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“No One, Not Even God, Can Take the Place of the Victim”: Metz, Lévinas, and Practical Christology after the Shoah

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Derek Simon
Derek Simon*
Affiliation:
St. Paul University
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Abstract

The legacy of the Shoah invades christology as one of its most basic postfoundationalist challenges in the demise of modernity. Fackenheim heuristically amplifies the rupture of the metaphysical narratives of soteriology by the radical evil and sufferings in Auschwitz. As a representative instance of reorienting theological discourse through exposure to the trauma of the Shoah and the testimony of its Jewish survivors, Metz grounds practical christology in the biblical memory of suffering and an eschatological delimitation of time. Lévinas' phenomenology of the self counters residual issues in Metz and mediates a postfoundationalist framework for re-visioning christology after the Shoah. The phenomenological transposition of the notion of substitution to the ethical order rehabilitates Metz's practical christology and articulates the messianic significance of human agency as a sociopolitical responsibility for the sufferings of the broken and the dead.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , Fall 1999 , pp. 191 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1999

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References

1 Celan, Paul, Gedichte in zwei Bänder, II (Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987), 30.Google Scholar These verses can be translated:

I KNOW YOU, you are the deeply burdened,

I, the pierced, am subject to you.

Where flames a word, that has witnessed for us both?

You—totally, totally real. I—totally deranged.)

2 A preliminary draft of this article was originally given as a paper under the same title to the Canadian Theological Society at its annual meeting during the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in May 1998, while the interpretation of Metz was further developed and presented as a paper to the Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Group at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November 1998, under the title “Suffering God's Hidden Future.”

3 Emil Fackenheim attributes uniqueness to the ideological, racial, technological, and political features of this mass murder; see his article “Holocaust” in Cohen, A. A. and Mendes-Flohr, P., eds., Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (New York: Scribner's, 1987), 399–400.Google Scholar

4 Besides providing rigorous historical analyses of these figures, the research compiled in Bailer-Galanda, B., Benz, Wolfgang, and Neugebauer, Wolfgang, eds., Die Auschwitzleugner: “Revisionistische” Geschichtslüge und historische Wahrheit (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1996)Google Scholar, exposes the ideological, sociological, and psychological determinants of revisionist distortions, denials, and scapegoating tactics. The contributions of Simon Wiesenthal, “Vorwort,” 11-18, and Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, “Die Verbrechen von Auschwitz,” 98-114, merit particular attention for their detailed substantiation of the architecture and operation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These studies draw a clear line between credible fact and spurious fiction in the transmission of the Holocaust memory.

5 Lévinas, Emmanuel, “To Love the Torah More than God” in van Beeck, F. J., ed., Loving the Torah More than God? (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1989), 36–40.Google Scholar

6 Lévinas, Emmanuel, Difficile Liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 37.Google Scholar

7 Ozick, Cynthia, “Notes toward Finding the Right Question” in Heschel, S., ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist (New York: Schocken, 1983), 120–51.Google Scholar

8 Fackenheim, Emil, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, 1982), 28Google Scholar, contends that the language of testimony “first forced itself on those most desperately concerned to communicate the incommunicable—the survivors. All writers coming after them will always remain in their debt. To be sure, novelists and historians, philosophers and theologians are often tempted to ‘go beyond’ the survivors, to ‘transcend’ in imagination or comprehension their ‘limited perspective.’ But one need only reread Jean Améry or Chaim Kaplan, Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel in order to realize that to attempt to go beyond witnesses such as these is to have remained behind; that, after what has occurred, the going-to-school of thought with this life is not a temporary necessity but permanent.”

9 Fackenheim, Emil, God's Presence in History (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 93–98;Google ScholarFackenheim, Emil, “On the Life, Death, and Transfiguration of Martyrdom: The Jewish Testimony to the Divine Image in Our Time,” Communio 4 (Spring 1977): 31–35;Google Scholar and Fackenheim, , To Mend the World, 3–30, 201–313.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 11.

