The Gentile Problem: A Work in Progress

by Samuel Hux (September 2017)

Calvary, Marc Chagall, 1912

 

Change the rather aggressive word problem to the somewhat more pensive question. Instead of saying “You are a problem” we say “You raise a question by your being which we must cope with (probably at your expense).” Both may mean the same thing ultimately but the latter (minus the under breath parenthesis) sounds ever-so-much-more thoughtful. German has given us the phrase die Judenfrage, “the Jewish Question.” The clear implication: “The Jews raise a question by their being which we must cope with.” But, by the logic suggested above, who raises the question, who has, who is, the problem? Why can’t we call the whole familiar thing “the Gentile question”? And if you’ll indulge a moment’s linguistic play . . .

That problem, in its passive and aggressive forms, is the occasion for this article.

But absence is perhaps too strong a word. For that unitary idea of culture is what, I contend, characterizes the Jewish tradition—quite beyond a religious creed and/or an historical experience. Jewishness—clearly I am speaking “in the ideal”—is, I propose, the marvelous exception to the ethos of sundered faculties. And, unfortunately, that’s a problem. A people who represented what is best in our civilized traditions became the victim of those who took the dissociating tendencies of the age to fulfillment. There’s a dreadful logic to the events of the 20th century.

But that logic did not spring ex nihilo. National Socialism as it truly was—distinct from the various left-wing nationalisms and national syndicalisms and anti-Semitic populisms of which its earliest supporters and critics thought it the historical epitome—did spring from Hitler’s mind, and that birth is a sort of “out-of-nothing.” But once born it needed nurture—and a warm atmosphere was ready. Whence and how that atmosphere?

I don’t expect any hesitation to accept my harsh words for Nazidom in this rather lengthy essay, for words cannot be harsh enough. But I expect some hesitation about my characterization of the dissociation of ethics and cultivation as “The Gentile Question.” If to the possible charge that I am dismissing an old “question” by loading a new one I have to answer: so be it. It’s also true that no one is suggesting neutralizing or getting rid of Gentiles, of which I am one. (Nor am I making some ethnic argument: individual Jews may be “Gentile” in this respect.) And even if one accepts that separation of ethics from cultivation as the nurturing atmosphere for the abominations of the age, I expect considerable hesitation about my speculations (and that’s what they are, no more . . . and no less) that the separation of cultural assumption and moral action is related in some more than incidental manner to the longest and greatest debate in Christianity (save perhaps the nature of Jesus and the Resurrection): the problem of St. Paul’s soteriology (doctrine of salvation).

Paul famously argued in Epistle to the Romans and elsewhere that salvation was not achieved through Good Works, that while Good Works pleased the Lord, salvation was not their reward, and that salvation was through Faith, and Faith alone. Which, read or twist it how you wish, has to suggest a relative devaluation of Good Works, of ethics that is.

I hasten to insist there is no attempt here to lay the Nazis at St. Paul’s feet. I have no such intention. (Never! Paul is in fact an intellectual hero of mine, which is another and here irrelevant story.) My intention is much more tortuous and inexact: to suggest that the relative devaluation of Good Works could well have been a first step in Christendom’s, or “Gentiledom’s” rather, cutting ethics loose from cultivation as a mere disposition—with consequences no one could have foreseen.

Now, I have a problem, which I’d do well to face up front. For I have here a considered surmise—that the abominations of the age were facilitated by a divorce of ethics and cultivation which was facilitated by the relative devaluation of Good Works in Pauline Christian theology—which I cannot prove by any empirical test. But in a sense the problem is a greater one for the insistent empiricist himself who would, by his skeptical disposition (often tyrannically skeptical), invalidate a great deal more intellectual discourse than he suspects. Something Erich Heller said in The Disinherited Mind seems to the point.

If I cannot prove my surmise to a skeptic’s satisfaction, I request a certain freedom from that debilitating “rigor” (so perceived) of the most confining reaches of academic scholarship (“Germanic” scholarship, one might say) in which every statement must be seconded by accumulations of previous scholarship judged sound and not dangerously speculative before one may with confidence advance to the next statement. Any such endeavor is doomed in any case in intellectual and cultural history. For while one may document that B picked up such and such an idea from A because he said he did, or may semi-document same because B, who is known to have read A, formulated such and such in such a suggestively similar or provocatively contradictory way, ideas are in fact not always passed on as ideas. As often as not, they travel as muted assumptions and fuzzy dispositions, and are thus much less subject to empiricist rigor. We are thrown back then into the world of Heller’s caveat—where I prefer to be anyway.

