Stellenbosch Theological Journal 2022, Vol 8, No 1, 1–38

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17570/stj.2022.v8n1.a21

Online ISSN 2226-2385 | Print ISSN 0028-2006

2022 © The Author(s)

Karl Barth, Walter Benjamin, and Historical Mediation: A Metaphysical Aporia in Dialectical Theology and Messianic Politics

Khegan M. Delport

University of the Free state, Bloemfontein, South Africa

khegan.delport@gmail.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7502-7676

Abstract

Following Jacob Taubes, this essay seeks to make a comparison of the work of Karl Barth and Walter Benjamin. I argue, with the assistance of Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose, that Barth and Benjamin, for differing reasons, refuse the mediation of the transcendence qua history and the created world. For Barth, this may be traced to his critique of natural theology and his rejection of the analogia entis, and his apparently inability to conceptualize how materiality and historicity may constitute a “fitting” mediation for divine self-disclosure, intimating a nascent voluntarism in his theology. For Benjamin, this failure to approximate mediation may be linked to the conceptual diastasis between metaphysics and law, which leads him to adopt the idea of divine violence of law-breaking, as opposed to the mythical violence of law-making, as a way of resolving the disjunction. However, following Rose, I argue that this leads to a pathological conception of the relation of immanence to transcendence and a messianic politics that avoids the labour of mourning and the constraints of the middle.

Keywords

Karl Barth; Walter Benjamin; Gillian Rose; Rowan Williams; Jacob Taubes; metaphysics; historicity; mediation

I

In a lecture series given in early 1987 to the Forschungsstätte der evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft (or FEST), the Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes outlined a political theology of Paul the Apostle, as well as a historical reception amongst figures within the Weimar intelligentsia. Published in 1993,1 under the joint-editorship of Aleida and Jan Assmann, and translated into English ten years later, these talks have gathered a place alongside several other continental exposés of Paul, all attempting to re-actualize Pauline categories for contemporary thought.2 My desire is to not to enter into the debate surrounding this theme, which is now voluminous, but to extract one of his interventions as a touchstone for my argument: namely, his juxtaposition of Karl Barth and Walter Benjamin. After engaging in a slightly breathless reception-history of Pauline apocalyptic, in which the importance of the theme of divine creation for the New Testament is provocatively denied,3 and after making telling comparisons between Marcion and Harnack, Barth and Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno, Taubes parallels Benjamin’s “Theological-Political Fragment” with Barth’s Römerbrief. There he called Benjamin’s text a “dialectical theology outside the Christian church.”4 In this literary torso, Benjamin argues that, on the one side, “the Messiah himself completes all history,” but on the other “nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground to anything messianic.” For Benjamin, the secular order of happiness promotes the coming of the kingdom, but only in a negative sense to the degree that it instigates and repeats “an eternity of downfall,” since “nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.” In a programmatic sense, a messianic world politics is equalled to nihilism, one that strives for “the passing away of those stages of man [sic] that are nature,” enduring that “intensity of heart, of the inner man in isolation,” the human being who “passes through misfortune, as suffering.”5 Taubes thinks that Benjamin here echoes Paul’s language of redemption, despite departing from him as regards the autonomy of the order of the profane from the order of the messianic (which Taubes says is an internalization of Luther’s two kingdom’s doctrine). For Taubes, it is Benjamin’s “hardness” which rivals Barth’s caustic denunciations of post-Wilhelmite liberalism. For both, in redemption there is “nothing … having to do with immanence. From that one gets nowhere” (“Da ist nichts vom Immanenten. Von daher kommt man zu nichts”).6 Echoing Barth: “If God is God, then he can’t be coaxed out of our soul … Something has to happen from the other side; then we see, when our eyes are pierced open. Otherwise we see nothing. Otherwise we ascend, we strive until the day after tomorrow …”7

Taubes’ analogy of Barth and Benjamin is not unique; similar parallels have been drawn by others, inspired some of their affinities in style and thought. But there are more than simply affinities here; for one thing, there are some tangential, personal connections: they shared some associates, like Fritz Lieb, a former student of Barth and close acquaintance of Benjamin.8 In a letter to Karl Thieme, Benjamin expressed knowledge of Barth but admitted to not knowing his writings well enough to comment on the stakes of dialectical theology.9 Material influence is also probably there: the renowned Benjamin scholar Michael Jennings has traced the intertextual, albeit indirect, influence of Barth’s Römerbrief and apocalypticism on Benjamin’s beleaguered Habilitationschrift regarding Baroque Tragedy.10 One may also see resemblance with texts (already mentioned) like the “Theological-Political Fragment,” which Michael Jennings and Howard Eiland explicitly link to the subterranean influence of dialectical theology.11 To indicate something of an awareness of this influence, Benjamin, in a review of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard, describes Barth and dialectical theology as constituting, at “their outer limits” something like “waves” that “make contact with the concentric circles set in motion by Heidegger’s existentialist philosophy.”12 Such “waves” of theological co-influence have also been noted by the historian Rudy Koshar who has also placed Barth and Benjamin together within the “expressionist” movements of early twentieth century Germany,13 while Benjamin Lazier has situated Barth and Benjamin within, and over-against, wider intellectual trends characteristic of Europe after World War I.14 Andreas Pangritz has also analysed the negative reception of “dialectical theology” by Benjamin and Scholem, showing how it is largely predicated on a misunderstanding of Barth’s position vis-à-vis Judaism;15 and Hent De Vries has sought – under the inspiration of Taubes – to conceptually relate the projects of Barth and Adorno in an essay in which the presence of Benjamin is never too far away.16 Daniel Weidner has similarly suggested intertextual affinities between Barth’s critique of “religion” and Benjamin’s text “Capitalism as Religion.”17

