the individual standing in the midst of the congregation; or the ecstatic outpouring of the soul in ritualized words; or the absolute freedom with which one performs a binding obligation. “Polarity,” Heschel reminds us, “is an essential trait of all things in reality,” and though the poles interact with each other, they exist for us as constantly opposed sources of concern even as we struggle to balance them.86 To understand more deeply how these various appeals to polarity act as an organizing principle in Heschel’s thought, it is useful to turn to his major historical work (originally published in Hebrew), Torah min Hashamayim b’Espaklaryah shel Ha-Darot (Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations).87 This enormous three-volume study of the historical origins of rabbinic Judaism is organized around a fundamental polarity which Heschel introduces as his governing hermeneutical tool for understanding the great multiplicity of rabbinic interpretations. Through an exhaustive search through the texts of classical Judaism, Heschel perceives there to be two competing visions of religion—and more specifically, of revelation—which can be associated with two second-century figures of Talmudic Judaism, and around which all the succeeding variations may be grouped. On one hand, there is the school of thought to be identified with Rabbi Akiva, whose approach to revelation was to regard the Torah as God’s exact words to Moses (which Tucker calls the “supernatural/spiritual/ immanent” stance). His concern was to establish unambiguously the divine authority of the Torah as a direct expression of God’s will—a perspective which emphasizes God’s immanent engagement in creation. On the other hand, there is the school of thought to be identified with Rabbi Ishmael (which Tucker calls the “humanist/rationalist/ transcendent” stance), who as more of a pragmatist regarded the Torah as a text in which the words are human and only the sense divine. Ishmael’s concern was to guard against anthropomorphisms which might intrude on the absolute transcendence of God. Heschel summarizes them both thus: Rabbi Akiva, the esoteric personality who was not satisfied with straightforward rationality, was possessed of an intuition that what is secreted within the Torah far outweighs what is there on the surface. Having searched out the Torah’s secrets, he found that its very letters wisen and enlighten in ways inaccessible to reason. His method demonstrates that just as human language is a pale projection of the Torah’s language, so are human ideas compared to the ideas latent in Torah. Rabbi Ishamael, who was possessed of a more reflective and critical personality, who would have no truck with esoteric matters and did not see a transcendent substance in the Torah, proceeded in a straightforward manner. He assessed and weighed Scripture with scales of logic, eschewing sleight of hand, and interpreted it directly. The principle “the Torah speaks in human language” was his guiding light.88

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The unifying theme, then, is how the words “Heavenly Torah” are to be understood: was the Torah (both written and oral) preexistent in heaven and delivered by God to Moses, or is the Torah the product of a divine-human cooperation in which the processes of interpretation and expansion are crucial to its development?89 At issue is the authority of the Torah itself, for only if it can claim to have “heavenly” origins, however that term is understood, can it bear the weight assigned to it in the tradition. The first volume of Heschel’s work, after defending the importance of maintaining the polarity of aggada and halacha, explores the distance between these two views on revelation as they are reflected in such matters as miracle, sacrifice, love of God, suffering, righteous deeds, and religious language. The second and third volumes go on to document (some say in wearisome detail) how 2,000 years of Jewish reflection can be understood in light of this primary dichotomy of viewpoints. The fundamental point which Heschel is driving at throughout the whole of the book is that these two poles of thought should as a matter of principle never be either reconciled, nor should one come to dominate the other. In the pivotal Chapter 36, “Both These and These Are the Words of the Living God,” Heschel asserts the value of each tradition as the two sources by which Jewish thought is nourished: “Whoever says that these two approaches contradict one another,” he writes, “is simply mistaken. Both are focused on one reality, and each is subsumed by the other. The hidden essence of reality is that of two natures coming together.”90 This duality Heschel calls a “covenant between opposites,” a turn of phrase which returns us to the earlier point that he does not envision these “two countenances” collapsing into a single “amalgam,” but rather that they should remain in creative tension as a dialectic that is “neither univocality nor dualism.”91 Heschel’s work on classical Judaism, structured as it is around this governing polarity, reveals quite clearly how intrinsic this notion is to Heschel’s approach to larger theological issues.92 Reviewing the second volume of Torah min Hashamayim when it first appeared, for example, Jacob Neusner observed that the underlying theme of all of Heschel’s scholarly and theological works is the tension between revelation and inspiration. Heschel’s core interest, he says, is in articulating the nature of revelation in the broader context of the ontological status of religious experience. The net effect of this exploration is the renewal of aggada as a form of Jewish theology (in balance to the opposing pole of halacha), for the consideration of the status of the law necessarily entails reflection on the larger theological issues of revelation. “Heschel has demonstrated in these volumes that the Rabbis were just as serious, just as penetrating, and just as self-consistent in theology as in law, for precisely the same reason, and in much the same manner.”93 Echoing Neusner’s assessment, Arnold Eisen in his article, “Re-reading Heschel on the Commandments,” summarizes Heschel’s accomplishment in Torah min Hashamayim in two aspects. The first is that Heschel demonstrates there to be a fundamental “aggaddic pluralism” at the core of Judaism which resists any definitive rendering of basic principles. “One can leave the book with doubts about Heschel’s rabbinic scholarship. But it is impossible to doubt either his immense learning or the presence of profound disagreement among the vast array of sources which he cites— at length, in the original, and with extensive footnotes.”94 The second achievement,

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according to Eisen, is that Heschel restores “aggada to parity with halakha,” which allows him to use the former to call for renewal of the latter. Eisen summarizes this reading: “Matters of faith, of the heart, of the mind, are no less important than matters of law, of action; indeed, the authority of law rests upon the belief in Torah from Heaven—by definition a matter of aggada!”95 Both Neusner and Eisen, then, understand Heschel’s development of the polarity between Akiva and Ishmael as a hermeneutical tool which allows him to renew the vital dynamism of the related polarity between aggada and halacha. Rebecca Schorsch extends this interpretive reading in her article, “The Hermeneutics of Heschel in Torah min Hashamayim,” taking it a step further.96 Observing that the scholarly weaknesses for which the work has been faulted are not due to Heschel’s inability to analyze or organize such a vast range of material, nor that his reduction of the variations therein to two neat polarities is “jarringly simplistic,” Schorsch argues that Heschel’s program is instead to demonstrate the open-ended character of Torah. Based on an exegetical encounter with the Torah through the rabbinic tradition, Heschel shows that the meaning of Torah is disclosed only in an ongoing interpretive process through which one encounters the divine. “The content and the form are one and the same,” she writes. “In Torah min Hashamayim Heschel merges with his material, he becomes a part of the tradition of rabbinic scriptural exegesis, linking man with the Divine, the text.” The importance of the aggadic material, therefore, is based on humanity’s “active participation and continual role in the eternal dialectic of God’s revelation.” From a somewhat different reading, Schorsch once again illuminates how a governing polarity allows Heschel to amplify another aspect of the polar dimension of rabbinic thought, namely the tension between the fixed textual form of the Torah and its continual amplification through exegetical encounter. The essential point to draw from Heschel’s Torah min Hashamayim in a consideration of the role of polarity in his theology is that having organized rabbinic thinking around one hermeneutically useful opposition, Heschel then demonstrates an intrinsic multiplicity of perspectives across the whole of Jewish theology which implies a polyvalent theological matrix held in dynamic tension. So, for example, one of Heschel’s lifelong concerns was that Judaism had been overtaken by too strong an emphasis on the halachic dimension, that is to say, that it had become obsessed by observance—what Heschel calls “religious behaviorism”—and had let slip the spontaneity and inwardness brought by aggada.97 He contrasts by way of example the enlivened spirit of the Judaism of his youth, in which aggada was widely studied and appreciated, with the more rigid character he found in Jewish life elsewhere. It was only in Berlin, he said, that he encountered the “halachic heresy,” contrasted with the “living theology” of his Hasidic youth: he therefore committed himself to defending the essential tension between these two poles of Jewish life and spirituality. Like the tension between the halachic and aggadic dimensions, the other polarities of which he makes such frequent use are not simply individual, isolated oppositions which may be taken up in a series, but they interact with and are interrelated to each other so that at no point is one able to separate out individual elements entirely. This is the essential implication of his exhaustive review of rabbinic theology in Torah min Hashamayim: that the whole of Jewish thought is given structure by the ineluctable

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tensions between transcendence and immanence, revelation and inspiration, the mystical and the material. In this sense, Heschel’s theological stance anticipates the later postmodern conceptualization of theology as a “thick description,” whereby rather than building from foundational principles, theological method circulates amidst a matrix of polyvalent concepts, identifying the ways in which they interact with each other and inform one another’s meaning, opening new avenues of creative insight. Indeed, Heschel’s method may be fruitfully compared with the “postliberal” methodology described some 20  years after Torah min Hashamayim by George Lindbeck in The Nature of Doctrine (1984). The book was motivated by Lindbeck’s wide experience in ecumenism, where he observed that each time churches which have historically held divergent views on a particular issue declare that they have reached basic agreement, “those who hear these reports often find them difficult to believe.” The reason, Lindbeck feels, is the apparent logical contradiction involved in both churches continuing to affirm that they adhere to their basic convictions, once divisive, but which have now become not so. Since a traditional view of doctrines (in which there is a direct correspondence between religious statements and the truths and events to which they refer) has difficulty accounting for such a seemingly contradictory statement, Lindbeck sets out to offer another interpretation of how doctrine functions in a religious community. He first describes three types of theories of religion and doctrine which have been typical of modern theological efforts. The first theory, which he calls the cognitive-propositional, emphasizes how doctrines “function as informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities.” This approach is the most familiar in traditional orthodoxies, and methodologically resembles analytical philosophy in its concern for the status of its truth claims. A second approach, the experiential-expressive, “interprets doctrines as noninformative and nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations,” or in other words, as typically prereflective and prelinguistic experiences. This approach, most characteristic of liberal theologies, stresses the significance of individual experience in the manner, for instance, of Schleiermacher (although more recent scholarship has argued that Lindbeck gets Schleiermacher wrong in this regard98). A third approach, which is a hybrid of the other two, Lindbeck calls a “two-dimensional” outlook, which is represented by such figures as Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner, who attempted to articulate the transcendent element in individual experience. Lindbeck finds all three of these theories wanting in the ecumenical context because they have such difficulty, each in its own way, in explaining the “intertwining of variability and invariability in matters of faith” which is at the heart of the search for ecumenical consensus. Lindbeck therefore proposes an alternative, which he calls a “cultural-linguistic” approach, in which “religions are seen as comprehensive interpretive schemes, usually embodied in myths or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world.”99 In this model, the emphasis is placed on how human experiences—even religious experiences—are shaped by the cultural and linguistic apparatus with which members of that culture are equipped. The cognitive aspect, though important, is subsumed into the cultural framework which is a sort of precondition for having the religious experiences which

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constitute a given faith. “In short,” Lindbeck writes, “it is necessary to have the means for expressing an experience in order to have it, and the richer our expressive or linguistic system, the more subtle, varied and differentiated can be our experience.”100 In this model, doctrine takes on a regulative role, in which it establishes boundaries for reflection and experience which are acceptable within a particular tradition, without specifying their exact content. Doctrines as rules can retain an invariant meaning, and may even be propositional in form, but nevertheless have different applications in varying historical circumstances as the issues at stake shift (as, for example, the rule “drive on the right side of the road” means one thing in the United Kingdom, another in the United States). An appeal to Lindbeck’s work may at first seem an unlikely move to make in considering Heschel’s theology, since Heschel repeatedly resists the idea of there being a determinative role for doctrine in the Jewish tradition. In fact, Heschel’s program for depth theology seems to emphasize the first-order religious experiences over and against the second-order doctrinal formulations which attempt to account for and systematize these primary existential encounters with the divine. Yet the role that Heschel assigns to polarity in effect functions much like the regulative role of doctrine described by Lindbeck, in that it sets certain parameters which both shape the content of religious experiences and limits what may authentically be said about them. As a consequence, polarity becomes a defining condition both for the primary experience and expression of piety. An example will make the point clearer: Heschel’s concept of the Shekhinah as it is situated between the poles of transcendence and immanence. In A Passion for Truth, Heschel writes that, Throughout the ages, Judaism has celebrated God’s lordship and transcendence as well as His nearness and presence. Poets have sung of it and mystics have alluded to it, while theologians have mostly been too restrained to articulate it. Eager to deepen their understanding of God’s unity and uniqueness, medieval Jewish philosophers entirely disregarded the Shekhinah, God’s Presence and Indwelling in the world, which as so passionately taught by the great Rabbi Akiba and his disciples. Even in later Jewish mysticism, the doctrine of the Shekhinah was upheld mostly in terms of theosophic transcendence, rather than intimacy and involvement in the experience of man.101

For Heschel, the great renewal achieved by the Baal Shem was the reintroduction into Jewish life and thought of the awareness of God’s immanence (the pole represented by Rabbi Akiva and aggada). The overemphasis of the medieval philosophers on God’s transcendence had, to use Lindbeck’s language, violated the rule against either a strictly immanentist or transcendentalist view of God, a rule which is established by the governing polarity between the two. In Heschel’s estimation, the violation of the regulative dimension of this polarity had allowed a too exclusive adherence to the halachic aspect of Judaism to take hold, with the consequence that the inward spirit of pious observance had been replaced with the outward rigor of obedience to the law. Heschel also observes this regulative polarity at work in the tension between the Baal Shem and Kotzker: the Rabbi of Kotzk found the Hasidic “intoxication with

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God’s nearness” irritating, emphasizing as he did God’s absolute otherness, and it was primarily on this issue that he and the Baal Shem parted ways.102 As the polarity of transcendence and immanence is used in the example of the Shekhinah, it takes on a doctrinal force that governs both how one experiences God, and what can be said about the objective content of that experience. In his culturallinguistic model, Lindbeck describes this function of doctrines as a “grammar” which provides the framework in which the “vocabulary” of symbols, rites, narratives, and injunctions can be meaningfully used.103 Doctrines thus make “intrasystematic” claims rather than ontological ones, defining how various aspects of a religious system relate to one another. In the case of the Baal Shem’s recovery of the sense of the nearness of God, for instance, the regulative polarity between immanence and transcendence helps to explain how a Hasid could simultaneously express the nearness of God through the intimacy of intense personal prayers, while at the same time trembling before the majestic awe of God. This is a first-order religious experience which is incomprehensible outside of the second-order rule which shapes the parameters of an authentic awareness of the nature of a divine-human encounter. The polarities which Heschel identifies in Jewish faith must, therefore, remain exactly that, for they cannot be harmonized without jeopardizing their regulative boundary-setting function. The polarities are not to be understood simply as a rhetorical device employed by Heschel to evoke the ineffable (as has sometimes been alleged), but as an essential theological tool defining an “intrasystematic” coherence with the creative potential of what we are about to explore as the bisociative framework of piety.

VI  Piety’s bisociative nature The import for Heschel of the dynamic tensions of polarity can be deepened with reference to a mode of reflection contemporary with his own, though coming from a widely divergent context. During the 1960s and ’70s, Paul Watzlawick of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, engaged in a series of studies related to human communication and change. His work drew on the earlier study of the act of creation by Arthur Koestler, who developed the idea of “bisociation” in order “to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane’, as it were, and the creative act, which . . . always operates on more than one plane.”104 In Koestler’s analysis, human thought always occurs within a certain “frame of reference,” “code of behavior,” or “universe of discourse.” As long as thought remains locked within one of these “matrices of thought,” the possibility of innovative, creative ideas is blocked since thinking will follow the prescribed rules and patterns of the matrix. Creativity, then, comes about when two or more matrices are allowed to interact, with thought moving back and forth between these contrasting perspectives. The result may be either collision (resulting in laughter), fusion (producing a new intellectual synthesis), or confrontation (the source of aesthetic experience). Bisociation is therefore defined as “the perceiving of a situation or idea . . . in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference . . .”105 As the origin of creative innovation, then, “The bisociative act connects previously unconnected matrices of experience; it makes us

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‘understand what it is to be awake, to be living on several planes at once’ (to quote T. S. Eliot, somewhat out of context).”106 Watzlawick takes the idea of “bisociative originality” and expands it within an investigation into the role of paradox in human communication and change. If creativity is dependent upon the ability to hold two contradictory ideas from different matrices of thought in tension with one another, then “it can be seen that many of the noblest pursuits and achievements of the human mind are intimately linked with man’s ability to experience paradox.”107 In a more careful analysis of the mode of changes in human communities, Watzlawick argues that it may occur on one of two levels. “Firstorder change” is that which occurs within a given system, which leaves the system itself unchanged. A behavioral example would be that a person having a dream can respond within the dream in a variety of ways, without actually waking. “Second-order change,” in contrast, changes the system itself, for example by waking from a dream.108 This second-order change (which is equivalent to Koestler’s concept of bisociation) appears random, exterior, even capricious from within the system experiencing change, but from the alternative matrix of the bisociative act, “it merely amounts to a change of the premises . . . governing the system as a whole.”109 The significance of the bisociative model in respect to Heschel is that it helps to give a more precise picture of what Heschel has in mind when he argues for the centrality of a dynamic polarity in religious life and theology. To give one example: the tension between halacha and aggada may be understood as the interaction between two matrices of thought, and as the mind moves back and forth between the two, a creative dynamic is established which allows new insight into each of these systems. A change in perspective within either of these related but opposing “matrices” is motivated by the exterior encounter with the other. How, then, are these polarities to be maintained? For Heschel, it is in the piety of the individual believer where the polarities of ultimate truth intersect. The polarities are not simply an intellectual construct destined to govern the method and content of speculative theology; nor are they simply guideposts about the manner in which one lives religious life. Indeed, they are both, and it is only in the consciousness of the pious individual where the polyvalent structure of these polarities is fully realized. Ultimate truth, then, is not a structure of ideas which is given verbal articulation and to which one then gives intellectual assent, but rather it is an intersection of the presence of God with one’s own consciousness which manifests itself in the acts described as “piety.” In a section of A Passion for Truth entitled, “To Be Truth,” Heschel approvingly quotes in this regard Kierkegaard’s Training in Christianity: The truth consists not in knowing the truth but in being the truth. . . . Knowing the truth is something which follows as a matter of course from being the truth, and not conversely; and precisely for this reason it becomes untruth when knowing the truth is separated from being the truth, or when knowing the truth is treated as one and the same thing as being the truth, since the true relation is the converse of this: to be the truth is one and the same thing as knowing the truth.110

Linking Kierkegaard’s conviction to the Kotzker, Heschel notes that the Rabbi of Kotzk held that truth is a supreme concern of Judaism, truth being defined as “the coincidence

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of the individual’s life with the will of God.” Truth is knowing God, for truth resides in God, and therefore the process of learning to know the truth is dynamic and neverending, since it is contained within one’s relationship with God. The way that leads to God is the means of knowing truth, and in Heschel’s terms, piety is the word which describes such a way, bridging both the mystical and rational. The nature and content of a pious life thereby becomes central to Heschel’s overall scheme, for it is in piety that the truth whose parameters are shaped by his governing polarities coincides with the concrete modalities of human life: only the experience of living within them makes otherwise polar concepts cohere into a meaningful whole. As Heschel commented in the interview cited at the beginning of this chapter, “Taken abstractedly, all these terms seem to be mutually exclusive, yet in actual living they involve each other; the separation of the two is fatal to both.” Such a statement encapsulates the whole range of Hasidic and kabbalistic influence on Heschel which this chapter has been at pains to identify. An underlying theme in our discussion of mysticism has been the extent to which Heschel may himself be considered to be a mystic, and to what extent his writings may be considered to be part of the mystical genre. An answer to those questions may now have emerged, in that mysticism may be understood as one of the polarities which governs his thinking. But being a polarity, mysticism in the pious life is held in constant tension with other competing modes of insight: rational thought, biblical exegesis, received tradition, and moral consciousness. In the limited sense that Heschel’s thought includes consideration of the immediate and direct experience of God, it is mystical (and Heschel himself could be described as a mystic), but that statement is by now evidently incomplete unless it is simultaneously held in tension with these other dimensions. Piety, as a larger and more generally applicable organizing principle, cannot be reduced to mysticism, nor the pious individual to the mystic. Piety includes mystical experience, but it also includes the most strenuous reflective analysis and intellectual rigor. The nobility of character which is piety is to be preferred to the more limited nature of mystical insight, in that it more consciously seeks to hold in dynamic relationship the essential polarities of immanence and transcendence, experience and responsibility. It is therefore to Heschel’s analysis of piety itself to which we now turn, for it is there that the peculiarities of his own theological scheme finally begin to cohere.

Notes 1 Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 10. 2 Patrick Granfield, “Abraham J. Heschel,” 74. Heschel himself writes, echoing the interview in Theologians at Work, “Jewish thinking can only be adequately understood in terms of a dialectic pattern, containing opposite or contrasted properties.” Heschel, GSM, 341. 3 Maurice Friedman, Introduction to Kasimow, Divine-Human Encounter, vi. 4 Fritz A. Rothschild, “Architect of a New Theology,” 59. 5 Sherwin, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 22. 6 Abraham Heschel, “A Hebrew Evaluation of Reinhold Niebuhr,” in Heschel, IF, 135.

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7 Moshe Idel, preface to Heschel, Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets, vii. This volume makes available in English two essays which Heschel had published earlier in Hebrew: “Did Maimonides Believe that He Had Attained the Rank of Prophet?”, originally published in the Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (American Academy for Social Research, 1945); and “Prophetic Inspiration in the Middle Ages,” originally published in the Alexander Marx Jubilee Volume (Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950). 8 Abraham Heschel, The Quest for Certainty in Saadia’s Philosophy (New York: Philip Feldheim, 1944). Originally published as two articles in The Jewish Quarterly Review 33/2–3 (1943): 263–313 and 34/4 (1944): 391–408. 9 Abraham Heschel, Don Jizhak Abravanel [German] (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1937). English edition (abridged), Intermountain Jewish News, trans. William Wolf (19 December 1986): 5, 8–12. 10 Heschel, “The Quest for Certainty,” 309. 11 Ibid., 408. 12 Heschel, “Prophetic Inspiration in the Middle Ages,” 7. 13 Ibid., 67. 14 Heschel, “Maimonides,” 92. 15 Ibid., 104. 16 Heschel, Abravanel, 29. Quoted in Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 253. 17 Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 22. 18 Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, ix. 19 Ibid., 138. 20 Abraham Heschel, “Depth Theology,” in Heschel, IF, 120. Originally published in Cross Currents (Fall 1960). 21 Abraham Heschel, “The Vocation of the Cantor,” in IF, 243. 22 Samuel Dresner, Introduction to Heschel, CBST, xi. 23 Steven T. Katz, “Abraham Joshua Heschel and Hasidism,” Journal of Jewish Studies 31/1 (1980): 82–104. 24 Abraham Heschel, “Unknown Documents in the History of Hasidism,” YIVO Bleter 36 (1952). Cited in Dresner’s Introduction to CBST, xi. 25 Dresner, Introduction to CBST, xx. 26 The most extended effort to examine the Hasidic influences on Heschel is in Harold Kasimow’s Divine-Human Encounter. He limits his examination to the two figures about whom Heschel wrote in The Passion for Truth (the Baal Shem and Kotzker rebbe), however, not extending his inquiry to larger influences in Heschel’s work. 27 Dresner, Introduction to CBST, ix–x. 28 Heschel, MNA, 153. 29 Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, vol. 1 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991), xvii. 30 Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 22. 31 Abraham Heschel, “Hasidism as a New Approach to Torah,” in Heschel, MGSA, 33–9. Originally published in Jewish Heritage 14/3 (1972): 4–21. 32 Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534–72) was a kabbalist who lived in Palestine and who combined a renewed Messianism with older kabbalistic tenets. 33 Heschel, PT, 75. 34 Ibid., 52. 35 Heschel, MNA, 154. 36 Heschel, PT, 30.

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

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Kasimow, Divine-Human Encounter, 22. Heschel, PT, 26. Heschel, CBST, 2. Heschel, PT, 6. Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 126. Heschel, PT, 106. Ibid., 42. Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 132. The authors point out in a footnote that this idea occurs directly in several of Heschel’s later writings, including his essay “The Mystical Element in Judaism” (1949), The Earth Is the Lord’s (1950), and The Insecurity of Freedom (1966). Abraham Heschel, Der Shem Hameforash: Mentsh. Lider (Warsaw: Farlag Indzl, 1933). English edition The Ineffable Name of God: Man. Poems, trans. Morton M. Liefman (New York: Continuum, 2004), 57–8. Heschel, PT, 39. Heschel, EL, 72. Heschel, PT, 45. Brown, “ ‘Some Are Guilty, All Are Responsible,’ ” 129. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 26, quoting Dresner, “Heschel as a Hasidic Scholar,” xxiv. Heschel, “Hasidism as a New Approach to Torah,” 34. Ibid., 33. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 24. Franklin Sherman, The Promise of Heschel (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1970), 28. Heschel, “Hasidism as a New Approach to Torah,” 37. Heschel, CBST, 136. Kasimow, Divine-Human Encounter, 63, citing Louis Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer (New York: Schocken Books, 1973). Abraham Heschel, Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (New York: Crossroad, 1993). Originally published as Man’s Quest for God (1954). Petuchowski, “Faith as the Leap of Action,” 391. Cherbonnier, “A. J. Heschel and the Philosophy of the Bible,” 23. Kasimow, Divine-Human Encounter, 70. Abraham Heschel, “The Mystical Element in Judaism,” in Heschel, MGSA, 164–84. Originally published in The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion, ed. Louis Finkelstein (New York: Harper, 1949), 602–23. A variation on the exiled presence of God in the world through the Shekhinah is the Lurianic idea of tsim-tsum, which Friedman defines as the idea that “God, who is the whole, withdraws from it to a point in order to leave room for the world and for man. The flavor of God remains in the world as the flavor of wine remains in an empty bottle.” This understanding, also to be found in Heschel, puts a more positive spin on God’s absence for it has the effect of making space for the creation to exist separately from God. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 276. Heschel, “The Mystical Element in Judaism,” 184. Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 61. Ibid., 178n. 12. Ibid., 36. Heschel, “Depth Theology,” 122. Heschel, GSM, 57.

134 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

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88 89

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety Ibid., 74. Gamberini, Pathos e Logos, 58–61. Heschel, WM, especially Chapter 6, 94–119. Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 131. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 28. Heschel, “Depth Theology,” 123. Ibid., 121. Abraham Heschel, “Sacred Image of Man,” in Heschel, IF, 156. Abraham Heschel, “Confusion of Good and Evil,” in Heschel, IF, 134. Heschel, “Confusion of Good and Evil,” 144. Ibid., 140. Heschel, EL, 96. Heschel, “Confusion of Good and Evil,” 145. Ibid., 145–6. Heschel, QG, 64–5. It is interesting to note, however, that certain “polarities” which are, according to Heschel, typical of Christianity are not so regarded in Judaism. In A Passion for Truth, Heschel cites Reb Henokh, a disciple of the Kotzker, who believed that “it was the ability to overcome the discrepancy between the worldly and the Heavenly that marked the major difference between Judaism and Christianity. For Christians, this world is one realm and Heaven is another. To the Jews, this world and Heaven are not separate. They are one and the same thing.” Heschel later also claims that the lack of a dichotomy between body and soul in Judaism is a second outstanding difference between it and Christianity. Heschel, PT, 173 and 243. Abraham Heschel, Torah min Ha-Shamayim b’Espaklaryah shel Ha-Darot (London and New York: Soncino Press, 1962 [vol. 1]; 1965 [vol. 2]). A third volume was still a manuscript at Heschel’s death, and published by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 1995. English edition, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, trans. Gordon Tucker (New York: Continuum, 2007). Heschel, HT, 57. A curious discrepancy between critics’ reading of Torah from Heaven is their application of the terms “transcendent” and “immanent.” Some regard Akiva to be the “transcendentalist,” emphasizing the miraculous and mystical nature of Torah, whereas Ishmael is the “immanentist,” approaching the divine rationally (Seymour Siegel, “Divine Pathos, Prophetic Sympathy,” Conservative Judaism 28/1 [1973]: 71–4). Others exactly reverse the direction assigned to these terms, describing Akiva as the immanentist for his sense of God’s direct presence in revelation, whereas Ishamel is the transcendentalist, respecting the absolute otherness and distance of God (Jacob Neusner, “The Intellectual Achievement of Abraham Joshua Heschel,” in Heschel, To Grow in Wisdom, 15). Heschel more obviously uses the terms in the latter sense, as also evidenced in A Passion for Truth where he describes Akiva as “passionately teaching” God’s Presence and Indwelling in the world. Heschel, PT, 30. Heschel, HT, 709. Elsewhere, Tucker notes that there is a widely noted “tilt” by Heschel in the end toward Ishamael, perhaps betraying a desire to address an imbalance within himself that was inherited from the Akivan world “that was his mother’s milk.” Tucker, “Heschel’s Torah min ha-shamayim,” 54–5.

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92 Friedman records an interesting comment made by Heschel on the issue of polarity in relation to his work on rabbinic theology: “What underlies my thinking is something I proved and demonstrated extensively in the two Hebrew volumes of Torah min Shamayim. . . . Jewish thinking moves along two paths, that of critical thinking and that of imaginative reasoning—Maimonides and Yehuda Halevi, the Baal Shem Tov and Moses Mendelssohn. I am both. I live these two trends. I am neither a rationalist nor an irrationalist.” Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 43–4. 93 Jacob Neusner, review of Torah min Hashamayim (Theology of Ancient Judaism), vol. 2, Conservative Judaism 20/3 (1966): 66. 94 Eisen, “Re-reading Heschel on the Commandments,” 14. 95 Ibid., 14–15. 96 Rebecca Schorsch, “The Hermeneutics of Heschel in Torah min Hashamayim,” Judaism 40/3 (1991): 301–8. 97 See the chapter, “Religious Behaviorism,” Heschel, GSM, 320–35. 98 See, for example, Theodore Vial, “Anschauung and Intuition, Again,” in Brent W. Sockness and Wilhelm Gräb, eds, Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 39–50. Vial argues that while Lindbeck is correct to read Schleiermacher as understanding religion as intuition and feeling, and religion as absolute dependence, to mean much the same thing—nevertheless intuition is shaped by our worldview, which itself is informed by language and culture: “Thus Lindbeck is not correct that for Schleiermacher one can assume that there is a pre-linguistic experience that a Buddhist and a Christian (for example) would have in common.” 99 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 32. 100 Ibid., 37. 101 Heschel, PT, 30. 102 Ibid., 31. 103 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 80. 104 Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 35–6. 105 Koestler, The Act of Creation, 35. 106 Ibid., 45. 107 Paul Watzlawick et al., Pragmatics of Human Communication (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967), 253. 108 Paul Watzlawick et al., Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974), 10. 109 Watzlawick, Change, 24. 110 Heschel, PT, 163–4.

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A Phenomenology of Piety

Religion is real because it has real effects. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

I  The personal dimension Perhaps one of the most distinctive features of piety as a theological idea for Heschel is that it is not a purely formal concept, but one that emerges from deep within his own spiritual and intellectual formation. Heschel himself acknowledges the personal nature of his writing, noting in a revealing passage in the opening pages of God in Search of Man that, In a profound sense, the philosopher is never a pure spectator. His wisdom is not a commodity that can be produced on demand. His books are not a response. We should not regard them as mirrors, reflecting other people’s problems, but rather as windows, allowing us to view the author’s soul. Philosophers do not expend their power and passion unless they themselves are affected. The soul only communes with itself when the heart is stirred. Quandaries knocking at the heart of the philosopher provide the motive that impels him to toil for truth. All philosophy is an apologia pro vita sua.1

Byron Sherwin picks up on this intimate relationship between Heschel, his works, and his ancestry when he remarks that, “The goal of scholarship, for Heschel, is to make our ancestors our contemporaries, our companions, and to learn how to apply their insights to our situations.” He goes on to remark that “Heschel’s philosophy of religion and his philosophy of Judaism are expressions of his own quest for self-understanding, for self-transcendence. . . . His works may be read as a journal of a soul in search of self-understanding . . .”2 Heschel openly acknowledges the role of familial roots in shaping his theology; summing up the strength of the influence these ancestral figures had on him, he wrote these words in the opening lines of an essay, “In Search of Exaltation”: In my childhood and in my youth I was the recipient of many blessings. I lived in the presence of quite a number of extraordinary persons I could revere. And just as I lived as a child in their presence, their presence continues to live with me as an adult.3

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Kaplan and Dresner record how Heschel’s own father, Rabbi Moshe Mordecai Heschel (1873–1916), “was his first model of piety, for he actualized within himself the spirit of the prayerbook.” Also significant was his maternal uncle, Alter Israel Shimon Perlow (1874–1933), the rebbe of Novominsk (whom Heschel later confessed to his students to be the model for his early studies of piety, as we have noted).4 As a boy, Heschel lived only a block away from Rabbi Perlow’s Hasidic court in Warsaw, and so most days had opportunity to observe his uncle’s piety firsthand. Based on conversations with Heschel recorded in his own personal diary, Dresner gives this description of Rabbi Perlow: The Novominsker rebbe was a paragon of Jewish spirituality. As devout Jews strive to transform themselves on the Sabbath, Heschel’s uncle became “completely immersed in its holiness.” His prayers, “full of soulfulness and longing for the Creator,” lasted for hours, and when eating he would say before each bite, “In honor of the holy Sabbath.” On the Seventh Day the family spoke only Hebrew, the sacred tongue.5

Rabbi Perlow also directed Heschel’s early education, and referred him to the influential Rabbi Abraham Mordecai Alter (1866–1948), head of the Ger branch of Hasidism originally founded by the Kotzker. Heschel there received rigorous training in Hasidic piety, and discovered the tension within himself represented by the generous piety of the Baal Shem on the one hand, and the more strident spirit of the Kotzker on the other, a tension which followed him the rest of his life. Describing what they call Heschel’s “double consciousness—joining the ethical and divine dimensions,” Kaplan and Dresner observe that the poems Heschel was composing while writing his doctoral thesis on the nature of prophetic revelation expressed his own intense personal response to this sense of the divine. The poems articulate his deeply felt consciousness of being caught between the struggles of pragmatic living and a sense of loyalty to the divine. The epigram to his published collection of poems, for instance (“I asked for wonder instead of happiness, and you gave them to me”), reveals the tensions in Heschel’s life, embracing in typically Hasidic form both polarities of pious living. A poem entitled “God’s Tears” evokes this great sense of personal identification with God’s presence in the world: God’s tears lie on the cheeks of shamed, weak people. Let me wipe away His lament. He in whose veins there whirls a quiet shudder before God, let him kiss the nails of a pauper. To the worm crushed under-foot, God calls out “My holy martyr!” The sins of the poor are more beautiful than the good deeds of the rich.6

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The theme of the role of authentic piety is strikingly evident in Heschel’s participation in the Koigen Circle during the spring of 1930.7 Heschel advocated an attention to the concrete individual, instead of collective religious life, seeing the urgent need to augment personal piety rather than to develop generalized cultural theories such as those of Koigen. We thus see piety emerging as his primary interest within the larger philosophical concerns addressed in his academic account of revelation. Indeed, once Heschel had finished his dissertation and moved on to Frankfurt to assume his teaching responsibilities as Martin Buber’s successor at the Jüdisches Lehrhaus, he explicitly indicated to his predecessor that reviving piety was his major commitment.8 His intention was to establish it as the foundation of a living Judaism; as Kaplan and Dresner put it, he “subordinated ‘objective’ scholarship to elucidating a Judaism that was both spiritually sensitive and ethically engaged. . . . His heart was elsewhere, beyond philosophy. His subject was piety.”9 Not surprisingly, therefore, piety was the first major topic that Heschel took up once he arrived in the United States in 1940. The progression from prophecy as his dissertation topic to piety is significant, for biographically, it is the same progression that is made thematically in his principal philosophical works (Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man): God, revelation, and response. He had already begun to write and publish on the issue even while in the process of trying to escape the impending threat of the Nazis, with one article written in German, “Das Gebet als Äusserung und Einfühling” (Prayer as expression and sympathy),10 and another in Hebrew, “Al mahut ha-tefillah” (The essence of prayer).11 These two articles formed the basis for Heschel’s first article in English, “An Analysis of Piety,”12 which was in turn the first of four extraordinary studies which appeared in English in the 1940s, forming the core of his phenomenological study of religious consciousness. Following the study of piety came related articles on “The Holy Dimension,”13 then on “Faith,”14 and finally “Prayer.”15 These four essays, although they were not necessarily intended as a series, collectively establish the centrality of piety as a preoccupying focus of many of Heschel’s early works (indeed, Heschel reused these articles as key chapters in his later works). And although they are written in the detached style of phenomenological analysis, they also betray the intimate character we have seen Heschel admit of his own work, namely, that he used the phenomenological method to analyze his own consciousness and that of those whom he respected.16 It is an analysis of these four seminal articles, as they lay the groundwork for his later works Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man, which will form the subject matter of the rest of this chapter. We begin with a close reading of the four essays on piety themselves, as the basis for an analysis of their content and method.

II  The pious consciousness: Four seminal essays “An Analysis of Piety” This dense essay appears seamless on the page, yet falls into two distinct parts, indicated in Heschel’s statement that the intention of his study is “an analysis of the

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consciousness that accompanies the acts of a pious man, and a classification of the concepts latent in his mind.” In the first part, Heschel gives relatively clear indication that his approach is phenomenological in nature (although he never explicitly says so), and that he intends to deploy this method in order to examine certain essential structures of the consciousness of a pious individual. The second part then goes on to describe the “attitude” of the pious man, enumerating a list of the characteristics that cumulatively describe a pious approach to living. Heschel begins the essay by identifying piety as a real “phenomenon” of human experience, to be found “in all times and in all places” as “something solid, clearly to be seen, and of real power.” Hence, his subject is stated in classically phenomenological terms: “as a specific fact of existence met with in life, it is something which indisputably deserves examination.” He claims, however, that it has typically been neglected by “scientific research” due to its “theological connotations which are repellent to the modern mind.” Yet Heschel throws down a gauntlet to the scientific mind itself: if the phenomenon truly exists as an “incontestable fact,” why should prejudice deter one from “at least endeavoring to understand it?” Heschel is invoking the eidetic reduction here, choosing to set aside the question of the validity of the truth claims which piety makes, in order to examine the experience of piety itself: “We are not discussing here that implicit faith which is involved in general systems of faith and worship. . . . Our purpose, rather, is to analyze the pious man, and to examine, not his position with regard to any specific form of institutionalized religion, but his attitudes toward the elemental forces of reality.” Heschel then identifies certain things that piety is not. It is not “a psychological concept,” that is, it is not a function of the psyche (although certain mental dispositions may influence it), for its origins and content are independent of the “psychical chain of causation,” just as the Pythagorean theorem is independent of the temperament of the mind which considers it. Taking a position reminiscent of Dilthey’s “psychical nexus,” Heschel notes that piety “belongs to the stream of psychical life” in the sense that it is a part of the intersection of reflective reason and historical events, yet its content cannot be reduced to the psychical setting in which it occurs. Then alluding to the phenomenological distinction between the noetic and noematic aspects of consciousness, he observes that, “The spiritual content is not identical with the act itself, nor are concepts tantamount to functions of the mind. The spiritual objective content is universal, and should be distinguished from the subjective psychical function. Piety is an objective spiritual entity.” Piety is also not to be defined as an ability, a habit, a mood, nor a moral or intellectual virtue: although it may manifest itself in particular deeply felt or virtuous acts, “it is beyond the distinction between intellect and emotion, will and action.” Again, then, a statement is given of Heschel’s phenomenological purpose: “to describe piety as it is, without claiming to explain it or to suggest its derivation from other phenomena.” The essay then moves on to the positive content of piety, which may be summarized as “referring us to something that transcends man.” Piety prevents human beings from defining the world in terms of their own needs or desires, for it constantly insists “that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, of a generation or even of an era.”

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Piety redefines human being in terms of a destiny, orienting “human inwardness toward the holy.” As a consequence, piety is “a mode of living,” in which concern for the will of God becomes the driving force behind human action. In other words, piety’s essential characteristic is concern for transcendence: “It is the regard for the transcendent, the devotion to God, that constitute its essence.” To paraphrase Heschel a bit in order to bring into higher relief his meaning: a pious individual is one who lives life based on the conviction that all things point beyond themselves to a higher meaning and purpose, and it is the discovery of and conformity to that purpose which is the substance of authentic human living. Heschel then distinguishes between piety and faith, which are related yet distinct concepts, and not necessarily concurrent. Faith (at least as it is described in this essay) has a more passive character than piety: it is an intellectual assent to the transcendent, whereas piety is an active engagement with it. “Faith is a way of thinking, and thus a matter of the mind; piety is a matter of life.” Whereas faith may sense the reality of the transcendent, it is piety that engages in a relationship with that reality. Faith is objective; piety subjective. Piety is usually preceded by faith, yet it can also exist without faith (presumably in some state of naiveté, although Heschel is not clear about this, since he also seems to describe piety as the actualization of faith as though it were dependent upon it). And so Heschel arrives at the conclusion of the first part of the essay: piety is essentially “an attitude toward God and the world.” In the second part, Heschel shifts gears from having emphasized an awareness of the transcendent, describing now the sense of God’s immanence which affects a pious man’s approach to daily living: “everywhere and at all times he lives as in His sight . . . he feels embraced by God’s mercy . . .” In a curious reordering of our normal perception that God is somehow beyond the natural world, Heschel describes God as between us and the world. The pious man’s attitude to daily life, the material world, and the value therein are thus “looked at through Him.” In this sense, there is no need for miraculous events or extraordinary spiritual experiences, for the divine is always close at hand, and the pious man’s “mindfulness” of this reality in every aspect of his life, even the seemingly trivial, shapes his life to be “compatible with God’s presence.” Using language which masks an essentially phenomenological point, Heschel observes that “This compatibility reveals itself in the way in which he regards and evaluates all phenomena,” or in other words, his intentionality. Rejecting the “instrumentality” by which things are evaluated economically, Heschel insists on the “inner value of any entity” as a matter of fact, independent of any use or purpose it might have. Piety sees “reality in its entirety,” which Heschel believes puts everything existing into a category demanding reverence because of its allusion to the divine. This attitude of reverence is a source of stability and patience, for it gives one an awareness of having earned nothing, of receiving everything as gift: contrary to the vacillation of the “natural man” between joy and gloom, the pious man’s tranquil thankfulness outweighs desire and anxiety. Piety encourages one to see a fundamental unity of purpose and meaning in life, so that one’s life is not separated into distinct realms such as the ethical and spiritual, but is a single unified construction erected day by day. This responsibility for oneself implies human freedom, and it is only this responsibility before God which authentically validates that freedom.17 Yet embedded

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in this responsibility is the necessity for sacrifice, which is the means by which one is preserved from the “hallucination” of possession. Such sacrifice includes both “selfdispossession and offering,” which insures one’s personal participation in the act of sacrifice and its appropriate focus on God, rather than on asceticism as an end in itself. Such sacrificial living is an ultimate relation to God, an “imitatio Dei, for it is done after the manner of the Divine Giver.” Heschel then returns to the theme of transcendence, placing this relation to the divine in the context of an individual’s persistent aspiration to go beyond him or herself, serving some higher purpose or ideal. This striving toward transcendence, amidst an awareness of the divine immanence, is tied together in piety as “allegiance to the will of God.” Life is defined as an opportunity for service, so that what is most important is not the realization of one’s own perfection or salvation, but the realization of the will of God. Our destiny with the transcendent is the immanent expression of God’s will, through our commitment to transcendent purposes. Heschel ends on the unexpected note that death is the fullest expression of this self-offering to the divine, and so the conclusion to this circle of divine-human encounter: This is the meaning of death: the ultimate self-dedication to the divine. Death so understood will not be distorted by the craving for immortality, for this act of giving away is reciprocity on man’s part for God’s gift of life. For the pious man it is a privilege to die.

One might even say that to exegete the meaning of the last line—that for the pious person, it is a privilege to die—is the ultimate meaning of the entire essay.

“The Holy Dimension” Following Heschel’s initial study of the particular phenomenon of piety came a second article on “The Holy Dimension,” devoted to what might be called piety’s contextuality within the larger domain of the holy. That is to say, he conceives of holiness as the encompassing reality which makes piety possible, and even necessary, for human living. He thus goes a step further from the governing method of the article on piety, arguing that even to examine the content of pious consciousness is insufficient, until one goes on to discover what lies beyond that consciousness. To establish this stance, he makes first use of the summary statement which he later repeats elsewhere, expressing the strategy which supports each of these four phenomenologically based articles: “While penetrating the consciousness of the pious man, we may conceive the reality behind it.” As noted in the Introduction, this sentence serves as a unifying methodological theme for Heschel’s entire theological program, for it unites the personal dimension of his reflection with the phenomenological method he uses to probe the structure of the human encounter with the divine.18 Heschel challenges the idea that religion can be studied abstractly, independent of its rootedness in the experience of piety. While the scientific study of religion has tried to understand its relation to economics, history, art, and libido, it has failed to examine the nature of religion itself beyond the superficial effects which it produces: “The stratum of inner experience and the realm of the objective reality do not lie on the

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same level.” He takes as a point of comparison the simple fact of eating: one does not eat because one is hungry, but because nourishment is essential to the maintenance of life—hunger is but the signal, not the true cause. Similarly, religion cannot be reduced to the human desire for immortality or flight from fear, but must be understood in terms of the objective encounter with the divine which gives rise to it. Hence, Heschel states his primary conviction that religion “is not an event in the soul but a matter of fact outside the soul.” The pious man, he says, recognizes this exterior, objective quality to religious experience, knowing that it is derived from the ultimate integration of all things into God. Religion, as “the state which exists between God and man,” is “an everlasting fact in the universe, something that exists outside knowledge and experience, an order of being, the holy dimension of existence.” Religion therefore describes an ontological reality, which is the contact between God and the universe: it precedes human life, and is the means by which humanity is known to its Creator. Heschel gives an explanatory analogy: “Just as man lives in the realm of nature and is subject to its laws, so does he find himself in religion; and just as it is impossible to take leave of nature, so it is impossible to escape the bounds of religion.” Even the word “relationship” is found wanting in describing humanity’s standing before God, since it seems to imply a partiality or transitoriness, whereas religion is essential and prior to the human experience of it. The holy dimension—religion—is the setting, origin, and possibility of relationship between humanity and God, but not the relationship itself. A concept even as basic as “existence,” then, is empty unless it refers to something beyond existence: to exist is transitory and mortal, and therefore meaningless without a context of another existing in which existence takes place and acquires value. Human life has a dual “ownership”: we belong to the natural realm of existence, but also to God as that which is beyond. As Heschel puts it enigmatically, “To exist is to belong to an existing [world] as well as to something that is more than existence.” More simply, Heschel expresses the key concept in these terms: life visits matter. Life cannot generate itself, and despite the fact of its reality, it remains a mystery referring back to its transcendent origins. Finally, Heschel circles back to piety (referring to his own previous essay), summarizing the overall point of this second article: “Piety is the response of man to the holy dimension, the subjective correlative of objective religion.”

“Faith” The third of Heschel’s phenomenological studies centers on the nature of faith. In it, he is at pains to distinguish the act of faith from its content, as well as to situate the role of faith in human knowing. Curiously, although the earlier essay on piety had described a particular connection between faith and piety (the latter being the enactment of the former), this study of faith makes no direct mention of piety, although its subject matter has much to do with it. Indeed, at times in this essay, Heschel applies language to faith which he had previously used to analyze piety, especially when he talks about it being an “attitude” toward the world, despite his insistence that piety and faith are not the same thing. This essay does, however, have a certain sequential logic following from the two previous essays, for having studied “the holy dimension” as the locus of

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piety, he goes on in this third essay to identify the origins of one’s awareness of this sacred aspect of existence. The theme of this article is that faith opens up a fundamental dimension of knowing which is otherwise inaccessible. The essay begins with a reminder that one of the first lessons a child learns is that the resistance experienced to the absolute fulfillment of his or her personal desire indicates the existence of an external world. As adults we forget this lesson that the world cannot be directed by our will, falling into the trap of thinking that our rationality can contain and control our environment. In an oblique reference to the historical circumstances in which this article was written in  1944, Heschel reminds the reader, “the world which we have long considered to be ours has exploded in our hands,” an event which he believes must “sweep away our monstrous conceit” of having control of history or even of our own lives. The implication of the depths of violence and wretchedness into which the world had plunged is, for Heschel, a warning that human beings cannot live without a sense of the sacred, any more than they can live without the light of the sun. We forget at our peril, he argues, that there are two foci around which the course of human life and intelligence moves: the self, and what is beyond the self. To lose this elliptical shape to human living and knowing is to lapse into a narcissistic loss of the “urge to respond, to yield, to give.” Faith, which is built around the acknowledgment of this exterior encroachment on the autonomy of the self, dawns when we again become aware of the strangeness of the world, of the gap which exists between it and our own mind. Faith is not a deduction of a higher reality from the world as we know it, but an intuition or “attitude of mind” which senses that across the gap of what we do not know, there is transcendence. An attitude of faith is openness to this potentiality, not foreclosing on its possibility before exploring its possible ramifications for human living. It is an alertness of the mind to “ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp,” recognizing the wonder which permeates all things, wishing to be integrated into this holy dimension of existence. Referring back to the essay on “The Holy Dimension,” Heschel states, “Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge, and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality.” In the course of this essay, Heschel applies a number of words to faith: it is “affiliation,” “allegiance,” “a dynamic, personal act,” “loyalty,” “the adaptation of the mind to the sacred.” Each of these terms, in its own way, hints at the reciprocal quality of faith: although it begins in the openness of the human mind to the transcendent, it is not merely an “inner, private quality” but an engagement in divine mutuality. Faith is not psychical, but the encounter with a force which comes from the beyond—a form of communion with the divine. Nor is faith purely a matter between an individual and God: “Faith is the achievement of many generations, an effort accumulated over centuries.” Faith rests on a collective memory of the climactic communal events which confirm each individual’s intuition of the beyond, and so its essence is memory. Our individual and communal encounters with the divine may be fleeting glimpses of the holy dimension, but it is faith that ties us to the great moments in which God has been made known. As such, it realizes that although it can maintain attachment to its origins, it cannot penetrate their essential meaning, “For to believe is to abide rationally outside, while spiritually within the mystery.”

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Faith is most properly understood, therefore, as an act of believing, to be distinguished from the content of a creedal expression of that in which one believes. It is an act of the spirit which adapts the mind to the sacred, opening it to an intuitive awareness of the transcendent. Such an understanding is analogous to the rational awareness of the temporal and material which arises from the act of reasoning. Creed and dogma are translations of the insights of faith, but are not to be identified with it. To repeat: faith is an attitude of openness to transcendence, rather than an assent to a specific formulation of what characterizes that holy dimension. As Heschel suggestively observes, “It is faith in which the great things occur.” Surprisingly, because of the phenomenological context in which he has placed faith, Heschel is able to assert that “there are many creeds but only one faith.” His meaning is that faith is a universal human experience of openness to transcendence, from which there may evolve various forms of expression in particular creedal formulations, each of which is an attempt “to translate into words an unutterable spiritual reality.” Heschel then briefly tries to articulate more of what he understands to be the distinction between reason and faith. He offers an explanatory metaphor of light: to a rationalist, God is sought in the dark by the light of reason, whereas to a person of faith, God is the light. The image is striking, for it separates the step-by-step, linear progression of logical thought from the more encompassing perspective that religious faith finds connections in complex matrices of meaning rather than in syllogistic progressions. Reason may be the tool by which we grasp the perceivable and temporal things of life; but faith reveals their sacred dimension. So while rational knowledge seeks to integrate previously unknown information into what is already known, faith reverses that direction, seeking to place what is known into the context of the unknown. Faith even becomes the necessary context of reason, for while logical research seeks to formulate knowledge, it relies upon a prior faith in ultimate coherence and meaning: “Faith is virgin thinking, preceding and transcending all knowledge.” Faith’s opposition is thus not to reason, but to a narrowness of mind which would confine knowing to the content of logical argument. Goodness, love, beauty—all are known, yet not through a syllogism. Reason is a coefficient of faith, not an alternative to it.

“Prayer” Heschel next turns his attention to prayer as the pious activity which expresses the attitude of faith toward the holy dimension. The essay analyzes prayer from the viewpoint of a typology: there are two forms of prayer, both with a common essence. This essence is to be found within the act of prayer itself, “inside the consciousness of man during the act of worship,” and so is not available for inspection except through the sort of phenomenological examination which Heschel proposes to give it. Whereas the psychologist, for example, tends to understand prayer in relation to the various occasions such as grief or anxiety which give rise to it, in Heschel’s view to do so is like trying to understand a work of art “by discovering the occasion of its creation.” Prayer, however, occurs at the moment when an individual loses awareness of his or her own interests—the self—and becomes mindful instead of transcending the limits of what

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is human into the divine. Prayer, therefore, is primarily kavanah, a turning of one’s attention to God as the subject of prayer, and away from oneself. It is an event which begins in an individual man or woman, but ends in God: “What goes on in our heart is a humble preliminary to an event in God.” Ironically, then, although prayer begins in the turning of the human heart to God, its purpose is not to know God, but to be known by God, “to become the object of His thought.” Based on this analysis of the essence of prayer, Heschel argues that the usual classification of prayer into supplication and praise is ill-founded, in that it substitutes a thematization for the essential inner dynamics of the act of praying. Citing the Kotzker, he insists that the nature of prayer is not given in the words which are uttered, but in the ineffable residue left at the end of expression: “Prayer is almost pure content; the form is unimportant.” He substitutes, therefore, his own division of prayer into two types: “expressive” prayer that is the result of a strong inner feeling which stirs the soul to seek disclosure, and “empathetic” prayer which comes from the evocation of the transcendent by the words themselves of formal prayers. In either case, it is the discovery of a deep yearning for the holy which is key; prayer brings us to the threshold of the divine where we may discover “what moves us unawares, what is urgent in our lives, what in us is related to the ultimate.” The deepest motive for prayer is the fact that we are incapable of being alone, and we seek the divine sympathy which alone can assure us that we are the object of an ultimate concern. The privilege of praying, Heschel says, is humanity’s greatest distinction. It is the realization in prayer that we are partners in realizing God’s will for creation, in sanctifying the ordinary, that bestows on us our ultimate dignity. Worship is our means of finding an inner agreement with God—what Heschel in Die Prophetie called our sympathy with God’s will. Likewise, prayer is our assurance of God’s transitive concern for us—again, what Heschel had earlier called God’s pathos. So prayer is an answer given by both of its participants: it is humanity’s answer to the “inconceivable surprise of being,” and it is also God’s answer of love to our trembling awe. While suffering or amazement may lead us into prayer, they are not themselves the source of prayer, for they are merely stimulants which make actual what was otherwise only potential, namely, human participation in the divine will. This fourth essay on prayer completes, as it were, the cycle of Heschel’s phenomenological examination of the essence of spiritual living. Through the juxtaposition of these essays, an overall structure to Heschel’s studies of piety begins to emerge. The holy dimension is the ontological context of human life, the sine qua non of meaningful existence; faith is our awareness of that dimension, prior to any dogmatic exposition of it; piety is our concrete commitment to participate in realizing the meaning latent in the sacred dimension; and prayer is the active means of making that response, opening us to a full awareness of the sacred dimension of existence. Completing this descriptive circle of the structure of spiritual life, then, the last essay on prayer returns to the guiding themes of Heschel’s study of the prophets (which likewise articulated a spiritual circularity, though using another vocabulary), drawing from it the interplay of God’s transitive concern (pathos) for humanity, and our sympathetic identification with it.

