Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament 9780226056883

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Displacing Christian Origins

Religion and Postmodernism A series edited by Mark C. Taylor and Thomas A. Carlson recent books in the series Mark C. Taylor, After God (2007) Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (2006) Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (2006) Paolo Apolito, The Internet and the Madonna: Religious Visionary Experience on the Web (2005) Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (2004) Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption (2004) Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, editors, Mystics: Presence and Aporia (2003)

Displacing Christian Origins Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament

wa r d b l a n t o n

The University of Chicago Press

chicago & london

wa r d b l a n t o n is a lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2007 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-05689-0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-05690-6 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-05689-9 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-05690-2 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blanton, Ward. Displacing Christian origins : philosophy, secularity, and the New Testament / Ward Blanton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-05689-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-05690-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-05689-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-05690-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophical theology. 2. Continental philosophy. I. Title. bt40.b53 2007 270.1072—dc22 2007003726 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

Real philosophy of religion emerges not from preconceived concepts of philosophy or religion. Instead, the possibility of religion’s philosophical understanding arises from of a kind of religiosity—for us the Christian religiosity. Exactly why the Christian religiosity is the focus of our study is a difficult question that is answerable only through the solution of the problem of historical connections. The task is to gain a real and original relationship to history, which is to be explicated from out of our own historical situation and facticity. At issue is what the sense of history can signify for us, so that the “objectivity” of the historical “in itself ” disappears. History exists only from out of a present. Only thus can the possibility of a philosophy of religion be begun. martin heidegger

Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself. New cliché, new technology retrieves unexpected archetypes from the rag-and-bone shop. marshall mcluhan

Contents

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s • ix introduction • 1 Interdisciplinary Maps of Religion and Secularity: Toward a Critical Present c h a p t e r o n e • 25 Escape from the Biblical Aura: Hegel and Strauss on “Modern” Biblical Criticism c h a p t e r t w o • 67 The Mechanics of (Dis)Enchantment: Nietzsche and D. F. Strauss on the Production of Religious Texts in the Age of Industrial Media c h a p t e r t h r e e • 105 Paul’s Secretary: Heidegger’s Apostolic Light from the Ancient Near East c h a p t e r f o u r • 129 Reason’s Apocalypse: Albert Schweitzer’s “Fully Eschatological” Jesus and the Collapse of Metaphysics c o n c l u s i o n • 167 Displacing Christian Origins as Displacements of Religion and Secularity n o t e s • 175

b i b l i o g r a p h y • 211 i n d e x • 219

Acknowledgments

As it is a product of long fascinations with several intertwined fields, this project owes more debts than I could account for here. Initial institutional space for the work was provided by Bart Ehrman and Tomoko Masuzawa, both (then) in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. I must confess that I have always felt this book to be a simple filling out of critical genealogical questions (not to mention voluminous reading lists) that I began to formulate with them, UNC’s Religion and Culture program, and the faculty constituting UNC’s interdisciplinary Cultural Studies track. Among this last group, Alice Kuzniar and Jonathan Hess in Germanic Languages and Literatures were influential in setting up some of the historical and theoretical questions with which I have continued to wrestle. It was also in Chapel Hill that I first met Mark C. Taylor, then visiting and teaching about complexity theory, a course from which my thinking remains blissfully unrecovered even today. Thanks also to Ruel Tyson for his continuing support and generosity with time, which was all the more remarkable as he was then organizing and directing the nascent UNC Institute for Arts and Humanities. Similar thanks are due to many professors, colleagues, and friends at Yale University. Thanks to Karsten Harries, whose lectures on continental aesthetics and Heideggerian ontology prepared the ground on which all these chapters were built. I am likewise indebted to Kevin Repp, whose eye for historical nuance is paired with a peculiarly voracious appetite for intellectual history. I count myself among the many young thinkers at Yale— and these from a panoply of disciplines—who profoundly benefited from the extracurricular reading group Kevin so kindly led, From Idealism to [ix]

acknowledgments

Postmodernism. Of similar benefit to me was the Marxist Reading Group at Yale, particularly in my efforts to keep up a thinking of the “materialities of communication.” Much of the initial writing of this book was made possible by a generous grant from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, from which I received a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities in 2003–2004. Thanks also to Maria Rosa Menocal and Norma Thompson for their kind intellectual hospitality in directing the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale and for appointing me as a graduate fellow there in 2003–2004. This is a better book for the many interdisciplinary conversations the appointment made possible. Looking back, I am struck by the way that my interdepartmental labors at Yale constitute a testimony to the lively intellectual atmosphere of my home department, Religious Studies, and its program in New Testament studies. Thanks to all of the faculty there and at the Yale Divinity School. Interactions with Harry Attridge, Adela Collins, Steven Fraade, Diana Swancutt, and Bentley Layton remain influential on my own thinking about earliest Christian history and the state of New Testament studies more generally. Most of all, thanks to Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale, for his remarkable teaching, his unrelenting enthusiasm for this project, and his firm commitment to support what were once merely intuitions about where these intellectual paths might lead. Thanks to Roland Boer of Monash University in Australia, with whom I have been lucky enough to organize the Initiative for Research in Religion and Politics. His writing on the interdisciplinary dimensions of biblical scholarship continues to break new ground, and I am grateful that some of the loose ends and dropped footnotes from this book have found a happy home in his new journal, The Bible and Critical Theory. Amy Blanton, Andy Blanton, Creston Davis, Jeremy Hultin, Tomoko Masuzawa, Mark C. Taylor, Henry Rubin, Ruel Tyson, Matthew Waggoner, Emma Wasserman, and Kevin Wilkinson looked at portions of the book along the way, for which I am grateful. Likewise, in various coffee shops (and used bookstores) of New York City this book underwent significant improvement over the course of chapter-swap conversations with David Shefferman. Hent DeVries, Karsten Harries, Dale Martin, Wayne Meeks, Kevin Repp, and two gracious anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press read the entire manuscript, some of them more than once and at various stages along the way. The book is better for their comments. I am grateful to Mark C. Taylor and Thomas A. Carlson for their willingness to consider my work for their Religion and Postmodernism series,

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which I have always admired.Working with Alan Thomas and Randy Petilos at the University of Chicago Press is a pleasure. Joyce Dunne saved this manuscript from a technologically induced formatting disaster, and her keen editorial eye is much appreciated. Thanks, finally, to Kathy Buzza, in charge of interlibrary loans at Luther College, who endured more than her fair share. I dedicate this book to Amy and Zoe.

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[i n t roduc t ion]

Interdisciplinary Maps of Religion and Secularity: Toward a Critical Present

In a provocative series of lectures entitled The Political Theology of Paul, philosopher Jacob Taubes confides in his audience a desire for departments of philosophy to include professors who work primarily on biblical studies and religious history.1 On behalf of this deformation of regnant disciplinary boundaries, Taubes points only to an untranslatability that seems to govern the work of these disciplines in relation to one other, an incommunicability that itself constitutes these disciplinary boundaries and their place within the “impermeable formations” of the modern academy.2 Taubes laments (from the philosophical side of this communicative impasse), for example, interpretations of Walter Benjamin’s work that seem to be hamstrung by philosophers’ failure to recognize or understand the extent of Benjamin’s negotiations with biblical texts and traditions of its interpretation. By the end of Taubes’s lectures, he will have made similar pleas for what can only be explained as a thought process that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries in the reading of Freud, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Adorno. Focusing on the disciplinary division between biblical studies and philosophy as a kind of enforced radio silence or dead air, Taubes’s imaginary department of philosophy, with its biblical literacy and familiarity with the political history of religious thought, appeals to a sense that something has been lost, that there once was a communicative traffic whose messages are no longer able to be broadcast or received across our disciplinary borders. There is a great deal to be said for this type of description, if only for the simple reason that times (or, rather, disciplinary formations) have changed. Considering the possibility of lost communicative traffic from another side of this academic division of labor (as a New Testament scholar who wishes [1]

introduction

more philosophers were around the department), it seems safe to say that historians of early Christian religion have generally lost their ability to interact with large portions of those complex philosophical environments within which so much of our New Testament scholarship was produced. One does not have to read many of the philosophical treatises of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars of Christian origins, for example, to become convinced that, in comparison with this earlier period of the academic endeavor, a similar forgetfulness (or even active proscription) of a once vibrant “interdisciplinary” traffic has become part of the standard training of contemporary biblical scholars. Maybe it is best to follow Taubes’s strategy of mourning for this lost traffic; in a way, it appeals to the sensibilities of the contemporary scholar, educated within these now-circumscribed academic territories. For contemporary New Testament historians, such a strategy could involve the suggestion that this narrowed intellectual field within which we now labor has a debilitating effect on that more limited task to which we had hoped to remain faithful, as if by the chaste forsaking of all others. Ironically, forgetting philosophy has taken a heavy toll on our ability to produce creative new historiographical modes of thinking about early Christian religion. To such thoughts I will return. For the moment, it must be said that this melancholic repetition of a lost interdisciplinary traffic may be much, much more than a simple return to the past or a historical interest in earlier scholarship.

Religion’s Return as the Displacement of Philosophy into History—and Vice Versa How are we to navigate the surprising return of the religious that seems to press in upon us today, in critical theory and Continental philosophy as much as popular film, political rhetoric, or the explosive growth and politicization of fundamentalisms? It is the pressure of this return and its recurrence within what have been traditionally the most demanding forms of secular reasoning that suggest an emergence here of something whose potential exceeds the boundaries of our initial sketch of Taubes as a melancholic longing for what once existed. The retrospective look for lost but previously known messages simply fails to register what seems to be the really questionable—or genuinely potential—issue of what is at stake in the current renewal of interest in religion or the many contemporary thinkers who find themselves caught up in a kind of historicophilosophical reflection on the legacies of earliest Christianity. [2]

Interdisciplinary Maps of Religion and Secularity

In addition to Taubes’s witness to an important but currently virtual academic territory, other indications of the stakes of the academic return to religion may be gleaned from the recent spate of philosophical engagements with early Christian writings. These include, just to name several that have received a great deal of attention lately, Jean-François Lyotard’s reading of Pauline thought, Jean-Luc Nancy’s attempt to deconstruct it, Jacques Derrida’s consistent (though sporadic) references to the New Testament, Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Hent de Vries’s rethinking of the Heideggerian legacy through the Pauline epistles, and the remarkable centrality of a Pauline structure of subjectivity in the materialist ontologies of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.3 Early Christianity, and Paul in particular, has returned as a contemporary philosophical issue, and not only, it seems, because we might feel obligated to remember what our academic predecessors knew. What, we must ask initially—and naively—might this mean? How, for example, should we understand the peculiar ancient-modern contemporaneity at work within a statement like Žižek’s? “My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible only through a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is accessible only to a materialist approach— and vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience.”4 What makes Christianity (and in light of Žižek’s analysis of the Pauline writings, early Christianity) contemporaneous with his own work of cultural critique, or indeed, interchangeable with his own materialist analysis? As Taubes would certainly agree (he was a professor of hermeneutics, after all), one begins to suspect that it is not possible to clarify what is at stake in his imaginary department of philosophy by the gathering of fixed, past data under the rubric of what might be called a reconstructive disciplinary history. To be sure, some very prominent philosophical monuments were hammered out during a time when Europe’s relation to its religious heritage seemed more obviously to present pressing political, social, and intellectual problems, and this alone may have equipped previous philosophers with a more adept fluency in these matters than Taubes believed they have come to possess. But why would now be the moment at which the time has arrived for us to take account, say, of Schelling’s fascination with Marcion or the Gnostics, Kant’s peculiar trouble with the censors over his statements about the Bible, Nietzsche’s patient readings of the Greek New Testament, or his profound intellectual affinities with a historian of early Christianity? Is it not likely that the now of this apparent contemporaneity [3]

introduction

between philosophy and early Christian religion is more than a straightforward repetition of past scholarship, a repetition that brings with it a properly incalculable dimension that itself may yet herald the appearance of new critical constellations altogether? Suffice it to say that when Žižek announces that one cannot really know a materialist theory of the subject without having undergone the Christian experience (and vice versa), more than a few intellectual hierarchies are inverted and more than a few contemporary identities become as if they were not. The moment of such apocalyptic reversals calls for thinking. More than a historical reconstruction of lost messages, then, the present studies of philosophy and biblical studies are oriented around the question of what futures—academic, social, and political—might be ushered in by our oddly displaced present in which we may yet refigure our modes of thought. While one must not assume such a potential refiguration may be circumscribed by introductory remarks (such would be the most standard and predictable form of nonengagement with this new-and-old interdisciplinary terrain), it will help to orient my analyses here by highlighting a basic problematic that organizes my thoughts throughout. In every case, these readings navigate some of the striking interstices between Continental philosophy and the historical study of Christian origins. At one level this course is directed by my intuition that we must illuminate more distinctly the excessive nature of both the formal, abstract categories of philosophy and the empirical or historical descriptions of New Testament historiography, particularly as each borrows (however surreptitiously) from the other. In this respect, the following chapters may be read as a radicalizing of traditional philosophical questions of the relation between ontological structure and ontic discourse or between the universalities of reason and the particularities of existence. Again, the excessive or displaced nature of this relationship is of interest to me, as philosophical discussions and categories have so frequently anchored themselves through a reference to some aspect of early Christian religion. By the same token, historical reconstructions of earliest Christianity have frequently functioned to exemplify some imagined fundamental aspect of philosophical rationality. Schleiermacher’s Jesus was the perfect embodiment of a Kantian moralism, D. F. Strauss’s Jesus was the reflection of Hegelian social and historical reason, and Albert Schweitzer’s postliberal and postmodern Jesus functioned as the indication of a postmetaphysical life of saturated phenomenality, a mysticism of the everyday. Because they lay bare these moments of an excessive “double duty” accomplished by the philosophical and historical depictions of early Christian religion, these studies make a sig[4]

Interdisciplinary Maps of Religion and Secularity

nificant contribution to the Kantian question of the “exemplar,” Heideggerian discussions of “formal indication,” and more recent analyses of the “trace.” Displaced between philosophy and history is the energetic drama of the modern discourse of Christian origins. As an explication of this basic problematic, I frequently point out the way a given depiction of earliest Christian religion may likewise be read as a struggle between philosophy and New Testament studies to secure a kind of disciplinary ownership of the early Christian legacy by declaring its own realm of thinking to promise a superior mode of access to primordial or original Christianity. This is an important part of the modern history of the search for “Christian origins,” as it has functioned so frequently as a contested site through which various sorts of disciplinary practices attempted to showcase their superiority. Finally, my laying bare of this space between the formal-philosophical and concrete-historical are often drawn to the way this space so obviously registers the imprint of modern technology and mass media. It is no exaggeration to say that the ground on which these distinctions between ancient and modern or reason and history arise and set themselves in opposition is a shared “media space” of modern communicative technologies and the everyday spaces and times of normal experience that these install. Both of these layers in my new rendition of the old question of formal indication, exemplarity, or trace will be discussed in turn.

Christian Origins and Originary Christianities: “Outbidding” There is another way to articulate the “displacement” at work in formal indication or the excessive blurring of boundary between formal abstraction and historical particularity. In this respect, the following chapters explore some of the peculiar interrelations of philosophy and New Testament studies as a struggle to appropriate aspects of the early Christian legacy for their respective disciplines. With this in mind, I sometimes speak of the “images” or “depictions” of earliest Christian religion as these may be read as symptoms of an agonistic interdisciplinary economy.5 To speak of the images or depictions of earliest Christian religion, therefore, signals a concern to pay attention to the way both philosophy and New Testament studies attempted to guarantee the efficacy (or even hegemony) of their respective epistemic techniques and disciplinary specializations by way of the production of new, striking, or otherwise significant renditions of early Christian religion. [5]

introduction

One of the modes in which such interdisciplinary agonistics is explored here is by focusing on the ways the philosophical or historical depiction of Christian origins has functioned as an exemplary case that distinguishes a particular academic tactic from others that are likewise vying to be recognized as the best mode of access to the topic in question. This type of exploration, naturally, is a radical departure from the assumptions about a representational economy through which New Testament studies (in particular) tends to imagine itself. Within a representational economy, after all, the determining issue is thought to be the accuracy or correctness with which a depiction corresponds with some ancient reality. To focus on depiction as an image by which this or that academic practice attempts to establish itself as a powerful mode of disclosure is thus a very different kind of approach. Here the focus is on the performative effectiveness of the depiction itself, the way its production operates as an exemplary, convincing embodiment of the power of this or that mode of disclosure. As my language here suggests, I am happy to draw the strongest of parallels between my way of rethinking the modern depiction of Christian origins (by thinking beyond our worn-out repetitions of representational assumptions) and Heidegger’s discussion of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” What may be said of a work of art should likewise be said of the images or depictions of early Christianity: at stake in each production are various networks of enabling or performative force that necessarily exceed the traditional representational question of whether the production is a more or less accurate picture of an object.6 Following through on Heidegger’s esthetic clues allows us to see with blazing clarity something that has been obscured generally in two centuries of New Testament scholarship, namely, that the authority of the scholar as someone who can reveal the truth of an ancient religion is only given in the effective scholarly performance, in the way others find in the scholarly depiction a sense that, yes, this is the way to understand Christian origins and myself in relation to these. As if through a reflective play of mirrors, the “truth” of any given depiction of ancient Christianity emerges only in that same moment in which an audience recognizes this depiction to be an exemplary embodiment of those distinctions in terms of which it desires to identify itself. By considering the history of these disciplines this way, new insights emerge about the competitive stakes that informed the way philosophy and New Testament studies tinkered together their respective depictions of early Christianity—and their own authority as academics by way of them. More significantly, the comparison between Heidegger’s work of art and the modern history of the depiction of Christian origins makes it pos[6]

Interdisciplinary Maps of Religion and Secularity

sible to map the crucial ways a thinking of Christian origins has functioned to redefine (or differently exemplify) fundamental “modern” distinctions like the difference between “religion” and (philosophical or historical) “reason,” “modernity” itself from its premodern others, true religion from its merely “positive” instantiations, religion versus magic, and so on. Again, when a specialist produces a depiction of early Christianity, the performative success or failure of this production is tied to the ways various audiences recognize within it the proper modes of distinguishing history from myth, religion from reason, or modern subject from ancient object. To focus on the image or depiction of early Christian religion is, then, to focus on the various historical and philosophical renditions of early Christian religion as various embodiments of competing techniques and strategies to produce some of the basic distinctions about which modern academia has been so fascinated to clarify or in terms of which it must maintain itself as a form of academic authority.7 This basic orientation makes it possible to explore the competitive stakes of the philosophical and historical descriptions of Christian origins. The relative efficacy of these exemplary models to guarantee or effectively manage the difference between religion and reason or premodern religion from modern secularity, for example, only emerges from audience reception of these productions or from readers finding in them persuasive embodiments of these basic distinctions. Far from more or less accurate repetitions of an ancient object, modernity’s depictions of original Christianity must be read as a working through of its own identity. As such, the following chapters offer significant expansions of the work of Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo on the legacies of religion in modern and contemporary critical thought. Because there is a competitive play of images between these disciplines, it is (as we will see again and again) frequently difficult to tell the difference between ancient religion and modern (historical or philosophical) reason without seeming to set in motion, once more, another scramble of disciplines and thinkers to renegotiate their depictions in relation to this new hierarchy of differences through which they understand themselves. Such a dilemma in all its instability presents a fruitful point of comparison to what Derrida has called a process of outbidding that continually destabilizes modern (and contemporary) thought in relation to religion. Among other things, Derrida’s outbidding points to the repeated transformations that proceed from philosophical attempts to posit a clear distinction between religion and itself as a form of modern or autonomous rationality. Similarly, he uses outbidding to describe the paradoxes or double binds that emerge when European and generally Christian [7]

introduction

philosophers attempt to grasp religion as such or universally apart from its positive instances. In fact, in his most sustained discussion of outbidding, the essay “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” Derrida describes these processes as occurring with a regularity sufficient for them to be called a “little machine.”8 An understanding of the automated productions of this machine, he claims, promises to provide points of orientation amid the disorienting “return of religion” that seems to be happening inside and outside the academy. The machinistic outbidding he considers is the movement by which philosophy has continually attempted to abstract itself from “positive” religion in order to transcend its limitations toward a pure thinking of religion as such, which Derrida associates, significantly, with the modern philosophical tradition of offering secularizing critiques of Christianity (or universalizing critiques—one can already see the indeterminacy here between religion’s demise and its universalizing triumph, the oscillation between religion’s crucifixion and its resurrection). Trotting out Voltaire, Kant, and Heidegger as examples of this philosophical tradition in which Christianity’s triumph and its secularizing critique may be read as the same movement of thought, Derrida uses outbidding to indicate the way these universalizing interpreters present themselves as outdoing the religious communities or traditions in view in relation to some of the highest potentials of those traditions themselves. Thus, Derrida notes, critical interpreters of religion (like Voltaire, Kant, or Heidegger) sometimes presented their own thought as a kind of “purified” or “originary” version of the religious tradition they criticized, doing Christianity one better, as it were, in the polemical struggle to establish the parameters of religion itself. The polemical contexts of this repeated maneuver have stamped the destructive critical force of modern critical thought with the image of its adversary, so to speak, and this to the point that the very notion of the secular or the religious produced by this “little” Christian-secularizing “machine” must be considered as part of the same struggle of thought to transcend its own limitations. It is as if the polemical context of outbidding has injected a profound and lasting ambivalence into the heart of the very opposition between religion and its rational interpretation.9 Again, there is much more at play with Derrida’s notion of outbidding (only some of which I care to engage here), and his desire to grasp the contemporary theoretical implications of outbidding understandably leads him away from a more historically detailed analysis of even those moments in the history of this self-transcending gamble that he does mention.10 [8]

Interdisciplinary Maps of Religion and Secularity

There is, however, a historical component to his argumentation, even if he aims to construct from these examples a machine whose automaticity indicates a more than empirical order. For this very reason, the comparative and genealogical analyses offered here suggest a significant rethinking of this modern process of outbidding that Derrida elaborates, particularly as the interdisciplinary analysis in view here immediately multiplies the possibilities in Derrida’s philosophical game of producing distinctions between the religious and the secular or positive religion and religion as such. With the insertion of New Testament historiography into the self-transcending economy of modern thought, we immediately double the modes of originariness in view because we double the academic modes in which such gambles to outbid Christianity may be performed. Both philosopher and biblical critic frequently outdo the religious communities they criticize through their depictions of earliest Christianity (as we will see, e.g., in D. F. Strauss’s post-Christian “community to come”), but they do so in very different ways and in ways that are themselves often trying to outdo each other. (Consider, e.g., the hysterical disavowals among New Testament scholars of recent readings of Paul by philosophers and literary critics.) To his credit, Derrida recognizes a striking similarity between philosophical originariness and a Protestant model of thinking about Christian origins, but he does not explore the significance of the fact that Voltaire, Kant, or Heidegger were themselves negotiating the (philosophical) difference between “religion” and “secular reason,” or positive and universal religion, in relation to another form of academic knowing that likewise hoped to function as the guarantor of these basic distinctions.11 In each instance, Derrida’s philosophers were doing so, and the shape of academic biblical criticism—with its own methods of disclosing Christian origins—continually influenced philosophical self-presentations as philosophers attempted to manifest themselves as the true disclosers of originary Christianity Derrida has in view. To process Derrida’s allusions to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and so on, an analysis of the relationship between modern religion and modern secularity must be teased out in just the kind of self-consciously interdisciplinary ways we are considering here, and there is no more pressing territory to explore than the space between philosophy and biblical studies. As will be shown in chapter 3, for example, Heidegger’s reading of Paul was a self-conscious contrast to that of the biblical scholars of his day, and it was to guarantee the (hierarchical) difference between the philosopher and the historian that Heidegger projected the depiction of earliest (or, as he said it, “authentic”) Christianity that he did. [9]

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In short, and as Derrida would have no doubt agreed, we are dealing here with comparative and competitive methods of disclosing the originary in relation to religion, what it really is. Between philosophy and New Testament studies, therefore, a struggle invariably took place not only between religion on the one hand and reason or modernity on the other but also between the capacities of the different disciplines to best disclose these distinctions themselves. Who will speak for or stand in for the distinction between religion and its others? Who or what specialists, institutions, or techniques will guarantee or manage the limits between the religious and the secular? The present variations of Derrida’s discussions of outbidding are really about nothing else. Within the German philosophical tradition, the use of Pauline rhetoric to solidify a particular moment of transforming, outdoing, or critiquing the Christian tradition on its own terms seems to have been almost irresistible. With these appropriations of the Pauline mantle, other groups become, in turn, hide-bound “Pharisees” or some other standard icon from the early Christian tableau. As a critique of Kant’s discussions of divinity, for example, Hegel asserts that “the same thing happens as happened with the Jews, the Spirit passes through the midst of them and they know it not.”12 More importantly for our purposes, Hegel does something similar with biblical scholars themselves, making them alternately into the “pagans” or the traditionalist “Pharisees” of the modern historical formation even as he takes up for himself a Pauline role (see ch. 2). Heidegger similarly makes the biblical critics into the irreligious misinterpreters of Paul and guarantees the authority of his phenomenology by way of a phenomenological reading of an “authentic” Pauline experience of time (ch. 4). That we have missed the (at least) double duty being accomplished by many of these texts is due in part to the fact that we have been reading, as Taubes suggests, from within the “impermeable formations” by which these modern disciplines make sense of themselves. The thinkers I consider here, therefore, are New Testament scholars who knew philosophy and philosophers who knew biblical scholarship. In terms of the general period I consider (from Hegel and D. F. Strauss to Albert Schweitzer, Adolf Deissmann, and the early Heidegger) and the (primarily German) context in which I consider it, finding such thinkers is no difficult task. This group is narrowed yet further inasmuch as I am very interested in the way these philosophers and historians used depictions of Christian origins to clarify the nature of modern or critical or secular thought. In terms of New Testament studies, for example, I am intrigued by the various (and ever-changing) modes in which historical reconstructions functioned as [ 10 ]

Interdisciplinary Maps of Religion and Secularity

tools to argue against one or another form of religious belief or theological community. This may need a word of explanation, as it may not be obvious for some that the work of biblical critics may be read as similarly producing distinctions between religion and modern (historical) reason as the work of philosophers. Modern New Testament studies, however, is nothing without a vigilant differentiation of its own “historical” reconstructions from the “religion” it analyzes. Without this basic distinction, there was no historical explication of religious phenomena, no break between the secular “subject” and its religious “object,” but only a kind of endless recycling of religious experience, the academy becoming in the breakdown of this distinction just another church, just another revelation, or just another confession. While a self-critical evaluation of this distinction-making process is (and perhaps for this reason) often the last thing biblical scholars want to think about, there is no modern historical criticism of the Bible without the implicit assumption that the scholar is able to identify and translate religion into something that is essentially other than religious history, whether “historical rationality” or “modern” or “critical” thought. To repeat once more the language of Heidegger’s event-focused analysis of cultural production, at work in every work of historical-critical scholarship are the basic techniques, assumptions, or images that will guarantee (or stand in for) the stability of the distinction between religion and modern academic rationality for a given period of scholarship. Without the convincing, performative embodiment of this difference, the scholar becomes just another shaman, prophet, or scribe, a possibility that self-consciously modern scholarship found quite intolerable. Perhaps, however, New Testament scholars should not be as frightened as they usually seem to be by the kinds of questions I am only introducing here, so let me throw them an inspirational bone. The old representational economy and its dreary deployment of correspondence could claim for the great landmarks of New Testament historiography only that they were not (like all their predecessors) duped by some prejudice or unaware of some ancient reality. The best one can do, in the land of correspondence, is not to fall into some error of representational measurement. What such a form of self-understanding necessarily suppresses, unfortunately, is the way that great works of biblical criticism have done much, much more than to more accurately represent the past. Representationalism simply cannot grasp the sublimely violent reorientation of basic cultural coordinates that was ushered in, for example, by the work of D. F. Strauss and others. The demolition of the old coordinates by which so many of Strauss’s read[ 11 ]

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ers understood the difference between religion and rationality, or themselves as “moderns” against their counterpart in the form of an ancient religious object, was a marvelous catastrophe the dimensions of which could never be plumbed by the discrete measurements of representational assumptions. New Testament criticism simply sells itself short in its refusal to think beyond the old representational economy. In this selling short we consign ourselves to being mere measurers of the past, refusing as we do to acknowledge the terrifying truth that we once played our part in the destruction and creation of worlds. Biblical studies was once—though it has not been so for some time now—what Heidegger called a site for the “happening of truth” or the “event” that founds new forms of subjectivity. Rather than obscure this past and future possibility, the present studies are written with just such a radically open-ended potential in view. With so much of this ambiguously secular/religious or ancient/modern jockeying for position, the dynamic of outbidding does indeed occur frequently enough to be a “little machine” in whose disorienting motions we can trust. We have returned to the basic distinction with which we began, it would seem, that between philosophy and biblical studies in the writings of Taubes. At stake in this distinction, then and now, will have been the nature of the difference between reason and religion, a difference that is, as we have already begun to see, always doubled as a disciplinary boundary separating the different techniques, assumptions, and depictions that stand in for the academy’s struggle to clarify this fundamental opposition.

Religion and Technology: Imagining the Secular/Religious One of the most pressing questions to have presented itself to academic thinking about religion in recent years is how the history of religion, with its manifold modes, epochs, or senses of revealing (or revelation) may be rethought through the history of media, communicative technologies, and forms of distanced interconnectedness. As Mark C. Taylor has suggested consistently, today all wonders are networked, and our thinking of religion detaches itself from a thinking of the production of presence, new forms of mediation or “tele-technology” only at the risk of completely missing the actuality with which religion makes its appearance today.13 Most of the recent thinking about religion and media or communicative technologies has been done in relation to the way more recent transformations of communicative space and time have scrambled some of the codes by which modern distinctions between reason and religion—with its here and beyond, real and ideal, present and to come—once (literally) made sense, leaving us to [ 12 ]

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reorient ourselves within such exploded or deformed oppositions amidst new informational networks. Gianni Vattimo, another thinker of religion with whom the present studies share a strong affinity, has noted that many of the old categories of religion, myth, and reason collapse with the simple realization that an allegedly secular modernity is itself always “ ‘fabled’ by the media.”14 For Vattimo (like McLuhan before him), it is the “electric age” whose information systems generate new forms of actuality that are incomprehensible to older “mechanical” models of modernity with their sense of stable architectures subtending mere ornamentation of various sorts, whether religion, myth, value, or subjectivity.15 Precious little has been done to follow up on the sketches of contemporary religion and media by Derrida, Vattimo, and Taylor at the level of retrospective, genealogical analysis of the academic study of religion, however. And while I wholeheartedly concur with the intuition about contemporary religion and media, when the sense of an immediate, static distinction between the religious and the secular begins to slip away, the time has come for us to look back at the productive, mediating matrices in which this basic opposition was itself produced as a coherent and convincing mode of analysis. What were the media constellations within which such modern distinctions first rang true? As Vattimo and Derrida both suggest about contemporary society, technological development or the market expansion of communicative media has produced a kind of phantasmagoria in which the ancient or naively religious becomes somehow modern, and vice versa. Anyone who was around to see Marshall McLuhan prophesy a deliverance from linear calculation and disenchanting control through the powers of the “electric age” to come will not have forgotten the provocative reorientation of identity that technology can effect on the secular-religious imagination. Nor should we miss the way Jean Baudrillard, too, seems unable to write about the changing function of “information” without finding himself setting in motion the rhetorical and imaginary structures of “Gnosticism.”16 Žižek succumbs to the same delirium when he proclaims that a return to paganism is operating at the mediating heart of globalizing capital.17 Significantly, my analysis of the history of the contestation between history and philosophy in relation to the depiction of Christian origins suggests that such delirium is the rule rather than the exception. Hegel watches the emergence of a popular book market and the individual readers it produces only to see returning specters of early Christian religiosity, and his reading of the morning newspaper left him reeling with the sense that this decidedly “modern” and “worldly” activity was the return [ 13 ]

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of prayer in a new form (see ch. 1). Even more than Hegel, the New Testament historian Adolf Deissmann and his contemporary Heidegger find themselves under the melancholic spell of a threatened form of artisanal production and the modes of communication they imagined to go with it. Moreover, in rejecting industrialized and distanced communications, both thinkers spin out phantasms of an early Christian experience that escapes the clutches of tele-technology (see ch. 3). The effect of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century media environments or the practices of everyday communication on our discipline’s negotiation of the difference between religion and profane reality—the here and now from the deferred or otherworldly, the fantastic hopes of religion against the concrete possibilities of the everyday—must come into its own as a sustained topic of research. Serious engagement with these questions in relation to academic interpretations of religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have yet to emerge, and I hope that my analysis will contribute to the consolidation of sustained reflection on these questions. McLuhan and Baudrillard may be the norm rather than the exception here, but studies that patiently delineate how transformations within modern communicative media transform the look of religion in the academy are still too few and too sketchy. In a world in which new religious phenomena participate, always, in the development of new media and the radical expansion of old forms of communicative techniques, perhaps the best thing to do at the moment is to look back in order to consider how the emergence of modern media shaped the look of modern religious studies and the relative stability of those basic distinctions by which it oriented its analyses.

Lost Traffic as Calcified Paradigms: A Word to the Scholars of Christian Origins As New Testament historiography sometimes seems particularly reticent to travel down these paths of thought, it may be helpful to say an additional word to them specifically. First, we could add to Taubes’s list of the figures whose work seems to have fallen into a kind of obscurity and forgetfulness through disciplinary incommunicability, not to mention the effects such incommunicability has on contemporary productions of knowledge. As if not to be outdone by Taubes’s parading of Benjamin, Schmitt, and Adorno, we should remember our own Schleiermacher, D. F. Strauss, and Bultmann. It is standard disciplinary history, for example, that the first chair of New Testament studies at the newly established University of Berlin was Fried[ 14 ]

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rich Schleiermacher and that he produced some of the initial arguments about the pseudepigraphic authorship of the so-called pastoral epistles (i.e., that the New Testament writings 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus were not written by Paul as they claim). Whether or in what ways Schleiermacher’s configuration of the ancient evidence on this question, or his notions of authorial authenticity in general, were articulated in terms of his struggle to work out a system of the cultural translatability of Kantianism (by way of a hermeneutical theory), few of us would even begin to recognize. Such an example is, of course, but one in a very long list of New Testament scholars whose work emerged side by side with serious engagement with modern philosophical thought. More to the point, perhaps, a list of such “lost” interdisciplinary messages would have everything to do with the scholars and scholarly monuments that contemporary New Testament historians assume to have established the basic methods and orientations by which contemporary scholarship exists as a legitimate academic enterprise. That the interdisciplinary environments in which these scholars and monuments were produced have become, at best, an interesting sideshow to the real work of historical reconstruction represents an implicit gamble that these environments may be bracketed, forgotten, or repressed without negative repercussions.18 This gamble, however, seems more and more to be the reactive response of a discipline that has already become unable to interact with these aspects of its own history in any productive way. Additionally, as I suggested earlier, with this forgetfulness of the philosophical thoughts of its formative moments the field loses the sense in which it has been an important participant in the struggle to determine crucial modern distinctions between religion and secular reason, autonomous freedom and the somnambulism to which we might otherwise be confined, myth and history, or a parade of other distinctions. Even a figure as well known for his interdisciplinary engagement with philosophy as Rudolf Bultmann is underexplored in this respect. We have simply forgotten most of the ways his historiographical tableaux frequently deploy icons of ancient groups and individuals in ways that are functionally interchangeable with his descriptions of modern philosophies and modern forms of cultural engagement. The interchangeability of these figures in Bultmann’s scenes is striking, as they are replete with “Stoic” positivists, “Gnostic” failures to challenge the hegemony of modern Bildung, and a “Paulinist” formulation of indeterminacy that explodes the limits of any given historical formation and thereby constitutes human freedom. The forgetfulness of much of the ancient/modern double duty being performed by Bultmann’s New Testament scholarship is but another aspect of the political-cultural [ 15 ]

introduction

history of the field that seems to be, at present, a mere gap in the disciplinary memory.19 Because so many of New Testament studies’ former functions have been, as it were, happily outsourced to other disciplines or cultural institutions, it is worth mentioning once more that the reorganization of the disciplinary archive in view here has everything to do with the contemporary historical analysis of earliest Christian religion. Again, with this circumscription of disciplinary memory goes the one piece of the fragmented intellectual process to which we had hoped to cling, a vigorous production of new and illuminating forms of historical analysis of early Christian religion. The dynamic is paradoxical, but not less real for all that, and the only thing that will ever replace a rich awareness of the historicity, contingency, and local sites within which this discipline’s history was produced will be a naturalization of the paradigms it has made and a diminished potential for creating new ones. To take a page from the work of Roland Barthes, written so long ago now, the current circumscription of disciplinary memory brings with it the ironic possibility that modern historical criticism of the Bible has itself become a kind of mythological discourse. Without a radical historicization of historical criticism itself, there is simply no alternative to this inversion of its former value. What began as a critical movement of thought has generally collapsed into a kind of self-protective intellectual complacency. The best way forward now is for the discipline to expose its own history to the strange movement of the “dialectic of enlightenment” or, in Derrida’s terms, to one more twist of the religiosecularizing screw he calls outbidding. To maintain its critical edge, New Testament studies must risk calling into question the stability of its own enterprise as an other of religious discourse. While it is not the goal of this book to flesh out how a reconfiguration of the disciplinary memory of Strauss, Deissmann, and Schweitzer might express itself as alternative historical depictions of ancient evidence, we can always gamble—it is the safest risk in the world—that transformations within a historiographical discipline’s self-understanding always reshape the look of its historical reconstructions after this experience. With the hermeneutical tradition, therefore, one could say that a transformed understanding of the disciplinary history is nothing but a new way for New Testament studies to analyze early Christianity, and vice versa. It is only the current parceling out of academic reflection that creates the illusion that this gamble might be otherwise, and those who are inclined to consign the following to an academic enterprise “outside” the work of early Christian historiography are taking their cue from a shabby state of in[ 16 ]

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tellectual affairs rather than reading with the requisite forward-looking imagination. In this light, moreover, it also seems to me that this type of study is the only thing that will save “theory” from its current lack of vitality within biblical studies. “Theory” in its various current guises, whether cultural studies, postmodernism, or ideology critique of various sorts—if it does not illuminate the social and intellectual conditions within which the dominant forms of New Testament historiography have come to exist—simply does not carry within itself the strength for real revolutions of thought within this field. On the contrary, without a growing awareness of the disciplinary past, “theory” quickly falls into a flighty anarchy or a cliquish politics of identity that lacks real intellectual potential. Why must biblical studies think down these genealogical paths? In a nicely Hegelian moment of inversion, there is today a collapse into unity of the two disciplinary alternatives I have just described. On the one hand, there is the complacent, modernist “historian” who wants nothing to do with the notions raised here about the questionable distinction between religion and that academic enterprise that would explain religion, in part because his or her own status as a guarantor of religion’s truth relies on such questions not being answered. On the other hand, there are the “theory” crowds whose position, ironically, collapses back into the conservative modernist’s. Is this not an example in which les extremes se touchent? As a symptom of this state of affairs I point only to the ubiquitous, but invariably abstract or indeterminate, gesture toward discursive or cultural relativism that New Testament historians of both sorts have begun to claim for their historical work. Far from being radical statements, such confessions (despite their apparent humility) are—in both cases—little more than polite dogmatisms, and they will not be otherwise as long as scholars are declaring the historicity of their thinking without being able to articulate much about how this thinking participates in various types of contingency or what genuinely viable alternatives might be available to these forms of analysis. In this respect, the avowedly “postmodern” among us are frequently no better off than the most positivistic of biblical historians (and in this field such a designation is really saying something). As neither understands how his or her forms of academic knowing are determined (or, to say the same thing, how they might be otherwise), the two remain locked into the same position. The positivist historical critic, playing the traditionalist, tends not to want a revolution in approach, while the postmodernist obsessively declares that there could be one. But neither seems to be finding their way [ 17 ]

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to actually producing one. This current theory deadlock—the relative indistinguishability between the traditional historical critics and postmodernists—will only be relieved if we do the difficult work necessary to attain a deepened sense of the historicity of modern historical interpretations of early Christianity. To repeat another still-important mantra from the hermeneutic tradition, the intellectual development of a discipline should be judged by its ability to allow for revolutions in its basic principles. Again, it is a basic assumption that part of the current disciplinary deadlock—in which the extremes of conservatism and radical theory meet in a zone of indifference—is the result of a narrowing of what New Testament historiography thinks itself to be, a narrowing that goes hand in hand with a lack of serious reflection on the history of the discipline. As yet another indication of this strange contemporary moment, we might consider the shared tendency of the historical critics and the cultural studies gurus in the field to describe New Testament studies as a discipline in which there are “traditional” historians on the one hand and a series of “other” types of approaches (from the “literary” and the “theological” to the poststructural, feminist, queer, and so on) on the other. In this largely uncontested division of labor and its subsequent proliferation of identity groups revolving like so many satellites around a relatively stable norm in traditional historiography, both traditionalist and postmodern perspectivists attest to a kind of inability to transform received modes of historiography. Again, only serious engagement with the history of the discipline seems to offer a potential for change. The best that “theory” can do without a radical engagement with disciplinary history is to start another sideshow at the Society of Biblical Literature or, perhaps, to abscond to another guild altogether. At the moment, however, a profound connection exists between this sluggishness of real movement or serious interaction among these parts and the fact that most of the path-breaking work on the social and intellectual history of modern biblical scholarship has, in recent years, been produced by scholars in other fields. Have communiqués between biblical studies and philosophy been lost? Yes. It is safe to say that New Testament studies, at least, has generally forgotten much of this interdisciplinary traffic (which is to say in large part, its own disciplinary history). As is the case in Taubes’s philosophy department, however, by now this lost traffic has become institutionalized as an academic division of labor that does our forgetting for us, in our place and on our behalf. In this process of disciplinary narrowing and its retroactive justification, however, the job of the New Testament critic has become ever more circumscribed, and with the sacrifice of breadth goes his or her [ 18 ]

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ability to see the larger pictures, movements, or networks within which its methods and monuments have come to exist. The result can only be the uncritical repetition or naturalization of received modes of scholarship. The handing over of these aspects of the disciplinary history to others (who know this history in the place of contemporary biblical critics) has led to terrible lapses in critical self-reflection, a complete abandonment of some of biblical studies’ former political and social potentials, and a sluggishness in the production of new forms of historiographical knowledge. With these working assumptions in mind, the present study intervenes at various crucial points along the way in the history of this disciplinary formation by rethinking some of the interactions between scholars of early Christian religion and their philosophical contemporaries.

The Path of Displacing Christian Origins The reconfiguration of cultural memory presented here operates primarily through a rethinking of New Testament historiography in relation to Continental philosophical thought and the mediated, modern communicative practices within which these disciplines worked. It is necessary to orient ourselves within the vast amount of material that could be engaged here, so I have chosen to focus on three of the most important New Testament scholars of the modern period, David Friedrich Strauss, Adolf Deissmann, and Albert Schweitzer. These three are compared to their philosophical contemporaries who exert no less of a continued significance, namely Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and some of the early twentiethcentury neo-Kantians. Moreover, a careful examination of the interdisciplinary intersections here goes a long way in explicating the way religion has “returned” of late, a return that brings with it the intuition that critical and even avowedly secular thought never really left the orbit of the religion against which it once so effectively marshaled its forces. In the case of David Friedrich Strauss, author of the (in)famous Das Leben Jesu, chapter 1 considers the biblical critic’s reception of Hegel and, more importantly, his attempt to fashion from a Hegelian modernity an image of the biblical critic as the embodiment of a cultural avant-garde. The position of the biblical critic in Strauss’s writings becomes a crucial placeholder in the basic distinction between premodern religion and a modernity that has freed itself from the thrall to a heteronomous book. At every point, Strauss’s engagement with Hegel is significant for this self-fashioning, which represents an important development in the history of the selfunderstanding of New Testament studies. [ 19 ]

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Of the many Hegelian legacies, therefore, here I am interested in the one that shows up in the writings of Strauss. Similarly my analysis sifts Hegel’s own writings for information about New Testament historiography and the territory dispute that may be observed between philosophy and this field. Again, in chapter 1 the philosophical material is primarily intended to inform an analysis of biblical criticism in terms of the basic movement of Hegel’s thinking. Those who are already very familiar with Hegel (or Strauss as a reader of Hegel) must wait until chapter 2 before the analysis moves beyond the basics or pushes the logic of Strauss’s Hegelianism well beyond anything Strauss himself had in mind. In the meantime, however, some of the ways Hegel appropriates early Christian images for his own use within this territorial dispute are revealing for a consideration of his philosophy and the larger cultural trends that shaped their discussions of religion. Some of the stakes of this religiophilosophical economy are revealed in the ways Hegel takes up the Pauline mantle against other philosophers and against biblical critics themselves. This is the first of many instances portrayed in the book of someone’s demolishing a particular Christian tradition in the name, ironically, of a Pauline distinction between the letter and the spirit, a topos that continues to invert the distinction between religious and critical or secularizing thought. Likewise, chapter 1 uses the philosophical material to plumb some of the truly revolutionary transformations the mass print market brought to the study of religion. The texts of Kant, Hegel, and Strauss all reveal a striking level of concern with the function of the mass market of texts in these interdisciplinary struggles to define the earliest Christian legacy within the modern world. As we will see, the historical condition of the possibility for much of this contestation was an academy that was registering the effects of the print market in its interpretations of religion. Even more intriguingly, it is clear that the modern mediasphere ushered in an open-ended potential, a risk or danger that writers like Strauss would use to explicate both the autonomous future of humanity freed from its subservience to religion and the essential heteronomy of religion from which modernity must free itself. To follow chapter 1’s use of this material to consider the kind of modernity Strauss hoped to establish by way of his secularizing or profaning critiques of New Testament literature, chapter 2 takes up the problem of the industrialized mediasphere in more detail. How does one produce a scandalous and avowedly secularizing critique of early Christian religion in mid-nineteenth-century Germany? Strauss does it by making aspersions about the literary value of early Christianity’s textual productions, and he [ 20 ]

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consolidates these essentially esthetic arguments by evoking anxieties about the value of literature in the age of industrialized print production and mass communities of middle-class readers. Up to this point, we have missed this crucial component of Strauss’s secularizing critique of earliest Christian religion because we have been reading Strauss only in terms of New Testament historiography or the history of academic theological debates. To my knowledge, this is the first time that Strauss’s biblical criticism has been read as an instance of that never-ending struggle of Western thought to distinguish between a “good” and “bad” writing, and (just like the texts of Plato or the apostle Paul) Strauss’s intervenes within the communicative practices of his own time in a way that attempts to localize the difference between the self-presence of truth and a heteronomous, external realm that must be expelled. Frequently, for example, Strauss has been read as a moment in the progressive advance of the self-liberating modern historian whose reconstructions correspond more or less accurately to a real first-century religion (and this to the degree that he was or was not freed from a prior religious prejudice). Those who read Strauss differently tend to do so within a carefully circumscribed history of religious ideas. As will be shown, however, Strauss’s critique of the biblical material is knotted around very modern anxieties about the cultural status of authorial production in the age of the mass production of texts. Strauss’s self-consciously secularizing critique of early Christian texts gambles on the fact that no self-respecting modern reader will identify with the kind of unconscious or automatic literary production that some, including Nietzsche, were beginning to associate with the modern mass print market. Another significant outcome of chapter 2 should be a renewal of interest in Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations on Strauss. So far this essay seems to have slipped under the radar of the philosophers and scholars of religion alike. It offers, however, a compelling reflection on the interplay of modern mass media and religious discourse during this period, one that continues to spur our reflection on the embodied history of religion into our own time. This last aspect of these studies in particular is one of the ways they are oriented not just to a lost interdisciplinary traffic but to a virtual interaction yet to come concerning the way religion (and its other forms) have been produced. One of the underlying assertions of these studies is that new media (or a new pace and expansion of already existing media) have given rise repeatedly to modern images of religious bondage and modernity’s triumphal escape therefrom. As these new imaginations of freedom or heteronomy have likewise inspired new ways of imagining modernity [ 21 ]

introduction

against the imagined otherness of earliest Christian religion, the modern has frequently become ancient and the ancient modern. Such is certainly the case with Strauss, and the frequency and force of this technological, communicative, or media-oriented hermeneutical circularity needs to be explored in more detail. To consider the concretely mediated or reflected nature of the old “dialectic of Enlightenment” is to consider this still topsyturvy and surprising movement but without the totalizing structures within which the opposition between the religious and the secular appear as discrete mirror images of each other. As will become clear, to consider a concretely mediated inversion of the opposition between religion and secular reason is to look at the way these poles themselves function as fugitive placeholders within more complex networks than thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer had in mind. Chapter 3 takes up similar questions in a different mode by considering Heidegger’s remarkable interpretation of Pauline Christianity in a 1920– 1921 lecture course on the phenomenology of religious life. Others have pointed out the significance of this course for an understanding of the later Heidegger, particularly as there remains a striking isomorphism between the philosopher’s reading of earliest Christian religious experience and his later depictions of an allegedly nontheological and generic interpretation of human existence in relation to time. Expanding on these studies and pushing them toward a thinking of the communicative media within which Heidegger imagined the difference between authentic religion and the “dead letter,” chapter 3 reads this text of the early Heidegger against the backdrop of some of the early twentieth-century New Testament scholarship with which he was very familiar. In the process, it becomes clear that Heidegger’s basic interpretation of the early Christian experience of time—and, in turn, the basic homology between Heidegger’s early Christianity and his later analyses of human existence as such—revolves around a particular (mis)reading of 2 Thessalonians. In this case, the modern history of biblical interpretation provides previously unrecognized dimensions of Heidegger’s text and striking insights about the struggle to define religion in an age of tele-technologies. Chapter 4 follows the intertwined strands of the history of philosophy and biblical studies into the remarkable work of Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer remains one of the most influential New Testament scholars from this period, and his self-descriptions as a modern thinker of the Bible continue to be replayed within academic biblical scholarship with considerable regularity. Schweitzer’s occasional distinctions between fact and value, history and meaning (or New Testament scholarship and theology or eccle[ 22 ]

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siastical tradition) remain standard components of the self-presentations of biblical scholars today. Even more importantly, Schweitzer’s use of the designation “eschatology” as a name for the decidedly nonmodern aspects of earliest Christian religion remains underexplored in relation to his philosophical depictions of the collapse of modernity and the futility of metaphysics. Chapter 4 breaks new ground, therefore, by reading Schweitzer’s biblical criticism in light of his training and early research in neo-Kantian philosophy. Doing so allows us to see clearly how Schweitzer, in a remarkably similar way to Heidegger’s processing the end of metaphysics through the lens of earliest Christian religious experience, attempted to break through the fundamental limitations of Western metaphysics by a radical rethinking of Christian origins. By reading Schweitzer’s work against the backdrop of the neo-Kantianism and life philosophy in which he was steeped, it becomes possible to unearth the doubly historicophilosophical stakes of his discovery, made at the end of a period of biblical scholarship he called both “modern” and “liberal,” of an “eschatological” Jesus who was “as yet unknown” to modern thought. Schweitzer’s Jesus must be read with Nietzsche’s Dionysus or Heidegger’s poet as a thinking of being that makes its appearance on the ancient/modern stage only with the “end” of modern metaphysics.

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[ch a p t er on e]

Escape from the Biblical Aura: Hegel and Strauss on “Modern” Biblical Criticism

In a way that offers a wealth of insight into the ambiguously religiosecular economy within which we continue to exist today, David Friedrich Strauss represents one of the most important attempts of a biblical scholar to invent a specifically “modern” cultural and academic identity. Strauss’s invention of the “modern” New Testament scholar, with its ambiguous and even aporetic mirroring of modernity against an ancient religion, was produced by a basic reflexive gamble: one constitutes oneself as modern by marking a difference between one’s own identity and that of this nonmodern Christianity. A modern interpretation of early Christian religion for Strauss is therefore a reading that manifests this difference by producing secularizing, profaning effects on its potentially modern readers. Strauss sometimes identifies these effects (following his master Hegel) as a “sense of repulsion.” Intriguingly, the formal and reflexive operations of Strauss’s modern biblical scholarship, its self-constitution through the production and exclusion of an other, was carried out within a network of contingent biographical events, peculiar fascinations, and a newly industrialized economy of mass-produced texts in ways that render Strauss’s hermeneutic modernity a more singular affair than is generally recognized. Strauss was, for example, a biblical scholar whose work was intended to produce secularizing effects, and biblical scholarship that was explicit about such orientations was not often produced in the early nineteenth-century German academy. It is no surprise that Strauss’s efforts to use the interpretation of the New Testament against ecclesiastical interests created almost immediately such an uproar that he lost his university post—and this in those fragile days of [ 25 ]

chapter one

an early academic career. This uproar and expulsion occurred with the publication in 1835 of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu Kritisch Bearbeitet, a text that will be considered here in some detail. The expulsion of the secularizing biblical scholar resulted in another peculiarity in Strauss’s secularizing mission, however. Having lost his job in the academy, Strauss was forced to take refuge in the popular print market as an author of more popular books and newspaper articles. This significant detail of Strauss’s tumultuous biography invites reflection about how it fits with the formal, systemic movements of his profaning esthetic. In what way, for example, does his production of a “sense of repulsion” in relation to the early Christian writings play upon the sensibilities and protocols of a nineteenth-century economy of information, with its mass of anonymous readers reading their identical copies of massproduced texts? The invitation leads our thinking into a remarkable new understanding of the intertwining of religion and media, and in ways that take us to the heart of a modern dialectic of Enlightenment in which secular modernity inverts itself into religion and vice versa. Moreover, and this is one of the most pressing contributions of this exploration of biblical studies and philosophy, my reading makes clear that modern communicative technology functions to install the everyday perceptual expectations that constitute the hinge on which these dialectical inversions of religion and secularity swing. In his still very relevant explorations of the symbiotic relationship between forms of consciousness and forms of technology, Henri Bergson once claimed that the universe was a machine for the production of gods. Given the reliance of Strauss’s secularizing esthetic effects on the sensibilities of industrialized print production, however, we must add to Bergson’s conclusion the assertion that the universe is likewise that site of manufacture whereby the nonreligious and, indeed, the secularizing rendering of religion into the profane, organizes itself or (literally) makes sense of itself. The universe may be a machine to manufacture deities, but it is also the realm within which they appear as obsolescent, exorcised, or secularized, and it is the production of this difference that needs to be considered. These topics will be taken up here in two ways and in two separate chapters. The present chapter considers Strauss’s descriptions of the formal or systemic hermeneutical binds (and, as we will see, double binds) on any modern reading of the Bible. Here I explore Strauss’s theoretical statements about biblical interpretation and observe his deployment of the notion of interpretive reflexivity against his interpretive contemporaries. While some paradoxical twists and turns are found here, it is the goal of this chap[ 26 ]

Escape from the Biblical Aura: Hegel and Strauss

ter only to lay the basic framework within which Strauss attempted to solidify a truly modern biblical criticism. Chapter 2 will push Strauss’s reflexive logic well beyond the basics and well beyond anything Strauss had in mind. For the moment, however, it is necessary to set the stage for understanding Strauss’s theory and use of a modern interpretive reflexivity, a task that may be accomplished by considering Strauss against the backdrop of Hegel. Throughout his adult life, Strauss remained fascinated by Hegel’s writings, and he used the basic movement of Hegel’s thinking to develop his own specifically modern hermeneutic of disenchantment. Comparing Hegel and Strauss reveals, moreover, important clues about the changing function of New Testament studies in relation to the production of images of early Christian religion during this modern period more generally. In terms of the interdisciplinary traffic between history and philosophy, the comparison of Strauss and Hegel opens a new chapter in the history of “outbidding,” in which the modern study of early Christianity plays such an important role. There is more than a little maneuvering among these authors to suggest a struggle between disciplines about who will own the property rights, as it were, to the early Christian legacy. Neither the philosopher nor the New Testament historian emerges from this contest without having held the mask of the early Christian image in front of his own face in a gamble to outdo the others in relation to the “originary” essence of Christianity. Indeed this masking cannot but occur with every disciplinary bid to properly house, clarify, or understand the early Christian legacy against the other department. Moreover, because these gambles occur as part of an attempt to establish a modern identity in relation to religion, the attempts to guarantee various modern hierarchies by way of an understanding of ancient religion invariably produce oscillating identities in which depictions of earliest Christianity become, in turn, sacred, secular, modern, and ancient. At the same time, Hegel and Strauss (not to mention the disciplines they represent) become, alternately, apostolic, Pharisaic, pagan, or Jew. Beyond the vertigo of this play of identities, what emerges from these comparisons is the way that, in so many of these writings, the popular book market has begun to play the role of a reflecting mirror for all these identities and in this way shapes how religion is described, evaluated, and critiqued. Following Niklas Luhmann and Benedict Anderson, therefore, chapters 1 and 2 grapple with the way modern mass media made possible new experiences of reflexivity and, in the process, new ways of thinking about religion and its other. We can begin to unpack this interdisciplinary (and interepochal) traffic among modern philosophy, New Testament [ 27 ]

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scholarship, and ancient religion by considering one of Hegel’s descriptions of modernity and the reflexive thought that distinguishes it.