The similarities between Barth and Benjamin’s thought registered by the likes of Taubes, I would suggest, should also be more broadly registered within the ferment of crisis, cultural pessimism, and eschatological malaise of the post-Weimar period. As Eric Hobsbawm has written, “[the] decades from the outbreak of the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, was an Age of Catastrophe for this society. For forty years it stumbled from one calamity to another.”18 Within this age of impending cataclysm, a renewed and vertiginous rhetoric of the apocalypse gained ascension, both within political and artistic life,19 as exemplified in the “crisis theology” of the Weimar period. Peter Gordon has described that time like this: “theological radicalism was grafted onto political pessimism; rebellion against the liberal-historicist teaching of the nineteenth century was transformed into apocalyptic and anti-historical doctrines on both the left and the right; God was expelled from the social-historical matrix only to return with even more irresistible authority as the numinous or the wholly other or – perversely – as the Volk.”20 It is therefore not a coincidence that Barth’s Römerbrief is coterminous with the publication of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918 and 1922), as well as Benjamin’s “Theological-Political Fragment” and later his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. It was a time of the aesthetic upheavals of Dadaism, Surrealism, Expression, and Cubism, the “new objectivity” of Max Beckman, the prints of Alfred Kubin, the serialism and atonalism of Arnold Schoenberg; and one may also mention here Saxl and Panofsky’s saturnine explorations of Albrecht Dürer21 – a figure of influence on Benjamin.22 In a short text on mourning and melancholia, simply entitled “Vergänglichkeit” (“Transience”) and published in 1916, Sigmund Freud spoke of how when the war broke out it “destroyed not only the beauty of the countryside through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races.”23 It was a situation and mood well-summarized by the statement of Siegfried Kracauer – another compatriot of Walter Benjamin – when he writes in 1922, coincidentally the year of the publication of the second edition of the Römerbrief, of a people who

when they do pull back from the surface into the centre of their being, they are overcome by a profound sadness which arises from the recognition of their confinement in a particular spiritual/ intellectual [geistige] situation, a sadness that ultimately overruns all layers of their being. It is this metaphysical suffering from the lack of a higher meaning in the world, a suffering due to an existence in an empty space, which makes these people companions in misfortune.24

In this essay, I suggest that something of this Stimmung, in the Heideggerian sense of the term,25 is present in the writings of both Barth and Benjamin. With this in mind I want to focus on a one metaphysical aporia at work in their oeuvres which I think is linked to this general mood; it relates to the problem of history, and more specifically the question of historical mediation, and how both of them account for immanence as a mediation of transcendence. In this text, I will be drawing quite heavily on the interpretative work of Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose, and if my reading and theirs are on to something, then it might suggest that both Barth and Benjamin exhibit a metaphysic that has trouble with accounting for historical mediation, eventuating in a kind of extrinsicism in both of their approaches. Both Barth and Benjamin tend to conceive revelation and divine action along “interventionist” lines, in which creational order and the immanent lawfulness of Being having to be suspended, thus leaving unaccounted how the experience of transcendence may be mediated historically.

The larger conceptual and theological stakes of this discussion I believe circulate around the formulation of the goodness of finite being, the fallenness of creation, and the nature-grace complex. What I hope to reiterate is that Barth’s insertion of the doctrine of creation and revelation within a prior dialectical metaphysic tacitly reconstructs the nature-grace distinction; it conceives this relation as a matter of “externalised” action of divinity on the created world. There are several upshots to this theological posture: one outgrowth is an occasionalism of revelation that is disconnected from the temporal dilations of salvific economy; in this scheme, the question of how something like the Christological event is related to the processes of cultural reception is left dogmatically obscured. This complex is further related to the relation between Christology and creation, and how the incarnation itself may be described as a fitting mediation of redemption. Barth’s historicised Chalcedonianism,26 in my estimate, does not resolve the fundamental issues that arise from his rejection of ontological analogy (analogia entis). God’s eternal election to become the incarnate Son, without articulating the manner in which historical being is a “natural” mediation of divinity and redemption, raises the spectre of voluntarism within Barth’s theology. Why is created being an “appropriate” sacrament of revelation? If there is not a certain fittingness at work here, if created finitude is violently negated within the dialectic, then this raises the problem that history may simply have been “elected” for such purposes, but without a further explanation of how or why this election is ontologically fitting. Another implication of this extrinsicism is that of an ontological secularity in which the world may be coherently described without a “natural” orientation to the gracious donation of God. Since the foundations of metaphysical “convenience” (convenientia) have been undermined by the Barthian dialectic of the analogia fidei, it appears that we are left with a picture in which the created world may be described without a “natural” orientation to the divine.