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III  From prophecy to piety: Husserl Having worked through the content of Heschel’s four essays on piety, we now need to draw back from them to inspect more carefully the controlling phenomenological themes which emerge from these studies, especially as they were later developed in the more overtly philosophical works, Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man. As we have previously noted, Lawrence Perlman’s study of the underlying Husserlian concepts which support Heschel’s treatment of revelation and depth theology, Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, is by far the most serious attempt to uncover “the methodology that unifies Heschel’s thought,” as one of its chapter titles promises. Before proceeding further in the current investigation, therefore, more deliberate consideration must be given to what can be learned from this important study. Perlman’s book is of immense value for having unearthed the Husserlian foundations of Heschel’s work, and for demonstrating the manner in which Heschel applies that methodology through many parts of his theology. He also goes a long way toward answering many of the criticisms leveled against Heschel, especially the complaints that his work lacks philosophical rigor, or that his work naively, or even irrationally, assumes belief in God in such a way that it is unapproachable by someone not of like mind. Yet in the end, by focusing so much attention on the Husserlian sources of Heschel’s thought, Perlman also neglects other methodological issues which are equally as important. His almost single-minded determination to make the point that Heschel’s method is derived from Husserl fails to take into account the broader intellectual and spiritual context from which Heschel was working (a distortion which Perlman himself acknowledges). Heschel’s “phenomenology of piety,” therefore, must be understood not just in Husserlian terms, but also as it is shaped by other significant influences on his theological method and interests.19 Perlman’s basic understanding of Heschel’s motivation is that it is a response to the “depreciation of biblical thinking” especially evident in Kant and Spinoza, alternatively reasserting the possibility of revelation as “the communication of a divine content to man.”20 The book’s overall point is that Heschel cannot be understood without taking his debt to Husserl into account, for otherwise the reader cannot follow the train of Heschel’s thought and will misinterpret him on several key points. Perlman points out, for example, that the scattered nature of Heschel’s epistemological comments can only be accounted for in the context of his reliance on a phenomenological method which brackets the question of an event’s “natural” reality, focusing instead upon its phenomenal characteristics. Perlman is quick to acknowledge that Heschel himself gives relatively few clues of his own methodology, so that his own study of Heschel is largely reconstructive, despite its bearing on such important questions as Heschel’s epistemological stance: Heschel’s remarks about his own phenomenological method and its dependence on Husserl are neither exhaustive nor are they explanatory. Consequently, the philosophical significance of Heschel’s method is left undeveloped. . . . Even more, the Husserlian ideas that Heschel implicitly uses are opaquely buried within his works.21

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This opacity is an omission for which Perlman faults Heschel,22 even suggesting that it is the reason that the significance of his theology has been “neglected.”23 Yet Perlman goes on to fill in the gap by demonstrating quite convincingly the close parallels in Heschel’s concepts and language to those of Husserlian phenomenology. Indeed, it is this supplementary nature of Perlman’s book to Heschel’s œuvre which makes it so strategically important to a philosophically sophisticated reading of Heschel’s work. In particular, Perlman emphasizes the noetic-noematic correlation as the key to Heschel’s understanding of prophecy, and therefore to the entire corpus of his theological program. As Perlman understands it, Heschel’s primary goal is the explication of “prophetic religion,” and so the “analysis of the prophet’s consciousness is the phenomenological foundation upon which all of Heschel’s thought is based . . .”24 This analysis rests upon discovering the correlation between the form of the prophet’s temporal ecstatic experience and the ideal content encountered therein. Making a point that he repeats as a refrain throughout the book, Perlman writes, The meaning and essence of prophecy, according to Heschel, can only be considered from the point of view of its noetic character. The consciousness of the prophet, has an explicit noetic character and Heschel’s explanation of prophecy is based partially on that phenomenological point. The completion of the explanation of the prophet’s consciousness rests on another implicit, but no less significant point. . . . It is the objective, noematic aspect of consciousness (the prophetic phenomenon possesses a real objective reality).25

Perlman relies quite heavily on Die Prophetie for documenting the evidence for this philosophical orientation, following it up with reference to its later version in The Prophets. In either case, the essential starting point is that the experience of revelation, given its unique character, makes it unanalyzable by empirical methods: it is not a fact that can be perceived except in its ideal form as an event which happens in the consciousness of the prophet, at the initiative of God. The concept of a noetic-noematic correlation, of course, contains within it the idea of intentionality, which Perlman emphasizes as the key to grasping the possibility of revelation. As Heschel explores in Man Is Not Alone, thinking always deals with posthumous objects, that is, our thoughts are always considering what has already been encountered and then received interpretively into consciousness.26 Yet the very act of perception is likewise shaped by what is already in the consciousness, so that an exterior object cannot be understood as giving rise to knowledge in a genetic fashion. Rather, the act of perception in which the mind assigns meaning to what is presented to it is characterized as an intentional act: the objects become present to the mind through its interpretive ascription of meaning. Intentionality, in other words, is an act of awareness, a consciousness of something, the mode of activity which we call consciousness, the making present in the mind of an ideal, atemporal unity. The “I” directs itself intentionally toward an object (the noetic dimension), and this attentive, open presence of an understanding subject is a precondition for the experiencing of the object as it is presented (the noematic dimension). As Perlman nicely summarizes it, following Husserl, “The noetic aspect is the subject-in-relation-to-the-object and the

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noema is the object-in-relation-to-the-subject or the content of the mental act. These are not two distinct components of the act of consciousness, but two different ways of analyzing the act of consciousness.”27 Commenting on an analogy Heschel makes in God in Search of Man between the indescribability of revelation and the communication of an intention of the mind to the body, Perlman puts the issue this way: The reality of intentionality is the seminal issue. The description of intentionality cannot be conveyed in physical terms. Intentionality is not consistent with the natural attitude. There is no way to explain “how it takes place,” yet, it is real. Similarly, in the case of revelation, intentionality is indescribable in natural terms. There is no way to explain the “how” of revelation. But, there is certainly a way to explain the “what” of revelation. The “what” of revelation is the intentional structure that becomes clear as a result of the phenomenological reduction. Heschel’s analogy leads him to conclude that the major problem of revelation, the indescribability of its intentionality, should not lead us to reject a priori the reality of revelation. The intentional structure of revelation is guaranteed by his method and its application to prophetic consciousness through the noetic-noematic correlation, just as Husserl guaranteed the validity of intentional structures.28

Behind this analysis of the intentional nature of consciousness lies an assumption of the presence of an object about which the reflective subject can become aware. The objectivity of this “ontological presupposition” is, in one sense, bracketed; yet the phenomenological method circles back to it, analyzing its eidetic content—or essence—and thereby establishing its transcendent meaning by laying open its full significance to human existence. Heschel seizes on this ontological presupposition as the route by which he can lead his readers to an awareness of God (indeed, a chapter of God in Search of Man bears the unmistakably derivative title of “An Ontological Presupposition”). Perlman asserts that this awareness of God “is the content of Heschel’s phenomenological reduction,”29 the residue of his methodological program. The basic strategy as Heschel deploys it is this: laying aside the question of the objective status of the natural world, one becomes aware of the search for selfunderstanding as a fundamental characteristic of being human. This search, in turn, leads to a consideration of the overwhelming amazement we have at being able to think at all, of having consciousness with which to consider the world around us; going behind conceptual thinking, we discover our awe at our own self-consciousness, which is an intimation of transcendence. Human life and thinking, Heschel asserts, are fundamentally a response to this intuition of transcendence. Moreover, the raising of it from the depths of our mind to conscious reflection and our response to it as an essential element of our being are based on the ontological presupposition of the reality of the Ultimate: In other words, our belief in His reality is not a leap over a missing link in a syllogism but rather a regaining, giving up a view rather than adding one, going behind self-consciousness and questioning the self and all its cognitive pretensions. It is an ontological presupposition.30

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Heschel resists the Kantian image “of first having the idea of a hundred dollars and then claiming to possess them on the basis of the idea,” rejecting thereby the idea that believing in a divine Ultimate is the product of having a reasoned conviction of the reality of the divine and then constructing an ontal picture of God. By contrast, in Heschel’s phenomenological reduction of human consciousness to an awareness of transcendence, “what obtains . . . is first the actual possession of the dollars and then the attempt to count the sum.” The residue of this act of reflection, Heschel is trying to show, is an intuition that human consciousness can only be understood in relation to God. As Perlman observes, “The experience of the reality of God within consciousness is preconceptual and prereflective. As such, it can be recaptured in the mind with the use of the phenomenological method.”31 Two related yet distinct ideas are at work here in Heschel’s conceptualization of human awareness of the divine, and a noticeable weakness in Perlman’s analysis is that he fails to take this bipartite dimension into account. On one hand, Heschel is trying to describe the possibility of revelation within the noetic-noematic correlation in the context of biblical prophecy: this is the primary theme of The Prophets. On the other hand, he also takes up the question of each ordinary individual’s intimation of the divine, which he tries to uncover phenomenologically, especially in Man Is Not Alone and more fully in God in Search of Man. The point upon which Perlman is less than clear is the articulation of the relationship between these two themes: “prophetic experience” on one hand, and the religious life of any ordinary believer on the other. Whereas at some points, Perlman emphasizes the understanding of prophetic consciousness as the essential and unifying element in Heschel’s theology (as described above), at other places he substitutes the notion of “radical self-understanding” as “the primary Heschelian category.”32 By this term, he (with Heschel) means an understanding of the essence of human knowing as awareness of transcendence (essence here understood in the phenomenological sense as that which is discovered through the application of the eidetic reduction). The theological implication is that understanding the act of believing is foremost, prior to the content of faith itself, for belief is born out of the essential, transcendent encounter with awe which Heschel believes is both universal in human experience and constitutive of religious belief. The confusing aspect of this description is that the universal experience of awe is something quite different from the more particular experience of the prophet, and it is not clear whether the two are to be understood as equivalent in form (in that both exhibit the same fundamental noetic-noematic correlation) and content (in that both are a revelatory experience, that is, a communication of the divine). Perlman never directly explores this interrelationship, yet this oscillation back and forth between prophecy and radical self-understanding as the primary Heschelian concepts is not entirely his fault, for he is only following an ambiguity which is inherent—at least on the surface—in Heschel’s own thought. Nevertheless, there is a lapse in Perlman’s study which exacerbates this lack of clarity. Relatively early in his book, he makes a rather significant observation which he fails to elaborate in the following dissection of Heschel’s work: “The whole task of God in Search Of Man becomes an analysis of the act of prophetic inspiration as the pious individual is capable of experiencing it. The impact of this analysis on religious

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life forms the last section of the book, appropriately titled, ‘Response.’ ”33 Perlman’s footnote to this remark significantly refers back to the final chapter of Man Is Not Alone, which by now we recognize as Heschel’s 1942 essay, “An Analysis of Piety.” Yet despite this reference, Perlman seems oblivious to the significance that piety has as a theological and phenomenological subject. Now, admittedly Perlman’s subject is officially limited to Heschel’s idea of revelation. Yet his study of Heschel’s application of the phenomenological method ranges much wider (including, for example, Heschel’s ontology, as well as his anthropology in Who Is Man?), and he also devotes a chapter to exploring the relationship between revelation, depth theology, and theology. A major limitation of his study, therefore, is introduced by his reluctance to follow the lead given in this remark toward understanding the connection within “prophetic religion” between the ecstatic experience of the prophet and the experience of ordinary believing men and women: namely, that the relationship between the specialized event of prophetic revelation and the more common experience of religious life is articulated in piety. Perhaps this disjuncture is reflective of a subtle conflation of terms that both Perlman and Novak share in common, namely, using “revelation” almost interchangeably with “prophecy.” Although Novak makes the important observation that the title of Heschel’s original study, Die Prophetie, literally means prophecy (which he says “more precisely indicates [than The Prophets] the phenomenological method Heschel employed in  all his theological reflections thereafter”), nevertheless he follows Perlman’s lead in entitling his own study of Heschel’s method a “Phenomenology of Revelation”, rather than of prophecy.34 Heschel, however, emphasizes that the subject of his study is the prophets themselves: as the very first sentence of The Prophets reads, “This book is about some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived: the men whose image is our refuge in distress, and whose voice and vision sustain our faith.” (This point is even more forcefully made by the original title of the dissertation itself, Die prophetische Bewußtsein, [Prophetic consciousness]). The distinction between a study of revelation and one of the prophetic personality is important, for methodologically it means that Heschel is careful about conflating the content of the prophetic experience (the self-disclosure of God), with the form the prophetic event takes within the prophet himself. His focus, he says, is on the consciousness of the prophets, because it is there that the essential structure of their experience becomes apparent. His aim, then, is: . . . to attain an understanding of the prophet through an analysis and description of his consciousness, to relate what came to pass in his life—facing man, being faced by God—as reflected and affirmed in his mind. By consciousness, in other words, I mean here not only the perception of particular moments of inspiration, but also the totality of impressions, thoughts, and feelings which make up the prophet’s being.35

Although God may be the initiator of the prophetic event, from a human perspective, it is with the prophet’s experience of that event as it is shaped by the presumptions he brings to it that one must begin an analysis, because it is only through these that we have access to the prophetic event itself.

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These distinctions are important in our consideration of piety because the language Heschel uses here is evocative of what we have seen him describe as his parallel methodological intentions concerning piety: he seeks to penetrate the consciousness of the pious individual to perceive the reality behind it. In both cases, there is an underlying object for study (prophetic consciousness/piety), which being analyzed discloses a residue of transcendence (revelation/faith), which is both conceptually and methodologically distinct. The ultimate goal, of course, is to reach this residue, but the point of departure remains decidedly within human experience, even if the originator of that experience of transcendence is God. Novak makes a telling observation that helps to indicate the link between Heschel’s studies of prophecy and piety, for he observes, “for a traditional Jewish thinker like Heschel, biblical revelation is an experience sui generis, which can be employed as a template to illuminate subsequent experiences that imitate it.” Such an experience, he says, “was the archetype into which [Heschel] wanted to locate his own experience of the presence of God; it alone made his own experience gain ontological/historical significance . . .”36 Perhaps here, then, the significance of piety as a phenomenological datum is seen most clearly: outside the rare experience of prophecy, piety is the more common human phenomenon within which one may encounter the divine pathos as it gives rise to a sympathetic human response. Piety is, in other words, the form of consciousness through which individuals may appropriate to themselves the insights and experience of biblical revelation. So if the subject of Heschel’s early work, Die Prophetie, was prophecy and what is disclosed of the divine within the prophetic consciousness, then the theme of his later works could correspondingly be said to be piety and what is disclosed of the divine in the pious consciousness.

IV  The reversal of subjectivity We have already indicated that a principal goal of Heschel’s theology is to expand the terrain of human understanding beyond the knowing subject as constructed by Kant.37 This concern is implicit in the preceding discussion of piety, but it is now our task to bring to the forefront this epistemological dimension. Indeed, as Heschel himself expanded his early studies of piety into the larger philosophical work, Man Is Not Alone, his resistance to a Kantian approach to human knowing becomes quite evident, though in typical Heschelian style not cohesively presented. Indeed, rather than elucidating systematically his objections to specific points of Kant’s epistemology, Heschel tends to respond to it in the aggregate, that is to say, by resisting its overall tenor and conclusions rather than its step-by-step logical development. If one were to extract the bits and pieces of Heschel’s expressed opposition to Kant in Man Is Not Alone and put them together in one argument, the direction of that discussion would run something like the following. He begins by questioning the incontestable status of the reasoning subject, the “I,” arguing that it is no better known than any other aspect of reality: “All we know of the self is its expression, but the self is never fully expressed. What we are, we cannot say; what we become, we cannot grasp.”38 Heschel uses the unknowability even of the “I” to open up the space in which

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to deploy a phenomenological analysis of this unknown entity, which in turn opens the door for alternate modes of cognition. Based on the phenomenological reduction described above, for example, awe is to be identified “not as a psychological state but a fundamental norm of human consciousness.” This awe does not hold a passive place in our consciousness, but is in fact what Heschel calls a “categorical imperative,” by which he intends to assert it as a fact of existence which impinges itself upon us, demanding our response equally as much as any of the ethical imperatives identified by Kant. Epistemologically, awe upsets the rational, self-confident relationship constructed by Kant between the knowing subject and the objects of its reflection, for it reminds us of the ineffable quality of the world which defies our ability to comprehend it: through the experience of awe, the object reasserts its transcendent independence and reality from the knowing subject. In a key passage in a chapter provocatively entitled, “Knowledge by Appreciation,” Heschel writes: Our self-assured mind specializes in producing knives, as if it were a cutlery, and in all its thoughts it flings a blade, cutting the world in two: in a thing and in a self; in an object and in a subject that conceives the object as distinct from itself. A mercenary of our will to power, the mind is trained to assail in order to plunder rather than to commune in order to love. Moreover, selective as our attention necessarily is, beholding one thing, we overlook all others which, being out of control, set our authority at naught.39

Interestingly, Heschel identifies in this passage the confidence of the mind in its own powers of reason as part of a will to power which masks an underlying contradiction: that the world is larger than our ability to understand it, and that it presents itself to us in a form which commands a deeper response from the fullness of our cognitive apprehension rather than merely our disengaged, though logical, rationality. In short, for the world to be “known,” it must be loved, but “reason alone is incapable of forcing the soul to love.”40 Rather, the world must be held in awe. If one recalls here Heschel’s intellectual debt to Dilthey, it is not difficult to see at work the idea that reality cannot be reduced to a phenomenal abstraction à la Kant, but must be interpreted through a more inclusive “lived experience.” Becoming aware of the awe which the natural world evokes in us when we consider it from an engaged contemplation rather than detached intellectualism, we attribute to it a meaning which Heschel insists evokes our reverence, a feeling which is “as indigenous to human consciousness as fear when facing danger or pain when hurt.” This reverence, in turn, becomes a part of the mental attitude by which we understand the world: or, to return to a phenomenological terminology, it is a part of the noetic dimension of intentionality through which we encounter and interpret the world. We are now far removed from Kant in Heschel’s argument, for rather than relying only on the activity of reason in human knowing, the cognitive dimension of feeling and emotion has been incorporated as well—a key debt which Heschel owes both to philosophical sources such as Dilthey and Scheler, as well as his own personal background in Hasidic Judaism.41 The importance that this cognitive dimension of feeling has for Heschel is most explicitly defined in The Prophets, in a chapter on religious sympathy (to which we shall soon return):

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It is as nonbiblical to separate emotion or passion from spirit as it is to disparage emotion or passion. The disparagement of emotion was made possible by ascribing to the rational faculty a power of sovereignty over the objects of its comprehension, thought being the active, moving principle, and the objects of knowledge the passive, inert material of comprehension. However, the act of thinking of an object is in itself an act of being moved by the object. In thinking we do not create an object; we are challenged by it. Thus, thought is part of emotion. We think because we are moved, a fact of which we are not always conscious. Emotion may be defined as the consciousness of being moved.42

This allowance for the influence of emotion on consciousness is, Heschel believes, the way out of the impasse in religious thinking which had been introduced by Kant. Heschel’s most succinct expression of what he understands this impasse to be is in Quest for God: Kant has demonstrated that it is utterly impossible to attain knowledge of the world as it is because knowledge is always in the form of categories and these, in the last analysis, are only representational constructions for the purpose of apperceiving what is given. Objects possessing attributes, causes that work, are all mythical. We can only say that objective phenomena are regarded as if they behaved in such and such a way, and there is absolutely no justification for assuming any dogmatic attitude and changing the “as if ” into a “that.” Salomon Maimon [Versuch über die Transcendentalphilosophie, Berlin, 1790] was probably the first to sum up Kantian philosophy by saying that only symbolic knowledge is possible.43

For religious thinking, the inescapable conclusion of Kant’s argument is that God can likewise only be known symbolically. Yet Heschel argues that to the pious person, reducing God to a symbol is utterly unacceptable “as a form of solipsism,” for just as one does not fall in love with a symbol but with a real person, so too for the pious man or woman, God is not an idea fabricated by reason out of various abstractions, but a concrete presence encountered through awe. In other words, assuming that objects external to us can only be attributed a symbolic reality essentially reduces the world to myself; when the categorical imperative of awe is taken into consideration, however (which is epistemologically speaking the acknowledgment of the real rather than ideal status of external phenomena), the Kantian subject is revealed to be intrinsically contradictory of this existential requirement. For Heschel, the ultimate example of the insufficiency of Kant’s stance is, as the preceding citations demonstrate, the experience of love. Human beings simply do not encounter the objects of their love—and especially not other persons—as symbolic: the level of communion and appreciation opens layers of meaning and knowing which cannot be reduced to rational categories. To “know by appreciation,” therefore, opens the communal aspect of reality, in which all beings are united in a fellowship of meaning: “To our knowledge the world and the ‘I’ are two, an object and a subject; but within our wonder the world and the ‘I’ are one in being, in eternity. We become alive to our living in the great fellowship of all beings . . .”44

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The real problem, then, is not to account for how human beings can know God, but how they are to be known to God (Kant’s refutation of the classical “proofs” of God notwithstanding): He who seeks God to suit his doubts, to appease his skepticism or to satisfy his curiosity, fails to find the whereabouts of the issue. Search for God begins with the realization that it is man who is the problem; that more than God is a problem to man, man is a problem to Him.45

Within this framework, piety has the effect of causing a radical reordering of perception, making an essential shift in perspective from the rational arguments of natural theology to the theocentricity of a theology of creation. From humanity’s awareness of the sublime, Heschel moves to the observation that we encounter our own incapacity to account for our existence: “in penetrating and exposing the self, I realize that the self did not originate in itself, that the essence of the self is in its being a non-self, that ultimately man is not a subject but an object.”46 Subjectivity is thereby shifted from the human being to God: the “I” discovers that it is an “it,” the object of God’s own creation.47 Reflective persons realize, then, that we are what is not ours. As Rothschild observes, this shift is a sort of reversal of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”48: God cannot be proved as a conclusion derived from a set of premises, but rather the existence of human reason is itself in need of comprehension.49 Heschel’s awareness of the objective standing of humanity in relation to the subjective reality of God leads him not to deny the role of reason, but to insist that an adequate account of human consciousness cannot rely solely on empirical evidence or analytical reason: “It is a misconception to assume that there is nothing in our consciousness that was not previously in perception or analytical reason. Much of the wisdom inherent in our consciousness is the root, rather than the fruit, of reason.”50 When Heschel describes “the holy dimension” in his phenomenological essays, therefore, it is this contextualization of human knowing in a dimension which precedes its own reflective activity which he is identifying. Finding ourselves “in” religion, only the essential orientation of piety toward the transcendent can adequately open us to reality as it authentically is, phenomenologically considered. Piety as an “attitude toward God and the world” evokes a certain intentionality which redirects human reflection from the I-It of the Kantian paradigm: objectivity now rests with the self as known to God, not even within an I-Thou structure (as in Buber’s terminology articulated in Ich und Du [1923, Eng. trans. I and Thou, 1937]), but within an “it-He” relationship (as Heschel describes it in another essay on prayer).51 This reversal of subjectivity is expanded in a chapter of Man Is Not Alone, entitled, “God Is the Subject”: The more deeply alert we become to the inwardness in which all things are engrossed and to the mystery of being which we share with all things, the more deeply we realize the object-nature of the self. We begin to understand that what is an “I” to our minds is an “it” to God. . . . Entering the meditation about the ultimate, we must rid ourselves of the intellectual habit of converting reality into an object of our minds.52

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The world is therefore to be regarded through a divine rather than human perspective. This intentional dimension of piety is clearly evident in Man Is Not Alone: “To the pious man knowledge of God is not a thought within his grasp, but a form of thinking in which he tries to comprehend all reality.” Or, as Heschel expresses it in “An Analysis of Piety,” only piety sees reality in its entirety, and it thereby opens dimensions of knowing that are otherwise unavailable to us. From the implications of this reordering of subjectivity, Heschel articulates a quite different concept of human understanding from that of Kant, an alternative concept which will be explored in more detail in the following chapter. Some concluding remarks will draw to a close this section on the intentionality of piety as a reversal of subjectivity. The preceding discussion has demonstrated Heschel’s resistance to the pure reason of the Kantian subject; likewise, his discontent (following Dilthey and Scheler) with the transcendental ego of Husserl has also already been discussed (Chapter 4). In either case, Heschel’s primary objection is that the world as we experience it engages us at a deeper responsive level than can be articulated in terms of an abstracted intellectualism. Heschel’s alternative, as we have seen, is to propose situational thinking as the antidote to such conceptual detachment, which he does at the very beginning of God in Search of Man: The attitude of the conceptual thinker is one of detachment: the subject facing an independent object; the attitude of the situational thinker is one of concern: the subject realizing that he is involved in a situation that is in need of understanding. The beginning of situational thinking is not doubt, detachment, but amazement, awe, involvement.53

Contrary to Perlman, therefore, it is insufficient to describe Heschel’s methodology solely in terms of Husserlian phenomenology. Rather, even while the structure of his thought betrays a clear debt to Husserl, it nevertheless incorporates a personal dimension which cannot be accounted for in purely phenomenological terms. It thereby heightens the methodological significance of piety—and this is perhaps the significance of Heschel’s partial disavowal of the phenomenological method in The Prophets—for piety becomes the locus of the “amazement, awe and involvement” which are presupposed in situational thinking, the suspension of indifference through involvement. So when the situation in which human thinking must occur is defined, as Heschel does, as an objective one within the subjective presence of God, there results a fundamental shift from a strict phenomenological suspension of judgment to the engaged perspective of pious attachment. Heschel himself clearly indicated this shift of attention in the conversation with Friedman (previously cited in Chapter 4), where he asserts that his method actually reverses the expected direction of human thinking: “knowing myself as known by the other rather than knowing the other as known by myself.” Piety is the recognition of this rudimentary foundation of human knowing, and as such becomes what we have seen in both “The Holy Dimension” and Man Is Not Alone as “the subjective correlative of an objective condition, the awareness of living within the holy dimension . . .” Piety—in a rather complex inversion of terms—is thus a subjective individual response made to

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the objective standing of human beings before the ultimate subjectivity of God. Perhaps this is the meaning of what Heschel writes in the essay, “Prayer as Discipline”: How does man become a person, an “I”? By becoming a thought of God. Man lives on earth as a self but also as an object of divine concern. Such discovery is the reward of prayer. Such realization is the major motivation of piety. This is the goal of the pious man: to become worthy to be remembered by God.54

The consequences of piety’s intentional relationship to the ultimate subjectivity of God are more carefully defined by Heschel in terms of sympathy (an idea which, as we have already seen, he borrows from Scheler). The concept is mentioned in Man Is Not Alone,55 but it is more directly employed in God in Search of Man, hearkening back chronologically to Heschel’s original usage of the concept in Die Prophetie, and ahead to its usage again The Prophets. Indeed, framed as they are between the two versions of Heschel’s study of prophetic religion, his more philosophical works seem to use the term piety virtually synonymously with sympathy, except that he applies piety to ordinary religious experience, and sympathy to prophetic religious experience, as the following discussion will seek to describe. Piety thus stands as the bridge between the specialized event of prophecy and the more ordinary event of personal faith, the very gap which we observed was unaccounted for in Perlman’s analysis of Heschel’s phenomenology.

V  Pathos and piety Kaplan and Dresner suggest that the final two chapters of Heschel’s dissertation (“Theology of Pathos” and “Religion of Sympathy”) “establish the biblical source of his ideal of piety,” and so following this lead we turn to these central texts.56 The starting point for the discussion is God’s pathos. Heschel derives this concept from his study of the biblical prophets, in which he contrasts the immutable ideal of the God of Greek philosophy with the active, passionately engaged God of Hebrew faith. Heschel notes that the philosophical God was based on a fear of attributing to God anthropomorphic passions—surely, the argument goes, the God of perfect being rests above the vicissitudes of pathetic feeling. Yet, as Heschel powerfully refutes, the ideal of justice found in the Hebrew prophets is no anthropomorphism: “Where is the man who is endowed with such characteristics? Nowhere in the Bible is man characterized as merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abundant in love and truth, keeping love to the hundredth generation.”57 No, the biblical ideal of divine justice is derived only from its revelation through the prophetic witness, or as Heschel puts it, through God’s “turning toward man.”58 Through God’s revelation of God’s own concern for the future of humanity, human beings learn that “our task is to concur with His interest, to carry out His vision of our task.”59 Hence Heschel’s boldest assertion: that God is in search of man, even in need of man,60 so that life is a “partnership of God and man.”61 Heschel conceives of this revelation of divine concern as a new creative event in human history, analogous to the initial bringing into being in the act of creation.62

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The essential characteristic of pathos is that it expresses a divine relation to humanity; it is not an attribute of God as such, but refers to an outward directedness of God’s concern. The idea is more radical than it may seem at first, for it implies that God is affected by human events. God does not remain remote, hidden behind an impassible omnipotence, but actively responds to the caprices of human nature: “. . . man’s deeds may move Him, affect Him, grieve Him or, on the other hand, gladden and please Him.” Heschel identifies this as a uniquely biblical view of God, saying, “This notion that God can be intimately affected, that He possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God.”63 Pathos, given its transitive character, has as its object human being as it is lived out in history. Heschel therefore describes pathos as being equally significant for a theology of history, as is the idea of humanity fashioned in the image of God for a theology of creation: Never in history has man been taken as seriously as in prophetic thinking. Man is not only an image of God; he is a perpetual concern of God. The idea of pathos adds a new dimension to human existence. Whatever man does affects not only his own life, but also the life of God insofar as it is directed to man.64

Pathos is thus not a finality or absolute which confronts human beings, but an expression of relationship. Significantly, Heschel’s emphasis upon relatedness as the primary consequence of God’s pathos distances his conception of God from that of someone like Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), whose notion of God as “wholly other” stands apart from the idea of a divine pathos, despite its seeming overlap with Heschel’s stress on the ineffability of God. Otto argued in his book, Das Heilege (1917, Eng. trans. The Idea of the Holy, 1923), that religion was founded principally upon a nonrational sense of the tremendous or mysterious—or in his own words, the “numinous.” Without quoting Otto directly, Heschel consciously distances himself from this perspective in The Prophets, arguing in a section entitled “The God of Pathos and the Wholly Other” (in what may be an oversimplification of Otto’s meaning) that a conception of God as “Wholly Other” is an overreaction to excessive rationalism. “The God of the prophets is not the Wholly Other,” Heschel writes, “a strange, weird uncanny Being, shrouded in unfathomable darkness, but the God of the covenant, Whose will they know and are called upon to convey.”65 God’s pathos discloses itself not as an intrinsically irrational numen, but as a state which may be comprehended both morally and emotionally. Holiness has both the characteristic of otherness and nonotherness, that is to say, it is both beyond human analysis and within the sphere of human participation through sympathy.66 Now, there is much that could be discussed and debated about the notion of God’s pathos, but such a discussion is really beyond the scope of this study. Rather, our current interest is in the other side of the equation, namely how Heschel conceives of the human response through piety to this divine pathos. At the beginning of his chapter on sympathy in The Prophets, Heschel reiterates the distinction between “the objective and subjective aspect of the prophetic consciousness of God,” the objective content being the divine pathos, and the subjective response, sympathy.67 Here again, Heschel resists the reduction of this exchange to what Perlman analyzes exclusively in terms

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of the noetic-noematic correlation: the prophet does not merely engage in a “mental appropriation” of the prophetic experience, but “he is convulsed by it to the depths of his soul.” In a clear indication that his theology must be read in broader terms than Husserlian phenomenology, Heschel remarks, “Epoché [or the suspension of judgment regarding the existence of the external world] in the face of divine involvement would be callousness to the divine.”68 Rather, the prophet seeks a harmony of being with the “fundamental intention and emotional content” of the divine message. In analyzing the structure of this sympathy more carefully, Heschel describes two types of sympathy (making the appeal to Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy). Recall from our earlier discussion that the first type is a joint feeling with others; the second type is a feeling for others. Although both types of sympathy are present in the prophetic response to God’s pathos (since the prophet and God are both presented with the same reality), it is the latter commiserating form which dominates, for the prophet is moved by the anguish of God over the spiritual and moral plight of the people of Israel. “In other words,” Heschel summarizes, “the prophet’s sympathy and God’s pathos are phenomenologically two different facts, not one fact . . .”69 Prophetic sympathy, then, is “mostly an articulation of God’s view and an identification with it.” Having analyzed the nature of prophetic sympathy in these terms, Heschel goes on to examine the role of emotion in consciousness, as described above. The important conclusion drawn from this consideration of sympathy is that through identification with God’s pathos, sympathy makes a human passion of a divine concern, so that the prophet’s interior life may be said to be theomorphic. “That is the true meaning of the religion of sympathy— to feel the divine pathos as one feels one’s own state of the soul.”70 Now, it is not given to every person to experience the intensity of prophetic sympathy: indeed, it is quite rare. But one could argue that the crucial correspondence between the prophetic experience and ordinary piety which we have been trying to make (although Heschel never overtly acknowledges it himself) is most evident in the response of sympathy. We have already seen how Heschel structures his theology around a reorientation of subjectivity, and that piety is a lived acknowledgment of humanity’s objective standing before God. There is, however, a further step to be taken, and that is to note that piety yields, as Heschel writes in the essay on prayer, an “inner agreement with God,” which is none other than a sympathy for God’s concern parallel to prophetic inspiration. This linkage becomes clear in a section of God in Search of Man in which Heschel discusses the Bible. He describes how one moves from having faith in what the prophets said, to having faith with the prophets.71 This evolution is possible because the Bible is not a static record of concluded historical events, but an ongoing event itself, disclosing God’s pathos into the present. Piety, as attachment to the sacred events of the biblical narrative, opens one sympathetically to the message contained therein: “Only living with its words, only sympathy with its pathos, will open our ears to its voice.” Through piety, the biblical events endure through the response of sympathy which they evoke. Piety, therefore, as Heschel writes later on in the same work, “is unconditional loyalty to the holy.”72 Again, Heschel’s analogy is love: one cannot understand love by reading tales about it, but only by being in love; and likewise, one cannot understand prophetic sympathy except through one’s own pious response to God’s pathos.

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Piety, then, is a life lived as if one were the recipient of a divine revelation of God’s concern for the world; yet having lived that presupposition, one in fact achieves certainty of it. Heschel acknowledges the circularity of this thinking: “We are moving in a circle. We would accept the Bible only if we could be sure of the presence of God in its words. Now, to identify His presence we must know what He is, but such knowledge we can only derive from the Bible.” Piety is thus a sort of lived hermeneutic which allows for this circularity: a means of adopting the biblical interpretation of the world through one’s attitude and actions, and a means of appropriating the prophetic passion to oneself.

VI  Freedom, responsibility, and holiness: Shestov Lurking behind the intentionality and sympathy that Heschel ascribes to pious individuals is the rather big assumption that human beings are in fact able to act of their own free will. Indeed, in the essay “An Analysis of Piety,” having observed that human beings are responsible before God, Heschel makes the not-so-obvious corollary claim that this “responsibility implies freedom.” He lets the claim stand without further justification; one could, however, think of contradictory examples, such as a slave is responsible to a master, yet not in any plausible sense free. Yet for Heschel, the interrelatedness of responsibility and freedom is an important point, as he underscores by saying, “Only before God is man truly independent and truly free.” Nevertheless, like many other key concepts, freedom is not carefully spelled out here or in any other of Heschel’s works, even though it occurs with some frequency in his descriptions of the nature of piety, even appearing in the title of his collection of essays on human existence, The Insecurity of Freedom. To explicate what Heschel’s notion of freedom is, and how it relates to piety, it will be useful to turn for comparison to a thinker whose work bears an uncanny resemblance to Heschel’s own in many respects, namely the Russian Lev Shestov (1866–1938). We know that Heschel knew Shestov’s work, at least to some degree, for he quotes him directly in A Passion for Truth.73 Although separated by a generation, they share a number of biographical similarities: most obviously, they both came from Eastern European Jewish origins and eventually immigrated to the west (Shestov to Paris as part of the wave of emigrations following the 1917 revolution). More important, however, is the overlap of their intellectual concerns. Like Heschel, Shestov was intent to refute the hold of empirical rationalism on the modern mind, concerned as he was with “the nightmare of godlessness and unbelief which has taken hold of humanity.”74 Many of the same opponents thus appear in his work, Spinoza and Kant in particular. Also like Heschel, he was well versed in the breadth of western philosophy, while remaining deeply suspicious of its fundamental orientations. His core interest was to reassert the value of biblical thinking as an alternative to the dominance of Greek thought, an effort culminating in his work Athènes et Jérusalem (1937, Eng. trans. Athens and Jerusalem, 1966). He also had interests similar to Heschel in authors who helped to defend this perspective, Kierkegaard in particular, and was a personal friend of Husserl (with

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whom he disagreed strongly, although it was Husserl who suggested that he study Kierkegaard). Shestov often wrote in an aphoristic style quite comparable to that of Heschel, and so perhaps also for similar reasons has not been widely appreciated as a serious philosopher in his own right. To use his work as a point of comparison with Heschel will not only be illuminating for the particular issue of freedom, therefore, but also serve one of the larger intentions of the current study to place Heschel in relation to other thinkers with whom he shares overlapping concerns. In the book Athens and Jerusalem, Shestov mounts an attack on the supremacy of scientific reason, arguing that it represents a fundamental denial of human freedom. As the title of the book suggests, Shestov places this attack in the context of a contrast between the philosophical legacy of classical Greece and the religious perspective of the Hebrew Bible.75 In Shestov’s reading, the basic problem is that for Greek philosophy, knowledge was always thought of in terms of necessity and constraint, in that it assumes a cosmos structured by invariable and immutable laws. As this assumption was expanded in medieval philosophy, and then by modernity in the scientific method, a confidence in humanity’s ability to discover such natural laws bound its thinking to a deterministic view of cause and effect. This confidence is, Shestov argues, ultimately tied to a wish to know absolutely, “in other words, to be convinced that what is not only is but cannot be other than it is and must necessarily be what it is.”76 In a rather unusual reading of the first chapters of Genesis, Shestov maintains that the consequence of the fall was this constraint of necessity: the fault through which we lost our freedom was not sin through disobedience, but seduction by the power of absolute knowledge (represented by the tree in the middle of the garden): Adam exchanged the freedom which determined his relationship to the Creator who hears and listens for a dependence on the indifferent and impersonal truths which do not hear and do not listen to anything and automatically actualize the power which they have seized.77

The natural relation of God to humanity in the biblical account is as Creator, that is to say, as one who is subject to no power of necessity and no insurmountable laws: “[The Bible] introduced into the world a new, unheard of idea—the idea of the created truth, the truth which the Creator rules as He wishes and which docilely accomplishes the desires of its master.”78 When humanity exchanged its relationship to an unfettered Creator for obedience to the necessity of knowledge, its freedom disappeared with it. Reason thereby became the ultimate idol, denying to both God and humanity the freedom to live in open relationship, for each became subject to the laws of immutability. Shestov provocatively summarizes this problem in terms of a personified conflict between Athens and Jerusalem: When Athens proclaims urbi et orbi: “If you wish to subject everything to yourself, subject yourself to reason,” Jerusalem hears through these words, “All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me,” and answers, “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve.”79

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If human beings are to regain their freedom, Shestov argues, reason must be revealed as a form of slavery, otherwise “we must servilely obey all that reason dictates to us.”80 In a final section of Athens and Jerusalem, in which Shestov lapses into an especially aphoristic style, he reaches this conclusion: in contrast to reason, faith as attachment to the creative dimension of God, that is, to God’s own freedom to act, liberates humanity from the bonds of necessity. “The truths of faith,” he writes, “are to be recognized by this sign: that, contrary to the truths of knowledge, they are neither universal nor necessary and, consequently, do not have the power of constraining human beings.”81 Against this background, then, let us turn our attention back to Heschel. Like Shestov, Heschel makes frequent use of the distinction between “Athens and Jerusalem”; indeed it forms the theme of the opening presentation in God in Search of Man of his “philosophy of Judaism.” We have already seen that it also furnishes the basis for his distinction between the pathetic God of Israel and the remote, impassible God of speculative philosophy, as well as for his resistance to Parmenides’ static concept of the oneness of being. In an essay entitled “The God of Israel and Christian Renewal,”82 Heschel further distinguishes between “The God of Israel” as a name and a notion (the first being an Hebraic, the second a Greek concept). The difference, he says, lies in the fact that a notion is an idea which is meant to apply as a generalization “to all objects of similar properties.” A name, on the other hand, applies to one and only one referent, which is known through relationship. The uniqueness of “the God of Israel” belongs to the thinking of Jerusalem, Heschel argues, for Athens could never understand one who is utterly unique in a cosmos governed by necessity. Similarly, in “Did Maimonides Believe that He Had Attained the Rank of Prophet?”,83 Heschel places Maimonides’ attachment to the ideal of prophecy in the framework of the same dichotomy, this time phrased in terms of “Aristotle and Sinai.” Heschel notes that despite Maimonides’ great admiration of Aristotle, “the perfect exemplar of human knowledge,” Maimonides believed the philosopher’s knowledge to be inferior to that of those who have attained prophetic rank because only with the aid of prophecy can one grasp “that which eludes the power of rationality.” The theme of distinguishing Greek philosophy and Hebraic religion is continued in “Sacred Image of Man,” one of the essays in The Insecurity of Freedom, where Heschel gives a more explicit explanation of what lies at the heart of the separation between Athens and Jerusalem, making a point which will lead us back to the question of freedom in due course: Man is man not because of what he has in common with the earth, but because of what he has in common with God. The Greek thinkers sought to understand man as a part of the universe: the prophets sought to understand man as a partner with God.84

Heschel makes this statement based on the first chapter of Genesis, in which humanity is described as having been created in the image and likeness of God. For the Judaic tradition, this assertion is, according to Heschel, “the fundamental statement about the nature and meaning of man,” for it defines not only an origin, but also a destiny. In other words, from the biblical perspective, meaning is not something which has to be found or created by humanity, but something that is already pursuing each individual.

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Then, quoting Ernst Cassirer as an example of the misdirected Socratic search for an answer to the question, “What is man?”, Heschel observes that a human being is a creature “in search of himself,” in search of meaning. But against the backdrop of the biblical account of creation, Heschel turns this statement on its head in light of the claim of our likeness to God, for implied in that claim is that our meaning comes from God, from our conformity to the one in whose likeness we are made, not from our own pursuit of it. “To the biblical mind man is not only a creature who is constantly in search of himself, but also a creature God is constantly in search of.” When Heschel entitles one of his books God in Search of Man, therefore, he is not simply alluding to a sort of idyllic pastoral image; rather, he is stating what he takes to be absolutely fundamental to human nature, namely, that we are the object of God’s concern and that the flow of meaning is always from God to humanity, not the reverse. Heschel summarizes in Who Is Man? the distance of this view from Greek thought: “The Greeks formulated the search of meaning as man in search of a thought; the Hebrews formulated the search of meaning as God’s thought (concern) in search of man.”85 Heschel takes the idea of a divine pursuit of human beings as the basis for his understanding of freedom. In a chapter of God in Search of Man simply entitled, “Freedom,” it is the difference between the Greek idea of cosmos and the biblical idea of creation which anchors Heschel’s articulation of how freedom can be said to exist. Referring again to Maimonides, Heschel argues that contained within the idea of creation is an awareness that the universe did not have its origins in, nor is ruled by, necessity, but that it is a result of a free act (an idea which, we might add parenthetically, is almost exactly parallel to Shestov’s own expression of it). A free act of creation is the origin of the necessity which we experience in the natural world; behind the experience of necessity, therefore, there is an ultimate freedom given in the creative activity of God: The divine concern is not a theological afterthought but a fundamental category of ontology. Reality seems to be maintained by the necessity of its laws. Yet, when we inquire: why is necessity necessary? there is only one answer: the divine freedom, the divine concern.86

Freedom is thus directly related to creation: it is not experienced as a process (which implies a chain of determinative causal events), but as an event. For human beings, the experience of freedom is an event which is “an act of spiritual ecstasy, in the original sense of that term”: that is, it is an extension of the self in a creative act of self-engagement with the freedom of God’s creative concern, or pathos. Freedom is not, therefore, a permanent state for humanity, but rather something that is only experienced at rare moments when we rise above the realm of law and necessity into the presence of the divine freedom itself. We finally begin to see here the parameters of Heschel’s idea from “An Analysis of Piety,” that “Only before God is man truly independent and truly free.” For Heschel, freedom is virtually equivalent to holiness, for we are free to the extent that we live into our likeness to God, that is, to the extent that we participate in God’s own creative concern for the world. We are responsible because of the image of God which we bear: our responsibility is to reveal that likeness by participation in the divine concern.

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But by fulfilling this responsibility, we are also sharing in God’s own freedom, so that freedom is a product of our acceptance of responsibility and vice versa. Ironically, then, Heschel says that “we are forced to be free—we are free against our will,” in the sense that only by accepting responsibility do we find freedom.87 To the extent that we live as the likeness of God, as images of the holy, we are free. This relationship between freedom and holiness is made quite clear earlier in God in Search of Man, where Heschel writes, “There is no freedom except the freedom bestowed upon us by God; there is no freedom without sanctity.”88 The idea is also expressed in Man Is Not Alone, where Heschel similarly defines freedom in terms of spiritual ecstasy: it is “the dedication of the heart and mind to the fact of our being present at a concern of God.”89 A number of ideas are at play in this discussion of freedom—creation, holiness, spiritual ecstasy—and it is not always easy to perceive exactly how Heschel relates them together. Remembering Shestov as a point of comparison, however, one can see that the essential position which Heschel is trying to establish is that when viewed from the perspective of the biblical account, human freedom is not only a given, but also a goal. That it is a given is established by a theology of creation, which describes our origins; that it is a goal is established by a theology of pathos, which proposes God’s transitive concern as that to which we may aspire through a sympathetic identification with it. And this latter dimension of freedom leads us back to piety, for as we have seen, the sympathetic human response which pathos evokes is none other than the pious life. Piety’s awareness of the transcendent thus becomes an integral component of the experience and exercise of human freedom, for freedom is found only in contact with its divine origins. Indeed, only in the context of piety do Heschel’s ideas of freedom finally cohere, for only there do they resolve into a lived experience of both act and conviction: Jewish piety may be expressed in the form of a supreme imperative: Treat thyself as an image of God. It is in the light of this imperative that we can understand the meaning of the astonishing commandment: “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). Holiness, an essential attribute of God, may become a quality of man. The human can become holy.”90

Piety is thus the actualization of freedom because it is the appropriation of God’s creative holiness. If piety is a sympathetic response to God, made freely and knowingly (as those terms have been explicated in this chapter), then it cumulatively constitutes what Heschel calls “a way of thinking.” We have seen already that Heschel emphasizes this cognitive dimension in the four phenomenological studies of piety: in “An Analysis of Piety” he calls it an “attitude toward God and the world,” and in “Faith” he refers to it as an “alertness to the holy dimension” and as an “openness to transcendence.” This way of thinking is not an aspect of our life which is grafted onto our other activities and perceptions, but it becomes the lens through which we intentionally encounter the world (in the full phenomenological sense of that phrase). In Shestov’s terms, it is the opportunity to heal the wound of the fall, in which we exchanged our free relationship to a Creator “who hears and listens” for a dependence on “the indifferent and impersonal truths which do not hear and do not listen to anything . . .”91

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Shestov, in his heightened rhetorical manner, appeals to Dostoevsky’s dictum that “ ‘two times two makes four’ is already the beginning of death,” by way of making the point that the life of freedom given in faith is cut off by the “immutable reason” of Greek philosophy. Biblical thought proposes an essentially different “way of thinking” where human beings are engaged in a creative communion with God’s own freedom. Heschel writes more cautiously, but essentially with the same meaning: Israel and Greece not only developed divergent doctrines; they operated within different categories. The Bible, like the philosophy of Aristotle, for example, contains more than a sum of doctrines; it represents a way of thinking, a specific context in which general concepts possess a particular significance, a standard of evaluation, a form of orientation; not only a mental fabric but also a certain disposition or manner of interweaving and interrelating intuitions and perceptions, a unique loom of thoughts.92

This way of thinking, which Heschel describes as “understanding the world from the point of view of God,” shifts the center of discussion from how to reconcile reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, Aristotle and Moses, to the question of what are the ultimate insights and practical implications of the freedom and responsibility which are given in religious living. In summary, then, we have seen Heschel explicate piety as an intentional human orientation to the transcendent which acts as a unifying nexus of sympathetic response to God, with a corresponding sense of ethical responsibility that is exercised within an existential freedom. Contained in this definition, two primary implications of theological significance are clearly evident: piety’s amplification of the breadth of human knowing beyond the rational capacities of the mind, and its willing embrace of the accountability of moral living. Following the analysis made in this chapter of the phenomenological aspect of Heschel’s understanding of piety, the next two chapters will now be given over to a consideration of these epistemological and moral consequences of piety. It is the exploration of piety as a way of thinking, and of what analogies can be found for its manner of knowing, that will be the subject for the next chapter’s exploration of piety as a mode of understanding. Then in the succeeding chapter, the nature of piety as a form of virtue in the development of human character will provide the context for an elaboration of its ethical content.

Notes 1 Heschel, GSM, 6. 2 Byron Sherwin, “My Master,” in Kasimow and Sherwin, eds, No Religion Is an Island, 50–1. 3 Abraham Heschel, “In Search of Exaltation,” in Heschel, MGSA, 227–9. Originally published in Jewish Heritage13/3 (1971): 29–30, 35. 4 Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 134. 5 Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 43. 6 Heschel, ING, 42–3.

