1

Cosmopolitan Political Theology in Cohen and Rosenzweig

Miguel Vatter

Published version in: Philosophy Today 60:2 (Spring 2016), 295-324

Introduction

Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig have been credited with the “renewal of

Jewish religious philosophy” in the 20th century.1 The expression is ambiguous, and it

has led to a division of labor between philosophical and theological receptions of their

thinking. As a consequence, the politico-theological aspect of their works has received

less attention. However, under the twin pressures of a renewal of interest in Carl

Schmitt’s Christian political theology in contemporary Leftist thought, and of the

growing importance of Leo Strauss within Jewish studies, Cohen and Rosenzweig have

been recently associated with a form of “Jewish political theology.”2 This article argues

that Cohen’s and Rosenzweig’s distinct engagements with political theology share the

aim of providing a philosophical interpretation of the Jewish messianic ideal that is

oriented toward a cosmopolitan conception of democracy. Both authors seek in the so-

called “diasporic” condition of Judaism those elements needed to reconstruct a

conception of peoplehood beyond those offered by liberalism and nationalism.

This article puts forward three theses with respect to the conjunction of Judaism

and political theology in Cohen and Rosenzweig. The first thesis is that the Jewish

1
Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism. The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to
Franz Rosenzweig(New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 397.
2
For the problem of “Jewish political theology” see Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka, ed. Judaism,
Liberalism, and Political Theology(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014). Judith Butler,
Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). and
David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005). On Judaism as it touches on the question of political theology in early modernity
and in its reception in 20th century political theory, see Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, ed.
Political Theology and Early Modernity(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). and Victoria Kahn,
The Future of Illusion. Political Theology and Early Modern Texts(Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2014). For a sober presentation of “Jewish political theology,” see Abraham Melamed, Wisdom's
Little Sister. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought(Brighton, MA: Academic
Studies Press, 2012), 35-49. On the contemporary understanding of “Jewish political thought” see Julie
Cooper, "The Turn to Tradition in the Study of Jewish Politics," Annual Review of Political Science 19,
no. 5 (2016): 1-21. (forthcoming).
 2

messianic ideal orients the political theology of Cohen and Rosenzweig towards a form

of cosmopolitanism characterized by a conception of the rule of law that is no longer

tied to the state or to sovereignty, and in that sense is both supranational and anarchic.

In contrast, the political theology that Schmitt develops roughly at the same time is

designed to defend the sovereignty of the national and imperialist state, and assigns

priority to order over law.3

The second thesis is that the political theology of Cohen and Rosenzweig undoes

the kind of opposition between Greek and Roman “political philosophy” and

monotheistic “revealed religion” that Leo Strauss would later refer to as the problem of

“Athens and Jerusalem.”4 This article shows how Cohen and Rosenzweig attempt to

overcome the division between pagan philosophy and revealed religion by adopting a

Platonic-Maimonidean approach to the messianic ideal that undoes the opposition

between reason and faith, nature and revelation, articulated by Paul’s messianism and

transmitted to modernity through Christian theology.

The third thesis of the article is that both Cohen and Rosenzweig work out their

idea of messianism in an explicit confrontation with Paul’s antinomianism. Current

post-Marxist thinkers like Badiou, Agamben or Zizek have theorized their radical

conceptions of emancipatory politics by appealing to Paul’s antinomian messianism,

comparing it favourably with respect to Jewish messianic politics which is believed to

entail an exclusivist form of cosmopolitanism. The interpretation of Cohen’s and

Rosenzweig’s messianic thought offered here suggests that theirs may be the more

radical form of cosmopolitanism because it is founded on the priority of a “natural” rule

3
On the current state of the discussion on Schmitt’s political theology see Miguel Vatter, "The Political
Theology of Carl Schmitt," ed. Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons, The Oxford Handbook of Carl
Schmitt (Oxford University Press, 2014).
4
On this motif in Strauss, see David Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy and
Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought(Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2008)., Michael
Zuckert and Catherine Zuckert, Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2014). and now Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Leo Strauss. On the Borders of Judaism,
Philosophy, and History(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015).
 3

of law associated with peoplehood over the “conventional” rule of concrete state orders

associated with nationhood.

It is well known that Cohen and Rosenzweig were both critics of political

Zionism. The dilemma inherent in their critiques was clearly expressed by Rosenzweig

in a fragment from 1920 entitled Der Jude im Staat: since on account of the Jewish

messianic ideal “the state cannot be in the Jew”, then “it is necessary that the Jew be in

the state.”5 For Cohen and Rosenzweig, the state in question was the German one, and it

had to be lived in under conditions of rising nationalist and anti-Semitic sentiments,

exacerbated during World War I, which would eventually bring Hitler and National

Socialism to power. Thus, in both Cohen and Rosenzweig a sort of “compromise” or

“symbiosis” had to be made, not only with the German state, but also with the German

philosophy, from Goethe and Kant through Hegel and Nietzsche, that accompanied the

development of this state until the age of Bismarck.6 It is precisely the widespread, but

not universal, rejection of any notion of a “German-Jewish symbiosis” after WWII and

the Shoah that seems to render moot any attempt to recover the theological-political

thought of Cohen and Rosenzweig.7 Since there is no space here to treat the

5
Franz Rosenzweig, Confluences. Politique, Histoire, Judaisme, ed. Marc Crépon Gérard Bensussan,
Marc de Launay(Paris: Vrin, 2003), 179.
6
See the 1920 “Concluding Remark” of Rosenzweig’s Hegel and the State where he lucidly and critically
deconstructs the transition from Hegel’s idea of the state to Bismarck’s realization of the “national state.”
Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan(Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 2000), 73-83. On Rosenzweig’s political writings prior to the Star of Redemption see the general
sketch in Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism," in The Philosophy of
Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), 138-61. and now
the discussions in Markus Kartheininger, Heterogenität. Politische Philosophie in Frühwerk Von Leo
Strauss(Munich: Fink, 2006)., Benjamin Pollock, "From Nation State to World Empire: Franz
Rosenzweig’s Redemptive Imperialism," Jewish Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4 (2004): 332-53., and Bruno
Quélennec, "Retour Dans La Caverne. Philosophie, Religion Et Politique Chez Le Jeune Leo Strauss"
(Ph.D. Diss., Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2016).
7
See the moderate comments in Butler, Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, 140-1..
For a much less generous reading of Cohen, see Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God. Religion, Politics, and the
Modern West(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). For a balanced discussion see Pierre Bouretz,
Témoins Du Futur. Philosophie Et Messianisme(Paris: Gallimard, 2003). and especially Hartwig
Wiedebach, The National Element in Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy and Religion, vol. 16, Supplements
to the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy (Dordrecht: Brill, 2012). A fascinating defence of
Cohen is found in Steven S. Schwarzschild, ""Germanism and Judaism" - Hermann Cohen's Normative
Paradigm of the German-Jewish Symbiosis," in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933, ed. David
Bronsen(Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1979), 129-72.
 4

complexities of their engagement with the German state, this article outlines their

cosmopolitan political theologies, since only against such a background can their

contingent political engagements be judged.

Cohen and messianic political theology

It is not commonly acknowledged by current post-Marxist usages of messianic

theologemes that, prior to Benjamin and Scholem, it was Cohen who insisted that the

central importance of Judaism to politics is due to its single-minded adherence to the

teaching of messianism.8 According to Cohen, Judaism understands the ideal ethico-

political association between free human beings (which he terms Sittlichkeit or societas)

as coextensive with God’s Kingdom, where this Kingdom denotes the messianic

condition.9 Cohen’s political theology can be expressed by the following formula: “the

Kingdom of the Messiah is God’s Reign… God’s Reign as the Ideal of world history”

(JS III, 174). For Cohen, Jews call God’s Kingdom that ideal form of society which has

managed to abolish its main world-historical character, namely, the division between

rich and poor. On Cohen’s account, the Sabbath stands for the belief that in the day

dedicated to the study of God’s ways there can be no difference between rich and poor,

masters and slaves. Expressed otherwise, Cohen’s conception of the actuality of

freedom requires the end of (forced and wage) labour and the universal access to free

(“liberal”) education.10

8
A good pointer to this failed reception is the early study by Jacob Taubes on messianic thinking in the
Western tradition, which does not mention Cohen at all, but starts from Bloch and Rosenzweig. Jacob
Taubes, Occidental Eschatology(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
9
Hermann Cohen, Juedische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauss, 3 vols.(Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke & Sohn,
1924), I 169. Subsequent references are made in the text, preceded by JS and volume number.
Translations are mine.
10
Both requirements reappear in Agamben’s conception of “inoperativity” Giorgio Agamben, Means
without End. Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti; Cesare Casarino, vol. 20, Theory out of Bounds
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). See the discussions in Jessica Whyte, Catastrophe
and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben(Albany: SUNY Press, 2014). and Sergei
Prozorov, "Giorgio Agamben and the End of History. Inoperative Praxis and the Interruption of the
Dialectic," European Journal of Social Theory 12, no. 4 (2009): 523-42..
 5

Cohen’s conception of Sittlichkeit is intentionally modelled against the Hegelian

politico-theological conception of Sittlichkeit.11 Whereas in the Hegelian conception,

God rules in history through the (national) State as highest expression of objective

spirit, for Cohen the government of God in history is manifested only messianically,

that is, in an anti-statist, an-archic and cosmopolitan fashion.12 Cohen denies that traces

of the messianic conception of theocracy can be found either in the concrete orders of

Empire and Church found in medieval Christian Europe, or in the sovereign nation-

states of the early modern jus Europaeum which replaced the medieval world order.

