Modernity, Jewry, Christianity

But the strangers we speak of are unique in retaining their peculiar attributes, especially their religious views, while stoutly denying that these peculiarities are of crucial importance, or relevant to their relationship to the society in which they dwell. This attitude rests on an illusion which is nevertheless, for the most part sincerely and honourably, accepted as a reality by both sides, but which, being half felt as delusive, communicates a sense of desperate embarrassment to those who seek to examine it:, as if a mystery were being approached to the belief in the non-existence of which both sides are pledged, yet the reality of which both at least suspect.¹ Isaiah Berlin

Several ideas that run like an obbligato through this book must now, in the conclusion, be picked up and thematized for their own sakes. One of these is the curious, secret, adversary relationship of the secular Jewish intellectual to the Jewish bourgeoisie (that is, the ordinary, Jewish, middle-class community). The intellectual is sensitive and refined; the bourgeoisie, obviously, is vulgar. Undeniable as their vulgarity may be in his eyes, the secular Jewish intellectual almost never allows himself to come out and say so, explicitly, In this matter, all, excepting Marx, have observed, more or less faithfully, the eleventh or Diaspora commandment: “Thou shalt not reveal in-group secrets to the goyim.” As a result of this self-censorship, this “secret,” intraethnic war has been encoded in various ways in the literary and ideological product of the Jewish social critics of the Diaspora. Diaspora creativity is thus a form of “secret writing” enciphering covert Jewish “family understandings.” The opera omnia of the Diaspora tradition constitute, in one degree or another, hermeneutic systems in which the Jewish pays réel must be read “between the lines” of the Jewish pays légale.

In earlier times, “when Jews spoke a language of their own, they could criticize and admonish each other without worrying about giving ammunition to their enemies,” writes Milton Himmelfarb.² In a quite literal sense, Norman Denison notes, both Jewish German and Yiddish could serve “among other functions, as concealment codes.” For Yiddish speakers, living mainly among non-German speakers, a German-derived linguistic structure in itself went a long way “towards meeting the need for concealment.” Speakers of Jewish German, on the other hand, lived among German speakers and hence, for them, “an extensive special vocabulary was necessary…. Typical of the concealment function of Jewish German is the use of Hebrew numerals—of considerable importance to dealers discussing prices and wares in private.”³ After Emancipation, and writing in French, German, English, and other tongues, the fear by Jewish writers of being “overheard” built into secular Diaspora writing a subtler variety of “normal esotericism.” A self-enforcing self-censorship, a taboo on the public ventilation of “tribal secrets” maintained in the name of prudence and “social responsibility,” became common practice. The fear of “persecution,” political and social, had created a “secret writing.”⁴

What happened to what Professor Daniel Aaron in “Some Reflections on Communism and the Jewish Writer” describes as “the radical Jewish intellectuals’ own hostility toward the vulgar Jewish philistine whose unashamed drive for social status struck them as particularly reprehensible”?⁵ (my emphasis). Where did this hostility, this undeclared intraethnic war, go? It disappeared publicly, displaced and universalized—this is the nuanced meaning I give to “esoteric’—into a general indictment of bourgeois Western capitalism as a whole. The key phrase here is the”unashamed drive" of the Jewish bourgeoisie (Marx’s and Lippmann’s “primal scene”). It was the complex fate of the acculturated Jewish radical intellectual to feel the shame that ordinary, “unashamed” Jews were not feeling, and to perform on an intellectual-cultural level those rites of Goffman’s “remedial interchange”—in the form of apology and explanation to the goyim (Marxism, Stalinism, Trotskyism)—that ordinary prost Jews were remiss in performing on the everyday social level.⁶ The “vulgar Jewish philistine’s” trip to Miami has, in a sense, created the Jewish intellectual “trip,” the ideological pilgrimage to Moscow. The hidden injury of shame at “Miami,” the fear of vulgarity by association, creates that “world elsewhere” which is “Moscow.” Let us call it “the M & M phenomenon.” “Miami” becomes a nightmare for the “refined” Jewish intellectual generally. Robert Alter winces at “the hideous ostentation” displayed in an yo the children and grandchildren of the Lower East Side.⁷ Even in Tel Aviv, Cynthia Ozick finds “an arrogant row of Miami-like hotels…”⁸

