Judaism Despite Christianity

The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig

Michael Gormann-Thelen, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226728025
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Before they were both internationally renowned philosophers, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig were young German soldiers fighting in World War I corresponding by letter and forming the foundation of their deep intellectual friendship. Collected here, this correspondence provides an intimate portrait of their views on history, philosophy, rhetoric, and religion as well as on their writings and professors. Most centrally, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig discuss, frankly but respectfully, the differences between Judaism and Chiristianity and the reasons they have chosen their respective faiths. This edition includes a new foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a new preface by Harold Stahmer along with his original introduction, and essays by Dorothy Emmet and Alexander Altmann, who calls this correspondence "one of the most important religious documents of our age" and "the most perfect example of a human approach to the Jewish-Christian problem."

1
ABOUT THE CORRESPONDENCE:

Essays by Alexander Altmann
and Dorothy M. Emmet

Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: An Introduction to Their “Letters on Judaism & Christianity”
by Alexander Altmann*

The “Letters on Judaism and Christianity” of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock have rightly been described as one of the most important religious documents of our age.¹ The two correspondents face each other not as official spokesmen of their respective faiths but as two human beings who are aware both of their separateness as Jew and Christian and their oneness in Adam. They meet, as Rosenstock once put it,² “under the open sky.” They express but their own views; and it is precisely this informal, personal, and direct character in their meeting which brings out a depth of thought and a frankness of expression that is unparalleled in the long history of Jewish-Christian relations. Unlike the medieval disputations, in which dogma was arrayed against dogma and verse set against verse, this discussion is a true dialogue. It is indeed the most perfect example of a human approach to the Jewish-Christian problem. It is also an exemplification of what is called the “existential” attitude to theological problems, in that it breaks down the artificial barrier between theologumena and philosophumena and considers its subject from an all-round human viewpoint, instead of isolating it.

The present analysis is concerned with the history and background of this important correspondence. It does not enter into an elucidation of the correspondence itself, which is a task that may be reserved for a later opportunity. Everybody who has read these letters will agree that they require an introduction. It is hoped that the present article may serve this purpose and, at the same time, encourage those who are as yet unacquainted with the letters to read and study them.

Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock met for the first time at Leipzig University in 1913. Rosenstock was lecturer in medieval constitutional law, and Rosenzweig, though two years older, was his pupil. He had studied medicine, turned to history and philosophy, written a thesis on Hegel und der Staat, and now felt the importance of some training in law. As early as 1911, theology had been added to the subjects to which he was devoting himself “in an unbounded receptivity.”

When he met Rosenstock, he found in him not only a jurist and historian but a philosopher as well.³ Both of them were aware of the discrepancy that existed between the great philosophical heritage of 1800 and the sterility of philosophy in their own generation. Nietzsche had put forward the just claims of the human element in any philosophical approach to the world and history. He had asked for a type of philosopher who was not only a great thinker but a complete human being. The generation of 1910 began to understand how legitimate this claim was. In the years just before and during the Great War, a fundamentally new philosophical approach was gathering strength. The “existential” philosopher was emerging from the barrenness of the schools. The importance of the “existential” factors of personal decision and response was being recognized in determining that generation’s philosophy. This soon became clear in theology, to which new depth was being given by Karl Barth. In philosophy, a new irrationalism (Stefan George and his group; Georg Simmel in Germany, Henri Bergson in France) at first obscured the rise of the new “existential” philosophy, but the movement was gaining more and more ground. It expressed itself most notably in the new branches of phenomenology, which sprang from Edmund Husserl’s renewal of scholasticism; in Max Scheler’s philosophy of values; and, finally, in Martin Heidegger’s ontology.