Generalizing and simplifying to an extreme, one can say that both the medieval

(Gelasian) and the modern (Grotian) world orders remain Trinitarian in their theologico-

political structure.13 In the Trinitarian model, to the triune personality of God there

corresponds a tripartite division between God’s Kingdom which is “not of this world,”

His divine representative on earth (be this Church, Empire, or Nation-State), and the

council or association of His people (the “mystical body” of the believers).14 Cohen’s

political theology rejects all Trinitarianism in so far as it develops out of the rigorous

unfolding of Jewish monotheism understood as the doctrine of the radical singularity or

11
The idea of Sittlichkeit in Cohen is distinct from the Kantian idea of Moralität, since Sittlichkeit
includes the system of positive law and the constitutional arrangement of church and state, as in Hegel. I
shall translate the term as “ethico-political association”. For other discussions of Cohen’s doctrine of
right, see Myriam Bienenstock, Cohen Face À Rosenzweig. Débat Sur La Pensée Allemande(Paris: Vrin,
2009)., Robert Gibbs, "Jurisprudence Is the Organon of Ethics," in Hermann Cohen's Critical Idealism,
ed. Reinier Munk, Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought (Amsterdam: Springer, 2005), 193-230.;
Michael Zank, "The Ethics in Hermann Cohen's Philosophical System," Journal of Jewish Thought and
Philosophy 13(2006): 1-15.and Daniel Loick, Kritik Der Souveranität(Frankfurt Campus, 2015).
12
On Hegel’s political theology, see the indispensable studies in Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre Vom
Absoluten Geist Als Theologisch-Politischer Traktat(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970)., Ernst-Wolfgang
Boeckenfoerde, Recht, Staat, Freiheit(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006). and Jean-Francois Kervégan, Hegel,
Carl Schmitt: La Politique Entre Spéculation Et Positivité(Paris: PUF, 2005). In English, see Andrew
Shanks, Hegel’s Political Theology(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). and now Roberto
Esposito, Two. The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought(New York: Fordham
University Press, 2015).
13
For the medieval world order, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology Ii. The Myth of the Closure of Any
Political Theology(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). On the modern world order, see Charles Taylor,
Modern Social Imaginaries(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). On the presence of
Trinitarianism in medieval and modern governmentality, see now Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and
the Glory. For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government(Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2011).
14
For a recent discussion, see Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains. The People's Two Bodies and the
Endgames of Sovereignty(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
 6

“uniqueness” of God.15 For Cohen, the strict singularity of God correlates with a

Sittlichkeit understood as a radically horizontal and egalitarian ethico-political

association in which there is no “personal” representative of God as one finds it in the

Christian constructions of Empire, Church and Nation-State because there exists only

the rule of law, not of persons.

One of the problems that seems to stand in the way of clarifying the real

contribution of Hermann Cohen to political philosophy and political theology in the 20th

century is the widespread tendency to see in his philosophical system a creative re-

interpretation of Kant’s critical thought, without taking into due consideration Cohen’s

Platonism and Maimonideanism, and this despite the best efforts of Leo Strauss’s

indications.16 One of the merits of Franz Rosenzweig’s Introduction to Cohen’s

posthumously published Jewish Writings is to have shown that Cohen’s approach to the

phenomenon of religion is primordially “Platonic” rather than Kantian because God is

understood starting from the Idea of the Good.17 Cohen’s Platonism accounts for his

politico-theological approach to religion because, so the claim, when God is considered

as Idea, God’s Kingdom is necessarily conceived in terms of the prophetic “social

ideal,” namely, the ideal of a humanity organized around principles of socialist

democracy (JS I xxxii-xxxiv). In what follows Cohen’s messianic interpretation of

Judaism is shown to be a democratic variant of “Platonic political philosophy,” to use

Strauss’s term.

15
Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism(Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995).:
41-49. Subsequent references are made in the text, preceded by RR.
16
See here Dana Hollander, ""Plato Prophesied the Revelation": The Philosophico-Political Theology of
Strauss's Philosophy and Law and the Guidance of Hermann Cohen," in Judaism, Liberalism and
Political Theology, ed. Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2014), 66-107. and compare with William Altman, The German Stranger. Leo Strauss and National
Socialism(Boulder: Lexington Books, 2011), 281-300, 467-9.
17
This is the same intuition developed by Gillian Rose’s admirable reading of Cohen, “Hermann Cohen:
Kant among the Prophets” in Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity. Philosophical Essays(Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993), 111-25.. However, this text also avoids Cohen’s political theology.
 7

The heart of Cohen’s political theology is found in his interpretation of

Maimonides.18 For Cohen, Maimonides held a “negative” theology according to which

the “essence” of the singular God is entirely unknowable. If theo-logy is to be at all

possible, then it can only take the form of the knowledge of God’s “existence” (e.g.,

God as Creator), or, knowledge of His actional attributes, conceived as negations of

privations (e.g., “God is not inert”) (RR 63).19 According to this reading, these attributes

do not reveal God’s Being, but only His Kingdom: they structure nothing short of the

ideal human ethico-political reality.20 As Idea of the Good, God’s actional attributes

provide the standard for the ethico-political association between human beings (JS III,

133). In a striking phrase, Cohen says that for the prophets “God’s innermost attribute is

simply the Messiah” (JS I, 30). In other words, the “action” closest to God’s essence is

the establishment in world history of the humanity of mankind. On Cohen’s account of

messianism, salvation is not an individual matter, but is essentially political. However,

unlike in the concept of “political religion,”21 where it is the hierocratic ruler that

provides salvation, for Cohen the subject of salvation or happiness is the entire human

species when it organizes itself in relations of non-domination and without state: “The

people does not die, but has a history which continues…. Immortality acquires the

meaning of the historical living-on of the individual in the historical continuity of his

people…. The individual soul acquires its immortality in the historical continuation of

the human species” (RR 301). Since salvation can never be personal, there is no

personal savior (JS I, 31). According to Pauline messianism, the content or truth-event

18
Hermann Cohen, Ethics of Maimonides, ed. Almut Sh. Bruckstein(Madison, WI: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 2004).
19
For a brief discussion of an extremely complicated topic, see Arthur Hyman, "Maimonidean Elements
in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy of Religion," in Hermann Cohen's Critical Idealism, ed. Reinier Munk,
Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought (Amsterdam: Springer, 2005), 357-70.
20
Cohen says that all human action can be understood from the phrase: “Gott und sein Reich” (JS III,
175). A philosophical conception of politics follows from two presuppositions: first, the singularity of
God; second, the task of establishing His Kingdom on earth.
21
See Jan Assmann, Herrschaft Und Heil. Politische Theologie in Altaegypten, Israel Und
Europa(Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002). for a discussion of this concept.
 8

expressed in the belief that “Jesus is the Christ” is the actuality of individual

resurrection from the dead. Such resurrection only makes sense on the assumption of a

“future world.” Cohen therefore strictly distinguishes his conception of messianism

from Pauline messianism by employing Maimonides’s distinction between a “future

time” and a “future world” (JS III,146) (RR 447, 461). This distinction permits him to

think the messianic as separate from the personality of a Messiah. Much before Derrida,

Cohen postulated the concept of the “messianic without Messiah” as corresponding to a

“people of the future, as the humanity of the future” [Volk der Zukunft, als die

Menschheit der Zukunft] (JS I,32). In short, the messianic, as God’s rule on earth,

assumes the figure of what Derrida calls “democracy to come.”22 From this perspective,

the messianic represents the process whereby the history of man as a natural species

overcomes itself into the history of humanity as a species.

What Heidegger will later call “onto-theo-logy” is in Cohen evacuated of

reference, and is substituted by a philosophy of politics that aims at the realization of the

social ideal through a critique of class divisions. Since for Cohen God is epekeina

ousias, “beyond existence,” his conception of messianism refers to a world-historical

politics that must adopt nihilism as its method. This insight is later developed and

radicalized in different directions by Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, and Strauss:

each of them gives Cohen’s methodological nihilism a different content and

orientation.23 At the same time, since God’s singularity is approachable only by

establishing an authentically political relation between human beings, which is a

relation characterized by an absence of domination, Cohen’s messianism also turns out

22
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx(London: Routledge, 1994).
23
For two discussions of methodological nihilism in Cohen and Rosenzweig, see Pierfrancesco Fiorato,
"Voraussetzung Des Denkens Bei Cohen Und Rosenzweig," in Franz Rosenzweigs ‘Neues Denken’.
Band I. Selbstgrenzendes Denken - in Philosophos, ed. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik(Freiburg: Karl
Alber Verlag, 2004). and Luca Bertolino, "Die Frage ‘Was Ist?’ Bei Hermann Cohen Und Franz
Rosenzweig," Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, no. 21 (2013): 57-71.
 9

to be an an-archism, anticipating the sense in which Arendt, Levinas and Schürmann,

among others, will later assign to this term.24

The conjunction of a methodological nihilism and a practical anarchism in

Cohen culminates in what could be called a theory of liberal education. Like Nietzsche

and, on some accounts, also Hegel, Cohen holds that the final purpose of politics is the

“education of humanity.” Education is what emancipates human beings from the grip

that myth has on their thinking, and, for that reason alone, education should be both free

and accessible to all: it is in this sense that Cohen’s conception of education is

“liberal”. Cohen follows Maimonides in holding that the Torah is something more than

a particular people’s civil religion: it is also a rational and thus universal teaching of

God’s singularity and its messianic reality. If the Torah is understood as a politico-

philosophical teaching, then for Judaism there is in principle no distinction between

philosophy and faith. As Cohen says, “our philosophy is at the same time our faith” (JS

III: 173). This formula nicely expresses the meaning of his interpretation of Judaism as

“religion of reason.”

