Marxism and the Bible
Roland Boer
Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology
Monash University
Marxism and religion, especially Christianity, the dominant form of religion in Europe in the time Marx worked and wrote, have not always got on each with other very well. This is due in part to the complicity of religion with the ruling classes, and in part to the resolute atheism of Marxism itself. This situation has always been a matter of some frustration for someone working both areas - religion and Marxism. The context for this paper is a larger project called "Marxist Literary Theory and the Bible", for which the author has received a Logan Research Fellowship from Monash University. This paper will briefly discuss this project as a whole, before interrogating more closely the work of Ernst Bloch. Marxist Literary Theory and the Bible The major objective of this project is twofold: it seeks to provide the first large-scale
critical treatment for biblical criticism of a significant area of contemporary cultural and literary
theory, namely Marxist literary theory. Second, it will argue that biblical
criticism has a distinct contribution to make to Marxist literary theory, not
least of which is a reconsideration of its own emergence and continued
existence. Despite the influx of new methods into biblical criticism in
the last two decades, as witnessed for instance by the landmark volume The Postmodern Bible,1 Marxism is conspicuous by its absence. Although sporadic studies in selected areas of the Bible have dealt with Marxist issues, there has been no sustained consideration in biblical criticism of Marxism, compared to the coverage which areas such as postmodernism, post-structuralism, feminism, post-colonialism and queer studies have received. This is all the more surprising given the influence of the major figures of Marxist Literary Criticism in precisely these and other areas of contemporary criticism -- figures such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, George Lukacs, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton. The situation needs to be addressed in a comprehensive and critical fashion so biblical critics will be able to use, or at least be aware of, various elements of Marxist criticism in their critical task. For its part, Marxist literary criticism has remained -- rightly, in many
cases -- suspicious of anything to do with religion, of which biblical criticism
is inevitably understood as a subset. There has, therefore, been little
consideration of the Bible and biblical criticism in Marxist literary theory in
any sustained and rigorous fashion. The other side of the coin to my previous
paragraph thus applies: a work like the one I am proposing is needed in Marxist
literary criticism, if not literary criticism as a whole, for the Bible is a
crucial factor in the development of Marxism and Marxist theory. The project has three distinct parts: one is a detailed investigation of the major figures listed above in order to assess the ways they engage with the Bible and what the effect of such an engagement means for their work; another is a consideration of the work of these characters for biblical criticism, that is, an assessment of the value of these Marxist critics for their comrades in biblical criticism. The third aim is to read crucial texts and debates in biblical criticism -- the quests for the historical Israel and Jesus, the constructions of gender and sexuality, the referential function of the text and so on -- in light of Marxist literary criticism. The issues or problems that interest me from Marxist criticism may be understood as a list of major issues, and as the methods for reading texts that each writer produces. The issues might be listed as follows: the nature and function of dialectics; ideology and its construction; the understanding of culture, literature and aesthetics in the light of ideology; the nature and role of commodification; economic value; reification; the superstructure (that is, the arena of culture in all its forms, the judiciary, philosophy and reflection, religion and ideology); social class and class conflict; the concept of mode of production, particularly as that has a bearing on interpretation of ancient documents and on the dynamics of history, with one aim being the relativizing of the mode under which they all have done and do their work: capitalism. Each of the writers I have mentioned -- Adorno, Althusser, Benjamin, Bloch, Eagleton, Gramsci, Jameson and Lukacs -- debate some or all of these problems with specific reference to questions of literature and culture. Indeed, in most cases there is a distinct method, or at least cluster of questions, that arises from their own particular positions. I will be interested in such methods, not only because they are important items in themselves and need to be subjected to critical reflection, but also because they offer possibilities for the reading of the Bible. The discussion will also move in the other direction, seeking out the ways the