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7 See Kaplan and Dresner, “Koigen’s Philosophical Community,” Prophetic Witness, 129–37 and 329–30n. 21. 8 Abraham Heschel, letter to Martin Buber, 19 June 1938, quoted in Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 271. 9 Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 268. 10 Abraham Heschel, “Das Gebet als Äusserung und Einfühling,” Monatsschrift für Geschicthe und Wissenschaft des Judentums 83 (1939): 562–7. Included in revised form as “The Person and the Word” in Heschel, QG, Chapter 2. 11 Abraham Heschel, “Al mahut ha-tefillah,” Bitzaron 3/5 (1941): 346–53. This article was originally prepared for the Mayer Balaban jubilee volume (Warsaw), but publication was prevented because of Nazi confiscation. 12 Abraham Heschel, “An Analysis of Piety,” The Review of Religion 6/3 (1942): 293– 307. Reprinted in Heschel, MGSA, 305–17. A revised version of the essay appears as “The Pious Man,” the final chapter of Heschel, MNA, 273–96. 13 Abraham Heschel, “The Holy Dimension,” The Journal of Religion 23/2 (1943): 117– 24. Reprinted in Heschel, MGSA, 318–27. Portions of this essay appear in Heschel, MNA, chapters 17 and 22. 14 Abraham Heschel, “Faith,” The Reconstructionist 10/13 (1944): 10–14 and 10/14 (1944): 12–16. Reprinted in Heschel, MGSA, 328–39. Portions of this essay appear in Heschel, MNA, chapters 17 and 22. 15 Abraham Heschel, “Prayer,” Review of Religion 9/2 (1945): 153–68. Reprinted in Heschel, MGSA, 340–53. Also included as “The Inner World,” in Heschel, QG, Chapter 1. 16 Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 55. 17 Heschel interestingly includes a discourse on the environmental implications of human responsibility, long before “environmentalism” became an identifiable political movement: “Powerhouse, factory, and department store make us familiar with the exploitation of nature for our benefit. And lured by familiarity, the invisible trap for the mind, we easily yield to the illusion that these things are rightfully at our disposal, thinking little of the sun, the rainfall, the watercourses, as sources by no means rightfully ours.” Heschel, MNA, 290. 18 Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, recounts a more colloquial version of the same theme: “A story my father used to tell is about someone who gazes through a window at people jumping and moving and thinks they are mad. Then he goes inside and hears the music: they are dancing. From the outside, prayer and religious observance are difficult to understand. Only when the inner music is perceived can the religious expression begin to have meaning.” Susannah Heschel, Introduction to Chapter 5 of Heschel, Essential Writings, 138. 19 James Hyman, in his dissertation on the “trope of meaning” in Heschel, reaches similar conclusions about Perlman’s work: “Perlman goes so far as to argue that within Heschel’s work we can find a new and innovative phenomenological method which has significance beyond the parameters of Jewish thought. I believe this to be a serious overstatement. Heschel’s use of phenomenology did not conform to a strict Husserlian formulation. Rather, he borrowed technical terminology and methodological strategies from Husserl, amongst others, when it suited his needs and ignored them at other times.” Hyman goes on, however, to disparage the lack of methodological structure in Heschel, concluding that his reliance on individual, personal experience undermines his search for a structure of meaning in human life. Hyman misses the point, in my view, that the purpose of using these “individual,

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personal experiences” as a theological foundation is to develop through a phenomenological analysis of them the structure of piety, which lifts the subjectively personal onto an objectively universal plane. See Hyman, “Abraham Heschel,” 159–68. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 7. Ibid., 45. “It is to Heschel’s discredit that he never clarifies the use of the method or the philosophical meaning of phenomenology but merely injects it into his religious thought creating the impression that all questions of insight are self-evident, needing no further explanation.” Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 38. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 65. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 13–14. Heschel, MNA, 6. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 55. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 66. Heschel, GSM, 121. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 72. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 25. Novak, “Heschel’s Phenomenology of Revelation,” 36. Heschel, TP, xiii. Novak, “Heschel’s Phenomenology of Revelation,” 38. Perlman, in Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, notes the “anti-Kantian” aspect of Heschel’s work, although without exploring it substantively. He collects together in a footnote a number of remarks from Heschel’s major works referring to Kant, noting only that they are too numerous to quote them all. In a separate article published the same year as the book on revelation, however, Perlman went into greater depth regarding one of Heschel’s main objections to Kant, namely the description of intuition. The central disagreement Perlman notes is that Heschel rejects Kant’s use of transcendental judgments, that is, the idea that reason must have a pure concept of categories by which it is able to deduce the particular from the universal. Heschel, Perlman argues, believes that Kant’s position does not sufficiently take into account the existential and situational aspects of intuition: “The evidence of God’s presence is of a phenomenological and existential nature, never to be categorized in pure concepts nor to be confused with empirical limitations.” Overall, however, the article spends more time rehearsing Kant’s position than Heschel’s objections to it. See Perlman, “Heschel’s Critique of Kant.” Heschel, MNA, 46. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 141. Kaplan and Dresner also point out the affinity this emphasis on emotion has with the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto. Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 133. Heschel, TP, 316. Heschel, QG, 128. The consequence of Kant’s position is a point which seems to have been particularly important to Heschel, for he repeats the paragraph identically elsewhere: “Symbolism and Jewish Faith,” in Religious Symbolism, ed. F. Ernest

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48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety Johnson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 53–79, reprinted in Heschel, MGSA, 80–99; and “Toward an Understanding of Halacha,” in Yearbook of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, vol. 63 (1953): 386–409, reprinted in Heschel, MGSA, 127–45. Heschel, MNA, 39. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 48. David Novak argues that the idea of our being an “object” must be understood as dialectical, “a hyperbole uttered in order to deny that God is an object of human knowing.” Objects, he notes, do not respond to those who objectify them, so rather than characterizing the divine/human relationship as the relation of an object to subject, he proposes that it is an “inter-subjective relationship, albeit a decidedly asymmetrical one.” Novak, “Heschel’s Phenomenology of Revelation,” 46. Rothschild, Introduction to Between God and Man, 14. Heschel, MNA, 14. Ibid., 16–17. Abraham Heschel, “Prayer as Discipline,” in Heschel, IF, 255. Heschel, MNA, 126–7. Heschel, GSM, 5. Heschel, “Prayer as Discipline,” 256. “There is no sympathetic knowledge but there is sympathetic understanding.” Heschel, MNA, 133. Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 164. Heschel, TP, 271. Heschel, GSM, 198. Heschel, WM, 75. Heschel, MNA, 215. Heschel, GSM, 287. Ibid., 209. Heschel, TP, 224. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 227. Whether Otto himself meant to say that the divine is entirely “other” beyond human knowing is a matter of debate; in the foreword to the English translation he distinctly tries to indicate that he meant only to make “a serious attempt to analyze all the more exactly the feeling which remains where the concept fails . . .” Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923, reprint 1973). Heschel, TP, 307. Ibid., 308. Ibid., 314. Ibid., 319. Heschel, GSM, 249. Ibid., 346. The quotation is taken from Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, and describes Kierkegaard’s attitude toward original sin. Heschel, PT, 257. Lev Shestov, letter to Mikhail Bulgakov, quoted in Bernard Martin, Introduction to Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1966), 27.

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75 Shestov is not, of course, original in making this contrast. He himself argues that it is a basic attitude of Paul in the New Testament, of Luther, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, and he pays the necessary homage to Tertullian’s famous “quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?” 76 Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, 282. 77 Ibid., 346. 78 Ibid., 336. 79 Ibid., 372. 80 Ibid., 375. 81 Ibid., 425. 82 Abraham Heschel, “The God of Israel and Christian Renewal,” in Heschel, MGSA, 268. Originally published in Renewal of Religious Thought: Proceedings of the Congress on the Theology of the Church Centenary in Canada, 1867–1967, ed. L. K. Shook, CSB (Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1968), 105–29. 83 Heschel, “Did Maimonides Believe that He Had Attained the Rank of Prophet?”, 95–6. 84 Abraham Heschel, “Sacred Image of Man,” in Heschel, IF, 152. 85 Heschel, WM, 74. 86 Heschel, GSM, 413. 87 Heschel, WM, 101. 88 Heschel, GSM, 170. 89 Heschel, MNA, 142. 90 Heschel, “Sacred Image of Man,” 156. 91 Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, 346. 92 Heschel, GSM, 14.

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Piety as Understanding

We live our life in various realms of meaning, which do not quite cohere rationally. Our meanings are surrounded by a penumbra of mystery, which is not penetrated by reason. —Reinhold Niebuhr, Pious and Secular America

I  The analogy of music In an essay exploring “The Vocation of the Cantor,” Heschel made the following remarkable observation about himself: “I would define myself as a person who has been smitten by music, as a person who has never recovered from the blows of music.”1 Indeed, Heschel makes frequent recourse to music throughout his works as an image to illustrate his meaning. Interestingly, it seems that it was through his wife, Sylvia Straus (who was herself an accomplished concert pianist at the time of their marriage in 1946) that he discovered the profundity of music;2 his daughter, Susannah, intimates that it was this marital partnership that supported the very personal spirituality which lies beneath the surface of his most important theological works, pointing out that Jewish men traditionally write religious books only after they are married.3 Referring to a passage from God in Search of Man, she gives an example of the influence of this partnership on Heschel’s thinking: “I can hear my mother’s voice in this sentence, ‘The music in a score is open only to a person who has music in his or her soul, and the holiness of the mitsvah is open only to a person who knows how to discover the holiness in his or her soul.’ ” The importance of music for Heschel is a dimension of his writing which has been noticed before, yet relatively little effort has been made to examine the specific uses that he makes of it, most citations being made in passing or in the context of a broader consideration of Heschel’s “poetics.”4 In light of the analysis given in the previous chapter of Heschel’s intellectual resistance to Kant, however, a sharper picture emerges of why he turns so often to music as an analogy. In a section of Man Is Not Alone on “Knowledge by Appreciation,” Heschel once again takes aim at the Kantian hubris “to subject [objects] to our purposes and to impose on them the forms of our intellect,” reminding us that following that exercise “we are stunned and incapable of saying what things are in themselves.” Then follows a direct appeal to the example of music and poetry: “Music, poetry, religion—they all initiate in the soul’s encounter with

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an aspect of reality for which reason has no concepts and language has no names.”5 The sequence of moving from pointing out the insufficiencies of Kantian reason to describing the expressive power of music and poetry is significant, for it suggests the role which Heschel assigns to music: namely, to suggest analogically an integrative mode of knowing through the attitude of piety that reaches beyond analytical reason. As we have seen in reference to Dilthey and Scheler, Heschel particularly wishes to recover emotion as part of human knowing. In The Prophets, he makes the point that it is inappropriate to think of the rational faculty as itself being unmoved by exterior forces: to think of the objects of reflection as passive and inert ignores the fact that the world presses in upon us. To think about an object is to be moved by it, to be stimulated by its presence into a reflective consideration of its meaning and nature: “In thinking we do not create an object; we are challenged by it.”6 Heschel argues that although we may not always be aware of the fact, consciousness of an object always involves being moved by its presence; when we become aware of this state of being affected, we experience it as an emotion. Thought is thus part of emotion, and emotion part of thought. Heschel could be faulted here for underestimating the complexity of an appeal to the cognitive significance of emotion. Jon Elster, for example, in a more psychologically based study of rationality and the emotions, explores the difficulty even of defining exactly what the emotions are—emotions are a class, he argues, “whose membership is uncertain.”7 To enumerate the emotions, for example, first asks for an explication of what qualifies as an emotion: is it a psychological state? a physiological reaction? can it be objectively identified, or is it purely based on subjective reporting? Are only private feelings such as anger, shame, or joy to be included, or also the social feelings of sympathy, pity, and jealousy? Having admitted the difficulty in describing the emotions unambiguously, however, Elster goes on to consider how their relation to cognition might be described. In a point which at first seems supportive of Heschel’s position, he observes that emotion and cognition are intimately connected, especially because emotions have intentional objects: they are “about” something, and therefore significantly related to the act of apprehension. Although he acknowledges the “revisionist” view that emotions may improve rational perception by enabling a more focused attention to the salient aspects of a situation, Elster sides in the end with the view that emotions are primarily “sand in the machinery of action.” Emotions, in this view, interfere with the rational behavior of human beings, distorting their ability to perceive external phenomena objectively and therefore causing them to make fundamentally irrational choices. The comparison of Heschel with Elster’s approach to the questions of emotion and cognition is instructive, for it helps to differentiate Heschel’s own position and to demonstrate the nature of his appeal to the cognitive value of emotion. Whereas Elster perpetuates a distinction between rationality and the emotions, understanding them to be in essential conflict with one another, Heschel wishes to insist that the supposed ideal of purely rational behavior or cognition is itself a fictional construct. Human knowing is always governed by emotional responses: even the attraction of our mind to consider one thing rather than another is already emotionally determined to some degree, and the manner in which we intentionally apprehend an object is necessarily

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qualified by our emotional response to it. His appeal to emotion, then, is not to a mode of thought which stands opposite to rationality, but to one which is inextricably bound up with it in any act of human knowing. Moreover, in asserting the emotional component of thought, Heschel is not merely promoting as cognitively significant momentary responses such as anger or sadness. Rather, his interest is in the longer emotional spans which shape our conscious reflectivity. These are the emotions which motivate and guide a human being’s search for meaningful activity and belief, and so form the larger mental context of religious thought. In this regard, Heschel shares common ground with James Gustafson’s ethical appeal to the “affectivities” (or senses) of dependence, gratitude, obligation, remorse, possibility, and direction.8 These senses are closely related to the more obvious and fleeting emotions of fear, hope, love, fear, joy, sorrow, and so forth—indeed they contain these feelings within them—but cumulatively they develop a certain attitude or disposition which deeply influences our perceptions of events and things. Indeed, “piety” describes one such attitude, which predisposes the individual to understand him or herself in relation to a divine presence. This attitude has deep roots in the religious affectivities, but it is not itself a transient feeling: it is, as Heschel describes, a settled disposition, “something unremitting, persistent, unchanging in the soul, and perpetual attitude of the whole man.”9 Reason and emotion are thus intricately related to one another, whether for someone with a pious temperament or otherwise, for they operate together in shaping our response to objective experiences presented to us but interpreted through the filter of both our intellectual and emotional disposition. The importance of emotion is all the more crucial for Heschel’s theology because it is not only an issue for understanding the fullness of human comprehension, but also for articulating the concept of pathos which is so central to his overall scheme. In a chapter of The Prophets on “The Philosophy of Pathos,” Heschel takes to task the “disparagement of emotion” in Greek philosophy, which he believes is responsible for the assumption that the divine perfection could not itself be anything other than apathetic. Tracing a line of thought from Plato, through Aristotle and the Stoics, he demonstrates what he considers to be a continual priority given to thinking over emotion, based upon an underlying—and ultimately false—dichotomy between soul and body: whereas emotion is associated with the lower, animal nature in humanity, reason is associated with the divine nature which raises humanity above the animal level. Heschel argues that Jewish medieval scholasticism regrettably followed the lead of Greek thought in this regard; Maimonides, for example, held that because emotion necessarily implies a changed state in its agent, and change is a sign of imperfection, then only a divine impassibility is thinkable for a God who must be understood to remain in a state of apathetic perfection. Heschel, however, confronts this “doctrine of apatheia” head-on: Is religious thinking ever to be completely separated from the stream of emotion that surges beneath it? Religious reason is more than just thinking, and religious emotion is more than just feeling. In religious existence, spontaneity and receptivity involve each other. Is there no reason in the emotional life?10

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Rather than holding emotion at a level inferior to reason, Heschel insists that there is an interdependence between the two: reason responds to the objects which arouse us emotionally, and emotion guides reason to seek understanding of that which inspires our feeling. Heschel comes to what he considers a decisive rebuttal to the disparagement of emotion in religious thinking by arguing that to separate the emotions from reason is fundamentally contradictory of the unity of human nature reflected in the Hebrew Bible. The scriptures, Heschel argues, set up no dichotomy between body and soul, no hierarchy in the inner life between thinking and emotion. The heart, as the center of the inner life, is a unity of knowledge as well as feeling: “the mind is not a member apart, but is itself transformed into passion.”11 Pathos, which is part of religious experience, is not to be disparaged as unworthy of the divine, but celebrated as the one thing which we know of it: God feels for humanity, and acts on its behalf. Rather than fearing that the perfection of God would somehow be compromised by ascribing passion to God, Heschel sees God’s feeling for humanity as demonstrative of a perfection of love and concern. The divine pathos is, quite simply, what is shown to us in the angry, compassionate, longing, pleading God of the Hebrew Bible. For Heschel, the interrelatedness of thought and emotion is a key concept, not only because it opens divinity to the possibility of pathetic feeling, but also because it provides him with the means to articulate the visceral attraction of such human experiences as wonder and awe, where an emotive response draws us into the process of reflection which makes us aware of the transcendent, evoking our sympathetic response. And here we come to Heschel’s analogical use of music, for it provides an ideal example of this kind of relationship: “Listening to great music is a shattering experience, throwing the soul into an encounter with an aspect of reality to which the mind can never relate itself adequately. Such experiences undermine conceit and complacency. . . . Music leads us to the threshold of repentance, of [the] unbearable realization of our own vanity and frailty and of the terrible relevance of God.”12 Heschel thus describes music paradoxically as having the ability “to convey that which is within our reach but beyond our grasp,” which is a precise analogy to his theory of mystical knowing as an operative apprehension of the ineffable. Heschel also appeals to music as a means of emphasizing that our intuition of the ineffable is of something real—not merely an intimation which points to a mythical, imaginary, or projected reality. Religion deals with the real, in other words, and not merely the symbolic. That which we encounter as ineffable is not so because it is unknowable, but only because it is beyond our ability to conceptualize. Music is an example of one form of expression which fills this gap between what is known and what is real, for although it is nonverbal and nonrational in form (although it can have a carefully developed structure), it nevertheless conveys a real content and evokes a real response. Returning to Heschel’s essay on the cantor, we read, “The only language that seems to be compatible with the wonder and mystery of being is the language of music.”13 So Heschel seems to mean in this statement that in the presence of an ineffable mystery, only a nonverbal form of expression such as music can truly communicate the nature of that reality.

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There is more at stake in the assertion of music’s compatibility with the ineffable, however, than a mere eschewing of verbal formulation. When read in light of Heschel’s other references to music, the statement that music is a language compatible with mystery also contains the stronger point that beyond music, there is a true reality to which music gives authentic expression. In concluding the section on “Knowledge by Appreciation” mentioned above, for example, Heschel writes, “Essentially music does not describe that which is, rather it tries to convey that which reality stands for. The universe is a score of eternal music, and we are the cry, we are the voice.”14 In this sense, Heschel holds music up as analogous to depth theology, in that both make a universal appeal to the whole person, emotional, rational, and active, giving rise both to ideas which may be conceptualized verbally and to ideas which overflow our conceptual vocabulary.15 We are in essence participants in two worlds: that which is tangible and concrete, subject to our physical and mental manipulation, and that which is ineffable, beyond our grasp or control. The two are intrinsically linked, and yet a space separates them as surely as a violin and the melody it plays are distinct yet inseparably related.16 While music is dependent upon the physical means of its production, therefore, the ineffable quality of its melody gives access to what Heschel elsewhere describes as the “meaning beyond the mystery,” even while the means by which it accomplishes this task of evocation cannot precisely be defined. As Heschel asks rhetorically, “Can we describe exactly how the tense power of a spirit glides on the strings of a violin, creating a world of delicacy out of nothing?”17 The answer is no, and music thus bears a close phenomenological resemblance to prophetic revelation in that while it can be analyzed as an event and the form of its content described, it cannot be reduced to a rational formulation without destroying that content—the very expressive power which it has is dependent upon it remaining beyond exact definition. In a passage immediately preceding this appeal to music’s “world of delicacy,” Heschel writes, It is essential to revelation that it elude our inquiries. To explain, to make it intelligible, transparent, would be to ignore it; in proving it, it would be reduced to insignificance. . . . Revelation should not be rejected because of its being incomprehensible. It is not the only fact that is impervious to exploration, unverifiable by experience. That which is incomprehensible must not be considered unreal.

The underlying issue which Heschel is addressing with these musical analogies is that music—like religious experience—is not a symbolic form of expression which stands for something else, but that it gives direct access to a realm of knowing and experience intrinsic to itself. This nonsymbolic nature of musical (and by analogy, religious) experience is a fundamental concept for Heschel, and one to which he returns on numerous occasions. He is most focused on the issue in Quest for God, which is suggestively subtitled “Studies in Prayer and Symbolism.”18 As Kaplan points out, Heschel’s polemic against religious symbolism was a reaction against the philosophical anthropology of Dilthey, Cassirer, and Buber—intellectual mentors who in other ways supplied Heschel with much of his inspiration—as well as the liberal religion he encountered especially in North America.19 Heschel was distressed to observe that on one hand, concepts or ideas of God were being substituted for the living God

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(e.g. Buber’s reduction of prophecy to a symbolic representation of morality), while on the other hand “rituals, customs, and ceremonies” were taking the place of authentic praise and devotion. On the question of symbolism, therefore, Heschel deeply dissented from the prevailing view that religious life in general, and Jewish ritual in particular, is primarily a system of the symbolic representation of God, where a symbol is understood to be an object which “represents to the mind an entity which is not shown . . . by reason of relationship, association, or convention.”20 To Heschel, symbols are substitutes, deployed only in the absence or unreachability of the thing to which we wish to cleave. To think in terms of religious symbols is thus a form of solipsism, for it replaces a true encounter with the other with a substitute of our own creation. It is this very aspect of symbols’ substitutionary character against which the Bible reacts in forbidding all graven images, for they take the place of God, effectively denying the immediate and real presence of the divine: “Giving to symbolic objects what is due to God and directing the soul to express itself by proxy, symbolism degenerates into a vicarious religion.”21 Moreover, the most real and concrete aspects of human experiences are never lived symbolically: we neither eat, nor sleep, nor suffer, nor love symbolically, but truly and actually. Heschel wishes to include in this list of primary human activities worship, for it has the same character of immediacy as the others. Again, music serves as his analogy: “Of a violinist who is moving his bow over the strings of his violin we do not say that he is performing a symbolic act. Why? Because the meaning of his act is in what he is doing, regardless of what else the act may represent.”22 The analogy is supplemented with a reference to friendship, arguing that to do a service to a friend is not a symbol of friendship, but friendship itself. Likewise, religious life is not comprised of actions or behaviors which symbolize to us God’s presence: they are direct participations in the divine presence and engage us really rather than symbolically (or, to use more contemporary language, they are first-order experiences which precede any secondorder reflectivity). As Heschel writes in yet another musical allusion, expressing the immediacy of religious experience, “While in regard to other issues we doubt before we decide, in regard to God we sing before we say. Unless we know how to praise Him, we cannot learn to know Him.”23 There is, however, one thing the Bible does regard as a symbol of God: “It is not a temple nor a tree, it is not a statue nor a star. The symbol of God is man, every man.”24 Elsewhere we have seen Heschel describe piety as treating oneself as an image of God: here he spells out more specifically that human life is made holy not by the deeds which an individual performs, but by the God-given likeness of human beings to their creator such that “Reverence for God is shown in our reverence for man.” The intensity of Heschel’s attachment to this idea, common in Jewish mysticism, is demonstrated by his description of “the motivating force of Jewish piety” as “the craving to keep that reflection pure, to guard God’s likeness on earth . . .”25 The ethical dimensions of this conviction we will explore in the following chapter, but here we might be drawn back to the idea mentioned in Chapter 3 of the incarnational aspect of Heschel’s thought— an incarnation without the Incarnate. In the divine symbolism of humanity, God is represented in creation by a being that has the potentiality of imitating God in acts

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of mercy and love. That potentiality, which distinguishes humanity from every other creature, makes of human life an arena in which the nature of God’s pathos is disclosed to the extent that humanity identifies itself with that concern: “What is necessary is not to have a symbol but to be a symbol.” Piety—treating oneself as a symbol of God—thus has a disclosive dimension as it becomes in some measure an embodiment of pathos itself. The point that religious actions involve us with a real rather than idealized or symbolic transcendence leads to another general use of the analogy of music—and to its connection with the concept of piety—which is to describe how this involvement occurs. Here, the question is one of engagement, and the analogy of music is deployed to demonstrate that without a firsthand encounter, one cannot begin to understand its art: “It would be futile . . . to explore the meaning of music and abstain from listening to music.”26 Musical theory does not make one a musician,27 for the ability to create actual artistry from a score “is open only to him who has music in his soul.”28 Heschel uses this necessary interiority of a true musician to demonstrate the important principle of kavanah, which he defines as an attentiveness which is “the direction of the mind toward the accomplishment of a particular act, the state of being aware of what we are doing, of the task we are engaged in.”29 In the case of religious deeds, or mitzvot, Heschel argues that this attentiveness is an essential element because it pushes the consciousness of the doer beyond the performance of the deed to an awareness of the one who has commanded it, namely God. It is, therefore, the antidote to symbolism and its solipsistic tendencies. The point is not merely the fulfillment of the commandment, but to use its performance as a means to encounter the reality to which the deed leads, “For a mitsvah is like a musical score, and its performance is not a mechanical accomplishment but an artistic act.”30 Heschel’s emphasis on the importance of inwardness is another sign of the influence of Hasidism on him, and leads us back to piety as its realization. In A Passion for Truth, for example, inwardness is regarded as a prerequisite for authenticity in the performance of mitzvot, and Quest for God emphasizes the role of kavanah in prayer, arguing that interiority is the very soul of prayer without which one merely rehearses blank words. The point, Heschel repeatedly stresses, is that the goal of both a person’s moral and religious behavior “is to be what he does,”31 to achieve an integration of act and attitude in which the outward form is a manifestation of an inward state. Once again, music provides the analogy: At the moment in which an artist is absorbed in playing a concerto the thought of applause, fame or remuneration is far from his mind. His complete attention, his whole being is involved in the music. Should any extraneous thought enter his mind, it would arrest his concentration and mar the purity of his playing. The reward may have been on his mind when he negotiated with his agent, but during the performance it is the music that claims his complete concentration.32

This contemplative integration of act and attitude is none other than that which is described by piety, for it is the nature of piety to reveal the divine through conscious conformity to it through the performance of sacred deeds, to be a “counterpoint in the music of His will.”33 The pious life, as a disclosure of the divine through a pattern

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of religious living, places the meaning of human living in the context of “composing a song of deeds which only God fully understands.”34 Only the willingness to become engaged, to commit oneself through piety, makes this dimension accessible, for like a student of music who has not actually listened to it, the student of religion who has not practiced it will remain both rationally and spiritually outside the mystery, to paraphrase a line from Heschel’s essay, “The Holy Dimension.” To revisit a concept first developed in the previous chapter, then, piety is a “lived hermeneutic,” but here we see that it is so in the sense that it is intentional—in two senses of that word. In the first instance, piety is intentional in the phenomenological sense of the term, shaping the consciousness of the pious individual in such a way that the world—its objects and experiences—is interpreted with “the ability to look at all things from the point of view of God, sympathy with the divine pathos, the identification of the will with the will of God.”35 So, for example, the pious individual approaches human life as sacred to God, created as it is in God’s image, and sought after as it is through God’s will. Placing such a high value on the human being inalterably changes the pious individual’s interpretation of the world as he or she encounters all those moments and situations which are the content of the human community. But in the second instance, piety is also intentional in the moral sense in that it describes a deliberate interiority—kavanah—which focuses the pious individual on a certain pattern of behavior and response. Piety is thus the unity of religious ideas with concrete action, just as performance is the unity of a musical score with an individual interpretation of it. Piety makes of human life a nexus where both a religious way of thinking and an ethical way of acting are inextricably unified in a single framework of understanding.

II  An intuition of meaning We have already seen in discussing Heschel’s study of prophecy how he adopts the notion of understanding (Verstehen) from Dilthey, intending by its distinction from knowledge (Erkennen) to broaden the terrain of human comprehension to include all the “cognitive-affective-volitional” aspects of concrete human living. Having now in another context described piety as the point at which emotion, thought, and action coincide in an integrative act of apprehension, our next task is to examine more carefully Heschel’s application of his idea of understanding outside of his prophetology, especially as it is to be differentiated from knowledge. Our purpose is not to give a thorough account or critique of the epistemological importance of this concept, which would be a rather different subject, but to develop the idea of understanding to such a degree that its relationship to piety can be fully grasped and appreciated. Heschel’s primary discontentment with knowledge as it is derived through speculative reason is that he finds it unjustifiably narrow in its reduction of human comprehension to the known. Observing that a detached attitude of doubt is the usual starting point for reasoned accounts of knowledge—an approach which treads cautiously even while wielding the sword of skepticism—Heschel posits instead (extending on the importance of emotion) that wonder must be the beginning of

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insight.36 Doubt narrows our field of inquiry because it insists that only that which is expressible in the mind’s own terms is knowable, whereas wonder realizes that a vast range of human experience is meaningful without being expressible. “Doubt is an act in which the mind inspects its own ideas; wonder is an act in which the mind confronts the universe. Radical skepticism is the outgrowth of subtle conceit and selfreliance.”37 Wonder, for instance, senses the limits of words and concepts in the face of the deep experiences of life such as love and death, and is therefore what gives rise to artistic and religious creativity as attempts to express the ineffable.38 That which is unknowable, is not necessarily inconceivable, but rather must be encountered and expressed in alternative ways to logical analysis or the categories of knowing imposed by the mind. In this sense, Heschel departs from Dilthey’s theory of consciousness, for he wants to make room for a mode of knowing that lies outside of any of the ordinary categories by which the mind interprets the world around it. As he writes, “Just as material things offer resistance to our spontaneous impulses, and it is that feeling of resistance that makes us believe that these things are real, not illusory, so does the ineffable offer resistance to our categories.”39 The resistance of the ineffable to our attempts to know it both indicates its realness, and the impossibility of giving to it definitive expression. Indeed, Heschel argues that we have to take seriously the incompatibility of the fullness of reality with the human mind, “the incongruity of all categories with the nameless, unfathomable omnipresence of the mystery,”40 refraining from the unjustifiable pretense that only that which can be grasped logically is capable of existing.41 Moreover, we must acknowledge that rationality itself includes nonrational elements, “such as an initial trust in the veracity of our faculties and a continual trust, a kind of faith, in the most reasonable hypothesis.”42 Such an acknowledgment of nonrational components restrains the unlimited authority of reason, resting as it does on not fully warranted assumptions of its own. Needless to say, Heschel’s detailed arguments supporting these claims are themselves not presented in a strictly logical fashion, for as we saw in the previous chapter, he ultimately relies upon the human intuition of transcendence (which he uncovers through a phenomenological reduction) as a kind of alternative to or expansion of reason in order to support his critique of an overly restrictive epistemology. Intuition, as he uses the term, is an immediate awareness of insight before any categories of reflective thought are deployed upon it.43 The primordial encounter with reality which gives us our first knowledge of the world is of this nature, for it is preconceptual and presymbolic, and the forms which conceptual thinking takes must remain aware of their origins in this intuitional sublayer in our consciousness.44 Heschel argues that many of the ideas which support even scientific thinking are fundamentally intuitions of this sort: the idea of the universe, for example, is itself a “metaphysical insight,” meaning that even the assumption that all reality exists as a unified cosmos is finally only an intuition of coherence and uniformity.45 For Heschel, the most important intuition human beings have is one of awe, which he describes as “an act of insight into meaning greater than ourselves.”46 The value which we attach to all human beings, for example, is an intuition that each individual represents a meaning more significant than his or her mere physical existence. Awe, then, is an awareness of transcendent meaning, “of a spiritual suggestiveness of reality”;

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the preciousness with which we regard being in the first place (our desire to live, to understand, to love, to create, to procreate), Heschel insists is an intuition which “is inexplicable, nameless, and cannot be specified or put into one of our categories.”47 In a phrase of which he is especially fond, Heschel describes awe as “an intuition for a meaning that is beyond the mystery.” The intuition of awe is thus an example of what Heschel describes as the essence of intuition, that is, not grasping what is describable but sensing what is ineffable. Hence Heschel’s startling assertion (clearly aimed at Kant), that awe is a “categorical imperative,” something that is required of human beings in the face of the ineffable character of reality.48 Intuition, of course, is Heschel’s route into mystery. If equating the meaningful with the expressible “ignores a vast realm of human experience,” then the cognitive insights available through intuitive awareness open up the whole dimension of the ineffable.49 The somewhat elusive meaning of the ineffable is defined by Heschel as “that aspect of reality which by its very nature lies beyond our comprehension, and is acknowledged by the mind to be beyond the scope of the mind.”50 Heschel is careful to describe the mystery to which the ineffable points in terms which do not make it unknowable, but rather comprehensible only in divine terms: “[Mystery] is not a synonym for the unknown but rather a name for a meaning which stands in relation to God.”51 Thus, as we explored more fully in Chapter 5, mystery is an ontological category, so mystery is not something esoteric to which only a select few are initiated, but an essential quality of all being. This quality is derived from the fact that all being speaks of meaning—a meaning conferred by it having been created by God. Having worked through Heschel’s stress on the intuitive apprehension of the ineffable mystery of existence, we now have to tie this argument more directly to the concept of understanding. In a key passage of Man Is Not Alone entitled, “Knowledge or Understanding,” he writes, It is more appropriate to describe the ideas we acquire in our wrestling with the ineffable as understanding of God [rather than as knowledge of God]. For if He is neither an abstract principle nor a thing, but a unique living being, our approach to Him cannot be through the procedures of knowledge but through a process of understanding. We know through induction or inference, we understand through intuition; we know a thing, we understand a personality; we know a fact, we understand a hint. Knowledge implies familiarity with, or even mastery of, something; understanding is an act of interpreting something which we only know by its expression and through inner agreement with it.52

The core of what Heschel is trying to get at here is that while understanding is a cognitive act in that it is derived from an interpretive reflection on intuited awareness, it is also more than cognitive in that it is an act of will through which we identify ourselves with the object of our intuition and seek to be in agreement with it. Understanding thus contains within it the notion of sympathy (as we have described Heschel’s use of that term), implying that understanding cannot be obtained from a distanced, neutral position, but only results from intimacy and engagement. As Heschel points out, understanding can be synonymous with sympathetic agreement (as in the sentence, “He is an understanding person”): it is, he says, “through agreement

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that we find a way of understanding.” Understanding, then, must be gained through response: it is not enough to consider the ultimate questions of God with a detached air of objectivity, for one must engage the reality behind those questions in order to make sense even of the question. One must, in other words, imitate the example of the prophets, “who had no theory or ‘idea’ of God,” but understanding. As we noticed earlier, for Heschel, the analogy to explain this immediacy of understanding is love: between two persons in love, communicated expressions are comprehensible only within the context of the meaning of their relationship. As we have by now seen in numerous reprises, piety is the means by which we place ourselves in relationship to God; and so, it is also the means by which we enter into the context of meaningful expressions of the divine, and by our response to them, achieve understanding. Piety, therefore, may be said to achieve an understanding which deconstructs the limitations and exclusions of ordinary thought. Contrary to the casual notion that piety represents a stunted form of thinking which relies only on received ideas and clichés, Heschel relocates cognitive complacency to where piety’s sense of the “meaning beyond the mystery” is absent: In order to grasp what is so overwhelmingly obvious to the pious man, we must suspend the trivialities of thinking that stultify unique insights and decline to stifle our minds with standardized notions. The greatest obstacle to faith is the inclination to be content with half-truths and half-realities. Faith is only given to him who lives with all his mind and all his soul; who strives for understanding with all beings not only for knowledge about them; whose permanent concern is the cultivation of the uncommon sense, education in sensing the ineffable.53

Piety, in other words, itself serves as the most efficacious source of understanding because it alone embraces the full complexity of the emotional, rational, and intuitive range of human knowing.

III  Mediating the universal and particular One of the criticisms that has been leveled against Heschel takes issue with what is perceived to be an unwarranted assertion in his argument: namely, that the intuited understanding of mystery is an awareness which is universally available to human beings. The dissenting argument responds quite simply that human experience is not so constituted, that many persons have no such intuition, and that Heschel is trying to make valid for all persons what is in fact a very personal and specific experience. Heschel does in fact argue for a universal applicability of the intuitive accessibility of mystery: “The sense of the ineffable is . . . an ability with which all men are endowed; it is potentially as common as sight or as the ability to form syllogisms.”54 Yet Heschel is under no illusion that all persons instinctively and unavoidably perceive the ineffable: such perception, though it is potentially available to every person, can only occur when the mind is habituated to appreciate that which lies beyond reason, or at least is not inhibited by the restraining assumption that the knowable is contiguous with the

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reasonable.55 Indeed a motivating drive behind Heschel’s overall theological project is his concern to reinvigorate this intuitive ability, which though he believes it to be innate, he also fears is becoming more and more atrophied from disuse and neglect through what he at one point calls “the systematic liquidation of man’s sensitivity” to God.56 He lists a variety of indications that support this worry: fatalism, the incapacity for outrage, the isolation of religion from life, infatuation with technology. The cumulative effect is that the prerequisites for an openness to transcendence are absent, and the intuition of the ineffable is blocked. Heschel reads this situation as a crisis in modern life, and repeatedly gives voice to his anxiety. In a televised interview with Carl Stern taped just a few days before his death, for example, Heschel spoke of his concern that young people were losing the capacity for reverence, an awareness of the mystery of their own existence, and he urged that education for reverence be a central theme of the formation of young persons.57 Heschel’s universalism, in other words, is hopeful rather than descriptive, and the incongruence of reality with it does not so much refute as confirm it. Yet the underlying problem of an unwarranted claim to universality in Heschel’s theology can also be put in a more telling and sophisticated manner to which it is more difficult to respond. This reserve is exactly that which was articulated in another context by Paul Ricœur in “Expérience et langage dans le discours religieux,” part of a collection of essays on phenomenology and theology.58 Ricœur’s observation is that any phenomenological study of religion faces the obstacle that a claim to uncover the generalized attitudes and emotions of religious experience must somehow take account of the fact that the immediacy of these experiences is always mediated through language, and therefore through cultural and historical factors as well. He draws from this observation three consequences. The first is that one must give up the goal of a phenomenology of universal religious experience, contenting oneself with tracing the hermeneutical structures of a particular religious tradition. Second, any hermeneutical structure which a specific religion manifests cannot be taken as universally applicable, except through a cautious step-by-step process of analogy which seeks points of contact with other traditions. Third, the idea of a general phenomenology of religion remains only a hypothetical idea at the horizon of such study, a goal which invites interreligious dialogue and “hospitality” but which remains elusively beyond our grasp. As if to demonstrate the complexities inherent in trying to generalize from the contingencies of a specific tradition, Ricœur turns his attention to the JudæoChristian context, which he points out is caught in the enigma of several interlocking hermeneutical circles. The first circle revolves around Word and Scripture, in that Scripture is taken to be the unique access to the Word of God, yet one knows that identification only through Scripture itself: “The Word is taken for the foundation of Scripture, and Scripture for the place where the Word is manifested.”59 This textual circle is itself inscribed in a larger one, which is the relation between Word/Scripture and the ecclesial community. In this case, the circle is derived from the fact that it is the community which draws its identity as the people of God from Scripture, yet it is the community which identifies the Scriptures as inspired: “One can designate the circle as that of the inspired word and the interpreting and confessing community, by virtue of which there is established between the one and the other a relation of mutual

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election.”60 Finally, there is a third circle which encompasses the other two, namely that the believing individual is most often made part of the cultural and religious community by the chances of birth, yet the believer is asked to embrace it as though it were a unique and personal choice: “Such is the existential circle: a chance transformed into destiny by a continual choice.”61 The question which Ricœur leaves open based on this discussion is how a religious tradition, informed by such a series of hermeneutical circles as these, can open itself to an encounter with other traditions in an effective communication. Or, one might add, how can a religious tradition open itself to an encounter with traditions of thought and experience which are not religious at all, but secular and agnostic? Turning this critique of religious phenomenology toward Heschel, one might make the observation that it touches upon his work in two distinct ways. First, the principal difficulty his theology faces results exactly from the attempt to correlate a particular religious tradition with universal religious understandings—a project which Ricœur warns is infeasible. In Heschel’s case, however, the problem seems to be not so much one of moving from the particular to the general as it is the inverse: moving from a universal apprehension of the ineffable to the specificity of Jewish faith. Friedman identifies this difficulty as the central problem Heschel’s theology faces, saying “no particular religion can ever be justified in general.”62 The difficulty stems from the fact that in one aspect, his theology attempts a linear progression (from a sense of wonder, through the experience of awe, to the intuition of the ineffable, resulting finally in an awareness of covenanted relationship to the God of the Hebrew Bible), which at the crucial transition from a universal intuition to a specific faith is forced to rely on prophetic revelation to make the link. Once Heschel appeals to the specific textual record of that revelation in the Hebrew Bible, the argument has moved from the level of the universal to the contextual. This point of transition, which is in essence the move from Heschel’s depth theology to dogmatic theology, falls prey to Ricœur’s criticism that all religious insights are ultimately bound linguistically to a particular tradition and cannot be universalized. Yet one could also make the argument that the question is not simply one of jumping from generalized to particular conclusions, for Heschel’s phenomenology runs on two parallel tracks which remain in communication with one another: on one side, there is the generalized progression from wonder to a sense of the ineffable, and on the other, the particular experience of piety which as Heschel uses it is always grounded in Jewish experience. These two tracks inform and respond to each other, so that Heschel’s theology is never entirely enclosed within the limitations of its own cultural base, nor left entirely open-ended in an abstract consideration of human religiosity. Piety responds to the experience of the ineffable, and the experience of the ineffable is conditioned by an attitude of piety. In his study of Thomas Merton, Christopher Pramuk has made great advantage of Newman’s concept of the religious imagination, put in dialogue with Heschel’s poetic language, to explore precisely this question of the relationship between the universal and particular.63 As Pramuk reads him, Newman was intent to resist what he regarded as the overdomination of theology by the methodologies of the positive sciences, which results in a presumption that only that can be held to be true, which can logically

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and empirically be demonstrated to be so.64 Noting the piety of children, the poor, and the busy “who can have true Faith, yet cannot weigh the evidence,” Newman concludes that “evidence is not the simple foundation on which Faith is built.”65 In contrast to such foundationalism, Newman sought to establish a middle way between the rationalism of the empiricists, and the evidentialism of biblical literalists. For him, the first stratum of religious knowledge is the individual conscience, which presents to our judgment the intuition that the world is meaningful because of an underlying moral structure. From this basic concept, Newman says, we move to an awareness that these moral demands lead us to a presence that is their source: the presumption of this universal presence becomes the basis for religious reflection rather than the Cartesian presumption of doubt. From this beginning, Newman understands the development of faith to be not the result of a single leap, nor of rational argument, nor of irrefutable evidence, but rather as the gradual accumulation of impressions, experiences, and probabilities through what Newman calls “the illative sense,” or an inferential instinct. Pramuk defines this sense as a capacity of the human imagination for a “dynamic, selective, and holistic manner of appropriating reality.” Religious certitude, then, is for Newman like a cable made up of many strands, “each feeble, yet together as sufficient as an iron rod.” Not only is such certainty an interweaving of any number of sources of knowledge, but its cumulative effect is stronger than the sum of its parts: “an assemblage of probabilities separately insufficient for certainty, but when put together, irrefragable.”66 Several points need to be emphasized about Newman’s account of the epistemo­ logical sources of religious faith. One is that it relies on an interior sense of presence (or transcendence) that is prereflective, but which forms the basis for the assessment of other suppositions, ideas, and experiences. In this regard, it bears a close resemblance to Heschel’s own program of depth theology. Second, the religious imagination, as Pramuk says, “spirals around two elemental experiences: first, the wordless but vivid sense of God’s presence in the conscience, memory, ‘true self,’ or seat of the soul, an experience presumed open to all; and second, the experience of God’s love and mercy poured out in history. . . . These two experiences, both personal and communal at once, spring forth in and from a polyphonic range of social forms, languages, and practices that make up [religious] life.”67 The significance of this schema, which Pramuk describes as itself phenomenological in nature, is that it introduces both universal and particular elements into religious consciousness: the intuitive sense of presence is to be found across cultural and religious boundaries, whereas the explicit doctrinal commitments that are gradually associated with that intuition are specific to the historical circumstances of a given religious tradition as they are experienced in community. Pramuk’s particular interest is that he identifies Merton as an exemplar of one who had come to embody the intersection of these diverse elements within himself. On one hand, Merton was deeply aware that there “lives a hidden memory and experience of God that, whether or not we are conscious of it, binds everything together across all distances, cultures, physical landscapes, and times.” Yet at the same time, he was also conscious that the memory of God by other peoples and traditions is also “integral in the life story of God.” Merton, in other words, was able to live the particularity of Christian faith with an openness to other forms of religious commitment, because he saw underneath them a common

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pattern of intuitive apprehension that cannot be denied or suppressed, because of its very universality. So since piety is both personal and communal at the same time, it partakes of both an indeterminate preconceptual sense of transcendence, and the unique historical forms in which that transcendence is given concrete expression. The consequence is not only an appreciation for religious pluralism, but also an expectation of its necessity because of the historicity of a community’s encounter with God: piety is brought into the universal without compromising its particularity. Like all the dots on the circumference of a circle, each determined by its equidistance from the center, yet each also unique in the particularity of its own location, so too are religions related to a common center, but diversely situated. As Heschel himself put it, “In this eon diversity of religions is the will of God.”68 Indeed, Friedman reports that Heschel believed he had in fact provided the conceptual link between a general philosophy of religion and a specialized philosophy of Judaism in his concept of time in The Sabbath, an idea clearly rooted in Jewish piety, where he says that it is through attachment to holy events and their continual remembrance in time that human beings find an attachment to God.69 Heschel’s specific argument runs like this: turning one’s attention through religious observance from the results of creation (given in space) to the mystery of creation (given in time), holy observances such as the Sabbath invest all moments with a sanctifying awareness of “the holy dimension.” This connection is formed because the observances link ordinary, mundane activities that are carried out in space (such as work or sleep) with the extraordinary events which reveal the presence of the divine in time (such as Eden or Sinai). Or, on a more personal level, one could say that religious observance links the individual to those moments of transcendence which occur in one’s personal life as well, bridging the ordinariness of most days with the rare moments of extraordinary insight and conversion. Religious experiences happen in time, Heschel asserts, and it is not the spatial location that is significant but the event of insight. Such transcendent moments are always accessible through the observance of those religious acts which refer to these experiences: religious practices thus sanctify all of time by recalling those special moments of time in which the holy was revealed. Heschel might well have referred Friedman to God in Search of Man for a fuller explanation of his concept of time, and for a more rigorous answer to the problem of how to move from a general philosophy of religion to a specific faith tradition. In two key chapters, “About the Meaning of God” and “A Religion of Time,” Heschel situates his theology in an existentialist context, making oblique reference to the work of Paul Tillich, while also differentiating his own concept of God from Tillich’s idea of “ultimate concern.”70 Heschel and Tillich shared a concern that the study of religion had tended to be reduced to some psychological aspect of human life rather than the depth dimension of the spiritual life (cf. Tillich’s essay, “Religion as a Dimension of Man’s Life”). The existentialist shape of Heschel’s theology reflecting this concern has been noted by other commentators, especially his critique of rational objectivity and the depersonalization found in modern society. Friedman in particular places Heschel in the context of Camus, Tillich, and Heidegger, pointing out his insistence that only the concrete, personal mode of human existence can make of ideas and doctrines something congruous with human experience.71 Rothschild also notes a similarity

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between Heschel’s correlation of ancient teachings with basic human questions and Tillich’s own “method of correlation” which “explains the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence.”72 The more specific point which Heschel seeks to make in reference to Tillich, however, is to distance himself from the idea of God as “man’s ultimate concern,” fearing that it tends to make God only a symbol of humanity’s preoccupations. If we follow this reaction through its various permutations in Heschel’s work, we will arrive at a clearer picture of how he understands himself to have made a link between his generalized phenomenology of religious experience and the particularity of Jewish experience—and hence of religious understanding. In the chapter on the meaning of God in God in Search of Man, Heschel begins by noting that at the minimum, the word “God” refers to an “ultimacy,” yet it is not the ultimacy of bearing the highest of human concerns, but of “a Being beyond which no other exists or is possible.”73 Heschel refuses to hear in this statement an assertion that God is absolute (in the sense of being devoid of life or freedom): to affirm that God is a being at the very least implies that God is not inferior to human being, or in other words, it implies that God is alive. Heschel does not, therefore, think it appropriate to define God in a Tillichian manner as “a name for that which concerns man ultimately,”74 for God is a living reality who confronts human beings existentially and exteriorly and not merely in terms of their personal concern. Hearkening back to his conceptual reversal of objectivity and subjectivity in the divinehuman encounter, Heschel asserts that it is God’s concern for humanity which evokes religious consciousness, and not the reverse: humanity’s ultimate concern is often limited to its own ego, a self-referential ultimate concern which has to be broken by an encounter with God. Making this same point in the essay on “The Nature of Jewish Theology” (again responding to Tillich without specifically naming him), Heschel wrote, “The supreme issue is not whether in the infinite darkness there is a being of grandeur that is the object of man’s ultimate concern, but whether the reality of God confronts us as a pathos—God’s ultimate concern with good and evil—or whether God is mysteriously present in the event of history.”75 Heschel is reacting here to a wider implication of Tillich’s theology than the specific question of ultimacy. In particular, he is intent to resist Tillich’s notion that God is alive “symbolically,” by which Tillich means that since there is no distinction between potentiality and actuality in God, one cannot speak of God as living in a nonsymbolic sense of the word, “life.” For Tillich, God can be said to be alive “in so far as he is the ground of life.”76 To Heschel, such an assertion vitiates the concept of God of the potential for real relational engagement with human beings, hiding God behind a veil of impersonal abstraction. (Heschel does not, however, seem to wrestle very deeply with Tillich’s overall concept of God, for although Tillich denies that God is “alive” in a literal sense, he does not strictly speaking rob God of personality. Analogous to his statement that God is alive only in a very particular sense of the word, he also says that God is “personal” not in the sense that God is a person, but in the sense that God is “the ground of everything personal and that he carries within himself the ontological power of personality.”77 Heschel’s reading seems to rely more on isolated slogans lifted from Tillich than on a careful analysis of the text’s nuancing of its own position.) At any rate, as Merkle has pointed out in a discussion of Heschel’s notion

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of the personal nature of God, Heschel is always at pains to defend the subjectivity of God, for he regards it as the origin and focus of the pathos by which God engages human beings through history, and in this sense his analogical emphasis is quite different from Tillich’s “symbolic” notion of God’s life which tends to “subtract the subject.”78 Moreover, Heschel is determined to locate the origin of the religious question in quite a different place than Tillich. For Tillich, a human being, aware of his finitude and the extinction in death which it implies, looks for the infinitude “from which he is separated, and for which he is longing.”79 Thus, “it is the finitude of being which drives us to the question of God.”80 The mood dictated by this starting point, in a typical existentialist fashion, is to begin from a perspective of anxiety and alienation: it is the fear of nothingness that causes human beings to search for God. For Heschel, however, it is not the fear of nothingness that evokes the question of God, but rather the encounter with the inexplicable abundance of being. Quoting (but again without citing) Tillich’s statement on finitude as the origin of our quest for God, Heschel responds in The Prophets that on the contrary, it is “the grandeur and mystery of all being” that opens us to God.81 Finitude is not, for Heschel, the crux of the problem. Instead, the ultimate issue is one of meaning, for while “there is no stigma in being a finite creature,” the fact that we exist at all implies the challenge of how we are to live in a manner compatible with the mystery of being. The variation in starting point for Heschel and Tillich—wonder and awe in the first case, anxiety and alienation in the other—is reflected in the use to which each thinker puts the phenomenological method. Tillich begins his exploration of “The Reality of God” with a phenomenological description of the meaning of the word, “god.” Taking a universalist perspective that reaches uniformly across all religious traditions, he arrives at the conclusion that, “the meaning of ‘God’ in every religion” can be given as the following: “Gods are beings who transcend the realm of ordinary experience in power and meaning, with whom men have relations which surpass ordinary relations in intensity and significance.”82 The significance of this definition is that it supports Tillich’s larger conclusion that gods are “expressions of ultimate concern,” for they are found to embody the true and the good, to be superior expressions of power and meaning, and to transcend the cleavage between objectivity and subjectivity. Human beings, existing in a state of alienation from the infinite ground of being, seek to attach themselves to this expression of ultimacy by speaking of a “relation” to God—a relation which oscillates between an image of God responding to the needs of humanity and of God remaining obscured in an absolute otherness and detachment (a tension which Tillich relates to Otto’s description of the experience of the holy as both tremendum and fascinosum). The key aspect of this analysis is that the object of its investigation is a distinctly noncontextual human religiosity, that is, a generalized concept of the religious individual apart from any particularity given by participation in a specific religious tradition. In light of Ricœur’s warning that such universalist investigations risk an artificial separation from the linguistic and cultural roots of authentic religion, Tillich’s result is predictably devoid of any concrete encounter with a divine subjectivity, seeming to project instead an extension of human needs and desires onto God, more so than reflecting a divine challenge from God to human beings.

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Heschel, on the other hand, by keeping his phenomenological analysis always rooted in the concrete experience of piety, reaches quite a different conclusion, which will return us to the question of time. For Heschel, God cannot be thought of as the abstract object of our ultimate concern, for our notion of God is not an idea which we reach by philosophical consideration, but through the individual experience of unique historical events. In the previously cited chapter on “A Religion of Time,” Heschel offers a simple litmus test of the difference between a conceptual and historical notion of God by quoting the scriptures: “The ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ ” he says, “is semantically different from a term such as ‘the God of truth, goodness and beauty”— and, we might add, of ultimate concern. The difference is that to refer to the specific historical personages of the Bible invokes the uniqueness of particular moments in time when God was known in an unprecedented revelation. Conceptual ideas imply a static, repeatable access to God, whereas revelation is given in unique, extraordinary events. Trained as we are in the predictability provided though scientific investigation, Heschel argues, we find it hard to accept the idea of an event which happens only once, and not all the time: “No other deficiency makes the soul more barren than the lack of a sense for the unique.”83 Scientific thought, Heschel contends, conditions us to be most sensitive to the realm of space, where objects can be encountered in uniform patterns of behavior. In the realm of time, however, uniqueness asserts itself emphatically, for “what happened once will never happen again in the same sense.” One can hear in this insistence Dilthey’s influence on Heschel’s thinking, for Dilthey had himself stressed that for the understanding of the complex evolution of events in history, categories of understanding distinct from the natural sciences are necessary. In a line which reads almost as a direct gloss on Dilthey, Heschel writes, “Unique categories are necessary for the understanding of history, since that which is individual cannot be comprehended in terms of generalities. The category of the general is the key to the knowledge of the world of space; the category of the individual is the key to the understanding of the world of time.”84 Piety, then, comes to the forefront once again in the context of the historical nature of religion, for piety is the link between the ordinary progression of human living, and the unique, unrepeatable events of revelation (be they of biblical proportions or the more private moments of religious insight which are part of an individual’s experience). Piety is a means of attachment to those moments when the reality of God is overwhelmingly apparent, when we feel ourselves confronted and inspired to respond. So, piety provides an essential link in the evolution of understanding, for it connects our contemporary struggle to understand with the foundational experiences of insight which are the object of our reflective consideration. Piety rests on the presumption that not all moments are alike: in religious experience, there is a hierarchy of moments in which some disclose the divine proximity while others obscure it. Piety, as a faithful adherence to patterns of behavior premised on the divine revelation, allows one to live in the presence of the moments of insight even when they have passed, and even when the present moment is blank; piety carries the clarity of understanding which one only rarely achieves into the moments when uncertainty and doubt reassert themselves. For Heschel, then, attachment to God is not the result of an idea—an ultimate concern—but rather it is garnered from events, moments of insight. Even “the ultimate

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question” (the question about God) is not one which is always and everywhere available: it arises in specific instances which are experienced as events of God’s initiative toward us. Only within the context of such moments can an authentic examination of religious consciousness be made: “It is, therefore, necessary to understand the inner logic of the situation, the spiritual climate in which it exists, in order to comprehend what the ultimate question implies. It is a situation in which we are challenged, aroused, stirred by the sublime, the marvel, the mystery and the Presence. We do not choose to raise the question, we are compelled.”85 So for Heschel, an abstracted notion of God as our “ultimate concern,” based upon an indiscriminate examination of human religiosity, is an inadequate rendering of the content of piety, for piety can only be understood in “the spiritual climate in which it exists.” This description of the specificity of piety’s insights leads us into Heschel’s attitude toward religious pluralism and the need for interfaith relationship. As we have noted, his most well-known text in this regard is the essay, “No Religion Is an Island,” which makes an impassioned plea for the various religions (and the Abrahamic ones in particular) to see one another as spiritual allies in an increasingly nihilistic world. Most telling for our purposes here is his inclusion of an ancient rabbinic proclamation: “Pious men of all nations have a share in the life to come.” Although Heschel specifically identifies a number of commonalities between Judaism and Christianity, he locates the essential point of intersection between any differing religions as an attachment to the holy, which we have seen is experienced at the level of depth theology. Dogmatic commitments which are the product of theology per se are what separate religions; these must be respected as the particularities that result from the unique historical events that shape each tradition. But underneath these divergences, there is a common experience of transcendence to which a pious person of any tradition will bear witness. The underlying preconceptual foundation of piety, therefore, becomes the strongest meeting point between religions, even when the content and form of those pieties as they are lived out in distinct cultural settings may sharply diverge. Piety both resonates with the universal experience of transcendence, and at the same time, holds within itself the particularity of historically conditioned religious experience. For Jews and Christians, then, the “supreme issue is today not halacha for the Jew or the Church for the Christian—but the premise underlying both religions, namely, whether there is a pathos, a divine reality concerned with the destiny of man which mysteriously impinges upon history . . .” If we were to add a summary remark to this discussion, it could be this: that the link between the religious experience of transcendence (whether it is of biblical or personal proportions) and the particular expression of that experience through a specific faith tradition is made in piety. Piety thus becomes the site of a correlative understanding between a generic experience of transcendence and a particular structure of belief, because it is both the response to and the precondition for transcendent insight. And yet, at the same time, piety is necessarily embedded in the “historical contingencies” which characterize any religious tradition, taking on concrete forms which are almost arbitrarily determined by the cultural and historical developments within that particular tradition. As Friedman records Heschel saying, “Once I say to you I preserve

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my sense of mystery more by putting on tefillin every day, I do not need to say, ‘Why tefillin?’ ” So to return to Ricœur’s words of caution on a phenomenological study of religion, we can take note that we have arrived in the middle of just the sort of hermeneutical circle he describes, where piety both evokes and responds to experiences of transcendence. Yet to be caught in such a circle is not itself a bad thing: the hermeneutical circles which Ricœur identifies do not seem intended as a debilitating critique of the phenomenological method in theology, but rather as a caution against an overly universal application of the results. In fact, the circles that he identifies are dynamic ones, giving life to the interrelationship between the constitutive components of word and scripture, text and community, chance and destiny. The circles are therefore analogous to the polarities which we have seen Heschel to be at such pains to emphasize as essential to the theological project: the death of a tradition would be in the resolution of these tensions rather than in their ongoing inspiration of a reflective piety. If Heschel is to be faulted, then, it is not on the score of articulating piety within the circular relationship of transcendent experience and faith. Because his methodological maxim is to “penetrate the consciousness of the pious man to conceive of the reality behind it,” he can never lose sight of the fact that a pious consciousness is deeply embedded in linguistic and cultural influences. And so this contextuality necessarily places the study of piety within the rotating hermeneutical circles about which Ricœur instructs us. When Heschel writes in Man Is Not Alone, “all words that hint at the ineffable are understandable to everybody,” he may at first appear to have resolved artificially the circularity of a faithful response to transcendent experience into a single, universal apprehension of the ineffable. Yet the corrective parallelism of his phenomenology of piety always reasserts itself—a tension which gives rise to the unending process of understanding.

