Abraham Heschel's Man is Not Alone (1951).

Abraham Heschel, Man is Not Alone: A Study of Religion

If Christian theology is a blind spot in contemporary readers (my self-selecting twitter feed excepted), then Jewish theology is even lesser known among engaged readers. Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the leading American Rabbis of the 20th century, a leading voice on mysticism. Born in Warsaw, he narrowly escaped to America, where he came to lead the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary which he led until his death in 1974. This setting is important: Heschel was at the heart not just of the civil rights movement, but of the post-war transatlantic intellectual life. Yet it is Heschel’s attack on Reason which qualifies this position. This may not be so surprising considering the anti-enlightenment stance taken by many in the wake of the Holocaust, but what I think of as his anti-Humanism points also to a reaction against a Kantian universalism that links pre-war thought to that of the post-modern reaction typified by Latour.

This post will focus on Man Is Not Alone (1951), for three reasons. First, that’s what I finished reading the other week. Second, I believe it has the clearest explanation of what makes Heschel unique. Thirdly, it sets us up nicely for my next post on Leon Kass’ The Beginning of Wisdom. You’ll notice that this post is also more narrative based than the previous analytic posts. I think this works a bit better, as it doesn’t presuppose knowledge of the book or field.

Heschel’s Man is Not Alone seeks to define religion from first principles. Everyone has had, or will have, an encounter with the ineffable - that encounter with the sublime during, say, Bach’s St John’s Passion, Tallis’ Spem in Alium, or in nature. Any experience, that is to say, which represents a bouleversement of the self that escapes language. It is the attempt to theorise, represent, elicit, or parse the ineffable which serves as the first cause of philosophy, religion, and art.

How then to think rigorously about the ineffable? Doubt is the wrong approach. As he explains:

A philosophy that begins in doubt ends in radical despair. It was the principal of dubito ut intelligam that prepared the soil for modern gospels of despair. (13).

Instead, drawing on Plato’s Theaetetus, it is wonder - defined as ‘thaumatism’ - that is the best approach. We can doubt anything - and here there are undeniable links back to Descartes - except that we perceive and that we experience the ineffable. In other words, while we can doubt the cause of that amazement, we cannot doubt that we undergo the experience.

This represents not just a break from Descartes, but evolves into a rejection of Kantianism. Part of the problem comes with the doubt we have been told to abandon; in attempting to define and scrutinise, the mind tends towards plunder rather than experience, and breaks up the world into distinct units which exclude all else. 

 ‘When ceasing to convert the world into objects of our abstraction, man comes to realise that he is treated like a satellite by his own mind, which keeps him from getting in touch with reality itself and never gives its own secret away, debarring him from the essence rather than initiating him into it’ (38)

In other words, scepticism prioritises the rational self at the expense of a coherent yet distant world. Accepting the ineffable, surrendering ourselves to wonder at the experience, we don’t just break down that scientific tendency. We might think that ‘the world’ and ‘I’ are object and subject. In fact, these are upended. We are the object in the mind of the creator. We are not the master, but His object. As Heschel says, it’s easy to ask the question that follows - ‘if i am the object, who is the subject?’ but the very moment that we ask the question we become aware of ourselves, we begin to doubt, and in turn the awareness of the self precludes the possibility of grasping the content of the question. 

This, of course, is still nearly impossible to comprehend. Not solely does it invert Kant’s conception of the self and the world, but it invokes both Augustine and Blake to assert first the radical disunity of the self (coherent only as the object of another subjectivity) and a Romanticism (See page 68, where he asks ‘who lit the wonder before our eyes?’) that lurches into anti-humanism. If belief is an awareness that something is asked of us, then this in turn becomes an inversion of subjectivity to being the object of god’s eternal subjectivity. The question is not ‘where is god’ but rather ‘where are we?’ (p70). God of course is not something that is somewhere in space, and the religious man is one who is critically aware of himself as an object in God. Compare Julian of Norwich’s vision of the universe as an object in Christ’s hand and Augustine’s argument that a human life only becomes coherent from God’s perspective.

Inverting the subject and object in turn leads us to a new understanding of the Bible. 

The Bible is not man’s vision of God but God’s vision of man. The Bible is not man’s theology but God’s anthropology, dealing with man and what He asks of him rather than with the nature of God. God did not reveal to the prophets eternal mysteries but His knowledge and love of man. It was not the aspiration of Israel to know the Absolute but to ascertain what He asks of man; to commune with His will rather than His essence. 129

Faith, in turn, is neither radical doubt nor unthinking credulity, but ‘an effort accumulated over centuries’ (161) to retain and curate a ‘memory of God in the human spirit’(ibid) and to partake in this memory is to practice Judaism. Heschel again lapses into an anti-Enlightenment anti-Humanism as he attempts to broadly characterise religion. Religion is something beyond sociology (note how Moses struggled not just against Pharaoh, but also against a people more than willing to worship the golden calf). So too is it beyond any sort of rigorous analysis. Just as you wouldn’t take swimming lessons from someone who has never dipped his toe in water but has a deep theoretical understanding of swimming, has his doctorate on the biology and sociology of swimming, and has built award winning swimming pools, neither should we come to understand religion by the academics’ scholarly citations. 

Piety, then, is a constant awareness of one’s own objectivity in god’s subjectivity. With it comes the awareness of God’s questioning of man, His cry to the world. Unsurprisingly, the Bible must be removed from anthropocentric reading. For Heschel, scripture is no longer the story of one people in particular, a kind of ‘history of the Jewish people’. It is God’s search for righteousness. In a nod to a forthcoming article, here it’s worth noting briefly that Heschel’s approach elides Kass'. Both read the Bible, and for Kass Genesis in particular, as contextualised by, yet distinct from, the classical age of heroes washed away by the flood. Influenced by the flood of Gilgamesh or tangentially by the Athenian Polis it may be, but the Bible explicitly rejects these models. Indeed its passages on Babel, Sodom, Abram/Abraham both show the futility of the perfect political system and the cruelty of demiurge actors in the face of humanity. 

This can be seen most explicitly in God’s approach to sacrifice. Unlike the deities of the Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians, Hittites God has no need for the pleasing aromas. It is a means to an end: Horrifically aware of the violent tendencies of man, yet promising never again to wash away the world and start over, God knows that man’s violent urges need to be deflected, and sacrifice is the means by which we do so. Yet it also serves another purpose: 

The purpose of sacrifice does not lie in self-pauperisation as such, but in the yielding of all aspirations to God, thus creating space for him in the heart. Moreover it is an Imitatio Dei, for it is done after the manner of the divine giver, and reminds man that he is created in the likeness of the divine, and is thus related to God. 293.