Translation—Dialectic of "Decay": Adorno's Letter to Scholem on the Zohar (4/19/1939)
Jewish mysticism between myth and enlightenment
For a series of translations of Adorno and Horkheimer’s reflections on ‘dialectics’ through the conception (~1939-1941), composition (~1941-1942/43), and revision (1944-1946) of the text that would become the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).
Adorno and Horkheimer return to the ‘theological’ and ‘historical-philosophical’ sides of the question of the legacy of Jewish mysticism Adorno poses to Scholem below in their discussion protocols for DoE later in 1939:
Translation: Adorno & Horkheimer's 1939 Discussion on “The Temporal Core of Truth. Experience & Utopia in Dialectical Theory.” (Ed. Gretel Adorno)
Dialectic of Decay: Jewish mysticism between myth and enlightenment.
[Adorno to Scholem, 4/19/1939]1
Dear Herr Scholem, it is no mere figure of speech when I say receiving your translation of the Zohar-excerpt was the greatest joy any gift has given me in a very long time.2 Please don’t mistake this for impertinence: it is far from my intention to pretend I could prove myself a serious reader of this text. But it is the kind of text which imparts an element of joy to me by its very un-unravelability [Unenträtselbare]. Anyhow, I believe I can say that with your afterword to the text in hand, I have at least obtained a clearer notion of its topology. It’s somewhat like if one were to venture into the high mountains in the hope of sighting a Chamois, and, as a near-sighted and short-winded city-dweller, fails to do so—but nevertheless has an experienced guide indicate all of the precise spots where the Chamois roam, by virtue of which one eventually becomes so intimate with the true landscape of the Chamois that one feels they must surely catch a glimpse of the elusive creature in the flesh at any instant. And the summer vacationer cannot presume to gain anything more from this landscape, the true experience of which is worth nothing less than risking one’s very life for it.
Nevertheless, however foolish they might be I would like to make two remarks. The one concerns my astonishment at the connection between the [Zohar] and the Neoplatonic-Gnostic tradition. This connection was the last one I would have expected. I had imagined the Zohar to be, in a certain sense, the most inward and self-enclosed product of the Jewish spirit, only to find that, precisely due to its foreignness, it is most mysteriously interwoven with Western thinking. If it is in fact a Jewish document in the preeminent sense, then it is nevertheless an extremely mediated one, in the sense that the ‘Galuth’ is Jewish destiny.3 This seems to harbor significant ramifications, however, for it transposes the work into historical-philosophical contexts which the otherwise uninstructed hearing the word ‘Kabbalah’ could not even begin to dream of. Perhaps it would not be too bold of me to ask whether the metaphysical intuitions condensed in the text are not better conceived under the historical-philosophical aspect of the “decay” [“Verfalls”] of Western Gnosis—and you know very well that the concept of “decay” doesn’t have the least bit of the depraved in it as far as I’m concerned—than under the aspect of a religious “primordial experience” [Urerfahrung], a concept which you, as the custodian of the great tradition of the commentaries, are as sure to be as skeptical of as I am; I, who cannot, on philosophical grounds, believe in any “primordial experiences” nor imagine the life of truth as anything but its mediation. In a number of moments, it seemed to me as if the force of this text owed itself to this ‘decay,’ and perhaps this dialectic could contribute something to reaching an understanding of the moment you emphasize with such vehemence: the inversion [Umschlags] of spiritualism—and in the spirit of your interpretation I would almost say: acosmism—into mythology.4 With this, we would then find ourselves in the area around which our conversations this last summer revolved—namely, the question of mystical nihilism. The spirit which banishes the world from the act of creation calls up the demons for whom the world once served as a boundary.
The other question is in a certain sense one of an epistemological nature, though it is evidently and substantively connected with the mythical figure of absolute spiritualism. The excerpt you translated is an exegesis of the history of creation as a “symbol.” However, the language into which the ‘symbol’ is translated is itself a purely symbolic language, calling to mind Kafka’s statement that all of his writings are ‘symbolic,’ but only in the sense that they are to be interpreted in an infinite succession of stages passing through ever-renewed symbolic forms. The question I would pose to you is this: whether there is any ground whatsoever for this construction of stages of symbols, or whether this construction represents a bottomless plunge. Bottomless because, within a world which knows nothing but spirit, and in which otherness is still determined as the sheer self-emptying [Selbstentäußerung] of the spirit, the hierarchy of intentions knows no end. One could even say: whether there is nothing more than intentions. To refer to Benjamin’s old theorem about the intentionless character of truth,5 which does not present us with an ultimate intention but rather brings the flight of intentions to a halt, then the same question of the context of delusion of myth [Verblendungszusammenhang des Mythos] arises with respect to the Zohar-text as well.6 Doesn’t the totality of the symbolic, however much it may appear an expression of the expressionless, fall into nature because it doesn’t truly know the expressionless—or, I might even say, nature in the true sense?