Which is another way to say this is, rather than a scholarly article, an “an essay”—which ideally presents not merely conclusions but exposes the actual processes of thought.  If the heavy gunnery of Germanic scholarship is missing, the lonely gunner is visible throughout. No place to hide.

So, now, onward to my half . . .

St. Paul’s elevation of Faith over Good Works has bred enormous theological difficulties.

For instance, to what degree was the relative devaluation of Works an inspired rhetorical strategy to free the followers from a too-legalistic adherence to Mosaic Law and all those Deuteronomic dos and don’ts of daily observance? To what degree was it a modest correction of the too-self-reliant and potentially prideful apparent good sense that you work your way into God’s good graces through being your brother’s keeper? Or: what are the odds we miss the point altogether by miscomprehending Faith in the first place?

Now, if there’s no such phrase as by and small, let’s invent it. For in the by-and-small there was a radical tradition of urges to special spiritual condition removed from biblical ethical commands which lived on in a kind of too-literal “Pauline” imagination: the tradition of “antinomianism.” Antinomianism in a religious context is the belief that since the Elect receives faith and salvation through God’s free gift of grace and not through any personal moral effort (pure Paul), it follows first that the Mosaic Law has been superceded or rendered irrelevant, and second that the saved is free of mundane moral obligations, which is certainly a putting of Works in their place.

One of the early challengers of Christian orthodoxy was the 2nd-century theologian Marcion. Although there were rumors—probably spread by his enemies—that he was a seducer of virgins, Marcion was evidently a nice boy who didn’t go all the way. But he went pretty far. Marcionism would have rid Christianity not only of Mosaic Law but of all Jewish impurities, and would have cast out not only all gospels save a modified Luke, but the Old Testament in its entirety, as well. Mistake: well it was avoided.

The 16th-century German reformer Johannes Agricola proposed the extreme antinomian position as clearly as possible. “Art thou steeped in sin . . . ? [No matter.] If thou believest, thou art in salvation. All who follow Moses [the Mosaic Law] must go to the devil. To the gallows with Moses.” This in theological disputation with his two great Lutheran contemporaries, Martin Luther himself and Philipp Melanchthon.

In a good history of Christianity, from Marcion to Agricola and beyond, one finds antinomian curiosities—from 2nd-3rd-century Adamites on. And one finds this or that group or thinker charged with antinomianism, indicating its persistence as reality or threat. To New England Puritans, the followers of saintly Anne Hutchinson were “antinomians,” which couldn’t have meant much more than “anarchists.” Luther was often charged with it, even though he disputed with Agricola. Because of its emphasis on Good Works as a way to salvation, the Epistle of James was to Luther “an epistle of straw.” As for the Mosaic, “We do not wish to see or hear Moses . . . They wish to make Jews of us through Moses, but they shall not.” Which while not as circumspect in tone as Melanchthon’s words to the same effect—“It must be admitted that the Decalogue is abrogated”—is still not quite as maddened as Agricola’s fulminations. Which fulminations, “To the gallows with Moses,” become historically laden. I am not suggesting Luther was thoroughly antinomian, but I grasp the nature of the suspicion.

But this is quite heavy and there is a lighter side. When you examine the “sins” antinomian sects practiced, freed as they were of the law, they’re often comic. The habits of the Adamites were quite charming. Stripping things down to essentials, and having been born again, they preferred communal worship in their birthday suits. And should you forget formal -isms and -ites and look to some idiosyncratic contemporary manifestations: the chronicler of randyism, John Updike, has been called an antinomian. Note his novel A Month of Sundays, in which Episcopalian priest, lusty as a sailor, has a girl for every Sabbath. Pardon me if I don’t take this kind of “antinomianism” with proper seriousness.

For the sake of clarity, I repeat: The dramatic break with the Hebraic notion that Good Works were a precondition for salvation, was a giant step in a process of great moment, the dissociation of behavior from mental action, ethics from culture.

