SOPHIA DOI 10.1007/s11841-017-0620-y

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth Yotam Hotam 1

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

Abstract Between 1910 and 1917, Walter Benjamin composed a range of philosophical works and fragmented texts all of which touch upon the concept of youth (Jugend) and its intersection with issues of modernity and theology, faith and political action, religion and secularization, God, and the world. Yet, while scholars have rather extensively discussed Benjamin’s early works on language, literature, and esthetics, less attention has been given to his work on youth. This paper focuses on Benjamin’s writings on youth from these early years. Its aim is to demonstrate how these writings were intended as contributions to the composition of a comprehensive theory of youth, which itself was to combine philosophical discussion with theological imagination. More concretely, by using the example of Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), who is rarely discussed in connection to Benjamin’s thought, the paper shows how Benjamin draws on Christian mystical notions of time, transcendence, and divinity, albeit in a secularized and therefore transformed guise, and how Benjamin’s intellectual endeavor can hence be labeled a modernmystical theory of youth. Keywords Walter Benjamin . Mysticism . Theory of youth . Secularization . Philosophy and theology Between 1910 and 1917, Walter Benjamin composed a range of philosophical works and fragmented texts, such as “The Life of The Students” (Das Leben der Studenten), “The Metaphysics of Youth” (Die Metaphysik der Jugend), “The Youth is Still” (Die Jugend Schwieg), “Experience” (Erfahrung), “Socrates” (Sokrates), and “Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot,” all of which touch upon the concept of youth (Jugend) and its intersection with issues of modernity and theology, faith

* Yotam Hotam [email protected]

1

The Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, 3498838 Haifa, Israel

Y. Hotam

and political action, God and the world, and secularization and its discontents (Benjamin 1991, 1996, 2011).1 The trope of youth, the meaning of being young, the call for “youthfulness,” (Benjamin 2011: 56) and its success or failure, marked an issue with which Benjamin grappled in most of his early writings before and during the First World War. Benjamin “proclaimed the slogan of youth,” (Benjamin 1994: 23) which call was already rather widespread in the German cultural atmosphere of that time, making it an epicenter of his intellectual endeavors. This paper focuses on Benjamin’s writings on youth from these early years. Its aim is to demonstrate how these writings were intended as contributions to the composition of a comprehensive theory of youth, which itself was to combine philosophical discussion with theological imagination. More concretely, by using the example of Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), who is rarely discussed in connection with Benjamin’s thought, the paper shows how Benjamin draws on Christian mystical notions of time, transcendence, and divinity, albeit in a secularized and therefore transformed guise, and how Benjamin’s intellectual endeavor can hence be labeled a modern-mystical theory—a theory that may provide insights to Benjamin’s philosophy of religion. Benjamin’s thoughts on youth are clearly connected to a wide range of influences, such as nineteenth century romanticism, idealism, and the post-Nietzschean trends of his time (Witte 1991; Wolin 1982). Reference to these distinct strands, however, may be rather misleading if not set against a more comprehensive acknowledgment of Benjamin’s theology. While Benjamin’s theology in general and his idea of youth in particular seem to bear on Benjamin’s politics (Jennings 1987; Jacobson 2003; Guerra 2007), the present paper confines itself to a critical engagement with the theory—albeit with attention paid to its political, cultural, and intellectual context—independently of its implications for issues of identity, society, and political action. There is, no doubt, a growing scholarly interest in Benjamin’s early writings, which are increasingly acknowledged as bearing deep significance for the overall understanding of his thought (Steizinger 2013; Deuber-Mankowsky 2000; Kohlenbach 2002; Rrenban 2005; Caygill 2005; Guerra 2007; Pignotti 2009; Wetters 2014). As Eiland and Jennings (2014) argue, for example, the early “outpouring of writing is suffused with the originality that would mark virtually everything Benjamin would later write” (39). The main attraction is—Peter Fenves (2010) makes this case persuasively—the young Benjamin’s unequivocal theological orientation. Yet, while scholars have rather extensively discussed the theology invested in Benjamin’s early works on language, literature and esthetics, less attention has been given to his theory of youth. This is somewhat striking because youth stood out as a dominant symbol for Benjamin and his—at times inchoate, cryptic and poetic—entries on the subject represent a decisive portion of his early writings. Johannes Steizinger’s groundbreaking study makes this case rather clearly by presenting how the idea of youth provided Benjamin’s writings from that time with a “leitmotiv” (Steizinger 2011, 2013). These writings, then, reflect Benjamin’s personal interest in the German Youth Movement and his reaction to a cultural atmosphere in which notions of “crisis of culture” (Kulturkrise) and youth, alienation and redemption were quite widespread; but they provide also something

1 These texts were first published together in the German edition of Benjamin’s writings (Benjamin 1991). An English version of these texts is presented in: Benjamin 1996 and Benjamin 2011.

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth

more. For Benjamin’s early thoughts on youth seem to constitute “the workshop of his later philosophy” (Eiland and Jennings 2014: 39) and a source out of which sprang Benjamin’s mature and much discussed views of history, culture, society, and politics. To make a case for Benjamin’s theory of youth, the paper first presents, if rather briefly, the German cultural atmosphere at the turn of the nineteenth century in which the trope of youth became central. Following this historical overview, the paper examines the manner in which an “age of youth” (Zeitalter der Jugend) came to represent for Benjamin, not a particular biological age, but rather a “spiritual” essence of the human being that is composed of three facets: eternity, transcendence, and divinity. The next section makes an excursus into the thought of Meister Eckhart, focusing on his allegorical reading of youth as an inner spiritual core of the human being, characterized as transcendent, eternal, masculine, and divine. The penultimate section takes a closer look at Benjamin’s adaptation of the type of mysticism that Eckhart represented and is followed by a discussion of the ways in which Benjamin’s theory of youth is a form of modern mysticism.

Youth, Rebellion, and Quest Youth, youthfulness, and being young were all widespread metaphors in the German cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the turn of the nineteenth century. As historians such as Walter Rüegg (1974), Frank Trommler (1985), and RobertJan Adriaansen (2015) have pointed out, a concept of youth was employed as an emblem for an “abstract break” with modern cultural, social, and political reality. The reinvention of the concept of youth as such a break occurred against the backdrop of a growing distrust in positivism, materialism, and the rationalist “demystification” of the world that modern secular culture represented. Youth stood for an iconoclastic revolt against these modern conditions and at the same time for the opposite iconographic quest for an alternative return to nature, to community, and to a spiritual reverence for life (Stoff 2004; Hotam 2009). Against the Wilhelmine social and political order, it represented a cultural revolt—a counterculture as it were—embodying a wished for remedy to feelings of alienation and of existential crisis. Where modernity signified alienation, youth represented a return to an authentic being that had been allegedly lost in the process of modernization, although what exactly such authenticity actually meant remained heavily disputed. Where modern life oppressed, youth redeemed (Hotam 2009: 6). This image of being young received a wide range of cultural, artistic, literary, and intellectual interpretations. Intellectuals such as Erich Gutkind (1910) and Oswald Spengler (1922), for example, related, each in his own way, to a concept of youth as a symbol of pre-historical originality that stands over and against the history of modernity. In a rather similar abstract tone, Karl Jung (1969) used the archetype of Peur Aeternus—forever young—to describe a psychological mechanism that not only refuses boundaries and limits but also “represents our totality, which transcends consciousness” (73). From a more concrete social perspective, Karl Mannheim (1952) placed the quandary of youth and of its reaching maturity at the center of his discussion of “generationality” (Generationalität)—a dilemma that, to some extent, constituted the main theme in Frank Wedekind’s play,

