As we reenter the philosophical grounds for demonstrating the boundless communication requisite for Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic inter-Axial dynamics, we must now assess Hebrew claims to species-ethical universality. As the leading Hebrew voice in lending social-scientific credibility to the multiple modernities thesis, S.N. Eisenstadt claims that one step along the way would be to undermine the de facto legitimacy of a rational secular modernity as the surest route to species universality. We return full circle to the important question considered in our introductory chapter, the intellectual query: ‘Why Jaspers?’ According to Eisenstadt, to consider Jaspers as a viable scholarly alternative to Weber entails undermining misconceptions about the endemic pariah status errantly attributed by Weber to the Hebrew tradition:

It [Hebrew moral, ethical, and rational appeals to species universalism] exhibited strong tendencies to proselytization which often were in tension with the more particularistic primordial emphases and which the sages and sects tried to resolve through their own mode of rationalization of religious contact. Thus even later on, in the medieval period, the Jewish people were not just, as Weber put it, a religious pariah community or people…..[M]any of the characteristics of a pariah people were not peculiar in this period to the Jews….Unlike many other minority peoples, the Jews attempted not only to maintain some place for themselves in the tumultuous political reality of the period, but also developed and continued claims of the universal validity of their religion and tradition. (Eisenstadt 2003, p. 132)

Taking these remarks into account, I concede that appeals to the domain of the species-ethical are most likely to be associated by the reader with modernist philosophical origins from Hegelian-Marxist analysis—especially for readers coming to political theory out a distinctively European understanding of modernity. With respect to Marx, my appeal to Eisenstadt does not seek in Marx a corrective to Hegelian and Weberian Protestantism often employed in order to justify the perceived necessity of a secularized state. These may indeed seem the best resolutions to two related dilemmas: the conflation of state secularization with dubious state neutrality and the corresponding trend of a biased, merely purported impartiality, heavily-weighted in the Christian direction. Instead, my prime motive would be to agree with Eisenstadt that addressing the Jewish question differently than the default intellectual positions requires a radical readjustment to our understanding of the origins of modernity. As an alternative to Weberian state secularity, Hegelian Protestantism secularized, or the opposed Zionist extreme of a distinct Hebrew nation-state as the path to ongoing vitality, we will read a universal species-ethic as an enduring constant for grasping the full symbolic import of the narrative self-understanding of the Hebrew Biblical heritage (Weil 1975, pp. 26-27).

The Hebrew salvific message of truly species-wide import stretches back to the historiogensis detailed in the earliest writings that comprise the corpus of Biblical religion . One risk of missing the full existential import of the Judaic salvation impulse would be the hasty conflation of the moral-ethical dimensions of universality solely with Moses ’ symbolic reception of the Sinai covenant. We concede to historical-critical Biblical scholarship the notion that the first five books of the Torah were likely written from the retrospective standpoint of the Exodus event . However, putting too much emphasis on the culmination of the historical process without due recognition to the origination (historiogenesis) loses much of the narrative and symbolic import of the ensuing species-ethical universality originally conferred by a personal God.

[T]he process of world-history reaches its highest level with the divine choice of individuals and groups for special instruction and the trusting response of the chosen individuals and groups. The special covenant between God and man is formalized through the covenants. The covenant, the berith, must therefore be ranked with toroth [divine commands] and toldoth [generations] as the third great symbol used in the expression of Israelite historical thought….[W]e must remain aware that when we try to determine the historiographic function of the symbol, we are dealing with a layer of meaning superimposed on the two others. (Voegelin 1974a, p. 171)

The toroth, as the more than 500 commands found in the collected canon of the Torah, was rooted in the concrete pragmatic experience of a particular historical group. The toldoth, in particular, overcame the solidaristic limits of kinship identification of clan into the wider federated arrangement of the genetically dispersed but symbolically related twelve tribes of Israel as united by the berith. Generations of symbolically reconstructed meaning served to constitute an ethical monotheism producing commands binding not just on the elect of Israel but upon the species as such. Yes, the Sinai Covenant carried this dual function of issuing a set of divine commands with a species-ethical component. However, the universality extended beyond the Israelites insofar as they were prefaced by the reminder of the historical trustworthiness of Yahweh to uphold the Abrahamic Covenant to ensuing generations. In taking the Sinai covenant as prior in symbolic import to the Abrahamic, conflates the symbolic import with a reversal of the historical conditions.

In order to clarify this latter move from a historical-critical perspective, we also need to reconsider from a historiogenetic standpoint the symbol of each covenantal promise. The symbolic import of the berith takes its origin from the king to suzerain relations of other Near Eastern peoples. What was unique to the Hebrew experience was replacing the symbolic role of the king with Yahweh. God’s elect supplant the place of the suzerain subjects. However, when adding yet a third layer to the berith, the narrative placement of the earliest Adamic covenant prior to both the Abrahamic and the Sinai one carried the command of species procreation. The dual Adamic command and promise also plays the symbolic function in the Hebrew canon as an act of grace requisite for the ensuing exposition of the human will as free only insofar as we posit divine gifts as freely offered. The species-ethic constant traces its symbolic historiogenesis to the Adamic covenant mandating all humans so constituted would never relinquish their unique differentiation from the rest of creation as image bearers of the divine.

[T]he act of creation is evidence of God’s free, unrestricted will, an expression of His loving-kindness and concern for His world. The motif of creation ex nihilo which was to occupy Jewish and Christian thought is still far removed from the world picture of the Bible. The main point is that ontological detachment is accompanied by the voluntary relationship between God and His world, a fact witnessed by Israel through its own fate. This is the common ground of all creation traditions in the Bible. Israel’s primaeval experience during the Exodus from Egypt, the wanderings through the desert, and the revelation of God on Mount Sinai are concrete expressions of this voluntary relationship. (Uffenheimer 1986, p. 163)

In light of the mention of creation ex nihilo as completely foreign to the original (and arguably proper) Hebrew hermeneutic, Uffenheimer warns that the second-personal symbolic overtones to the narrative construct of both the Hebrew account of creation and Hebrew symbolic genealogies of humanity must not be taken as third-person scientific postulations. We miss their symbolic import if taking them exhaustively to explain the origination of the material cosmos, such as in rivaling the explanatory power of Big Bang physics at the cost of slipping out of the participatory narrative mode into a textually unwarranted third-person perspective. Likewise, we miss the point if reading Genesis as offering us an epistemically valid third-person standpoint for describing the origins of the human species as a viable alternative to evolutionary theory or in putting our hopes in saving the credibility of the Hebrew canon with the scientific trump card of an Eve gene. Voegelin concurs with these category mistakes:

[T]aking it for granted that the ancient symbolists were not as naïve as modern fundamentalists, the quality of trustworthiness must have been meant to attach not to the detail of the registers but to the symbolic meaning which they intended to convey. A clue to the meaning is furnished by Genesis 2: 4: “These are the generations [toldoth] of heaven and earth.” The passage opens an account of the creation but uses the same phraseology as the genealogical registers. That is an odd usage; for the noun toldoth contains the verb yalad, “to bear,” “to bring forth,” and thus unmistakingly refers not to creation but to procreation. Hence, we must assume that the oddity was intended, precisely in order to reveal a deeper connection between creation and procreation. (Voegelin 1974a, p. 169)

Voegelin thus applies this etymological subtlety to his ensuing reconstruction of how best to interpret the import of Hebrew historiogenesis . When read from a participatory second-person narrative construct, we disclose the co-originality of the creation of the cosmos and the procreative impulse to the species imbibed in the symbolic Biblical conferral of naming:

Beyond the tribes of the confederacy we enter the realm of legend, myth, and speculation. The great nodal point in the symbolism is the descent from Shem, “the father of all the children of Eber” [the origination of the term Hebrew] (Gen. 10: 21). The Hebrew word shem means “name.” With Shem the register of names reaches the abstraction of the Name by which “all Israel” is distinguished from a symbolically anonymous naming. From Shem, finally, the register goes back to Adam. The Hebrew word adam means “man.” The man with the Name ultimately descends from the generic Man. (Voegelin 1974a, p. 166)

The symbolic ties referenced earlier between toldoth (generation) and the toroth (divine commands and promises of the attendant covenants) carry their species-ethical universality by virtue of the common origin of humanity from Adam. The promise that adhering to the Abrahamic covenant will serve as a sign or symbol to the rest of the nations (literally Gentiles, or ‘non-named,’ non-Jews) symbolically points the reader in two narrative directions simultaneously. We find a dual fulfillment backward to the Adamic covenant as co-participants in species origination from Adam/mankind and forward in the reiteration of this original divine grace through the narratively later Exodus event as both a sign to the Israelites and world-historical symbol of species import.