Considered world-historically, the education proposed by the Torah sets itself up

in counterpoint to Greek paideia. Whereas the Greco-Roman ideal of the education of

humankind leads to the elevation of the arts and of the national state (an ideal that the

Renaissance recovers in the belief that the state is humanity’s greatest work of art,

Hobbes’s machina machinarum, the technical artifact that makes all technological

progress possible), Cohen argues that the fundamental content of Jewish teaching, the

basic purpose of its education of humankind, is “the overthrow of the nation under

humanity [die Unterwerfung der Nation unter die Menschheit]” (JS III, 173). For

24
Compare with Martin Kavka, "What Do the Dead Deserve? Toward a Critique of Jewish "Political
Theology" " in Judaism, Liberalism and Political Theology, ed. Randi Rashkover and Martin
Kavka(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 112-3., who claims that Cohen thinks of God
as arche and it is only Benjamin’s and Scholem’s messianism that is truly anarchic..
 10

Cohen, an ethico-political action becomes world-historical only when it aims to

transcend the “natural” horizon of separate nations living in a Hobbesian state of war. A

truly political act is the one that expresses the perspective of humanity as the only

relevant political subject, and this politics calls for nothing less than a “fundamental

fight against war understood as historical idol worship [gründsatzliche Bekämpfung des

Krieges als des geschichtlichen Götzendienstes]” (JS I, 143). But how is such a “war

against war” to be carried forth by the “remnant” of Israel, by all those who stand for

the messianic ideal of a world without nations, and thus without wars, and for the ideal

of a life dedicated to learning under conditions of material equality? It is here that

Cohen orients his understanding of Jewish messianism by turning towards Platonic

political philosophy.

Cohen’s return to Platonism and the problem of fighting against war

Despite the tension between Athens and Jerusalem over the ideal of education,

Cohen believes that the messianic fight against war cannot dispense with Platonic

philosophy. For Cohen, Socrates and Plato established the definitive standard for

political life (Sittlichkeit) as a life lived in accordance with the Idea of the Good. The

Idea of the Good means that an authentic messianic politics must be grounded on

reason, or, that messianic politics must be a philosophical politics (JS III,111). Platonic

political philosophy helps Cohen in rejecting without hesitation the belief that “without

religion, no true political society exists” (JS III, 112). By “religion” Cohen here means

both the pagan idea of “political” or “civil” religions and the “religion of the priest” of

which Rousseau speaks in the last chapter of The Social Contract. Only a “mythical”

(pre-Platonic) conception of politics can be based on religion, whereas a messianic

conception of politics must be based on political philosophy.

 11

Cohen was convinced that if the conception of politics was no longer to rest on

war, then politics could no longer rest solely on religion or myth: this last step required

that philosophy, in turn, had to become “political, not metaphysical,” as happens with

Socrates’s second sailing. Conversely, should philosophy remain “metaphysical” and

leave unattended its political vocation, then this would put at risk what Cohen calls

“true religion” (i.e., the teaching of God’s singularity and its messianic correlate).

Socratic political philosophy sets the ethico-political relation between human beings

above the “sacred” relation between humans and their gods. Platonic philosophy breaks

into the mythical precincts of religion with two concepts: the philosophical conception

of nature, and the philosophical conception of politics (JS III,121). There is no “true”

or non-mythical religion without Platonic philosophy.25

True religion can only be a “religion of reason” in a double sense: it must be a

religion which has been purified of its mythical aspects by passing through the sieve of

Platonic critique, but, in a second sense, it must be a religion that leads Platonic political

philosophy towards its real end, namely, the messianic realization of the Idea of the

Good.26 Platonism stands in need of the prophets as much as the prophets stand in need

of Platonism.

Indeed, Cohen argues that Platonic philosophy is unable to completely break

away from the mythical without the aid of the prophetic understanding of God. Here he

anticipates what Adorno and Horkheimer will later call the “dialectic” of the

Enlightenment. Cohen’s thesis is that the ideal politics cannot rest exclusively on the

Platonic transcendence of the Idea of the Good because this Idea, although “beyond

25
This is the source of Assmann’s account of the so-called “Mosaic difference” between true and untrue
religion. However, Assmann understands this distinction as being exclusively a Mosaic or Jewish idea,
whereas for Cohen it is equally a Platonic one. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism(Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009).
26
On the different senses of the term religion in Cohen, see Mara Borda, "Political Theology and the
Politics of Conversion. Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason as Alternative to Reason," Leipziger
Beiträge zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 3(2005): 255-72..
 12

being,” is not “beyond nature.” An ideal or messianic politics requires the transcendence

of the Good as understood by the prophets, namely, a Good that is characterized by the

absence of the concept of nature (JS I, 310).27 For Cohen, the absence of a concept of

nature in the Bible indicates that the prophets do not have knowledge of the Idea of

Good, because for them God is not Idea, but is “He who is the Good” (JS I, 313). The

correlate of this Good (but not of the Idea of the Good) is the concept of messianic

humanity: “Plato still had no idea of humanity” (JS I, 314). This prophetic idea of

humanity is connected by Cohen to the fact of suffering: the prophets identify suffering

with a social evil, with poverty, and the pious with the poor, the “suffering servants” of

God.

To indicate the salient difference between Plato and the prophets, Cohen

significantly refers to another republican ideal in the western tradition, namely, the

constitutional model of the Three Crowns characteristic of Moses’s Hebrew Republic,

according to which the king must make for himself a copy of the Torah and make sure

to always follow its statutes (Deutoronomy 17).28 Cohen takes this to mean that the king

in the Hebrew Republic, as opposed to the philosopher-king in Plato’s Republic, is

thereby “placed at the same level with each member of the people” (JS I, 318). This

reference to the doctrine of the Three Crowns is crucial in several respects. First, it

offers a clear indication that Cohen’s critique of Platonism is internal to the

development of a Jewish political theology which is both cosmopolitan and republican

in character. Second, it reveals the mistake found in Peterson’s claim, later adopted by

27
The point is often rehearsed by Strauss in his explanations of the difference between Biblical teaching
and Greek philosophy. See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1953). and Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
28
The three crowns are those of the priesthood, kingship, and the Torah which is held by no person or by
all. On this topic, see Stuart Cohen, The Three Crowns: Structures of Communal Politics in Eraly
Rabbinic Jewry(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)., Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic:
Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought(Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2010). And Shmuel Trigano, Philosophie De La Loi: Origine De La Politique Dans La Tora(Paris:
Le Cerf, 1991).
 13

both Löwith and Voegelin, according to which Schmitt’s political theology of

sovereignty paradoxically finds its origins in Jewish monotheism rather than in

Christian Trinitarianism.29 The mistake is not found in connecting Judaism to political

theology, but in not seeing that such a political theology rejects sovereignty because it

is based on a principle that is at once republican and an-archic: “in the relation of God

and human beings no difference can be made between those who rule and those who

are ruled [In Bezug auf Gott und den Menschen darf es keinen Unterschied geben

zwischen Regierenden und Regierten], nor between philosophers and non-philosophers.

Moses says: ‘may the whole people of God be prophets’” (JS I, 318 emphasis mine).30

Cohen calls this republican principle of an-archy the Mosaic “principle of God” and

distinguishes it from Plato’s “principle of scientific knowledge,” which is strictly

hierarchic, as shown by the Allegory of the Cave.31

Thus, although for Cohen Plato’s ideal or perfect republic is the ideal state, it is

so only within a horizon that presupposes the Hobbesian state of nature between nations

as the primary and unchangeable reality. The horizon of the permanence of the state of

war is the “abyss” that separates Plato’s ideal from the social ideal of the Biblical

prophets: “According to Josiah’s characteristic expression, peoples should no longer

learn war. And learning means literally custom [die Gewöhnung]” (JS I,320). The

Torah, that is, learning as a custom [Lernen als Gewöhnung], is an education in peace,

not in war. By way of contrast, the Platonic state ultimately educates to war because it is

the ideal warrior state.

29
Erik Peterson, Theological Tractates(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Eric Voegelin, The
New Science of Politics(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952); Karl Loewith, Meaning in
History(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
30
The same idea is taken up in Hannah Arendt, On Revolution(New York: Penguin, 1990).
31
On the phrase “principle of anarchy” in relation to Heidegger, see Reiner Schuermann, Heidegger on
Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). See also
the discussion of Scholem’s debts to Cohen in Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted. Heresy and the
European Imagination between the World Wars(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 182-90.
But Lazier does not refer to Cohen’s political theology, and its relation to Platonic political philosophy,
and thus misses how Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem and Strauss further articulate politically the debate
on nihilism and anarchy that Cohen unleashed.
 14

One could say that for Cohen Plato’s Republic is the model for a city at war with

war, but this city is not a true cosmopolis.32 The messianic and cosmopolitical ideal of

peace is not attained by the Platonic war against war because what is needed,

additionally, is the abolition of poverty and the class distinctions that generate it. But a

society without classes requires an organization of society such that everyone can come

to learn the truth because the truth is, so to speak, the capability of everyone’s mind. For

Cohen, Plato remains attached to the idea of the Idea and thus misses “the Idea of the

Good in every human mind [die Idee des Gutes in jeden Menschengeiste]” (JS I, 318).