As you can see—and as is probably not possible to do otherwise with a text such as this—I have read nothing out of it aside from that which I have read into it, and in so doing have perhaps fallen under the spell of the text much more than my remarks may have initially suggested. To me, there is no doubt that the force which emanates from the text first becomes fruitful in the very moment it is converted into the force of its own critique, and I should have understood little of your own contribution if the faithfulness in your insistence upon the text had not itself led to such a critique of the text. In this connection, I would ask how you responded to the positions in my little Kierkegaard book—positions inseparable from the questions discussed here.
I would also like to add that the notion of the all-too-transient [grass] angels struck me most profoundly.7 And finally, one last thing: the connection between your concerns and Benjamin’s has never been so present to me as it was in the course of reading through this text. If in the Urpassagen, Benjamin sought to present a determinate historical constitution of the world as a “symbol” of a process through which this world, in a certain sense, corporeally traverses the space of hell within time, then this is not far from the gesture in your text.8 I must confess to you: this thought still animates me in the extreme today. How it might be maintained when faced with that critique of spiritualism about which, if I’m not mistaken, you, Benjamin, and I agree, this is still completely unclear to me, and I see little possibility other than to postpone such questions ad Kalendas graecas.
Ad. Adorno to Benjamin, re: Scholem’s ‘explosions’ of Jewish mysticism.
[Adorno to Benjamin, 3/4/1938]9
But first about Scholem. You may find this hard to believe, but the first time we got to meet him was at the Tillichs, together with Goldstein and his new wife.10 Not exactly the best atmosphere in which to be introduced to the Sohar; and especially since Frau Tillich's relationship to the Kabbala seems to resemble that of a terrified teenager to pornography. The antinomian Maggid was extremely reserved towards me at first, and clearly regarded me as some sort of dangerous arch-seducer: I had the strange feeling of finding myself identified with Brecht. Needless to say, nothing of the kind was actually said, and Scholem contrived to sustain the fiction, with considerable brash grace, that he knew nothing at all about me except that a book of mine had been published by the blessed Siebeck.11 Nevertheless, I somehow succeeded in breaking the spell and he began to show some kind of trust in me, something which I think will continue to grow. We have spent a couple of evenings together, as the ringing in your ears has presumably already told you by now; once on our own, in a discussion which touched in part upon our own last conversation in San Remo concerning theology, and in part upon my Husserl piece, which Scholem read with great care, as if it were some intelligence test. We spent the second evening in the company of Max, and Scholem, who was in great form, regaled us in detail with the most astonishing things in connection with Sabbatian and Frankist mysticism; a number of which, however, sounded so clearly reminiscent of some of [Alfred] Rosenberg's notions about ‘the people’ [Volk], that Max was seriously concerned about the prospect of more of this kind actually appearing in print. It is not altogether easy for me to convey my own impression of Scholem. This is indeed a classic case of the conflict between duty and inclination. My personal inclination comes into play most strongly when he makes himself the mouthpiece of the theological moment of your, and perhaps I might also say of my own, philosophy; and it will hardly have escaped you that a number of his arguments against simply abandoning the theological moment, and above all his argument that in truth this moment is no more eliminated by the method of your work than it is by mine, corresponds with my own excursions on the subject in San Remo; and not to mention that philosopher's stone, and rock of offence, currently living in Denmark.12 But my sense of duty also immediately asserts itself here and compels me to admit that your own comparison with the sheet of blotting paper, your own intention to mobilize the power of theological experience anonymously within the realm of the profane, seems to me utterly and decisively superior to all of Scholem's attempts to salvage the theological moment.13 Thus I insisted on maintaining the general line of approach agreed between us at San Remo, that is, while I certainly conceded to him the presence of this ‘alien body,’ I simultaneously affirmed the necessity of its intrusion. Part of the problem here is the particular form which theology has now assumed for Scholem himself. For one thing, this attempted salvation of theology is a strangely linear and romantic one: when he emphasizes, for example, the opposition between the ‘content’ and its genesis, and accuses Marxism of simply concerning itself with the latter and ignoring the content as such, I am very strongly reminded of Kracauer or even Theodor Haecker. But when one takes a closer look at the things which he himself presents—and for my own part I was unable to separate the contents of his mysticism from the very historical fate as he described it himself—then their most essential characteristic seems to be the fact that they ‘explode.’ He himself insists upon a sort of radioactive decay which drives us on from mysticism, and indeed equally in all of its monadically conceived historical shapes and forms, towards enlightenment. It strikes me as an expression of the most profound irony that the very conception of mysticism which he urges presents itself from the perspective of the philosophy of history precisely as that same incursion into the profane with which he reproaches both of us. The narratives he describes, if not his thoughts themselves, actually provide a rigorous justification for the very changes in your own thought which offend him the most. —The spiritual energy and power of the man is enormous, and he certainly belongs amongst those very few individuals with whom it is still worthwhile discussing such serious matters. But it is rather strange how this power sometimes abandons him at a stretch and allows prejudice and the most banal observations to prevail uncontested instead. This is also true for his style of historical interpretation, when he explains the ‘explosions’ of Jewish mysticism [in (Sabbatai) Zevi and, fully, in (Jacob) Frank]14 in exclusively internal theological terms, and then precisely for that reason violently repudiates the social connections which would otherwise ineluctably force themselves upon one's attention. It is as if a lifeboat has just been released with enormous care; but the art then principally consists in swamping it with water and getting it to capsize. For my part, I share your view that it would be best for the whole ship to sink with all hands on board, and then at least some of the freight could be saved, even without the crew. Nonetheless, I am quite fascinated by the man, and Felicitas likewise, and I think there is some real contact between us, which on occasion assumes the form of a certain trust—rather like that which might develop between an Ichthyosaurus and a Brontosaurus meeting for coffee, or even better, if Leviathan should decide to drop in on Behemoth. In a word, one is still amongst one's own. Perhaps I should also add that Scholem is obviously bound to you emotionally to a quite remarkable degree, and at least initially regards anyone else who crops up in this connection, whether it is Bloch, Brecht or whoever, as one of the enemy. As far as I myself am concerned, I feel that he has been mollified somewhat; I cannot speak for how he stands toward Max. For his part, Max reacted very positively, and I should like to believe that the meeting, which took place incidentally in a New York bar, also proved valuable in so far as it gave Max a fresh perspective on certain things with regard to you from before his time. On the other hand, Scholem obstinately refuses to become involved with the Institute and even turned down our invitation for him to come and give a lecture there—this is presumably connected with the fact that he knew Löwenthal and Fromm during their Zionist period.15 …
In: Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem. Briefwechsel. 1939-1969. Edited by Asaf Angermann. (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015), 9-14. Author’s translation.
[receiving your translation of the Zohar-excerpt:] Following their first meetings in New York the year prior, Scholem sent them an ‘exemplar’ of the second edition, published as a Schocken private printing: “Die Geheimnisse der Tora. Ein Kapitel aus dem Sohar,” Berlin 1936. The first edition had been published a year before that under the title “Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung. Ein Kapitel aus dem Sohar” in Band 40 of the Schocken Verlag library.
[Galuth:] Hebrew: exile, Jewish diaspora.
[the inversion (Umschlags) of spiritualism:] Adorno is probably thinking of the passage from Scholem’s introduction, “Zum historischen Verständnis des Sohar,” which states: “Erst mit dem Zusammenbruch jener Lebens- und Glaubens-Schicht, in der die Kabbala eine geschichtliche Macht darstellen konnte, erlosch auch der Glanz des Sohar, der nun in aufklärerischer Umwertung zu jenem ‘Lügenbuch’ wird, das das reine Licht des echten Judentums verfinstert haben soll.” (Scholem, Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung, Frankfurt a.M. 1971, S. 6 f.)
