54 Readings

dealings with it. for the pres~IlXJ<:>U!l [the m01phe] ofthis world [tou cosmou] i.~
passing away. I want you to be free from anxieties.

This means: under this time pressure, if tomorrow the whole palaver, the
entire swindle were going to be over-in that case there's qq,pg,!nS),tt,l!HY
r~y:<?JHSi_Rn! That's absolutely right, I would give the same advice. Demon-
st~~te obedience to state authority, pay taxes, don't do anything bad, don't
get involved in conflicts, because otherwise it'll get confused with some
revolutionary movement [Revoluzzer-Bewegung], which, of course, is how Effects. Paul and Modernity:
it happened. Because, after all, these people have no legitimation, as, for
instance, the Jews do, as a religio licita-weird as they were, they were nev-
Transfigurations of the Messianic
ertheless recognized and didn't have to participate in the cult of the em-
peror. But now here comes a subterranean society, a little bit Jewish, a lit-
de bit Gentile, nobody knows, what sort oflowlifes are these anyway-f?r
heaven's don't stand out!

r. Strangers in This World: Marcion

and the Consequences

We alllmow that the Gospels were written later, that Paul naturally
cannot refer to them. Nevertheless, I think that the dual commandment is
one of the deepest recollections of the congregation and that this is no small
matter, this extreme reduction, both in the famous passage of 1 Corinthians
13, in which love is glorified as an independent and unique force, and ex-
plicitly in Romans 13. I can imagine that this makes you uneasy.
'V_,hy, we must ask, i~!9.Y~9~tter, tha_nfaith _~nd hope? This is a funny
thing. It says there: menei [r Cor. 13:~3}, - ''f~ith:h'~p~-;'"-~'"~d love abide, these
three; and the greatest of these is love." Why is love the greatest? Because
we have such romantic views oflove? Nothing like that can be imputed to
Paul, of course, that sort of twelfth-century feeling in the m anner of Denis
de Rougement, Love in the Western World 1 The text is usually read in the
wrong way. They abide, these three. Why can hope abide? ~h~n one sees
f1:1<:~t9[ac~ t~eflreallyno .hope is needed. Then I can ~ee. As long as I'm
waiting for the bus, I'm hoping. W hen it arrives, I get on . And faith
means: l__&~.l~..!h~..9.~xJ~Jl.\O,~~- You know the passage: "We walk by faith, not
by sight.';-If you see you don't need to believe. And now, what about love?
What does love mean? {Forgive me for asking such dumb questions, but
after all it must be possible to figure this out.) ~ove .111e~I1s th~~ I il:m.got
s~~.S<:E~L,iJl,ffiY!i\(!f-just think of the Symposi~:.n=q_g~"-Eiih~;: Lf~::~,a
56 Effects
u~s:.d. T~e. gt~~r p~r,~QP,).Jl~ede~L I can't do without the other. The other
is not some sort of construction as it is in Husserl, so to speak, from the
self-ego blah blah blah blah, or Fichte's-Forgive me, all these things that
I have to teach all the time, I'm bringing it all up now. Instead, Love is the
admission of my need. Now it is of course possible to say: If the kingdom
of God arrives and everyone is resurrected, what do I need love for then?
Then we'll be perfect! T,:~e pojnt!!l aw.issh_ar,ey~n.inprft:;qiQ!,l..LWJ.-~
an I, but we are a we. Meaning that need consists in perfection itself Just
as it s~ys in Second Corinthians: "Your power is made perfect in your
weakness." Telos, perfection, is a notion from mysticism, from the language
of the Mysteries, but also from physics. And the punchline is: en astheneia,
"in weakness."
I don't want to get into the whole discussion between Harnack and
Reitzenstein, about whether this is a pagan formula that is transformed by
Paul-I find Reitzenstein's interpretation more interesting.2 In any case,
the ontology, even of redemption, brings in need and presupposes the
body of Christ, a commonality. We are not as the Gnostics see it-that is,
each perfect for himself-~';1-t rathe~ ~n_ o~ t;_es~!,_we _:_;~j.~g<;!b.erj_Q_~e
9.9~)' of.C::_hrist. This is Paul's critique of gnosis, of the Gnostic tendency,
which had already completely developed then, there's no doubt about that.
There are two ways out of Paul. One is the way out into the church
(Peter, the conformist tradition of Clement, the Pastoral letters) . But there
is another way our of Paul, which for me is the decisive one, that is, Mar-
cion. You know the book by Harnack, the one he worked on for fifty years,
with frightful theses at the end, that the whole Old Testament ought to be
thrown out of the Bible. Indeed, Marcion sees himself as a disciple of Paul,
in fact, as the real one. Presbyteros, he says of himself, and everything else
is a mistake. And so what is Marcion's point?3 That Jesus Christ's father
cannot be identical to the creator coeli et terrae. The Old Testament is per-
fectly all right and in good order [vollkommen in Ordnung], that is, liter-
ally: it begins with the creation of this world by the creator-and just look
at it, what a miserable creatio it is, in which there are so many mosquitoes
(I am quoting Marcion). But Jesus Christ's father is not at all identical with
him. Rather, he is the alien God, deus alienus, the other God. You can read
up on the entire vocabulary in Harnack.
It says in C ampenhausen- every student can read up on this- that
the formation of the Christian canon is an answer to the canon that Mar~
cion created out of one Gospel: Luke plus purged Pauline epistles. 4 Purged,
Paul and Modernity 57
of course, not on philological grounds, but because he says they have been
messed with, a harmonistic understand~ng has taken hold that has no jus-
tification. And then he hits upon something in Paul! Just think of Paul's
tremendous feal' of being cut off from God's love. Who cuts off here? This
creator-god must thus have demonic qualities: He is powerful-viewed,
that is, from a Pauline-Marcionite perspective-but he has no interest at
all in anything having to do with redemption. Redemption comes from
the father ofJesus Christ, who is the God who is unknown, who is beyond
the eons, a truly transcendent God. Not transcendent like the one there
with creation, that's small potatoes for Marcion. Creator of this world
means creator of all the world's flaws, which can be discerned in his works.
And that's the way he is: jealous, angry, in other words, everything that
Protestant theology later reproaches the Jewish Old Testament God for.
This Gnostic tendency begins in Paul, and my question was: Where
is that beginning? After all, he could easily have introduced the dual com-
mandment with a sentence in I Corinthians 13 and especially in Romans
13. It's not a problem at all. T here the horizons are open, and the Mar-
cionite church, which of course was the first church, is in there. What I was
after was to understand this, that it's not some shipowner from Pontus who
comes to Rome with lots of money and presents his Gospel, but someone
who has experienced tremendous ~urmoil. If you remember-of course,
we don't have this "Gospel," but know it only from the Antitheses- Mar-
cion says: 0 what wonder of all wonders that in spite of this world and its
God there is redemption! And there the father of Jesus C hrist is not the
creator of this world.
The church resisted this, because its life depended upon it. It pro-
duced a concordia, vetus testamentum et novum testamentum. This is why
the allegorical interpretation was vitally important for it and by no means
arbitrary. And this is where Marcion opposed the church, because he
wanted to make a clean sweep just as Harnack did in the nineteenth cen-
tury, poor guy. 5
It's easy to read the story of Paul one-sidedly and to overlook latent
elements within him. No one understood him, one might say, but then no
one completely misunderstood him either. It's not a question of showing,
pedantically, where Marcion diverges from Paul; that's easily done. The
question is where he does capture an intention-and he does take himself
to be Paul's true disciple. Are there any other indications of this (polemi-
cal) restriction of Paul? Look at the jubilation we discussed, Romans 8: sep-

Effects
arated from the love of God through Christ. God's love, which Paul p re-
s~mes, is very, very, far away. By powers of earthly and heavenly prove-
nance, or archon tic provenance, this love of God, of the father of Jesus
Christ, is interrupted. The ray does not get through. Were it not for the
fact that the face-I am thinking here of 2 Corinthians- the face (proso-
pon) of Christ is present, is there.
I hate to do this, but then again I am in a Protestant institute: Luther
is not such an easy matter either. There are passages by him that speak of
hatred against God, real hatred, if not in Christ.
The first book that I read about Luther in N ew York was not the one
by Erikson, 6 but the one by H arnack's father, Theodosius Harnack from
Dorpat.7 Two volumes, a really fat thing. I found it exciting. Because it was
pure M arcionism. This was a Luther for whom the two sides, law and
gospel, the crud God on the one hand and the loving Christ, were totally
torn apart and the thread between them was a very, very thin one, in the
interest of dogmatics. But the experiential richness of this work runs
counter to dogma. I take it that it's not an adventurous hypothesis to pre-
sume that Adolf von Harnack knew this book. The book that presents us
with Luther as Marcion through a nineteenth-century theologian.
All the father-of-Jesus-Christ passages (one day someone really ought
to examine them in detail, I can only give hints here) are of an ambivalent
nature. Sometimes one gets the sense of an addendum. That Christ is
enough, and then another addendum gets tacked on. (A philologic;;al study
with a high degree of sensitivity ought to be able to bear this out.) One can
also ask this another way: What did the father look like before Jesus.Christ
came along? After all, he was also there. And there it's safe to assume that
this latent element that then breaks through in Marcion and creates a
church- Marcion is not an individual with ideas, but someone who cre-
ates a church, that is, a church of ascetics. The fundamental precept of this
church is celibacy, and if there is to be matrimony, then no matrimonial in-
tercourse. That's why all the members have to be constantly recruited
anew. In other words, it's a church with a radical mission that can't rest on
its laurels as a people's church. The Marcionite church stretches from
North Africa, where it's m ixed with the Manichaean, all the way to China.
T his is no small thing! To think this thought through means, after all, to
starve the world by withholding the seed from it. It's a church that prac~
tices, or executes, the end of the world. In th is respect, the Catholic
Church has found compromises, in whatever way; that is, it has a class, the
monastic class with its martyrium cottidianum, and then later on also, from
1
Paul and Modemity ('";; })
....... -
the twelfth century on, marriage as a sacrament, which at first was out of
the question. A t first the institution of.marriage did not come up at all.
One has only to cite Paul. What it says there about marriage completely
goes against the grain of our modern, Protestant understanding. ~ever fall
head ove_,h_eds ..h~ P-J~_q:ibes, but there is o<:>Ihil1g positive there. I read a
s~~dy:;--~ce-there's no such thing as no such thing, they say-entitled
"Was Paul a Widower?" If we assume for a moment, as he himself de-
scribes it, that the Pharisee was the son of a Pharisee with certain tenden-
cies to zeal-within these circles not to marry is a very rare exception. Jhe
Jew-this you also know from the Rosenzweig text-<?.9!Y ~e<:;omesa full
~ffi~~.!L~ing.~3-Je~!JlL!~Eg1-ilXF-i~g~-~. Well, th<it.\!W.t;.Paul.
..... ----- I could go on. This is a bit of a tangent; but it's interesting. I was
once asked, in a college course in America, we had to do Old and New Tes~
tament there in a course in Humanities,8 by a student: What is really the
difference' between the Old and the New Testaments? Just imagine, you get
a question like that from a student (it was Michael Baermann, who today
is an important literary theorist), what are you supposed to answer? It was
clear to me that I couldn't feed h im the usual line. That was evident, that
he knew. He wanted to understand something, and I myself also want to
understand, since I was being asked. And then I thought of something. I
said to him: You know, ifl read the Old Testament in search of a leitmotif,
it is this: that a barren woman and ~(he~: ~sks, clamors for a child. Sarah,
Rebecca, :fG-ch~l, H;~~;:};,-the mother of Samuel, and there are others, too.
If you look at the New Testament, there are all kinds of miracles recounted
about Christ. He made lame people walk, made blind people see, raised
people from th~ dead, but one thing_is not reported: that a woman comes,
w.:hl.Ch would.be thep10st obvious thing, and throws herself before him or
tt:~rs at his robe and says: "I want a son!" T_h}~doesn't come up.
- This Michael Baermann was a clever fellow and said, But it does
happen. It happens with the birth of John the Baptist. A~d with this he
wanted to knock me out in front of the class. I say, Michael, you are mis-
talcen . This precisely proves my point. ~~-<:.~~!~-E~-~E.!~}.eforeChrist. That is
the transition from the Old to the N~w Testament. It's all th e more aston-
ishing that there is no such thing in the NewTestament. Later, in the me~
dievallegends of the saints, this miracle natmally_comes up again as a sign
of the saint, since at that point t_h_er~.~-!J-<J longer this atmo~phere of total
s~lf~centeredn~ss ::1nd the relating of salvation to the self. That is an early
Christian mentality ~hi~h ofcourseco~ld not endure.
I think this can be linked to our problem of the reduction of the dual