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“Spring Awakening” (Weddekind 1991). Similarly, Fidus’ 2 popular drawings depicted the free and naked esthetic figure of the young body (Janz 1985), and the overall new style of “art-nouveau” was endowed, at least in its German variation, with the meaning of Jugendstil. The emergence and rapid growth of the German Youth Movement stands, perhaps, as the most salient example of the social and political impact of the new concept of youth (Laqueur 1962; Mosse 1988; Stachura 1981; Hotam 2009; Adriaansen 2015). From the Wandervogel’s modest beginning in 1896 in the Steglitz Quarters of Berlin, the German Youth Movement (and its later variant the Freideutsche Jugend) quickly became a significant cultural phenomenon, spreading far beyond the borders of the German Reich over the next decades. For members of the German Youth Movement, hiking or camping and singing or experiencing nature, provided not only a central apparatus for demonstrating rebellion against the modern way of life; such activities also confirmed the quest for independence and self-assertion. Thus, in 1913, in the first all-German meeting of the Youth Movements at the hohe Meißner Mountain near Kassel, being young was defined as a search for an autonomous and free life, devoid of external interference; the taking of responsibility to follow one’s untainted inner convictions, whatever they might be. This “Meißner formula” demonstrated the extent to which the Jugendkultur posed a remedy for a feeling of crisis and alienation induced by a modern way of life. It represented what historian Hartmut Böhme (2001) has called “the utopian potential of youth” (26) in the eyes of many contemporary young German scholars, writers, intellectuals, and political activists, mostly young men, who belonged to the well-established educated bourgeoisie.3 Benjamin was one of these young men. Making sense of what youth means marked for him both a personal quest and a sign of the times, the latter with its abundance of notions of crisis and youth, rebellion and quest, and alienation and redemption (Wolin 1982: 5; Brodersen 1990: 56–57). “We are living in an age of Socialism, of the women’s movement, of traffic, of individualism”—writes the enthusiastic 18 year old Benjamin—“Are we not headed toward an age of youth?” (Benjamin 2011: 26). It was especially the metahistorical and metaphysical meaning of such an “age of youth”—the “youth’s two bodies” to play on Kantorowitzc’s famous concept—that captured his intellectual imagination. Beginning from his early intellectual experiences around 1910, Benjamin brought the trope of youth to bear on his critique of the social and political reality of Wilhelmian Germany (Benjamin 1970: 33–40; Eagleton 1981: 12). From summer 1912, when he was 20 years old, and a student of Freiburg’s university, and until the outbreak of the World War, Benjamin was involved with what was then known as the “radical faction” of the German Youth Movement, which took its inspiration from Gustav Wyneken (1875–1964) (Witte 1991: 22–23; Eiland and Jennings 2014: 39–40; Brodersen 1990: 50–51). The “radical” appellation denoted a commitment to an ideal of youth, rather than to a particular practice, or political alignment. To the members of this faction it 2

Fidus was the pseudonym of the illustrator Hugo Reinhold Karl Johann Höppener (1886–1948). The type of Männerbund that the youth movement represented, with its esthetic ideal that related mainly to the male body, and the fundamental experience that assumed at its center the psychology of the maturing boy, induced Hans Blüher (1912), the first scholar to present a study of the German youth movement, to underline the youth movement as a homo-erotic phenomenon (Mosse 1985; Nur 2014). 3

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth

meant holding to a concept that should remain politically un-aligned and should not be reduced to the practices and rituals common among other contemporary youth movements. Upon returning to Berlin in the winter semester of 1912–1913, Benjamin, still a committed Wynekenian, devised the Sprechsaal (talking room)—a free association of friends who joined together in the spirit of “radical” youth. He attended the 1913 youth rally at the Hohe Meißner and in summer 1914 finally succeeded in being elected as the chair of the Berlin Independent Students’ Association, where he immediately accommodated lectures from Martin Buber on his new book Daniel (Buber 1913) and from Ludwig Klages on his theory of dualism between “spirit” (Geist) and “life” (Leben) (Benjamin 1970: 39–40; Brodersen 1990: 57; Witte 1991: 23; Benjamin 1994: 69; Eiland and Jennings 2014: 63). From 1912, he was also involved in Zionist student circles (his famed friendship with Scholem to follow) and combined his thoughts on youth with questions of Jewish identity and politics. The outbreak of the World War, and more profoundly the dramatic suicide of his close friend, the poet Frinz Heinle, pushed Benjamin away from Berlin to Munich (and eventually in July 1917 to Switzerland), and also from his early enthusiasm for Wyneken’s formula of youth to a more tragic approach towards the failure of youth culture (Brodersen 1990: 90–91; Witte 1991: 34–38; Benjamin 2011: 13). As Rolf Goebel (2013), Reinhold Görling (2011), and Erdmut Wizisla (1992) point out, Heinle’s tragic death was rather decisive for Benjamin’s eventual withdrawal from a positive avowal of youth culture. This approach in mind, he composed his 1917 piece on ‘Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,”’ which may represent his last explicit engagement with the trope of youth (Steizinger 2013: 222).

Transcendence, Divinity, and Eternity What, then, is an “age of youth”? For Benjamin such an “age” refers to an historical era and, more profoundly, relates to a particular human condition, pointing also to the distinction between the two. In relating to a human “individual time” (Benjamin 2011: 242), an “age” is not equivalent to a particular biological phase (being 14, 19, or 35), but rather to an inner spiritual essence. Thus, for Benjamin, the ‘meaning of the word “youth”’ lies in the fact “that from youth alone radiates new spirit, the spirit” Benjamin 2011: 136). And in the same vein, and over and against a “philistine” experience “devoid of meaning and spirit,” Benjamin draws an image of youth as “the voice of the spirit” (Benjamin 1996: 4). Such a “voice” represents a site of independence and freedom. Thus, an “intellectual autonomy of the creative spirit” denotes, for Benjamin, not just a resistance to particular social and cultural circumstances (that of bourgeoisie life, education, or moralities), but more radically an independence from all forms of external social, cultural, or political influences (Benjamin 1996: 43–44; Benjamin 2011: 136). The point to note, then, is twofold: first, that an “age of youth” represents for Benjamin an inner human spiritual core—“the pure word for life” in an “inward, spiritual sense” (Benjamin 1996: 80); and second, that such an inner spiritual core lies beyond historical and societal conditioning; a site of “beyondness,” to put it metaphorically. This inner human spirituality is theologically articulated by Benjamin, and as such, composed of three characteristics: it is transcendent, eternal, and divine. It is transcendent because Benjamin conceptualizes youth as an unmalleable inner human essence, separated from all external demands. To put it differently, youth transcends worldliness