Scholem: “It was only with the collapse of that stratum of life and belief in which the Kabbalah was able to represent a historical force that the splendor of the Zohar also faded; and later, in the revaluation of the Enlightenment, it became the “book of lies,” considered to have obscured the pure light of Judaism. The reform-tending polemic in this case too made haste to become an instrument of historical criticism, which, it must be said, after a few promising starts, showed itself weak and uncertain in the carrying out of its program, sound as its methods and true as many of its theses may have been. Historical criticism, however, will survive the brief immortality of that “genuine” Judaism whose view of history and whose hierarchy of values gave rise to it. Freed from polemic, and concerned for a more precise and objective insight into its subject matter, it will now assert itself in the new (and in part very old) context in which we begin to see the world of Judaism, and Judaism's history.” Zohar. The Book of Splendor. Selected and Edited by Gershom G. Scholem. (Schocken Books, 1963 [1949]), 9.
Ansgar Martins: “Adorno may, for example, have been thinking of the following remark in Scholem’s introduction to the Zohar translation: “At this point, one will readily notice that the mythical primitive element bursts forth in an entirely unrestrained and, above all, perfectly undisguised manner from everything the Zohar has to say on demonology. No form of mysticism that ventures to unriddle the ‘mystery of faith’, no matter how profoundly speculative its lines of thought may be, can avoid the pitfall of rendering a mythical rather than mystical account of God.” Scholem, Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung, 38.” In: The Migration of Metaphysics into the Realm of the Profane. Theodor W. Adorno Reads Gershom Scholem. Translated by Lars Fischer (Brill, 2020), 69. [Footnote No. 63.]
[Benjamin’s old theorem about the intentionless character of the truth:] In the “Erkenntniskritischen Vorrede” of the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin writes: “Das Sein der Ideen kann als Gegenstand einer Anschauung überhaupt nicht gedacht werden, auch nicht der intellektuellen. Denn noch in ihrer paradoxesten Umschreibung, der als intellectus archetypus, geht sie aufs eigentümliche Gegebensein der Wahrheit, als welches jeder Art von Intention entzogen bleibt, geschweige daß sie selbst als Intention erschiene, nicht ein. Wahrheit tritt nie in eine Relation und insbesondere in keine intentionale. Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis als ein in der Begriffsintention bestimmter ist nicht die Wahrheit. Die Wahrheit ist ein aus Ideen gebildetes intentionsloses Sein. Das ihr gemäße Verhalten ist demnach nicht ein Meinen im Erkennen, sondern ein in sie Eingehen und Verschwinden. Die Wahrheit ist der Tod der Intention. ... Also erfordert die Struktur der Wahrheit ein Sein, das an Intentionslosigkeit dem schlichten der Dinge gleicht; an Bestandhaftigkeit aber ihm überlegen wäre.” (GS I-1, S. 215 f.)
Benjamin: “The being of ideas simply cannot be conceived of as the object of vision, even intellectual vision. For even in its most paradoxical periphrasis, as intellectus archetypus, vision does not enter into the form of existence which is peculiar to truth, which is devoid of all intention, and certainly does not itself appear as intention. Truth does not enter into relationships, particularly intentional ones. The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention. The structure of truth, then, demands a mode of being which in its lack of intentionality resembles the simple existence of things, but which is superior in its permanence.” In: The Origin of the German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. (Verso, 1998), 35-36.
[the question of the context of delusion of myth:] Cf. Adorno’s ‘Idea of Natural History’ (“Wie allen Mythen das Moment des Scheines inhäriert, ja wie die Dialektik des mythischen Schicksals, unter den Formen von Hybris und Verblendung, allemal von Schein inauguriert wird, so sind die geschichtlich produzierten Schein-Gehalte allemal mythischer Art…”) as well as the Kierkegaard-book, which Adorno gifted Scholem in the course of their first conversations, and in which the connection of myth to the “context of delusion,” which Adorno relates to the dialectic of the domination of nature (Naturbeherrschung) and the fall into nature (Naturverfallenheit), forms the core of Chapter 6, “Reason and Sacrifice.”