6o Effects
commandment and of the Gnostic elements in Paul. ~_r_e~~~o!)_ll<l.UlQ_rQ.le
i_Q_!he)'{ewTestament. Whoever tries to talk you into this, I !mow that the
theologians make a big deal out of it, but that leads nowhere, it's just not
there. There's-only on~ thing there: redemption. That's the concern. And
the que;t:i~n is-now I'm connecting these two themes-t~~ !hread ~hat
UJ?._l{~ ~re<J.~lC>l?-.. ~nd red~ll:J:P-~.io.n..ka very tqi11 one. A very, very thin one.
And it can sn~p: - ~d that is Marcion. There the thread has snapped. He
reads-and he knows how to read!- the father of]esus C hrist is not the
creator of heaven and earth. T he creator of heaven and earth says all he has
to say in the O ld Testament and is the righteous God and not the evil God.
And because he is righteous he is not the father of Jesus C hrist. Righteous-
ness in the sense in which it is radicalized by Marcion is to the death, is
haec cellula creatoris. This world is the cellula, the cell, of this creator, and
full of vermin.
Let me now read you Marcion's very first sentence in the book that
we don't have, but that is reconstructed by Harnack out of various sources.
Here the gospel is understood as a gift and is introduced as follows:
0 what wonder upon wonder, what amazement, and overpowering astonishment
it is, that people have not a thing to say about the gospel, that they do not think
about it, nor that it can be compared with anything at all!9
T hat is, certainly not with anything of this world. It is alien [das Fremde].
The alien God- an expression of Marcion's, deus alienus-meets with
something equally alien in us. When it is said that we are strangers
[Fremdlinge] on the earth, that must make some sort of sense. We are
strangers because we are connected with some other authority. "We are
strangers" is a worn-out Christian sentence. But consider for a moment the
potential that lies within it! In it lies a potential of reversion [ Umkehrung].
And now I will present to you Harnack's thesis-Harnack being, af-
ter all, the most important liberal theologian of the Wilhelmine epoch. He
was, you know, also president of the Kaiser W ilhelm Society; there was
nothing that he did not do. That Overbeck was deeply contemptuous of
him (and compiled a H arnack alphabet full of invectives, in which he ob-
served, among other things, that Harnack served Wilhelm II as the coiffeur
of his wig just like Eusebius once upon a time did for Constantine), that's
something he could afford to do, but not we.
The thesis that is to be argued in the following may be stated thus: the rejection of
the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the great church
Paul and Modernity 61
rightly avoided; to maintain it in the sixteenth century was a fate from which the
Reformation was not yet able to escape; bu.t to continue preserving it in Protes-
tantism since the nineteenth century as a canonical document is the consequence
of a religious and ecclesiastical crippling. H)
Now this is quite something, isn't it? This is the secret of German liberal
Protestantism, which then in 1933 couldn't pass the test. Because why
should they concern themselves with Old Testament stories of shepherds,
and of Jacob especially, this roundabout guy- our children should learn
this? What do they need that for, they're better offlearning Germanic leg-
ends and then having Jesus Christ as pure love! That was-by and
large-the mood the day that liberal Protestantism was put to the test,
and Harnack's pronouncement was .not the motor of the thing but its se-
cret driving force.
Harnack writes a history of the secret Marcionism in the church it-
self And then he sees deism, which, after all (you tell it to the daughter but
you mean the daughter-in-law), attacks the Old Testament in Englan~.
T his was a potentially explosive source that did explode, was absorbed m
turn by the Anglican Church, and then became influential by way of
Voltaire. Deism means the radical critique of the Old Testament using ex-
actly the same arguments. Yo~ -~:>~ ~??~v~~-~:~2~ ..r?. s.~~~dyhi_s_t()ry has
t~g~! l]se,<i~t?_ tl:_ef~~<~hat_the aEK~~.I!-tJ..Ee?~-~-~,Eh_~mselves. !J::~ -~r~~
~~!1ts__~_yv_3ys consist in_ the confr?rit~uo~ of J.~~~-~~~: ~nd love. ~d thats
also how Harnack sees tt, he sees tt as berng the log1cal conclusion of the
whole line of German Protestantism from Luther on-against which
Thomas Miintzer said to Luther that he forgets the bitter Christ, the
wrath. And the Calvinists, who rake recourse to the Old Testament because
they don\ describe this using the color of pure love, but in the darker col-
ors of predestination, of communality, of congregationalismll and not of
this individualistic element which is particular to Lutheran Protestantism.
To what degree is something you can argue about, but the fact that interi-
ority [Innerlichkeit] has something to do with Luther and P rotestantism,
the best place for you to read up on that is in Doctor Faustus, by Thomas
Mann.
And now you will ask me in return: You can find this in Paul, that's
one side emphasized by Marcion in the ingenuity of error. Paul, if you had
asked him, would have answered: Of course Christ and the father ofJesus
Christ are cut from the same cloth, namely the God of the Old Testament;
that's absolutely clear. You need only consider Romans 9- n, with its infi-