A striking parallel to the exasperated snobbery felt by the Jewish intellectual elite for its bourgeois Jewish community emerges in the way the British Left feels about its working-class vacation land Blackpool Blackpool maddens the English ideological Left, Peregrine Worsthorne notes, because it “shows the working class as it really is rather than as the Left would like it to be.” It shows them to be

resolutely old-fashioned, provocatively insular, shockingly low-brow persistently racialist,… unashamedly vulgar, very easily pleased with very little … the very opposite, that is, of what socialism would wish them to be…. There they are, walking down the front, gawping, drinking, leering, having a wonderful time, now, in this unreconstructed capitalist hell, showing no awareness that they are living in a cultural desert, displaying no desire for higher standards, no concern about the Race Relations … behaving, in short, with brazen naturalness without the slightest reference to any canons of taste and propriety other than their own … a museum piece of genuine working class culture…. For the progressive Blackpool is a nightmare. They have got the rest of us on the run … but Blackpool refuses to budge.⁹ [His emphasis]

This recoil from the vulgarity of their own Jewish community, in which we find the covert root of the social and literary creativity of Diaspora intellectuals, is not a matter confined to the West. One thinks of Russia and Babel’s creative ambivalence about the Polish Ostjuden.¹⁰ There are Tchernichovsky and Mandelstam. “But how offen-sive was the speech of the rabbi—though it was not ungrammatical,” recalls Osip Mandelstam of a childhood trip to the synagogue in the Jewish quarter of Saint Petersburg, “how vulgar when he uttered the words ’His Imperial Highness, how utterly vulgar all that he said!”¹¹ But Synagogues were, in a sense, Jewish private places. In the West, with urbanization and the emergence of the “social” category, the “Jewish Problem” was to become the problem of social appearance as such, the Problem of creating “scenes” in urban public places like streets, parks, and public halls. It was no longer the charge made by anti-Semites of “hidden,” behind-the-scenes manipulations by “Jewish financiers”; it was the anguish of acculturated Jews at the public behavior of their fellow Jews.

When in 1897—the same year as Herzl’s first Zionist Congress—Walter Rathenau writes his pseudonymous manifesto, “Hear O Israel!,” he opens by insisting on the visibility of “the Jewish problem.” Whoever wishes to see it, he writes “should wander through the Tiergartenstrasse at twelve o’clock on a Berlin Sunday morning, or else look into the foyer of a theatre in the evening. Strange sight! …”¹² This aversion of the socially assimilating Jew to the loud and conspicuous public behavior of his fellow Jews is the functional equivalent of the disdain of the Jewish intellectual for the vulgarity of the Jewish community. The ancient “Jewish problem” had surfaced as a problem of behavior in public places, a problem of “relations in public” bequeathing to the Jewish intellectual his problem of “public relations.” It was a problem of social esthetics.¹³

Nothing in the ethos of Yiddishkeit had prepared its sons for this demoralizing differentiation in social life of morals from manners.¹⁴ And nothing in the ethos of Yiddishkeit had prepared them for the analogous ordeal of differentiation in the life of culture, namely, the distinction of fiction from legend and history. In the West, these two differentiations hang together. If your culture has “fiction,” your social life will probably have “behavior,” for behavior is a kind of fictive or ideal element in social interaction. C. S. Lewis pinpoints in the age of Sidney and Spenser the critical debate of sixteenth-century critics as the time of “the difficult process by which Europe became conscious of fiction as an activity distinct from history on the one hand and from lying on the other.”¹⁵ Not until some three hundred years later, as part of its “delayed modernization,” did Diaspora Jewry take its first steps in that “difficult process.” In 1853 there appeared a novel, or rather, a melodramatic Biblical “romance” written by a maskil of the Hebrew movement of enlightenment, Haskalah. Titled The Love of Zion and written by Abraham Mapu, it constituted for its Jewish readers their “first introduction to the very concept of literature as such.”¹⁶ But, in general, the idea of fiction has remained a stranger to the world of Yiddishkeit. East European Jews, Alfred Kazin notes, “have produced many stories, narratives, legends, but until our day, very little fiction.”¹⁷