I would then argue that is within this Barthian ambience that we are to understand something of Benjamin’s constructive endeavours also. Benjamin’s messianism is formed via a materialist theology that seeks to ground a theory of redemptive and revolutionary action. This imaginary is characterised by his idiosyncratic account of the interrelation between the mythical violence of law-making-and-preservation as opposed to the divine violence of law-destruction. However, this position creates a diastasis between metaphysics and law, which leads to a pathological configuration of the political, implying a kind of escapism from the labours of negotiation as well as mediation. For Benjamin, the advent of the messianic can only come through the antinomian suspension or destruction of the law, which undermines the work of the political as this takes place within the historical middle, where we all find ourselves. It is this shared aporia within the work of Barth and Benjamin that I am concerned with in this essay.

II

Barth’s account of revelation as a form of eschatological actualism is established within Barthian scholarship.27 According to the much-recounted story of Barth’s intellectual development, in the wake of his break with the liberal Protestantism of his teachers, Barth developed an actualistic account of divine revelation which sought to undermine any creaturely security of grounding theological knowledge within the created order. Beginning particularly with the second edition of his commentary on Romans, Barth accentuated the dialectical account of divine revelation that he had inherited from his teacher Wilhelm Herrmann.28 Since God alone is the subject and object of God’s self-revealing act, creation has no inherent capacity to disclose or anticipate the saving action of God in Jesus Christ.

God is known by God, and only by God; because even as an action undertaken and performed by man, knowledge of God is objectively and subjectively both instituted by God Himself and led to its end by Him; because God the Father and the Son by the Holy Spirit is its primary and proper subject and object. If it is also a human undertaking and action, if as such it also arrives at its goal, this is in consequence of the fact that God does not wish to know Himself without Himself giving us a part in this event in the grace of His revelation.29

This act is grounded in God’s sovereignty and freedom,30 which is always already an expression of God’s electing love and saving grace in Jesus Christ.31 Hereby, any account that would ascribe to created being revelational qualities in itself is radically undercut. Creaturely existence as such cannot give us any saving knowledge of God, and therefore no knowledge which is theologically interesting. Any analogical correspondence between created and uncreated being is grammatically ordered by a prior dialectical opposition of the finite and the infinite, the dialectic of sin and grace, veiling and unveiling. For only as creatures are made to correspond to God’s saving action through the gift of faith, via the objective and subjective knowledge of God in Christ and the Spirit, can there be any analogical relation between God and creatures (analogia fidei), and it is only within “the analogia fidei [that] there is … a similarity between God and man.”32 For in divine revelation, as he says, “our existence is confronted by something outside and over-against it.”33

For Barth, the correspondence of God and humanity is grounded in the concrete event of God’s reconciling act in the God-man Jesus.34 There is no god hidden or revealed that can be known in se apart from this actualisation in time of God’s eternal Triune Being, the One who is revealed to be always and unreservedly pro nobis.35 Famously, Barth believes that this actualistic account centred on the Christ-event destabilises any ontological order or doctrine of participation that would ground the analogia entis; for Barth, “the analogy of the analogatum and therefore of the creature is proper to the creature only externally in the existence and form of its relationship to the analogans, that is, to God, but internally it is proper only to this analogans as such.”36 For Barth, there is no analogy between God and creature that belongs to the creature by virtue of being created. It is only within the gracious event of God’s revelation that the human being is made to correspond to God, so that any analogy between God and creatures can only be “extrinsic” (analogia attributionis extrinsecae). There can be no analogy that belongs “inwardly” to the creature, but only externally through grace; to his mind, the analogy of being denies the proper dialectical relation between the divine veiling and unveiling as this occurs within trinitarian disclosure, which for Barth is only given in divine action and the gift of faith. It is not given with “the co-existence of the Creator and the creature” for such truthful knowledge of God can only occur through a kind of additional action whereby our concepts “become true by the special decision of God in His revelation and therefore on the way from His unveiling to His veiling.”37

It is language like this that has led some to ascribe a “decisionism” to Barth’s account of revelation. Michael Menke-Peitzmeyer has argued that that Barth’s theology of divine election is influenced by a philosophy of “decisionism (Decizionismus) that struggles to show how God’s self-determination is already an expression of God’s essence, and furthermore that it has difficulties with articulating an orthodox notion of the relation between grace and nature, thereby leading to a “positivism of revelation” (“Offenbarungspositivismus”).38 Rowan Williams, in his critical appreciation of Barth, remarks how Barth’s account makes it difficult to conceive how revelation is actually appropriated and learned.39 By this Williams means that revelation cannot be extracted from or simply opposed to those ordinary material and temporal processes in which cognitional objects are discovered and fabricated. Contingency and time-taking – in other words, historicity – are of essence to any religious gnoseology, since there is no knowledge of divinity which can circumvent finitude. We cannot, so to speak, step out of our skin in anticipation of any unmediated access to truth: all knowledge, within varying degrees of intensity, remains partial and perspectival.40 For Williams, this is an epistemological correlate of our createdness, that we are as human beings limited. But to assert our createdness does not, for Williams, only have the critical function of holding-in-check totalizing claims, but also a positive one to the degree that it postulates an orientation of creation towards the good, since all that exists and persists does so within the infinite act of God. Materiality, as manifest in the embodiments of nature, time, culture, and language, may exhibit a creative participation in and reception of God’s self-disclosure, while maintaining that revelation always implies an authorization that exceeds the generative potential of culture.41 It is here that Williams expresses his disagreements with Barth. According to him, there is in Barth too much of a revelational theology that holds divine disclosure to have little actual connection to the kind of cosmos we inhabit, as if revelation could be territorialized to a mythical “outside” (“a simple model of divine utterance – an otherworldly agent providing otherwise inaccessible information,” as Williams puts it).42 It is precisely this “simple model of divine utterance” which concerns Williams, forming a part of a critique that goes back at least to the late seventies.

