Justin Reynolds
Department of History
“History in Context: Transcendence and History in Transatlantic Theology and Philosophy in the Early Cold War.”
By the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed to many intellectuals in the West that history had turned on humanity. Between 1930 and 1960, reaching an apex in the immediate postwar years, a considerable literature emerged addressing what might be termed the problem of history: what sources of meaning, if any, were available within the parameters of this historical experience? While strains of existential and pragmatist thinking sought to forge meaning from the resources of immanence, a surprising range of thinkers – of diverse intellectual, religious, and political allegiances – were united in looking beyond time, to notions of transcendence for personal and political orientation. My dissertation examines networks of European and American thinkers, many of them émigrés and all of them in contact across national borders, who sought to place history itself in context. The project both illuminates the process by which Christians joined with “secular” liberals and conservatives to articulate a vision of the “Judeo-Christian” West in contrast to what they perceived to be the “secular religion” of Soviet Communism. It also examines how three non-Christian German émigré intellectuals – Ernst Bloch, Karl Löwith, and Jacob Taubes – who shared the age’s prevailing concern to distinguish history and transcendence but sought to avoid what they saw as the dangers or difficulties built into the Christian and liberal traditions. My research thus provides a concrete case in which to explore the continuities and discontinuities between thinkers identifying as “religious” and thinkers who refused to do so – an approach that seeks to do justice to the distinctions between these alternatives while acknowledging their profound inextricability.
The first part of my paper will focus on the period between the late 1930s and early 1950s, tracing the emergence of an intellectual consensus that united Christian and non-believing thinkers by the beginning of the Cold War. In the wake of liberalism’s manifest failure in interwar Europe, leading western intellectuals of the Left and the Right discarded the pre-war belief in a “value-neutral” modernity and candidly – even happily – acknowledged that foundation upon a theological inheritance. In order to bring into focus a larger movement, I will focus on two colleagues and fellow émigrés, the conservative Eric Voegelin and the liberal Raymond Aron, who embraced Judeo-Christian thought traditions while disavowing personal belief. In defending the compatibility of western liberal modernity and Judeo-Christian thought, they found themselves substantially allied with political theologies espoused at the time by Catholic thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and a transatlantic network of Protestant thinkers centered around the World Council of Churches that included in its orbit Reinhold Niebuhr, Oscar Cullmann, Emil Brunner, and Paul Tillich. Both groups stressed that the enjoyment of rights and liberties and the defense against “totalitarian” political solutions required delimiting this world from a beyond. By the same logic, they identified the Soviet Union as a “political religion” (Voegelin’s term) or “secular religion” (Aron’s) that had improperly collapsed the distinction between the two realms.
The liberal-Christian consensus masked a critical disagreement: while non-believers sought remedies for this world (and used notions of transcendence primarily as intellectual constructs or, as in the emergence of human rights methods for signifying the “transcendent value” of the individual person), Christians actually believed in an escape from history by the grace of God. It was in the space between these options that three poorly understood non-Christian thinkers — Ernst Bloch, Karl Löwith, and Jacob Taubes – developed their ideas in the postwar era. In frequent contact with Christian theologians, these three figures each sought to recover notions transcendence that avoided: a) reverting to essentially neo-Kantian notions of a timeless, but abstract Absolute and b) accepting the reality of an “end of time” in which history would culminate and terminate in the Kingdom of God. The atheist Bloch turned to philosophical anthropology and Marxist criticism to recover a notion of transcendence rooted in the human capacity to hope for a better future. Taubes, rabbi and philosopher, turned to eschatological traditions in Christianity and Judaism and apocalyptic movements of the early Christian era to formulate a critique that harnessed the prophetic possibilities in religion while escaping its institutionalizing constraints he believed to follow upon the Christian notion of Incarnation. Löwith, meanwhile, a non-Christian known mostly for his critique of the theological foundations of western philosophies of history in Meaning in History (1949), developed in the 1940s and 1950s a concept of Welt, or existence beyond historical experience, that aimed specifically to remove all eschatological elements from Christian and Jewish notions of transcendence. These three thinkers attempts to theorize the relation between history and transcendence may help to illuminate pathways and obstacles relevant to our own attempts to imagine a “post-secular” world.