IV  An evocation of sapiential spirituality The emphasis upon understanding as a product of pious living is not, for Heschel, limited to the experience of the ordinary believer, but also shapes the more formal exercise of theological discourse. The convergence of pious living with theological reflection in the notion of understanding is a significant dimension of Heschel’s consideration of both elements, and it is worth exploring this correlation in order to perceive more clearly its particular theological implications. We have already noticed that Heschel’s conception of Jewish theology is unusual in that he redefined many of its concerns and methodology; in discussing the polar nature of Heschel’s thinking, for example, we noted his emphasis on the creative dynamic between halacha and aggada as one such redefinition of a primary parameter of a Jewish theology. In an address on “Jewish Theology” which Heschel gave in 1968, he directly takes up this question of the nature of theology, using the tension between halacha and aggada as the starting point for a consideration of theology as a form of “understanding” rather than as the development of theories or ideas about God.86

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In his address on the nature of theology, Heschel attributes the loss of appreciation for aggada to the fact that Jewish theology has through the ages been corrupted by its “Hellenization,” a process long in the making but which resulted in a “non-Jewish” philosophy that blocks the way to a true biblical theology. Heschel gives as an example of this Hellenization the neglect of the idea of the Shekhinah, or divine presence. For him, it lies at the heart of the central idea of a Jewish theology that “God is in search of man.” Yet a more Hellenized attitude pushed the idea of the divine presence to the sidelines, instead discussing God in terms of omnipotence and perfection; even Maimonides, under the influence of western ideas, left the idea of the Shekhinah out of his list of core Jewish dogmas. Heschel believes that without such an idea as the indwelling of God, one misses the core biblical conviction of the infinite importance of human beings, for one overlooks the destiny which the Bible envisions for human beings to be partners with God in redemption. This idea, he insists, is distinctly biblical, not to be found in any other religious or philosophical system, and it supports the fundamental but paradoxical concept that God needs humanity. “If I had to make a statement about God, one that is fundamental in Judaism, it would be that God is in search of man. . . . It is a paradoxical formula, to be sure. It is not a Hellenistic formula. It is a biblical formula. It is a rabbinic formula.” Hence, Heschel defines his life’s purpose as a resistance to the corrupting influences of pan-halachism and westernization: May I say to you personally that this has been my major challenge, ever since I began working on my dissertation; that is: How to maintain a Jewish way of thinking? This was the major concern and the major thesis of my dissertation Die Prophetie. Since that day I consider this to be my major effort. It is not an easy enterprise.87

The point to be made is that for Heschel, theology is an act of understanding, that is to say, it is a process of dwelling within the polarities which define its parameters but which prohibit the advancement of any one aspect of theology in a single generalized principle. In his address on the nature of theology, he argued that “Understanding is an act. It is a slow process. The intention is to receive, register, record, reflect, and reiterate. . . . The prophets had no idea of God. What they had was understanding.”88 Just as we have already observed above in Heschel’s analysis of understanding, here too he emphasizes that theological understanding embraces a “fullness of what transpires” in forming an idea. The danger is to cut off the process prematurely, “regarding the part as the whole.” Heschel resists any such seeking after one idea of God that is sufficient or stable; ideas of God are subject to the ongoing evolution of God’s historical search for humanity. The “living theology” of his Hasidic youth approached his ideal more closely than anything else, for it was a continual renewal and adaptation of basic insights within the framework of dynamic polar tensions. It was, in other words, what we have called the lived hermeneutic of piety, or what might be called in this context a lived theology. It is the “way of thinking” which Heschel identified as his life’s work to describe. Seen in light of Heschel’s ideal of an ongoing evolutionary process of understanding, his theology has sometimes been labeled “evocative,” in the sense that it is meant not only to analyze religious experience, but also to evoke and rekindle those experiences themselves. James Hyman, in his study of meaning in Heschel, is particularly insistent

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on this point: “[Heschel] believed that if he could evoke a sense of ineffability through his writings, then the act of reading his work could serve as a means of communicating the idea he was espousing.”89 Overall, Hyman’s reading of Heschel is that he was most intent on finding a means to lead the Jewish community back to a devout observance, and that offering the existential experience of meaningfulness through an encounter with the ineffable was the means to do so. His prose, Hyman concludes, is at the service of this goal: to convince his readers to abandon their worldview and engage in the divine-human encounter which “would be accomplished by the literary technique he embraced: evocative prose.”90 While Hyman’s point is not without foundation, a more sophisticated treatment of a similar perspective is offered by Edward Kaplan in his detailed analysis of Heschel’s writing style in Holiness in Words. Heschel’s rhetorical strategy, Kaplan writes, “aims to convert the reader’s consciousness from egocentered to theocentric (or prophetic) thinking.”91 The style adopted, therefore, is “meant to stimulate intuition,” evoking “what he called ‘the ineffable’—intimations of the transcendent that cannot be expressed in language.”92 Kaplan uses a variety of words and phrases to describe this style—multilayered, polyphonic, esthetically gratifying, ecstatic evocation, rigorous sequencing—providing detailed analyzes of certain texts to demonstrate how Heschel leads his reader through a gradual distancing of oneself from previously held views to an openness toward the transcendent. Moreover, Kaplan points out that the newly emerging theocentric consciousness of the reader must be nourished on figurative language, lest it fall prey to the very literalisms from which Heschel is trying to save it. So while a philosophy of religion is the skeletal frame of Heschel’s thought, “poetry is the flesh and blood.”93 Poetry often clinches the argument for Heschel where discursive language begins to run thin, with the result that his language becomes itself an event which overcomes the subject/object split which so often belies our full apprehension of the meaning of things. The attentiveness with which Kaplan (himself trained as a literary critic) reads Heschel in this light is impressive, even illustrative of Dresner’s remark that one should study Heschel “like a page of the Talmud, that is, weighing with care each sentence, each phrase, each word.”94 Despite the detailed and insightful analyzes which Kaplan provides, however, someone approaching Heschel from a more strictly theological perspective may be left unsettled by such a strong emphasis upon the literary character of his works, evident though it may be. To read Heschel as primarily “evocative” seems to leave too much of the theological content of his work to the side, although certainly many passages can be interpreted under that rubric. A contrasting approach might be made in reference to two works in Christian theology, Ellen Charry’s By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine95 and Mark McIntosh’s Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology.96 Each of these works, though approaching its subject matter in a very different manner, seeks to address a perceived weakness in modern academic theology: namely, that it has become separated from its foundation in the spiritual lives of real, active Christian men and women, and thereby neither speaks authentically from or to these roots. Heschel, in his own manner, was working from a similar perception that Jewish theology had also become dislodged from its spiritual base. So, if we are correct to think that these three thinkers share a common

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concern to encourage the grounding of theology in religious living, the insights and methodology of the two works in Christian theology may shed some light on the larger theological purposes of Heschel’s own work a generation or two earlier. Charry begins with an examination of patristic sources which she argues exhibit an emphasis on “sapiential theology,” that is, a theology which was devoted both to knowing God and attachment to God: “Sapience is engaged knowledge that emotionally connects the knower to the known.”97 This theological orientation was based on the conviction that human life can best flourish when it is lived knowing and loving God; the consequences are a moral transformation in which the virtues of Christian living are acquired and nourished.98 Charry uses the word “aretegenic” to describe this theology (meaning “conducive to virtue”), since it was given over to the encouragement of this moral transformation in the believer. She offers examples from several New Testament, patristic, and later sources to illustrate this theme, including Matthew, Paul, Athanasius, Basil, Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin. In Charry’s account, however, theology gradually lost its moorings to the sapiential tradition, moving instead toward a concern for a rational defense of faith, a process greatly exacerbated in the modern period: Sapiental theology waned with modernity. Theology came to be thought of as the intellectual justification of the faith, apart from the practice of the Christian life. The wisdom of God has ceased to function in the church as the foundation of the good life. Theology is no longer expected to be a practical discipline, burdened as it is in the modern period with the awkwardness of speaking of God at all. Theology has become preoccupied with considerations of the conditions of knowledge.99

Her thesis—plea would not be too strong a word—is that theology must become reconnected to devotional life, cultivating the skill of living in the believing community as well as engaging in the intellectual art of public argument in defense of belief. She describes this dimension as the “pastoral function” of theology, whereby doctrine becomes something that is practiced from within, not merely given an exterior assent, and which thereby performs a “therapeutic” function in the old sense of the term, meaning the “cure” of the soul.100 In a similar vein, McIntosh examines in his book a supposed divorce between theology and spirituality which, he claims, threatens the integrity of both. Also beginning with the patristic age, McIntosh traces a gradual separation of theology from its roots in the experience of the believing community: theology ought to be, he says, the expression of what the community experiences as the impression of God’s presence.101 This conviction is the result of his earlier study of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in Hans Urs von Balthasar, where he observes a type of theological method which is born out of a consideration of the experience of the saints’ participation in the divine life. This theology “from within” McIntosh describes as a “hagiographical method,” by which he means a deliberate effort “to seek for the plausibility and intelligibility of theology in correlation with the believing, obedient self-giving of faithful men and women.”102 While certain theologians such as von Balthasar exhibit this integration of spirituality and theology, McIntosh nevertheless fears that on a larger plain theology tends to be detached from

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the experience of the believing community. The consequences of such a separation of theological reflection from spiritual experience, he warns, are dangerous on both sides. Spirituality, without the critical eye of theology, is prone to become disoriented, to lapse into an individuality independent of its communal basis, and then to succumb to the idols, compulsions, or fears of the individual. Theology, on the other hand, when divorced from spirituality, risks losing the skill of speaking the language of faith, falling into the trap of talking about an altogether different god than the one encountered and believed in by the faith community: So while it is very true that theology provides an indispensable critical function for spirituality, it is no less true that spirituality affords a radically critical perspective equally necessary for the health of theology. . . . The critical function which spirituality serves for theology is not a matter simply of adding one more source for theology to consider; . . . but a matter of exposing theology to the profound questioning that animates the very heart of the community’s struggle to be faithful.103

Consequently, McIntosh enters a plea similar to Charry’s for theology to regain an orientation to the lived experience of the believing community, reclaiming doctrine as a representation of the encounter with the mystery of God, while spirituality takes its rightful place as part of the public experience of that communal event. How, then, might these two obviously related works in Christian theology shed some light on Heschel’s own theological program? What is significant is that both works share a discontent with the current practice of theology—at least in the American context, where the academic study of religion is often far removed from the life of believing communities. At one level, the observation can be made that Heschel shares this concern, and that his work repeatedly attacks theology separated from belief: “One of the fatal errors of conceptual theology has been the separation of the acts of religious existence from the statements made about it. Ideas of faith must not be studied in total separation from the moments of faith.”104 Heschel’s determination to avoid such a separation becomes evident in the opening chapter of God in Search of Man, one of his most explicit expositions of his underlying methodology, where he identifies “depth theology” as the essence of his program.105 Given that there are two primary foci available to a theological study—the act of believing or the content of belief—he clearly identifies his terrain as the former, which is in essence the act of piety. His primary concern, he says, is not “to analyze concepts but to explore situations,” and the specific situations which interest him are the “concrete events, acts, insights, of that which is a part of the pious man.” His goal, then, is to reach behind the formal religious formulas such as belief and ritual to the source of these phenomena, the “substratum out of which belief arises.” As a result, he gives as the organizing theme of his work the study of “the act of believing.” The method for such an investigation, as we have seen, is that of depth theology, and its context is religion’s “natural habitat of faith and piety.” Heschel’s ambition for depth theology is most explicitly explored in a lecture he gave as a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in  1960.106 He said that he envisioned this program as a recovery of the questions which precede theological formulation, laying open the inquiry of what happens within an individual

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to bring about faith. Thus, depth theology examines individuals in relation to specific moments of experience, when their whole person is involved in thinking, feeling, and responding to a confrontation with “ultimate reality.” The reaction of the individual to such critical moments as these is, Heschel contends, critical in understanding the development of faith. Although he does not make the point directly, what Heschel is in effect proposing here is that such moments be subjected to analysis to reveal their essential content and form, parallel to his study of the experience of the prophet in the ecstatic moment of prophecy. Heschel himself describes the effects of such study as “evocative” (supporting Kaplan’s reading of his work),107 yet the results of such an analysis are also more complex in that they involve the layered results of a phenomenological analysis analogous to those Perlman identifies in Heschel’s study of prophecy. Moreover, Tucker observes that the essential structure of such an inquiry “begins with the phenomenon of religious belief and seeks to create empathy and identification with it,” so that the experience of reading is less cognitive than empathetic. Tucker sees this as the same pattern that also governs Heschel’s Heavenly Torah, which although is ostensibly a historical work in rabbinic studies, also engages this evocative style: Heschel does not set out to pinpoint with the historian’s precision the genesis of elements of rabbinic theology; rather, he takes those elements as given and invites the reader to see them over and over again, refracted through the generations right down to the present moment.108

Heschel does not, however, disparage the role of dogmatic theology, despite his own emphasis on depth theology and relative lack of attention to a more dogmatic program, for he understands it to be the means by which the rare moments of insight discovered through depth theology are preserved and made accessible in ordinary functional living. Not only that, but the insights uncovered by depth theology are “vague,” and so it is the task of theology “to establish the doctrines, to bring out coherence, and to find words compatible with the insights.” Yet Heschel is always worried that such formulations will become rigid and dominant, substituting formulas for understanding. Not surprisingly, Heschel’s articulation of the relation between the two regards them as a polarity which must always be maintained in dynamic tension: the polarity “of doctrine and insight, of dogma and faith, of ritual and response, of institution and the individual.” To give a summarial indication of the type of theology which Heschel proposes, to regard it as “sapiential” (in the manner that Charry uses the term) is one useful angle from which to consider it, for he clearly has in mind that the goal of theological reflection is the encouragement of the pious attachment of the individual to God through a knowing appreciation of God’s concern for humanity. Moreover, Charry’s primary concern is that a sapiential theology should have direct consequences for the spiritual transformation of the believer, with the practical result of encouraging the development of virtue. As we shall explore more fully in the next chapter, a key aspect of Heschel’s exploration of piety is to articulate this relationship between faith and action. Indeed, for him, the two are so inextricably linked that to consider them separately is already an artificial distinction: faith as agreement with the divine will necessarily

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receives its expression in holy deeds. While further comment on the relation of piety and virtue is reserved to the next chapter, it is worth noting here that Heschel’s rooting of theology in the study of piety naturally gives to it an “aretegenic” quality, for as we shall see, if piety results in the first instance in understanding the divine will, then subsequently it results in the virtues that allow us to pursue it. Viewed from another angle, Heschel might also be taken as an example of one whose methodology seeks to achieve just the sort of integration between mystical insight and theological exposition that McIntosh advocates. Some readers have interpreted Heschel as working within the tradition of natural theology, moving from an appreciation of the “wonder” we experience in the natural order toward an apology for the divine hand at work within it.109 Yet there is a prior phenomenon lying behind Heschel’s description of wonder, and that is the pious consciousness which perceives it to be an intimation of the divine. Holding Heschel’s phenomenological method in mind, one realizes that it is not the natural world itself which is the subject of his investigation, but a particular consciousness which perceives it through a uniquely shaped religious intentionality. Rather than the natural world being a starting point for his theology, Heschel begins with piety: it is the lens through which the world is seen with an attitude of wonder and awe. The example of the pious individual is what stirs Heschel’s curiosity to try to account for such a phenomenon, and it is the example of the consciousness of awe which he discovers therein which serves as his model of faith. Theology and spirituality, therefore, are intimately connected in his work, serving as a model of what McIntosh hopes for in Christian theology.110 Moreover, if piety is formative of the understanding which comes from a sympathetic attachment to God, then Heschel implicitly defines piety as one of the prerequisites for the practice of authentic theology itself. Since understanding comes only from personal engagement with the divine will, theology can only be practiced as a discipline by one who is involved in this kind of relationship (a characteristic Heschel carefully cultivated in himself): “Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method, who are able to find categories that mix with the unalloyed and forge the imponderable into unique expression.”111 Not only does Heschel root the subject matter of theology in piety—the lived experience of the believing individual—he also roots its methodology therein. His approach to the theological enterprise thus exhibits an especially close symbiosis between the experience of God and reflection about God, which is precisely the goal articulated by McIntosh in his study of mystical theology. So if it is true that the study of piety and its integrative mode of understanding is in effect Heschel’s point of departure, then that fact gives his theology a particular kind of grounding in the experience of the believing community. As a theologian, he is not seeking to construct abstracted ideas of God independent of the lived faith, nor is he even trying to give a systematic doctrinal order to the experience of God in the faith community. His subject is piety, seeking to draw directly from the experience of the pious individual the cognitive insights and moral commitments which such faithful living yields. It is in this sense that his oft-repeated intention finally congeals as a methodological strategy: that in penetrating the consciousness of the pious individual, we may perceive the reality behind it.

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Notes 1 Heschel, “The Vocation of the Cantor,” 246. 2 Susannah Heschel, Introduction to Heschel, MGSA, xx. 3 Susannah Heschel, “My Father,” in Kasimow and Sherwin, No Religion Is an Island, 29. 4 See, for example, Avraham Holtz’s article “Religion and the Arts in the Theology of A. J. Heschel,” Conservative Judaism 28/1 (1973): 27–39, or Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Poetics of Piety. 5 Heschel, MNA, 36. 6 Heschel, TP, 316. 7 Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 241. 8 Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. I, 197–201. 9 Heschel, MNA, 277. 10 Heschel, TP, 256. 11 Ibid., 257. 12 Heschel, “The Vocation of the Cantor,” 247. 13 Ibid., 243. 14 Heschel, MNA, 41. 15 Heschel, “Depth Theology,” 119. 16 Heschel, MNA, 8–9. 17 Heschel, GSM, 221. 18 Heschel incorporates in QG an address entitled “Toward an Understanding of Halacha,” which he gave in 1953 before the Central Conference of American Rabbis, in which he challenged many of the liberal assumptions of American Judaism. The address is reprinted in Heschel, MGSA, 127–45. The book also includes Heschel’s article “Symbolism and Jewish Faith,” op. cit., and a second address, “The Spirit of Jewish Prayer,” Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly of America, vol. 17 (1953): 151–215, reprinted in Heschel, MGSA, 100–45. 19 Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 75. 20 Heschel, QG, 118. 21 Ibid., 131. 22 Ibid., 13. 23 Heschel, MNA, 74. 24 Heschel, QG, 124. 25 Ibid., 126. 26 Heschel, GSM, 282. 27 Heschel, MNA, 183. 28 Heschel, GSM, 315. 29 Ibid., 314. 30 Ibid., 315. 31 Ibid., 310. 32 Ibid., 405. 33 Ibid., 313. 34 Heschel, MNA, 205. 35 Heschel, GSM, 75. 36 Heschel, MNA, 11ff.

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Heschel, GSM, 98. Ibid., 104. Heschel, MNA, 20. Ibid., 44. Heschel, GSM, 104. Heschel, MNA, 62. Ibid., 98. Heschel, GSM, 115–16. Heschel, MNA, 104. Heschel, GSM, 74. Ibid., 106. Heschel, MNA, 27. Ibid., 22. Heschel, GSM, 104. Ibid., 74. Heschel, MNA, 133. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 19–20. Heschel, GSM, 189. Abraham Heschel, “Choose Life!”, in Heschel, MGSA, 251. Originally published in Jubilee 13/9 (January 1966): 37–9. “Carl Stern’s Interview with Dr. Heschel,” originally broadcast on NBC-TV, 4 February 1973. Transcript reproduced in Heschel, MGSA, 395–412. Paul Ricœur, “Expérience et langage dans le discours religieux,” in Phénoménologie et théologie, ed. Jean-François Courtine (Paris: Criterion, 1992), 15–38. Ricœur, “Expérience et langage,” 22. Ibid. Ibid., 25. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 62–3. Christopher Pramuk, Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009). I am grateful to Edward Kaplan for directing me toward this book. Pramuk is here relying on Nicholas Madden, “Approaching Theology with Newman,” Irish Theological Quarterly 69 (December 2004): 323–36. John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 231, quoted in Pramuk, Sophia, 37. John Henry Newman, Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, eds. C. S. Dessain and T. Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), vol. 212, 146, quoted in Madden, “Approaching Theology with Newman,” 327. Pramuk, Sophia, 53. Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” 244. Abraham Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1951). That Heschel would use Tillich as a reference point is hardly surprising, given that at the time God in Search of Man was written, Tillich had just published the first volume of his Systematic Theology (1951), and was teaching at Union Theological Seminary— literally across the street from Heschel—where he remained until 1954 (one year before the publication of Heschel’s book) when he moved to Harvard Divinity School.

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71 Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel, 74. Interestingly, Heschel quotes Camus only to disagree with him, indicating the distance between their convictions despite similarities in mood: “According to Camus, ‘There is only one really serious philosophical problem: and that is suicide.’ May I differ and suggest that there is only one really serious problem: and that is martyrdom. Is there anything worth dying for?” Heschel, WM, 92. 72 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I: Reason and Revelation, Being and God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 59. See Rothschild, “Architect and Herald of a New Theology,” 57. 73 Heschel, GSM, 125. 74 Without giving the reference, Heschel is here quoting Tillich’s Systematic Theology, vol. I, 211. 75 Heschel, “The Nature of Jewish Theology,” 163. 76 Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, 242. 77 Ibid., 245. 78 Merkle, The Genesis of Faith, 101 and 249–50n. 106. 79 Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, 14. 80 Ibid., 166. 81 Heschel, TP, 266. 82 Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, 212. 83 Heschel, GSM, 202. 84 Ibid., 204–5. 85 Heschel, GSM, 130. 86 Abraham Heschel, “Jewish Theology,” in Heschel, MGSA, 154–63. Originally published in The Synagogue School 28/1 (1969): 4–18. 87 Heschel, “Jewish Theology,” 156. 88 Ibid., 162. 89 Hyman, “Abraham Heschel,” 75. 90 Ibid., 158. 91 Interestingly, Kaplan goes on in the very next sentence to say, “The result should be ‘piety’ . . ., a way of living that includes ‘faith’ and ‘action.’ Heschel’s own moral, theological, and political commitments flow from this ideal of piety.” Despite such a strong statement about the importance of piety, however, Kaplan leaves the idea relatively undeveloped, focusing more on the implications of the previous sentence regarding Heschel’s rhetorical style. There is a brief discussion of piety in the chapter on “Mysticism and Despair,” in which Kaplan observes that the pious person embodies the recentering of subjectivity in God, which translates into a “prophetic ethics.” Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 3. 92 Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 13. So, for example, Kaplan offers an analysis of a passage from Man Is Not Alone, describing it as a literary masterpiece for its “representation of mystical illumination.” Through a close reading of the text’s metaphors, rhythm, and vocabulary, Kaplan seeks to demonstrate how it accomplishes the reversal in the normal subject-object correlation that characterizes Heschel’s work. 93 Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 35. 94 Dresner, I Asked for Wonder, xiv. 95 Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, op cit. 96 Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). 97 Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 4.

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98 Interestingly, in an essay included in an issue of the Christian Century focusing on the experience of teaching theology in the classroom, Charry approvingly cites the model of Origen’s tutoring of Gregory Thaumaturgus in the manner of piety: “What Origen taught Gregory may be summed up as piety. This means he helped him live an upright life that longs for truly good things. He taught him not to be distracted from the study of that which lifts up the soul. And he did this through friendship.” Ellen Charry, “Growing into the Wisdom of God,” Christian Century 119/4 (13–20 February 2002): 21–2. 99 Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 5. 100 Charry uses the analogy of a medical cure for the pastoral function of theology and the attendant power of God as an agent for human transformation. Both require information, skilled judgment, and the cooperative trust that exist between the parties involved. Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 11–16. Interestingly, Heschel makes a similar implicit comparison, speaking of the “prophetic ingredient in the calling of a doctor.” Abraham Heschel, “The Patient as Person,” in Heschel, IF, 28. (Originally presented as a paper to the American Medical Association annual convention, 21 June 1964). Both authors see the practice of medicine, like theology, as an art whose primary focus is on the wholeness of the individual. 101 McIntosh, Mystical Theology, 11. 102 Mark McIntosh, Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in Hans Urs von Balthasar (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 29. McIntosh refers readers in particular to von Balthasar’s “Theology and Sanctity” in The Word Made Flesh: Explorations in Theology I [Eng. ed. of “Theologie und Heiligkeit,” in Verbum Caro, 1960], trans. A. V. Littledale, 2nd edn. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989). 103 McIntosh, Mystical Theology, 17. 104 Heschel, GSM, 8. 105 Heschel, GSM, 7–8. One might note in passing that Merkle’s study of Heschel, The Genesis of Faith, stresses depth theology as the governing subject matter of his thought. 106 Heschel, “Depth Theology.” 107 Heschel, “Theology,” 118. 108 Tucker, Preface and Acknowledgments to Heschel, HT, xxix. 109 Kasimow’s Divine-Human Encounter is particularly representative of this reading, where he sees the approach to God through the world as one of three themes in Heschel (revelation and holy deeds being the other two). He writes, “The approach to God through the world, through nature, was not emphasized by Rabbinic Judaism but was revived once again by Hasidism, which . . . played a most decisive role in shaping Heschel’s own thought.” Kasimow, Divine-Human Encounter, 22. 110 One might draw the distinction between the example McIntosh finds in von Balthasar of a “hagiographical method,” which relies on a consideration of the exceptional examples of spirituality provided by the saints, and Heschel’s phenomenology of piety, which probes the religious life of more ordinary individuals. Heschel, too, values the example of especially pious men and women, but he finds them not only in historically remote figures such as Maimonides, but also within the contemporary circle of his own family and colleagues. Perhaps it is this “ordinariness” which gives Heschel’s method its particularly accessible character, and which engaged him so actively on a personal level in the social issues of his own day. 111 Heschel, GSM, 8.

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Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mass of metaphysical and ethical crumbs. —Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion

I  The contours of Heschel’s ethical thought If one essential aspect of piety is its integrative understanding not only of God, but also of the relation of human being to the divine, then a second equally important aspect is how that understanding results in the formation of human character. Although Heschel’s writing is infused throughout with a consideration of the ethical dimensions of piety, to attempt a systematization would by itself be an artificial project, for Heschel is adamant that ethics is not a separate field of inquiry, but deeply embedded in the larger phenomenon of piety. Moreover, Heschel does not systematically approach the subject himself,1 but as we shall see, lets it develop naturally out of his investigation of the relationship between God and humanity. Rather than offering a developed ethical theory, therefore, Heschel’s writing on moral matters is more in the genre of either an exhortation or a meditation—a stylistic trait that will have its own influence on the shape of this chapter. In this sense, he perhaps makes the rhetorical move of foregoing “clarity for the sake of depth” which he observed in the Ashkenazic writers of Eastern European Jewry, in which the contours of thought were “often perplexingly entangled, . . . animated by inner wrestling and a kind of baroque emotion.”2 Our task here, therefore, must first be to establish the primary contours of the manner in which Heschel shapes the ethical question, before drawing any larger consequences from his moral thought. Heschel’s moral reflection bears a strong resemblance to the interest in “virtueethics” which has preoccupied much ethical thought, both religious and secular, in the last several decades. For Heschel, however, the idea of virtue is born out of piety, and so piety becomes his core ethical concept for it is through pious behavior that humanity responds to the transitive concern of God and thereby engages in its own ultimate purpose and meaning. In fact, Heschel was suspicious of ethics as a formal intellectual discipline, fearing that it tends to separate into the isolated categories of the “just” or the “good” questions of how one ought to live, whereas these questions are more appropriately considered within the total context of human life: “There is a boundless realm of living that, if it is not to be stultified, cannot be placed under the

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control of either ethics or jurisprudence. . . . Living cannot be treated piecemeal; it must be treated as a whole.”3 As we have seen in previous chapters, Heschel is always in dialogue with the tradition of western philosophy, sometimes overtly and sometimes more obliquely. In the case of the ethical dimensions of his theology, one of most frequent sources is Aristotle. Following Aristotle, Heschel argues that “the moral problem cannot be solved as a moral problem,” that is, the moral question cannot be isolated from the “total issue of man.”4 Based upon that presupposition, Heschel adopts an essentially Aristotelian attitude that ethics is more a matter of fostering an instinctively virtuous character in each individual, than it is of resolving the rightness or wrongness of specific actions. Heschel, then, sees ethical questions as significant not just in the extreme cases of absolute good and evil, but in the more quotidian issues of how to deal with humanity’s basic needs and activities—what he calls the neutral. So, for example, the emphasis in Jewish observance on the ritualization of eating elevates a mundane activity to the ethical plane, where it has the possibility of disclosing constitutive aspects of the relationship of responsibility both between individuals, and between a community and God. “What is first at stake in the life of man is not the fact of sin, of the wrong and the corrupt, but the neutral acts, the needs. Our possessions pose no less problem than our passions. The primary task, therefore, is not how to deal with evil, but how to deal with the neutral, how to deal with needs.”5 Heschel thus shares common ground with Aristotle’s search in the Nicomachean Ethics for an ethics embracing the totality of human experience, yet he remains more convinced than Aristotle of the need for an external form of objective ethical boundaries, given the proclivity of human nature toward selfishness. Moreover, Heschel distances himself from Aristotle’s goal of apathetic contemplation and insight, arguing instead that it is our passionate commitment to mercy and justice that God requires of us. So Heschel resists Aristotle’s assumption that “virtues cannot be ascribed to the Deity—not even acts of justice.”6 Such an apathetic conception of God in the end privileges contemplation over action—a concession which Heschel is not willing to make on either side of the divine-human partnership. A second primary source for Heschel’s ethical reflection is Kant, from whose theory of the rational perception of moral imperatives Heschel sharply distinguishes his own position. Such a rationally based ethical theory is inadequate generally, Heschel argues, for it fails to realize that mere knowledge of the right does not convince an individual to do it: Ethics expects man to consult his power of judgment, decide what action to take in light of general principles and faithfully carry out the wise decision. Thus, it not only underestimates the difficulty in applying general rules to particular situations, which are often intricate, perplexing and ambivalent, but also expects every man to combine within himself judicial and executive powers.7

Heschel maintains that “while telling us what we are fighting for, [such] ethical theory fails to tell us how to win the struggle; while telling us that we ought to do, it does not tell us how to achieve mastery over folly and madness.”8 In Heschel’s estimation, Kant’s fundamental question, “What ought I do?”, is a weak formulation because it separates “doing from the sheer being of the ‘I’. ” Rather, the ethical question is not somehow

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added to a person’s selfhood, but comes from taking the self as a problem: “The moral problem can be treated as a personal problem: How should I live the life that I am?”9 Contrary to Kant, Heschel understands his approach as “more radical, a metaethical approach,” in the sense that it deals not only with the morality of individual, isolated deeds, but also with all deeds under the question of “what is our right to act at all?”10 Or, as Heschel puts the problem in Who Is Man? (his most sustained anthropological study), “The primary problem is not how to endow particular deeds with meaning but rather how to live one’s total being, how to shape one’s total existence as a problem of meaning.”11 One notes in this last formulation of the ethical question that Heschel has shifted the emphasis from the rightness or wrongness of an act onto its ultimate meaning. Thus, “the moral deed is important not only because the community, for example, needs it. It is important because without it there is no grasp of what is human about my being human.”12 This emphasis is derived from Heschel’s anthropological stance, whereby he distinguishes humanity from the simple needs-satisfaction desired by animals: “Man insists not only on being satisfied but also on being able to satisfy, on being a need not only on having needs. Personal needs come and go, but one anxiety remains: Am I needed?”13 This anxiety for meaning through being needed is, according to Heschel, based on the process of maturation which takes place from childhood, when we are focused on “obtaining and seizing,” to adulthood when “we become involved in giving and providing for those we care for.”14 This essential development from self-centered to self-sacrificial behavior is what gives humanity the capacity for dignity, for it opens the door for moving from the mere biological processes of life to the independent creative events which give humanity the possibility of reaching beyond itself, transcending the physicality of its own humanness. Heschel insists that humanity only finds meaning when it transcends its basic needs and instincts—this openness to transcendence changes the core anthropological question from “What is man?” to “Who is man?” The shift of the ethical question from one of obligation to one of meaning is based upon Heschel’s uncompromising commitment to the theocentric character of creation. We must not forget that Heschel establishes the essential subject-object correlation between God and humanity in that order. Based on this prioritization, he goes on to observe that if this is the true relationship between the divine and the human, then there is necessarily posed to each individual a question of immense importance: “What is expected of me?”15 The ethical importance of Heschel’s subject-object inversion becomes evident here, for he resists humanity’s egocentric question, “What will I get out of life?”, with the question, “What will life, what will society get out of me?”16 This latter question, Heschel argues, has the effect of challenging human beings to beware of converting their perceived needs into ends; rather, the challenge is to perceive the ends which ask sacrifice and commitment of us for their realization. Here one senses Heschel’s resistance to an emphasis on the structure of being as an abstract concept (in the manner of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein), for he says, “Human living is being-challenged-in-the-world, not simply being-in-the-world”17: The Bible speaks of man as having been created in the likeness of God, establishing the principle of an analogy of being. In his very being, man has something in

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common with God. Beyond the analogy of being, the Bible teaches the principle of an analogy in acts. Man may act in the likeness of God. It is this likeness of acts—“to walk in His ways”—that is the link by which man may come close to God. To live in such likeness is the essence of imitation of the Divine.18

The point Heschel returns to over and over again is that the most important problem ethically is not abstract being, but the concrete problem of living: he contrasts the ontological and biblical approaches as the difference between human being and being human.19 What makes the latter possible is that the ultimate being—God—is not pure being (to whom humanity would have no possibility of relating), but a creative, living Being with whom humanity may engage in the ongoing partnership of creating meaning.20 This openness to transcendence Heschel takes to be “a constitutive element of being human.”21 But this openness is possible, as we have seen, not simply because humanity is in search of meaning, but because of God’s turn toward humanity as the “object of divine knowledge and concern.”22 The ethical question, then, can be formulated as one of response to God’s search, through which humanity discovers meaning. And as we recognize by now, it is piety that holds the key place in Heschel’s theology in describing this constitutive response. Piety, then, is the meeting point of God’s transitive concern for humanity and an individual human being’s response to that concern which ennobles him or her with the possibility of meaningful—or in other words, ethically significant—activity in the world.23 Accordingly, although the “pious” is a basic ethical concept for Heschel, it is not a formal ethical category in the sense that “the good” or “the right” are in traditional philosophical or theological ethics, for it includes within itself both the perception and enactment of moral concepts in relationship to God. Indeed, Heschel goes out of his way to avoid developing an ethical theory of goodness or rightness, per se. Hence, one notices that there are no moral absolutes in his ethical discourse: rather than seeking to define universal or abstract terms such as “justice” or “beauty,” Heschel converts the ethical debate into a discussion of ultimate meaning. The moral quality of an action is not dependent upon its adherence to some formal principle or imperative, but rather for the place it holds in the construction of a pattern of meaning for each human individually, and humankind generally. Ethical behavior cannot simply be based upon the rational apprehension or construction of norms to which each of us is subject, but only upon our ability to perceive and enter into a pious relationship with the depth of reality in a meaningful way. Piety, then, becomes the essential precursor to our awareness of moral responsibility, for it is the key which opens the door between the human and divine realms. Through the activity of a pious life, a person achieves the necessary orientation toward the divine which opens his or her insight into the true nature of our relationship to the whole order of creation. Heschel observes that humanity’s capacity to go beyond itself—whether it be “the family, a friend, a group, the nation, or . . . art, science, or social service”—bears witness to our kinship with God: service to God and to one another has to be viewed not as an option, but as fundamental to our experience of what it means to be truly human. What is morally valuable is thereby perceived as that which leads to convergence, togetherness, and union,24 for viewed from the divine

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perspective all things are related in such a way that “the pious man” will be “incapable of disparaging any of them by enslaving them to his own service,” approaching all things instead with reverence for their intrinsic value as created beings.25 Morality ought not to be thought of in static terms, therefore, but as a continually evolving relational response to God’s improvisation in history. Life is given to us for a purpose, for the construction of meaningful relationship: “Life is a mandate, not the enjoyment of an annuity; a task, not a game; a command, not a favor.”26 Piety is, above all, a life lived in response to this mandate. For Heschel, the prophets are a primary source of reflection for seeking a model for this response, but even they do not set a definitive standard, but are only exemplars: “we must think, not about, but in the prophets, with their concern and their heart.”27 The prophets’ basic conviction was that every human action has consequences to the divine concern. This is why Heschel remarks, “To the prophets even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions,” for every action which has not contributed to the construction of the ultimate meaning of participation in God’s will for humanity has impeded nothing less than the redemption of creation.28 One notes again in this turn to the prophets the recurring device of Heschel’s approach, which is less analytical than descriptive: the turning to spiritual mentors in the tradition for models of pious living, rather than for precise definition of its form. Perhaps, the fundamental moral characteristic of piety for Heschel is that it embodies a “leap of action,” which he contrasts with Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith.”29 Jewish spirituality, he argues, rests on the conviction that the way to God is a way of God.30 That is to say, it is in doing that which we are required to do that we learn to know and recognize the source of the requirement itself.31 Heschel contrasts this learning by engagement with what we have seen him call “symbolic religion,” in which symbols have value only for what they represent, whereas the activity of pious living has a value intrinsic to itself.32 This conviction of intrinsic value also contrasts sharply with the rationalist attempt to ground consciousness and moral norms in analytical reason. Contrary to Descartes, for example, Heschel proposes the maxim, “I am commanded—therefore I am.”33 Living is a matter of “acceptance of meaning, obedience, and commitment”; moral life is grounded in a sense of indebtedness and gratitude which comes from our consciousness of having been created.34 The “leap of action” is an acceptance of this existential situation, which attunes our mind to a consciousness of obligation to God’s will. For Heschel, this will is no euphemism or metaphor, but a concrete expression of the moral responsibility given in the commandment to be.35 Moral consciousness is therefore not merely an expression of feeling or desire, but a response to an “objective requiredness” which is contained within the act of creation.36 Piety is both characterized by and enables this “leap of action,” which directs the individual toward seeking the realization of God’s will. If piety is characterized by a “leap of action,” how then does “the pious man” know what is asked of him? Heschel’s response relies upon the revelatory experience of the prophets, out of which comes the concrete requirement of the law “to do justice and to love mercy” in fulfillment of God’s will. Heschel first identifies this will with pathos, pointing out in The Prophets that he does not mean by God’s pathos a fixed, inalterable attribute of God but “an expression of God’s will.”37 As such, pathos has a “functional

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rather than a substantial reality,” in the sense that it grounds a form of relationship: the structure of pathos is part of an ongoing, responsive engagement with human being. It is this open dimension of pathos which identifies it with God’s will, for as God responds to the events of human history, there is through pathos an expression of God’s justice as well. But Heschel does not think of this justice as an expression of a fixed moral order, with God as a sort of guardian. If that were true, there would be an ultimate law to which God also would be subject, and Heschel is emphatic that such a limitation of God is not part of prophetic religion: The prophets did not conceive of the ethos as an autonomous idea, as a sovereign essence, higher in the scale of reality than God Himself, standing above Him like a supreme force. God to them was more than a moral principle or a moral exemplar.38

Justice is best thought of as an expression of God’s concern, and God’s concern is for justice—or as Heschel puts it, God’s “ethos and pathos are one.”39 The ethical content of the prophetic voice is the call to justice, which again Heschel does not attempt to define analytically, but always in reference to God’s will. Thus, although justice (mishpat) surely means at the very least to give to each person what is due, it is also “God’s stake in human history,”40 and includes “all actions which contribute to maintaining the covenant, namely, the true relation between man and man, and between God and man.”41 Justice is not, therefore, a narrow principle or norm: rather, it is “a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24) which is “charged with the omnipotence of God.”42 Heschel rejects the image of justice as a blindfolded arbitrator, weighing right and wrong on a set of impartial scales. No, justice as it is imagined according to the biblical witness exists only in the relation between living beings (God and humanity, one individual to another), and so “expresses content, substance, power, movement, vitality.”43 The biblical sense of justice appeals only “to the fact that God has demanded it and that its fulfillment is a realization of His concern.”44 This point—that God’s ethos and pathos are one—is an assertion on which Heschel repeatedly insists, for it establishes the essential structure of human responsibility around the idea that we are accountable not to an autonomous moral law, but to a living being who is engaged in a relationship of concern with us. This concern cannot be reduced to a moral code or idea, for it includes mercy, grace, repentance, and forgiveness which exceed any formal ethical category. The prophets, therefore, should not be seen as proclaiming a system of justice, but rather one who is just: they are “proclaimers of God’s pathos, speaking not for the idea of justice, but for the God of justice, for God’s concern for justice.”45 The ultimate criterion for the moral is not its reasonableness, but the degree to which it realizes God’s concern. The link of the concrete pattern for moral living with the will of God is embodied by mitzvot (“pious deeds”), which Heschel describes as the “actualization of God’s immanence” for they include every act done in agreement with God’s will.46 It is here that one feels most strongly Heschel’s Jewishness in his ethical perspective, for the clear appeal to the Torah and related texts as the determinative source for defining moral acts is an unlikely move for a non-Jewish theologian. Piety is most clearly defined as observance of the law: “The law serves us as a source of knowledge about what is and

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what is not to be regarded as a mitsvah.”47 Yet it would be a mistake to suspend the theological inquiry too abruptly here, even as a Christian, thinking that one has run up against a uniquely Jewish way of ethical thought that will bear no more fruit for others. For Heschel goes on to nuance the place of law in significant ways which make the ethical question much more complex than mere observance. First of all, Heschel points out that the Hebrew word translated as “law” (din) is more accurately translated into English as “teaching.”48 Torah, he notes, is more than law, for the ultimate requirement is not merely to fulfill the law, but based on its core teaching of justice and mercy, to surpass it in its application to the countless problems of actual living.49 The formality of the law is “a cry for creativity,” an application of the essential basis of reciprocal love which underlies the concept of mitzvot. The law can guide and indeed must form the essential boundaries of human conduct, but it cannot enforce the freedom of the heart.50 Moreover, the purpose of mitzvot is not to prescribe the minimum standards of conduct, but to confer holiness. As a response to the will of God, the performance of mitzvot is not simply the meeting of an obligation: it is a participation in the source of the commandment itself, which is the holiness of God. “To perform deeds of holiness is to absorb the holiness of deeds.”51 More than a commandment, a mitzvah is a source of insight, “a way where the self-evidence of the Holy is disclosed.”52 In this sense, holy deeds share a close relationship to the act of worship, in that both are disclosures of the divine presence, and both confer upon humanity its ultimate significance and meaning: to be a symbol of the divine.53 Indeed, evil is sometimes understood by Heschel not as a thing in its own right, independent of or in conflict with righteousness, but rather as an absence of the hallowing presence of the holy in mitzvot.54 Elsewhere, Heschel speaks instead of evil as parasitically related to the good, so that the task of doing mitzvot is the challenge of separating good and evil.55 Taken in either sense, mitzvot are humankind’s participation in the redemption of the world, which Heschel understands as a long process requiring the engagement of God and humanity alike.56 Heschel here again contrasts his ethics with the tradition of Greek philosophy, for whereas in the Greek way of thinking, values were the essential quest (think of Plato’s idea of “absolute essences which are laid up in heaven”), in the Jewish perspective mitzvot are the core of ethical action, for they are our mode of response to the will of God, which is alone the source of goodness.57 Heschel goes on to elaborate certain characteristics of mitzvot, which are in turn characteristic of the piety which motivates their doing. Mitzvot, as commanded by God, are the means by which “the pious man” remains loyal in the long term to the irregular profound moments of spontaneous insight.58 As such, they form “a pattern for living”59 (or “grammar of living”60) which provides the necessary guidance of principles while not stultifying the spirit—as do pure systems of ethics or jurisprudence.61 Mitzvot are “checks and balances” on the moral life more than they are a code of behavior.62 Mitzvot deal “not so much with the training for the exceptional as with the management of the trivial,” so that true piety is “unassuming” and “inconspicuous.”63 The moral life is therefore not composed of the performance of exceptional good deeds, but “the pursuit of a way.”64 And yet the pious life is not trivial, for it understands our approach to simple human needs as spiritual opportunities, based on what Heschel calls the essential message of Judaism: “that in doing the finite we may perceive the infinite.”65

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In Heschel’s way of thinking, right living becomes more important than right believing, for more significant than a confession of belief is “the active acceptance of the kingship of God.”66 This position is justified by Heschel on the grounds that belief necessarily surpasses our ability to give adequate expression to it. So although we may seek to know God, our reverence for God through acts of piety forms the dominant content of our religious and ethical life, the acceptance “of an order that determines all of life.”67 Even so, as Heschel is at great pains to demonstrate in A Passion for Truth, the quality of inwardness, or kavanah, remains fundamental. Heschel compares, for example, the shift he perceives in Kierkegaard’s theology from the “objective world of ideas [cf. Kant] to the person who has those ideas,” with the Hasidic movement’s emphasis on the individual who performs a good deed rather than the deed itself.68 Whereas Jewish reflection had previously been preoccupied with the subtleties of the Law, and Christian theology with dogmatic formulations, the Kotzker and Kierkegaard each reflected “on the individual’s inner life.”69 Illustrating this emphasis on interiority, Heschel tells the story of a young man who came to see the Kotzker, proud of having gone through the Talmud three times. The Kotzker replied, “Yes, but how much of the Talmud has gone through you?”70 The necessary quality of inwardness in “the pious man” reflects an awareness that pious living is not limited to the fulfillment of norms and principles, but is an attempt to shape one’s entire being into a pattern of meaning, oriented toward the holy.71 Thus, the pious man “is not aiming to penetrate the sacred. Rather he is striving to be himself penetrated and actuated by the sacred.”72 The purpose of mitzvot, then, is not to define the limits of the moral, but to point “the pious man” in the direction of the holy, to make him a participant in the redemption of the world by the interior integrity of his life. “Piety,” says Heschel, “is unconditional loyalty to the holy. The pious man is he who seeks attachment to the holy.”73 A final important dimension of the ethical significance of piety is that it is exercised in freedom. As we have seen in comparison with Shestov, Heschel argues that the biblical conviction that the world was created (rather than caused) through the voluntary action of God implies that “freedom, not necessity, is the source of all being.”74 Similarly, the Bible shows God’s relationship to human beings always to be under the rubric of freedom, for our choice is always the precondition of our acceptance of God. Yet to think that this essential freedom consists in the ability to act as we desire is a grave danger, for the will is not “an ultimate and isolated activity, but determined by motives beyond its own control.”75 On the contrary, freedom comes from the liberation of the will from the self-centered ego, so that it is free to respond to the God who seeks to be in relationship with human beings. Heschel traces this liberation of the will as following the pattern of a radical amazement, leading to an openness to the transcendent, through which our resulting God-awareness leads us to make a free response: “As the object of divine transitive concern man is; knowing himself to be the object of divine concern and responding through acts of his own transitive concern he is free.”76 The responsibility which comes from our free choice for doing the good is therefore the product of responsiveness: “Free is he who has decided to act in agreement with the spirit that goes beyond all necessities.”77 Responsibility depends on our capacity to be aware of the transcendent, and that capacity is derivative of our

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grateful acceptance that all that we have, even our own life, is given to us as a gift to be used toward advancing the purposes of God.78 Our dignity is in the power we have for reciprocity, faced with the overwhelming generosity of God.79 Heschel contrasts this account of the origin of ethical behavior sharply with that of Greek philosophy: Greek philosophy began in a world without God. It could not accept the gods or the example of their conduct. Plato had to break with the gods and to ask: What is good? Thus the problem of values was born. And it was the idea of values that took the place of God. Plato lets Socrates ask: What is good? But Moses’ question was: What does God require of thee?80

Piety, then, is a free and passionate attachment to the holy which seeks to do the will of God not because it is imperative for human beings, but because it is desired by them as the source of their own ultimate meaning in freedom. Recognizing the power of human desire, Heschel observes that unless moral behavior is allied with our strongest passion, it is little able to compete with our other selfish inclinations.81 Piety is a cultivation of a love for the holy by doing those things which make the holy immanent, for it is our will and not our reason which finally determines our course of action: No code, no law, even the law of God, can set a pattern for all of our living. It is not enough to have right ideas. For the will, not the reason, has the executive power in the realm of living. The will is stronger than reason and does not blindly submit to the dictates of rational principles. Reason may force the mind to accept intellectually its conclusions. Yet what is the power that will make me love to do what I ought to do?82

Surprisingly, piety plays the role not of quieting our passions or fulfilling our desires, but of fanning a discontent with the unjust state of affairs, endowing us with a “craving that knows no satisfaction.”83 For the pious man, “his desire is not only to know more than what ordinary reason has to offer, but to be more than what he is,”84 driven by the desire to find and follow God’s ways.