What keeps Plato’s state from attaining the messianic ideal are two mistaken

beliefs. The first is the belief that truth is accessible only to the few. The universalism of

the Torah, without which the messianic interpretation of Jewish monotheism falls apart,

requires that philosophy not be reduced to a form of life that is exclusive of the many.

But according to Plato, “philosophy is not possible for the many…. The prophets are

not philosophers. For them it is enough that human beings come to recognize God and

through him recognize human beings. They are confident that all human beings are

capable of this knowledge of God” (GS I, 329). For Cohen, any a priori distinction

between those who can know and those who cannot know the truth inevitably carries

with it the distinction between the priests and the laity, reducing the Three Crowns to a

single Crown of a sovereign who becomes the tutor of the people as a minor, inevitably

leading to a struggle between priesthood and kingship for that one crown. By way of

contrast, Cohen’s messianic, anti-nationalist reading of the Three Crowns highlights the

Mosaic idea of a “people” (the supranational “remnant of Israel”) which is entirely

conformed by “priests,” namely, by students of the teaching of the Torah as political

philosophy.

32
This intuition is taken up by Strauss in his reading of Plato, where the Republic is traversed by the
power of money and the power of war, and Socrates is made to join hands with Thrasymachus. See Leo
Strauss, The City and Man(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
 15

The second mistaken Platonic belief is that social order requires a division

between natives and foreigners which in turn establishes the need for a division between

rulers and ruled. For Cohen, instead, prophetic messianism stands or falls on the

possibility of transcending national barriers and differences: “The difference between

Platonism and Prophetism is approximated sociologically in the difference between the

foreigner (Ger) and the barbarian. The Hellene is autocthonous. The Torah commands

unity between natives and foreigners” (JS I, 327). That Jewish monotheism does not

hold as absolute the distinction between those who are born into a nation and the

resident foreigners is evidenced, according to Cohen, by the fact that the prophets see

God’s glory even in the destruction of their own state (JS I,328). Two fundamental

points are made here. First, the threat of the destruction of a given form of state is not a

sufficient reason for accepting a distinction between masters and slaves within that

state. Second, the Torah must be understood as something radically other than the law

of a particular nation because it also contains a teaching of natural right that establishes

peoplehood on the basis of abolishing the exception to humankind that is contained in

the concept of barbarian.33 This republican and cosmopolitan teaching of natural right is

therefore accessible by the natural reason of everyone.34

Ultimately, Cohen rejects both mistaken Platonic beliefs because he believes that

the historical “present” of war, where Plato situates his ideal Republic, is surpassed by

the “future” of peace, where the prophets’ “state of humanity” is found. Cohen at one

point says that the contradictions between nations in political space can be overcome by

transposing them into the “infinity” of time, the analogon of God’s eternity (JS I, 325).

33
For a critique of the “civilizational discourse” that Cohen is rejecting, see now Wendy Brown,
Regulating Aversion. Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008), chs. 6-7. On the question of the foreigner and democratic cosmopolitanism, see Bonnie Honig,
Democracy and the Foreigner(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). For these themes in Cohen,
see the excellent treatment in Bouretz.
34
I leave for another occasion the complicated question of Cohen’s critique of Spinoza on the essence of
natural right.
 16

This does not mean that messianic peace is the regulative ideal of an indefinite progress

into empty time, as Cohen’s theory of a “future time” has sometimes been

misinterpreted. The key is to think about the “future time” starting from God’s eternity.

“The right meaning of the Messianic Age is only fulfilled through its connection with

the present, and Maimonides elucidated this meaning not only by making a distinction

between the future time and the future world, but also through his entire connection of

religion with ethics” (RR 386). If the idea of a “future time” is to be related to a “now-

time” (the present), the messianic future must correspond to an “immanent”

transcendence of God with respect to Nature. Any other conception of transcendence

would make the idea of a “future time” collapse into the idea of a “future world,” into a

supernatural or other-worldly dimension.

Indeed, Cohen does not oppose the “creator of the world” to the idea of the

eternity of the world.35 To the contrary, he argues that the messianic ideal requires a

conception of eternal life and this life, in turn, entails the eternity of this world, not the

transition to “another” world: “Eternity… is the meaning, the goal, the end of the whole

of human life…. It is significant for the Hebrew linguistic consciousness that the

Hebrew word for world, olam, at the same time means eternity: ‘He hath set the world

[olam] in their heart’ (Eccl. 3:11)” (RR 461). In other words, the messianic “future

time” is synonymous with leading an “eternal life” in a world that is itself “eternal”.

Significantly, Cohen concludes Religion of Reason with the following extremely dense

and cryptic thought: “But for this [Hebrew] religious consciousness for which the

world is God’s creation and revelation, neither the world nor man could be simply

perishable. The presentiment of the immortality of man and the eternity of the world
35
See the excellent discussion of the doctrine of Creation in Hartwig Wiedebach, "Logic of Science Vs.
Theory of Creation: The ‘Authority of Annihilation’ in Hermann Cohen’s Logic of Origin," Journal of
Jewish Thought and Philosophy 18, no. 2 (2010): 107-20. who points out that in Cohen there is both a
creatio ex nihilo and one that is ab nihilo so that “a Creation ‘in the beginning’ stands side by side with a
continuous ‘renewal of the world’.” (120) However, this reading does not address Cohen’s belief in
eternal life and the eternity of the world, which is a stronger idea than a “renewal of the world”.
 17

manifests itself in this deep word, olam…. But this eternity is only the continuation of

the earthly life – the same root of the word comprises both sides of existence; hence,

peace, as it leads to eternity, is also the guide of earthly life, to the beginning of all

historical survival, which lies in it…. In this historical eternity the mission of peace of

messianic mankind is completed” (RR 462). Cohen never specified how the geo-

political opposition between the messianic social ideal and the world of nations can be

overcome in historical time, by understanding the logic behind the “historical eternity”

of the “remnant” of Israel and the universalization of the messianic ideal. This task was

to be attempted by Rosenzweig in the Star of Redemption.

Rosenzweig, prayer and the critique of religious fundamentalism

The start of the Third Part of the Star of Redemption literally takes off from the

concluding words of Religion of Reason.36 The Third Part works out the messianic idea

of the Kingdom of God under the rubric of the “eternity of the world” (the “Eternal

Supra-World”) and discusses the conditions of possibility for humankind to accede to

eternal life. It amounts to Rosenzweig’s interpretation of Cohen’s idea of an “historical

eternity.” Rosenzweig follows Cohen in claiming that the possibility of eternal life for

humankind is contained in the correlation between the love of God and the love of the

neighbor. 37 This correlation is grounded on the relation between Creator and creature:

“How else could he be conscious of loving God by loving his neighbor if he did not

know from the first and the innermost that the neighbor is God’s creature and that his

love of neighbor is love of the creatures.”38 Thus, the fundamental problem of the Third
36
On the many references to Cohen’s work in the Star see Pierfrancesco Fiorato and Hartwig Wiedebach,
"Hermann Cohen Im Stern Der Erlösung," in Rosenzweig Als Leser. Kontextuelle Kommentare Zum
“Stern Der Erlösung”, ed. Martin Brasser(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 305-32.
37
It is striking that in Eric L. Santner Slavoj Zizek, Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor. Three Inquiries in
Political Theology(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). there is no discussion of eternal life.
38
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo(Notre Dame , IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1985), 259. Subsequent references are made in the text, preceded by SR. Translations are
amended when necessary.
 18

Part is how humanity can establish God’s Kingdom on earth and found the “house of his

eternal life in the temporal cross-currents of love of God and love of neighbor” (SR

259).

Rosenzweig argues that such a correlation between love of God and love of

neighbor is expressed by prayer, because in prayer service to God is at the same time

service to the ideal of an authentically political relation between all human beings.

Machiavelli liked to quote Cosimo de Medici’s quip that one does not govern men by

reciting the Lord’s Prayer. This is undoubtedly true, but Rosenzweig’s point is that

prayer is the way in which God, not human beings, governs men. Cohen had already

linked prayer to “God’s government of the world” in view of imposing on the world its

messianic end (RR 396). In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben has recently

rehearsed the reasons why liturgy and democratic politics have an intimate relation:

liturgy was modelled on the acclamation of the human emperor by the people because it

sought, analogously, to glorify God by elevating the Messiah to the Throne, thereby

founding God’s, not man’s, Kingdom on earth. In this sense, the initial discussion of

prayer announces that the Third Part of the Star is to be read as a treatise on political

theology.

But whereas for Cohen, the politics of prayer was “universal” in a still abstract

sense because “it is universal humanity, the human community [Gemeinschaft] by

virtue for which the individual is able to seek, and entreat for, his own connection with

God” (RR 385), for Rosenzweig, the prayer of the “human community” is parsed

through the fundamental political distinction between peoplehood and nationhood,

which in turn is articulated with respect to their conditions of belongingness (“blood”

versus “land” respectively), with respect to the different historical communities of

 19

prayer (pagan, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, secularist), and, lastly, with respect to their

articulation of the distinction between political friendship and enmity.