items within Marxist literary criticism that I noted in the preceding paragraph
may be seen from biblical studies. In particular, I will be interested in the
function of the Bible, and theology more generally, in the construction of the
categories of ideology and culture (given Marx's statement about the origin of
all criticism lying with the criticism of religion)2; of mode of production,
particularly in its determinist precursors in the notion of divine guidance over
history; of class and class conflict in the idea of a chosen people of God over
those not chosen; of literature itself in the trail of the Bible; and even the
dialectic. Also, I will investigate the way certain items become contested
terrain in Marxist and non-Marxist criticism, such as private property, money,
the individual and so on. That is, the appearance of such items in the Bible
becomes an argument by some that these are eternal social realities, rather than
developments of capitalism (or rather, that capitalism has appropriated them and
made them dominants of its own system). While the specific issues of Marxism, as well as the various methods used for reading texts, have a bearing on the interpretation of the Bible, they also affect the understanding of the practice and theory of biblical criticism. The questions within biblical criticism that need to be dealt with in this way include the construction of the text (in terms of ideology, mode of production and so on), temporal difference and temporal presence of that text (that is, that it comes from the past but is very much a text that is read in the present via tradition), an understanding of the development of biblical scholarship (specifically in terms of periodization, such as realism, modernism and postmodernism), the function of biblical scholarship under capitalism (reification, commodification, class and so on), the continued relevance of classics like the Bible (Marx's question about the classics of Greece now asked about the Bible), canonical literature (the Bible as canon itself and as part of other canons), the demise of the canon and the Bible's place as part of a discredited Western canon, the place of biblical scholarship as a subgroup of literary criticism per se, and its relation to that other subgroup, Marxist criticism, and the whole area of post-modernism/post-colonialism. A Biblical Bloch? There are a range of examples that could be discussed here, such as Marx's and
Engels' persistent use of the Bible (including direct "exegesis", allusion and
polemic), Engels' reflections on the Bible and early Christianity, the
contributions of the Bible to the formation of ideas such as class and ideology,
and the profound influence of the Bible on Brecht's writing or that of Walter
Benjamin. Further, the intricate interweaving of the Catholic church in the
communism of Gramsci and Althusser, the role of the medieval allegorical method
of biblical interpretation mediated through Northropp Frye in the construction of
Fredric Jameson's method, and Terry Eagleton's early work in radical Catholic
theology would provide interesting studies. However, I will focus on Ernst
Bloch. And the specific question on which I want to focus is precisely how much
influence the Bible has on Bloch's thought, especially in the light of his avowed
atheism. Flowing on from this is the deeper issue of whether the Bible itself,
now a very unpopular text in so many quarters, is inseparable from the
construction of a Marxist philosophy like Bloch's. One of a collection of European Marxists noted for longevity, exiled in the US
during the Nazi era and then opting to live in West Germany after the building of
the Berlin Wall, Bloch is in some respects an easy person to study. He has been a
figure of continued interest for theologians, particularly in light of his
readings of major figures in the tradition of European Christianity, such as
Augustine of Hippo and Joachim of Fiore. In fact, the first translations of
Bloch's work into English were enabled by the theologians Jurgen Moltmann and
Harvey Cox, specifically Man on His Own.3 Atheism in Christianity4 followed in translation soon afterwards. However, Bloch's use of the Bible has been less of a focus, although Brecht's
admission might as well apply to Bloch. When asked by a German newspaper as to
what book made the strongest impression on him in the course of his life, Brecht