Like other modernizing peoples, the Jews, in moving from their towns and shtetlach into the urban public space of the modern city, were thrust among a world of strangers. In the small towns of their past, their personal and family worlds—and the world of their ethnic “family”—were coextensive with their spatial worlds.¹⁸ On opening the door in the shtetl they had been instantly surrounded by relatives, friends, enemies, neighbors, acquaintances, or, at the very least, by fellow Jews: life-is-with-people." But when, in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, London and New York, when Jewish city-dwellers (who had left their ethnic enclaves of first settlement) opened their front doors and stepped out into an urban public space belonging to no one in particular, they were instantly engulfed by Strangers: “life-is-with-strangers.” To tolerate the continued copresence of strange others without personally knowing them—that is without coding them instantly as friend or foe—is a difficult feat for any still tradition-directed people. The social exigencies of behaving in a seemly way in a world of strangers, as a “stranger among strangers,” require that one have in one’s behavioral repertoire a certain “ritual competence,” as Erving Goffman calls it,¹⁹ that traditionally falls under the rubric of civility. For what, fundamentally, does “stranger” mean in the modern liberal era of the city of strangers but a “fellow user of a public place”?²⁰ And what kind of code did modern liberalism—which, at its best, Benjamin Nelson reminds us, “looks, at the very least, to the ’advent of a certain kind of Brotherhood, a Brotherhood in which all are brothers in being equally others”²¹—hope would replace the ancient brother-enemy code but a code that would transform otherness into the tertium quid of civility? Thus, out of an intolerance of the ambiguity of the surrounding stranger, to “travel in packs” in public places, to transform public space into private or semiprivate space, “privatizing” it by creating a mobile “home,” is perceived by the copresent strangers as an intrusion, as “acting as if they owned the place, the space,” as, in a word, creating a social delict that symbolically subverts liberalism’s secret wish for the new equality of a purely civil kind of brotherhood. The depth of Walter Rathenau’s acculturation to the core values of Protestant individualistic Calvinism is revealed by his “overreaction” to the unseemly group intrusion by his fellow Jews into the impersonal, Public, “protestant” space of the modern Gesellschaft. He experienced their vulgarity religiously, that is, as a profanation.

The older question: Is Jewry Salonsfähig? that is, fit for the salon, Passes into the later question: Is Jewry Gesellschaftsfähig? that is, fit for modern civil society? These social questions, as we have seen in our chapter on the entry of Jewish characters into the modernist novel—are Jews Romansfähig? that is, fit for the modernist novel? —are continuous to some extent with cultural problems. For questions of fitness, appropriateness, and propriety are all, in the end, matters of esthetic, not moral or Political, judgment. And when, recently, Meyer Levin (in The Obsession) revealed to the public the quarrel with his rival dramatizers of Anne tank’s Diary of a Young Girl, he claiming they had bleached out her Jewishness, they claiming “that my work was unstageworthy,…”²² do we not hear the question: Are Jews Bühnenfähig? that is, fit for the stage?²³

Everything, it would seem, has always “conspired” to maintain and justify the tradition of hidden self-censorship and the public relations orientation in the Diaspora: politeness, respectability, an era of political anti-Semitism and Holocaust, a:time of cultural philo-Semitism, the fear by Jews of the label “self-hate” and by Gentiles of the label “anti-Semite” (both functioning as instruments of social control), everything, it seems, conspires to legitimate submerging whole dimensions of the experience of Diaspora Judaism where it does not actually falsify that experience itself. No Jew is free as long as telling the truth is eo ipso to become an informer to the goyim. Leslie Fiedler, after exploring Karl Shapiro’s tergiversations in the attempt to “rewrite” his own past, confesses: “We are all spiritual Stalinists engaged in a continual falsification of our own histories, and we must pray for critics capable of pointing this out.”²⁴ The nearest cultural parallel in this respect to the ideological “secret writing” of the Diaspora giants is, curiously, the writings of the Puritan divines, who were eventually to find their great critic in the late Perry Miller. To understand the Mathers, Miller maintained, it is necessary

that we appreciate the habit of speech that grew up in New England as an inevitable concomitant to the jeremiads: references had to be phrased in more and more generalized terms, names never explicitly named, so that we are obliged to decipher out of oblique insinuations what to contemporaries were broad designations. When ministers [read: radical secular Jewish intellectuals—J.M.C.] denounced “oppression” and “luxury” they meant certain people whom they did not have to specify…. This habit of ambiguity, developed out of New England’s insecurity, out of its inability to face frankly its own internal divisions, out of its effort to maintain a semblance of unity even while unanimity was crumbling—which became more elaborate and disingenuous as internecine passions waxed—was to cling to the New England mind for centuries. We look ahead to the decades in which an emerging Unitarianism swathed itself in terms of studied vagueness…. In Boston society today, matters may be fully discussed which, to an outsider, seem never to be mentioned at all.²⁵