The explicitly politico-theological character of Part Three is already signified by

the exergue in tyrannos! which can be rendered as a command to lead the charge

against the tyrant. Commentators of the Star have not given much attention to this

exergue and its relation to the discussion on prayer that follows it.39 But the exergue

indicates that for Rosenzweig the political question of tyranny is identical to the

theological question of how people should glorify God. Whereas the priestly orders of

established religions have often argued that toleration of tyrants is part and parcel of

glorifying God, the tradition of republican political thought has reversed this argument

and affirmed, in the words of Thomas Jefferson’s motto, that “rebellion to tyrants is

obedience to God.”40 The first instance of such a prayer for a revolutionary, messianic

leader is found in Machiavelli’s concluding chapter of The Prince.41 These references

indicate that Rosenzweig’s approach to the problem of tyranny through a discussion of

prayer may have more than one meaning.42

39
It is indicative that the two-volume collection of essays from the “mythical” Rosenzweig Congress at
Kassel in 2004 bear the subtitles of the first two parts of the Star (“in philosophos!” and “in theologos!”)
but there is no third volume dedicated to the third part. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, ed. Franz
Rosenzweigs ‘Neues Denken’. Band I. Selbstgrenzendes Denken - in Philosophos(Freiburg: Verlag Karl
Alber, 2006); Franz Rosenzweigs ‘Neues Denken’. Band Ii. Erharene Offenbarung - in
Theologos(Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2006). Even the line-by-line commentary in Norbert Samuelson,
A User's Guide to Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption(Mitcham, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 223-
32. does not comment on the senses of tyranny.
40
See the discussion in Brian Tierney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 1150-
1650(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
41
See Miguel Vatter, "Machiavelli and the Republican Conception of Providence," The Review of
Politics, no. 75 (2013).
42
Extant interpretations of the Star in English for the most part lack a politico-theological understanding
of liturgy, and have missed its internal connection with republican theories of revolution. This is the case,
for example, in Leora Batnitzky, "The Philosophical Import of Carnal Israel: Hermeneutics and the
Structure of Rosenzweig's Star," Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 9(1999): 127-53. Peter Eli
Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger. Between Judaism and German Philosophy(Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003)., Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992)., and Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of
Philosophy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Michael Mack, German Idealism
and the Jews. The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003). and Bouretz, Témoins Du Futur. Philosophie Et Messianisme. where the
political reading of prayer is thematized, but not developed. Compare Alexander Altmann, "Franz
Rosenzweig on History," in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr(Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England 1988). and Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History. Rosenzweig,
 20

Rosenzweig argues that prayer is the discourse where God tempts humans, and

tempts them into revealing themselves as either free or slavish. The locus classicus for

such divine temptation is the Book of Job. God only wants to be worshipped by “free”

human beings (SR 266). In order to elicit human freedom, God “not only must hide his

rule over the human being: he must deceive him about it… so that the latter have the

possibility of believing him and trusting him in truth, that is to say, in freedom” (SR

266). In his unorthodox employment of the motif of the “noble lie,” Rosenzweig’s

interpretation of the problem of prayer shows one of its Platonic-Maimonidean traits. At

the same time, it reflects a republican assumption with regard to the nature of divine

government, in so far as the freedom that God wants to elicit in such an indirect way is

expressed by the “fear of God,” which is the only thing that is not commanded by God

at Sinai and justifies the covenantal or constitutional, rather than tyrannical, political

relation that is established between God and his People.

Prayer is understood mythically when it seeks to change the course of the world

and calls for God to realize His Kingdom before the time is “ripe” (SR 271). Such a

prayer invokes the figure of the Anti-Christ, whose representatives are “the fanatic, the

sectarian, in short all tyrants of the kingdom of heaven” who, by trying to force God,

tend to delay rather than accelerate the End of history (SR 271). The non-mythical

understanding of prayer is in all cases a prayer for revolution: “eternity must be

accelerated. It must always be capable of already coming ‘today’” (SR 288). But this

messianic prayer must also be delivered at “the right time” if it is to be met with God’s

grace, that is, with the sending of the authentic Messiah.

Benjamin, Scholem(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009)., whose readings fall within the
horizon of the secularization debate initiated by Schmitt, and the recent interpretations that take as their
starting point the comparison between Rosenzweig’s understanding of miracles and Schmitt’s analogy
between miracle and state of exception in Eric L. Santner, "Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig,
Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor," in The Neighbor. Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Eric
L. Santner Slavoj Zizek, Kenneth Reinhard(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 76-133. and
Bonnie Honig, "The Miracle of Metaphor. Rethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and
Schmitt," diacritics 37, no. 2-3 (2007): 78-102.
 21

The novelty in Rosenzweig’s account of prayer consists in his claim that the

“right time” to pray for the Messiah comes “after” the prayer of “unbelief” which he

attributes to Goethe.43 This is the prayer of “politics is destiny,” of human self-assertion

(to speak with Blumenberg), in which the human species becomes all that it can be on

its own, giving full vent to its Promethean legacy (SR 283-4). Goethe’s prayer is the

prayer of the modern revolutions for “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Rosenzweig’s thesis

is that without these political pre-conditions, there can be no Kingdom of God on earth,

since, to mention but the most obvious reason, humanity is still “enslaved” and

therefore cannot accept “God’s yoke” in freedom (SR 287). This is also the teaching of

what Rosenzweig calls the “Johannine Church” (Lessing) which effectively brings the

long arc of political Catholicism to an end.44 Thus, for Rosenzweig the religious

fundamentalists who pray for the coming of God’s Kingdom before humanity has

realized its worldly destiny of freeing itself through political and social egalitarian

revolutions are the very same “tyrants” that delay the messianic time, and are to be

fought without quarter.45 The transition from Goethe’s prayer of unbelief to the

authentic prayer for the Kingdom discloses the novelty of Rosenzweig’s political

theology, which does not see modern, secular political and social revolutions in terms of

a purported “secularization” of messianic aspirations, but, to the contrary, envisages

43
Referring to Goethe’s role in the “pantheism” controversy unleashed by Jacobi. Goethe is absent in the
otherwise excellent discussion of this controversy in German Jewish thought in the early 20th century
Lazier, God Interrupted. Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars, 69-110.. For
another view on the political stakes of this controversy, see Altman, The German Stranger. Leo Strauss
and National Socialism.. For the deepest treatment of Goethe’s prayer, see Hans Blumenberg, Work on
Myth(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988)..
44
On the Johannine Church in Rosenzweig, seeAltmann, "Franz Rosenzweig on History.". For the
revolutionary implications of the teachings of Franciscanism and Joachim of Flora, see Eugen
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution. Autobiography of Western Man(Norwich, VT: Argo Books,
1969). and now Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty. Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life(Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2013).
45
This is one sense in which Rosenzweig claims to have written a book that is “Jewish and unfanatical”
(Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World. Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought(Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 65ff..
 22

these egalitarian revolutions as preparatory for what can be appropriately termed a

“post-secular” messianic politics.

Rosenzweig, constitutionalism and the critique of violence

For Rosenzweig, world-history is characterized by the attempt of nations, which

are not always already eternal, to gain eternity in time through the state. “For the state is

the ever changing guise under which time moves step by step toward eternity…. For the

nations of the world there is only the current era. But the state symbolizes the attempt to

give nations eternity within the confines of time, an attempt which must of necessity be

repeated again and again. The very fact that the state does try it, and must try it, makes

it the imitator and rival of the people which is in itself eternal, a people which would

cease to have a claim to its own eternity if the state were able to attain what it is striving

for” (SR 332, emphasis mine).This conceit is best expressed by the Hegelian idea that

the state is the Da-sein of God (eternity) in history. In his early politico-theological

writings, Hegel thought that the Jewish people was opposed to the march of the state in

and through world-history on the grounds that it had not known any revolution since

being given its Mosaic constitution: the Jews represented a people who did not

understand the necessity of revolutions, and thus their political ideal could not be the

ideal for the rest of the world.46 In the Star Rosenzweig turns this critique around and

places the Jewish polity not at the start of world-history, but at the end of it. Features of

the Hebrew Republic thus become a model for all states that pray Goethe’s prayer of

unbelief. It is a commonplace in standard interpretations of Rosenzweig to reduce the

political significance of the Jewish people’s adherence to the messianic ideal to the

negative function of being the stumbling block on the path of the nation state because

46
On Hegel and Judaism, see Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy. A Preface to Future
Jewish Thought(New York: Schocken Books, 1973). and now Daniel Loick, "Terribly Upright: The
Young Hegel’s Critique of Juridicism," Philosophy and Social Criticism 40, no. 10 (2014): 933-56.
 23

“the true eternity of the eternal people must always be alien and vexing to the state, and

to world history” (SR 334). However, the teaching of Jewish messianism is not simply

that the national state is the false God on earth. Rosenzweig’s cosmopolitan political

theology is not a “negative political theology” (Taubes) because it identifies in the

Jewish idea of messianism an affirmative ideal of politics to which all other states ought

to aspire. The messianic ideal of a people who enjoys eternal life and peace in

adherence to law but without a state is the historical unconscious of all national states.

Rosenzweig describes the non-Jewish attempt to attain eternity in history by way

of the state as follows:

A cycle, the cycle of the years assures the eternal people of its eternity. The
world’s peoples as such are without cycles; their life rushes downstream in a wide
river. If the state is to provide them with eternity, this stream must be halted and
dammed up to form a lake. The state must seek to turn into a cycle that pure flow
of time to which the peoples as such are committed. It must transform the constant
alternation of their life into preservation and renewal and thus introduce a cycle
capable, in itself, of being eternal (SR 332)

Employing the famous simile from chapter 25 of The Prince of the state as a dam built

to contain the river of Fortune, Rosenzweig understands the modern state as an attempt

to replicate, in the secular space of the cycles of constitutions, what the cycle of prayer

already does for the people of Israel, namely, to turn the linear flow of time around, to

give it the form of a recurring cycle, and thus to stabilize its flow into predictable

patterns. Through its constitution, the state tries to impose a law on the flow of time.