On this symbolic reading of human progeny, humans thereby become co-participants in a process of creation with God, adding layered iterations of toldoth generations escalating in divine conferral of sacred import from creation, to humankind, to the elect.

No modern translation can adequately render the innuendo of the Hebrew text that the first generation of creation, that is, the heavens and earth, become procreative and co-operative with Yahweh in the work of creation. From the fertilization of ad [mist] and adamah [soil] arises, under the forming and animating action of Yahweh, the second generation of adam, with the double meaning of man and Adam. (Voegelin 1974a, p. 170)

In this respect, we can begin to understand why Voegelin’s employment of the social-scientific dimensions to his interpretation of Hebrew history nonetheless does not fall prey to lapsing into the third-person objective descriptions offered by those he labels as gnostic ideologues.

With the linguistic structure of the text before him, the reader will not doubt that the toldoth of Adam continue the toldoth of heavens and earth. The authors intended the meanings of creation and procreation to merge in a co-operative process; the order of being is meant to arise from the creative initiation of God and the procreative response of creation. Hence, what is trustworthy about the registers is not the genealogical ascent from the presently living to some remote ancestor but the generative descent from God—generative understood in the double meaning of creative-procreative. The adam that was created by God with the procreative response of ad and adamah continues to generate himself in the likeness of God. To the presently living the registers authenticate their being adam in the likeness of God—that is, the human medium that is supposed to co-operate in generating the order of being through procreative submission to the creative will of God. (Voegelin 1974a, p. 170, 171)

On such a read of human freedom, Voegelin suggests that accounts of the creation of the cosmos and that of man within the context of Biblical religion must be read from the proper hermeneutic in order to avoid two misunderstandings. On the one hand, an overemphasis on a literal historical read misses the rich allegorical overtones. In addition, at the other ideological extreme, the text bears no license for beginning with the secular modernist assumption of the absolute autonomy of man as the rubric for assessment of the rational merits of a particular tradition, Hebrew or otherwise.

Voegelin concludes in a pragmatically open manner fully consistent with his repeated resistance to collapsing our hopes for universal justice into what cannot receive adequate species closure in the nation-state, regional empire, or global political order. One can easily trace the symbolic roots of this philosophical and political commitment to his interpretation of the universal versus particular tension endemic to Israelite history he regards as having no consummating concrete resolution:

The relationship between the life of the spirit and life in the world is the problem that lies unresolved at the bottom of the Israelite difficulties. Let us hasten to say that the problem by its nature is not capable of a solution valid for all times. Balances that work for a while can be found and have been found. But habituation, institutionalization, and ritualization inevitably, by their finiteness, degenerate sooner or later into a captivity of the spirit that is infinite; and then the time has come for the spirit to break a balance that has become demonic imprisonment. Hence, no criticism is implied when the problem is characterized as unresolvable. But precisely because the problem is unsolvable on principle, an inestimable importance attaches to its historically specific states of irresolution. In the Israelite case, the problem is unresolved in so far as it is on the point of emergence from the compactness of the Mosaic period [we] into the Prophetic differentiation [species]. And the foundation of the Kingdom was, furthermore, the specific crisis that revealed the demonic derailment of the Mosaic foundation. Here we witness the interplay of experiences in the struggle of the spirit for its freedom from encasement in a particular historical organization. That struggle of truly world-historic importance has, by its experiential phases, determined the unique structure of the Biblical narrative, as a literary work. (Voegelin, 1974a, p. 183)

For the skeptic of the work of Voegelin having overstepped the bounds of political theory proper by including spiritual entities and cosmic comportments into his framing of political participation with the cosmion , he does buffer these speculative components with some pragmatic lessons. While contemporary academic treatments of American pragmatism have generally taken political theory mostly in the opposed direction of an outright dismissal of such a widened view of the political, Voegelin found much solace in the cosmic speculations of Whitehead, James, and Pierce in his extensive studies of American pragmatism that, on his read, constituted a philosophical tradition immune from the third-personal excesses of the Austrian positivism of his early intellectual development. Once one submits to the second-person narrative construct of man, the Thou second-person plural of the species, and the cosmic domain as an experiential manifold of spirit and human co-participation, we are closer to assuming a compatibilist account of human freedom that nonetheless can offer an alternate to one(s) that are inherently secular . We can take license to call this Biblical narrative construct modern nonetheless since we have not pretended to replace the necessary pragmatic assumption of the ongoing subjection of our epistemic commitments from the critical scrutiny of the empirical sciences. Nor have we sacrificed the crucial moral-ethical assumption of authentic responsibility taken for one’s creative capacities for reason, sociability, and political agency.

While Jaspers would endorse the symbolic meanings ascribed above to what he terms collectively experiential ‘ciphers ,’ Jaspers consistently resists the ascription of first-personal qualities to the divine. In turn, he also argues that we have stretched the limits of both our linguistic and philosophical capacities once we allow persons to address the divine from the performative attitude of a first person I to a second person you. He resolves this tension reserving the postulation of an Encompassing as a species-constant experiential domain that nonetheless must retain a third person distance from the subjective consciousness.

As a compelling alternative to Jaspers’ accounts of subjective individuation born from the crisis of individual culpability for owning the social fact of species interdependence, the adoption of a universal species-ethic need not entail an existential humanism bereft of a personal God. Perhaps put best in the probing prose of Buber’s I and Thou:

Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into a relation to a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like a You—and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in full consciousness. (Buber 1970, p. 80)

One’s responsible participation in the species and cosmic order—or citizenship, for lack of a better term—renders its ultimate conferral from the You/Thou that Buber takes as the fundamentally pan-relational context we are thrown into since birth (Buber 1970, pp. 75–79).³ However, while such an account rooted in a narrative order to human experience can easily concede the distinctly pragmatic notion that ‘individuation is the product of socialization,’ the priority ultimately rests on the relational quality of our personhood that only thereafter makes possible the articulation of first-person responsibility.

Jaspers’ references to the Hebrew influence upon the initiation of the Axial Age highlight the importance of key prophetic elites like Amos, Jeremiah, and Isaiah—not only at the expense of Yahweh as a personal God, but also at the expense of Abraham and Moses . These assumptions belie the pragmatic reality of the experience of a collective people. In a parallel construct, Taylor’s existential historiography of Latin Christendom repeatedly appeals to what he terms the nova effect of civilizational transformation through elites as driving Axial Age breakthroughs. For Taylor, these reconstructions typically begin with civilizational crisis, met by an elite-initiated response. In events of successful mediation of crisis, the requisite elite insights then spill over to eventuate the gradual transformation of the masses.