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(Wolin 1982: 16; Steizinger 2013: 60). Youth in this particular sense is dedicated to “faithfully serve the true spirit” (Benjamin 2011: 133). Here, the spirit (Geist) does not signify a sign of a particular culture or historical stage in some Hegelian sense, but rather an innate state of the human being. This point is important because, for Benjamin, “individual time” marks a distinct category that he wishes to advocate separately from any notion of the advancement of history and society. Benjamin’s short script “The Life of the Students,” could serve as an example for this last point. The text opens with a clear differentiation between a “view of history” that concerns itself with the ways in which “people and epochs advance along the path of progress” and Benjamin’s analysis of history that aims at grasping a “metaphysical structure, as with the messianic domain or the idea of the French Revolution” (Benjamin 1996: 37). Such a “metaphysical structure” underlines history and in this sense, though embedded within history, lies beyond its different appearances and manifestations. It is separated from any notion of “progress” and advancement. In referring to a redemptive “domain” (that of messianism) or to an “idea” of an historical event (rather than to the event itself) it contains for Benjamin a certain “spiritual” essence that points to a double meaning—the logic of history, but also and more importantly, a differentiated inner core that transcends the social and historical. This separation between history and its “spiritual” essence, informs Benjamin’s distinction between true and false education, central to his “The Life of the Students.” Benjamin starkly distinguishes between academic “vocational training” and an autonomous student “spirit.” (Benjamin 1996: 37–38). 4 True education, for Benjamin, is about “living and working sub specie aeternitatis,” a reference to Spinoza that he reiterates in a range of texts from this time (Benjamin 2011: 58, 70, 90; Eiland and Jennings 2014: 34; Witte 1991: 24). Echoing especially neo-romantic notions, Benjamin represents true education as an “erotic” and “creative” core that “cannot be captured in terms of the pragmatic description of details (the history of institutions, customs, and so on)” but rather “eludes them.” (Benjamin 1996: 37). The true “spirit”, here, relates to an imagined human essence that escapes history. Its fulfillment is not aligned with the historical process and though it could be distilled from a certain historical situation (for example that of the students) it marks an essence that lies beyond historical conditions. What Benjamin then calls the “perversion” of the universities lies in their attempt to transform “the creative spirit into the vocational spirit” (Benjamin 1996: 41). Conversely, Benjamin pleads for “a hazardous self-dedication to learning and youth” (Benjamin 1996: 42). “All these institutions,” argues Benjamin, “are nothing but a marketplace for the preliminary and provisional, […], they are simply there to fill the empty waiting time, diversions from the voice that summons them to build their lives with a unified spirit of creative action, Eros, and youth” (Benjamin 1996: 46). Youth transcends existing social conditioning. It does so by means of a radical retreat to an inner human “spirit” (Benjamin 2011: 104–105). It also denotes Eros. As Benjamin explains in a letter to Carla Seligson, Eros for him combines the Platonic heavenly Eros with Christ’s “Kingdom of God” (Benjamin 1994: 92). It connects a passionate desire for self-cultivation (Bildung) with self-elevation to the realm of truth, beauty, and

4

This particular text was based on a speech that Benjamin gave at the Berlin Free Student Group. See Witte 1991: 29.

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth

totality (Wolin 1982: 6). Such an entwining of a modern concept of education (Bildung) with Platonic and Christian symbolism was a central theme in his fragment “Socrates” (Benjamin 1996: 52). Figuratively, self-cultivation (as denoted in the concept of Bildung) appears as a reenactment of the Socratic winged chariot in its trajectory of returning to the godly dominion, albeit in the Christian redemptive sense. Youth resonates a theia mania (divine madness) and human life is in this way re-enchanted. Pedagogically, such a re-enchantment of human existence is not about learning a specific curriculum that prepares the young person for productive and meaningful life in a modern German society and culture; it is rather about transcending this curriculum. Socially speaking, over and against “bourgeois security” youth offers “the Eros of creativity.” (Benjamin 1996: 42). For Benjamin, this radical approach takes the Humboldtian kind of “freedom,” (Humboldt 1969) with which Benjamin was familiar (Witte 1991: 35), to its logical end—a Freiheit zum Grunde that is freedom from all types of limiting actions. If transcendence denotes Eros, and self-fulfillment, it also aims at the “Kingdom of God.” This reference to the divine marks the second aspect of his concept of youth. The human (youth) and the godly realm are interwoven. In this way, transcendence aims at the divine. Such a combination of human existence and godly presence was central to Benjamin’s theory of language of that time (Menninghaus 1980). His much discussed 1916 fragment “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen), underlines the “communion” of human language “with the creative word of God.” It is the “immanent magic,” that is a mythical moment of creation and revelation, that provides language with its logic (Benjamin 1996: 66–67). The aim of using written language, writes Benjamin to Buber, is “to lead the reader toward that which escapes the world; only when this nonverbal realm is opened up in its pure, inexpressible power, can the magic spark fly between word and motivating deed to the point of unity between these two equal realities” (Benjamin 1994: 127). What escapes this world is the divine “word,” (also: logos) and thus the human being shares “the same language in which God is the creator” (Benjamin 1996: 69). Benjamin’s theory of youth goes along similar lines. Youth taps into the divine element within the transcendent human (spiritual) essence. And it is this connection that Benjamin wished to capture by evoking the idea of “youth by the grace of God” (Benjamin 2011: 102). There is a transcendent and divine “spiritual”—or youthful— core of the human being, an element that the human being incorporates, may experience, but that refers to God. In following divinity, eternity is the last main aspect in Benjamin’s conceptualization of youth. For Benjamin, youth time is eternal because it lies beyond human experiences in the world (Benjamin 1996: 37). Denoting Kairos, youth time is also the “now” (Jetztzeit), or, better, represents the eternal now moment (Levine 2014: 27). Benjamin reiterates then a distinction between two concepts of time: the flow of time that characterizes this worldliness, and the other, removed, transcendent-eternal time of youth. Benjamin’s “The Life of the Students,” may serve again as an example. Understanding this life means for Benjamin transcending the particular social and historical reality and thinking in terms of the everlasting “metaphysical” nature of this reality (Benjamin 1996: 37). Students as young people according

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to Benjamin embody such an eternal “metaphysical” feature. Here the distinction between two concepts of time makes an appearance in the form of a separation between the time of history and that of youthful eternity. In temporal terms, youth may denote, then, what sociologists had termed “moratorium”—a time in which all social laws, regulations, and duties are suspended by the young person (Kahane 1997). Yet the point to note is that Benjamin does not seem to think here sociologically. Nor is he focusing on a psychology of youth, as merely a break from infancy anticipating adulthood—as “a period of preparation” or a “period of waiting for marriage and a profession” (Benjamin 2011: 41, 207). Rather, Benjamin aims at articulating the relations between eternity and temporality, and such an articulation is starkly informed by a theological speculation. The suspension of world time denotes for Benjamin the Christian true divine time that lies beyond historical linearity; it echoes a religious dualism between transcendence and immanence; and it is meant to play on the gnostic themes of redemption and fall (Steizinger 2013).