Miller was to crack the cryptogram of this “tribal reticence”—as he calls it in concluding the above passage—in the Mathers, in Jonathan Edwards, and in the New England mind generally.²⁶ A similar work of reclamation, opening out the great secular Jewish “rabbis” and their covert jeremiads against “their own,” is an idea whose time, I think, has come. For what is a Jewish intellectual in the first place but a person, in Bernard Rosenberg’s definition, “who pretends to have forgotten his Yiddish.”²⁷

Are there broader implications to this “case study” of Freud, Marx Lévi-Strauss, and Diaspora intellectual culture generally? It would seem that there are. But the “broad implications” are precisely indentured to the details. We find three conclusions growing out of our study:

1. In the first place, we learn that we learn nothing about our civilization from the Christian and Jewish celebrants of what ecumenist public relations insist on calling “Judeo-Christian” civilization. This factitious phrase with its facile hyphen is part of what I have called at the beginning of Chapter 22, “the cultural and theological illiteracy of our times.”²⁸ To learn the nature of the civilization of the West we must go, not to the assimilators, not to our Chagalls and our Malamuds, nor to our Niebuhrs and our Neuhauses, but to the great unassimilated, implacable Jews of the West, to a Marx, to a Freud, to a Lévi-Strauss, to a Harry Wolfson, to those who exhibit a principled and stubborn resistance to the whole Western “thing.” These proud pariahs experience Western civilization as an incognito or secularized form of Christianity, and they there-fore openly resist it as such. Professor Harry A. Wolfson, the great Harvard scholar of Jewish philosophy and theology, puts the matter with unimpeachable authority. Looking back on a century of Jewish Emancipation, and writing in 1962, he openly declares of Western Jewry that

a century of infiltration of Christian ideas into our life through all the agencies of education has robbed us of our essential Jewish character, of our distinctive Jewish philosophy of life…. In everything that guides our life and determines our view thereof, we have become Christianized, for we have somehow accepted Christ if not in the theological sense of a saviour at least in the historical sense of a civilizer. We have fallen in with the prevalent view that Christianity is essential to the progress of human civilization, which is, after all, another version of the Christian belief that Christ is necessary for the salvation of one’s soul…. We proceed on the assumption that modern civilization is the fulfillment of the promises of Christ.²⁹ [My emphasis]

This study unpacks, somewhat, Wolfson’s “somehow” in the preceding passage and endeavors to spell out some of the ways in which the “differentiated modernity” of the West is experienced, by its more profound Jews, as a matter of the acceptance or rejection of Christ, in Wolfson’s words, as “a civlizer,” if not as “a saviour.” For them, the West is experienced as a standing “temptation scene” to religious apostasy: to universalize, to differentiate, to refine, to upgrade, to reform, is eo ipso to convert to “Christianity.”

Some Jews turn back from the brink of this cultural conversion, deliberately reconverting to the Jewish community, becoming its spokesmen. A returnee (baal teshubah) in this little-known tradition of Diaspora intellectuality³⁰—-from Franz Rosenzweig to Cynthia Ozick in our own time—is converting, in effect, from the vulgarity which conceals to the coarseness which reveals, from Jewish parvenu-assimilation to Jewish pariah-Ostjudentum, from the refinement which is vulgarity to the coarseness which connotes the modern “authenticity.”³¹

2. We have probed the question of the “primitivism” of the shtetl Jew and his resistance to modernization, in both belief and behavior. Peculiar as it may seem as a “finding,” we find that a kind of predifferentiated crudeness on the culture system level, and a kind of undifferentiated rudeness on the social system level of behavior, is believed to be—by certain Jews themselves—not only an integral part of what it means to be a Jew, but integral to the religious essence of Judaism, and not an accidental result of Exile or of socioeconomic disadvantage. “How many Jews today,” Michael Selzer asks in a recent analysis of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption—“How many Jews today, proudly identified during the past two or three generations with Western modernity, can join in Rosenzweig’s insistence that the traditional primitivism and obscurantism of the Jews (in the eyes of their critics) is of ‘the very essence of Judaism’?”³² (my emphasis). It is with good reason, then, that in Chapter 9, The Temptation Scene, when Bleuler came from Zürich to visit Freud, we felt ourselves to be, in some obscure but unmistakable way, witnesses to a religious confrontation: when Bleuler dangled the lure of Edelkeit before his eyes, it was Yiddishkeit that spoke through Freud and thundered its no.