One initial step of critical analysis from the pragmatic experience of the Hebrew tradition would be to challenge the necessity of elite figures stirring on civilizational transformation. Along the lines of the incredibly compact Hebrew breakthrough that fits Jaspers’ original Axial Age dates, the ensuing ethical monotheism of the Hebrew tradition becomes associated with the 800–600 BC prophets Amos, Hosea, and Duetero-Isaiah. However, Hebrew scholarship on its own Axial qualities tends to resist such a straight-forward temporal climax owing its success to transformative leaders. According to Uffenheimer, Jaspers in particular may have fallen prey to conflating otherwise experientially disparate phenomena, particularly in collapsing the Greek experience into the Hebrew one:

We contend that this is diametrically opposed to the historical reality reflected in the biblical sources, especially in those pertaining to the Sinai covenant. These sources disclose that monotheism, far from being the speculative, contemplative faith of a small, elitist group, was the result of an overwhelming historical event involving an entire nation. While this powerful historical experience is embedded in legend and myth, there is nevertheless no reason to doubt its essential historical reality, nor is it likely that the legend was the free invention of late writers. This experience was Israel’s redemption from the house of bondage in Egypt, followed by the covenant made by the people with their divine redeemer, the so-called Sinai covenant. In other words, the nucleus of monotheism is a primaeval collective historical event, which was perceived as the encounter of an entire nation with Yahweh , their redeemer. This was an existential experience totally different from an intellectual acquisition of a small elitist group, like the ontological monism of the pre-classical Greek philosophers. (Uffenheimer 1986, p. 150)

Uffenheimer cites the historical backdrop to the Sinai covenant that pushes the relevant dates much earlier than the conventional framework of the more compact 800–200 BC axial setting. As support, and in agreement with the scriptural hermeneutics of Voegelin and Buber, he appeals to the close literary conventions of the Sinai covenant to the sorts of treaties documented as characteristic of those between 1400 and 1250 BCE Hittite kings and their vassals:

Israel accepted the exclusive suzerainty of its divine king. The prohibition against worshipping any other god besides Him found its classical expression in the first commandment. Indeed, this is consonant with the prohibitions found in Hittite vassal treaties, where the vassal is warned against recognizing anybody besides his suzerain, “the Sun.” This is a striking parallel to the Sinai covenant in which Israel, the vassal nation, pledges absolute and exclusive obedience to Him by an act of free commitment. Thus, the Sinai covenant was tantamount to the establishment of the kingdom of God. We may therefore assume that it was the radical response of Israel to the traumatic experience of Egypt, “the house of bondage,” the symbol of human enslavement and tyranny. By contrast, the kingdom of God was meant to be free of any kind of human domination and oppression. Buber, in his book Konigtum Gottes (1936), already persuasively demonstrated that this theopolitical utopia may be traced within the most ancient political and narrative sources of the Bible (Num. 10:35–36; 23:21–23; Judg. 5, etc.). There, the idea of human kingship is repudiated as an offense and a sin against God, the true king of Israel (Judg. 8:22–23; I Sam. 8:7 ff.). In other words, the covenant between God and His people, which is the very core of biblical monotheism, is in a certain sense the transmission and reshaping of these ancient vassal treaties, in which Israel is conceived as the vassal of God. (Uffenheimer 1986, p. 151)

In addition, as an answer the positivist nineteenth century Germanic historical critical school of Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) that still retains substantial impact upon Biblical scholarship to this day, Voegelin also shows a decided preference for describing the ideal form of political governance for the Israelites as the notion of a theopolity (which he also attributes to Buber: Voegelin, 1974a, p. 415). Since theocracy too closely conflates the spiritual and political orders, Voegelin’s contrast of the terminological type signs theocracy and theopolity gives his best clarification for the attendant danger of collapsing the two distinct orders: “The compact symbol of the Chosen People could never be completely broken by the idea of a universal God and a universal mankind. Yet the problem of the church, however imperfectly differentiated, was inherent in the situation as soon as a temporal polity was built into the Yahwist theopolity, with the national monarchy. Hence, the monarchy of Saul, indeed, marked the beginning of the theocratic problem” (1974, 1974a, p. 248).

Voegelin’s recasting of the thornbush episode of Moses elicits a pragmatic sensitivity to the original Hebrew audience to whom Moses must communicate his revelatory message—an audience three centuries removed from the Israelite desire to be like their neighbors and anoint Saul as the king of their theocracy . On the one hand, we must concede our earlier remarks that Voegelin posits the Hebrew corpus of scriptures as stretching across multiple authors, clearly demonstrative of historical redaction, and even intermeshing layers of interpretive precedent into type symbols such as kingship, just governance, and retrospective prophetic fulfillments. On the other hand, like Uffenheimer, Voegelin resists the idea that the concession to historical redaction of the narrative therefore places composite authorship—even in the case of 800–600 BCE composite tradition of scriptural experts charged with preserving the historical meaning of sacred texts—between Wellhausen’s dates of about 800–300 BCE (Voegelin, 1974a, pp. 192–193).⁴ Voegelin also explicitly rejects Wellhausen ’s quasi-Hegelian evolutionary vision of Israelite history proceeding from primitive animism, to henotheism, and culminating in a mature monotheism only through composite redactors that were temporally situated in close proximity to the key Axial prophets of the period of Babylonia exile (Voegelin, IR 1974, p. 199, 200; Dillard and Longman 1994, p. 45, 46). By situating the thornbush episode in the much earlier Egyptian historical context, Voegelin acknowledges the import of historical context without falling into the errors he attributes to the Wellhausen historical-critical schools that tend to miss the forest of meaning imbibed in comprehensive symbolic imagery for the trees of the historical-critical deconstruction of type symbols (Voegelin 1974a, pp. 192–202). For instance, the third person charge that the miraculous parting of the reed sea never factually occurred (and therefore undermines the integrity of the entire Hebrew corpus of scripture), disavows the more significant postulation that some major collectively experiential event(s) occurred for the Israelites to derive such symbolic import to an experience that could only be equated with the grace of divine deliverance:

The parallel between the Yahwist and the Amon symbols is clear enough not to require elaboration. The tension between the hidden depth in God and his manifestations has been transposed, by the thornbush episode, from the form of cosmological myth to the form of revealed presence in history. Such a transposition could well have been the decisive work of Moses , if we consider the fundamental issue of his existence as it has emerged from the previous analysis, that is, the conflict between the orders of Yahweh and the Egyptian empire. It is highly probable that the revelation of the new order was couched in symbol which clearly abrogated the order of the Egyptian gods as it was understood at the time. It would be the same type of symbolic opposition that we observe in the Abram episode of Genesis 14. [Abram’s refusal to profit from the Canannite worship of Melchizedik but nonetheless put his trust in the covenant revealed to him by God]. The revelation could break with the cosmological experience, but it could not be communicable unless it continued the symbols while changing their meaning. The God of Moses had to make himself intelligible to his people, not only as God of the fathers, but also as the God of the new historical dispensation in opposition to the Amon of the empire. Hence, we are inclined to attribute the symbolism of the thornbush episode to Moses; and since the Egyptian texts which supply the continuity are later than the Amarna period, a date for Moses will have to be assumed in the thirteenth century B.C. (Voegelin 1974a, p. 414)

Voegelin therefore regards the passage as most properly read from a theopolitical typology rather than a theocratic one since he mixes the sort of evidence valid for the historical-critical school with the transformative symbolic meaning that for him indubitably constitutes the collective experience of a people dated near the thirteenth century BCE.

He therefore provides us with a set of pragmatic presuppositions for the Hebrew hermeneutic of these type concepts that still retain the postulation of a personal God while also carrying the potential for responsible self-transformative learning. On the one hand, he highlights the sensitivity of the authors to appeal to symbols within the range of the second-personal audience’s experiential manifold: in this case, by appeal to the Amon Hymns of Dynasty XIX that carry many of the characteristics of the thornbush episode (413). He finds in these a reference to the mysterious qualities of Amon that came into being at an unknown date through an unknown source, whose divine qualities carry close parallels to those ascribed to the Israelite pragmatic experience of their new relationship with Yahweh . In parallel symbolism, the Egyptian Amon and Israelite Yahweh have the capacities to remain hidden, while nonetheless the potencies are capable of becoming manifest in a multitude of possible forms (413). On the other hand, despite these typological similitudes, Voegelin also highlights that the symbols have been subjected to a transformed meaning that sets them apart from their original Egyptian imperial context: specifically the radical transformation from cosmological myth to revelatory presence in human history (414).

Thus, invariably we are led into the murky debate concerning the hidden meanings of the famous “I am who am” second-personal revelation of God’s name to Moses at the thornbush that confirms for the participant reader the veridical status of a divine calling. While Voegelin concedes that the richness of such a debate could take a separate manuscript in order adequately to present the array of positions stated on the proper exegesis, he outright dismisses the efficacy of purely etymological attempts:

[T]he rich etymological debate concerning the name of Yahweh, with its variegated conjectures, some more plausible than others but none conclusive, must be excluded as irrelevant to our problem. The narrative itself does not refer to any meaning attached to the name of Yahweh that could have influenced the content of the revelation. On the contrary, it presents the name as one whose meaning is unknown, so that an exegesis is necessary in order to endow it with spiritual vitality. The exegesis, furthermore, is not intended as an etymology. As far as we know, the ehyeh has etymologically no more to do with Yahweh, than mashah and mosheh, that is, nothing at all. The exegesis plays with a phonetic allusion, but its meaning is autonomous. (Voegelin 1974a, p. 408)

In other words, by dismissing any straightforward etymological point of departure to his scriptural hermeneutic for this passage, he claims that the very lack of direct content to the name serves as a necessary condition for endowing the name with a more dynamic experiential vitality.