The passages from Adorno’s Kierkegaard [1933], quoted in full:
Mythical Sacrifice
Of the many commentators, only Monrad gives any insight into the relation between Kierkegaard's sacrifice and the mythical. As part of a sketch of Kierkegaard's character, he quotes a passage from the Havamal of nordic mythology: “Odin Speaks: I know that I hung from a wind blown tree nine nights long, wounded by a spear, consecrated to Odin: I myself, consecrated to myself.” Monrad emphasizes the phrase “consecrated to Odin: I myself, consecrated to myself”; it could in fact serve as the motto of a theology of sacrifice in which the individual must “perish” to become “himself.” Nothing is added here by the observation of more recent Danish authors of Kierkegaard's “genuinely nordic character.” The relation is evident in the material. The god sacrifices himself, that is, autonomously; for himself, that is, remaining in the natural domain of his own domination. Ultimately the sacrifice transpires, as the continuation of Monrad's passage makes evident, because the god wanted “to procure a higher knowledge through the transcendence of runes“ even Kierkegaard's philosophical intention of “transparentness,“ including the model of the cipher, is contained in the passage from the Edda. Kierkegaard himself compares the concept of philosophy with mythology: “No philosophy ... no mythology ... has ever had this idea.“ The idea, however, that should overcome philosophy and the context of mere nature is that of the paradox. — Kierkegaard himself perceived in the aesthetic sphere that sacrifice is mythical. He wrote of Euripides’ “Iphigenia in Aulis“: “Agamemnon is about to sacrifice Iphigenia. Aesthetics demands silence of Agamemnon, inasmuch as it would be unworthy of the hero to seek comfort from any other person, just as out of solicitude for the women he ought to hide it from them as long as possible. On the other hand, in order to be a hero, the hero also has to be tried in the dreadful spiritual trial that the tears of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia will cause. What does aesthetics do? It has a way out; it has the old servant in readiness to disclose everything to Clytemnestra. Now everything is in order. What is specified here as the aesthetic character of sacrifice is in truth mythical: it is the silence of speechless submission to fate; the mute struggle that the hero puts up against fate as he submits and by submitting inserts a caesura in the fateful circle. The servant's speech, however, is no aesthetic “way out“; rather, his disembodied voice is the echo of fate itself that announces its consummation to the taciturn hero. The paradox also offers up a sacrifice, one comparable to the silent hero, and therefore falls prey to that mythology that Kierkegaard imagines never to have “had this idea.“ For just as the hero, deprived of all hope, is handed over as absolution to blind natural forces, paradoxy sacrifices hope, the favorite child of spirit, to spirit itself as expiation. In this fashion Kierkegaard himself “aesthetically' bans the paradoxical, to which he “religiously“ succumbs specifically in the mythical figure of memory. As mere imageless spirit, memory destroys the pictorial configuration of hope: “I can describe hope so vividly that every hoping individual will acknowledge my description; and yet it is a deception, for while I picture hope, I think of memory.' This already points the way, by means of a “transcendence of spheres,“ to Kierkegaard's Christology: while hope here falls to the mercy of memory that is as mythical as the recollection of what has always been, in the Christology all worldly existence is ultimately consecrated to the simply different that cancels the “deception“' of existence but without reconciling it. The mythical figure of pure spirit ascends out of the hell of memory: “No power in the play, no power on earth, has been able to coerce Don Juan, only a spirit, an apparition from another world, can do that. If this be understood correctly, then this will again throw light upon the interpretation of Don Juan. A spirit, a ghost, is a replication; this is the mystery which lies in its apparition; Don Juan can do everything, can withstand everything, except the replication of life, precisely because he is immediate sensuous life, whose negation the spirit is.“ Thus power over natural life remains dedicated to its annihilation in spirit rather than to reconciliation. The annihilation of natural life, originating in the statue of the commander, is correctly understood as ghostly. For here it is not merely natural life that is destroyed by spirit; spirit itself is annihilated natural life and bound to mythology. For this reason, spirit is without hope, and, even in Kierkegaard's doctrine of faith, paradoxy distorts hope as the simple annihilation of nature by spirit: “And next the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, this hope which is hope against hope. For in every man there is a spontaneous hope, in one man it may be more vitally strong than in another, but in death (i.e. when thou dost die from) every such hope dies and transforms itself into hopelessness. Into this night of hopelessness (it is in fact death we are describing) comes then the life giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for according to that merely natural hope there was no hope left, and so this is hope against hope.