Young Man, I Tell You, Stand Up! Transcendence, divinity, and eternity point to the theological imagination invested in Benjamin’s theory of youth. This imagination should be regarded, more particularly, as a mystical one. In order to make a case for Benjamin’s reposing in mysticism it is helpful to make sense of the type of mystical thought that informed Benjamin’s symbolism. Meister Eckhart’s writings may provide us with a suitable example, and not just because of their strong mystical tone but also because of what could be viewed as Ekchardt’s own theory of youth. Though a full analysis of Eckhart’s mysticism is beyond the scope of this paper, it is possible at least to point to some of the main notions that characterize his take on youth. Eckhart was a Dominican priest who served as the first provincial of Saxony and as a vicar general of Bohemia in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. He was condemned, posthumously, for heresy by Pope John XXII (who himself was later condemned for holding unorthodox views) (Eckhart 2009; Lagier 1989; Kopper 1955). His condemnation related to “unorthodox” views mainly surrounding his mysticism and to the connections drawn between his mysticism and heresy. These suspicions were traced back by his accusers to his main work, The Book of Divine Comfort (1308), but also to a range of “German sermons” composed in Mittelhochdeutsch, which were considered his most explicit mystical writings. These various texts were singled out as “spreading dangerous doctrines among the common people” (Eckhart 2009, 8). The importance of these mystical writings for the discussion of Benjamin’s theory of youth lies in their modern reception. As Ingeburg Dengenhardt’s pivotal study has shown, Eckhart’s mystical writings received particular attention within the intellectual environment of the turn of the nineteenth century, in which mysticism was once again “in the air” (Ingeburg 1967: 226). Induced by Franz Pfeiffer’s 1857 first modern edition of Eckhart’s sermons, treatises, and lectures, the growing interest in Eckhart culminated in 1903 with the appearance of two new German editions of Eckhart’s writings— Gustav Landauer’s Meister Eckharts Mystische Schriften and Hermann Büttner’s Meister Eckeharts Schriften und Predigten—the later was more comprehensive and

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth

influential of the two (Pfeiffer 1857; Landauer 1903; Büttner 1903; Ingeburg 1967: 237). Eckhart’s impact was then visible in a wide range of literary, poetic, intellectual, and scholarly outputs, as also in the formation of völkisch aspirations and in the rhetoric of German nationalism (Ingeburg 1967: 239–266). Eckhart’s mystical writings presented modern celebrators no less than Middle Ages excommunicators with a theologically explosive substance. His allegorical interpretations of biblical texts were rather central. The birth of Christ, for example, is presented, not as an historical affair, but as an allegory for the manner in which God can “awaken” his “son,” potentially in every human soul. The “son” becomes an emblem for a transcendent ground or an essence of the soul that can be “awakened” from slumber by the “father.” Jesus is thus an allegory for the divine “son” within us all. In this way, the inception of the “son” in the “soul” becomes a formula used by Eckhart (and underlined in the condemnatory Bull of John XXII) to express the relations between God and the human being, interpreted not historically but mystically (Eckhart 2009: 27). These relations are made by the fusion between the rejection of this worldliness and the turn into the inner human experience that, in being “united” with God, transcends this world (Kopper 1955: 33). The image of an awakened “son” is also symbolically understood by Eckhart as young. Youth (Jugend) marks then an important aspect of the godly presence embedded within the human experience. This last point is accentuated by numerous sermons5 that were made available in Pfeiffer’s collection, and in part also in Büttner’s translation (Büttner 1903 v.2: 149–156). In three of these sermons, Eckhart focuses in particular on one episode from the gospels in which Jesus, who is approached by a “widow” whose son lies dead before her, cries: “Young man, I tell you, stand up!” (Adolescens, tibi dico: surge! Luke 7:14). Eckhart’s allegorical reading of this passage underlines the godly, transcendent, and eternal characteristics of being young to which Jesus supposedly refers. There are three points to note. First, the charging of the text with a symbolic meaning. The widow represents, according to Eckhart, the human soul devoid of God (Eckhart 2009: 576). The young man stands for the “son,” that is the (godly) essence of the soul—“the highest intellect”—that “can receive the divine light” and thus can be awakened by God (Eckhart 2009: 214). Youth is where the soul is “Godlike: there she is an image of God” (Eckhart 2009: 396). And Eckhart comments: Why did he say ‘young man’? […] ‘Young man’: All the powers that belong to the soul do not age […] Therefore, ‘Young Man.’ The masters call ‘young’ that which is close to its beginning. In the intellect man is ever young […] […] Now he says, ‘Young man, arise.’ What does it mean ‘arise’? ‘Arise’ from the work, and let the soul ‘arise’ in herself! (Eckhart 2009: 396) If “youth” represents the godly within the soul, it also transcends this worldliness. It connects the “now,” the divine spoken word (“he says”), a command (“arise”), and youth—all are but elements of the human “soul” that ‘“arise” in herself.’

5

Eckhart 2009, Sermons 8, 21, 37, 79, 80.

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A second point to note is how Eckhart’s symbolism involves images of femininity and masculinity. The soul is a “widow” while the young core within it is a virile “son.” In following this positioning, Eckhart underlines an intercourse between the masculine figure of youth and the feminine image of the soul. Thus, the soul for him is “virginal” (Jungfrau—suggesting also a young woman) when it is free from “alien images” (Eckhart 2009: 77–78). It elevates itself to the position of “bearing fruit,” and thus being a “wife,” only on being incepted with the “young man” (Eckhart 2009: 214). Youth represents, then, the “intellect” or the “citadel” of the soul, which is not only transcendent and divine, but also imagined as masculine, or better, masculine within the feminine (Eckhart 2009: 77). Finally, youth is eternal. In denoting the faculty of the human being that “touches neither time nor flesh,” youth is underlined by Eckhart as the “eternal now” (Eckhart 2009: 79). As Hannah Arendt demonstrated, such an “eternal now” was also St. Augustine’s conception of divine time, in distinction from the future-past linearity of this worldliness (Arendt 1929). For Eckhardt, the “eternal now” also denotes being young, which corresponds to the “eternal life” of the soul (Eckhart 2009: 148). It is where the soul is “free from time” (Eckhart 2009: 394; Kopper 1955: 50–52). The dualism of the eternal-godly and the human-worldly, a central theological trope, is here suspended by the introduction of an eternal presence within the human experience. The location of the godly within the human ensures the possibility of salvation by means of a human regression into the human own innermost sublime, eternal-young, core. Reading through Eckhart allegories, a mystical Christian tradition points to the essence of the human being as eternally young, and as such reposing in unity with the divine, in this way guaranteeing salvation. Here, it seems, human time and world time are disconnected because the first, human, entails a godly presence, while the second, worldly, is discussed in the wake of its absence.

