BOOK
REVIEW Indispensable handbook for global
theopolitics The Star of
Redemption by Franz
Rosenzweig
Reviewed by
Spengler
"Learn Greek, dear
reader, and throw my translation into the fire!"
wrote the first German translator of Homer's
Iliad, Count von Stolberg, words that Franz
Rosenzweig placed as a superscript to the preface
for his own translation of the medieval Hebrew
poet, Judah Halevi.
Read Franz Rosenzweig,
I should like to say, and hit the delete key, for
the 100-and-a-score essays I have published in
this space were an attempt to put fragments of his
thinking before the English-speaking public.
A tragedy of 20th century history is that
Leo Strauss, who began
as
Rosenzweig's student, transferred his intellectual
loyalty to the odious Martin Heidegger. Strauss'
follower, Irving Kristol, the "godfather of
neo-conservatism", once confessed that he tried to
learn German in order to read Rosenzweig. It is a
pity he failed. But one still can hope that
Rosenzweig's star will ascend.
We live not
merely in an age of faith, but in an age of
religious wars. Today's intellectual elite feels
something like the mad Englishman in a lunatic
asylum whom Karl Marx sketched in The 18th
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. He imagines that
his warders are barbarian mercenaries who speak in
a welter of unintelligible tongues, and mutters to
himself, "And all this is happening to me - a
freeborn Englishman!"
So felt France on
the return of the Napoleonic dynasty, and so feels
the intelligentsia on the return of religion to
world politics. To such perplexed secularists, I
strongly recommend Rosenzweig's The Star of
Redemption, available in a new English
translation, but with a caveat: it might cure them
of secularism. That the translation is miserably
inadequate is another matter; it is probably no
worse than its prospective readers.
In
fact, there is no idea in The Star of
Redemption that one cannot find close to hand
in the mainstream of Christian and Jewish
teaching. Rosenzweig's act of genius was to show
that Christianity and Judaism are not ideas, not
mere religions (his dismissive characterization of
Islam), but rather lives.
From
death - from the fear of death - arises the
perception of the transcendent, his book begins,
and in the face of the fear of death, one proceeds
- to life, as he avers in the book's last
sentence. But the path to life requires a life
outside of time, that is, the hope of immortality.
Man cannot abide his mortal existence, cannot
tolerate the fear of death, without the prospect
of life eternal.
Faith cannot be proven or
defended, but only lived, Rosenzweig taught. It is
not a system of beliefs but an existential choice,
not a proof but an affirmation. Critics call
The Star of Redemption a difficult book,
and that it is, not because Rosenzweig's
conclusion is difficult, but rather because modern
readers will resist his conclusion to the bitter
end.
Sadly, it is easier for today's
readers to consume Homer in the original than to
read Rosenzweig. First, he cannot be translated
into English, for there is no scholar active today
with a command of language commensurate with one
of the sublime masters of German letters.
Secondly, even if well translated, Rosenzweig no
longer can be understood, for his 1920 volume
refers to a cultural realm long since annihilated.
Thirdly, even if Rosenzweig were understood, he is
rather unwelcome.
Barbara Galli's new
translation of Rosenzweig's great book bears
witness to these assertions, in several ways. To
begin with, this essay constitutes, to my
knowledge, the only review to appear on the
Internet. The only other published notices I have
found are a two-liner in the Library
Journal, and a non-specialist notice in an
obscure Jewish weekly. Although a cottage industry
has arisen around Rosenzweig in academia, the
general public has little interest.
Although Galli's rendering flows more
easily than the only other English version,
published in 1970 by William Hallo [1], it
provoked this writer to tear out a handful of hair
every second or third page. Some examples will be
provided below.
One does not read
Rosenzweig for inspiration, the way Christians
read C S Lewis, for example, or Jews read A J
Heschel. A secular German Jew trained in Hegelian
philosophy, Rosenzweig was ready to convert to
Christianity in 1913, when his attendance at Day
of Atonement services brought him back to Judaism.
He was not, or ever could be, a traditional Jew,
but remained the outsider looking in with the
critical eye of a trained skeptic.
Religious faith is woven into the fabric
of traditional life, in which individuals have no
choice about the roles and rhythms of life.
