W. likes lists, he says. It’s a Borges thing. — ‘This quote is especially for you’, he says:
Proselytes and those that emit semen to no purpose delay the Messiah.
‘For how long have you personally delayed the coming of the Messiah?’, says W. ‘Years? Millennia?’
W. is sure he heard somewhere or another — at a lecture, symposium or suchlike — about the stupid Messiah, and this has oriented his research ever since. The stupid Messiah, whatever can that mean? When did this figure appear? Under what circumstances?
Of course, there is a long tradition of the occultation of the Messiah, W. says. The idea, that is, that the Messiah has already arrived, if only we could find him (if only we knew how to find him). Then there’s the belief that it’s only when certain conditions are satisfied that he will reveal himself to be where he always was. The moral improvement of humankind, for example.
But what could it mean to think of a Messiah so stupid that he is occulted from himself? Of a Messiah who does not have the intelligence to know he is the Messiah? There’s a tradition, of course, that the Messiah would be the one who broke the law rather than simply fulfilling it. Whence the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi, whose followers likewise committed apostasy, it being a sign for them of the kind of test the Messiah would ask them to undergo.
Would the stupid Messiah have stupid followers? W. wonders. Followers so stupid they wouldn’t know who they were following, or what it meant to follow? Mystery upon mystery, says W. But at least it goes some way to explaining my significance vis-à-vis messianism. Because I’m attracted to it, aren’t I, in my own stupid way? Even I have a sense of the importance of the messianic idea as I circle around it in my stupidity.
W. is a little less unwitting than I, he says, a little less stupid. And perhaps that means I’m a truer follower of the stupid Messiah, he says, he’s not certain.
Are we religious? we wonder. I’m never quite sure. We feel things about religion, that’s already something. There’s an immense pathos about religious matters for us, that’s certain. But are we religious, I mean really religious?
Wasn’t it pathos that nearly made a Christian convert of Rosenzweig? we wonder. Wasn’t it the pathos of his friend Eugen Rosenstock, with whom he spent so many nights in conversation? There was one conversation in particular — that of the night of June 7th, 1913—which ended with Rosenzweig holding a pistol to his temple.
He had confronted the Nothing, he said later. He’d come to the very end. Rosenstock had persuaded him Judaism was outmoded, forgotten, and that Christianity was the only way redemption could be brought to the world. Rosenzweig agreed, but that wasn’t what disturbed him. Asked what he would do when all the answers failed — when the abstract truths of logic failed to satisfy him — Rosenstock had said with great simplicity, I would go to the next church, kneel and try to pray.
Kneel and try to pray: that’s what moved Rosenzweig, W. says. It moved him immeasurably, because those words came from a scholar, a thinker like him, not a naïf or a romantic. Forget the argument about redemption and Christianity and world history, it was pathos that brought about Rosenzweig’s crisis, W. says. The pathos of a scholar who would live in faith and offer it as testimony.
Rosenzweig, of course, did not convert. Or rather, he converted back to Judaism. If he was to become Christian, he wrote to Rosenstock, it was to be by way of Judaism, W. says, even though his relationship to Judaism was weak. Even though his family was almost entirely assimilated.
But then a few days later, he attended the Yom Kippur service in an orthodox synagogue in Berlin. Up until that point, he felt one’s relationship to God depended upon the mediation of Christ. And after it? Read The Star, and you’ll see the Yom Kippur service is placed at the height of Rosenzweig’s account of Jewish religious experience. At the height! Pathos again, says W. It’s all about pathos.
Of course, there’s pathos and pathos, W. says. What could we understand of Rosenzweig’s despair after his conversation? How could we understand why he held a pistol to his temple, or what seeing the Nothing might mean?
Hadn’t our second leader spoken to us at length of his faith? Hadn’t we heard from his lips the testimony of one as far as possible from naivety or romanticism? But we were plunged into no crisis. We didn’t contemplate our own deaths, or no more than usual. What did we feel? Stirred, moved to be sure, but it didn’t translate into action.
Did we rush to a church and kneel and try to pray? Did we hold guns to our temples, or flail about in contemplation of the Nothing? Did we set about writing our own Stars of Redemption? Of course not. We fell short, says W., as we always fall short. But short of what? What idea could we have of faith, of the pathos of faith, as it streams infinitely far above our stupid heads?
‘How depressed are you?’, W. asks me on the phone. Very, I tell him. W.’s in his office in the southwest of the country, and I am in mine in the northeast. W. says he’s looking out of the window and thinking of his failure. How has it come to this? he thinks to himself over and over again.
Unopened parcels of review copies of books surround him, W. says. His office is thick with them. What can he do? I am the only person who would be interested in such books, W. says. They sicken him. They’re like the ballast attached to a body to make sure it sinks, he says. And he is sinking.
It’s different for me, W. acknowledges. I get some satisfaction from office work. It makes me think I’ve done something with my miserable life. It makes me feel my life is justified. W. can’t bear it, though. Why does he go into work, then? What’s the point? He could take a few days leave. But W. feels something significant might happen in the office at any moment. He has to be there, W. says. Why? What will happen? He doesn’t know, says W. Something momentous.
We’re bottom feeders, W. says as he often does. We live on scraps. Soon there will be nothing for us, and then what? Well, the apocalypse will decide it all. It’s coming, we agree. Our second leader told us so. In eight years time, wasn’t it? W. asks. Four years, I tell him. He’s revised his estimate. — ‘Four years’, says W. ‘How will we survive until then? What will we do?’ W. will be waiting in his office, the rain falling.
W. is still lost in Cohen, he says on the phone. What’s it all about? He could be reading in Dutch for all he knows. Nevertheless, he sends me some notes for my edification, he says. This is what real scholarship is all about, he says.
I read. Not the apparatus of knowledge itself, but in its outcomes, Ergebnis. Namely, science. And a little later, Unlike all the other fundamental concepts of Erkenntnistheorie, the concept of the infinitesimal does not have its roots in ancient thought.
I’m impressed, I tell W. — ‘You’re always impressed!’, W. says. ‘Anything could impress you, monkey boy’.
W. says he can only stand reading Cohen for two hours a day. Two hours, from dawn to six A.M, then up for breakfast and into the office. He never understands a word, not really.
W.’s come to the chapter on conic sections, he says. Do you know what a conic section is? he asks me. It’s a transverse section through a cone, I tell him. It’s something to do with Kepler. Now it’s W.’s turn to be impressed. I have odd corners of knowledge, he says. Like the German for badger, for example — what was it? Der Dachs, I told him, that’s why you get dachshunds.