Hegel’s Bible and the Book Market As is well known, the appearance of the printing press is one of the pivots on which Hegel’s narrative in The Philosophy of History moves beyond the medievalism of “the German world” to become a tale about “modernity” (Die Neue Zeit).1 Less discussed is the way this transformation of communicative technology becomes a kind of mirror image of his descriptions of a change in the nature of modern European religion. Above all, these two breaks in the historical narrative, the Protestant Christian and the modern/ Gutenberg moments, are both articulated as a form of subjective individuality that Hegel describes through a mutual explication of each through the other. The mutuality of this explication establishes a religiomechanical image that unites Christian religion to the modern mass production of texts as a mirror play that sets the stage for Hegel’s reception of biblical criticism as a genuinely modern phenomenon. In terms of Hegel’s historical narrative, it is a consideration of what he calls the modern epoch that inaugurates the shared movement of this refrain. Hegel’s story cites “three events” that indicate this new epoch, comparing these to “that blush of dawn, which after long storms first announces the return of a bright and glorious day. This day is the day of universality [der Tag der Allgemeinheit], which breaks in upon the world after the long, eventful, and terrible night of the Middle ages. . .” 2 Hegel reads the first two heralds of this breaking dawn as the twin Renaissance fascinations with Greek art and literature (as opposed to Roman literature, which Hegel believes not to have fallen out of favor during the Middle Ages). These, he suggests, spread a secular appreciation of human activity within a delimitable space and time, or, as he often describes it, “a world” whose value is not siphoned away by a space or time beyond or yet to come. The tilting of ontological weight toward the present, delimitable world is synonymous with a new “passion of men to understand their earth” (diese Begierde des Menschen, seine Erde kennenzulernen) (emphasis in original). Moreover, the “recognition of the spherical figure of the earth” similarly determines the shape of this new “human” domain, as this recognition offers humanity a world that becomes a “self-enclosed object” (für ihn Abgeschlossenes sei).3 In turn, this newly sensed relation to “world,” namely, as a property relation to an object, both presupposed and encouraged the production of new “technical means” (technische Mittel) by which human[ 28 ]

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ity could further organize this new world-as-delimitable-object. Thus Hegel describes the moment of modernity as an interlocking network of events, revelations, and projects, each feeding off the others or receiving from them the conditions of its own possibility. In this way—and this is significant for the kinds of thinking we will set loose within Strauss’s writings—these events, revelations, and projects are both the primary indices (Haupterscheinungen) of the productive force of the modern age itself and the answers to modernity’s own needs (Bedürfnisse).4 No delimitable human world exists without the exploration and technical parceling of this new world object or without a concomitant sensation of ownership and belonging within its delimitable sphere. Each mediates and is conditioned by the others. When Hegel mentions the emergence of the print industry, therefore, he describes it also as part of a complex that actualizes the coming of the modern age. Still, Hegel seems to sense that the printing press and the perceptual apparatuses or desires it disseminates can function as a basic indication of the modern age, and he gives it pride of place in his narrative of the worldification of the world, or the secularization (or immanentization) of a transcendent Christianity. Speaking of the mass medium that will render the everyday experience of the religion of the Middle Ages obsolete, he writes, “Plato became known in the West, and in him a new human world [eine neue menschliche Welt] emerged. The new ideas found a principal medium of diffusion [ein Hauptmittel zu ihrer Verbreitung] in the newly discovered art of printing [Buchdruckerkunst], which, like the use of gunpowder, corresponds with modern character, and answers the needs of the age, by enabling men to stand in ideal connection with each other [auf eine ideelle Weise miteinander in Zusammenhang zu stehen].” 5 As Friedrich Kittler points out, the combination of gunpowder and printing as the indices of modernity goes back at least to Rabelais, with the devil administering gunpowder and a benevolent angel providing humanity with the printing press in Gargantua and Pantagruel.6 While one can only wonder what precisely Hegel must have had in mind about gunpowder, particularly as it relates to the printing press, the juxtaposition of these two—and these two as the techniques that best “correspond to modern character”—is certainly suggestive. In one of his remarkable ruminations on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Werner Hamacher imagines in the juxtaposition of gunpowder and the printing press two “technical processes” in which “the immediate sensuous presence of the one who writes and the one who kills, is reflected back upon itself and eliminated—written and killed—in order to achieve its effect abstractly and, to a greatly enhanced [ 29 ]

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degree, profanely.” 7 Perhaps, and it remains for precisely this reason difficult to tell what precisely is disconcerting about printing and gunpowder for the “sensuous” or immediate view of authorship. In both cases, we have on the one hand a deforming reduction of authorship to a mere hand on the printing press or a mere finger on the trigger. On the other hand, however, this profaning reduction of authorial status to a technical means is matched with an unprecedented diffusion and expansion of authorial presence, distanced writing (or distanced killing) exploding earlier limits of the authorial self. Hamacher’s general focus on a self-threatening reflexivity in relation to the printing press is right on target and remains profoundly significant for the way biblical studies will deploy profaning images of a “mass” reader as an unconscious, collectively governed Golem figure that threatens modern individuality. The print market makes possible a new experience of reflexivity or, as Benedict Anderson has it, of imagining oneself as part of a large and anonymous reading public. It is time we followed these basic insights into a consideration of whether a way of thinking about “mass media” does not allow us to think yet more radically the “reinsertion” of the imagination of religion and secularity back into an immanent field of cultural production, something we will accomplish here by reinserting Strauss’s secular overcoming of religion back into the protocols and sensibilities of the print market itself. Moreover, given the interaction between the world-as-delimitable-object and the technical means by which such an object may be navigated, measured, or otherwise experienced as delimited, it is no surprise that there is a homology here between the “internal,” “ideal” relation between subjects and the “external” print industry (or gunpowder) that mediates this appearance. Hegel’s history, we might say, is one in which the medium becomes the message, or, to place the McLuhanism back into a Hegelian register, a systemic movement in which substance becomes subject and vice versa. The mediations of Hegel’s media history, then, appropriate images of Plato, an enlightened age of universal thinking, and, as we will see, an epochal transformation of religion that echoes his understanding of early Christianity. Hegel’s narration of the Protestant Reformation, therefore, is an overdetermined or radically comparative production that sets the stage for our reading of Strauss’s negotiations of religious and secular transformations of society that are likewise an esthetic transformation of the body’s embeddedness within medial environments. Significantly, Hegel’s first chapter of the emerging dawn of this Neue Zeit [ 30 ]

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is occupied with a consideration of the Protestant Reformation. As if repeating his depiction of a Gutenberg modernity, Hegel asserts that the new religious experience of the Reformation, the one establishing medieval religion as antiquated or passé, was the sense of an individual’s “immediate relation to [the Absolute] in Spirit” (ein unmittelbares Verhältnis im Geiste).8 This mode of relating to the absolute Hegel compares to a Lutheran view of the Eucharist. He suggests that, for Luther, both the Catholics and the Calvinists misrecognize the divine in the Eucharist as a thing, an object that is necessarily in a merely external relation to the believer. Against these views, Luther proposes that the divine is truly participated in at the ceremony (rather than simply commemorated as a once-historical presence per Hegel’s version of Calvinism). For Hegel’s Luther, then, this divine presence is mediated by a relation internal to the believing recipient rather than through an object or event that would remain external to the subject. A second indication of the new dawn Hegel likewise identifies with Protestantism and that causes him to reflect on the transformed sense of self is involved in this (Lutheran) view of the divine object in a way that is of the utmost significance for his larger narrative of the territorializing world. For Protestantism, we are told, there is no “one class” (eine Klasse) that is privileged in relation to the ownership of the “contents of truth,” an economy of spiritual goods that Hegel presents as a radical redistribution of property from the medieval period. This redistribution rearticulates the proper boundaries and modes of access in which the modern self now finds itself relating to the whole.9 Moreover, this experience of a newly democratized sense of self brings with it a retroactive sense that the previous medieval type of self now presents itself as a kind of monstrous alienation from what the true self has come to be. The standard refrain of praise for a democratizing Protestantism, therefore, closely resembles his description of the redistribution of information made possible by the print industry. It is as if the third age of the Spirit had waited for Gutenberg, or as if Gutenberg’s presses had themselves conjured the immanent and generalized presence of the Spirit that now flows into the mediating channels established by the book market. A new heavenly order finds its mirror image in an order of books in which, as Hegel puts it, individual readers are “enabled to stand in ideal relation to each other.”10 The print market, and its numerous individual readers, in other words, simulates universality and immediacy. Hegel is himself aware of the isomorphism and proposes that the new experience of an immediate and owned relation to God—and the abyss of subjective freedom opened up through this experience—is tied to the mass [ 31 ]

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circulation of serially produced Bibles. With Gutenberg, therefore, Bibles are now given to “the hands” of the people, and with this distribution there emerges an information network in which each individual must accomplish “the labor of reconciliation” (das Werk der Versöhnung) for himself or herself, rather than handing over this task to another.11 If there had been conflict in the modern era about whether this mass installation job (or mass distribution of individually owned and read Bibles) should be allowed or whether it would be appropriate (zweckmäßig), according to Hegel’s narrative, the actual dissemination of these books appears to have been the event that transformed the very standard of appropriateness that would govern any such judgment.12 In other words, immediately installed within this new information network are the sensations that mark the medieval epoch as irremediably antiquated. Within the new set-up, medievalism appears as antiquated or as an obstruction within the (new) system’s smooth functioning. Hegel describes what is in effect the systemic production of obsolescence by suggesting that the medieval mediasphere now makes itself known by its presence as a “vitiating element of externality” and, therefore, as abrogated.13 The order of words and things established in this new information set-up installs an altered set of expectations, or, as Hegel suggests, a previously unexperienced set of “cravings” that, in turn, can only register the presence of the (“prior”) communicative epoch as a “perversion” or a “wound” against itself. Strikingly, and perhaps frighteningly, Hegel describes this retro element in the new flow of information as the grit of sand in the teeth of this flow, something that will drive the newly emerged system of information to see it “pursued and destroyed.”14 Its messages having become garbled or incompatible with the new communicative environment, medieval religion cannot but appear now as “problematic,” destined to fade away, or to remain an obstruction within the smooth functioning of the new information network. “This is a huge alteration of religion’s basic principle: the whole tradition and the structure of the church becomes problematic and the principle of its authority is subverted.”15 This type of analysis is of crucial significance both for Hegel’s evaluation of academic biblical studies and for Strauss’s Hegel-inspired attempt to produce a secularizing critique of early Christian literature. How does one construe the heteronomy or externality of religion against the self-possession of modernity, and what do these modes of construal reveal about the system of everyday communication in which heteronomy or autonomy are sensed (literally) as convincing oppositions? How does the academic biblical critic reveal the antiquated nature of premodern religion, [ 32 ]

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and how may the appearance of this religion-as-antiquated (or premodern) phenomenon be read as a symptom of a larger complex of modern communicative practices? Speaking from the post-Gutenberg mediasphere, Hegel writes that “Luther’s translation of the Bible has been of incalculable value to the German people” (von unschätzbarem Werte für das deutsche Volk) and that the few disadvantages of its distribution (which he does not specify) are more than paid for by its “enormous benefit” (von den ungeheuren Vorteilen), an incalculable benefit that (notwithstanding) registers itself at the level of the book market.16 That Hegel can begin to describe the book market as a barometer of religion in this way is remarkable. The mere fact that he is able to make an argument about the relative successes of the Bible with the people (i.e., a German Bible for the German people) as something that distinguishes Germany from other nations attests to the growing sensitivity and diversity of the print industry along linguistic and national lines.17 Hegel’s description of this new order of words and books is rife with paradox and national interest. The immediacy with which an individual may now approach the absolute, for example, is a sensation that arises out of an elaborate apparatus that itself mediates or sets up the sense of immediacy. The print industry cannot effect the enlightenment of the age to come, for example, without finding a coupling in the form of a readership that has already been appropriately installed with an ability to receive its productions in the ability—and desire—to read. Hegel describes the German Bible, for example, as a “Volksbuch such as no nation of the Catholic world has.”18 Catholic nations, he asserts, have no comparable Volksbuch because their educational institutions have not effected a similarly high degree of literacy. To be sure, he tells us, they do have innumerable minor prayer books, but “no foundation-book for the instruction of the people” (aber kein Grundbuch zur Belehrung des Volkes).19 No Volksbuch exists without mass production, no Volksbuch without a system of education that installs a homogeneous universal connector within the individual so that he or she could thus function as a receiver of the people’s book. It is thus not without a paradoxical element that Hegel describes the true Volksbuch as that which accomplishes something all the more recent publications cannot, the production of the “respect of individuals” (Ansehen des einzigen).20 This highlights another paradox of the Bible as the Volksbuch within Hegel’s media analysis of modernity and its universalism. The Bible, the banner of universalism under which the modern masses rally, seems to function as such only by virtue of a collective agreement to forget, repress, or otherwise not advocate potential readings of the book that do not fit a [ 33 ]

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universalist frame. In short, the Bible functions as the banner of universalism only by virtue of the institutionally planned exclusion of much of its content. This aspect of Hegel’s description of the Bible is especially intriguing given his valorization of Protestantism as that spiritual economy in which no class relation to the truth establishes itself by the exclusion of others. The striking paradoxes of Hegel’s analysis, moreover, arise in connection with the function of the print industry to reflect back to the individual a kind of inverted self, unconscious, collective, and (as Hamacher points out) a possible threat to the very ideals this self makes possible. Strauss was not the only one to struggle for a place within the academy or to have been cast upon the popular print market for an income; Hegel too worked for a time as a newspaper editor.21 In both writers, discussions of the Bible seem to be haunted by the presence of the printing press, its markets, and the transformations of religion that can be gauged precisely by the market statistics of the print industry. Nor is it only with Strauss that this market (and the desires of the middle-class reader that it reflects) informs an understanding of the task of the modern New Testament critic. Hegel, like Kant before him, intertwines questions about the task of modern academic biblical interpretation with questions of the popular book market. To repeat the immanentizing or profaning gesture of a Hegelian modernity now in relation to modern biblical studies itself, we must point out that it is as if the labor of the modern biblical critic and the status of the Bible as a book could no longer be considered in abstraction from a growing awareness of the statistical, calculable trends of the print industry itself. If, as Benedict Anderson has suggested, the print market and the everyday reading practices it engendered gave rise to imaginary identifications of the individual with a national identity, the writings of Hegel, Kant, Strauss, and Nietzsche also suggest that this same market has begun to set the stage, or the terms of engagement, for a genuinely modern biblical criticism. When national identity and (as Hegel points out) national religion find its mirror reflection or appropriate measure within the trends of the book market, we must begin to look at this market, also, for a context in which Strauss’s secularizing critique of the biblical texts might find its conditions of intelligibility. If the goal is to exorcise the aura of the biblical texts or to free modernity from its heteronomous subservience to a book, how does the changing awareness of the book market (and the tastes it both registers and creates) affect this secularizing intervention? Again, the radical possibility of such a question is that it allows us to reinsert religion

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and secularity back into a system of cultural production that structures the way this opposition is itself imagined or sensed as convincing.

Outbidding and the Print Industry: Excursus on Kant It will help clarify some of the stakes of the question by taking a very brief detour through some of Kant’s earlier statements on these matters. Kant, who at least once imagined the production of academic knowledge as a “mass production” (fabrikensmäßig) of scholars by way of a division of labor, knew more than a little about the territorial struggles between biblical critics, theologians, and philosophers. Moreover, like Hegel, Kant works out these territorial disputes in the shadow of a public sphere or with an awareness of the potential for scholarly publication to encourage religious transformation at the level of a reading public. This is to say that Kant produces knowledge amid a growing awareness of the ambiguous relation to the popular book market that the academy would come to occupy.22 In this respect, it is worth saying what is obvious to everyone who has read through the wonderful prefaces to Kant’s works: we can sense the movement of this public shadow in the traces of “the censor” on Kant’s philosophical writings. Kant is frequently careful not to annoy the censors as guardians of a theologically or ecclesiastically interpreted Bible, and his Conflict of the Faculties (Streit der Fakultäten) should be read as a negotiation of the various faculties’ relation to the sensibilities of the general reading public. As is well known, Foucault makes the provocative suggestion that one should read Kantian “critique” and its protreptic call for self-legislation (which Foucault characterizes as a struggle against governance) as a laicization and proliferation of techniques of “governmentality” and its deft refusal. Foucault, of course, typically adds that this governmentality can be traced back to premodern Christian pastoral techniques and the struggles over biblical interpretation through which these techniques articulated themselves. Bracketing the question of the stakes of Foucault’s consistent attempt to link various forms of governmentality (e.g., psychoanalysis) to premodern Christian pastoral techniques, there is more than may at first appear to be the case in his laconic remark, “Let us say that [Kantian] critique is historically biblical.”23 The statement is significant inasmuch as it highlights the way Kant’s peculiar depictions of enlightened autonomy frequently deploy biblical allusions that function to glorify the role of the (autonomous) philosopher even as they present readers of the Bible as indices of a heteronomous textual engagement par excellence.

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Throughout The Conflict of the Faculties, for example, Kant defines the “higher” faculties, almost by synecdoche, with an imagined relationship between theology and the Bible. As he does in his essay on the nature of enlightenment, Kant organizes his description of (philosophical or enlightened) self-legislation here around a depiction of religious heteronomy as a mode of remaining deferential to unchanging canonical texts by way of dogmatic interpretations (and this by guardians who endlessly redeploy that “text’s” hierarchies within an apparently closed interpretive circuit). As part of this imagined scenario, therefore, the Bible, as an indication of an inherently conservative mode of relating to texts, performs a very important service in Kant’s crucial and ironically hierarchicalizing distinction between the “lower” (philosophical) faculties and the “higher” ones (theology, law, and medicine). Read this way, Foucault is certainly correct to link Kant to biblical interpretation. The distinction between conservative (Bible) readers and those who are free to reinterpret therefore plays into the dramatic “outbidding” we have already highlighted. Astonishingly in this case, Kant’s hierarchicalizing distinction between the higher and lower faculties in terms of this relation to texts becomes tied to a Pauline distinction between letter and the spirit. Paradoxically, then, at the very moment he relegates “biblical” interpretation (and the faculties he ties to this conservative image) to a less significant rational status, Kant begins to play the role of an apostle Paul against opponents among the faculties who are in turn ready to become “Pharisaical” or dogmatic. Linking the nonphilosophical faculties to history and, therewith, to the ephemeral, accidental, or (at best) the mere vehicle of the solid truths of reason, Kant contrasts these mere vehicles of reason to a more immediate inscription of the logos that trumps all such traditionalism.24 As we might expect, the immediacy of the spirit against the mediated reading of canonical texts makes (as he puts it in another striking evocation of biblical language) the “last first and the first last” in the original distinction between the lower philosophical faculty and the higher against which it found itself in conflict.25 Moreover, Kant describes this philosophical freedom of the spirit against the dead letter of the higher faculties in mediatic terms, as the appearance of that which is immediately “dictated by reason” (von der Vernunft dictirt) instead of being mediated through the traditional canons.26 As in Hegel, negotiations of print, writing, and a changing mass media give rise to repetitions of an early Christian tableau, with the opposition between religion and its autonomous critique becoming scrambled in the process.

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For the masses, even more so than the higher faculties, the Bible is a detour away from the direct dictations of reason, and it is of interest that Kant, like Hegel after him, links the effectual cultural force of the Bible to popular reading practices and a sense that these practices may function, ironically, by encouraging a kind of forgetfulness. In his often repeated words, “If I have a book which understands for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself.”27 The Bible is a very important proxy for an otherwise self-legislating citizen, and Kant will suggest, like Hegel, that the Bible’s place on the benumbing book market is governed by forgetfulness. Contrasting the socially organizing potential of a book with a generic “tradition,” for example, Kant suggests that “a book arouses the greatest respect among those (indeed, most of all among those) who do not read it, or at least those who can form no coherent religious concept therefrom; and the most sophistical reasoning avails nothing in the face of the decisive assertion, which beats down every objection: Thus it is written. It is for this reason that the passages in it which are to lay down an article of faith are called simply sayings [Sprüche].”28 In this comment from Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant agrees with Hegel that forgetfulness provides the crucial index of the way the Bible functions within society, a forgetfulness that needs to be observed and combated, ironically, by the austerity of the philosophical idiom. Again, it is worth remembering that the basic distinction between types of Bible readers likewise organizes the distinction between the higher and lower faculties. As Timothy Bahti suggests in a similar reflection, Der Streit der Fakultäten lumps theology together with law, medicine, and theology as departments controlled by Schriften: “After Kant has pointed out that the doctrines that the so-called ‘higher’ faculties serve derive from various ‘scriptures’ or ‘scripts’ [Schriften, which he also specifies as norms, statutes, legal codes, canons, authorities]—thus theology’s doctrine derives not from reason but from the Bible; law’s not from natural law but from state law; medicine’s not from the physics of the body but from medical code—he distinguishes the ‘lower’ faculties relation to doctrine as one of autonomy: ‘it concerns itself only with doctrines that will not be taken as a plumb-line at the command of a superior.’ ” 29 Hegel’s treatment of the Bible continually gambles on this connection between the aura of biblical literature and a kind of nonengagement or forgetfulness that determines its reading. At the moment, however, it is important to note that, for both Kant and Hegel, the dynamics surrounding the academic interpretation of the Bible are by no means limited to de-

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bates merely internal to the university. On the contrary, at work herein are repetitions of biblical scenes that become indistinguishable from modern hierarchies and concerns about the way the academy will relate to a reading public. Strauss, as a secular interpreter of the Bible for a general reading public will, similarly, operate within these basic textual and social strata in a way that has never been explored in its interconnectedness and mutual determination. Interpreting the biblical texts in a way intended to convince middle-class readers of the heteronomy involved in their engagement with these texts, Strauss eventually produces biblical interpretation (in the form of a “life of Jesus”) first and foremost for the book market, for the middleclass reader. In this respect, the link between biblical interpretation and the esthetic protocols of the mass print market is even more immediate than it is in the writings of Kant or Hegel.

Book Markets, Readerships, and the Esthetic Demands of Modern Biblical Studies, or What Must Modernity Forget about the Bible? Hegel is more explicit than Kant on some of these points. As we have seen, he repeatedly suggests that it is a willingness to forget that constitutes the Bible as the Volksbuch it has become. The Bible’s antiquity, for one, saves it from the more discriminating tastes of the modern reader. No recent production, Hegel suggests, even without the flaws of the Bible, would ever be recognized as the people’s book in this way, as “every country parson would have some fault to find with it, and think to better it.” That the Bible would remain the people’s book involves not so much its perfections as the audience’s cultivated willingness to forget its offenses, a reading practice Hegel describes, interestingly, as a holding on to “the substantial.” He even gives this mass readerly forgetting function a name, calling it the “religious sense” (der religiöse Sinn), an ability “to distinguish” (unterscheiden) that which is “offensive to the heart and understanding” (dem Herzen und Verstand anstössig) in the Volksbuch so that the readerly reception can “overcome” (überwindet) the offense and attain to the “substantial” (Substantielle) aspects in the event of reading.30 Holding on to the substantial (or, like Kant’s dictation of reason that surpasses the untrustworthy vehicles of history, reading in the medium of Spirit itself) will invariably entail a refraining from certain particulars as they are proscribed as what offends the religious sense. Forgetfulness— and the progress of Hegel’s history of religion is never without it—is an abyss, and one way to read the hermeneutical legacy of Hegel for disci[ 38 ]

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ples like Strauss (not to mention Marx and Feuerbach) is as the continuous questioning among themselves about what must necessarily be sacrificed to this oblivion in order for the absolutely substantial to (finally) appear. Indeed, this question governs the relationship between Hegel and the biblical critics of his day, and while the impasse suggested here would be transformed in key respects by Strauss, at times Strauss plays the docile historian before the imperative voice of his philosophical master, ready to forget, but what? In a defense of his Das Leben Jesu against other Hegelians, for example, Strauss summarizes the process of trying to determine the relationship between the particular biblical histories and a universal sphere in which they might find their substantial meaning (a universalized territory Strauss concedes to the philosopher): “Whenever we looked for clarification in the writings of Hegel and his leading disciples, just at the point on which we most wanted light we found ourselves to the greatest extent left in the dark. In Hegel, especially in his Phenomenology, the total ambiguity of the concept Aufhebung revealed itself at this exact point.” 31 The problem was not simply one of remaining true to the personal intentions of the master, though Strauss may very well have been concerned about this. The discussion remained a central problem for theological and nontheological exegetes of the Bible alike in the nineteenth century, and the constitutive indeterminacy of this fundamental distinction ensured its fecundity as a talking point for scholarly reflections on religion. As Hegel points out, “Truth with Lutherans is not a finished object; the subject himself has to become truthful, giving up his particular content in exchange for the substantial truth [substantielle Wahrheit], and making that truth his own. In this way subjective spirit becomes free in the truth, negating its particularity and coming to itself in the truth. Thus Christian freedom is actualized.” 32 There is a systemic connection, therefore, between what we might call profanation and a sense that Spirit has become present to itself, or that Spirit has freed itself to itself. This was Hamacher’s point in relation to Hegel’s interest in the printing press. The “printingpress instructs us how to read: it destroys the cultic aura and authority of the original, makes its mechanical reproducibility manifest, and thereby subjects it to the authority of an intrinsically universal subjectivity.” 33 Indeed, with Hegel the destruction of aura is frequently the means by which Spirit returns to itself from out of its “fallen” states. To put the idea in the terms we are exploring at present, it is precisely when they are performing a destructive reading of the Christian tradition that Kant, Hegel, or Strauss tend to take up the Pauline mantle as advocates of spirit over the dead letter. [ 39 ]

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It is in this respect that Hegel, like Kant in The Conflict of the Faculties, takes an active interest in the field of New Testament interpretation, as if it were the site of an unstable suture between the (ancient) particular and the (modern) universal, or of the contested limit between memory and forgetfulness in modernity’s appropriation of the biblical texts.34 At stake in this instability and contestation is an academic and a social hierarchy that seems to be no less than Bildung itself. Friedrich Kittler’s suggestion that the focus on educated interpretation in the early nineteenth-century academy “enforces a selection and control of discourses like all others, even if hermeneutics owes its victory to having initially masqueraded as the opposite of that control” is certainly apropos to these portrayals of truth, the Bible, and the biblical critic in relation to a reading public.35 To put it more bluntly, we must begin to analyze whether the inequalities of spiritual ownership (or access to the cultural totality) that govern Hegel’s medieval period do not return in the modern, universal age as precisely that form of information selection over which the New Testament scholar will claim a specialization. In this case, the form of information selection is installed within the individual reader by way of an educational cultivation of what Hegel calls the religious sense. Having become institutionalized at the University of Berlin in 1910 (with Schleiermacher being the first to teach New Testament studies there), the New Testament scholar becomes a unique functionary of that hierarchicalizing selection that was the inculcation of a religious sense among readers of the Bible.36 Historical depictions of early Christian religion from this nonpriestly form of authority will, after all, present the distinction between superstitious mystification and modern enlightenment, antiquated religion and universalizing critical thought. As is evident from Hegel’s discussion, this new discipline would need to exercise its authority in a modern rather than medieval mode, which is to say through the structures of academic knowledge rather than those of priestly control, but the hierarchicalizing and suppressive (or forgetting) function remains.37 As Kittler points out, the distinction between modern rationality and antiquated religion that forever haunts the modern academic study of religion invariably traffics in much more than exegetical minutiae. Distinguishing the late eighteenth-century emergence of a human sciences model for the interpretation of texts from that which preceded it, he writes, “Someone has been found who all day long speaks only the words: ‘The Bible is in my head, my head is in the Bible.’ No words could better express the early modern order of words. But in 1778, the year they were

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recorded, their speaker was in an insane asylum. Two hundred years of inscribed faithfulness to Scripture suddenly sounded pathological to the new sciences of man.” 38 Enforcing changing distinctions that will separate the professor from the madman, the citizen of the universal age from the outmoded fetishes of religious dogmatism, the struggle over, in, and through the Bible acquired a new institutional form with the emergence of New Testament studies as a specialized field of academic knowledge. As we will see, Hegel engages this field in the struggle to determine the nature of religion, reason, and the essence of that shining dawn whose universal—or global—light would remain for him determined by the industrialized nineteenth-century media network and the specific forms of enlightenment or blindness, memory or forgetfulness this network made possible.

Publicness, Secrecy, and Hegel’s Philosophical Outbidding of the Biblical Critics As we have already begun to see in Kant and Hegel, sometimes one must forget a great deal in order to experience the immanence of the logos or, in Hegel’s terminology, in order to “hold on to the substantial” within a tradition. Indeed, as for Kant, so for Hegel: the temptation to present himself (and philosophy’s relation to the historical sciences) within a Pauline or Lutheran tableau (the two are the ready-made Siamese twins of German intellectual history) seems to be nearly irresistible. Critiquing the abstract or immediate absolute of the deity that Hegel finds in Kant and Jacobi, for example, Hegel takes up the apostolic mantle of Paul before the Athenian philosophers’ statue of the unknown God (Acts 17): “[Their] standpoint lacks mediation, and thus remains as the immediate. Paul, in speaking to the Athenians, appeals to the altar which they had dedicated to the Unknown God, and declares to them what God is; but the standpoint indicated here [in Kant and Jacobi] takes us back to the Unknown God.” 39 More importantly for my purposes, and as Charles Taylor has pointed out in a different context, Hegel occasionally assumed the Pauline role against the biblical scholars themselves (just as Kant had done before him).40 In these cases, Hegel takes up the apostolic mantle, advocating a spiritual freedom against the biblical critics who become, in turn, positivists avant la lettre, alternately medieval or Pharisaical, debilitatingly addicted to the letter rather than the freedom of the spirit. The time, as we must continue to note, is out of joint, and the overdetermination of early Christian images

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by a modern struggle to determine the very textures and limits of public opinion and public information will shape Strauss’s secularizing portrayals of early Christian religion from first to last. The first thing to consider in this light is the remarkable frequency with which Hegel attaches his own “secularizing” critiques of religion to the rhetoric of Paul. Hegel frequently enacts the Pauline role precisely by playing the destroyer of faith and the overcomer of the Christian legacy. It is as if Hegel were articulating a secret bond that joins this tradition within Christianity to the secular critique of religion.41 Moreover, as Hegel’s suggestions about the production of the sense of the intolerably antiquated from out of a particular media network might have led us to suspect, the secret bond linking secularity to ancient religiosity here always has something to do with the emergence and establishment of those limits that define public opinion and the limits of the public domain as such. In a striking example of the union between religion, modernity, and the public sphere, Hegel articulates that which is unspeakable in polite modern company by way of a depiction of early Christianity. Ever the Paulinist (once he lets go of the early fascination with pagan religion that he shared with Hölderlin), here he becomes a Paul who will boldly reveal to all what “the mysteries” would keep secret: “If a large part of the educated public [gebildeten Publikums], even many theologians, had to declare with hand on heart whether they hold those doctrines of faith [miracles, Trinity, etc.] to be indispensable for eternal blessedness, or whether not believing in them would have eternal damnation as its consequence, there can surely be no doubt what the answer would be. ‘Eternal damnation’ and ‘eternal blessedness’ are themselves phrases that must not be used in so-called polite society [guter Gesellschaft]; such expressions count as  [gelten für a[rrhta]. Even though one does not disavow them, one still would be embarrassed to have to declare oneself about them.” 42 This intriguing passage invites a comparison with the often-rehearsed passage in the Phenomenology where he blasts the empiricist fascination with “sense-certainty” by suggesting that empiricists have not yet experienced the nothingness of the mere object: In this respect we can tell those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of sense-objects that they should go back to the most elementary school of wisdom, viz. the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, and that they have still to learn the secret meaning of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. For he who is initiated into these Mysteries not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but to [ 42 ]

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despair of it; in part he brings about the nothingness of such things himself in his dealings with them, and, in part, he sees them reduce themselves to nothingness. Even the animals are not shut out of this wisdom but, on the contrary, show themselves to be most profoundly initiated into it; for they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but despairing their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat them up. And all nature, like the animals, celebrates these open Mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.43

If the mysteries can teach the nothingness of the mere object, they also afford a model of religion that is private and that cannot be brought to light in public. There is thus a scathing critique underlying Hegel’s description of would-be moderns not being able publicly to inhabit the space of their Christian convictions. In such a case, Hegel suggests, they are not so much Christians as purveyors of the  that exist only within the private initiatory chambers of the (now modern) Greek mysteries.44 Hegel’s self-presentation, therefore, in relation to these discrete moderns (and, surprisingly, moderns cum ancient pagans) is not simply one of a secular avant-garde proclaiming a truth that has yet to register itself at the level of mass society. On the contrary, there is a sense in which, by boldly rejecting those forms of religion that are sensed—within the present information set-up—as antiquated, Hegel becomes the truly Pauline voice. Just as importantly, he does so by identifying with those utterances that have fallen under the ban of everyday speech as if they were proscribed by the censor’s blot, tacitly unspeakable in polite conversation at any rate. Here, echoing his assumption that the hegemonic structures governing the reality of the modern world are intertwined with a sense of self that, in turn, articulates the extension of education and the proliferation of print media, Hegel describes the transformation of religion in terms of a changing sense of what is “proper” for public discourse among “educated” people. The passage is another important clue about the contexts and ways in which Hegel negotiates a relationship to the historians of early Christianity. Historical research holds the potential, as part of the educational apparatus, to install a sense of “religious repulsion” in defining the limits of the proper for an educated class. On the other hand, Hegel consistently critiques the historians of early Christianity for being like the polite parlor conversations he interprets as a kind of ancient/modern scenario in which the educated class embodies an existential stance toward their own religion that is like the pagan mysteries. Historians cannot bring themselves, [ 43 ]

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Hegel asserts, to acknowledge the real stakes of the game in which their own efforts participate. Like the polite conversationalists, Hegel’s biblical historians are, as a class, unable to bring themselves to affirm the changing medial network that makes their work possible. He writes in the context of his parlor conversationalists, for example, that the biblical historian emerges only when “Christ is dragged down to the level of human affairs; not to the level of the commonplace [des gemeinen], but still to that of the human, into the sphere of a mode of action which pagans such as Socrates have also been capable.”45 But this is not to suggest that historians are capable of speaking about the cultural conditions of the possibility of their discipline. In a mode of argumentation Strauss will repeat against other biblical scholars, historical criticism as such emerges only when the divinity of the stories is put to flight by the emergence of a new cultural problematic or, in terms we have been using, by a new medial network and the new expectations and desires it engenders. Forging a final bond between the historical critics of the Bible and the polite conversationalists cum ancient pagans, he writes of them that the “most important sign that these positive dogmas have lost much of their importance is that in the main these doctrines are treated historically.”46 Like the instruments of measurement and calculation that made possible the emergence of the modern world as a delimitable object, however, Hegel describes this becoming human or becoming historical of Christianity as both an activity and a response to a need of modernity itself. As they often are, Heidegger and Hegel are very similar on this point. In “The Age of the World Picture,” for example, Heidegger writes: A fifth phenomenon of the modern age is the loss of the gods. This expression does not mean the mere doing away with the gods, gross atheism. The loss of the gods is a twofold process. On the one hand, the world picture is Christianized inasmuch as the cause of the world is posited as infinite, unconditional, absolute. On the other hand, Christendom transforms Christian doctrine into a world view (the Christian world view), and in that way makes itself modern and up to date. The loss of the gods is the situation of indecision regarding God and the gods. Christendom has the greatest share in bringing it about. But the loss of the gods is so far from excluding religiosity that rather only through that loss is the relation to the gods changed into mere “religious experience.” When this occurs, then the gods have fled. The resultant void is compensated for by means of historiographical and psychological investigation of myth. What understanding of what is, what interpretation of truth, lies at the foundation of these phenomena?47 [ 44 ]

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To ask such a question is to demand a kind of positive accounting for the production of secularity itself, rather than seeing it as a mere bracketing of a prior prejudice. And while he does not develop it as thoroughly as it could be (by any stretch of the imagination), Strauss does begin to suggest the significance of New Testament historiography for such an investigation of the modern production of secularity when he makes of New Testament historiography a kind of comparative analysis of the media networks that make different interpretations current. To pick up such a project takes us beyond Heidegger’s description of the historical investigation of religion as a mere coping mechanism of a society in which the gods have fled, but it also takes us beyond the assumption that currently reigns, surprisingly, within religious studies, that we do not need to analyze precisely its function in the production of secularity as such or the (mediating) grounds on which the distinction between religion and its others (literally) makes sense.48 This aspect of Hegel’s engagement becomes absolutely central to Strauss’s hermeneutic of historical criticism. Likewise, it is the interplay between these polite conversationalists, ancient paganism, and his own philosophical reflexivity (attuned as he believes it to be to the shifting underlying ground of an emergent communicative sphere) that governs Hegel’s consistent appropriation of Pauline images against the biblical critics themselves. Like the polite society of everyday conversation, Hegel presents the biblical critics as those who are haunted by a virtual or emerging identity with which they cannot presently identify and, therefore, as those who are in the grip of something that cannot be said. More devastatingly, biblical critics (according to Hegel) are participants in an academic discipline that itself cannot say these things: As far as this historical procedure [geschichtliche Bahandlung] is concerned, it deals with thoughts and representations that were had, introduced, and fought over by others, with convictions that belong to others, with histories that do not take place within our spirit, do not engage the needs of our spirit. What is of interest rather is how these things have come about in the case of others, the contingent way in which they were formed [die zufällige Entstehung]. The absolute way [Die absolute Entstehungsweise] in which these doctrines were formed—out of the depths of spirit—is forgotten, and so their necessity and truth is forgotten, too, and the question of what one holds as one’s own conviction meets with astonishment. The historical procedure is very busy with these doctrines, though not with their content [Inhalt] but rather with the external features [Äuserlichkeit] of the controversies about them, with the passions that have attached to them, etc.49 [ 45 ]

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Without the reflexive movement within a system that, in effect, constructs its own historical objects in the typically Hegelian circuit we have already described, the “history” of the biblical critics is consigned to be only the mere museum staging of the desires, passions, or needs of others. In a striking reversal, it is as if the warning dictum of Kant has become true of the academic biblical critic. The book “believes on their behalf,” leaving them free to traffic in the commitments and risks of another. Their museum-like objects are, to be sure, looked upon with interest, but only because biblical scholars are watching a spectacle from afar, without risk or committed involvement. In another turn of the reflexive screw, Hegel goes on to suggest an intimate link between the externality of this object focus and the astonishment of the polite conversationalists at being asked to declare their true belief about religious matters.50 The texts, as the religious production of others, perform the risky response to the delicate mediasphere of the modern subject in his or her place, leaving him or her to reify religion as the mode of existence of another and to (thereby) lose himself or herself, ironically, in heteronomy. The academic division of labor between reflexive philosophy and empirical biblical studies becomes doubled, therefore, as a distinction between different modes of existence in the world. Further along in his 1827 lectures on the philosophy of religion, Hegel repeats his criticisms of the biblical scholar, whom the philosopher accuses of having taken a nonreflexive existential mode and objectified it as a “historical method” that simply reifies its basic lack of reflexivity. In this case, the existential attitude morphs into a kind of ready-made metaphysical distinction, dear to biblical critics of the nineteenth century just as it remains so for them today, between (historical) facts and (theological) meanings. Hegel refuses to submit to such an uninterrogated metaphysical opposition, charging that this bulwark of historical method is a simple refusal of reflexive thought and thus an obstruction in the road to understanding. Rejecting any division of academic labor that would simply leave history and contemporary selfknowledge in an uncompetitive nonrelation, he writes, “How totally improper, indeed tasteless, it is that categories of this kind are adduced against philosophy, as if one could say something novel to philosophy or to any educated person in this way, as if anyone who has not totally neglected his education would not know that the finite is not the infinite, the subject different from object, immediacy from mediation. Yet this sort of cleverness is brought forward triumphantly and without a blush, as if here one has made a discovery.”51 Instead, Hegel consistently demands of biblical critics that they recognize their place in the struggle for a hegemony or basic di[ 46 ]

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rection of academic knowledge more generally. The philosopher suggests that these would-be critics “go back to the alphabet of philosophy itself ” and realize that the oppositional poles by which they structure their historical method—in this case a distinction between a (historical) fact and its (modern) meaning—imply one another and are thus “inseparable.”52 After all, we are told, “only slight experience is needed to see that where there is immediate knowledge there is also mediated knowledge, and vice versa.”53 Hegel’s university, in other words, replaces Kant’s prefabricated “division of labor” by a competitive agon among its parts. Against the static oppositions and easy departmental distinctions in which historiography secretly siphons off questions of modern meaning that it claims not to be answering, Hegel affirms that the “true is their unity, an immediate knowledge that likewise mediates, a mediated knowledge that is at the same time internally simple, or is immediate reference to itself.” Thus, the “one method [eine Method] in all science” that holds the potential to salvage historiography from imploding into an uncritical methodological applicationism is what Hegel calls “the self-explicating concept” (der sich explizierende Begriff) or, in terms of the conflict among the faculties, academic distinctions that constantly reflect back upon these differentiations themselves.54 To be sure, Hegel continues, “the difference” (die Verschiedenheit) that marks the contested boundaries between heaven and earth, finite and infinite, subject and object “emphatically does not disappear, for it belongs to the pulse of its vitality, to the impetus, motion, and restlessness of spiritual as well as of natural life. Here is a unification in which the difference is not extinguished. . . .”55 An academic hierarchy in which the discipline-constituting differences between departments are not forgotten or repressed, however, is one in which these boundaries remain open to question and renegotiation. Strauss, as we will see, who articulates his biblical criticism in terms borrowed from Hegel, took his cue from such remarks and refashioned New Testament historiography into a kind of radically reflexive cultural criticism. A clue about how Strauss will do this can be gleaned from one of Hegel’s statements about historical criticism of the Bible: “Whether the Bible has been made the foundation [Grund] more for honor’s sake alone or in fact with utter seriousness, still the nature of the interpreting explanation [interpretierenden Erklärens] involves the fact that thought articulates itself in it. Thought explicitly contains definitions, principles, and assumptions, which then make themselves felt [geltend] in the activity of interpreting.”56 For Hegel, reading the ancient texts is never a mere perception (whatever this would mean) but occurs as an event in which modern forms of thought [ 47 ]

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make themselves felt, externalize themselves in (and as) the object of historical inquiry. It is this sense of the productive nature of biblical interpretation, what Charles Taylor calls the “expressivist” scenario in which an experience of a historical object is itself a manifestation of the modes of perception that indwell the interpretive gaze, that allows Strauss to reorient biblical criticism in a radical manner.57 It is worth repeating the basic movement here, in part because it is a kind of forgotten challenge within contemporary biblical studies (though not just there), and also because it is this aspect of Strauss’s work that I will use to push beyond the ways Hegel or Strauss are considering the production of both religion and modern secularity in their work. Moreover, according to Hegel, the historians’ suppression of this productive aspect of interpretive acts can only result in the biblical critics’ misrecognition of their intellectual ownership of the object in question. In short, biblical criticism, forgetting or suppressing the way its work is a productive labor, begins to think of itself as a neutral looking-at-an-object. Ever ready to map a new aspect of human history onto his reflexive map, Hegel even creates a brief history of biblical interpretation from these distinctions, suggesting that his own discussions of biblical criticism represent a step beyond the Enlightenment-era historiography in which modernity had to remain blind to its own role in these productions. Without this recognition, Hegel asserts, the philological and historical endeavors of the Enlightenment biblical interpreters are comparable to “the work of the countinghouse clerk or cashier, because all the active bustle is concerned with the alien truths of others.”58 Similarly, like Strauss after him, Hegel asserts that the attempt of his contemporaries to study simply what the Bible meant or to speak of it only as a given historical object by bracketing reflection on the modern habits of thought that themselves construct its appearance ironically fails to succeed in what seems to be this more modest task of simply interpreting the ancient evidence as ancient evidence. In this case, and in a classic Hegelian inversion, the attempt to free the ancient object from the obfuscating desires of modern interpreters ends up producing the very problem it had hoped to remedy. In this case, the methodological distinction between a discretely separate modern subject and ancient object only makes the problem of thinking about what types of organizational structures might be articulating themselves in the construction of these objects completely (and, indeed, methodologically or systematically) intractable. Because a failure to think about this process does not mean that the process is not

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at work, Hegel’s Enlightenment biblical critics are presented as unwilling for the critical movement of thought to fold back upon their own basic methodological distinction. He describes this unwillingness, therefore, as a resistance to the movement of critical thought, a movement that is itself suppressed in not being able to shed light on the most fundamental difference that governs their historical endeavors, the very difference between modern subjects and ancient objects. One manuscript adds, “History occupies itself with truths that used to be truths, i.e., for others, and not with truths such as would be the possession of those who concern themselves with them.”59 Hegel’s critique of Enlightenment or nonreflexive historiography thus implies that the products of such labor are alienated, misunderstood, and an obstruction of the way modernity’s understanding of the past can be revelatory of its own implicit cultural forms and the concerns that constitute (and are constituted by) them. Moreover, refusing to become conscious of these, the nonreflexive historians are bound to remain passive in the face of the cultural forms themselves. On the other hand, Hegel presents himself, in the name of philosophy, as one who performs the self-risking or concerned engagement from which the philologists, historians, and Enlightenment interpreters of the Bible shy away. As we might have begun to expect by now, it is at this point that Hegel begins to hear echoes of his own risky gamble in the writing of the apostle Paul, declaring to a recalcitrant community of biblical historians that the mere letter kills, while only the spirit gives life. Against the positivism of the biblical historian, he writes, “one can quote the essential sense of the text, ‘the letter kills,’ etc.” Playing the (philosophical) Paul against the (historical) Pharisees, Hegel’s critique of historical reason plays itself out as a repetition of the early Christian scene.60 As we will see, Strauss’s attempt to invent a role for the modern biblical critic scrambles some of the intellectual hierarchies of both Kant and Hegel, particularly inasmuch as Strauss makes the object of New Testament criticism much more complex, ethereal, and difficult to compare easily with either theology or philosophy. Additionally, however, his biblical criticism is, from start to finish, a self-conscious attempt to delineate some of the modern cultural forms that, in effect, construct a particular vision of the ancient evidence. His own comparative or reflexive biblical criticism, therefore, escapes Hegel’s accusations against the Enlightenment historians and, in fact, Strauss appropriates Hegel’s philosophical/Pauline mantle for himself as a reflexive biblical scholar with his own critiques of Enlightenment historiography.

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Strauss on the Binds and Double Binds of Modern New Testament Criticism As an enthusiastic proponent of Hegelian thought, Strauss appropriated some of the basic structures of the philosophy for his own depiction of the goals and methods of a specifically modern historical investigation of early Christian religion. A basic feature of what Jürgen Habermas calls a “Hegelian modernity,” that a genuinely modern knowing is one that is incessantly thrown back upon itself as the sole foundation of this action, becomes central to Strauss’s reorientation of biblical research.61 He, at least, was listening to Hegel’s critiques of Enlightenment or nonreflexive historiography. Strauss was also fascinated by the intertwining of what Hegel sometimes called “objective” and “subjective” spirit (cf. Gutenberg technology and Protestant subjectivity), or that flow of mind and matter more recent theorists of the humanities have called “cultural memory.” Strauss’s work remained oriented around not only the way early Christian religion emerged within the context of ancient modes of perception and the media storage potentials of antiquity but with the way modern communicative networks likewise structure historical understandings of ancient religion. Similarly, Strauss followed Hegel’s lead in suggesting that his own work was a making public of certain proscribed aspects of polite everyday conversation, a making public of that emerging modern self with which most still could not identify. This appropriation of Hegel provided useful fodder for Strauss’s attempt to establish the biblical critic as a kind of modern cultural avant-garde. Exemplifying the suspicion that modern historical understanding of the Bible only makes sense amidst the “flight of the gods,” Strauss liked to suggest that the modern, critical interpretation of the Bible is a stop-gap reaction to a traumatic rupture that itself demands to be articulated, negotiated, or worked through by means of interpretation. Strikingly, biblical interpretation for Strauss is thus a response to the ruptured ground of modern existence itself and not unlike therapy for an emergent modern identity. Speaking in the name of the torn ontological ground, Strauss introduces his voluminous study of the historical Jesus in a decidedly Hegelian manner: “Wherever a religion, established on written monuments [schriftliche Denkmale], extends its dominion in wider territories of space and time [Raum- und Zeitgebieten] and accompanies its adherents through manifold and progressive stages of cultural formation [Bildung], sooner or later a discrepancy opens up [eine Differenz . . . bieten] between those old documents and the new formation which is dependent on these as holy books.”62 [ 50 ]

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Like Hegel’s reading of modern religion as an expression of and response to a developing set of disclosive communicative and measuring techniques, Strauss broaches the topic of the historical Jesus in terms of a history of media or the history of cultural memory. In this case, the territories of space and time in which a religion makes itself felt—or, perhaps, makes itself “current” (geltend)—are indistinguishable from these regnant forms of embodied cultural memory. That Strauss begins an account of the historical Jesus by describing a rupture between an original mode of inscription and later cultural formations hints at the way the biblical critic will deploy Hegelian descriptions of modernity in order to solidify the position of the New Testament historian as a particularly crucial guarantor of modern identity itself. For Strauss, the biblical scholar is almost uniquely equipped to explore, diagnose, and evaluate the nature of the rupture that opens itself up within (and that sets opposed) the different forms of cultural memory that distinguish a self-reliant modernity from its predecessors. Indeed, the difference that emerges within and between these spheres is the message of a genuinely modern biblical criticism for Strauss, a message that will always and necessarily reveal itself in terms of a gap that historians tend to read as an indication of temporal discontinuity. As Hegel described the way the modern environment of information circulation grounds the disclosure of an “antiquated” or “alien” (medieval) period, here Strauss offers a straightforward (though more simplistic) scenario in which “later” forms of representation register as an obstruction in the smooth functioning of the feedback loop between itself and its object.63 At first, we are told, this obstruction or rupture reveals itself as an “unessential” or a merely “formal” one. “By degrees,” however, the difference begins to appear essential and more disconcerting: “the expressions and delineations are seen to be inappropriate” or illegitimately foreign to the reigning order of things.64 Strauss is clear and seems to confirm Hegel’s proposal that religion manifests itself in the book market. In this case, the old canonical texts “no longer satisfy” the new cultural formation; in other words, it is distaste or lack of readerly satisfaction that manifests the premodern antiquity or obsolescence of the texts in question.65 Strauss adds a remarkable statement that exemplifies his vision of the nature and function of biblical criticism within a genuinely modern culture: “As long as the discrepancy is either not so considerable or else not so commonly brought to mind as to lead to a complete rejection of these documents as holy, so long will a process of mediation [Vermittlungsprozess] arise and be maintained, in which the interpretation [Auslegung] of these books proceeds by those who are more or less conscious of it.”66 Some[ 51 ]

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where between the incontrovertible dominion of Christianity in its various spatial and temporal realms and the “complete rejection” of the same, in the realm of a “more or less conscious” sense that the original form of memorializing religion has become passé, there is Strauss, theorist of cultural memory and historical critic of the Bible.