In addition, although ascribing to Yahweh the personal qualities requisite for having established a communicative relation through Moses to the Israelites, Voegelin allows the precise capacities and qualities of God—akin to the Egyptian Amon—to remain hidden and indeterminate. However, he posits Yahweh less as a theocratic hypostasis to behold from a third-person objectivigating perspective nor does he, like Jaspers, supplant the personal God with and impersonal mystery of the Encommpassing. Instead, he posits Yahweh as a theopolitical practical moral agent whose primary action is salvific as the consummate helper of his people:

In the framing passages of the thornbush episode, 3: 12 and 4: 12, the ehyeh has the meaning “I will be with you”; and the Chicago translation justly paraphrases the ehyeh in 4: 12 as “I will help you”—though the paraphrase destroys the structure of the text. The meaning that God will be present as the helper, furthermore, is confirmed by the instruction to Moses to tell the people: “Ehyeh has sent me to you” (3:14). The passage would have to be paraphrased: “The one who is present as your helper has sent me to you.” In light of this meaning, supported by the prophecy of Hosea, must be understood the central ehyeh asher ehyeh, usually translated as I AM WHO I AM. Unless we introduce extraneous “philosophical” categories, the text can only mean that God reveals himself as the one who is present as the helper. While the God himself is hidden (the first ehyeh) and, therefore, must reveal himself, he will be manifest whenever, and whatever form, he chooses (the second ehyeh). (Voegelin, 1974a, p. 413)

In his seemingly misplaced reference to the much later prophetic writing of Hosea (1:9) to explain an event potentially six or more centuries prior, he seems to provide support for the Wellhausen school he had earlier rejected. Since scholarly dating of Hosea places the book in the eighth century BCE, it might seem more plausible to support to the notion that the entire Biblical canon had undergone significant redaction precisely around the climatic Axial period celebrated by Jaspers. In response, Voegelin explains that during the later period of the destroyed Northern Kingdom (722 BCE), Hosea has Yahweh explicitly call the Israelites Lo-ammi (literally: not-my-people) and even takes on the self-designation of lo-ehyeh (literally: I not I-am to you). The significance of his inclusion of the later dating of the Hosea reference nonetheless contributed to his painstaking efforts to retain the theopolitical import of original thornbush episode.

On the one hand, in support of Voegelin’s resistance to the Wellhausen postulation of Torah authorship and significant redaction during Jaspers’ Axial Period, the prophet Hosea severely chastises the people for their forgetfulness of having forsaken the Sinai covenant. They had effectively undermined the second-personal relations of trust with Yahweh essential to the ongoing vitality of the theopolity . On the other hand, Voegelin adds yet another reason for skepticism cast on the Wellhausen thesis of the greater corpus of the Hebrew Bible having been written and redacted considerably by Hebrew scriptural schools dated near the historical periods of Amos, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Deutero-Isaiah. According to Voegelin, and his affinity for Buber’s hermeneutics, the very act of such a harsh rebuke in Hosea necessarily presumes the pragmatic weight of centuries of experiential revelation for it to remain consistent with God’s status as a just and good author of true promises. On this interpretation, the Israelites symbolically merit the justice meted out by God’s punishment for having willfully forgotten what he presumes was a collective experience carried forward with the toldoth across the numerous generations (anywhere from 15 to 20 generations on the biblical rubric of 40 years comprising a generation) that continued the line of communicative relationship with God across the centuries. The same promise initiated at the Sinai event of the thirteenth century continued to resonate in the collective consciousness up into the sixth century and forward (412).

While Voegelin avoided the etymological route for the interpretation of YHWH in order to open its symbolic content to the collective memory of an entire people, that does not mean he dismisses the role of etymological symbolism as an important carrier of meaning in Biblical religion . In the case of some proper names, Voegelin actually follows the etymological read of Buber’s in-depth understanding of Hebrew. For instance, again in support of his experiential—as opposed to historical factual—reading of the Exodus event , he follows Buber in associating the name Moses not with the popular notions of ‘because I drew him out of the water’ with the dual overtones of Moses’ sparing from death by deliverance out of the river by the family of Pharoah and the more overt overtones of the great Exodus event of the parting of the sea. Instead, in a reading that both he and Buber find grammatically more precise would be a symbolica ‘drawing of Israel from the floods’ (394, 395). Voegelin cites similar references to the use of the same grammar in the Psalms amidst trials whereby David receives deliverance from his enemies. Firstly, he finds this reading helpful in evading an overly naturalistic reading of the miracle of the Red Sea parting that could thereby lose its symbolic import of deliverance from real historical bondage. Secondly, if the historical precedence behind the name did derive from the exegesis of the naming to read “the one who draws out” from the certain death and destruction characteristic of a tumultuous flood (as in David’s symbolic usage) then that would lend greater credence to the historical prospect that there was an event of such experiential magnitude later to become the symbolic association attributed retrospectively to Moses (395).

In response to the possible charge of gerrymandering his hermeneutic commitments to fit best with his theoretical and exegetical aims, when Voegelin opts to extract the etymological depth of symbolic terms, he emphasizes these instances to call attention to the historical-critical skeptic that attempts to exploit apparent textual inconsistencies through a mix of lack of knowledge of the original Hebrew, an over literalizing of merely symbolic terms, and mistaking the rational unfolding of scriptural narratives as ones that best proceed along a linear axis of time. For example, one fitting instance of Voegelin’s hermeneutic sensitivity would be to read the grammatical parallels between burning bush (seneh) along a hermeneutic sensitivity to the close etymology of the Sinai mountain.

To see God is to die. Moses has hidden his face from the terrifying sensual presence, and he listens, with his soul, to whatever the voice had to say. And the voice tells him of the divine knowledge that is action. The revelation opens: “Seen I have, seen the oppression of my people who are in Egypt”; and it closes: “Lead my people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt!” Here, for the first time, appears the theme of “my people [ammi],” firmly framing the promise of freedom in 3:8. As the seneh [bush] points forward to Sinai, so the ammi points forward to the Berith [covenant] through which the Hebrew clans, who as yet are ignorant of the fate in store for them, will be transformed into “my people.” In the knowledge of God the action distended in historical time is complete. Moreover, the historical action has subtly begun with the revelation, for the knowledge of God has now become the knowledge of Moses who, in the course of his life, has grown to the point where he can hear the divine voice articulate its command. When Moses can hear the voice appoint him the servant of Yahweh , he has grown spiritually into the servant of Yahweh. The command could be rejected only by a man who could never hear it; the man who can hear cannot reject, as the will of God has entered him. When the consciousness of the divine will has reached the clarity of revelation, the historical action has begun. (Voegelin 1974a, p. 407)

In other words, as the bush (seneh) is to Sinai, this similar etymological construct leads the reader to draw the historical parallel between the thornbush episode and the Sinai covenant. The dispersed wandering clans had not formed a polity by the theocratic and heroic leadership of Moses into a single people but rather served a participatory role in the unfolding drama of the disclosure of a new type of order: the theopolity of Yahweh’s divine governance.

The combined result of reading the burning bush ‘I am who am’ passage as symbolically pointing to Yahweh’s performative action as helping savior via the Exodus, widens the original second-personal discourse between God and Moses to the establishment of a second-person plural relationship with the Israelites (you plural implied) as my people.