Rosenzweig argues that the modern state can bend the river of time into a cycle

only through violence: “Violence provides life to its law [of the state] against the law

[of the state]. By being violent and not merely lawful, the state remains hard on the

heels of life. This is the meaning of all violence, to found new law. But a paradox lurks

in the idea of new law. Law is essentially old law. In the violent act, the law constantly

becomes new law. And the state is thus equally both lawful and violent, refuge of the
 24

old law and source of the new” (SR 333). This extraordinary passage stands in the

closest proximity to the ideas advanced by Benjamin in his 1921 essay Critique of

Violence and its theory of the legality of the state as expression of the mythical violence

over pure life, which in turn lies at the basis of Agamben’s Homo sacer and the

subsequent discussions on constitutions and states of exceptions.47

In the Critique of Violence Benjamin distinguishes a law-preserving violence

from a law-creating violence.48 Agamben puts forward the hypothesis that in his own

Political Theology Schmitt reacted against Benjamin’s essay: where Benjamin’s

anarchism saw in positive state law the expression of mythical and bloody violence on

life, Schmitt sought to place the “authority” of the sovereign at the heart of the

mechanism of legal change,that is, of suspending old law and creating new law. .49

However, it is also possible that Benjamin and Schmitt may both have reacted to

Rosenzweig’s analysis of constitutional law in this part of the Star, had they known of

it.50

Rosenzweig argues that violence becomes the ground of constitutional law

because this law stands in constant need to be changed and renewed in order to

“subsume” the “pure life” of peoples under the form of the national state. Since the new

law requires the destruction of the old it follows that violence (over life) lies at the

47
For a different reading of these passages which does not draw out the constitutional implications, see
Robert Gibbs, "Gesetz in the Star of Redemption," in Rosenzweig Als Leser. Kontextuelle Kommentare
Zum “Stern Der Erlösung”, ed. Martin Brasser(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 395-410..
48
On Benjamin’s essay, see more recently James Martel, Divine Violence. Walter Benjamin and the
Eschatology of Sovereignty(London: Routledge, 2012). Judith Butler, "Critique, Coercion, and Sacred
Life in Benjamin's "Critique of Violence"," in Political Theologies. Public Religions in a Post-Secular
World, ed. Lawrence E. Sullivan Hent de Vries(New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 201-19. and
Loick, Kritik Der Souveranität.
49
See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
50
The Star is finished in 1919 but is only published in 1921. Benjamin writes his text in January 1921,
apparently spurred by Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (1920). The relation between these three texts needs
further, urgent study. See the discussion in Uwe Steiner, "The True Politician: Walter Benjamin’s
Concept of the Political," New German Critique, no. 83 (2001): 43-88. which brings into play also Bloch,
Erich Unger and Sorel among others but does not mention Rosenzweig or Cohen. Butler touches on the
possible relation but does not work it out Butler, Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,
74, 230..
 25

origin of constitutional law. For Rosenzweig, the constitutional, egalitarian framework

of the modern state cannot bring about eternal life and true peace to its peoples because

it is plagued by an irresolvable contradiction: “the state is therefore equally as much

lawful and violent, refuge to the old law and source of the new” (SR 333). The

circularity of state constitution cannot really reverse the flow of time. “Thus war and

revolution is the only reality known to the state” (SR 333).

The founders of liberal constitutional democracies faced this problem directly.

As Arendt discusses at length in On Revolution, the Constitution of the United States

attempts to address this problem through its theory and practice of constitutional

amendments. But the possibility of amending the Constitution only begs the question of

the justification of constituent power and its relation to violence. Jefferson, in his most

Machiavellian moment, was persuaded that the Constitution would have to be renewed

every 10 years, and that the tree of liberty would have to be watered by bloody revolts:

all this was required to keep the freedom of the American people alive. Lincoln, more to

the point perhaps, reversed Jefferson and called for strict adherence to the rule of law

while he justified going to war in order to realize the messianic ideal of equality found

in the Declaration of Independence’s doctrine of natural rights. In both cases,

constitutionalism is born from revolution and ends with revolution.

For Rosenzweig these revolutionary “moments rooted to the spot by the state are

thus properly ‘hours’ of the people’s life, which know no hours of its own; it is the state

which first introduces standstills, stations, epochs into the ceaseless sweep of this life”

(SR 334). However, when compared to “the true eternity of life” of the “eternal

people,” political revolutions can appear as “all-too-worldly sham eternity of the

historical moments of the nations, moments expressed in the destiny of their states” (SR

335). In other words, for Rosenzweig the circular relation between revolution and
 26

constitution, which in the last instance keeps politics tied to war, is not due to the

messianic ideal and promise that these constitutions harbor, but to the form of the

national state that contains and neutralizes this ideal. Rosenzweig’s political theology is

cosmopolitan in so far as it argues that in order to unleash this messianic force,

constitutionalism needs to transcend the limits of the nation and structure the world as

such. To establish the bases for a global constitutionalism is the post-secular role

assigned to Judaism and Christianity.

Rosenzweig on nationhood and messianic peoplehood

The messianic conceptions in Judaism and Christianity provide a common

framework in which to understand history as a process that is always open to the

messianic moment, which must be “capable of coming ‘today’.” This “Today” refers to

the nunc stans or “eternal moment” that represents the aion or life-span of humanity,

considered as a species, as a week plus the Sabbath (SR 291). Taking up some obscure

passages that Maimonides’s Guide dedicates to Sabean agriculture and their star

worship, Rosenzweig argues that “it is not for nothing that the words for cultivation and

cult, for the service of earth and the service for God, for agri-culture and the cultivation

of the Kingdom are one and the same in the sacred tongue. As law of cultivation laid

down by man the week is the earthly analogy of the eternal, but it is more than this: as

law of the cult laid down by God it attracts the eternal into the Today, not just by

analogy but in reality” (SR 292). Agriculture is practiced by all nations and peoples as a

condition of possibility not just for preserving their lives, but in order to inform them

with a measure of culture and constancy amidst the flow of time: agriculture takes place

in cycles, and the “cycles” of planets and stars (when considered from the earth as fixed
 27

point) form the center of sacred life in agricultural societies. Understood in this way,

agriculture and astral religion is the universal basis or groundwork into which the

messianic doctrine is planted as a “seed”.

For Rosenzweig the earth is “cultivated” by all the nations of the world through

their states and their arts, a process that is symbolized by the working week. But it is

Judaism and Christianity that plant the “seed” of messianic politics corresponding to the

Sabbath, with its ideals of free and universal education and land redistribution.51 The

political meaning of the Sabbath is both “revolutionary” and “cosmopolitan” only

thanks to having its groundwork in the universality of “agriculture” and the cult of the

stars that it gives rise to: there is no Star of Redemption without these other stars

because “the time which the cult prepares for the visit of eternity” is “the common

property of all. They are based on the cosmic orbit of an earth which patiently bears

them all, and in the law of the earthly work is common to all…. ‘In multitudes’ he

praises the Lord. The enlightenment which befalls the individual can here be none other

than that which can befall all others too” (SR 292). The post-secular messianic politics

of Judaism and Christianity are ultimately addressed to the real universal multitude,

composed of all those people who work the land and live off it, and who are currently

often forced to wander the face of the globe or are crowded into urban centers turning

these into megacities, a far cry from a cosmopolis. There is no post-secular messianic

politics which does not begin with the demand to secure for all humanity the “basic

needs” for water, shelter, food, clean air, as well as for hospitals and schools.

51
I cannot here engage the very complex question as to why Rosenzweig has not given the prayer of
Islam an analogous “sabbatical” role in his messianic logic of history as he does the two other
monotheisms. Rosenzweig interprets the messianic in Islam as tied to the notion that every age has its
Imam or leader. But he understands this notion to be supportive of a conception of history as progress, to
which he opposes the authentic messianic conception of history: “That the kingdom is “among you,” that
it is coming “today”, is a notion of the future which eternalizes the moment. And it is this notion which
expires in the concept of eras, the Islamic as well as the modern one. True, the ages form an endless
sequence here, but endless is not eternal” (SR 226). Thus, for Rosenzweig Islam is essentially a religion
of modernism and modernization, whereas Judaism and Christianity have “post-modern” potentialities
which he seeks to highlight.
 28

However, Rosenzweig pushes this agricultural metaphor further in order to grasp

the phenomenon of nationalism. The modern nation state depends on a concept of the

“nation” defined by a people’s choice to “sink their roots into the night of the earth” for

“they do not trust in the life of a community of blood, in a community that can dispense

with anchorage in solid earth” (SR 299). Rosenzweig was acutely aware of the

racialization of politics in our age: “He who is able to see through the pseudonaturalist

wrappings of the race idea… recognizes here the striving to transform the concept of

peoplehood in such a way that the people obtain the right to exist simply from their

existence, independently of their factual achievements.”52 However, his belief that Jews

conform a “community of blood” would be falsely construed if it were taken to mean

that Jews should embrace the “apparent despiritualization of the people into a race, of

the ‘national’ to the ‘populist’ notion [zum völkischen Gedanken]” which Rosenzweig

explicitly rejects in the case of all other nations.53 Rather, Rosenzweig seeks to employ

the distinct constructions in Judaism and Christianity of a messianic conception of

“peoples” in order to establish the transition from nationalism to cosmopolitanism.