The Metaphysics of Youth It is useful to address the manner in which Benjamin’s theory of youth incorporated a reworking of such allegories, described above. Benjamin probably became familiar with Eckhart’s writings long before he enriched his personal library with a copy of Eckhart’s sermons (Benjamin 1994: 178). In using the pseudonym “Eckhart. Phil” for his 1912 essay “School reform: A Cultural Movement,” he made clear, at the very least, his awareness of Eckhart. The main issue, however, is not whether Benjamin was directly influenced by Eckhart’s theory of youth but, rather, in what manner he was precociously attuned to the type of mysticism that Eckhart’s writings exemplified. As presented above, Benjamin’s concept of youth reiterated the notions of transcendence within a human spiritual core, the eternal-present, and the numinous unity with the divine realm that are central to the mystical imagination. In the same vein, his understanding of youth as an emblem of free experience, or better, the fundamental experience of being free, for example, radiated mysticism because it reiterated the same metaphors—like “awakening,” the “alien” soul, and the “godly” essence of “youth.” This does not mean that Benjamin’s articulation of youth did not condense together a wide range of other influences (Benjamin 2011: 9). The mystical symbolism relating to the numinous unity with the divine, or to the “awakening” of the soul, however,

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth

became a central characteristic for Benjamin by means of his allusion to this range of influences (mainly German romanticism), or, perhaps more accurately, by way of his presentation of these textual and historical traditions within their theological common denominator (Dieckhoff 1987: 22; Steizinger 2013: 55). Perhaps the most striking text into which Benjamin engraved his reworking of mystical allegories was “The Metaphysics of Youth.” The text was written between 1913 and 1914, and according to Gershom Scholem remained unfinished (Angermann 2015: 46). As Steizinger (2013: 48) points out, the text aimed at explicating what should be understood under the concept of “youth” in a way that brought together the prevalent themes within a variety of the texts that Benjamin had written prior to this point. It does so, however, by employing a highly enigmatic style (Eiland and Jennings 2014: 56), which resists systematic scrutiny. Its value to an understanding of Benjamin’s philosophy, rather than poetics, remained heavily debated. The style and content, nonetheless, seem to be rather useful to a more detailed analysis of Benjamin’s mystical orientation described above. To understand this last point, it is valuable to note the play between ordinary experiences that the text describes, and the cryptic manner in which it describes these experiences. Benjamin’s obscure style relates to rather mundane experiences from his everyday life—dancing, conversing with friends, writing a diary, and, also, addressing sexual desires in venues that were then fairly common to members of the young Bourgeoisie. Against the background of these daily experiences, and given the encrypted style of the text, the self-aware author opens with a call upon the readers—most probably the circle of friends among which the text was circulated—to decrypt the “uncomprehended symbolism” that “enslaves us” in our everyday life (Benjamin 1996: 7). This opening statement, together with Hölderlin’s poem that Benjamin selected as a motto for his text, resonates well with Benjamin’s call to understand the student’s life “as a metaphor, as an image of the highest metaphysical state of history” (Benjamin 1996: 37). The reading of everyday life as a symbol, or “as a metaphor,” presents here the issue to note. In suggesting such a symbolic turn, the text reflects a tension between the overly poetic description of mundane experiences characteristic of youth (dancing, writing a diary, conversing with friends) and the elevation of these issues to an allegoric, and for Benjamin profound, order. Benjamin reads life allegorically (Cowan 1985; Steizinger 2013), and such a reading means that mundane experiences are taken by Benjamin as reflections of more abstract, metaphysical, themes; they are not to be taken merely literally, but also symbolically. Taking on Benjamin’s call to engage with the text’s symbolism seems to be particularly fruitful to the gaining of some insights into its play with mystical themes. The text has three sections, labeled respectively “conversation,” “diary,” and “ball.” Read allegorically, the first (conversation) takes on youth mainly in terms of language and gender; the second (diary) conceptualizes youth in reference to time and temporality; and the third (ball) may be seen as focusing on space and transcendence. Benjamin’s “conversation” relates to language and gender because it is made of an interaction between a “speaker” (appearing rather bluntly as an “he”) and a “listener,” (addressed as a “she”) which also stand, respectively, for masculinity and femininity (Benjamin 1996: 8). Here, Benjamin expands on a variety of rather challenging concepts, like “genius,” and its counterpart “prostitute” (Dirne), manhood (Mannheit), and its womanly (Weiblich) equal. These, however, could be seen as symbols of an inner human experience—partly carried over by him from German romanticism

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(Wetters 2014: 124; Freidlander 2012: 75)—and not as referring to individuals or to social categories. They point to what Paul North called “a silent conversation in the soul” (North 2015: 12). As such, speaker and listener, masculinity and femininity, are aspects of the human soul, engaged in the elusive instigation of truth and meaning. Thus, for example, the speaker “receives meaning” from the “silent” listener, who is “the unappropriated source of meaning” (Benjamin 1996: 6). One should note how in this case the “source of meaning”—eventually what youth should stand for—is located in an experience (what Benjamin calls “silence”) that cannot be appropriated or grasped by the language of the conversation. Benjamin terms this source “the internal frontier of conversation” which he relates to the eternal and the true spiritual (Benjamin 1996: 7). Because conversation cannot appropriate its source, it becomes a paean for the fall of language, that is, what has been “lost” through its operation (Benjamin 1996: 6). Benjamin makes this exact point in his theory of language, where the theological image of a “fall” is central to the shift from the godly “word” to the human “knowledge.” Here, and somewhat preceding his thoughts on language, Benjamin’s allegory presents this lost origin as the “silence,” which he locates as the “inner frontier of conversation,” and the “source of meaning,” which corresponds also to the innate womanly essence of the masculine (Sein Weiblich-Gewesenes) (Benjamin 1996: 8–9). It is possible then to see the variety of propositions relating to the woman who “protects meaning from understanding,” or referred to as “the guardian of conversation,” as allegories for the unappropriated source of meaning, that is innate in the human soul. These are not random images. For Eckhart, the being mute (ohne Laut), for example, characterizes the “original experience” (ursprüngliche Erfahrung) beyond understanding (Büttner 1903: 188). In Benjamin’s adaptation, the focus on experiencing a moment beyond understanding is the decisive one. The enigmatic character of the text that Benjamin composes, for example, could be seen as intended to break with understanding and to make a case for experience and for poetics. As in Eckhart’s mysticism, the source of meaning is not external to human experience (which the symbol “conversation” represents), but is rather internal, located within this experience, an embedded transcendence of sorts. The same could be said of Benjamin’s application of masculine/feminine symbols, although these have a more elusive, abstruse, appearance in the text. It is interesting to note how the feminine aspect that Benjamin plays with relates to two of the missions apparent in Eckhart’s writings. As a “prostitute,” who is in a dialogue with the “genius,” it symbolizes for Benjamin the human soul devoid of the divine presence of “greatness,” and youth. In this sense, “greatness has no claim upon her, for greatness comes to an end when confronted by her” (Benjamin 1996: 8). In playing with mystical symbolism, Benjamin’s prostitute echoes, perhaps, the human existence devoid of God (what Eckhardt terms the “widow”), who stands in opposition to the so-called “virginity” of the spiritual soul (Benjamin 1996: 35–36, 53). As womanly (weiblich), however, the feminine aspect of the soul marks, concurrently, the possibility—the conditions, as it were—for the human touching upon its inner youthful and divine essence. Woman, thus, is where the human “receives the silence” (Benjamin 1996: 9). The soul is, to begin with, feminine, in alignment with a long mystical tradition that has both Christian and Jewish variants. “Woman,” in this last sense, “is the guardian of conversation,” the structural conditions, as it were, for the rise of “the youth of mysterious conversation” (Benjamin 1996: 9–10).

