The Rise of Jerusalem - New English Review

By Friedrich Hansen (January 2018)

Moses Receiving the Tablets of Law, Marc Chagall, 1966

ith Jerusalem on track again after millennia to becoming the acknowledged capital of the Jews, major politico-theological changes are upon us. Just as the increasingly fragile EU rescued Athens more than financially and is seen by many as itself in need of something to hold on, Donald Trump wholeheartedly embraced its old rival Jerusalem. No surprise then that the announcement by President Donald Trump that the United States will move its embassy to the holy city was met with immediate rejections by the Arab League in sync with the European Union—with the notable exception of Czech Republic and Hungary. It is no coincidence that the rejectionists belong to the club of the last universalists, even if they reside on the opposite ends of the political spectrum: liberals vying with fundamentalists. This must be put in the context of the recent Renaissance of particularism and nation states which is driven by disappointment by the Davos elites. In addition, the hype of gender diversity has awakened the silent majority from the slumber of enlightened identitarianism and is fostering the longing for self-determination. It is for this reason that basic democratic concepts such as referenda and populism have surged recently.

To my knowledge, it was the apostle Paul who invented universalism as the Christian brand of Catholicism (which means the same thing) by alienating Jesus from his Jewish roots consisting of strong families tied to religious inwardness. Jewish hope culminates in the never-to-be-arriving Messiah, which is why scores of Hebrew verbs, like in English, gravitate towards “becoming” rather than the Greek and German “being”. The former belongs to the mentality of traders while the latter represents the mentality of craftsmen. This is being corroborated by the strong centripetal orientation of Jewish particularism. It culminates in the “ontological pull” of Hebrew grammar conducive to transcendence and extremely avers to mirror thinking and metaphysical reification. By contrast, Paul would be abstracting from the particular, wedded as it is to the unique Jewish person, whereby he would vaporize divine transcendence.

The dismal effect of Paul’s Catholicity is this: he redirected all projections and prejudices between individuals from inward transcendence tied to the auditive paradigm toward outward immanence issuing from the visible paradigm. The result of this universalist manipulation which works, by the way, as an extinction of meaning intelligible to the faithful subject, was drawing all class and ethnic projections toward the one-proxy scapegoat called Christ. By comparison, Judaic inwardness was meant to deal with homegrown evil personally and stay clear of any redemption by proxy or scapegoating. The latter was the rule in late antiquity, dominated as it was by Greek shame culture. This much was understood by Sigmund Freud very well, who was appalled by rampant anti-Semitism in pre-WWI Vienna. As a result, Freud would analyze projections as a mendacious psychological mechanism. With that he accomplished a self-enlightenment of the “persecuting innocence”, the flip side of Christ as eternal victim.

Nevertheless, modern victimology became ubiquitous and remained the bane of secularized Christianity. The gravity of this European nemesis is on full display only today while the rapid abandonment of Christ is about to unleash hell onto Israel as the global scapegoat. And yet, already in antiquity the reconstructed Pauline Christ, by contrast to the Jewish Jesus, was a centrifugal universal Type, alienated from family and hence prone to missionizing and speech codes that turned piety outward as a matter of show. Inward Judaism and Orthodoxy, by comparison, stuck to married priests wedded to the family. As Philip Rieff observed, the Greek-Oriental hybrid called Christ was self-contradictory, half man and half God, who actually internalized the tension between the universal and the particular often in an antagonistic fashion which sometimes results in suicide or gender dysphoria. This is why very early on and lacking the protection of the family, St Paul had to resort to concepts of group protection similar to modern multiculturalism and diversity. The enduring symbol for this is the faceless hood of the Christian monk and the modern automaton lefty, his personhood weakened by typological identity, which often confused sexual orientation in waves of group mania.

As an intellectual category free-wheeling universalism stands in principal opposition to the particular Jewish divinity and subsequently loses the capacity to neutralize anxiety, a mechanism thoroughly analysed by Soren Kierkegaard.[1] Paul’s universals, discussed below, eventually would morph into modern derivates such as class, race or gender, all of which share the dangers of abstracting from meaningful context. It is no coincidence that they became essential for totalitarians like Nazis, Marxists, or modern gender ideologies. As mass typologies they all gravitate—just like Pauline Chrisianity—toward the organic-visible paradigm of Aristotelian metaphysics, churning out surrogate truth claims which imitate divine incarnation. Like universal Christ who descended from On High, these typologies formed the metaphysical “clutter” of modern totalitarianism. Equally imposed from above and descending upon us and hostile to human nature they would eventually provoke the countercoup of naturalism and environmentalism.