answered: ‘You’re going to laugh: the Bible’: ‘Sie werden
lachen: die Bibel’.5 Indeed, for Bloch communism was all the poorer
for not studying and considering the Bible, given the way it was woven into the
fabric of the ideological and social life of the rural and urban poor, providing
an indispensable language to frame their disappointments, fears, hopes and
struggles. All one needs for a preliminary sense of the pervasive presence of the
Bible in Bloch's work is a look at the column upon column of references to the
Bible in the indexes of his books (especially the massive The Principle of
Hope6) or to read his assertions that the Bible speaks to all people across
vast times and spaces in the book-length study of the Bible, Atheism in
Christianity.7 In fact, along with Goethe, especially his Faust, the
Bible forms the major inspiration in Bloch’s work. So, it seems useful to explore a little further the ways in which the Bible's cadences may be heard in this major text, of which there are four. (I should say in passing that reading Bloch has a strange effect on one so accustomed to the reading and analysis of religious documents, that I wish to explore further elsewhere: these texts generate a peculiar desire to read more, an anticipation and fascination with the text that enthralls.) As for the four ways, there is most obviously the explicit and sustained consideration of the Bible, especially certain themes such as the role of Paradise, of Eden, Exodus or the new Jerusalem. Characteristically, Bloch rarely refers directly to secondary literature, but he does show signs that he is aware of the major issues of debate in biblical studies and he works comfortably with the major critical assumptions about the text. Secondly, there are continual references to ideas, texts and biblical figures in other discussions; that is, biblical texts become part of the fabric of a larger argument. Thirdly, there are whole series of allusions and passing references. Finally, there are the deeper patterns in Bloch's thought, the basic ideas upon which he builds his work. Taking these themes in reverse order, I’d like to suggest that in this
last category are some of the deepest currents in Bloch's work -- most obviously
the utopian -- which could not have been thought in the first place without the
Bible. A weaker version of this argument is that the specific shape of Utopian
longing and reflection has been affected profoundly by the Bible, by the figures
of Moses and Jesus, and by the themes of Exodus and the Kingdom of God,8
particularly in light of the Bible's foundational role in the fabric of medieval
culture and society in Europe. Before I discuss this fourth category more extensively, I return to the first point, namely, Bloch's explicit consideration of biblical texts, of which there are several. It is at the beginning and end of human life, both individual and collective, that religious symbols tend to cluster and clot, and Bloch's own hermeneutics of hope zeros in on both moments. He slides very quickly from the individual to the collective, preferring at one end the theme of Eden/paradise/promised land as a key utopian feature, and at the other resurrection, the Day of Judgement and the return of the messiah. Eden9 is a paradigmatic example in Bloch's work of how a
particular biblical motif launches a trajectory that then follows through
centuries of thought, only to come back to the biblical moment once again. After
a run through vast territories, seeking the wished-for geographical Edenic
utopias, he concludes: "Eldorado-Eden therefore comprehensively embraces
the other outlined utopias".10 But Eden itself cannot be separated from
the idea of a Promised Land, which he suggests precedes the Babylonian story of
Eden borrowed by the Israelites, nor from the new Jerusalem, when Eden will be
restored at the end. But what interests Bloch is the way Eden remains a physical,
geographical space, a garden to which entry is forbidden but the search for it
and living close by are permitted. This space of unfallen nature is remarkably
moveable, often connected with other legends, but Bloch finds it in Jerusalem, on
the high mountain in the antipodes to Jerusalem (Dante), India (in the broadest
possible sense), the Indian kingdom of Prester John, the voyage of St Brendan and
St Brendan's Isle, in the Atlantic (which was often read as India), in what drove
Columbus, who believed he had found India and that close by was paradise which
would soon lie within Christendom, in the south land, terra australis, in the icy
north of the kingdom of Thule, and then off earth in the stars, or within the