II  Personhood as task Viewed collectively, the overlapping contours of Heschel’s ethical thinking as we have just defined them lead to a vigorous reassertion of the importance of the individual human person. If moral living is to be characterized by an emphasis upon the meaningfulness of human activity as an engaged participation in God’s pathos, then the integrity and responsibility of the person is paramount as the site in which that participation has the potential for realization.85 This assertion of the priority of the person is based on Heschel’s reliance on the Genesis account of humanity’s creation in the image and likeness of God. In fact, one of Heschel’s more interesting discussions of the importance of the individual person comes in an essay on “Death as Homecoming,” written 2 years before Heschel’s own death, which takes the form of an extended meditation on the implications of humanity’s likeness to God.86 As he points out, this affirmation conceals as much as it reveals, for the Genesis story of

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God’s creative activity says very little about the nature or intentions of the one who is the creator. In fact, biblical thinking is at great pains to distinguish the otherness of God, resulting in the puzzle that human beings are created in the likeness of God, but “the likeness of God means the likeness of Him who is unlike man.” Asking, then, in what sense humanity may be compared to God, Heschel asserts that it cannot be a particular quality or attribute, for the comparison would remain incomplete and contentless given the absolute otherness of God. Rather, the point of commonality is that humanity shares “a concern and a task” with God: human beings are meant to be partners with God, engaging the whole of their being and identity in the task of realizing God’s purposes for creation. Locating the point of intersection between God and humanity in a task, rather than an attribute, Heschel then elaborates the significance of personhood in these terms: the personhood of an individual is the sum total of the moments of his or her existence, meaning that to share a task in common with God bestows on every moment the potential of being part of fulfilling this task. The distinct personhood of every human being is thereby definitively related to the historical evolution of moral character as it is actualized in relation to this task, and as it is held in common by all of humanity. Heschel draws several important implications out of this perspective, which are found scattered throughout his works. In Man Is Not Alone, for instance, he insists, “humanity begins in the individual man.”87 If humanity’s likeness to God is defined in terms of a task, then that task is accomplished only at the level of the individual response to God. The word “mankind,” which biologically refers to a species, denotes something entirely different in the realm of religion and ethics, where it refers to “an abundance of specific individuals; a community of persons.” The meaning of this community, Heschel claims, cannot be defined at the societal level, because society itself is in need of meaning; the only source of authentic meaning is at the level of the concrete individual in relationship to God, or more specifically, the concrete individual in relationship to the task which he or she holds in common with God. In an essay on interreligious dialogue, for example, Heschel stressed the importance of the individual in suggesting that sympathetic encounters between different faiths do not occur at the official level of institutions or cultures relating to one another, but rather depend first and foremost upon the one-on-one comprehension of “the personhood of the human being I face.”88 A second implication that Heschel draws out of defining personhood in terms of task is that “responsibility is the essence of being a person.”89 Although this is a recurring theme throughout Heschel’s work, he became particularly focused on it during the crisis of the Vietnam War when confronted with the moral dilemma of how as an individual he could resist what he considered to be the great social evil of the war. His contention was that the individual can never be absolved of responsibility simply because the moral questions he or she faces occur at a societal level (a perspective no doubt influenced by the experience of the Holocaust): as he wrote in his essay on Vietnam, echoing a phrase from The Prophets, “some are guilty, all are responsible.” Moreover, Heschel wished in this context to distinguish between guilt and responsibility: although not every individual bore the guilt of having committed moral crimes in the war, nevertheless society as a whole and each member thereof bore a responsibility, “the capability of being called upon to answer.”90

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The importance of responsibility in defining the person was especially stressed by Heschel in another of the essays collected in The Insecurity of Freedom, “Religion in a Free Society.”91 His starting point in this article is the observation that whereas the Bible’s principal concern is to address the question, “What is required of man?”, contemporary society (and often religion with it) has succumbed to the question, “What does man demand of God?” Reflecting on the strength of the modern appeal for individual rights, Heschel contends that it is often made without a corresponding awareness of individual obligations. This lack of correlation between rights and obligations, he says, is the result of an overemphasis on human needs (poorly understood and selfishly defined), whose pursuit is raised to the level of moral or spiritual norms. “We must beware of converting needs into ends, interests into norms. The task is precisely the opposite: it is to convert ends into needs, to convert the divine commandment into a human concern.” We have seen above that Heschel thinks that the inescapable reality of authentic human need has to be carefully transformed into a means of spiritual opportunity, yet in this article he expresses his fear that even religion has been seduced by the attractiveness of serving human needs without bringing them into contact with a transcendent responsibility, converting spirituality solely into the satisfaction of the need for solace. But the central message contained in prophetic religion, Heschel affirms, is given in the form of a commandment to the individual person. To remain unaware, or unresponsive, to this overarching reality is to hollow out the integrity of individual personhood, for it casts a human being from the privileged position of partnership and likeness with God, into a subhuman reliance on instinct and desire. A third implication of personhood as task, therefore, is that the integrity of the “inner man” must be preserved and defended—a theme which runs especially strongly in the essays of The Insecurity of Freedom. If an individual is to be responsible for responding to the will of God, for sharing in God’s concern, then the nurture and preservation of sufficient spiritual and emotional depth in the individual are essential for establishing the conditions in which a pious response can be made. As previously mentioned, the “liquidation” of the spiritual life of the individual was a motivating concern for Heschel. In the essay on “The Patient as Person,” Heschel considers the implications of losing sight of the spiritual and emotional depth of the human person, examining one acute instance of it: the typically impersonal relationship between physician and patient in the practice of modern medicine.92 Because the individual is “infinitely precious,” Heschel argues, the doctor-patient relationship must always come to pass “in the dimension of personhood.” This dimension includes both the doctor and patient: each needs to be conscious of the value and integrity not only of the other, but also of themselves as individuals. Such a consciousness of being a person “depends upon being alive to the wonder and mystery that surrounds us, upon the realization that there is no ordinary man.” The alternative to this spiritual awareness of the value of the particularity of a human being is to reduce a patient to the level of a machine which needs repair, “an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.” For medicine to retain its identity as an art rather than a form of engineering, a focused attention is necessary on the covenantal aspect of the doctor-patient relationship, in which each participant fully acknowledges the personhood of the other—not as a combination of body and soul, but body and soul as one. The care for the interiority of the spiritual life, in other

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words, is as much a part of the treatment of disease as the physical interventions, for the “inner man” and the physical body (with its needs and desires) are inseparable. Heschel’s emphasis on the importance of the preservation of the “inner man” returns us to the subject of piety, and its relation to the concept of personhood. There are several fairly obvious links between the two, such as the role piety has to play in preserving inner spiritual sensitivity, and the moral dimension of piety as the concrete realization of the human responsibility for partnership with God. Perhaps less obvious, however, is that piety also has a distinct role to play in the defense of the integrity of the individual. Writing in the essay on “Children and Youth,” Heschel raises the issue of the instrumentalization of human beings in modern, technological society: We are reducing the status of man from that of a person to that of a thing. . . . There is a strange cunning in the fact that when man looks only at that which is useful, he eventually becomes useless to himself. In reducing the world to an instrument, man himself becomes an instrument. Man is the tool, and the machine is the consumer. The instrumentalization of the world leads to the disintegration of man.93

Now, there is nothing strikingly unusual about Heschel’s argument here (this is, for example, an instance of a strong resemblance to the critical theory of Heidegger). What is striking is that Heschel’s prescription for addressing the problem is piety. When he writes in “Sacred Image of Man” that piety may be expressed as the imperative, “Treat thyself as an image of God,” he intends by this formulation both to reassert the responsibility of the individual to God, and also the essential value and potential of the individual. In Heschel’s reading, human beings are caught in the polarity between having been created of worthless dust, yet endowed with the divine image. This polarity takes account of the baseness and corruption to which humanity may succumb, but it also distinguishes it with the expectation that it is capable of righteousness. Piety, as the realization of this expectation, is the pattern of life which most effectively resists the instrumentalization of humanity, for it refuses to look on either the world or humanity as mere instruments for the satisfaction of needs or desires. Rather, piety regards humanity as endowed with the ineffable likeness of the holy, so that human beings can never be regarded as a means but always retain the dignity of being distinct personal ends.

III  Heschel’s positive moral realism We have already described piety as uniting an awareness of God’s transitive concern for humanity with the concrete human response of holy living, and we have just seen that Heschel understands this synthesis to result in a reassertion of the priority of the individual person. Within this framework, Heschel betrays a pervading optimism in the possibility for moral perfection, despite the fact that—like the prophets—he remained deeply agonized by the historical failure of human beings to do so. Heschel believed that this high expectation of moral accomplishment which he had for humanity, looking through the lens of piety, was a significant contrast to the “realism”

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of his theological contemporary, Reinhold Niebuhr. These two theologians were close personal friends, working across the street from one another at the Jewish and Union Theological Seminaries in New York City.94 They shared many liberal political convictions in common, and their respective involvements in various organizations and causes drew each of them regularly outside the academy. After Niebuhr retired from Union Seminary in  1960 and moved to an apartment on Riverside Drive, he and Heschel were virtually neighbors, living only two blocks apart, and they could frequently be seen strolling together through Riverside Park, deep in conversation. Niebuhr’s widow even remarked that toward the end of his life, Niebuhr counted Heschel as his closest friend.95 When Niebuhr died in  1971, Heschel proclaimed in a eulogy at his funeral, “In boldness of penetration, depth of insight, fullness of vision, Reinhold Niebuhr’s system excels any other system produced by an American theologian to this very day.”96 Despite Heschel’s high admiration for Niebuhr, however, he personally differed from Niebuhr in at least one critical respect, and that was on the subject of the moral potential of humanity. In “Confusion of Good and Evil,” Heschel critiques Niebuhr’s assessment of the depth of evil’s infiltration into human life.97 Observing that Niebuhr rightly challenges liberal society’s essentially nominalist view with regard to evil (evil is not intrinsically real but only an impulse that can be manipulated by “astute social engineering or more psychiatric help”), Heschel nevertheless challenges Niebuhr’s contention that evil is an inevitable component of human conduct. In Niebuhr’s estimation, because of human sin the possibilities for evil are intimately bound up with the possibilities for good: evil and good become inextricably confused. This situation is fueled by the insecurity which people feel within the vicissitudes of life, causing them to seek through power and wealth to protect themselves at the expense of others. Although Niebuhr expressly intended that his social realism, inspired by the witness of the prophets, should “strengthen the Hebraic-prophetic content of the Christian tradition,” Heschel contends that such an extreme assessment of the impossibility of true goodness is contrary to the biblical witness: “Biblical history bears witness to the constant corruption of man; it does not, however, teach the inevitable corruptibility of the ultimate in the temporal process.” Niebuhr’s position may be “plausible and profound,” but Heschel as a Jew could not subscribe to the idea that no deed is intrinsically good in itself. The performance of a mitzvah, in particular, is an act which Heschel maintains “assumes that man is endowed with the ability to fulfill what God demands, at least to some degree.”98 Interestingly, Heschel’s book which most deals directly with personal and social ethics, The Insecurity of Freedom, bears a title evocative of Niebuhr’s position, yet develops a viewpoint more confident than Niebuhr’s in the possibility of righteous human endeavor. In essence, Heschel’s critique of Niebuhr makes the same critical point that he also made in various other works, but with reference to Christianity in general: that the emphasis upon an original sin which can only be mitigated by grace received through faith is contrary to a Jewish confidence in the value of righteous works. Unfortunately, Heschel in this regard takes a quite caricatured view of the Christian understanding of grace. In God in Search of Man, for instance, he challenges what he considers to be the inappropriate exclusion of good works in a Christian perspective, first citing Paul’s

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“passionate battle against the power of law” in favor of “the religion of grace.”99 He then goes on to include Luther’s “antinomian tendency” which “resulted in the overemphasis of love and faith to the exclusion of good works,” and moves on to mention in passing Ritschl, Barth, and Kierkegaard as further examples of the supposed doctrine that “there are fundamentally no human deeds which . . . would find favor in God’s eyes.” He even attributes to a paraphrasing of Pauline doctrine Kant’s teaching that “the essence of religion or morality would consist in an absolute quality of the soul or will, regardless of the actions that may come out of it or the ends that may be served.”100 In contrast to the supposed Christian deprecation of works, Heschel maintains that there is no concept of original sin in Judaism which foreordains human activity to such corruption. In a section on “Original Sin” in A Passion for Truth, for example, he writes that in a Jewish understanding, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden did not fundamentally alter the relationship of humanity to God, which would abrogate the sovereignty of God over creation: “No act of man, however grave, could essentially change or distort what was created by an act of God.”101 Without entering too far into the question of faith and works in a Christian understanding, at the very least, we can note that Heschel’s critique seems to buy into a narrow reading of the doctrine based more on the most extreme polemical positions of the sixteenth century than on an appreciation of the larger Christian tradition. In particular, Heschel fails to take into account the role of sanctification in the Christian understanding of the relationship of faith and works—a doctrine which is shared in various forms across the divide of the Protestant Reformation. Returning to Niebuhr, we might note that Heschel’s criticism of his theological realism falls prey to the same lack of nuanced understanding as his critique of the doctrine of grace—an observation also made by another Union Seminary faculty member, John Bennett (who was Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics and also president at the time Heschel became a visiting professor at the seminary in  1965). Bennett writes, “Heschel misunderstood Niebuhr in attributing to him fatalism or a dogmatic pessimism. Niebuhr was most concerned about false human claims to perfection.”102 Bennett argues that Niebuhr did not rule out the possibility of authentic sanctity, but only emphasized that it always involves partial and approximate realizations of human responsibility. He concludes, “Heschel differed hardly at all from the Niebuhr whom he knew so well, and he differed from the Niebuhr of the books only in emphasis.” To relate this discussion of moral realism back to the issue of personhood, we should note that the core of what Heschel seems to be defending—even when he is making a poorly grounded critique of other perspectives—is that the individual person must remain the focus of moral engagement, implying both that the individual is responsible for and capable of authentically moral actions. Any concept of human being which threatens to empty that fundamental moral agency, whether it be technological instrumentalization, or a form of social totalitarianism, or a distorted religious antinomianism, must in Heschel’s mind be resisted as a temptation to lessen the rightful expectations which we can have of one another, and ultimately which God has of us as individuals and as a society. The defense of personhood through a realistic but positive realism is for Heschel a defense of the human being as the image

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and likeness of God, which both bestows an infinite value on each person as the sign of God’s presence in the world, and ascribes to the individual an absolute obligation to pursue the holy—a goal which is at least partially attainable through the life of piety.

IV  The constitutive role of indebtedness Following from Heschel’s defense of the positive moral potential of the individual is another key concept: the definition of human responsibility in terms of indebtedness. If the biblical witness to our creation in the image of God supports the sacredness of the individual person, it also has as its corollary a primitive relationship of indebtedness between the creature and creator. For Heschel, this sense of debt plays a pivotal role in the development of character both because it is a precursor to faith, as well as a foundation of virtue. In Who Is Man?, Heschel offers a short but dense phenomenological analysis of this indebtedness as it is constitutive of human being.103 In a sense, he understands a feeling of embarrassment to be a necessary antecedent to an awareness of indebtedness, for human beings must first of all recognize the precariousness of their existential situation before being able to acknowledge the debt implied in their existence. “Embarrassment,” Heschel says, “is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, of perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension.”104 Embarrassment should be our response to the “pettiness, prejudices, envy, and conceit” by which we live, and to our basic inability to overcome suspicion and the distortion of human life, despite our great wealth and power.105 It is born out of the realization that the world is greater than our ability to comprehend it, and that we are the contemporaries of God without knowing it. Embarrassment is the feeling evoked by realizing how incompatible are our concerns and behavior with the ultimacy of creation—an experience very much part of the substratum of pretheological emotion which Heschel seeks to uncover in his depth theology. Beyond our embarrassment in the face of the mystery of creation, however, comes a sense of indebtedness. The origin of this indebtedness is that we are not simply human being—we are created being. In another reversal of terms, therefore, Heschel argues that the “ought” precedes the “is,” in the sense that our being is predicated upon the fact of it having been given to us; being is not something that can be taken for granted, but rather is itself a gratuitous gift which establishes a foundational responsibility of debt: Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; it lives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. It means having a task, being called. It experiences living as receiving, not only as taking. Its content is gratitude for a gift received. It is more than a biological giveand-take relationship. Indebtedness is the pathos of being human, self-awareness of the self as committed; it is given with the awareness of existence.106

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Heschel’s phenomenological instinct is clearly at work here, for in describing indebtedness as “the pathos of being human,” he is attempting to account for the variety of ways in which this core experience is manifested in human consciousness: the sense of duty, obligation, allegiance, conscience, sacrifice. The reduction of these terms to their essential characteristics leaves the content of an awareness of indebtedness, of owing something to the world in return for what we have ourselves received simply in existing—a sense which Heschel argues is “a constitutive part of being human.” He goes on to insist that this thought is not something which we stumble upon passively: it exerts itself upon us, so that our intentional instinct to make adequate response is a being drawn to, a sense of being called, a desire to transcend the self and self-interest. Heschel’s concern with the importance of indebtedness in forming a sense of human responsibility is repeated in other works as well, especially The Insecurity of Freedom. In his essay on “Children and Youth,” for example, he reflects on how one can instill in youth a sense of belonging and commitment to society: the problem is how to resist the modern temptation to act as though the world is indebted to oneself, rather than that the self is indebted to something which transcends its own limits.107 Then in the essay on aging, “To Grow in Wisdom,” Heschel continues to insist on the importance of a sense of indebtedness, contending that at the end of life such a sense is important in resisting an encroaching sense of emptiness or uselessness: the simple fact of one’s being continues to impart the basic structure of indebtedness which gives rise to responsibility and commitment, even when one becomes physically incapacitated.108 Or again, in A Passion for Truth, Heschel has recourse to the same basic points made in Who Is Man? in order to stress the importance of indebtedness in opening us to an awareness of being called, of having a task to fulfill.109 In sum, our sense of indebtedness as human beings is a recognition of an existential situation which calls us into a life of piety, where piety is understood as the committed response of the individual to the relational responsibilities bestowed in our creation. The significance of what Heschel is trying to establish by developing the idea of indebtedness can be brought into clearer perspective by comparing it with a work in moral philosophy, Nathalie Sarthou-Lajus’ L’Éthique de la dette.110 Working in the tradition of Emmanuel Lévinas and his emphasis on the importance of an encounter with the Other, Sarthou-Lajus proposes the thesis: “Dependence does not represent a simple stage in the development of subjectivity in the course of its narrative, but goes back to a fundamental structure which defines precisely the original indebtedness of the subject.”111 In this proposition, she distances herself from a strict Lévinasian position, for she wishes to move beyond an abstracted, resistant encounter with the face (visage) of the Other, to the real experience of support and sustenance which we receive from others—an experience which establishes a palpable sense indebtedness and gratitude. Thus, the absolute antecedent priority of the Other gives rise to an indebtedness which creates a relationship of obligation, constraining the traditional autonomous subject: “The comprehension of an indebted subjectivity places in question the existence of a subject traditionally conceived as a primary and sovereign appeal. Debt grounds a subjective figure who recognizes the precariousness of his condition and acknowledges his essential dependence on the adjacency of the other and of time.”112 The significant existential effect of the recognition by a subject of such an indebted dependence is a

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link to one’s finitude, enabling the individual person to escape from the pretension of being the sole principle of his or her own existence. And here we have the primary point of contact between Sarthou-Lajus and Heschel: it is this breakdown of the imaginary autonomy of the self-contained subject which both thinkers seek to describe in their respective uses of the idea of indebtedness. In this deployment of the concept, therefore, both Sarthou-Lajus and Heschel understand indebtedness to be a fundamental and originary aspect of human subjectivity—not merely the product of social relations, but constitutive of human existence as such. Sarthou-Lajus goes on to make a more detailed examination of the structure of various forms of indebtedness. She is particularly interested to examine the nature of unpayable debts, such as those that are established in the dependence of children upon their parents or those that express the gratuitous self-offering between lovers, noting that the sense of infinite indebtedness which they engender is the seat of our moral responsibility to the Other. Observing that dependence has traditionally been held in low esteem by a philosophical tradition which stresses the liberty of the free subject, she turns the idea of an originary indebtedness on Kant’s notion of an autonomous subject “who submits or refuses to submit to the law which his reason prescribes to him.”113 Given the idea of an originary indebtedness (which one should note is parallel to the classical notion of filial piety), she argues that rather than moral obligation being derived from an exercise of independent reason, it must be understood to flow from a sense of interpersonal dependence between persons, or between human beings and God: Contrary to the Kantian definition of responsibility, debt establishes a relation of interpersonal dependence between a creditor and a debtor. The dependence of the indebted subject to the presence of an exterior authority supposes that he is not in a place to give the law to himself. It is the mark of his finitude. Debt brings morality out of the limits of reason. It is no longer reason which obliges the subject, but the absolute antecedence of the other. Relative to this primacy of the other, in the figure of the neighbor or of God, the subject is indebted. The moral order does not exist except in the recognition and acceptance of this original indebtedness.114

Sarthou-Lajus thus distinguishes between a morality of indebtedness and a morality of obligation, arguing that the latter remains even in its fulfillment essentially an attitude of detachment, whereas the former is based on a dependence which privileges a passionate and even irrational relationship with the Other, with all the risks that such relations include. So indebtedness becomes not only a source of passionate moral responsibility, but also a contributor to an ardent intercourse with family, society, and ultimately God. Like the passion for relationship which Sarthou-Lajus argues is evoked by indebtedness, Heschel likewise understands that indebtedness does not leave one emotionally neutral, for it is allied with the accompanying feeling of gratitude which is “the basic notion of reciprocity” which is one of the prerequisites for faith.115 Given this generation of a feeling of reciprocity, it is significant that in Heschel’s four phenomenological essays on piety, gratitude appears as a recurring motif.

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For although Heschel does not seem to make the connection explicitly himself, it is the gratitude which flows from a feeling of indebtedness which leads to our sympathetic identification through piety with God—to whom we owe the greatest debt of all. This connection is, at least, certainly implied by his repeated assertion that a sense of indebtedness gives human beings an awareness of having “a task to fulfill.” In “An Analysis of Piety,” for instance, he distinguishes between a possession and gift: in the case of a pious individual, all that he has is acknowledged to be a gift from God, held in trust but not his own possession. Such a gift is a conduit for the affection of the giver, so that in receiving it one receives the presence of the giver as well; by acknowledging all that we have as God’s gift, we are brought into an intimacy with God’s presence within that gift. The gratitude that comes from an awareness of being the recipient of a gift is tied to a feeling of relationship and belonging, whereas possession is loneliness in that it excommunicates the possessor from this commerce of offering and gratitude.116 Extending on this theme in “Faith,” Heschel describes the “overwhelming thrill” of being grateful, for it draws one out of the narrowness of the present moment to the nobility of remembering both one’s origins and destiny.117 And yet again in “Prayer,” Heschel describes gratitude as a deliverance from the tyranny of the present: its most forceful expression is in the act of prayer, where “spinning a deep softness of gratitude to God around all thoughts,” one escapes from “the mean and penurious, from calculating and scheming.”118 At the heart of a pious commitment through sympathy to doing the will of God, therefore, is a prior sense of gratitude based on the indebtedness one owes for the creation and preservation of life itself. Indebtedness accordingly holds a cardinal place in the generation of an awareness of moral responsibility, drawing the attention of the individual beyond him or herself to an engaged, beholden relationship. In a short passage from the essay on the patient as person, Heschel summarizes the significance of such gratitude, drawing it together with the personhood of the individual by observing its formative role in the definition of what it means to be human (and, incidentally, making a prescient observation about what we now know as the information age): The truth of being human is gratitude, the secret of existence is appreciation, its significance is revealed in reciprocity. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation.119

V  Piety as character An implicit theme of Heschel’s ethical reflection as we have understood it in this chapter—the location of the ethical in holiness, the defense of personhood, a positive moral realism, and the counsel of gratitude—is the development of character as the context in which these various elements of the moral life are held together. Although Heschel preceded the more recent renewal of “virtue-ethics” both in secular and religious thought, the structure of his moral reflection is closely parallel in many respects to this later development. This dimension of Heschel’s thinking is not overtly developed in his own work, however, although he certainly intends that piety should result in habits conducive to virtuous living: as he writes in God in Search of Man,

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“A good person is not he who does the right thing, but he who is in the habit of doing the right thing.”120 Consequently, a comparison of certain key aspects of his ethical reflection with more contemporary writers on moral philosophy and theology will help to draw out the manner in which he relies on the development of the virtues as the basic moral content of the pious life. A first and easily observable characteristic of Heschel’s ethical reflection which follows the pattern of virtue-ethics is his stress that ethical living is not a matter of isolated decisions and actions, but a holistic pattern of conduct—what we have seen him call a “way,” a “pattern,” or a “grammar of living.” This reliance on structuring the moral life in relation to the individual’s overall character situates him alongside the larger and more recent philosophical effort to recover an ethics which is teleologically oriented. By way of comparison, one might take the well-known work of Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, in which he seeks to regain for philosophy an appreciation of the classical concept of virtue.121 MacIntyre reviews the dominance which he believes emotivism to have had on moral reflection in modern society, that is, the attitude that moral statements are ultimately only expressions of personal preference given in the form of attitudes or feelings. He traces the ascendancy of emotivism to the failure of the Enlightenment project (represented by Kant, Diderot, Hume, and Smith) to realize that its quest for a morality strictly founded on rational principles resulted in the detachment of moral discourse from a teleological framework. Two consequences resulted from this detachment. On the one hand, the individual moral agent began to think in terms of being sovereign in moral authority, freed from a governing hierarchy or teleology. And on the other hand, when these autonomous moral agents discovered that they were unable to guarantee a rational warrant for moral judgments, then those judgments came to be viewed as instruments of individual desire or will. MacIntyre’s prescription for addressing the detachment of moral discourse from a teleological concept of human purposes is a recovery of a narrative sense of life, which he argues “turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions.”122 He contends that the ability of human beings to live together in the present is dependent upon their having some shared vision of the future, and that it is this common narrative framework that gives value to the decisions made in the present about what to do and to refrain from doing. The practice of the virtues therefore becomes indispensable, for they “sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good.”123 The virtues, in other words, are part of sustaining those traditions by which men and women are able to express common goals within a morally necessary and teleologically oriented narrative history. Returning, then, to Heschel, we can see several important overlaps in his ethical approach with MacIntyre’s advocacy of a narratively based pursuit of virtue. As already suggested, Heschel understands moral questions to be part of a “way,” which by definition suggests a purposeful directedness. The parameters of this “way” are given within the biblical story itself, which as we have seen orients human behavior toward partnership with the divine purposes. But this sense of direction is not merely pointed toward the future, nor is it living according to principles abstracted from the

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narrative text; it is also a continuation of events, a living of the covenant made with Abraham now, as if we ourselves were he.124 Heschel is unable to imagine any sufficient basis for moral understanding outside of participation in this narrative arc. Pointing to the importance of this continuity of purpose, he suggests that our life must remain in some degree intelligible to our ancestors, or in other words, that it should be lived in such a manner that they would be able to recognize our own self-understanding and intentions to be continuous with the same narrative tradition of which they understood themselves to be part.125 Heschel’s appeal to such a narrative could, in one light, be understood as a conservative defense of traditional, moral, and religious values, particularly in their Jewish context. His theological reasons for emphasizing the importance of narrative in moral consciousness, however, are derived from a more recondite attitude contingent upon the core religious conviction that God is One. “Nothing in Jewish life,” says Heschel, “is more hallowed than the saying of the Shema: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”126 In a significant chapter of Man Is Not Alone, “One God,” Heschel explores the variety of meanings that the oneness of God can have. Its most basic meaning, of course, is the denial of the existence of other gods, but for Heschel, this is only a starting point. It also means that in relation to the plurality of creation, God stands apart as a unity of being to which all other things are related as fellow creatures. Relationship to the earth, to one another, and even to ourselves is derived from the common relationship that all things have to the oneness of God. The oneness of God also means that God is unique: God is totally other from the creation, incomparable and ineffable. It means that only God is truly real, and that the reality of all other things is derived from the reality of God. One also means the same, that is to say, that no aspect of God is separated from another: God’s power is love, God’s justice is mercy, or to recall an observation made earlier, God’s pathos and ethos are one. From the exploration of the oneness of God, Heschel derives what may be his most explicit statement of the origin of moral consciousness: “Moral sentiments originate in man’s sense of unity, his appreciation of what is common to men. . . . The ultimate principle of ethics is not an imperative but an ontological fact.”127 The ontological fact to which the statement alludes is, precisely, humanity’s standing in relationship to the oneness of God. Yet despite the seemingly fixed point of this “ontological fact,” the statement has an essentially narrative dimension that evolves out of the dynamic which is implied by the relatedness of humanity to the one God. God’s oneness seeks partnership with human beings, which can only be achieved as humanity pursues the teleologically oriented, covenanted life which is the way to God, provided by God. The oneness of God may be an ontological fact, but the redemptive incorporation of humanity into that oneness is part of the historical relationship which is shaped and guided by the moral life. Consequently, moral consciousness is spiritually rather than rationally justifiable,128 or to put it another way, it is narratively rather than intellectually grounded. Like MacIntyre, then, Heschel develops his moral categories out of a sense of directedness in which the daily and ordinary fact of human living is oriented around the practice of the virtues (or in more Heschelian language, the observance of mitzvot), which cumulatively carry an individual toward a recognized and desired end.

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Following in the footsteps of MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas builds on the idea of narrative virtue in his A Community of Character, which takes a more deliberately Christian approach. His central thesis is that in order to make sense of an individual life in moral terms, one has to make appeal to the idea of “character.” He justifies this claim by arguing that no one life is capable of embodying fully the “plenitude of values and virtues” which constitute the moral awareness of a human community (derived from an historical narrative consciousness). Integrity, therefore, is not the result of a perfect fulfillment of the variety of expectations and goals which permeate a community, but rather the development of a moral “character” which allows one successfully to make choices amidst the options that are available. Character is a matter of giving a narrative unity to the self, not in contradiction or distinction to the larger community, but within it: “The development of character involves more than adherence to principles for their own sake; rather, it demands that we acquire a narrative that gives us the skill to fit what we do and do not do into a coherent account sufficient to claim our life as our own.”129 Hauerwas’ description of character touches on the moral significance of Heschel’s concept of piety at several key points. Of particular importance is that neither concept is primarily restrictive, but rather formative. Character is a nature that one acquires through practice and cultivation; it is open and generous rather than narrowly conformist to a set of rules; it is an instinct for graciousness and fairness that comes not at the expense of freedom and creativity, but as its motivation. Similarly, piety is an openness to the challenge to become in one’s own self a living symbol of the generosity and righteousness of God; it is a lifelong pursuit of the holy which is manifested in a deliberateness in daily activity. For Heschel, piety could even be said to be the root of character, for it is the means of attachment to the good which allows character to blossom. Character and piety also obviously overlap in their preservation of the integrity of the individual. It is not a depersonalized human being who has the confidence to cultivate the virtues or pursue holiness, but rather one who has a strong sense of self, even of being infinitely valuable. Like character, the concept of piety describes not merely a way of acting, but also of thinking. Character and piety are both comprehensive modes of living that engage the wholeness of individual persons in a larger narrative, shaping their consciousness and sense of purpose. And finally, character and piety provide a means of addressing the inherent ambiguity presented to human beings in the course of moral decisions, both great and small. The integrity which each of these concepts seeks to express is thus the counterpoint to the polarities of which Heschel is so keenly aware. Faced with the impossibility of resolving the polarities in which we live, and the uncertainty of fulfilling absolutely the requirements of righteousness, persons of pious character can nevertheless advance in the confidence that their lives are part of a larger narrative that can accommodate the ambiguous consequences of moral imperfection. Piety, then, is closely related to the classical concept of virtue, and may even be said to ground a particular form of virtuous character: a life that is based in the controlling consciousness of participating in the objective requiredness which emerges from the dialectic between God’s creative concern for, and challenge to, human beings. André Comte-Sponville, in his Petit traité des grandes vertus, posits “politesse” (politeness) as the origin of all the other virtues.130 It is, he maintains, in the superficial regard

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for how one ought to behave in the company of others that the awakening of the possibility and importance of the other virtues occurs. No doubt Heschel, faced with this schema, would respond by proposing piety instead as the governing virtue, for in his estimation, it is not in regard to human interaction that virtue emerges, but in regard to the holy. Although piety is not formally one of the cardinal virtues, nor even one of the theological virtues, it is for Heschel the summational content of virtue par excellence, for its orientation is to the source of all moral requiredness in God’s concern, and its practice is the fulfillment of that requiredness through a passionate response. Yet just as faith and piety are intrinsically related yet conceptually distinct, moral consciousness and piety are likewise interrelated yet separate. Heschel is careful to distinguish between ideas and the psychical setting in which they occur. So while moral consciousness becomes aware of what is our responsibility, piety is the effort to put it into effect, not merely to agree with it, but to act on its insights. Piety thus has a double role to play, one of approach to God and another of response. On one hand, it is an attitude of indebtedness toward God and the world which allows us adequately to perceive our obligation. And on the other hand, it is also our active response as moral individuals to that perception of responsibility. Piety is both the initiator and the response to our moral consciousness; it is a unifying concept of both the interior consciousness of the human soul in relation to God, and its exterior engagement with the world.

Notes 1 The most sustained treatment by Heschel of the ethical dimension of his theology is “Response,” Part III of God in Search of Man, which follows logically from sections I and II on “God” and “Revelation,” respectively. Other significant treatments are his collection of “essays on human existence,” grouped together in The Insecurity of Freedom (see especially “Religion in a Free Society” and “Confusion of Good and Evil”), as well as “The Problem of Living,” Part II of Man Is Not Alone. 2 Heschel, EL, 31. 3 Abraham Heschel, “No Time for Neutrality,” in Heschel, MGSA, 75. Previously unpublished manuscript. 4 Heschel, GSM, 382. 5 Ibid., 383. 6 Heschel, TP, 251. 7 Heschel, MNA, 184. 8 Ibid. 9 Heschel, WM, 36. 10 Heschel, GSM, 286. 11 Heschel, WM, 98. 12 Ibid., 36. 13 Heschel, MNA, 193. 14 Heschel, WM, 46. 15 Heschel, “Religion in a Free Society,” 4. 16 Abraham Heschel, “Children and Youth,” in Heschel, IF, 44. Heschel delivered this paper at a White House conference of the same title on 28 March 1960, some

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety months before John F. Kennedy’s first inaugural speech in which he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; Ask what you can do for your country.” The parallelism with Heschel’s earlier paper is suggestive, and it is possible that Kennedy picked up the idea from Heschel. Heschel, WM, 105. Heschel, GSM, 289. Heschel, WM, 68. Ibid., 71; see also GSM, 16. Heschel, WM, 66. Ibid., 74. One notes here a correspondence to Reinhold Niebuhr’s perspective that it is precisely in “man” that the Gospel intersects the world, a stance which is investigated in The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Scribner’s, 1941). Heschel, MNA, 120. Heschel, “An Analysis of Piety,” 312. Ibid., 316. Heschel, TP, xvii. Ibid., 4. Heschel, QG, 106. Heschel, GSM, 137 and 312. Ibid., 106. Heschel, QG, 105. Heschel, WM, 111. Ibid., 98. Heschel, QG, 131. Heschel, MNA, 223. Heschel, TP, 231. Ibid., 217. Heschel, TP, 218, and again at 225. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 219. Ibid. Heschel, GSM, 361. Ibid., 362. Ibid., 325. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 362. Ibid., 310. Ibid., 312. Heschel, QG, xii. Heschel, GSM, 363. Heschel, “Confusion of Good and Evil,” 135. Heschel, EL, 72. Ibid., 377. Ibid., 343. cf. “A Pattern for Living,” the penultimate chapter of Heschel’s Man Is Not Alone.

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Heschel, GSM, 384. Heschel, MNA, 272. Ibid., 266. Ibid., 271. Ibid., 270. Ibid., 265. Heschel, GSM, 331. Ibid. Heschel, PT, 106–7. Ibid., 107. Ibid. Heschel, WM, 98–9. Heschel, MNA, 281. It is interesting to note that in a passing remark, Perlman notes the ability of a “sacred deed” to “integrate otherwise disparate elements, because it is based on intentionality.” Perlman’s observation is made in the context of a discussion of Heschel’s ontology, so he overlooks the potential significance of the statement for Heschel’s ethical concern. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 155. Heschel, GSM, 346. Heschel, “Religion in a Free Society,” 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid. Heschel, “An Analysis of Piety,” 315. Heschel, “An Interview at Notre Dame,” 384. Heschel quotes in this context Psalm 116:12 as the basic notion of reciprocity: “What can I render to the Lord for all His bounties toward me?” Heschel, GSM, 98. Heschel, MNA, 251. Ibid., 259–60. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 254. Donald Moore is one of the few commentators on Heschel to emphasize the importance of personhood in his theology. Indeed, he opens his exploration of Heschel’s spirituality with a chapter on “The Quest for Being Human,” where he writes: “Any approach to a meaningful spirituality must be rooted in an understanding of the human person. So it must be in this study of the spirituality of Abraham Joshua Heschel.” He goes on to locate in the struggle for meaning the overriding problem of the human person, which in turn he describes as the quest for relationship to what is beyond being. Moore, The Human and the Holy, 21–49. Abraham Heschel, “Death as Homecoming,” in Heschel, MGSA, 366–78. Originally published in Genesis of Sudden Death and Reanimation, Clinical and Moral Problems Connected, Proceedings of the 1st International Congress, Florence, Italy, 10–14 January 1969 (Florence: Marchi & Bertolli, 1970), 533–42. A very similar emphasis on humanity’s image and likeness to God is made in the essay, “Sacred Image of Man.” Heschel, MNA, 196. Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” 238. Abraham Heschel, “The Moral Outrage of Vietnam,” in Novak et al., Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience, 59.

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90 Abraham Heschel, “Required: A Moral Ombudsman,” in Heschel, MGSA, 220. Originally published in United Synagogue Review 24/3 (Fall 1971): 4–5, 28. 91 Heschel, “Religion in a Free Society,” 3–23. 92 Heschel, “The Patient as Person,” 24–38. 93 Heschel, “Children and Youth,” 41. 94 Niebuhr was one of the first non-Jewish theologians to recognize Heschel’s potential, writing in a review of Man Is Not Alone in 1951, “It is a safe guess that he will become a commanding and authoritative figure in the religious life of America.” Reinhold Niebuhr, “Masterly Analysis of Faith,” review of Man Is Not Alone by Abraham Heschel, New York Herald Tribune Book Review (1 April 1951): 12. 95 Ursula M. Niebuhr, “Notes on a Friendship: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr,” in Merkle, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 37. 96 Abraham Heschel, “Reinhold Niebuhr,” in Heschel, MGSA, 301. Originally published as “Reinhold Niebuhr: A Last Farewell,” in Conservative Judaism 25/4 (1971): 62–3. 97 Heschel, “Confusion of Good and Evil,” 126–49. 98 Heschel cites Deut. 30:11–14: “Surely this Commandment [mitzvah] which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach.” 99 Heschel, GSM, 293. 100 Heschel repeats this overview of the history of the Pauline doctrine of faith and works in “Toward an Understanding of Halacha,” 139–40, and again in QG, 108. 101 Heschel, PT, 253. 102 John Bennett, “Heschel’s Significance for Protestants,” in Kasimow and Sherwin, No Religion Is an Island, 130. 103 Heschel, WM, 107–9. 104 Heschel, “Depth Theology,” 124. 105 Abraham Heschel, “Existence and Celebration,” in Heschel, MGSA, 31. Originally given as a lecture in Montreal to the Jewish Federation, 1965. 106 Heschel, WM, 108. 107 Heschel, “Children and Youth,” 44. 108 Abraham Heschel, “To Grow in Wisdom,” in Heschel, IF, 78. 109 Heschel, PT, 257–60. 110 Nathalie Sarthou-Lajus, L’Éthique de la dette (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). 111 Ibid., 2 112 Ibid., 6. 113 Ibid., 96. 114 Ibid., 102. 115 Granfield, “Abraham Heschel,” 73. 116 Heschel, “An Analysis of Piety,” 315. 117 Heschel, “Faith,” 334. 118 Heschel, “Prayer,” 342. 119 Heschel, “The Patient as Person,” 26. 120 Heschel, GSM, 345. 121 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 122 Ibid., 208. 123 Ibid., 219. 124 Heschel, QG, 88.

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125 Abraham Heschel, “To Be a Jew: What Is It?”, in Heschel, MGSA, 9. Originally published in Zionist Quarterly 1/1 (Summer, 1951): 78–84. 126 Heschel, MNA, 114. 127 Ibid., 119–20. 128 Heschel, GSM, 351. 129 Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 151. 130 André Comte-Sponville, Petit traité des grandes vertus (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995).

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9

Responding to the “Other”

Philosophy has been affected, since its infancy, with a horror of the Other, with an insurmountable allergy. —Emmanuel Lévinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl

I  The priority of the ethical: Lévinas Up to this point, we have been largely preoccupied with an examination of how piety functions as the linchpin in Heschel’s overall theological work, where it describes the essential point of relational intersection between God and humanity. We have argued that the governing structure in Heschel’s thinking for this pattern of dynamic relationship is the observable parallelism between his phenomenological analysis of the prophetic consciousness of God’s pathos and the corresponding apprehension of God’s presence and will by ordinary pious men and women. The consequence of this parallelism is that Heschel develops piety as a theologically significant synthesis of the primary experience of God, with the reflective dogmatic articulation of the content of that experience, as well as with the practical implications of how the life of faith is enacted in the moral commitments of everyday experience. Piety thereby becomes what we have called a lived hermeneutic of religious belief, with its own instinctive approach to the questions of what we can know and what we are to do in relationship to God. Throughout this exploration of piety’s role in Heschel’s thought, we have been at pains to connect it with a variety of other issues and thinkers, and in this final section of the book, we take up more explicitly the question of Heschel’s legacy by considering ways in which his work anticipates and even interacts with a diversity of other theologians, some of them contemporary with Heschel and others who succeeded him by a generation or two. The first of those is Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–95).1 The structure of piety that we have seen Heschel develop as a mode of understanding and as a form of virtue exhibits as one of its most prominent features an orientation to the “otherness” of God. Throughout his description of piety, Heschel is at pains to analyze how it is, in one way or another, a response to a challenge which comes to us from the outside, an answer to a question addressed to us from the exterior. This theme of an encounter with otherness, and the manner in which it evokes a sense of moral requiredness, is at the heart of Heschel’s understanding of piety, and connects him with a contemporary interest in “the Other” as a key element of philosophical discourse.

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The present chapter will therefore explore how Heschel’s underlying anthropology (which supports his concept of piety and is most succinctly expressed in Who Is Man?) can be brought into sharper focus by making a comparison with Lévinas as another thinker for whom “otherness” is also a central issue. To deploy Lévinas in studying Heschel has at least some biographical foundation, for the two share a similar cultural point of origin (with variations), as well as a similar intellectual formation.2 Yet there is also a more suggestive convergence between the two, and that is the peculiarity of their writing style. Like Heschel, Lévinas has often been accused of an unnecessarily aphoristic and elliptical style, in which he circles around the central point of what he is driving at rather than moving progressively toward it. In language which could apply equally well to Heschel, for example, Colin Davis (an English commentator on Lévinas) observes, “His texts are assertive and propositional, but also enigmatic, fragmented, paradoxical or perhaps just plain inconsistent,” and he continues a few pages later, “Levinas perpetually returns to his starting point, reiterating, modifying and expanding his ideas as he goes.”3 Yet this characteristic is not simply a fault in rational argument, but serves Lévinas’ purpose of challenging and breaking open much of the self-contained discourse that he believed had trapped Western philosophy. This point, which we will explore more carefully in relation to Heschel, means that to understand either thinker, one has to pay attention not only to the content of the writing, but to its form as well, for the structure of their prose is derived from their common origins in a phenomenological method. Each writer therefore attempts to be descriptive rather than prescriptive in presenting their depictions of fundamental realities—what Davis calls in the case of Lévinas “exposure rather than exposition,”4 and what Kaplan describes in the case of Heschel as a poetic probing of “the subtle modalities of our inner life,” awakening “not-yet-conscious insights.”5 This mutual and self-conscious attempt to contest prevailing philosophical notions through an elusive use of language strongly suggests the potential for an exploration of the concept of “the Other” in Heschel with reference to Lévinas’ own use of the term. Another indicator of why a comparison between Heschel and Lévinas may be useful is the perspective each of these two men had on Judaism in relationship to nonJewish thought. Heschel and Lévinas both believed that although there is a unique integrity and system to Judaism, it has the potential of offering universal insights into the nature and meaning of human activity. One might say that in the traditional controversy between Jerusalem and Athens, these two participants understood there to be the possibility of a meaningful dialogue between the two (a topic which has been examined above in relation to Lev Shestov’s Athens and Jerusalem). Indeed, Heschel and Lévinas alike define their respective philosophical projects as questioning the Greek inheritance of Western thought (and its emphasis on ontology and epistemology) through the Hebraic instinct for the priority of the ethical. One commentator on Lévinas goes so far as to say, “Lévinas’s entire philosophy can be understood as but another layer of meaning attached to Sinai, another interpretation— the priority of the other, conscientiousness before consciousness, ethics before reason—exalting and penetrating to the heart of one of the greatest moments in the religious history of the world.”6 Indeed, this specifically Jewish dimension to Lévinas’

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thought is often overlooked in contemporary readings of his work; yet as he himself remarked in reflecting on the ethical dimension of the Hebrew scriptures, “Whenever one sees ‘Israel’ in the sacred texts, one can substitute ‘humanity.’ ”7 Similarly, when Heschel writes a “Philosophy of Judaism,” as he proposes to do in God in Search of Man, he is only amplifying his previous “Philosophy of Religion” (Man Is Not Alone), which approached the same questions from a more universal perspective. The uses that each of these authors makes of his Jewish roots in approaching general questions of ethics are thus significant to the issue of otherness. So while to deploy Lévinas in studying Heschel is, in one sense, artificial in that there is no explicit intellectual or personal connection, yet because of the convergences they unknowingly shared, the one can inform our understanding of the other in a manner analogous to the way in which Heschel himself deployed Kierkegaard as a counterpoint to the Hasidic Rabbi of Kotzk in his book, A Passion for Truth: they manifested, Heschel said, an “affinity of strangers.”8 In his poem, “Of Heaven and Hell,” Jorge Luis Borges closes with words that suggest the fundamental theme of otherness that links Heschel with Lévinas. At the Judgment Day, he writes, a face will form whose contemplation will be an Inferno for the rejected, “and for the elected, Paradise.”9 Borges wishes to instruct us that when we look into the face of another, we see there a radical challenge to the independent self-centeredness of our ego, problematizing our place in the world. Radiating from the gaze of the “Other,” which comes to us from what Lévinas calls the visage (face) in his Totalité et infini (1961, Eng. trans. Totality and Infinity),10 is not just the presence of another concrete human being, but an abstract radical alterity forcing upon us the realization that we are not alone in the world; that the world is not ours individually; and that everything we do directly affects others who dwell beside us.11 Lévinas understands this contemplation of the face—“faithful, still, unchangeable”—as imposing an infinite responsibility upon one’s self, for through it I come to realize that my obligation to the Other is an absolute which I can never totally fulfill: its contemplation may be either an “Inferno” or a “Paradise.” Now, this is not the place to give a detailed examination to the subtleties of Lévinas’ concept of the visage: the goal is to say something about Heschel, more so than Lévinas. But for the purpose of putting Heschel’s thought in juxtaposition to that of Lévinas, one should note that Lévinas’ attempt to locate the source of ethical responsibility in the Other (as presented in the face) has lurking within it a self-conscious and significant reversal of the traditional priority of ontology over ethics. Whereas the usual sequence of philosophical thought would first be to know that we are, and then to inquire what we ought to do, Lévinas wants to contest the primacy of ontology by the ethical, arguing that the right to be—the justification for being itself—must precede an analysis of the structure of being. As the title of one of his seminal essays suggests, ethics is “la philosophie première.”12 His concern is that to dwell on the issue of being tends to collapse consideration of the Other into a sort of sameness, since we inevitably define being in reference to ourselves. While otherness may provisionally be accepted, as it is further analyzed in terms of being, it is gradually reconciled with sameness. What is at stake, as Davis remarks, is “the ability of consciousness to encounter something other than itself.”13

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In making the argument for the priority of the ethical, Lévinas is directly resisting both Husserl’s concept of the Ego and Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein. In the case of Husserl’s phenomenology, Lévinas finds that as the Ego discovers its world through the intentionality of meaning, it tends to see that world in terms of itself. As he writes in an early work, De l’existence à l’existant (1947, Eng. trans. Existence and Existents, 1978): “[Phenomenological description] remains within the world of light, the world of the solitary I does not have an other as other, for whom the other is another me, an alter ego known by empathy, that is by the return to oneself.”14 The dilemma is that consciousness can never truly encounter something outside of itself since it knows the world only as the product of its own activity. Similarly, Lévinas sees Heidegger’s Dasein as essentially solitary and isolated from otherness: its fundamental encounter is with Being itself, rather than with other concrete human beings, and therefore its encounter with a truly Other is ephemeral and limited.15 To resist this totalizing presence of Being, Lévinas posits in two of his early works, De l’existence à l’existant and Le Temps et l’autre (1947, Eng. trans. Time and the Other, 1987),16 the il y a, to be distinguished from Heidegger’s es gibt. The latter implies being as the result of an original act of donation, whereas Lévinas’ il y a is totally impersonal and impossible to analyze, referring only to an anonymous “existence” without “existents.” Room is thereby made for the otherness of the Other to emerge prior to the limiting strictures of an analysis of Being. This move is essential to Lévinas, for otherness somehow has to be maintained as the limitation which presses upon us a responsibility to that which is outside of ourselves. It is in this sense that Lévinas insists that ethics takes priority over ontology, contrary to either Husserl’s or Heidegger’s understanding. His ultimate goal, as he articulates it in Totalité et infini, is to disrupt the totality of fixed concepts, identities, or systems of thought which inhibit the subversive encounter with the Other. How, then, does this model of philosophical reflection inform a reading of Heschel? Whereas he has typically been understood in relatively limited terms, seen in light of projects such as that of Lévinas, Heschel’s work exhibits a similar attempt to rethink fundamental ontological and ethical categories. In Man Is Not Alone, for example, Heschel begins from the point of view that even before we acquire knowledge of ourselves, we become aware of the unknown dimension of reality. “For while it is true,” he writes, “that the given, the apparent is next to our experience; within experience is otherness, remoteness, upon which we come.”17 Even before we can begin to inquire into the nature of who we are as human beings, there is the overwhelming encounter with the sheer surprise of being: “Being is unbelievable,” he says. “We are amazed at seeing anything at all; amazed not only at particular values and things but at the unexpectedness of being as such, at the fact that there is being at all.”18 From this standpoint of radical amazement, Heschel argues that we realize, “The essence of what I am is not mine. I am what is not mine. I am that I am not.”19 His point is that when we back away from the self-consciousness which usually preoccupies our thoughts, and notice that we cannot account for the simple fact of our existence, we are left with the realization that the self does not originate in itself, and that ultimately we are not autonomous subjects but derivative objects, existentially speaking. We are thereby introduced to a reality which is intrinsically other than ourselves.20 (We have seen earlier how Heschel develops this

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objective standing of humanity in relation to God in light of the concern [pathos] of God for creation, with the implication that the meaning of human life is to be found only in relation to this prior concern which brings it into existence.) Heschel contests the primacy of ontology even more directly in Who Is Man?, distinguishing between an “ontological” and “biblical” viewpoint: The cardinal difference underlying these two approaches is that the first, or ontological, approach accepts being as the ultimate, whereas the biblical approach accepts living as the ultimately real. The first seeks to understand living in terms of being, the second seeks to understand being in terms of living.21

In Heschel’s understanding, to say that the primary problem is “living” is to say that the moral question is paramount, for living is defined by the response we make to what is required of us. Rather than a relationship to transcendent Being, therefore, the relationship which constitutes humankind is to “divine living, to a transcendence called the living God.” This relationship is framed within the structure of command and obedience, creation and response, requirement and accountability. The biblical man, therefore, is free of what Heschel calls the “ontocentric predicament.”22 Freedom from that preoccupation moves the question of how one is to live to center stage, for rather than trying to understand the nature of human being, one seeks instead to understand the nature of human doing. “Ontology inquires: what is being? What does it mean to be? The religious mind ponders: what is doing? What does it mean to do? What is the relation between the doer and the deed? between doing and being? Is there a purpose to fulfill, a task to carry out?”23 Now, what Heschel is doing here is not identical to Lévinas, although the direction of their thinking is similar. Indeed, Heschel seems to be combining elements associated both with Heidegger’s es gibt and Lévinas’ il y a: being is given to us, an act of donation which establishes our objective relationship to it, yet on the other hand, it has a sheer unexpectedness which resists an analytical approach. Yet Heschel also takes issue with Heidegger’s concept of Dasein in several places. In his essay, “The Holy Dimension,” for example, he alludes to the inadequacy of “being-in-the-world” to account for our relation to the overwhelming otherness of the Holy.24 And in Who Is Man?, Heschel resists Heidegger’s call simply to “surrender to being,” arguing that human life cannot so easily be restricted to sheer being because the fact that we exist at all imposes upon us a challenge and responsibility to discover something “more-than-being” as its source and meaning. Being itself is an inadequate category through which to understand ultimate reality, for prior to being there is the command to be, and in being we have already obeyed.25 As previously noted, Heschel responds to Heidegger this way: Heidegger’s rhetorical question, “Has the Dasein, as such, ever freely decided and will it ever be able to decide as to whether to come into existence or not?” has been answered long ago: “It is against your will that you are born, it is against your will that you live, and it is against your will that you are bound to give account . . .”26

Significantly, Heschel concludes (as we also saw in the previous chapter) by observing, “Philosophically the primacy of creation over being means that the

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‘ought’ precedes the ‘is.’ The order of things goes back to an ‘order’ of God.” One sees here Heschel’s strong resistance (similar to that of Lévinas) to the totalizing effect of Being, conceived of in ontological categories—a resistance which seems to have been born from an instinctive suspicion of the philosophical climate in which he was schooled in Berlin. “I realized,” he later wrote, “that my teachers were prisoners of a Greek-German way of thinking. They were fettered in categories which presupposed certain metaphysical assumptions which could never be proved. The questions I was moved by could not even be adequately phrased in categories of their thinking.”27 For Heschel, this need to move beyond a preoccupation with Being was motivated by two impulses. First was his desire to open room for the overwhelming encounter with the radical otherness of God; this fundamental dimension of human life was simply shut off, in his estimation, by the reliance on concepts of God which were “a postulate of reason,” with the restrictive status “of being a logical possibility.” As Heschel announced early on in his study of the prophets, “In the Bible the realness of God came first, and the task was how to live in a way compatible with His presence.”28 One notices here that in his own language, Heschel has similarly substituted ethics as having priority over ontology: the primary question is not how or whether God (or anything else) exists, but how we are to live in that presence. This, of course, is the very issue which Heschel’s emphasis on piety is meant to address, for piety responds before it questions, acts before it doubts. As Perlman observes, in this schema Heschel has no pure concept of being, for “Being qua created and not qua being establishes the fact that the ‘ought’ of being precedes the ‘is’ of being.”29 Deontology precedes ontology. Heschel distinguishes these two approaches as the difference between a speculative and a religious mind: The speculative problem is impersonal; the religious problem is a problem addressed to the person. The first is concerned with finding an answer to the question: what is the cause of being? The second, with giving an answer to the question: what is asked of us?30

A second motivation for contesting the primacy of ontology, after making room for the primordial otherness of God, was Heschel’s own conviction—evident in the discussion of Heidegger above—of the importance of situational thinking, which is the examination of the real problems of living which confront human beings rather than trying to understand their situation abstractly. In Who Is Man?, for instance, Heschel observes that, In speaking about human beings we have in mind a being very much alive. Living is a situation, the content of which is much richer than the concept of being. The term “human being” is apt to suggest that the human is but a mode of being in general, with the emphasis placed on being. Since the power of the term easily determines the image of what we undertake to explore, we must always keep in mind that it is the living man we seek to understand when we speak of the human being: human being as human living.31

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At one level, Heschel could be understood here as making a similar argument to Heidegger’s initial impulse for examining human existence from the standpoint of Dasein: an attempt to understand the structure of authentic human life. Yet as already pointed out above, in Heschel’s estimation Heidegger’s collapse of the meaning of human existence into the category of being is ultimately unable to account for life as it is lived in obedience to the prior creative command to be. For Lévinas, of course, the Other has to be embodied in the face of another: alterity is therefore simultaneously human and more than that. For Heschel, in contrast, the Other has a more cosmic or metaphysical dimension, as we would expect from his identification of the Other with the divine. But despite the contrast in approach, there is also a second stage of the common concern shared by Heschel and Lévinas (after the disputation of the priority of being), which is to establish that the sheer fact of our existence necessarily implies a responsibility, and that awareness of that responsibility is not something arrived at rationally but which is given in the structure of alterity. As Heschel describes it, this is a metaethical approach which does not deal with the rightness or wrongness of individual deeds, but with our right to act at all. To act is to assert our will, thus “invading realms that do not belong to us,” as Heschel puts it.32 The otherness of the world and even the mystery we are to ourselves constantly question this invasion, demanding to know by what right we exploit and consume. The priority of ethics over ontology is determined by this demand to account for our right to be, even before we are.

