HAVING written a biography of Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989) and discussed his revolution in the context of a theocracy, I discovered an interesting interpretation of this form of religious authority in the work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). In 1921, at the age of twenty-nine, Benjamin wrote a summary of Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, which makes an attempt to combine the rising popularity of German Marxism with messianism.
Whilst Benjamin took issue with Bloch’s fusion of Gnostic epistemology and what he described as an “impossible Cristology,” he also concluded that theocracy – i.e. the fusion of religion with politics – has no validity whatsoever. The basis for such a claim, he argued, is that theocracy can only ever be religious. This was due to his belief that “nothing historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to the messianic” on account of the impossibility of the messianic to be treated as a part of history.
Benjamin’s portrayal of the incompatibility between historical life and the purely religious domain was influenced by the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth (1886-1968), and his 1920 Epistle to the Romans. Whilst much of this work is concerned with the relationship between God and humanity, it also sets out to demolish the notion that God is connected to forms of human achievement, culture and earthly possessions. Barth’s successful use of dialectic reasoning, on the other hand, convinced Benjamin that the messianic cannot be a goal of history for the simple fact that it appears as the end of history itself. As the latter explains:
“If one arrow points to the goal towards which the secular dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of messianic intensity, then certainly the quest for free humanity for happiness runs counter to the messianic direction. But just as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment another force of the opposite path, so the secular order – because of its nature as secular – promotes the coming of the messianic kingdom. The secular, therefore, though not itself a category of this kingdom, is a decisive category of its most unobtrusive approach.”
The absolute otherness of God, therefore, as demonstrated by Barth several months earlier, led Benjamin to arrive at the unique idea that theocracy is effectively invalidated as a result of the paradoxical association between the purely religious and the secular facilitation of a messiah. This dialectical theology, he insisted, leads to an eternal “happiness in downfall” in which history is actively brought to a conclusion for the purposes of worldly restitution. As a result of this theory, Benjamin began to call for an ironic political vision in which “eternal transience” is itself sought through nihilism.