In his most sustained exposition, published in 1979,43 Williams criticised what he saw as Barth’s overly “linear” concept of revelation, and the manner in which it fails to account for the unavoidable accretions of time and the diversity of human responses. For Barth, according to his well-known distinction, the Word becomes manifest within the “unity-in-plurality” of revelation, scripture, and proclamation,44 in harmony with God’s freedom to be for human beings within “their particular and concrete circumstances,” becoming a Word that enters into their “manifold particularities.”45 But despite these conceits, Williams wonders whether Barth is not still too enamoured with an idea of divine revelation and not with “the concrete structure of revelation as it has occurred and is in fact occurring.”46 He worries about “the awkwardness of a scheme which so divorces the substance of revelation from its historical form, in making the latter’s relation to the former basically external,” in which revelation ultimately “demands … historical predicates,” even as “there is nothing in these predicates which in any sense makes them ‘appropriate’ to their content.” The way in which creaturely mediation may be fitting is not addressed sufficiently. On the Barthian schema, according to Williams, “the revealing Word’s secularity and historicity” becomes merely accidental. This means, if one follows the logic, that “History, and the world as such, are wholly foreign to God: he can act through, but not in, the historical qua historical.”47 Furthermore, the particularity of different models of revelation are subjected to an homogenization that is aligned to a singular, predetermined idea of self-disclosure as a dialectic of veiling and unveiling, which, as Williams and others suggest, is a basically Hegelian approach.48 Now one could protest against this, suggesting that Barth’s reformulation of the doctrine of election, in which God’s aboriginal self-determination for humanity within Christ, does include in the revelatory event “the circumstantial historical event ‘with and under’ which the revelation occurs.” However, even Barth’s emphasis on the Christ event as the site of revelation does not address “the fact that the existence of Jesus of Nazareth is historically contingent, a point in the interrelated, interdependent system of worldly events, from which it can in no way be abstracted.” In Williams’ gnomic compression, the “election of Jesus logically entails the election of his ‘world.’”49

This does not mean that Barth’s concept of revelation is irredeemable for Williams (at least at this stage of his development). Already then, before it was suggested by the likes of Eberhard Jüngel and Bruce McCormack, Williams sensed a shift in Barth’s thinking after Church Dogmatics II/2 and especially IV/1.50 Consequent upon Barth’s revisions of the doctrine of the Trinity, most notably in the section entitled “The Way of the Son into the Far Country,” Williams argued that Barth’s theology, at least in its implicit structure, expressed a greater openness to the reality of contingency and human responsiveness as being included within the Trinity, and thus within the content of revelation as well: “as soon as the history of Jesus, in a fairly simple sense, the detail of a human life and death, is allowed a place of genuine salvific import, the unity, clarity, and security of a scheme based upon a single and compelling act or event of revelation is put in question.”51 It places in doubt a model of revelation based on God’s self-interpretation,52 in which the Incarnation is introduced primarily to solve the epistemological issue of human ignorance.53

And yet, both here and elsewhere,54 Williams remains worried about how the Holy Spirit is invoked within this structure, since within the Barthian schema it appears that pneumatic agency becomes reduced to a confirmation within us of God’s uninhibited self-interpretation.55 There is still too much in Barth of an idea of the Spirit as “the seal of epistemological security,”56 and a sense overall that the Dogmatics, as a purported pure science of Christian doctrine, in turn, remains too methodologically entangled with “the search for certainty.”57 Connected to this, Williams thinks, is that there is “little of a doctrine of creation” implicit within Barth’s theological hermeneutics: rather what we have is a hyper-Protestantism in which the “Fall has, it seems, obliterated any theological significance in the created order,” leaving “no room for a conception of free, creative, and distinctive human response”58, instead proposing an “infinite gulf between the created and the uncreated” against any metaphysical amelioration within something like the analogia entis.59