By contrast, Judaism is gradually ascending and famously transcends human nature in an upward move toward the divine. By contrast, the Gospel—due to its metaphysical Greek credentials—descends onto human nature—the result of which is often hybrids of “passion and pathos” or, what was considered by Maimonides, the greatest Jewish mind of the Middle Ages, to be just dependable “clutter”, a clutter in the service of martyrdom and self-pity. This Greek disease was rarely taken up by Islam or Judaism, leaving them firmly wedded to transcendent trains of thought. Nevertheless, Jewish Kabbalah and Kalam philosophy became also contaminated with Hellenic metaphysics. St Paul’s quest for unity via universal equality is tied to immanence and victimology—something altogether different from active Jewish unity in transcendence, which creates resilience and self-sufficiency. From its first days, universal Christianity was therefore burdened with the curse of unresolved conflicts, conflicts mired in Greek metaphysics that took their latest form since the fin-de-siecle decadence as the sexual revolution that is with us still. Pauline unity was eventually to disintegrate as “incarnated” sexual diversity, as it were, splitting Christ into sparks of multiple organic identities. This clearly answers to the longing for a return to particulars and the centripetal sense of belonging, if narrowed into the biological categories of race and gender. Particularism was originally stolen by St Paul in his famous “neither Greek nor Jew, neither rich nor poor, neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28)—a kind of metaphysical surgery that continues to haunt Christianity.

In other words, Paul abandoned the particular Jewish law and, with it, the timely spread of people’s biographies along the lines of piety whilst “walking before God.” He set off global universalism with his Greek or “spatial turn,” agglomerating multiple tribes attached to their land and languages. Yet this spatial diversity is centrifugal, necessarily turning its back on the family, and he had to compensate this by inclusion of all individuals indiscriminately regardless of their merits. The price for this was a Greek split between reality and afterlife or “two ages”. The “two ages” gave us the apocalypse and Christian afterlife, representing yet another break with Judaism. Frankly speaking: the postponement of punishment toward last judgement inverts the immediate postponement of pleasure in Judaism and takes away the foundations of transcendence.

It was Benedict Spinoza who resolved the problem of split reality and Christian ambivalence[2] by reversing the sanctifying upward “All in One” into the downward and pantheist “One in All”. The unresolved contradictions incorporated in Christ would later be disentangled by Martin Heidegger and inspired his discovery of the seminal “ontological difference”, i.e. the difference between the inward perspective of Adam II and the outward perspective of Adam I. The former is to be conceived as tied to transcendence and the internal-audible paradigm, also known as the system of slow thinking, while the latter is tied to the external-visible paradigm with its delusionary metaphysics, craving for virtual tangibles as proofs of divine rewards. As an example for this, Spinoza invented his centrifugal vehicle of animal instincts called “conatus”, the ever expanding ego rejecting the family. Reflecting his Greek credentials, Spinoza ended up with a split mind, oscillating between Jewish particularism and Christian universalism. It is the issue of form which brings us back to the tensions between Athens and Jerusalem. The modern predicament, image-laden as it is, can surely be read as a victory of Athens over Jerusalem. For these are the two leading, sometimes antagonistic cultural streams of the Western spiritual heritage. While Jerusalem is typically wedded to the word, Athens is fully absorbed by images. Jewish forms of knowledge are led by inner conscience and tend to be therefore autonomous or self-directed yet under the inner heteronomy of transcendent revelation, the “yoke of heaven”. By contrast, Hellenic knowledge tends to be other-directed or externally heteronomous.

In order to understand this difference, I will brush historical sources against the grain in order to expose the Western, Hellenistic bias, born from one-sided attachment to Athens. For image and gaze often militate against language and oral tradition. While the proud Greeks often protested against their dependency on the gods, leaving them in hopeless disunity, the humble Jews understood that embracing divine authority afforded them lasting unity and peace. The blessing of transcendence intelligence is the diminishing of vanity and pride of authorship, which minimizes rivalry. It is quite literally better to depend on a transcendent being than on multiple hybrids as the Greeks did, subject to the conflicting demands of polytheism. A recent example of persistent Western Hellenism is the awarding of Pulitzer Prize to Stephen Greenblatt. He received the coveted trophy in 2012 for his historical yet fictionalized account on Lucretius, the Roman disciple of the legendary hedonist Epicurus. According to Greenblatt’s plot, Lucretius’ manuscript De Natura had been rediscovered in a remote Bavarian Abbey during the Renaissance and became very influential thereafter. Greenblatt is known as an authority in Anglo-American letters after the death of Mike Abrams in April 2015, with whom he put together the signatory Norton Anthology of English Literature. Greenblatt, to my knowledge, is presently presiding over the American Canon.