There is evidence that, in some measure, Rosenzweig had worked his way through to an “existential” philosophy even before he met Rosenstock, though the decisive turn toward the “new thinking”⁴ was undoubtedly due to Rosenstock’s influence. In 1909 Rosenzweig and a circle of friends had met with the purpose of forming a society to save the ripe achievements of the nineteenth century (social progress, the historical approach, nationalism, the scientific attitude) in the twentieth century, so as to possess them no longer as mere objects of a struggle but as elements of a new civilization.⁵ The scheme failed; but what Rosenzweig had felt to be the cardinal point of his and his friends’ endeavors, namely, that they wanted to realize 1900 as distinctively different from 1800, still remained his guiding star. In a letter to Hans Ehrenberg (September 26, 1910),⁶ Rosenzweig emphasized how the twentieth century had departed from the Hegelian view of history. To us, he says, history is no longer something to be contemplated but something to be acted upon. This has, he feels, a vital bearing on theology. Hegel’s religious “intellectualism” is no longer ours. Today we emphasize the practical moment, sin, actual history. History can no longer be interpreted as a divine process developed in time and to be contemplated by the onlooker but has to be recognized as the sum total of human actions. It does not present an impersonal process but personal actions, relations, and meetings. Therefore, we refuse to see “God in history” because we do not want to look on history as a picture or as a being that unfolds. We recognize God in every human being of ethical value, but not in the accomplished whole of history; for why should we be in need of a God, if history were godlike, if every deed, once it entered history, became ipso facto godlike and justifiable? No, he says, every human deed is liable to become sinful precisely after it has entered history and has become part of it, since through the interrelation of acts in history no act is merely personal but is caught up in an impersonal nexus of cause and effect beyond the control and intention of the doer. For this reason God must redeem man, not through history, but—there is no alternative—through religion. For Hegel and his “school” history was divine theodicy; for us religion is the only true theodicy. Thus Rosenzweig felt that the twentieth century’s attack on the nineteenth century’s interpretation of history paved the way for a new and deeper understanding of religion.

This new approach to religion had, however, to wait for its actual embodiment in his life and work until he met Rosenstock about three years later. The union of philosophy and theology that was to become the main feature of the “new thinking” could be brought about only by an experience of the reality of religion, not by mere academic reflections. Though some of the sentences quoted could have been written by Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig was still far from a standpoint of faith. The reason must be sought in Rosenzweig’s personal situation as a Jew without actual roots in Jewish tradition. He was the son of an old Jewish family that had lost most of its Jewish heritage. True, there was a certain loyalty to the old faith and community, both on his and on his parents’ part.⁷ But it was of no vital importance to him. And, rather than pretend to be a Jew, he tried to ignore the fact, seeing that, assimilated as he was to German cultural life, his mind had already become Christianized. “We are Christians in every respect,” he once expressed himself in an outburst of sincerity; “we live in a Christian state, attend Christian schools, read Christian books, in short, our whole civilization is fundamentally Christian,” he wrote in a letter to his parents (November 6, 1909). There was nothing, he felt, that divided him from his Christian friends.⁸ But he failed to see that there was a breach within his own being and that he was unable to find his inner form of life until that breach was closed.

The discussions he had with Rosenstock during the summer of 1913 led to a crisis in his life. Not only did Rosenstock share with Rosenzweig a sense of dissatisfaction with contemporary philosophy and a strong tendency toward “existential” philosophy; he seemed actually to personify the new type of philosopher that Rosenzweig was striving so hard, and yet in vain, to become. Rosenstock not only taught but lived his philosophy. The experience of his oneness could not fail to impress Rosenzweig. He was faced with a thinker who was living in accordance with his faith, and this faith was not a naïve return to the old dogma but a reinterpretation of the old faith in a new philosophical language. The “philosophy of speech,” which was later to play so great a part in Rosenzweig’s own thinking, had already been conceived by Rosenstock, it seems, at the time the two met in Leipzig. According to it, truth is revealed through speech as expressing the intercommunication of one mind with another. It is not the formal truths of logic in their timeless, abstract, systematic character that are really vital and relevant, but rather the truths that are brought out in the relationships of human beings with God and with one another—truths that spring from the presentness of time and yet reach out into the eternal. The I—Thou relationship is the central theme of this philosophy of speech, as against the I—It relationship of traditional philosophy. The truths of revelation are identical with the truths of the I—Thou relationship. The “word” (in the biblical sense) is superior to the logos of philosophy. The “word” springs from meeting and response. It has the character of a dialogue, whereas the logos has the nature of a monologue. Rosenzweig was to formulate these ideas and their deeper implications later in his magnum opus—The Star of Redemption⁹—and more concisely in his essay on “The New Thinking” (1925). To what extent his philosophy of speech was developed in 1913 is difficult to establish. But its basic character, i.e., the existential attitude, was certainly there.

The discussions between the two reached their climax in a memorable night’s conversation on July 7, 1913, which is frequently referred to in the correspondence and forms its permanent background. It was the most decisive and most far-reaching event in Rosenzweig’s inner life. It produced a crisis from which, after months of struggle, the new Rosenzweig eventually emerged.