II  The constitution of the person What, then, are the implications of an ethics that claims to be the “first philosophy”? An important result of this shift of priority for both Heschel and Lévinas is that responsibility has a particular nature which is constitutive of human life, even preceding freedom. As pointed out already, just in existing, we are already responding to a command. Life itself is embedded in a structure of obedience—a structure which is indicated by God’s question to Adam and Eve in the garden: “Where art thou?” (Gen. 3:9). Interestingly, Heschel and Lévinas both cite this question as indicative of a primordial responsiveness in human existence. And as Catherine Chalier has pointed out, this is a perspective shared by yet a third Jewish thinker of an earlier generation, Franz Rosenzweig, in Der Stern der Erlosung (1921, Eng. trans. Star of Redemption, 1971). “The signification of the self,” she writes in explicating Rosenzweig’s perspective, “lies in its answering this calling. The uniqueness of the self—which is a prerequisite for freedom—does not rest in its self-asserting but in its answering the calling that appoints it as unique.”33 Lévinas takes the perspective of a primordial relatedness a step further in Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974, Eng. trans. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 1981),34 arguing that the subject in fact exists only in relation to the Other. This move is important to him because, once again, it challenges the false priority of questions of being and knowing, replacing them with the ethical issues of relationship.

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Our responsibility toward the Other does not begin once we have established the truth of our own subjectivity, followed by the epistemological verification of the existence of others. Our responsibility is given from the beginning. Davis summarizes the argument succinctly: Levinas elegantly sidesteps the classic philosophical problems posed by the existence of other selves. From his point of view the problems are badly posed for two reasons: firstly, because they presuppose that the self preexists the encounter with others, whereas in Levinas’s account the subject is constituted by and as its exposure to the Other; and, secondly, because they focus on questions of knowledge (How can I know that others exist, and what can I know about them?), whereas for Levinas it is ethics rather than knowledge which is at stake in the relationship with the other.35

So the acknowledgment that we are confronted by an Other which asks of us a deference to its alterity comes about, as Lévinas remarks, only through “an awakening of the Same, drowsy in his identity, by the Other.”36 We are awakened from the illusion of an autonomous freedom to the responsibility of obedience and obligation toward the Other. This awakening to responsibility is the fundamental point which Heschel and Lévinas have in common, each trying to evoke it, though in different ways, in their respective works. The significant role of the Other in awakening responsibility suggests that a more careful examination of the structure of our relationship to otherness is needed in order to shade both the commonalities and differences in the use to which Heschel and Lévinas put this idea. For Lévinas, otherness is a concept which he derives in Totalité et infini—at least in part—from reflecting on the idea of the infinite in Descartes’ Méditations. The reflective subject (the cogito), Descartes argues, cannot itself be the source of ideas which are greater or more perfect than itself. The infinite is one such idea, which must come from a source infinite in itself, namely, God. The very idea of the infinite is thus the indicator of the existence of the divine. Lévinas sees in this notion the possibility of describing something absolutely beyond the thinking subject, which cannot be reduced to its own self-reflective state. Lévinas summarizes: “Descartes, better than an idealist or realist, discovers a relation with a total alterity, irreducible to interiority, which nevertheless does not do violence to interiority; a receptivity without passivity, a relation between freedoms.”37 From this notion of the alterity of the infinite, Lévinas derives his own concept of an absolute other; the difference is that for him otherness is not directly experienced as God, but in the face of another human being. The realignment of otherness from the divine to the human is an important shift for Lévinas, and to explicate it properly is important for distinguishing Heschel’s approach from his. The difficulty comes from the fact that Lévinas does not explicitly deny that alterity resides in God (he does, e.g. affirm that “God is the Other” in Totalité et infini38). But when he does use the word “God,” he means by it more impersonal concepts such as transcendence, infinity, and exteriority, rather than an affirmation of the sort of personal being understood by Heschel. Davis notes that to define the nature of our relationship to such an alterity, Lévinas’ theory of the Other has three challenges before it: a description of the subject who encounters alterity; an account of the Other

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which does not unwittingly reduce it to the Same; and a picture of how the two relate to one another without abolishing either.39 In addressing these problems, Lévinas relies on the idea of the face—the visage—because in its abstracted form (i.e. both its concrete human embodiment and more-than-human essence), it is simply there, faceto-face, inescapable, demanding a response without attacking the subjectivity of the beholder. The face for Lévinas is not iconic, though it does bear the trace of God upon it, yet even this trace is not analogical. Indeed, for Lévinas, God always remains hidden behind the trace (a trace is like an erasure, expressing both presence and absence): the requiredness of our responsibility is given by the presence of the infinite expressed through the face of the Other, but God’s presence in that demand is erased by the divine absence. Only the ethical relationship we have to the Other as it is embodied in the human face remains. As Seán Hand remarks, though Lévinas is not afraid to use the term God, for him God remains “invisible, infinite, non-thematizable and irreducible to intentionality.” God “comes to mind” only in trace as the absolute alterity of the face-to-face encounter with the Other.40 In contrast, for Heschel, the Other necessarily has an explicit theological implication, and the face-to-face relation with the Other is not given in the proximity of another person, but in the ineffable presence of God which we discover in the form of our wonder and awe at the sheer fact of creation.41 In his typically evocative prose, Heschel writes about this encounter in these striking words: A tremor seizes our limbs; our nerves are struck, quiver like strings; our whole being bursts into shudders. But then a cry, wrested from our very core, fills the world around us, as if a mountain were suddenly about to place itself in front of us. It is one word: GOD.42

Now, this awareness of God is not, in Heschel’s way of thinking, an awareness of an essence of infinite or perfect being. Rather, his concept of God’s pathos presents God’s presence in the form of concern. What we are made aware of in our encounter with the Other is a concern which seeks to be in partnership with us, not an alterity which is simply a resistance or challenge to our autonomy. The concern comes as a question addressed to us, expressing itself not only as an infinite responsibility, but also as a concrete manifestation of God’s will for human life to participate in the divine concern. Piety, therefore, as a form of active partnership in God’s concern (and not merely an ethical response to an impinging alterity) is sharply distinguished from the almost anonymous ethical relationship of Lévinas’ account of our response to the Other. Moreover, to Heschel, the encounter with the Other is not limited, as it is for Lévinas, to the otherness which we can ourselves be to other people: the Other is not disclosed in a face-to-face encounter between equals (which Heschel would suspect once again is a reduction of otherness to a kind of sameness), but rather in a face-toface encounter between unequals. “The soul is introduced to a reality which is not only other than itself, as is the case in ordinary acts of perception; it is introduced to a reality which is higher than the universe.”43 Yet even in this encounter with a reality which is truly other than human life, there is a point of commonality which binds the two sides together; the transcendence of the divine meets the transcendence of human life itself “when we stand face to face—the ineffable in us with the ineffable beyond us—suffer

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ourselves to be seen, to commune, to receive a ray and to reflect it.”44 So like Lévinas, Heschel conceives of the encounter with otherness as intruding on our selfhood; it is not an affirming experience of self-transcendence but a restriction of the self: Awareness of the divine that intrudes first as a sense of wonder gleaming through indifference, as a compulsion to be aware of the ineffable, grows, imperceptibly, like a hair, to uneasiness, anxiety, until it bristles with an unbearable concern that deprives us of complacency and peace of mind, forcing us to care for ends which we do not wish to care for, for ends which have no appeal to our personal interest.45

Now, it is true that Lévinas also understands there to be a fundamental asymmetry in the personal encounter with the Other: the face-to-face relation is not one of mutuality, but one in which the priority of the other person stands out over and above my own subjective interests. In this sense, Lévinas is equally as suspicious as Heschel of such equations as Buber’s “I-Thou” correlation, insisting that there is no such equivalency between the two participants.46 Indeed, Lévinas understands the biblical concern for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan to be an example of this fundamental asymmetry of ethical relations: the Other to whom I am responsible does not share my status or privilege. Davis notes that this asymmetry is a characteristic of Lévinas’ ethics which is frequently remarked upon, saying, “the decoupling of responsibility from reciprocity has been described as the decisive act which distinguishes Levinas’s ethical theory from virtually all others.”47 Yet Heschel would continue to see this nuancing of the personto-person form of encounter with the Other as a semantic contrivance, ignoring the underlying sameness of the actors when compared to the more radical alterity in the divine-human encounter, which he insists is the only authentic presentation of a true “Other.” There is, however, another level at which Lévinas and Heschel may be seen to converge, and that is in their understanding of the foundational role language has to play in describing the encounter with the Other, in whatever manner that Other is conceived. In Autrement qu’être, Lévinas draws a distinction between le Dire (Saying) and le Dit (the Said). Following on his previous argument against the priority given in philosophy to statements about Being, truth, the world, and so on, Lévinas argues that these concepts fall under the rubric of the “Said.” The Said, despite the authoritative manner in which it asserts these concepts, masks the fact that underlying each such statement is a prior encounter with an Other, either as speaker or listener. At this level, “Saying” is an event which precedes the Said in terms of priority; that is, something that is Said presupposes that there has been a Saying which gave rise to it. The Saying, being “pre-original” in Lévinas’ terms, is not totally present in the Said, yet it is only through the Said that one can recognize the traces of the act of Saying. What is significant for Lévinas is that one’s exposure to the Other takes place at the level of Saying, for the Said is already one step removed in that it has begun the process of thematization which Lévinas argues is a reduction to sameness. The dynamic of speech and response implied in the act of Saying is the fundamental encounter with otherness, so that there is a verbal foundation to the ethical dimension of such an encounter: “Saying is to be responsible for other.”48

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Heschel similarly assigns to language a pivotal role in the encounter with the Other, except that in his case it is more obliquely done and occurs in his discussions of prayer as a specific act of piety, in Quest for God in particular. Without engaging in the sort of technical analysis of language done by Lévinas, Heschel does assert the responsibilitymaking power of words when they are used in dialogue with the otherness of God. Concerned with what he calls the “liquidation of language,” Heschel argues in a chapter entitled, “The Person and the Word,” that a word of prayer becomes a creative force enacting the exchange between the divine and human: “What goes on between the soul of man and the word of prayer is more than an act of employment, of using words as if they were tools. Here the soul and the word react upon each other; the word is the creative force.”49 Our reluctance to find the spirit in words is because we fail to acknowledge that speech has power, including the power to make the Other present to us. A word is a meeting point, a place where the meaning of what is said and the realms to which it gives access are both present. The word as an act of expression opens the possibility of an act of empathy as well, for the ideas with which words are pregnant open us to meanings which are larger than our ability to express, and yet which command our empathy. Alternatively put, words open us to the encounter with an Otherness that is beyond our subjective formulation, but to which we discover ourselves to be obligated. Locating the use of language within the pious act of prayer, however, Heschel stresses more strongly than Lévinas the relational quality which linguistic communication implies, and thereby reinforces the participatory nature of his understanding of the encounter with otherness. Interestingly, although both Heschel and Lévinas locate the encounter with the Other in different places (either in God’s will or the human face), their conclusion that there exists for each person an infinite responsibility to the Other is quite similar. In contrast to the rational subjectivity inherited from Greek philosophy, for example, Lévinas (like Heschel and Sarthou-Lajus) asserts that responsibility is given to us in the form of a debt, of which we can never be clear: “A responsibility which is not a debt that can be limited by the extent of one’s active commitment, for from such a debt one can become clear, whereas—unless we compromise our thought—we can never be clear of our debts to the Other. It is an infinite responsibility, a responsibility which does not suit my wishes: the responsibility of a hostage.”50 In Lévinas’ account, this inescapable indebtedness is so because one’s obligation to the Other is not just to render to another person his or her due in a fair and equitable manner; rather, one’s obligation to others is for their whole lives, even to the point of assuming their place in death. This unending responsibility comes from the ineradicable presence of the other’s gaze: the face is always before us, questioning and demanding. An implication of the extent of this responsibility is that moral life is a dissatisfied life, which is always aware of its shortcomings and inability to fulfill its ultimate responsibilities. Davis cites the work of the ethicist Zygmunt Bauman on this point: “One recognizes morality by its gnawing sense of unfulfilledness, by its endemic dissatisfaction with itself. The moral self is a self always haunted by the suspicion that it is not moral enough.”51 In another similarity with Lévinas, Heschel likewise sees our ultimate responsibility as productive of a current of discontent in the moral life. Curiously, Heschel in this

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context himself adopts the vocabulary of “problematizing” the self (although he uses it with a less specific meaning than Lévinas). Resisting the “mere description, simple dogmatic acceptance of the self ” which he believes characterizes philosophy, he proposes instead that the self must remain a problem to be examined through the moral lens of responsibility. As he remarks later on in Who Is Man?, “the aim is the maintenance and fanning of a discontent with our aspirations and achievements, the maintenance and fanning of a craving that knows no satisfaction.”52 As a consequence, Heschel—also like Lévinas—understands the moral question to be one raised not of human life in general, but a challenge put to each individual in relation to otherness. “In the realm of science, a question may be asked and an answer given by one man for all men. In the realm of religion, the question must be faced and the answer given by every individual soul.”53 Moral life is engendered not in generic or general terms, but through a specific relationship between an individual and someone else. “A unique feature of the conscience is that, unlike reason, its main awareness does not lie in conceiving something but in being related to, in being accountable, in being judged as well as in judging. Accountability means to be accountable to someone.”54 For Heschel, of course, that someone ultimately is God. So like Lévinas, Heschel also understands ethical indebtedness to be unlimited. Interestingly, both find the origin for this ethical responsibility in a tripartite scheme, though the players in this scheme are rather different in each case. For Lévinas, there are not only the self and the Other, but also others. That is to say, in our awareness of the otherness of another human being, we are made aware that such an encounter takes place in the presence of a “third party,” which Lévinas identifies as “the whole of humanity which looks at us.”55 In Ethique et Infini (1982, Eng. trans. Ethics and Infinity, 1985), he writes of “the multiplicity of human beings, the presence of the third party alongside the Other, which determines laws and establishes justice.” He continues, explaining the significance of this “third party”: If I am alone with the Other, I owe him everything; but there is a third party. The interpersonal relationship that I establish with the Other, I must also establish with other human beings; there is then the necessity of moderating the privilege of the Other; from whence comes justice. As exercised by institutions, which are inevitable, that must always be controlled by the initial interpersonal relationship.56

If for Lévinas this “third party” impersonally introduces the role of justice as moderating the absolute claims of the Other in a community of persons, for Heschel, the third player is the personal proximity of God for whom justice is not an abstraction, but the objective content of the divine pathos. Thus for Heschel, the role of the third party establishes a common community of concern, bound together by the concern of God for each and for the whole: God means: No one is ever alone; the essence of the temporal is the eternal; the moment is an image of eternity in an infinite mosaic. God means: Togetherness of all beings in holy otherness. . . . When God becomes our form of thinking we begin to sense all men in one man, the whole world in a grain of sand, eternity in a moment. To worldly ethics

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one human being is less than two human beings, to the religious mind if a man has caused a single soul to perish, it is as though he had caused a whole world to perish, and if he has saved a single soul, it is as though he had saved a whole world. [Mishnah Sanhedrin, 4:5]57

Thus, whereas for Lévinas the origin of ethical responsibility is the face-to-face encounter between the self and the Otherness of another person, made in the presence of others, for Heschel it is the encounter between the self with the Otherness of God, made in the presence of others. As Heschel puts it, “the self, the fellow-man, and the dimension of the holy are the three dimensions of a mature human concern.”58 And it is within this arena of human responsibility that piety takes its central place, for it is the synthetic merger of an awareness of and sense of accountability to each of these three dimensions. There are two important differences, however, between the conception of an infinite responsibility in Lévinas and Heschel. The first is that whereas for Lévinas, our responsibility is born out of the existential experience of the encounter with the face of another human being, for Heschel there is an “objective requiredness” which goes further in defining the ethical content derived from that encounter. This difference is indicated by the distinction between Lévinas’ language in which the Other “problematizes” the self, and Heschel’s assertion that the Other makes the self “accountable.” For Lévinas, the Other brings about a sense of moral responsibility through its questioning of one’s own egoistic spontaneity: “We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics.”59 While Lévinas describes at some length how this encounter awakes a sense of moral responsibility, he is less able to describe either why I ought to heed that sense or how I am to know what it bids me to do. For example, the only commandment which he mentions is, “Thou shall not commit murder,” which he takes to be foundational for all other obligations.60 This commandment is not itself, however, founded on anything other than the paradoxical position of majesty and misery which the Other has in relation to the both threatening and promising presence of the self.61 The Other may command or implore that I respect its own existence, but it has no means of coercing or convincing me to obey. Davis concludes that given the lack of consideration of ethics as “philosophically established principles, rules, or codes” in Lévinas work, his thought is better understood as dealing with the “ethical” than with “ethics,” or in other words with “the broader domain where ethical experiences and relationships occur before the foundation of ethics.”62 Heschel, on the other hand, is keenly interested in the objective content of moral life, and so deals much more directly with what would typically be understood as ethics itself in discussing the nature of moral responsibility. He is instinctively more at home with the language of accountability, for in his understanding the encounter with God is more than a problematizing of the self: it is the commandment of the self. An individual, Heschel says, “is sure of reflecting objective requiredness, of striving for a goal which is valid regardless of his own liking.”63 This certainty is so because the encounter with the Other (God) is not just one of infinite distance or absolute otherness (although it includes these dimensions); it is also an engagement of reciprocity in which God seeks to be in relationship with us. In this case the Other, rather than remaining remote in

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its absolute alterity, “sues for our devotion, constantly, persistently, and goes out to meet us as soon as we long to know Him.”64 In contrast to the sort of standoff which exists between Lévinas’ moral subject and the Other, in Heschel’s system the Other actively displays an interest in us and therefore seeks through covenant to instruct and guide—to command—and therefore to hold us accountable. “Our task is to concur with His interest, to carry out His vision of our task.”65 This distinctly more religious conception of Otherness and our accountability to it has the important implication that the pursuit of the moral life and the discovery of the just and good is not a burden placed on us by an abstract alterity, but one in which the source of that Otherness is engaged as well. Whereas Lévinas describes the self ’s relationship to the Other in Autrement qu’être as being its “hostage,” Heschel describes the relationship to the Other in terms of partnership as it is enacted in piety.66

III  God’s concern versus God’s trace: Our need to be needed In Heschel’s emphasis upon the objective requiredness of moral life as it is given in God’s concern, we come to the point at which Heschel and Lévinas are furthest apart, for their conceptions of the role which the divine plays in human life are radically different— though both very Jewish. In the case of Lévinas, God is (as already mentioned) known only in trace. God is not encountered directly, but only through the ethical relationship given in the encounter with the Other. As Lévinas explores in his essays on religion, Difficile liberté,67 this tension between human freedom and divine transcendence is characteristic of Judaism. God remains transcendent, and one can only acknowledge the divine in the way that one treats the Other: the only relationship with God is in one’s concrete relationship with other human beings. “That the relationship with the divine crosses the relationship with men and coincides with social justice is the entire spirit of the Jewish Bible.”68 (One notices here the contrast in Lévinas’ origins in rabbinic Judaism, with its more distant concept of God, and the mysticism of intimate relationship in Heschel’s Hasidic roots. Indeed, Lévinas goes so far as to suggest that the ecstasy of mystical experience is a form of violence to the human spirit, for it happens against one’s will and entails an unfree submission to a force greater than oneself. In Lévinas’ mind, this is contrary to the spirit of the “difficult freedom” of Judaism.69) Yet despite Lévinas’ deliberate restraint in using overtly theistic language, one should be careful not to overlook his insights into theological questions, and his use of these insights in his work.70 In the essay entitled, “La Révélation dans la tradition juive,” for example, Lévinas considers the role of Torah and its origins in revelation. His own understanding of revelation emphasizes it as a “call to exegesis” in which the biblical text is an open-ended work which discloses its content only as it is continually engaged by individual readers.71 It thus bears an exteriority which challenges the self-contained limits of reason: revelation challenges “our habit of thinking of reason as the correlative of the possibility of the world, and counterpart to its stability and identity.”72 Lévinas imagines this fissure in the limits of reason to be equivalent to the encounter with the Other described above: what one encounters in revelation is

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a “you must” independent of any rational deduction of “I can.” In other words, in the ethical relationship to the Other, one encounters a transcendence which exceeds reason’s ability to account for it: ethics is itself an encounter with the transcendent, and is uncontainable and infinite. Hence, Lévinas is able to say that in the exemplary biblical response to the presence of the other, “Here I am” (I Sam. 3:4), we discover “obedience to the Most High as the ethical relationship to the Other.”73 Revelation, then, when it is described in terms of the ethical, is a mode of relation to God, and this mode is characterized as unfulfillable: The Other is thought of only abusively as the enemy of the Same; its alterity does not invite us to the play of a dialectic, but to an incessant questioning—without any ultimate instance—of the priority and tranquillity of the Same, like the burning without consuming of an inextinguishable flame. The prescription of the Jewish Revelation, with its unpayable obligation, is it not in this same form?74

It would be fair to suppose that Heschel would resist the more agnostic aspects of Lévinas’ thought which restrict the encounter with the Other to the visage, although he would probably not disagree with the idea of an infinite responsibility as the essence of the ethical implication which follows. But Heschel’s concern would be that to locate the origins of responsibility at a distance from God betrays an inadequate appreciation for the volatile nature of human beings themselves. There is, for example, the simple fact that although the Other problematizes the self and asks for responsible commitment in response, the self can just as well choose to respond aggressively through the exercise of power, as the events of the twentieth century so amply demonstrated. Human beings cannot, as we have seen Heschel say in response to Kant, be asked to exercise both the legislative and executive functions of morality: the Other must not only problematize the self, but command it as well and evoke its sympathetic attachment (the very response described by piety). So a description of the Other only as the human face—however abstracted or universalized, and whatever trace is left upon it—does not satisfactorily express the ineffable dimension of existence which Heschel argues is necessary to and constitutive of a pious awareness of accountability. It is, he argues, simply impossible fully to feel our responsibility for another human being unless we are first aware of God’s concern for that person as well: “There is no other way to feel one with every man, with the leper or with the slave, except in feeling one with him in a higher unity: in the one concern of God for all men.”75 Ethical motivation and behavior is not generated from within (even in face of the Other), but comes from a pious participation in the foundational concern of God for us. Moreover, the encounter with the Other cannot be limited to a problematizing of the self. Rather, Heschel is adamant that one of the self ’s basic needs is to be needed. The Other does not simply call into question the autonomous existence of the self: it also presents the potential fulfillment of one of the deepest needs of the self, and that is to have purpose, to be able to meet the needs of someone else. Heschel interprets this craving to be needed as the desire for transcendence itself, for it can find satisfaction only outside of the self in an encounter with an Other: “Unlike all other needs, the need of being needed is a striving to give rather than to obtain satisfaction. It is a desire to satisfy a transcendent desire, a craving to satisfy a craving.” To satisfy one

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of the fundamental longings of the self, therefore, one has paradoxically to abnegate the self in deference to the needs of others: “the meaning of existence is experienced in giving, in endowing, in meeting a person face to face, in fulfilling other people’s needs.”76 This perspective puts quite a different spin on the nature of an encounter with the Other, for it has the potential of being both problematic and deeply satisfying at the same time—the sort of polarity of pious experience which Heschel inherited from his Hasidic roots. With his particular tripartite foundation for moral living in the self, the divine Other, and others, Heschel is able to answer a dilemma which haunts Lévinas’ work, namely, the burden of individually bearing an infinite responsibility, caught in the gaze of the Other. Carrying such a burden, we may find ourselves with the morally debilitating realization that we are simply incapable of fulfilling it, which leads toward passivity, cynicism, or frustration. Heschel likewise evokes a sense of infinite responsibility, but in his view the responsibility is not ours to bear alone, but something we share in partnership with the divine concern. Without the infinite wisdom of God, infinite human responsibility becomes an overwhelming embarrassment—not only are we unable to do all that we ought, we are even unaware of what it is. “How should we reconcile infinite responsibility with finite wisdom? How is responsibility possible?”77 Heschel’s answer is that by participating in God’s justice and compassion, we are encouraged through piety to persevere because we know that the task is not ours alone.

IV  Who is man? Human being or being human Already in this chapter we have had recourse several times to Heschel’s work, Who Is Man? The central thesis of this book, which revolves around a pivotal distinction between the questions “What is man?” and “Who is man?”, can perhaps best be understood in light of the preceding discussion of Heschel and Lévinas, for it represents Heschel’s most sustained attempt to articulate a human anthropology devoid of a reliance on ontological concepts of being.78 Heschel sets the opposition in this manner: Even the form in which we ask the question about man is biased by our own conception of man as a thing. We ask: What is man? Yet the true question should be: Who is man? As a thing man is explicable; as a person he is both a mystery and a surprise. As a thing he is finite; as a person he is inexhaustible.79

What Heschel is trying to get at is a distinction we have seen him make before between human being and being human. The first he fears is susceptible to unhelpful reductionism—human being defined merely in biological or functionalist terms. (In a discussion of the inappropriateness of such definitions, he cites the absurd example of Plato’s having defined a human being as a two-legged animal with no feathers, whereupon Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it to the Academy!80) Being human, on the other hand, is defined in terms of a person’s sensibilities and relationships, going beyond mere physical needs to the questions of meaning and destiny, which of

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course Heschel locates in piety. Perlman sums up this emphasis on being human by arguing that it is based on the concept of intentionality, that is, human being can be understood only in terms of the sense of task—of requiredness—which consciousness gives to it.81 He bases this reading on the reference Heschel makes to his philosophical sources (Brentano and Husserl): whereas they have shown that “consciousness always posits an idea,” Heschel expands beyond this intentional notion to the idea that “selfconsciousness posits a challenge.”82 Heschel’s great worry—and here one senses the influence of his personal history of loss—is that modern society’s ability to sense what is morally at stake in human life is rapidly receding. The events of the twentieth century, which he refers to obliquely as an “overwhelming self-disdain,” have resulted in what he argues is a “massive defamation” of what it means to be human. “The eclipse of humanity, the inability to sense our spiritual relevance, to sense our being involved in the moral task itself is a dreadful punishment.”83 His appeal, then, to the question “Who is man?” is an attempt to recover the sense that human beings have a moral stake in the world, that they cannot simply take existence for granted (“to be is an intransitive verb”), but must continually be engaged in the struggle to surpass the self through the search for meaning. And meaning, in Heschel’s thinking, is derived from living in such a way that one’s life would “deserve and evoke an eternal Amen.”84 The anxiety which haunts us is whether my life is needed, whether it will be acknowledged as having served some end beyond itself. As Heschel remarks in Man Is Not Alone, “[Man] finds no happiness in utilizing his potentialities for the satisfaction of his own needs . . . his destiny is to be a need.”85 Now, Heschel’s analysis here is in one sense not very rigorous philosophically: his generalized assertions that human beings think in terms of “being needed” are more personal reflections than substantiated observations. However, when one considers these reflections in relation to the connections made above to the project of Lévinas, one can see that there are more substantive philosophical issues at stake than meet the eye. The distinction between “Who” and “What” a human being is, for example, relies on just the sort of questioning of ontology by ethics that underlies the whole Lévinasian program. Heschel wishes to treat the self as a moral problem simply given the fact that it exists: the moral question is not something appended to being, it is the problem of being. Indeed, Heschel asserts, one can know nothing about what is human in human being unless one has first asked the moral question, “How should I live the life that I am?”86 Embedded in the thematic question, “Who is man?,” therefore, is a prioritization of ethics which makes of it the “first philosophy.” One might object that in fact Heschel also sets out to study humanity in relation to being in Who Is Man? He does, for example, devote the third chapter to describing “modes of being.” And the fourth chapter begins with two questions, one of which is simply, “What is being?” In each case, however, despite the seemingly ontological language, Heschel undermines any traditional metaphysical response by circling back to the original question of the book’s title. In doing so, he asserts, “man may be characterized as a subject in search of a predicate,”87 meaning that there is no essential quality to his being without reference to the foundational moral engagements which both he and Lévinas argue for: “Existence does not receive its meaning from the realm of being, because being-itself is less than being human. The human is not derived

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from being; although it may vanish within it.”88 Even when Heschel enumerates the “modes of being” which form the theme of Chapter 3 of Who Is Man?, the categories he describes can only be defined in relational terms (preciousness, uniqueness, opportunity, nonfinality, process and event, solitude and solidarity, reciprocity, and sanctity). That is to say, they are not intrinsic in being itself, but only as that being is put in relation to something other than itself. For human beings, therefore, the nature of an individual’s existence is entirely dependent upon a relationship to another: as Lévinas puts it, subjectivity is discovered only in the presence of the Other, or in Heschel’s terms, the self is made meaningful only in response to the question asked of it by God.

Notes 1 The name “Lévinas” appears both with and without an accent. It will here be used with the accent, except in citations where it appears in the original text without one. 2 Certain biographical details suggest that a comparison between Heschel and Lévinas is not entirely arbitrary, even though they did not know one another and evidently did not read one another’s books, despite the fact that they were exact contemporaries (Lévinas was born the year before Heschel, but outlived him by 23 years). There is not, for example, any reference in the respective works of Heschel and Lévinas to one another. Heschel’s lack of acquaintance with Lévinas was confirmed by his daughter, Susannah Heschel, in an e-mail sent in response to an inquiry by the present author, dated 4 November 1999: “I do not believe my father read Lévinas, and am sure he never met Lévinas. And I imagine he would not have cared for his work.” Both Heschel and Lévinas were born into the Eastern European Jewish tradition: Heschel in Warsaw and Lévinas in Kovno, Lithuania. Yet whereas Heschel was deeply immersed in the Hasidic milieu of Poland, Lévinas was raised in the more cosmopolitan and literary Judaism of Lithuania (Richard A. Cohen, “Emmanuel Levinas” in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Steven Katz [Washington: B’nai B’rith Books, 1993], 205)—a world Heschel would encounter himself during his preuniversity studies at the Real-Gymnasium in Vilna from 1925 to 1927 (Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness, 79). Both men, however, were raised in a context where Judaism was a manner of living that permeated every aspect of daily life, and in which the study of Hebrew texts was paramount (although Lévinas seems to have come to Talmud study later on). Heschel and Lévinas each moved several times during their childhood with their families, including for Lévinas a period in the Ukraine where he encountered Russian literature and philosophy. For their formal intellectual formation, Heschel and Lévinas each chose a path that led them far afield from their familial roots: Heschel to Germany in 1927 (Berlin) and Lévinas to France in 1923 (at the University of Strasbourg). It was at their respective universities that these two aspiring students encountered the philosophy of phenomenology. Heschel’s exposure to this school of thought has already been described. In Lévinas’ case, his attraction to phenomenology led him to travel to Freiburg for the academic year 1928–29, where he became a student of Husserl himself and attended lectures given by Husserl’s successor, Martin Heidegger. Lévinas also attended the Kant seminar in Davos, where Ernst Cassirer

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(one of Heschel’s intellectual mentors) debated Heidegger on Kant (Cohen, “Emmanuel Levinas,” 208). Whereas Heschel published his dissertation in 1936 on the distinctly religious theme of prophecy, however, Lévinas’ thesis identifying him more as a philosopher was published in 1930 on “Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl.” From these Eastern European roots, Heschel in turn emigrated to America, becoming a theologian of conservative Judaism; Lévinas by contrast settled in France, where he became a secularized philosopher: as he expressed in his own words, “plutôt que penseur juif, je suis un juif qui pense” (Rather than a Jewish thinker, I am a Jew who thinks, quoted in Andrius Valevicius, From the Other to the Totally Other [New York: Peter Lang, 1988], 2). Both thinkers, however, were noted for their Talmudic interpretations and remained actively engaged in Jewish reflection. Lévinas, for example, gave detailed Talmudic readings at the annual Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française from 1960 onward (Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996], 107). Perhaps it is worth noting that in these far-separated contexts, both Heschel and Lévinas developed reputations for embodying a continuity between their intellectual and personal lives, each making a genuine concern for others an extension of their more theoretical reflections. (As Cohen remarks, “Levinas’s is not at all the case of an ‘abstract’ intellectual. . . . Quite the contrary. Beyond the generosity and probity of Levinas’s public works, his book reviews, secondary articles, prefaces, contributions to Jewish causes, direction of an important Jewish educational and cultural institution, university teaching, dissertation supervision, a global correspondence, lectures every Sabbath morning in the synagogue, and the like, not to mention raising a family, there shines Levinas the man, his outgoing friendliness, his real concern for others, his genuine modesty and personal dignity, and always a warm and ready sense of humor. The ethics of Levinas the man and the ethics of Levinas the thinker are, in a word, at one” [Cohen, “Emmanuel Levinas,” 210]). One could take note of another recent comparison of Heschel and Lévinas in Andrzej Leder, “The Problem of Legitimization: The Position of Emmanuel Levinas and Abraham J. Heschel,” in Krajewski and Lipszyc, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 52–9. Leder places Lévinas in a continuing Cartesian tradition: “the metaphysical doubt of the cogito opens the realm of a legitimate metaphysics.” Heschel, on the other hand, sees such a radical doubt as only leading to radical despair. Nevertheless, Leder sees both thinkers as coming to “similar conclusions as to the moral role of man on earth: his autonomy in defense of justice.” 3 Davis, Levinas, 35–7. 4 Ibid., 56. 5 Kaplan, Holiness in Words, 39. 6 Cohen, “Emmanuel Levinas,” 219. 7 Ibid., 220. 8 Heschel, PT, 5. 9 Jorge Luis Borges, “Of Heaven and Hell,” trans. Alastair Reid, The New York Review of Books 46/8 (6 May 1999): 32. 10 Emmaneul Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971; first edition 1961). English edition Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 11 In general, the English convention is to use the word “Other,” in its capitalized form, to translate Lévinas’ use of the word Autrui (a personalized form of Autre), whereas

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Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety in lower case it stands for the word autre. The key distinction is that the “other” can be incorporated into the Same, whereas the “Other” remains always distinct. Lévinas himself is inconsistent, however, sometimes also using Autre. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Éthique comme philosophy première,” Justifications de l’éthique (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1984). English edition “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Davis, Levinas, 9. Emmanuel Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1981; first edition 1947), 145. English edition Existence and Existants, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1978). Davis, Levinas, 23. Emmanuel Lévinas, Le Temps et l’autre (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1947). English edition Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987). Heschel, MNA, 7. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 65. Heschel, WM, 69. Ibid., 71. Heschel, GSM, 285. Heschel, “The Holy Dimension,” 372. Heschel makes this point in several places. In Man Is Not Alone, for example, he writes, “Looking at our own existence, we are forced to admit that the essence of existence is not our will to live; we must live, and in living we obey. Existence is a compliance, not a desire; an agreement, not an impulse. In being we obey.” Heschel, MNA, 203. Similarly, in an essay on aging, Heschel observes, “Advancing in years must not be taken to mean a process of suspending the requirements and commitments under which a person lives. To be is to obey. A person must never cease to be.” Heschel, “To Grow in Wisdom,” 78. Heschel, WM, 97. Heschel, “Toward an Understanding of Halacha,” 129. Heschel, TP, 16. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 156. Heschel, GSM, 111. Heschel, WM, 68. Heschel, GSM, 286. Catherine Chalier, “The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the Hebraic Tradition,” in Ethics as First Philosophy, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7. Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). English edition Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). Davis, Levinas, 78. Emmanuel Lévinas, “La Révélation dans la tradition juive,” in Paul Ricœur et al., La Révélation (Bruxelles: Publications des facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1984), 76. English edition “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” in Hand, The Levinas Reader. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 233. Ibid., 232.

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Davis, Levinas, 41. Hand, Introduction to The Levinas Reader, 7. Heschel, MNA, 91. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 71. Cohen, “Emmanuel Levinas,” 216. Davis, Levinas, 51. Lévinas, Autrement qu’être, 80. Heschel, QG, 25. Lévinas, “Révélation,” 73. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 80. Cited in Davis, Levinas, 54. Heschel, WM, 87. Heschel, GSM, 153. Ibid., 159. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 213. Lévinas, Ethique et Infini (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 84. English edition Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1985). I am grateful to Paolo Gamberini, SJ for pointing out this text as it relates to Heschel. Heschel, MNA, 109. Ibid., 139. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 33. Ibid., 217. Davis, Levinas, 50. Ibid., 48. Heschel, MNA, 223. Ibid., 241. Ibid. In an essay on “Jewish Education,” however, Heschel alludes to an encounter with the Other which is not strictly speaking with God: he remarks that in light of the objective requiredness which human beings feel, “it is improper to maintain that our supreme goal is to express the self. What is the self that we should idolize it? What is there in the self that is worthy of being expressed and conveyed to others? The self gains when is loses itself in the contemplation of the nonself, in the contemplation of the world, for example.” Abraham Heschel, “Jewish Education,” in Heschel, IF, 228–9. Lévinas, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963). English edition Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (London: The Athlone Press, 1990). Lévinas, Difficile liberté, 36. Davis, Levinas, 103. For a comparison of the treatment of Jewish sources in Heschel and Lévinas, see Éphraïm Méïr, “La notion de revelation dans «la théologie des profoundeurs» de Heschel et la métaphysique éthique de Lévinas,” in Gérard Rabinovitch, ed., Abraham J. Heschel: un tsaddiq dans la cité (Paris: Alliance israélite universelle, 2004), 153–86. Lévinas, “Revelation,” 57.

252 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety Ibid., 72. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 76–7. Heschel, MNA, 142. Ibid., 214. Heschel, GSM, 285. Many of the points made in Who Is Man? are further amplified by the later essays published in The Insecurity of Freedom. In the first five essays contained therein, for example (“Religion in a Free Society,” “The Patient as Person,” “Children and Youth,” “Idols in the Temples,” and “Grow in Wisdom”), Heschel refers the reader back to Who Is Man? as the source of the ideas under discussion. Heschel, WM, 28. Ibid., 23. Perlman, Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, 20. Heschel, WM, 106. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 52. Heschel, MNA, 213. Heschel, WM, 36. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 67.

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Now true piety does not rest in fear . . . but rather it consists in a pure and true zeal which loves God as Father . . . — John Calvin, Genevan Catechism

I  Prelude: A deductive evaluation of piety The current chapter proposes a shift in approach from the previous inductive analysis of the content of Heschel’s theology to a more deductive evaluation of the concept of piety as he develops it in the corpus of his work. The proposition to be tested is that if piety is as epistemologically, morally, and spiritually rich as we have argued Heschel understands it to be, then it ought also to support and inform an engagement with a variety of other theological issues of contemporary concern. Indeed, we have previously made the point that Heschel’s theology anticipates by at least a generation many of the concerns of “postmodern” theology, and by adopting a shift in emphasis from his phenomenological elaboration of piety, to its intersection with current theological issues, we gain the opportunity to explore this assertion in greater detail. That such a convergence should be observable is hardly surprising, given that Heschel was himself working out of a mindset that wished to overcome the hold of metaphysics on theological concepts of God. In his case, this determination came principally out of his close reading of the Hebrew prophets, where he could find no support for a conceptualization of God as anything other than passionate and personal. As we have seen, such a reading was made possible by the convergence in his own experience of both the mystical realism of Hasidic Judaism, and an encounter with modern phenomenological philosophy which was itself turning away from the dominance of ontological categories in search of a more thorough account of human being. What, then, are the points of intersection which become apparent between Heschel’s theology of piety and contemporary religious debates? If one were to take Graham Ward’s introduction to The Postmodern God as representative of that aspect of theological discourse which describes itself as “postmodern,” what becomes clearly evident is the thematic significance of the “surrender of the subject.”1 In using this phrase, Ward has in mind a whole constellation of issues which coalesce in a necessary displacement of the autonomous knowing subject as it developed in modern Western thought (“modern” understood broadly as extending from the rise of nominalism in the

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late Middle Ages, through Enlightenment rationalism, and to nineteenth and twentieth century liberalism). There is, for example, the issue of the rupture between reason and revelation, which is argued to be an extension of the separation of philosophy from theology occasioned by the late medieval assertion of a universal Being which exists prior to any consideration of the particularity of either our created or God’s noncreated being. The result of this rupture is claimed by postmodern theology to have been the establishment of a metaphysics of being which is ordered according to the limits of human reason alone (with the implication that the real is that which is knowable in human terms), with the consequent eclipse of theological apprehension per se by a purely rational epistemology (epitomized by Kant). Theology thereby became captive to philosophical categories of being and knowing, abdicating to the autonomy of secular thought any claim to unique modes of insight and understanding. In calling for the “surrender of the subject,” Ward is suggesting that the priority of the secular must itself be challenged if theology is to reclaim its authentic legitimacy, for as the articulation of the dependence of the created upon the creator, “theology cannot conceive of a secular space at all, nor an autonomous subject.” The way has been cleared for such a reassertion of the priority of the theological, Ward argues, by the complex critique of modernity accomplished by the philosophical trajectory extending from Nietzsche, through Heidegger, to Saussure and the French deconstructionists, which has left the autonomous subject isolated in an aporetic pattern of “ambivalences, generated by difference.” Only a certain kenosis of the subject, allowing for a reconstitution of the self as participatorily related to the presence of God, can fully address this ultimate nihilism: “Doing theology, acting, writing, functioning theologically is not to own a voice, but to be voiced; to be spoken, not a speaker.” Heschel’s fundamental emphasis through piety on human partnership with the transcendental divine subjectivity (which he identifies as the cornerstone of his theology) emerges here as the key engagement that piety has to make in a discussion of the kenotic emptying of the autonomous modern subject. The “doing of theology,” which Ward asserts as the necessary fulfillment of the postmodern project to overcome a metaphysics structured on human reason, can be read as an expression in another mode of the essential insights which Heschel argues are native to piety itself: a regard for the ultimate subjectivity of God, and an orientation of human living and knowing to participation in that divine subjectivity. To look for such connections between Heschel’s concept of piety and contemporary theologies is not to argue anachronistically that Heschel himself necessarily understood his position to be part of these debates, however, but rather to test the pertinence of his own insights into the nature of piety for successive theological discussion. Hence, this chapter will investigate how piety could be deployed in contemporary theological discourse as a fruitful contributor to several fundamental issues that are related to this kenotic instinct, thereby testing the strength of Heschel’s own formulation of piety’s theological significance. These investigations do not pretend to be exhaustive, but only indicative of the fecundity of piety as a theological tool in relationship to five distinct, though interconnected, issues of moral, ascetical, systematic, and philosophical theology. Specifically, the chapter will probe how piety can illuminate a theocentric grounding for the moral life; how it can nuance the idea of human participation in God as a divine-human partnership;

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how it can inform the notion of a theo-logical focus on the excess of divine love in contrast to an idolatrous metaphysics of being; how it can engage with the concept of a kenotic secularization; and finally, how it can respond to the weakened ontology of postmodern philosophy by enabling the hopeful enactment of the will, if not always the ability, to believe.

II  Theo-centrism: Piety as a moral act If a defining characteristic of the postmodern theological instinct is a turn away from the attempt to ground human knowing and action in an autonomous and self-warranted reason, then the theocentric character of Heschel’s ethical reflection becomes an important instance of his anticipation of this rupture with modernist thought. We have already examined the means by which Heschel argues for a basic shift of subjectivity from human being to God, which is in essence a shift of orientation from an anthropocentric to a theocentric vision of human life. Although Heschel’s ethical reflections are firmly grounded in this theocentric perspective, his development of piety as a form of virtue lived in partnership with God nevertheless also allows for a corresponding emphasis on the development of moral character in the individual person (Chapter 8). The sense of an absolute human dependence formed from an overwhelming indebtedness toward God—which one would expect of a theocentric theology—is not lacking in Heschel; yet given his always polar way of thinking, neither is the sense of God’s need for the evolving integrity of the human individual. While stressing the subjectivity of God as the ultimate orienting principle, therefore, Heschel continues to assert a well-defined personalism that stresses the development of the individual within the “it-He” construct of human-divine relations. In this sense, his “theocentrism” almost appears to have two foci set in an elliptic relationship: one point expressive of divine intentionality, and a second point expressive of its human fulfillment.2 We have already noted in passing that Heschel’s shift to a divine subjectivity as determinative of moral discourse is a stance he shares in common with James Gustafson’s “theocentric ethics,” and a brief comparison of their respective approaches will bring into the foreground the significance of Heschel’s unique elliptic articulation of this concept. How the theocentric alteration of perspective affects our moral understanding connects Heschel at a profound level with Gustafson’s own treatment of moral theology, since Gustafson is likewise motivated by a focused concept of piety, derived in his case from the Reformed tradition. Gustafson, like Heschel, is not himself formally a part of the “postmodern” discourse, yet nevertheless his relocation of moral requiredness to a divine intentionality, away from the categorical imperatives of abstract reason or the universal deontologies of natural law, marks him as a participant in the theological turn away from the humanistic predisposition of modernist thought. Yet whereas for Heschel even a theocentric ethics retains an elliptic tension between its divine and human foci, for Gustafson, theocentrism is singularly focused in a divine center of gravity, and therefore lacks the personalist emphasis of Heschel’s own moral thinking.

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Gustafson is quite open about his spiritual and intellectual debt to the Reformed tradition, making frequent reference to such representative figures as John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Karl Barth. In a chapter on his “Preference for the Reformed Tradition” in Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective (1981/84), he lists three emphases in this tradition with which he especially identifies his own method: a sense of a powerful Other, the centrality of piety in religious and moral life, and an understanding of human life as needful of being ordered in relation to the purposes of God.3 In describing more fully the import of these three points, he begins by reviewing the role piety played in Calvin’s own theology. As we have seen, for Calvin, piety was not merely a human response to God, but the precondition to any authentic knowledge of God. True knowledge, Calvin argued, is not just recognition of an idea of God, but recognition of how that fact impinges on human being: By the knowledge of God, I intend not merely a notion that there is such a being, but also an acquaintance with whatever we ought to know concerning him conducive to his glory and our benefit. For we cannot with propriety say there is any knowledge of God when there is no religion or piety.4

The knowledge about which Calvin speaks is not, therefore, of a speculative kind, but remains firmly grounded in what God is in relation to us. The true knowledge that comes from piety is a reverence for the majesty of God, joined with a loving embrace of humanity’s dependence on and obligation to that authority.5 Gustafson approvingly quotes another of Calvin’s statements regarding piety (that human beings will submit to God’s authority only when they feel themselves to owe everything to God), saying, “this sentence brings together the powerful God on whom all depends together with piety and with the discipline of service to God.” Piety for Calvin is not simply a religious feeling, therefore, but a profound sense of honor and duty toward God. Following Calvin, Gustafson himself defines piety as “an attitude of reverence, awe, and respect which implies a sense of devotion and of duties and responsibilities as well.” This definition effectively bridges the other two affirmations of the Reformed tradition embraced by Gustafson (a sense of human obligation, to a powerful Other), and forms the basis for his development of a theocentric ethics. Indeed, the significance of a Calvinistic piety for his overall project is so central that it is worth quoting at some length his description of its overlap with his own argument: There is a similar sense of the powerful Other, of that on which all things ultimately depend, to which all are ultimately related, which both limits and sustains human activities. That Other evokes piety; a sense of awe and reverence, the senses of dependence, gratitude, obligation, repentance, possibilities for action, and direction. Piety is, in a sense, the hinge which joins the frame of the moral and natural ordering of life to the door of human duties and obligations. Morality and religion are, for those of religious consciousness, inextricably intertwined. Both are evoked by God, both are directed in their activity toward God.6

The core of the argument which Gustafson develops emanates from this orientation toward a “powerful Other”: in resistance to what he perceives as an unwarranted

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theological and moral anthropocentrism (even in the religious idea of individual salvation), Gustafson advocates that “the proper orientation is not primarily toward self but toward God—to the honoring of God, and to the ordering of life in relation to what can be discerned of the divine ordering.”7 In proposing his own shift “from subjectivity to objectivity,” Gustafson observes that too often supposed pieties become instrumental of human, rather than divine, purposes. Whether it be communal or individual pieties, if religious life contributes primarily only to a feeling of consolation or self-gratification without setting human life within the appropriate limits of finitude and ordered relationship, then such religious behavior is only a form of “superficial utility.”8 In contrast, Gustafson argues that when one takes a “theocentric” perspective, effectively shifting the center of gravity in human life away from the individual to God, “Both religious and moral activity are directed toward an end beyond themselves: the honoring, or glorifying, of God.”9 Hence, he proposes as a governing moral imperative, “we are to conduct life so as to relate to all things in a manner appropriate to their relations to God.”10 Of particular significance in this formulation is that it includes not only human beings within the moral horizon, but situates moral life in relation to all of creation. The governing principle is that all things are created by the same Creator, and derive their moral significance from that fact alone. Human life as such does not automatically take priority over the rightful existence of other created beings—either animate or inanimate. Like Heschel, Gustafson adopts piety as a more inclusive and accurate term than faith for describing the kind of attitude which ought to characterize religious life lived from a theocentric perspective. Whereas faith tends to be contrasted with reason, piety includes not only reasoned judgment, but also faithful fidelity, a settled disposition toward God and the world, and emotive responses (which Gustafson calls, following Edwards, the “religious affectivities” of fear, hope, love, hatred, desire, joy, sorrow, gratitude, compassion, and zeal).11 Piety thereby allows for the “correction” of the contracted form of human nature which resulted from the fall: piety is an “enlargement” of our soul and interests by a proper alignment “with all things in relation to each other and to the ultimate power and orderer of life.”12 The “affectively rich” language of piety provides a manner in which to speak of religious devotion as God-centered, and only from this stance is there a true conversion of human life. It is, in other words, only from a theocentric devotion that there comes a truly transformative experience in human existence: an orientation of all human purposes and meaning in the praise and honoring of God. Seen in relation to Gustafson’s project, Heschel’s own development of piety as the objective response to the subjective reality of God bears a startling resemblance, and yet in the end results in rather different conclusions. Their respective descriptions of the inclusive richness of piety as a portrait of authentic religious life are virtually identical (Gustafson’s comment that piety is “a persistent attitude toward the world and ultimately toward God” could have come right out of Heschel, though there is no indication in Gustafson’s text that he knows Heschel’s work). The manner in which they each argue for a reversal of subjectivity from humanity to God is also strikingly similar. Despite these convergences, however, there are significant dissimilarities in the conclusions which these two authors draw from piety.

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Aside from the obvious contrasts in approach which arise from their respective Jewish and Christian backgrounds, a more significant divergence between them emerges in the extent to which they utilize “virtue-ethics.” One might expect, given their mutual reliance on piety as a foundation of moral living, that they would also share a commitment to the development of character as the consequence of piety (in the manner in which we have seen to be the case in Heschel’s elliptic way of thinking). Gustafson, however, remains true to his Calvinist roots in maintaining the accent on the absolute sovereignty of God, even at the expense of a more fully realized portrait of the consequences of piety for the character formation of the individual.13 His location of what is morally required remains focused on the fulfillment of one’s duty to this sovereignty of God (what he calls the “discernment” of what is morally required by our relation to God). Moreover, his concern to avoid any anthropocentric or instrumental piety makes him suspicious of the kind of teleological language which is used in proposing the moral significance of the development of character. Gustafson does not, therefore, make the turn from understanding piety as an inclusive description of human religious and moral life, to understanding its goal as the development of character. He comes very close, as when he talks of piety as the “enlargement” of the human soul, or when in his “profile” of theocentric ethics he states, “the divine governance enables us to be certain kinds of persons and certain kinds of communities.”14 Yet he always quickly turns back to his basic theocentric language of duty and obligation.15 So while Heschel and Gustafson share piety as an orienting principle of moral reflection, Heschel is more willing to talk of it in terms of human fulfillment, and not only as the fulfillment of obligations to the divine. In a manner quite similar to Augustine, Heschel develops an understanding of the human will as finding its true freedom in its intentional directedness toward the telos of relationship to the divine, which defines both our truest desire and ultimate purpose as human beings. A pious attachment to the divine, in other words, both fulfills what is morally required of us, and is experienced as being fulfilling emotionally and existentially. The subjectivity of God does not negate, but rather modulates, the human instinct for self-fulfillment. Although this emphasis on a creative human partnership with God (rather than on a strict obedience to God) may seem at first to be in contradiction with Heschel’s own argument for the ultimate subjectivity of God, his manner of articulating this pious relationship manages to stress both that subjectivity is rooted in God, and that God’s presence in the world is mediated by individual men and women who are partners with the divine purpose. Moral character and its accompanying virtues thereby become not autonomously or instrumentally focused, but are an extension of the divine presence through its created image and likeness in humanity. Piety abstains from forming any dualistic understanding of that which is willed by the divine being, and its realization in human activity; rather, the moral life is a continuum between the two where “obedience is a form of imitating God.”16 As a consequence, in Heschel’s view moral living has an intrinsically creative dimension which is inspired by the love evoked by the commandments of God; understood as a form of piety, the moral life is “the art of being.”