11 Thus, in “On the Life, Death, and Transfiguration of Martyrdom,” 28, and To Mend the World, 25, the Nazi (il-)logic of destruction and resistance to the Nazi empire are identified as nova. In “Holocaust,” 405-6, the four nova singled out for attention concern the systemic organization of the Final Solution, the lack of political refuge in an Israeli state, the idealistic absolutism of racial idolatry, and the effort to banalize Jewish martyrdom. In The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 18–19Google Scholar, the prevalent novum under consideration is the aryan-Christian/nonaryan-Jew abyss opened up by the Nuremberg laws in 1935 and the popular acquiescence it met with all the way to the extremes of the Final Solution. Indeed there is a plurality of nova beyond those explicitly identified as such. They all signify the radical vulnerability of faith and interpretation to the decisive impact of historical events and networks of interactions on them. The underlying philosophy legitimating this historical theme of the novum is elaborated in Fackenheim, Emil, Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1961).Google Scholar

12 Fackenheim, , To Mend the World, 288.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 280-88. These questions are posed in an ascending order of gravity and consequence. To initiate his cross-examination, he fictitiously asks what the fate of Jesus the Galilean Jew would have been in Nazi-occupied Europe. If Jesus voluntarily accepted to go to Auschwitz, he would have underscored the lack of genuine disciples following him into that place. If Jesus the Jew was involuntarily deported on account of his Jewish-ness, the anti-semitic bias operative within Christian identity and its institutions as com-plicit participants in the Final Solution at the core of Eurocentric Christianity would rest confirmed. In addition to this indictment, Fackenheim further inquires whether, after the unmitigated darkness of the Shoah, the symbol of Good Friday has not completely overwhelmed and undone the Easter proclamation with irredeemable tragedy. Finally, Fackenheim brings his probe to a rhetorical pitch: if Jesus was free, could he, under the circumstances of Nazi criminality, have become a Muselmann? (The Muselmänner were those Jews surviving in the concentration camps at such a minimal level of physiological subsistence that they hovered on the ground, the spark of life and affect or interest extinguished in their bodies. The Nazis derided them as “Muslim-men,” banalizing their slow murder by systematic torture and implying that their abjection worshiped the Holy One.) Liberal theology, he surmises, would answer affirmatively. If this were the case, however, Fackenheim draws the conclusion that Hitler is laughing in hell with deepest satisfaction: an incarnate Son of God made into a decrepit, lifeless Muselmann. Jesus would pathetically figure among the disintegrated dead. Neo-orthodox theology, he speculates, would qualify the affirmation by saying that the divinity in Jesus remains untouched and impervious to his human depravation as a Muselmann. In this case, the real Muselmänner are despotically mocked, since the Father and Son in unity are by default aligned with, since spared from, the Nazi logic of destruction. The Spirit is not mentioned in these dialectics.

14 He has also come under critique for insensitivity to other histories of suffering, the lack of a critical ethical reflection on the use of power in Zionism that would promote concrete social responsibility and public policies, inconsistency regarding the uniqueness attributed to the Holocaust, and the ethnic insularity of the “commanding Voice at Auschwitz.” See Baum, Gregory, “Emil Fackenheim and Christianity” in Essays in Critical Theology (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1994), 130–35.Google Scholar It is interesting to note that Baum, in an essay dedicated to Fackenheim's analysis of Christianity, does not open a conversation with the soteriological dimensions of Fackenheim's critique of Christian theology. (The “commanding Voice of Auschwitz” is the virtually revealed imperative given to Jews as the duty to survive; to remember and tell the tale; to forgo cynicism and otherworldliness; and never to despair of the God of Israel. See Fackenheim, , God's Presence in History, 83–84;Google Scholar and Fackenheim, , To Mend the World, 25–26.Google Scholar)

15 Ibid., 19.

16 See ibid., 293-94, footnote; Fackenheim, , “Holocaust,” 404;Google Scholar and Fackenheim, , The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust, 117, note 23.Google Scholar

17 Metz, Johann Baptist, “Christen und Juden nach Auschwitz” in Jenseits bürgerlicher Religion: Reden über die Zukunft des Christentums (München: Kaiser, 1980), 34;Google Scholar cf. Metz, Johann Baptist, “Christians and Jews after Auschwitz,” in The Emergent Church, trans. Mann, P. (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 21.Google Scholar Due to repeated inconsistencies or inaccuracies in English translations, the German source has been directly translated when cited; those interested in variants can consult the English reference.