earth itself, as Franz Baader suggested.11 Even Eden becomes not so much an image of the beginning of life for Bloch, but
rather a utopian, future-oriented image. So, his focus moves rapidly to the other
end of life, where he finds the efforts to outdo death a reason to tarry awhile
in the Bible, and a reason to exercise a major love, biblical exegesis.12 In this
case he traces in great detail the rise of belief in resurrection -- hardly to be
found in the Hebrew Bible -- in late sections of the Hebrew Bible, the New
Testament, actively espoused by Jesus and the Pharisees, and then in early
Christianity (he reads the New Testament as witness to precisely this group) with
its strong apocalyptic feel -- the hope for the end of the age when death would
be no more. The fundamental drive of the resurrection from the first and second
deaths (physical death and hell) is one of the search for "a thirst for
justice; thus the wish became a postulate, the post-mortal scene became an
out-and-out tribunal".13 It is not, of course, that Bloch finds resurrection a
believable concept,14 but rather that it is a crucial feature of Bloch favoured
apocalyptic thought, practice and speculation. For on the last day, Judgement
Day, a collective resurrection overruns the merely individual notion and justice
is dispensed by a returned Christ. And this advent of Christ was always more
immediate, expected soonest by revolutionary groups at revolutionary moments,
such as the Albigensian wars or the German Peasants' War. "[R]etribution for all
the living after death, for all the dead after the last trumpet, retained a
wishful revolutionary meaning for those that labour and are heavy laden, who
could not help themselves in reality or were defeated in the struggle".15 Then comes the immense section towards the end of The Principle of
Hope.16 Here, along with Islam,
Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Taoism, the Bible is a central component of the
discussion, with a distinct focus on the Exodus, and then the continuation of
the revolutionary moment with Jesus in New Testament.17 For Bloch Moses is a key
figure, and he argues strenuously for the lineaments of a distinct,
flesh-and-religious leader over against the tendency in biblical scholarship at
the time to lose such a historical Moses in the layerings of myth and legend.18 The
reason for reaching out to grasp the real hand of Moses and draw him out of the
realm of myth is that Moses signals the first religion that began not in the
realm of astral myth, but with rebellion. Moses is thus the "first heros
eponymos, the first name-giving originator of a religion, of a religion of
opposition".19 Moses and the Exodus become the archetype of all other
religions that began with rebellion, and so they hold a special place in Bloch's
appreciation of religion. Not only this, he is for Bloch the "earliest leader of
a people out of slavery" per se, religious or otherwise.20 Add to this the
primitive communism of the bedouin-type existence of the first Israelites21 -- at
least those for whom Moses was the leader -- and we have the prime conditions for
the kind of religion Bloch would find congenial, a religion that runs through the
prophets to Jesus. Yet this Yahweh of the Exodus is opposed to another image of
God that comes through in the Hebrew Bible, and that is the high "lord-god", the
god of rabbis and Canaanites in one, who is equivalent to none other than Baal,
the "lord" (which is precisely what Baal means in Canaanite) of all. For there is
plenty in the Bible that Bloch finds objectionable: high gods, priestly
privilege, opiates for the common people. But all of this is not what the Exodus
God signifies: "The God of exodus is different in nature, in the prophets he
proved his hostility to lords and opium".22 This God is ultimately the God of
the future: "I will be who I will be".23 Apart from running through the prophets, the other major moment at which the
same revolutionary impulse may be found is messianism, which he follows through
Zoroaster, Mani and Buddha to Jesus. And Jesus too must be a historical figure,
embedded in a mythical and political context.24 Bloch is out to establish the
fullest revolutionary credentials of Jesus, who, with the prophets, provides the
basis for social utopia. The revolutionary dimensions of Jesus show through in
both his "downward attraction", towards the poor, and his "upward rebellion
against above", against the powerful, the money-changers, the wealthy. In the
end, wealth prevents salvation, and the love-communism of the early community
(comparable to the primitive communism of the early Israelites under Moses),
where everything is distributed equally, provides the model of a new society.