Now . . . what if, in the Pauline doctrine of Faith and Works, there had been a dynamics whereby Faith, of itself, compelled Good Works . . . theoretically at any rate? I am not so bookish as to believe that a theological theory, a reformulation of Paul, would in some directly causative way have necessitated in a person of Faith a need to Good Works, to social obligation toward one’s fellows. Nonetheless, we’re an enormously suggestible species, and if theory doesn’t work miracles in a causative way, ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver used to say. That is, a theory which held that a necessary consequence of Faith was a compulsion to Good Works might have had a suggestive power subliminally and to the consciousness, just as, I judge, a theory that one is justified by Faith alone has had a suggestive power!

Now, the view from the other: Since most Elect and Damned are subject to “suspense or doubt,” the best way to convince themselves and others that they have been chosen may be with great shows of piety and action. The sheer uncertainty implicit in Calvinism amounts to the power of suggestibility. And note that it isn’t Faith which thus compels Works: it’s the attempt to show that you have it—a different dynamics. This suggestibility-in-uncertainty strikes me as a good explanation of the strenuous ethical impulses in the very Calvinism which teaches that Works can gain you nothing in the way of salvation.

As for myself, I frankly confess, that I should not want free will to be given me even if it could be, nor anything else be left in my own hands to enable me to strive after my salvation. And that, not merely, because in the face of so many dangers, adversities and onslaughts of devils, I could not stand my ground and hold fast my free will—for one devil is stronger than all men, and on these terms no man could be saved—but because, even though there were no dangers, adversities or devils, I should still be forced to labor with no guarantee of success and to beat the air only.  If I lived and worked to all eternity, my conscience would never reach comfortable certainty as to how much it must do to satisfy God. Whatever work it had done, there would still remain a scrupling as to whether or not it pleased God, or whether He required something more. The experience of all who seek righteousness by works proves that. I learned it by bitter experience over a period of many years. But now that God has put my salvation out of the control of my own will and put it under the control of His, and has promised to save me, not according to my effort or running, but . . . according to His own grace and mercy, I rest fully assured that He is faithful and will not lie to me, and that moreover He is great and powerful, so that no devils and no adversities can destroy Him or pluck me out of His hand . . . I am certain that I please God, not by the merit of my works, but by reason of His merciful favor promised to me. So that if I work, too little or too badly, He does not impute it to me, but, like a father, pardons me and makes me better. This is the glorying which all saints have in their God!

While this may be great comfort to those whose Election “is liable to no suspense or doubt,” it is both to the saints and to the suspenseful and doubtful both an invitation to and justification of quietism, whether intended or not. Free will (and, logically, its attendant responsibility), were it even possible, would be a bad thing to have! And the suggestibility in Lutheran theology, so unlike that in Calvinism, has had its effect. Erich Kahler, in The Germans, held Luther accountable in great part for the submissiveness to authority (“utter freedom in the realm of the mind and ‘spirit,’ utter subjection in the realm of the body and the body politic”) that formed the German character and shaped the course of German history.

The suggestibility in Calvinist theory goes a long way toward accounting for the affinity for the Old Testament Jews, so unlike Luther’s distaste (“We do not wish to see or hear Moses.”). It’s difficult to imagine a great Lutheran movement for political and social action inspired by the Exodus story, as Calvinist movements were so inspired. It makes sense that in Michael Walzer’s brilliant Exodus and Revolution there are several comparative allusions to Calvin and Calvinists, and none to Luther.

The Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) in the 1930s was one of the few instances of courageous Christian collective action against Nazidom in Germany, and some of its deserved reputation has accrued to German Lutheranism, since Martin Niemoeller (who survived Dachau) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was executed at Flossenburg) were members. But as the Protestant church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette pointed out (Christianity in a Revolutionary Age, volume IV), the Confessing Church was primarily the creation of and was sustained by churchmen of the Reformed tradition (Calvinist) and “Few of the oldline Lutherans went into active resistance, and many of them were critical of fellow Lutherans who coöperated with” the Confessing movement, and some chose to cooperate with committees from the semi-pagan, “German-Christian” Church, the Nazi Reichskirche.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology (before and in prison) can be read, and should be, as a heroic attempt to reverse the peculiar suggestibility of Luther’s thought, even while he argued that Luther didn’t really mean what he apparently meant. (He did.) Bonhoeffer’s definition in The Cost of Discipleship (Nachfolge) of “cheap grace” as “grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares . . . grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system . . . forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth” can be read in retrospect as an unintended comment on that lengthy passage I have quoted from Luther. Cheap grace as a safety net. And the craggy argument developed in a remarkable series of letters from prison to Eberhard Bethge for a “religionless Christianity” in a “world come of age,” that God has withdrawn himself from the world so that we can no longer depend upon him and his grace, so that we must “recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur” (“even if”—better understood in the sense of “as if”—“there were no God”)—this argument, beaten from the mind in historical crisis, birthplace of the radical “God is Dead” theology of some years ago, is no less than an attempt, it seems to me, to reverse the Pauline and Lutheran priorities of Faith and Good Works. And any attempt to return to the comforts of dependence on the grace of God and not on one’s own moral efforts is “a dream that reminds one of the song o wüsst’ ich doch den Weg zuriick, den weiten Weg ins Kinderland” (“Oh that I knew the way back, the long way to the land of childhood”).