18 Metz, Johann Baptist, “Facing the Jews: Christian Theology after Auschwitz,” Concilium 5 (October 1984): 26.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 31. In “Christen und Juden nach Auschwitz,” 31, he writes: “We Christians can never again go back behind Auschwitz; we can only go beyond Auschwitz, never again on our own, to be exact, but only with the victims of Auschwitz.” Cf. Metz, “Christians and Jews after Auschwitz,” 19.Google Scholar

20 Metz, Johann Baptist, “Erlösung und Emanzipation,” Stimmen der Zeit 191 (1973): 180;Google Scholar cf. Metz, Johann Baptist, Faith in History and Society, trans. Smith, D. (London: Burns and Oates, 1980), 130.Google Scholar

21 Metz finds that contemporary christology has insulated itself from the testimony to the recent history of Jewish sufferings and the resultant shift to a practical fundamental theology: “None of the important modern Christologies (in the German-speaking countries especially) take this practical structure of Christology as their point of departure. In this sense they are all idealistic and characterized by a nondialectical relationship between theory and praxis” (Faith in History and Society, 79). He contends (“Facing the Jews,” 30) that there are three ways of keeping the radical trauma of the Holocaust at a safe and tolerable distance: (i) blame it exclusively on Nazism in isolation from the insidious collaboration (whether direct, indirect, or by default) of countless Christians and networks of Christian institutions which actually existed; (ii) reduce it to a symbol of suffering-in-general; and (iii) focus on Christian “saints” who died in concentration camps (a strategy dear to some Christians, including the current Roman Catholic pontiff). Fackenheim impugns the first mechanism by pointing out the missed kairos of European Christian solidarity in the years 1933-45 (The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust, 19) and by describing the tragedy of systemic guilt by which Hitler deviously implicated all Germans in obscene criminality (To Mend the World, 186-87). Regarding the second he tirelessly argues against relativizing the Shoah (To Mend the World, 11), and with respect to the third poignantly writes with deep irony that “If Christians succeeded in saving a Jew's life they were Christian heroes, while the saved Jew was only a survivor; and if they failed they were Christian martyrs, while the murdered Jew was only a victim” (The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust, 19). Metz continues to be disturbed by the alarming suppression of Auschwitz in theological discourse (Trotzdem Hoffen, ed. Schuster, E. and Boschert-Kimmig, R. [Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1993], 18–22).Google Scholar

22 Metz, “Christen und Juden nach Auschwitz,” 31;Google Scholar cf. Metz, “Christians and Jews after Auschwitz,” 19.Google Scholar

23 Metz, Johann Baptist, “The Future in the Memory of Suffering,” Concilium 1 (1972): 9–25.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 12-14.

25 Metz invokes biblical precedents to corroborate his claim and works out their philosophical dimensions in Faith in History and Society, 183-228. See Metz, “Erlösung und Emanzipation,” 183–84;Google ScholarMetz, Johann Baptist, “Suffering from God: Theology as Theodicy,” Pacifica 5 (10 1992): 282–83;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and also Metz, “Facing the Jews,” 28.Google Scholar

26 Metz, Faith in History and Society, 50–58.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 229-30.

28 Ibid., 52.

29 Ibid., 51. “This christology of discipleship makes it clear that Christianity … contains a narrative and remembrance knowledge. Narration and remembrance correspond cognitively to a faith which understands itself as a going, as a being-underway, as a constitutional form of homelessness” (Metz, “Facing the Jews,” 31–32).Google Scholar

30 Metz, Trotzdem Hoffen, 48ff.Google Scholar

31 Metz, Faith in History and Society, 113–14.Google Scholar This entails that “whoever hears the message of the raising of Christ from the dead in such a way that in it the cry of the crucified one can no longer be heard, no longer hears the Gospel but only a myth” (Metz, “Suffering from God,” 276Google Scholar). Myth is construed as a pejorative category signifying escape from concrete historical conditions and hence an alienated consciousness liable to ideological distortion.