What can be deducted at this point is that while this essay does express moments of juvenilia that would not persist throughout Williams’ career – as seen in his deference to a Moltmann’s doctrine of passibility,60 as well as interpretative sleights of hand that are more Balthasarian than Barthian61 – it appears that the essence of his critique has not abated. This is most clearly seen in his essay “Trinity and Revelation,” originally published in 1986.62 For the sake of space and time, we cannot enter the details of his rich argument, except to say that at this juncture he still thought that Barth’s concept of revelation continued to think of “the absolute isolation of the revelatory event from any historical condition (it occurs in, but not as part of history),” and because of this “the question about ‘learning about learning’ is again circumvented. Revelation interrupts the uncertainties of history with a summons to absolute knowledge, God’s knowledge, and interpretation of himself.”63 This in turn is connected to Barth’s doctrine of creation and his rejection of the analogy of being. It is this factor, which renders lucid Williams’ earlier concerns about how, within Barth’s theology, immanence remains purely accidental to revelation, and that there is nothing inherently appropriate between material form and intellectual content64 – a detail, which if true, implies a subtle voluntarism in Barthian thought, since if revelation remains a purely “external” appropriation, with created nature having no created affinity to God’s self-disclosure, then the election of the medium remains somewhat arbitrary. Moreover, the deeper risk of this tendency, a seen in a recent essay of Williams,65 is that it creates a univocal dualism between created and infinite being,66 so that there remains “a stark dilemma as to the relation of God to creation,” whose correlate is “a picture of divine and finite action as simply mutually exclusive,” one that eventuates in “a univocal understanding of finite and infinite being, two modes of action that are in competition for one logical space.”67 And if this deduction is correct, then it may suggest a metaphysics that implicitly endorses an ontologised secularity, since now “Being” can be considered on its own terms, in a manner external to divinity. Here, in conformity with scholastic notions of concursus and the duplex ordo,68 infinite and finite causality are conceived as acting within the same metaphysical plane of reality, while remaining radically and non-paradoxically distinct. Even though Barthian accounts of divine sovereignty and Christology would seem to resist any objective “secularity,” this aspect of his metaphysic suggests a spectre of pure nature that exists “outside” of God’s infinite act-of-being, one that is constructed precisely to assert an utterly extraneous intervention of divine grace. Such is done ostensibly to uphold a Reformed demolition of intellectual “works-righteousness” and “natural theology.” But overall, for Williams, this creates significant conceptual problems and suggests that the historical mediation of revelation might be tied to a subtle voluntarism in Barth’s general approach, one that falls short in showing how finitude and history may exhibit a certain fittingness for divine self-disclosure. One of the outgrowths of this basically extrinsicist model, as others like Oliver Keenan have pointed out,69 is a tendency to adopt violent metaphorization in his account of God’s revelational and redemptive action, as when Barth says that “in the Word of the grace of God there is attack to the extent that in it there is proclaimed and indicated a decisive, radical and universal alteration”70 or his description of the coming of the new man in Christ as “a new reality diametrically opposed to the old man who is now outmoded and removed.”71 In this light, Keenan wonders whether

Barth can sustain such a powerful emphasis on divine interruption without inscribing a competitive account of created and uncreated agency, in which revelation invokes an ontological “violence” by which the stronger overrides the weaker. The emphasis on the interruptive character of revelation risks a sacralization of violence, with political consequences almost inverse to those that Barth identified with Liberal Protestantism: within an irreducibly dialectical framework there is a tendency to identify the destruction of creaturely structures with the work of the divine “no” that overrides human language, sacralising revolt, but without offering a compensatory positive affirmation.72

It is this “sacralization of violence” and “the destruction of creaturely structures” that I also believe is present in the writings of Walter Benjamin, whose theorizations of divine violence find resonance with Barth’s reflections, as I hope to show in the next section. Once more, it is difficult to assert direct influence of Barth on Benjamin, but there is enough subterranean influence (as suggested earlier) to warrant such comparison.

III

Walter Benjamin was influenced through multifarious streams of thought, including Kabbalistic Gnosticism, Jewish Messianism, and Brechtian Marxism; he related theology to critical thought through a liquidation of theology, a dissolving of its traditional formulations to recalibrate its potency for historical materialism.73 His theology forms an attempt to think metaphysics together with experience via the category of “transience,”74 in which contingency, decay, and the eternal passing-away of nature are emblematic of existence in general, and become “allegorical”75 or “messianic”76 insofar as these rhythms of profane transience are redemptively integrated with “happiness” (Glück). Transience is redemptive for Benjamin when the eternal rhythm of undoing or Untergang (downfall) is joined to the experience of happiness and fulfilment.77 His metaphysical understanding of history is thus opposed to transcendental accounts of “history” and “progress” which absorb the history of contingency, suffering, and marginalisation into its immanent justification. Following his famous parable, Benjamin’s materialist theology is “hunchbacked”; it is one which is “small and ugly and has to keep out of sight,” a dwarf that animates the puppet of historical materialism and acts from the underside of history.78 It is a weak theology, or as Werner Hamacher puts it, it is “an anatheology of the weak possibility of theology.”79 Benjamin’s thought is indeed pervaded by theological themes, as clearly admitted in an often-cited fragment of the Passagenwerk.80 His concept of the messianic is placed within his broader materialist theology that animates his account of revolutionary action, in which the historical memory of suffering comes together within the dialectical image of the present as this “flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again,” here in deference once more to his metaphysics of transience.81 Hereby the prophetic agent, in his words, “perceives the contours of the future in the fading light of the past as it sinks before him into the night of times.”82 The dialectical imaging of the past and the present opens the possibility of Jetztzeit (“Now-Time”), or “a secret index,”83 whereby the messianic moment (Augenblick) renders the present malleable to revolutionary intervention, creating a redemptive rupture within the “progress” of history.84 For him, the Messiah does not come at the end of a historical development, but rather breaks “history” off (“Der Messias bricht die Geschichte ab; der Messias tritt nicht am Ende einer Entwicklung auf”).85 Against a historicism which projects a world of facts and causal necessity, it is precisely those moments of redemptive potential, of contingent possibilities that may be missed, that grounds historicity for Benjamin. History is not established in what really happened, but rather via “appropriating a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”86 As long as history continues, the awareness of the unactualized possibilities of “happiness,” as this occurs through a reflection on what might have been, will energise our “envy” in the present and open every moment to the possibility of messianic action. Through a materialisation of Lurianic ideas of the tikkûn, Benjamin imagines this messianic action as being recollected within a redemptive “constellation” of historical moments as these form part of a knowledge of the single moment, a dialectical image whereby the past becomes a part of “the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity.”87