If one puts together the various references to that night’s conversation both in the correspondence and in an important letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg, one is able to form a fairly clear picture of how it developed. Rosenstock himself gives a brief account of it in his Preface to the publication of the correspondence.¹⁰ In 1913 Rosenzweig and Rosenstock had opposed each other, not as a Jew and as a Christian, but as “faith in philosophy” against “faith based on revelation.” The Christian was confronted with a Jew whose sense of Judaism was not strong enough to face him. He considered his friend’s Judaism merely as “a kind of personal idiosyncrasy, or at best as a pious romantic relic of the posthumous influence of a dead great uncle”—a reference to Rosenzweig’s great-uncle, Adam Rosenzweig, who had some considerable influence on his nephew—and he felt justified in putting it “in inverted commas.”¹¹ Rosenzweig was forced “to lay bare his own skeleton and to examine his own anatomy.”¹² His opponent compelled him to take a stand, and eventually defeated him. Rosenzweig wrote some three months later:

In that night’s conversation Rosenstock pushed me step by step out of the last relativist positions that I still occupied, and forced me to take an absolute standpoint. I was inferior to him from the outset, since I had to recognize for my part too the justice of his attack. If I could then have buttressed my dualism between revelation and the world with a metaphysical dualism between God and the Devil [he meant to say if he could have split himself into two halves, a religious and a worldly one], I should have been unassailable. But I was prevented from doing so by the first sentence of the Bible. This piece of common ground forced me to face him. This has remained even afterwards, in the weeks that followed, the fixed point of departure. Any form of philosophical relativism is now impossible to me.¹³

The change in Rosenzweig’s philosophical outlook can be clearly seen in two letters to Hans Ehrenberg, written in December of the same year.¹⁴ They concern the relationship between faith and reason, revelation and philosophy. What happens in history, he says, is not a struggle between man’s faith and man’s reason but a struggle between God and man. In world history the absolute powers themselves are dramatis personae. Revelation breaks into the world and transforms creation, which is the Alpha of history, into redemption, which is the Omega. Philosophy has a pagan quality. It is an expression of the Alpha, of creation, of pure nature to which God has given freedom—even against himself. But as revelation comes into the world, it gradually absorbs philosophy, deprives it of its pagan elements, and illuminates it with its own light. The Omega of history will be realized after the element of creation, the world’s freedom, has spent itself. Then God, who has allowed the world to be the Alpha, will again be the First and the Last, the Alpha and the Omega.

Rosenzweig believed (cf. the two letters mentioned just above) that the absorption of philosophy into the realm of revelation was not merely a postulate of faith but a historical fact. Medieval scholasticism meant the adoption and transformation of Greek, i.e., pagan, philosophy. The reformations of the sixteenth century could not alter the fact that the spiritual world of Europe had already been Christianized; on the contrary, they only confirmed it. Though faith and reason had again been separated, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz were no longer pagans, but they were Christian heretics; and their spiritual descendants, e.g., Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, actually returned into the fold of Christianity. Rosenzweig felt that, whatever pagan tendencies may have been left alive in philosophy, they could not have any decisive influence in the post-Hegelian world, because in Hegel’s philosophical idealism the Greek, i.e., pagan, spirit had spoken its last word. Hegel marked the finis philosophiae. “From Thales to Hegel” or “from Ionia to Jena,” as Rosenzweig put it in The Star of Redemption, the history of philosophy was identical with the history of philosophical idealism. It was the declared aim of every philosopher to reduce “everything” (God, world, man) to a single principle—to identify everything with onething. It tried to reduce God and man to the cosmos (in ancient philosophy), man and the world to God (in medieval philosophy), or God and the world to man (in modern philosophy).¹⁵ In Hegel this tendency overreached itself, insofar as he attempted not only to derive everything from the absolute mind but also to comprehend the historical process of philosophical thought as a process of logical necessity. Thus, in Hegel’s system the problems of idealistic, i.e., pagan, philosophy are finally settled. No further step beyond is possible. After Hegel there can be no more philosophers in the idealistic, i.e., pagan, fashion but only philosophers of faith, Christian philosophers. The monologues of the idealistic philosophers have now to be replaced by the dialogues of human beings with faith and common sense....