32 Metz, Faith in History and Society, 176.Google Scholar

33 Metz, Johann Baptist, “Communicating a Dangerous Memory” in Lawrence, F., ed., Communicating a Dangerous Memory: Soundings in Political Theology (Atlanta, GA: Scholars, 1987), 39.Google Scholar See Metz, “Suffering from God,” 275;Google Scholar and Metz, “Christen und Juden nach Auschwitz,” 32.Google Scholar

34 Metz, , “Suffering from God,” 275 and 284.Google Scholar The translation, in the title and throughout the English text, needlessly betrays the meaning of the phrases “an Gott leiden” or “leiden an Gott” in German. The English “Suffering from God” has the regrettable connotation of suffering sent or (worse) inflicted by God, which is absolutely incongruent with Metz. The preposition “from” would best be left out of the translation altogether. “Suffering God” is ultimately suffering the delay of God's final justice amidst histories of suffering, and penultimately suffering the delay of human solidarity.

35 See Metz, “Erlösung und Emanzipation,” 181–82;Google ScholarMetz, Faith in History and Society, 131–32;Google Scholar and Metz, “Suffering from God,” 286.Google Scholar

36 Metz, “Suffering from God,” 286;Google Scholar and Metz, Trotzdem Hoffen, 52–53.Google Scholar

37 Metz, “Suffering from God,” 287;Google Scholar and Metz, Trotzdem Hoffen, 52.Google Scholar

38 Metz, “Suffering from God,” 287.Google Scholar

39 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, “Fundamental Theology and the Enlightenment,” Journal of Religion (1982): 289–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Chopp, Rebecca, The Praxis of Suffering (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), 146–47.Google Scholar

41 Metz, Trotzdem Hoffen, 32.Google Scholar

42 Meskin, Jacob, “The Jewish Transformation of Modern Thought: Lévinas and Philosophy after the Holocaust,” Cross Currents 47/4 (Winter 1997–1998): 507.Google Scholar

43 Lévinas, Emmanuel, “La souffrance inutile” in Entre-nous: essais sur le penser-à-l'autre (Paris: B. Grasset, 1991), 114–18.Google Scholar

44 The following phenomenology of suffering is based on the description offered by Lévinas in “La souffrance inutile,” 107-11.

45 Lévinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, A. (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 238.Google Scholar

46 Lévinas, , “La souffrance inutile,” 111.Google Scholar

47 Lévinas, , Totality and Infinity, 196.Google Scholar

48 Lévinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Lingis, A. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 105.Google Scholar

49 Ibid., 114 and 146.

50 Lévinas, Emmanuel, “Messianic Texts” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Hand, S. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 89.Google Scholar

51 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, trans. Blarney, K. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 337.Google Scholar

52 Lévinas, Emmanuel, “Judaïsme et Kénose,” Archivio di Filosofia 53/3–4 (1985): 23.Google Scholar

53 Lévinas, , Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 183.Google Scholar

54 Ibid., 112.

55 Ibid., 114 and 124. An essay on practical pneumatology in Metz and Lévinas is yet to be ventured as a follow up to the rehabilitation of christology after the Shoah, whereby remembrance and inspiration mutually condition each other's interpretation in events of substitution provoked by the epiphany of the face.

56 Lévinas, Emmanuel, “Diachronie et représentation” in Entre-nous, 189–90.Google Scholar

57 Lévinas, , Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 100–1.Google Scholar

58 Ibid., 186-87.

59 Ibid., 196-97.

60 See Thompson, William M., The Struggle for Theology's Soul: Contesting Scripture in Christology (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 174–98Google Scholar, for the biblical and theological qualifications of the traditional discourses on substitution in metaphysical frameworks of either satisfaction or exchange. While Thompson notes the critical intervention of Rahner's soteriology as a methodological interruption of the excesses of such discourse on metaphysical and theological grounds, the Lévinasian reading of Metz's practical christology radicalizes the basis for transforming the theology of substitution even more than transcendentalist principles by accentuating the christological configuration of human agency amidst legacies of afflicted peoples.