One of the tenors of Benjamin’s materialist theology is its radically antinomian edge, whereby redemption occurs through a release from the mythical law of being. The divine cannot appear in the world precisely because of its fallenness and transience and can only manifest itself through those moments of messianic singularity and disruption. For Benjamin, in the words of Bielik-Robson, “the divine incompatibility with the laws of this world” implies that there is no connection or intimation within the fallen world of anything like the divine. It is a “world without revelation” in which “transcendence … does not communicate with immanence.”88 It is completely devoid of traces of divinity, except for those apertures of possibility which are only grasped within a fleeting moment of Jetztzeit, the Now of Messianic Time. Such is grasped within a weak messianic power89 as a recognition of the historical potential of what might have been, as these moments are arranged in a Lurianic constellation of redemptive scintilla, creating an “image of the past which threatens to disappear in every present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image.”90 However, the laws of this world dictate, for Benjamin, a “messianic vision of extreme irreconciliation” in which “To be transcendent is to be against the law.”91 The only possibility of salvation is to hasten transience, which Benjamin diversely exemplifies through imagery such as pulling the emergency brake of history,92 “playing along with the ‘rhythms of transience’,”93 or through enacting a bloodless divine violence that overcomes the mythical violence of law, a violence whose modern paradigm is “the proletarian general strike [that] sets itself the sole task of destroying state power.”94 The paradigm of divine violence contra mythical violence is described by Benjamin in the following way:

Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythic violence is confronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects. If mythic violence is law-making, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.95

It is these images of bipolar extremity that will be subjected to Gillian Rose’s critique. Rose was not a theologian by profession or confession: she was a Jewish philosopher, who while having deep interest in theological debate, nonetheless maintained a commitment to the Judaic and rabbinic traditions – despite her last-minute conversion to the Church of England. But even in her late period, the philosophical approach she espoused remained formally “secular” in its assumptions and did not express a thoroughgoing adherence to either Judaism or Christianity. Rather, at her core, she remained a negative Hegelian, concerned with the aporias of mediation rather than their resolution. She was a theorist of the middle, of the always-already entangled beginnings in which we find ourselves, “middles” which is expressed within those interlaced relations of theoretical and practical reason, reflective and determining judgements, the interplay between transcendence and immanence, and religion and secularity. If one could summarise her contribution, it would be her Hegelian proposal of a “speculative identity of form and history,”96 of the “speculative identity and non-identity of law and metaphysics.”97 For Rose, “speculative” philosophy, as opposed to “dialectical” thought, does not to attempt to resolve tensions within a more eminent synthesis – a spurious reading of Hegel, she argues – but rather holds them together within the idea of an Absolute.98 It does not try to escape or remove these polarities, but precisely tries to think and reflect upon their compossibility in the here and now. And it is the refusal to engage this mutual implicatedness that constitutes Rose’s biggest gripe with continental theory. Against this trend, her guiding project, as expressed in the “Preface” to The Broken Middle, is to usher a return to the logos rather than the pathos of the concept.99 Much like the Freudian return of the repressed, she argues that postmodern theory rejects “metaphysics” only to have it return within pathological configurations.100 It constitutes a failure to think through the co-implication of metaphysics and law, the universal and particular, identity and difference, and how these aporias – as already intimated by Aristotle – are never quite resolved.101 For her, metaphysics, concerned the experience of perplexity and the aporetic, that is “the path from the law of the concept to the peculiarity of each instance,” which for her is connected to ethics and the way we discover ourselves “being at a loss yet exploring different routes, different ways towards good enough justice, which recognises the intrinsic and contingent limitations in its exercise.”102