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth

The second section of Benjamin’s text, the “diary” (Tagebuch), explicitly aims to engage with the question “in what time men live?” (Benjamin 1996: 10). It aims then at rethinking the same issues of youth, divinity, human existence, and transcendence in terms of time and temporality (Steizinger 2013: 66). In his answer, Benjamin articulates two times in which “men live.” The first stands for the past-future linearity of this worldliness, and whose human characteristics are “mortality,” “emptiness,” “hopelessness,” and loss of meaning (Benjamin 1996: 11). Living is articulated by Benjamin as a living towards death (McFarland 2013; Steizinger 2013). Death indicates for Benjamin not only finitude but also being empty, hopeless, and devoid of meaning. Over and against this “emptiness of time,” however, lies the second “eternal,” “youthful,” that is, the “true” and “immortal” time: “That time, our essence, is the immortality in which others die” (Benjamin 1996: 11– 12). Eternity marks here a characteristic of youth and its “immortality” stands against the temporality of this worldliness. Benjamin contrasts in this way world time (mortal, empty, moving towards death) and eternal time (youthful, true, immortal). As a “book of time” the diary points to the possible “act of liberation” from this worldly temporality. Against the “calendar time, clock time, and stock-exchange time,” where “no ray of immortality casts its light over the self,” the diary embodies the potential for the emergence of its opposite when ‘an “I” that we know only from our diaries stands on the brink of an immortality into which it plunges.’ Here, the “immortal” time stands on the other side of the world time. It penetrates world time in the form of an “interval” (Abstand—to be read also as “distance”). One of the points to note is that the interval represents for Benjamin “the diary’s silence”—the source of meaning, the idea of youth, and that of internal frontier, put in temporal terms (Benjamin 1996: 12). A diary stands, then, as a symbol for the eternal-present youth and in this way Benjamin’s accentuation of the interval as a “pure time” relates to his overall theory. As such a “pure time,” it suspends temporality by the very experience of “timelessness” and “the birth of immortal time” (Benjamin 1996: 15). The stark distinction between the eternal/timeless and linear/worldly—lifetime (Lebenszeit) and world time (Weltzeit), to use Hans Blumenberg’s terminology—should command our attention. Because of this distinction, dualism of the kind expressed by Eckhart remains here a sound basis for Benjamin’s thoughts. As a “ray of immortality” the eternal may pierce into this worldliness and in this sense it is not of this worldliness; as a suspending “interval,” it cannot act through this worldliness or, better, cannot act by its means. The image that Benjamin seems to evoke relates to a certain act of penetration: eternity may erupt, disturb, and suspend the other temporality, but cannot be reconciled or combined with it. Benjamin seems then to propose what Harry Jansen called “incarnated” time (Jansen 2016: 66–90) that rejects rather than accept a Hegelian conceptualization of the cunning of history, in which the advent of the divine-eternal is fulfilled by the workings of the worldly-temporal. To put it more polemically, not the advent of transcendent reason through history but rather its reverse implosive eruption in history is advocated by Benjamin. The potential for salvation, though always present, and possible, remains nonetheless out of human control and beyond historical reach. It should be also noted how, at this point, the mystic theme of “awakening” (erwachen) becomes meaningful to Benjamin (Kirchner 2009; Steizinger 2011). As Ansgar Hillach (1999) points out a concept of “awakening” is informed by a “utopian movement of the spirit” (890). Within the context of the diary, such a movement maintains for Benjamin the meaning of “resurrection” of the self “for immortality can be found only in death, and time

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rises up at the end of time” (Benjamin 1996: 16). Benjamin thus explicitly connects his concept of time with the “awakening” of the human being, in the same way that Eckhart talks of the redemptive awakening of the “son” embedded within each of us (Benjamin 1996: 12). The trope of “awakening youth” seems to be not just about being selfconscious. More profoundly it represents for Benjamin the mission of the “new religion,” in which “the spirit of youth will awaken in all,” and as the mystical opening up of “a spiritual reality” (Benjamin 1996: 133). Shifting the focus from time to space, the “ball” could be seen as the succinct culmination of these discussions. This culmination is arrived at by taking a prom night to symbolize “a space for Elysium, the paradise that joins the isolated into a round dance” (Benjamin 1996: 16). In Benjamin’s allegory, this heavenly space of interaction between man and woman, is where “we are truly in a house without windows, and a ballroom without world” (Benjamin 1996: 16–17). In a way, then, we are dealing here with a free space (i.e., free from the “external” worldliness), that is represented by the joining together of the different forces of our mental lives, and in which “time is captured” (Benjamin 1996: 17). To the extent that youth is associated in this way with freedom and implies—one could say—a room of one’s own, it also denotes a singularity, located not in the outer universe but rather within our inner experience—on the other side of the “outside world” (Benjamin 1996: 17). Described from a mystical perspective, this singularity depicts the numinous unity of opposites. In alignment with mystical symbolism, the mysterious unity of opposites is embodied in Benjamin’s poetics by the joining together of the virile and feminine aspects of the human experience (Benjamin 1996: 16). The “ball” culminates in such a unifying “dance” and, thus, dovetails with the potential of salvation—existing, but beyond reach, celebrated, but out of sight. Read allegorically, the conversation, the diary, and the ball bear on Benjamin’s play with mysticism. Jean-Luc Nancy pointed out—in quoting Meister Eckhart—that this type of mysticism brings the “nothing” into the center of “the world.” For Nancy, it is then about praying to God to make us “free of God” (Nancy 2008: 36; North 2015: 26). The act of awakening according to Nancy affirms an inner freedom, a pure spiritual singularity, beyond the possible, and as an imagined limitless limit that only a nothing—a nihil—can represent (Collins 2015: 332; North 2015: 26). Similarly, an affirmation that affirms the nothing is what Benjamin seems to drive at. Youth, in this sense, depicts a pure, uncontaminated, not-of-this world, original, creating being. This being is truly transcendent to the extent that it contains no substance that could be captured by form, or by any articulation; it is truly divine if, while being the creative force of this world, it is fundamentally detached from the world; eternal only in being non-temporal; existing in its non-existence. To follow the notion of singularity, youth may be seen as the event horizon, representing for Benjamin a gravitational center of all that is. Benjamin’s alluding to such nothingness induced Gerschom Scholem, for example, to accentuate Benjamin’s “nihilism” and to connect it with Jewish messianism (Scholem 1981: 18; Benjamin 1994: 82). Messianism is well engrained in Benjamin’s early writings (Fenves 2010; Khatib 2013; Jacobson 2003). It referred to “the potential for redemption” that is embedded, according to Benjamin, in every present moment; a fulfillment of time that is redemptive, and that therefore signifies the end of time. “This idea of fulfilled time,” writes Benjamin, “appears in the Bible as its dominant historical idea: the messianic time” (Benjamin 1996: 85). Within the theory of youth, messianic