61 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler and Tracy, David, “The Holocaust as Interruption and the Christian Return to History,” Concilium 5 (10 1984): 86Google Scholar, identify the racism, sexism, and biological fundamentalism of Nazi ideology formulated in terms of Aristotelian philosophy and mediated through Christian theological traditions as consequences of Western capitalist patriarchy. Insofar as christology is embedded in hegemonic male codes of religious language and forms of social organization, it interprets and communicates the Christ figure in a way that transmits the anthropological substrate of patriarchal systems partially enabling National-Socialist ideology as a distinct historical possibility. The authors conclude that “the memory of the Holocaust must ‘interrupt’ all forms of Western patriarchal theology if the legacies of the dead are not to be in vain.” Christology after the Shoah and in the face of Jewish peoples must therefore exercise hermeneutical suspicion and liberation from its androcentric inculturations.

62 For an astute analysis of the ethnological foundations and anthropological implications of the polyvalent languages of substitution in a cultural and psychoanalytic framework, see the study by Vergote, A., “La mort rédemptrice du Christ à la lumière de l'anthropologie” in Léon-Dufour, X.et al., eds., Mort pour nos péchés: recherche pluridisciplinaire sur la signification rédemptrice de la mort du Christ (Bruxelles: Facultés universitaires St. Louis, 1976), 45–83.Google Scholar Vergote contends that an initiatory interpretation of substitution, temporally orienting human identity as an identity in process, is relatively more coherent on biblical and theological grounds than an expiatory interpretation of substitution that tends to juridically rationalize static social structures.

63 See Johnson, Elizabeth A., She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 150–69;Google Scholar and Johnson, Elizabeth A., “Redeeming the Name of Christ: Christology” in Lacugna, C. M., ed., Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 115–38.Google Scholar For a different direction in sophia-christology, see Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, 2nd ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 118–39;Google Scholar and Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet (New York: Continuum, 1994), 131–62.Google Scholar

64 Witherington, Ben III, Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994);Google Scholar and Witherington, Ben III, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 161–98.Google Scholar

65 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza justifies the new term wo/men as a signal “that disenfranchised men also are defined by their subordinate kyriarchal status. … Such a spelling must be understood in light of the systemic analysis of partriarchal kyriarchy which I have developed in my work. Kyriarchy is the Greek word for the domination of elite propertied men over women and other men, whereas patriarchy is generally understood in feminist discourses in terms of the western sex/gender system which posits a man/woman opposition. In contrast, I understand partriarchy as a structure of kyriarchy as a social and discursive system that interstructures gender, race, class, and colonialist oppressions …” (“Struggle Is a Name for Hope: A Critical Feminist Interpretation for Liberation,” Pacifica 10 [06 1997]: 225).Google Scholar

66 Witherington, , The Jesus Quest, 192–94.Google Scholar

67 In a noteworthy coincidence with Lévinas’ insight that “All persons are Messiah,” Elizabeth A. Johnson develops the repercussions of the scandalous particularity of messianic responsibility as a being for the disenfranchised and marginalized when writing that “feminist theological speech about Jesus the Wisdom of God shifts the focus of reflection off maleness and onto the whole theological significance of what happens in the Christ event. Jesus in his human, historical specificity is confessed as Sophia incarnate, revelatory of the liberating graciousness of God imaged as female; women, as friends of Jesus-Sophia, share equally with men in his saving mission throughout time and can fully represent Christ, being themselves, in the Spirit, other Christs” (She Who Is, 167).

68 This kenotic process at the origins of self-emergence arguably undermines the inscription of preconstructed kyriarchal male codes of discourse and relations in human action. See Blenkinsopp, J., “Sacrifice and Social Maintenance,” Cross Currents 45:3 (Fall 1995): 359–67.Google Scholar

69 Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Arendt, H., ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Zohn, H. (New York: Schocken, 1968), 254.Google Scholar