In her most expansive statement,103 Rose places Benjamin within his own genealogy of modernity in the Ursprung der deutschen Trauerspiel: here, “the unintended psychological and political consequences of Protestant Innerlichkeit” culminate in a “hypertrophy of inner life” and an “atrophy of political participation,” a “combination of anxiety and ruthlessness” that “amounts to a ‘combination of inner and outer violence’.” Benjamin is concerned here with tracing the transition from the Protestant to Baroque imaginary, that is, from a “worldly asceticism to worldly aestheticism, from worldly renunciation to worldly ornamentation,”104 a migration which is correlated by Benjamin with “the transition from the end of politics in the spirit of capitalism to aestheticized politics in the spirit of Fascism”: “While the Protestant ethic leads to the withering of the interest in salvation without loss of the anxiety of salvation, the Baroque ethic evinces a created and creaturely world with the aspiration but without the promise of redemption.” The “Baroque Ethic” signifies the “mournfulness of creaturely being, set in language and deserted by God, experiences the world as excess of signification without salvation, which is world aestheticization, not truth as beauty but ornamentation without truth.”105 In short, “Melancholy is the logical outcome of Protestantism,” and Benjamin argues that “the antinomic relation to the everyday of Lutheranism” in which – due to the doctrine of justification by faith alone and the disavowal of meritorious works –produces a world “deprived of all value,” since human actions do not contribute to transcendent significance.106 This explains the Baroque aesthetic of allegory in which the destruction and lassitude of nature become “emblematic,” projecting a voided universe whose ornamentation is the “torso, rune, ruin, fragment, monument, piled up with no goal, significance without realization, sacrament or salvation.”107 Translated into Judaism, this anxiety is concentrated within “the Messianic fixation,” “a disgrace or disorder in the relation to revelation” – not a “Christian mournfulness or melancholy” but “the Judaic state of desertion,” the agunah.108 Such disgrace of revelation is literally a dis-grace, “a revelation which stamps the creature and the creaturely world of nature as forever lacking grace, that is, with no hope of redemption.”109 For Rose, Benjamin is that “taxonomist of sadness” par excellence, whose proclivities are for those thinkers and poets whose “mourning is not completed” but “remains aberrated not inaugurated.”110 In Rose’s lexicon, the distinction between “aberrated” and “inaugurated” is that the former “mourning cannot work: it remains melancholia; it remains aberrated not inaugurated; pathos of the concept in the place of its logos. Instead of producing a work, this self-inhibited mourning produces a play, the Trauerspiel, the interminable mourning play and lament, of post-modernity.”111 Such aberrated mourning, like the Trauerspiel and Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, imagines a grief that has become “rigid and petrified,” a melancholia that will not “soften and weep” in its refusal of the work of the mourning (Durcharbeitung).112 However, this constitutes only one side of the binary since melancholia is “counterposed … to the Divine, which is characterized by pure violence and pure language,” an agency who “eschews law or mediation or representation.”113 It is a model, in short, that refuses “the middle” of historical mediation and immanence.

For Benjamin, all law is irredeemably fallen – “the birthing of law is absolute loss”114 – and the “only complete response to the violence of law-making and law-preserving, the violence in law, would be divine, the law in violence, which is only conceivable as God’s anarchy,”115 or differently stated, a “subjective, fallen, melancholy judgement [that] can only be overthrown by the expiation of bloodless violence of a new, divine immediacy.”116 Benjamin’s God is not a God of love but rather of law-abolishing violence; such a Baroque and sublime rupture is opposed to “any notion of the rule of law, the law of constitution or representative institutions.”117 In laconic phraseology, Rose argues that “Benjamin knew no day of atonement, no Yom Kippur” but rather “the hard heart of judgement” that “does not melt into grief, into forgiveness, or into atonement.”118 And if there is no atonement or no grace, then according to Rose what we are left with is a “baroque melancholia immersed in the world of soulless and unredeemed bodies.”

For if all human law is sheer violence, if there is no positive or symbolic law to be acknowledged – the law that decrees the absence of the other, the necessity of relinquishing the dead one, returning from devastating inner grief to the law of the everyday and of relationships, old and new, with those who live – then there can be no work, no exploring of the legacy of ambivalence, working through the contradictory emotions aroused by bereavement. Instead, the remains of the dead one will be incorporated into the soul of the one who cannot mourn and will manifest themselves in some all too physical symptom, the allegory of incomplete mourning in its desolate hyper-reality.119

Assuming this reading is reliable overall, what is extractable from this is that Benjamin, like Barth, favours the supremacy of transcendence without the middle, leading to a violent suspension of historical mediation. Whereas Barth, according to Williams, seemed to avoid mediation via an overly-linear account of revelation that fails to sufficiently include our material practices of learning, Benjamin, according to Rose, similarly refuses those mediating institutions of law in a name of apocalyptic, law-abolishing violence. Its topology of being denies any affinity between historical mediation and lawfulness from the speculative intuition of transcendence. This is not to say that Barth and Benjamin are by-any-means exchangeable, nor does it imply that Williams and Rose are united at every point. Williams, for instance, is more willing to encompass representation and mediation within an ever-deepening and aggrandizing ontology, as can be seen in his Clark120 and Gifford Lectures.121 Rose, however, at least in her mature work still remains suspicious of Christian notions of revelation, as far as this suggested the appearance and remainder of truth outside of the aporias of the middle.122 She held to a more agnostic, post-ontological approach, since “ontology” symbolized for her the Heideggerian “being-towards-death,” the unrepresentable event of Being within its trajectory towards death. It is this kind of bad infinity which she ascribes to post-structuralist thought and is also why she is wary of any ontology exceeding representation. If true, this means that Rose’s position is not finally compatible with an analogical metaphysics, at least of the kind that Williams espouses.123 However, one should also nuance Rose’s Judaic emphasis on law with her ruminations on the agon of charity, which she signifies for her that work or “conditionality” that is “the only unconditionality of human love,” since for her, “there is no love without power.”124 Consequently, one senses for Rose that Benjamin’s materialist theology evinces a violence-without-love, while for Rose political theology concerns the violence-within-love. For Rose, Benjamin’s messianism ultimately implies a severing of justice from the workings and time-taking of love. Moreover, an inaugurated mourning – in distinction from a melancholic fixation on the happiness that might-have-been – gestures towards the futural comic and euphoric outcomes of “the ineluctable discrepancy between our worthy intentions and the ever-surprising outcomes of our actions.”125 In other words, one might say that for Benjamin the guiding genre is a Baroque deployment of Trauerspiel, while for Rose it is the Hegelian analogue of La divina commedia.