Unravel this fabric, and faith dissolves. That was
the position of Europe after World War I, which
undid the great dynasties of Europe and poisoned
the ancient loyalties of family, tribe, church and
nation. That is the predicament of the Islamic
world today (See The crisis of faith in the Islamic
world, Asia Times Online, November 8).
The philosophers, who had been God's
apologists, became God's persecutors. Immanuel
Kant demonstrated that God's existence could not be
proven, and a century later Friedrich Nietzsche
insisted that God was dead.
In 1914,
Europe believed not in God, but in nation and
Kultur. By 1918 these gods were toppled,
and Europe began to worship the false gods of
historical materialism and national socialism.
Kant had already destroyed the philosophical
proofs of God's existence in 1781, prompting
Heinrich Heine's quip that Robespierre merely
decapitated a king, whereas a German professor
sent the Almighty to the scaffold. Biologists
reduced to myth the Biblical story of creation.
The Higher Criticism proved multiple authorship of
the Hebrew scriptures. Modern philosophy and
science presented themselves as a rational
alternative to the sham of religion. Except for
the backward or the recalcitrant, traditional
faith became impossible.
Along with the
great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth,
Rosenzweig opened a path for a modern faith, a
faith strengthened by skepticism as if by
inoculation. He turned the tables on the
philosophers, the undertakers of faith, arguing
that philosophy itself was the sham, the
equivalent of a small child stuffing his fingers
in his ears and shouting "I can't hear you!" to
ward off the terror of death. Science did not
threaten the faith of the West, Rosenzweig
explained, but rather the resurgent "inner pagan"
inside every Christian. Christians are torn
between their belief in the Kingdom of Heaven and
their belief in their own blood. It is the Jew, he
argued, who converts the inner pagan inside the
Christian.
Only a "community of blood"
(Blutgemeinschaft) provides man with the
assurance of immortality, Rosenzweig argued. God's
covenant with the physical descendants of Abraham
provides such surety to the Jews, and precisely
for this reason the Jews provide Christians with
proof of God's promise of a New Covenant. By
virtue of Christ's blood, Christians become the
next best thing to a community of blood, an
ekklesia, those who are called out from
among the nations, and through immersion in water,
undergo a new birth to become descendants of
Abraham in the spirit. Christianity embraced the
gentiles newly conscious of their own mortality,
of the inevitable end of their bloodline. As he
wrote in the Star:
Just as every individual must reckon
with his eventual death, the peoples of the
world foresee their eventual extinction, be it
however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the
peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and
pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is
only surpassing sweet when it is directed
towards a mortal object, and the secret of this
ultimate sweetness only is defined by the
bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the
world foresee a time when their land with its
rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as
it does today, but other people dwell there;
when their language is entombed in books, and
their laws and customs have lost their living
power.
But the contending claims of
pagan blood remain in perpetual conflict with the
promise of the spirit, and Christianity never
entirely suppresses the inner pagan inside each
believer. Christianity cannot exist except in
symbiosis with Judaism, averred Rosenzweig, to
which one might add that Europe's determination to
destroy its Jews was not just an act of genocide,
but of suicide. European Christianity did not
survive the regression back to the bloodline of
the nations during the middle of the past century.
Only in a new nation conceived in the spirit, that
is, in ideas, and free of the taint of pagan
birth, could Christianity truly flourish, I have
argued in the past; and although Rosenzweig never
wrote about America, I believe this assertion is
consistent with his views.
How different
faiths - different modes of living - address the
fear of death, not only individual, but also
national - creates a unique vantage point from
which to understand how profoundly Christianity,
Judaism and Islam differ from one another. That is
the proof of Rosenzweig's pudding: the elaboration
of a rigorous sociology of religion. Those who
miss this point have not understood a word that
Rosenzweig wrote. Sadly, among them is Professor
Michael Oppenheim, who cites Rosenzweig's
treatment of Islam as one of the "greatest
weaknesses of the book". On the contrary,
Rosenzweig's work on Islam is of indispensable
value for strategic analysis today. "The coming
millennium will go down in world history as a
struggle between Orient and Occident, between the
church and Islam, between the northern peoples and
the Arabs," he wrote in 1920.