Repulsion, Difference, Gap Strauss thus follows Hegel in suggesting an inextricable link between what they both call the modern identity of the historian and the ancient objects that respond to, or “externalize,” the modern epoch’s mode of historical representation. To change the metaphor in a way that is only partially illuminating (but that Strauss would appreciate), the look in which one sees early Christianity always leads through its object to somehow stare back upon the interpreter himself and on what Strauss frequently describes as his “modern habits of thought.” Every historical reconstruction of these religious texts, therefore, in good Hegelian fashion, necessarily offers itself as the product of a prior constructive labor, in this case the product of a hierarchicalizing, organizing, modern habit of everyday experience. To borrow from Foucault’s early analysis of nineteenth-century academic discourse, we might say that it is this aspect of Strauss’s work that constitutes his biblical criticism as a truly modern endeavor. There is, invariably, an automatic doubling of the subject in every object of perception.67 The very basic reflexive movement here is worth pointing out, if only because it represents a system of thought about which contemporary biblical studies continues to think in only a confused way. Narrations of the modern history of New Testament research tend both to appropriate the idea of such a doubling and to act as if it embodies a problem that will eventually be overcome. With the evolutionary development of historical criticism, so the story goes, narcissistic prejudice is increasingly being overcome, allowing the ancient religious object to show itself to us, more and more, as it really was. This form of disciplinary self-description is often repeated, of course, at the level of an accusation that one’s interpretive adversaries are wrong because they have seen only themselves in the ancient texts or, as the topos goes, “read something into them.” The narration is thus a guild favorite both as a historical self-narration of the evolution of historical critical method and as a way to oppose the interpretations of others. One does not need to wait for the work of Foucault or Luhmann to suggest a very different kind of reading of this problem. One could even say that the blockages of perception in the form of a narcissistic prejudice that [ 52 ]

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sees only itself in the ancient texts (and thus continually disrupt the guild’s otherwise liberated perspective) are not accidents, failures, or prejudices but constitutive elements of modern critical perception as such. Far from being a problem or the vestiges of prejudice that still need to be overcome, this particular “danger” functions as the condition of the possibility for the continuation of the guild and the proliferation of its new products of historical reconstruction—in short, for the progress of the discipline as a whole. These failures of the guild are, therefore, necessary for its very survival, or for the very possibility of future research. The reflexive dimensions of Strauss’s hermeneutic Hegelianism here suggest new avenues whereby we might address such a rethinking of the discipline.68 Not all doubles of the self are welcome reflections, however, and it is all the more intriguing to note that Strauss repeatedly characterizes this mirroring as governed by the presence of a “more or less conscious” recognition of difference that links the modern biblical interpreter to his object. The suggestion solicits our investigation of Strauss’s biblical criticism, therefore, in esthetic terms of the distasteful, the grotesque, and the uncanny double. As Strauss, following Hegel, has already made clear, the true phenomenological bond between the self-reliant modern interpreter and the ancient religious text is an experience of gap, lack, or negativity, and this for fundamental reasons. Indeed, in a telling statement that once again brings us back to the question of the book market and its relation to modern biblical interpretation, Strauss summarizes modernity’s relation to the New Testament by declaring that a modern reader, face to face with “the humanity of those records” (das Menschliche jener Urkunden) will feel “uncomfortable” because he will sense this other self to be “undeveloped and crude.”69 Moreover, it is important to notice that Strauss’s esthetics of biblical interpretation establish the parameters within which he distinguishes the various sorts of biblical interpretations of his contemporaries. Far from being able to lose himself in the discrete and merely technical ordering of ancient facts, for Strauss the historical reconstruction of early Christian texts always brings with it the possibility of profoundly misrecognizing oneself, misunderstanding oneself in relation to the very habits of thought that have begun to lay hold on the modern historian. With Strauss, the interpretation of the Bible begins to carry with it an ever-present threat that one’s interpretations might be symptoms of a failure to identify properly, recognize, or respond to the modern habits of thought in which the historical critic exists, a failure that would register itself in terms of a misunderstanding of the “otherness” of the literary object. [ 53 ]

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Strauss’s biblical critic, like the would-be modern whose everyday speech Hegel diagnosed, can know something without knowing it, and Strauss develops an analytical machinery, keyed to the thematics of (dis)taste, by which he will argue that his contemporaries do in fact misrecognize themselves by misrecognizing the bond that separates them from their ancient religious object. Thus Strauss’s interpretive disclosure of a rupture between a culture and its canonical ground involves the diagnosis of the way an interpretation “deludes itself against the consciousness of the difference between the new formation and the old documents.”70 In this case, and in a repetition of Hegel, the esthetic revelation becomes a secretly recognized fact or a disconcerting difference that inevitably remains present for all, even if not acknowledged. In short, the entry fee to a truly modern interpretation demands that the biblical critic take up a standpoint that is defined as “altogether different” from that of the authors of the premodern texts.71 Others may refuse to open their eyes, but the modern biblical scholar is going to tell the secret, voice the repulsion, and thus allow the texts to become illuminated by a foreign light altogether different from that which illuminates a modern habit of thought. Again, how does one hail, here in the mid-nineteenth century, an altogether different light than that which familiarizes modern existence, another light with which the would-be modern cannot identify? Claiming that, for the biblical interpreter, modern identity emerges only by that interpreter’s ability to re-present the ancient texts as nonmodern and different, Strauss establishes a kind of Hegelian fort-da game with his interpretive adversaries in which something must be lost. With Strauss, biblical studies becomes an eternal engagement with the esthetics of otherness, difference, gap, and repulsion. Anything else, Strauss affirms, is in danger of being a symptom of a misunderstanding in relation to oneself as a self-reliant modern and, therefore, the production of kitsch.

From Primitive Misunderstanding to Pseudo-Modern Kitsch and Beyond: Strauss’s Brief History of Biblical Interpretation Strauss spins out the intriguing drama of this modern hermeneutical double bind in a Hegelian three-act play. First, he posits a genuinely primitive or naively religious horizon of the mythologically oriented biblical texts, an imagined period he suggests is followed by a “rationalist” period of interpretation. In this second interpretive mode, the interpreter attempts

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to lay bare universal historical mechanisms operating, as it were, behind the mythological “ornamentation” of these texts.72 Whereas a first-stage, primitive reader may read the biblical texts quite honestly as a naive religious expression interpreting another, the second type of reader has begun to understand the texts only through a self-deluding ruse. It is left up to a fully modern reader (namely, a post-Enlightenment or post-“rationalist” reader) to emerge from the self-delusion by which the second stage orients its understandings. Strauss makes sense of this three-part movement by focusing on the transition from the second stage or rationalist reader to the third type. When he does stop to distinguish the first-stage reader from the second, he does this by way of standard language about the way rationalist interpreters assume a finite, rule-governed realm of nature that does not admit of magical, divine, or otherwise supernatural influence from the outside. Echoing Hegel’s narrative of the emergence of the world as a delimitable, measurable object, Strauss writes, “The modern world [Die neuere Zeit] through centuries of sustained and arduous research, has attained the insight that all things in the world hang together through a chain of causes and effects [Alles in der Welt durch eine Kette von Ursachen und Wirkungen zusammenhangt].” Indeed, the “world” appears as this chain whose links mark a territory that “tolerates no interruption” (keine Unterbrechung duldet).73 An attunement to these assumptions as a modern habit of thought governs both the second mode of interpretation (rationalist, Enlightenment) and his own (mythological), despite the fact that those participating in this world may sometimes sense various holes, aporiae, or unexplained tensions within its way of thinking: To be sure, single objects and spheres of the world, with their processes and conditions of change, are not so self-contained [abgeschlossen] that they are not open to influence and interruption [Unterbrechung] from the outside, though the action of one being or regime of nature encroaches on that of another, human freedom stops the development of many natural objects, and natural causes react on human freedom. But always the totality of finite things [die Gesammtheit endlicher Dinge] makes a vast circle, in which, except that it owes its existence and law [Dasein und Sosein] to a higher power, suffers no intrusion from without. This conviction has become so much the consciousness of the modern world, that, in actual life, the opinion or assertion of a supernatural cause, a divine effect [eine göttliche Wirksamkeit], or any immediate intervention, is straightaway considered either ignorance or imposture.74

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It is not clear how Strauss thinks the centuries of “arduous research” in view here relates to the eventual “conviction” or habit of thought that guarantees a negative response to the suggestion that there is an immediacy of divine action at work somewhere, whether research is its result or prerequisite. It is also not clear that his “totality of finite things” stands as a firm opposition to a premodern conception of reality once he begins to suspect that these “things” are always open to a transformative interruption by “higher” objects or spheres of power. What is important for my purposes in this staging of an immanent cause-effect universe is that Strauss claims that both the second and third forms of interpretation in his brief history of biblical interpretation share the habits of perception embodied in this picture of reality. Both the rationalist (or Enlightenment) biblical interpreter and the new, fully modern form of interpretation Strauss claims to be inaugurating are, therefore, attuned to this world as an immanent “circle of finite things.” The key difference between these two positions, however, is that the rationalist interpretation proceeds as if it can intuit the workings of a mechanistic nature underneath the mythological ornamentation of the first-stage representation. The rationalist interpreter acts as if the merely historical or particular kernel may be detached from a static, universal structure of historical process or a “normal” perception. The ruse in play here is, therefore, the implicit suggestion that there is an accessible, static reality that is shared by the ancient and modern author, or, in this case, shared between modern academic subject and ancient religious object. The rationalists’ implicit self- or hermeneutic understanding of the perceptual bond that unites them to their historical object is thus not a negative bond of difference but a positive one—the world of universal laws of causality and the straightforward perceptions that might be assumed to flow from such rule-governed events. Strauss presents this ruse of the “as if ” as the suppression of what must, in the case of the rationalist interpreter, become a “secretly recognized fact” that a foreign “habit of thought” distinguishes the ancient representation much more radically from modern modes of thought than the allegedly universal laws of causality could possibly register. In a move that remains profoundly significant today, Strauss instead insists on the translational discontinuity between representational forms. To put it differently, for Strauss, the rationalist historians are not yet historical enough, because they assume an unchanging or self-same medium in which information may travel from the ancient to the modern epoch without being scrambled by the differences separating these systems of cultural memory. [ 56 ]

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The entire volume of Strauss’s monumental Life of Jesus moves from Gospel story to Gospel story according to this eventually monotonous threefold schema. Invariably, Strauss first argues that the story makes no sense (to us) as a straightforward account of historical cause and effect or event and perception. Because both the second- and third-stage interpreters must realize this to be true, the biblical story cannot be salvaged from some sort of supernaturalism with which modern readers cannot identify, attuned as they are to a world of delimitable objects. In step two, Strauss goes on to describe the attempts of various rationalist interpreters to reconstruct an underlying (historical, finite, or delimitable) event beneath the biblical story. Strauss’s rationalist interpreter attempts to discover in the biblical text an underlying event, accessible to “normal” perception but then subsequently misinterpreted by a gullible, supernaturalist eyewitness. Strauss usually does away with this interpretive method by mockery, laughing it out of existence as an absurd form of special pleading. Finally, in the third interpretive moment, Strauss describes the biblical story in terms of the mythological assumptions and patterns of perception that might have generated the stories—whether perceptions or interpretations—as we find them in the biblical texts. This task he usually accomplishes by a more or less helpful plundering of texts from the Hebrew Bible in search of topical or thematic parallels. The Gospel stories become, in the process, indications of a kind of Jewish mentalité, usually a form of collective messianic expectation. Once more, it is worth saying that what drops out of the interpretive equation from the second to the third hermeneutic stage is the “as if ” assumption that modern interpreters may make reference to an imagined universal realm of cause and effect, a sphere of “normal” perception that links the different cultures through a bond of similarity. A well-known example of Strauss’ general procedure occurs in his treatment of the Gospel stories in which Jesus walks on the water of the Sea of Galilee. Jumping right in at the second interpretive stage, the exegete enumerates a host of “natural” explanations that attempt to find, behind the appearance of a miracle, a conceivable and, indeed, according to their proponents, a desirable basis of the story in common-sensical fact.75 In this instance, Strauss suggests (playing along for the moment) the case is difficult. Whereas a naturalistic interpretation of the various healing stories and exorcisms might assume Jesus “could act on the human mind and living body in a psychological and magnetic manner,” the calming of a storm offers no such “point of union between the alleged supernatural agency of Jesus and the natural order of phenomena.”76 Despite the rationalist attempts to see, underneath the mythological perceptions, a possible historical fact, they [ 57 ]

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are stuck it seems with what Strauss claims would be a “miracle proper.” Removing the mask, Strauss proceeds to seal the exits, dismissing several modernizing allegories as special pleading intended to save Jesus from what is obviously a crass supernatural engagement. He lists, as so many failures of this sort, the idea that Jesus’s calming of the storm was “only a prognostication, founded on the observation of certain signs, that the storm would soon subside,” or (my favorite) that Jesus’s apparent walking on water was actually his walking on a sandbar.77 Strauss, however, has seen what he has seen: “It remains, then, that, taking the incident as it is narrated by the Evangelists, we must regard it as a miracle.”78 Of course, for the habit of thought that regards all allegations of a “divine effect” within the finite realm of cause and effect as arising from either ignorance or imposture, this makes the value of such a story suspect. As his own discussions of hermeneutics would lead us to expect, Strauss’s revelation of the secret amounts to little more than delivering the Gospel texts over to a censor of modern habits of perception that is already at work but from which the rationalist interpreters are still trying to protect the biblical stories. As he sometimes does, further along in his analysis of the story of the calming of the sea Strauss manifests a desire similar to the rationalists to save some “historical” kernel of a straightforward event that might yet elude the censor’s prohibition: “Viewed more nearly,” he writes, “and taking Matthew’s account as the basis, there is nothing to object to in the narrative until the middle of v. 26 [the moment when Jesus commands the storm to stop].”79 The story almost passes, we are to think, but this last section will never escape the censor’s blot. Strauss cannot send this message to the emerging modernity his work hopes to hail. Instead, now stuck with a miracle, Strauss calls for a confession that the text’s productive ground is decidedly nonmodern and cannot be founded on a generically universal or “normal” perception.80 In place of the secondstage, enlightened attempt to detach the text’s mythological ornamentation from its historical kernel, Strauss will attempts what he here calls a “natural” explanation of the story, a kind of repetition of the rationalist operation but in a mythological mode (or the rationalist mode without the “ruse” of the rationalists, the assumption that they can act “as if ” they could discern a generically universal structure of perception underneath the mythological ornamentation). In this case, the generic universal is replaced by specific ancient texts, and Strauss lists several ancient stories that were, in one respect or another, similar to the early Christian tale of Jesus calming the sea: Moses parting the Red Sea; later Rabbinic representations [ 58 ]

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in which the Messiah dries up the sea; and a “no less emblematical image than Ulysses sleeping when, after so many storms, he was about to land on his island home.”81 Strauss also mentions the attribution to Pythagoras of the ability to calm storms.82 With this move, Strauss retains the rationalist’s desire for an immanent or natural explanation of the story, and he retains a historical kernel to the story in question. In his move beyond the rationalists, however, the natural becomes what fits within a particular horizon of expectation that he discerns by way of a panoply of ancient texts that bear some thematic resemblance to the Gospel narrative. The historical kernel thus becomes a host of possible collective expectations that might have governed the perception of a somewhat less than remarkable real event or that might have even fabricated the memory out of whole cloth. Instead of universal or generic structures of perception—a basic humanitas that would (then or now) be impressed by the self-contained and external event in the same way as ours—Strauss finds a mentalité that is capable of generating perceptions, images, and stories almost from nothing at all. This aspect of Strauss’s method is of profound interest to us here, as, like Hegel, his interpretive practice is distinguishable from most of his contemporaries in that it is always implicitly doubly comparative, comparing the ancient texts both to other ancient writings and to the modern habits of perception that construct “our” ancient objects. This doubly comparative nature of interpretation is exemplified in a discussion of the story of the appearance of the angel Gabriel to the father of John the Baptist in the Gospel of Luke. There Strauss finds himself, once again, in the grip of doubt, unable to accept the passage in a straightforward manner. Here “the angel announces himself to be Gabriel that stands in the presence of God.”83 The very appearance of an angel, of course, is the “first offense” (Den ersten Anstoss) to modern habits of perception. Second, Strauss asserts, “Here the supernaturalist finds himself in a quandary, even on his own ground.”84 When Gabriel speaks of his name, rank, and “particular station in the court of heaven,” Gabriel seems to say too much, implicating himself in an unbelievable historical scenario. These particular notions of angelic figures, Strauss explains, emerge not from a “sound” Judaism with which the typical, biblicistic supernaturalist might want to identify, but from “apocryphal” books that are “evidently a product of the influence of the Zend religion of the Persians on the Jewish mind.”85 With the self-incriminating confession that he has a heavenly rank and celestial station in God’s army (evidence for Strauss that Gabriel is being imagined in an apocryphal or less than traditionally Jewish mode) Strauss believes [ 59 ]

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himself to have caught out the angelic mediator in a slip of the tongue that reveals him to be of an unacceptable origin, even to the supernaturalist. Having linked the story to an unnatural, unsafe, or, indeed, unheimlich source, he is ready to proceed: “Now it is inconceivable that the heavenly spirit-state should really be constituted in this [monarchical, courtly] way, as the Jews thought after the exile, or that the names given to the angels should be in the language of this people [in der Sprache dieses Volk].”86 These notions and names were borrowed from Babylon, not part of the autochthonous Jewish tradition, and Strauss is certain that the intrusion of these foreign names, the fruits of a foreign language and the light of a foreign reason, will render this passage unacceptable even to the supernaturalist interpreter. “Were these representations essentially false so long as they continued to be among the foreigners, but true when they went over to the Jews? Or were they always true, and was such a wonderful truth uncovered by an idolatrous people sooner than by the people of God? Did this nation, shut out from a special divine revelation, arrive at the truth by their own reason alone sooner than the Jews who were guided by that revelation? If so, it seems that the revelation was superfluous, or merely negative. That is, it functioned to hinder an early development of knowledge. . . .”87 Thus it is not only the problem of the miraculous by which Strauss perceives unacceptable secrets in the texts of the supernaturalists. His ears are, more generally, tactically attuned to other echoes that might let the supernaturalist’s sense of ownership and familiar dwelling amidst the biblical texts “destroy itself.”88 Having linked Gabriel’s self-description to a foreign origin, his pious adversaries (he gambles) must admit the untruthfulness of the story’s representation or accept a deity who manifests truth by way of exilic, foreign borrowings. Strauss seems certain that even the supernaturalist will not abide the idea of a deity who would thus manifest truth by way of simulation: “We would be driven to the expedient of supposing an accommodation on the part of God: that he sent a divine spirit with the instruction to simulate a rank and title which did not belong to him, in order that, by this conformity to the Jewish representations, he might insure the belief of the father of the Baptist.”89 Strauss’s ears perceive a cacophonous echo, and he uses it to disconcert the eyes of the supernaturalist that would otherwise remain fixed on their object, as if, in that moment of vision, they were seeing, simply, a “natural” representation of a “normal” perception. For Strauss’s doubly comparative mode, the proliferation of echoes does not stop with the cacophonously mixed horizon of ancient voices that might disrupt the distinction between an autochthonous biblical tradition and the other ancient religions from which it is thought to be [ 60 ]

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distinguished. Rather, the echoes travel closer still until they seem capable of disrupting even the distinction between ancient and modern culture, academic subject and ancient religious object. Here Strauss speculates about “a twofold source” (eine gedoppelte Quelle) that grounds the ancient representation of an angelic appearance. The first source of this biblical story of an angel battling behind our backs over messages generally unheard and unseen is “the natural desire of our minds [unseres Geistes] to assume more mind [mehr Geist] in the world than is realized in human form.”90 Strauss adds to this problematic, however, the striking proviso that in the modern era the desire that drove the production of such biblical stories has been filled, thus rendering such angelic visions unnecessary. Among some moderns, Strauss notes, “this desire is satisfied in the conviction that other worlds exist besides our own, and are peopled by intelligent beings; and thus the first source of the belief in angels is destroyed.”91 Moreover, not just the expectation of aliens abroad but the experience of governments at home establishes everyday habits of perception that likewise tend to send the angel Gabriel packing. Thus the second source, the valorization of a monarch and, by implication, the messenger of a divine figure modeled on such an authority, does not fit within a modern sense of proper government, and it therefore contradicts modern modes of conceptualizing the divine. Having lost his place in the reigning order of things, the angel is cut loose to wander as an illegitimate, foreign creation. For the modern, Strauss suggests, “the belief in angels is without a link [Anknüpfungspuktes]” by which it might otherwise be attached “to the Bildung of the modern period [der neueren Zeit].”92 There is, therefore, an implicit but productive system of habits underlying the experience of Gabriel as a foreign or nonmodern figure. The two sources of the ancient, religious representation are always themselves haunted or doubled by modern, academic habits of existence that themselves ground our understanding of these texts, particularly as they appear to us as foreign. The angel, like Hegel’s medieval religion amidst the Gutenberg galaxy, appears as an obstruction in the smooth traffic of contemporary or current expectations. As Strauss explains, no longer needed and without an umbilical link to modern habits of thought, Gabriel’s presence has become an “offence.” With Strauss, biblical studies becomes a kind of doubly comparative project of the underlying “expectations,” “desires,” or “needs” that call into existence different types of “religious” re-presentations (though ultimately re-presentations of these very expectations, desires, and needs). More to the point, and to step back from Strauss for a moment, the [ 61 ]

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basically modern reflexivity involved here suggests the possibility of a type of analysis of biblical studies that has not yet come into its own even today. Once the doubling of modern habits of perception begins in relation to its ancient historical objects, the modern study of the ancient world is forever solicited to renew its consideration of the various links by which these ancient objects of historical perception “attach themselves” to an implicit system of everyday modern perceptual practices. At only a basic level, it seems clear that any attempt to narrate the movement of the discipline in terms that refer only to a more or less accurate representation of the ancient world would necessarily obscure as much as it reveals of this question. As yet, however, New Testament studies has not yet begun either to overcome this productivist hermeneutic of modernity (one option) or to explicate this history of doubling that began with Strauss’s Hegelian hermeneutic and its attention to the slips of Gabriel’s tongue. This latter task is, we might say, modern New Testament studies’ unfinished project, and one whose radical (and still unanalyzed) implications I will attempt to exemplify in chapter 2.

Publicizing the Secret as Diagnosing the Opposition Strauss’s reflexive engagement would not achieve recognition as the best way in which to approach the biblical texts, however, unless he could present himself as having revealed the secret or self-deluding ruse governing the entire rationalist program—and there was, after all, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher, as we have noted, was the first to be given the responsibility of teaching New Testament interpretation at the University of Berlin, and he was influential as an exegete of the early Christian writings. Strauss presents him, however, as a beginning that was also an end, the first professor of New Testament studies making the “last attempt” to urge a rationalist interpretation of the Bible before that mode of interpretation gives way to the fully modern moment of myth production.93 Strauss thus presents Schleiermacher’s work as a twilight production, the last of its kind, using against it the same polemical tools he always used: an appeal to an epochal rupture that has already arrived (though not yet completely); suggestions that his contemporaries are repressing this rupture because they cannot yet bear to recognize themselves therein; and a final call to fully assume their own subject position by recognizing the bond of difference, gap, or rupture that is their only means of access to the foreign medium in which the biblical representations were produced. In one of his critiques of Schleiermacher, however, Strauss initially [ 62 ]

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sounds a little like the rationalists he attacks, apparently wanting to hang on to some historical kernel beneath the mythological overlay. To be sure, he tells us, Jesus must indeed have been a great personality—“as far as I am concerned, the greatest—personality in the series of religious geniuses [in der Reihe der religiösen Genien], but still only a man like the others.”94 The statement is out of the ordinary for the interpreter of myth, as Strauss is generally much less concerned about the establishment of a collection of free-floating historical facts than he is about describing the matrices by which such facts might have been produced in the first place. Here he joins the chorus of rationalist voices whose favorite kernel to find underneath the mythological overlay of the early Christian texts was, significantly as we will see, the great personality, or even the religious genius, of Jesus. Strauss adds the additional concession to this refrain that the “Gospels are to be regarded as the oldest collections of the myths which were attached around the core of this personality.”95 He does not repeat the rationalist chorus for long, however, adding: “It is not as if they [the myths] do not simultaneously carry with them much historical material [historisches Material]; but the medium in which they transmit [das Medium worin . . . uberliefern] this is thoroughly the mythical, that is, the concept [Vorstellung] of Jesus as a supernatural being.”96 In his desire to identify with a truthful kernel, Strauss tells us, Schleiermacher, lecturing away at the University of Berlin, has lost sight of the medium itself, a concept that is (and this is a crucial point) also a mode of information processing, a medium that simultaneously carries with it historical facts in only an indirect manner.97 The crucial thing for modern interpretation “is that the Christian world must come to terms [auseinandersetzen]” with the foreignness of the medium in which reality appeared to the early church.98 This is the crisis point to which rationalist interpretation had brought the modern world, but without being able to acknowledge its own basic insight, that the biblical stories do not contain much in the way of perceptible facts underneath the mythological overlay. Once again, there is no positive or self-same medium in which the perceptions of a modern could translate into an early Christian perception of reality. The acceptance of the end of its own enterprise, however, the experience of finding that the text comes to modernity from a different or lost mediasphere that fails to convince, is what the rationalist program refuses to do. Strauss levels the critique directly at Schleiermacher. Instead of helping the Christian world with the requisite work of mourning over this lost medium of existence, “Schleiermacherian theology, and especially also Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus, was a last attempt to make us agree [ineinszusetzen] with it.”99 [ 63 ]

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As he did in his Life of Jesus, Strauss here analyzes Schleiermacher’s engagement with this “completely different” medium by diagnosing it as a refusal to acknowledge something the rationalist has already begun to assume. Having caught Gabriel himself in a slip of the tongue, Strauss looks for the same from Schleiermacher’s pen, even when the professor is not speaking directly about the Bible. In this case, the analyst finds that about which he suspects Schleiermacher in a private letter that was originally addressed to the philosopher Jacobi.100 Strauss intercepts the mail, as it were, and calls upon it to disclose the secret of the professor’s biblical criticism. The apprehended mail attests, damningly, “My philosophy and my dogmatic are firmly committed not to contradict each other; but for just this reason neither will ever be complete, and as long as I can recall, they have mutually affected one another and gradually approached each other.”101 As for the analyst Strauss, he has heard enough, translating for his own readers, “There are few remarks from Schleiermacher that allow one to see so clearly the basis for his character [Grund seines Wesens].”102 Nor will the disciple of Hegel abide Schleiermacher’s eternal flirtation of “faith and science” without exposing it to a more dramatic possibility of consummation or agonistic breakup. Strauss senses a cover-up on an ontological scale: “As soon as it is established that a contradiction between faith and science absolutely may not erupt, then one can be certain that with such an astute man as Schleiermacher no expedients will be lacking for concealing this rupture even from his own consciousness [vor dem eigenen Bewusstsein zu verdecken].”103 Strauss is not impressed by the flirtatious delights of this mutual affectation, set in motion by an initial commitment only ever to approach each other without violation. No wonder Schleiermacher would proclaim the eternal bliss of what Strauss presents as an arrested stage of development: having struck the original bargain, Schleiermacher deceives even himself. Strauss goes on to describe the scenario as the establishment of a harmonious tuning between faith and science, and the construction of an imaginary bridge that Schleiermacher refuses to acknowledge is continually collapsing.104 For Strauss (echoing Hegel), this architectonic and hermeneutic illusion necessarily repeats itself at the level of Schleiermacher’s historical reconstructions. Every interpretation of an historical text that is generated by this imagined scene, Strauss asserts, will only repeat the initial gesture of “concealing the rupture” Strauss wants to make public. If Schleiermacher was the last to repeat the gesture of concealment, Strauss wants to be the first to say the unspeakable, proclaiming in public the secret of the complete otherness of early Christianity. Strauss, it seems, must replace Schlei[ 64 ]

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ermacher’s bridges and harmonious tunings with soul-wrenching rupture and a “sense of repulsion.” As we should expect by now, the struggle will be played out in the arena of public taste, and its transformation by the hand of Strauss as would-be avant-garde will demand the representational strategies of the uncanny or the esthetic of shock. These will be the new tools of the trade for Strauss’s truly modern biblical scholarship. It was yet to be seen, however, what academic and social organizations might depend on this harmonious tuning and what forces might be unleashed if this constantly collapsing bridge were to be recognized as destroyed. Strauss claims, we should not forget, that the structure of rationalist interpretation repeats itself also as the “basis” of Schleiermacher’s “character.” What might be the effect of the separation of these ligatures that established biblical interpretation as an important quilting point of the (would-be) modern soul, weaving together an order of words and things that include collective communicative habits (or the media in which reality shows itself) and the basis of individual characters? As promised, this chapter shows that Strauss’s basically reflexive or modern (and Hegelian) hermeneutic implies that self-reliant moderns could only ever relate to the biblical texts in terms of a “negative bond.” Moreover, some of the basic ways Strauss represents this formal negativity or difference between modern interpreters and their premodern or mythological others have been described. Likewise, it is worth repeating that we have begun to see how Strauss’s comparisons frequently remain stuck in a positivistic opposition between supernatural and natural modes of explanation that (like the faith and science of the Kantians) he and Hegel both criticize. Despite his wonderful suggestions, Strauss himself does not submit this fundamental distinction to a radically reflexive critique or historicizing analysis. Despite himself, therefore, Strauss’s use of the category of the natural (as the sphere of immanent cause and effect) simply repeats the pretensions of the rationalist distinction between (universal) structure and mythological ornament. While he gestures toward a more radically reflexive mode of thought, he does not generally explore the possibility in great detail. This suggests, of course, that one could repeat Strauss, as it were, while simultaneously moving well beyond the limitations of his otherwise radically reflexive project. Chapter 2 does this by repeating at a more basic level the question with which we began chapter 1. If it is the case that the selfreliant modern can only relate to the biblical texts as a foreign or nonmodern medium, how does Strauss present this otherness in a convincing manner here at the midpoint of the nineteenth century? How, in other words, [ 65 ]

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does modernity produce this other in order to disavow it and thereby to render itself autonomous through this disavowal? How does modernity imagine religion at this point so that it can thereby imagine into existence its own secularity? On the one hand, Strauss’s autonomous modernity must necessarily relate itself to biblical texts only by means of a bond of negativity, gap, rupture, or “sense of repulsion.” This leaves us to wonder about the way this negative bond links itself to modernity by way of an umbilical cord that responds to the modern needs of a system of everyday communication—and the blockages or dangers such an order finds obsolete and unacceptable. To follow the reflexive analysis beyond Strauss’s own, there must be a modern thematic of otherness with which his own descriptions of the foreignness of early Christian experience participates. If so, what are the modern habits of everyday communication that organize such motifs? Though it does indeed push Strauss’s writings well beyond anything he was aware of, chapter 2 is a fairly straightforward repetition of Strauss’s own interests in reflexive or second-order interpretations. In short, what about modernity will stand in for the otherness of early Christianity? Or, to repeat Strauss more closely, what about modernity will stand in for that with which modernity cannot identify? Such are the questions of an “auto-immune” disorder that Derrida has rightly diagnosed in modern critical thought’s relationship to religion. Their answer, in this case, can only take us to the performative heart of Strauss’s biblical interpretation and to that ambiguously ancient/ modern otherness his secularizing biblical scholarship designates as “ancient myth production.” With the exploration of this disconcerting, nonmodern, or foreign pulse constitutive of Strauss’s “myth production,” we will find ourselves, once more, alongside the movements and mechanics of modern mass media and in the grip of a “dialectic of enlightenment” that has not yet registered itself within academic discussions of religion. The unfinished project of modernity is precisely this: to recognize that we have manufactured or imagined secularity as much as we ever manufactured or imagined religion. Indeed, with modern reflexivity one cannot imagine the one without the other, and we must now consider the ways in which philosophy and biblical studies allow us to glimpse a crucial mechanism of autoimmunity whereby the production of an excluded religious other produces the sense of modernity’s presence or self-same identity, as if it had arrived, at last, in all its simple stability or undeniable givenness.

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The Mechanics of (Dis)Enchantment: Nietzsche and D. F. Strauss on the Production of Religious Texts in the Age of Industrial Media

“In the life of peoples [Leben der Völker], as of individuals, there are times when that which we have long wished and striven for confronts us in so strange a shape [in so fremder Gestalt] that we do not recognize it, and even turn away from it in displeasure and resentment. So it was with the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866 and its consequences. It brought to us Germans what we had wanted for so long, but it did not bring it in the way we had wanted, and therefore a large part of the German Volk shoved it away from themselves.”1 Strauss’s image here is a standard Hegelian topos about the disenchantment, we might say, of getting what you pay for, and there is no better place to begin to understand the esthetic demands informing Strauss’s secularizing biblical criticism than some of the clues found in this statement. Included in a public letter to Ernest Renan, the evocation of an uncanny return on an investment seems appropriate for the occasion. Strauss’s letter presents a tale of failed political hopes and repeated military conflict between the French and Germans, conflicts over which these wellknown literary figures (Strauss laments dramatically) were not in charge. Indeed, salting his rhetoric with every clue that the public audience of this open letter should consider Strauss himself to be a literary giant, the German biblical scholar confides to Renan—one author of a wildly popular life-of-Jesus work to another—a frustration with his own inability to govern the course of such national conflicts.2 The link between authorial production and military conquest, therefore, is not incidental, and Strauss consistently intertwines literary and military history in his discussion of the present European crisis: “Since the epoch of Richelieu and Louis XIV, France has been accustomed to play the [ 67 ]

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first role among European nations, and in this claim she was strengthened by Napoleon I.”3 This role, Strauss continues, was “based on her strong politico-military organization and, even more, on the classical literature” produced by France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Strauss, of course, immediately contests the hegemony of this politicalmilitary-literature complex by adding that the French dominance had, as its “immediate condition,” the “weakness of Germany” at the time. Given the occasion of Strauss’s piece (1870, after a French military defeat), it is not surprising that he goes on to assert that this weakness had been shaken off toward the end of the eighteenth century and that it existed no longer. The signal of this transformation within the European national hierarchy, therefore, is described as a recent military victory—and the fact that nineteenth-century Germany had “produced a literature; it gave to the world a succession of poets and thinkers, who took their place by the side of the French classics.”4 Strauss’s description of national culture, invariably linked to a zero-sum struggle for European domination, continually oscillates between literary and military productions. This oscillation between the material and spiritual poles of cultural progress is, in fact, the basis for Strauss’s intriguing presentation of a moment of disenchantment in which modern society refuses to identify with the expression of its own processes, in this case by rejecting the expression as being merely mechanical or merely material. Strauss’s text is quite clear that one of the cherished expressions of culture, the greatness of its literary monuments, is in danger here, as if the spiritual with which modernity wants to identify were being usurped by the material and its external or mechanistic productions. In the case of the latest war between these nations, Strauss suggests, “We had hoped to work out the unity of Germany from the popular idea, from the popular desire, from the thoughts of its best men. Now it was by the action of the de facto powers, by blood and iron, that we saw the road cut out.”5 Elsewhere (see below) Strauss describes this material-mechanical inversion of spiritual-literary cultural production as the appearance of the literary giant’s dreaded “other self,” a kind of mechanistic double that inverts the value of literary production or spiritual achievement. Such statements in Strauss should be read against Friedrich Kittler’s exploration of the mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon in which the geistlich productions of great authors begin to appear as having as much to do with electric lines and a mechanized industrialism as they do with the private expressions of great individual souls.6 Here, for example, the appearance of this authorial

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double threatens to unplug the aura from the very position Strauss himself hopes to fill, that of the great author whose literary productions actualize the most authentic spiritual longings of the people. Small wonder, then, that Strauss (who considered his own writings to have achieved the status of “modern classics”) suggests that, “in the life of nations, as in individuals,” the allegedly soulish expression of a collective culture sometimes “presents itself to us in so strange a shape” that we cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge it as our own. What else could the (supposedly) great national author do but turn away when the “thoughts of its best men” seem to have been replaced by the force of “blood and iron” in the establishment of “culture”? Strauss’s letter does not fully explore the tension among the productions of the modern author, the recognition of this individual’s greatness by popular opinion, and the “blood and iron” that threaten the entire spiritual circuit with its phantom double in the form of a mechanized shape with which no one wants to identify. However, the image of a double that threatens modern authorial production with its (mechanistic or industrial) undoing remains a frequent motif within his cultural, literary, and—most important for our purposes—biblical interpretation. As we began to see in chapter 1, with the emergence of the modern newspaper industry, Strauss and Hegel alike found themselves dreaming of a kingdom to come, ambiguously modern and secular or ancient and religious, as if the technological history of modernity were destined to generate ambivalent collective fantasies of itself and its nonmodern “other.” This chapter follows this line of thinking into Strauss’s New Testament interpretation by comparing the way he and Nietzsche use the notion of a mechanistic, automatic, and unconscious literary production to disparage the esthetic value of a given text. Narrations of biblical scholarship have never analyzed this esthetic backdrop against which secularizing authors like Strauss made sense of their devaluations of biblical literature, but such analysis is a necessary component of the efforts of someone like Strauss to declare the New Testament Gospels as “mythical” productions. To foreshadow the analysis to follow, Strauss’s “mythical mode of interpretation” is above all a way of representing the mechanisms of early Christian text production, a mode of production he describes as collective, automatic, or unconscious and therefore not of the order of “normal” individual perception or memory.7 Like Nietzsche, moreover, Strauss gambles on the fact that a self-respecting modern individual will not identify with this form of textual production. On the contrary, both Strauss and

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Nietzsche will gamble on the fact that no one will identify with this unconscious, collective, or automatic mode of writing but that they all will turn from it in a moment of profound disenchantment, just as Strauss assumed that a “spiritually” inclined or “literary” audience would hesitate to identify its inner treasure with crassly material or military victories, the “blood and iron” of cultural progress. This type of analysis is profoundly significant for our understanding of the struggle to determine religion within the modern period and the strange “dialectic of enlightenment”—that transformation of myth into modern critique and vice versa—to which such determinations remain susceptible. At stake is nothing less than the fundamental question of why and how religion or secularity appeared as they did within this period. Why and how did these categories make sense, or why and how did they invoke from modernity such trust, such solidity, or such faith? For Strauss the recognition of the foreign, nonmodern mode of production at the heart of the biblical texts becomes the point of access for a mass reading public who would be liberated from its thrall to a heteronymous biblicism. Such was the idea. But how does one perform a secularizing critique of ancient religious texts amidst the mid-nineteenth-century book market? Or, to borrow from terminology considered in chapter 1, how does one invoke rhetorically the “sense of repulsion” that is the entry fee for a liberated modernity’s mode of relating to the Bible? What is the aisthe¯sis of (dis)enchantment? As he does with modern authors in the letter to Renan, Strauss frequently negotiates this terrain by invoking a disconcerting “other self ” of the individual authors who wrote biblical books. Leaning on the literary judgment that biblical texts are not the production of a self-possessed individual but, rather, the automatic writing of a transcriber of collective desires, the biblical texts are thus rendered “nonmodern,” not a cultural production with which modernity will identify and, therefore, not a valuable piece of literature for us. Moreover, despite their profound differences, in these depictions of an unconscious or automatic textual production, Strauss’s biblical criticism sounds just like the young Nietzsche’s critique of other moderns. Both disparage the value of a piece of literature by showing that it was produced not by the self-collected individual or the great literary genius transported into the freely producing realm of nature. Instead, the production is represented as having been made by a mass-produced individuality whose transports are not into nature but into the mechanistic or automatic rhythms of the industrial age and the “blood and iron” that threaten authentic cultural production.

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Strauss’s (Post-Christian) Community to Come The circuits within which the inversion of spiritual and material culture will occur—or within which purveyors of literature will disavow certain textual productions as foreign, mechanistic, or inauthentic—can be shown more thoroughly by looking at one of Strauss’s later writings, The Old Faith and the New (1872). This is the primary object of Nietzsche’s criticisms in the Untimely Meditations, and the philosopher finds in this work an indication that the very physiology of the bourgeois soul has been colonized by the markets and mass productions of print in the age of industrialization. Nietzsche’s response to the text is crucial, though it is helpful to explore some of the motifs in Strauss’s own work before the philosopher’s “untimely” critique is considered. Both pieces exemplify the “dialectic of enlightenment” in which the value and function of religion and modern secularity are inverted. Likewise, both writings lay bare the modern communicative circuits within which such inversions are mediated. The Old Faith and the New, for example, presents a politicized diagnosis of contemporary religion in terms of a newspaper industry whose potential for mass reorganization gripped Strauss with a conviction that mass media could give birth to a community to come, freed from its thrall to—and organizational influence of—the biblical Volksbuch. Like Hegel, Strauss articulates this secularizing transformation in a Pauline mode, proclaiming a new liberation from the letter of Christianity through the power of a new spiritual medium—the newspaper. Like Hegel’s descriptions of a Gutenberg modernity, Strauss’s would-be secularizing text becomes, therefore, fraught with irony as its descriptions of modern mass communications are deployed within the frame of an early Christian tableau. Nowhere is this play of doubles more striking in The Old Faith and the New than when the destroyer of faith finds himself dreaming of being a country parson. Having imagined himself into the initial scenario, Strauss jumps from one phantasmatic Christian assembly to another, where he and his readers become virtually present in order to “assist in thought at the Christian festivals in a Protestant church.”8, 9 Lest we, the educated public to whom the book is addressed, become disoriented by the fantasy, our guide informs us that the minister is to be imagined as acquainted with “contemporary science” (der heutigen Wissenschaft) and, indeed, an exponent of the “latest, mildest, most modern and simultaneously concrete form” (neuesten, mildesten, modernsten, und zugleich in concreter Gestalt) of Christianity. Strauss’s thought experiment, therefore, is to “see whether we can

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still be sincerely and naturally edified” by these meetings, or whether “we” must admit that Christianity belongs to a community (Gemeinschaft) whose moods (Stimmungen) are no longer “our” own, even in this modern guise. This question (and its negative answer) is the major structuring device of The Old Faith and the New, and Strauss directs it, like the fifth edition of his Das Leben Jesu (subtitle: für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet), to an anonymous group of middle-class readers.10 The “we” on this virtual scene, however, are not here to listen: “How will this man—or we, if we put ourselves in his place—set to work, and what must the chain of his reasoning necessarily be, even if he does not care to give expression to everything?”11 Assisting in thought, now by standing in for the preacher, Strauss vicariously sets himself to work, imagining the possible satisfactions to be had if “we” were the country parson. Strauss first imagines the minister making use of accommodating hints about religion, desiring to say without saying that which he does not want to “express fully.” “At Christmas he will tell himself, and perhaps also hint to the informed among his audience, that the miraculous birth and the virgin mother are utterly out of the question” or beyond the pale of acceptability for a modern. Later, at the Epiphany celebration, “such a minister would again have to make a clearance . . . to eliminate the gospel narrative as a Messianic myth.”12 During Easter, Strauss imagines the minister to be caught between the opposing desires of the community to which he (and “we”) phantasmatically speak(s). His audience, divided now between “the old-fashioned believers” (die Altgläubigen) and “the more advanced” (die Fortgeschrittenen), equally desires the minister to satisfy its longing. In this case, there is no exit from the dilemma. The minister (and the virtual words that have become the object of a conflicted longing) will necessarily leave someone “unsatisfied” (unzufriedener). Cycling through the Christian calendar and its scenes of staged desire, Strauss imagines them serially until, “now,” he suggests in peculiar prose, “I think we have reached the end.”13 “And the result? Our answer to the question with which we have headed this section of our account? Shall I still give a distinct statement, and place the sum of all we have said in round numbers under the account? Most unnecessary, I should say; but I would not, on any consideration, appear to shirk even the most unpalatable word. My conviction, therefore, is, if we would not evade difficulties or put forced constructions upon them, if we would have our yes yes, and our no no—in short, if we would speak as honest, upright men, we must confess [so müssen wir bekennen] that we are no longer Christians.”14 The virtual demand of this imaginary scene brings this account to a close with [ 72 ]

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a confession, though what account is thus settled, and what details must be disregarded for the sake of Strauss’s round numbers, remains to be seen. Strauss, for example, was a country parson at one time, and his failure to do at that time what he imagines himself doing in The Old Faith and the New makes his post-Christian heroics here more than a little affected.15 In light of Hegel’s description of the goal of academic biblical research as the installation within the individual of a “religious sense” whose criterion of distastefulness comes to direct the public, it is interesting to see that Strauss’s confessional scene is similarly reflected or staged as an answer to the desire of another, the anonymous public categorized only according to whether or not it has within itself the requisite religious sense of repulsion that indicates education. The anonymity of this other, whose desire governs the meaningfulness of Strauss’s confession here, is distinguishable only as educated or not. Like Hegel, as we have seen, Strauss too assumes a profound link between religion and the everyday reading practices of the middle class, something that will become the focus of Nietzsche’s critique of Strauss’s exposition of a post-Christian religion. Nietzsche’s reading is illuminating, and we must not miss that the structure of Strauss’s parson fantasy, in which he articulates the desire of the middle-class reader and disavows the faith of the Altgläubigen, is really a kind of phantasmatic crystallization of a dominant feature of The Old Faith and the New as a whole—an obsession with public opinion found in newspaper articles, imagined newspaper readers, and newspaper reviews. In the preface to The Old Faith and the New, appended after its initial release, Strauss tells his readers that the furor evoked by this latest work is nothing new to him. Indeed, his Das Leben Jesu Kritisch Bearbeitet had caused such a scandal that he lost his job at the University of Tübingen. Strauss was, at this more recent outbreak, “pained” by the turn of public opinion, voiced in the newspapers, even by the “educated middle party.”16 After the initial turmoil of his work on Jesus, he points out, “people had gradually accustomed themselves to meet me with some degree of respect; on many sides I was even done the unsolicited honor of being ranked as a sort of classical writer of prose.”17 Still, the now-recognized classical writer assures us, “this new tone of the press is nothing new at all to me; rather it is the very first greeting I received when I entered on my literary career with the Life of Jesus.” Strauss takes the entire complex as a sign: “That I observe the same tone now, when I am approaching the goal, is for me a sign that, unlike many a literary veteran, I am unchanged, and that I have persisted in the line of my vocation.” Strauss has fought the good fight, completing the [ 73 ]

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race set out in his calling, which remained unchanged. The gesture conceals, of course, the way the virtual minister of Strauss’s late fantasy performs the actions that Strauss himself could not do when he was, in fact, a young country parson. Perhaps he had simply grown tired of waiting for that coming community in whose name he so often spoke. If he had attempted to speak deferentially and with two voices at the beginning of his career, by the end of it he would reject all such attempts as bound to fail: “In short, unless backed by accomodatio, by disguise and secrecy, by manifold deception, in a word by falsehood, such compromises are bound to fail.”18 Strauss adds, “In politics compromise is indispensable; but there it does not of necessity imply deceit or falsehood, because in political affairs we are not concerned about convictions but about measures, not about the true but about the useful.”19 The minister, Strauss, and the educated “we” the author envisions accompanying him along his virtual tour are urged to stay awake to the potential liberations at stake in his/their/our criticism of the Bible, voicing a standard nineteenth-century desire to replace theology with anthropology: “we must become and remain clearly conscious of the untenable character of these notions, so that we shall be compelled to look for and find the firm grounds of our moral conduct in man’s nature as known to us, and not in any pretended superhuman revelation.”20 Like Strauss’s Gabriel, the pretended revelation of the Bible as a whole comes from a foreign, exilic source and must therefore be rejected in the name of the knowledge that belongs to us rather than treated as an acceptable accommodation or simulation of the true. The Bible itself becomes an obstruction to knowing as we know, in our way, as emerging moderns. A return from exile is, however (as it always seems to be), on the way, and Strauss hopes to lend his voice, and his notoriety in the popular press, to the re-collecting of the now scattered community. Strauss’s descriptions of this coming community are, throughout, intimately linked to the organizing power of an emergent mass media, and not simply because he seems (much to Nietzsche’s disdain) to be obsessed with mentioning and answering articles written about him in a panoply of newspapers. Strauss will send out the proclamation to come out from among the sleeping, unknowing mass to cast off one’s thrall to the antiquated and dissimulating Volksbuch in the name of a gathering force that cannot fail: “We have public address [den öffentlichen Vortrag], and above all else, we have the newspaper [die Presse].”21 If the Bible itself must be disavowed as a foreign medium that cannot [ 74 ]

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provide the requisite participation of a free community to come, such is not true of the newspaper: It is through this latter medium that I now try to communicate with the rest of my We [mit meinen Wir]. This medium is quite sufficient for all those purposes which we at present can have in view. For a new formation [ein Neubildung]—not of a church, but, after the latter’s ultimate decay, a new organization of the ideal elements in the life of the people [im Völkerleben]—the time seems to us not yet to have arrived. But neither do we wish to repair or prop up the old structures, for we discern in these a hindrance to the process of reorganization. We would only exert our influence so that a new growth should in the future develop of itself from the inevitable dissolution of the old. For this end—communication without formal organization [eine Verständigung ohne Verein]—an inspiriting through the free word will suffice.22

Fluent in Pauline metaphor that doubles as the newness of the Neuzeit, Strauss suggests that the liberating word is not far away, sealed and separated in an allegedly heavenly book, but is near Strauss’s “we,” on their lips—and in their newspapers. By means of this inspiriting medium, “communication without formal organization,” modernity finds itself in the presence of a kind of eschatological talking cure that will elude the dead ends of previous social formations. We have the inspiriting power of free speech—and above all, he tells us, “We have the newspaper.” The apocalypticism of mass media was not new to Strauss. Years earlier, in his Sechs Theologisch-Politische Volksreden (1848), Strauss had recognized the free press to be one of the politicotheological “signs and wonders” whose appearance indicated the arrival of a new age for which the “fathers and forefathers” of the people had long awaited.23 Nietzsche does not miss the way Strauss’s secular confession of the death of Christianity in the hearts of the middle-class readership begins to double as the proclamation of a new, post-Christian gospel. Nor will he forget that this ambiguously ancient/modern euangelion extends its pneumatic reach by way of the serial repetitions and expanding markets of the popular print industry, something Strauss misrecognizes as communication without organizational form. The young Nietzsche, in fact, calls upon the apotropaic resources of a counterreligion by which he might resist the otherwise implacable organizing force of this new spirit, a counterreligion that will necessarily announce itself as an alternative articulation of the body in mass media. This was the only space of resistance, perhaps, against what Strauss in The Old Faith and the New had already begun to refer to as the [ 75 ]

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“inward preparation” (innere Vorbereitung) through which his cherished industrialized medium had already begun to draw to itself a new humanity.24 Nietzsche maintains no illusions about such turns of phrase and interprets them literally as the physiological effects of the popular print industry on the nervous system of the middle-class reader.