62 Effects
nite web of citations. Yes, but the point is not the web of citations, but the
foundation in experience, which is more ambivalent than the way it's gen-
erally told in courses in theology. I mean, I for one had to think all of that
up for myself. At least in Zurich during my student days you could find
out nothing about it.
2.The Zealots of the Absolute and of
Decision: Carl Schmitt and Karl Barth
Dialectical theology is only one of the ways-that is, the church
way-in which this problem is posed in the 1920s. It would be worth the
trouble to collect all the negative reviews of Karl Barth's Epistle to the Ro-
mans. (I think they actually are collected in a volume, but not enough of
them. I know the one by Ji.ilicher and then some other one that compares
it with Marcion.) I don't claim that it's all true, but there's never anything
that is completely false. You do see something there. The way I see it is that
with the First World War the synthesis of cultural Protestantism, in which
the German Jews participated just as much, broke down. This was, so to
speak, a joint firm (or rather, wanted to be- just think of H ermann Co-
hen's shameful tract on Germanism and judaism; one can only avert one's
face before this equation 12). But this firm had its major partner and ami-
nor partner who took himself to be a partner while the other one didn't
take him to be a partner at all.
The harmonistic understanding of world, God, and man, the long
Wilhelminian period of growth, the Grii.nderzeit, in which everything was
of course becoming bigger and better: all of that came to an abrupt end in
the trenches of France, M acedonia, and Russia. There are films about this,
and novels, which are very important. It's a riveting topic, howGe.rman
theglogy !~acre~ to th~ exp.!!.ti!!na: of th<.:_,first :'il{'or!4 War. The great pro-
fessors, ;,ho ofcourse at the time were like gods, Martin Rade and Adolf
von H arnack, lo~hrif)nfl.g~nce; tgew!wle th.iiJg !;.Qll~p~_d J!ke aJ::J.QU~~J}f
cards. (Referen~e to a letter from Rade to Barth, who doesn't countersign
i?.)ft"became apparent that they were nothing more than Prussian civil ser-
vants. The same goes for Hermann Cohen, lest you think that the minor
partner was any better.
In these trenches the <;:gl_tutal~Prot~~!il)J.t .Y1!1hs;~is.b~oke~.ap.sr_t. I only
have to theologically recall the conversation between H arnack and Barth,
........._, ____........
-....,..,...,.,.,......,~~~-:_....,-:...,.,.,.,,............
Paul and Modernity 63 ,.,
the conversation in Aarau, in which two worlds confronted each other and
did not understand each other at all. Harnack thought, here comes a new
pietism, neo-orthodoxy, etc. Harnack was astonished that there could be a
commentary s uch as Barth's on Romans, that something like this could be
written! Anyway, and with this astonishment he died~
The theological variant, then, was Karl Barth, and that is why this
thought is accessible to you. But this goes much further and has to be dif-
ferentiated. A radical ~ei.~i~fi'.tz?Jde..~QU.gai_p.st this. culty,ral-"P!9te~~a~t
mush about-which ~~e doesn't know: Is it the absolute? Is it not absolute?
f;~eltsch, for example, in hundreds of articles and books on historicism.
Against this there mounted a fronde, which, incidentally, went across reli-
gious affiliations. That was the powerful work by the <;;t~oli<:_ school-
teacher Feq:llnwd. Ebner> .Thrr %r4 and.J..ke SpiritualRealifies, which I urge
y~-;:; ~~-~~d in order to come to understand the years 1917-18. 13 The book
has an ironic introduction which includes the report by the editor at the
p ublishing house that had rejected the text. T his is great! The editor says:
This is a nervous breakdown; this is "the failure of nerves," 14 as Gilbert
15
Murray later said about late antiquity, when Christianity was emerging;
these are feverish meditations. With this argument the major publishing
house rejects the work; I think it was Braun-Muller, a large publisher in Vi-
enna. And this Ebner puts into his preface.
Also in this period belongs- let's leave aside for now the filiations,
there are always quarrels about these, which are what many Privatdozenten
occupy themselves with-Martin Bober's I and Thou, 16 which concludes
his mystical period and articulates the hard experience of the Thou. It's n~t
much, but it is something other than mysticism. He was never able to nd
himself of this mystical phase, because after all he was revered-I experi-
enced this in 1947 in Z urich, adult people behaving like children, that is
Ken~nyi and C. G. Jung, in their adulation of the Martin Buber of the Ec-
static Confissio ns, 17 which he himself had put a hundred miles behind him;
they didn't want to take note of the fact that he h ad become another man,
that is, one who preferred conducting Bible lessons to collecting the mys-
tical texts of the Finns or God knows what. They, however, saw only the
great mystic with the long beard, who came from the Orient.. Of course his
outward appearance seemed to indicate this, but it wasn't true, he h ad be-
come another man! He was in fact no longer the expressionist author who
earned his keep with a little H asidism and a little general mysticism, bur
had become a serious person.
(6~) Effects
And of course it was in the Macedonian trenches that this work of
frap,;z;B,.q.senz;weig was written. If one considers the density, the concen-
t~;tedness of this text, the constructive achievement and the linguistic sen-
sibility, then one can only wonder at how someone can write such a thing
on military postcards to his mother in Kassel, who then copies it from torn
scraps of paper so that it becomes a book- this is among the most aston-
ishing events.
And Benjamin was also a part of this, and so was Carl Schmitt. It was
he who was interested, after all, in attacking the law of the state [Staat-
srecht]18 in AnschUtz and in Kelsen, especially in Kelsen. Positivism cuts off
the fundamental problems and believes it can wield its concepts in a neu-
tral way. But this is a self-deception, according to Schmitt; he is interested
in a critique of secularization, not from a Barthian perspective, but from
the Catholic perspective. Schmitt is the Catholic variant, but this goes
across the denominations. The journal Irgendwo, which also positioned it-
self across the denominations, is a part of it, as well as the three volumes of
Kreatur, which were published by Buber, Viktor von Weizsacker, and the
Catholic JosefWittig from Silesia, a find of the highest order. Then there
is the Catholic Summa, that's where Hugo Ball begins to play a role, the
post-Dada Hugo Ball, who then becomes a strict Byzantinist. The Church
ofthe Saints, Byzantine Christianity, one of the really powerful works in the
German language; Critique ofthe German Intelligentsia, by Ball, is also a
part of this epoch. 19 A lot could be told about this.
You see what I am getting at: Karl Barth's second edition of the Ro-
mans commentary is one variant in the collapse of German cultural
Protestantism. About this edition Karl Barth says, No stone has stayed in
its place, and this he ascribes to the enigmatic Overbeck, as it says in the
preface.
And now listen to Carl Schmitt's Political Theology. The book begins
with a bang: "Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception [Aus-
nahmezustand]."20 This is a jurist writing, not a theologian. But this is no
praise of secularization, it exposes something. The law of the state doesn't
lgl,ow what it says because it operates with concepts wh~se g~~ti~d, wh~se
r9()t. r~!,ll~insc()n~ealedJr()!TI it. ~$c.a,yse of a!,llnesia,forg~tful11ess ..And
this is why castles are built that on the day of the t:r~e e~~rge~C:y c~llapse
into nothing.
And the irony is: This first appeared in the memorial volume for
Weber and is an implicit critique of Max Weber, of that obscure point one
Paul and Modernity 65
cannot make sense of about charisma. This is a bang, right? Starting from
this, he goes through the legalliteratun;, since he is of course a teacher of
law, and he knew how to demarcate his territory. T he end of this essay
reads:
It would be consequent rationalism to say that the exception proves nothing and
that only the normal can be an object of scientific interest. The exception con-
founds the unity and order of the rationalist scheme. One encounters not infre-
quently a similar argument in the positive theory of the state. T hus, to the ques-
tion of how to proceed in the absence of a budget law, Gerhard Anschutz replies
that this is not at all a legal question. "Here, there is not only a gap in the law, that
is, in the text of the constitution, but moreover in law as a whole, which can in no
way be filled by conceptual operations of legal scholarship [rechtswissenschaftliche
Begriffioperationen]. Here is where the law of the state stops." (21-22/I4-15)
This is what it says in the text of Anschutz, the greatest state law theorist
of that generation: "Here is where the law of the state [Staatsrecht] stops."
At the most decisive point, he says, it has nothing to say. Unbelievable!
Precisely a philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and
the extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree. T he exception
can be more important to it than the rule, not because of a romantic irony for the
paradoxical, but because of theseriousness of an insight that goes deeper than the
clear generalizations inferreqf~~I?} \Yhar ~rqi!1arilfl'ep~~ts ii:~elf. The exception is
~~re {~~e~~;~ing than the norm. The normal proves ~~thing; the exception proves
everything: It not only confirms the rule; rather, the rule exists only through the
exception. In the ex~eptiorlthe povver qf r ea1 .life br~a1cs t~ro!lg~ the crust of a
!UechanJ~rnthat has ?ec~ITiet~rpi<f by repetition. A Protestant the~logian who
d~~;;~;;stratecl the..;,ital int~!lsity possible in theological reflection even in the ninee
teenth centmy stated: "The exception explains the universal and itself. And if one
wants to study the universal correctly, one only needs to look around for a true ex-
ception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the universal itself. Eventu-
ally one grows weary of the incessant chatter about the universal; there are excepe
tions. If they cannot be explained, then the universal cannot be explained. either.
Generally, the difficulty is not noticed because one thinks the universal not with
passion but with a comfortable superficiality. T,h~,~~~,SEE!~n, however, ~h.ifl~.~.sh.e
universal with in tens~ p~~.~,i<m. " 2 '
...._. ....... < . . ..-:. ... . . :--:-:-:-:': .: ..
Who is this theologian of the nineteenth century?' JSierkegaardJ who of
course was also a lay theologian. You see the trajectory between Kierkegaar-
dian exception and Schmitt's definition of sovereignty. And you see what
liberal theory of law [Rechtslehre], in its greatest representatives Radbruch
 . .;:.. .
66 J:.Y.fects
and Anschutz, has to say about it. The same kind of appeal to Kierkegaard
happens at the same time in theology and in philosophy. I can't expound
here on how Heidegger wants to subvert this and wants to neutralize the
Christian in Kierkegaard; this is something the theologians have never un-
derstood, that Heidegger wanted to dig the grave of theology, but I can't
go into the Bultmannian naivetes today, who wanted to understand natu-
ral man using Heideggerian categories and Christian man using Pauline
categories. And Heidegger played along and managed in this way to make
the entire theological Marburg circle into his apostles, which was no small
matter. Heidegger, you see, was a tactician, a strategist of the highest order.
But that isn't my topic, this no longer concerns me.
Anyway, everything revolves around this Kierkegaard of the excep-
tion, whether in Rosenzweig, in Ebner, or in Schmitt. This is what they
have in common, And now on to the second point. Schmitt says in the
third chapter of Political Theology:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state [Staats!ehre] are secular-
ized theological concepts not only because of their historical development-in
which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for
example, the almighty God became the omnipotent lawgiver- but also because of
their systematic structure, recognition of which is necessary for a sociological con-
sideration of these concepts. The state of exception in jurisprudence is analogous
to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate
the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last cen-
turies. For the idea of the modern state based on the rule of law [Rechtsstaat] tri-
umphed together with deism, a theology and metaphysics that banished the mir-
acle from the world. This theology and metaphysics rejected not only the
transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about by direct
intervention, as is found in the idea of a miracle, but also the sovereign's direct in-
tervention in the valid legal order [Rechtsordnung]. The rationalism of the En-
lightenment rejected the exception in every form. Conservative writers of the
counterrevolution who were theists could thus attempt to support the personal
sovereignty of the monarch ideologically, with analogies from a theistic theology.
(49/36-37)
Secularization is thus not a positive concept for Schmitt. O n the contrary,
to him it is the devil. His objection is: The law of the state doesn't under-
stand itself. N ow Schmitt had an opponent who saw the problem and
chose a different way our. This is the secret adversary of Carl Schmitt,
Hans Kelsen. Hans Kelsen, who appointed him in Bonn. In fact-this I
add for those who want to pursue this problem-Kelsen was working on
Paul and Modernity
this very problem at the same time, that same year, 1922, in "God and
State," an essay in Logos.22 He too noticed that there are analogies between
theology and law, in the first place formal ones, and secondly psychoana-
lytic ones. That's the Viennese atmosph ere in r 920-22. For Kelsen the
analysis now takes on the function of theology, a function of revealing.
Schmitt, by contrast, insists that theology is always in the right as opposed
to these nebbich state law theorists, because there the concepts have mean-
ing and coherence, whereas in the law of the state they are confused.
It is a misunderstanding to impute to Schmitt any kind of taste for
synthesis. Nothing of the sort.
Germari Romantics possess an odd idea: everlasting conversation. Novalis and
Adam Muller feel at home with it; to them it constitutes the true realization of
their spirit. Catholic political philosophers sud1 as de Maistre, Bonald, and
Donoso Cortes- who are called Romantics in Germany because they were con-
servative or reactionary and idealized the conditions of the Middle Ages- would
have more likely considered everlasting conversation a product of a gmesomely
comic fantasy. F!::Jr what. c~a.racterized their counterrevolutionary political philos-
an
ophy w~~..the.r~GQgni~i<?n chat_rh~ir times demanded _a decisi?n. 'And-wii:fi en-
e.rgy.that rose to an extreme between' the rwo revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the no-
tion of decision becomes the center of their thinking. Wherever Catholic
philosophy of the nineteenth centu1y expressed itself on contemporary intellectual
matters, it expressed the idea in one form or another that there was now a great al-
ternative that no longer allowed for mediation. ~9}11.Sc!i~p, s~ysJC.a~~i~~Jl.tJ:~w
man, betwe~,!l _,Ca!h<>lj~i.ty and a~b,~ism.H Everyone formulates a great Either/Or,
;i;~;{g;;;of which sounds more like dictatorship than everlasting conversation.
(69/)3- 54)
And now, on page 78, near the end of the essay, at the point where Schmitt
presents his figW'ehead, Donoso Cortes, a high-ranking Spanish diplomat
who was active in Berlin and wh o then gave powerful speeches in the
Cortes during t he r848 revolution about the dictatorship of t he saber and
the dictatorship of the dagger. H e said, "If one had a choice between free-
dom and tyranny, who wouldn't choose freedom?! But that isn't the alter-
native! The alternative is between the dictatorship of the saber or the dic-
tatorship of the dagger, that is, between the dictatorship of the state or that
of the anarchists."
De Maistre and Donoso Cortes were incapable of such "organic" thinking. De
Maistre showed this by his total lack of understanding of Schelling's philosophy of
life;
,.,.,.,.,..,.,....,...,.,=..,.,.....--.--""''"'....
68 Effects
What he means is transitions, syntheses, all of that was idiocy as far as he
was concerned.
Donoso was gripped by horror when he was confronted directly with Hegelianism
in Berlin in 1849. Both were diplomats and politicians with much experience and
practice and had often enough concluded sensible compromises. But systematic
and metaphysical compromise was to them inconceivable. To suspend the decision
at the decisive point by denying chat there was even something to be decided upon
had to appear to them as a strange pantheistic confusion. T~hj~Ji\l~Ii!\.i~fll,.':Vit~.i_ts
inconsistencies and cornp_r()!Ilises, exists for Cortes only in that brief interim in
which it is p.ossible to ansy.'er the questi~~ ''Christ or.Barabb~?".with movea to
adjourn or t~ appoint (1. cqrnmissi()n ofinquiry.
That's Cortes in one of his great speeches in Spain.
Such a position is no accident but is founded in liberal metaphysics. The bour-
geoisie is the class of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and it arrives es-
pecially at these freedoms, not from some kind of arbitrary psychological and eco-
nomic condition, from thinking in terms of trade, or the like. (78- 79/6r-62)
So there you have it: there's no talk here whatsoever of a synthesis, of a
compromise, or of a positive assessment of secularizat ion, on the contrary.
Xou cannot move even one step forward ondeci4ing b,etween C~~~st. and
Barabbas by meanso(investigative commissions. With "class of discussion"
h~ grasps, not the wh~le, but ~-good pa1:t ofbourgeois, liberal cultural
Protestantism. Think ofBuber and H ammerskjold in the United Nations
building. Them just speaking to one another! ~ if the~~< ~'?:!~et~r,n_al con-
versation the path to peac~ vyere ah~~g.y_ gpened. T hat just completely
misses the real powers at work here.
Many decades later Schmitt gets a new opponent in the person of
Hans Blumenberg. Blumenberg's first book, The Legitimacy ofthe Modern
Age, is a piece of work. 24 It seems that around I950- 6o m odernity came
under pressure. People began to see the end of modernity, the beginning of
the Middle Ages; Guardini,25 Sedlmayr, The Lost Center, 26 shuffle the cards
however yolJ. want. Blumenberg discovers in the word "secularization" an
illegitimate title; he rejects this concept, he says it doesn't hold up. (I still
believe it does hold up.) Blumenberg's idea is that the same substance gets
passed on into other realms; it oozes, in the way that sludge oozes, from
theology into theory of law, from theory of law into literature. Blumenberg
wants to cut this thread methodically and says: The concept doesn't hold ...
And Schmitt- he is the only one-answered this and included in Politi-
.. :.
Paul and Modernity 69
cal Theology II an excursus on Blumenberg. 27 This discussion in its ti.irri <.Fi
prompted Blumenberg, in the second edition of his book, to answer ~
Schmitt.28 \
The upshot of this is: W hat Schmitt regards as realities, Blumenberg /i
regards as metaphors. Blumenberg, who among those who are alive is the
only p hilosopher in Germany who interests me, is a metaphorologist.
:=
Schmitt asks: What is behind the metaphors? And he shows that there is an
autism there, lurking behind the metaphors. An autos. You can read up on
that. Anyway, that is the meaning of secularization: it's an illegitimate cat-
egory. That something is secularized implies that it has been transferred
from a legitimate place to an illegitimate one.
I don't think theologically. I work with theological materials, but I
think in terms of intellectual history, of actual history. I ask after the polit-
ical potentials in the theological metaphors, just as Schmitt asks after the
theological potentials oflegal concepts. Nor do I think morally. I'm no Last
Judge. I dop't have Carl Schmitt before me on the stand, or Karl Barth on
the stand. I want to understand what is going on there. Just think of 1848.
The political potential ofKierkegaard had long been underestimated. The
first to point it out was Karl Lowith, when he underscored the sentence:
There are no longer rulers, no kings who cari still keep a rein on the
masses, the rabble; there remains only the image of the martyr. 29 What is
this but a political statement! T he rabble in 1848 can no longer be held in
check by means of figures of legitimacy, a king, a Kaiser, a general, but only
by a martyr, because it has gotten out of hand. That is a political statement.
Kodalle has written a very comprehensive essay on the political potential in
Kierkegaard. 30 There is an interest in saving the state from the chaotic pow-
ers of the party. 31 I can understand that there is an interest on the pan of a
jurist, of a state law theorist, to ~~ptu:re _the c~aos in forms, so that chaos
d~?.~sn't t~k~ ()Ver. And that's wh; t he calls thec~~-t~a:;~;:;[;(; i~p~lse. The re-
tainer [Aujhaftni. Once in an essay I called Schmitt the "apocalyptician of
counterrevolution." We knew that we were opponents to the death, but we
got along splend idly. We knew one thing: that we were speaking on the
same plane. And that was a very rare thing. T he hot-and-cold between
symbolism and keen analysis were significant, one had to jump up hill and
down dale, so to speak, to keep up.
The interest in the power of the state- you have that in Christianity
too, of course. One prays for the preservation of the state, since if, God for-
bid, it doesn't r~main, the~ ch,~<?s.-~ r~;U<:s.f9.9~~:o;, e~~-w~rse, th;K.ing-