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth

time is not about divine involvement in and through history, but rather about the breaking of, indeed the suspension of, historical time. In messianic terms, the youthful “time of the now” can occur only as an “extra-historical” event within history (Kohlenbach 2002: 34). This is not so much about the transformation of eschatological time into the notion of historical progress, but rather about symbolizing the break from history, or else the possibility of a break/rapture within history (Khatib 2013: 217; Jacobson 2003: 28; Frisby 1985: 220). For Scholem, such messianism placed Benjamin at the heart of Jewish mystical thought, especially in light of its apocalyptic overtones, demonstrating, perhaps, how Benjamin’s theory of youth was not exclusively informed by one single source. 6 Yet, while thinking in messianic terms, Benjamin’s theory of youth seems to follow the type of allegories that Eckhart expressed. It presents, perhaps, more of an admixture of Christian and Jewish mystical sources. Without questioning Benjamin’s reworking of Jewish mysticism, this was always entangled—one could perhaps say scrambled—with Christian sources—“Christian ethics (or Jewish ethics, if you will)” (Benjamin 1994: 20), as Benjamin rather cunningly put it (the proposition “or” signifying affinity, not differentiation). A categorical Christian/Jewish split seems to be alien to Benjamin’s theory of youth.

A Modern-Mystical Theory? Benjamin’s theory of youth depicts the most intimate stances of the mystical mystery: the fortress of the soul, the unity with the beyond, femininity and eternity, nothingness, and self-contraction—all are part of the young Benjamin’s enthusiastic—maybe too enthusiastic—imaginaries. In this particular way, Benjamin makes a case for what Paul North called “the logos of theology” (North 2015: 4). Nonetheless, mysticism also undergoes transformation. This point is crucial for the understanding of Benjamin’s modern adaptation of mystical imaginaries and also for why it could be defined as modern-mystical. There are, it seems, two main issues to note. First, the relations between mysticism and secularization. Benjamin’s theory of youth is mystical in its retreat to the mystery of the intimate unity with the divine, which Benjamin describes as an eternal-present moment of awakening and salvation. It is modern and secular because, in so doing, the human being encounters an alleged human inner true self—i.e., youthfulness—without, however, any reposing on a simple faith in a unity with God. Transcendence here denotes an innate human faculty, rather than the presence of an almighty God; a spiritual trait that may be fulfilled in any mundane human action or simple communication (dancing, conversing or composing a diary as examples), yet which is not conditioned by godly providence. The “secular” characteristic stands for the transformation that is enclosed within Benjamin’s play between religious symbolism and its modern adaptation, which brings the original religious meanings that were ascribed to divinity to bear on simple, unconditioned, human interactions. Modern mysticism is thus also a form of secularization (Verweltlichung) in the sense that it reframes transcendence within independent human experience in the world

6 Interestingly, in their correspondence, Scholem and Adorno agree on this point. See Angermann 2015: 462, 467.

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(Wexler 2007). Benjamin in this sense reframes mystical symbolism rather than simply reproduces it. When Benjamin, for example, discusses the “awakening” of the innertranscendent experience, he does so by focusing on an exclusive human experience. In Benjamin’s allegory, what “awakens” the humanity of the human being is the human being; a self-referring self, one might say, which stands for the former mystical “divine self-revelation” (Kohlenbach 2002: 50). As Kohlenbach argues, such a “self-reference” serves as an image “of the absolute, or of a God who is no longer found in traditional religion” (Kohlenbach 2002: xii). The traits that were associated with a divine sphere are absorbed into a definition of the humane in the form of an autonomous, selfreferring, human experience. As in the case of the “Metaphysics of Youth,” the notion of God is relocated (rather than disappearing—God is not “dead,” in the strict sense) because transcendence is compartmentalized within a human experience with no excess beyond it (Fenves 2010: 34). Put differently, an inherited mystical mechanism is restructured as an exclusive human experience—pointing, perhaps, to gnostic elements in Benjamin’s thought (Steizinger 2013; Hotam 2013; Lazier 2008). Such a restructuring, however, does not refer to an absorbing of an eschatological time into historical progress, because it is exactly this alignment which is negated by Benjamin’s concept of time, or that of messianism. The restricting of transcendence within an exclusive human experience may be seen as signifying a distancing from the original mystical endeavor, for example the one that Eckhart’s writings expressed. At the same time, the relocation of the godly still reverberates the same mystical logic (Kohlenbach 2002: xi). Is it not possible then to argue that Benjamin evokes a mystical notion and turns against it at the same time? What is accentuated, in this sense, is Benjamin’s mystical turn against mysticism (Benjamin 2011: 77). To follow this idea through, Benjamin’s modern reworking of mysticism takes mysticism to its radical, heretical conclusion, signifying a break with the mystical tradition itself. Doing so, however, denotes a performance of consistency with this tradition’s original message (that of a break with a tradition). Such a structure of thought is not exclusive to Benjamin. Adolf von Harnack’s Marcion (Harnack 1924) makes, for example, an analogous case. For Harnack, Marcion was the true disciple of Paul in that he introduced a type of radical dualism that breaks with the Pauline tradition. Here, a specific break with a theological tradition represents a pure theological formulation of that tradition. Grainer and Schmidt (2001) underline such a modern exercise, which maintains the religious principle (e.g., rebellion, heresy, transgression, the turning against) while rejecting its former historical religious manifestation, as a form of “liberating” a theological principal from its bondage to previous historical expressions. Benjamin seems to play along the same lines of argumentation because of the compartmentalization of transcendence within a human experience, the human self-awakening self, and the relocation of the godly. These compositions signify, perhaps, being religious to a fault (to put it ironically), or the going to the limits of a religious message, which takes an original doctrine so seriously as to break with it altogether. If modern mysticism denotes a secular theology of sorts, it also brings together, rather than separates, critique and theology. This is, then, the second issue to note. For the young Benjamin taking a “critical” approach means exercising understanding and in so doing gaining knowledge in accordance with the tradition of the enlightenment (Wolin 1982: 9; Trabizsch 1985: 61–62). Critique is further articulated by Benjamin in