“ In spite of its forcefulness, this image of hope is false. Hope does not unfold in this image in the absurdity of a life that is natural, fallen to nature, and yet at the same time created. Rather the absurdity turns against hope itself. By annihilating nature, hope enters the vicious circle of nature; originating in nature itself, hope is only able to truly overcome it by maintaining the trace of nature. The twilight of Kierkegaardian hope is the sallow light of the twilight of the gods that proclaims the vain end of an age or the aimless beginning of a new one, but not salvation. Thus, in the dialectic of hope, Kierkegaard's paradoxy proves to be caught up in nature by virtue of its anti-natural spiritualism. His polemic against mythical hope becomes mythical hopelessness just as the movement of “existence“ changes into the despair that initiated its flight into the labyrinth. According to its stated intention, his interpretation of Christianity is directly opposed to any mythological interpretation. He would like to exclude every mythical content that propagates itself in images; with the greatest severity, he criticizes “childish religiosity“ for its “immediacy“; and he equally repudiates infant baptism and anabaptism as “external“ because of their theological symbolic form, which he attributes to myth. Blinded, however, it escapes him that the image of sacrifice is itself mythical and occupies the innermost cell of his thought, accessible equally by way of his philosophy as by his theology. The sacrifice of Christ and the “disciple“ of reason cannot be finally distinguished. The claim “that Christ came into the world to suffer,” paradoxical and yet all too laconic, transforms the Christian doctrine of reconciliation itself into the mythical. However unrelentingly he undertook to extirpate the mythical origin of sacrifice through dialectics and however effectively the ambiguity of this mythical origin supported him in this, he nevertheless unintentionally betrays the mythical essence of his theology in otherwise unimposing sentences: “If Christianity once changed the face of the world by overcoming the crude passions of immediacy and ennobling the state, it will find in culture a resistance just as great.“ Thus the dialectical refraction of subordination to nature, of the “crude passions of immediacy,“ is to become a danger for Christianity itself, is to break Christianity — with the result that Christianity reverts to subordination to nature. The fact that Kierkegaard, to mollify nature, polemically substituted the reified and questionable concept of culture for a reconciling dialectic that issues from nature changes nothing in this situation.
“Gnosis”
There is thus a mythologization of Christianity in the last instance, although in all preceding instances, nature had been driven out of Christianity. Christ's death itself is for Kierkegaard not so much an act of reconciliation as a propitiating sacrifice. However the Training in Christianity may employ the phrase “reconciling death,“ the “doctrine of reconciliation“ is still explicitly defined as atonement: “It is taught that Christ has made satisfaction for hereditary sin.“ In vain, Kierkegaard denies that which to him marks Christ and likewise man as an “exception“: “It was not in order to appease the angry gods that Abraham transgressed the universal” — but why else? For all authentic existence is atonement for Kierkegaard: in The Instant he demands that Christians “live as sacrificed men in this world of falsehood and evil.“ Is All thereby violate “the universal.“ Moral requirements are properly promulgated only in a life for which reconciliation is a continuous possibility; if life is sacrificed, ethos disappears with it in the abyss of the natural. The distinction of good and evil no longer holds under the domination of death. For this reason, ethics constitutes for Kierkegaard a “transitional stage“; since no life is begrudged it, it cannot prove itself. Sacrifice is that point in the system where the tangent of an abstract and unreachable “meaning“ touches the closed circle of life, and his doctrine insists on this “point“ without progressing along the circumference; if, according to the paradox, it is only here that he can participate in “meaning,“ he must pay for it according to a graceless mythical calculus with the loss of the living person. In his ethics human life sets itself, powerlessly, against sacrificial annihilation. — Through sacrifice, the difference between Christ and man is abolished. If Christ, as sacrifice, falls to the mercy of the natural, in sacrifice the individual raises himself up, sacrificially, as a follower. Of Christ, it is said: “This story, the story of constant maltreatment which finally ended in death, or shall I say the story of this suffering, is the story of his whole life. It can be told in several ways. It can be told briefly in two words, nay even in one: it was the story of the passion.“ Thus the story is mythically reduced to a sacrifice, systematically reduced to a single point, as in the morose thesis that “indeed every day of His life was a day of burial for Him who was appointed to be a sacrifice.“ The life of the individual is “relegated“ — through sacrifice — to nothing else: “Now if for any individual an eternal happiness is his highest good, this will mean that all finite satisfactions are volitionally relegated to the status of what must be renounced in favor of an eternal happiness.“ Renounced by the strength of the “follower“: the Christian is to “make ‘the pattern’ so vividly present that” he experiences “such suffering as if in contemporaneousness you had recognized Him for what he is. All ado made afterwards, all ado about building his tomb etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., is, according to the judgment of Jesus Christ, hypocrisy and the same blood guilt as that of those who put him to death. This is the Christian requirement. The mildest, mildest form for it after all is surely that which I have used in Training in Christianity: that you must admit that this is the requirement, and then have recourse to grace” — a grace for which Kierkegaard knows no other criterion than suffering. The mythical content of suffering is hardly mastered by Christology and by being a follower; occasionally this mythical content breaks through, autonomously, and sacrifice is presented in its true natural form: as expiation, performed for the sinful corps of the present “generation.