New Media and the Physiology of Faith Nietzsche, who knew something about modern cultural transformations that reconfigured basic features of the academic interpretation of ancient culture, responded to Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New with a vigorous critique.25 In his “untimely” reflection on the topic, Nietzsche begins, significantly, by lamenting the way, as he describes it, “public opinion in Germany [Die öffentliche Meinung in Deutschland] seems almost to forbid discussion of the evil and perilous consequences of a war, and especially of one that has ended victoriously.”26 Worse, this prohibition of everyday speech is reflected back into “those writers who know no more important opinion” than this so-called public opinion and who write, therefore, in such a way that the public will attentively listen to its own messages returning to them, as if from the pen of another. The war in question, once again, is the War of 1870, and the author who will bear the brunt of Nietzsche’s suspicions about the surreptitiously organized complicity among the print industry, text production, and a docile readership is David Friedrich Strauss. Nietzsche’s suspicions here, in the essay “David Strauss, Writer and Confessor” (der Bekenner und der Schriftseller), arise in view of the way Strauss’s work in The Old Faith and the New was being praised, often by Strauss himself, as a modern classic. While the essay is carefully crafted to play on Strauss’s fascination with the newspaper network within The Old Faith and the New, the philosopher’s comments are another crucial clue with which we can understand the esthetic strategies of Strauss’s secularizing portrayal of early Christian writings as a nonmodern (and, thereby, heteronomous) form of myth. Both Nietzsche and Strauss, for example, use the notion of a self-affirming circuit linking public opinion and authorial production to discredit the value of an otherwise literary work, Strauss in relation to early Christianity’s Gospels and Nietzsche in relation to Strauss’s writings about modern religion. Once in play, of course, the ancient-modern or religiosecular mirror game—the giddy inversion of another dialectic of enlightenment—quickly spins out of control. Nietzsche’s statement that the whole society had been transformed [ 76 ]

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into an ear for the hearing of the voice of public opinion establishes several motifs (and several Hegelian topoi) that he lampoons throughout the essay. Here the imagined mediating link between public opinion and its merely repetitive or self-reduplicating enunciation in an “author” is the serialized industrial productions of the newspaper industry. Similarly, for Nietzsche, Strauss’s success as an author is a perfect example of this absurd solipsistic relay, his status as a modern classical writer of prose becoming an indication of a degenerating circuit thus linking the newspaper, common opinion, and a truncated ability of the German academy to recognize greatness. Nietzsche had read Strauss’s book on Jesus and, we are told, stopped taking communion the same year.27 Later he would make sure to distance himself from the suggestion that he experienced (like so many of his contemporaries) a profound shock at first reading the book: “My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs [Strauss’s work on Jesus].”28 Elsewhere Nietzsche suggests that he had “become too serious” for the biblical analysis of Strauss’s work, dismissing it as a hopelessly complex sorting of legends in search of ever-elusive historical facts. In the polemics of the “untimely” essay, however, Nietzsche suggests that something much more insidious than secularity is articulating itself through Strauss’s writings, something capable of putting the “German spirit” (deutschen Geist) at risk even of “extermination” (ja Exstirpation). This risk he associates both with Strauss’s fascination with the newspaper and what he calls a thoughtless, one-sided praise of the “German Reich,” a designation Nietzsche sets apart in quotation marks. There is thus, for Nietzsche, something pathological, even insanely selfdestructive about the ready-made self-assurances of the public opinion circuit with which he associates the success of Strauss as an author. One of the most intriguing aspects of the essay, and one that fits with our focus on the mediological inversions of religious and secular identities, is the way Nietzsche does not differentiate sharply between premodern religious experience and that of modernity’s sense of the world in terms of its advanced telecommunications and mass media. Nietzsche explores, in fact, the religious dimensions of journalism, novel production, and the emergence of new folk songs, tragic drama, or forms of history writing, despite the fact that these religioindustrial productions of culture may be described as being “authored” by industrial “manufacturers” (Roman-, Tragödien-, Lied- und Historienfabrikanten).29 In short, Nietzsche will read Strauss’s new religion in a way that presages McLuhan’s investigations of the “folklore of indus[ 77 ]

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trial man.”30 The implications are clear enough in relation to Strauss’s proclamation of a “new” post-Christian faith: For these are evidently a society belonging together [eine zusammengehörige Gesellschaft] which seems to have sworn itself to take possession of the leisure and ruminative hours of modern man, which is to say, his “cultural moments” [“Kulturmomente”], and in these to stun him with printed paper [und ihn diesen durch bedruktes Papier zu betäuben]. Since the war, in this society all is happiness, dignity and self-awareness [Selbstbewusstsein]. After such “successes of German culture” it feels itself [sie fühlt sich] not merely confirmed and sanctioned, but almost sacrosanct, and it therefore speaks more solemnly, loves to address itself to the German people, produces collected editions in the manner of the classics, and even employs those world-wide periodicals [Weltblättern] which stand at its service to proclaim individuals from its midst as the new German classics [die neuen Deutschen Klassiker] and model writers.31

The entire network, it seems, has become a self-organizing structure that senses itself (and itself as sacrosanct), addresses itself, and produces monuments of itself. Nietzsche will decline the service of this self-admiring and relaxed deity, and he will see in its very smooth functioning the evidence that it is itself the mere simulacrum of culture. After all, wherever an individual of such a society turns, he “finds all public institutions, schools and cultural and artistic bodies organized in accordance with his kind of cultivation and in the service of his requirements.”32 Against this manufactured production of shared culture, Nietzsche suggests that society has become a docile, complacent fake that can install within its circuit only a sham individuality. Sharing is indeed among individuals, but it is a sharing that results from being installed within this carefully organized flow of production and reception that turns the Germans into a single body, an it that finds itself mumbling to itself—and only about itself. However, the cultural philistine (Bildungsphilister) thus produced finds so many others just like him that he is doubly deluded into thinking that the imprint of this serial identity points to a truly shared culture.33 So much for Strauss’s communication without organizational form. In other words, the paradox of this modern individuality is that it is, in effect, a serial anonymity that installs itself within almost everyone, a no one that makes us all someone. Like Hegel, Nietzsche points out that this aporetic installation job relies on modern structures of education and the mass circulation of mass-produced texts. It is in the industrialized harmony established by these two producers of culture that there exists the experience of sharing [ 78 ]

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in which “structured” or “educated” (Gebildeten) individuals recognize in so many other people and products “identical reproductions” (gleichförmigen Gepräge) of themselves.34 Nietzsche calls this prefabricated harmony a “unity of style” and “a bond of tacit conventions” (das Band einer stillschweigenden Konvention) whose emanations are mediated by the newspaper and registered “especially in religion and art.”35 The philosopher goes on to suggest that, within this circuit, and in the writings of Strauss, there is no possibility of any “real experience” (wirklichen Erfahrung) or “of any original insight into humanity.”36 Strauss’s writings, and the information storage potentials of his beloved newspaper relay, permit no genuinely human engagement with existence as such. Instead, as Nietzsche informs, Strauss’s writings perfectly mirror his “inspiriting” medium, a reflection the philosopher sees in Strauss’s “tattered memory and incoherent personal experience,” a kind of being in the world of “the sort found in the newspapers.”37 The statement is all the more remarkable as it is almost verbatim (minus the newspaper reference) the same as Strauss’s criticisms of the New Testament Gospels as forms of cultural memory. The esthetic distaste hovering over both texts will be the same—a sense of repulsion with which the modern (individual) cannot bring himself to identify. Once the analyses of mass-produced individuality by Hegel and Nietzsche come to the fore, many of the more recent approaches to Strauss in terms of the history of ideas may be cast in a remarkably different light. Consider, for example, the way Strauss contends for a particular reception of Hegel that would, in effect, appropriate traditional theologoumena for anthropology, a move typically called Strauss’s “left-wing Hegelianism.” As is well known, Strauss argued that the universal could not possibly have been contained in a single historical personality, Jesus, to the exclusion of others (namely, modern humanity). Against F. C. Baur, therefore, Strauss asserts that Jesus should not be thought to participate any more than other individuals in the universal or divine. He writes: “I deny only the way it [ecclesiastical tradition] finds this divine humanity to be realized perfectly in Christ and merely imperfectly in all other humans. To me an outpouring of the total fullness of the idea into one individual, and a stinginess toward the rest, is incompatible with the way the idea is otherwise realized. Given every difference in the portion of the idea in individuals, it still realizes itself in such a manner that each individual in turn needs to be complemented through others.”38 Rehearsing the movements of Hegel’s dialectic of sense certainty in terms of the individual, Strauss argues against the philosopher and Hegel [ 79 ]

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biographer Karl Rosenkranz in a similar vein, suggesting that the latter misses the basic equality between all individuals, an equality that appears necessarily to make anonymous, empty, or merely formal every instance of the individual, including the so-called great personality. In a wonderful repetition of the print industry’s serial reproduction of the individual, Strauss asserts that the idea of an individual Jesus participating any more than any other individual in the divine “rests on the confusion of the single and a single.”39 Strauss agrees with Rosenkranz that individuality is the privileged expression of Geist, but, he asserts, this privileged site is necessarily an empty or formal site of an anonymous subjectivity. Given the way Nietzsche and Hegel argue (and as Strauss frequently seems to assume) that such a formal or anonymous subjectivity is an effect of a mass media plugging into education, we must assume that the everyday reading practices of the mid-nineteenth-century print industry constitute that experience, which makes the idea of the great individual “incompatible with the way the idea is otherwise realized.” The history-of-ideas approach to nineteenth-century religion always misses the way religious discourse could be read otherwise as media theory. To return to Nietzsche’s essay with these questions in mind, it is worth noting that Nietzsche finds himself longing for the veil, the strangeness, and the decidedly nonpublic aspects of a religious mode of experience, as if such were the only protection from the installation of this serialized subjectivity. He even opposes Strauss’s manufactured “confession” of a “new religion” by an appeal to a “confession” of his own, an euangelion he designates as the “confession of the individual.” Thus, if Strauss’s new religion is a kind of manufactured cultural simulacrum, the horrific obverse of “real” cultural unity, Nietzsche cites German religion as providing a point of exit from this self-feeding labyrinth. He suggests that not only the orthodox but “every individual German, insofar as he is a theological sectarian by nature and invents his own strange private theology so as to be able to dissent from every other,” has grounds to resist the otherwise “inspiriting power” and “inward preparation” of Strauss’s new religion. Moreover, in light of Strauss’s use of the newspaper esthetic to dismiss the biblical texts, it is worth adding that Nietzsche’s galled reaction to Strauss likewise extends to the intrusion of modern massified opinion into the biblical texts: “Our philistine chieftain is indeed brave with words to the point of rashness whenever he believes he will give delight to his noble ‘we’ through such bravery. Thus, the asceticism and self-abnegation of the saints and hermits of old may count as a form of Katzenjammer [or day-after hangover], Jesus may be described as a visionary who would in our day hardly escape the [ 80 ]

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madhouse, the story of the resurrection may be called a ‘piece of world-historical humbug’—let us for once let all this pass, so that we may study the singular courage of which Strauss, our ‘classic philistine,’ is capable.”40 In the face of Strauss’s public, and publicly mediated, monstrosity, Nietzsche presents himself as longing for the veil, even the reveiling, of early Christian texts against the texture-destroying blurbs and public packaging of Strauss the newspaper man. He calls on the potential resistance of a kind of religion, the veil of a “strange private theology,” in order to oppose the newspaper circuit he sees organizing, inspiriting, and exterminating the German spirit.41 Nietzsche, therefore, is attentive throughout to the way Hegel and Strauss consistently refer to religion in terms of communicative formations. Indeed, when in The Will to Power fragments Nietzsche suggests that a kind of “Buddhist” pessimism rather than Christianity may be of invaluable significance for a genuine cultural achievement, it is no wonder that he immediately adds, “We feel contemptuous of every kind of culture that is compatible with reading, not to speak of writing for, newspapers.”42 Religion in these texts just is a socially organized form of communication, and the body’s relatedness to or mediation of information becomes, in turn, religious.43 If Strauss presents himself as one who has his ear to the ground, making bold to tell the horrifying secret of a polite society by disclosing the otherness of early Christianity, Nietzsche finds in Strauss yet another shabby author whose ear has been “imprinted” by the banal medium of industrialized print production: How is it possible that, given the limitless experimentation with language everyone is permitted to indulge in, certain individual authors nonetheless discover a universally agreeable tone of voice? What is it really that is here so universally agreeable? For the greater part of what Germans of today reads undoubtedly comprises the newspapers and the magazines that go with them: the language here employed, a ceaseless drip of the same locutions and the same words, imprints itself on his ear, and since they usually reads this literature at times when their wearied mind is in any case little capable of resistance, their ear for language gradually comes to feel at home in these everyday Germans and is pained when it notices its absence.44

Yes, Strauss is attuned to the secrets of modernity, Nietzsche implies, though the secret in view for the philosopher is the devastating force of the mass media to organize and imprint the very sensory organs. Nietzsche, while he condemns the use of neologisms and industrial metaphors in [ 81 ]

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Strauss, also speaks of a kind of machinistic production of culture. He describes the work of Strauss and the other “manufacturers of these newspapers,” these “day laborers” in the world of literature as those whose work represents a kind of pseudoproductive force that must supplement its own inability to create (and the boredom that ensues) with neologisms. Significantly in light of Hegel’s suggestions about print media, everyday speech, and the transformation of religion, Nietzsche links Strauss’s fascination with the print industry to his interests in Hegelian philosophy. Even in Strauss’s later writings, Nietzsche tells us, “it is still noticeable that in his youth he stuttered Hegelian.”45 As we might expect, for Nietzsche, such an engagement is not without lasting deleterious effect: “something in him became dislocated at the time, some muscle got stretched; his ear became dulled, like the ear of a boy brought up amid the beating of the drums, so that thereafter he became deaf to the subtle and mighty laws of sound under whose rule every writer lives who has been strictly trained to follow good models.” The ears of Strauss were permanently damaged, having become insensitive by the beating of the Hegelian drums—or perhaps by the continuous roar of the electric printing presses that had begun to rumble in Berlin at about the same time as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.46 Strauss, we are told, “if he is not to slip back into the Hegelian mud, is condemned to live out his life on the barren and perilous quicksands of newspaper styles.”47 As suggested already, Nietzsche’s criticisms of Strauss are a kind of shrewd revaluation of Strauss’s own suggestions about the importance of mass media for the emergence of a new community freed from its auratic thrall to a foreign, nonmodern book. Thus Strauss’s self-conscious assertions about the “inspiriting” power of mass media in the gathering of a coming community becomes, in Nietzsche, a threat to the very existence of the German “spirit.” Likewise, Strauss’s enthusiastic description of the potential of the media to produce an “inward preparation” for this liberating event turns into a Nietzschean warning against the disconcerting effects on the nervous system of this new form of industrialized mass communication. These motifs do not stop at the limits of these two texts, however, or even at the edges of Strauss’s “cultural” writings. On the contrary, the description of a flow of disembodied experiences and a self-verifying relay of public opinion that threatens personal experience and authentic expression are both fundamental aspects of the esthetic critique constituting Strauss’s secularizing rendering of early Christian writings. Strauss simply changes the name, calling this process a primitive Christian “myth pro-

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duction.” But we can still hear underneath this name change modernity’s concern to ask itself what is real or authentic amid a fateful realization of its own participation in what McLuhan, once more, called the “folklore of industrialization.” This is extremely significant for an understanding of the performative success of Strauss’s critique of the Christian Volksbuch. With Strauss, the critique of the Bible becomes a kind of staged rumination on the problem of authentic experience in the age of mass communication. If the deists had critiqued the Bible as a failed embodiment of universal ideas or as a poor expression of a rational system, Strauss’s critique would find in the biblical texts the same problems Nietzsche was finding in the massproduced authorial productions of the newspaper age. The same tactic, or cultural gamble, in other words, deploys itself through the critiques of Nietzsche and Strauss, both authors attempting to exorcise the aura of a Volksbuch (whether Strauss’s Bible or Nietzsche’s pseudoclassic Strauss). In both cases, the aura is unplugged by the suggestion that the text in question was, in essence, not produced by an author so much as by a schizophrenic and collective process that renders the productions of the (otherwise) “great author” into a mechanistically or unconsciously produced text against which the self-respecting modern individual will react with the requisite “sense of repulsion.” In short, to repeat it like a report in the electrically run presses of the Allgemeine Zeitung, Strauss’s critique of the Bible should be read as his attempt to allow the Bible to reflect back to modern society its own disconcerting awareness that mass media were changing the basic experience of what it means to be a perceiving, communicating individual. Also crucial for our analysis, therefore, is the paradoxical realization that Strauss will continue to stage this self-awareness as a coming to terms with the nonmodern otherness of early Christian text production—even as he hopes in the inspiriting force of the newspaper to bring about a liberated community to come. Such is the giddy play of mirrors in what Derrida has flagged as the “auto-immune disorder” at work in modern Western thinking about religion. “Religion” and “secularity” are equally thrown out of joint by their being mediated by the same medial grounds constitutive of modern existence. The “inspiriting power” of the newspaper circuit thus emerges as the pharmakon or scapegoat by which this system works. At once the promise of a liberated community to come and the essence of a heteronomy that modernity must reject in order to save itself, the organizing or inspiriting force of the new media appears in all the ambiguity of the best and worst to come.

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Camera Obscura: The Inverted World of Earliest Christian Text Production As we have noted, at the beginning of the fifth edition of Das Leben Jesu (subtitled, in this version, für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet), Strauss dedicates the work to a middle-class reader, knowing there are many others like him, coming home to read after a day of hard work. Moreover, this larger readership for whom the book is addressed consists of those who possess the requisite sense that “there is no security or political progress, at least in Germany, until there is a liberation of Geist from superstition and a concern for a purely human culture [rein humane Bildung].”48 These readers, Strauss hopes, will possess good religious sense, as explicated by Hegel, a requisite sense of repulsion for that which, though it may be in them, is foreign to them and worthy of disavowal. This process, as it was in Hegel, is what constitutes Strauss’s readers as modern: “If antiquity found it valuable to treat nothing as alien to humanity, the watchword of modern times [der neueren Zeit] is to regard everything as alien [Alles als fremd] which is not human and natural.”49 Strauss addresses the work, then, to the German people who are capable of the requisite self-purgation, namely those who toil by day and (he imagines) read biblical scholarship at night. How does Strauss represent the Bible in order to shock this anonymous readership into disavowing it as a heteronymous obstruction to its attainment of a “purely human culture”? What part of the emergent modern self will be disavowed in order to attain, ironically, a liberation to itself? One of the basic techniques used by Strauss to this end involves the idea of an unconscious textual production or an automatic writing that is associated with a nonmodern mode of authorial production. Strauss spends the first half of the book, therefore, explicating a basic biography of Jesus, the very desire for which, he suggests, is thoroughly modern.50 Part two of Das Leben Jesu, however, moves beyond this modern form of reconstruction in order to consider the foreign, nonmodern medium of early Christian textual production as such: “So far we have drawn the rough outlines of a real biography [einer wirklichen Lebensgeschichte] of Jesus, have endeavored to make him as intelligible to us as is possible in the case of a figure [Gestalt] which we view not merely at so remote a distance, but, in the main, through a medium so dim, and one which interrupts the light in a manner so peculiar. We now proceed to decompose the medium itself [dieses Medium selbst zu zerfessen], i.e., to analyze the images [Scheinbilder] visible in it by pointing out the conditions under which they have originated.”51 In the second half of the book, historical reconstruction [ 84 ]

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gives way to media analysis. In this case, the nonmodern medium whose foreign productive depths Strauss hopes to sound is described, above all, as a realm of unconscious production, and it will be the recognition and rejection of this unconscious mode of production that constitutes himself and his middle-class readers as genuinely modern interpreters of the Bible. Like Hegel before him and Schweitzer after him, Strauss describes the acceptance of the Bible’s foreignness as the entry fee for modern subjectivity. Those who continue to construct biographies of Jesus, those who still find in it a Gestalt with which they hope to identify, he suggests, are attempting to resist the high price of modern identity as such. Going beyond these authors of biographies who fail to recognize the foreignness of the productive medium in which the biblical texts emerged, he writes: By this [truly modern] view early Christian myth production [urchristliche Mythenproduction] is placed upon the same footing as that of those which we find in the history of other religions. It is in this, in fact, that the progress which in modern times [in neueren Zeiten] the science of myth has made consists, namely, in having comprehended how the myth, in its original form is not the conscious and intentional invention of an individual but a production of the common consciousness of a people or religious circle [ursprüngliche Gestalt nicht bewusste und absichtliche absichtliche Dichtung eines Einzelnen, sondern Erzeugniss des Gemeinbewusstseins eines Volks oder eines religiösen Kreises], which an individual does indeed first enunciate, but which meets with belief for the very reason that such an individual is but the organ of this universal conviction [nur das Organ der allgemeinen Ueberzeugung ist].52

Small wonder, then, that Nietzsche suspected Strauss’s career (as a popular writer of newspaper articles and lives of Jesus for the German people) of arising from a nervous system imprinted with the rhythms of the newspaper industry’s feedback loop between authorial production and audience reception. Strauss was humming the tune of this refrain even when he considered the origin of ancient religious myth. As Nietzsche had feared, however, it was not just Strauss whose nervous system was being harmonized with the newspaper industry and the myths it produced. Strauss claims it is an awareness of this refrain that constitutes the truly modern breakthrough for the “science of mythology” (die Wissenschaft der Mythologie).53 Going against the conception of myth that had driven the earlier Enlightenment critiques of religion (that myth is the product of a priestly class of deceptive rulers), Strauss continues: “It is not a covering in which a clever man [ein Kluger Mann] clothes an idea which arises in him [die ihm aufgegan[ 85 ]

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gen] for the use and benefit of the ignorant multitude, but it is only simultaneously with the story [nur mit der Geschichte], more, in the very form of the story [ja in der Gestalt der Geschichte] he tells that he becomes conscious of the idea which he is not yet able to apprehend purely as such. ‘The myth,’ says Welcker, ‘arose in the mind [Geist] as a seed springs up springs from the soil: content and form identical, the story a truth [Inhalt und Form Eins, die Geschichte eine Wahrheit].’ ”54 But the new science of myth, as the science of unconscious or automatic textual production, is left with a troubling question about the relation between the conscious intention of the not-so-clever author and the expectations of the masses whose expression his writings are. The closer one gets to the original moment of expression of this feedback loop (in which the author becomes the organ of public opinion), “the more difficult becomes the possibility of conceiving how the authors of such stories could have been unconscious that they were recounting as having happened something that had not really happened, but had been invented by them.”55 The illumination of this strange productive moment, therefore, belongs to the expert in ancient religion and, indeed, to the expert in the ancient production of myth. The uncanny approximation of these poles—a produced myth whose presence cannot be explained by pointing to the conscious intentionality of an author, and an author who finds himself having expressed a collective impulse for the first time—did not sit well with all of Strauss’s critics. Some of them, in fact, found it completely impossible or utterly intolerable, despite Strauss’s implicit warnings about what such a reception of this modern science might imply about the relative modernity of its adherents. In a discussion of his mythical approach to early Christian texts in the fourth edition of The Life of Jesus, Strauss remarked, for example: “If the orthodox were displeased at having their historical faith disturbed by the coming of the enlightening mythical mode [of interpretation], the rationalists were no less indignant to find the web of facts they had so ingeniously woven together ripped through, and all the art of their natural interpretation at once declared useless.”56 If the orthodox wanted the Gospels to present a straightforward set of facts about supernatural events, the rationalists spent their energy trying to explain that biblical texts were embodiments of an original “historical” perception that was, subsequently, burdened by a supernaturalist misinterpretation. The historical shed, for the rationalists, was always waiting to be discovered underneath its unfortunate ornamentation with supernaturalist knickknacks. Both projects, therefore, were immediately threatened by Strauss’s approach, in which there could be an “original” production of a story that could not be explained (whether by [ 86 ]

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a “supernaturalist” or a “naturalist” interpretation) as a product of a prior “perception” or as an invention of a conscious author. Strauss’s negotiation of this opposition is remarkable, as he maintains both that his interpretive assumptions reveal a nonmodern, foreign mode of textual production and that he is simply expressing or making conscious a lurking knowledge that all Europeans must, even if only in secret, acknowledge to be the case. It is difficult to overemphasize this paradoxical knowing of what one is not, as it invites us to the heart of the autoimmune splitting of the modern mediasphere into a “good” and “bad” version of itself, one being disavowed or excluded as nonmodern and heteronymous even as the other seems to incarnate the deepest treasure of modernity itself. Strauss even finds his diagnoses of modernity’s lurking familiarity with what it itself (we are told) is not to be confirmed by slips of the tongue and implicit hesitations among his rationalist opponents. Strauss speaks in the name of a strange mythological mode of production underlying the canonical Gospels, an uncanny guest whose disconcerting and yet undeniable presence is only reluctantly admitted by his interpretive adversaries. He imagines Dr. Paulus, a leading rationalist interpreter, as refusing to represent, even to himself, the troubling productive mode underlying the early Christian Gospels. Unwillingly [nur ungerne] does Dr. Paulus admit to himself the presentiment that the reader of his commentary may possibly exclaim: “Wherefore all this labor to give an historical explanation to such legends [Legenden historisch zu erklären]? How peculiar [wie sonderbar] thus to handle mythi as history, and to attempt to render marvelous fictions intelligible according to the rules of causality [wunderbare Dichtungen nach dem Causalgesetze sich begreiflich will]!” Contrasted with the toilsomeness of his natural explanation, the mythical interpretation appears to this theologian merely as the refuge of mental indolence [Geistesträgheit], which, seeking the easiest method of treating the Gospel history, disposes of all that is marvelous, and all that is difficult to comprehend, under the opaque term mythus and which, in order to escape the labor of disengaging the natural from the supernatural [des Wunderbaren vom Naturlichen], fact from opinion [des Factums vom Urtheil], carries back the whole narration [die ganze Erzählung] into the camera obscura of ancient sacred sagas.57

The passage is revealing of the way Strauss and the rationalist interpreters like Paulus were separated by an epistemic rupture that was, in some sense, undecidable according to the terms of their historiographical inter[ 87 ]

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action. Each appears to be afflicted by a kind of methodological untranslatability in relation to the other, the labor of understanding for one becoming a hopeless waste and detour for the other. Strauss imagines that Paulus must think mythological interpretation a ruse of lazy scholarship or a methodological escape hatch from the true labor of historical reconstruction. Strauss cannot help but wonder whether the rationalists will feel that the mythologists “have simply passed by their paper fortifications without thinking them worth a regular blockade. . . .”58 The difference between the two camps appears to be profound, each receiving back from the other its own message in inverse form, each mode of analysis separated by an abyss. Small wonder, then, that Paulus should have appealed, as if to accuse Strauss, to the disconcerting visual prosthesis of the camera obscura. Their messages are, indeed, completely inverted in the other.59 If Strauss worries that he is seen to be lazy, he pictures Paulus worrying that an acceptance of a mythological mode of interpretation would take him out of the world of common sense in which truth corresponds to simple fact or to authorial, which is to say, conscious, invention. In its place, the rationalist historian would be left to flounder in a topsy-turvy world without orientation. Reading textual production as neither simply fact nor simply opinion, Strauss’s mythological mode seems to surrender all of Paulus’s basic historiographical compass points in exchange for a hopelessly ambiguous web of transitive relations between fact and opinion or reality and the flight of fancy. Paulus thinks Strauss is walking away from historical causality into a kind of madness—and what is the anxiety of the camera obscura but a worry to safeguard the trustworthiness of one’s own eyes? As if to echo the concern elsewhere, Strauss himself calls his method a “peculiar apparatus for causing miracles to vaporize into myths” (eigenthümlichen Apparat, die Wunder mythisch verdampfen zu lassen).60 The very distinction between fact and opinion, the natural and the supernatural was at stake here. As Kittler has pointed out, Vasari’s mistaken association of the invention of the camera obscura with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press was a fortuitously prescient error.61 Here, at least, it is Strauss’s description of the nature of mythological text production that conjures Paulus’s fears that his world of cause and effect, fact and opinion, has been turned upside down. Still trusting his own eyes as a window on the world, Strauss’s focus on the productive media of textual creation and the transitive, ambiguous links among author, audience, and communicated information appeared to Paulus only a kind of madness.

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Paulus’s basic visual plan to perceive the difference between fact and opinion, reality and fantasy, is immediately rendered obsolete by Strauss’s effort to discern the productive matrices or generative mentalité giving rise to the early Christian texts. Paulus’s “rationalist” mode, in fact, will have become instantly outmoded once the structures of this new interpretive desire make themselves felt, once Paulus’s life-long and intensive efforts to distinguish natural events from their detachable interpretations fall before a sense of the transitivity between perceived and perceiver or author and audience that always and already link these oppositional poles in a unified productive bond. By now it is obvious that the transformation of basic categories that separated Paulus from Strauss was not a transformation occurring only within the study of ancient religion. In fact, it is remarkable that Strauss still stages this debate as a debate about ancient Christianity, a staging that is all the more strange as Strauss frequently describes myth production as an otherness of early Christian religion that modernity already knows but does not want to acknowledge. Against this phantasmatic staging and its deferral of the real drama of myth production onto ancient religion, it is better to trust the profound anxiety of Paulus. He, after all, seems to be afraid for his own eyes. He sensed the encroachment of a strange apparatus of perception that would turn the whole world upside down. Or perhaps Paulus merely feigned anxiety, as if he were not himself familiar with the basic inversion or reflection of the individual perception into that of an unconscious collective, the very maneuver he decries in Strauss’s depiction of myth production. In his own Das Leben Jesu (1828), after all, Paulus stages his consideration of the historical individual Jesus by citing statistics regarding the number of people belonging to different sorts of religions around the world. Citing statistics on the number of adherents to monotheistic religions (Jews, Christians, and “Mohammedans”) and polytheistic religions (Lamaites, Bramanists, Buddhists, and fetish worshippers), Paulus claims thus to have brought “before the eyes of all” the crucial rationale for a book-length study of Jesus.62 The subtitle of Paulus’s book, therefore, als Grundlage einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums, is more than a little ironic. While Paulus rejected Strauss’s focus on the unconscious and “opaque” media of early Christian text production as an obfuscating camera obscura, his own quest for a “pure” historical account of the individual Jesus was also making its own detour through the structures and statistics of the mass reception of this individual personality. It would be only a matter of time before a growing awareness of these collective structures, working behind the backs of individual perceptions

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and great personalities alike, would completely topple the enterprise of the search for the “life of Jesus” altogether. Despite his rejection of Strauss, in other words, one can already discern the cracks in the edifice of this scholarly endeavor when even Paulus begins his reconstruction of the great religious individual by quoting population statistics about the number, type, and spread of different religions throughout the world, mass audience reception governing the significance of any search for the “pure” historical individual. Strauss was right: in an age of industrialized media, even Jesus is forced to find himself by way of his dim reflection in the collective. Strauss adds yet another important piece of information about what was at stake in the struggle between these two biblical critics when he claims later that the Gospels are a mere assemblage or a “flood” of disembodied and freely circulating pieces of second-hand experience. As such, they fail to present the reader with discernible human aims whose coherent intentions and experiences might account for the textual product in question.63 The fragmented quality of the biblical texts precludes them from being an appropriate mirror for self-recognition. Providing at best only “fitful glimpses” of Jesus as a coherent personality, the medium in which the memories of Jesus are contained frustrates what Strauss designated as a modern desire to reconstruct a biography of the individual Jesus. With the loss of Jesus as a coherent personality, Strauss adds, he must therefore “remain ineffectual as regards practical influence.”64 Again, the autoimmune disorder at work here should be apparent, as these criticisms will be echoed only a few years later by Nietzsche in relation to Strauss-the-newspaperman, particularly when the philosopher describes the biblical critic as a personification of the disconnected motifs and second-hand experiences one finds in newspapers. Giving voice to the repulsion within that marks the presence of the nonmodern other, voicing the secret everyone knows but will not admit to themselves, Strauss says of the once coherent narratives of the Synoptic Gospels that they allow no space for authentic, human identification: “We see in the first three Gospels what happens to discourses that are preserved in the memory of another and [thus] shaped by their inscription. Severed from their original connection [ursprüngliche Zusammenhang] and split into smaller and smaller fragments . . . when collected they give the appearance of a mosaic in which the connection of the parts is purely external and every transition a leap [ein Sprung ist].”65 Strauss is amazed, in fact, that any of Jesus’s sayings retained their original integrity amid such a medium. In these Gospels, however, the “discourses of Jesus . . . were not dissolved by the flood of oral tradition.”66 These smaller bundles of information did not escape the flood [ 90 ]

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of this medium unscathed, despite the fact that fragments of experience remained intact throughout their incorporation by the stream of secondhand memory. Frequently, Strauss continues, the sayings were “torn from their natural connection, floated away from their original situation, and deposited in places to which they did not properly belong” (wohin sie eigentlich nicht gehörten).67 The Gospels, like Strauss’s own media-induced religion according to Nietzsche, leave an audience with only the “tattered and fragmentary” experience of the sort available to readers of the newspaper. Strauss collects his thoughts about the fragmentary, prosthetic, and even schizophrenic medium in which the Synoptic Gospels came to exist under the name of an epoch he calls mythical. Like Hegel’s medieval or modern periods, though, this epoch is likewise a designation of a mode of information processing or cultural memory that was profoundly modern—and remarkably disconcerting to modern notions or experiences of self-possessed individuality. Given the isomorphisms between this ancient epoch of cultural memory and (among others) Nietzsche’s criticisms of modernity and its mass distribution of texts, it is striking to observe Strauss’s insistence that this phenomenon is a decidedly ancient affair. Consider how Strauss moves from noting the counterintuitive nature of such descriptions to calling on expert testimony from scholars of ancient culture. He begins by presenting what could be read as a basic mid-nineteenth-century notion of ideology (cf. Marx), adding that it is “certainly difficult to conceive, how narratives which thus speak of imagination as reality can have been formed without intentional deceit, and believed without unexampled credulity; and this difficulty has been held an invincible objection to the mythical interpretation of many of the narratives of the Old and New Testament.”68 In order to persuade his orthodox and rationalist opponents of the possibility of such a process, Strauss calls not on theorists of modern culture like Marx or Hegel, however, but experts in the nonlinear and transferential machinations of the nonmodern or ancient religious mind. Indeed, Strauss calls on a recognized authority in respect to mythology, religion, and the productive capacities of the primitive mind: Otfried Müller. Müller, whom Strauss describes as “an experienced researcher of Greek mythology and primitive history [Urgeschichte],” wrote in 1825 a Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie.69 In part because of its role as expert testimony regarding a decidedly nonmodern epoch of text production, Müller’s work plays a pivotal role in Strauss’s attempt to summarize his own method of interpreting biblical texts. Like Strauss, Müller depicts myth production as a foreign social economy in which expectation and experience, desire and reality, or fact and interpretation intertwine in such a [ 91 ]

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way that no clear differentiation of these is possible. Müller, too, suggests that an understanding of this exotic social economy is the distinguishing factor in his specialist ability to understand ancient myth, an ability that separates him from his contemporaries in the study of religion. Relying on the expertise of Müller to bolster his own case, Strauss quotes: “How shall we reconcile this combination of the true and the false [mit dem Factischen Nichtfactisches], the real and the ideal [Ideelles . . . Thatsache], in mythi, with the fact of their being believed and received as truth? The ideal, it may be said, is nothing else than poetry and invention clothed in the form of a narration [als in die Form von Erzählung eingekleidete Dichtung und Erfindung]. But a fiction of this kind cannot be invented at the same time by many different persons without a miracle, requiring, as it does, a peculiar coincidence of intention, representational capacity, and representational mode [ein eigenes Zusammentreffen von Absicht, Darstellungsvermögen und Darstellungsweise].”70

It is this “peculiar coincidence” of authorial production, readerly reception, and medium of transmission that, as we have seen, did indeed strike interpreters like Paulus as the strangest (here: “miraculous”) aspect of the mythical mode of interpretation. Still, the causal or mechanistic modelization of a Paulus and his focus on individual, conscious creations no longer sufficed for Müller. Thus the mythologist rejects the possibility that there existed in the ancient world an individual or “caste of deceivers” who could have convinced others of such fabrications either because of a crass will to domination or through a noble lie constructed for the benefit of the masses. “Hence,” he writes, “an inventor [Ein Erfinder] of the mythus in the proper sense of the word is inconceivable. Where does this reasoning lead us? To no other revelation than that the concept of invention, namely, a free and intentional fabrication, in which the author clothes that which he knows to be false in the appearance of truth, must be entirely set aside as insufficient to account for the origin of the mythus [Entstehung des Mythus].”71 How then does this invention without inventor arise? The answer, both Müller and Strauss will insist again, necessarily takes us to the exotic, nonmodern heart of ancient, religious existence. Revealing the productive core of this nonmodern world in which the madness of the camera obscura reigns, Müller continues: In other words, there is a kind of necessity in this connection between the ideal and the real [Verbindung des Ideellen und Reellen] that constitutes the mythus. The mythical images were formed through a drive which [ 92 ]

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works on all alike. Moreover, the different elements grew together without the author’s being himself conscious of their incongruity. It is this notion of a certain necessity and unconsciousness in the formation of the ancient mythi on which we insist [Es ist der Begriff einer gewissen Nothwendigkeit und Unbewustheit im Bilden der alten Mythen, auf welchen wir dringen]. If this be once understood, it will also be perceived that the contention whether the mythus proceed from one or from many, from the poet or the people, though it may be started on other grounds, does not go to the root of the matter. For if the one, the inventor, of the mythus is only obeying the impulse [nur den Antrieben gehorcht] which acts so upon the dispositions [Gemüther] of the others, hearers, he is but the mouth through which all speak, the skillful interpreter [der gewandte Darsteller] who says what everyone wants to express, the first to give form and expression to the thoughts of all [zuerst Gestalt und Ausdruck zu geben das Geschick].72

Like Nietzsche’s newspaper circuit in which the modern author finds himself merely reflecting back to the reading public its own sense of self, Müller’s ancient myth production is an information network whose transmissions are more important than the individual players and whose movement seems to have no place for the author-as-inventor or solitary genius. Again, however, Strauss bolsters this way of thinking about myth production by referring to another expert in ancient religious text production. He does not cite any of the theorists of modern subjectivity, including his hero Hegel, who were beginning to suspect that these disconcerting and “miraculous” conjunctions of subject and object, ideal and real, were constitutive not just of primitive, ancient, or religious subjectivity but of modern subjectivity as such. On the contrary, Strauss repeatedly cites Müller’s suggestions that these are precisely those aspects of cultural production that render early Christianity truly different from modern society, so different that any truly modern individual could not possibly identify with the products of this mode of textual production or this epoch of information processing. Müller is cited as saying, for example, “It is however very possible that this notion of necessity and unconsciousness, might appear itself obscure and even mystical [dunkel ja mystisch] to our scholars of antiquity (and theologians), from no other reason than that this mythicizing activity has no analogy in the present mode of thinking [diese mythenbildende Thätigkeit in unserem heutigen Denken keine Analogie hat]. But is it is not history to acknowledge even what is strange [Fremdartige], when led to it by unprejudiced research?”73 Whereas Paulus and the other rationalists were still speaking of a reality [ 93 ]

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that is perceived more or less independently of the “common sentiments” by which an epoch may be defined, Müller finds himself, like Nietzsche, making recourse to the idea of a self-referential economy that allows no step outside, whether in the name of an originally uninterpreted grounding perception or of an individual authorial invention. In the primitive world of religious text production, as in the early Nietzsche’s dystopic modernity, authorial production is no longer an index of original experience or authentically individual perception. Indeed, the primitive economy in view here is one in which the multitude is united by an impersonal “impulse” that itself functions to attune both authorial production and “the minds of his hearers.” The circuit is self-referential, communicating (if we should still call it that) to itself, its structure itself structured by the “peculiar coincidence” that preestablishes a harmony between subject and object, author and audience with a preconscious authority that is itself, in Müller’s terminology, an “unconscious necessity.” In order to liberate from the prejudices of rationalist historiography this peculiar realm in which original authorship and creative autonomy become folded back upon an anonymous impulse circuit (which itself installs authors as the mouthpiece of a collective and impersonal voice), Müller goes so far as to suggest that scholarly interpreters of this exotic process refrain from using the terms “authors” or “inventors” in relation to cultural production. An unconscious and collective automaticity has replaced the prior function of these terms, displacing their focus on an opposition between author and audience, fact and opinion, and so on, in ways that can only be misunderstood if the traditional vocabulary is used. Echoing Nietzsche’s vision of the destruction of authentic text production at the hands of modern mass media, Müller proposes that students of ancient myth should speak not of “authors” but of “relaters” (of second-hand information) and “compilers” (of experiences not their own).74 Camera obscura indeed. On the stage of ancient or mythical text production is being performed the final swoon of bourgeois authorship. Like Strauss, however, Müller does not make the basic reflexive connection between what they are saying about nonmodern, primitive myth production and the information networks springing up around them. Both continue to claim that his descriptions of the myth-producing mode of writing must appear “obscure and mystical” to modern understanding. Müller repeats the sentiment again and again, as if to ward off the very thought: the productive economy he describes (we are assured) is foreign to anything modern individuals might experience in daily life, and it “has

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no analogy to the contemporary mode of thinking.” For this reason, the expert in ancient religion informs, the (topsy-turvy) space of this inverted world will be “difficult for us to enter.”75 Most striking of all, having brought his readers beyond the old Enlightenment theories of a class or caste of inventors of myth to a recognition of a “miraculous” link between ancient experience and the imaginary realms, Müller goes on to claim that this “mode of contemplating the world” is so foreign that the ground of its ancient necessity lies beyond the ability even of Mythenforschung to disclose. The arrival of a satisfactory explanation of the miraculous conjunctions in view with myth production, in fact, must await the illumination of a science yet to come— “from the highest of all historical sciences,—one whose internal relations are scarcely yet dreamt of [in ihrem innern Zusammenhange kaum noch geahneten]—the history of the human spirit [Geschichte des menschlichen Geistes].”76 In the absence of such a science, perhaps it was better for Müller to have continued to watch these dynamics work out only within an allegedly nonmodern or ancient mentalité. Otherwise he would have fallen into the grip of the same horror as grabbed young Nietzsche, for whom the physiology of mass media had already outpaced traditional notions of authorship, culture, and critical thought altogether. As we have seen, Nietzsche would assert that the circuitous movements and strange sharings of this type of ancient or primitive generation of texts have everything to do with modernity and, more specifically, with the threat to modern authorship by an industrialized sphere of mass communications and the popular reading practices of the bourgeois consumer mass culture. What are Müller’s images of the “nonmodern otherness” of mythical text production but what Nietzsche called “that philistine culture . . . whose gospel has been proclaimed by Strauss”?77 Strauss rarely begins to bring such connections to light or to explore the umbilical or hermeneutical “link” (as he liked to put it in relation to the rationalists) that united modern communicative expectations to this aspect of his interpretation of early Christianity. Moreover, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, when such reflections do appear, they usually do so in the form of an anxiety for the modern author or for literary culture, as that so fremder Gestalt with which modernity cannot identify. We might add to Strauss’s scattered moments of self-recognition within the nonmodern, primitive, and religious other a vignette sketched by Strauss in which an authorial double—an unconscious, mechanistic, or automatic aspect of authorial production—makes a threatening late-night visit to a professorial guardian of the value of the German Klassiker.78

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The (Other) Self of Modern Authorship: A Modern Myth In his denunciations of Strauss-as-classic and the organizing potential of the print industry, Nietzsche does not mention a short story Strauss himself had written several years earlier in 1856. The story of “Der Papierreisende,” however, would have bolstered Nietzsche’s suspicions that the nervous system of this modern author was being tapped into and organized by the imprint of unconscious, collective mechanisms.79 The piece begins like a tale from E. T. A. Hoffmann, with an author receiving a late-night visit from a stranger. In this case the stranger claims to possess an intimate knowledge of both the author and his writings, thus claiming not to be a stranger at all. Told second hand and in staccato style, the reader soon learns that the man who received this visit was a professor and admirer of the literary geniuses of the German tradition. This man, described only as the nearly anonymous “paper traveller and autograph collector K” (who himself initially appears with greetings from “Professor X in B”). K soon finds himself recounting a disconcerting “adventure” in paper travel, an adventure that began with the appearance of a stranger at his own house.80 One night, late enough to be a nuisance, the stranger appeared. Noting the visitor’s haggard appearance, the professor begins cautiously with the polite formalities of introduction, something that annoys the stranger as if he were slighted by the professor’s lack of recognition or forgetfulness of their prior acquaintance: “You have certainly seen me before, and not only once,” the stranger interrupts, chastening the professor for “never wanting to make a closer acquaintance with me, nor ever taking my service into account.”81 It is the professor’s forgetfulness of the stranger’s participation in his own authorial productions that annoys the haggard visitor the most. After all, the stranger suggests, his own nonprofessorial labor makes possible the expressive clarity of the learned author, a benefit of the author’s “connection” (Verbindung) with the stranger that, the professor is warned, he should not regret (nicht zu bereuen). The professor’s first attempt at recognition, of course, is a false one. Playing the part of the good professor, a veteran of paper travel if ever there were one, he assumes the demanding stranger must be a publisher. Nonplused by this further misrecognition, the stranger claims his own agency is even more fundamental to authorial production than that of the publisher and that it is a necessary (nöthig) condition of the possibility for the labor of the publisher himself. Not to be outdone, the professor assumes himself to be in the presence of a paper manufacturer, though this attempt proves to be the guess of a vulgar materialism that likewise misses the function of [ 96 ]

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media to establish the technical conditions of the possibility of modern authorship. The scene takes a further turn toward the Hoffmannesque uncanny as the professor recounts a subtle transvaluation of values in the author-focused hierarchy of his own understanding of the writing process: “The man only laughed at my speech [Rede], without giving me an answer [as to his identity].” Indeed, in lieu of an identification, the stranger presents the professor-author with a row of signed papers, spread out on the table, at which the professor finally exclaims with delight, “Ah, so, an autograph collector [ein Autographensammler]!”82 Thinking he now recognizes the literary interests of the stranger at last, he tries to shake the hand of this newly recognized “colleague.” The stranger refuses. Indeed, only in the final scene of the short story does the anonymous stranger extend the hand of recognition in the moment he identifies himself (in a not so Hoffmannesque resolution) as a punctuation mark. The anxious underpinnings of the tale, however, do not evaporate with the appearance of this campy resolution. The unexpected and unrecognized visitor has shown up at the professor’s house at night, claiming for himself the responsibility for the otherwise geistig productions of the modern author: “I? Can’t you see it! Don’t you believe what you are saying? Give me your right hand! I am, not your son-in-law, but a semicolon.”83 It is not only the professor’s own authorial productions over which the stranger claims a kind of ownership, however. As Herr K relates, on the table were “the most amazing autographs—testimonies I want to say,” from the hand of Kant, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel. Indeed, the stranger seemed to be in possession of the signatures of “nearly all the greats of our literature [von fast allen Grössen unserer Literatur],” though, Herr K points out, he likewise possessed the signatures of all the unknowns (Unbekannte) as well.84 The great signatures here, the ones underwriting the entire German literary canon, have been “collected” by the anonymous hand of the stranger, a figure who begins to seem anything but human, much less the consummately human literary personality. The stranger, after all, claims to have been intimately familiar with all of these literary giants, despite their (self-protective) tendency to forget him. If the modern author would forget the labor of this anonymous stranger in “his” own writerly productions, the stranger, as if in revolt, would show up at his house—uninvited and as the literary man is crawling into bed—and he would do so with “testimonies” of his disavowed “connection” to the great authors. Overcoming the professor’s disinclination to share the credit for his own writings, the stranger leaves no doubt as to his place within the liter[ 97 ]

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ary productions that have established the literary genius of these writers. About Lessing, he boasts, “One says [Man sagt], Kleist was his best friend, Mendelssohn his confidant: but I—think of me as you will, it is nevertheless true—I was his other self [ich war sein anderes Selbst]. I was indispensable for his authorship.” Likewise, in a striking repetition of Strauss’s letter to Renan and his anxious evocation of that inversion which threatens to destroy the literary and spiritual greatness of Europe by transforming it into a techomechanical production with which modernity cannot identify, the stranger suggests that it is the technical structures of his own disavowed place in literary history that were responsible for these authorial productions being “full of spirit” (voll Geist). In one last attempt to maintain the independence and superiority of the literary man, the professor attempts to interpret the stranger’s claim as the suggestion that he had been the author’s “Famulus, his amanuensis.” But the professor was only trying once again to disconnect his own signature from the danger to spiritual production this stranger brings with him. The attempt was another misrecognition of the identity he already knew to be true. The stranger only laughs at this desperate attempt at (self) forgetfulness and, much to the professor’s dismay, begins to speak back to the literary man, boldly and out of a “sense of himself ” (mit Selbstgefühl). Unlike the uncanny doubles of a Hoffmann or a Hegel, the narrative explication of this appearance does not end in the death of either of these doubles. The narrative simply stops, and the reader is left to wonder how the allegations of this anonymous stranger might play themselves out in the self-understanding of the author and professorial guardian of the spirit—and its book productions from “the great Weimar period” (die grösse Weimarische Literaturperiode). But what could the coming into its own of the mediating function of authorial technology produce but the death of the great author?85 If Strauss would not fully recognize the effects of reflection on the technical conditions of the possibility of modern literary greatness, Nietzsche would soon enough, claiming that the newspaper circuit had begun to imprint itself on Strauss’s literary productions. When Strauss did attempt to articulate the threat to literary value and modern notions of the self or the great literary personality, he would do so by staging the drama in a decidedly “other” scene: as a “joke” tale about a late-night visitor or, more pressing for our purposes, as early Christian or mythical text production. The temporal and geographical displacements of these phantasmatic stagings are all the more apparent when we remember that Strauss claimed to be bringing to consciousness something modernity itself already knew (but refused to acknowledge) about the nonmodern otherness of early Chris[ 98 ]

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tian text production. Before Strauss could bear to accept the death of his own authorship, he could fantasize such a death in terms of early Christian myth production and its drama of anonymous, collective, or automatic writing. Strauss, like Nietzsche, gambles on this image as a sure bet to render ineffective the aura of the Volksbuch, whether the Bible or Strauss’s own popular writings about religion. The implications of this hermeneutical mirroring of ancient and modern text production—and the modern media network within which such inverting reflections take place—have yet to be registered within biblical studies, philosophy, or a thinking of the secular.

When Biblical Criticism (Re)Turned to Media Analysis: Reflections on the Death of the (Biblical) Author As mentioned, one of the astonishing things about Strauss’s intervention in modern religious history is the way it deploys topoi already familiar to the modern history of scholarship but with radically different effects. When, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Herder described the Gospels as collective and unconscious (or, to borrow from Charles Taylor, “expressivist”) productions, the description was not calculated to demolish religious faith. Indeed, with Herder, not to mention other German Romantics like Novalis or Hoffmann himself, the idea that texts were produced by way of an ecstatic preconscious or collective character (“the physiognomy of the soul and body” as Herder called it), rather than by means of an authorial self-awareness and careful measuring of perceptions, was rather a source of literary value. The entire gamble of Strauss’s critique of early Christian text production is otherwise. The spirit, as Nietzsche would suggest, had begun to stink—or at least to confront modern authors with disconcerting images of their other selves. To be sure, there was in authors like Herder always a possible critique or cultural hierarchy latent within such descriptions, as there were in Herder’s descriptions of “sublime Hebrew poetry.” Half a century later, however, Strauss could say many of the same things as Herder about biblical texts, but as forms of secularizing or profaning critique. This generally unacknowledged fact is a striking indication of transformations that had altered the nature of religious studies and the academic interpretation of the Bible.86 The difference in the reception of these ideas points not only to transformations within the study of religion or the Bible but also to changing expectations about what it means to count as a “real” object within the world. Following Hans Frei, one way to describe these changing expectations is by reference to “bourgeois realism,” and Strauss certainly [ 99 ]

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relies occasionally on the idea of a “normal” perception and a positivistic “natural” realm in his secularizing critiques of myth production. It is as an implicit proponent of this positivist circumscription of the natural that Strauss may be considered to be fulfilling Hegel’s demand for academic interpreter of the Bible to police the religiosity of these ancient religious texts by inculcating in his students a proper “religious sense” of repulsion toward the nonmodern, or, as we have seen, that which is in the modern and yet unrecognizable as such. Similarly, hand in hand with Strauss’s obliteration of Jesus as a coherent personality whose biography stands in as the most crucial object of the study of Christian origins goes Strauss’s growing awareness of the mediated nature of modern life and the shifting experiences of individuality such mediation installs. In 1919 Martin Dibelius suggested something similar to what has been argued here about the esthetics of “bourgeois realism.” Dibelius remarked that Herder’s biblical studies oriented themselves around the question of the “popular mind,” which Dibelius describes as a focus on “anonymous” transmitters of unconsciously formed information. From Herder’s time (at the turn of the nineteenth century) to his own (at the beginning of the twentieth), Dibelius asserts, the popular mind as an object of analysis was systemically obscured by historians of early Christianity. The problem, as Dibelius puts it, was that interpreters “were immediately concerned with historical results.” 87 Significantly, Dibelius explains what he means by this by saying that nineteenth-century historians were immediately concerned with “literature created by the mind of an author.”88 To Dibelius’s suggestion we must add that this was also the period during which New Testament scholarship was obsessed with the question of the “life of Jesus.” With this in mind, Dibelius’s striking statement is in full agreement with the argument being made here, namely, that there is a mutually constituting relation between a “bourgeois” conception of authorship and the “historical Jesus” as an object of historical enquiry. It is also worth mentioning in passing that the period Dibelius bookends with anonymous textual production and the dominance of the popular mind closely resembles Foucault’s modern age as that epoch of academic labor in which man emerged from an unconscious medial ground at the beginning of the nineteenth century only to slip back into the sea of information from whence it arose at that century’s close.89 As with Foucault’s man so goes the historical Jesus. Both arose only for a time and in the light of particular expectations about “authorship.” In Dibelius’s terms, when a “consciousness” of the anonymous forces that work behind the backs of the great literary personality appears, the great literary [ 100 ]

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personality—and the historical Jesus as a coherent biographical personality—fades away as the most significant object of enquiry. Dibelius does not mention the selbstgefühl of Strauss’s late night visit of der Papierreisende or the biblical critic’s more general attempt to give expression to the disavowed mechanisms of the (modern) author’s other self, and this within the heart of early Christian myth production. In this respect, Dibelius reads Strauss like almost every other historian of early Christianity, looking for summary evaluations of the historical Jesus and missing the Strauss who had himself moved from rationalist historical research to a probing, as Müller had put it, of a media history of the embodied spirit. Once Strauss begins to focus his attention away from the modern biographical search for an individual existing behind the texts and toward a “dissolving of the medium” within which this personality is constructed, the end of the quest for the historical Jesus has begun. Nietzsche, moreover, makes two aspects of this basic transformation of biblical scholarship very clear. First, he uses isomorphic forms of critique to dismiss not ancient religion but Strauss’s status as a modern author of classical prose, describing him as the pawn of a popular print industry whose ubiquitous influence threatens the literary individual with a complete takeover of his faculties, up to and including a generic re-organization of the sensorium itself. Following Müller, Strauss simply calls this uncomfortable possibility ancient “myth production,” while Nietzsche designates it as the effects of specifically modern and industrialized mass media. The threat to the cultural value of a given literary production, however, is assumed by both. Second, because Nietzsche’s deployment of this scenario is expressed more explicitly as a threat to modern individuality, his statements bring up the crucial issue in relation to Strauss’s New Testament studies: what are the implications for a history of New Testament studies that Strauss’s descriptions of unconscious, automatic, or anonymous textual production were the means by which he attempted a secularizing critique of orthodox views of the Bible? As I have pointed out, the connection between nonmodern (or nonbourgeois to use Frei’s terminology) text production and the absence of cultural value did not exist half a century or more before Strauss. Vico, Herder, Lowth, and others grounded many of their analyses on similar notions of unconscious, collective, and even automatic textual production without being perceived as heterodox secularizers of biblical texts. The biblical critic of the mid-nineteenth century (like the philosopher), however, could count on this connection to be assumed. The rather obvious juxtaposition has profound implications for the [ 101 ]

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ways in which one narrates the history of New Testament studies or even the study of religion or the rise of secularity more generally. The difference between Herder and Strauss, for example, does not all come down to a development that may be described as a mere internal development within New Testament studies, whether as the progressive overcoming of prejudice or an improvement in method, our standard modes of explanation within these fields. On the contrary, we see here again the importance of considering the history of the field in ways that respect that its basic orientations or methods are always constituted by an environment that itself overflows the delimitable borders of New Testament studies proper. More generally, this chapter makes clear the importance of New Testament studies for a consideration of modern Europe’s ambivalent relationship toward religion. At stake in Strauss’s analysis of early Christianity was the basic distinction between an enlightened historical rationality and a premodern religious heteronomy. Given the comparison with Nietzsche, it is very significant that Strauss’s images of early Christianity oscillate between an eschatological hope in the inspiriting power of the newspaper to establish the enlightened community to come and an anxiety of collective or unconscious influence as that tyranny that is the essence of a nonmodern heteronomy. What has been emphasized here in the comparison between Nietzsche and Strauss is the degree to which New Testament studies has functioned as an other scene on which modernity’s own cultural undecidabilities are played out. Here is a dialectic of enlightenment in which what counts as religion or secularity arise and set themselves in opposition from within the same systemic (or mediating) network. This particular event of mirroring between modern secularity and ancient religion simply must be read as a profoundly ambivalent struggle to negotiate the uncertain potentials of the same historical constellation, a constellation that has everything to do with modern mass communication and its potential as an organizational force to usher in a new dawn whose approach registered itself as the twin fantasies of the best and worst to come. These fantasies stage the representation of modernity’s final liberation from religion even while they fuel new historical imaginations of the nonmodern, heteronomous heart of (early Christian) religion itself. On the cusp of this ambiguous new prospect was the modern biblical critic, writing on the fold of that distinction between a liberated modern (future) and the heteronomously religious (past). While an unhelpful division of academic labor has kept the act or gamble of this particular splitting of future and past, religion and secularity, from the light of day for centuries, Nietzsche was already beginning to perceive it within the writings of Strauss. In his meditation on Strauss’s [ 102 ]

The Mechanics of (Dis)Enchantment: Nietzsche and D. F. Strauss

Old Faith and the New, Nietzsche perceived the paradoxical connection between Strauss’s obsession with the newspaper as a secularizing, enlightening force and Strauss’s kerygmatic announcements of this secular community to come as a new (and industrially produced) mythology. Not even Nietzsche perceived, however, that the industrial imprint of this splitting of enlightenment from myth could likewise be discerned in Strauss’s interpretations of the New Testament, at the heart of which is the presentation of an early Christian text production whose collective, unconscious, or automatic processes become that with which the truly modern reader cannot, must not, or will not identify.