Not only Freud’s genius, but the genius of all the intellectual giants of the Jewish Diaspora has deep if “hidden” connections with their bein consciously and deliberately, albeit helplessly, social pariahs. These “hidden transformations” occur not only with a Marx or a Freud in the field of the social sciences, but with an Einstein in the natural sciences as well “He hated violence and ceremony equally,” Howard Moss writes, in his elegy “The Gift To Be Simple.”³³ Everybody knows the polarity that was Einstein: the social pariah with the crazy hair and the rumpled sweater the subtle and fastidious rationalist exploring the secrets of the universe. ’But if one probes deeper," Gerald Holton writes, “one will find that these polarities are essentially connected to his scientific genius. Einstein’s disinterest in making quite sure he will not turn up incorrectly dressed for some formal occasion is not unrelated to his ability to adopt an unconventional point of view when it is needed to expose the key fault in some hoary old problem of science”³⁴ (my emphasis). But the inner connection runs deeper than this.³⁵ Einstein found the refinements and differentiations of Western social decorum and civility absolutely unfathomable, endlessly fascinating, and, personally, a torture. During Thomas Bucky’s extended stay as a guest at Einstein’s home, the physicist’s only nonscientific reading “was Emily Post’s book on etiquette. He read the book in his bed-room study in the evenings and his sharp laugh rattled through the house. Frequently he came downstairs with the book in hand and offered to read a particularly choice passage on the proper conduct of a gentleman.” Einstein’s friends, Bucky continues, “never expected him to behave in the conventional manner…. Since [my fiancée and I] knew how Einstein was tortured by formal occasions, we didn’t invite him to [our] wedding in 1953 at the Plaza in New York…. He showed up,” he concludes, “without being invited.”³⁶

Over the fireplace in Fine Hall. at Princeton Einstein’s famous line is inscribed: Raffiniert ist Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist Er nicht—God is subtle and refined, but He is not arbitrary or malicious. The social code of civility, also, is subtle and refined, and requires tact in its exercise. What we call “tact,” Sartre notes, “is connected with esprit de finesse, a thing the Jew does not trust…. To base his conduct on tact would be to Tecognize that reason is not a sufficient guide in human relations and that traditional and obscure powers of intuition may be superior to it.”³⁷ Einstein, we suggest, realized that the problem involved in the social assimilation of the emancipated Jew in the nineteenth century was, in a way (like God), raffiniert, subtle and refined, but that, unlike God’s, society’s refinement could be malicious and arbitrary. “The rationalism of Jews is a passion,” Sartre writes, “the passion for the universal…. If reason exists,” he continues

then there is no French truth or German truth; there is no Negro truth or Jewish truth…. It is precisely this sort of disincarnation that certain Jews seek. The best way to feel oneself no longer a Jew is to reason…. There is not a Jewish way of mathematics; the Jewish mathematician becomes a universal man when he reasons. … He experiments with and inspects his intoxicating condition as universal man; on a superior level he realizes that accord and assimilation which is denied him on the social level.³⁸

Experiencing himself as coarse and crude at the level of social system adaptation, the Jew as rationalist “escapes” upward into another order of subtlety and refinement at the level of the culture system. “He joins,” Sartre writes, “crude sensibility to the refinements of intellectual culture.”³⁹ Our analysis of Freud, Marx, and Lévi-Strauss, then, would seem to be applicable—mutatis mutandis—to other intellectual giants of the Diaspora.⁴⁰

3. We may also conclude from this essay that socialization into modernity is, at best, a difficult matter. It is least difficult, perhaps, for the members of the WASP core culture descended from Calvinist Christianity. They, in a sense, are “ego-syntonic” to modernity. They alone were “present at the creation.” For the rest of us, it is more or less costly, more or less rewarding. Part of the difficulty, as we see in the case of Freud, is the problem of Gemeinschaft-affect. Modernization invades our sentiency, demanding wider modes of feeling congruent with the civil modes of behavior needed for living among strangers. In this connection I once wrote, regarding modernization and differentiation in India:

An important dimension of the tradition-modernity collision is located in the neglected domain of affect. The “magical” ties of blood and amoral familism, the given, ready-made intimacies of caste, ethnicity, and sect, indeed, all the old familiarities embedded in ascription render the Indian (of course, not alone the Indian) loath to trust himself to the cooler, more impersonal width-sentiments (such as respect and civility) ingredient in the processes of modernization. Affective modernization, in which traditionary affect is in part dissolved, in part relocated, is a traumatic though liberating experience. For most people, it would seem, this emotional change [at the everyday life level] is what the “long revolution” of modern. zation is all about, is what it is experienced as (to use William James’ formula for radical empiricism). To acquire the “affective neutrality” (Parsons) or “emotional asceticism” (Geiger) that civilize one into modernity is to divest one’s solidary sentiments of their sacred particularity. Nation building, the legitimation of wide public authority, the establishment of a civil politics, all fine things, can wreak havoc in the pre-civil emotional life of a familistic people These changes are experienced inwardly as a kind of secularization of affect. Schooled in Calvinist Christianity, the modernizing West has undergone its sentimental education. Are there available in the East functionally equivalent values (operating fairly early in the socialization process) which can instruct the Indian in those curious innerworldly disciplines that promote, sanction and maintain the structures of generalized affect?⁴¹ [Emphasis in original]

This same question, of course, applies with full force to all of us who strive to measure up to, or struggle against, the exigencies of modernity Modernization is a continuous variable. All of us, any of us, are only relatively modern, be we Irish, Jewish, German, black, whatever. All of us are witness to the profanation of our sacred particularities; all of us suffer the pathos of the secularization process.

Our third conclusion is: the modernization process is “objectively anti-Semitic.” But it is also, if much less so, “objectively anti-Catholic” and “objectively anti-Lutheran.” The Catholic Counter Reformation is an early form of counter-modernization. The quarrel continues. The differentiations of modernity are “disenchanting.”

We have noted the resistance movement to modernity, men like Marx, who create ideologies of dedifferentiation, at once nostalgic and utopian. For them, modernity’s differentiations are “bourgeois contradictions” to be abolished by revolutionary action. We all know “the great hatred” of modernity and how deep its sources run. We have explored Freud’s holding operation—an evasion, essentially, of the full thrust of modernism. We all know, also, those who willingly submit and who have made themselves a smoothly functioning part of modernity’s Apparat: bureaucratic virtuosos of ascetic rationalism, “specialists. without spirit, sensualists without heart.”⁴² We have most to learn I think, from those heroic bourgeois who have a lover’s quarrel with the modern world, exemplary men of the stature of Max Weber and Pastor Bonhoeffer.

In Max Weber the differentiations of modernity internalized themselves in the excruciatingly personal form of a human contradiction, a deep, inner value-conflict: the contradiction between man and specialist man, between diffuse human freedom and disponibilité on the one hand and, on the other, the “iron cage” of affectively neutral functional specificity, between twa loves that have built two “cities.” We must allow Karl Löwith, in his magnificent 1932 essay on Weber, to be our teacher—there is no better guide—on how a man of Weber’s inordinate ethical passion lived this contradiction—for there is no “solving” it. We quote him at length:

Weber never presented himself as an inseparable whole, but always as a member of a specific sphere—in this or that other role, as this or that other person: as an “empirical” individual scientist in his writings, as an academic teacher on the podium, as a politician on the rostrum, as homo religiosus in his most intimate circles. It is precisely in this separation of the life spheres—whose theoretical expression is value-freedom—that Weber’s individuality in the uniqueness of its wholeness reveals itself. Even here the question for Weber was not the same as for Marx, namely, to find a way by which the specific human type of the rationalized world, i.e., the specialist man, can be abolished along with the division of labor. Rather, Weber asks, by which way can man as such preserve the freedom of self-responsibility, amid, and in spite of, his inescapable compartmentalized humanity. Here too Weber affirms this self-alienated humanity (as Marx puts it) because it was precisely this form of existence which, while not affording or offering it, forced him into an extreme “freedom of movement.” To act in the midst of this specialized and indoctrinated world of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” with the passionate force of negativity piercing now here now there through some structure of “bondage”—this was the meaning of “freedom of movement.” … The salvation of the human individual as such means to him that it must take place within the ingrained attitude of specialist humanity and with regard to it. But submitting to his fate, he at the same time already opposes it. But this counter-position has this previous subjection as its inevitable presupposition…. Thus the individual as such … does not signify an indivisible whole above or outside the factual, compartmentalized mode of existence of the modern specialists. Rather, the individual is a “man” when he stakes his whole being in each and every separate role, great or small…. Thus Weber’s deliberate renunciation of the “universal man” … is a renunciation which at the same time incorporates a great demand, namely, in spite of this “compartmentalization of the soul,” man must ever be involved with his whole being—on the strength of passion—in all such acts which in themselves are isolated.⁴³ [My emphasis on “forced him”]