“ “The thought goes very far back in my recollection that in every generation there are two or three who are sacrificed for the others, are led by frightful sufferings to discover what redounds to the good of others. So it was that in my melancholy I understood myself as singled out for such a fate.“ The emancipation from the Christian prototype, the separation of the sacrifice from the name and fulfillment of Christ, the fetishistic autonomization of the sacrifice are — in this passage — no accident of expression. In fact his philosophy develops the cult of sacrifice with such tenacity that it finally becomes a gnosis, which Kierkegaard as a Protestant would have otherwise passionately opposed. Gnosis erupts in late idealism when — through spiritualism —mythical thought gains power over Christian thought and, in spite of all talk of grace, draws Christianity into the graceless immanence of the course of nature. Kierkegaard's gnostic doctrines are presented as “literary works“ and fantasies. This is perhaps not simply on formal grounds the result of the requirements of the material, as set out in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but also in order to mask the heterodox character of these doctrines — a requirement that Kierkegaard must have been aware of. Yet these gnostic doctrines return so relentlessly; they present such a tight nexus of motives; they pursue so strictly the course of transcendence defined by the system of spheres; that the critic of the mythical content of Kierkegaard's philosophy finds its real basis in them. The mythical character of sacrifice becomes evident in the fateful necessity of the “offense,“ over which God is supposed to have no control: “This precisely is the sorrow in Christ: ‘He can do no other,’ He can humble himself, take the form of a servant, suffer and die for man, invite all to come unto him, sacrifice every day of his life and every hour of the day, and sacrifice his life —but the possibility of the offense he cannot take away. Oh, unique work of love! Oh, unfathomable sorrow of love! that God himself cannot, as in another sense he does not will, cannot will it, but, even if he would, he could not make it impossible that this work of love might not turn out to be for a person exactly the opposite, to be the extremest misery! For the greatest possible human misery, greater even than sin, is to be offended in Christ and remain offended. And Christ cannot, ‘love’ cannot render this impossible. Lo, for this reason He says, ‘Blessed is he who shall not be offended in me.’ More he cannot do.“ Indeed, it is not the sacrifice itself, but its acceptance by the creature that is withdrawn from the control of the deity; just as in the astrology of the spheres, so in the demonic “offense,“ necessity rules. God's sadness over the unreachable, the “lost“ person, responds gnostically to this necessity as the final word of Kierkegaard's theology. In ambiguous reconciliation divine love itself laments: “Behold, he therefore brought to completion this work of love, he offered the sacrifice (in which for his part he exulted), but not without tears. Over this — what shall I call it? —historical painting of inwardness there hovered that dark possibility. And yet, if this had not hovered over it, his work would not have been that of true love.“ Thus the “historical painting of inwardness“ as the theological prototype of all melancholy: God's mournfulness over humanity is itself mythical. In the image of this mournfulness, the creator founders and falls helpless; in sacrifice he is devoured by nature. This is the self-evident and gnostic heresy posited by Kierkegaard's doctrine of the imprisonment of God in his own “incognito,“ just as this imprisonment follows rationally for Kierkegaard from the paradox of the immediate unity of divine and human nature: “And now in the case of the God-Man! He is God, but chooses to become the individual man. This, as we have seen, is the profoundest incognito, or the most impenetrable unrecognizableness that is possible; for the contradiction between being God and being an individual man is the greatest possible, the infinitely qualitative contradiction. But this is His will, His free determination, therefore an almightily maintained incognito. Indeed, he has in a certain sense, by suffering himself to be born, bound himself once and for all; his incognito is so almightily maintained that in a way he is subjected to it, and the reality of his suffering consists in the fact that it is not merely apparent, but that in a sense the assumed incognito has power over him.” If a theology of the “strictly different“ were prohibited from any pronouncement over “God's mournfulness,“ it must be fully confounded since it denies God's freedom and subsumes the incarnate God to a necessity that he cannot “revoke.“ Kierkegaard's theology cannot escape this entanglement because the conception of the paradoxy and absolute difference of God is itself bound to the autonomous spirit as God's systematic negation, an autonomous spirit that ultimately cancels divine transcendence by construing God dialectically out of itself and its own necessity. Just as in the depths of perdition the dialectic of pure spirit turns toward deliverance, it plummets from the heights of sacrifice into mythology, which subjects its god to abstract fate: “But the unrecognizableness of the God-Man is an incognito almightily maintained, and the divine seriousness consists precisely in the fact that it is so almightily maintained that He Himself suffers under His unrecognizableness in a purely human way.“ Haecker criticizes Kierkegaard's spiritualism: “The Individual is to become spirit, as he is intended to be, pure spirit if possible; this is an almost gnostic error on Kierkegaard's part,” and this gnosis proceeds from the definition of man as purely spiritual to a theology that classifies god in the categories of pure spirit, as which man appears to god. The result is that god disappears into that nature that is in truth precisely man's spirituality. Mythical dialectic consumes Kierkegaard's god, as did Kronos his children.
