Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom

283 Pages·2009·9.847 MB·English

by  Ernst Bloch, J. T. Swann (trans.)

ATHEISM IN CHRISTIANITY
The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom
ERNST BLOCH
With an introduction by Peter Thompson
Translated by J. T. Swann
V
VERSO
London ■ New York
First published by Herder and Herder, New York 1972
© Herder and Herder 1972
Introduction © Peter Thompson
This new edition published by Verso 2009
© Vetso 2009
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Contents
Introduction by Peter Thompson ix
ROUND THE CORNER
1. Against the Goad 1
2. Glance at Slave-Talk 2
SCANDAL AND FOLLY
3. No Longer So Submissive 5
4. From Sighing to Murmuring 5
5. Renunciation and the Semi-Disillusioned 7
6. The Strange Ubiquity of the Bible and Its Language 10
7. Whose Bible? 13
PROMETHEUS A MYTH TOO
8. From Murmuring to Contention 17
9. “The Lord Has Said that He Would Dwell in Thick Darkness” 18
10. Contrary Principles in the Bible:
Creation and Apocalypse 19
11. Discernment of Myths 24
12. Marxism and Religion 46
13. Bible Criticism as Detective Work 57
EXODUS IN THE CONCEPT OF YAHWEH
14. An Unheard-of Saying of Jesus’: Departure-in-Full 71
vi ATHEISM IN CHRISTIANITY
15. Early Traces of the Break-Away:
First Thoughts about the Serpent 72
16. Breakthrough in the Theocratic Concept ofYahweh:
First Thoughts about the Exodus-Light (Ex. 13. 21) 76
17. Nazirites and Prophets—Yahweh’s Exodus into
Universal Moral Providence; Pre-Vision 82
18. The Bounds of Patience 92
AUT CAESAR AUT CHRISTUS?
19. How Restless Men Are 109
20. Mildness and the “Light of His Fury” (William Blake) 110
21. Jesus’ Exodus into Yahweh 111
22. Christ’s Secret Name Is Son of Man, Not Son of God;
The “Mystery of the Kingdom” 130
23. The Diminishing Greatness of the Son of Man—
The “Smallness” of the Kingdom 140
24. The Title “Son of Man” Is Eschatological,
the Later Tide “Kyrios-Christos” Wholly Cultic 145
25. The Total Christocentricity ofjohn 17,
the “Key to the Gospel” 150
26. Paul’s So-Called Patience of the Cross.
His Appeal to Resurrection and Life 155
27. Resurrection, Ascension, and Parousia:
Wish-Mysterium in Spite of Sacrifical Death 162
28. Second Thoughts about the Serpent: The Ophites 167
29. Second Thoughts about the Exodus-Light:
Marcion’s Gospel of an Alien God
Without This World 173
AUT LOGOS AUT COSMOS?
30. The Call Before the Door 181
31. Orpheus 181
32. Exodus and Cosmos in the Stoics and in Gnosticism 183
33. Astral-Myth in the Bible 186
34. Logos-Myth Again: Man and Spirit,
Feuerbach, Christian Mysticism 192
CONTENTS vii
35. Further Consequences of the Logos-Myth: Pentecost:
Veni Creator Spiritus, Not Nature But Kingdom 199
36. This-Worldliness in the Astral-Myth 208
37. The Strange, Stricdy Non-Parallel Breakthrough of
Both Man-Centered and Materialistic Systems Into
the “Divine Transcendence,” Which They Replace 213
SOURCES OF LIFE-FORCE
38. The Only Safe Handhold: Openness 219
39. True Enlightenment Is Neither Trivial Nor Shallow 221
40. Enlightenment and Atheism Do Not Overthrow
the “Satanic” with the God-Hypostasis 225
41. Moral, and Final, Sources of Life-Force 233
42. Sources of Possible Death-Force: Departure 240
43. Hunger, “Something in a Dream,”
“God of Hope, ” Thing-For-Us 248
44. Conclusion: Marx and the End of Alienation 251
To think is to step over, to overstep.
The best thing about religion is that it makes for heretics.
Religion is re-ligio, binding back. It binds its adherents back,
first and foremost, to a mythical God of the Beginning, a
Creator-God, So, rightly understood, adherence to the Exodus-
figure called “I will be what I will be,” and to the Christianity
of the Son of Man and of the Eschaton, is no longer religion.
Only an atheist can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be
a good atheist.
What is decisive: to transcend without transcendence.
Dies septimus nos ipsi erimus.
—Augustine
Ernst Bloch and
the Quantum Mechanics of Hope
Dies septimus nos ipsi erimus1
These are times when competing caliphates—both religious and
secular—dominate the intellectual and political realms. We are
passing through one such era at present, and the evidence of this is
manifold. The rise of popular and radical Islam on the one hand and
the rediscovery of Christian evangelism on the other; the flight into
New Age spirituality or New Atheist rationalism; the slow beating
pulse of the Church of England, quickened by debates on sexuality
and gender; against a background of unbelief, the re-emergence
of faith in China, either in the form of traditional Confucianism,
Taoism or Buddhism, or the new Christians and the Falun Gong.
The list is endless and points to new levels of contradiction and
tension in the ideological make-up of the world today. What
all of these things show, however, is that religion as both debate
and way of life has not crumbled in the face of an apparendy
inexorable rationalist, scientific, modernising Enlightenment and
the globalisation of the market economy, but retains a potency and
strength which remains far in excess of its ability to explain.
If the current economic crisis and the profligate years which
preceded and gave rise to it have shown us anything, it is that the
1 We ourselves shall be that seventh day.
x INTRODUCTION
relationship between the social relations of production and the way
we understand those relations remain as strained and as inseparable
as ever. In the forum of religious belief, therefore, theists and atheists
battle it out, each convinced they are on the back foot, each fighting
against what they see as a combined tide of muddle-headedness,
dogmatism and irrationality, threatening to overwhelm us with
theocracies, technocracies, sterile democracies, faithless scientism,
value-free liberality and fundamentalist regimes and movements.
We seem to be trapped in a dualistic but essentially static way of
thinking about the relationship between religion and science. As
Derrida and Vattimo put it, “We are constantly trying to think