His starting point is that these two messianic peoples are “not alive in the sense

the nations are alive: in a national life manifest on this earth, in a national territory,

solidly based and staked out on the soil” (SR 304). Pursuing the agricultural metaphor

to the point of paradox, for Rosenzweig “the seed of eternal life has been planted, and

can wait for the budding. The seed knows nothing of the tree that grows from it, not

even when it flings its shadow all over the world. In time to come, a seed that is like the

first will fall from the fruits of that tree” (SR 335). In other words, the messianic politics

of Judaism and Christianity are both oriented beyond the nation state. However, it is not

52
In “Atheistic Theology” Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, 17.
53
See the discussion in Fackenheim, To Mend the World. Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish
Thought., Batnitzky, "The Philosophical Import of Carnal Israel: Hermeneutics and the Structure of
Rosenzweig's Star.", and Mack, German Idealism and the Jews. The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy
and German Jewish Responses..
 29

a simple matter to extricate both messianic religions from the discourse of nationhood.

For Christianity is complicit with the rise of nationalism. Likewise, apart from the

possibility of construing in racial terms the claim that Jews conform a “blood

community,” there is the added complication, as Anidjar has recently shown, that the

relation between Christianity and nationalism passes through a discourse on blood and

blood-shedding which may in turn give rise to the suspicion that Rosenzweig is offering

a Christianized reading of Judaism.54 I shall treat these two complex issues in turn,

starting from the latter.

Rosenzweig’s discourse on “blood” and “soil” forms the most controversial part

of his political theology. While his critique of the national-state form is rejected by

advocates of political Zionism, who want to establish the “right” of the State of Israel to

exist as a “normal” nation-state, his reference to a Jewish “blood community,” on the

other hand, is often accused of harboring an ethnic particularism verging on racism. One

interpretative strategy has argued that Rosenzweig’s “notion of blood reacts only

against philosophical concepts that set out to justify the shedding of blood for the

political possession of land. He associated the earth with death and blood with life.”55

This line of thinking is found in Rosenzweig’s text, but it does not go far enough to

resolve the deeper dilemmas raised by the Star.

The first problem is that, as shown above, the common possession of the earth

and the basis of cult in agriculture is the groundwork into which the messianic seed is

planted. Thus, it is not entirely correct that Rosenzweig stigmatizes the earth as such.

The second problem is articulated by Zizek’s critique according to which even if “Jews

are constituted by the lack of land, of territory” their universalism or cosmopolitanism

54
See the discussion in Gil Anidjar, Blood. A Critique of Christianity.(New York: Columbia University
Press, 2014), 1-78.
55
Mack, German Idealism and the Jews. The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish
Responses, 130.. A similar strategy is also offered by Massimo Cacciari, Icone Della Legge(Milan:
Adelphi, 1985), ch.1.
 30

remains a partial one since “it reserves for itself a privileged position of a singularity

with a direct access to the universal”.56 Here Zizek must mean the “singularity” of the

Jewish people as “chosen” to form part of a covenant with God. Prior to Zizek the basic

problem was already voiced by Fackenheim: How can Rosenzweig avoid both “a

natural determinism of the blood” and a “supernaturalist determinism of divine

decrees,” given that both imperil the freedom of Jews presupposed by their covenantal

action? Fackenheim argues that Rosenzweig is forced into a dilemma that he cannot

resolve. Either the individual Jew is free to choose whether he or she remains a Jew or

not, and this means that the purported “eternity” of the “eternal people” is hostage to the

choice of the individuals composing it, who could after all cease to follow the

commandments of Moses or who may simply marry outside of the community of faith.

Or, “Jewish existence” somehow precedes individual choice, but this would elevate

Jewish “life” over Jewish “faith,” a gesture that seems to close Judaism onto a sort of

identity politics, and may perhaps border on racism.57

Santner has suggested that Rosenzweig’s discussion of the foundations of Jewish

“life” should be interpreted as a form of bio-politics.58 One can add that Rosenzweig’s

biopolitics adopt a republican idiom. Thus, Fackenheim’s dilemma can be addressed by

arguing that belonging to the Jewish people, unlike belonging to the Christian people, is

not based on individual choice for the same reasons that from a republican perspective a

people is never reducible to the aggregation of atomic individuals and their choices. For

republicanism, prior to the establishment of human governments the state of nature is

not populated by a- or anti-social individuals, as Hobbes taught, but with free peoples

which have the right to assume “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of
56
Slavoj Zizek, The Neighbor. Three Inquiries in Political Theology, 154..
57
Fackenheim, To Mend the World. Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, 83-4.. For a critique
of ”Jewishness” as a political identity, see Julie Cooper, "A Diasporic Critique of Diasporism: The
Question of Jewish Political Agency," Political Theory 43(2015): 80-110..
58
Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. Reflections on Freud and
Rosenzweig(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 19, 30.
 31

Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” as Jefferson stated in the Declaration of

Independence.59 Just like a republican conception of natural right sets out the natural

yet legal conditions under which individuals can be considered to be citizens of a free

people, so too Rosenzweig seeks a natural yet legal condition for belonging to the

Jewish people as carrier of a messianic ideal of the radical equality of all human

beings.60 He finds this condition in the obligation of “procreation” (Erzeugung),

understood as the demand to secure the transmission of the messianic “seed” by giving

birth to future generations: the Jewish people “preserves itself in the eternal self-

preservation of procreative blood” (SR 341). Perhaps the best approximation to this idea

is to conceive of it as the opposite of the Roman conception of filiation, where, as a

condition for bearing legal rights, the son must be exposed to the absolute power of life

and death held by the father. In the Jewish case, the capacity to bear the law is given at

birth and through natality itself. Since for Jews one cannot be born “out of the earth,”

the transmission of “procreative blood” bypasses the distinction between natives and

foreigners. As Cohen also argues, the Jewish “natural right” understanding of

peoplehood cannot rest on such a distinction.

Rosenzweig distinguishes this bio-political condition of the Jewish messianic

peoplehood from the Christian condition of belonging to the messianic community

which requires that each individual, irrespective of their nationality, be “born again” as

witness (Zeugnis) to the “event” that God came on earth, died, and resurrected (SR

342). No individual is born a Christian: the body that gives rise to a Christian is the

mystical one of Christ. Unlike Judaism, which separates eternal life from nationhood at

birth, Rosenzweig thinks that Christian promise of eternal life is more compromised

59
For this view, see Quentin Skinner, "Hobbes on Representation," European Journal of Philosophy 13,
no. 2 (2005): 157-84..
60
This approach does not require that “the blood community… marks the limit of philosophy itself”
Batnitzky, "The Philosophical Import of Carnal Israel: Hermeneutics and the Structure of Rosenzweig's
Star," 148.. The “laws of Nature” and “God’s Nature” are after all accessible to reason.
 32

with the emergence of the national state. As Schmitt did not cease to emphasize, in

Hobbes state sovereignty depends on the belief “that Jesus is the Christ.”61 Augustine

had criticized the aspiration of pagan states to attain eternal life on earth but he had

affirmed it for the representative of the “city of God,” namely, the Apostolic Church.

Rosenzweig identifies the origins of nationalism with the adoption of the Christian

belief in the eternity of the Church on the part of national states, such that every nation

came to believe in its “chosenness” and “manifest destiny” (SR 329-330). Additionally,

the sacralization of the nation in early modernity made it possible for secular, political

wars to be seen as “holy wars” (SR 329-330). Whereas for the Jews the distinction

between “war as a religious act” and political war was “constitutionally distinguished,”

Christianity made it impossible for other nations to “draw this fine distinction; they

simply cannot know in how far a war is holy war, and in how far merely a secular war”

(SR 331). This led to a radical separation between the path of nationalism, now oriented

towards “total” and “planetary” warfare (in the forms of colonialism, imperialism,

World War) and the Jewish people which lived “outside of time agitated by wars” (SR

332).

That said, Rosenzweig thinks that Christian messianism harbors a post-national

future through its conception of “brotherliness” or solidarity that “takes men as it finds

them and yet binds them together across differences of sex, age, class, and race.

Brotherliness connects people in all given circumstances – independently of these

circumstances, which simply continue to exist – as equals, as brothers ‘in the Lord’”

(SR 344). The reference here is to the Paulinian concept of the hos me (“as if not”) in I

Corinthians 7, 29-32, recently analyzed by Taubes and Agamben.62 Zizek has argued
61
See the discussion in Miguel Vatter, "Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza. On the
Relation between Liberalism and Political Theology," The New Centennial Review 4, no. 3 (2004): 161-
214..
62
See Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). and
Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans(Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005).
 33

that when Christian love is understood in these Paulinian terms, it amounts to “the

notion (and practice) of antagonistic universality, of the universality as struggle which

cuts across the entire social body, of universality as a partial, engaged position.”63 In

other words, for Zizek the true messianic position consists in adopting Christian love

but practicing it with “excessive cruelty as its necessary obverse,” where this “cruelty”

is represented by the Jewish God.64 His proposal “argues for the step from Judaism to

Paulinian Christianity” and it echoes Santner’s belief that “Saint Paul was the first great

German-Jewish thinker, equal in stature to Rosenzweig, Freud, and Benjamin.”65

In reality, Rosenzweig’s reading of Christian messianism moves in an entirely

different direction, since he finds the affirmative aspect of Christianity in the dualism of

Empire and Church: these supranational orders gave rise to processes that will destroy

in time the hegemony of the national state. With respect to the Christian justification of

Empire (“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”), Rosenzweig understands the

emperor as the harbringer of universal law, in analogy with the way in which “creation,

the work of divine omnipotence, is consummated in the universal rule of law on earth”

(SR 352, emphasis mine). In this sense, Rosenzweig rescues the republican, not the

antinomian dimensions of Paulinian messianic politics: the post-secular conception of

empire worth defending is that of an “empire of law” (as it was for Dante) strong

enough to resist the monarchic “rebellion” of the national states “which presumed to

fight for jurisdiction not, like the empire, over the world, but only over themselves” (SR

352).