As in the preceding scene the promise of freedom was framed by the introductory and concluding references to “my people,” so now the supreme revelation of God’s nature is framed by the “I will be [ehyeh] with you” of Exodus 3:12 and 4:12. In the exegesis at the center, the meaning of God is then revealed as “I am who I am [ehyeh asher ehyeh].” To the skeptical sons of Israel Moses will have to say: “Ehyeh has sent me to you” (3:14). The people thus will break the bondage of Egypt and enter the present under God, once they have responded to the revelation of God’s presence with them. The mutual presence of God and Moses in the thornbush dialogue will then have expanded into the mutual presence of God and his people, through the Berith, in history. (Voegelin 1974a, p. 407)

Voegelin uses this hermeneutic to reinforce the point the Moses must again not be mistaken as the king of a Hebrew theocracy . In addition to the three centuries of removal from David’s monarchy, insofar as the people freely assent to this call too, the second-personal act of divine revelation breaks through historically as the we-experience of an entire people under the theopolical kingship of Yahweh their divine deliverer.

Despite my resistance to confining the Hebrew axial breakthrough to Jaspers’ dates, one may nonetheless associate a secondary Axial breakthrough around the time of the writings of Deutero-Isaiah, as a restoration and final consummation of the first breakthrough of the monotheism established by the Sinai covenant (Stone 1986). In this respect, Jaspers gains credence in his appeal to this period of major Hebrew prophets as justification for inclusion of the axial breakthrough of Judaism within his original axial timeframe of 800–200 BCE. For commentators like Nikiprowetzky defending Jaspers’ axial preference for the later dates, the axial moment comes with the consummation of the gradual process of Yahweh as truly unique among the competing gods of the temporal context. The strong contrast would point to Yahweh not just the mightiest and most trustworthy among many—but eventually crystallizing into yet a more complete revelation of the universal God of ethical monotheism.

Radical monotheism is unambiguously present, however, in the doctrine of he Second Isaiah, which represents a crystallization of the entire previous process. Isaiah of Babylon still uses formulas of incomparability but now gives them a definite monotheistic meaning….Hebrew and Judaic literature will never again cease to affirm the belief in an only God and the non-existence of all the others, so that ethical monotheism, in Palestine and in the Diaspora, will become the characteristic of Jewish uniqueness and so that a text from the Talmud will be able to proclaim the following definition: “Anyone who denies the existence of other gods is called Jewish.” (Nikiprowetzky 1975, p. 82)

As a mediating of the two camps, I follow Voegelin in presuming a reading of the Hebrew canon with multiple centers of symbolic meaning that resist reduction to a single event, symbol, or principle. The breakthrough brought about by the diaspora following the Babylonian exiles preserves the historical dimensions of a full restoration of the Sinai covenant begun with Moses , lost for centuries in the real pragmatics of the historical wavering of the chosen people, and finally redeemed again during the Second Temple Period.

It [ethical monotheism] simply represents the culmination of a historical process belonging to Israel and Israel alone. Even if one forfeits the notion of the monotheistic ‘vocation’ of the Semites, one still cannot achieve precision if one assumes that Israel had its concept of God from the beginning, either by finding it ready-made in the great African or Asian Near East, from whom it could have merely borrowed, or by taking advantage of the external and gnostic revelations in the Patriarchs’ dreams or the flames of Sinai. Despite the fervor and the moving depth of its piety, and the grandiose sublimity of its theological concepts, neither the religion of Babylonia nor that of Egypt offers anything that is truly comparable to Israel’s monotheism. Neither the Patriarchs nor Moses were true monotheists. Ethical monotheism, in its complete expression, incontestably appears only during the prophesy of the exile period. (Nikiprowetzky, p. 69)

Nikiprowetsy’s commentary thereby notes a consistency between the collective experiential content the Israelites ascribed to ethical monotheism and Buber’s defense of the Hebrew theopolity . Active participation in such a hypothetical polity need not require an explicitly territorial theocracy whereby a Hebrew monarch plays dual role of residing over Jerusalem as the spiritual and political capital of the kingdom, especially during historical periods in which the Israelites are not in Canaan. The impetus follows to regard the God of ethical monotheism in truly axial universalistic terms that can more fully encompass the species when diaspora surreptitiously facilitates the presence of Judaic practices more centered on Biblical religion as the temple cedes its symbolic place at the center of worship to the synagogue. We thus find additional reasons to support Jasper’s association of Hebrew axiality with Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and the prophetic writings falling in the range of his Axial Age timeframe:

Subsequent to Amos, in a famous vision in the temple of Jerusalem, Isaiah has the Seraphim proclaim the glory of Yahweh fills the entire world. This constant exaltation of the image of Israel’s god left less and less room for others. Religious thought evolved from the idea of the incomparability of Yahweh to that of his uniqueness. The feeling the prophet Elijah expressed by proclaiming that Yahweh is God (haelohim) meant, as we mentioned earlier, that Baal cannot be compared in power and in the capacity to do and to save to Yahweh, to whom no other god can be likened. Next to the living God, the gods of the nations are only idols literally, ‘nothings’ elilim), ‘breaths of wind’ (hebel), ‘non-gods’ (lo-elohim), lies, or abominations. (Nikiprowetzky, p. 81)

However, again for the sake of preserving the symbolic unity to prior stages in the Hebrew narrative, we can compare this predicament to Voegelin’s earlier emphasis on the retrospective chastising of the Israelite people by Hosea, speaking on behalf of God as calling them literally: not-my-people. The experiential lack of a covenantal bond between Yahweh and Israel manifests itself in pragmatic history through their worship of idols among a competing spectrum of possible Gods need not therefore warrant positing a quasi-evolutionary progression from henotheism to monotheism. Yahweh’s proclamation of Israel’s repeated failures lead to an etymological self-ascription as lies and abominations (lo-elohim), presuming centuries of a monotheistic collective experience stretching back to the Sinai covenant. This again magnifies rather than detracts from the justice of God. The etymology of the contrast between the God of the Sinai covenant and the Second Temple period of estrangement from God reads literally: not-divine-beings and not in a privileged ancestral or family relation of affinity between a people and their God. We evade the reading of the Hebrew God as temperamental and arbitrary in the exacting of justice by adapting a Biblical context again that presumes the loss of a covenantal relation that had earlier been still intact.

Moreover, the earlier Abrahamic covenant to establish the toldoth of the Israelites in the promised land of Canaan, with the split between Israel and Judah also continues to receive greater symbolic meaning in the historical context of a geographically divided Hebrew polity. We can follow the lead of Buber and Voegelin and continue to read the narrative symbolically in contrast to a literal historical expectation of fulfillment:

Monotheism made further progress after the Jeroboam Schism. The political split and the enmity that had built up between the two kingdoms did not prevent either of them from worshipping Yahweh . Yahweh was no longer the divine patron of ethnic groups or united territories; in spite of the memory of and the regret over the loss of former unity, he was the god over two opposed political entities. This was the first practical recognition of his universal character. A further stage was attained when the Assyrians were seen as the instrument of God’s anger, and Cyrus as Yahweh’s anointed. (Nikiprowetzky, p. 81)

We should thus qualify Nikiprowetzky’s remarks to say that the practical recognition of Yahweh’s universal character did not occur the first time with the Jeroboam schism but instead represents a period where what was forgotten has been re-established by Yahweh . The consummate helper-God reaffirmed the historical realization first laid out with the Abrahamic and Sinai covenantal experiences when showing that the Middite Egyptian suzerainty of the God-king and subjects must indeed not have the same theocratic idolization of king and kingdom relation repeated in historical terms. When even Cyrus plays the quasi-messianic role of theocratic leader and king providing Assyrian resistance against Babylonian expansion, for Voegelin and Buber, Cyrus also unknowingly participates in the theopolitical realization of God’s plan for the Hebrew kingdom.