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Paul’s Secretary: Heidegger’s Apostolic Light from the Ancient Near East

“ But what does it say? ‘The logos is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.’ This is the word of faith we are announcing. . . . I, Tertius, who wrote this, greet you” (Rom. 10:7, 8; 16:22). Jacques Derrida has suggested repeatedly, even incessantly, that the history of apocalyptic or revelatory thought (and these two in all their ambiguously religious and philosophical codetermination) might be rendered in terms of a history of communication technologies. We could recall, as he puts it, his “post card apocalypse,” the “small library apocalypse” where one of his postal personae finds itself wanting “to write and first to reassemble an enormous library on the courrier, the postal institutions, the techniques and mores of telecommunication, the networks and epochs of telecommunication throughout history.”1 More recently, Derrida has described contemporary religious phenomena in terms of a mondialatinization that insinuates its revelations by way of “those sites of abstraction that are the machine, technics, technoscience and above all the transcendence of teletechnology.”2 There, in the essay “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” he confides in his audience a desire to “conceive a small discursive machine,” a machine that, transversal to every specific telecommunications or digital information machine, would express the peculiarly automatic nature of the shuttling between place and deterritorialized abstraction that demarcates the contemporary revelatory space of global communications. In broad terms, this desire for a telecommunicative analysis of contemporary religious phenomena thus repeats his hope for a postal or media history whose ancient and modern [ 105 ]

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envois would determine the texture of any opposition between religious and rational revealings, the aporetic intertwining of which threatens to have made believers of us all. As the opening citation suggests, I would like to add a circuit diagram to Derrida’s imagined media history, an ancient-modern or religiorational postal circuit that is channeled through the hand of an almost entirely forgotten scribe, called only Tertius, a secretary of sorts for the apostle Paul. This particular postal circuit, all the more effective for having been forgotten, is of crucial genealogical significance for both Derrida’s imagined media archive and his little discursive machine about religion, as Tertius’s hand structures some of the most crucial negotiations of Heidegger’s interpretation of early Christian experience. In his engagement with philosophical interpretations of religion from Kant to Derrida, Hent de Vries has explored the strange loop linking phenomenological revealing and religious revelation by presenting it in terms of Heidegger’s 1920–1921 lecture course Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, and, more specifically, the interpretation of Pauline Christianity presented therein.3 For De Vries, this course suggests an isomorphism between Heidegger’s early interpretation of the religious experience of Pauline Christianity and several of his later philosophical explications of human existence. De Vries speaks of a “formal analogy” or “structural parallel” between the Pauline apocalypticism Heidegger finds in the earlier lectures and the attempt, later, to process the event of being in an originary fashion.4 Comparing Heidegger’s discussion of the early Christian experience of time with his later “Letter on Humanism,” De Vries writes, “While the historical names of religion and humanitas are retained, they are thus at the same time formalized, and this to the point where they become virtually or at least structurally interchangeable with each other. And not only with each other, but also with the existence toward which they are said to provide possible access, or even, in the case of religion, the shortest detour.”5 As in Derrida’s essay, here we have a kind of hidden, almost automatic or mechanical bond between the particularity of a religion and the potential formalization or abstraction of thought, but this time it links not only religion and reason or religion and contemporary networks of communicative media. Rather, the bond is between the humanitas of Heideggerian ontology and the apocalypticism Heidegger ostensibly discovered in his phenomenological reading of the apostle Paul. This aspect of De Vries’s work on the question of Heideggerian formal indication in relation to the heritage of early Christian thought suggests, in turn, the potential fruitfulness of a yet more contextually detailed description of Heidegger’s reading of Pauline Christianity, one that may [ 106 ]

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be accomplished by considering this reading against the backdrop of two early twentieth-century biblical critics with whom Heidegger was familiar. One of the intriguing results of this focus is an appreciation of the degree to which many of Heidegger’s early writings, including those on Pauline Christianity, share many of the discursive topoi that likewise informed what were recognized at the time as the most persuasive historiographical reconstructions of Paul. In keeping with my investigation of the philosophicoreligious traffic that both links and separates biblical studies from philosophy, it will be of interest here to consider Heidegger’s Paul as a particular engagement with the highly charged set of discursive regularities and disciplinary boundaries that constituted some of the early-twentieth-century interpretations of Paul in and outside of biblical studies. As we will see, Heidegger reveals a remarkable attunement to the various stakes of the larger “interdisciplinary” game. At times he participates with the most popular biblical critics in their use of specific techniques that promise to conjure the authentic Paul from among the many ancient and modern dissimulators, misinterpreters, and traitors of the religious experience for which he has come to stand. By the same token, and as we might have expected by now, Heidegger also contests the propriety, which is to say the property rights, of the biblical critics in relation to the Pauline heritage itself.

Unmodern Light from the Ancient Near East Some of these shared or contested interpretive techniques may be observed by comparing Heidegger’s reading of Paul to that of the biblical scholar Adolf Deissmann. Deissmann produced some of the most widely read historical reconstructions of Pauline Christianity in the early twentieth century, and Theodore Kisiel, in his Genesis of Being and Time, makes a few suggestions about Heidegger’s familiarity with Deissmann’s work. Heidegger listed Deissmann’s book, for example, Paulus: Eine kultur- und religionsgeschichtliche Skizze, in the reading list for his 1920–1921 course on the phenomenology of religion.6 Kisiel likewise speaks of “Heidegger’s fascination with Deissmann’s work on Pauline mysticism,” namely, Deissmann’s attempt to render a Pauline experience of self as being given, first and foremost, “in Christ”—and therefore, as being constituted by “Christ in me”—instead of given as a self-present object considered apart from any relation to the transcendent.7 Thus Kisiel mentions Deissmann’s reading of the Pauline notion of having one’s identity lost to itself, hidden “in Christ,” as it were, or given in a primordial synthesis of the self and the [ 107 ]

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absolute, as possible topics of exploration into the relation between Heidegger and Deissmann. There are other circuits or shared productive strategies, however, that consistently shuttle back and forth between the texts of these two very different authors. To probe some of these I will refer primarily to two texts of Deissmann: his work on Paul and his Licht vom Osten, translated as Light from the Ancient Near East.8 In both these writings the biblical critic employs the image of an unmodern light from the East in order to critique modern academic productions as a form of alienated—and alienating—labor. He suggests, ironically, that it is only when these merely paper productions of Europe are offered up to the flame of an unmodern light that a return to authentic self-possession will be realized. “The book that records an echo of Jesus and his apostles, the New Testament, is a gift from the East [ein Geschenk des Ostens],” Deissmann begins. “We are accustomed to read it under our Northern sky, and though it is by origin [Ursprung] an Eastern book, it is so essentially a book of humanity that we understand its spirit in the countries of the West and North.”9 Despite the universal communicability of this book of humanity, Deissmann suggests that its “particulars” (Einzelheit) and its “historical mood” (historische Stimmung) are best experienced by a “son of the East,” a filiation the historian describes in terms of an exposure to light: “The traveller [Wanderer] who follows the footsteps of the apostle Paul from Corinth over the ruins of Ephesus to Antioch and Jerusalem, will even today have much revealed to him in the sun of the Levant that he would not have seen in Heidelberg or Cambridge.”10 The German biblical critic’s own strategy to explicate this book of humanity and its promised echo of Jesus and the apostles will, throughout, be governed by the figure of this “son of the East” and particularly his status as a working-class laborer whose productions seem to be animated by, and expressive of, a non-European and decidedly nonmodern light. Interestingly (and as biblical scholars are sometimes inclined to do), Deissmann assumes that this light is at once from the ancient Near East and the communicative bond of a universal humanity, carefully enfolded though this humanity may be within the three horizons he mentions (the East, West, and North). Moreover, it is the light shed from this non-European laboring hand that Deissmann presents as promising a return from what he describes as a current academic exile, captured and carried away as academics are by their own European civilization. He would write of one of his text-collecting journeys to Greece and Palestine: “On pilgrim ships where one may very well be the only ‘educated person’ [‘Gebildete’] among hundreds of Serbs and [ 108 ]

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Russian peasants, Eastern Jewish working people [östlichen Judenproletariern], Armenians, Turks, and Arabs, one learns ten times as much about the condition of the people [Volkstum] of the East at the present day (and in ancient times) as on the great Levantine steamers, which, even on the waves of the Mediterranean, do not let us out of our cage of European civilisation [aus dem Käfig unserer europäischen Kultur].”11 The passage suggests a self-differentiation that is likewise a recipe for nonmodern, non-European illumination from the East, all of which repeatedly structures Deissmann’s writings on the New Testament. The refrain functions to distinguish Deissmann’s own scholarly reconstructions from those of the other Europeans who, riding away on the Levantine steamers and remaining caged within their own culture, fail to perceive by the non-European light that here, at least, illuminates both the ancient and modern East. In a later edition (published fourteen years after the first one of 1911) Deissmann will add to this paragraph, as if providing an explanatory gloss, “Only the obscurities of the learned university man must be put aside in order to come in contact with those people.”12 In this instance, a genuine academic experience of Eastern light appears to be coterminous with an escape from the European “cage” of its own educational system. Europe, it would seem, desperately needs this experience that is likewise a “contact” with a non-European illumination. Deissmann will write that “Paul is indeed valued by many today as a great gloominess. But the darkness arises in large part from the bad lamps of our studies,” workspaces whose productions are nothing but “the fallout of a doctrinaire study of Paul” (der Niederschlag der doktrinären Paulusforschung).13 There is an interpretive practice, darkened and doctrinaire, that has marred the labor of the academic interpreters of Paul and his Levantine light, obscuring the revelation of this genuinely nonmodern illumination and leaving Europe, therefore, trapped inside the cage of its own creation. Deissmann, however, has stepped outside, been released, seen the light, and thus has become attuned to an existence that is by no means that of the bookish European professor: “I have had, after long years of studying the Pauline documents and their modern interpreters, the good fortune to experience a new teacher in addition to those appreciated and esteemed old teachers at home [heimatlichen Lehrern]. This new master-teacher is not at all academic [ganz und gar nicht akademisch] and completely without paper and paragraphs, giving all that she teaches freely with a kind hand.”14 This freely giving realm of insight, a teacher who by no means writes on paper, Deissmann calls “the world of Paul.” In a later edition, Deissmann adds the summary, “I may say that the good germs of an historical appreciation of Paul, [ 109 ]

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which I owed to my teachers and my own studies, underwent new growth in the apostle’s own field and beneath the rays of his sun, but that many rank shoots that had sprung up in the shade of the school walls withered under the same beams.”15 Throughout, and this seems to be a significant aspect of the performative force of Deissmann’s very influential histories, his historical reconstructions are offered as a salutary regimen or a recipe for contact with an otherness that releases the European academic from the cage of his own studied civilization. Moreover, as we have seen, this regimen is generally directed against a European academy whose productions are described as a kind of darkened, nonlaboring busyness at books and calculated reflection. Thus Deissmann’s apostle Paul becomes the image of a body inured to labor, a toughened worker whose thought and writings are not disconnected from his own rootedness in this work, an image that is presented everywhere as a challenge to modern society and modern academics in particular. “And now we see,” Deissmann writes, “that the sick, illtreated man, weakened by hunger and sometimes by fever, completed such a life-work [Lebenswerk] that, as a mere physical performance, demands our admiration. Just measure out the mileage Paul logged by water and land and compare it with the distance managed by modern archaeologists and geographers.”16 As we might imagine, the spectacle of these physical hardships immediately evokes a censure of the modern academic traveler. In a passage that offers us, perhaps, a peculiarly uncanny image of Deissmann’s own frequent travels as a historian and collector of papyri “in the footsteps” of Paul, he continues, “Or [better yet], try to walk in the way of Paul [Paulusweg]. One sits, Kaiserpass and diplomatic recommendations in a pocket, inside a comfortable modern traincar [im bequemen modernen Wagen] on the Anatolian railway, and travels in the evening twilight easily towards his destination on the track which has been forced through rocks and over streams by engineering skill and dynamite.”17 Deissmann even suspects that this anonymous traveling “one” has sent ahead word of his arrival by telegraph, in contrast, the biblical critic points out, to the poor (ancient/ modern) Easterner who, traveling without the technological support of rail line or telegraph wire, finds himself deeply concerned about the approach of nightfall. If the light of Paul’s world does not calculatingly write on paper, it certainly does not send notes along telegraph wires, an absence that marks, once again, modern Europe’s failure to attune itself to the natural rhythms of Levantine light. A remarkable portion of Deissmann’s revelation of this nonmodern [ 110 ]

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light, therefore, presents itself as a rescuing of the apostle from the elaborate structures of thought that have come to be associated with him. Instead of these systems, Deissmann finds in Paul only passionate and often inconsistent engagements with the situations of life. Instead of a calculating author, Deissmann discerns beneath the texts a flow of unmediated living experience that he repeatedly compares to the movement of lava beneath the earth’s crust. Moreover, it is this energetic flow that modern European academics must touch in order to escape the reifying and selfreplicating forms of academic culture that threaten both themselves and the apostle with a kind of civilized capture. Deissmann’s solution to the crisis of the European sciences, as it were, is to find some connection to the pretheoretical experience of the apostle and his committed cohorts (a group Deissmann likes to call homo novus). As it will for Heidegger, the appearance of this salvific and decidedly unmodern light for Deissmann will have everything to do with the way the academy interprets ancient texts. In this respect, it is interesting that Deissmann unveils what would become his most lasting contribution to twentieth-century interpretations of early Christianity (namely the acquisition, publication, and interpretation of ancient Near Eastern papyri) in similar terms. Regarding the title of his influential Licht vom Osten, in which he presents many of the ancient letters that he describes as “unliterary” (unliterarischen) textual productions, Deissmann admonishes his reader: “before you censure it, just look for a moment at the Eastern sunshine.”18 Again, Deissmann gambles on the possibility that this unmodern light, shining from outside the cage of European civilization, can teach his readers not to misrecognize the authorial productions they have before them, but can show these writings to be completely other than the darkened, doctrinaire products of the European spirit. Deissmann encourages the reader, in fact, “to make that sunbeam your own and take it with you to the scene of your labors on the other side of the Alps. If you have ancient texts to decipher, the sunbeam will bring stone and potsherd to speech.”19 Once the reader becomes the owner and beneficiary of this light, “you cannot help yourself: made happy by its marvels, thankful for its gifts, you must speak of the light of the East.”20 It is automatic really, the postal structure uniting Deissmann’s interpretation of Paul with that of Heidegger being a shared critique of an objectifying academic gaze that threatens to alienate the living expression of unmodern productions and the revelation, we might say, of a homo novus out of the ashes of a desiccated modern Europe. There is one particular strand linking these texts, however, that I want [ 111 ]

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to highlight in particular. Both Heidegger and Deissmann will contend against the academic interpretations of their contemporaries by speaking from the place of, in the name of, or in the spirit of the authentic apostle Paul, and they will both stage this redemptive enunciation by bracketing out a particular form of writing. Indeed, both of them will forget (and this in the very moment of the enunciation in which an authentic European modernity becomes indistinguishable from the lived experience of the apostle) the early Christian figure of Tertius and the masks, doublings, and play of mirrors this secretary sets in motion. Those who are familiar with Heidegger’s writings, particularly his occasional suggestion that (as Derrida puts it) he “would have to close up his thinking-shop if he were to be called by the faith,” might be surprised to see this prediction of a link between Deissmann, the self-avowed proponent of a Paulinist cosmopolitanism, and Heidegger’s early writings on the phenomenology of religion.21 Has Heidegger indeed brought some of Deissmann’s Levantine light across the Alps for his own deciphering of the Pauline texts, writings that he, too, will attempt to release, in the power of the spirit of Paul, from the doctrinaire interpretations of the modern academy? The constellation here signals, I am happy to say, a more complex negotiation than the worn-out descriptions of influence (whether of Deissmann or “Paul” or “early Christianity” on Heidegger), though as we have mentioned, Heidegger did read Deissmann’s very popular description of Paul in preparation for his course on religion and phenomenology. One way to make this constellation intelligible is to think of it in terms of a common postal principle that has installed a single address over two unlikely housemates, an installation job that has insured a common forgetfulness and thereby lured them both to make isomorphic proclamations in and as the spirit of the apostle. The postal setup in view here scrambles a clear differentiation between the inside and outside of “religion,” the inside and outside of the “spirit” that presents itself, they will imagine, from the Pauline writings, or, indeed, between the philosopher and the fervent Protestant biblical scholar. In other words, “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart. . . . I, Tertius, who wrote this greet you.”

Between Deissmann and Heidegger: Interruption of (a) Tertius Like Heidegger’s own lecture course on the phenomenology of religion, perhaps this abstract assertion needs the interruption of a concrete example from the early Christian writings themselves.22 Picture, or perhaps [ 112 ]

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picture-postcard, the scene. Revealed is Deissmann’s artisanal tableau, a musty Corinthian shop where Paul is authorizing a message to be sent to those who might be interested in his working-class philosophical wares at Rome. His hands hold a large needle and thick thread and pull together at least two large pieces of rough cloth. The apostle’s mouth is open, from which, presumably, flows lively speech. Across the room sits the amanuensis Tertius, hands also moving swiftly in the production not of tents but of texts, his stylus scratching quickly a waxen tablet or sheet of papyrus. Tertius’s ear is turned toward the master’s mouth like the horn of a vibraphone—or so Deissmann would tell us: “Paul preferred to dictate his letters. Writing probably was not particularly easy [bequem] for him, and he may have dictated many of his letters while he himself remained working.”23 Scratching away in his own study in Berlin, Deissmann would even imagine that the apostle’s script, unlike his own, was produced with great difficulty by a “hand deformed by labor” and that this may have been the reason the apostle used a secretary like Tertius.24 Amid the bustle of this Corinthian tent shop, however, one is struck by a barely legible phrase, destined for the Roman congregation(s), in which (the apostle? Tertius? where does one situate automatic recording devices within discourses of religion and secularity?) glosses “the law,” summarizes it by speaking in its name, and saying (as if of itself) that its demand is no longer externalized but more immanently inscribed within human existence: “But what does it [the law] say? ‘The logos is near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart.’ This is the logos of faith we proclaim” (Rom. 10:8). Further along in this same letter the productive hand of Tertius will leave a brief and generally forgotten trace of its integral role in this performance, appearing, as if from nowhere, in the concluding greetings: “I, Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you” (Rom. 16:22). The presence of Tertius in this scene has been for the history of biblical scholarship more than a little disconcerting, as if the circuitry of the apostle’s spirit-mouth-text machine has hit a snag: I, Tertius, who write the proclamation of a now-internalized immanence of the law and its letter; I, Tertius, who write in the name of another whose persona is already doubled as the speaking telos of the written code; I, Tertius, who wrote this greet you (cf. Rom. 10:4). If the Paulinist teaching of an overcoming of an externalized law by the way of an inward immanence of the spirit has functioned so often as the rallying cry for autonomy and an openness to cultural change, Tertius can only appear here as a bizarre double of this liberatory image. Tertius takes up the Pauline word, perhaps, but only from an anonymous, mechanical outside, as it were, without having his place in [ 113 ]

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this religious legacy guaranteed by the standard archival topoi of faith, innovation, or even exuberant repetition. Small wonder that he had to insert his name at the end of this letter lest he be forgotten altogether. “You cannot help yourself,” Deissmann would tell his audience as he ruminated on this scene, “made happy by its marvels, thankful for its gifts, you must speak of the light of the East.”25 It is automatic, really. Deissmann sees the light and calls it marvelous. Tertius may have done the same, though (how could we know?) perhaps without Deissmann’s sense of investment. Work is work, after all, and Tertius was a secretary. Was he a pagan employed by the speaking apostle to write on his behalf or in his stead; and, if so, would the product of his labor be determined appropriately by the categories “religion,” “faith,” or the “influence” of the apostle? The problematic of this “third” man is not at all beside the point, installed as Tertius is here between Deissmann and Heidegger and along the boundary of that “faith” or “religion” that is in all quarters still thought to be a clearly determining factor in this particular epoch of the religiosecular narrative. Here Tertius marks the site of a struggle to determine the limits of the Pauline territory, overdetermined as this delimitation will always be by a struggle between disciplines and the struggle to control the legacies, whether of “Paul” or “Heidegger.” As our analysis takes its cue from biblical texts and biblical criticism, above all we must remember that, in modern cultural memory, there has never been an imagined scene of enunciation of the Pauline message that is not already crossed by such disciplinary and interdisciplinary contestations, and this remains so despite the fact that these contestations are almost never made the focus of sustained reflection, or despite the fact that Tertius’s place in the early Christian heritage has been systematically elided.26 Tertius, therefore, as an index of a nearly forgotten mediation and a contested space between Deissmann and Heidegger, reminds us that Deissmann the believer and historian, Heidegger the philosopher, and the so-called biblical legacy were, within the space of this relay, all under negotiation or all up for grabs. The place in which all is up for grabs affords us, however, a quilting point at which many of these diverse threads may be grasped at once. As already mentioned, they will have been knotted around a forgetfulness (or better, an expulsion) of Tertius by both writers, a disavowal that will unite Heidegger and Deissmann in their interpretations of early Christianity. Moreover, both do so in a way that remains profoundly significant for the consideration of the debts to religion within Heidegger’s philosophy, as several of the much-discussed similarities, isomorphisms, or correspondences be-

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tween Heideggerian ontology and early Christian motifs will hinge on Heidegger’s interpretation of a peculiar New Testament text, namely 2 Thessalonians. The crux of all this traffic—and this is what no one who writes about the topic seems to remember—is Heidegger’s emphatic declaration that Paul himself, rather than a well-meaning impostor, wrote the New Testament letter called 2 Thessalonians. In this crucial interpretive event, Heidegger simultaneously expels the secretary-as-pseudepigrapher, distinguishes himself from “merely historical” interpreters of the text, and finds himself speaking in the name—or in the spirit—of the apostle against these merely paper productions of the modern European academy. More important, in this moment of the expulsion of (a) Tertius, the distance between Heidegger and Deissmann collapses, the violence of which promises to send out a shockwave of an ecstatic becoming-apostle that has yet to be registered in the descriptions of Heidegger’s engagement with religion.

Second Thessalonians: Apostolic Stylings and the Expulsion of (a) Tertius Again, the nub is Heidegger’s self-conscious rejection of the possibility that 2 Thessalonians is an apostolic forgery. As he mentions in his 1920– 1921 lecture course on the phenomenology of religion, in this letter the audience is told, “As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together in him, we beg you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here. Let no one deceive you in any way” (2 Thess. 2:1–3a).27 There seem to be so many media channels in which the apostle fears the emergence of simulacra, whether by spirit, conversation, or letter. Has Tertius run amok? We should not forget the canonical context. This warning against a pseudepigraphic letter or false witness to an apostolic conversation follows directly on the heels of an epistle in which the Gentile believers in Thessalonica are praised for the way the “message of the gospel came . . . not in word only but also in power and in the holy spirit with full conviction” (1 Thess. 1:5). Indeed, in that letter the Gentile Thessalonians were said to have been turned from the false appearance of deity to a recognition of the true and living God (1 Thess. 1:9) and praised for their conviction of the veracity of the Pauline teaching. In the second letter of the canonical order, however, the implied original scene of danger seems to have returned, as the believers are now warned against being

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duped by a fake that will speak, write, or spiritually insinuate itself into the place of the true apostolic proclamation. To make matters even more disconcerting for the Thessalonian converts, and as Heidegger also points out, many modern biblical critics have suggested that 2 Thessalonians is itself a pseudepigraphic production. The irony in such a case would be rich, as the letter claims to be written by Paul and, rather perversely, warns its readers against pseudepigraphic imitations. Heidegger is well aware of the possibility and mentions an advocate of this interpretation, a New Testament scholar from Basel, Paul Wilhelm Schmidt, who shows how the letter seems not to have been written by Paul but by a well-meaning impostor.28 Schmidt’s explanation of this possibility was a common rationale for thinking the letter a forgery; namely, 2 Thessalonians seems to have a set of apocalyptic expectations different from those in 1 Thessalonians. The first epistle, as Heidegger notes, urges the believers to “stay awake” inasmuch as the parousia of Christ will come “like a thief in the night,” indeed, at the very moment when others are proclaiming a period of “peace and safety” (1 Thess. 5:2, 6).29 By contrast, 2 Thessalonians suggests that the awaited end will not come without a necessary delay that will itself precede this desired parousia and function as a kind of sign gauging its approach. (As an aside, in a striking gloss, Heidegger describes this expected period of delay in 2 Thessalonians as one of “war and chaos” [Krieg und Wirrwarr], though these terms are not self-evident descriptions of the drama predicted in the letter.)30 Additionally (and Heidegger will remain fascinated by this), the “second” epistle inserts a promise that the true parousia of Christ must necessarily be preceded by an appearance of the messiah’s diabolical double: “that day will not come unless the apostasy comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction” (2 Thess. 2:3). Like the proliferation of potential simulacra in the very warning against them, this double (often called the “anti-Christ,” though this term is not in the text itself) is described in the “second” letter with language that directly mirrors the depiction of Christ in 1 Thessalonians. Like that letter, the apokalupsis of the double here (2 Thess. 2:3) appears as the revelation of a son (this time “of destruction” rather than “of God”) who will, like the Christ, be exalted as divine, installed in a holy place, and confirmed in this special status by signs and wonders (2 Thess. 2:9). Indeed, and perhaps the most astonishing parallel of all, the force that guarantees the performative success of these (diabolical) signs is described as God’s own, establishing yet another uncanny repetition of 1 Thessalonians. The initial reception of Paul’s kerygma, after

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all, was there described as the result of a divinely empowered conviction (ple¯rophoria) of its truth (1 Thess. 1:4, 5). In the “second” letter, however, the divine power now functions as an energeian plane¯s, which we may translate as an “effectual force of delusion” and one that lures many to a misrecognition of the diabolical pretender as the messiah (1 Thess. 2:9, 11). Heidegger’s engagement with this christological and apostolic play of mirrors is remarkable. He immediately suggests that those who navigate these interpretive dilemmas as does Professor Schmidt, searching for indications of pseudonymous authorship in observably different sets of eschatological doctrines, are already playing at a very different kind of game than was the apostle’s own. “But this whole playing out of different representational views,” he declares ominously in relation to Schmidt’s rationale for the pseudepigraphic authorship of 2 Thessalonians, “is not in the spirit of Paul.”31 With this rejection, Heidegger only adds one more mirror, however, to what is already a labyrinthine play of reflections. Throughout the course, after all, Heidegger has criticized such “world-view” or representational comparisons as a reifying and inadequate way of thinking about philosophy or religion, and he has done so in the name of the phenomenological mode of interpretation. Likewise, it was this rejection of such ready-made modes of comparison that the philosopher presents as distinguishing the primordiality—or the fundamentally risky or avant-garde nature—of philosophy against all the mere purveyors of determinate knowledge. Here, of course, the same distinction is repeated as that which distinguishes the spirit of the apostle Paul from the historical method of Professor Schmidt. As he was perhaps aware, Heidegger has essentially inserted the key distinction of his phenomenological discussion into the early Christian frame he is considering. This is to say, in turn, that the struggle of phenomenology against the comparison of world views begins to take on the flavor of an early Christian experience. This negotiation of the question of 2 Thessalonians’ authenticity is, therefore, a significant moment in Heidegger’s larger project to render a reading of early Christian religion that would not be a “dogmatic or theological-exegetical interpretation, or even an historical consideration or a religious meditation,” but only a means to “phenomenological understanding” (phänomenologischen Verstehen).32 What Heidegger does not confide in this initial self-presentation, however, is that phenomenology’s “primordial mode of access” (ursprünglichen Weg des Zugangs) would be unveiled in the same moment that he conjures the authentic “spirit of Paul” from under the misleading taxonomies of the biblical critics.33 It is as if the ursprüngli-

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chen Weg of phenomenology was all along none other than the Paulusweg Deissmann also had hoped to trod, finally freed from the reifying doctrinal baggage of the European university for an engagement with the liberty of an unmodern light. The simultaneous unveiling and the reciprocal guarantee it sets in place for phenomenology against biblical scholarship pivots around the question of the “authenticity” of 2 Thessalonians. For Heidegger, the historian Schmidt reveals that he labors “outside” the Pauline spirit in the precise moment that he attempts to establish the pseudepigraphic nature of 2 Thessalonians. To be sure, Heidegger acknowledges that the two letters do not agree in terms of their contents. Against Schmidt, however, the phenomenologist asserts that he will not approach the question of 2 Thessalonians’ authenticity by means of this type of comparison. His own approach, instead, will be to clarify “the situation” of the letters in relation to each other and their respective audiences, an engagement that will afford the philosopher a different mode of access from Schmidt’s. With this move Heidegger has rejected the question of authorial authenticity at one level only to resurrect it at another, in this case with an authenticity determined by the axiomatic of a situation rather than one of content. This is an intriguing gesture, as Heidegger completed his summary of Schmidt’s arguments against the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians by declaring that he himself would not go into the “question of authenticity” (Echtheitsfrage).34 By moving from the historicist comparison of doctrines to the comparative articulation of the “situation” of 2 Thessalonians, however, this question remains, albeit in a different form. Remarkably, however, this transfiguration of content into situation allows Heidegger to point to the differences between the contents of the two letters as the most important indication of the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians. Thus the very thing that, for Schmidt, suggests the presence of a forger indicates, for Heidegger, the genuine Christianness and, indeed, the authentic Pauline origin, of 2 Thessalonians. By the same token, the salvation of Pauline authorship here likewise establishes Heidegger’s phenomenological reading as that which operates in the spirit of the apostle Paul and thus as distinguished from the reifying and complacent gaze of the mere historian. The nodal point at which these threads weave together is, once again, Heidegger’s exclusion of the calculating, impersonating, and pseudepigraphic author of 2 Thessalonians, despite the phenomenologist’s explicit statement that he will not “go into” the “authenticity question” (die Echtheitsfrage).35 Of course, with the exclusion of this Tertius or this authorial

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proxy, the distinction between Heidegger and Deissmann—indeed, between the phenomenological approach and the Paulusweg of the fervent biblical critic—collapses, and both scholars find themselves speaking in the name, or the spirit, of the authentic apostle. Deissmann, after all, had likewise found the spirit of Paul by way of this same exclusion, an expulsion he would consistently mark by the declaration that the apostolic writings were “unliterary” because they were textual productions of one who was too passionately engaged in the apostolic mission to write calculatingly or in a high academic style. “To regard Paul’s letters as unliterary [unliterarische] takes nothing essential from them; rather it restores to them their original fire [ursprunglichen Gluten]. And whoever has seen the holy fire glowing in these jewels has noticed that they are genuine precious stones [echte Steine]. Covered with dust and disfigured with doctrinaire accessories, several letters of Paul appeared unpauline; and many a researcher, made doubtful by the tremendous contrasts in their spiritual contents [seelischen Gehaltes], abandoned a part of the letters as inauthentic.”36 Indeed, because of the dusty, doctrinaire obfuscation of Paul’s originary flame, many scholars have not realized that their “literary” criticisms of the authenticity of his writings miss the mark, or that an “energetic thinking through” of the properly “unliterary” essence of Pauline text production removes “all ground for most of the objections to the authenticity of individual Pauline letters.”37 Regarding these skeptical misinterpretations of the authentic original fire, Deissmann writes that, while these methods might be applicable to “literary epistles,” they “are almost always unilluminating in the case of unliterary letters; I am thinking especially about the second letter to the Thessalonians and the so-called letter to the Ephesians.”38 Heidegger likewise only sees the fiery light of apostolic authenticity by sensing the movements of a particular style of writing, and in the name of this style he makes, despite himself, crucial judgments about “the authenticity question” (die Echtheitsfrage) in relation to both 2 Thessalonians and the disciplinary, methodological, and philosophical struggles that are playing themselves out on that stage.

Excursus on the Social Dimensions of the Echtheitsfrage It is worth taking a very brief detour in order to map one more aspect of this struggle to define original or originary Christianity as it relates directly to the Echtheitsfrage. In response to Karl Kautsky’s 1908 Ursprung des Chris-

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tentums (a text that deserves much more attention than I am able to offer here), Deissmann wrote a telling review. Kautsky’s reading, he tells us, does indeed possess a concern for the propertyless masses typical of the Marxist author, but the concern is marred by what Deissmann calls a “sated Berlin rationalism that looks down genteelly and unhistorically upon the ‘ignorance’ of the evangelists and their mania for miracles.”39 With its disdain for the living enthusiasm that the masses can have for a great personality, “many passages in [Kautsky’s] book read as if written, not by one who knows the lower classes and their simple-heartedness, their enthusiasm, their delight in the massive, the crude, and palpable, but by some pale, anaemic representative of the bourgeois press, in whom the rude strength and native vigor that a labor leader should possess have been shrivelled by the atmosphere of the modern city.”40 Deissmann, who had joined Kautsky in Berlin only a year earlier, is especially incensed at the way Kautsky’s “bourgeois” disdain for the masses registers itself as a misunderstanding of the authenticity of some of Paul’s letters: “From his own point of view he ought to have regarded these letters as fiery pamphlets in the agitation conducted by an enthusiastic leader of the proletariat. Actually he saddles himself with the opinions of certain curious critics, who, mistaking the volcanic nature of the letters, treat and maltreat the tentmaker of Tarsus as if he were a Professor of Dogmatics, and proceed with their scissors to carve out the genuine paulinism from the false.”41 What is the upshot of Kautsky’s misreading? Deissmann could not be more clear. An early Christian movement without “authentic” letters designating clearly their authors-as-leading-personalities would leave us with an early Christianity that is nothing but a communist movement: “The chief point of disagreement between Kautsky and myself lies in our fundamental judgment of the primitive Christian movement. He sees in it a movement for the emancipation of the proletariat, accompanied by a tendency to communism; and thus he underrates quite considerably the effects of the creative personality of Jesus and St. Paul.”42 Deissmann says something similar when he rejects the work of Albert Kalthoff by claiming that Kalthoff failed (despite his “heart for poor people”) because he was not “researching the real psyche of the masses and ultimately discovering within the masses the leading personalities [die Führer-Persönlichkeiten] who made the individual to be an individual indeed and raised him out of the masses.”43 Deissmann’s reading of early Christianity resists Kautsky’s “communism” by way of an appreciation of its leading personalities and, by the same token, a recognition of the “authentic” productions of the fiery apostle.

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Back to Heidegger: Authenticity and the Messianic Doppelganger A crucial component of Heidegger’s stylistic revelation of his own and 2 Thessalonians’ authenticity is that he follows the canonical order as an order of production and reads the second epistle in terms of a linear reception history. After the first epistle, Heidegger narrates, the community must have taken a stance of content-oriented or representational knowing in relation to the Pauline teaching of the parousia. They made an objectifiable doctrine out of the obligation to attend faithfully to the arrival of the Savior. In other words, they fell into the same error as Professor Schmidt, the one that Heidegger, himself standing in the spirit of Paul, resists. Heidegger then detects in the second epistle a definitively Pauline stylistic technology endemic to the nature of authentic relatedness to the future. In this respect, the uncanny doublings and contradictions in the second epistle were intended to cast the Thessalonian believers back upon their initial existential stance (i.e., before it collapsed into a detachable “content”) a casting back upon oneself that Heidegger describes as the necessary “intensification of tension” that must accompany all authentic human orientations. All these repetitions and doublings are evoked when Heidegger summarizes the scene of 2 Thessalonians in terms of first-person account: “When the parousia is dependent on how I live,” he writes, “then I am not able to maintain the faith and love that is demanded from me.”44 When this happens, “I have come near to despair.” Again, Heidegger’s depiction of this anguish of soul in relation to the claims of faith is intended to address the stylistic and thematic differences between the first and second letter. Intuiting that some of the Thessalonian believers must have, between the two letters, as it were, begun to make a dogmatic content out of the Pauline teaching of the parousia, the philosopher also discerns a shrewd rhetorical strategy within 2 Thessalonians itself. Far from offering a palliative for this despair, Heidegger tells us, Paul here “does not help, but only increases their tribulation” by producing images of uncanny doubles in the second epistle, calculated to demolish all calculations of the end.45 Indeed, the intensification of this imagined struggle by the ambiguous and off-putting images of the second epistle is what becomes, for Heidegger the endeigma, or sign, of genuine faith and— simultaneously, we must note—of the genuineness of 2 Thessalonians. Heidegger has seen enough to be convinced that the tarrying with the dregs of

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despair in 2 Thessalonians comes from no well-meaning Tertius: “This can only have been written by Paul. The overload [ple¯rophoria] of expression in the second letter has [here] its entire attuned motivation and is the sign of authenticity.”46 Heidegger’s doubly “authentic” 2 Thessalonians now reveals its differences from the first epistle in terms of a stylistic overload, an expressive ple¯rophoria calculated to undo all calculations of the end. The apostle overloads or undoes every image by which the calculations of the understanding might orient its way, going so far as to suggest that the messiah’s awaited appearance will itself be mimicked or doubled by a deceptive revelation of the anti-Christ, for all appearances indistinguishable from the revelation on which the believers are waiting. Heidegger even speaks of this diabolical imitation as the hypokeimenon (or underlying substratum) to which one falls in falling away from authentic waiting. The Greek word is not one that the ancient writers use, though it fits with Heidegger’s overall portrayal of the situation of these letters and his profound interest in the question of what is already underneath the surface of any given detail. The highest good, the approach of the saving messiah, is invariably interlaced with or grounded by its horrific obverse, divinely empowered deception from which one may not return and an anti-Christ who is indistinguishable from the messiah by any generic or objective standard. “This can only have been written by Paul.” The authenticity of 2 Thessalonians is guaranteed by the esthetic of the uncanny double, in all its horror and incalculability: I, Tertius, who wrote these things greet you. Like Deissmann, Heidegger sees through the Pauline simulacra of his contemporaries by insulating himself in, and as, the spirit of Paul that burns through every merely paper reproduction. Like Deissmann, Heidegger urges his hearers to remove themselves from a reading focused on discrete doctrines and objectifiable content in order to allow the true apostle to reveal himself as a laboring and passionate spiritual energy. In this respect, both seem to be penning a similar modern protreptikos in which the audience is called out of a desiccated academic environment to the illumination of a nonmodern (which is to say a nonreified and properly incalculable) light. Heidegger’s phenomenological approach, in fact, seems to gamble on the image of apostolic energy (and authorial authenticity) as much as does Deissmann’s Paulusweg ever did. Moreover, and this is of significance for every apocalypticism without apocalypse that partakes in the Heideggerian religiophilosophic discourse, up to and including Derrida and Vattimo, there is no incalculable apocalypse in which the highest good is intertwined with incalculable evil here [ 122 ]

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except through a bracketing of the possible pseudepigraphic presence of (a) Tertius and the interpretation of 2 Thessalonians as an authentic Pauline text. At least they are not present in Heidegger’s text. So many mirror plays are solidified and guaranteed in that one moment in which Heidegger moves himself, and phenomenology, into the place of 2 Thessalonians as an authentic Pauline production. What would we have without this mutual gamble of Heidegger’s phenomenology and the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians? We could have, just to begin, a Christianity coping with failed hopes, the calculated and retroactive rewriting of its own doctrinal content, and a pseudepigraphic taking up of another’s persona in order to accomplish this. What we would not have is the pathos of the Heideggerian interpretation of Paul with its apocalypticism without apocalyptic content or, in turn, the isomorphism between Heidegger’s early explication of the Pauline experience of parousia and his later interpretation of a primordial relatedness to time.47 This is not, however, the end of the story.

Why Do Pauline Impersonators Write Such Good Letters? Repetitions of (a) Tertius One never brackets the labor of (a) Tertius without repercussion, and Heidegger’s attempt to do so sets in motion tremors that reverberate into his own later writings, which affect his consistent rejection of theology as an appropriate scene in which to think phenomenologically. Early on in Being and Time we are told, for example, “the term ‘phenomenology’ is quite different in its meaning from expressions such as ‘theology’ and the like. Those terms designate the objects of their respective sciences according to the subject-matter which they comprise at the time. ‘Phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject-matter thus comprised.”48 In a lecture originally delivered the same year, Heidegger makes the same point in somewhat different terms. He summarizes, his hand scrawling (or clacking away in italics): “Our thesis, then, is that theology is a positive science, and as such, therefore, is absolutely different [absolut verschieden] from philosophy.”49 He repeats the gesture several times, scribbling the exact line again: “Our thesis is: Theology is a positive science and as such is absolutely different from philosophy.”50 In turns of phrase that are striking in the context of our investigation, Heidegger goes on to name the positum of theology as positive science: “Theology is a conceptual knowing [begriffliches Wissen] of that which first of all allows Christianity to become an originarily historical event [ursprünglich geschichtlichen Ereignis], a knowing of that which we call Chris[ 123 ]

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tianness pure and simple. Thus we maintain that what is given for theology (its positum) is Christianness [Christlichkeit].51 In this latter writing, however, Heidegger suggests that this particular event, faith in a crucified God, is something that cannot register within phenomenology itself. “This peculiar relationship [between Christian experience and phenomenological investigation] does not exclude but rather includes the fact that faith, as a specific possibility of existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is an essential part of philosophy and that is factually ever-changing. Faith is so absolutely the mortal enemy that philosophy does not even begin to want in any way to do battle with it.”52 We must remark immediately, even if only to state the obvious, that this text represents a completely different set of beliefs about phenomenology from those to be found in his previous notes on the phenomenology of religion. In the earlier lectures on the phenomenology of religion, after all, (and as we have noted) the philosopher promised that “with phenomenological understanding a new way opens itself for theology.”53 Now, however, the neue Weg refuses theology even the embrace of combat (and for Heidegger this is really saying something). The basic difference in the content of these two writings may cause some to doubt, or even to abandon part of this philosophical canon, as if the real Heiddegger has moved on from an early period of interest in early Christianity to a later period of development in which he no longer allows himself to speak in the spirit of Paul or to guarantee the phenomenological approach through a revelation of the early Christian experience of parousia. And what could be more obvious here—as the historicophilological method of Schmidt could show without question—that these earlier and latter texts, differing in content, simply could not have been written by the same author. From the perspective of the “earlier” author, in fact, one can only wonder what amanuensis or pseudepigrapher has emerged thus to write in Heidegger’s name (no doubt with the best of intentions and in heart-felt solidarity with the earlier tradition). No wonder that some so eagerly desire, therefore, to cordon off the later writings from the former, to separate the mature or real philosopher from the exuberant youth who still found himself speaking in the spirit of the apostle. We could take another tack, of course, one that would not forget the interpretive dilemmas just explicated from Heidegger’s interpretation of 2 Thessalonians. To follow this direction, Heidegger’s own after all, we should assert that such content-focused or representational distinctions between an early “Protestant” Heidegger and a later, more hard-boiled secularist only obscure the unfolding situation of the Heideggerian drama, [ 124 ]

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foisting on Heidegger a method foreign to his fundamental aims. We must therefore leave such scholars to their merely paper reconstructions and let the texts reveal themselves for what they are, apparent contradictions generated in the spirit of the apostle Paul. What would we have in these later writings—when we do not forget Heidegger’s negotiation of 2 Thessalonians—but the necessary intensification of apocalyptic waiting? What are these later texts but the rejection of ready-made discursive crutches in the press toward the Ursprung, a radical abolition of all externalized or reified ordering, and this with all the violent intensity of the Paulusweg itself? Let us read Heidegger, therefore, and with his own categories, in the spirit of Paul. This is the substantive task that would not mistake the fiery glow of spirit for the objective and misleading differences of content. In the midst of this task it is clear that Heidegger does not offer a palliative of any sort, but only seems to overload these later writings with frightening repetitions or plerophoric denunciations of any effort to suggest that his philosophy is a repetition of that earlier scene in which he found himself, as a phenomenologist, speaking in and as the spirit of the apostle. Yes, therefore, without question, this could only have been written by Paul. From among several, perhaps we should mention one clue that might help us to see that these present interpretive distresses are nothing more than a sign that we have ourselves begun to follow the tracks of the Paulusweg, that we have (as Deissmann urged) begun to walk in the footsteps of Paul. Consider, in this respect, the section in Being and Time on the call of conscience. Heidegger worries that some of his contemporaries are not hearing the call, and, in this case, such an aural divide of those with and without the ears to hear makes all the difference. Indeed, this distinction is the difference, the chasm between Being and beings. At the beginning of Being and Time, Part II, Heidegger claims that his aim in the consideration of the call of conscience is an orientation to “fundamental ontology” itself.54 In a repetition of dynamics we have already crossed, Heidegger’s turning toward this new philosophical revelation, the renewal of fundamental ontology, is thwarted by a present culture that is in the grip of an ossified perceptual practice. If the silent voice of conscience comes to us as a “call,” then it comes as one that is, given modernity’s propensity to perceive everything in terms of easily tabulated objects, easily ignored. Thus we are told that the call itself is liable to “perversion,” “lostness,” and a propensity to “listen away” from it toward the traditions of common opinion.55 Each of these misrecognitions of the fundamental existential situation is an attempt of finite existence to heal itself by identifying or localizing its finitude with something [ 125 ]

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to which one could point or with a debt that could be paid. At the critical moment, Heidegger names the culprit who thus “listens away” from finitude, returning us to our original scene in the process: “If we cannot reach the primordial phenomenon by a characterization of ‘bad’ conscience, still less can we do so by a characterization of ‘good’ conscience, whether we take this as a self-subsistent form of conscience or as one which is essentially founded upon ‘bad’ conscience. Just as Dasein’s ‘Being-evil’ would be made known to us in the ‘bad’ conscience, the ‘good’ conscience must have made known its ‘being-good.’ It is easy to see that the conscience which used to be an ‘effluence of the divine power’ now becomes a slave of Pharisaism.”56 Either way, the fundamental ontological fissure constituting Dasein is obscured, covered by a map (whether “good” or “bad”), soothed, and tricked. In this case, surprisingly, there is a name for this obfuscation, one that seems to have leaked out of Heidegger’s pen quite easily, as if he were taking dictation: “Pharisaism.” The designation is all the more remarkable because it is, he assures us, “easy to recognize.” Heidegger may have begun to renounce theology as an appropriate site from which to think ontology, but here, at this delicate moment of nailing down such a fundamental distinction, he finds himself once more within the early Christian tableau. This is all the more intriguing as it occurs in a tract that most readers misrecognize as no longer being written in the spirit of Paul. I leave these to their merely paper productions and instead draw attention to one particular aspect of our postal foray into Heidegger’s reception of early Christianity. To begin, Deissmann and the Heidegger of the early religion course are united in a shared gamble on an unveiling of an early Christianity whose imagined immediacy of lived experience affords a model for a European academy whose forms of perception seemed to have become worn out or to have ossified as modes of thought. Both Heidegger and Deissmann find in the Pauline writings expressions of a dynamic living energy or expressive dynamism. Better yet, their analysis of this dynamic, living energy (and this in the writings of both scholars), has simply no place for the “tele-technological” possibilities of ancient media, particularly the ancient pseudepigraphic author who writes in the persona of another. More than the function of historical oversight here, their respective attempts to bracket this ancient media possibility is tied to the way both of them privilege a kind of artisanal text production as much as they do other forms of artisanal labor. The “authentic” production of texts finds its exemplarity in the lone author who, in touch with his own laboring energies, produces texts that then function properly when they refer back to this artisanal “personal[ 126 ]

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ity” in all its self-reliant and volcanic force. In Heidegger’s case, moreover, the exclusion of the possibility of a pseudepigraphic author of 2 Thessalonians is the (technical or tele-technological) condition of the possibility for his descriptions of an early Christian experience of time that stands in as the authentic experience of time as such. Without the exclusion of (a) Tertius, we would not have the same kind of “Pauline” legacy of a plerophoric doubling of the messiah by the anti-Christ or the apocalypticism without apocalypse that Heidegger was particularly intrigued to find in an “authentic” 2 Thessalonians, calculated as Heidegger thought it was to destroy all calculations of the end. To press the postal property rights of (a) Tertius against the imaginary picture of immediately lived authorial experience that so possessed Heidegger and Deissmann is, among other things, to find oneself without a clear distinction between the “inside” and “outside” of religion, the spirit, or the apocalypticism of Pauline Christianity. This loss of an immediately obvious orientation, in other words, unhinges many more oppositions than those having to do only with a historical interpretation of the early Christian writings. Among these, this loss of orientation unhinges the obvious distinction between Deissmann, the fervent biblical scholar, and Heidegger, particularly the Heidegger who later disavows a connection between phenomenology and faith. The place of (a) Tertius in the biblical legacy remains to be fixed, therefore, and promises a return on an investment in the further analysis of the ancient (and modern) intertwining of religion and writing technologies of all sorts.

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Reason’s Apocalypse: Albert Schweitzer’s “Fully Eschatological” Jesus and the Collapse of Metaphysics

“ Our great mistake, however, is thinking that without mysticism we can reach an ethical world- and life-view [Welt- und Lebensanschauung] that will satisfy thought. Up to now we have done nothing but construct world- and life-views. They are good because they keep people up to activist ethics, but they are not true, and therefore they are always collapsing.” 1 “ This image [of the ‘rational’ or ‘liberal’ historical Jesus] has not been destroyed from outside. It has collapsed in on itself, split and shattered by concrete historical problems that came to the surface one after another. In spite of all the artifice, art, artificiality, and violence that was applied to them, they refused to be planed down to fit the design on which the Jesus of the theology of the last hundred and thirty years had been constructed. . . . The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma.” 2

Schweitzer’s Spot in the Archive of New Testament Historiography In that bittersweet moment of closure or collapse that Albert Schweitzer called, alternately, the end of “modern,” “rational,” or “liberal” thought, this biblical scholar and philosopher likewise asserted that this decline of an age brings with it a possible irruption of a new form of cultural power. As the quotations above begin to suggest, this previously unrecognizable or even repressed force—an otherness that modern “constructions” or “designs” of thought excluded at the level of their basic architecture—emerges only to operate beyond the borders constituting those modern structures [ 129 ]

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of recognition or forms of knowledge by which modernity had identified itself. As these statements also begin to suggest, however, and this in a way much more peculiar to Schweitzer’s fin-de-siecle cultural analysis, crucial moments of Schweitzer’s philosophical explication of the end of modernity and the emergence of new and previously unrecognizable realities in his Kulturphilosophie stand in isomorphic relationship to his descriptions of a century of scholarship on the historical Jesus in Von Reimarus zu Wrede. At the end of each narration, there is an irruption of a previously unrecognizable force that sounds the death knell of the modern form of thought from which it emerges, now, in the very destruction of the modern mode of knowing. It is the way Schweitzer’s historical Jesus and his postmetaphysical philosophy partake together of the same discourse of the decline, crisis, and end of modernity that I want to make clear here, particularly as this sharing—and this ending—has yet to register itself fully within philosophy or biblical studies. Albert Schweitzer remains one of the most influential New Testament scholars of the last two centuries. Born in Alsace in 1875, Schweitzer had a publishing career as a scholar, medical doctor, and humanitarian that represents a polymathic (and still underexplored) engagement with an extraordinarily broad range of topics. To situate Schweitzer as biblical critic and philosopher, it is worth saying that his university studies led him to Strasbourg, where he studied the New Testament with H. J. Holtzmann and the history of philosophy with the neo-Kantians Wilhelm Windelband and Theobald Ziegler. During this period a Goll scholarship allowed Schweitzer to pursue Kant research at the Sorbonne. According to Schweitzer’s account, the lecture style of the professors there disenchanted him, and he spent much of his time working privately on Kant and (with several prominent Parisian music teachers) on his skills as an already accomplished organist. Later, a mystical experience while reading an evangelical magazine article about the need for medical doctors in Africa led him to pursue ordination and a medical degree in order to go there himself. Following the publication of his doctoral dissertation on the function of religion within Kant’s developing philosophical system, Schweitzer produced exegeticohistorical investigations of the New Testament, a small portrait of the life of Jesus, and a lengthy study of Bach. From there the scope of his publications expanded to include what is still an influential history of scholarship about Jesus entitled Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906); narrations of Pauline scholarship and historical investigations of Pauline mysticism; a study of modern philosophy and its relation to the cultural problems of Europe (Kulturphilosophie, 1923); a manual about the repair of [ 130 ]

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antique organs; lectures on Goethe; and books about Indian philosophy, African history, and atomic warfare. Schweitzer’s summary of nineteenth-century scholarship about the historical Jesus in Von Reimarus zu Wrede remains a crucial model for contemporary narrations of that period of scholarship and its relation to the larger aims, methods, and disciplinary afflilations of the New Testament scholar. At one level, the continued significance of the book is no doubt related to the fact that it remains a common set piece in the training of scholars within the field and a common touchstone for those who find themselves needing to summarize (rather than read for themselves) nineteenthcentury biblical scholarship. Above all, however, it seems to be the basic framing devices of Schweitzer’s narrative that prove to be so irresistible for contemporary New Testament scholars. These ready-made frames, easily detachable from the specifics of Schweitzer’s narration of earlier scholarship or his own (now outdated) explication of the life of Jesus, continue to stage the dramatic self-presentation of many scholars of the historical Jesus and the New Testament more generally. It is these detachable framing mechanisms that are of interest here, particularly as a consideration of them allows one to engage more thoughtfully in what might be called Schweitzer’s archival function within contemporary New Testament studies.3 The name Schweitzer, and, even more, the movable stagings this name mediates to contemporary scholarship, are a crucial placeholder for at least three interrelated states of affairs: a summary of (and self-positioning in relation to) nineteenth-century scholarship; a description of modernity’s stake in the discovery (or suppression) of an “eschatological” Jesus; and an articulation of the labor of New Testament scholarship in relation to other academic departments and broader cultural values. One cannot tug at any one of these interlaced threads without transforming the entire complex and thus without transforming the contemporary archival function of Schweitzer’s work. Precisely because these frames organize such crucial territory for contemporary New Testament scholarship, Schweitzer’s “spot” in the disciplinary archive has become just that, a peculiarly unanalyzed moment in the history of the field. In contrast to Schweitzer, for example, contemporary discussion of Strauss or Deissmann almost immediately finds its way to the disclosure of basic information about the intellectual background against which these scholars should be understood and, often enough (we are warned) kept at a distance. Consider the frequency with which one observes the seamless—or even automated—segues of descriptive analysis of such figures into warnings about the debilitating influences of “Hegelian[ 131 ]

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ism” or “Romanticism” (respectively) on the otherwise sound practices of biblical scholarship. Such is not the case with most discussions of Schweitzer, and this is itself a rather remarkable fact. In relation to the sheer number and range of texts produced by a biblical critic, few compare to Schweitzer (most of whose writings, moreover, are readily available in translation, unlike Deissmann and, particularly, Strauss). Schweitzer leaves behind a treasure trove of material for a broad contextualization of his early Christian research in relation to a much larger body of work. Moreover, many of the interconnections among these very diverse subjects are fairly obvious once one begins to read widely in the material. Who would have thought, for example, that the basic categories with which Schweitzer understood nineteenthcentury biblical studies would likewise organize his discussions of Indian philosophy or African history? Who would have guessed that his praise of the bourgeois subjectivity of the Goethezeit would repeat itself as a valorization of the naive sincerity of first-century Christians? As a discipline, New Testament studies simply does not discuss Schweitzer the way we discuss many of the other figures in our history, and this fact is far from an accidental or inconsequential lapse in disciplinary memory. In terms of an interdisciplinary conversation between biblical studies and philosophy, Schweitzer’s work offers a rich example of cross-pollination. Schweitzer’s first two books, just to begin, were not about the New Testament at all, but about the philosophy of Kant. Moreover, his later volumes on modern philosophy and the crisis of European culture (Kulturphilosophie, 1923) were a topic of research from the time Schweitzer finished the first books on Kant (1899). These topics were, in other words, on his mind during the time he produced some of his most influential works of biblical scholarship, including the one to be examined here, Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906). Even more pointedly, the narrative orientation and basic framing devices of Von Reimarus zu Wrede are themselves profoundly indebted to Schweitzer’s own ambivalent relation to Kant, or, in terms of the intellectual directions of his own time, his own frustrated “neo-Kantianism.”