Likewise, the affirmative messianic role of the Church consists in opening up a

possibility for politics that, like the empire of law, is both supra-national and

constitutional. The Church “cannot dispense with a legal constitution of its own. On the

63
Slavoj Zizek, The Neighbor. Three Inquiries in Political Theology, 154..
64
Ibid., 189..
65
Ibid., 132..
 34

contrary, it is a visible system and of a sort which the state cannot tolerate…. a system

which claims not to be a whit less universal than the state. Church law, no less than

Caesar’s law, sooner or later applies to everyone” (SR 353). This thought would later

be developed by Rosenstock-Huessy in his conception of cycles of legal revolutions

starting with the Papal legal revolution and leading up to the Russian Revolution. It also

lies at the basis of Berman’s genealogy of the rule of law out of the functional

differentiation of law from government. Most recently, Brunkhorst has identified in it

the precursor of the idea of cosmopolitan constitutionalism.66

Rosenzweig on progress and return to beginnings.

Christian messianism serves the cause of peace by breaking with the circular

relation between law and violence characteristic of state government in order to

“conduct through time” all nations towards the End of the true messianic time and

eternal life. The politico-theological meaning of Christianity is that “it must master

time” for the nations of the world which cannot “create their own time and thus liberate

themselves from time” (SR 337). Christianity “masters” time through its concept of the

saeculum (Rosenzweig speaks of the “epoch”), which stretches the messianic moment

of the nunc stans into the historical period coming after the first Coming of Christ and

lasting until the End of times: “All the time that succeeds, from Christ’s earthly sojourn

to his second coming, is now that sole great present, that epoch, that standstill…. Time

has become a single way, but a way whose beginning and end lie beyond time” (SR

339).

66
See Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution. Autobiography of Western Man., Harold Berman, Law and
Revolution. The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).,
and Hauke Brunkhorst, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives(London:
Bloomsbury, 2014).
 35

Rosenzweig understands Christianity as propelling a process of secularization

that, although entirely disconnected from the End of history, nonetheless accelerates its

coming in so far as it “eternalizes” the present by turning history into the “way” to

redemption. Thus, every single historical event is equally “midway between beginning

and end of the eternal path and, by virtue of this central position in the temporal middle

realm of eternity, every event is itself eternal” (SR 339). In this sense, Christian

messianism has the task of arresting the empty flow of time and bring the progression of

time to a “standstill.” Benjamin’s interpretation of the Baroque Christian Trauerspiel,

for which all of history becomes “natural history,” works out one possible implication

of Rosenzweig’s claim. Benjamin’s later interpretation of Baudelaire and la modernité

as “drawing out the eternal from the transitory” works out another implication. As

paradoxical as it may sound, Rosenzweig’s thesis is that Christianity is the messianic

force that drives every nation on its “one-way street” to modernization.

But to bring time to a standstill is entirely a different matter than to reverse it.

This second, revolutionary messianic task is the one assigned to the post-secular idea of

Jewish messianism. For Rosenzweig, the Christian drive to modernize the world will

never attain the End of history. At most it can prepare the nations of the world for this

change, much in the same sense that for Marx capitalism brings pre-history to an “end”

and is thus preparatory for authentic communism, in which everything will be, perhaps

ever so slightly, reversed.

Like Schmitt, Peterson, Taubes and Agamben, Rosenzweig recognizes that the

problem of history, and a fortiori of historicism, is a function of the divinely-willed

“enmity” between Jews and Christians thematized by Paul. “Before God, then, Jew and

Christian both labor at the same task. He cannot dispense with either. He has set an

enmity between the two for all time, and withal has most intimately bound each to each.
 36

To us he gave eternal life by kindling the fire of the Star of his truth in our hearts. Them

he set on the eternal way by causing them to pursue the rays of that Star of his truth for

all time unto the eternal end” (SR 415). However, unlike these authors, Rosenzweig

leaves Paul and turns to Maimonides one last time to interpret the sense of this enmity

between messianic peoples. Rosenzweig connects it with what is perhaps the thorniest

question of all within a philosophical account of Judaism, namely, the question as to the

esoteric meaning of the relation between the account of the Beginning (Creation) and

the account of the Chariot (Redemption) (RR 67-8). Maimonides had said that these two

accounts stand to each other like physics (nature) to metaphysics (God). Picking up this

suggestion, Rosenzweig advances the stunning hypothesis that “creation would actually

already be redemption” (SR 419). Redemption is only possible on condition that God as

Creator of Nature is also Nature’s God.

In the “system” of the Star, philosophy correlates to the doctrine of creation,

theology to the doctrine of revelation, and (as I have been arguing) political theology to

the doctrine of redemption. The Star begins with an initial anti-Hegelian motif,

according to which it is not (Christian) theology which anticipates the truth of

philosophy, as Hegel’s system has it, but rather that true philosophy is always already

“prophetic” in that it announces the End, the messianic age. Rosenzweig concludes the

Star with the reverse claim, namely, that the messianic End is attainable only in a

“return to the beginnings” of philosophy: this is the possibility preserved by Judaism.

Through their study of God’s ways, the Jewish “remnant” brings about a

“peculiar inversion of chronological sequence,” such that its ethico-political reality, by

“constantly anticipating the End,” turns this End of Redemption back onto the

beginning of Creation: “in this reversal it [the life of the eternal people/MV] denies time
 37

as decisively as possible and places itself outside of time” (RS 420, emphasis mine).67

On this account, “progress” towards Redemption is achieved by going against historical

“progress” and turning time around, deconstructing history backwards toward Creation.

Benjamin will later adopt this thesis and radicalize its implications in his conceptions of

apoktastasis and reductio ad integrum. In this sense, the “eternal life” of the messianic

community must be understood as an “active denial” of the Christian saeculum and

thus of the process of secularization and modernization: “the active denial would occur

only in the reversal” of time and in the denial of the claim that history is productive of

truth.68 As Rosenzweig says: “to reverse a Between [the Christian saeculum/MV] means

to make its After a Before, its Before an After, the end a beginning, the beginning an

end. And that is what the eternal people does” (SR 420). This formulation echoes

Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, and it provides the context for Strauss’s

critique of historicism and his question: Progress or Return?69 For if Creation is already

Redemption then the very concept of historical progress is a contradiction in terms:

progress only takes us a-way from Redemption rather than bringing it about.

The Jewish conception of the messianic turns upside down Paulinian

antinomianism because it requires that what is “temporally speaking … a starting point,

the law, this it sets up as its goal” (SR: 420). The law that is found at the beginning, in

Creation, and that will be recovered equally by all creatures at the End of time, is a form

of natural right. Although “Athens” is characterized by the worship of pagan gods,

67
In contrast, Gordon claims that in Rosenzweig “eternity” is not really opposed to “time” because
historicity remains the ultimate horizon for him, just as it was for Heidegger. Gordon, Rosenzweig and
Heidegger. Between Judaism and German Philosophy.. Gordon opposes his reading to Karl Löwith,
"M.Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity”," Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 3(1942): 53-77.
68
In contrast, Batnitzky argues that Rosenzweig structures his entire argument in the Star in a sense
analogous to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, whose first principle is the productivity for truth of historical
distance. See Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation. The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig
Reconsidered(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)., chapter 3.
69
Both Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy.: 276-278 and Robert Gibbs,
"Lines, Circles, Points: Messianic Epistemology in Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin," in Toward the
Millenium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, ed. Peter Schäfer and Mark
Cohen(Leiden/Boston: Brill, 1998). miss the movement of eternal return in Rosenzweig.
 38

which signifies a worship of the state and of the arts, of “civilization,” and “Jerusalem”

stands for the belief that “He who thrones in heaven mocks” both the state and the arts,

Rosenzweig understands this opposition to mean that the work of “civilization” is

opposed by “the quiet effectiveness of created nature,” or, what is the same, “divinely

ruled nature” (SR 421). But “divinely ruled nature” grounds the conviction that all

human beings are created equal and endowed with inalienable or innate right. In this

sense, the “reversal” of progress, the return to beginnings, entails that the goal of all

philosophical politics is the fulfilment of natural right. For Rosenzweig, just like for

Cohen, a secret and mutual understanding between Platonic political philosophy and

Jewish messianism underlies the apparent division between Athens and Jerusalem.

The conclusion to the Third Part of the Star makes explicit what is already

implicit in the Maimonidean identification of Redemption with Creation, of

metaphysics with physics, namely, that the redemption of humankind from war and

poverty must also be the redemption of the All of Nature, that is, its emancipation from

the slavery in which it has been placed by civilization, by the pretense of omnipotence

brandished by the state and by technology, when it turned the creations of nature into

mere “material” for the inventions of human beings. It is thus fitting to conclude with an

aphorism by Benjamin that seems to recapitulate the central points of the Star of

Redemption, starting from its title, “To the Planetarium,” passing through its initial

reflection on star worship, and culminating in the vision of a new redemptive approach

to nature: “technology is the mastery not of nature but of the relation between nature

and man. Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago, but

mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized

through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from
 39

that which it had in nations and families…. Living substance conquers the frenzy of

destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.”70

70
In “One-Way Street”, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bollock
and Michael W. Jennings(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 487.