The Hebrew species-ethical import begun with Adam, and affirmed through Abraham and Moses , in the period of both intense turmoil and prophesy finds its full construal as not one of empire but rather one of universalistic, salvific, and spiritual, collective and individual self-transformation (Weinfeld 1986, pp. 181-82). The emphasis continues in expanding the reign of world-historical influence beyond Egypt, Israel, and Assyria out to the wider regional context eventually to achieve Jaspers’ universal scope of boundless communication:

Around 750 B.C. we find Amos emphatically stressing the grandeur of Yahweh , and the universality of his field of action and jurisdiction. The prophet of Teqoa sees Yahweh as creator of the world and Lord of the celestial legions. He sees him as the Judge, not only of Israel and Judah, but also of the Aramaeans, of the Philistines, of the Phoenicians, of Edom, of Ammon, and of Moab. The Israelites are in fact no more than the Coushites are for him. If Yahweh helped Israel to rise out of Egypt, did he not also help the Philistines out of Caphtor and the Aramaeans out of Qir? (Nikiprowetzky, p. 81)

Even when reading these reflections from a contemporary standpoint, we can affirm along with Voegelin (and what seemed to be the likewise prescient assessment of Arendt) that the any gnostic conflation of theopolity with a theocracy falls subject to pagan idolatry. On the one hand, the risk of pagan idolatry would be the attendant assumption that a foreign god would be the true source of deliverance, in its myriad forms (fertility, ecstatic enjoyment, abundance crop yields, military conquest, etc.) that only Yahweh as the helper-God of historical intervention could accomplish. On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, the substitution of national institutionalization of worship as a prerequisite for salvation also falls subject to the idolatry of concrete institutions (that are uncontestably, and paradoxically, finite in nature) as the ultimate source of the experiential fullness only to be satisfied in faithful trust and commitment to the promises of Yahweh.

Running throughout the symbolic reconstructions provided above, we can agree with Eisenstadt’s generalizable observation that one abiding feature of all the Axial traditions would be constant endemic tensions between center and periphery. We could read these observations in the literal sense of multiple geographical centers and/or world-historical movements that see the various Axial centers morph with respect to internal and external imperial threats. In addition, we could also take center to periphery tension in the metaphorical or symbolic sense of shifting sites of worship (temple versus synagogue) or even among the ideas propagated by competing scholarly traditions of interpretive precedent. For our present purposes, I would like to follow Voegelin’s most insightful conclusions drawn from his multi-volume Order and History that ultimately led him to abort the original motives of his project upon prolonged scholarly impasses that came about with his 4th Volume of the 5 Volume study: The Ecumenic Age (1974b). We will thus shift our focus to the influence of center to periphery competition upon the methodological paucity of a linear conception of time (termed by others, perhaps more fittingly: stadial consciousness) that fails to satisfy the sufficient degree of complexity he associates not only with the Hebrew corpus of literature, but also the deeper historical dilemmas tied to a linear construction of world history. In lieu of the Hebrew case in particular, he finds that

The historical narrative from the creation of the world to the fall of Jerusalem is neither a book, nor a collection of books, but a unique symbolism that has grown into its ultimate form through more than six centuries of historiographic work from the time of Solomon to ca. 300 B.C. Moreover, this written literary work has absorbed oral traditions which probably reach back as far as the first half of the second millennium B.C. Hence, it is possible to find a tradition from the seventeenth century [B.C.], side by side with an editorial interpolation of the fifth century, in a story that has received its literary form in the ninth century B.C. (Voegelin, 1974a, p. 145)

For lack of a better term, we could thus deem his historical sensitivity to the overlapping plural centers of narrative motivation multiperspectival.⁵ However, this must not lead to the opposed error of regarding the composite canon of Hebrew biblical religion as if it comprised an arbitrary collective authorship:

One may, furthermore, find that the odd composition is not a piece of clumsy patchwork but a well-knit story that conveys a fine point of nomad ethics, or spiritual responses to revelation, or diplomatic compromises with foreign divinities. And we may, finally, find that the story has an important function in a wider historical and speculative context which in turn reveals an equally complex composition. That is a disconcerting situation, as it appears impossible to identify the object of inquiry. Do we deal with the component ideas of the seventeenth, ninth, or fifth centuries; or with the idea conveyed by the composition, which does not seem to have a date at all; or with the meaning which the piece has by virtue of its position in the larger context? Certainly no simple answer will be possible, and in many instances no satisfactory one at all. We must recognize the difficulties presented by a symbolism that has absorbed primary traditions and records of more than a thousand years, and overlaid them with interpretations, with interpretations of interpretations, with redactions and interpolations, and subtle imposition of new meanings through integration in wider contexts. (Voegelin, 1974a, p. 145).

With in the above rendering of Voegelin’s historicized hermeneutic as multiperspectival, we could also label the complexity of his social-scientific methodology as multiperspectival in the disciplinary sense and with respect to the delicate inter-penetration of first person (Biblical narrative of first person singular reports and first person plural accounts of Hebrew collective experience), second person (divine rebukes of individual kings and prophets and prophetic warnings to ‘you’ individuals, the Israelites, and/or the species), and third person (reports of events subjected to historical-critical analysis).

Therefore, also in opposition to those that would regard its unique narrative form as akin to the construction of a piece of literature, the symbolic significance Voegelin and Buber attribute to the ontologically-open call to second-personal imaginative participation includes granting the prospect of the real participation of God in the ongoing course of historical revelation still in the process of disclosure.

The telos of the people’s existence was ontologically real, and whoever participated sensitively and imaginatively in Israel’s order was a potential participant in the creation of the historiographic symbol. The literary characteristics indicate no more than the common language of a group of persons, perhaps numerous over a period of time, who were occupied with the traditions concerning Israel’s existence under God. We have arrived here at the basic philosophical weaknesses of literary criticism, that is, at the attempt to treat the Biblical narrative as if it were “literature” in the modern sense and the disregard for its nature as a symbolism which articulates the experience of a people’s order—of the ontologically real order of Israel’s existence in historical form. (Voegelin, 1974a, p. 156)

As implied in the nomenclature of his wider project of Order and History, the Hebrew conferral of meaning upon creation, the exodus event , and the ensuing deliverance into Canaan serves as much for Voegelin as the unique collective psychological experience of the Israelites as it also becomes, for him, the historically variegated ordering that each of the Axial traditions confer upon their historical experience in this same non-linear self and collective understanding.

While Voegelin’s openness to the prospect of divine second-personal participation in human history may seem beyond the post-metaphysical commitments of contemporary critical theory , his steadfast commitment to the pragmatic qualities of lived experience continually reorients the focus of his analysis away from the misguided distractions of lapsing back into treating social science as a third-person observer somehow outside the set of events through which one ultimately cannot escape from status as a perpetual participant.

Complexities in a structure of meanings cannot be dissolved by far-fetched explanations, but only by a clearer statement of the issue. We started from the observation that the world-history had absorbed variegated materials and merged them in the medium of the narrative. The narrative, with its content, was recognized as a symbolic form sui generis. It did not have a “subject matter”; its meaning had to be understood in terms of the experiences that motivated its construction. (Voegelin, 1974a, p. 179)

The utter absence of any capacity to regard the composite whole of history from the observer standpoint, fittingly, makes Hegelian closure upon the successful completion of a grand-historical narrative the exact opposite of his methodological aims.

In the final analysis, his unique employment of the multiperspectival mode of critical reconstruction led him to uncover three related but distinct historical fallacies attributed to the exegetical correctives he exercises upon the Hebrew canon of scripture.

The literary genesis revealed the foundation of the Kingdom as the primary motive in chronological order; but the total construction, with its long posthumous work, made the historical present created by the Covenant, as well as the speculative origins and periods of history, the dominating principle of the content, though this motivation was secondary in chronological order. The order of motives in the content, thus, was the reverse of the order of motives in time. Moreover, to round out the problem, the order of motivations in time—first the Kingdom, second the Covenant—was the reverse order of events in time. The elements which account for the complexity of the historiographic work can, therefore, be summarized in the following three propositions: (1) In the sequence of historical events the Covenant precedes the Kingdom; (2) in the sequence of motivations of the narrative the Kingdom precedes the Covenant; (3) in the content of the narrative itself the Covenant dominated the Kingdom. Once the structure is recognized, its meaning is apparent. (Voegelin, 1974a, p. 179)

As a composite lesson to be drawn from the clarification of the complexity of the reversals in motives and sequences comes a corrective to how best to read the eschatological movement of the narrative itself as retaining its central focus upon the unresolvable tension between spiritual orders and their concrete institutionalization as political orders. Treating the concrete historical realization of a particular political kingdom (or state or any other polity) as if it were the ultimate telos of history supplants the central role to be played by both God and subject(s) in ongoing relations of trust. To do so would run counter to the original first-commandment prohibition on the construction of false idols, certainly endorsed by Buber’s and Voegelin’s emphasis on the You performative perspective of participant, as most effectively illustrated in the first generation critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno .

Aptly summarizing their general aims for the sociological study and philosophical critique of modernity, Horkheimer and Adorno devoted their intellectual work to ending sources of domination in all of their historical forms. Their critical accounts of the emergence of the modern state saw it as carrying as much, if not more, potential for domination than for justice. They thus share with both Jaspers and Voegelin a fundamental suspicion toward political closure through the rational institutionalization of principles. Jaspers expressed this in his conclusions to The Origin and Goal to History that endorses a world order over a world empire (pp. 193–212). Voegelin showed similar pessimism in warning against the reduction of the political order to state activities that preclude considerations of participation in the wider cosmic order. Therefore, in an odd consensus among diverse philosophical schools, Horkheimer, Adorno, Jaspers, and Voegelin, respectively regard states and constitutional orders with a cautious eye as these could coercively impose transcendental categories of absolute ordering upon phenomena that belie administrative closure. However, in closer affinity to Jaspers’ Encompassing as a more universalizable philosophical category than the species-ethical personal God of Israel (and humanity)—as defended by Voegelin and Buber, Horkheimer and Adorno call for strict adherence to the mutually reinforcing commandments of non-idolatry and prohibition on the use of the divine name.

Horkheimer and Adorno give a philosophical exposition of the long tradition behind the first commandment Hebrew prohibition on idolatry as a radical critique of the Enlightenment obsession with third-person objectivity. They acknowledge it as running the ideological risk of objectification of the divine. They pair together the theological ban on idols with the ritualistic practice of the non-utterance of God’s holy name that runs throughout Hebrew history and finds its climax in Hebrew Kabala mysticism.

Yahweh ’s essence will be relegated more and more to an ontological abyss completely separated from the world, and his name will be increasingly supplanted by the personal pronoun hu’, i.e. “Him,” the “absolute Being,” until it becomes totally unutterable, probably under the influence of Greek custom. But such a process did not make Yahweh either a deus otiosus or a pure intellectual abstraction. By a sort of paradoxical dialectic, which we encounter constantly in the doctrine of the monotheism of Israel, this transcendent God did not cease to be passionately concerned with this world and with its history. Yahweh also never ceased to be a Holy God. (Nikiprowetzky, p. 83)

Horkheimer and Adorno thus associate the inarticulate ordering of a reign of perfect justice demanded by an absolutely holy God with the aforementioned tradition of the unknown and inarticulate qualities increasingly ascribed to the tetragramaton (YHWH).

In contrast to the Enlightenment optimism of universal historical progress, they offer an alternate postmetaphysical first principle: the practical hope of bringing an end to the species-ethical existential constant of unspeakable suffering and loss. Like Jaspers and Voegelin, Adorno and Horkheimer thus leave history as an open narrative script seeking redemptive hope. Therefore, as a general locus of broad agreement, they each viewed neo-Hegelian idealism as carrying the latent risk of lapsing into either dogmatic institutionalization or gnostic withdrawal from pragmatic engagement with the world altogether. In light of a thoroughgoing secularization of Horkheimer and Adorno’s shared Hebrew heritage, they associate an inarticulate longing for justice with the longstanding Hebrew prohibition of idols:

A consciousness interpolating images, a third element, between itself and that which it thinks would unwittingly produce idealism. A body of ideas would substitute for the object of cognition, and the subjective arbitrariness of such ideas is that of the authorities. The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology. Its great desire would be resurrection of the flesh, a desire utterly foreign to idealism, the realm of absolute spirit. The perspective vanishing point of historical materialism would be its self-sublimation, the spirit’s liberation from the primacy of material needs in their state of fulfillment. Only if the physical urge were quenched would the spirit be reconciled and would become that which it only promises while the spell of material conditions will not let it satisfy material needs. (Adorno, 1973, pp. 207, 400, 401, 404)

Conceived in this light, Horkheimer and Adorno’s appeal to the resurrection of the body as the ultimate satisfaction for historical injustice pushes directly against the potential tendency to associate the ineffability of the divine with an other-worldly rejection of human material needs or with mystical cognitive abstraction back into the elite academic realm of idealist concepts.

As support for what otherwise might seem to be an odd conflation of non-idolatry and an affirmation of a robust materialism, Uffenheimer affirms that the most accurate hermeneutic of the original Hebrew cannot even distinguish between justice as an ideal and its ensuing performative dimensions in concrete praxis. The historical tradition that outright rejects modern distinctions between the spiritual and material can apply to Hebrew biblical semantics in general and the proper understanding of a long litany of particular examples in light of their material and embodied manifestations. For instance, he ties the Hebrew noun nefresh (life, soul, spirit) to blood as the material manifestation of life or spirit, thus enhancing the meaning of blood wiping out the contaminants of the soul in addition to the prohibition against eating blood on the assumption of its material representation of divinely-endowed life. He also associates affective and intellectual experience with particular organs of the body, such as the link between the heart, emotive, and cognitive functions and the kidneys direct bearing on conscience. Uffenheimer shows how this association between biblical semantics and materiality applies as much to an organic understanding of the entire cosmos as to moral action and scriptural content:

[T]he semantic field of the word ruah bears witness to the organic unity of the world, for it means both “spirit” and “wind” simultaneously. As to mishpat, sedek, sedakah, etc., they are no mere pneumatic-spiritual immaterial concepts. On the contrary, they are functional derivatives of concrete ways of behavior: thus mishpat and sedakah do not mean “justice” and “righteousness” as such, but “just deeds” or “righteous deeds.” True, by a process of generalization these nouns slowly developed into abstract concepts, but the most important point is their originally concrete functional meaning. Last but not least, davar means “word,” but the compound devar YHVH is not only the “word of God”; it is a concrete force of creative and destructive power: By the word God created the world (Gen. 1:3, etc.; Ps. 33:6). There is also something material in it, for God transmitted it to Jeremiah by physically touching his mouth (Jer. 1:9); on another occasion he coerced Ezekiel to eat a scroll which contained his words (Ezek. 3:1–4 ff.); it aroused a physiological reaction, for Ezekial relates its sweetness. Its destructive faculty comes to the fore in Jeremiah, where it is supposed to uproot, destroy, and overthrow kingdoms and nations (Jer. 1:10). (Uffenheimer 1986, p. 159}

In line with the second-person narrative approach I have ascribed to the Hebrew canon of scriptural exegesis so far, Uffenheimer posits such a holistic outlook upon creation, divine revelation, human action, and ritual prescriptions to an inherently dialogical, communicative, and free personal engagement between God and the world and between Yahweh and the Israelites individually and collectively (158).

In a thoroughly secularized application of these materialist overtones to basic Hebrew concepts, Horkheimer and Adorno embrace the pragmatic dimensions of justice by focusing on the ultimate redemption of the lived and embodied capacities of the body. Via appeal to the symbolism provided by the messianic longing and hope for bodily resurrection, they also strive to secure the institutional and material conditions beyond injustice as carrying mutually reinforcing material and moral dimensions. They find in dubious appeals to the institutional fetish of universal first principles of reason an aggressive affront against any perceived threat to ideologically driven civilizational universality. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment path to the hope of species self-deliverance ultimately unleashes the destructive powers of total warfare, culminating in the evil of genocide.

In an outright critique of Hegelian phenomenology (and therefore aligned with mutual opposition to Hegel shared with Voegelin) they apply this prohibitive restriction on attaining the absolute justice only ascertainable by a transcendently holy God to the idealist exaltation of the absolute truth of concepts. They project this fetish with absolute truth as an Enlightenment regression into the auspices of myth it purportedly had overcome and into an overt dismissal of the material conditions requisite for moral achievement of a just order. The utter confidence in Enlightenment reason above the material phenomena and practical engagements under purvey led to an unbridgeable disjunction between the language of philosophy taken as infallible truth in contrast to the non-categorical material phenomena informing language, finite embodiment, and the diverse particulars of every novel historical circumstance.