Here is an example of the practical consequences of transcendent versus metaphysical reasoning: compared to the open-minded Norton Canon, the competing “Heath Anthology” is caught up in trendy terms of groupthink. Contaminated by political correctness, it appears at the same time more iconoclastic, making room for a wealth of particulars appealing to post-modern minorities at the cost of the classics. The fight against racism, for instance, should start with criticism of the slave-holding elite of Athens in antiquity, yet this issue is rarely touched upon by liberal academia. Yet it was the reception of Greek philosophy in the Renaissance and beyond which is marked by racial bias since it threw the fate of slavery in Athens under the carpet. This has been mainly the work of Western Cultural Protestants who have lost access to transcendent long ago. It is well known that Protestants associated themselves with Athens and Catholics with Rome. This explains why the slaves were simply forgotten when the first American constitution was drafted in 1787, still reflecting the continuity of slave ownership that ended only with the Civil War.

Mugged by Reality

If some chutzpah is in order here, we might think after all that God had started in Eden as an idealist and inevitably was to be mugged by human reality. Thus, a sobering gap had opened up between physics and metaphysics in the shame culture of Eden’s low hanging fruits. It would in the end leave Adam and Eve short-changed with expulsion and lifelong toil. This was then followed by the covenant with Noah suited by yet another with Abraham later. But the broader heaven of transcendence would only be made accessible to the proverbial stiff-necked Israelites at Sinai. Raised by a generation of former slaves and still lacking a Jewish persona, the children of the exiles from Egypt were eventually deemed capable of absorbing a comprehensive revelation translated by Moses. Nevertheless, the Torah even had to be revealed twice at Sinai to afford the Jews an important divine lesson: God started with the “visible” or written law first, inducing his people to trust their eyes more than their ears—as if the calamity of Eden had not been enough.

The Hidden Hitler).

Burden Sharing

Clearly this situation called for divine relief. Burden sharing is a principled and much older alternative to any passive Christian notion of afterlife or “two ages,” for it is a hands-on approach to piety wedded to personal commitment and promise made true. Divinely inspired action became such a blessing for the Jews because they knew the bitter taste of forced work under tyranny. And we can realize with empathy that, before the Israelites were slaves, God himself made that experience himself, by somehow becoming a slave of the passions of his people. This could not go on forever and it was from this unprecedented low point of Israel, stuck in slavery which had been dragging on for 400 years, that God, all forgiving ruler that he is, made yet another new start. This explains why he choose the desert which is best suitable for inculcating his message into “unformatted” slaves. To accomplish this, he had to be in full control of the environment.

Mysterium Tremendum and Fascinans better than a decent earthquake. If the mountain shattered, the Israelites would tremble too, regardless of whether they liked it or not. Hillel Halkin gives us brilliant examples of biblical imagery: “Onkelos, anxious as always to avoid idolatry, translates ‘God came down on it’ (Sinai) as ‘was revealed on it.’ Rashi, the medieval French commentator, having no such compunctions, tells us that God spread the sky over the mountain “as though covering a bed with a sheet and lowered His throne onto it”.[3] This is an example of authentic biblical language and its sensibilities to contexts, nicely maintained in the metaphorical term embedding. In Hebrew, we could find a great many of such examples but also in languages not affected by the Reformation, such as Russian. In both, the transcendental associations and meaning still dominate the way of reasoning and its expressions. The Reformation being an assault of Greek metaphysics on monotheism resulted in the domination of an alienated metaphysical layer of meaning taking precedence in the expressions. The biblical use of transcendental images does not allow for split or double meanings as common in metapyhsics. Rather biblical words are embedded in particularism or multiple associations, as opposed to binary dialectical meanings in Hellenism. We cannot elaborate on this here any further however.

John James Audubon: Bald Eagle

In the desert, the sensual attachment of man to his environment seems uprooted or at least less palpable. This is understood as engendering the urge for artificial things to hold on, in particular intangible ones. One obvious demonstration of this is the invariable generation of optical delusions, fake realities known as Fata Morgana. Here, the visual imagination takes control over our mind and it gives us perhaps the closest experience to what we might call a feeling of metaphysics. It is quite different from the experience upon closing our eyes which triggers the longing for transcendence. Only birds naturally encounter a similar experience of void or very remote limits when rising up in the sky. There seems a naturalist case to be made for the experience of avian as analogous to human dis-embeddedness. Sensual deprivation, which might in both cases have been addressed by divine evolution, so to speak, provided a sort of natural metaphysical hold through pairing in monogamy, which is shared with humans by birds only. Let’s hear a voice of the famous Audubon society, the specialist on American birds, on the monogamous conduct of eagles:

[4]

[5] This is a likely culprit for the Western collapse of marriage, religion and family resulting in Europe’s nemesis: demographic winter and the dismal answer to it which is unregulated immigration.[6]

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Dr. Friedrich Hansen is a physician and writer. He has researched Islamic Enlightenment in Jerusalem and has networked on behalf of the Maimonides Prize. Previous journalistic and academic historical work in Germany, Britain and Australia. He is currently working in Germany and Australia.