After his glowing appreciation of Jesus, Bloch accords a central place to the
scandal of Christian love, which is the "stumbling block" to the world -
"This is Christian love, a love which is almost micrological, one which
gathers up its own in their out-of-the-wayness, their incognito to the world,
their discordance with the world: into the kingdom where they
accord".25 Finally, it is Jesus' apocalypticism, the expectation of an
imminent end to the world and the inauguration of the kingdom that marks him out
as both a revolutionary and as the mark of the "perfection of the exodus
god into the god of the kingdom".26 It is this apocalyptic dimension that
Bloch treasures most highly from the Bible, or, as he often calls it, messianism,
the inauguration of the new age at the hands of the messiah. I have let Bloch speak here for a few moments, since it is important, and a little stunning, to catch the enthusiasm with which he appropriates the Jewish and Christian materials. One can sense the immense value he accords Moses and Jesus, their historicity, Christian love and apocalytpicism, but above all their revolutionary credentials. Is he, then, too sympathetic to religion, too blind to the atrocities and complicities with the powerful that Christianity has manifested, as his critics in East Germany insisted? There are various levels at which Bloch's work might be assessed: on the question of biblical interpretation he is of course an amateur, but a distinctly perceptive one. He captures, via the German translations, the incomplete, open-to-the-future, sense of Exodus 3:14. And yet, he attaches himself to a historical core of the Exodus, Moses and Jesus traditions with an insistence that is not found in many biblical scholars. It is not that he was unaware of the arguments at the time that all three were largely legendary and/or mythical; he just didn't find such an approach useful for his project. Some fifty years later the search for the historical Israel and Jesus continues, with the latter faring better than the former. These are questions that need to be explored elsewhere, for the focus here is on the structural function of the Bible in Bloch's thought, and he has a few of his own twists that we need to follow. These twists depend on the dialectical nature of Bloch's thinking, which I
will track in two crucial dimensions of his treatment of the Bible. The spoor of
the first appears in a slab of exegesis that I have held until now. In "The
Bible and the kingdom of neighbourly love".27 Bloch pays out a line,
responsible for the earliest form of social utopia, from the Bedouin nomadic
communism of the desert, through the prophets and Jesus to the early Christian
communism (and then on into the work of Augustine and Joachim of Fiore). The
sharp distinction between such a line and its opposite -- Canaanite hierarchies,
wealth and poverty, the church of Baal that runs through to the Christian Church,
the "ideologically profitable insurance company"28 -- is both
illuminating and problematic, not least because the initial distinction of
nomadic/settled, Israelite/Canaanite can no longer be held.29 Yet, this is an
important distinction for Bloch, providing a basic structural element of
Atheism in Christianity. He demarcates creation from exodus,30 the heavy
priestly hand of stability and state power from the liberation from oppression of
the exodus and the prophets, exodus-god from creator-god, and in the New
Testament, Son of God from Son of Man. At many particular points Bloch does
identify something central, but, as Geoghegan points out,31 the attempt to trace a
structural dialectic continuously throughout the Bible strains the text. Bloch is
well aware of the complexities, layers, varying voices to be found in the Bible,
and I would agree that a dialectical reading is able to deal with such
contradictory complexity better than any other approach. However, what is needed
is an even more sophisticated dialectical reading that accounts even better for
the twists, fold-backs, curious alliances and changing oppositions of the text,
one that reads back and forth between the ideological, social and economic
contradictions that are inevitably found there. The dialectic appears also in what is Bloch's basic thesis regarding religion, especially Christianity. The power of this argument lies in the phrase, "atheism in Christianity", that the strains he identifies must conclude in atheism, in an atheistic religion in which revolutionary hopes are borne. (For a biblical scholar such as myself, these moves are not unworkable, since biblical scholarship has always maintained a distance from theology where the issue of religious commitment is a crucial issue.) In fact, the messianic drive can only be realized within atheism, and specifically Marxism: The existence of God, indeed God at all as a special being is superstition; belief is solely that in a messianic kingdom of God -- without God. Atheism is therefore so far from being the enemy of religious utopia that it constitutes its precondition: without atheism messianism has no place.... And the end of religion is thus, in this knowledge, as comprehended hope in totality, not