The Return to Kant and the “Declaration of War against Positivism” While my own interest in Schweitzer’s frustrated neo-Kantianism will become clear in the analysis that follows, it may be useful to make three brief comments about the turn to Kant that structured a great deal of the scholarly environment within which Schweitzer came of age in the academy. The [ 132 ]

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common early twentieth-century struggle to define or rethink the Kantian legacy was just that, a struggle without simple unity of direction. Moreover, Schweitzer’s own relation to Kantian thought was, as we will see, ambiguous, and this ambiguity mirrors an ambivalence toward Kant among many of Schweitzer’s philosophical contemporaries. The remarkable interchange between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger about Kant (1929) offers several important clues in both respects, clues that warn us against proceeding here by way of a cookie-cutter definition of neo-Kantianism. cassirer: What does Heidegger understand by neo-Kantianism? Who is the opponent to whom Heidegger has addressed himself? I believe that there is hardly a single concept which has been paraphrased with so little clarity as that of neo-Kantianism. . . . Neo-Kantianism is the whipping boy of the newer philosophy. To me, there is an absence of neoKantians. . . . I must confess that I have found a neo-Kantian here in Heidegger. heidegger: For the present, if I should name names, then I say: Cohen, Windelband, Rickert, Erdmann, Riehl.4

To say the least, there is no uncontested or stable meaning here about the definition of neo-Kantianism, as Heidegger’s disdainful reaction against being lumped together with what he thought to be the “real” (and, in his view, misled) neo-Kantians makes clear. It is worth noting, however, that Schweitzer studied with one of these true “culprits” that Heidegger names, Wilhelm Windelband.5 In his inaugural address at the University of Strasbourg (where Schweitzer studied with him), Windelband proclaimed a “declaration of war against positivism,” and part of the neo-Kantian legacy with which Schweitzer was so intimately acquainted may be said to be a wrestling with the problem of “value” and a subsequent discomfort with any method of the human sciences that obscures this problem through an implicit reliance on mathematical or scientific models of knowing.6 Schweitzer sometimes speaks, in this respect, of a “neo-idealism” that marks early twentieth-century interest in Kant and his Copernican inversion of epistemology by an articulation of experience as a matter of the subject constructing representations for itself. We might add that it was another teacher, also in Strasbourg (a thriving center of neo-Kantian thought), named Theobald Ziegler, who encouraged Schweitzer to pursue Kantianism as a research topic and who oversaw his dissertation on the subject.7 To fill out our portrait of Schweitzer’s neo[ 133 ]

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Kantian connections, it is worth mentioning that Schweitzer also studied with the sociologist Georg Simmel. Traveling on his Goll scholarship, Schweitzer listened to Simmel’s lectures while in Berlin, an experience that must have been pleasant, given Schweitzer’s frequent repetition of the rhetoric of “life” that one finds in Simmel or a philosopher like Bergson. There is one more important clue to be gleaned from the debate between Heidegger and Cassirer that will orient our reading of Schweitzer. There Heidegger goes on to describe neo-Kantianism as a recuperative rereading of Kant’s work as a “theory of knowledge” and, indeed, Kant as a “theoretician of a mathematico-physical theory of knowledge.” In the more developed Kulturphilosophie (1923), Schweitzer assumes a similar function of Kant and, like Heidegger, rejects Kantian epistemology (with its demiurgic “subject” organizing the chaos of sensation into objects of experience) as a blockade against a more fundamental exploration of ontology. This was not an uncommon way to criticize Kant, and Schweitzer gleaned many of his own criticisms from Bergson, whom he read with great admiration.8 For now, these three initial clues are enough to orient our initial reading of Schweitzer’s “frustrated” neo-Kantianism: a contested legacy; the problem of value as a means to critique positivism; and a probing of the limits of thinking about knowledge as a construction made by a subject. Almost no one is speaking about Schweitzer’s “neo-Kantian historiography of the New Testament,” however, our fascination with producing descriptions of this sort notwithstanding. Why? Perhaps it is because, unlike Strauss and Deissmann, Schweitzer was, precisely in his deployment of a “neo-Kantian” framework, espousing ways of thinking that are still deeply entrenched within New Testament scholarship. Given the ease with which Schweitzer’s basic framing devices or self-descriptive stagings are so frequently repeated within contemporary scholarship, this possibility seems to me more than likely. Contemporary New Testament scholarship wants to occupy the archival space of Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede, to be tucked away among the intertwining of these threads that knot together, around this name, a way of thinking about the nineteenth century, the historical Jesus, and themselves as historians of early Christianity. We do not demand the same background check for this name because it is a name (or a voice) in which we still hope to speak. We do not analyse the frames with which Schweitzer stages his work because we want to remain comfortably within them. It is with the aim of a contestatory clarification of this desire that the present chapter considers Schweitzer’s discovery of a “consistently eschatological” Jesus in terms of the biblical scholar’s peculiar, and peculiarly unanalyzed, [ 134 ]

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interests in philosophy. More specifically still, this chapter examines the way Schweitzer’s discovery of the consistently eschatological Jesus functions to resolve the same intellectual deadlock or sense of modern European cultural crisis that Schweitzer describes in his Kulturphilosophie. As can already begin to be seen in the above juxtaposition of quotations from these two works, with the collapse of modern intellectual constructions (philosophical or historical) arises a previously unrecognized spiritual or cultural energy that is itself what modernity had both suppressed and needed all along. In short, in Schweitzer’s depiction of Christian origins is being negotiated the philosophicocultural crisis—and the answer to this crisis—that he found everywhere around him. This, of course, invites the obverse question about the ways Schweitzer’s depiction of Christian origins serves as an exemplary answer to the philosophical crisis into which modernity seemed to have plunged.

Kulturphilosophie: Schweitzer on a Modernity in Crisis Schweitzer’s most explicit analyses of cultural decline and the “crisis” that had laid hold of European thought occur in the two volumes of Kulturphilosophie.9 Both volumes of the work were published in 1923, after Schweitzer had committed to his well-publicized departure from academic life in order to attend medical school and then to start a hospital in the French colony at Lambaréné, Africa.10 Schweitzer is explicit in his suggestions that these reflections on nineteenth-century philosophy and its relation to a more general cultural transformation of Europe came of age during the time of his missionary and humanitarian labors in Africa. It should also be noted that many of the diagnoses of modern thought in the Kulturphilosophie remain basically the same as those he produced before moving to Africa, namely, in Die Religionsphilosophie Kants von der Kritik der reinen Vernunft bis zur Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Kant’s Philosophy of Religion from the Critique of Pure Reason to Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). This earlier book, published in 1899, was a version of his doctoral dissertation and, like many of his contemporaries, Schweitzer’s summary and critique of nineteenth-century philosophy overall found its orientation in a reading of Kant.11 In this case, Schweitzer claims to have begun working on Kulturphilosophie in 1900, only a year after he published his studies of the philosophy of religion in Kant.12 At any rate, temporally speaking, there is no safe way to distinguish Schweitzer the biblical critic (or the author of Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 1906) from Schweitzer the philosopher. Both types of study were being thought about and produced during the same period. [ 135 ]

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Like the decline narratives of a Nietzsche, Spengler, or Heidegger, Schweitzer’s tragic drama of Western culture begins with the Greeks and ends somewhere in the nineteenth century.13 Despite the broad historical sweep, Schweitzer’s narrative revolves continually around what he calls the “modern” period from Kant to the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the same chronological frame within which he narrates his summary and resolution of a crisis in New Testament studies in Von Reimarus zu Wrede. Moreover, in a move whose significance is difficult to overestimate, Kulturphilosophie progresses (as does Von Reimarus zu Wrede) chapter by chapter through the description and evaluation of successive attempts of nineteenth-century individuals to answer a basic and unchanging question. In the case of the Kulturphilosophie, Schweitzer follows many of his contemporaries in serially evaluating each philosopher by a measuring rod Schweitzer calls an individual’s “world-view.” Or, to say it even more strongly, “world-view” is simply another name for this type of serializing historiography. Finally like many of these contemporaries, Schweitzer’s serial history of philosophy assumes that philosophy’s value resides in its ability to produce worldviews able to inspire, clarify, and direct Europe in its cultural and technological development. As is well known, the method was popular at the time. Schweitzer’s teacher Windelband produced a history of philosophy while Schweitzer was in school at the University of Strasbourg, for example, that treats philosophy in a similar manner.14 Others, like Dilthey, did the same thing even as they began to suggest that this method was itself the last gasp of metaphysics, a moment Gianni Vattimo has recently interrogated in a similar way as I proceed here.15 Taking up a stance against the common practice, Martin Heidegger made a living producing censures against it.16 The seriality of such narrations annoyed the increasingly historicist and postmetaphysical sensibilities of some, sensibilities from which (despite himself) Schweitzer does not entirely escape. Surprisingly, given his own mode of historical narration, Schweitzer sometimes suggests like Heidegger (or Hegel before him) that this form of serial narration is what happens after the failure or weakening of a genuinely philosophical impulse renders it powerless to do anything but organize the museum displays of past ideas. In the Kulturphilosophie, Schweitzer even stages a break with worldview construction as an epoch of thought altogether. This break is of central importance for a consideration of Schweitzer’s thought, as it suggests that like Dilthey, Schweitzer found himself at a turning point of thought that can be read as fissuring his own work from the inside. In this case, Schweitzer proclaims a break with a basic [ 136 ]

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mode of philosophical thinking even as it continues to structure his Von Reimarus zu Wrede and his Kulturphilosophie. While a panoply of tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions is seen in Schweitzer’s writings, it is (in part) the ambivalence of his break with worldview construction that causes me to label him a “frustrated” neo-Kantian. If there were any doubt about Schweitzer’s continued reliance on worldview construction as a way to understand philosophy, it would be dispelled at the outset of the Kulturphilosophie. The initial chapter, “The Guilt of Philosophy for the Decline of Culture,” proceeds by way of three subtopics: “Our self-deception as to the real conditions of our culture”; “The collapse of the world-view [Weltanschauung] on which our cultural ideals [Kulturideale] were grounded”; and “The superficial [Unelementare] character of modern philosophizing.” Schweitzer’s writings of the 1920s were frequently oriented around jeremiads about the war (particularly those he penned while trying to embody European humanitas as a physician in the jungles of Africa), and this one is no different. Schweitzer inaugurates this discussion by gesturing toward the catastrophe and declaring, “We are standing today under the sign of the decline of culture.”17 He goes on to diagnose the war as a symptom of a more distant and fateful transformation by claiming that the decline “has not been produced by the war,” but that the war was “only a manifestation” of the present “situation.”18 In this instance, mortar shells and bomb shelters are only indications of a similarly distant but intrusive enemy: “what was spiritual has translated itself into facts, which now react on the spiritual with disastrous results in every respect.”19 Significantly, this metaindividual or cultural transposition of the proper hierarchy between “spiritual” (Geistigen) and “material” (Materiellen) results in a basically “unhealthy” (unheilvollen) mixture of the two, leading to a dramatic circumscription of the era’s basic liberatory potential. Relying on the early twentieth-century image of the spiritual and material “stream” of culture, Schweitzer warns that this inversion or reification of spiritual energies has caused Europe to slip out of “the main stream” and into a “channel with weird whirlpools” (mit unheimlichen Strudeln), the self-extrication from which will demand “the most gigantic efforts to rescue the vessel of our fate.”20 As if fated to destroy itself, Europe’s navigational failure (Schweitzer counsels) arises from a lack of “real reflection on what culture is.” Intriguingly (and in yet another statement that sounds very similar to the culturephilosophical diagnoses of Heidegger), this forgetfulness of the essence of culture has begun to reign, as if by fate, in the midst of a massive proliferation of texts about this topic. As if part of a clandestine plot not to dis[ 137 ]

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cuss the elemental questions, this print coverage has only covered over the real question at hand. As though “in obedience to some secret order [geheimen Parole],” scholars of culture “made no attempt to settle and make clear the conditions of our mental life [Geisteslebens], but devoted themelves exclusively to its origin and history.”21 In this respect, the descriptive historiographical interests of the nineteenth century thinkers of culture, Schweitzer asserts, functioned merely to obfuscate any “genuine reflection” that might “test it regarding the nobility of its ideas and its energy [Energie] for true progress.”22 Unlike the early Heidegger, however, Schweitzer presents his own worldview narration as a way to dig down to the elemental questions of the essence of culture. Each worldview becomes, therefore, a metaphysical picture that is read as a more or less appropriate answer to an unchanging logical problem of culture. In line with this way of thinking, the frustrations, confusions, and disasters of history intrude into Schweitzer’s otherwise static tableau, as so many “results” or “effects” of the improperly answered problem of culture. Historical event, therefore, becomes a result of unstable structures that are themselves assumed to exist in static, architectural terms. Disaster, in other words, functions as the sign of a lack of an underlying metaphysical stability the philosophers were supposed to provide. “Now it is public knowledge for everyone that the self-destruction of culture is in progress. What yet remains of it is no longer secure. It is still standing, indeed, because it was not exposed to the destructive pressure which made a victim [Opfer] of the rest. But it is likewise built on scree, and the next landslide could take it away.”23 The statement is remarkable in the way it plays out the logic of Schweitzer’s description of the “unhealthily mixed” stream of culture. It is the stream of culture itself, presumably, that is producing the suicidal gesture, demanding the sacrifice of parts of itself for the maintenance of this (superficially grasped or “unhealthily mixed”) self of the cultural stream. Schweitzer does not clarify who or what he believes to be that portion of culture that the (secretly controlled or fated) superficial engagements have offered up as a sacrifice, or, more importantly, what is the precious remainder of this disaster that may yet be saved from destruction. By memorializing the recent military, economic, or social catastrophes of Europe as so many effects or results of an improperly built foundation (a significant change in metaphor), Schweitzer’s serial narration of modern European worldviews appears all the more important. In yet another shift in metaphor that will be significant for Schweitzer’s cultural intervention, he moves seamlessly from stream and architectonic metaphors to those of a cultural energetics of vigor and exhaustion. In this [ 138 ]

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case, the reader is warned that, for his or her own good, he or she must consider “what it was that preceded and led up to this disempowering of the cultural energies [Kraftloswerden der Kulturenergien].”24 Schweitzer explains his answer to this problem by way of the standard refrain that European society of the nineteenth century began to go wrong when “progress” began to operate according to an autonomous logic that then escaped the oversight of “ethical ideals.” Echoing his general assumptions about philosophy, Schweitzer claims that this inversion of the hierarchy between progress and ideals put a stop to the cultural advances of the Enlightenment, a period Schweitzer invariably portrays as being led by philosophers and a high point of modern Europe. Worse, Schweitzer continues, this abdication of philosophical oversight has begun to react upon the very spiritual powers that once gave progress its birth and governed its development. The return of the creation to feed upon its now docile and impotent creators is even given an approximate date: “. . . about the middle of the nineteenth century this mutual explication [Auseinandersetzung] of rational ethical ideals and reality began to break down. In the course of the next few decades it came more and more to a standtill: without struggle, without protest, the abdication of culture.”25 The tragedy of Europe will play, therefore, as it did for so many other authors of the decline of the West, as an increasingly autonomous realm of “reality” whose unquestionable right not to be tampered with is such that Schweitzer can only describe his generation’s apparent submission to it in terms of a conspiracy. It is as if all the writers of cultural philosophy had already become the automata of a “secret command” coming from offstage or, what amounts to the same thing (for Schweitzer), unstable manifestations of an unseen but shoddy philosophical foundation. “The differentiating factor [in all this] was philosophy’s failure.”26 With this move, the entire narrative organization of Schweitzer’s tale is established, as well as the description, analysis, and remedy of its decline. Schweitzer’s story of the inauguration and painful collapse of what he calls “modernity” consists in trotting out one philosopher after another (or, rather, the one worldview of each individual after another) before the eyes of the reader as so many examples of the failed effort to clarify the fundamental questions of the essence of culture. In each case, the failure to lay bare the primordial problems or the basic structures of a philosophy of culture has resulted in a failure to protect Europe from what appears to be a heteronomous enervation working within the secret heart of a now “late” modernity. Two crucial points are to be highlighted from this initial delineation of the basic narrative mechanisms of Schweitzer’s Kulturphilosophie. First, [ 139 ]

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the architectonic thinking of worldview provides the basic form of historical narration, something that is all the more striking as Schweitzer will criticize this mode of thought by the end of the same book. Second, this serializing “logical problem” method of narration also structures Schweitzer’s summary and evaluation of what he calls “modern” or “liberal” biblical scholarship in Von Reimarus zu Wrede. This is predictable enough, perhaps. Schweitzer wrote worldview histories. It is the shared denouement of these respective narrations that concerns us, however. At the end of both these narratives there is a revelation, in the very collapse of modern thought, of a previously untapped spiritual energy that completely inverts the value of the failure with which it appeared. There is, at the end of both the Kulturphilosophie and Von Reimarus zu Wrede, the appearance of a form of salvation that only becomes apparent in the experience of modern thought’s self-destruction and failure.

Back to the Reading Room with Schweitzer and Kant To clarify this shared narrative or philosophicocultural paradox, it is helpful to keep in mind Schweitzer’s early reading of Kant, particularly as Kant exemplifies some of the basic problems according to which Schweitzer presents his vision of a modernity in crisis. In his earlier writing, Die Religionsphilosophie Kants, Schweitzer frequently repeats the standard gesture of making Kant the paragon of modern thought and, thus, as having established the basic philosophical problematic within which nineteenth-century thought would struggle. Several recurrent motifs within Schweitzer’s reception of Kant should be mentioned, not because they are particularly profound or original but because they reveal an orientation that likewise determines the way Schweitzer categorizes and judges the success of modern philosophical thought and modern biblical studies alike. One does not need to read the writings of a great number of New Testament scholars to begin to suspect that they are, as a class, well equipped for peculiar philosophical engagements (or at least they were when some of them still read philosophy). Schweitzer’s initial description of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is, without question, one of these strange interactions. According to his own account, while he was at the Sorbonne researching Kant and writing his dissertation on the thinker, Schweitzer became very frustrated by the lending policy of the reading room at the library there. As he would reminisce later on, to “investigate the literature about Kant’s philosophy of religion in the Bibliothèque Nationale proved to be impracticable on account of the cumbersome regulations of the reading room.”27 Sch[ 140 ]

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weitzer’s solution to the problem, in his own words, was to decide “without further ado to write the thesis without troubling about the literature, and to see what results I could get by burying myself in the Kantian writings themselves.”28 While his neo-Kantian professors back in Strasbourg were not similarly charmed by his lack of engagement with secondary sources, the decision paid off by giving Schweitzer the opportunity to preface his 1899 book on Kant with the declaration that it “does not want to be a work on Kant’s philosophy of religion and it does not intend to pass a judgment” on the philosopher (all the more remarkable a suggestion in light of its title, Die Religionsphilosophie Kants von der reinen Vernunft bis zur Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft).29 On the contrary, and conveniently, “its purpose is to provide an opportunity for Kant to be heard again after all the works that have been written about Kant’s philosophy of religion.”30 This was a cozy proposal, but to leave a budding New Testament scholar alone in the reading room with only Kant’s writings to accompany him is to invite all kinds of trouble. Schweitzer—who had already begun to work on his path-breaking new way to configure the various strata of traditions within Matthew’s Gospel—did not finish the first Critique before he had become obsessed with the idea that philological analysis of the book could reveal previously unrecognized layers of authorial production. Schweitzer’s autobiographical reflection says it all: Studying them thus [i.e., Kant’s works without secondary literature] I was struck by variations in the use of words; that, for example, in many sections of the Critique of Pure Reason which dealt with religious philosophy, the word intelligibel, which alone corresponded to the Kantian criticism, disappeared and was replaced by the simpler übersinnlich. I therefore tracked, through the whole series of his writings, the words which play a part in the expression of his religious philosophy to find out how often each is used and any variation there might be in the meanings assigned to them. This enabled me to establish it as a fact that the long section on the “Canon of Pure Reason,” as shown by its diction and its thought alike, is no real part of the Critique of Pure Reason, but an earlier work of the philosopher, which he adopted for a religio-philosophical introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, although it is not really in harmony with it.31

Naturally Schweitzer, being a biblical scholar, determined to name this rogue philosophical fragment and, thereby, to solidify his philologicohistorical reconstruction of Kant’s writing process. As he would later remem[ 141 ]

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ber proudly, “This earlier, pre-critical work I designated ‘the Sketch of the Philosophy of Religion [die Religionsphilosophische Skizze].’ ”32 The “discovery” of the “Sketch” does more than indicate Schweitzer’s peculiar interdisciplinary orientations, however. Reading Kant again for the first time, Schweitzer’s interpretation of the philosophers’ entire oeuvre remains magnetized by this displaced “pre-critical” fragment. The young Schweitzer goes so far as to declare this detachable or free-floating moment of Kantian thought to be an indication of a forgotten and unfinished project that could not be worked out within the constraints of Kant’s overall “critical” philosophical system. Blurring the boundary between his philological and philosophical reception of Kant, Schweitzer declares the sketch to be, in terms of Kant’s overall system, “actually somewhat sketchy [Skizzenhaftes],” a direction of thought that remains a “fluctuating” loose end within the system itself.33 As such, it indicates to Schweitzer a philosophy Kant at once desired and yet could not refrain from destroying once the “Sketch” was inserted into the architectonic structures of his “critical idealism.” As the last long quotation suggests, Schweitzer sees in this sketchy “Sketch” of a philosophy of religion a Kant who is still holding together a basic distinction that would later, and for essential reasons, collapse into a stable or systemic opposition. It is significant, therefore, that Schweitzer takes this section of the “Canon of Pure Reason” to be a loose end—and even a precritical leftover—that makes its way into the Critique of Pure Reason. As such, this section stands in for Schweitzer as the philosophy of religion that Kant’s system, in its various permutations from the Critique of Pure Reason to Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, can support less and less. The basic question with which Schweitzer frames his study of Kant is, therefore, “whether or not critical idealism has succeeded in supporting a philosophy of religion.”34 The question should be posed in terms of his rogue “Sketch,” as Schweitzer is basically asking whether or not the developing understanding of “critical idealism” can support this fragment as a philosophy of religion. Schweitzer claims that, no, Kant’s developed system is not able to hold together what is, in fact, held together in this precritical fragment. Why? Kant begins this section of the critique by declaring that the movement of reason’s “unquenchable desire” to absolve itself from the entanglements of sensibility and “to find a firm footing beyond all bounds of experience” must, nevertheless, circle back around as a kind of productive labor of reason within the sensible realm.35 As Kant writes, “Pure reason has a presentiment of objects of great interest to it. It takes the path of mere specula[ 142 ]

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tion in order to come closer to these; but they flee before it. Presumably it may hope for better luck on the only path that still remains to it, namely that of its practical use.”36 At stake is whether the self-critique of pure reason has anything to offer practical activity within the sensible sphere, or, to borrow from Schweitzer’s later description of philosophy and culture, whether pure reason—or the freedom of spirit—has anything to do with the practical, worldly engagements by which modern Western civilization could produce monuments to its autonomy. Schweitzer’s understanding of modernity, worldview, and religion—in short, Schweitzer as New Testament historian and philosopher of culture—will always remain focused on the basic problem indicated here. Indeed, it governs Schweitzer’s engagement with the daunting early twentieth-century realization that academic philosophy was no longer (if it ever had been) supplying the foundational worldview by which technological progress would orient itself. In the Kulturphilosophie, for example, Schweitzer invariably praises Kant’s rejection of utilitarian calculation as a sufficient definition of reason itself. Reason in his view is much more than mere cleverness in the relating of means to preestablished or naturalized ends. Schweitzer, following Kant at this point, describes reason as that which calls humanity to a realm beyond the instrumental sphere by means of the “immediate and absolute commanding duty” that is the categorical imperative.37 In this, Schweitzer wants to remain thoroughly Kantian, praising the philosopher for being the first since Plato to realize the ethical imperative as that “mysterious fact within us” (rätselhafte Tatsache in uns), which raises us above the “order of nature,” and indeed “above ourselves,” by the imperial force of an ineluctable command: “In powerful language he shows in the Critique of Practical Reason that ethics is a volition that raises us above ourselves, frees us from the natural order of the sensible world [von der Naturordnung der Sinnenwelt], and attaches us to a higher world-order. This is his great insight.”38 Again, the basic problematic here will orient both Schweitzer’s philosophical critique of modernity and his understanding of Christian origins. In both cases, there is a repetition of the basic problem in the “Sketch” (or “Canon of Pure Reason”) that so intrigues Schweitzer, namely, whether humanity’s belonging to this transcendent order can ever embody itself within the realm of the “natural order of the sensible world.” If it cannot, if reason’s self-extrication from the sensible cannot complete its own circle back into this exterior domain, then the sensible remains something like a realm of mere appearance and the self-enclosure of reason remains [ 143 ]

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forever deferred within a cleft circle of dualism. For Schweitzer, with this question stands or falls the modernity of Kant as a thinker. He suggests, for example, that “as a child of the modern spirit” (als Kind des neuzeitlichen Geistes), Kant cannot submit to a Platonic (or nonmodern) form of religion, which Schweitzer describes as a form of “world and life negation” (Welt- und Lebensverneinung).39 Instead, the modern thinker attempts to find a path from this transcendent sphere of immediate obligation back to the world of phenomena in the form of a substantial engagement with the pressing problems of cultural progress. Unlike his ancient predecessor, the modern Kant is determined not to consider the call and response of reason as a simple escape from the world of sense, as if this realm were one of mere appearance. On the contrary, Schweitzer recounts, Kant “sees himself faced with the confusing task of letting purposive, activist ethics [zweckvoll tätige Ethik] directed on the empirical world originate in impulses that are not determined by any adaptation to the empirical [keine empirische Zweckmässigkeit].”40 In short, and to borrow from Schweitzer’s comparison of Plato and Kant, at stake in the “Sketch of a Philosophy of Religion” (i.e., the “Canon of Pure Reason”) is whether the universal and necessary call of reason, having drawn our thinking out of the world, will send us back with a mission. Again, the question of the Kulturphilosophie about human autonomy (and, indeed, control) in relation to economic and technological development is just below the surface here. In this respect, it is important to remember that the obligation that exceeds all the instrumental demands of the “natural order of the senses” in the form of an “immediate sovereign duty” is an indication of the self-legislating sphere of reason. When Schweitzer begins to speak of the “reverence for life” (the phrase has become a popular designation of his philosophy overall), he is simply repeating this aspect of the Kantian tradition and attempting to find that obscure bond which joins respect for one’s own spiritual essence (which transcends the “order of nature” and its utilitarian calculations) to an activist engagement with the cultural progress of humanity. Whether in his philosophical interventions or his historical reconstructions of Christian origins, Schweitzer will suggest that it is religion—and even the “kingdom of God”—that provides this fragile attachment between those two orders which modern humanity otherwise remains unable to bridge. In a way not dissimilar from Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant several years later, here the biblical critic believes himself to have found in this naive or precritical intuition a loose end that will remain obscured or undeveloped within Kant’s system overall. Unlike Heidegger, Schweitzer’s reading highlights the problem of ethics, and he consistently claims that [ 144 ]

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it is in religion that the self-legislating activity of pure reason does express itself in the form of activist engagements with the world. Schweitzer summarizes this way: “The ideas [God, immortality, freedom] which become realized in the practical realm are prepared for this by means of critical idealism. They have moved, in a way, to a position of equilibrium, from which reason in practical use then draws them toward its own domain. This relationship is also expressed in the Kantian terminology when he speaks, in this connection, of a theoretical (speculative) and a practical use of pure reason [Gebrauch der reinen Vernunft], but does not distinguish, as he does later in the Critique of Practical Reason, between a ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical reason.’ This distinction in terminology is grounded in a difference in thinking.”41 Reason, in the rogue fragment, Schweitzer claims, is not yet split into a dualism that will forever defer an embodiment of humanity’s self-legislating transcendence within the world. In the “Sketch,” he asserts, there is a kind of naive harmony or equilibrium in which the practical and the theoretical stand as two uses of reason, but not yet two spheres as will, increasingly, come to be the case in the Kantian system. With the growing systematic distinction between these two uses, Schweitzer claims, the philosopher fails to escape the Platonic “world-denial” that, as a child of modernity, he must flee. With this failure arises the collapse of Kant’s worldview as a viable modern self-understanding able to support human autonomy and active cultural engagement. In the way the oppositions are “framed” (gestellte), Schweitzer claims, the question of their interrelation becomes “insoluble.”42 The opposition, cast in this form, can only ever produce self-consuming artifacts and insoluble antinomies. Ultimately, in the conclusion to his Die Religionsphilosophie Kants (as in his Kulturphilosophie and his biblical studies more generally), Schweitzer treats the failure of the “Sketch” as an indication of the impossibility of grounding a thinking of religion within the measured or epistemological structures of Kant’s “critical idealism.” Schweitzer will never cease in his declarations, therefore, that a thinking of religion (or, better, interventions within the world that are grounded in a realm transcending the merely calculating or utilitarian) will only ever be sundered by the structures of knowledge. The “Sketch” is placed beside two great streams of thought, which only diverge increasingly throughout the development of the system.43 The sketchy sketch of a philosophy of religion, therefore, may have been naive, but this naiveté, for Schweitzer, trumps the perpetual disembodiment or dualism of reason. Beyond a militant naiveté there is only the structural self-consumption and collapse of the Kantian antinomies. To return to one of the quotes with which this chapter began, Schweitzer claimed that “our [ 145 ]

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great mistake . . . is thinking that without mysticism we can reach an ethical world- and life-view that will satisfy thought.” These projects are “good,” Schweitzer suggests, “because they keep people up to activist ethics, but they are not true, and therefore they are always collapsing.” Epistemology, in other words, is not and cannot be a discourse of truth. The basic problem remains the same for all of the philosophers Schweitzer considers in Kulturphilosophie, and Kant’s failure eventually becomes narrated as modernity’s failure. In the moment of its final self-consumption and collapse, however, something sparks to life for Schweitzer, and he begins to sense, in the very failure of the project, that hidden bond between theory and practice that had eluded Europe for so long. When he senses it in the Kulturphilosophie, Schweitzer refers to it as a postmetaphysical turning away from the architectonics of worldview and toward a mysticism of the everyday. When the same fragile bond appears in his biblical studies, Schweitzer calls it the “fully eschatological” Jesus or, elsewhere, the “kingdom of God,” modernity’s last hope against the dehumanizing tyranny of a measured everyday “reality.” This intuition that one should not submit to the divisions governing modern thought, Schweitzer claimed, would allow him to “dig down to the roots of the ethical as such” in order to unearth the previously hidden union of a self-legislating, transcendent realm of humanity and a project of cultural engagement that would, essentially, construct a world of its own making. Despite some of his easy dismissals of Kant in Kulturphilosophie, therefore, Schweitzer remains within the general ambit of Kantian thought. It is often difficult to say, in fact, whether Schweitzer considers himself to be critiquing or espousing Kant, and he sometimes says very Kantian things in the context of criticizing the philosopher. Moreover, there are moments when Schweitzer suggests he is “solving” a basic problem of Kantian (or modern) thought even as he recreates many of the same antinomies and dualisms he claims to overcome. The purpose here is not to wonder whether Schweitzer was correct, original, or profound in his negotiation of the Kantian legacy, but to set the stage to show how Schweitzer’s (alleged) step out of modern metaphysical thought is likewise repeated at the level of biblical criticism with his discovery of a fully eschatological Jesus and that figure’s “kingdom of God.” Again, Schweitzer hopes to outdo Kant’s modern desire to have a worldly or activist ethical vision, and he attempts to accomplish this by criticizing Kant for failing to overcome Platonism. Only by doing so, Schweitzer asserts, could there arise an ethical philosophy that is able to motivate, guide, and ground a popular movement of cultural production.44 Kant [ 146 ]

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rescued ethical thought from utilitarianism only to leave it stranded in a transcendent realm that does not participate sufficiently in the structures of practical engagement. Schweitzer formulates the standard criticism by claiming that “the exaltation of the fundamental principle of the moral costs him a loss of all of its content.”45 Not only does such a dualism demolish the possibility of a popular cultural ethic, however. It also compromises the very absoluteness of ethics Kant had hoped to protect. Kant “never even realizes that he has arrived at the problem of finding a basic principle of the moral which is a necessity of thought.”46 In his own quest to save the arche¯ from the sensible order of nature, Kant has sacrificed the phenomena, and it is the subsequent search to grasp both at once that precipitates Schweitzer’s own turning in relation to modern thought. “To the absolute,” he writes, “belongs the universal. If there really is a basic principle for the moral, it must be concerned in some way with the relations between man and life as such in all its manifestations [in allen seinen Erscheinungen].”47 Schweitzer chastises Kant for not escaping the “world- and life-negation” of a Plato—despite his modern propensity to do so. By failing to overcome the dualism, and, indeed, for failing to say “yes” to appearance, Kant abandons the world to an ontological status that lacks real density, consigning it to the vaporous order of mere appearance. Speaking the desires of the child of the modern spirit, Schweitzer writes: “Ethics have materialist instincts [Die Ethik hat materialistische Instinkte]. They want to be concerned with empirical happenings [Geschehen] and to transform the circumstances of the empirical world. But if the empirical world is only ‘appearance,’ derived from an intellectual [geistigen] world which functions within it or behind it, ethics have no object. To want to influence a self-determined play of appearances has no sense.”48 Significantly, this desire for the absolute or a basic principle that would function as a more immanent universal eventually leads Schweitzer to turn away from what he calls modern worldview construction and the measured architectonics of Kantian thought and toward a thought that Schweitzer describes in terms of phenomenality, movement, and “life.” Within the overall narrative of Kulturphilosophie, this turn can scarcely be overemphasized, as the “overcoming” of Kant at this point is portrayed as the overcoming of the decline of a modern culture whose reality and ideals, as we have seen, stood only in an abstract relation to each other. What began as a concern for “activist” ethics, in other words, ends up transforming Schweitzer’s thinking about being as such, a transformation that sees Schweitzer’s static, architectural, or systematic language being replaced by that of process, movement, and singularity. With this shift in [ 147 ]

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basic metaphor one catches glimpses of a philosophy to come “after” the structures of Kant (and the modernity Schweitzer associates with him) are finally allowed to implode. In the process, this self-destructive event opens an experience Schweitzer calls, alternately, his (and modernity’s) “turning,” “conversion,” or “new way.” Nor will this be the only time Schweitzer’s writings undergo this turning and its apocalyptic inversion of values in the very moment of the collapse of a modern project. The same thing, in fact, will occur with the revelation of the fully eschatological Jesus at the end of his Von Reimarus zu Wrede.

Schweitzer’s Turning, or Conversion to a Mystical Reality One by one Schweitzer allows the modern philosophies under consideration to founder alternately on the shores of generally Kantian antinomies until he has condemned each of them for having failed to properly ground popular cultural progress with a philosophical worldview. With each failure the “disempowering” (Kraftloswerden) of Europe’s primal spiritual or cultural resources only increases, the ultimate sign of this being, as we have seen, the devastations of world war. In this final (and doubled) moment of the philosophicomilitary self-destruction of Europe, Schweitzer (and a now “late” modernity with him) undergoes what he calls both a turning and a conversion to a new way of thinking.49 The great telos of modern thought, therefore, appears as the revelation of its own impossibility, and Schweitzer, standing at this limit, finds there “a new way” that is at once a familiar retreading of the old intellectual paths. This time, however, they are trod by way of the “turn,” that is, with the understanding that they do not lead anywhere: We are standing at a turning-point of thought [Wendepunkte des Denkens]. A critical act that clears away [aufräumende ] all the naivetés and dishonesties that exist up until now has become necessary. We must resolve to give our life-view [Lebensanschauung] and our world-view [Anschauung von der Welt] their mutual freedom and, in this respect, to allow a sincere mutual explication of both. We have to admit that because our life-view is made up of convictions which are given in our will-to-live [Willen zum Leben] but are not confirmed by any recognition in the world, we have allowed it to go beyond the various knowledges that make up our worldview. This renunciation of worldview in the old sense, that is, of a worldview that is a self-enclosed unity, means a painful experience for our thought [ein schmerzvolles Erlebnis unseres Denkens]. We come hereby to a [ 148 ]

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dualism against which we at every moment involuntarily rebel. But we must yield to facts.50

It must be said at once that this is, to say the least, a very peculiar way to overcome those charges Schweitzer has with regularity been making against both Kant in particular and nineteenth-century thought in general. Schweitzer explains that the “will to live” (from which arises those most profound demands whose force exceeds all grounding in the realm of the calculable or even the recognizable) must resign itself to the fact that it cannot “find itself again” in the “manifold wills-to-live” that are encountered in the world. The will to live will always need, therefore, the self-recognizing prostheses or supplementary aids of worldly knowledge in order to find itself. On the other hand, the manifold knowledges that constitute a worldview cannot by process of mere addition construct a system that grounds those profound demands coming to it from the will to live. Wherever the metaphysician starts, it seems, the circle remains broken, unable to close in on itself. One begins to wonder, therefore, whether this painful experience of modern thought is anything but the acceptance of the Kantian problematic Schweitzer claims to overcome. Likewise, Schweitzer repeats the allegedly Kantian dualism between the intelligible and the sensible when he accepts a permanent split between worldly knowledge and the transcendent dictates of “life.” By the same token, the distinction between convictions implanted by the will to live and a worldly knowledge to which they cannot be reduced seems to be a fairly straightforward repetition of that ethical distinction between transcendent reason and the instrumental sphere of appearances that so annoyed Schweitzer through both volumes of the Kulturphilosophie and his earlier Die Religionsphilosophie Kants. In line with the idea that Schweitzer’s “painful” turning could be read as an acceptance of the Kantian problematic, there are even occasions in Kulturphilosophie when Schweitzer suggests that those fundamental distinctions for which he hopes to argue may be traced back to Kant (and not just to Kant, but to the Kant of the Critique of Practical Reason). In an introduction to his own “new way,” Schweitzer writes, “In Kant this overpowering of knowledge [by ‘life’ or ‘will’], which until then had been but naively practiced, was worked out systematically. His doctrine of the ‘Postulates of the Practical Reason’ means nothing other than this, that the will claims for itself the decisive word in the last pronouncements of the worldview. Only Kant manages to arrange the matter so cleverly that he will never force its supremacy on knowledge, but receives it from the latter as a free gift, and then makes use of it in carefully chosen parliamentary phrases. It proceeds as if it had [ 149 ]

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been invoked by the theoretical reason to provide possible truths with the reality belonging to truths which are necessities of thought.”51 There is scarcely a passage that more explicitly formulates Schweitzer’s own hopes for a “new way” in which there is a sort of “discordant accord” between will and worldview, and it is remarkable that it occurs here where Schweitzer is attempting to summarize Kant’s postulates of practical reason.52 This suggests a radical shift from his early thinking in Die Religionsphilosophie Kants, in which the postulates of the Critique of Practical Reason were described as the first of a series of debilitating departures from the naive “Sketch of a Philosophy of Religion,” in which the practical and theoretical uses of reason were, he argued, held together in a more harmonious unity. The postulates of practical reason are no longer an indication of Kant’s “worlddenying” dualism, but have become a handy summary of the new way his Kulturphilosophie proposes. Kant has become the model of a healthy relation between the transcendent demands of the will to live and the practical knowledges constituting worldview. This passage indicates not only development within Schweitzer’s thinking but also some of the tensions, or even outright contradictions, within the Kulturphilosophie itself. Throughout, the work attempts to maintain an appearance of arguing for a radically new way that will carry modernity beyond its present intellectual and cultural deadlock, even as Schweitzer continually pieces together its “solution” from eclectic fragments of the authors he dismisses along the way. While it certainly does not smooth over all the rough edges of Schweitzer’s negotiation of the Kantian legacy, it is important to note that one of the hinges here between the Kant of modernity’s problems and the Kant of Schweitzer’s salvific “answer” to the same is the idea that Kant should be associated with an epistemological orientation. Like many of his contemporaries, Schweitzer associates Kant with a focus on a “theory of knowledge,” and it is this association that governs the rhetoric of liberation in his (ever ambiguous) description of the “collapse” of Kantian/modern worldview construction and a turning to a new mode of thinking altogether.53 As Schweitzer writes at one point, Kant wants to bring an “ethical idealism into connection with an idealistic representation of the world which has its source in a theory of knowledge,” as if from this epistemic scaffolding could be constructed a foundation for modernity’s highest potentials. This may be a bad reading of the philosopher, and it may contradict the Kant we see elsewhere even in Schweitzer’s own book, but such comments do provide an explanatory context for the explosive liberation of cultural energy Schweitzer senses in the very failure of (modern/Kantian) worldview [ 150 ]

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construction. No longer bound to seek its source in the measured epistemological structures of worldly knowledge, “life” is free to proliferate its transcendent passions through an ungrounded production that itself does not submit to the measured actions of utility or the strictures of ordinary possibility.54 To gauge the connection between Kant the epistemologist and the subsequent liberation of “life” from this orientation, it is helpful to track more closely some of the language Schweitzer uses to describe the turning point of thought at which Europe has arrived (even when, as we have begun to see, such language tends to lure Schweitzer into contradictions). What is most important here is not the value of Schweitzer’s work as a philosophical text but its narrative framing and resolution of a crisis of European culture. Because of his acceptance the rift that forever derails the self-enclosure of the transcendent realm of “life,” for example, Schweitzer sometimes claims to have saved phenomena from the “world- and life-negation” into which Kant has fallen.55 “The greatness of European philosophy,” Schweitzer reveals, “consists in its having chosen the optimistic-ethical worldview; its weakness in its having again and again imagined that it was putting that conception on a firm foundation.”56 Now that the foundational pretensions of worldview construction is revealed to be a Sisyphean task, the West is free to explore the possibilities of a phenomenal “life” that is dependent only on itself rather than an abstract logical ground standing behind these appearances or that recedes from the phenomenal sphere in the moment of its production. With the rejection of metaphors of “foundation,” Schweitzer believes himself to be observing a kind of irreparable wound to metaphysical selfenclosure. Moreover, from this wound in the self-enclosure of Being drips a force by which Schweitzer hopes to say “yes” to the process of becoming, and his “reverence for life” presents itself as a radical affirmation of ungrounded, self-organizing life in the phenomenal realm. As he writes in Kulturphilosophie, one must be committed to this realization and, therefore, committed to a rejection of the temptations of metaphysical language: “The essence of being, the absolute, the world-spirit, and all similar expressions signify nothing actual, but something conceived in abstractions which, for that reason, is also absolutely unimaginable. The real is only that being which appears in appearances.”57 Even the coinage of modern worldview terminology exists, in this respect, only as an imaginary selfabstraction from the immanent realm of phenomena, or, as he puts it, as an abbreviating reduction of the richness of the “given” for the purpose of representation. Once this is recognized, and once the “general temptation” [ 151 ]

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to submit to the ascetic foundationalism of philosophical terminology is resisted, there emerges in place of these static structures a kind of mysticism of the everyday.58 The reference to a general temptation is not incidental here, and the “turned” biblical critic or philosopher calls for a kind of resolve not to fall back into the comfort of representational world pictures or to be enticed by the lure of traditional philosophical terminology. Schweitzer (who claimed in the preface to the Kulturphilosophie that it had “finally ripened in the stillness of the primeval forest of Equatorial Africa”) adds this remarkable statement about standard philosophical talk: “The absolute has to become for [this new thinking] as his fetish is to a converted [bekehrten] Negro. With all seriousness, it must undergo a conversion to the mysticism of reality [Bekehrung zur Mystik der Wirklichkeit]. Abandoning all the decorations and declamations of the stage, let it try to get its experience in living nature.”59 Without the props and ready-made remarks of worldview constructions and their staged, measured, and calculated engagements with the absolute, the turned or converted modern now traffics in the immediate and unquestionable force or respect by which various sorts of individuals, creatures, and territories make themselves present to the various spheres in which an individual exists. Having experienced the painful loss of existence as a knowing subject against a world of delimitable, calculable objects, something, and something incalculable, returns: “There is no essence of being, but only infinite being in infinite appearances. Only through the appearances of being, and only through those which I enter into relations, does my being have any traffic with infinite being. The devotion of my being to infinite being means devotion of my being to all the appearances of being which need my devotion, and to which I am able to devote myself.”60 No longer trying to communicate a sacrificial “devotion” to Being by way of a submission to a “totality” that is itself framed in metaphysical language, Schweitzer thinks himself released to traffic in the selfaffirmations of phenomenal life that no longer, as he suggests, “signifies nothing.”61 In the excessive richness of appearances, one finds the reality of life: “the ethics of self-perfecting [Selbstvervollkommung] and the ethics of devotion can [finally, here at the last] interpenetrate each other.”62 The Tantric interpenetration in view is thought to give rise to active engagements in the midst of phenomena, or, as Schweitzer puts it, a harmony between activity and passivity. In language that will be significant for our consideration of Schweitzer’s consistently eschatological Jesus, the biblical scholar describes this rejection of the language of modern worldview thinking as an overcoming of a [ 152 ]

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“dead spirituality” (tote Geistigkeit), the only spirituality that could emerge from the “ground of such an intellectualism” as was the metaphysical thinking of modern worldview constructions.63 Remarkably, all of these characters will return at that moment when, at the end of Von Reimarus zu Wrede, Schweitzer unveils with a single motion both the self-destruction of modern biblical interpretation and the appearance of his own fully eschatological Jesus. Like the living force of “life” or “will,” Schweitzer unleashes on the structured and measured utilities of bourgeois existence and the patterns of recognition it calls knowledge, Schweitzer’s historical Jesus will explode all those structures of recognition that have constituted modern thought. As Schweitzer’s famous declaration goes, this Jesus will come to modernity “as one unknown,” and with the appearance of this unknown occurs a liberatory release from the constraints of “modern” thought itself. Without function for modern knowledge or a ready-made place in its systems of recognition, Schweitzer’s Jesus represents another moment in the liberation of vitality from the desiccated thought forms of a modernity in decline.

The Pastiched Radicalism of Schweitzer’s Kulturphilosophie Before we explore the way Jesus functions as an exemplar of this postmetaphysical mysticism, it is worth pointing out how, in his presentation of a “reverence for life” as the euphoric overcoming of the limits of modern thought, Schweitzer’s rhetoric frequently gets the better of him. This occurs particularly when he presents visions of the happy plenitude of life against the ascetically measured limitations and boundaries of worldview construction. One sometimes senses the leading strings of a deus ex machina, all the more when Schweitzer assures us that his exposition of a life philosophy heals all the old breaches, gaps, and aporiae of modern thought. He writes, for example, that the rejection of metaphysical abstractions allows him to overcome the (“Kantian”) paradox whereby one could only influence the world by first escaping from it: “The completeness is now there all by itself. In wonderful harmonies now all the tones of ethics ring out, from the vibrations in which resignation begins to be audible as ethics, up to the high tones in which morality crosses over into the noises of the regulations [Bestimmungen] which are given out by society as ethical.”64 The end result, however, is an individual who finds his or her own “spheres” of influence in “practical dispute” with reality as such, and Schweitzer does not seem to wonder about the possibility that his harmonic scale could be a misleading euphemism for the war of all against all. In [ 153 ]

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short, one could see the irreparable breach between the transcendence of “life” and its empirical embodiment as the basis for a much more agonistic scenario than Schweitzer tends to describe, and the fact that this interplay is no longer grounded in epistemology does not seem, in itself, a guarantee of the harmonies Schweitzer promises. For example, despite the fact that he has suggested a “dispute with reality” to be at the heart of all ethical action, Schweitzer’s image of the sage, liberated from epistemological calculation, is all sweetness and light: The fundamental principle [Grundprinzip] which is a necessity of thought [denknotwendige] in relation to the the moral means not only an ordering and deepening, of the current views [geltenden Anschauungen] of good and evil. A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion [Nötigung ] to help all life which he is able to stand by, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives. He does not ask either to what extent this or that life deserves sympathy as being valuable, or whether and to what degree it [es] is capable of feeling. Life as such is holy to him. He tears no leaf from a tree, plucks no flower, and takes care to squash no insect. When he is working in the summer by lamplight, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe musty air rather than see one insect after another fall on his table with singed wings.65

Moreover, while he invariably claims, as he does here, that ethical existence is a limitless, expanding sphere of responsibility for all that lives, he does not explore the way such a limitlessness seems to leave the ethical subject guilty, always guilty, of having limited the limitless responsibility “life” owes to itself.66 Indeed, the limits of what Schweitzer describes as an individual’s sphere of influence could be read as nothing but that point at which nature’s responsibility without limits to itself is necessarily transgressed. In a telling statement, he writes: “Only an infinitely small part of infinite being comes within my reach. The rest [Das andere] of it drives past me, like distant ships to which I make signals they do not understand. But by devoting myself to that which comes within my sphere of influence and needs me, I make spiritual, inward devotion to infinite being a reality and thereby give my own poor existence meaning and richness. The river has found its sea.”67 Limits, calculated and otherwise, seem at every turn to creep back into Schweitzer’s mystical immersion in life, and there seems to be an inevitable trauma attending his basic distinction between activist ethics and a passive resignation to the limits of one’s sphere that he refuses to explore (in his militant commitment to what he calls the maintenance of “optimism”). Nor do visions of limitless and incalculable (yet, miraculously, [ 154 ]

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harmonious) responsibilities seem to describe the fierce hierarchicalization by which Schweitzer ordered his own life or his humanitarian efforts in Africa, visions of helping every insect notwithstanding.68 As has been suggested more than once, however, the profundity or originality of Schweitzer’s philosophical reflections are not as significant here as are his description and resolution of a crisis of thought and culture, and his Von Reimarus zu Wrede repeats many of these rhetorical constructions at the level of its own serial narration of an epoch of modern or liberal scholarship. At the end of that narration, also, Schweitzer concludes with a similar call for a conversion from the constraining epistemological measurements of modern thought. In that work, this call is accompanied by his discovery of a fully eschatological Jesus whose appearance will be nothing if not an exemplary model of Schweitzer’s postmetaphysical experience of life.

