God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between by Benjamin Lazier
By Benjamin Lazier
May perhaps the simplest factor approximately faith be the heresies it spawns? major intellectuals in interwar Europe concept so. They believed that they lived in an international made derelict via God's absence and the interruption of his name. In reaction, they helped resurrect gnosticism and pantheism, the 2 so much effective demanding situations to the monotheistic culture. In God Interrupted, Benjamin Lazier tracks the resultant debates in regards to the divine throughout confessions and disciplines. He additionally strains the dazzling afterlives of those debates in postwar arguments in regards to the surroundings, neoconservative politics, and heretical varieties of Jewish identification. In full of life, stylish prose, the publication reorients the highbrow heritage of the era.
God Interrupted also presents novel debts of 3 German-Jewish thinkers whose rules, seminal to fields usually considered as wildly unrelated, had universal origins in debates approximately heresy among the wars. Hans Jonas built a philosophy of biology that encouraged eu vegetables and bioethicists internationally. Leo Strauss turned probably the most very important and debatable political theorists of the 20th century. Gershom Scholem, the eminent pupil of faith, significantly recast what it ability to be a Jew. jointly they assist us see how speak about God was once tailored for discuss nature, politics, know-how, and paintings. They alert us to the abiding salience of the divine to Europeans among the wars and beyond--even between these for whom God was once lengthy lacking or lifeless.
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Additional resources for God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars
Example text
The latter was born just as much of religious polemic, however, if fourteen centuries later. The Cambridge Platonist Henry More was the first, in 1669, to affix its fateful suffix, fateful insofar as it carried with it the latent potential for a certain slippage in meaning. ’’ More’s use of the term is extraordinary. In its very invention, he managed to both expand and circumscribe the term’s capacity to refer. He destabilized the term’s relation to its putative historical referent (identifying Catholicism’s foundational heresy with a version of Catholicism itself).
This discomfort was nowhere more evident than in efforts to account for the origin and continued presence of evil in the world. No matter the explanations offered, they could hardly compete in imaginative force with the gnostic solution: two powers in heaven, one the evil creator, the other an absent, unknown, and transcendent god of salvation. Even as they feared the cogency of gnostic exegesis, the early heresy hunters complained of gnosticism’s prodigious capacity for invention, its penchant for spontaneous mythmaking.
The question is why. The answer is in part bound up with a second drawback: to call this story an overcoming of gnosticism obscures the fact that Jonas’s attack on gnostic thought had its precedent and complement in his attack on Paul. Like the gnostics, Paul enjoyed a renaissance in this period, prompted not least by the theologians of crisis. Many associated Paul with gnostic theology, and in this Jonas was no exception. He in fact advanced a strong version of the thesis, describing Paul as the most perfect incarnation of the gnostic spirit.