the interconnectedness, albeit otherwise, of knowledge and faith,
technoscience and religious belief, calculation and the sacrosanct.
In the process, however, we have not ceased to encounter the
alliance, holy or not, of the calculable and the incalculable.”2
Put another way, in words which Bloch might have used, the'
dualistic sterility of the “either/or” position disables our critical
faculties and our ability to recognise that the contradictions
within a situation carry within them the potential solution of that
situation and that the surplus of one carries over into the corpus
of the other. The way to overcome the limitations of religion is
not simply to rush at them head on in the hope that exposure
to reason will destroy them, but to find within religion its own
insuperable dualistic contradictions and to sublate them into the
next stage of the dialectic. Bloch was thus concerned to search
for the materialist base within the metaphysical apprehension of
the religious worldview. As he puts it, “The question here is not
of giving the death-blow to fantasy as such, but of destroying and
saving the myth in a single dialectical process, by shedding light
upon it. What is really swept away is real superstition.”3
In Atheism and Christianity, Bloch sees biblical exegesis and his
new reading of the Bible and of the Judaeo-Christian tradition
as a whole as “detective work,” whose purpose is to unmask
2 Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Religion, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 54.
3 This volume, henceforward denoted AC, 37.
INTRODUCTION xi
and illuminate the contradictions within the religious message.4
Although, as Vincent Geoghegan points out,5 this is Bloch’s only
full book-length study of Christianity itself, the understanding of
religion in its social role is the central concern of all of his work,
from the expressionist The Spirit of Utopia (1918) and Thomas
Miinzer as Theologian of the Revolution (1921)ito the more considered
Atheism in Christianity (1968) and Expefimentum Mundi (1975).
However, it would be a mistake to break his work down into late
and early Bloch. Certainly there are differences of approach in the
two periods; but there is no clear break. For example, we find in
his very earliest writings (1907) the opening lines "The Am is as
yet unmediated, not there. That is why we have to start there. It is
precisely the Thing of its Something which is missing (genau das
Was seines Etwas fehlt)”6; and Experimentum Mundi, almost seventy
years later, opens with “I am. But I do not yet possess myself. Thus
we must become. Therefore we do not know what we are, and
too much is full of Something which is missing.”7
In Bloch, however, there is no cut between these two insights,
merely a transition in which the concerns of the former are
complemented by and taken up into those of the latter. It is the
search for the “Something” of human existence which drives us
on, Bloch maintains, and we will find it wherever we can. If we
can detect what it is which attracts us to the texts and traditions
and ideas in which we seek that something, then we might gpt
close to finding it in ourselves. If we simply reject those traditions
and texts in an excess of hyper-rationalism or dogmatic materialism
then, Bloch says, we miss the point of human culture. Using our
own detective skills we can see in these bookends of the twentieth
4 AC, 62.
5 Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, London: R.oudedge, 1996, 83.
6 Ernst Bloch, Tmienz-Latenz-Utopie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978,53.1 include
the original German here as Was of an Elwas, which alludes to the essence/existence {was/
doss) debate in ScheUing and Aristotle and is therefore very poorly translated as iking, which
implies an essence lather than a process. There is of course also the allusion to Brecht's
contention from Mttltagonny that Etwasf ehlt, das treibt (something is missing which drives us
on). I am indebted to Johan Siebets for this as well as other important points. I would also
like to thank Fiances Daly and Karen Leeder for their insights and corrections.
7 Ernst Bloch, Experirnenlum Munii, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975, 12.
xii INTRODUCTION
century, as well as of Bloch’s creative life, the same concerns with
warden (becoming) and with the nature of humanity’s relationship
to both its external and internal worlds. In the first we have a young
man’s obsession with his own life force, heavily influenced still by
the Nietzscheanism of the time, and in the second—in which the
we replaces the I—there comes a recognition that the transition
to real enlightenment comes not from within the individual but
through his interactions with others.
This work, Atheism in Christianity, stands between those two
bookends and expresses this transition through its engagement
with the role of atheism not against but within Christianity, in a
way similar to Bloch’s own recognition that the individual must
stand not against but within society and humanity. This transition
is expressed clearly in the opening lines of the original German
text that precede “Against the Goad” but which, unfortunately,
were not included in this translation from 1972. However, in their
entirety, the missing words read as follows:
ONLY STILLNESS
Someone goes into himself. He thinks that will heal him.
But if he stays in there too long no one will notice. He
will end up just trampling around on himself.
With the inclusion of these missing lines we can make a litde
more sense of the following two short sections, in which Bloch
is talking precisely about the way we must move out of ourselves
by throwing off the muzzles that are placed upon us by religious
and secular authority, and combine with others to challenge the
muzzlers. Using the highly biblical language for which he was
famous, Bloch says that ‘‘one should not muzzle the ox that treads
the com, however necessary the drivers may find it to do so, both
inwardly and outwardly. Especially when the ox has ceased to be