The End of Modernity and the Last Biblical Scholar Like his Kulturphilosophie, Von Remarus zu Wrede (originally published in 1906) presents a summary and diagnosis of a period of European scholarship. Schweitzer’s study of the progress and internal collapse of this scholarly epoch, called, alternately, the “modern” and “liberal” approach to the historical Jesus, participates in many of the basic narrative structures and critical diagnoses of the Kulturphilosophie. Moreover, like the repressed spiritual or cultural energy that only makes its appearance at the end of the Kulturphilosophie with the internal collapse of modern philosophy, Schweitzer concludes his narration of modern or liberal biblical scholarship by presenting a “mighty spiritual force” that shows itself only amidst the failure of all modern constructions, designs, and every ready-made Gestalt that might comprehend it. The terminology is important, so I repeat the passage with which we this chapter began: “This image [of the ‘rational’ or ‘liberal’ historical Jesus] has not been destroyed from outside. It has collapsed in on itself, split and shattered by concrete historical problems that came to the surface one after another. In spite of all the artifice, art, artificiality, and violence that was applied to them, refused to be planed down to fit the design on which the Jesus of the theology of the last hundred and thirty years had been constructed. . . . The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma.”69 As should be clear by now, there is more at stake in Schweitzer’s language of design, construction, and excess of living detail than the standard histories of New Testament studies tends to register. The common line, after all, is that Schweitzer, here at the end of a trajectory of scientific prog[ 155 ]

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ress, unveils the way previous scholarship has “read itself into” the ancient evidence, leaving Schweitzer to pare back these passions to reveal the truly historical Jesus at the end of the story. This is certainly a correct rendition of one level of Schweitzer’s rhetoric (one that Schweitzer repeats frequently, in fact). What it misses is the way Schweitzer’s terminology does not simply condemn a specific “construction” or “design” but calls into question an entire modern epoch of “constructivist” thought and metaphysical design in general. We have not yet begun to take seriously enough the fact that, for Schweitzer, it is only with the collapse of modern attempts to understand Jesus that this figure becomes a “mighty spiritual force”—precisely as he absconds from modern constructions “back to his own time” from which he will remain for us always an enigma, a question, or the source of an inexplicable demand.70 Like the later work, Schweitzer’s Von Remarus zu Wrede meanders along a surprisingly narrow, linear path, summarizing and evaluating the work of more than 50 scholars (mostly German) in an attempt, as he puts it, to bring “order into the chaos of modern lives of Jesus.”71 Likewise, in a move whose methodological significance can scarcely be overestimated, Schweitzer repeats in Von Reimarus zu Wrede a form of historical narration that fully participates in many of the implicit assumptions of worldview thinking, history becoming a series of answers to an unchanging question. In this case, Schweitzer inserts “order into the chaos” of scholarship by a serial lineup of individual authors and the respective answers they gave to what he sometimes calls “the logical problem” of the historical Jesus. The Schweitzer of Von Reimarus zu Wrede, in other words, is one who still works within many of the structures he eventually condemns (even at the end of Von Reimarus zu Wrede) as being part of a reductive, metaphysical, worldview thinking that cannot register the flux of history and the ungrounded or excessive freedom of phenomenal life. Thoughout most of the book, however, Schweitzer does not operate from this more developed thinking, just as he narrates the Kulturphilosophie according to a worldview model that is itself called into question in that work’s eventual explication of a “reverence for life.” In this case, the narrative framework allows Schweitzer’s “answer” to the (stable) “problem” retroactively to establish the model by which all the former answers are evaluated. Schweitzer’s own “answer” to the historical Jesus “problem” functions, therefore, to generate the illusion of narrative movement in what is actually a continual repetition of a static tableau, with various answers offered, perhaps, but to an essentially unchanging, and, indeed, “logical” problem. The answer he presents is what he calls the consistently [ 156 ]

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or fully eschatological approach to the historical Jesus, an answer whose arrival is foreshadowed by chapters like “The Eschatological Question” and later “Against Eschatology.” The narrative begins, then, with Hermann Samuel Reimarus, passes through David Friedrich Strauss, enters a stage he describes as the “rejection of eschatology,” and ends up with his own position, “the fully eschatological approach.” This fully eschatological approach he associates with his own work and that of two near contemporaries, Johannes Weiss and Wilhelm Wrede. Schweitzer is eager to present all three as providing something like a common project that destroys prior scholarship on the topic even as it provides the framework within which a radically new answer to the problem may be posed. Schweitzer alludes to this destructive/productive solidarity by adding that Wrede’s Das Messiasgeheimnis (1901) appeared “on the same day” as his own early description of the historical Jesus.72 (Interestingly, in light of his explication of Kant’s “rogue” fragment only two years earlier, Schweitzer called his own study a “Sketch of a Life of Jesus,” a sketch about which he would consistently claim that it expresses the truth that modern scholarship could not allow itself to recognize.) To these two works Schweitzer frequently adds the work of Johannes Weiss on the apocalypticism of Jesus’ teaching as a proponent of the consistently eschatological approach. That Schweitzer links his work to that of Weiss and Wrede—and this under the name “eschatology”—is somewhat surprising, if for no other reason than that Wrede’s work does not focus on eschatology per se. Wrede’s work was an investigation of the implicit historical and theological rationales that may have led to the fabrication of the “messianic secret,” those Gospel stories in which Jesus urges others to keep silent about his messianic status or special powers. As Wrede focused attention on such questions in relation to Mark’s Gospel, a crucial piece of the modern historical Jesus was dislodged, namely, that this earliest canonical Gospel represents something like unvarnished history, without the theological development and rethinking of later Gospel memories. Recruiting the critical function of Wrede’s study for his own purposes, Schweitzer suggests that historians had now arrived at a moment of decision. They must either accept the skepticism of Wrede’s approach (seeing in even the earliest Gospel a later Christian projection back onto Jesus) or accept that Jesus himself taught some of the crassly literal sayings about the quick arrival of the “kingdom” that are attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Either way, according to Schweitzer the death knell had begun to sound for the modern Jesus who, up to that point, was thought to be accessible through the Gospel texts (on [ 157 ]

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the one hand) and yet not himself “eschatological” (on the other). Together, these two types of study perform the requisite “work of destruction” (Zerstörungswerk) on the modern and liberal lives of Jesus, a work of Destruktion that will liberate an otherness whose suppression itself founded the modern accounts.73 The buildup to, and sudden arrival of, this apocalyptic inversion of values is worth observing carefully, particularly as it stands in striking similarity with the narrative-philosophical resolution of the crisis of modern paradigms in Kulturphilosophie. The scene begins with Schweitzer calling upon the strength of the allied powers in Weiss, Wrede, and his own “Sketch” for a final destruction of the “blockade of modern theology.”74 Schweitzer is confident of the success of their attack: “Supposing that only a half, or even a third, of the critical observations that are common to Wrede and the ‘Sketch of the Life of Jesus’ are correct, then the modern historical view of the history is totally ruined.”75 Turning specifically to his own work, he declares that between these two alternatives, “the modern historical” and his own “eschatological life of Jesus,” “no compromise (Vermittlung) is possible.”76 Claiming to lay waste to modern theology and its self-protective desires, Schweitzer adds, “Something has entered into contemporary theology that is totally incompatible with it. Its whole territory is threatened. It must either reconquer it step by step or else surrender it. It has no right anymore to advance a single assertion until it has taken up a definite position in regard to the fundamental questions raised by the new criticism.”77 Modern, liberal approaches to the study of the Bible, in other words, are ruined as completely as the modern philosophical project of worldview thinking. Similarly, just as he would in Kulturphilosophie, so here Schweitzer claims simply to have given the epoch over to its own self-destruction. Schweitzer suggests that he and Wrede have simply culled together into a “system” those incomprehensible, unassimilable aspects of the modern, liberal project that reigned from Reimarus to Wrede. The bold historian is, therefore, simply making conscious the lurking otherness that the liberal project has suppressed, thereby “completing” the “work of destruction” that was already at work in modern theology.78 Again, in light of the later demolition job in which modern worldviews construction eventually falters under the excess of life, Schweitzer’s language here is particularly interesting. In this case also, the “design” by which modernity “constructed” a representation for itself becomes haunted by an excess that does not fit within it. In light of this excess, the modern project itself becomes infused (in either case) with a kind of neurotic energy that drives it to attempt to fully incorporate these apparently uncategorizable [ 158 ]

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rough edges, and this with all the “artifice, art, artificiality, and violence” it can muster. Like the perpetually collapsing worldviews of modernity, however, the excess cannot be tamed, and now at last the entire project collapses. The framing mechanisms of Von Reimarus zu Wrede are, therefore, very similar to those setting up the collapse of Western metaphysics in the Kulturphilosophie. Nor should we forget that Schweitzer’s enactment of the destruction of Western metaphysical views was precisely the trigger giving rise to a productive release of spiritual energy. The same event happens at the end of Von Reimarus zu Wrede. Negating the negation, identifying himself precisely with those unassimilable excesses in modern scholarship that guaranteed its failure as a project, spirit returns to itself and Schweitzer’s consistently eschatological Jesus bursts into flame.

The Death of the Liberal Jesus and the Coming of Eschatology or the “Kingdom of God” Liberated from the designs and construction plans of modern European thought, Schweitzer’s Jesus necessarily “will be to our time a stranger or a riddle” (ein Fremdling oder ein Rätsel).79 In this form, however, the destructive work of “history” miraculously transforms itself into a usefulness for theology that Schweitzer had (with some frequency) disavowed throughout the narrative of biblical scholarship. In one of many striking inversions of this uselessness into theological value, Schweitzer boasts that those “who like to talk about negative theology do not have it difficult here. There is nothing more negative than the result of life of Jesus research.”80 “The Jesus of Nazareth who appeared as the Messiah, who preached the morality of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven on earth, and died to give his work its consecration, has never existed. He is a figure designed [Gestalt . . . entworfen] by rationalism, brought to life by liberalism, and clothed with historical science by modern theology.”81 Schweitzer’s aggressive identification with this moment of collapse in rationalist designs, the vivifying energies of liberalism, and the pseudohistorical science animated by these, however, results in an explosive spiritual event reminiscent of modernity’s “turning point in thought” and its “conversion to a metaphysical reality” in the Kulturphilosophie. In the form of a “stranger or a riddle,” the “eschatological” Jesus finds himself profoundly useful to theology, even if the self-descriptions of the New Testament historian had not led us to expect it. Remarkably, in fact, this particular historiographical overcoming of theological prejudice accomplishes the mirac[ 159 ]

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ulous by convincing theology that it really does not need history after all. Schweitzer writes, “The work that historical theology thought itself bound to carry out, and which fell to pieces in the moment it was nearing completion, was only the brick facing of the true unshakeable historical foundation which is independent of any historical knowledge or justification [historische Erkenntniss und Rechtfertigung].”82 The statement is astonishing given Schweitzer’s frequent rhetorical juxtaposition of the hard-boiled “historian” against the self-protective desires of the “theologian.” The historical critic, precisely because he has produced an image of an eschatological Jesus with which modernity cannot identify, has released modernity from seeking its foundation from among the images history is capable of providing. In good Kantian terms, therefore, the destruction of modern pictures of the historical Jesus functions to call humanity beyond the “natural order of the senses” that Schweitzer identifies with the order of history: “Although historical knowledge can no doubt introduce greater clearness into an existing spiritual life [vorhandenen geistigen Lebens], it cannot itself create life. History can destroy the present [Die Geschichte vermag Gegenwart zu zerstören]; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to construct [aufzubauen] the present is not given to it.”83 Salvaging the Other from the clutches of modern historiography, and modernity itself from a submission to the order of historiography, Schweitzer’s fully eschatological Jesus performs a double miracle that might have seemed the last thing on Schweitzer’s mind throughout much of Von Reimarus zu Wrede. Far from being (simply) the terrible apparition of an otherness whose visage modernity could not bear to see, Schweitzer’s eschatological Jesus functions to establish a similar escape hatch from the constraints of modern forms of knowing as did the demolition of worldview thinking at the end of Kulturphilosophie. In both cases, the very appropriation of the failure of the modern project becomes the now postmodern life raft or conversion to a mystical reality that an increasingly desiccated modern thought seems to have needed all along. Consider Schweitzer’s summary of this paradoxical resolution: And yet the confusion [Irrewerden] had to come. We [!] modern theologians are too proud of our historicity, too proud of our historical Jesus, too confident in our belief in the spiritual gains which our historical theology can bring to the world. The thought that we could, with historical knowledge, construct a new and vigorous Christendum [ein neues lebenskráftiges Christentum] and liberate spiritual forces [geistige Kräfte] in the [ 160 ]

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world, rules us like a fixed idea, and does not let us see that with this task we have grappled with (and in some measure discharged) only one of the cultural preliminaries of the great religious task. We thought that it was for us to lead our time by a roundabout way through the historical Jesus, as we understood him [wie wir ihn verstanden], in order to bring it to the Jesus who is a spiritual power in the present. This roundabout way has now been closed by true history.84

In the very closure of this roundabout way, however, a new way opens itself up. In the very impossibility and failure of the modern historiographical project arises its success. Genuine history and its nonmodern eschatological Jesus have, at the last, miraculously given back to modernity with one hand what they have taken away with the other. No longer constrained by the measured forms of modern historical recognition, Jesus is free to become a “spiritual power” in the present. Moreover, to proliferate the paradoxical mirrorings and repetitions at work in Schweitzer’s discussions of ancient and modern issues, it should be pointed out that this eschatological Jesus does not just function thus for modernity. On the contrary, the historical Jesus that Schweitzer uncovers manifests the same (postfoundational) dynamics as those that begin to swallow up modern humanity in both the Kulturphilosophie and Von Reimarus zu Wrede. In a remarkable statement, Schweitzer summarizes his eschatological Jesus, the very Jesus which modernity had refused to recognize, in this way: “Eschatology is simply ‘dogmatic history,’ which breaks in upon the natural course of history and abrogates it.”85 Schweitzer is consistent on this point. The eschatological Jesus is a Jesus in the grip of an ineluctable demand that cannot be reduced to a knowledge or justification that belongs to the world of utilitarian calculations, functional recognitions, or (as Schweitzer likes to put it) the progress of normal “historical” occurrences. The Jesus who remains, for our time, a “stranger and an enigma”—and yet who makes on us militant and transformative demands—was himself in the grip of a desire that was, according to Schweitzer, “miraculous, unintelligible, but unfailingly certain.”86 Moreover, as we would expect given Schweitzer’s reception of the self-legislating character of these “transcendent” demands, Schweitzer senses in the “chaotic confusion” of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry a sign of the “volcanic force of an unfathomable self-awareness.”87 Like Hegel’s famous “Egyptians,” Jesus is a riddle not just to modernity but was so even to himself, and this in the very moment of his self-awareness. In the name of this “secret” demand of the unfathomable self to instantiate itself in a “kingdom,” then, [ 161 ]

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Jesus sent out his disciples to spread the message of a transformed order to come as well as (according to Schweitzer) Jesus’ own identity in the “beyond” of a natural order, an identity Schweitzer’s Jesus thought of as the messianic “son of man.” This sending out of disciples to embody the unknowable and yet unquestionable demand in a world to which it cannot be reduced likewise plays on this Kantian register. The sending out of the disciples, a central moment in Schweitzer’s reconstruction of the ministry of Jesus, was “activated by a dogmatic idea,” which is to say by an eschatological irruption into the normal order of facts.88 In the terminology of Kulturphilosophie, this sending-on-a-mission is the moment when a radical passivity—an “unfathomable” intuition of oneself as the universal or “transcendent”—finds a link to the world of individual consciousness in the form of a “dogmatic” and “activist” intervention. Jesus is here just as Schweitzer would have us all be: “thinking dogmatically and actively ‘making history’” both at the same time.89 Schweitzer’s eschatological Jesus transcends “history” just as Schweitzer hopes to do at the end of Von Reimarus zu Wrede or in his postmetaphysical ruminations within Kulturphilosophie—through a “respect for life” that is indistinguishable from an authoritarian or dogmatic intervention within the world in the name of something that cannot, properly, be named, designated, or recognized within the world’s structures of intelligibility. In a way that has still not registered within New Testament studies, Schweitzer designates this entire Kantian problematic as the revelation of Jesus’ eschatology. In keeping with this problematic, Schweitzer also understands the Gospels to be an appropriate aesthetic form for this irruption of categorical demand within the empirical realm. The Gospels themselves, he suggests, manifest the categorical or universal only as it appears as trace, gap, or vanishing presence within the “historical” order of fact. Schweitzer is at pains to make this clear. Indeed, he frequently charges modern receptions of the Gospels with a willingness to organize and make intelligible the essentially disconnected Gospel stories in the name of an intelligible personality of Jesus. The necessary prerequisite for such an interpretive procedure is that this intelligibility be found in a recognizable individualistic aim, thus nicely instrumentalizing the Gospels and Jesus in the process. As Schweitzer writes, “Formerly it was possible to get through tickets at the booking office of supplementary psychological knowledge which enabled those writing a Life of Jesus to use express trains, thus avoiding the inconvenience of having to stop at every little station, change, and run the risk of missing their connection.” Instead of such deferrals to the individual and instru[ 162 ]

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mental psyche as the ground of a universal intelligibility, Schweitzer allows this imagined link with the individual aims or personality of Jesus to fall by the wayside. In its place are Gospels marked by “gaps,” “disconnectedness,” and “uncorrelated episodes” that are now “unsettled and erratic.”90 As he goes on to claim, “This ticket office is now closed. Each pericope is a station, and the connections are not guaranteed.”91 In terms of the Gospels’ representation of Jesus’ intervention, of course, the accounts may be said to be marked by gaps at the level of “historical” connections, and these gaps are themselves the indication or sign of the dogmatic or eschatological irruption of the vanishing absolute within the life of Jesus. This fascination with the Gospels as a hodgepodge or assemblage of disconnected events, therefore, must be read against the backdrop of the initial juxtaposition of quotes in this chapter. There, the modern subservience to epistemology meant that modernity became locked into an attempt to plane down or exclude the many loose ends and excesses that could not be registered by its intellectual apparatus, whether philosophy or the historical criticism of the Bible. These reductive pictures were useful, Schweitzer claimed (because they inspire instrumentalized “ethics”), “but they are not true, and therefore they are always collapsing.” The irony of this failure of epistemology and its concomitant collapse of modern worldview construction is that it is only with this collapse that (a now postmodern) thought becomes a discourse of truth. Once thought turns from its modern “fetish” of knowing, the mysticism that now faces it may be read as a reflection on the way truth appears to modernity only through the holes it bores within those totalities by which modernity would otherwise attempt to map and measure it. Schweitzer’s consideration of the gaps or holes within the New Testament’s depictions of Jesus are not, therefore, incidental to the postmetaphysical esthetic his thinking elsewhere implies. Schweitzer’s Gospels embody just that kind of communiqué we would imagine between the “historical” order of the “world” and the “transcendent” order of the categorical. In their very disconnectedness, the Gospels allow Jesus to function as an exemplary (Kantian) intervention: “What is historical is the lack of connection, the impossibility of applying any natural explanation, because the course of history was determined, not by outward events, but by decisions governed by dogmatic, eschatological considerations.”92 Those who would find in Schweitzer a mere advance in historical correctness against previous scholarship will necessarily miss the shared traffic elucidated here between Schweitzer’s philosophical critiques of modernity and his discovery, at the end of the modern and liberal period of [ 163 ]

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scholarship, of an “eschatological” Jesus. To read Schweitzer simply as the hard-boiled historian who is willing to find an inexplicable mystery or a first-century other where there was once someone with whom modernity could identify is to miss the way that, for Schweitzer, “truth” could only appear, after the collapse of modern worldview construction, in the gaps, disconnects, or schizzes within everyday structures of knowledge and recognition. Far from being a problem, Jesus’ appearance on the late-modern stage as an “enigma and a stranger” constituted him as the exemplar of a discourse of truth (and this beyond mere correctness) that Schweitzer the philosopher and biblical scholar was attempting to unleash in the world. Such an enigmatic or “unintelligible” intervention of Jesus—by definition dogmatic or eschatological—was the only site left from which a free humanity could contest the dehumanizing tyrrany of an instrumentalized reality of everyday life. Nor did it matter for Schweitzer that Jesus’ demands on the world—his eschatological expectations—went unfulfilled. Tragic failure is a question of correctness, not of the discourse of truth. If Christendom had retroactively disavowed such initial expectations because they had been “delayed” to an absurd degree (such is our ever-so-polite way to discuss the matter), Schweitzer’s assertion was always that humanity could relinquish the perogative or demand of eschatology only at the cost of the loss of the freedom of culture itself. Indeed, Schweitzer’s entire oeuvre, from the writings on Kant to the Kulturphilosophie to his historical scholarship on Jesus or Paul, may be read as a reinforcement of this single insight. Arguing for the mysticism and eschatology of the apostle Paul (which he read in terms of the same problematic of Jesus’ dogmatic intervention), Schweitzer urged, “Our religion must renew itself by contact with Paul’s Kingdom-of-God religion. As modern men we are in danger of confining ourselves to Kingdom-of-God propaganda and external Kingdom-of-God work. Modern Kingdom-of-God religion calls on men to do Kingdom-of-God work as though anyone could do anything for the Kingdom of God who does not bear the Kingdom of God within him. Thus, with the best intentions, we are constantly in danger of giving our allegiance to an externalised Kingdom of God belief.” 93 In the face of this growing danger of the reification of cultural aims through an exclusion of our sense of an “inner law” that must remain the “inner necessity and kernel” of such activity, Schweitzer claims, at the end of yet another work, that modernity must “remain primitive Christian.” 94 Without guarantee or even the “hope” of “success,” Schweitzer’s militant ancient/modern eschatology intuits itself to be in the grip of a transcen[ 164 ]

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dent or dogmatic demand even as it seeks to embody that demand within the world. Proclaiming a kingdom that can never arrive and yet always demands to be fought for, Schweitzer’s “primitive” Christian religiosity, like his postmetaphysical “reverence for life,” unleashes ungrounded and noninstrumental interventions within the world.

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[conclusion]

Displacing Christian Origins as Displacements of Religion and Secularity

This book began with the wager that a patiently interdisciplinary reading of philosophy and biblical studies would allow for a rethinking of two disciplines that are crucial to critical thinking about religion today. This was particularly to be the case as these maps were to reorient the disciplinary boundaries by which these two academic enterprises continue to be constituted. Culling initial inspiration from Jacob Taubes’s imaginary philosophy department and Jacques Derrida’s opening of the distinction between the secular and the religious onto a single movement of systemic “outbidding” and a logic of “auto-immunity,” I explored some of this vast and generally underexplored territory between modern philosophical thought and the modern historical study of Christian origins. Simply put, this interdisciplinary excavation proceeded by focusing on various depictions of Christian origins, produced by philosophers and biblical critics alike, as these functioned to produce, embody, and guard these academic boundaries and the social hierarchies with which such academic boundaries always tacitly participate. To borrow a phrase from Hegel, the space between philosophy and the historical study of Christian origins has been (and remains) one in which various methods, tactics, assumptions, and procedures “make themselves felt” in the production of new interpretations of original or originary Christianity. Moreover, as Hegel himself showed so clearly, these different techniques and tools of the academic trade make themselves felt not only in their ability to organize ancient historical data but also in their ability to organize modern social and academic distinctions. Every depiction of

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Christian origins doubles as an articulation of modern academic and social hierarchies. In addition to the difference between history and philosophy, I have considered depictions of Christian origins as place holders of the difference between Judaism and Christianity, religion and modern historical reason, authentic and inauthentic (textual) production, theology and history, and real value over bourgeois categories of usefulness. One could add more distinctions for which various depictions of early Christianity have (intentionally and unintentionally) functioned as placeholders, and given disciplinary tendencies for a few basic oppositions to function as self-evident blockades to further thought, we need to keep adding and exploring these. Such is the danger of departmental distinctions, after all. They all too readily become tacit agreements about what not to think about in relation to their own academic productions. And while interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of religion and philosophy will never exorcise that fugitive blind spot that makes possible a finite field of vision, it is safe to say that without these approaches we simply have no hope of catching glimpses of what we are missing. The academic production of depictions of Christian origins has thus been—and remains—an important place holder for a creative ordering of distinctions that are intimately related to interdepartmental politics in ways that have shaped profoundly the look of modern critical thought into our own time. In terms of the competition between two discrete disciplines, our surprise at the frequency with which Hegel takes up the apostolic mantle against the biblical scholars is tempered only by the fact that Heidegger does something very similar in relation to biblical scholars of his time, and on multiple occasions. Both philosophers are able to portray the biblical scholars as opponents, “Pharisaical” and addicted to the letter rather than the (philosophical) spirit. By the same token, Hegel presents the biblical critics as “pagans” who cannot inhabit publicly the beliefs they (privately) espouse, in part, he asserts, because historians grow accustomed to trafficking in beliefs and religious events that are not their own or for which there is no risk to themselves. And if the philosophers were attempting to guarantee an intellectual supremacy over the biblical critics by appealing to depictions of earliest Christianity, the biblical critics likewise were producing interpretations of original Christianity that gambled on very modern philosophical debates. Strauss, for example, appropriated Hegel’s critique of the positivism of “Enlightenment” or nonreflexive historiography in order to use this critique against many of his fellow biblical scholars. In the process, he began [ 168 ]

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to sketch an intriguing approach to New Testament historiography that made of it a reflexive and comparative approach to the different “media” or forms of cultural memory within which a sense of faith is produced. Schweitzer followed explicitly philosophical paths in his depictions of historiography and his unveiling of a historical Jesus whose value appears only in its liberation from all modern forms of recognition and utility. In both cases, the biblical critics negotiated modern philosophical territory in the way they represented Christian origins. Again, the modern disciplinary hierarchy at stake between these disciplines attempts to secure itself by laying claim to the earliest Christian legacy. A successful performance of this repetition of modern hierarchies in the (philosophical or historical) depiction of Christian origins ensures that the depiction functions as a readymade benchmark for the hierarchy at issue. Such is the self-grounding or performative circularity of cultural power, and it is in the successful performance of a rendition of earliest Christianity that modern hierarchies “make themselves felt” or make themselves available as a model for others to follow. This says a great deal about the contexts in which not only Hegel and the early Heidegger but also a budding field of New Testament criticism struggled for recognition and intellectual distinction. As has been noted repeatedly here, even the “secularizing” efforts of these figures seemed to need to the bolstering of sometimes subtle appropriations of the stock of figures, imagery, and phraseology of earliest Christianity. This particular type of retrieval of the “past” religion, of course, completely inverts the status of the “secular” in these texts, and one can certainly say of Hegel, Strauss, or Heidegger that, in their writings, the Pauline legacy was often a secularizing one. Clearly, however, to describe the disciplinary boundaries between New Testament studies and philosophy in this way is already to move beyond the question of two discrete disciplines and into more general questions about social hierarchy and that fateful modern opposition between religion and secularity. The wager with which this book began, therefore, could never just have been about philosophy and biblical studies or the imaginary university department of a Jacob Taubes. Rather, my analysis of a contested space between disciplines likewise illuminates at every step along the way how “secularization” or “secularizing” readings of religion during this period had themselves to be grounded in performance, produced by way of a gamble or an imaginative projection. In a way that academy and polis alike have yet to work through, secular reality is not what is “there” once religion is bracketed. It must itself be produced, imagined, and conjured just like its religious other. Indeed, in [ 169 ]

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the cases we have examined, secularity was conjured precisely through the other in the most basic sense. Modernity grounded its own secularity by way of a depiction of that very religiosity which it itself was not. The paradoxical implications of this basic self-defining gamble were, of course, difficult for modernity to grasp, no doubt because it was so desperately trying to grasp itself apart from the religious language of conjuration or the fideistic gamble. Indeed, academic religious studies (not to mention philosophy) still tends to make its living on the assumption that its own activities are not that of the religious or fiduciary sort. At the moment, however, the only possible alternative to a consideration of this peculiar secret sharing between the pronouncement of academic subjects and their religious objects remains an antitheoretical positivism. And while the reference can only be a little problematic so many decades after its initial publication, it is in light of this very real potential for the collapse of genuinely critical thought in relation to religion today that I have frequently presented my explorations of this secret sharing as a “dialectic of Enlightenment.” The phrase obviously is a programmatic borrowing from Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s fragmentary interventions into the ways critical thought and obfuscating myth tend to collapse into each other at various stages along their contestatory way. In this fundamental respect, I remain faithful to the basic impulse of their Dialectic of Enlightenment, that monumental effort to dismantle a “lapse from enlightenment into positivism, into the myth of that which is the case.” In keeping with the sentiment—and to repeat the Hegelian paradox so important to this study—the academic study of religion must risk its own identity as a stable other of religion,or else it will lose its status as critical thought. In more general terms than a discrete comment on biblical studies and philosophy, therefore, these studies urge the idea and program that the only way forward for critical thinking today is to risk the thesis of the ephemeral banality of the difference between “religion” and the “secular.” In an aporia from which we will not escape, it is only the risk of losing ground to the form of religion that one can remain faithful today to a purely immanent, secularizing—or this worlding—critique. It concerns me only a little that such a deployment of modern reflexivity against one of modernity’s favorite oppositional poles sounds the death knell for an academic triumphalism that parades its own procedures as the result of overcoming prior religious prejudice and thus as a laying bare of the world as it merely is. And it is in light of the way such a postreligious, but also postcritical, positivism seems to me generally to hamstring discussions of religion today (both inside and outside the academy) that my chapters on Hegel, Strauss, and Nietzsche focused on the near indis[ 170 ]

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tinguishability of their secularizing or profaning critiques of religion and those depictions of original or originary Christianity whereby they guaranteed their own status as critical thinkers. When secularizing critiques of religion find themselves attempting to inhabit or co-opt the “originary” force of Christianity in order to substantiate themselves, it is time to toss out old narrations of secularity as a progressive overcoming of a prior religious prejudice. We simply must discover new modes of self-narration, not to mention new modes of asking the basic modern question about the selfgrounding or performative production of the difference constituting religion against secularity. The “alternative” mode of analysis presented here is simply a radical repetition of modern, reflexive logic, one that does not allow modernity’s own triumph over a prior religious prejudice to escape the gravitational pull of that immanent, reflexive critique modernity must demand of everything. Finally, given my interest in a second order or reflexive observation of the difference between religion and secularity (not to mention our concomitant need to draw both poles of this opposition into a single systemic backdrop),I have tried to mark out new ways that we might begin to map modern religious history onto media history. To repeat a McLuhanism, these investigations have functioned as experimental “probes” into multiple medial environments, particularly as these displace the basic oppositions between religion and its others onto questions of modern communicative technologies and the accompanying transformation of what constitutes authentic literary production. By paying attention to the descriptions of religion and the public sphere in Kant, Hegel, and Strauss, for example, it was possible to catch glimpses of the way the modern book market set the stage for some of the basic ways the difference between religion and its others have been described by these authors. In these texts, the book market has begun to function like a new kind of mirror in which the individual experiences himself or herself as part of a much larger “population” whose anonymous, collective identity begins to stand in as the true locus of “religion.” As the analysis of Hegel shows, his prescient discussions of formal, abstract, or universal “individuality” can be read as an expression of the nineteenth-century print market and the mass of individual readers such a market produced. This kind of individuation was not experienced without some genuine levels of anxiety, however, and Strauss’s writings exemplify the way discussions of religion could concretize his hopes in this new experience even as he gave voice to accompanying anxieties about the self within the new communicative sphere. On one hand, Strauss’s hopes for a liberating cri[ 171 ]

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tique of religion are frequently bound up with depictions of the mass production and dissemination of newspapers through which a truly modern community of individuals might begin to sense itself as equal parts of a transparent and self-directing collective: free communication without organizational form. On the other hand (and even at the same time), Strauss’s texts depict mass-produced patterns of experience as the very essence of an opaque, “nonmodern,” and stupidly religious heteronomy, as if the new communicative network were registering itself simultaneously in these writings as the harbinger of the very best and the very worst possibility to come. Derrida was right: the place to explore the emergence, substance, and regularity of the difference between religion and the secular is along the historically specific lines of modernity’s “tele-technologies.” And in keeping with Derrida’s herky jerky logic of autoimmunity or outbidding whereby religion and the secular compete, Strauss’s secularizing critiques of biblical literature as a form of collective, unconscious writing must be read as providing his audience simultaneously with a chance to affirm modern mass communication as harboring the promise of autonomy and transparency even while they disavow it as a “premodern” form of religious heteronomy. In ways that have yet to be registered within the academic study of religion, Strauss could assure his hearers both that his reading of ancient “myth” production touched on the very alterity of nonmodern thought and that this alterity, inexplicably, was what modernity already knew or could already sense to be the case. There could be no better indication of the systemic logic of autoimmunity than this, as it indicates a remarkable splitting of the unknown possibilities of the single modern mediasphere into opposed images of a liberated (secular) future and a heteronomous (religious) past. And this autoimmune logic, whereby something within modernity must be sacrificed for modernity to achieve its (true) self, is the basic problematic that we must continue to elaborate with diligence, all the more so as it is a logic within which contemporary society continues to find itself perhaps now more than ever. As Hegel and Strauss both took pains to point out, modernity’s reflexive gamble was that it could free itself to itself, and this gamble cannot be acted upon without the splitting and disavowal of part of the modern self as, ironically, not itself. A tarrying with this basic modern paradox continues to afford a radical rethinking of contemporary life as it negotiates its own secularity by way of depictions of nonmodern religiosity. We must continue to think, in short, of productions of religion and secularity as they occur within the same basic, world-forming gamble.

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Or, to shift registers only slightly, we must, increasingly, throw the distinction between religion and secularity back onto that immanent field of mediating technologies within which occurs their original splitting and setting into oppositional poles as religion and secularity. We must acquire an ear for these performative events of religion and secularity.

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introduction 1. Jacob Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993), 12f. The book is a series of conversations that Aleida Assmann culled from the recorded lectures of Taubes. A translation is now available in the Cultural Memory in the Present series, Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, translated by Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 2. Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus, 13. 3. While he frequently alludes to various Pauline motifs (e.g., cosmopolitanism, debt, mystery, and revelation) and New Testament texts as being pressing legacies to sift, Derrida does not make an engagement with the early Christian writings the object of a sustained analysis. For example, Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2002), 18ff; Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 54ff; Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 345–50. Also, Jean-François Lyotard, The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999). Otherwise, Giorgio Agamben, Le temps qui reste, translated by Judith Revel (Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2000); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), translated by Ray Brassier as Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). While many of the issues here are consistently sprinkled throughout Žižek’s writings, he most directly engages various aspects of the Pauline legacy in Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute—Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London/New York: Verso, 2000); Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London/New York: Routledge, 2001); and Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). I have shown elsewhere how Žižek’s analyses rehash earlier Hegelian readings of Christianity as the lack that explodes the totalitarian state in Ward Blanton, “Apocalyptic Materialities: Return(s) of Early Christian Motifs in [ 175 ]

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Slavoj Žižek’s Depiction of the Materialist Subject,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 6, no. 1 (2004): 10–27. 4. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 6. 5. As we will see, the agonistic economy within which the various images of early Christianity are produced represents a complexity that goes beyond the contested modes of distinction governing two disciplines in relation to each other. Analysis must cut into the complexity somewhere, however, and the main point to be made here is that typical descriptions of the “object” of New Testament scholarship or the adequacy of its historical “representations” (judged in terms of their correspondence to first-century data) will be rearranged. This rearrangement of perspective emerges through a concern to remember the interdisciplinary and contested stakes of the larger game in which these objects or representations were counted as successful. For a similar redescription of disciplinary self-understanding along these basic hermeneutical lines, see Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 44ff. 6. While they generally remain in the background here, the following studies owe their initial impetus to some of the explorations of recursivity or reflexivity by Martin Heidegger and Niklas Luhmann. For reflections on the performative establishment of distinction, see Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, translated by Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 23f., and the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), esp. 20f. 7. The function of image or depiction or the “production” of religion and secularity here are ways to tag the comparative readings of the interpretation of early Christian religion in view. The designations are, therefore, much more project specific than Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. Our basic focus on an agonistic totality and a system of differences (or a radically relational system) in which recognition (and, subsequently, interest) is always subject to shifts in a complex economy that is itself beyond one’s control, however, is the same. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 137f; Pierre Bourdieu, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 170f. 8. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–78. 9. Ibid., 2, 12, 21. 10. As may be evident already in this statement, Derrida’s machinistic outbidding is a movement of self-abstraction that organizes the development of more than just philosophical critiques of positive religion, and I do not mean to suggest that Derrida’s discussions of outbidding are merely historical or retrospective. The notion of outbidding is, among other things, tied in Derrida’s writings to nationalist outbursts, fundamentalisms of various sorts, the expansion of and reaction against contemporary communicative technologies, and the globalization of capitalism itself. It is tempting to say, therefore, that the “auto-immune” deficiencies he has in mind are all examples of his recurrent fascination with the aporetic scenario in which the condition for [ 176 ]

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the possibility of a system is likewise the condition of its impossibility. See Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge”; Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, translated by Michael Naas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992); Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 11. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 7, 28. 12. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, Medieval and Modern Philosophy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 429. 13. The tracing of technological and mediological themes through Taylor’s seminal work on religion would be a worthwhile study in its own right, particularly as his writing has moved on to think about the medium of all contemporary media, money. It is promising, moreover, to read Taylor with Friedrich Kittler, as both of them suggest a kind of postmedia thinking of the convertibility of almost anything into the medium, the digital for Kittler, capital for Taylor. The present focus on the produced rather than naturalized sense of a difference between religion and secularity finds itself in profound sympathy with both approaches. See Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994); Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For Kittler’s retroactive thinking of different media through an implicitly digital logic, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, translated by Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Friedrich Kittler, Eine kulturgeschichte der kulturwissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000). 14. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, translated by David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 28ff. The way contemporary communication technologies have transformed the basic performative dimensions of everyday speech and, with this, our experience of credit, testimony, or faith, has also been explored to some degree by Slavoj Žižek, On Belief; Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge.” Interestingly, these questions sometimes come up for Žižek when he explores the claims of media theorists that Oedipal dynamics of modern subjectivation are transformed into a kind of self-creating liberation from the body. While he familiarizes himself with these topics enough to refute the media theorists, what Žižek does not do is take the opportunity to begin to historicize many of the Lacanian structures within which he continues to work. This is not to suggest that he should fall into the easy “historicist” explanations he so often crusades against, but it is to say that the possibility is now emerging to think more seriously about the way modern communicative technologies have informed structures like the “symbolic” he uses so frequently. See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1998), 127. Others have more directly engaged questions of religion, media, and structures of belief. See the introductory essay of De Vries in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). [ 177 ]

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15. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, translated by Ron R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Vattimo, The Transparent Society. Taylor makes similar points in Taylor, Hiding. 16. While one could see many places in his writings in this respect, I am thinking above all of Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (New York: Verso, 1996). 17. The motif is more frequent in his writings than one might expect, cf. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 3ff. 18. The general sentiment also demands of those who would focus on disciplinary history that they make some sort of case for the value of their work. The reader will bear with me, I hope, as several paragraphs are spent on this necessity. 19. These isomorphisms in Bultmann’s work are sometimes even more obvious in those writings in which he tries to be explicitly historical in the sense that he is speaking about the ancient cultural contexts of Christianity. A prime example is the way he describes Das Urchristentum im Rahmen der antiken Religionen (1949), translated as Primitive Christianity in its Contemporary Setting. There Pauline Christianity emerges by way of a comparison with the various subject positions or existential stances represented by Gnosticism, Hellenistic philosophy, and Judaism. The modern parallels of all these subject positions are fairly easy to see, particularly for those who have read not only Bultmann but his philosophical conversation partner, Heidegger. At about the same time, of course, a remarkably similar interdisciplinary and ancient-modern traffic occurs in the investigations of Gnosticism by a student of both Heidegger and Bultmann, Hans Jonas. Jonas’s description of Gnostic tenets reads like an inventory of standard topoi from Heidegger’s work (thrownness, worldhood, dwelling, falling, dread, homesickness, numbness, worldly chatter, and the call from nowhere). Žižek more recently takes up this tradition of interpretation to popular effect, with writings that are replete with a privileged Paulinism (his own Leninist materialism) contending against the twin heterodoxies of a (deconstructionist) Gnosticism and a (liberal) paganism. One of the striking things about Žižek’s more recent writings on Christianity is that they do not skip a beat from the style, motifs, and theoretical descriptions of his earlier work. Readers are left to puzzle over this strange continuity, wondering whether Žižek must have been writing about Christianity even before he began to do so explicitly, or whether he has, even with his turn toward Christianity as a topic, never really stopped cycling through a multitude of permutations of the very limited series of (Lacanian) subject positions with which he began in works such as Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Christianity, in this latter case, would be simply the latest in the endless circulation of a few basic subjective scenarios. See Rudolf Bultmann, Das Urchistentum im Rahmen der antiken Religionen (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1949); Rudolf Bultmann, Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting (1949); Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spaqaqtantiker Geist (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934). A second, revised edition was published in 1954, translated as Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958); Slavoj Žižek, ed., Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992); Slavoj Žižek and F. W. J. Von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World

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(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Žižek, Fragile Absolute; Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf.

chapter one 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke in Zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 491; G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 412. Hereafter, I include references to the English edition in parentheses after the German page number—e.g., 491 (412). 2. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 491 (410f.). 3. Ibid., 491. 4. Ibid., 490. 5. Ibid., 491 (410). 6. Friedrich Kittler, Eine kulturgeschichte der kulturwissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000), 118f. 7. Werner Hamacher, Pleroma—Reading in Hegel: The Genesis and Structure of a Dialectical Hermeneutics in Hegel, translated by Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (London: Athlone Press, 1998), 194f. 8. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 495. Emphasis in original. 9. Ibid., 496. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 498, 496 (418, 416). Against the backdrop of this emergence of a Protestant or individualistic immediacy from medieval Christianity’s phalanx of priestly intermediaries, it is significant to note that Kant, as we will see, finds himself combating the book itself as that crucial prosthetic stand-in for an individual’s faith or knowledge. Books can be, as Kant famously boasts, the prostheses that believe for the otherwise autonomous individual. Hegel’s focus on the abyss of autonomy as being mediated through the hands that hold a book, therefore, invites us to reflect on a more embodied notion of autonomy than Kant’s dismissal of writing encourages us to think. 12. Ibid., 496. 13. Ibid., 495f. (416). 14. Ibid., 494 (414f.). 15. Ibid., 497f. 16. Ibid., 498. It is worth pointing out that Strauss will follow Hegel in generally eliding the distinction between the Volk and the middling social and economic class of the “educated” reading public. This is worth saying because of the massive amount of research recently on the question of the middle class in nineteenth-century Germany. As Hegel (in these texts) and Strauss (almost ubiquitously) do not distinguish between the Volk and this reading public, I will not either. My goal, after all, is to elucidate their rhetoric, not to comment upon a very developed topic within cultural and intellectual history. On the other hand, as I will point out later, Nietzsche faults Strauss on just this point, imagining a religion “to come” that is a decidedly “middle class” affair. The

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tension between these groups is already implicit in Hegel’s and Strauss’s writings, as they discuss the way education about religion can contribute to an overcoming of the people’s passion for the Volksbuch. For a helpful summary of a great deal of research on the question, see Jonathan Sperber, “Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World,” Journal of Modern History 69 (June 1997): 271–97. 17. Anderson’s Imagined Communities is an important point of comparison here. First, Anderson recognizes the function of forgetting as a sine qua non of an imagined national identity (mediated through mass media), namely the forgetting of the fact that one does not really know all the people with whom one senses oneself to be in community. Likewise, Anderson traces the way the distinction within the print market between several (vernacular) languages affects its ability to reflect back to individuals a collective identity that, in turn, registers this market distinction. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Compare Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–78. See also the illuminating discussion of these topics in Hent De Vries’s introduction to Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 18. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 498. 19. Ibid. 20. While his analyses are not characterized by the historical detail that statements like Hegel’s call for, I know of no one else who has explored such paradoxes of modernity like the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, and Friedrich Kittler is correct to say that Hegel is the great predecessor of Luhmann’s systems-theoretical analyses of modern subjectivity. See Kittler, Eine kulturgeschichte der kulturwissenschaft, 82, 101. Emphasis in original. 21. Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 236–47. 22. In his still very important engagement with Kant’s newspaper statement about the nature of enlightenment, Foucault lamented that no one had yet written a history of late eighteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy in relation to journalism. The same could be said about the history of religion during this period, as the book market (and, more importantly, a growing awareness of the book market) inverts much of the standard rhetoric about the external/internal aspects of the subject, the public/ private spheres, and a host of other oppositions by which we continue to narrate the religion of this period. See Frank Hartmann, Medienphilosophie (Vienna: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 2000), 52–70. The writings of Armand Mattelart are likewise attuned both to the way the dynamics of the print market functioned as the condition of the possibility of Kant’s notion of enlightenment and to the consideration of what liberating political engagement might look like in an age when these reading practices are transformed. See especially Armand Mattelart, Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture, translated by Susan Emanuel and James A. Cohen (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994); [ 180 ]

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Armand Mattelart, The Invention of Communication, translated by Susan Emanuel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 23. Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 385. 24. For a wonderful engagement with Kant’s use of history as such a category, cf. Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Timothy Bahti traces the Kantian placement of history within the university through later philosophers and students of literature to good effect in Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), cf. 20ff. In relation to New Testament studies, Kant’s negotiation here bears the marks of a form of an academic division of labor that would not remain for long. Kant frequently refers to “biblical theologians,” for example, their alleged concern to harmonize the historical origins of Christianity with the later creeds, and he constantly assumes that the goal of their teaching is the production of a rational religion for the people. Specialization and the struggle for academic autonomy would increasingly transform this assemblage of faculties, widening the gap between philosophy and theology as much as that between the theologians and the biblical critics. In this respect, I find it difficult to overestimate the significance of Strauss in inventing a subject position for the biblical critic that was not constrained by the university formation that Kant both mirrors and projects. One can see the radical alteration of Kant’s entire problematic that Strauss’s work effects when, from outside the academy and as a form of secularizing critique, he begins to write about early Christian history as a means of destroying the traditional creeds. Moreover, in chapter 2 we will consider whether Strauss’s reading of the Gospels lays waste to what is, among Kant’s biblical theologians, the precious kernel behind all the historical detail, the moral example of Jesus. For Strauss, the memory of such an ethical personality may not be reconstructed through the fragmented and manufactured memories tinkered together in the Gospel texts. The autonomy and critical potential of history that Strauss would begin to explore in a polemical manner is no doubt related to the development of specialization in this field, a specialization that simply did not exist in the earlier parts of the century (see, e.g., Joachim Rohde, “Die Geschichte des Berliner Lehrstuhls für Neues Testament,” Wiss. Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Gesellschaftsw. 39, no. 7 [1985]: 539–43). 25. Observing the rhetorical maneuver here is perhaps not so surprising once its frequency in a text like Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone has been noted. There Kant’s Stoicizing reading of ethics and the Paulinist advocacy of spirit over letter become nearly indistinguishable, in part because Kant frequently bolsters his case with appeals to Pauline motifs and texts. 26. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties / Der Streit der Fakultäten, translated by Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 65. As it almost invariably does, this distinction plays itself out on the terrain of a distinction between the spirit or reason and writing: “All three higher faculties base the teachings which the government entrusts to them on writings, as is necessary for a people governed by [ 181 ]

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learning, since otherwise there could be no fixed and universally accessible norm for guidance. It is self-evident that such a text (or book) must comprise statutes, that is, teaching that proceed from an act of choice on the part of an authority [that do not issue directly from reason]” (33). Interestingly, Hegel occasionally reverses the hierarchy: “The words of the Bible constitute an unsystematic account; they are Christianity as it appeared in the beginning. It is spirit that grasps the content, that spells it out.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1, Introduction and the Concept of Religion, translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 168–69. Here the original unsystematic word needs to be led by spirit into writing. 27. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in On History, edited by Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 3 (35). 28. Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 98. In his exceptional work on Romanticism and the literary-theoretical potentials of prophetic traditions, Ian Balfour also points out some of these connections between writing, scripture, and philosophical modes of contestation in Kant. See Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel, 20f. The really interesting discussion of modern autonomy in terms of a university department’s production of knowledge begins when New Testament studies, the gatekeeper of academic understanding in relation to early Christianity, attains autonomy in relation to theology and ecclesiastical institutions. It is perhaps only with this autonomy that Kant’s rough-and-ready distinction between the higher and lower faculties in terms of a canon of some sort becomes obviously problematic. The department, at times at least, exists rather to mark the distinction between modern understanding and nonmodern religion. It is the antithesis of the biblical theology department Kant has in mind. 29. Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel, 20f. 30. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 498. 31. David Friedrich Strauss, In Defense of My Life of Jesus against the Hegelians (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983), 29f. 32. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 496. 33. Hamacher, Pleroma—Reading in Hegel, 195. 34. For “suture” as a volatile point of intersection between the particular and universal that is constitutive of identity, cf. Slavoj Žižek’s renewed engagement with Hegel and this particular topos of Lacanian film theory. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2002), 20ff; Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kie lowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 31ff. One of the ways in which this concept is helpful in relation to modernity’s engagement with religion is that it highlights the synchronic, dialectical, or structural problem in the interplay of the ancient or modern identities in question without representing these as self-same objects floating along in a lazy stream of homogeneous time. 35. Kittler’s crucial investigations into the medial dimensions of hermeneutics, from the training of children to read to the explosion of sheer numbers of texts avail[ 182 ]

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able to readers during this period, are all relevant here, though a detailed comparison is beyond the scope of the present enterprise. Kittler, however, finds a forgetting function not only in academic theorizing about hermeneutical principles but also in the popular pedagogical principles of the time that taught this generation of scholars, among other things, how to read and write. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, translated by Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 20. 36. Rohde, “Die Geschichte des Berliner Lehrstuhls für Neues Testament,” 539. 37. In this respect, Habermas’s suggestion that Kant and (particularly) Hegel increasingly treated public opinion as an arena in need of various forms of control (rather than as a self-creating sphere in which reason embodies itself) is an intriguing point of comparison. Standing in as science against the extravagances of (public) opinion, academic biblical critics like the (Hegelian) Strauss, after all, do nothing if not to enforce new self-conceptions of society in relation to religion, and they do this by guarding particular interpretations with all the authority that academia affords. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 118ff. 38. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 10. 39. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History. vol. 3, Medieval and Modern Philosophy, translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 475. 40. If Luther and Paul are conjoined twins in this literature, so are the Pharisees or Judaism and medieval church hierarchies. Their substitutability within this literature, devoid of comparative nuance, should encourage us (like Kittler or Žižek) to consider this material in terms of structural forms of information processing, as abstract forms of subjectivation. 41. That Hegel’s engagement with Christianity plays itself out in ambiguous or paradoxical ways is well rehearsed. It is perhaps worth pointing out, however, that it is quite often with early Christian images that Hegel strikes this ambiguous or paradoxical pose as both saint and sinner, faithful believer and destroyer of Christianity. Moreover, in an odd way, New Testament historians do something similar whenever they reveal (or attempt to assure themselves of) their own secularity by way of a particular rendering of early Christian religion. In both cases, the originary nature of Christianity is revealed in the precise moment that received religious traditions are demolished. 42. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Teil 1, Einleitung. Der Begriff der Religion (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983), 67f. (157). 43. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1977), 65 (109); G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 3 of Theorie Werkausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 91. 44. This particular critique, therefore, could also be read as part of Hegel’s rejection of his earlier fascination with Hölderlin and the Eleusinian Mysteries as providing a kind of model of the ineffable. See the wonderful discussion in Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, Theory and History of Literature 78 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 9ff. [ 183 ]

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45. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, 67 (156). 46. Ibid., 68 (158). Italics added. 47. Martin Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 116f. Italics added. 48. In this, my own interests in a kind of recuperation of Strauss’s Hegelianism (to be sure, read beyond the limits of Strauss’s own reception of that thinker) are in line with those of Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). The project is absolutely pressing, all the more so as the new religious wars have begun. This sense gives rise to my consistent attempt to keep ontological traditions at the forefront of my studies. Identity politics has long since left us powerless to think as radically as we need to in relation to the formations of religion, secularity, and the power to distinguish between them. 49. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, 68f. (158f.). 50. The recent critiques of multiculturalist liberalism by Slavoj Žižek amount to nothing else but a repetition, in relation to markets and political commitments, of Hegel’s critique of the biblical historians. In both cases, the act of belief is fobbed off on another, freeing the multiculturalist (or biblical historian) to react to the gambles of others rather than taking their place within the risky demands their own (political, economic, informational) economies place upon them. See Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001). 51. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, 80 (171). 52. Ibid., 80 (172). 53. Ibid., 82 (173). 54. Ibid., 83 (174). 55. Ibid., 82 (173). 56. Ibid., n. 369, p. 77 (168). Italics added. 57. I am following Taylor here inasmuch as he links Hegel to Herder in what he calls an “expressivist” ontology in which it would be inappropriate to distinguish clearly between meaning and being. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 13–27. In a McLuhanism avant la lettre, Herder defines human rationality in terms of the complex interaction of “material” and “spiritual” streams that themselves become the environment in terms of which any human rationality finds itself attuned. “The difference between men too, as well as between all the other productions of the terrestrial globe, must be regulated by the specific difference of the medium, in which, as in the organ of the deity, we live.” Johann G. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, translated by T. Churchill (London: Luke Hansard, 1800), 13. 58. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, 16 (166). 59. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 167, n. 44. 60. As we will see in chapter 3, Heidegger becomes involved in the same play of identities when he, too, dismisses the biblical critics as being superficial students of the letter and without a disciplinary capacity to enter into the fundamentally risky space that is the openness of the spirit. In that instance, also, the philosopher begins to use Pauline language. To the mirror play between the spirit of Paul and the spirit of [ 184 ]

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philosophy, we might add the spirit of Europe. See Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 60ff; Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, translated by Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 61. As Niklas Luhmann points out, the reflexivity that came to characterize a Kantian or Hegelian modernity was being repeated contemporaneously in historiography and literature (with the modern novel). Luhmann writes, “As a sociologist, one sees no mere coincidence in these congruencies. They take place at a time in which modern society begins to understand as irreversible its break with all of its predecessors. This demands a distance from immediately fact-related observations and descriptions, demands a second level, on which one can observe and describe observations and descriptions.” Biblical research as Strauss performed it, therefore, could likewise be cited as one of the “many parallel inventions” of reflexivity or second-order observations during this period. Indeed, given the significance of religion—and a break with Protestant Christianity performed through biblical criticism—this modern reflexivity may be said to have found a privileged (if still underanalyzed) site in biblical studies. See Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 113. 62. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, Erster Band (Tübingen: Osiander, 1840), 1; David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, translated by George Eliot (Ramsey, NJ: Sigler Press, 1846), 39. 63. Strauss, of course, did not yet put scare quotes around “later” and would almost invariably view time as a linear container of these “developments” of representational forms. It will only be later, with Bergson and, especially, Heidegger, that time itself will need to be “thrown back on itself ” as in the self-grounding modern loop. As I keep pointing out, however, the potential for this type of thinking is already there in Strauss, even if he did not make an explicit thematic problem out of it. In his discussion of Hegel’s engagement with time, Heidegger lectured, “For Hegel the former time, the past, constitutes the essence of time. This corresponds to the fundamental view of being according to which what is a genuine being is what has returned to itself. If this is understood absolvently, then it means that being is what has already occurred, in the face of which nothing can be earlier, and everything always comes later or too late. (The a priori is the original past, as what is antecedent and simply prior to time and thus beyond time, as what is in advance, prior, reposed in itself, as the past which has become quiet.)” Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Parvas Emad and Kenneth May (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 146. Heidegger goes on to distinguish this thinking to his own attempt to think systematically about time and being, adding, “precisely at that juncture—where in fact the problematic of ‘being and time’ flares up for the first and only time, namely, in Kant— people refuse to see the problem and speak rather of my arbitrarily reading my own views into Kant.” Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 146f. I will occasionally push Strauss’s analysis, especially in chapter 2, toward what could be read in terms of a consideration of the “self-affection,” reflexivity, or recursivity in what Heidegger finds alternately, in notions of time, life, or factual life experience. As Otto Pöggeler says of [ 185 ]

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Heidegger’s descriptions of factual life, “Expression, appearance, and testimony belong to it.” I do not know a better way to describe the problem of biblical studies as a form of cultural memory that I am trying to analyze and retrieve from Strauss. cf. Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, translated by Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987), 17. 64. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 1 (39). 65. Ibid., 1. 66. Ibid., 1 (39). 67. See the description of what Foucault calls the “modern episteme” in The Order of Things. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 303ff. Strauss’s focus on the structure of interpretation in terms of modern habits of perception also invites comparison with Foucault’s later reinterpretation of nineteenth-century knowledge in terms of practices or disclosive techniques. 68. See Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 2, 18; William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 13ff. Following such appropriations of the Hegelian problematic into New Testament studies, I have exemplified such a rethinking of the disciplinary history of this field in Ward Blanton, “Biblical Studies in the Age of Bio-Power: Albert Schweitzer and the Degenerate Physiology of the Historical Jesus,” The Bible and Critical Theory 2, no. 1 (February 2006): 6.1–6.25. 69. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 2 (40). 70. Ibid., 1. 71. Ibid., 2 (40). 72. The suggestive rejection of a clear distinction between fact and value or thing and interpretation in terms of a rejection of a “decorated shed” model of reality I borrow from the architectural and philosophical writings of Karsten Harries. See, for example, Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 70f. 73. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 80 (78). 74. Ibid. 75. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, Zweiter Band (Tübingen: Osiander, 1840), 162 (496). 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 165 (497). 78. Ibid., 165. 79. Ibid., 165 (497). 80. Again, to radicalize Strauss’s Hegelianism, we must remember that there is more at stake here in the movement beyond the rationalist mode of interpretation than a simple rejection of the biblical text as a helpful embodiment of the universal. Rather, the move from the rationalist to the mythological mode of interpretation is likewise the move beyond a universalizing humanism altogether. The “ruse” of the rationalists is just this “as if ” structure of the imagined universal human perception. This is important to remember. The move to the mythological mode of interpretation [ 186 ]

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is not just a move beyond a literalist allegiance to the Bible. It is also the emergence of radical cultural difference at the level of hermeneutic reflection. This is one of the many occasions when we must think beyond the specifics of New Testament studies to realize the deep systemic and even ontological transformations occurring therein. 81. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 166 (468). 82. Ibid., 166 (498). 83. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 112 (96). 84. Ibid., 112f. 85. Strauss asserts that the ideas did not originate “from the revealed religion of the Hebrews” but, instead, sources represented by “the Maccabean Daniel” and “the apocryphal Tobit.” Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 112 (96). 86. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 112. 87. Ibid., 113 (96). 88. Ibid., 112. 89. Ibid., 114 (97). 90. Ibid., 118. 91. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 118. Italics added. 92. Ibid.. 93. David Friedrich Strauss, Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte (Ammersee: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1971), 101; David Friedrich Strauss, The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A Critique of Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus, Lives of Jesus Series (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 161. 94. Strauss, Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte, 101 (161). 95. Ibid. Italics added. 96. Ibid. 97. This is worth saying, and it invites us to reflect on the contemporary habits of perception—or ontology of information—in which such a reading makes sense. We must push beyond Strauss today, particularly as his reflexivity did not yet engage the fundamental distinction between religion and its others. But what does it say about the informational matrices within which we live today that the difference between the natural and the supernatural may be elided in the name of a more radical reflexive thinking of cultural production itself, whether of religion or secularity? To ask such questions is at once to accomplish the directions of modern thought about religion and to bring them to a strange stand-still. Or, in the media-esthetic terms, it is a “digital” thinking of religion or secularity in which either can be circulated within the same (digital) networks. I will reflect further on such questions in the conclusion. 98. Strauss, Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte, 101 (161). Emphasis in original. 99. Ibid. Emphasis in original. 100. As a sidebar, it is interesting to see how much of the influential scholarship of this period could structure itself as the “revelation” of otherwise private letters. Jacobi himself, we should not forget, boosted his career when he made public allegedly private confessions of Lessing that he was a Spinozist and hence (in the perception of the time) a follower of a pantheistic Jew. The career boost came from the fact that Jacobi’s exposé went public in tandem with a biography Moses Mendelssohn was writing about [ 187 ]

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Lessing. In thus disparaging the private Lessing, Jacobi made his own thoughts about theism the public talk of the town. See Pinkard, Hegel, 30ff. 101. Strauss, Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History, 21; Strauss, Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte, 16. 102. Strauss, Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte, 16. 103. Ibid., 16 (21f.). 104. Ibid., 19f. (25).

chapter two 1. David Friedrich Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Bonn: Emil Strauss, 1876), 305 (49). 2. Indeed, they were famous authors, though, as we will see, Strauss’s self-presentations are a little overwrought. Renan’s Vie de Jésus, published just a few years earlier in 1863, sold 60,000 copies the first year alone. For an exposition of the social and political contexts and implications of Renan’s biblical criticism, see Halvor Moxnes, “Renan’s Vie de Jésus as Representation of the Orient,” in Jews, Antiquity, and the Nineteenth Century Imagination (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2003). 3. Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, 301; D. F. Strauss, T. Mommsen, F. Max Müller, and T. Carlyle, Letters on the War between Germany and France (London: Paternoster Press, 1871), 43. 4. Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, 302 (44). 5. Ibid., 305 (49). 6. The theme is central to Kittler’s technological histories of writing and his focus on various technological objects whose function within these histories is, as one of his projects suggests, the Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften (1980). Particularly relevant here is his analysis of Nietzsche and his suggestion that the spirit has “begun to stink” in the age of mass media. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, translated by Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), cf. 177–205. 7. Again, it is with the stable sense of a “normal” or “straightforward perception” that Strauss unwittingly repeats the nonreflexive or positivist maneuver of the rationalist interpreters he dismissed. This installment of a normalizing perception across time I take to be Strauss’s participation in the “bourgeois realism” invoked by Hans Frei (see the conclusion of this chapter). Moreover, while their differences are still profound, the young Nietzsche is closer to Strauss’s “bourgeois realism” than one might expect. For more general discussions of myth as a category in Strauss’s writings, see Gotthold Müller, Identität und Immanenz Zur Genese der Theologie von David Friedrich Strauss: Eine theologie- und philosophiegeschichtliche Studie (Zurich: Evz-Verlag, 1968), 19ff., 192ff; Jörg F. Sandberger, David Friedrich Strauss als theologischer Hegelianer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), 91–112. 8. David Friedrich Strauss, Die Alte und der Neue Glaube: Ein Bekentnis (Bonn: Verlag von Emil Strauss, 1873), 86; David Friedrich Strauss, The Old Faith and the New (Am-

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herst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), 99. Hereafter, I include references to the English translation in parentheses after the German page number—e.g., 86 (99). 9. David Friedrich Strauss, Die Alte und der Neue Glaube: Ein Bekentnis (Bonn: Verlag von Emil Strauss, 1873), 86; Strauss, The Old Faith and the New, 99. 10. There he wrote of his deceased brother: And here the dedication [to his brother] coincides with its destination as announced by the title. In dedicating it to my brother, I consider him as a representative of the people, believing that among the German people, for whom the book is destined, there are many like himself, many who find their best solace after a day of toil in serious reading, many possessing the exceptional courage to disregard the beaten track of conventional and ecclesiastical routine, and to think for themselves on the most important objects of human concernment. I may add—the still rarer capacity of seeing that there is no security in Germany, at least for political liberty and progress until the public mind has been emancipated from superstition and initiated in a purely human culture. (David Friedrich Strauss, A New Life of Jesus [London: Williams and Norgate, 1865], iv) Particularly in light of the essentially esthetic arguments that the “great literary figure” makes to this middle class audience, it is interesting to see Strauss as attempting to fulfill the Schillerian dictum: “In vain will you assail their precepts, in vain condemn their practices; but on their leisure hours [and with esthetic productions!] you can try your shaping hand” (Tenth Letter, cf. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind in a Series of Letters [Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1967], 61). Small wonder that Nietzsche, as we will see, would not forgive Strauss for being one of those authors of a culture that has “sworn itself to take possession of the leisure and ruminative hours of modern man,” which is to say, his “cultural moments [Kulturmomente], and in these to stun him with printed paper” (see below). Elsewhere in the essay, Nietzsche criticizes Strauss for thinking of the Volk only in terms of the middle-class reader. Since Strauss and Nietzsche both assume the biblical critic means, loosely, “educated reader” when he says “Volk,” I will follow them here. The ambiguity of the notion of the nineteenth-century “middle class” has become a pressing topic of cultural and intellectual history, as I have already pointed out (see chap. 1, n. 15). For a summary of much of the relevant literature, see Jonathan Sperber, “Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World,” Journal of Modern History 69 (June 1997): 271–97. 11. Strauss, Die Alte und der Neue Glaube, 87 (99). 12. Ibid., 87f. (101). 13. Ibid., 93 (107). 14. Ibid., 93f. (107). 15. See Richard S. Cromwell, David Friedrich Strauss and His Place in Modern Thought (Fair Lawn, NJ: R. E. Burdick, 1974), 39f; Müller, Identität und Immanenz, 149. 16. Strauss, The Old Faith and the New, xxv. The comment comes from the “prefatory postscript” he later appended to the text.