simply no religion but -- in the convolutions of Marxism -- the inheriting of it, meta-religious
knowledge-conscience of the final Where To, What For problem: ens perfectissimum.32 In another place I will need to comment on Bloch's sentence construction and style, but the final step of the argument can be followed in this quotation, for Marxism inherits, indeed fulfils, religion itself. Thus, the sections that follow "Religious Mystery" in The Principle of Hope, the last two sections of the whole work, concern Karl Marx himself as the culmination of the whole process. The seeds of this "anthropologisation" of religion lie in the Bible itself --
Bloch quotes Romans 5:5; 8:18; 1 Corinthians 2:9 and Ephesians 4:13 -- and are
then realized in the work of Feuerbach: only through anthropoligisation is the
hope of Christianity realized, since here is found the anticipation that human
beings will be created anew and be deified. In the end, the thread of hope that
Bloch recovers through Moses, Jesus, mysticism and Feuerbach, is fully realized
in atheism, the "realm of freedom",33 that most recent of religious
developments which is in itself the final logic of religion, specifically that of
the Bible. Apart from these detailed stretches of exegesis, the Bible appears as one item
in larger discussions, used as an example, or as evidence for certain beliefs and
practices, or as a crucial piece of something else. For instance, in a longer
discussion of the various attractions of the stars as a counter-utopia to death,
Bloch refers in passing to the book of Job (31:26-7)34 where the seduction of the
heavenly bodies for worship is noted. And then, in a lament for the modern
resistance to psychoanalytic dream interpretation, he offers the contrast of
Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dream and the crucial prophetic role of
interpreting dreams.35 A more significant example is the tracing of death consciousness and a wishful
consciousness of anti-death in Brahms in German Requiem, where Hebrews 13:14 --
"For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come" -- is the basis of
the first movement and Isaiah 51:11 -- "Therefore the redeemed of the Lord
shall return, and come with singing unto Zion; and everlasting joy shall be upon
their heads" -- the basis of the second (1 Corinthians 15:51-2 also
appears). Bloch reads this, with its robust core in a music of annihilation, as a
"musical initiation into the truth of Utopia".36 Now, I'm not a great
follower of such music, but my point here is that Bloch notes the biblical texts
used at the basis of this crucial piece of music by Brahms in a larger discussion
of the utopian dimensions of music as such. The Bible appears along with a whole
array of other material in a wider analysis. It might be argued that it is
precisely the biblical content that turns the German Requiem into an initiation
into Utopia.37 Finally, there are the allusions, passing references, comparisons. For
instance, biblical epigrams stand side by side with those from Marx, Yeats,
Feuerbach, and Bloch himself.38 Biblical phrases appear in the flow of another
point to be made, as in the reference to "honour and the hoary head" of Leviticus
19:32 in a discussion that signals a greater role for old age than this in
socialist societies; or, Psalm 127:2 -- "the suspect god who gives to his beloved
in sleep" writes Bloch, alluding to "he provides for his beloved in sleep" -- is
a passing phrase in the discussion of daydreams. And then there is the allusion
to the "wise virgin" of the parable, who, in the confidence of the expectant
intention "in going into the chamber of the bridegroom, offers up as well as
gives up her intention".39 In fact, this reference is a good example of the depth
to which the Bible permeates Bloch's vocabulary and thought, for in the English
translation of Plaice, Plaice and Knight the biblical allusion is not noted.
Incognito, it enters into the very structure of Bloch's vocabulary, syntax and
thought. Or, the very language of speaking about the road to utopia, which for Bloch is
a code word for socialism, is permeated with both the Bible and Goethe's
Faust: the road to the abolition of deprivation, which is itself socialism
(not its goal), is also "the road which first leads to the treasures where moth
and dust doth corrupt, and only then to those which stay awhile".40 And, as if to
pick a recurring motif, at the end of the discussion of Brahms Bloch writes: "In
the darkness of this music gleam the treasures which will not be corrupted by
moth and rust, the lasting treasures in which will and goal, hope and its
content, virtue and happiness as in a world without frustration, as in the