Efficts
dom of God! That would be the worst thing that could happen. You can
find ali these passages assembled in BlumenbergY T hat's the interest in
the state.
Carl Schmitt told me that he was once shipped off, along with Ger-
man state officials and professors, H eidegger among them, by Goring in an
overnight train to Rome to a conversation with Mussolini. And that Mus-
solini told him, then, in 1934: "Save the state from the party!" Indignation
won't help one bit here.
3 Nihilism as World Politics and
Aestheticized Messianism: Walter Benjamin
and Theodor W Adorno
Romans 8 has its closest parallel, it seems to n;te, in a text that is sep-
arated from it by nearly nine hundred years, ~!~~~~r;j~_!!lin'~ _:']'}"leo
logico-Political Fragment. " This text is included in Itluminationen 33 and
placed, uncle~: f'al~e a~sumptions, after the "Theses on the Philosophy of
History" [1939-40], which is Benjamin's last work. Scholem, one of the ed-
itors, lmew it to be an early text; Adorno, the other editor, didn't know chis.
I tried to explain to Adorno why it is an early text, and he saw my point
because of the Bloch reference, so it was clear that it dates from around
1921. It is Benjamin's most compressed text, and I believe it to be polemi-
cal through and through. Not only in connection with our topic, but in
connection with the whole created being [Kreatur] and its transitory na-
ture. So Romans 5 resonates here as well.
Theologico-Political Fragment
Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he
alone redeems, completes, creates irs relation to the Messianic.
A very difficult sentence. AU right, first of all, one thing is clear: T here is a
Messiah. No shmontses like "the messianic," "the political," no neutraliza-
tion, but the Messiah. We have to be clear about this. Not that we are deal-
ing here with the C hristian Messiah, but it does say: the Messiah. No
cloudy Enlightenment or Romantic neutralization.
For this reason nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything
Messianic. Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic;
it cannot be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history. ..it. is not go.<!J.!)ut
.. -..-- ,
_,
-~-
.. -- -----....,...,~.,.....,.,~-=....,...,..,.,..,,..,.,..,,.,...
Paul and Modernity 71
Benjamin share1> Scholem's idea (which I'm not quite sure is correct) that
a?o~~~ptics !mows no transitions, but _posits between the Now.and -th~
T~en a time of catastrophe, a time ofsilence, <1, time of total destruction
a~~~~~-~ihilation. th1s would need to _be tested against the m any apoca-
lypses ofJewish and non-Jewish time.
Therefore the order of the profane cannot be built up on the idea of the Divine
Kingdom, and therefore theocracy has no political, but only a religious meaning.
To have denied with utmost vehemence the political significance of theocracy is
the cardinal merit of Bloch's Spirit of Utopia.
A word on this sentence. We lmow from letters that Benjamin went to
great lengths and wrote a review of Spirit ofUtopia, in its first edition, that
is, which he managed to get accepted by some journal published by Bruno
Cassirer. It got lost. That is, it hasn't turned up so far. Based on his own tes-
timony, the review's main point was that theocracy31 (which, by the way, is
for Bloch a totally negative concept; for him it means Ezra, ecclesial
regime): I really don't see where it even has a positive role in Bloch in Spirit
of Utopia and certainly not in that utopia picture-book The Principle of
Hope. It's not quite possible to recognize Benjamin's intention here, be-
cause the sentence is too enigmatic, too short. But it mustn't be misread! It
doesn't mean that concepts of theocracy aren't political. All the Christian
concepts I know are highly political and explosive, or become so at a cer-
tain moment. The witness, for example, the marryr-Romans 13 is also
linked to Revelation 13, the martyr rheology. T his ~eol()gy 9f martyrs is
also a part of Christianity. And there, eyeryt~ipg)~. public. And whoever
sneaks away, like the D ocetists and so on, gets pretty much denounced in
the epistles. So this is not nonpublic, but religious.
The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation
of this order to the Messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy of
history. It is the precondition of a mystical conception of history, containing a
problem that can be represented figuratively. If one arrow points to the goal to-
ward which the profane dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of Mes-
sianic intensity, then certainly the 9,!l.eg _of free .hUnl.\.IPity. Jor happiness runs
c~unterto the M~s_siaJfics;lirectiop; but just as a force can, through acting, increase
another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the profane order of the profane
assists the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The profane, therefore, although
not itself a category of the Kingdom, is a category, and indeed one of the most fit-
ting ones, of its quietest approach. For in happiness all that is earthly seeks its
. -----
end.
---- ~---"-"
downfall [ Untergang], and only in good fortune is its downfall destined to find it.
72 Efficts
l-!<!J?Piness and good fortune are here identified with passing away
[ Vergangnis], 'Yith downfall! '"(pis is just the opposite of Goethe's Faust, of
N_ierzsche's '~I desire wants eternity." This is said as a hard polemic against
all of that.
Benjamin sees the horror in this extension of Goethe, this longing for
sojourning [ Sehnsucht des Verweilens].
H ere you have the estrangement [ VerfremduniJ of Nietzsche's Eternal
Rerum. Certainly, he keeps corporeality as the order in which the profane
is fulfilled- after all, how else is it going to be fulfilled? But in downfall.
Whereas, admittedly, the immediate Messianic intensity of the heart, of the inner
individual human being, passes through misfortune, as suffering. To the spiritual
restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality, corresponds a worldly resti-
tution that leads to the eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally tran-
sitory [vergehend] worldly existence, transitory in its totality, in its spatial but also
in its temporal totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is
Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away [ ve1giingnis] .
To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task
of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism.
I contend that this concept of nihilism, as developed here by Benjamin, is
the guiding thread also of the hos me in Corinthians and Romans. The
world decays, the mmphe of this world has passed. H ere, the relationship
to the world is, as the young Benjamin understands it, world politics as ni-
hilism. And that is something that Nietzsche understood, that behind all
this there is a profound nihilism at work, that it is at work as world poli-
tics, toward the destruction of the Roman Empire.
This is why you can't make Lutheran deals with Romans 13, unless
you give up the entire frame, time is short and so on. Naturally, you can
then beat down peasants with that and whatever other crimes were com-
mitted, and are committed, under these auspices. But this has nothing to
do with Paul. Here we have a nihilistic view of the world, and concretely of
the Roman Empire. And that's something Nietzsche understood.
Benjamin- this is the astonishing parallel-has a Pauline notion of
creation; he sees thel;:tpo_r_pains of creation, the.futility of creation. All of
this is of course to be found in Roman~ 8": til_e groaning of the creature.
Open this text and read it out loud, and thenread Benjamin: Y~~r~-goi~g
to be amazed. Romans 8:r8. That's what Benjamin is talking about. That_ ~"
Ehsi..~-~e.c{cr~~-~ic:)flaS
.
decay, since it is without hope.
..... ---.- .-........ ....
, ,~ --.-,. ,... ...... --
Paul and Modernity 73
19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of [the glory of] the
children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will
but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 2.1 that the creation itself will
be set _free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of
the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in la-
bor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the
first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for [the full revelation of the]
adoption, the redemption of our body. 24 For [only] in hope we were saved. Now
hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope
for.what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. 26 Likewise the Spirit helps
us m our wealmess; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very
Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the
heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the
saints according to the will of God. 28 We know that all things work together for
good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. 29 For
those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his
Son, in order that he might be the ~_!stborn affi()[)gmany brethrell.
"Amon_g ~any brethren." One wouldn't call this "democratic," but in any
case thts IS not a lord, not an emperor. No, this is the anti-Caesar. Keep in
mind: this is written to Rome, where the aura is the cult of the emperors.
You notice that Paul has very peculiar worries about nature. Of course
they're not ecological worries. H e's never seen a tree in his life. He traveled
through the world just like Kafka- never described a tree, or mentioned
one. I know types like this in Jerusalem. He doesn't write: Dear Friend,
Nice weather h ere, or: Glorious nature all around me- he doesn't notice
any of that. Just find me one place in a Pauline letter where he lets up from
this passion , from this obsession, from this one theme that moves him.
None at all, it persists through and through. Look through Kafka's novels
some time, whether there is a tree there. Maybe one on which a dog pisses.
That is the only form in which a tree can even come up in The Castle or in
The Trial. Nature appears only as judgment, but this would take us too far ~/ () /
afield here.
And yet nature is a very important category-an eschatological cate-
gory. It groans, it sighs 1.mder the burden of decay and futility. What does
"groans" mean? There he explains that we too groan. You must imagine
prayer as something other than the singing in the Christian church; instead
there is screaming, groaning, and the heavens are stormy when people pray.
These are descriptions, these are experiences, these aren't theologoumena.
 74 Effects
This is how Paul experiences the praying congregation. ~ ~()lll~ .~~L~ .l.?t
about that, but this leads into a realm that mo4ernity dee1Il.~ ''priy;J,t~."
, Anyway, !see Benjamin as the exegete of the "nature" of Romans 8,
of decay, and of Romans r3, nihilism as world politics. And this is some-
thing that Nietzsche already saw, and Nietzsche resisted. Just as Celsus re-
sisted. You've got to look at this in Plotinus, these Christian-Gnostic
lowlifes, the people who don't do anything, no works, who thought they
were redeemed and had to do nothing in return-just like Plotinus in the
Enneads, just like Celsus according to Origen, that's Nietzsche today. Ex-
actly the same thing. I can't see any difference. I read Nietzsche and asked
myself: Can you find any argument that Celsus didn't already have? I
didn't find any. In principle, of course, what Celsus says is the same thing.
(I told a small publisher, Matthes & Seitz, Why don't you publish Celsus,
you'll be amazed! You can't publish Nietzsche, of course, since de Gruyter
has him, but Celsus is fair game! And then, suddenly, I see it, it's there. I
found that very funny. It sold splendidly, and now I can even check it!)
.: Benjamin differs from Paul, however, in the thought of the auton-
.:' omy of that which he calls here the profane. Then, several centuries after
Paul, we have the exegesis of the dogma of the two kingdoms. That, after
all, is the order of the profane and the order of the messianic. T his is, in
some form, what the dogma of the two kingdoms is about. And for Ben-
jamin it's important to note, first, that he maintains the Messiah and
doesn't let it drift into a neutrality, which isn't a matter of religious history
but an article of faith. Compared to this Bloch is just wishy-washy, and es-
pecially Adorno. Think of Minima MoraLia, the last part. There you can
tell the difference between substantial and as-if, and you can see how the
whole messianic thing becomes a comme si affair. That is a wonderful, but
finally empty, line, whereas for the young Benjamin it's substantial. It's
shaken by experiences. Of course I don't want to say that it's identical with
Paul in a strictly exegetical sense. I want to say: This is said out of the same
experience, and there are hints in the text that confirm this. These are ex-
periences that shake Paul through and through and that shake Benjamin
through and through after 1918, after the war. That's what I'm talking
about. This is not a matter of the ABCs of exegesis, but a question of op-
tics. If someone sums up their whole work on one page, this results in an
intensity that has no parallel in Benjamin's work. And now listen to the
aesthete's variant:
FilM/e.-The only philosophy that can be responsibly practiced in the face of de-
spair is d~e attempt to contemplate all things as they would prese11t
Paul and Modernity 75
from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the
~orld'by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. perspectives must
be fashioned that displaceand estrange the\yorld, reveal ittobe, with its ~ifts and
c~evl~~s, ~s indigent anc! d(st?r~~4~s irwillappear ~n~ day i~ the messianic light.
To gain such perspectives without arbitrariness or violence, entirely from felt con-
tact with its objects-this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all
things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because
consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its op-
posite. BLit it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a stand-
point removed, even though by a hair's breadth, from the magic circle of existence,
whereas we well know that anypossiblekno\ledge must not only be first wrested
fr()l11 '-"hatis, if it shall hollgood, but is also marked; for this very reason, by the
same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately
thought denies its conditionality for the salce of the unconditional, the more un-
consciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own im-
possibility it must at last comprehend for the salce of the possible. But beside the
demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of re-
demption itself hardly matters.35
There you have the aestheticization of the problem. Benjamin by contrast
begins with "the Messiah." These are the same ideas diverted into the aes-
thetic. Okay, they're wonderfully described, who else can write like this? At
the end of what is probably the most beautiful of Adorno's books, the Min-
ima Moralia from the 1950s-but a comme si, an as-if It hardly m atters
whether it's real. In Benjamin it does matter.
It is quite possible to understand Benjamin's text from the point of
view of Barth's Epistle to the Romans. This is dialectical theology outside the
Christian church. It is the dialectical theology of 1920, not in the church,
but as lay theology. Just like me, just like Schmitt, with more or less luck
and understanding. We don't h ave a church behind us, no bayonets, no
state stands behind it that collects the taxes. This is no small matter. (It's
different in America. 36) I just want to say: This is dialectical theology in its
first phase, I'm not talking now about dogmatics and so on, but in .its very
first phase in lay-theologese. And not aesthetic, as was later demonstrated
by Adorno at a very high level, unattainable at least for me. And yet it still
all hardly matters, and one goes for walks in Sils Maria, lives in the Wald-
hau~ and calls it a Protzbude;37 Luld.cs spoofed this as "The Abyss Luxury
Hotel"-and there we have the Frankfurt School in its first phase. Ben-
jamin is something different altogether. That's just a different substance.
That's what I wanted to point out.
Benjamin has a hardness similar to that of Karl Barth. There's noth-