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III  Participation in the divine concern: Piety as a spiritual act To locate human meaning and purpose in a partnership with God in the manner of Heschel not only allows him to describe moral living as an essentially creative act, but also gives him the means to describe in what sense a pious life may be said to be genuinely “participatory” in the divine, that is, in what sense it may be said to express a unity of will, understanding, and desire in which human living finds its true meaning in the transcendent. As we shall argue later in this section, this commitment to the participatory nature of reality is evocative of the insights of the “radical orthodoxy” movement. Before coming to that subject, however, we should first make clearer in what way Heschel’s theology may be said to contain this idea of human participation in the divine. Although Heschel does not have a formally developed concept of participation, in the classic neoPlatonic sense, it is a concept which enters into his thinking in the context of explicating the significance of pious deeds: the goal of a mitzvah is to transform an individual into an embodiment of the holiness of God by whom the deed is commanded, and in reference to whom it is performed. The purpose of such deeds “is to sanctify man,” making his pious observance of the law a participation in its source; one becomes most fully human in the act of a free obedience which effectuates the divine image in which we are created. To paraphrase Heschel, piety is what one does, in order to be.17 “Participation” is itself a complex concept that has both important ontological and spiritual dimensions. Its derivation is the Platonic attempt to describe the manner in which the fundamental unity of all being, as that which exists, can be related to the particularity of individual beings—an “ontological difference” which was bridged by Plato through the relationship of archetype and image. Whereas individual beings may exist with discrete differences from any other like instance (no person is exactly like another), nevertheless there is a common relationship to a single archetype (human being) in which each individual participates, whereby the differences of individuality are united into a single unity. As this idea was appropriated into Christian theology, it took on a variety of expressions, each with rather different emphases: examples of these expressions would be the participatory “theosis” of the individual in Orthodox theology; the metaphysical grounding of being in the Thomistic synthesis of Latin theology; or the incarnational emphasis of classic Anglican theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.18 To rehearse the major themes briefly: in the case of Orthodox theology, theosis refers to an incorporation or deification of the human person into an intimate relationship with God (taking as a supporting biblical text II Peter 1:4, which describes the destiny of believers as “partakers of the divine nature”). Through this relationship, the believer is incorporated into the eternal reality of the divine life, especially as it is understood in the Johannine tradition’s emphasis on the indwelling of the Father and Son. So, for example, Origen thought of deification as the recovery of a state of immutable rational contemplation of the Father. Later, Maximus the Confessor thought of deification in terms of taking on the characteristic modes of activity of God, which he distinguished from an appropriation of any static attributes which might imply a fusion of the soul

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with the divine nature. Gregory Palamas further distinguished between deified activity and nature, positing that it is with God’s acts (energeiai) that we are united, rather than with God’s essence, thereby preserving the absolute distinction between the human and divine natures. In a quite different manner, Latin theology (influenced especially by Augustine) described deification as that state in which the entirety of our interior life is focused on God as its teleological object. Aquinas elaborated on Augustine’s approach, defining deification as that state in which the formal object of the human will and understanding is God. Moreover, Aquinas extended the concept of participation into a fundamental tenet of his theology: being itself is conceived of in participatory terms, in which God is esse per essentiam, and the creature esse per participationem. In contrast, the idea of participation in its Anglican manifestation was largely shaped by the return of the sixteenth-century reformers to the Greek patristic texts, so that a particular affinity developed with the more eastern versions of deification, especially in the works of Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. Hooker developed a “theocentric humanism” around the idea of the cultivation of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love as the mode of our participation in God.19 The mystical dimension of the Anglican appropriation of deification was more fully developed by Andrewes, whose emphasis on participatory transformation was characteristic of the profoundly Trinitarian nature of his theology: the accomplishment of the incarnation was that the Son should be clothed with our flesh, and we embued with his spirit.20 Although one would not want to gloss over the self-evident Trinitarian grounding of the Christian perspective (which articulates human participation in the divine in terms of a communion with the interior communal life of God, rather than in terms of a prophetic tradition), nevertheless to allow Heschel’s own particular emphases to suggest certain congruent yet contrasting insights can be instructive in regard to the  idea of a human participation in God, both in its more mystical Orthodox expression, or more scholastic Latin expression. If the goal of the Christian idea of a deified participation is a perfection of human nature in a shared life with God, then it must be understood as a process which is begun in this life, but which only reaches its consummation in the age to come.21 What is striking in Heschel’s own idea, however, is that although his thinking parallels in certain ways the classic Christian appropriations of the idea, the manner in which he locates participation in a partnership with God, rather than as an ontological grounding in or mystical union with God, emphasizes participation more strongly as an ethical concept, with concrete possibilities for its authentic realization in ordinary piety. As we have seen, Heschel’s polar thinking, influenced by his Hasidic origins, is able to embrace simultaneously the nearness of God in everyday life, and the absence of God in exile. It stresses both the absolute sovereignty and glory of God, and yet at the same time dignifies the participatory role of pious individual human beings in the redemption of the world. Seen within this dynamic structure, a participation in the divine will is not to be understood as a promise which is consummated only at the eschatological horizon (in the manner of a mystical deification): it is an experience which may be concretely and fully realized in individual acts and moments here and now, though its full realization may be manifest only in the time of redemption.

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Our will may not be perfectly conformed to God’s, yet in Heschel’s understanding of human participation in the divine, any good deed done even now in conformity to God’s will is morally significant and precious. Human beings are capable of an absolute moral goodness (if not perfection), even on this side of redemption: Heschel stresses the unreproachable integrity of individual acts of virtue and justice. So whereas the ideal of a “union” with God accents a partiality of fulfillment, receding toward the horizon of time, the idea of “partnership” with God accents the positive achievements which are possible here and now. The consequence of this perspective is a stronger affirmation in Heschel’s thought than in some other mystical theologies of the integrity and even possibility of genuinely moral acts, even while they remain embedded in the ambiguities of a corrupted human nature. Partnership with God has, therefore, a both/and structure: human beings are both capable of authentically participating in the divine purposes through intentionally pious acts, and they await the final consummation of those acts in the oneness of the divine will at the final redemption. To describe this positive human potential for partnership with God as a “mystical realism,” which may be appropriate to do in Heschel’s case, hearkens back to his analysis and understanding of piety as the nexus of spiritual and moral life. As we have seen, piety is mystical in the sense that it operates from an experience of an immediate consciousness of God and initiates a sympathetic response to that awareness. And yet, piety is also profoundly realist in the sense that it expects human behavior and understanding to be concretely shaped by that experience of sympathy into a pattern which is compatible, if not identical, with God’s will.22 Viewed in relationship to the Christian ideal of participation, Heschel’s pious ideal of a mystical realism has the potential of serving not so much a contradictory as a corrective role: by underscoring the moral basis of religious life in the enactment of communal responsibilities, it forcefully asserts the ethical dimension of spiritual life, drawing the individual beyond a longing for union with the divine being, toward a sense of obligation to the divine concern. The ultimate goal is not an emptying of the self into God, but rather constituting oneself in the presence of God. The participatory aspect of Heschel’s concept of piety engages in a particularly close manner with the project of “radical orthodoxy,” a movement which has taken on the task of reasserting the priority of theology (as Ward advocates) that has been made possible by the deconstruction of classical metaphysics. Led especially by the three Anglican theologians John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Ward himself (each associated at one time with the University of Cambridge), the radical orthodoxy movement rather boldly asserts that its ambition is to “reclaim the world [from secularism] by situating its concerns and activities within a theological framework.”23 This ambition necessarily involves a complex set of issues, summarized in the introduction to a seminal collection of essays simply entitled Radical Orthodoxy. These issues revolve around the central conviction that the attempt to define immanent humanistic values based in the objective reason of secular philosophy can only result in a morally and spiritually crippling nihilism. This philosophical dead-end is inevitable, they argue, because only a recovery of the concept of “participation” in God can meaningfully ground the experience of reality—that is, only a reality which is understood as created both allows finite objects their own integrity, and at the same time grounds the

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meaningfulness of that integrity in a larger participatory structure. Any alternative configuration results in a territory which claims independence from God, which leads to a nihilistic instability, literally grounded in nothing. Without the stability of an eternal transcendence, the experience of worldly objects and events can only be structured into frames of reference which (as the deconstructivist tradition has demonstrated) are themselves inherently unstable and fleeting. These structures are therefore only moments of a “delusory and contradictory concealment of the void,” a perspective which is neatly summarized by the slogan, “If there is only finite matter, there is not even that.” Alternatively, radical orthodoxy proposes that the theological perspective of participation, rather than emptying objects, events, and persons of their “density,” actually insists that behind this density is the greater density of divine creation: “This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is.” In the perspective of radical orthodoxy—and this is where we discover the point of contact with Heschel—a secularist mindset bears within it a fundamental contradiction which finds expression in a perversion of human desire. If, in the form of a modernist liberalism, one embraces the finitude of existence (denying any ultimate transcendence), then in order to make that finitude cohere, one must paradoxically reassert the universal in the form of a spatial network “bound by clear laws, rules and lattices.” Or if, in the form of a postmodern variableness, one embraces the flux of all things, then one is confronted with an ultimate void that is both concealed and revealed in the empty idea of an inevitable fluctuation. The result, these theologians argue, is an oscillation “between puritanism (sexual and otherwise) and an entirely perverse eroticism which is in love with death and therefore wills the death also of the erotic, and does not preserve the erotic as far as its eternal consummation.” They continue: In a bizarre way, it seems that modernity does not really want what it thinks it wants; but, on the other hand, in order to have what it thinks it wants, it would have to recover the theological. Thereby, of course, it would discover also that that which it desires it quite other than it has supposed.24

Secularism, in other words, can deliver only the dissolution of the finite world, whether by means of a modernist epistemological humanism or a postmodern ontological nihilism—a choice which radical orthodoxy regards as “a dismal promenade.” The only viable alternative is to ground the finite participatorily in a divine transcendence, “saving the appearances by exceeding them.” Heschel’s own argument that human life can only be grounded in a partnership with God articulates a similar resistance to a secularist mindset, in which desire is left adrift without a meaningful object of fulfillment, except that he does so from the perspective of the piety which is evoked by God’s pathos. The “radically orthodox” theologians argue that the only appropriate context in which to consider authentic human ends is a participatory framework. Their outlook is shaped in large part by an Augustinian view of the fulfillment of human desire by its orientation toward a true telos, perceived through divine grace as a unity of will and understanding.25 Heschel has a rather different means of articulating the relationship of desire and will, but his overall point is the same: that human beings find their only authentic meaning in an

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attachment of the will to the divine purposes. For Heschel, this attachment comes, as we have seen, from the concerned turning of God’s pathos toward humanity, evoking the human experience of sympathy for God’s will, with piety as its concrete expression. Heschel characterizes the ascription of a transitive concern to God as an “anthropopneumism,” meaning that it is predicated on a spiritual and moral attitude of God, not on a psychic or emotional one;26 we know of God only what God asks of us.27 So as Donald Moore observes, Heschel’s advancement of pathos as the point of contact between the human and the divine means that any form of human participation in the divine is only available in the extension of God’s concern toward humanity, not in the ascent of human beings toward union with God.28 Piety is the form of our engagement with that invitation to participation, and interprets its content, as we have argued at length, both in terms of understanding and moral commitment. In regard to the program of radical orthodoxy to reassert participation as the necessary framework for human thought and action, therefore, Heschel’s concept of piety provides a description of the locus in which secularism is to be overcome: the sympathetic orientation of the individual toward God in a life compatible with the divine presence (and therefore admitting of no territory independent of God). The emphasis is placed on the realization in concrete terms of the divine intentions within the limits of time itself, so that the flux of temporality of the finite world is grounded in the stability of the eternal. The pursuit of God’s will is desired as the revelation of meaning (“the good is more than a value; it is a divine concern, a way of God”29); pious participation in that meaning discloses the value of being human, yet without implying a fusion of the divine and human natures. Thus, as the particularity of prophetic insight is embodied in a communal piety, it resists what Heschel calls “the fallacy of isolation,” that is, the idea that things and events can be treated apart from the will of God as separable parts of an occasion in which the divine is not at stake—or, more simply put, as secularized.30 As for radical orthodoxy, so too for Heschel: the idea of a secular realm conceptually apart from the participatory structure of all creation in its divine source—human life in particular—is ultimately incoherent. It is this rudimentary incoherence which piety instinctively eschews in its embrace of God’s invitation to a spiritual and moral partnership.

IV  Theo-logy: Piety as a reflective act The issue that is at stake in the idea of a pious participation with God is not limited to its moral and spiritual consequences. For even prior to the practical question of how we are to engage in the partnered relationship with God, there is the question of what it is that we can know of God. As we by now recognize, this question is answered in Heschel’s terms by saying that the God who remains always ineffable, nonetheless extends to us the gift of loving concern (pathos), to which human beings respond with sympathy through a pious gratitude. God remains beyond thought, beyond space, even beyond time, yet we are given in piety the possibility of apprehending the divine will within the extension of God’s concern to us. In a chapter of Man Is Not Alone on the presence of God, Heschel expresses this dynamic quite poetically, saying that God

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“is the word that means more than the universe, more than eternity, holy, holy, holy; we cannot comprehend it. We only know it means infinitely more than we are able to echo.” Then, as if commenting on his own experience, he continues, Staggered, embarrassed, we stammer and say: He, who is more than all there is, who speaks through the ineffable, whose question is more than our mind can answer; He to whom our life can be the spelling of an answer.31

Piety, as the “spelling of an answer” to the question of God, performs a key herme­ neutical task, for as Heschel describes it, piety is the appropriation of the great events of God in history to oneself. Piety does not foreclose the meaning of these events, but participates in them as the continuing and continual disclosure of God’s concern for humanity. Indeed, the aspects of piety which we have described earlier as “understanding” (the emotive intuition of transcendence) could be said to be the instrument of theological disclosure. In order to give expression to this understanding, however, piety does not rely on an ontological construct, but instinctively steps behind such a speculative attitude to engagement with the divine concern itself. Piety, therefore, is itself an act that is interpretive of the divine, and the manner in which it is lived and enacted is deeply revelatory of the nature of the divine gift that motivates it. What emerges out of the interpretive significance of piety is that as Heschel describes it, piety manages to reveal the content of the divine concern without thematizing it in reference to human being itself: the absolute alterity of the divine is consistently preserved even in the context of the participatory nature of the divine-human encounter. This concern to preserve the alterity of God is a key point of intersection between Heschel’s theology of piety and other more contemporary concerns: a similar analysis, for example, is made (albeit with a rather different vocabulary) by Jean-Luc Marion in Dieu sans l’être (1982, Eng. trans. God without Being, 1991).32 Concerned that theology tends to idolize the importance of “Being,” Marion turns to the example of Christian Platonists such as the Pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaventure to propose an alternative proposition for the basic subject matter of theology, namely, the divine gift of love (agape). Whereas most modern theologies attempt in one way or another to establish a correlation between reason and revelation, or Being and God, Marion takes a more postmodern approach (which is, in essence, a reappropriation of latent patristic and medieval themes): reason may be capable of thinking Being, but it is not capable of disclosing God.33 Only revelation can fulfill that primal theological function, and Marion understands the essential content of that revelation to be found in I John 4:8, “God is love.” The implication is that theology has an intrinsically apophatic character, for love is that which exceeds the ability to be thought because of the pure excess of its gratuitousness. Marion’s starting point is an analysis of the nature of an idol, for his underlying premise is that the idea of “being” functions in theology essentially as a form of conceptual idolatry. An idol is that which confines the divine to the measure of human sight, in essence blocking the encounter with the Other which we have investigated in the previous chapter. Rather than presenting a visage which gazes questioningly into the human reality, an idol limits the representation of the divine to a figure at which human beings gaze: the direction of attention is effectively reversed. An idea

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can function in the same way, positing an idea of God (which Marion indicates in quotation marks, « Dieu ») as a substitute for the divine presence itself: “It gives itself to be seen, but thus all the better conceals itself as the mirror where thought, invisibly, has its forward point fixed . . .”34 The second step of the argument is to contrast the idol with the icon: whereas the idol is the result of a gaze fixed upon it, an icon discloses a depth “letting the visible . . . little by little become saturated by the invisible.”35 From an icon, an invisible gaze permeates the human realm, disclosing the “inenvisageable” (inconceivable) reality whose depth lies beneath its surface. Whereas an idol is impassible, coldly returning the gaze that is turned toward it, an icon radiates an elusive yet pervasive presence. Having established the contrast between idol and icon, Marion next brings to the fore the concept which he wishes to characterize as fundamentally idolatrous: the application of the concept of Being to God. His argument (made in Heideggerian terms) is that to apprehend God in the ontological terms of Being is to measure the divine on the basis of Dasein: “The limits of the divine experience of Dasein provoke a reflection that turns it away from aiming at, and beyond, the invisible, and allows it to freeze the divine in a concept, an invisible mirror.”36 More specifically, Marion argues that the notion of “God” arises from a metaphysical predisposition to ground divine transcendence in terms of Being—in an onto-theological constitution—which holds the reality of God hostage to its conceptualization as “God.” The peculiar result is that the human knowledge of and experience of being—Dasein—conceptually precedes God, and the divine becomes an intentional effect of this prior cause. Being, in other words, determines in advance who and what “God” is. It is for this reason that Marion terms the notion of “God” an idol, and ask rhetorically, “Undoubtedly, if ‘God’ is, he is a being: but does God have to be?”37 Marion retrieves Anselm’s dictum that God is “id quo majus cogitari nequit” (that which nothing greater can be thought) in order to suggest a way out of the impasse which he has constructed. God must be thought of without any conditions, beyond all categories, and even beyond thinking; otherwise, God remains nothing more than the product of thought. In this apophatic mode, Marion suggests that the “God without being” be represented by the textual figure of “G d.”38 This sign indicates that God can only enter the field of thought through “excess,” through that which surpasses thought, which Marion suggests is the free gift of love. Unlike being, love is not constrained by thought, for it is disclosed only in emptying itself: the love of God is also God’s absence, manifested in the death and resurrection of Jesus.39 To relate to God as love therefore opens a “distance” which can only be traversed (though not filled) by the act of praise.40 Marion argues, therefore, that theology must retreat from its conceptual framework as a theo-logy to become more authentically a theo-logy of God’s self-disclosure as Love. Hence, Marion locates in the Eucharist the essential theological act, for it is there that the full expression of God’s giving is received in a responsory act of praise.41 The setting of the theological act in the Eucharistic context introduces, perhaps somewhat ironically, the connection between Heschel’s theology of piety and Marion’s theo-logy. In the previous chapter, we have already described the convergence of Heschel’s thinking with the mood of resistance evident in Lévinas against an ontological orientation, so that point need not be belabored in relation to Marion.

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The more particular intersection between Heschel and Marion, however, comes in their respective descriptions of the human response to the God who is disclosed “beyond being.” In describing the significance of this G d, Marion emphasizes that the gift given therein—agape—must also be received, but the reception of the gift is not something that is thought or spoken: “To return the gift, to play redundantly the unthinkable donation, this is not said, but done. Love is not spoken, in the end, it is made.”42 For Marion, it is the Eucharistic setting in which this reciprocal act of donation and reception is made, precisely because it is there that the conceptualization of “God” is replaced with “the unlimited repetition of an event” which realizes the excessive gift of G d’s love without reductively thematizing it, proposing instead only a response of praise and pious obedience.43 The Eucharistic structure that Marion ascribes to the theological act of reception and donation is suggestive of what Heschel’s concept of piety itself attempts to register, albeit in a different form. When Heschel ends his core essay on piety (“An Analysis of Piety”) with the enigmatic assertion, “for the pious man it is a privilege to die,” it is to this basic structure of a reciprocity of donation between humanity and God that he is making appeal. In life, the pious individual receives the gift of being, the gift of responsibility, the gift of creativity, in a spirit of indebtedness and gratitude which inspires the fullest manner of living. In death, that same pious individual returns to God the very gift which has enabled his or her life; yet not with regret, but with a grateful acceptance of the mysterious truth that perfection comes in a self-offering that both fills life with meaning and purpose, and at the same time empties it of subjective conceit and competitive violence. If the Eucharist is a celebration of this divine-human transaction as it is brought to its completion in the crucified and risen Christ, then it is the pious deed par excellence where God is encountered through the human act of worship as a pure subjective love that is received though not constrained, and disclosed though not known.

V  Kenosis: Piety as an interpretive act The separation of God from the idea of Being which we have seen in Marion’s theology leads us to another postmodernist, Gianni Vattimo, for whom the dismantling of metaphysics opens the door to a reconceptualization of its claims about truth and subjectivity in terms of “weak thought” (pensiero debole, or pensée faible in French). To give a very brief summary: working out of the tradition of Nietzschean and Heideggerian nihilism, Vattimo argues that the weakening of the structures of Being necessitates that our thinking about ourselves and reality must likewise weaken, recognizing the contingency and provisionality of all things. The former heaviness of absolutizing concepts of being, built around an idealized subject who was imagined to face an external objective reality, created an intellectual dogmatism which Vattimo insists could only be maintained through some form of violence. With the dissolving of this foundational worldview—and now that science and technology have secured for us the structure of the world instead—we assume that reality may be construed in any number of possible ways. This assumption gives us the possibility of greater

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opportunities for dialogue and experimentation in our worldviews; rather than taking a defensive posture regarding what once were understood as moral and ontological absolutes, we are free to entertain the idea of a legitimate pluralism. What is most interesting for our purposes is the way that Vattimo makes use of an idea of pietas as having a critical role in the ethical requirements of this new “ontologia debole” (weak ontology). As he positions this approach in La Fine della Modernità (1985, Eng. trans. The End of Modernity, 1988), it is inextricably related to the two Heideggerian concepts of Verwindung and Andenken.44 The first of these concepts, Verwindung, has multiple overtones of meaning, including twisting, entanglement, convalescence, distortion, and healing. As related to the history of metaphysics, it relates to the ways in which our previous thinking was enmeshed in the objectification of being—a pattern from which it must now extract or heal itself, yet without leaving behind the history of its past. Andenken, on the other hand, is our turning toward this past in conversation with its traditions, as the manner of our overcoming it. “The word that best defines this approach to the past and to everything that is transmitted to us (even in the present),” writes Vattimo, “is pietas.”45 The term is deliberately taken from Heidegger’s own concept of the “piety of thinking,” which we first encountered in Chapter 3 as the responsible and responsive interrogation of the world as we find it in its givenness. As Vattimo appropriates it, pietas is an attitude toward history that causes us to have a respect for, or to give a devoted attention to, the traces of our heritage even as we recognize its errors: We must keep in mind that it is the dissolution of metaphysics that liberates us for pietas. . . . Once we discover that all the systems of values are nothing but human, all too human productions, what is left for us to do? Do we dismiss them as lies and errors? No, we hold them even dearer because they are all we have in the world . . . 46

Pietas does not seek a new foundationalism, but only to “re-collect” the contours of metaphysical thinking by placing us within its texts, cultures, and myths—and then taking responsibility for rethinking them. The import of this attitude of pietas is that the interpretive significance of hermeneutics emerges as a fundamental stance with regard to the question of truth: truth is interpretation. Yet Vattimo remains convinced that despite the necessity for endless interpretive evaluation of what we say and do (and its resulting nihilism), truth paradoxically remains a valid commitment.47 This is so because if one accepts the weakness of truth, and thereby recognizes the authentically pluralistic environment in which we live where we are not able to value one truth above others, there nevertheless remains the possibility of multiple truths pertaining to a single reality. Truth, in other words, is not vacated by its multiplicity. But this valuing of even a provisional truth also means that hermeneutics requires an ethics that can guide our decisions about which interpretations to regard as valid and reasonable—hence Vattimo proposes an ethics of interpretation, which he grounds in the idea of kenosis. As used in the New Testament, of course, kenosis is tied to the emptying out by God of all claims to sovereignty who chooses instead to enter into human history in the person of Jesus Christ (Phil. 2:7). In Vattimo’s Credere di Credere (1996, Eng.

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trans. Belief, 1999), he argues in a rather different vein that the kenotic event of the incarnation has a corrosive effect on the metaphysical claims of an onto-theology: the divine majesty of God the Father gradually gives way to the servanthood of the Son, so that we “no longer consider ourselves to be servants of God, but his friends.”48 Vattimo calls this a process of “secularization,” by which he means that the inherently sacrificial model of the “natural sacred” was overcome by Jesus in his death and resurrection, dissolving the violence of this mythic form in favor an ethic of caritas.49 Moreover, Vattimo claims that this revolutionary inversion (which he understands to be the essence of Christianity) is itself the source of the gradual dismantling of metaphysics in Western thought. Here, then, is the link between kenosis and an ethics of interpretation: the postmodern world which we now inhabit is one shaped by a gradual realization of the gospel message of kenotic self-emptying in favor of charity, which itself is the foundation of a pluralistic tolerance. Among its characteristics, such a kenotic ethics requires a keen awareness of the finitude of the origins and assertions of our own interpretive perspectives: while we must remain piously aware of the influence of own tradition (for truth means dwelling within a tradition), yet at the same time we must be conscious of the pluralistic implications of the limitedness of our perspective. David Rose summarizes such a kenotic ethics like this: For me to propose my worldview as true, I must be aware of the other’s right to dispute it and I must encourage this right through explicating said truth in a manner in which the other can understand and, therefore, dispute it. These values are universal, in that one must adhere to them to resist both metaphysical violence and irrational, strong nihilism; and normative in that they prescribe the conditions for one’s truth to meet so that it does not fall into one of these two positions. They are the substantial account of the good that constitutes postmodern society.50

In short, a subject can successfully inhabit a pluralistic world only through the values of openness and tolerance, yet that pluralism must itself remain a recognizable interpretation of heritage and tradition that one achieves through a pious recognition of the givenness of the world. From this sketch of Vattimo’s deployment of pietas, one might wonder at first how Heschel could be brought into dialogue with what seems to be such a radically different conception: piety for Heschel is a response of one’s whole self to God’s concerned initiative toward humanity, whereas Vattimo understands it as an intellectual attitude of attentiveness toward an impersonal historical tradition. A point of contact might be found in the mutual concern that each thinker has to reorient our concept of the subject. In the kenotic postmodern “surrender of the subject” (which we encountered above in the work of Graham Ward), Vattimo sees human being as no longer corresponding to Being, “thought of in terms of fullness, force, determination, eternity, deployed actuality, as the tradition always recognized it.” Rather, through a weak ontology human subjectivity is opened to a charitable engagement with existence, now understood as an infinite plurality.51 Unlike some postmodern nihilists, however, Vattimo does not posit the death of the subject. Subjectivity instead becomes a shadow of its former self, yet the hermeneutic interrogation still requires a knowing subject, even if it is enfeebled. In short, subjectivity is weakened by the forms of interpretation, which disrupt the

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previous strong truth of a direct correspondence between an object and the conditions of its being experienced.52 Heschel, as we have seen, shares the desire to unwind the pretensions of the human subject. In his case, however, the method is inversion instead of enfeeblement: rather than as a knowing subject, we authentically understood ourselves only as objects of the subjective concern of God. Whereas for Vattimo the weakening of ontology necessarily also implies the weakening of our concepts of God (who is associated with absolute Being), Heschel makes an opening for an alternative location of subjectivity by replacing that strong ontological framework with the idea of God’s pathos, or concern. In what we have earlier described as a “Heschelian ontology,” Being is replaced with concern as the primary ontological category. Behind the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” lies the concern of God through which all things are created. As human beings, therefore, we can know ourselves only objectively as we are related to this subjective concern of God. The consequences of Heschel’s location of subjectivity in God are most apparent in the differing accounts that he and Vattimo give of the place of ethics. For Vattimo, ethics is primarily conceived as a means of mediating the encounter of differing perceptions of the world through the values of openness, communication, and tolerance. Grounded in the patterns of weak thought, these values rely for their force on the kenotic principle of charity, which Vattimo identifies as the moral conclusion of the process of secularization. In this sense, his ethics is reductive in that it does not attempt to provide a foundation for a comprehensive moral theory, but only to indicate the contours of those values around which postmodern society orients itself. They are not explicitly religious in origin, though they do parallel his description of the charitable “friendship” he understands us to have with God through the incarnation. For Heschel, on the other hand, ethics is a matter of response to the fundamental existential experiences of commandment, embarrassment, indebtedness, and gratitude. As we have seen, he regards our very existence as the response to a command to be (“I am commanded—therefore I am”). The feebleness of our response to that command results in our embarrassment at the poverty of our own lives, out of which comes the beginning of moral awareness. As we have seen, this moral consciousness precedes any direct inquiry into the nature of being itself—a priority of the ethical that we encountered in our comparison of Heschel with Lévinas. Ethics is generated by an encounter with the Otherness of God, and given a specific content in the revelation of God’s transitive concern for humanity where pathos and ethos are one. Moral obligation thus comes out of a sense of responsibility that is engendered through an explicitly asymmetrical encounter (and not Vattimo’s friendship with God and the resulting tolerant spirit of caritas). Thus, contrary to Vattimo’s kenotic ethics, which emphasizes restraint and contingency, a relational ethics such as Heschel’s calls for engagement and commitment. To that extent, the theocentrism of Heschel and the tolerant relativism of Vattimo are quite divergent. To stop there, however, would be to draw the line too quickly between their respective ethical accounts. Indeed, a more nuanced relationship between the two can be drawn out if we return to the idea of the kenotic self-emptying of God. At first, Vattimo’s attachment to the Christological dimensions of kenosis might seem to resist

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such a strategy. Yet the kenotic dimensions of God’s self-emptying are not confined to the incarnation. Vattimo himself hints at the continuity between the covenant of God with the people of Israel and the kenotic event of the incarnation.53 Moreover, a primary reason for his interest in kenosis is that it shows the divine to be fully involved with historicity, which is the very essence of the prophetic religion of the Hebrew scriptures. Yet another relevant aspect of God’s kenosis is identified by Luca D’Isanto in his introduction to Vattimo’s Belief, where he notes that Moltmann has suggested that the self-humiliation of God begins in creation itself: “God permits an existence different from his own by limiting himself. He withdraws his omnipotence in order to set his image, men and women, free. He allows his world to exist in his eternity.”54 These permutations on the theme of kenosis intersect with Heschel’s own Jewish thought in a variety of places: God’s indwelling presence expressed in the idea of the Shekhinah, for example; or the kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum, which describes God’s contraction of the infinite light of the divine to allow the conceptual space for creation to exist. For Vattimo, then, kenosis is an emptying out of the supporting structures of an onto-theology through which God could continue to be understood in traditional categories such as omniscience, plenitude, and the absolute, in favor of a “secularized” concept of God toward which one lives with a sense of openness and potentiality. An ethics grounded in the principle of charity describes the forbearing attitude which is the only justifiable attitude, face-to-face with such a weakened account of God. Heschel, on the other hand, is much more cognizant that for ethics to have force, it has to be grounded in an account of moral responsibility that can break through the self-interestedness of human nature. He is quite explicit about this in Man Is Not Alone: “Moral sentiments,” he writes, “originate in man’s sense of unity, in his appreciation of what is common to men.”55 But, we discover such a sense of unity only by understanding ourselves to be part of the common concern of God for all people: as we earlier saw Heschel write, the only way to feel one with every man is “in the one concern of God for all men.”56 The kenotic act to which Heschel appeals is God’s own self-extension from within absolute otherness, of God’s transitive concern in the act of creation, through which concern as a “spiritual characteristic” and “moral attitude” of God becomes manifest and known: “Divine concern means His taking interest in the fate of man; it means that the moral and spiritual state of man engages His attention.”57 If this is the fundamental status of creation—to be an object of the divine concern—then our life “hangs by a thread,” namely, “the faithfulness of man to the concern of God.” As we have seen, this idea of God’s pathos deconstructs the ontological categories of absolute Being, substituting a relational description of God in regard to creation. But unlike Vattimo, where the emptying of God’s Being also drains God of the transcendence which evokes our embarrassment and gratitude, it does so without relinquishing the moral requiredness that comes from our being the object of a divine concern. Vattimo gives, as it were, what Heschel would regard as too “weak” an account of moral responsibility, risking a hesitant passivity in the face of a pluralistic uncertainty that would itself be morally suspect. Heschel would not be adverse to Vattimo’s intent to make room

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for a diversity of experiences of God (indeed, we have seen that such pluralism is characteristic of his thinking). Yet in Heschel’s estimation it is not merely a tolerant charity that is called for, but justice—the justice that is known only as a prophetic revelation of God.

VI  Coda: Piety as the enactment of hope The relationship of piety to the participatory, nonthematized encounter with God makes of it, in one sense, an attitude of expectancy, anticipating more than it knows, yet also requiring tangible modes of enactment for its expectancy to become realized. Heschel himself is quite insistent on this anticipatory and hopeful dimension of piety, writing in God in Search of Man, “there is a way that leads from piety to faith. . . . The gates of faith are not ajar, but the mitsvah is a key.” Faith, in other words, is not something to which one comes as a necessary prerequisite to piety; rather, the practice of piety can itself be the context in which the coherent structure and meaning of faith is discovered. In the performance of pious acts, one is given the possibility of perceiving the reality to which they are directed. Hence, from Heschel’s perspective, God’s will is made known in our doing: “In carrying out a sacred deed we unseal the wells of faith.”58 One does not act piously only because of an antecedent disposition of faith, but also from a hopeful expectation that the context in which religious deeds take their meaning will become apparent as those deeds are conscientiously enacted. Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his classic study of the modes of interpretation in human experience, Wahrheit und Methode (1960, Eng. trans. Truth and Method, 1975), made a similar point in reference to the genesis of aesthetic judgment. One does not form an aesthetic appreciation for a work of art prior to an experience of the work itself: one appreciates artistic expression only as one personally engages with it. To make an intellectual differentiation between the experiential circumstances and the formal object about which such a judgment is made would be to break down the essential correlation between the two: one cannot understand a play except as it is acted, one cannot hear music except as it is performed, one cannot see a painting except as it is represented.59 By implication, one also cannot grasp religious meaning except as it is ritualized in both liturgical and ethical patterns, for an understanding of God is not merely a process of intellectual abstraction, but also an active participation in the event of God’s revelatory turning toward humankind. As Gadamer himself points out in analogy with the performance of a play or music, “No one will be able to hold that the performance of the ritual act is unessential to religious truth.”60 Understood in this context, piety may be thought of as a communal representation of a particular consciousness of God which is indispensable both to the expression of certain received experiences of God, and to the continuing expectation that the divine-human relationship is unfolding through time as God responds through pathos to the historical evolution of creation. In other words, it is Heschel’s assertion of the historically evolving divine pathos as that aspect of God which is known and

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knowable to us, rather than God’s immutable being, which in effect makes the divine will disclosed through a performative piety. Since it is only this dynamic and passible aspect of God which we apprehend, piety need not be limited to a fixed or convinced response, but may also be an enacted hope for belief offered within the relationality of the divine-human encounter. Returning to Gianni Vattimo, for instance, we might observe that his idea of a weakened ontology opens up a new possibility for faith (a confession which he makes in Credere di Credere from his own personal experience). If the encounter with divine being is thought of as a relational event with a “friendly” God emptied of any metaphysical pretence—with all the avenues for exploration and discovery which such an intimacy implies—then one can “hope to believe” even when one does not yet believe. Such an event is the outcome of a divine initiative, and our willingness to participate in such an event is a performative act of piety. Vattimo himself reflects such an understanding in writing, “When I pray, . . . I am aware of not acting only on the basis of a philosophical conviction, but on the contrary of going a step further. . . . In the end ‘to believe in belief ’ means a bit of all this: it may be to wager in the sense of Pascal, hoping to win while having no reassurance. To believe in belief, yet also: hoping to believe.”61 In this sense, piety can become the relational “event” of a weakened ontology. Going a step further with the idea of piety as a performative act, however, we must reassert that even considered in these terms, any pious act remains inherently ethical in nature, for it is shaped by the demands of its underlying relationality. Although an expectant piety may express itself in forms of praise, or adoration, or supplication, each of these forms of worship is ethical at its core, in that they are responses to God’s creative but demanding concern for us. The description Heschel gives of piety’s roots in gratitude and indebtedness supports this conclusion: piety is a mode of life rooted in a general sense of obligation, derived from our dependence on God for the fact of being itself, and turned toward other human beings as its concrete expression. This view of the prevailing structure of piety as an enacted obligation returns us to the observation made by Octavio Paz in regard to the classical idea of pietas (cited in the Introduction): the parental and filial forms of love, like love for God, are not an isolated love, but piety. Familial piety is an act of respect and devotion which comes from an innate and gratuitous loyalty, resulting in the virtuous and necessary bonds of responsibility and commitment. Yet these obligations are not experienced as burdensome or unwelcome: they are, in fact, the ground of our greatest joy and hope as we anticipate through them the fulfillment of our deepest purposes and desires in life. Similarly, a pious love for God is not founded on love as a self-concerned eros, but rather on a self-offering caritas that is lived both with an awareness of infinite gratitude and obligation, and with an unbounded sense of expectation. Perhaps it is for this reason that to come into contact with the ordinary piety of faithful men and women is, as we observed at the outset of this study, a restorative encounter with a native wisdom and insight which manifests a godly acceptance of the command to be, a kenotic dedication to the vocation to serve, and a sanguine enactment of the human destiny to participate in the divine purposes of God. Precisely because of this protean nature, piety has a particular pertinence to any theological reflection which seeks to describe the underlying participatory nature of human living.

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Notes 1 Graham Ward, “Introduction, or, A Guide to Theological Thinking in Cyberspace,” in Graham Ward, ed., The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), xli. 2 Heschel himself employs the model of “elliptic thinking” in reference to the tension between philosophy and religion: “Philosophy of religion is involved in a polarity; like an ellipse it revolves around two foci: philosophy and religion. Except for two points on the curve that stand in equal distance to both foci, the more closely its thought comes to one, the more distant it is from the other one.” Heschel, GSM, 12–13. 3 Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. I, 163–4. 4 Calvin, On the Christian Faith, Institutes Book I: “On the Knowledge of God the Creator,” Section 2.1, “The piety requisite for the knowledge of God,” 6. 5 McNeill, Introduction to On the Christian Faith, xviii. 6 Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. I, 167. 7 Ibid., 110. 8 Ibid., 21. 9 Ibid., 191. 10 Ibid., 113. 11 Ibid., 201–3. 12 Ibid., 307. 13 Gustafson is obviously conversant with the contemporary recovery of the idea that moral life is directed toward the encouragement of communal and individual virtues, for he readily quotes the significant authors of this school of thinking (especially MacIntyre and Hauerwas). In particular, he embraces their basic attitude toward the importance of narrative as the foundation of this recovery of character as a moral concept, saying, “the contemporary exponents of the importance of ‘the Christian story’ are correct in their recognition that the story bears the meaning of the tradition, and that one internalizes the meaning of the tradition only by participating in the community that makes it the common story of its life.” Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. I, 321. 14 Ibid., vol. II, 2. 15 When, for example, Gustafson discusses family life as a “school for piety and morality,” he argues that what we learn there “are the senses of dependence, gratitude, obligation, remorse and repentance, possibility, and direction.” This list of words is significant for its relatively strong emphasis on human life as situated in connection to external relationships, and its weaker emphasis on human life as oriented toward the development of one’s interior self. Ibid., vol. II, 173. 16 Heschel, GSM, 306–13. 17 Ibid., 311. 18 Rowan Williams, “Deification,” in A Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Gordon Wakefield (London: SCM Press, 1983), 106–8. 19 See A. M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in the Anglican Tradition (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1988). 20 Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes: Le Predicateur (Paris: 1986). English edition Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher, trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1991).

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21 Georgios I. Mantzaridis, The Deification of Man: St. Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition, trans. Liadian Sherrard (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1984), 117. 22 To attribute the insight of piety’s potential for religious and moral thinking solely to Heschel would be an exaggeration, however, as witnessed by some recent attempts in moral theology to recover the value of piety as a unifying concept. For example, the American Anglican ethicist, Timothy Sedgwick, in his book on The Christian Moral Life describes Christian faith as a “practical piety” (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999). Working out of a tradition of classic Anglican spirituality, he finds in such works as Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living (1650) evidence that “England . . . developed a distinctive tradition in which faith was identified more with faithful worship that bound a people together in a holy life than with the confession of beliefs.” The resulting piety, which he argues was rooted in a corporate, incarnational, and sacramental theology, understood Christian living as a godly way of life which bears faith in the world. In a typically Anglican fashion, however, he eschews understanding this life as a response to an objective duty, preferring instead to locate piety in “the personal language of relationships.” In contrast to Heschel, therefore, Sedgwick has a relatively undeveloped account of the source of moral obligation. 23 John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, “Introduction. Suspending the Material: The Turn of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), 1–20. 24 Ibid., 4. 25 See Michael Hanby, “Augustine beyond Western Subjectivity,” in Milbank et al., Radical Orthodoxy. 26 Heschel, MNA, 144. 27 Ibid., 129. 28 Moore, The Human and the Holy, 81. 29 Heschel, GSM, 375. 30 Ibid., 95. 31 Heschel, MNA, 78. 32 Jean-Luc Marion, Dieu san l’être: Hors-texte (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1982). English edition God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 33 David Tracy, foreword to Marion, God Without Being, x. 34 Marion, Dieu sans l’être, 26. 35 Ibid., 28. 36 Ibid., 44. 37 Ibid., 70. 38 Ibid., 72. 39 Ibid., 154. 40 Ibid., 114. 41 Ibid., 197. 42 Ibid., 155. 43 Ibid., 206. 44 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Originally published as La Fine della Modernità (Milan: Garzanti Editore, 1985). 45 Ibid., 175–6.

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46 Gianni Vattimo, Etica dell’interpretazione (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1989), 23, quoted in Marta Frascati-Lochhead, Kenosis and Feminist Theology: The Challenge of Gianni Vattimo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 82. 47 David Edward Rose, “The Ethical Claims of il Pensiero Debole: Gianni Vattimo, Pluralism and Postmodern Subjectivity,” Angelaki 7/3 (2002): 63–78. 48 Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 55. Originally published as Credere di Credere (Milan: Garzanti Editore, 1996). 49 Vattimo here relies on his reading of René Girard’s La Violence et le Sacré (1972, Eng. trans. Violence and the Sacred). Ibid., 36–7. 50 Rose, “The Ethical Claims of il Pensiero Debole,” 75. 51 Luca D’Isanto, Introduction to Vattimo, Belief, 14–17. His reference is to Gianni Vattimo, Al di là del soggetto: Nietzsche, Heidegger e l’ermeneutica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), 36. 52 Rose, “The Ethical Claims of il Pensiero Debole,” 75–6. 53 “Secularization is the way in which kenosis, having begun with the incarnation of Christ, but even before that with the covenant between God and ‘his’ people, continues to realize itself more and more by furthering the education of mankind concerning the overcoming of originary violence essential to the sacred and to social life itself.” Vattimo, Belief, 48. 54 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 118. Quoted in Luca D’Isanto, Introduction to Vattimo, Belief, 11. 55 Heschel, MNA, 119. 56 Heschel, “The Divine Concern,” Chapter 15 of MNA, 135–50. 57 Ibid., 144. 58 Heschel, GSM, 282. 59 I am indebted for the appeal to Gadamer’s analysis to Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 136–7. 60 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 104. 61 Vattimo, Belief, 92–3.

Conclusion: Indications of Piety for a Relational Theology

Through the thickest wall of the darkest dungeon, the narrow slit of an archer’s window is sufficient to verify the sun. Thus it is in this world, so opaque and heavy: a furtive encounter with a saint is sufficient to prove God. —Henri de Lubac, The Discovery of God

I  Penetrating the pious consciousness: A recapitulation In a section of God in Search of Man describing the people of Israel as the ongoing manifestation of God’s revelation, Heschel cites an anecdote of the seventeenthcentury philosopher, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, who was once commanded by Frederick the Great: “Herr Professor, give me a proof of the Bible, but briefly, for I have little time.” Gellert’s answer was simple: “Majesty, the Jews.”1 Heschel’s use of this illustration is telling, for it gets at the heart of his methodological presumption that in approaching questions of religious faith, the necessary starting point is the act of belief itself, rather than an abstract notion of God. In the concrete existence of the community of Israel, which enacts through its loyalty to the covenant the content of the biblical revelation, the Bible is both authenticated and interpreted. Scripture is not, in other words, ultimately warranted only by its congruence with rational reflection or historical research, but by the very act of faithful living in loyalty to the covenantal relationship it describes and through which its narrative revelation is carried into the present. Theology too, as Heschel practices it, is primarily an investigation into this ontology of relationship, based in the lived experience of the divine-human encounter as it is concretely manifested in pious behavior. Piety is thus designated as the privileged site of contact between humanity and God, where human understanding of the divine, and a sympathetic response to it, make possible the methodological strategy of penetrating the consciousness of the pious individual in order to perceive the reality behind it. At the beginning of this book, we suggested that one of the most significant implications of Heschel’s method is that he implicitly suggests one way in which an emphasis on the priority of God’s revelatory initiative (in the manner of Barth) can be opened to take into account the attendant role individual piety has to play (in the manner of Schleiermacher) in the divine-human encounter. By now, the contours of that proposal should be apparent, and also the ways in which Heschel differs from each of these contrasting theological trajectories. Contrary to a conceptualization of piety

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as a feeling of absolute dependence that is based in a consciousness of having been posited, Heschel’s account of piety pushes harder to unearth what he considers to be deeper dimensions of this phenomenon, arguing that a sense of awe at the ineffable mystery of existence is in fact the primal intuition—and if a sense of awe, then also a sense of requiredness and an imperative to respond. In our very intuition of meaning, in other words, there is already a sense of indebtedness that implies a structure of accountability. That is the first tack Heschel makes, moving from human experience toward God. But then leaving that thought incomplete, as it were, he reverses direction, recognizing that any account we are able to give of the ineffable origin of our intuited sense of indebtedness can ultimately be disclosed only at the initiative of the creator. Revelation of the divine concern (pathos), therefore, is entirely an act of God. And this is Heschel’s second essential tack, establishing that existentially we are objectively related to a divine subjectivity. These two movements—the human intuition of transcendence and the divine disclosure of a transitive concern—come together in the unique revelatory experience of prophecy, or more ordinarily, in the life of piety, which is the manner of our sympathetic human response to God’s initiatory pathos. In line with Barth’s complaint that in Schleiermacher, “no external givenness of God comes into consideration,” Heschel argues for a God of absolute otherness; yet at the same time, he indicates a certain suspicion of a concept of God’s ontological inseity by asserting that the relationality of the divine concern is itself in need of an object— namely, human being. Through the lived embodiment of this partnership by pious men and women, we come to understand and collaborate in some measure with God’s purposes. In effect, following its modern eclipse, Heschel reintroduces piety into the theological matrix as a subject worthy of consideration, reclaiming in the process its rich legacy in religious thought and experience. Throughout this study we have been at work explicating Heschel’s strategy, testing its methodological hypothesis and connecting its results to related arguments from other philosophers and theologians (primarily Christian, though not exclusively), whether they be Heschel’s forbears (including Kant, Schleiermacher, Husserl, Dilthey, and Scheler), or his contemporaries (especially Shestov, Niebuhr, Tillich, and Lévinas), or even his successors in later generations (Moltmann, Lindbeck, Gustafson, Hauerwas, Marion, Vattimo, and the theologians of the “radical orthodoxy” movement). The course of that study has caused us to look at a variety of issues either at the core of Heschel’s theology or connected to its main issues, but always returning to the theme of piety as the structural spine of Heschel’s thought. In the first section, we began by surveying the various uses to which piety has been put both culturally and theologically, by way of indicating the rich heritage within which any consideration of piety must unfold. In its biblical, classical, and contemporary uses, piety has most consistently been evoked to describe the motivation by which the individual is drawn beyond him or herself toward a reverent sense of obligation to family, to country, and to the gods. Despite the fact of its often pejorative connotations in current usage, therefore, it stands out as a primary social value that cuts across cultural and historical boundaries, suggesting the breadth of its philosophical weight and value. Over and above what might typically be understood in the Jewish tradition of the meaning of “piety,” therefore, these longer arcs of meaning in regard to pietas are the larger

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backdrop behind what Heschel’s interest in the phenomenon of piety might have to say to our own patterns of thought. In the second part, then, we went on to review the variety of interpretations that have been made of Heschel’s own work, noting that the lack of attention to the importance of piety in other readings has frequently resulted in exaggerated accusations that his work either makes a fideistic embrace of religious observance, or else exhibits an unsustainable preoccupation with the aesthetic bias of an elemental natural theology. In contrast, this study has taken a position, following the example of Heschel’s more discerning readers, that his work is based in a much more sophisticated intellectual apparatus which combines a highly personal religious conviction with a scholarly intellectual formation in philosophy (especially the modern German tradition). Although this apparatus is not always readily apparent beneath Heschel’s idiosyncratic rhetorical style, it nevertheless shapes his work into a rigorous treatment of theological issues that distinguishes him within his own Jewish tradition as a theologian of systematic intent. From this survey of critical readings of Heschel, we moved to sorting out the specific issues at stake for Heschel in his theological program. Reacting against the ratiocination of the academic environment in which he was educated (still under a heavy Kantian influence), Heschel pursued the new direction already marked out by Dilthey of seeking to enlarge our awareness of the realm of human knowing beyond its strictly rational capacities. In this turn to Dilthey, Heschel found the structural support for an alternative stress on understanding as the unitive cognitive act in which a human being’s sensation, feeling, and reflection are synthesized into a grasp of the full meaning and moral weight of lived experience. Applying this idea to religion, Heschel insisted that what is significant in faith is not its knowledge (Erkennen) of God, in the Kantian sense of that term, but the possibility for meaningful relationship to the divine which is opened by the more comprehensive cognitive act of understanding (Verstehen). To describe the nature of the divine-human intercourse that evokes such understanding, Heschel employed in his doctoral dissertation, Die Prophetie (Prophecy) a Husserlian phenomenological analysis of prophetic experience. He used this analysis to establish that the essential structure of the prophet’s experience is an encounter with God’s transitive concern turned toward humankind (pathos), evoking the sympathetic participatory response of the prophet (a concept overtly based in Scheler’s theory of sympathy). This early deployment of a phenomenological strategy for revealing both the structure and content of religious experience turns out to be the key to grasping Heschel’s overall method, for he adapted it throughout his career to the exploration of the various forms of piety such as prayer, worship, and moral commitment. With the philosophical basis of Heschel’s program established, we turned our attention to a second essential source of both his intellectual thought and personal character: the Hasidic movement within Judaism and related mystical currents such as the Kabbalah. The most evident consequence of these biographical roots is the polar aspect of Heschel’s thinking, which he grounds in his historical studies of rabbinic Judaism, and which becomes characteristic not only of the method and content of his approach to theological questions, but also of his regard for the nature of piety itself. The bisociative structure of this frame of mind gives Heschel’s thought a creative

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dynamism which allows it to move on several planes at once, so that Heschel imitates in his theological writing the polarities of pious living itself. He is, for example, adept at pleading for rigorous observance of the halacha, even while embracing the creative freedom of the aggadic tradition. Or, he is able to approach sinful human nature with a clear-sighted realism, even while defending the innate potential of the individual person, who has been made in the image and likeness of God. The point is that a pious life is the location in which the polyvalent structure of religious insight is held in dynamic tension: reason encounters the intuitions of the heart; the finitude of human action participates in the absolute otherness of God; and the suffering of creation is united with an ineffable wonder at the gift of being. Heschel’s early thought can thus be described as a combination of a comprehensive prophetic “understanding” and “sympathy” for God’s pathos, held within a dynamic structure of mystically based polarities: regularity and spontaneity, law and inwardness, joy and discipline, and time and eternity. Following his study of biblical prophecy, Heschel made a crucial turn to common piety as the subject matter for a series of philosophical studies (especially Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man), which, in the third section of the current study, become the heart of its argument. The premise of Heschel’s shift of attention from the prophetic to the pious is implicit, though never fully expressed in his work: namely, that the method of his analysis of the structure of the rare, even liminal prophetic experience can be transposed to the more common experience of the pious individual. Structurally speaking, piety is the modest equivalent in ordinary religious life of the extraordinary experience of prophecy, without the extremity or intensity of prophetic revelation itself. Piety thus exhibits the intentionality of “lived experience” in which one’s understanding of the content of experience is governed by the disposition of mind which one brings to it. Heschel is not altogether clear, however, on the difference between piety and faith, at times seeming to use the terms interchangeably. In general, he argues that piety is the enactment through religious and moral activity of the content of faith: though the two are closely related, piety mandates an engagement which faith by itself does not. Faith, in other words, is related to the content of that in which we believe (creed), whereas piety is the act of believing which establishes relationship with God. A significant feature of the pious disposition is its radical alteration of the more typical philosophical presumption of an autonomous human subjectivity. Instead, piety regards God as the ultimate subject to whom we are objectively related—a critical shift in Heschel’s thought which leads to a theocentric perspective on creation, from which in turn flows his anthropological and ethical emphasis upon “God’s search for man.” Standing in an objective relationship to the divine subjectivity, piety regards the concern of God for humanity (God’s pathos) with a sympathetic desire to concur with God’s interest, transforming human life into a partnership with the divine purposes. Yet, this partnership is not one of subjugation, but is exercised in the freedom of a creative (rather than necessary) act, made in  alliance with the absolute freedom of God as creator. Piety is lived as a “life compatible with God’s presence,” conferring on human activity an exaltation of expectation and potentiality, as individuals learn to surpass themselves by coming into contact with transcendent meaning and purpose.