We see in this passage the kind of “secret,” inner-worldly discipline “forced” on Weber by his inner assent to the modernization process: a kind of “role-distance” involving an ethicoreligious commitment to availability—that is, all of him would be there, if needed, in even the most trivial and routinized of roles, meeting the human needs of the most “ordinary” of persons whenever these needs might diffuse into “ultimate concerns beyond the specified proprieties of patterned role obligations. Weber’s ethic was an ethic of total human vulnerability concealed in the”divisions of labour"

Somewhere along the line this secret, inner-worldly ethic of Web feeds off the Lutheran doctrine of condescension—in the christological sense of “condescension”—and reminds us of that other high academic German bourgeois, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Arkandisziplin with which he “managed” the differentiations of modernity. It is in Bonhoeffer that the passionate ethicoreligious earnestness of Max Weber rediscovers itself in theological form. Weber, by withholding the “whole” man by “condescending” to the inconspicuousness of Specialized roles by remaining deliberately in the penultimate, refusing the “triumphalist,” flashy intimacy of pseudoeschatological “wholeness”-excitement wae practicing the inner-worldly asceticism of secularized Protestant Christianity. Religious motives maintained, for him, the meaningfulness of the “everydayness” of routine Western social life. Weberian motifs become audible as we listen to Pastor Bonhoeffer’s instructions in the theological logic of insensitivity training:

Let us ask why it is that precisely in thoroughly grave situations, for instance when I am with someone who has suffered a bereavement I often decide to adopt a “penultimate” attitude, particularly when I am dealing with Christians, remaining silent as a sign that I share the bereaved man’s helplessness in the face of such a grievous event, and not speaking the Biblical words of comfort which are, in fact, known to me and available to me. Why am I often unable to open my mouth, when I ought to give expression to the ultimate? And why, instead, do I decide on expression of thoroughly penultimate human solidarity? Is it from mistrust of the power of the ultimate word? Is it from fear of men? Or is there some positive good reason for such an attitude, namely, that my knowledge of the word, my having it at my finger tips, in other words my being, so to speak, spiritually master of the situation, bears only the appearance of the ultimate, but is in reality itself something entirely penultimate? Does One not in some cases, by remaining deliberately in the penultimate [read: the alltag], perhaps point all the more genuinely to the ultimate, which God will speak in his own time (though indeed even then through a human mouth)? Does not this mean that, over and over again, the penultimate will be what commends itself precisely for the sake of the ultimate, and that it will have to be done not with a heavy conscience but with a clear one?⁴⁴

Here we see the ancient Israelitish taboo on “direct reference” to the ultimate things—ta eschata—interiorized as theological taste; profanation is now inseparable from vulgarity. In the final count, Hanfried Miiller writes, there is now, in Bonhoeffer, “no visible difference between Christians and heathens” (my emphasis); the church of the future should relinquish “every special ostentation.”⁴⁵

Here we witness Christianity “acting back” on Christianity itself, heterogenously refining out of existence its residual crudities and insensitivities.⁴⁶ All vulgar “triumphalism” must go. All the creaking, embarrassing, superannuated, supernatural “deus ex machina” machinery of revelation and miracle have become, literally, unseemly. Christianity lives now only through the Arkandisziplin of an incognito: the “hidden” Christ. To be inconspicuous, yet faithful. The secret discipline of the arcane. To perform the penultimate roles, holding fast and secretly to that which is good. Modernity, child of Protestant Christianity, “acts back” on its parent, secularizing it out of sight, offended by the unsightliness of its own visibility. The Deus absconditus of modernity: Thou art indeed a tasteful God, the depths of whose existence, Whitehead declares, “lie beyond the vulgarities of praise or of power.”⁴⁷ Or of the rites of faith itself.

There is unbearable pathos in the figure of Pastor Bonhoeffer as he prepares to die: “Called to conduct his last worship service in prison shortly before his execution,” Peter Berger writes, Bonhoeffer “held back, for he did not want to offend his neighbor, a Soviet officer.”⁴⁸ A new offense has swallowed up the ancient skandalon; the rites of faith perform themselves in the rites of love; the ius divinum self-destructs; a new ius civile is all in all.