76 Effects
ing there having to do with immanence. From that one gets nowhere. The
drawbridge comes from the other side. And whether you get fetched or
not, as Kafka describes it, is not up to you. One can take the elevators up
to the high-rises of spirituality-it won't help. Hence the clear break. You
can't get anything out of it. You have to be told from the other side that
you're liberated. To liberate yourself autonomously accordin~ to the Ge~
man Idealistmodel-well, when you get to be my age and m my condi-
tion, you just have to wonder that anyone besides professors takes such a
thing seriously. That's the aura of German Idealism and of German Classi-
cism. That's the Goethe religion. "For him whose striving . . . [ Wer immer
strebend . .. ] ,"38 what do I know. You can really lose your mind when you
read stuff like that. If you take things seriously. We can strive until the day
after tomorrow; if there's no drawbridge, what's the point? That's Karl
Barth, isn't it, this total disillusionment, and I don't see that you can get
past that. Neither with the ascendancies of German Idealis~ nor with the
depths, the path inward, Navalis, and so on. You can do It however you
want but there it ends: If God is God, then he can't be coaxed out of<>_~r
soul. There is a prius the~e~-;;;_ a .pri~ri. S.o~ethingpa~ to h~P.Rt:!lf~l)l!l: !he
other side; then we see, when our eyes are pierced open. Otherwise we see
nothing. Otherwise we ascend, w~ strive until the day after tomorrow.
Adorno can't let go. He's an aesthete, after all. Music then has a soteriolog-
ical role. Neither Benjamin nor Barth could go in for such naive notions.
4 Exodus from Biblical Religion: Friedrich Nietzsche
and Sigmund Freud
Now philosophy in modern times, if I see it correctly, has dealt with
Paul in two places in particular, indeed, in two decisive places. At the be-
ginning of the modern age and at the so-called end of the mo~ern a~~'
anyway post-Hegel. The first is Spinoza, in the '[ractatusTheologzco~Polttt
cus. This treatise is structured in an extraordinarily ambiguous and multi-
layered way, but it's still possible to tell a student what is intended in it. He
wants to secure the freedom of philosophy from theol(?gy anc! reyela~i()n.
Theology and revelation deal with man's obedience; ph~losor:l!y, by COJ1-
t~ast, is the realm of knowledge, which doesn't fall under the law of ob_e,~i
ence. Those are more or less the external directives. But in Spinoza there
~re two astonishing bridgeheads. Two figures from Scripture who are
.. - :- - ~ -, --:--:---- - ~ -
Paul and Modernity 77
philosophers are highlighted. It's not so surprising, perhaps, that he names
!9:9-g,Solol?on from the Old Testament. Solomon was considered wise; the
Book of Pr~verbs is linked to him, and the Book of Kohelet especially,
which, after all, has a tendency toward fatalism. The second figure empha-
sized by Spinoza is Paul. ~aul is his chief witness from Scripture for what is
his most important concern, that is, his own doctrine of predestination.
The d()ctri11e of pr~9-estinati?n in_Spinoza oscillates. One can read it
with a divine eye as divine predestination-that's the Deus perspective-
but one can also read it with the eye of Nature, as necessity. However you
look at it, whether as necessity fro~ the Nature p~t;~pecdve or as predesti-
nation from the Deus perspective, this is a law that cannot be turned
around, not by any prayer or any supplication or any magic. It is the legit-
imation of natural law. Spinoza speaks about the Apostle Paul repeatedly in
the highest, most reverential terms. (It would be a worthwhile project to
write something about the two bridgeheads of Scripture in Spinoza's doc-
trine, which of course officially insists on effecting the division of theology
and philos()phy, a tactic that can be justified with reference ro the Bible. 39)
At the end of the history of philosophy, if one draws the arc from
Ionia to Jena, as one of Rosenzweig's formulas goes-that is, from the Pre-
socratics to the Phenomenology ofSpirit-at the end of this arc, then, it
breaks open with the antiphilosophers. These are the ones who break
through, each in a different way, the completion of philosophy. They in-
clude Marx, on the one hand, who, like Themistocles, wanted to found a
new Athens; on the other hand, they include Kierkegaard as a critic of
Hegel, who thinks hard about the apostle-the genius of the apostle-but
I wasn't formed by him. In my youth I had difficulties in really under-
standing Kierkegaard; I didn't unde~stand this play of masks, and I don't
understand it to this day. Here I'm speaking about Nietzsche.
It's a funny thing about Nietzsche. Nietzsche, after all, is a thinker
with the richest of facets. You stumble from one perspective into the other,
and it requires an enormous intellectual effort to hold onto a red thread.
How long such a thread holds, then, and when it tears, is another question.
In Nietzsche there is a pervasive theme, the critique of rationality, of rai-
son, which is a history of decadence, of the Fall. Nietzsche wasn't sharp
enough to understand that ~n the Bible knowledge and the Fall are con-
nected, but be that as it may, he describes the history of this decadence in
n1ultiple ways and in multiple facets. And one can say, I think, without
taking things too far, that his appeal to the Presocratics, his appeal to the