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Two particularly important implications follow from Heschel’s analysis of piety in these terms: the first is its epistemological significance, and the second is its moral influence. From the epistemological standpoint, piety may be described as a “lived hermeneutic” in which the world is intentionally encountered through a certain set of attitudes and behaviors, conditioned by a presumption of the theocentric character of the world. Through the resulting intuition of ultimate meaning, human beings are led to comport themselves in a manner conducive to the development of an understanding of their relationship to God (in Dilthey’s full sense of the term, “understanding”), analogous to the comportment of two lovers who derive their self-understanding in reference to one another. Moreover, Heschel extends this idea of understanding beyond the individual believer to the theological enterprise in general: theology’s appropriate goal is the sapience of both knowing and being attached to God. Ideas of God are therefore expressed in their fullest only with respect to lived moments of faith, where the individual is linked to the great revelatory events of scripture and of his or her own life by means of a grounded, consistent attitude of pious devotion. Piety thereby has as an important function as an “unconditional loyalty to the holy,” linking the individual through the disciplines of prayer and worship to Eden, to the Red Sea, to Sinai, and to Jerusalem. The moral consequence of interpreting human intentionality through the lens of piety is an assertion of the development of virtuous character as the overarching ethical issue. Emphasizing the irreducible value of the individual person, Heschel places human life in a position of ontological indebtedness with respect to the divine. This indebtedness becomes especially significant anthropologically, for it establishes the originary identity of human beings as one of relationship, rather than autonomy. Through the exploration of the multidimensional aspect of this relationality, human beings discover meaning and purpose in a sense of being needed by God—an assertion which is quite strong and unusual in Heschel’s description of the divine-human encounter. When this awareness is translated into a correlative sense of inexhaustible gratitude, both for the gift of life and for the possibility of purposefulness within it, indebtedness suggests a pattern of living which responds to the sheer gratuitousness of being through a responsible and engaged participation in the redemptive purposes of God. Piety emerges as a “grammar for living,” in which the elastic and evolving divine will is the seat of moral responsibility, rather than a fixed revelation, categorical imperative, or immutable natural law. This aspect of piety shows it to be of a formative instead of restrictive nature, shaping both individual character and the communal dimensions of human life in an evaluative act of creation inspired by an underlying existential sense of fulfilling a need of God for relationship and partnership with the human. What is of particular theological importance in Heschel’s idea of piety is how its epistemological and moral implications connect with a variety of contemporary issues—a series of connections explored in the fourth and final section of the book. First, an entire chapter is given over to developing a resonance between piety and the problematizing presence of the “Other” found in the work of Emmanuel Lévinas. We saw there that the Occidental preoccupation with ontological responses to the basic philosophical issues is troubling to both thinkers, because of the tendency such

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formulations have to see the world in reference to a similarity to oneself, with the effect of truncating any true encounter with otherness (which alone can contest the centrality of the ego). Despite the major variations between the two authors in locating the “otherness” which exacts moral accountability (an abstracted human face for Lévinas, God’s pathos for Heschel), the form and implications of their thought are quite similar: both argue that a true sense of ethical responsibility comes only from an awareness of something outside of oneself which impinges on our presumed autonomy by demanding an accountable moral response. Beyond the similarities with Lévinas, Heschel’s notion of piety also supports an engagement with a variety of other significant contemporary theological issues— philosophical, moral, and spiritual—which demonstrate its fecundity and pertinence as a source of theological reflection, especially in the postmodern context in which the emptying of the autonomous subject of modern thought is proposed as a necessary step toward the recovery of a desecularized idea of human participation in the divine. This goal places piety within the mindset of a theocentric ethics (James Gustafson), in which the ultimate moral questions are not those which are instrumental to specifically human well-being, but to the larger enactment of the divine purpose. Piety’s resistance to the dominance of an ontology based in the thematization of being by human reason also links it to the idea of a theo-logy (Jean-Luc Marion), in which the excess of God’s love is encountered and engaged without a restrictive or idolatrous objectification. At the same time, the kind of cooperation with a divine subjectivity that piety describes shifts the emphasis of religious spirituality away from a search for a unitive merger with the divine nature, to a participatory engagement with the divine will whereby the desecularized self is morally constituted and endowed with a purposeful meaning (an objective much in parallel with the program of “radical orthodoxy”). Piety thereby has the potential to serve as a form of enactive anticipation of the fullness of the very relationality which it intuitively seeks—a hope for belief that Gianni Vattimo sees in piety’s embrace of a kenotic “weak ontology.” So while Heschel’s thought is entirely at home with the idea of a mystical apprehension of God and the desire for immanent contact with the divine, he continuously presses the point that such contact is only truly realized through effective human engagement with God’s will; as he summarizes this interdependence of the spiritual and the ethical, “The way to God is a way of God.”

II  Making God credible At the outset of this study, we posed the problem of how one might take fuller account theologically of the ordinary experience of believing men and women. Although we have used the work of Abraham Heschel as the locus for an investigation into this question, it would be an exaggeration to regard this problematic as unique to him—one thinks of the example of the so-called “contextual theologies” of the last decade which have tried to investigate systematic theology from the starting point of such popular pieties as the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe.2 In the instructive case of Heschel, however, we have seen an unusual approach to this question in that he neither locates piety “contextually” in specific and often heterodox religious practices such as syncretic folk

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spiritualities, nor does he have in mind the doctrinally orthodox though intellectually unexamined practices of “popular” religion. Rather, Heschel means by piety a more circumscribed and even sophisticated set of attitudes toward God and human meaning which are universally observable in authentically pious persons—what he calls an “objective spiritual way of living and thinking.” Above all, such piety is manifested in the particular features of a theocentric regard for God’s transcendence and a correlative sense of moral requiredness. A consideration of piety from a theological point of view therefore becomes the supportive foundation for Heschel’s program of relational ontology, where God is known only through our engagement with the divine concern for human living. Heschel’s distinctive usage of piety in this manner is neither without methodological problems or broader theological implications, however, so in drawing this study to a conclusion we might take it one step further by elucidating some of these indications for further investigation, especially as they support a conceptualization of theology as establishing an inherently relational matrix of insight and belief. First of all, it is worth noting (if it is not already apparent) the democratizing effect for theology of Heschel’s focus on piety. To him, holiness is not something that resides in the heroic or astonishing examples of the saints, but a quality which is to be found near at hand in an uncle, or neighbor, or even oneself. Thus, while a generation before Heschel, Baron Friedrich von Hügel found it necessary in The Mystical Element of Religion (1908) to turn to a figure such as St Catherine of Genoa in order to resolve the separation between “enlightened” reason and religious experience, Heschel simply turns to those whom he knew best in his own community (as well as the lives of greater figures such as Maimonides or the Kotzker). This is not to say that Heschel reduces religious life to a sort of lowest common denominator; on the contrary, his point is that holiness resides in the “inconspicuous piety” which ennobles the common deed with uncommon significance. It is the manner in which an ordinary individual goes about living a life “compatible with the presence of God” which is theologically significant, not a reductionist inclusiveness that would accept any quasireligious intention or modest moral effort. Yet at the same time, piety does not hold out, in Heschel’s understanding, a distant and virtually unattainable goal of an especially sanctified life, but rather focuses on how one lives within the mundane tensions of doubt and faith, sinfulness and holiness, death and life—translating these challenges into opportunities for spiritual maturity. He does not find it necessary to draw exclusively from the mythologized example of the saints, or the idealized image of a perfected human nature, but finds the relationship of God to humanity realized in the compromised yet incessant struggle of ordinary individuals for moral and spiritual integrity. The result of this democratized localization of piety is that Heschel neither lapses into a despondent “realism” that holds no hope for the possibility of genuine moral goodness (in the manner of Niebuhr), nor does he locate the goal of moral life in an idealized unitive attachment to the divine (in the manner of mystical deification). Rather, human nature in his view must be accepted for what it is: endowed as the image of God with the potential for eternal greatness, yet enmeshed in the everyday reality of evil. Piety is the mediation between these polar tensions which makes meaningful their unresolved conflict by holding it always in relationship to the redemptive purposes of God.

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Several problems emerge, however, with Heschel’s deployment of piety in this mediating role. In particular, his taking of piety as a point of departure threatens to predetermine to a certain extent the outcome of the investigation he proposes. Choosing as a subject the example of persons whose piety is personally known and appreciated necessarily results in a theological outlook congruent with Heschel’s own initial viewpoint: the results would be quite different, for example, if one were to begin with the piety of some more heterodox movement, even within Judaism. Of course, Heschel might argue that such religious attitudes are not examples of piety at all but rather its distortion; yet then one becomes caught in the circular argument that authentic piety is defined by the orthodoxy of the religious belief which sustains it, while orthodox religious belief is defined by the authenticity of the piety it evokes. Nevertheless, this type of circular predicament (which we have seen Ricœur warn against as inherent in the phenomenological study of religion) need not distract us from the larger point that Heschel opens for us an awareness that piety is an appropriate and necessary element in theological reflection, even with all the hermeneutical problems which that appropriation presents. Indeed, it could be argued that more typical theological sources such as “tradition” and “spirituality” are incomprehensible without a corresponding account and understanding of piety, for it is the mediating mechanism between biblical revelation and its dogmatic formulation on one hand, and the lived enactment of faith on the other. A second problem, also of a circular nature, emerges in Heschel’s epistemological account as it merges with our awareness of moral responsibility. His drive to expand the boundaries of human knowing beyond logical reason is not in and of itself a unique posture (and given Heschel’s mystical temperament, this interest can be read at least in part as an effort to recover something of the premodern sensibility that love, rather than an isolated rationality, is the ultimate source of all true knowledge of God). Heschel was already indebted to his intellectual mentors—Dilthey, Scheler, and Husserl—for setting the philosophical direction in which he would pursue this project, and as we have seen his particular application of it to religious faith bears certain resemblances to the theological currents represented by Schleiermacher’s own phenomenology of piety. His argument for the plausibility of religious faith even has a certain overlap with Newman’s distinctions between notional and real assent in A Grammar of Assent (1870). But what is of special interest in Heschel is that having reasserted the breadth of human cognition to include the affective and volitional as well as rational, he in turn narrows the traditional limits of what we can know of God from the nature (but not essence) of God’s being, to the more restrictive concept of God’s concern: human beings do not perceive or participate in any aspect of God other than the divine pathos, expressed as God’s will for creation. Such an account of the divine-human encounter may at first seem strange for a theologian with mystical predilections like Heschel, for it has little in common with the ecstatic experience of divine union more typically associated with mysticism. As we have seen, however, Heschel insists that the prophetic (and by implication pious) consciousness is not an ecstatic dissolution of the person into oneness with God. Rather, he takes the position that such an encounter is rooted in a perception at the center of consciousness of the divine command of obligation and responsibility: one is not drawn out of oneself into the divine, but called to account in

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a responsible relationship enacted in partnership with God. It is at this point, however, that the circularity of Heschel’s epistemological argument becomes apparent: if what we know of God is only God’s will, then where is that will disclosed? The most tangible answer Heschel gives is that God’s will is known through the commandment of mitzvot. And what are mitzvot? They are deeds performed in accordance with the divine will. Such a circularity can be especially maddening, coming as it does right at the heart of Heschel’s account of the obligations which define the content of our response to God’s “ultimate question.” Moreover, the location of moral requiredness in a fundamentally Jewish notion such as mitzvot also seems to parochialize his thinking at this critical juncture. Yet, more careful attention to Heschel’s appeal to the Mosaic law reveals that beyond making a rather predictable appeal to its content as the normative basis for moral and religious behavior, he is in fact engaging in quite a radical rereading of it. The key is Heschel’s conception of God’s pathos, which intervenes to give expression to the divine will in concrete situations and touches the moral consciousness and commitment of individuals who then, through the enactment of mitzvot, give concrete definition to the divine will. In this sense, pathos may be thought of as a form of grace, in that it is a regard by God for human beings which affects in them a change of heart, turning the direction of their attention back to God. A change in human behavior, therefore, can change God’s pathetic reaction to a specific situation, even though the more abstract permanence of the divine will remains constant. Moreover, we have seen that Heschel does not subscribe to a radical distinction between law and grace: to him, the law is itself a form of grace which sanctifies human beings through the attachment to divine holiness it enables. Heschel’s defense of an essentially biblical definition of morality in the context of the Mosaic law therefore implicitly challenges the typical allergy Christian ethicists have to the Hebrew scriptures. Heschel himself expresses his perplexity that “Christians leave out the possibility and the greatness of the Mosaic Law.” As a Jew, he says that he feels “the blessing and the love of the Law,” whereas “a Christian theologian would say that the Law is an imposition.”3 He thereby calls into question the instinctive modern avoidance on the part of Christians of the moral richness of the Old Testament in favor of the New, reminding us that the covenantal aspect of the divine-human relationship is developed throughout the whole of scripture. And while a Christian exegesis of such texts as the Levitical code would no doubt read them differently from an overtly Jewish interpretation, nevertheless the moral principles of community and relationship contained therein have, at least historically, been a starting point even for Christian reflection about the nature of God’s will for humanity—one thinks especially of the Ten Commandments. As a demonstration of the specificity of application and generality of principle which the Hebrew biblical sources suggest, Heschel offers his own “summary of the law” which indicates the pattern of the law’s formation of the grace of holiness: “A man to be holy must fear his mother and father, keep the Sabbath, not turn to idols . . . nor deal falsely nor lie to one another . . . not curse the deaf nor put a stumbling block before the blind . . . not be guilty of any injustice . . . not be a tale-bearer . . . not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor . . . not hate . . . not take vengeance nor bear any grudge . . . but love thy neighbor as thyself (Leviticus 19:3–18).”4 In reference to

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such principles, Heschel would have understood his own participation in the march in Selma as a mitzvah which responded to these commandments, thereby giving voice to God’s outrage at the opprobrium of racial segregation. The divine will respecting the dignity of every person was actively communicated through the moral activism of the many individuals who were deeply and spiritually motivated by an awareness of God’s umbrage. In regard to the Mosaic law as the disclosure of the divine will, then, Heschel’s appeal to it is not merely to a static code, but to a pattern of affiliation with the divine purposes which shapes human behavior into conformity with the prophetic ideals of justice, compassion, and mercy. If one steps back from Heschel’s theology in order to gain some broader perspective on how to respond to these methodological problems, what emerges as an appropriate interpretive context is the current interest in “relational” theologies, represented especially by the work of Jürgen Moltmann. Relational theology emphasizes a transcendentally immanent God who enters into conversation with humanity in a shared relationship of expectation, a commonality which becomes the source not only of our knowledge of God, but also of our own being. This theological interest is based on an attempt to take seriously the biblical witness that God is revealed through the language of revelation (both covenantal and prophetic): the scriptures, read in this light, privilege the linguistic over the visual in making God known. The example of Heschel’s work (which accentuates so strongly God’s question to humanity as the basis of human meaning and responsibility) suggests that the Christian reclaiming of the covenantal themes of the biblical narrative is in many ways an instance of a recovery of an essentially Jewish instinct which had lapsed in Christian theology. Heschel’s description of piety, for example, is distinctly conversational in tone and relational in form. Yet to appropriate the idea of relationship as constitutive of the divinehuman partnership also means inclusion of the ambiguities inherent in language and relationship: the sort of circularities which we have observed in Heschel’s argument can be understood as being conditioned by the very fecundity and interpersonal complexity of the concept of relationality itself. The relational dimension of Heschel’s theology also allows him to cross what is often perceived to be an unbridgeable intellectual chasm: namely, the gap between the self-abnegation of a mystical encounter and the self-affirmation of ethical responsibility. The connection between these two aspects of religious life is intrinsically paradoxical: the problem is how one can connect the mystical themes of rupture, radical transcendence, deep personal interiority, and intimacy with an absolute infinite on the one hand, with the contrasting ethical themes of finitude, connection, communality, and personal accountability. The connection between the mystical and the ethical is made all the more problematic by the fact that mystical experience often alienates the self from community through an ascetic dispossession and isolation, making the mystic appear virtually nihilistic from a moral point of view. Yet at the same time, the revelation of the deep structures of human meaning and communion offered through the witness of a mystic’s life and testimony simultaneously touch upon the very foundations of communal morality and identity, suggesting the productive potential of establishing a lien between the two, despite their seemingly paradoxical cross-purposes.5

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Heschel’s stress in The Prophets on prophetic consciousness as an awareness of God’s intention “to bring about righteousness in history, justice in society, piety in the people” does not so much solve the problem of how to relate the mystical and ethical, as reorder its formulation in a different register of relational terms.6 The prophetic encounter is not the union with the divine sought after by the mystic, but rather an event or ecstasy of God through which the prophet is claimed (even against his or her will) as a bearer of a message imparting the divine expectation and intention for human living. In this case, the experience is not one of removal or rupture from ordinary human intercourse, but one of being sent into the heart of it, burdened with a deep awareness of the obligations which relationship to God carries. Torah, for example, becomes in this perspective what Heschel calls a “mystic reality” which, although it is inspired by the prophetic consciousness of God, shapes human conduct with a precise yet expansive sense of requiredness. The curious result is that in his description of prophetic consciousness, Heschel turns the usual orientation of mysticism toward union with the divine on its head, making the content of the event God’s profoundly humanistic interest in our capacity “to augment the divine in the world.”7 If Heschel’s regard for prophetic consciousness makes an unexpected reversal of the presumed content of traditional mysticism, then this inversion is continued in his idea of revelation, supporting and authenticating his description of how the mystical and ethical are joined. In contrast with the mood of a Barthian neoorthodoxy which reasserted the initiative of God in revealing himself, through himself, as himself, Heschel’s own version of the primacy of revelation strictly circumscribes it within the concept of will (despite the affinities he had with the contemporaneous neoorthodox program). It is not God’s self that is revealed to us, but God’s concern; it is not the ineffable God in the whirlwind who is made known to Israel, but the concern of God for the righteousness and justice proclaimed by the prophets with such tortured urgency. This focus on the revelation of God’s will for human living leads, in turn, to what we have described as Heschel’s distrust of metaphysical speculations about the nature of God as Being. The otherness of God to which we respond through piety is not a static and eternal being, but a dynamic will with its own history and development. As a consequence, our attachment to God is likewise framed within the biblical and historical narratives, carrying with it both the possibility of growth and elaboration, as well as the intrinsic ambiguity of any interpersonal relationship. Significantly, the expression of moral obligation within the dynamic framework of a pious relationality also allows Heschel to transcend the perceived dichotomy between an unacceptable moral relativism on one hand, and an unsustainable moral universalism on the other. The shift of the ethical question from an inquiry into what is universally or absolutely right and wrong to one of how to participate meaningfully  in the divine will suggests one manner in which we might speak of a morality with objective content even in a pluralistic age. Heschel proposes to do this without falling either into an individualistic emotivism, or into the difficulties posed by the often unacceptable universalism of the natural law tradition. While the latter has attempted to articulate a morality established by divine law which

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is everywhere rationally apparent, Heschel’s relocation of the moral question in relational participation enables him to derive moral guidance from the historically engaged will of God, which for him implies a dynamic rather than static moral universe. He thereby moves away from describing morality as the fulfillment of binding obligations; rather, moral life is our grateful participation as human beings in the evolving purposes of God, so that more than fulfilling our duty, our moral acts also fulfill us by linking us to our ultimate meaning. Moreover, morality itself (like revelation) has a history as the unfolding of a relationship between God and humanity, so that it is both constantly renewed and challenged by the evolution of time into the future, and permanently grounded by the passage of time recorded in the historical experience of our forebears. *** The witness that Heschel’s theology makes in its development of piety as “a life compatible with God’s presence” could be characterized, in its broadest terms, as establishing the intrinsic interrelatedness of the cognitive and ethical dimensions of theology in a single covenanted relationship: the experience of apprehending God’s transitive concern as it is embodied in a participatory partnership with God’s will for human life. This fusion of the content and consequences of religious life in a single experiential reality (accessible for investigation phenomenologically) makes piety an especially fruitful source for theological reflection. In its epistemological ramifications, piety acts as a response to the modern diminishment of human knowing to logical reason, opening an alternative depth of understanding embracing intuitive insight and affective feeling as well. In its ethical implications, piety describes the integrity of the individual person and encourages the development of moral character through the cultivation of the virtues, rooted in a lively and unbounded sense of indebtedness and gratitude. And in its spiritual aspect, piety links a mystical consciousness of the nearness of God with a concrete participation in the enactment of the divine will, rooting religious belief and commitment in the open-ended historical event of God’s pathos. Cumulatively, therefore, piety offers the possibility for drawing close correlations between the impression made by the consciousness of God in the lives of religious men and women, and the broader history of revelation expressed in scripture and the tradition of faith which has been the typical province of theological investigation. In a little book entitled Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief, Rowan Williams makes just those connections, offering us a model of the theological uses of piety. Written in a pastoral and apologetic tone, these essays try to lay out a case for belief that will make sense to ordinary people in the current age.8 Retreating at one point from the attempt to offer rational arguments about why the idea of God might make sense, the essays fall back instead upon the example of individuals whose life of faith is one that we find we can trust, or “believe in.”9 The Bible itself, Williams notes, has no arguments for the existence of God: it has only figures like Abraham, Moses, and Paul who “are already caught up in something the imperative reality of which they can’t deny or ignore.” Similarly, in our own midst, there are individuals who “take responsibility for making God credible in the world” (a phrase Williams takes from

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Etty Hillesum, herself a Jewish victim of the Holocaust). Although Williams does not explicitly use the term “piety,” it is clearly the pious individual whom he has in mind: We may be uncertain, still racked by doubt and inner anguish, we may be unable to give any very satisfactory account intellectually of what we believe; but somewhere in our horizon there are people who make the connection [to God]. Never mind that such people may themselves often be almost as anguished or struggling as we are: the point is that what we see is someone who is a native of the world in which we want to belong.10

Ultimately, Williams suggests, the encounter with such “natives” may be the most likely moment for us to be able to say of ourselves, “ ‘I want to live in the same world as them; I want to know what they know and to drink from the same wells.’ That’s when we can truly say, ‘I believe; I have confidence; I take refuge; I have come home.’ ” Piety thus becomes the most trustworthy evidence of God, and the pious man or woman the surest representation of the authentic implications of a religious life. With such an appreciative awareness of the integrative structure of piety, the academic theologian, the religious leader, and the inquiring believer may each find in the life of pious individuals a penetrating and authentic realization and verification of the transcendence of God in its immanent specificity in human life.

Notes 1 Heschel, GSM, 246. 2 See, for example, the works of the Latin American theologians Orlando Espin, Roberto Goizueta, Alex Garcia-Rivera, and the Eastern European Tim Matovina. 3 Heschel, “Interview at Notre Dame,” 386. 4 Heschel, GSM, 290. 5 I am indebted for this formulation to “La mystique, une éthique paradoxale?”, a study day sponsored by the Fondation Ostad Elahi at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, 5 October 2001. 6 See especially the chapter on “An Examination of the Theory of Ecstasy.” Heschel, TP, 361. 7 Heschel, “The Mystical Element in Judaism,” 166. 8 Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007). The essays were originally delivered as a series of Holy Week talks in Canterbury Cathedral, 2005. 9 Williams, Tokens of Trust, 20–8. 10 Ibid., 26.

Bibliography A  Primary works by Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings. Edited by Susannah Heschel. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Les Bâtisseurs du Temps. Translated by Georges Levitte. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957. Contains portions of The Earth Is the Lord’s and The Sabbath. The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov: Studies in Hasidism. Edited by Samuel H. Dresner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Contains essays originally published as “Rabbi Pinhas of Korzec.” The Salman Schocken Jubilee Volume, 213–44. Jerusalem: Schocken, 1948–52; “Reb Pinkhes Koritzer.” Yivo Bleter 33 (1949): 9–48; “Rabbi Gershon Kutover: His Life and Immigration to the Land of Israel.” Hebrew Union College Annual 23 (1950–51): part 2, 17–71; “Rabbi Nahman of Kosów, Companion of the Baal Shem.” The Harry A. Wolfson Jubilee Volume, 113–41. New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1965; “Rabbi Isaac of Drobitch.” Hado’ar Jubilee Volume, 86–94. New York: Hadoar, 1957. “The Concept of Man in Jewish Thought.” In The Concept of Man. Edited by S. Radhakrishan and P. T. Raju, 108–57. Lincoln, NE: Johnson Publishing, 1960. Don Jizhak Abravanel. Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1937. English edition (abridged), Intermountain Jewish News. Translated by William Wolf (19 December 1986): 5, 8–12. The Earth Is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in East Europe. New York: AbelardSchuman, 1950. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955. French edition, Dieu en quête de l’homme. Translated by G. Casaril and Georges Passelecq (Paris: Seuil, 1968). Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations. Translated by Gordon Tucker. New York: Continuum, 2007. Originally published as Torah min Hashamayim b’Espaklaryah shel Ha-Darot, 2 vols (London and New York: Soncino Press, 1962/65); a third volume was published posthumously by the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, 1995. I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Edited by Samuel H. Dresner. New York: Crossroad, 1996. The Ineffable Name of God: Man. Poems. Translated by Morton M. Leifman. New York: Continuum, 2004. Originally published as Der Shem Hameforash: Mentsh. Lider. Warsaw: Farlag Indzl, 1933. “The Inner World of the Polish Jew.” Introduction to Polish Jews: A Pictorial Record, by Roman Vishniac, 7–17. New York: Schocken, 1965. The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959/66. Israel: An Echo of Eternity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967. Reprint, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1997. “The Jewish Notion of God and Christian Renewal.” In Jewish Perspectives on Christianity. Edited by Fritz Rothschild, 325–39. New York: Crossroad, 1990. Originally published

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in Renewal of Religious Thought: Proceedings of the Congress on the Theology of the Renewal of the Church. Edited by L. K. Shook (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1968). Maimonides: A Biography. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. Originally published as Maimonides, Eine Biographie (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1935). French edition, Maïmonide. Translated by Germaine Bernard (Paris: Payot, 1936). Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951. French edition, L’Homme n’est pas seul. Translated by Françoise Boutet (Sisteron: Editions Présence, 1985). “The Meaning of Observance.” In Understanding Jewish Theology. Edited by Jacob Neusner, 93–103. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1973. Originally published in The Jewish Frontier (April 1954): 22–8. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Edited by Susannah Heschel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. “The Moral Outrage of Vietnam.” In Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience. Edited by Robert McAfee Brown, A. J. Heschel, and Michael Novak, 48–61. New York: Association Press, Behrman House, Herder & Herder, 1967. “The Nation and the Individual.” In The Religious Renewal of Jewry. Edited by Jacob Neusner, 10–26. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. Reprint of an address given at the 1957 Jerusalem Ideological Conference. “La notion judaïque de Dieu et le renouveau chrétien.” In La théologie du renouveau, Cogitatio fidei, 34. Edited by Laurence K. Shook and Guy-M. Bertrand. Paris: Cerf, 1968. A Passion for Truth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Reprint, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1995. French edition, Le tourment de la vérité. Translated by Georges Passelecq (Paris: Cerf, 1976). Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets: Maimondes and Other Medieval Authorities. Edited by Morris M. Faierstein. Hoboken: Ktav Publishing House, 1996. Includes the essays originally published in Hebrew, “Did Maimonides Believe that He Had Attained the Rank of Prophet?” Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, 159–88. New York: American Academy for Social Research, 1945; and “Prophetic Inspiration in the Middle Ages.” Alexander Marx Jubilee Volume, 175–208. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950. Die Prophetie. Cracow: The Polish Academy of Sciences, 1936 (Heschel’s doctoral dissertation). Excerpts published as “La Prophétie.” Translated by Henry Corbin. Hermès III/3 (November 1939): 78–110. Excerpts from Part 3, Chapter 1 also published as “The Divine Pathos: The Basic Category of Prophetic Theology.” Edited by William Wolf, Judaism 2/1 (January 1953): 61–7. The Prophets. New York: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962. (A revised and expanded version of Heschel’s doctoral thesis.) The Quest for Certainty in Saadia’s Philosophy. New York: Philip Feldheim, 1944. Originally published in The Jewish Quarterly Review 33 (1943): 265–313 and 34 (1944): 391–408. Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism. New York: Crossroad, 1954. “Space, Time and Reality: The Centrality of Time in the Biblical World-View.” Judaism 1/3 (1952): 262–9. The Sabbath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951.

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To Grow in Wisdom: An Anthology of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Edited by Jacob Neusner. New York: Madison Books, 1990. Who Is Man? Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965.

B  Secondary sources related to the life and works of Abraham Joshua Heschel “Abraham Joshua Heschel: A twenty-fifth yahrzeit tribute.” Conservative Judaism L/2–3 (Winter/Spring 1998). Includes Abraham Joshua Heschel, “From Der Shem Hameforash: Mentsh.” Translated by Morton Liefman; Edward K. Kaplan, “Readiness Before God: Abraham Heschel in Europe”; Alfredo Fabio Borodowski, “Hasidic Sources in Heschel’s Conception of Prayer”; Gordon Tucker, “Heschel’s Torah min ha-shamayim: Ancient Theology and Contemporary Autobiography”; Leonard Levin, “Heschel’s Homage to the Rabbis: Torah min ha-shamayim as Historical Theology”; Alexander Even-Chen, “The Torah, Revelation, and Scientific Critique in the Teachings of Abraham Joshua Heschel”; Neil Gillman, “Epistemological Tensions in Heschel’s Thought”; James Hyman, “Meaningfulness, the Ineffable, and the Commandments”; Gary Michael Banks, “Rabbi Heschel Through Christian Eyes”; Shaul Magid, “Abraham Joshua Heschel and Thomas Merton: Heretics of Modernity”; Susannah Heschel, “Theological Affinities in the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.”; Arthur Waskow, “ ‘My Legs Were Praying’: Theology and Politics in Abraham Joshua Heschel”; William Sloane Coffin, “Where Does God Dwell in America Today?”; Byron L. Sherwin, “Memories and Meanings of Being Heschel’s Disciple”; Samuel H. Dresner, “Heschel’s Hasidism: A Recollection”; Peter A. Geffen and Or-Nistar Rose, “Abraham Joshua Heschel Remembered: Reminiscences by Heschel’s Former Students”; Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Pikuach Neshama: To Save a Soul”. America, issue dedicated to Abraham Joshua Heschel, 128/9 (1973): 207–20. Includes Jacob Neusner, “Faith in the Crucible of the Mind”; W. D. Davies, “Conscience, Scholar, Witness”; John C. Haughey, “Jewish Prayer: A Share in Holiness.” Anderson, Bernhard W. “Confrontation with the Bible.” Theology Today 30/3 (1973): 267–71. Baccarini, Emilio. “A. J. Heschel: Le pluralisme religieux comme volonté de Dieu.” SIDIC 27/3 (1994): 5–11. —. “Pensare Ebraicamente: F. Rosenzweig e A. J. Heschel.” Archivio di Filosofia LXI/1–3 (1993): 365–90. Banach, Richard William. “The Relevancy of Abraham Joshua Heschel for Christian SelfUnderstanding.” D.Min. thesis, Drew University, 1975. Barnard, David. “Abraham Heschel’s Attitude toward Religion and Psychology.” Journal of Religion 63/1 (1983): 26–43. Ben-Horin, Meir. “The Ineffable: Critical Notes on Neo-Mysticism.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 46/4 (1956): 321–54. —. “The Ultimate and the Mystery: A Critique of Some Neo-Mystical Tenets.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 51/1 (1960): 55–71 and 51/2 (1960): 141–56. —. “Via Mystica.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 45/3 (1955): 249–58. Berkovits, Eliezer. Major Themes in Modern Philosophies of Judaism. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1974.

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—. “Dr. A. J. Heschel’s Theology of Pathos.” Tradition 6/2 (1964): 67–104. —. “A Reaction to Tanenzapf,” letter published in Judaism 24/1 (1975): 115–16. Borowitz, Eugene B. “Judaism: An Overview.” Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 8, 127–49. New York: Macmillan, 1987. —. A New Jewish Theology in the Making. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1968. Breslauer, S. Daniel. “Abraham Joshua Heschel’s ‘Biblical Man’ in Contextual Perspective.” Judaism 25/2 (1976): 341–4. —. The Charismatic Spirituality of Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mystical Teachings of an American Rabbi. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011. —. The Ecumenical Perspective and the Modernization of Jewish Religion. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978. —. “The Impact of Abraham Joshua Heschel as Jewish Leader in the American Jewish Community from the 1960’s to His Death: A Social, Psychological, and Intellectual Study.” Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 1974. Britton, Joseph. “Piety and Moral Consciousness: Contributions from the Mystical Realism of Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Anglican Theological Review 81/3 (1999): 391–411. Cherbonnier, Edmond La B. “A. J. Heschel and the Philosophy of the Bible: Mystic or Rationalist?” Commentary 27/1 (1959): 23–9. —. “Heschel as a Religious Thinker.” Conservative Judaism 23/1 (1968): 25–39. Chester, Michael. Divine Pathos and Human Being: The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005. —. “Heschel and the Christians.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 38/2–3 (Spring–Summer 2001): 246–70. Clarke, Robert Earl. “The Biblical Philosophy of Abraham Heschel.” Ph.D. dissertation, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1965. Cohen, Arthur. The Natural and the Supernatural Jew. New York: Pantheon, 1962. Comeau, Geneviève. Catholicisme et Judaïsme dans la modernité. Paris: Cerf, 1998. —. “Le Judaïsme dans le monde moderne: L’exemple du Conservative Judaism.” Recherches de Science Religieuse 85/2 (1997): 199–223. Conservative Judaism, issue dedicated to Abraham Joshua Heschel, 28/1 (1973): 3–95. Includes Heschel’s articles “Reflections on Death” and “The Concept of ‘Beings’ in the Philosophy of Ibn Gabirol”; Edmond La B. Cherbonnier, “Heschel’s Time-Bomb”; Louis Finkelstein, “Three Meetings with Abraham Joshua Heschel”; Alfred Gottschalk, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Man of Dialogues”; Avraham Holtz, “Religion and the Arts in the Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel”; Edward K. Kaplan, “The Spiritual Radicalism of Abraham Joshua Heschel”; Judith Herschlag Muffs, “A Reminiscence of Abraham Joshua Heschel”; Fritz A. Rothschild, “Architect and Herald of a New Theology”; J. A. Sanders, “An Apostle to the Gentiles”; Pinchas Peli, “Three Poems on the Death of My Teacher”; Seymour Siegel, “Divine Pathos, Prophetic Sympathy”; Moshe Starkman, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Jewish Writer and Thinker”; Jacob Y. Teshima, “My Memory of Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Dictionnaire Encyclopédique du Judaïsme. s.v. “Heschel, Abraham Joshua,” 519–20. Paris: Cerf, 1993. Dolna, Bernhard. An die Gegenwart Gottes preisgegeben: Abraham Joshua Heschel, Leben und Werk. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 2001. Dresner, Samuel H. “The Contribution of Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Judaism 32/1 (1983): 57–69. —. “Heschel and Halakhah: The Vital Center.” Conservative Judaism 43/4 (1991): 18–31. —. Heschel, Hasidism, and Halakha. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.

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Eisen, Arnold. “Re-reading Heschel on the Commandments.” Modern Judaism 9/1 (1989): 1–33. Even-Chen, Alexander. Voice Out of the Darkness. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Phenomenology and Mysticism [Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Mekhon Sheckhter, 1999. Even-Chen, Alexander, and Ephraim Meir. Between Heschel and Buber: A Comparative Study. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012. Fackenheim, Emil L. Review of God In Search of Man, by Abraham Heschel. Conservative Judaism 15/1 (1960): 50–3. Fiddes, Paul S. The Creative Suffering of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Fierman, Morton C. Leap of Action: Ideas in the Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel. New York: University Press of America, 1990. Fox, Marvin. “Heschel, Intuition, and the Halakhah.” Tradition 3/1 (1960): 5–15. Friedman, Maurice. “Abraham Heschel among Contemporary Philosophers: From Divine Pathos to Prophetic Action.” Philosophy Today 18 (1974): 293–305. —. Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel: You Are My Witnesses. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. —. “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Philosopher of Wonder.” Congress Bi-Weekly (18 December 1967): 12–14. —. “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Toward a Philosophy of Judaism.” Conservative Judaism 10/2 (1956): 1–10. —. “Buber, Heschel and Heidegger: Two Jewish Existentialists Confront a Great German Existentialist.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 51/119 (2011), published online 17 May 2010 at jhp.sagepub.com/content/51/1/129. —. “Divine Need and Human Wonder: The Philosophy of Abraham J. Heschel.” Judaism 25/1 (1976): 65–78. Gamberini, Paolo, SJ. “Il pathos di Dio nel pensiero di Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Civiltà Cattolica II (1998): 450–64. —. Pathos e Logos in Abraham J. Heschel. Rome: Città Nuova, 2009. Giannini, Gianluca. Etica e Religione in Abraham Joshua Heschel: Lineamenti di una Filosofia dell’Ebraismo. Naples: Guida, 2001. Granfield, Patrick. “Abraham J. Heschel.” In Theologians at Work. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Gross, Victor Moshe. “Educating for Reverence: The Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1987. Hallman, Joseph M. The Descent of God: Divine Suffering in History and Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. Hartman, David. “Heschel’s Religious Passion.” In Conflicting Visions: Spiritual Possibilities of Modern Israel. New York: Schocken Books, 1990. Held, Shai. Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2013. Hyman, James. “Abraham Heschel: Alienation and the Trope of Meaning.” Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1996. Jaeger, John. “Abraham Heschel and the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann.” Perspectives in Religious Studies 24/2 (Summer 1997): 167–79. John Paul II, Dies Domini. In La Documentation Catholique 2186 (1998): 658–82. Kaplan, Edward K. Abraham Heschel: Un prophète pour notre temps. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008. —. “Abraham Joshua Heschel.” In Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century. Edited by Steven Katz. Washington: B’nai B’rith Books, 1993.

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Index aggada  59–60, 72, 122, 125–6, 130, 191–2, 279 Akiva ben Joseph, Rabbi  64, 124–8, 134n. 89 Alter, Mordecai Abraham  140 amazement, radical  111, 148, 151, 158, 209, 234 anthropocentrism  9–10, 255–8 anthropology, in Heschel  52, 61, 71, 88, 90, 153, 204, 246, 279 Aquinas, Thomas  194, 260 Aristotle  5, 164, 167, 174, 203 Augustine  26, 48, 194, 258, 260 awe  152, 155–6, 180–1, 197, 277 Baal Shem Tov see Eliezer, Israel ben Babolin, Albino  61 Baeck, Leo  82 Balthasar, Hans Urs von  53, 194, 201n. 110 Barth, Karl  10, 33, 215, 256 comparison with Heschel  12–13, 276, 286 critique of Schleiermacher  8–9, 276–7 Bayly, Lewis  28 Berkovits, Eliezer  65 Berrigan, Daniel  51 Bertholet, Alfred  82, 91 Bible  26, 54, 63, 91–2, 159, 161–3, 167, 175, 177, 192, 204–5, 209, 212, 236, 244, 276 biblical use of piety  22–3 bisociative nature of piety  129–31, 278–9 Borowitz, Eugene  11, 60 Brentano, Franz  90, 247 Breslauer, S. Daniel  60 Buber, Martin  11, 67, 91, 110, 141, 157, 176–7, 240

Calvin, John  6, 29–31, 194, 256 Camus, Albert  186, 200n. 71 Cassirer, Ernst  83, 165, 176, 248n. 2 Charry, Ellen  19n. 2, 193–6, 201n. 98 Cherbonnier, Edmond La B.  63, 118 Chester, Michael  61 Christianity  9, 25, 45, 50, 134n. 86 see also interreligious/interfaith dialogue concept of original sin  214–15 theology  11, 16–19, 22, 52, 65, 284–5 uses of piety in  25–37 circularity of thought  148, 162, 191, 283–5 Comeau, Geneviève  59 commandment(s)  23, 29, 36, 60, 166, 206, 208, 212, 243, 258, 269, 284–5 see also requiredness concern, God’s transitive  9, 14, 16, 18, 46, 51, 116, 159–62, 165–6, 202, 205–9, 244–6, 261–4, 270 see also pathos Corbin, Henry  67, 88 death  144, 188, 266 definitions of piety  10, 12–13, 209 see also observance depth theology  16, 44–5, 60, 62, 108, 110, 120, 122, 128, 149, 153, 176, 184–5, 190, 195–6, 216 Dessoir, Max  82–3, 91, 97 Dilthey, Wilhelm  43, 68–9, 71, 88, 91–5, 97, 99, 142, 155, 158, 173, 176, 179–80, 189, 277–8, 283 see also Erkennen; Verstehen Erlebnis (lived experience)  85–7, 92–3 Geisteswissenschaften (humanities and social sciences)  82–5

304

Index

Dolna, Bernhard  61 Dresner, Samuel  55–8, 69, 110–11, 116, 140–1, 159, 193 Edwards, Jonathan  256–7 Eisen, Arnold  50, 78n. 88, 125–6 Eliezer, Israel ben (Baal Shem Tov)  47, 111, 113–17, 128–9, 140 Elster, Jon  173–4 embarrassment  122, 216–17, 246, 269–70 emotion, as cognition  92–3, 97–8, 115, 155–6, 173–5 Erkennen (knowledge)  93, 179, 278 ethics  17, 64, 97–8, 116, 119, 122, 202 Even-Chen, Alexander  67, 79n. 100 Fackenheim, Emil  59, 65 faith  16–17, 28–30, 35, 62, 68, 107–9, 143, 145–7, 161, 164, 185–6, 271–2 Heidegger’s analysis  45–7 as “leap of action”  60, 206–7 theology’s relationship to  194–7 Farley, Edward  32–3, 76n. 52 freedom  143, 162–7, 208–10, 235, 237–8, 244, 258, 279 Friedman, Maurice  55–6, 90, 105–6, 110, 116–17, 135n. 92, 158, 184, 186, 190 Friedrich Wilhelms Universität (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin)  82 Frömmigkeit (Heidegger)  48, 267 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  85–6, 271 Gamberini, Paolo, SJ  14, 45, 62, 67, 120 Giannini, Gianluca  61, 67 gratitude  18, 24–5, 174, 206, 216–19, 257, 263, 266, 269–70, 272, 280, 287 Gustafson, James  17, 73, 174, 255–8, 277 Guttmann, Julius  83, 94 halacha  11–12, 58–60, 72, 122, 125–6, 128, 130, 190–2, 279 Hartshorne, Charles  67, 80n. 122 Hasidism  17, 27, 49, 55, 58–9, 68–9, 83, 105, 110–18, 126, 128–9, 140, 178, 192, 209, 244, 248n. 2, 260, 278

Hauerwas, Stanley  73, 222, 277 Hebrew Union College (Cincinnati)  69, 111 Heidegger, Martin  6, 18, 121, 186, 204, 213, 234–7, 248n. 2, 265–7 comparison with Heschel  43–9 Held, Shai  62 Herberg, Will  67 hermeneutic, piety as a lived  37, 162, 179, 192, 231, 264, 280 Heschel, Abraham Joshua: works cited (primary references to principal works) “An Analysis of Piety”  13, 141–4, 153, 158, 162, 165–6, 219, 266 The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov  70, 111 Don Jizhak Abravanel  107 The Earth Is the Lord’s  69–70, 111, 123 “Faith”  145–7, 166 God in Search of Man  49–50, 59, 65, 72, 112, 119–20, 139, 141, 151–2, 158, 161, 164–6, 186, 195, 233, 271, 276, 279 “The Holy Dimension”  144–5 The Ineffable Name of God  50, 115, 140 The Insecurity of Freedom  49, 58, 110, 162, 164, 212, 214, 217 Maimonides  94–5 Man Is Not Alone  49–50, 119, 141, 150, 152, 154, 157–9, 172, 181, 211, 221, 234, 263–4, 279 Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity  50 A Passion for Truth  47, 49, 70, 111, 113, 116, 130, 178, 209, 233 “Prayer”  147–8 Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets  106–9 Die Prophetie  14, 53, 88–95, 150, 153, 192, 278 The Quest for Certainty in Saadia’s Philosophy  64, 107 Quest for God  118, 123, 156, 176, 241 The Sabbath  49–50, 186 Torah min Hashamayim (Heavenly Torah)  50, 64, 72, 124–7, 135n. 92

Index Who Is Man?  10, 43, 45, 49–50, 90, 121, 204, 216–17, 235–6, 245–8 Heschel, Moshe Mordecai (Heschel’s father)  140 Heschel, Susannah (Heschel’s daughter)  50, 70, 77n. 63, 168n. 18, 172, 248n. 2 Heschel, Sylvia Straus (Heschel’s wife)  172 Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Berlin)  82 holiness  83, 106, 123, 144–5, 160, 165–7, 208, 259, 282 in Anglicanism  33–5 Calvin’s understanding  29–30, 33 in Hasidism  112, 114–18 Hügel, Baron Friedrich von  282 Husserl, Edmund  6, 43–4, 68, 71, 97–8, 162–3, 234, 247, 248n. 2, 277, 283 phenomenology  49, 57, 63, 83–4, 89–91, 149–51, 158, 161, 278 image of God, humankind as  52, 83, 114, 123, 160, 164–6, 177, 179, 210, 213, 215–16, 258–9, 279, 282 indebtedness  62, 73, 122, 206, 216–19, 241–2, 255, 266, 269, 272, 277, 280, 287 ineffable (as beyond expression)  14, 16, 18, 49, 57, 61, 66, 73, 99, 113, 119, 122, 129, 160, 175–6, 180–5, 191, 193, 239–40, 277 interreligious/interfaith dialogue  183, 186–7, 190–1, 211 Jewish-Christian dialogue  49–51, 64–5 Ishmael ben Elisha, Rabbi  64, 124–8, 134n. 89 James, William  67, 115 Jaspers, Karl  91 Jewish Theological Seminary (New York City)  12, 49–50, 55, 58–9, 63 John Paul II, Pope  53 Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Frankfurt)  67, 141 justice  23, 26, 64, 96, 159, 203, 205–8, 242, 271, 286

305

Kabbalah  71, 108, 118–19, 278 Kant, Emmanuel  67, 71, 82, 209, 215, 218, 254, 277 Dilthey’s critique of  85–7 Heschel’s resistance to  84, 91–3, 114–15, 149, 152, 154–8, 169n. 37, 172–3, 181, 203–4, 245, 278 Scheler’s response to  97–8 Shestov’s refutation of  162 Kaplan, Edward  36, 55, 57, 69, 72, 110, 114, 119–20, 122, 140, 159, 193, 200nn. 91–2, 232 Kaplan, Mordecai  67 Kasimow, Harold  55–7, 114, 117–18, 201n. 109 kavanah  105, 148, 178–9, 209 kenosis (of the subject)  254, 266–70 Kierkegaard, Søren  12, 48, 67, 114, 130, 162–3, 206, 209, 215 King, Martin Luther, Jr.  51, 64, 67 Koestler, Arthur  129–30 Koigen, David  83, 91, 94–5, 114 Philosophische Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Koigen Circle)  83, 115, 141 Kotzker Rebbe see Mendl, Menahem Küng, Hans  59 Lévinas, Emmanuel  13, 17–18, 67, 73, 217, 265, 277, 280–1 biography and style compared with Heschel  232–3, 248–9n. 2 le Dire and le Dit  240 God’s trace  244–6 indebtedness and discontent  241–2 priority of the ethical  234, 237–8, 247, 269 third party, presence of  242–4 visage as Other  233, 237, 239–41 Lindbeck, George  16, 73, 127–9, 135n. 98, 277 MacIntyre, Alasdair  73, 220–2 Maier, Heinrich  82 Maimonides, Moses  65, 94–5, 103n. 70, 108–9, 164–5, 174, 192, 282 Marion, Jean-Luc  18, 73, 264–6, 277, 281 McIntosh, Mark  193–4, 197

306

Index

meaning in human life  14, 36, 44–9, 57, 62, 90, 99, 120–2, 143–4, 164–5, 179–82, 203–10, 246–8, 261–3, 280 Mendl, Menahem (Kotzker Rebbe)  111, 113, 128–30, 140, 148, 209, 233, 282 Merkle, John  14–15, 56, 62, 68, 187 Merton, Thomas  67, 184–5 methodology, piety as  4, 6, 10, 15–19, 154, 197, 277–9, 282–5 mitzvah (pl. mitzvot)  36, 62, 115, 123, 178, 207–9, 214, 221, 259, 284–5 Moltmann, Jürgen  53–4, 270, 277, 285 Moore, Donald  62, 225n. 85, 263 Mouw, Richard  5 music, analogy to  172–9, 271 mysticism  47–8, 65, 96, 105, 108–9, 112–22, 131, 196–7, 261, 283, 285–6 see also Kabbalah; polarity; Zohar Neusner, Jacob  11, 52, 56, 59–60, 67, 125–6 Newman, John Henry  4–5, 184–5, 283 Niebuhr, Reinhold  51, 64, 73, 123, 214–15, 277, 282 Niebuhr, Richard  6–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich  254, 266 observance, piety as  12, 16, 21n. 53, 23, 36–7, 113, 126, 128, 186, 203, 207–8 ontology  4, 17, 44, 46–7, 98, 187, 232, 259–60, 276 see also Lévinas, Emmanuel: priority of the ethical Heschelian ontology  14–15, 43, 57, 62, 71, 120–2, 125, 129, 145, 148, 151, 165, 205, 221, 246–7, 277, 280, 282 weakened  18, 253–5, 264–72, 281 Otto, Rudolf  6, 68, 73, 160, 188 Parmenides  121, 164 participation (theosis)  18–19, 194, 259–63 partnership, human with God  17, 51, 59, 116, 159, 205, 213, 220–1, 246, 254, 258–63, 279–80

pathos  51–2, 65–6, 159–62, 174–5, 178–9, 206, 270, 283–4 central idea in Heschel’s theology  14– 15, 61–2, 120–1 and ethos  206–7, 221, 269 as God’s concern  13, 148, 187–8, 190, 235, 239, 242, 263, 277–9 God’s passibility  53–5, 165–6 piety as human counterpart  14–16, 18, 48, 54–5, 73, 116, 154, 159–62, 263, 279 and prophecy  89–90, 95–7 Paul VI, Pope  50 Perlman, Lawrence  11, 63, 67–8, 88–91, 97, 149–53, 158, 160, 168n. 19, 169n. 37, 196, 236, 247 Perlow, Alter Israel Shimon (Heschel’s uncle)  70, 140 personhood  98–9, 114–15, 210–13, 215–16, 219, 255, 279–80 Petuchowski, Jakob  60–1, 118 phenomenology see also Husserl, Edmund; Perlman, Lawrence; prophets and prophecy; revelation; Scheler, Max eidetic content  90, 142, 151–2 intentionality  90, 143, 150–1, 155, 158, 247, 279 noetic/noematic dimension  47, 89, 142, 150–2, 155, 161 of piety  141–8 pietas  267–8, 277–8 filial piety  23–6, 29, 218, 272 Pietists  27 Plato  24, 174, 208, 210, 246, 259 polarity  72–3, 105–6, 110–18, 122–9, 196, 213 practices of faith, piety as  35 prayer  28, 30, 34–5, 58, 90, 111, 117–18, 123–4, 140–1, 147–8, 159, 168n. 18, 178, 219, 241, 280 prophets and prophecy  9–10, 14–16, 81–3, 88–94, 99, 159–61, 196, 206–7, 286 see also Husserl, Edmund; Scheler, Max connection to piety  141, 148, 154, 161–2, 277 continuation of  95, 106–9, 164 disclosure of God’s pathos  51–4

Index phenomenology of  148–53, 158–9, 278–9 relation to ethics  119–22 Puritanism  28 Radical Orthodoxy  73, 259, 261–3, 277, 281 Real-Gymnasium (Vilna)  82 redemption  115–16, 123, 192, 206, 208–9, 260–1 requiredness, objective moral  9–10, 122, 206, 222–3, 231, 239, 243, 247, 255, 270, 277, 282, 284, 286 revelation  57, 59, 61, 91–3, 107–8, 124–7, 176, 184, 244–5, 264, 276–7, 286–7 see also prophecy antithesis of religion  8–10 incarnational dimension  52–3 phenomenological study of  63, 149–59 relation to piety  33, 162, 189, 279 reverence  8, 10, 18, 23–4, 29, 59, 82, 122, 143, 155, 177, 183, 206, 209, 256 Ricœur, Paul  183–4, 188, 191 Rosenzweig, Franz  67, 94, 237 Rothschild, Fritz  55–6, 58, 106, 157, 186 Saadia Gaon  64, 107–9 Sabbath  35, 53, 58, 90, 111, 140, 186, 284 Sarthou-Lajus, Nathalie  73, 217–19, 241 Scheler, Max  6, 15, 43, 68, 73, 84, 88, 91, 94, 155, 158, 161, 173, 277–8, 283 critique of Kant  98 phenomenology of religion  98–9 theory of sympathy  96–7 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  276–7 Heschel’s critique of  9–10 piety, concept of as absolute dependence  6–10 regulative function  39n. 41 religion, distinguished from piety  20n. 20 Schneersohn, Fishl  82 Sedgwick, Timothy  274n. 22 Shekhinah  52, 54, 114, 119, 128–9, 192, 270 Sherwin, Byron  61, 106, 139

307

Shestov, Lev  73, 162–7, 209, 232, 277 Sheveland, John  33 Sindoni, Paola Ricci  14, 61 situational thinking  94–5, 102n. 66, 158, 236 Soloveitchik, Joseph  67 Spener, Phillip Jacob  27–8, 149, 162 Spinoza, Baruch  9, 67, 84, 91–3 Spranger, Eduard  91, 93, 95, 103n. 73 subjectivity  7, 46, 49, 90, 114, 238–41, 248, 254 reversal of  9, 119, 154–9, 161, 187–8, 217–18, 255–8, 268–9, 277, 279 symbolic religion  46, 127, 156, 175–8, 187–8, 206, 208, 222 sympathy  9–10, 15–16, 89–90, 148, 159–61, 179, 181, 219, 261, 263, 278–9 see also Scheler, Max Talmud, study of  83, 95, 124, 193, 209, 248–9n. 2 theocentrism  17, 30, 157, 193, 204, 255–8, 279–82 theology  3–4, 7–10, 16–19, 22, 33–4, 45–7, 184–5, 281–2 see also Christianity; depth theology; kenosis (of the subject); mysticism; ontology, weakened; participation (theosis); theocentrism biblical  51–5, 192 Jewish  11–12, 60, 63, 91, 102n. 51, 114, 125–6, 191–3 postmodern  4, 12, 17, 127, 253–5, 262, 281 relational  276–81 sapiential  193–7 Tillich, Paul  32, 186–8, 277 time  53, 58, 85–6, 122, 186, 189 Torah  36, 113, 117, 119, 124–7, 207–8, 286 transcendence  6, 10, 13, 46–9, 51, 109, 120–1, 124, 128–9, 143–4, 147, 151–2, 154, 167, 186, 190–1, 204–5, 244–5 tsim-tsum  133n. 63, 270 Tucker, Gordon  50, 63–4, 124, 196 Union Theological Seminary (New York City)  199n. 70, 214–15

308

Index

Vatican Council, Second  49–50, 78n. 95 Vattimo, Gianni  18, 73, 266–70, 272, 277, 281 Verstehen (understanding)  87, 91–3, 179, 278 virtue (character)  23–7, 142, 194–7, 202–3, 216, 219–23, 255, 258, 287

Warsaw, Heschel’s youth in  82–3, 140 Watzlawick, Paul  129–30 Weiner, Chaïm  55 Whitehad, Alfred North  67, 80n. 122 Williams, Rowan  33–5, 287–8 Zohar  115, 118–19