I would remark in passing how “Jewish” Paul Tillich sometimes sounds to me. Perhaps it’s that weighty word concern, so much more demanding and uncomfortable than belief. Perhaps it’s the tenor of his thought rather than any specific theological instance. Perhaps, it’s that, in some way meant as a compliment to both, he reminds me of Martin Buber.

An “originator of events”—shades of Bonhoeffer!—not a helpless victim revived only by Gracious handouts. “This answer implies a refusal to have anything to do with all separate ethics, any concept of ethics as a separate sphere of life, a form of ethics which is all too familiar in the spiritual history of the West,” (italics mine in this near perfect definition of the Gentile Problem!).

I am convinced that I am right in this long disquisition—even if the readerly half of the conversation I invited upon beginning might be skeptical. But my task is tougher than casual reservation can be. To assign linear historical causes and effects so resoundingly convincing as to rule out any possible reservations would require no less than a history of every thought and every action of every Gentile over two millennia. To trace synaptic relations, so to speak, between religious institutions and theologies on the one hand and secular institutions and mores on the other would require a sociology I am neither capable of nor inclined to seek. So I leave the various analogies to persuade as they will or not.

No, that’s not quite what I’ll do. Rather, I’ll claim my rights, so to speak. I’ll expand that quotation of Erich Heller (The Disinherited Mind) which I offered much earlier.

And, Heller continues,

While I do not think my analogies are in keeping with the silent agreements and so will not go unnoticed, I do, of course, think they pass the test of subtlety and profundity. But in any case . . .

Given the enormously persuasive power of suggestion inhering in doctrine, given the fact that no national or universal body of indicatives and imperatives in Western history has had anything remotely approaching the persuasive power and influence of Christianity, given the tempting analogy-at-least between the devaluation of Good Works as a path to Salvation and “any conception of ethics as a separate sphere of life” (Buber), if there were no conceivable connection between The Gentile Problem on the one hand and Paul’s fateful utterances on the other, you’d have a miracle.

This is not to assign a sort of “collective guilt” to Christian formulations and to Christians. (Nor is this a kind of Christian confession, it is rather in the spirit of a hard look.) Discussing collective guilt (and one knows the instance he has in mind) Tillich in Systematic Theology (volume II) argues that the “individual is not guilty of the crimes performed by members of his group if he himself did not commit them. The citizens of a city are not guilty of the crimes committed in their city . . .” But, nonetheless, “they are guilty as participants in the destiny of man as a whole and in the destiny of their city in particular; for their acts in which freedom was united with destiny have contributed to the destiny in which they participate. They are guilty, not of committing the crimes of which their group is accused, but of contributing to the destiny in which these crimes happened.” As with men, so with formulations.

I cut that quotation just before Tillich begins to descend, quite atypically, into banality: “even the victims.” Or perhaps that notion is saved from banality by brutal irony. Those who did not contribute to the “city’s” destiny did: their idea of culture as an integration of intellect and ethics was just too offensive to those who would sever the faculties. As I said at the beginning of this article, there’s a dreadful logic to the events of the twentieth century.

And it’s clear that the most dramatic and terrifying manifestations in history of The Gentile Problem have been various inquisitions intended to resolve, even unto the Final Solution, die Judenfrage so assumed. But there’s a certain symmetry quite beyond ironic linguistic analogues implied in the use of Problem and Question. That is, there is no real “Jewish Problem” because in the classical religious doctrines of Judaism and in the reigning secular cultural inclinations of the Jewish tradition there is no endorsed separation of ethical behavior from cultural responsibility. There is no question in Judaism of whether or not a rapist can really hear, grasp, comprehend what the cantor sings: he’s deaf to it.

 

 

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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.
 

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