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17. Ibid., xxv. Italics added. 18. Ibid., xlix. Likewise, it is interesting to note that he sometimes presents himself as struggling with precisely this question in relation to Hegel, that of the relation between content and notion within religion. He suggests, for example, that the entire problem of Aufhebung may be summarized as a variation of this theme. cf. Defense of My “Life of Jesus” against the Hegelians. Also, cf. Sandberger, David Friedrich Strauss als theologischer Hegelianer, 29f., 91. 19. Strauss, The Old Faith and the New, xlix. 20. Ibid., li. Emphasis in original. 21. Ibid., 8 (7). 22. Ibid. 23. Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, 242. 24. Strauss, Die Alte und der Neue Glaube: Ein Bekentnis, 10 (9). 25. See his early essays “The Future of Our Educational Institutions” and “Homer and Classical Philology,” though the themes are ubiquitous in his work. Compare James Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 177ff. Nietzsche’s essay on Strauss must be one of the least commented upon of all the philosopher’s writings. Even those who find themselves privileging Nietzsche in the effort to retrieve a kind of media esthetic from nineteenth-century philosophy have missed the remarkable comments he makes about mass media, reading practices, and the emergence of a new religion here. The present chapter focuses on certain medial dimensions of this essay, though other pieces of this generally overlooked work deserve attention. That it was Wagner who suggested that Nietzsche write a polemical piece against Strauss, for example, is a story in itself (see Joachim Köhler, Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation, translated by Ronald Taylor [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998], 93ff.). For a very different reading of Nietzsche’s essay from Köhler’s, and one of the few philosophical discussions of the piece, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 134ff. 26. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Insel Taschenbuch 509 (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1981), 9. References to the English edition will generally be included after the German page number—e.g., 9 (3). 27. See J. P. Stern’s gloss: “At Easter 1861 Nietzsche is confirmed, together with his closest school friend, Paul Deussen, in a spirit of great religious enthusiasm; but at this time, too, he reads D. F. Strauss’s ‘demythologizing’ Life of Jesus. His subsequent loss of faith seems to have been gradual and undramatic, not caused by any traumatic event” (J. P. Stern, A Study of Nietzsche [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979], 3). 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, translated by H. L. Mencken (Tucson: Sharp Press, 1999), 45. 29. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 11. 30. I borrow the phrase from the prescient 1951 study of Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2002). 31. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 11 (4). [ 190 ]

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32. Ibid., 15f. (7). 33. Ibid., 15. 34. Ibid., 16 (8). 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 56f. Nietzsche’s friend and hallmate in Basel, Franz Overbeck, echoed many of the philosopher’s sentiments against Strauss. In fact, the friends had a copy of Nietzsche’s essay on Strauss bound with a copy of Overbeck’s “On the Christianity of Our Contemporary Theology.” While this is not the place to explore this connection fully, both Nietzsche and Overbeck were united in thinking about modern media in their respective critiques of Strauss: “As it is these [theories of religion and culture in Strauss] only scrape that surface of human activity that newspapers write about” (Franz Overbeck, On the Christianity of Theology, translated by John Elbert Wilson [San Jose, CA: Pickwick Press, 2002], 110). Overbeck also criticized Strauss’s confidence in modern German culture as a tragic failure to recognize the critical potential of early Christianity’s “world denying” essence (to be sure, Overbeck implies, properly tempered so as not to be an “excessive” negation). Echoing Hegel’s juxtaposition of the “inner freedom” of early Christian religion as a means of escape from the totalitarianism he imagined to be characteristic of the Roman empire, Overbeck writes: There can be nothing more foreign to Christianity and its feeling of compassion [Mitleidsempfindung] than the ideal of culture that Strauss unfolds in answer to the question about how we are to live without Christianity. But where does it place us? Approximately on the standpoint of the narrow-minded citizen of imperial Rome, who had his religion in the “mysterium” of the chief of state. In the tranquil enjoyment of his wealth, he had the army to protect him from enemies outside Rome and the severity of the law to protect him from enemies within. He whiled away the gloomy hours with a dead art, which the order of the state could not keep from him. Insofar as he had the possibility of becoming Christian and refused, he is perhaps the most anti-Christian figure that history shows us. This standpoint is so base that we hardly need to call on Christianity to prove its meanness, nor even pre-Christian Greco-Roman paganism, which would truly provide only the most shaming parallel to Strauss’ ideal of life. The pagans of imperial Rome suffice, for they, or at least the thinkers among them knew [empfanden] the bitter fruit of every state that has arrived at its goal: uncontested and unconditional rule. . . . Strauss seems to be of the opinion that nothing is lacking in the happiness of a people that has let itself be locked in the cage of such a “finished” state. (Overbeck, On the Christianity of Theology, 108f) While in New Testament studies Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer, and others are credited with the dissolution of the so-called nineteenth-century liberal approach to the historical Jesus, all the seeds of these later thinkers are here in Nietzsche, Overbeck, and, indeed, Strauss himself. Whereas Schleiermacher and Paulus were still looking to Jesus as a historical personality to fulfill their desire for a map of human personality per se, Nietzsche and Overbeck were already beginning to see the important function of early Christian religion in purely negative terms, as expressions of that which cannot be incorporated within the control of a nation state and its “fixed” [ 191 ]

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culture. Schweitzer simply registers this eternal liminality of religion at the level of his reconstruction of Jesus, something Strauss had already begun to do (at the level of a “media analysis” of early Christian texts) when he made a point of proclaiming that “no coherent personality” can be reconstructed from the fragmented, disorganized, and temporally asynchronous pieces of “memory” in the Gospel texts. Given that the obverse of the “inner freedom” of early Christianity is thought to be the totally administered life of the Roman empire, it is of interest that, more recently, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have appropriated the image of early Christian religion as a means to evoke the “fragile absolute” of an apparently impossible revolutionary transcendence. Like Overbeck, Hegel had described Roman religion, “the religion of expediency,” as the stage in the development of religion in which an externalized necessity developed into a practicable project of organization and control: “At [this] stage . . . the purpose is still an external, empirical purpose, an all-encompassing purpose but on the plane of empirical reality—i.e., the purpose is a world dominion. The inherent purpose is one that is external to the individual, and it becomes ever more so the more it is realized and externalized, so that the individual is merely subordinated to the purpose, merely serves it.” (G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2, Determinate Religion [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], 399 [500]). Also like Overbeck, Hegel sees in the “world denial” of early Christian religion the initial glimmer of a way out of this subordination of the individual to the development of global empire. 37. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 36f. 38. David Friedrich Strauss, In Defense of My Life of Jesus against the Hegelians (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983), 59f. Italics added. 39. Ibid., 65. 40. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 29. 41. The sentiment is not dissimilar from that of Kierkegaard in the latter’s reflections on religion and the emergence of mass culture. Like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard consistently links the image of mass culture to the structures of Hegelian thought: No single individual (I mean no outstanding individual—in the sense of leadership and conceived according to the dialectical category “fate” will be able to resist the abstract process of levelling, for it is negatively something higher, and the age of chivalry is gone. No society or association can arrest that abstract power, simply because an association is itself in the service of the levelling process. Not even the individuality of the different nationalities can arrest it, for on a higher plane the abstract process of levelling is a negative representation of humanity pure and unalloyed. The abstract levelling process, the self-combustion of the human race, produced by the friction which arises when the individual ceases to exist as singled out by religion, is bound to continue, like a trade wind, and consume everything. (Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, translated by Timoth Dru [New York: Harper & Row, 1967], 55f ) 42. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), no. 132. 43. For more recent descriptions of religion in terms of media and “publicness,” [ 192 ]

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see Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ within Reason Alone,” in Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–78. Also, see “Above All, No Reporters!” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). The theme is also common in Habermas’s descriptions of modernity in relation to religion, particularly when discussing religion in Hegel. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 44. Marx would say the same thing about all of the left Hegelians, though without the emphasis on the medium to which Strauss had committed himself. Marx describes the first part of The German Ideology as having the “aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing that their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class” (Karl Marx [with Friedrich Engels], The German Ideology [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998], 29). 45. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 54. 46. See Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 414ff. 47. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 54. 48. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, Gesammelte Schriften 3 (Bonn: Verlag von Emil Strauss, 1877), ii. 49. Ibid., 6. 50. Ibid., 5f. 51. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, Gesammelte Schriften 4 (Bonn: Emil Strauss, 1877), 3 (2.35). 52. Ibid., 195. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 195 (206). 55. Ibid., 197. 56. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, Erster Band (Tübingen: Osiander, 1840), 58 (67). 57. Ibid., 58f. 58. Ibid., 206 (206). 59. As Strauss and Paulus gazed into the verkehrte Welt of ancient myth production, they were, of course, seeing something very much like the young Marx was seeing when he looked into nineteenth-century economic relations (see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, American Academy of Religion Classics in Religious Studies 3 [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1964], 105). A great deal remains to be thought about the shared discursive space of these discoveries, and it is clear that a thinking that is not comparative and interdisciplinary will not help us here. Goux’s essay “Numismatics” goes a long way in teasing out various isomorphisms between changing ideas about religion and changing theories of economics in Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). For a more general discussion of the nineteenth-century use of the camera obscura as an image of misrep[ 193 ]

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resentation, see Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura: Of Ideology, translated by Will Straw (London: Athlone Press, 1998); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: October Books [MIT Press], 1991). Peters attempts to place the image in a larger discussion of modern media and the everyday communicative practices (and fantasies) they engender (John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999], 125f). 60. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, 202. 61. See the discussion in Friedrich Kittler, Eine kulturgeschichte der kulturwissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000). 62. H. E. G. Paulus, Das Leben Jesu, als Grundlage einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums, vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1828), 1. 63. Strauss, The Old Faith and the New, 90. Italics added. 64. Ibid., 90. It is of paramount importance for the failure of the bourgeois quests for the “life of Jesus” that it makes its appearance with the dissolution of the personality of Jesus into the stratified or fragmented levels of the medium in which that personality exists. Hand in hand with such a dissolution goes the frustration of bourgeois aspirations to find in Jesus a model personality or moral subject. As Nietzsche and Strauss both understood quite well, there were more personalities being dissolved into media here than that of Jesus alone. A friend of the young George Eliot (who translated Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu into English) confides in a letter, “We have seen more of M.A. [Mary Ann Evans] than usual this week. She said she was Strauss-sick—it made her ill dissecting the beautiful story of the crucifixion.” This dissection or dissolution of the medium in which Jesus lives and dies resulted, apparently, in a need for Mary Ann to stare at a figurine and a picture of Jesus that Eliot kept in her room. As the friend remarks, the coherence of this image was salvific, if not for the dissected Jesus then at least for the Strauss-sick Mary Ann. “Only the sight of her Christ-image and picture made her endure it.” Cited in Marghanita Laski, George Eliot and Her World (New York: Scribners, 1973), 30. 65. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 700 (386). 66. Ibid., 614 (342). 67. Ibid., 614 (342). 68. Ibid., 86f (81). 69. Ibid., 86. 70. Ibid., 86 (81). 71. Ibid., 87 (81). 72. Ibid., 87f. 73. Ibid., 87f. (81). 74. Ibid., 130f. (70). 75. Ibid., 112 (61). 76. Ibid., 121 (61). 77. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 37. 78. While this is not the time to delve into the receptions of Strauss’s writings, it is worth pointing out that it is precisely his focus on unconscious myth production that

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was debated among the young Hegelians. As Strauss’s friend Friedrich Engels writes in “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” In Rheinische Zeitung of 1842 the Young Hegelian school revealed itself directly as the philosophy of the aspiring radical bourgeoisie and used the meagre cloak of philosophy only to deceive the censorship. At that time, however, politics was a very thorny field, and hence the main fight came to be directed against religion; this fight, particulary since 1840, was indirectly also political. Strauss’s Life of Jesus, published in 1835, also had provided the first impulse. The theory therein developed of the formation of the Gospel myths was combated later by Bruno Bauer with proof that a whole series of evangelic stories had been fabricated by the authors themselves. The controversy between these two was carried out in the philosophical disguise of a battle between “self-consciousness” and “substance.” The question whether the miracle stories of the Gospels came into being through unconscious traditional myth-creation within the bosom of the community or whether they were fabricated by the evangelists themselves was magnified into the question whether, in world history, “substance” or “self-consciousness” was the decisive operative force. Finally came Stirner, the prophet of contemporary anarchism—Bakunin has taken a great deal from him—and capped the sovereign “self-consciousness” by his sovereign “ego.” (Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, 223) No wonder Nietzsche threw the entire debate about Strauss (whose biblical research Engels believes to be a comment about the relation of consciousness to revolutionary historical change) back onto the organizing social force of mass media. Likewise, the debate offers some context for why, in order to critique the Christian Gospels, Strauss suggests they were not the product of a great personality but the unconscious productions of a collective. It was not only Bakunin and Nietzsche, after all, who were appalled to think that the unconscious productions of the rabble were the only effective agents in world-historical transformation. In short, Strauss, like Nietzsche, gambles that his audience will feel this way when confronted with the image of an unconscious or automatic textual production. In chapter 4 we will observe a similar struggle reflected in biblical interpretation when Deissmann dismisses the interpretations of Karl Kautsky as having overlooked the force of the “great personality” (of Jesus and Paul) in the development of early Christian religion. Without a recognition of the formative function of these leaders, Deissmann argues, one is left with the “communistic” version of early Christianity that Kautsky finds. For important suggestions about the political stakes of Strauss’s mythological mode of production, see Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of the Life of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). Massey’s work is wide ranging and informative about a host of players involved in the drama that was the biblical criticism of D. F. Strauss. Massey argues that Strauss’s biblical criticism can be read as a democratic document in which the “great individual” Jesus is upstaged by the “collective.” While I agree that this is a helpful way to understand the performative force of the text in general, this thesis alone does not express

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the way the focus on the collective works in a very ambivalent way. In short, the collective processes that take the place of the individual are, at one level, an icon of a more democratic state and a significant part of Strauss’s depiction of religion’s heteronomy. The collective, therefore, is an image of the best and worst to come. 79. David Friedrich Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Bonn: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1876), 365f. 80. The version of the story dedicated to Strauss’s friend, the philosopher Eduard Zeller, contains an afterward by Carl Schüddekopf in which he suggests that the story can be read as an allegory about Strauss’s friends. Indeed, that version of the story, “newly printed for the members of the society of bibliophiles,” does not present us with the anonymous figures K and X, but with Strauss’s merchant friend Künzler and son-in-law Zeller. I will remain with the version that appears in the collected works of Strauss: David Friedrich Strauss, Der Papierreisende: Ein Gespräch von David Friedrich Strauss (Weimar: Neugedruckt für die Mitglieder der Gesellschaft der Bibliophilen, 1856). 81. Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, 368. 82. Ibid., 369. 83. Ibid., 371. 84. Ibid., 369. 85. In a note to Eduard Zeller, who becomes the “Professor X” of another edition of this story, Strauss attempts to control the reception of the piece with a handwritten note to the philosopher saying, “Many were amused and no one hurt.” A member of the Society of Bibliophiles in Weimar would also call this piece a “cheerful tale,” the contents of which are only “jokes.” Zeller himself interpreted the story as an attempt to poke fun at the dialogicism of his writing style. That the reading of this story as a jesting biographical allegory makes this tale a more bizarre version of itself, however, is very possible. In this case, after all, the revelation at the end involves Zeller’s being confronted by a figure who plays upon the relation of Zeller to his father-in-law, F. C. Baur, though, in the end, all family drama (like dialectical philosophy) becomes a revelation of syntactical particles that undergird the erotics of literary production. See Strauss, Der Papierreisende, 20f. 86. Indeed, that the biblical authors produced texts by means of an unconscious self-expression occasionally qualified them as the darlings of the Romantic estheticians is the one sure sign that these naive, childlike, or poetic productions were produced not by the isolated individual but as an expression of nature itself. One thinks of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s young Anselmus, trained with the “best classical education,” who yet finds that he can produce texts only when he is overcome by the “Serpentina” of nature’s own voice, a production that was invariably unconscious and automatic: “Deeply troubled, fearful of the reproaches of Archivarius Lindhorst [who was paying him to reproduce the foreign script], he looked at the sheet before him—Oh wonder!—the copy of the mysterious manuscript was perfectly completed, and upon examining the letters more closely, that which was written was nothing other than the story Serpentina had told about her father, who was the favorite of Phosphorous, the Prince of the Spirits of Atlantis, the kingdom of Marvels” (E. T. A. Hoffmann, Tales of E. T. A. Hoff-

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mann, translated by Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight [Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1969], 68). By the middle of the century, however, the spirit, as Nietzsche says, had begun to stink (or, as Friedrich Kittler sometimes says, to appear as industrial process rather than the free voice of nature). For Nietzsche, after all, the unconscious religious expression he associates with Strauss is the discursive effect of a standardizing imprint of the newspaper industry and its “tattered and incoherent personal experience” rather than with the preconscious holisms of Romantic images of nature. That many of Herder’s portrayals of a quaint early Christian expressivism could, half a century later, be deployed by Strauss as the great unmasking of Christianity’s dangerous nonmodern otherness says a great deal about the way the Spirit had thus grown sour. 87. Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 5. 88. Ibid., cf. 1, 3, 5. 89. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970).

chapter three 1. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 11, 13, 27. 2. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 2. 3. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). De Vries has also begun the important work of explicating, contextualizing, and contesting some of the ways religion and technology are described in the “Faith and Knowledge” essay as it represents this larger engagement with religion and media in Derrida’s writings. See De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 1–31; Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 3–32. While he does not focus on religion per se, another thinker who offers significant historical and technological contextualizations of the religiotechnological aspects of Derrida’s work is Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, translated by Kevin Repp (Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press, 1999). 4. De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 238. 5. Ibid., 236. Emphasis in original. 6. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 525. 7. Ibid., 88. Heidegger likewise included in the course bibliography Adolf Deissmann, Die neuetestamentliche Formel “in Christo Jesu” (Marburg: Elwert, 1892); Kisiel, Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 525. 8. Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient Near East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World, translated by Lionel R. M. Strachan

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(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995). Hereafter, I include references to the English edition in parentheses after those of the German original—e.g. 123 (130). 9. Adolf Deissmann, Licht vom Osten: Das Neue Testament und die neuentdeckten Texte der hellenistisch-römischen Welt (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1923), 1/1. 10. Ibid. 11. Adolf Deissmann, Paulus: Eine kultur- und religionsgeschichtliche Skizze (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1911), 19/29. 12. Adolf Deissmann, Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, translated by William E. Wilson (New York: Harper & Row, 1927), 29. 13. Ibid., 4. 14. Ibid., 4. 15. Ibid., viiif. 16. Deissmann, Paulus, 45. 17. Ibid. 18. Deissmann, Licht vom Osten, v (xv). 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 2. 22. As both Heidegger and his student note takers point out, the focus on Paul in the course on the phenomenology of religious life emerged as an effort to concretize Heidegger’s formulations by way of an example. 23. Deissmann, Paulus, 36 (49). 24. Ibid. 25. Deissmann, Licht vom Osten, v (xv). 26. Nor is this elision an accidental one. We will have no understanding of the place of (a) Tertius within the Christian legacy until we begin to sketch out a history of religion that is, at the same time, a history of technology. Thus we return to the question of the intertwining of “religion” and “tele-technologies” that Derrida’s work proposes. With the problematic of (a) Tertius, moreover, we approach something that united Deissmann and Heidegger alike, the question of style, modes of writing, or esthetic history as a crucial point of reference for the history of religion. Pushing both of them toward a kind of interdisciplinary territory into which neither went of his own accord, it is possible to see in the biblical critic and the phenomenologist the beginnings of a history of religion that is likewise a history of the body in technology. See Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, Gesamtausgabe 60 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 82. 27. Ibid., 106. 28. Heidegger specifies that he is a “theologian.” My interest here is not on Schmidt’s work per se but on Schmidt as one of those names (Heidegger actually mentions several New Testament scholars here) that stand in for the philosopher as an index of a type of reading of 2 Thessalonians that understands the letter as an inauthentic forgery. 29. Ibid., 106. 30. Ibid., 106. The statement, particularly as it occurs within Heidegger’s expo[ 198 ]

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sition of the indeterminacy and danger of apocalyptic or messianic waiting, invites comparisons with Bergson’s evaluations of religion between the world wars. See Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 19. 31. Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 106. 32. Ibid., 67. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 106. 35. Ibid. 36. Deissmann, Paulus, 10 (15). 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 10 (16). 39. The review originally appeared in Die Hilfe 123 (1909): 123ff. As I have not been able to find a library that has this volume, I am relying on the English translation of the review included as appendix 11 in Deissmann, Light from the Ancient Near East, 465–67. 40. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient Near East, 466. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 467. 43. Deissmann, Licht vom Osten336 (394). Italics added. 44. Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 107. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. At least we would not have it in the same way as it ends up appearing in this text of Heidegger. One cannot help but wonder how he might have explicated the early Christian experience of time had he actually been convinced by the arguments of Schmidt. Would he have remained with the “first” epistle to the Thessalonians and its warning that the parousia will come like a “thief in the night”? Does his reception history of these two letters, with the “second” creating a vertiginous intensification of the ambiguity of the “first,” really rely on the question of “authenticity” as he discusses it here? More pointedly, would the disorienting effect of the second canonical letter remain, were it to have been produced by an apostolic fake, even if it were to remain despite the impostor’s best intentions to placate the anxieties of the early Christians against the “delay” (as it is usually and so delicately put) of the expected parousia? In this case, the failure of the original expectation, an imminent judgment coming “like a thief in the night,” would be justified retroactively by the pseudepigrapher’s addition of a new condition of the messiah’s arrival, namely that the parousia would not occur without a delay and a revelation of the diabolical double. In short, what would Heidegger’s explication of an early Christian experience of time look like if it were itself exposed more radically to the “tele-technological” possibilities of early Christian text production? But this invites the question how we might perform the phenomenological delineation of early Christian religion from beyond the horizon of Deissmann’s and Heidegger’s strictly artisanal vision of textual production, in which “authentic” texts come from the solitary labors of great personalities. The valorized mode of (artisanal) production is here everywhere and without fail repeated at the level of text production and the location of “authentic” meaning. For [ 199 ]

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discussions of this topic in relation to Heidegger and the typewriter, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 183–231; Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, translated by Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 265ff; Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 255ff; Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 205ff. 48. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Gesamtausgabe 2 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 46 (34f.); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962), 54. 49. Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe 9 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 49. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 52; Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43. 52. Heidegger, Wegmarken, 66; Heidegger, Pathmarks, 53. 53. Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 67. 54. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 357 (269); Heidegger, Being and Time, 313. 55. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 357 (265). 56. Ibid., 386 (291); Heidegger, Being and Time, 337.

chapter four 1. Albert Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik: Kulturphilosophie, Zweiter Teil (Munich: Oskar Beck, 1923), 233; Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization, translated by C. T. Campion (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 303. Hereafter I include references to the English edition by adding them in parentheses after the German page numbering—e.g., 233 (303). 2. Albert Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1906), 396; cf. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 478. 3. As should be clear, I am using the notion of an “archive” to repeat the basic and reflexive question of Strauss and Hegel about the “bond” that “links” a current set of disciplinary practices and the discipline’s understanding of its past. For more recent depictions of the “archive” as a problem for disciplinary and cultural memory, see the wonderful Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Rebecca Comay, ed., Lost in the Archives (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2002). 4. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., translated by Richard Taft (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 193ff. 5. For a general discussion of Windelband, see Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 63f.

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6. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 47. 7. See the introductory remarks and thank yous in Albert Schweitzer, Die religionsphilosophie Kant’s von der Kritik der reinen Vernunft bis zur Religion innherhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Leipzig: J. C. B. Mohr, 1899). 8. For one of several interesting places where the philosopher makes this move, see Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Modern Library, 1911), 385ff. 9. Albert Schweitzer, Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur: Kulturphilosophie, Erster Teil (Munich: Oskar Beck, 1923); Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik. There is an English translation in which both volumes are published together. Although this translation sometimes obscures the points I make, I will generally include a reference to the English page number after the German page number (e.g., 45/48). Schweitzer, Philosophy of Civilization. 10. See his autobiographical reflections in Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography (New York: Holt, 1933); Albert Schweitzer, Aus Meinem Leben und Denken (Munich: Oskar Beck, 1933). He also describes this transition in Albert Schweitzer, Zwischen Wasser und Urwald: Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen eines Arztes im Urwalde Äquatorialafrikas (Munich: Oskar Beck, 1926); translated as Albert Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest: The Experiences and Observations of a Doctor in Equatorial Africa (London: Fontana Books, 1956). 11. Schweitzer, Religionsphilosophie Kant’s von der Kritik; translated by Kurt F. Leidecker as The Essence of Faith: Philosophy of Religion (New York: Philosophical Library, 1966). 12. Schweitzer makes this claim in the preface to the first English edition, already being produced in 1923. Schweitzer, Philosophy of Civilization, xi. 13. Heidegger, no doubt, would reject the comparison, as he sometimes takes pains to distance himself from Spengler, Chamberlain, and the host of other early-twentieth-century authors in the “cultural pessimism” industry (e.g., Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker [Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1995], 69ff., par. 18 [103ff.]; Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph Manheim [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987]. Contemporary New Testament scholarship, despite the fact that it generally refuses the comparison, is profoundly indebted to the types of academic discourse on religion that emerged in this context. For example, it was this period of scholarship (with pride of place going to Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede) that solidified the designation of “eschatology” or “apocalypticism” as the most important description of early Christian religion. More recent scholarship has simply forgotten that this designation was a kind of gloss on a common discussion about whether Western modernity itself would be “for” or “against the world” or how it would relate to technological progress and cultural transformation. Discussions of “late Judaism” and the question of whether the formative forces of early Christian expansion were Greek, Roman, or Eastern mystical were all of a piece with this larger cultural topos. A full study of the borrowings and contestations remains to be written, though progress has been made

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in relation to these questions (see Wayne Meeks, “Judaism, Hellenism, and the Birth of Christianity,” in Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide, edited by Troels EngburgPedersen [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001], 17–29; Dale B. Martin, “Paul and the Judaism/Hellenism Dichotomy: Toward a Social History of the Question,” in Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide, 29–62). We will observe this interaction in more detail below in the context of the problem of apocalypticism among students of religion and the problem of nihilism among the philosophers. 14. Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1958). 15. Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History, translated by Ramon J. Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988); Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 31–36. Vattimo reads Dilthey as being trapped between the demand to produce a metaphysics, even as he already seems to know this is impossible. The upshot, of course, for Vattimo, is that we are in a similar position. The similarity with the present study of Schweitzer is that both of us read these thinkers, with these very hesitations, as embodying a turning point of thought, and one in which we continue to find ourselves. 16. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962), 178f. 17. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 1 (1). 18. Schweitzer’s description of his “experiences and reflections” as a doctor in Africa are always intriguing and, I might add, a still underquarried source for thinking through the larger political and social contexts of Schweitzer’s writings. Regarding the way his African acquaintances began to register the economic effects of the war, Schweitzer recounts this remarkable story: Not long ago, while we were bandaging patients, Joseph began to complain of the war, as he had several times done before, as the cause of this rise in prices, when I said to him: “Joseph, you mustn’t talk like that. Don’t you see how troubled the faces of the doctor and his wife are, and the faces of all the missionaries? For us the war means much more than an unpleasant rise in prices. We are, all of us, anxious about the lives of so many of our dear fellow-men, and we can hear from far away the groaning of the wounded and the death rattle of the dying.” He looked up at me with great astonishment at the time, but since then I have noticed that he now seems to see something that was hidden from him before. We are, all of us, conscious that many natives are puzzling over the question how it can be possible that the whites, who brought them the gospel of love, are now murdering each other, and throwing to the winds the commands of the Lord Jesus. When they put the question to us we are helpless. If I am questioned on the subject by negroes who think, I make no attempt to explain or to extenuate, but say that we are in “front” of something terrible and incomprehensible. How far the ethical and religious authority of the white man among these children of nature is impaired by this war we shall only be able to measure later on. I fear that the damage done will be very considerable.

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In my own house I take care that the blacks learn as little as possible of the horrors of war. The illustrated papers we receive—for the post has begun to work again fairly regularly—I must not leave about, lest the boys, who can read, should absorb both texts and pictures and retail them for others. (Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, 100f.) 19. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 1 (1). 20. Schweitzer, Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur, 1/1. 21. Ibid., 2. 22. Ibid., 2. It is certainly ironic that such an important figure for contemporary New Testament historiography was so frequently disparaging of history as a discipline. Indeed, it would be interesting to trace whether or not his movement away from the architectonics of “world-view construction” and toward the nonfoundational rhetoric of a philosophy of life (see below) resulted in a changing evaluation of history as an academic endeavor. Even his 1906 Von Reimarus zu Wrede concludes with a fairly dire analysis of history as a form of thought oriented only around what Kant called the “natural order of the senses,” the transcendence of which differentiates humanity from the animals. One of the reasons we tend not to recognize Schweitzer’s antihistoricist aspersions is the way he frames his consistently eschatological Jesus as a historical discovery that the theologians (allegedly interested in timeless truths) could not bear. To be caught up in Schweitzer’s rhetoric here is a mistake, as will be shown, and Schweitzer may qualify as one of the least “historical” historical critics to claim center stage among biblical scholars. The place to look for different evaluations of history (and of the history of biblical scholarship) might be in his biblical studies after the Kulturphilosophie of 1923. By the end of Kulturphilosophie, after all, Schweitzer would declare that architectonic worldview thinking was a failure. Since worldview construction was still the mode in which Schweitzer organized his serial evaluations of a history of biblical scholarship in Von Reimarus zu Wrede (in which a century of diverse scholarship becomes various attempts to “answer” a “logical problem”), his change of heart by the end of the Kulturphilosophie could have opened up the possibility of a radical reorientation in relation to the question of history. For a more general recent discussion of the problem of history within the neo-Kantian movement, cf. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. 23. Schweitzer, Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur, 2/2. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 2 (3). 26. Ibid., 3 (3). 27. Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought, 20. 28. Elsewhere Schweitzer remembers writing his Von Reimarus zu Wrede by filling an office with diverse piles of books on the historical Jesus, each representing a chapter or topical division in his significantly serial narrations of modern historical Jesus scholarship. As always, the archival practices have the last laugh, as Schweitzer’s worldview narratives directly mimic this type of writing environment. What would his early

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work on Kant have been like had the Bibliothèque Nationale allowed the young doctoral student to leave piles of Kant interpretations in one of the many corners of their reading room? 29. Schweitzer, Die religionsphilosophie Kant’s von der Kritik, v. 30. Ibid. 31. Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought, 20f. 32. Ibid., 20. 33. Schweitzer, Die religionsphilosophie Kant’s von der Kritik, 4. 34. Ibid., 1. 35. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 672 (A796/B824). 36. Ibid. 37. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 103 (182). 38. Ibid., 104 (182). 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Schweitzer, Die religionsphilosophie Kant’s von der Kritik, 7f. (18f.). 42. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 104 (183). 43. Schweitzer, Die religionsphilosophie Kant’s von der Kritik, 312f. 44. Schweitzer’s demand, of course, represents a kind of inversion of his high praise for Kant’s rejection of utilitarianism. The utility of philosophy returns through the back door of a rejection of utility, and the ambivalence of the biblical critic shows through: “[Kant] robs ethics of their simplicity. The strength of the ethics of the age of reason lies in their naive enthusiasm. They directly enlist men in their service by offering them good aims and objects. Kant makes ethics insecure by bringing this directness in question and calling for ethics derived from much less elementary considerations. Profundity is gained at the cost of vitality, because he fails to establish at the same time a basic moral principle with a content, a principle that will compel acceptance from deep and yet elementary considerations.” Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 104 (184). Nor does Schweitzer seem to sense any anxiety about whether such a content-filled practical sphere, governed directly by an unquestionable moral demand, would leave human freedom on the puppet strings Kant hoped to avoid. 45. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 105. 46. Ibid., 103 (182). 47. Ibid., 106 (184). 48. Ibid., 110. 49. The problematic could be tripled, in fact, as Schweitzer also describes the collapse of the spiritual-cultural potential of Europe in terms of a collapse of its economy. In all cases, the “disempowering” of the basic fund of “value” on which Europeans could draw is revealed quickly and without warning, here at the end of a “late” modernity: “The bankruptcy of the optimistic-ethical world-view was announced beforehand as little as was the financial bankruptcy of the ruined states of Europe. But just as the latter was gradually revealed, by the constantly diminishing value of the paper money that was issued, as having actually come about, so is the former being gradually [ 204 ]

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revealed by the constantly diminishing power among us of the true and profound ideals of civilization.” Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 198 (270). Somewhere in his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel compares the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century fascination with divine transcendence to an experience of a developing economy in which the “location” of value seems more and more removed from the concreteness of everyday life. As will become clear, the same could be said of Schweitzer’s consistently eschatological Jesus. See Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1978). 50. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 202f. (274f.). 51. Ibid., 202f. (274). Italics added. 52. I borrow the notion of “discordant accord” as a description of Kant from Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 53. Heidegger, as we have seen, described a focus on epistemology as a driving force in the “neo-Kantian” revival. In a strange rendition of Bergson’s description of the cinematographic image, Schweitzer writes: “During the war the German cinema theaters [Kinematographentheater] were crammed. People went to see pictures in order to forget their hunger. Bergson’s philosophy brings before us as living events [als belebtes Geschehen] the world which Kant depicted in motionless wall-pictures. But to satisfy the hunger of today for ethics he does nothing.” Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 193 (265). He goes on to associate Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Hermann Keyserling with the attempt to think modernity’s way out of the static visual structures of Kantian “knowledge” by moving toward a more intuitive, active, or living sense of what “knowing” is. For Bergson’s own criticisms of Kant’s focus on a “theory of knowledge,” see Bergson, Creative Evolution, 189. 54. On the other hand, and as we might expect by now, Schweitzer criticizes Bergson for his lack of reflection on the ethical dimensions of his move away from Kant. Schweitzer uses Kant, in the form of a difference between “world- and life-view,” to organize a century of philosophy that becomes, in turn, either positivistic and merely utilitarian or profound and ontological but without any ethical ties to practical states of affairs. See Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 192ff. 55. Incidentally, Kant’s false step here is the same as that made by Plato, China, and India. While it would take us well beyond the limits of the present chapter to explore the motif in any detail, the underlying problem of nihilism, which is to say of a world that “signifies nothing” (see Schweitzer’s comment below) is repeated throughout Schweitzer’s text in terms of a “non-European” or “Eastern” view of the world: “Kant is defeated by the same fate which rules in Stoic, Indian, and Chinese monism alike.” Ibid., 110 (188). At stake in such questions is, in a strange way, whether the West will be “the West.” Observing the way Schweitzer can slip, almost seamlessly, among discussions of Kant, metaphysics, modernity, and “non-Western” forms of “pessimism” or “world- and lifenegation” is an important clue about the need for further interdisciplinary reflection on the social and intellectual functions of Europe’s consideration of non-Western or nonmodern religions. How else will we understand, for example, the way Schweitzer’s standard rendition of the collapse of “Kantianism” and the birth of a “life-philosophy” [ 205 ]

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meshes so well with the types of questions his contemporaries in the study of ancient religious history were asking? Three years after Schweitzer’s Kulturphilosophie appeared, a new edition of Richard Reitzenstein’s Hellenistic Mystery Religions (just to pick an example) would explore Pauline Christianity as a “Hellenistic” religion, by which he meant “religious forms in which Oriental and Greek elements are mingled.” This intermingling, of course, was a “popular faith” that was itself caught between Auklärung and an unthinking valorization of polis. The main question posed to Pauline religion, moreover, was whether or not it maintained a sense of the individual or whether this entity dissolves into the community or the all. (See Richard Reitzenstein, Hellenistic Mystery-Religions: Their Basic Ideas and Significance, translated by John E. Steely [Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1978].) Several years earlier, Franz Cumont reversed many of the assumed values of “East” and “West” when he investigated the origins of Christianity in terms of a “peaceful infiltration” of the former into the latter. In the process (as we might expect), he observed the salvation of a dreary, pragmatic “Roman” culture being invigorated by the eruption of an “Eastern” ecstasy that transcended pragmatic knowledge. (See Franz Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism [Kila, MT: Kessinger, 1911]). None of these debates was entirely new, but they were repeated with some intensity during this period, and Schweitzer’s euphoric vision of a way of life in which activist optimism meets a radical passivity within the process of Being participates in them wholeheartedly. One is tempted to suggest that the scandal of Schweitzer’s fully eschatological Jesus was its implicit assertion that the Christian legacy was, in its origins, “world-denying” inasmuch as it preached not a progressive expansion of the brotherhood of humanity and the fatherhood of God but an imminent judgment on the world that allowed for no such “optimistic” engagement. An apocalyptic or other-worldly Christianity was, for many, that strange period before the “West” became itself. Nor is it surprising that such conversations became popular once more at precisely that moment at which so many academics were suggesting that Europe must deal with its status as a now “late” modernity in decline. Such reflections on early Christianity were not new (cf. Hegel, Overbeck), but these were, once again, live issues, and not just in any one of these academic departments. Could we not say something very similar of Heidegger, who makes creative use of these motifs when he finds alternatives to “Greek” notions of “presence” by way of an authentic (Pauline) apocalypticism? 56. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 199 (271). 57. Ibid., 234. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 235 (305). The statement about his time in Africa occurs in the preface to the English edition of 1923, p. xi. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 234. 62. Ibid., 235. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 236 (306). 65. Ibid., 240 (310). On the other hand, in the conclusion to Von Reimarus zu Wrede, Schweitzer makes a great deal of an early Christian legacy of “world-denial” in which [ 206 ]

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the received structures and limits find their contestatory negation. There Schweitzer sounds much more like Heidegger, Bultmann, and the more recent philosophical readers of early Christianity. Compare the interest in Paul’s statement (1 Cor. 7) that the impending judgment of God implies that one should live “as if ” the structures of the world were under erasure or as if they “were not” (Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, translated by Kendrick Grobel [New York: Scribner’s, 1955], 182, 351f; Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, translated by Ray Brassier [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003], 47; Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999], 199f; Giorgio Agamben, Le temps qui reste, translated by Judith Revel [Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2000]). 66. It is tempting to borrow from Heidegger’s provocative evaluation of Cassirer on “mana” and myth a question that could likewise be posed to Schweitzer’s selfwithin-the-harmonious-emanations of nature. Reading “mana” as another name for the facticity into which humanity is thrown, Heidegger makes this remark: “What has to be shown here is precisely how mythical Dasein, which in its ‘indeterminate lifefeeling’ remains bound to all beings, enacts a ‘confrontation’ between world and I that is proper to it, rooted in its own specific way of being, i.e., in its ‘doing.’” (This review appears as appendix 2 in Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 184 [261].) Precisely the same question could be posed to Schweitzer’s ethical subject, dwelling amidst the harmonious interaction with nature. There is, in other words, an underthought opposition in Schweitzer’s descriptions of “life,” namely that between the primordial immersion of the ethical subject in a self-organizing whole and the potential for this same ethical subject to enter into a violent contestation with these forms of organization. It is the subject’s potential to be Hegel’s “night of the world,” or a kind of Judas to its inherited structures that is nowhere fully engaged by Schweitzer, though he sometimes alludes to the problem. In one place he writes: “The ethical is not something irrational which becomes explicable when we betake ourselves from the world of appearance [Erscheinungswelt] to the region of immaterial Being [immateriellen Seins] that lies behind it. Its spirituality [Geistigkeit] is of a peculiar kind, and rests upon the fact that the world-process [Naturgeschehen], as such, comes in man into contradiction to itself. It follows that the ethical will and ethical freedom of the will are not explicable by any theory of knowledge, and cannot, moreover, serve as a support to any such theory. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik, 110f. (188f.). Once he begins his reveries about life, however, Schweitzer scarcely remembers this basic function of the “spirituality” of the “ethical.” 67. Ibid., 235 (305). 68. Such a remark goes without saying, perhaps, and Schweitzer was certainly not unaware of dilemmas. There are no lack of discussions on such questions in his autobiographical writings and personal correspondence. After a flood, for example, Schweitzer forced his (somewhat annoyed) hospital staff to divide their time (threequarters to one-quarter, in fact) between helping humans in the hospital and fish that had become stranded in now-evaporating pools beyond the normal river banks. One could also mention the sometimes fierce struggle to maintain control over his hospital Schweitzer both exerted and encouraged in those who would follow in his footsteps (or who desired not to be exploited by the “colonized or semi-colonized”). See Albert [ 207 ]

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Schweitzer, Brothers in Spirit: The Correspondence of Albert Schweitzer and William Larimer Mellon, Jr. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 30. 69. Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 396. 70. Ibid., 396f. (478). 71. Albert Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1977), 39; Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, xliii. Hereafter I include references to this English edition in parentheses after the German page number—e.g., 39 (xliii). 72. Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 327. Schweitzer is also fascinated by the language of the “secret” shared by the respective titles of Wrede’s (Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien) and his own (Das Messianitäs- und Leidensgeheimnis: Eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu) (ibid., 327 [296]). In this respect, this chapter simply further explores the secrecy motif in terms of the “secrecy” (or “mystery”) of Schweitzer’s (Kantian) reading of “value” and Weiss’ “open secret” that Schweitzer does not acknowledge (see below). 73. Ibid., 396. 74. Ibid., 328. I have explored alternate modes of configuring Schweitzer’s narrative, particularly through notions of self-obstruction, in Ward Blanton, “Biblical Studies in the Age of Bio-Power: Albert Schweitzer and the Degenerate Physiology of the Historical Jesus,” The Bible and Critical Theory 2, no. 1 (February 2006): 6.1–25. 75. Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 328. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 328 (297). 78. Ibid., 396. 79. Ibid., 397. While it is probably obvious by now, it may be worth repeating once more that Schweitzer praises Kant for being the first since Plato to fully understand the force of the ethical as that “mysterious fact within us” (rätselhafte Tatsache in uns) that raises us above all calculations and recognitions of knowledge. 80. Ibid., 396. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 397 (297). Italics added. 83. Ibid., 397 (479). 84. Ibid., 398 (400). 85. Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 315. 86. Ibid., 326. 87. Ibid., 315. 88. Ibid., 327. 89. Ibid., 315, cf. 327. 90. Ibid., 299, 302, 321. 91. Ibid., 299. 92. Ibid., 327. 93. Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (New York: Seabury Press, 1931), 388. 94. Ibid., 389.

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conclusion 1. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), xii.

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Index

Africans: Schweitzer and, 152; media and, 202n18 aisthe¯sis, 52–54, 65–66, 70, 96–103, 126– 27, 169–73. See also phenomenological bond; secularization Anderson, Benedict, and technologically mediated social imagining, 30, 34; 180n17 Assmann, Aleida, 175n1 authenticity, authorial and existential, 117–23 author, death of, 99–103 Barthes, Roland, 16 Bathi, Timothy, 37 Baudrillard, Jean, 13–14 Bergson, Henri, 26, 134, 199n30; and the cinematograph, 205n53 Bourdieu, Pierre, 176n7 Buddhism, not a “newspaper religion” according to Nietzsche, 81 Bultmann, Rudolf, 15, 178n19 Cassirer, Ernst, 133–34 Derrida, Jacques: and auto-immune disorder, 66, 83–84, 105–6, 172, 198n26; outbidding, 7–12 dialectic of Enlightenment: and auto-

immune disorder, 66, 83, 87; and media, 22, 26, 66, 70, 102, 170. See also Derrida Dibelius, Martin, 100–101 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 136 Eliot, George, “Strauss-sick,” 194n64 Eucharist, and theories of mediation, 31 forgetfulness, and the “essential,” 37–38, 48. See also global formal indication, 5 Foucault, Michel, 35–36, 52, 99–103, 180n22 Frei, Hans, 99 Gabriel (Angel) 60–61, 74 global (or universal), 7–12, 28–29, 40–41, 108, 202n15. See also forgetfulness Habermas, Jürgen, 50, 183n37 Hamacher, Werner, on printing press and gunpowder, 29–30, 37 Harries Karsten, 186n72 Hartmann, Frank, 180n22 Heidegger, Martin: Origin of the Work of Art, 6; against the neo-Kantians, 133– 34; on secularization, 44–45 Herder, J. G., 99–100

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index

history: and philosophical formalization, 4; reflexivity and the problem of positivism in historiography, 11, 16, 17, 41–50, 117, 159–65, 203n22; and the translation of religion into reason, 11 Holtzmann, H. J., 130 interdisciplinarity: agonistic outbidding, 5–7, 27, 36, 46–49; performativity and, 6, 176n6 Kalthoff, Albert, 120 Kant, Immanuel, 35–38, 47; Schweitzer on the “sketch” of the Canons of Pure Reason, 140–50; transformations of New Testament studies as a discipline, 181n24 Kautsky, Karl, 119 Kisiel, Theodore, 107–8 Kittler, Friedrich, 29, 40, 68, 88 Luhmann, Niklas, 27, 185n61,185n61 Marx, Karl, 91, 193n59, 194n64 Mattelart, Armand, 180n22 McLuhan, Marshall, 13, 83, 77–78 media: camera obscura, 84–88; everyday life and rhythms of, 14; Hegel on the printing press, 28–32; “inspiriting power of the newspaper,” 76–84; installs sense of “good” versus “bad” writing, 21, chap. 2 passim; print industry, chap. 1 passim, 76–83; religion and, 12–14; Strauss on newspaper, 74–76; temporality influenced by, 5. See also phenomenological bond Müller, Otfried, on myth, 91–95 mystery religions, Hegel on, 41 Overbeck, Franz, 191n36 Paul, Apostle: community-to-come and modernity, 75; chap. 3 passim; and Hegel’s killing letter, 49–51; and kingdom of God, 164–65; and

pseudepigraphy, 115–22; and the unknown God, 41 Paulus, H. E. G., 84–95 performativity, 6. See also aisthe¯sis; Derrida; outbidding phenomenology: as “bond” or “link” between historical subject and object, 6, 7, 28–33, 41–50, 52–62, 65–66, chap. 2 passim, 169–70 positivism: Windelband’s “declaration of war” against, 132–35, 170. See also history; phenomenological bond Renan, Ernest, 67 Rosenkranz, Karl, 80 Schiller, Friedrich, and the aesthetic education of the leisure hours, 189n10 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 15–16, 40, 62–66 secularization, 4; as aesthetic/literary critique, chap. 2 passim; and performativity, 167–73; read as universalizing of religion, 8; Strauss on the “worldification” of the worldly, 54–62. See also aisthe¯sis sense. See aisthe¯sis Taubes, Jacob, 1 Taylor Charles, 41, 48, 99 Taylor, Mark C.: on capital as medium, 177n13; on religion and technology, 12; technology. See media universal. See global Vattimo, Gianni, 13–14, 122, 136 Vries, Hent de, 106–7 Weber, Samuel, 176 Windelband, Wilhelm, 130; declaration of war against positivism, 133 Ziegler, Theobald, 130 Žižek, Slavoj, 4, 13, 178n19

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