IV

The extremities of Barth and Benjamin are not fully exchangeable: clearly Benjamin, in some ways, was more stringent and dualistic than Barth. Nevertheless, I still think it is beneficial to make some gestures as to why Barth and Benjamin may have evidenced mirrored striations in their thinking. As hinted at earlier, the extremity of Barth and Benjamin’s prose regarding the immanent abjectivity the world was informed by an ambience of quasi-apocalyptic rupture. The post-War developments and carnivalesque horrors that were to follow had a part to play in this tendency. However, what I have been calling an ontologised secularity, hinted at in Barth, and more explicitly espoused by Benjamin, needs to be placed within a broader context of a Protestant disenchantment of the cosmos, its extraneous accounts of grace, and the canonical divisions that come into play: reason and revelation, nature and grace, and so on. Benjamin’s division of transcendence and transience, as well as Barth’s dialectical theology of “extrinsic” revelation I believe form a part of this legacy. What I think is lacking in both of these visions is a theological metaphysic that is able to correlate the domains of historicity and transcendence analogically or speculatively; both Barth and Benjamin work within a largely “interventionist” framework where in order for the divine to act in history the creaturely predicates of limitation, particularity, and history are “suspended.” The supernatural addition of divine grace (in the case of Barth) or violence (in the case of Benjamin) suggests a negation of the middle of history and the creaturely.

A shared history of metaphysical assumptions possibly lies at the root of these respective visions. This may be linked to the general point, made by the likes of Bruno Latour, that one of the conceits of modernity is the construction of a dualism between nature and culture, and an obfuscation of the real persistence of mediation and hybridity – including concepts like transcendence and immanence.126 One might also speculate on the influence of developments within Baroque metaphysics regarding independent and neutral science of ontology,127 and how this in turn impacted both Benjamin and Barth, especially in the way that the medieval philosophies of John Duns Scotus and Francisco Suárez had influenced Protestant Scholasticism, and how this in turn affected Benjamin and Barth, via Gottfried Leibniz (as regards Benjamin128) and possibly Immanuel Kant as well (as regards Barth129). This tradition laid the groundwork for a formal separation of general and special metaphysics, rather than their “paradoxical” interpenetration within the High Medieval period.130 Consequently, I believe this ontological dialectic between nature and supernature in Barth and Benjamin creates an invidious, hardened aporia between transcendence and immanence, even as it has differing receptions in their work.

For Barth, it is arranged as a divine transcendentalism in which the natural order is interrupted from “outside” through God’s self-revelation and election, thus suggesting an oppositional dialectic between creation and grace. The metaphors then adopted for this relation, as a consequence, often take on somewhat violent imagery; moreover, this prior dialectical relation of nature and grace struggles to account for the way that historical form relates to revelatory content. Nature has no revelatory capacity as such, and only has so through an intervening grace. This picture overall is refracted, I believe, through a post-Scotist construal of the relation between theology and metaphysics and is the intellectual foundation of “natural theology”131 – which of course Barth rejects, while maintaining several of its prior assumptions. Such a vision fails to sufficiently account for more orthodox beliefs concerning divine revelation, namely that, in the words of Johannes Hoff, “God’s supernatural revelation is nothing other than to recover the natural destination of his creation,”132 in which to be transformed by the supernatural is the most natural orientation possible. In Benjamin, somewhat differently, this aporetic reception becomes an “inverted metaphysics,”133 a procedure that “turns to metaphysics precisely at the point where metaphysics has lost its home in theology,” leading to “the secularization of metaphysics within an imminent, self-enclosed world.” Under the inspiration of a Leibnizian infinite calculus and monadology, this takes on “the rapacious character of an infinite method” which is “brought to bear on the smallest, most peripheral traces of experience, with no guarantee of their ultimate grounding in God.”134 Putting things differently, while Barth’s revelational theology is characterised by a divine breaking-into history, Benjamin’s materialist theology concerns a breaking-through history, the rupture of the mythical law of being through a divine violence of law-breaking. Consequently, Barth’s dialectical theology of revelation has difficulty conceptually relating transcendence to immanence, thus conjecturing a variety of secularised immanence, while Benjamin’s relating of immanence to transcendence ultimately secularises transcendence, only to have it return under the modality of a violent suspension of profane order. Overall, it implies certain conceptual problems that form part of a shared heritage between these two thinkers that I believe needs to be supplemented, more generally by an analogical and “paradoxical” metaphysic that supplements any dialectical correlation of created and uncreated being. Hereby, the interplay of negation and affirmation, difference and identity, is embraced by an ever-greater difference-in-identity, whose ultimate premise, according to Christian doctrine, is the being of the Trinity. In this regard, one may need to return and “resource” earlier Christian thinkers who sought to correlate the concept of dialectic (difference, contrariety, negation) with analogy (proportionality, attribution, participation) within their trinitarian metaphysic; here I am thinking of Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa, in which the “aporia” of “being” and “existents” is grounded in the prior, eternal self-differentiation of the Holy Trinity, in contrast to the hardened aporias of secular modernity – a larger project which can only be gestured towards here.

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