highest good: -- the requiem circles the secret landscape of the highest
good".41 Of course, this is a double allusion, both to a saying in the gospels
and to Marx.42 And here, where the language slips into the sentences without the signal of
biblical references or even the mention of the Bible that I think we get closest
to the function of the Bible in the conceptual structure of Bloch's work. Bloch
himself teases us with passing claims, extraordinary statements, such as that
both the Novum -- "the eschatological conscience that came into the world
through the Bible"43 --and Ultimum, central categories in Bloch's philosophy,
find their earliest expression in the Bible. The Bible provides the source of the
"total expansion of hope that we find in humanism," it is the "basic manual of
hope," but also the sources of the "consciousness of evil" and the "concept of
hazard".44 But perhaps the most striking of all, and the motivation for my whole
project in the first place is this: "Implicit in Marxism -- as the leap from the
Kingdom of Necessity to that of Freedom -- there lies the whole so subversive and
un-static heritage of the Bible".45 Conclusion It has, in the end, not been too difficult to answer the question with which I
set out on this reading of Bloch, namely, how much the Bible influences Bloch's
thought. But I also asked how dependent his thought is on the Bible (and here I
need to emphasize again the distinction between theology and the Bible, for the
two are not the same). Apart from the large stretches of exegesis, the most
important items to assess this are where key ideas begin their long trajectories
in Bloch's thought from the Bible itself -- Novum, Ultimum, Eden, architectural
utopias, messianism. To this I add the remarkable suggestion that in the leap of
biblical miracle lies a precursor of the dialectic.46 (Now this is something that
needs more work.) And then there is the very issue of language, the permeation in
his writing of biblical allusions, phrases, vocabulary, all of which indicates a
profound absorption of the Bible that is more than the cultural background of a
German philosopher. It would seem that Bloch's system itself is unthinkable, in
its present form, without the Bible. What is surprising is the depth to which
Bloch reads and interprets the Bible in his work. In the end I need to ask: so what? For my larger project, Bloch hints at the possibility that Marxist literary criticism is unthinkable without the Bible, that the inter-relation is inescapable; a dialectic of Marxism and the Bible, of Marxist literary theory and biblical criticism. For the other side of this argument is to show how biblical criticism can benefit for the work of people such as Bloch. Inevitably, this is always a belated move, but one that is needed, particularly since an increasing number of biblical critics profess some form of atheism. The next question that needs urgent attention, but which is beyond the scope of this paper, is why Bloch is so enamoured with the Bible and why it is so central. Yet, let me finish with another track that marks my own distinct pleasure in
reading Bloch, a pleasure itself that I need to consider at another point (it
seems to me that it is very much a function of his style). Despite the sheer
volume of written work, the shelf space that his books consume, reading Bloch is
rarely tedious, and one of the results of a patient reading is a collection of
delectable phrases and sentences that mark in their own way his love of the Bible
and its permeation of his thought. So he speaks of the "socialist wealth" of the
Bible (Isaiah 55:1), of the "original model of the pacified International"47 and
the "communism of love".48 And then there is the mindfulness of utopia
itself: "The highest conscientiousness of this mindfulness is set down in
the words of the psalm: ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand
forget her cunning’".49 1. The Bible and Culture Collective 1995, The Postmodern Bible, New Haven: Yale University Press.
2. See Bloch on thesis 9 of the Theses on Feuerbach, Bloch, E. 1995, The Principle of Hope, Trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 265-256.
3. Bloch, E. 1970, Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, Trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Herder and Herder.
4. Bloch, E. 1972, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, Trans. J. T. Swann, New York, Herder and Herder.
5. Referred to in Jameson, F. 1997, Brecht and Method, London: Verso, p. 162.
6. Bloch 1995.
7. Bloch 1972, pp. 21-24. The arguments here elaborate on the points made in Bloch's 1970 The Principle of Hope.
8. See for instance Bloch 1995, pp. 496-515.
9. Bloch 1995, pp.758-94.
10. Bloch 1995, p.793.
11. A comparable example of the way a particular biblical theme underlies a whole discussion is the role of the Tower of Babel and Solomon's temple in the discussion of architectural utopias; see Bloch 1995, pp. 711-21.