78 Effects
tragic age of the Greeks, was an attempt to at least bring into view an al-
ternative to the Platonic-Christian and its sewage of modernity.
In the first phase of Nietzsche's critique we have the person to whom
he binds the critique, the person he has in mind, Socrates. (This, by the
way, is not only a Nietzschean theme; it is at the same time a theme of
Georges Sorel in France. Le Proces de Socrate [The Trial ofSocrates) sounds
similar notes. Sorel was accurately described by Lenin as muddle-headed.
But then he is the thinker who provided legitimation for both Commu-
nism and Fascism or, rather, both of them got legitimation from him.) This
is a theme against bourgeois rationality: against the city, the agora, against
this speech, this wanting-to-prove; this whole gesture of Socrates, as it is
traditionally viewed, rubs Nietzsche the wrong way. To this he wants to op-
pose the alternative of the tragic age of the Greeks.
But increasingly, as Nietzsche's investigations expand and reach a
kind of world-hi~torical perspective, he asks . why lordship [Hemchaft]
comes to decadence in the first place. How can the ruler become weak?
Doesn't he hold everything in his hand? And that's when Nietzsche in-
vents-typologically or as an ideal type, as Max Weber would say-the
type of the priest. The priest is the one who participates in lord-ship [Herr-
schaft] but who now emphasizes spiritualvalues. Not the blond beast, not
strength, not power, but one who instills something like sin, like con-
science. And this is where the bug gets into aristocratic history. If you
will-and one musn't underestimate the influence of such ideas-this in-
fluence extends to Adolf Hitle~'s saying that conscience is a Jewish inven-
tion. This is a sum-and, ifl may say so, an accurate sum-drawn from
Nietzschean thought, which is preserved in the table talk.
This is what Nietzsche meant: A type emerges here, the priest, and in
this type he discovered the first poison of resentment that infiltrates the so-
cial body. The type par excellence of the priest is Paul. Sometimes he
changes the names: Socrates, Paul, or Jesus, Paul; but in principle it is cer-
tain that starting with Daybreak the cannons are pointed at Paul. And
pointed in an invective manner that really gives one pause. I am a level-
headed reader. However big an author's mouth, or his pen, I ask after what
in Yiddish is called tachles. What does he say? Not what does he talk, but
what does he say? [Nicht was red' er, sondern was sagt er?] That's when it be-
came dear to me .that Nietzsche actually ties himself up in a very deep con-
tradiction. He has a criterion for the status of man. The status .<:>fa l!lan is
measured according to how he succeeds in _formin..g th~-~-;;j~~:~-9L<?.~hermen
;~~~rglob;u_ly
....... ........... ...... - .
and over centuries,_
.
in imposing
. . . .
upon
.
them
his own v~lues.
. .. ... ... . ______.,._.,......
.. . -:-~-: :" --" .............. _,____ ______ ------ --------
Patti and Modernity. 79
Now, I say, if this is the case: Who has determined the values of the Occi-
dent, in Nietzsche's own sense, more deeply than Paul? So he must be the
most important man. Because what did Nietzsche want? The transvalua-
tion of values. Well, so there we have someone who pulled.it ofF. And on
~his point, Nietzsche ~s very envious too. So he has to say: this guy pulled
lt off because the polson of resentment holds sway within him. Or he
called him chandala- he hunted down names from the whole ofliterature
including that of India. The pariah or the chandala or resentment becomes
genius here.
. That's why the. history of decadence, the history of modernity is a
h1story that can be pmned on Paul. Because if it is possible for these val-
~es .that Paul entrenched all over the world by the expansion of Chris-
uamty (not that they were adhered to, heavens no, that's not what's at is-
sue here, but that they are there in the first place, as a symbolon)-if it is
possible, then, for these values to be overcome, then I turn out to be the
greater lawgiver. This Nietzsche saw quite rightly: Either he fails, or a new
age begins wjth him. That is, a new age that begins with a new bible, that
is, with the parody of the Bible, Zarathustra, which of course is written in
Biblical style:- - - --
The p.roximi':f between Paul and Nietzsche is even greater. In Day-
break there 1s a section, number 68, "The First Christian," in which Nien-
sche tries to understand this problem of the suspension of the law as well
as what moves Paul. He mentions this on another occasion in section 84 on
the church's "farce with the Old Testament," which the church wants to
~ull out fr01~ under t~e feet of the Jews for the purpose of claiming it for
Itself as prehistory. I bnng these quotes to your attention because Nietzsche
has been my best teacher about Paul.
It's interesting that Spinoza-if I survey it correctly- mostly relied
on the Epistle to the Romans. Which also makes sense, since the docuine
of pre~estinatio~ is c~ntral to Romans. Nietzsche, in the invectives against
Paul, Ill the Antt-Chrzst (a strange work, already in its title; does Nietzsche
here proudly claim for himself the horror-tide of Christian faith? There's a
lot of evidence that he really meant this) refers to the Epistle to the
Corinthians. That was interesting for me as a professor of philosophy. The
passages that he thinks are positively insane,40 mentally crazy, the delusions
of this little people there and so on, you can check most of the quotes in
the Anti-Christ, which he comments on indignantly, these passages are
quotes from Corinthians.
__
I would say that there are two types of philosophy. (Excuse me for
~--.,---- ..... __.............,.
So Effects
being so dogmatic, but, after all, the discussio~ will com e to a_n end soon,
and I'll be able to get away.) There is the anuent type of phllosophy. In
essence lt goes lil<e th1s. Truth is difficult to attain, accessible
. only .. _a few,
___ _to .. _,
there Generally speaking that's-Plato and Artstotle. There ts
b. ur always ' . " . h Ch "
~other type of philosophy, I would call It havmg passed thoug . nst,
Hegel: Truth is very difficult to attain and has to p_as~ ~ough ~ o~_h1s~~ry,
., ft that.truth is for everyone. Marx a{ld Chnst taruty. The mdtgnatton
but a er ~- - d d
of Christianity about ancient philosoph~-justified, as f: r as I un ,erstan ~
this whole thing- centers on the question: What_ does for a few mea~.
If t ruth is at issue, and if salvation depends on this truth, of course that s
not an insignificant intensification rhar come~ in ':ith_ Ch~istianity (even
though in Plato rhere are already a few hints 111 thts dtrecnon), _then how
can it be for a few? It has to be for everyone. And here comes Nte~che at
the end of rhis arc from Ionia to Jena. At rhe en d of this history, ~h-tch _h as
now run irs course, the question arises once again: Once the Chr~suan tm-
pulse has been exhausted, wh at becomes of th~ humanum of man . ..;nd the
humanum of man is wisdom, sophian zetousm (r Cor. 1:22] . T hats what
makes the human human, otherwise he's just a rwo-legge~ creatu~e that
makes a lot of noise. To which N ietzsche now says: T he w tse man 1s. only
possible on the basis of other people's labor. H e_is dependent on letsure.
And leisure means that others must work for h1m, namely slavery. And
. h Yes , .that's worth itl. So that the
. wise man . may be there and
N tetzsc e says,
the humanum is present. For if the human ts not poss1ble, then humaruty
is a zoological species, nothing more. It does require a good bit of courage
to see this thesis through. . . . .1
And then Nietzsche asks himself: Who is the opponent of th.ts thes~s.
Where's the catch, who is spoiling this picture for me? And he hits, qmt e
hrl upon Paul. Absolutely correct. It's very clear, Paul's the one who ru-
n g y, . ki h' lf
ined his conception. Nietzsche nonces thts and lashes out, wor ~g 1mse
int of calling himself the Anti-Christ. Oh well, he dtd pay the
up to the Po h fi h'
price for that. You can't get away with saymg stuff l_tke t at or n~t m g.
With a man like Nietzsche words like that h ave a prtce. But I don t mean
that in the sense of some punishing justice.
By way of Nietzsche, I want to get ro Freu~~ but si~ce I am an ,oc~
sionalist, that is, since I like taking up opportumnes and 1mpulses, I d like
to refer to a text given to me by Enno Rudolph. T his is a post~umo~s
fragment by N ietzsche fro m the period of the writing of the A ntt-Chrtst.
Paul and M odernity 81
The "jesus" Tjpe .. .
Jesus the opposite ofa genius: he is an idiot. Feel his incapacity to comprehend a re-
ality: he circles around five, six conceptS; which he once heard and eventually un -
derstood, that is, wrongly understood- in these concepts he has his experience,
his world, his truth- the rest is foreign to him. He speal<s words such as are
needed by Everyman- he does not understand them as Everyman does; he un-
derstands only his five, six floating concepts. That the actual man-instincts- nor
only the sexual ones, but also those of doing battle, of p;id~; ~f heroism-n~ver
the
a~se in'film;"that hew;;.~ left bellirid and remained childlike 1;:; ; ge,of puberty:
clus be!Ongs-i:o the type of certain epilepsoid nemoses.
In his deepest instincts, Jesus is unheroic: He never fights: whoever sees something
like a hero in him, as does Renan, has vulgarized the type to the point of unrec-
ognizability.
Feel on the other hand his incapacity to comprehend something spiritual: in his
mouth, the word 'spirit' becomes a misunderstanding! This holy idiot h:lS not been
t~~=-~-~y~he slightest breath of scie11ce, good taste, spiritual cfud pline, logic; j~
as he has nor ,been touched by life.- Nature? Laws of nature?- No one revealed to
him d;;t th;r~-i;s~cl;-a rhing-~s nature. He knows only moral effects: signs of the
lowest and most absurd culture. One must keep this in mind: he is an idiot in the
midst of a very clever people. . . . Except that his disciples were not idiots- Paul
was certainly no idiot!-It is on this that the history of Christianity hinges.11
Nietzsche calls the new type that he wants "immoralists," "free spiri ts,"
.
etc.; there's a whole lexicon of terms. T h ose are the ones who come from
the sewage of C hristianity (for after all Christianity is no longer Christian,
but is a kind of mishmash in modernity) and make the hard attempt to re-
claim the ancien t values which have now been transvalued by C hristianity,
namely: what virtue means, what discipline [ZuchtJ means, and so on. The
decisive saying of Aristotle in this connection is that many people are slaves
physei, in body, but that others are free physei, as a matter of nature. This
cannot be acceptable to a Christian. A Ch ristian can accept that a person
lives in a state of slavery. T hat he can accep t. Just think of what Paul writes
about the escaped slave. One of the m ost wonderful letters of all, the most
nuanced, most personal letter, which he probably writes from Rome, but
I'm not sure about this. In any case, whether according to th e Old or the
New Testament, C hrist died for all, and there is no physei there, there is
neither slave nor free, neither Jew nor Greek, neither wom an nor man
(G al. 3:28). T his is the same Paul who then says: Woman should stay silent
 .. ......... ............___-
:~ -:~':"~ -::-- ~ "" ''
82 EYJects
in the congregation! We could have a conversation about how you arrive at
one from the other; in any case it is no gloss, as feminists today assume.
"I::he utopia is that they are ~ll one in Christ. And Nietzsche's utopia
is a differ~nt one. In fact, it is a different one in principle. If-and here I
am adopting a formulation of Max Weber's-the "Christian delusion,"
two thousand years of delusion, is now at an end, let us come back to the
primordial, and there we cannot shrink away from it. (This is in Science ~s
Vocation.) Weber is the sum of Nietzsche and Marx on the level of what 1s
today called sociology. The motifs of Nietzsche and the moti~s of Marx are
woven into each other by Weber in a particular way. W hat Nietzsche wants
is to get rid of this Christian optics. We still wear. Christian eyeglasses, ~
though they no longer fit the eyes. Our eyes see .dt~erently, an~ t~e Chn~
tian eyeglasses are artificial. And if they are artlnCial-and this mde~d ts
the critique of modernity-then :he question is: w~~.~:~e~~m~n bemgs
now beyond I:J~ipg t\Y()-legge~ ~~!1?:llsJh~tll)(!k~ .aJot gf.nolse. -~.~an
being:_ ~cc?r4.!!'lg__t_()~i~~C.~e, _~as<l g()aJ1 .Jl~ely,_,~()yvled.ge. l<E~:';'~dge
requi~es leisure. Leisure llleail~tha~ othersd~_ the work. ~hiS goes Without
s~y!"ng-Ior~Aristotle. Theri the problem was solved by saymg: Todar sla':'es
are no longer needed, instead we have technology. But Nietzsche saw
'tllrou~ghthls,'htsaw"thanechnologyis rio liberation, .but that w.hat mat-
ters is who is the master of technology. Who masters it? (There 1s a book
by Hug~ Fischer, which was ()rice a book about Lenin, but which was then
called, in the Biedermeier period after the second war: Who Are the Masters
ofThis World?4 2 Hugo Fischer was a philosopher of cult~re in Leip.zig, an
independent thinker who belonged marginally to the c1rcle of resistants.
The book is worth reading even in its falsified form. H e also wrote one of
the most important books on Nietzsche.43)
The question that I asked is: What are N ietzsche's countermodds?
What does he use to develop his history of decadence? And if I now look
through the whole of Nietzsche, whatever the edition, I think I can say that
a shift talces place from Socrates to Paul as the beginning of decadence, and
in particular the Platonic Socrates, almost with the suspicio~ that Plato was
still a man of the aristocracy, who was emasculated by this Socrates and
made into a philosopher: Nietzsche felt that Plato was broken by Socrates,
just as the greatest spirit, the genius of the sev~ntee~th ce~tury, Pascal, was
broken by Christianity. Whoever wants to 1magme th1s ~or themselv~s
should line up all the Pascal passages in Nietzsche and see w1th what fasci-
nation and horror he speaks about Pascal. f<;>E__t!:?re~e can disc~.r~~hat
Christianity makes of a f~~ypirit-mathematician~ geriius,' philosopher;
he pla~ed hi~ fa~ ab~;~-Descarres.
: ' . . " ............... .. ..--........
~ ~ -- - -
Paul and Modernity s3
I believe that this experience with Paul haunts Nietzsche all the wa
h d . . . y
tot e ~epest mnmac1es, even more than the Socratic danger. If Nietzsche
speaks, m the passage quoted, of the idiot, of the holy idiot, then that re-
flects the fact that he made this find in a bookstore in Nice, in French
transl~tion, .of the stories and confession of Dostoyevsky's U 1iderground
M~,- ill whtch he.could, so to speak, smell the early Christian mentality.
T~1s Is wha~ he wrttes to_P~ter Gast, to Brandes, his first interpreter. Georg
Bta~des wntes. back: Th1s IS a dreadful guy, this Dostoyevsky! Nietzsche is
not mterested ln how dreadful he is, but in the fact that for him the sum
total ~f early Christian mentality is bundled together in this Dostoyevsky.
I don t think he knew the whole Karamazov, although naturally the ex-
pr~ssion "holy idiot" reminds one of Alyosha. But these are questions of
philology. The most i.mportant writings about Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky
are those by the Russ1an ~~? he~~ov. I refer you to his powerful essay on
Dos~oye~sky in th~ b~ok !n }o~'s.IJ.~(ances. (I asked Suhrkamp in vain to re-
publish 1t; they d1dn t even locate the publisher.44) And then later even
more intensively in the book Athens and }erusalem,45 in which Shesrov
rather metaphysically exaggerates Nietzsche's history, bur nevertheless un-
dersta~ding something, when he shows that Nietzsche speaks of the Fall,
that decadence also has something to do with the fall of man and is not only
a story of downfall [ Ver-fall]. The Fall in the Biblical sense.
I would like to refer you also to the splendid passages-Catholica
non sunt legenda-in H ans Urs von Balthasar in the second volume of the
1pocalypse ofthe German Soul, of which only the first volume was repub-
lished under the tide Prometheus.46 By contrast, Jaspers, Nietzsche and
Christianity, I wouldn't even accept as a master's thesisY Ir brings together
a few passages, but the book misses the problematic. T he second person
whom one can learn something from is Bertram, this friend ofThomas
Mann, a Georgian, who compares Paul and Nierzsche.48 Of course this is
the Nordic Paul, not the Semitic, nasty, small one as he is described in the
Paul and Thelda novel in the New Testament apocrypha. No, the
Dtirerian, Nordified Paul. (By the way: one need not read the word
"Nordic" immediately as "Nazi"; it belongs to the Expressionist tradition.
;ou wi.ll ~nd it just as o~en in Ernst Bloch, The Spirit ofUtopia: "Gothic,"
Nordtc, etc. One cant know what would have happened with Ernst
Bloch if he hadn't been a Communist or a Jew, or both. After all, he him-
se~f thought about _thi~. in a very deep way in the book Heritage of Our
Ttmes. how the Nazis hiJacked authentic motifs, and people wanted to take
them away from them.49 For this was, after all, Benjamin's program: to tear
 ~- ..
,......,.,,..,...,,..,..---"''''"""'''""'
Paul and M odernity 85
s4 Effects
territory principle it is indeed the case that election is a gan1e of dice. .t}_n 4 >Ve-just
. otifs from the reactionaries; off mto enemy ' ~s the pot can't ask the potter- can't ask why he created us this way: . .
away the auth entlc m
to gather those motifs.) h nl h understood what is at issue All I want to say is that Nietzsche asked a really powerful question,
h h ps t e 0 y one w o one which hasn't been brought forward one step with decades of accom-
NieCtz.hsc_e_wa_s p:; the Now. He understood t~aril1 ~()th!?,~?l1Y~~~.
between nsttanlty ' ec ~ "Except that 1t [mar- modations- this has already been going on now for over a hundred years.
. . . artyrdom sunermg. .
;i~~Chnst wha~ IS at ISS~{: ts ~ife it~elf" 'says Nietzsche, "its eternal fernl- And it's a different matter whether one decides, in whatever way, to un-
tyrdom1 bas a d_ifferent sense. d ' . the will to annihilation. In derstand the cosmos as immanent and governed by laws, or whether one
b. s torment, estrucnon, thinks the miracle is possible, the exception. We are always dealing with
ity and recurrence, nng . . " ccering the 'crucified one
, h . . the Chnsttan case, sun' ' the same problem, whether we pursue it by way of Carl Schmitt or by way
the other case, t at ts, m b. . t this life a formula for its
' unts as an o Jecnon o ' of Nietzsche. The question is whether you think the exception is possi-
as the innocent one, co 1 d . The problem is that of the meaning of
condemnation. One may cone u e. . . . ' . God on the ble- and it is on the exception, after all, that the whole law of natural sci-
. h Christian or a tragtc 11l~:;tmng .... ence runs aground, because natural science is based on prognosis. (I'm not
suffenng, whet er a . Le the Corinthians is concerned
.. , hi . h t the Fast tter to . f the authority on this, nor am I so smpid as not to notice the metaphysical
cr~ss -:;-t s ts w ~ a su estion tha_!: o~ert;lease on.~~elf from tt, rom
wtth- a_curse: on ltfe, ." gg . .. ~ of life He will be eternally re- premises of this thinking.) The question is: j:l~~ ~E: ?~e .!h.LB.~ -~~9.\,ltuf
r D' us ___cut into pteces lsaprorruse_ ~.. fering in a transcendent-Christian way? Frop whatv:J.f1tageJ ()~t~i~e, c:;tn
l ne. 1onys . .-.. . "50
f t of the destruct!On. s;fferillg be describ~d? ~hence the right ~fGod on the cross as an ;ttack
born to return rom ou 'fi And verything in nineteenth-cen-
I find this absolutely m~gm ~e~~- . . e monistic universe there is no ~!:l.life, the right to this infinite repetition, which Nietzsche then works out
tuty modernity speaks for ~~:~~e: s~k:;~:g must b~. ~x~l~il1.~~:i~~n im- as.........a .....
- -
metaphysic;:al
... ...
image.
exodus, no transcendence. . lik . If you don;t totally lte to your- Nietzsche's jealousy with respect to Paul goes even further. He figures
_... f hi hether one es It or not. . that Paul had a great ecstatic experience: Damascus. I don't have time here
manent as on, w .. lf . d d ' l t c rms have a say over expen-
~-- . ks ourse an ont e ro f to prove this philologically ala lettre, but I could do it-that Nietzsche in-
self and play me on y fc. 1 bl I One must not delude onesel
h a eli ncu t pro em. . terprets his own experience) the myth of eternal return, as an ecstatic expe-
ences, t1len we ave d d I d n't know anyone who ts a
. 'f . h to be mo ern-an o rience, and that he does so with metaphors that he uses to describe the
about It t one wts es b d . Modernity is an immanent
d 't want to e mo ern. Damascus experience. The eternal return, the metaphysical key to under-
Protestant wh 0 oesn . wr izsacker and others, to smug-
d th few attempts, meanmg we . d standing everything, he calls it "ontological" (well, if you like you can use
cosmos. An e , d' cc type of literature, which eXJsts an
. 1' 1 h l gy thats a merent . this word, even though I take this coinage from the seventeenth century to
gle m a ttt e t eo o , bl' . d ted Germany Natural scten-
. d ted pu tc m e uca . . be totally superfluous), just as the Damascus experience is the metaphysi-
is of mterest to an e uca b . 11 redible How Mr. Emstetn
h u ht to e especta y c cal key for Paul. It says in a poem, you probably all know it by heart, "The
tists, after all , are t ~ g h G d d . 't play dice. But perhaps he does
. h ch certamty t at o oesn h. h Great Noon": "One to two/ And Zarath.ustra passed by." This is an evoca-
knew :"'lt su , hich h sical theories about relativity, w ~c .
play dtcel I don t see from w p y . c th t God doesn't play dice! tion of true ecstasy. And Nietzsche writes in a later exegesis of this poem
. . ' d tment one can even mter a .. that we, which means something like us normal people, have no idea what
are Emstems epar , . c d not five this is a dectston.
. Th times two ts 1our an ' inspiration means. He knows what inspiration means, because he has been
He plays dtce. at two D ho after all is also no idiot
. . all d e of dice, says escartes, w ' , . . shaken, but shaken in an anti-Christian way, and not by accident. Let any-
Thts ts c e a gam .h d . . e It flows into you JUSt ltke a
. do wtt mo ern sctenc . . one come along and say that he is cleverer in this regard. That he has found
and had someth mg to , l d. And no one dares to ask:
. d h God doesn t p ay 1ce.
good wme, the 1 ea t a.t ~ Paul's God p_la,y~--~_ice. He elects and some way out of this-not accommodations, anyone can do that. A whole
ay dtce. Because
Perh aps h e does Pl . . t c - ..........: :..."' .. ........---~f d' 0 is. born to e1ec- culture lives off accommodations, it must have them, otherwise it would
In t he Calvmts JO
rm this IS a game o tee. ne. ----- d -b- .
condemns. . 01 ., ch more comphcate , ut tn explode, wouldn't it. At least the elite would explode. People live their lives
tion a~<fj:Jorn_ro. ~-~IE?~10n. {ay, tts mu and have always lived them, but the elite needs coherences.
 Paul and M odernity g7
86 Effects
And then Nietzsche went even further: He got a good laugh out of
they all continue
h' hal d B thiskh theme. And the same forthe 1ettets . to Burckhardt

