The Creaturely and the Holy

Benjamin's Engagement with Secularization

It is characteristic of Walter Benjamin's simultaneously fascinating and difficult writing that he neither presents his thoughts in a discursive continuity—ordering them in terms of subject matter, themes, and aspects—nor provides his readers with a conceptual résumé. Although the composition of his texts is founded on a conceptual systematic, he rather unfolds his arguments and his work on concepts and theorems by means of readings, quotations, and thought-images. This manner of writing means that even after multiple readings certain passages may always catch one's eye that hitherto have largely escaped the notice of scholars and that launch new and different ways of reading his works. An example of this is a long quotation from Adalbert Stifter, taking up more than half a page in his 1931 essay Karl Kraus, which has up to now attracted little attention. It is one of the few places in Benjamin's writings in which he talks overtly about secularization. For the purposes of my reading, it is the point of departure for an investigation of his concept of secularization, or rather, his way of dealing with secularization. Benjamin does not so much work with a theory of secularization, a term he seldom uses explicitly; instead his approach to language, concepts, and images involves a rhetorical and epistemological practice that presents scenes of secularization.

"This insolently secularized thunder and lightning": The Holy, the Law and the Creaturely

The aforementioned passage is a commentary on a lengthy quotation from the preface to Stifter's Bunte Steine (Colored Stones, 1853) in which Stifter describes natural phenomena as the "effects of far higher laws" and compares the "wonder" felt in relation to them with the reign of the moral law in the "infinite intercourse of human beings." Benjamin comments on this passage as follows:

Tacitly, in these famous sentences, the holy has given place to the modest yet questionable concept of law. But this nature of Stifter's and his moral universe are transparent enough to escape any confusion with Kant, and to be still recognizable in their core as creature.

Though appearing harmless at first glance, Benjamin singles out the fact that Stifter describes natural phenomena as the effect of "far higher laws" and thus discovers therein a far-from-harmless operation: a tacit substitution of the holy with a concept of law whose origin in religion is to be discerned only in the attribute "higher." He continues:

This insolently secularized thunder and lightning, storms, surf, and earthquakes—cosmic man has won them back for Creation by making them its answer, like a statement of the Last Judgment, to the criminal existence of men; only that the span between Creation and the Last Judgment finds no redemptive fulfillment here, let alone a historical overcoming. (II.I/340; SelWr 1.437; emphasis S.W.)

What instantly catches one's attention here is the word 'insolently' (schnöde). It separates Stifter's version of a poetic secularization of natural phenomena both from a secularization that would somehow not be insolent, and from one that would be more than insolent, perhaps contemptible. Notable, too, is the characterization of the concept of law as "modest yet questionable" (dem bescheidenen, doch bedenklichen Begriff des Gesetzes). The ambiguity of the attribute bescheiden, which means 'moderate' but might also be read as 'scanty' or 'insufficient,' is echoed in the oscillation of bedenklich between 'requiring interrogation' and 'dubious,' even 'discreditable.'

Benjamin's commentary on this insolent secularization consists of two arguments. The first is that in speaking of the 'effects of far higher laws,' Stifter replaces the concept of the holy with the concept of law, a substitution that, since it has occurred 'tacitly,' remains concealed. The questionable (bedenkliche) character of the concept of law is not least the result of the tacit substitution through which the formulation 'higher laws' can continue to profit from the allusion to the holy even as law seems to have left the sphere of the holy behind. The second argument is initiated with the word 'but' and highlights the transparency of Stifter's concept of nature and of his moral universe, through which their creaturely status remains discernible: this is why they therefore cannot be confused with the Kantian moral universe. Benjamin does not undertake a closer examination of the opposite form, that is, of a form of appearance that would be obscure and not transparent, so that the creatureliness of Stifter's nature would then not be recognizable. At most, such a contrast is hinted at through the reference to the Kantian moral universe, lest it concern Stifter's nature alone. The pathos formula of the "two things" that "fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe" that we find in the Critique of Practical Reason in the form of the much-quoted phrase "the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me" is contradicted in Bunte Steine by the way in which Stifter distinguishes between these "two things." Stifter views "conspicuous events" in nature as manifestations of general laws that act silently and incessantly, while "the miracles of the moment when deeds are performed" are for him only small signs of a general power. This power is the moral law, which, in Stifter's view, "acts silently,...