While Horkheimer and Adorno sought in their Dialectics of Enlightenment more directly to deduce the historical conditions for the possibility of the Holocaust to have happened in order best to prevent its re-occurrence, their justifiable skepticism toward the political institutionalization of justice leads them to seek out universalizable truth in the domain of their respective Hebrew—albeit secularized—upbringing.

[I]f the possibility, however feeble and distant, of redemption in existence is cut off altogether, the human spirit would become an illusion, and the finite, conditioned, merely existing subject would eventually be deified as carrier of the spirit. An answer to this paradox of the transcendent was Rimbaud’s vision of mankind freed from oppression as being the true deity. (Adorno, 1973, p. 400)

Adorno views this methodological commitment to philosophical truth as nonetheless ensconced in historical tradition and best approximated in the critical exegesis of sacred texts. He grapples directly with the question of losing the universality of truth to the historical specificity of a given philosophical tradition in his Negative Dialectics:

[T]hat is the question how a thinking obliged to relinquish tradition might preserve and transform tradition….Yet philosophy’s methexis in tradition would only be a definite denial of tradition. Philosophy rests on the texts it criticizes. They are brought to it by the tradition they embody, and it is in dealing with them that the conduct of philosophy becomes commensurable with tradition. This justifies the move from philosophy to exegesis, which exalts neither the interpretation nor the symbol into an absolute but seeks the truth where thinking secularizes the irretrievable archetype of sacred texts. (Adorno, p. 54, 55)

His own biographical immersion in the Hebrew tradition brings this secularization of its Biblical canon to philosophy as a general norm for pragmatically transcendental truth in a manner widely consistent with Habermas’s later critical theorist approach to the translation of religious concepts into the more rationally accessible domain of public reason. As an emendation to Habermas, the requisite warrant for engagement in truly fruitful inter-axial comparative philosophy presupposes the utmost effort on the part of disparate traditions not only to translate their claims into publically accessible language but also at least presumes the prospect that one could engage in the rigorous hermeneutic training necessary at least to approximate treating another Axial tradition from concepts and practices internal to its own self-understanding.

As an additional pragmatic presupposition, we must not mistake the conflation of the ban on idols with a cynical approbation of the utter impossibility of even seeking a reign of justice. Since we must not forget the necessary critical theorist tie between cognitive learning and material advancement in securing justice, we ought not to devalue the rhetorical dimensions of negative dialectics.

Dialectics—literally: language as the organon of thought—would mean to attempt a critical rescue of the rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of thing and expression, to the point where the difference fades. Dialectics appropriates for the power of thought what historically seemed to be a flaw in thinking: its link with language, which nothing can wholly break. It was this link that inspired phenomenology to try—naively, as always—to make sure of truth by analyzing words. It is in the rhetorical quality that culture, society, and tradition animate the thought; a stern hostility to it is leagued with barbarism, in which bourgeois thinking ends. (Adorno 1973, p. 56)

In a performative twist, the emphasis upon this universal longing as pragmatically presupposed also to be a species-wide constant ultimately implies seeking to persuade others to engage in such rational justifications with performative import. In other words, Habermas’s infamous ‘unforced force of the better argument’ would also presume that exemplary acts of justice derived from one or more of the great Axial traditions would carry an affective appeal that would invariably motivate attempts at redactive emulation.

However, in contrast to Habermas’s tenor of optimism towards democratic proceduralism as perhaps the best means to overcome domination in all of its historical forms, there unmistakably resides a pessimistic strand to first generation critical theory . As adapted from perhaps the most understated influence upon first generation critical theory—in their appropriation of Shopenhauer’s tragic view of the will, they resist overburdening reason beyond its localized capacities, yielding a starting point that posits a more romanticized reading of the human will. And as for constructing a grand-historical narrative to cover the aggregate human experience, their skeptical portrayal of reason as instrumental parlays at points on an outright collapse into thorough pessimism:

Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it….No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb….[T]he One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering. (Adorno 1973, p. 320, 323)

While critical theory indeed holds out the prospect of a hope for a better future for the species, their starting point would be to recognize the atrocities of the present as unjustifiable if one were to attempt a rational justification for such evils as the means to an aggregate progress to the history of humankind. In particular, Adorno’s construal of negative dialectics plays two distinct functions in articulating a micro-level approach to communication action. Adorno’s approach to a communicative ethics, in its disavowal of the prospect of constructing a systematically comprehensive theory makes an epistemic virtue out of this incompleteness: ‘It lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope’ (Adorno 1973, p. 406) . Such epistemic humility therefore serves as the motivational force seeking a perfect justice always to be unfulfilled in this world. Thus, in contrast to their more idealistic predecessors and later second-generation progeny, they are hesitant to offer a verdict of continual species moral maturation in light of trends globally that might rather bear testament to aggregate regress.

Since Horkheimer and Adorno were both Nazi-era German Jewish intellectuals forced to flee to the US for political asylum, and given that such a pragmatic and deeply historical style of philosophy emerged in the immediate context of the holocaust, critical theory in its practical orientation to social justice has since its origin held an ambivalent attitude toward religion and its impending secularization. On the one hand, in partial agreement with the likes of Freud and Nietzsche, they saw in religion, at its worst, ideological tendencies towards the highest forms of paranoia, neurosis, and politically charged resentment and oppression over alterity. However, on the other hand, in their ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of the Enlightenment’ they characterized the pogrom as the climax of historical injustice through the German fascist totalitarian domination over the religious practices expressed by the European-wide Jewish diaspora of minority sub-cultures (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947, pp. 137–172) . Therefore, they defended religious tolerance as a normative prerequisite of political justice, particularly in affirming their closing remarks to their seminal Dialectics of Enlightenment that recommend limiting and ultimately overcoming the ‘rage against difference’ often all too characteristic of Enlightenment secular modernity.

As for Adorno’s position (which was typically a bit more optimistic than that of Horkheimer) , he seems closest to Voegelin’s biblical heritage of experiencing history as a manifold of textual interpretation, periodically disclosing aspects of the divine through communicative co-participation in a shared reality between humanity and God:

How one should think instead has its distant and vague archetype in the various languages, in the names which do not categorically cover the thing, albeit at the cost of their cognitive function. …It is when things are read as a text of their becoming that idealistic and materialistic dialectics touch. But while idealism sees in the inner history of immediacy its vindication as a stage of the concept, materialism makes that inner history the measure, not just of the untruth of the concepts, but even more of the immediacy in being. The means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration of its hard objects is possibility—the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one. But no matter how hard we try for linguistic expression of such a history congealed in things, the words we use will remain concepts….To be known, the inwardness to which cognition clings in expression always needs its own outwardness as well. (Adorno 1973, p. 52, 53)

My own employment of alternative modernities as derived from the shared premises of a critical theorist micro-analysis of discursive communication will eventually lead to my casting of cosmoipolitan justice as the best rubric for realizing justice historically. Such an approach is amenable to attempts, for better and worse, to articulate the theopolitical species-ethical domains of each tradition as close as possible to its own hermeneutic self-understanding. As a project in comparative philosophy, competing Axial claims to species-ethical universality will be put to the pragmatic test of candidate rational discourses conducted in the characteristic mode of presupposed reason responsiveness to legitimate justificatory claims.

As a historical reconstruction of these Hebrew hermeneutic lessons from which Horkheimer and Adorno recognized deep indebtedness, Habermas comments on Adorno’s warnings against ‘reification as deification’ or, rather, ‘the distortion of something conditioned into the Unconditioned’ (Habermas 2002, p. 158). The attendant Hebrew prohibition against images can be recast discursively as a critique of the ‘reification of interpersonal relationships’ that can employ the insights of philosophical school of first generation critical theory to inform Habermas’s renewed interest in resetting the onset of modernity at the universalizing species-ethical achievements of the Axial Age (158):

Adorno’s work is guided by the intuition that a subjectivity run amok transforms everything around it into objects, elevating itself into an Absolute—against the unconditional right of each creature not to be overlooked, to be acknowledged for what it is. The rage of objectification ignores the essential core of the fully individuated Other, by which the creature is marked as having been made “in the image of God.” Looked at philosophically, the powerful cognitive impulse behind the “Axial Age” [Achsenzeit

Only gold members can continue reading. Log In or Register to continue