~v~r
w JC rea y urc ardt regarded as confused and turn d ,
Renan, as you know-this now is my opinion-and with good reason. beck with the words, "Travel to Turin and have a look ate to.Over-
This Renan, who, all he does is write out the popular edition of David wc:~:r:~~~g
~sychtcally ~o
there!" "W_hich is what he did. These letters are theoreticall on
Friedrich Strauss and disseminate it in French with French pepper. He's the are confused. You don't write things like that a ld t, the_y
one who talks about the genius and the hero. About this he really went verstty colleague, but that's a different matter. n o er um-
wild, and this goes so far as to be physiological. One mustn't delude one-
D" The so-~alled insane writings consistently talk about th is matter

N ~onych
sus agamst the crucified one, Dionysus as the crucified one
self here. This is, in a sense, a reaction to this hero cult, Nietzsche as hero,
That'.
etc. But Nietzsche himself senses in Zarathustra, which, after all, is a kind Ietzs e. s
of parody of the Bible, that a new phase of humankind begins with him.
And now I want to attempt the transition by bri . .
And indeed, he's right, a new phase does begin! The crisis of atheism is one fro~ Nie.t~che that .is not unimportant to me. Because ~::: .a quote
~he a~
In
in which one can't always be on both sides, Christ or Barabbas. No, this is allmsensltlve to the fact that in Christianity something in the IS not
a decision, and he has decided for atheism as the implicit mentality of
h as changed profoundly. uman sou
modernity.
About this there is much to say: that there is a methodological athe- It
malis not altogether
h impossible that the souls of Dante' Paul' Calvm
. and teu
h . l'k
1
e
ism of science "et si deus non daretur" [in Pufendorf, De iure belli ac pacis] po:er.:zo once ave penetrated the gruesome secrets of such voluptuousness of
is a principle of the seventeenth century, that one must pursue science ac-
cording to this hypothesis, as if there were no God. This is at first meant So
m he. notices: .these aren't unequivocal figures The second quote Is
. even
methodologically, but the brakes can't hold it, and the methodological ote Important to me, and it stands pretty much alone in the Nachlass:
atheism becomes a substantial atheism. There are still exceptions, there are
J\11 deeper peoplear~_of
. one mind
- . about h" - l .uthe1,. Augustme
. Pa J
~rha~ it~ sye.m~.e!~--~0t-~~~g-;~~~c~irE~~;;~;;;~;;;:~;,1;~
still people who imagine God as a cloud-cuckoo-land, or because we can't d --- .tiS
1 f!!In our.n1orality and
know anything, Du Bois-Reymond in Skepticism and Faith. 5 But the trend
is unmistakable. Nietzsche knows or senses in Zarathustra that he won't get ~llOever has u nderstood this has understood more of Paul a~~- ;~ .
nne and Luther than can be found on this subject in normal e o . ugus-
h:~gest~.
very far against Christ by banking on the hero. That Christ is not a hero is
a given. But to play out the heroic against that, the way the stupid Baeum- is, they all understand that the ego doesn\ call the shots in !hat
lers or-what's the guy's name?- Bertram etc. wanted to do, that Nietz- That the autonomous hu b . h I , an emgs.
behind h' h man emg, t e ' doesn t call the shots, but that
sche therefore, who then gets caught up in the mill of 1933 (in which he I'm t ere are. forces at work that undermine the conscious will
doesn't belong, but which also would not have been possible without him), They don t overcome It, but undermine. T hat is .f ..
this is not Nietzsche's way. in a form~la,
that in the I there is a profound p'o~~~~s::~: t~~press ~t
In Zarathustra Nietzsche talks about the "superhero [ Uberheld]," theless N tetzsche maintains the critique of Ch . t . . F . h never-
h 'fy' . . ns Iamty. or w at he finds
about expending oneself. J\rl4 with this superhero he wants to build him- orn . mg, and this IS a very humane concern, is the cruelty of the an of
self a counterfigure in the 'Dionysian, immanent world, in whid~~uffering conscience. The conscience that can't be evad ed . Romans 7 n.ght? A P dgh'
~CJ.~i1.~sitselfanddestruction and birth continually repeat themselves in an second
. h' . accusation
d h . that Ch nstlanity ypostasJzes sacrifice rather thannabol-
. h . ' Is
es~rnal recurrence. He thus tries to penetrate all the way into the secret of IS 11mghall
1t an us p er~et.uates It.
t h" L et someone come and really theologi-
the Christian mystery, where the paradigm is a giving oneself up, a self-ex- cha Y c elnge t Is!fTh!~.~S..iJ:. ~i.~t-~ ~~~- ~--g~~pJy.~umane imnulse avainst
~ ~entang ement o guilt and t h; "--~ ;-"-:t>--
alectl~=b-ute~~~- ;i;e ;t.. ?!:~l.l::-~!l:E~-- .()~-- Y.(. ...!sh rh~-- ~ntu:~ P~!:!h!:.s.9-i-
penditure, and to reinterpret it in a Dionysian manner. This is his attempt, t
'ci '" .
and it is one which I believe he coherently pursued up to the last, so-called ,,.. ... ..." . .._... . -...--- ...-.-. .- . -~- - -Y .thatofm~ .QI4Iegarn~nt"-:"'Is based Th
i!_:!~?:-~~ .!'l.tiJif!gs. These are not insane at all; rather, I would be willing even unually self-perpetuating cycle of guilt, sacrific~: ~~~f'i~~;;:~;;~~t n~:;;~~
now to teach a course on Nietzsche's insane writings in order to show that
88 Effects
be broken in order finally to yield an innoce~ce ofbecoming (this is Nietz-
sche's expression). A becoming, e~en a b~ing, that is not guilty. Whereas
Paul really does believe that humanity and thecospos are gu_i~ty [Rom.
]:7-25]. A guilt thatc;a~ ~t:red,eemed by means of sacrifice and atOQC::~n:ent.
Justified:J3il'i-'whata terrible price is paid in this entanglement! What ter-
rible cruelty, from which there is no escape! Everything else in the critique
1 deaa failier, who has a much more powerful effect on him.
of Christianity is not worth talking about, is so to speak negotiable,5 as we
say about contracts, but not that. This is a fundamental experience. Now I
of course am a Paulinist, not a Christian, but a Paulinist, and I think one
must make one's opponent as strong as possible. Otherwise it's uninterest-
ing. With an opponent whom I can demolish straightaway it's not worth
talking any further.
And this is where Freud enters the game. Freud is also very depend-
ent-about this one can write dissertations and habilitation theses-on
Nietzsche. To the point that he refused to read Nietzsche, because he was
so close to him. But this is philology, which is not important here. Freud's
thesis, if one considers it for a moment, if one tries to think it through
[nach-denken], is that guiltis ~onstitutivefo~_hum~b~~ngs, that one can-
not escape rhis. What th~ o~dipus complex means is that the child is al-
ready jealous of the father and wants to murder him, because it wants the
mother. As primitive as that sounds, but that is the thesis.
I am not called upon now to substantiate or to reject this thesis or to
bring in proofs, but I want to think about what it implies. lUm:RH~s..Jhat
one cannot jump ov~r this Qedip!ls, becalise ~y~rY?:':le ~~g~ps,,,a~ -~- ~~ild.
Wbich, incide~taUy, the revolutionaries don't notice: take Marx, Babeuf, or
whomever you want: There all people are already adults and act. How they
get to that point, it doesn't say. They're all already there, and that's that.
Shot out of a pistol, they stand there and revolutionize. The only line that
I could cite is "Who educates the educators?" in the Feuerbachian thesis.
But even those are already adults. That there is a child, that the child has
drives, that these drives are murderous, who was able to think these things
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? That this cannot be overcome!
And not because Mr. H eidegger then writes an ontology of conscience and
of guilt, abstracted from realia. I don't want to tallc about this; this is some-
thing for philosophers.
Sure, there is an Enlightenment Freud, a nineteenth-century Freud.
The Freud who ultimately wants to make of psychoanalysis a scientific
technique. Only then is it kosher. That's the nineteenth-century Freud.
Paul and Modern.ity 89
"~11:~eic!_~as, the~e ~go sh~ll be." As if we were talking about draining
the Zuyder Zee! So tt ts posstble to drain parts of the unconscious of the
id, t~ put this chaos ~ur _to d?'. There is this in Freud. But this ;hanges
nothmg about the baste sttuatJOn: that the son is murderously ambivalent
about the father. ~d.that he becomes even more deeply entangled in guilt
n~~-~y ~~-~ ~~the IIVlng father whom he wants to kill, but by way ~f the
.
... If oiie-reids' Freud hermeneutically in this fashion, that is, as a self-
analysis (the Interpretation ofDreams and other works), one notices that at
i~s center is a ~ery deep g~appl~ng with the problem of guilt. And one no-
tl~es that Fre~d, almost against the intentions of his Enlightenment am-
?tanc:, to whtch he owes his education as a disciple of Charcot and Janet
m Pans, and that he thus-and this is Freud's genius-overcomes himself
that his insights [Einsichten] are greater than his intentions [Absichten]. '
You know that I don't have much use for great themes if one cannot
thread them through the eye of a philological neecUe. But I want to defend
the, claim that Freud, who is involved with the basic experience of guilt, is
a dtrect descendant of Paul. I want to demonstrate this for you by looking
at a book that' Freud, one might say, pursues almost his whole life, Moses
and Monotheism. Starting in 1913 he works on it. The book is a provoca-
tion. Any whippersnapper, whether Old Testament or Egyptologist, can go
to town here: absolute nonsense, Moses as Egyptian, Moses murdered, and
so on. Freud's analysis doesn't rest on this, even though it does also use this
crutch.
Freu~ .reflects on what a father is, and what a father-religion is. How
such a reltgwn has a stronger impact, particularly because of the dead,
stoned father; and also how the Moses who has been killed, stoned, has an
even str~nger effect on the rabble. Just think ofKierkegaard. Of course the
rabble nses ~p ~gainst the martyr. That's how he becomes a martyr, be-
cause they ktll him. And he alone can appease this. The thesis of Freud in
Moses and Monotheism is a variant of this thesis. Most interpreters who
connect A with A think to themselves, the Jew, what's his name? Sigmund
Freud, what makes more sense than that he sees his own reflection in
Moses!
Nothing of the sort. But you find this in French books, in German
books. About Michelangelo's Moses Freud after all wrote an anonymous
. 1e55-wh Y It
aruc . was anonymous would still need to be explained. In the
church San Pierro in Vincoli: Moses, who gathers together his anger at the
 :;~-"
-..'.- . ' :::---:--:"'-:":"-:-.-~ -
..... .. .-~ """""-""""'""~
Efficts
Paul and Mod~rnity 91
last moment and emanates a terrible calm. (Whether this interpretation of Christian evangelists still has his own favorite animal ) If . . all .
Michelangelo is correct or not is a different matter. This was discussed by th ld we provtston y ac
e wor -emptre of the Pharaohs as the determining cause of tl . cepe
Meyer Schapiro, an American art historian of very very high standing. 56) th th d 1e emetgence of
e mono etst I ea, we see that that idea released fi . . . . .
r d h ' rom Its nauve soil and trans
Certainly Freud was concerned with Moses, bur not as a figure of rerre to anot er people, was, after a 1ong penod of latency, taken hold of b -.
identification. This is a subversive program. How is it possible to suspend them, r.reserve~ ~y them as a precious possession and now, in turn, itself kee ~
rhe law? For the law is now not only Mosaic law-though it means that the~ ~~ve by giVIng the~ pride in being a chosen people: It was the reli ion ~f
too-but it means civil law, bourgeois custom, which gives human beings thetr pumal father to whtch were attached their hope of reward ofdt'st' t.g d
finally f Jd d ' HlC ton an
all these neuroses, the Victorian world that Freud of course treats in his . o wor. - O~J nton. fhis last wishfUl phantasy, long abandoned b the ew-
first cases. Perhaps you know that the transition in which Freud comes to tsh people, sttll survtves among that people's enemies in a belief in d y
of the "Elders of Zion."S7 le consptracy
!
himself is the one from the technique of hypnosis to the technique of nar-
ration. His teacher Josef Breuer worked only with hypnosis; his best known Thi~ ~assage in Freud is for m e the best explanation of the wh 1 f _
case was that of Berta Pappenheim. We know this woman and her entire seminsm. o e o ann
story; she later became a very important woman. All of this took place in
It appears as though a growing sense of guilt had taken hold of rlle Je . h 1
Jewish Vienna. She came from an Orthodox family, that's something one or perhaps of the whole civilized world of the time as a . whls peop e,
needs to know, otherwise one can't understand the whole case that took . d materta
the represse . I. , precutsor to t e return of
place here. And Josef Breuer wanted to penetrate and did penetrate into
depths that were previously inaccessible, into confessions which she herself This is how he inrerprets the changing times.
could not bring herself to utter, by means of hypnosis.
Till at ~stone ~f these Jewish people found, in justifYing a politico-religious agi-
Freud didn't deny this, but his objection against hypnosis as a tech-
~a:, t e occaswn for detaching a new-the Christian-religion from judaism.
nique was that its effects could only be temporary. And he was convinced . a , alRom_an Jew from Tarsus, seized upon this sense of guilt and traced it back
that another method must be invented, narration, the narrative method. correct y to Its ongmary historical source.
"What happens in classical analysis? The analyst sits in back, doesn't even
look at the patient. The patient lies on a couch, and he talks and talks. He Pa~ attention: every word is important to me here. "Correct1 " - h' . h.
toncal truth. y t IS lS ls-
can talk for a week, for months, and at some point something is supposed
to click. Bu t that's not something one can foresee. The history is not an a He called this the "orig al ". .
, :Ill .s m , ~.~ was a crrm~agamst God and could onl be
atoned for by death. W1th d1 e oriP'inal d h . .. .. Y
priori, one m ust go through it, one must work through it. And then the -.--a~-, - d ..Q ---~ ~~~.-.!:a_E . cafl1<:. 1nto the world. In fact this
undoing of a knot can take place. This is a very expensive way. One then ~nme eservtng eath had been the murder of the primal f~th~; ,;.,ho was later de-
invented ways of abbreviating it and making it cheaper, but Freud in his I_:_d. But the murder was not remembered: instead of it there was a phant~s o.f its
strict Jewish puritanical form didn't let up to the end, 1938 in London. atonement, and for that reason this phantasy could be h '1 d y f
d ( . a1 e as a message o re-
And the only book that he still completed during this phase was e~lpnodnh edvahngelmm). -{L~<>l.!...~(q()_d,}:. ~.'! .<Jllo:ved himself ro be killed without
Moses and Monotheism. (The following quotes are from the Bibliothek
g_ut - - a ..r . us... tal{en_o!1 him
. .... t-an . selft he gLLilt of all men. had
It
to b .
tt had been t~e murder of a father. It i~ pr~bable that traditions fro meoariseon~~sJ;:~
Suhrkamp edition 131, Frankfurt 1964.) I want now to ask for your patience
Greek. m~st~nes had had an influence on the phantasy of redemption. What was
and attention when I let Freud speak in longer passages from this impor-
essenttal m Jt seems to have been Paul's own contribution In th
tant book. h . e most proper
sense e was a man of an mnately religious disposition the dark t f h
h.
Iur1ced 10 IS mtnd, ready to break through races o t e past
No other portion of the history of religion has become so clear to us as the intro- . .
llltO ItS more COOSCIOUS regiOns. 58
duction of monotheism into Judaism and its continuation in Christianity-if we We have . already
. said that the Christian ceremony,of Holy Communron, . In . wh.1ch
leave aside the development which we can trace no less uninterruptedly, from the the be1lever wcorporates the Savior's blood and fl h h
animal totem to the human god with his regular companions. (Each of the four ld es , repeats t e content of the
~ totem me~~no doubt only in its affectionate meaning, expressive of venera-
tion, and not Hllts aggressive meaning.s9