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth

terms of liberation. To be critical thus means “to liberate, through understanding, the forms of the future from their distortions in the present” (Witte 1991: 30). What is at stake, then, is liberation of certain non-existing (“future”) forms from already existing (“present”) conditions. Critique could be then accentuated as containing a normative dimension: the acting against and overcoming of the powers that limit human freedom. Horkheimer, for example, made a similar point by arguing that a critical approach aims at “human emancipation”—the liberating of human beings “from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982: 244). In Benjamin’s case, however, it would be wrong to make sense of this “task of criticism” without taking into full account its theological meaning. Critique, for him, stands for the liberating of pure concepts from their worldliness. The “future” that Benjamin relates to, and that for him transcends the existing conditions, should be read not just a time of a “not-yet” but more particularly, and in the light of Benjamin’s concept of messianism discussed above, as encapsulating for him the theological, messianic, beyond time. It is then about gaining access to pure, divine knowledge, albeit in its secularized variation. To put it differently, critique is not about emancipating the human being from particular historical or social circumstances, but from circumstances as such. The aim of critique, then, is to rescue an experience of a transcendent truth, indeed to rescue the ability to defend such an experience, which is inaccessible to any classification within this world. It contains therefore a theological redemptive mission to go beyond the limits and into the limitless that only nothingness can represent (Wolin 1982: 29). The same goes for the concept of liberation, which is not only a liberation from the shackles of this world but also the liberation of a religious experience of nihility, or better, the rescuing of the liberating potential of such an experience. For Benjamin, then, Kant’s system of critique “must be conscious of eternity” and “must account for religious experience in the modern age.” In this particular sense, “the new philosophy is thus synonymous with theology” (Jennings 1987: 88)—a combination that supports Benjamin’s call for a “new religion” that aims at connecting “the religious significance of our times” with “the religious significance of knowledge” (Benjamin 2011: 168). The bringing together of critique and theology seems to underline a double move in which theology is defined as pure criticism, while operating critically is defined, circularly, as theological. Each form of thinking (critically or theologically) is conditioned by the other, to the extent of obscuring the boundaries between the two. Obscuring concepts means making them interdependent and in this way disintegrating any ability to clarify each of the concepts independently. Kirk Wetters (2014) illuminates rather brilliantly how such a mechanism was associated by Benjamin with an idea of “ambiguity” or, more accurately, “demonic ambiguity” (which goes back through Goethe’s “demon” to mythical origins) (114). For Wetters, such ambiguity—combining the idea of medium with that of a mythical force, the very concept seems to be evidence of its content—aimed at fusing together laws and their transgression, philosophical concepts, and their theological orientations. It was also part of Benjamin’s engagement with finding a language that would express the type of metaphysical openness he was advocating—his highly cryptic fragments on youth may constitute an example. In the case of the relations between critique and theology, ambiguity seems to work in a way that enables the pairing of reason and revelation, godly “word” and human “knowledge.” To the extent that theology means taking a critical stand to its radical end—including the critique of theology itself—it is not about

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exercising faith, or proving the existence of God. At the same time, since critique operates in a way that is “conscious of eternity,” it contains the constant presence of God as the precondition for its freedom from God. What is here, perhaps, imagined is a critical theology of sorts which reposes on a pre-conditional presence of an absent object, or, differently, absence as a content of presence.

Concluding Remarks By presenting an argument about eternity, transcendence, and divinity, that was both mystical and modern, religious and secular, theological and critical, Benjamin aimed at formulating a, somewhat ambitious, theory of youth. Such a theory may illuminate what a philosophy of religion could have meant for Benjamin. This unique combination seems to be also pregnant with broader implications, for example in relating to Benjamin’s later works. As Buck-Morss (1977) has showed, literary critique in particular meant for Benjamin “a form of secular revelation,” (xiii) and it may well be of value to understand this nexus of secular and theological notions in terms of the reworking of mysticism of which Benjamin’s theory of youth was composed. The same may be true with regard to Benjamin’s thinking on politics. In an exercise rather typical of contemporaneous German thought, Benjamin brought together his (theological) reading of modernity and his (modern) critique of theology in order to illuminate his thinking on society, politics, and identity. At the center of these latter thoughts lay Benjamin’s distancing from all political options available at the time (his critique of Zionism, on the one hand, and of Jewish assimilation on the other, are but two notable examples), and this overall refusal seems to resonate well with his theory of youth (Wolin 1982: 7; Witte 1991: 28–29; Smith 1991: 318–334; Schöttker and Wizisla 2006: 76; Pignotti 2009: 7; Brodersen 1990: 52; Steizinger 2013: 119). From this political perspective, a pure spiritual core stands for a “higher, mystical principle of authority” that lies beyond the reach of any worldly political structure and represents what a range of scholars termed “theocratic anarchism” (Guerra 2007: 126–135; Jacobson 2003: 28–29). 7 If the “political” is a sphere “necessarily (not just contingently) articulated by power” (Asad 1993: 185), Benjamin’s theology of youth makes a case for a complete resignation. Youth shows, perhaps, the definitive, redemptive, out of this world nothingness, that Benjamin played with as a prelude for his becoming “a peripatetic exile” (Jennings 1987: 3). This last point underlines the manner in which Benjamin’s notion of youth aimed at, was perhaps even composed for the sake of, drafting answers to modern social and political conditions. Yet, is it indeed possible to draft a tangible political program on the basis of constant distance and continuous metaphysical refusal? Is it not imaginable that a liberating mechanism may very well end as an oppressive myth if it remains intrinsically a guiding beacon beyond reach? Nothingness may present a rather shaky

7

Arendt’s comment that Benjamin theological orientation was aimed at refusing any kind of tradition could be seen as relating to this last point. See Schöttker and Wizisla 2006: 83 and McCole 1993.

Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth

basis for a valid political agenda and a mystical principle of authority could collapse in the wake of an emergent need for the protection that only an actual political constitution can provide. Benjamin’s theory of youth could be then seen as more than simply evidence of his rich and vibrant intellectual world, standing “at the crossroad of the modern intellectual landscape” (Moses 2009: 12). It is also a reminder of a vulnerability that perhaps accompanied its author to the last crossroad of his life. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Paul North for his piercing and highly challenging comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would like also to convey my special thanks to Hanan Hever, Yishai Kiel, David Sorkin, Kirk Wetters, and Eugene Sheppard for profound, insightful and passionate dialogues on issues of modernity, theology, Judaism, secularization, history, literature and philosophy and to my students, Clara Collier and Courney Hordrick, for intellectually captivating and thought provoking discussions during my stay as a visiting professor at the Judaic Studies Program at Yale.

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