IF GOD IS GOD... | Extract from ‘The Political Theology of Paul’ by Jacob Taubes

IF GOD IS GOD...  

Extract from 'The Political Theology of Paul’

by Jacob Taubes 

(translated by Dana Hollander, Stanford University Press, 2004)

[Walter] Benjamin has a hardness similar to Karl Barth. There’s nothing 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 according to the German Idealist model — well, when you get to be my age and in my condition, you just have to wonder that anyone besides professors takes such a thing seriously. That’s the aura of German Idealism and German Classicism. That’s the Goethe religion:

“Wer immer strebend... [sich bemüht
Den können wir erlösen”;

in Stuart Atkin’s translation:

“For him whose striving never ceases
We can provide redemption.”],

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 Idealism nor with the depths, the path inward, Novalis, 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 our soul. There is a prius there, an a priori. Something has to happen from the other side; then we see, when our eyes are pierced open. Otherwise we see nothing. Otherwise we ascend, we strive until the day after tomorrow. Adorno can’t let go. He’s an aesthete, after all. Music then has a soteriological role. Neither Benjamin nor Barth could go in for such naive notions.

(Extract from Jacob Taubes’ ‘The Political Theology of Paul’, 

translated by Dana Hollander, Stanford University Press, 2004, page 76)

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