In: Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Translated and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1933]), 108-113.
[transient angels:] In the interpretation of Psalms 104:14, the Zohar states: “Und diese ‘Berge’ (die die Frommen sind) bringen ihr täglich Gras hervor. Und dies ‘Gras’—das sind die Engel, die nur für eine Weile Macht ausüben und am zweiten Tag erschaffen sind, um von jener Behema verzehrt zu werden (der Schechina), die ein Feuer ist, das Feuer verzehrt.” (Scholem, Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung, S. 77)
See Martins: “The relevant passage (Zohar 1:18b) reads: “The earth brings forth grass, herbage that sows seed. … and heavenly forces and holy multitudes sprang from its womb, which the ‘children of faith’ [the pious] actualize secretly when they serve their Lord. The verse, ‘He who lets grass sprout for the behema’ [behema, really ‘the beast’, is the shekhina previously called ‘earth’], also called [in a passage of scripture] ‘the beast on a thousand mountains,’ points to this mystery. And daily these ‘mountains’ [i.e., the pious] bring forth their grass. And this ‘grass’— it is the angels who have power only for a short while and are created on the second day to be consumed by that behema [the shekhina], which is a fire that consumes fire.” Gershom Scholem, Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung (Berlin: Schocken, 1935), 70. The explanations in the square brackets were added by Scholem.” In: The Migration of Metaphysics into the Realm of the Profane (2020), 159. [Footnote No. 36]
And: “In the fragment “On the metaphysics of musical time,” which Tiedemann has placed at the end of his edition of Adorno’s notes on Beethoven, Adorno referred to his plan to[:] “Relate the end of the study to the teaching of Jewish mysticism about the grass angels who are created for an instant, only to perish in the sacred fire. Music—modelled on the glorification of God, even, and especially, when it opposes the world—resembles these angels. The glorification resides precisely in their transience, their ephemerality, i.e., the perpetual eradication of nature. Yet Beethoven raised this figure to musical self-consciousness. For his truth is the eradication of all that is particular. His compositions spelt out the absolute transience of music.”” In: Ibid., 157-158.
[Benjamin ... Urpassagen:] Among Walter Benjamin's drafts for the Passagenarbeit from the years 1927 to 1929 (“Pariser Passagen I,” cf. GSV. 2, pp. 993-1038) are several notes which refer to the “Zeit der Hölle” (cf. for example GSV. 2, pp. 1010 f.).
In: Adorno and Benjamin, Complete Correspondence. Translated by Nicholas Walker. (Harvard University Press, 1999), 248-250. [Translation supplemented with comments from Martins (2020).]
[Note: Adorno is referring to the psychiatrist and neurologist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), who was an acquaintance of his and Benjamin’s from their time in Frankfurt.]
[Note: Adorno’s book Kierkegaard had appeared in January 1933 with the publishing house of J. C. B. Mohr (Siebeck).]
[Note: an allusion to Brecht’s influence upon Benjamin.]
[Note: cf. GS V (1), p. 588: ‘My thought relates to theology just as a piece of blotting paper relates to ink. It absorbs the latter completely. But if we were solely concerned with the blotting paper, then there would be nothing written left for us to read.’]
As Martins notes, Walker omits the references to Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank in the English translation. In: The Migration of Metaphysics into the Realm of the Profane (2020), 79.
[Note: a reference to their work at the Jewish Teaching Institute (Das judische Lehrhaus) in the 1920s.]