92 Effects
This is a thesis of Robertson Smith's in the book The Religion oft~e Semi-
. fi t dicion which h aving b een called before the Consistory of
testn!ts rs e , ' .. 60
the Presbyterians in England, he had to delete in the se~ond edmon.. ~ust
so you know that this is explosive material and not l.tte:atur~. Thts IS a
powerful book even today, and all the finding.s of flaws m tt don t approach
its level. Here Freud's position is clear; he will not allow the newes.t fash-
ions in ethnological literature to sweep away fundamental expenences.
One can safely sleep through such fashions.
The ambivalence that dominates the relation to the father was clearly shown, hov.:-
. tl e final outcome of the religious innovation. Ostensibly aimed at propt-
ever, tn 1 .d f J d h d
tiating the father god, it ended in his being dethroned a~d. got n o u a!SJl1 a
been a religion of the father; Christianity became a reltg1on of ~e son. T~e old
G~cl the Fath~~: fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took h1s place, JUSt as
every son had hoped to do in primeval times.
This is also a contribution to the problem of the dual commandment and
its radicalization in the love command: the focus on the son, on the human
being; the father is no longer included.
Paul, who carried Judaism on, also destroyed it. No doubt h~ owed his success in
th~'first instance to the f~ct that, through the idea of redemption, he called on hu-
manity's sense of guilt; but he owed it a~ w~ll. to the circ~mstan~~ that b.~.aban
doned the chosenness of his people and 1ts Vlstble. !U~rk, cucutl1ctston, ~<:l..~at the
;;~~ligion~~~ld be a u;lv~rsal one, embracing allmen._Though a part may ha~e
been played in Paul's ral<ing this step by his personal destre for revenge for there-
jection of his innovation in Jewish circles,
Here you can h ear Nietzsche. "Desire for revenge," that's resentment, the
genius of the chandala,
al d a feature of the old Aten religion- it removed a restriction
yet 1t so restore . . th
which that religion had acquired when it was handed overt~ a new vehtcle,. e
h 1 The triumph of Christian.ity was a fresh vtctory for the pnesrs
J ewts peop e ....
of Amun over Akhenaten's god after an interval of fifteen hundred years and on a
'd And yet in the history of religion-that is, as regards the return of the
WI er stage. r from being any longer restricted to the Jewish people; it had caught hold of all the
repressed-Christianity was an advance and from that time on the Jewtsh re tgton
61
was to some extent a fossil.
1 want to call your attention, in contrast to other literatur~ of the thirties,
to this marvelous style, to this inner freedom. Read H e tdegger or Carl
Schmitt during this time, all of it is just whipped up into a frenzy com-
Paul and Modernity 93
pared with this final calm and stylistic transparency. The theses themselves
still need to be discussed. I just want t<? point out where the German lan-
guage still found a home during this t ime.
Ambivalence is a part of the essence of the relation to the father: in the course of
time the hostility roo could not fail to stir, which had once driven the sons into
killing their admired and dreaded father. There was no place in the framework of
the religion of Moses for a direct expression of the murderous hatred of the father.
All that could come to light was a mighty reaction against it- a sense of guilt on
account of that hostility, a bad conscience for having sinned against God and for
not ceasing to sin. This sense of guilt, which was uninterruptedly kept awake by
the Prophets, and which soon formed an essential part of the religious system, had
yet another superficial motivation, which neatly disguised its true origin. Things
were going badly for the people; the hopes resting on the favor of God failed in
fulfillment; it was not easy to maintain the illusion, loved above all else, of being
God's chosen people. If they wished to avoid renouncing that happiness, a sense
of guilt on account of their own sinfulness offered a welcome means of exculpat-
ing God: they deserved no better than to be punished by him since they had not
obeyed his commandments. And, driven by the need to satisfy this sense of guilt,
which was insatiable and came from sources so much deeper, they must make
those commandments grow ever stricter, more meticulous and even more trivial.
In a fresh rapture of moral asceticism they imposed more and more new instinc-
tual renunciations on themselves and that way reached-in doctrine and precept,
at least-ethical heights which had remained inaccessible to the other peoples of
antiquity. Many Jews regard this attainment of ethical heights as the second main
characteristic and the second great achievement of their religion. The way in which
it was connected with the first one.- the idea of a single god-should be plain
from our remarks. These ethical ideas cannot, however, disavow their origin from
the sense of guilt felt on account of a suppressed hostility to God. They possess the
characteristic- uncompleted and incapable of completion-of obsessional neu-
rotic reaction-formations; we can guess, too, that they serve the secret purposes of
punishment.
The further development takes us beyond Judaism. The remainder of what
:erurned from the tragic drama of the primal father was no longer reconcilable in
any way with the religion of Moses. \he sense of guilt of chose days was very far
Mediterranean peoples as a dull malaise, a premonition of calamity for which no
OJ:)<: could suggest areason.
62
That is the thesis: The sepse ofguilt has taken on a universal, economically
universal form. --- ~ . ... -----------------~~~----~~-
 .... .. ..
~ - ~ - ~ - ..

94 Efficts
Paul and Modernity 95
Historians of our day speak of an ageing of ancient civilization, but I suspect that
developed as a conceptual network in the way ofh' 'cal h
they have only grasped accidental and contributory causes of this depressed mood . d . . . ISton trur ' of tradi-
tion an memOiy, of distortion- against this all th all d
of the peoples. The elucidation of this situation of depression sprang from Ju- h c . ' e so-c e exegeses
t at come uom here are stm.ply trivial So B . .
daism. Irrespectively of all the approximations and preparations in the surround- egm anew to mterpret Paul! I
ing world, it was after all a Jewish man, Saul of Tarsus (who, as a Roman citizen,
want also to add one last sentence, that I believe that Fr d .
h eu , so to speak
called himself Paul), in whose spirit the realization first emerged: "the reason we enters mto t e r~le of Paul, of the Paul who supposedly brings redem tio~
are so unhappy is that we have killed God the father." And it is entirely under- on!~ phant~sm~ttcally, while Freud realizes it through this new meth~d of
standable that ~e could only grasp this piece of truth in the delusional disguise of healtng, whtch ts not only an incUvidual method b al h f
F d ' ut so a t eory 0 cul-
the glad tidings: "we are freed from all guilt since one of us has sacrificed his lif~_t<;> ture. J.~.u -~~a~9.octor_not only of the individual but a doctor of 1
absolve us:" . . . (Reference to Civilization and Its Discontents and Beyond ~he P..I . cu ~u.re.
Origil!~_l_irlanci reP.~mption by the sa~rifice of a victim became theJ()y)1- ctp /,e. ) Th'ts ts a vast field which probably you d'd teasure rrzn-
1 n,t Want to enter at all but
dation stonec:s of the .new religion fo1.,1nded by Paul. ... It is worth noticing how
Ih d
a to lead you to this limit so that you have an inklt.ng of h '
then~~ r~ligion dealt with the ancient ambivalence in the relation to the father. I jf h d . w at sources
h royse a.ve raw~1 on m various interpretations I have attempted, per-
Its mai n content was, it is true, reconciliation with God the Father, atonement for aps not Without VIolence. And I thank you very mu h c . . th
the crime committed against him; but the other side of the emotional relation . c ror giVmg me e
opportunny, at this advanced
'- --- --- . h f 1c
our my Ire, to at least present th
0 h _
showed itself in the fact that the son, who had taken the atonement on himself, ses here. ese t e
became a god himself beside the father and, actually, in place of the father. Chris-
tianity, having arisen out of a father-religion, became a son-religion. It has not es- . At any rate I think 1 now know a little more about what ~ .
tn Paul. s at tssue
caped the fate of having to get rid of the father.
Only a portion of the Jewish people accepted the new doctrine. Those who
refused to are still called Jews to-day. Owing to this cleavage, they have become
even more sharply divided from other peoples than before. "[hey "'{CE~ gJ:?Jjgs~__ to
hear the new religious comiTI~mity (which, besides Jews, included Egyptians,
Greeks, Syrians, Romans, and eventually Germans) ':$~_.,a.SUh.~.~-Y!t~h..~~~g
murdered God ........ -..

Everything else is just small stuff. J:h.eChristi~ <lg:us_a_tiQn_i~ ~h~~_.9f dei-

~cJ.tf:.e,
Now listen to what Freud thinks about this matter:
In full, this reproach would run as follows: "T..~~l...~l!!.2~.<EEt.lt ,.il.S true that
t~ey_murden~dGqg, :whc;reaswe ad!ni~Lt :t!.l~.h<tve ~een c_l(;!a!l~l!.cLgLtb,;tt.,gl!,ijt. "It
is easy therefore to see how much truth lies behind this reproach. A special enquiry
would be called for to discover why it has been impossible for the Jews to join in
this forward step which was implied, in spite of all its distortions, by the admission
of having murdered God. In a certain sense they have in that way taken a tragic
load of guilt on themselves; they have been made to pay heavy penance for it.63

Only now can an interpretation of Paul be begun-on an entirely new

leveL In essence I have done nothing more than to present to you prole-
gomena to these passages in Freud, under the yoke of philology. But I can-
not measure up to the greatness and profundity of this whole work, an in-
terpretation of which I still intend to take on next semester. What is here
 Appendix A:
The Jacob Taubes-Carl Schmitt Story

Preliminary Remark

Now it just so happens- let me just say this in advance-that in the

last issue of the "Hwnanities" ("Geisteswissenschaften") section of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which I got to read only after my arrival in
Heidelberg, there was a colwnn entitled "A Trauma." This column reports
on a discussion going on in journals about a certain Ms. Kennedy who
wants, in a tribunalistic fashion, to pin the conceptual formations and the-
ses of }i.irgen H abermas and the Frankfurt School onto Schmitt. I don't
know the essay. But apparently there is a connection between Habermas's
Structural Transformation ofthe Public Sphere and Koselleck's Critique and
Crisis. And since Koselleck is certainly steeped in Schmitt, Schmitt also
gets to Habermas.
Bur the matter is far more fundamental. The division berween right
and left, which was after all a deadly one after 1933-that is, for the left-
and after the war, the civil war continued spiritually [spiritual] (I for one
come from a city in which one asks first of all, Is he left-wing or right-
wing? That I have difficulties with this .sort of thing is something I cannot
hide). But at the moment of cultural civil war-this is something I also

'
i
f"
(.
want to profess from the outset-! made-let this be clear- a clear

i.I