12. Bloch 1995, pp.1125-1133.
13. Bloch 1995, p.1126.
14. Although see his effort to deal with death in a socialist context in Bloch 1970, Man on His Own, pp. 43-54.
15. Bloch 1995, p.1132.
16. Bloch 1995, pp.1183-1311.
17. Bloch 1995, pp.1256-1274.
18. Or at least a few years earlier. Bloch (1995, pp.1231-1232) makes reference in Principle of Hope to a work by Jeremias of 1902 and the more well known Budde of 1900 and Wellhausen of 1901. Given that the Hope was written between 1938 and 1947, these references are somewhat dated. All the same, as I will argue at greater length elsewhere, Bloch would have maintained his argument even if he had used more recent references, a somewhat difficult undertaking for a German exile with poor English in wartime USA. Bloch's relation to biblical criticism is itself a fascinating study.
19. Bloch 1995, p.1231, especially Moses, "The earliest leader of a people out of slavery...the first distinctive founder" (1231).
20. Bloch 1995, p.1231.
21. See also Bloch 1995, p.496.
22. Bloch 1995, p.1235.
23. Bloch 1995, p. 1236, quoting Exodus 3:14. The implications of the Hebrew of this passage will be discussed in another place.
24. See also Bloch 1970, pp.76-80.
25. Bloch 1995, p.1262.
26. Bloch 1995, p.1265.
27. Bloch 1995, pp.496-515.
28. Bloch 1970, p.89.
29. I have no space to pursue this here, though it is suffice to point out that subsequent research has indicated the profound inter-relation between nomadic and sedentary life, and that "Israel" emerged in a very amorphous and indistinct manner, as much Canaanite as anything else.
30. See especially Bloch 1972, pp.29-34.
31. Geoghegan, V. 1996, Ernst Bloch, London: Routledge, p. 99.
32. Bloch 1995, pp.1200-1201.
33. Bloch 1995, p.1293.
34. Bloch 1995, p.1150.
35. Bloch 1995, p.80.
36. Bloch 1995, p.1100.
37. Other examples include the biblical references in Bloch's discussion of the "cryptic collective" and Christ-like utopia of marriage (1995, pp. 330-1), the gradual suppression of dance from the Bible onwards (1995, p. 401), the task and suffering of the Jews in history (1995, 609-10), the world-creator as modeler and architect, taken from Egypt to Israel and then to the idea of the new heaven (1995, 730-3, 776), the model of Mary and Martha for quietude and activity (1995, 953-6), communion and baptism, in agnostic circles, as keys of the journey to heaven (1995, 1116-7).
38. Bloch 1995, p.1183.
39. Bloch 1995, p.112. Similar allusions, beyond the space of this paper, can be found on pp. 160 (Joseph and his brothers), 172 (the mother-image in Isis-Mary), 212 (the iconoclasm of the first commandment in Exodus 20:4), 215 and 221 (the absorption of the individual into the Totum of making all things new in Revelation 21:5, and of the drive in religious art that this brings), 274 (the saying on salt's savour in Luke 14:34 in relation to Marx's criticism of Feuerbach), 288 (in opposition to there being "nothing new under the sun", Ecclesiastes 1:9), 310 (Nero and Hitler not as the futhering of history, but an aberration as the "dragon of the final abyss", from Revelation 12-13), 313 (an allusion to Faust and John 1:1), 353 (the traditional end to German fairytales -- "still alive to this day" -- is based on an Old Testament form of ending tales), 388 (carvings of Adam and Eve in the Baroque garden, which itself has hints of the Song of Songs not mentioned directly by Bloch), 402 (the play on Daniel 5:27), 446 (the play on the Lord's prayer: "give us this day our daily illusion," Matthew 6:11) and so on.
40. Allusions to Matthew 6:19-21 and Faust, part I, 1700: "Stay awhile, you are so fair".
41. Bloch 1995, pp. 1103.
42. Bloch 1995, p.1181; Marx, K. 1964, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, New York: International Press, p. 150; see also Bloch 1970, p. 89.
43. Bloch 1995, p.221.
44. Quotations taken from a crucial paragraph in Bloch 1995, p. 116.
45. Bloch 1972, p.69.
46. Bloch 1995, pp.1306-1308.
47. Bloch 1995, p. 498; on Isaiah 2:4, Micah 4:3-4, see also p.501.
48. Bloch 1995, p.498.
49. Bloch 1995, p.189