That
bears on the gross deficiencies of Professor
Galli's translation. Galli hails from a circle of
liberal Jewish theologians who embrace Rosenzweig
as a non-sectarian exponent of their faith. But it
was not merely a Jew who wrote the Star,
but also a German soldier, making notes on army
postcards at an anti-aircraft battery in Serbia.
The Star is a German book as much as it is
a Jewish one, for it is the record of a German
philosopher's return to faith.
Galli chose
to leave out the extensive notes that accompany
the Hallo edition, and the few footnotes she
includes bespeak abysmal ignorance about
Rosenzweig's German sources. Consider a line on
page 10: "He may not drink up the brown juice that
night." That is a reference to Mephistopheles'
taunt to Faust, who had not the courage to drink
poison. Without a note, it is as incomprehensible
as Galli's rendering is inelegant. Or when
Rosenzweig speaks of a return to "the mothers",
Galli's note states that these are "primordial
forces" in the second part of Goethe's
Faust. But they are no such thing: the
"mothers" are a poetic embodiment of the Platonic
forms which give birth to earthly reality, and
Faust must descend to them to recreate Helen of
Troy. The list goes on.
That is not of
small consequence, for the Star is a
commentary on Goethe's Faust as much as it
is a commentary on religion. Goethe had given the
world a new Everyman, learned in all the science
and philosophy of the enlightenment, and left
empty by it, with a gnawing hunger for life. But
he could find no better guide through the world
than the devil, and his only redemption was that
no earthly pleasure could delude him. It is with
the eyes of Goethe and the heart of a Jew that
Rosenzweig descends to the "mothers", not to find
a new Helen, but to find life.
It is not
merely that Galli does not know German culture;
she does not know German. Rosenzweig wrote, for
example: "The history of philosophy had never yet
seen an atheism like Nietzsche's. Nietzsche is the
first thinker who does not simply abnegate God,
but quite actually 'denies' Him, in the
theological usage of the word." Rosenzweig employs
the German verb leugnen , which may be
translated as "to deny" or "to repudiate". But
here is Galli: "Nietzsche is the first thinker who
- not negates God - but, in the really proper
theological use of the word: 'refutes' him." (p
24) Not only is Galli's translation unnecessarily
clumsy; it is misleading. "Refutation" implies a
logical exercise (in which case a German writer
would have written widerlegen), but
Rosenzweig refers here to Nietzsche's existential
act.
In other cases it appears that Galli
has no idea what Rosenzweig is saying. For
example, Rosenzweig writes (my rendering),
"However much Ethics wished to give the
[individual] act a fundamentally unique position
[Sonderstellung] against the whole of
Being, in carrying this out, Ethics grabbed the
act right back into the circle of the knowable All
as a matter of necessity. All Ethics ends up as a
piece of Being within the doctrine of the
community." Rosenzweig refers here to Kant's
Categorical Imperative, an attempt to derive
ethical behavior from pure logic ("What if
everybody did?"). The individual act is a unique
event with respect to all of being, Rosenzweig
argues, but Ethics grabs the individual's act of
will out of his hands, and returns it as a piece
of being to the impersonal All, destroying its
unique and redeeming character. That is the nub of
Rosenzweig's rejection of philosophy: the
individual's redeeming act is not a logical
decision, but an affirmation of faith.
And
here is Galli's translation: "If fundamentally it
wanted to give a particular place of action in
relation to all being, ethics could only
reintegrate the action by the same necessity into
the circle of the knowable All at the moment it
elaborated it; every ethics ended by emerging
again in a doctrine of the community that forms a
part of being." What does that mean?
Rosenzweig's Star deserves an
edition resembling the Jewish Talmud, with
the original text in an inner square, and
commentaries and source materials surrounding in a
larger square. Hallo's edition, despite its turgid
prose, is somewhat more reliable, and contains the
exhaustive footnotes of the standard German
editions.
Note [1]
University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
The Star of Redemption by Franz
Rosenzweig, translated by Barbara Galli.
University of Wisconson Press, Madison 2005. ISBN:
0299207242. Price $20 (paperback), 459 pages.
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"Learn Greek, dear
reader, and throw my translation into the fire!"
wrote the first German translator of Homer's
Iliad, Count von Stolberg, words that Franz
Rosenzweig placed as a superscript to the preface
for his own translation of the medieval Hebrew
poet, Judah Halevi. 
