Evil in History: Karl Löwith and Jacob Taubes on Modern

Eschatology

Willem Styfhals

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 76, Number 2, April 2015, pp. 191-213
(Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2015.0012

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/580295

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 Evil in History: Karl Löwith and
Jacob Taubes on Modern Eschatology

Willem Styfhals

Around the end of the 1940s, a number of German philosophers debated

the connection between modernity and eschatology. In the Judeo-Christian
tradition, eschatology is the theological doctrine concerned with the end of
history and the salvation of human existence. Karl Löwith’s definition of
modern progress as secularized eschatology in Meaning in History is the
classic example of this continuity between pre-modern eschatology and
modern thought.1 It is, however, certainly not the only one. Two years
before the publication of Meaning in History, Jewish philosopher Jacob
Taubes had already developed an eschatological interpretation of Western
modernity in Occidental Eschatology.2 Taking a very different perspective,
Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, and Norman Cohn, to name only the most
important, have applied the concept of eschatology to modern politics.3

This article has benefitted greatly from the advice of André Cloots, Jerry Z. Muller, Mark
Lilla, Nicolas de Warren, Stéphane Symons, and the readers for the Journal of the History
of Ideas.
1
Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of
History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1949), 2, 60.
2
Jacob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie (Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 1947). I refer to
the English translation: Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
3
Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publikum Europaeum
(Cologne: Greven, 1950); Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millen-

Copyright  by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 76, Number 2 (April 2015)

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

As a result of Hans Blumenberg’s penetrating critique of secularization

and eschatology, however, these eschatological interpretations of moder-
nity have often been misrepresented, or even altogether overlooked.4 In the
Anglo-American reception of the Löwith-Blumenberg debate, for example,
Löwith’s concept of secularization has often been radically oversimplified.
In this regard, the latter supposedly defined secularization as the mere pri-
vation of Christian transcendence: progress is eschatology deprived of the
supernatural and, more generally, modernity is Christianity deprived of its
transcendent God.5 For Löwith, however, the relation between Christian
eschatology and modern progress is not merely privative. Rather, it also
entails a more substantial account of modernity, and of its relation to pre-
modernity. It is the aim of this paper to recover this substantial definition
of modernity that underlies the topical references to eschatology. By show-
ing how eschatology is essentially related to the problem of evil (section
1), I argue that Löwith’s eschatological reading of the modern historical
consciousness ultimately revolves around the notion of evil, and its epochal
significance to modern thought (section 2).
In this regard, the comparison of Löwith’s position to Jacob Taubes’s
account of modern eschatology will prove to be extremely illuminating
(section 3). With regard to the role of evil in modernity, however, Taubes
seems much more explicit than Löwith. Unlike the latter, Taubes does not
just refer to Christian eschatology, but focuses his interpretation of moder-
nity on the eschatology of Apocalypticism and Gnosticism, two radically
dualistic systems characterized by fundamental cosmological pessimism.
Despite this difference, the thematic scope of Taubes’s Occidental Eschatol-
ogy is strikingly similar to that of Löwith’s Meaning in History: both
develop a genealogy of the modern historical consciousness by uncovering
its eschatological roots; both argue that the secularization of eschatology
originates in Joachim of Fiore’s medieval philosophy of history; and both
agree that it culminates in the nineteenth-century philosophies of Hegel and
Marx.
These similarities notwithstanding, Löwith’s Meaning in History (1949)

nium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London:
Pimlico, 1957).
4
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 37–52.
5
See Robert M. Wallace, ‘‘Progress, Secularization, and Modernity: The Löwith-
Blumenberg Debate,’’ New German Critique 22 (1981): 64; Martin Jay, ‘‘Review of The
Legitimacy of the Modern Age,’’ History and Theory 24 (1985): 192; Laurence Dickey,
‘‘Blumenberg and Secularization: Self-Assertion and the Problem of Self-Realizing Teleol-
ogy in History,’’ New German Critique 41 (1987): 152.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

only refers twice to Taubes’s earlier Occidental Eschatology (1947).6 This

remarkable observation can be explained by the fact that the influence of
Taubes’s conception of eschatology on Löwith’s book was minimal. The lat-
ter had indeed developed his basic thesis on the secularization of eschatology
in several texts from the early 1940s, and thus before the publication of Occi-
dental Eschatology.7 In this regard, the line of influence has to be reversed.
The numerous references to Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche in Taubes’s
dissertation, Occidental Eschatology, clearly prove the former’s profound
influence on Taubes’s early thought. In the autobiographical introduction to
Ad Carl Schmitt, Taubes even explicitly praises this very same book: ‘‘It was
like the scales falling from my eyes as I grasped the line that Löwith traced
from Hegel via Marx and Kierkegaard to Nietzsche.’’8 In other words, the
comparison between both conceptions of modern eschatology can shed new
light on Taubes’s earlier writings, which remain largely overlooked in the
blossoming recent literature on his posthumously published intellectual testa-
ment, The Political Theology of Paul.9 While this literature elaborates either
on the latter book’s influence on contemporary political theology, most nota-
bly on Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that Remains, or on the relation
between Taubes and interwar (Jewish) political theology, my focus is more
on Taubes’s engagement in the postwar German secularization debate, and
especially on the role of eschatology in this context.10

I. APOCALYPTICISM AND CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY

Eschatology is generally considered to be the theological doctrine that deals

with the end of time, the establishment of the Kingdom of God, and the

6
Löwith, Meaning in History, 248 n.19 and 255–56 n.4.
7
Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionaire Bruch im Denken des neun-
zehnten Jahrhunderts (Zürich: Europa Verlag AG, 1941), part I, chap. I and V; Karl
Löwith, ‘‘Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 6
(1945): 3, 274.
8
Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, trans. Keith Tribe (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013), 2.
9
Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2004).
10
Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the
Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). For Taubes
and Agamben see Nitzan Lebovic, ‘‘The Jerusalem School: The Theopolitical Hour,’’
New German Critique 35 (2008): 97–120; Mark Lilla, ‘‘A New, Political Saint-Paul,’’
The New York Review of Books 55 (2008): 16. For Taubes and interwar political theol-
ogy see Benjamin Lazier, ‘‘On the Origins of Political Theology: Judaism and Heresy
between the World Wars,’’ New German Critique 35 (2008): 143–64; Marin Terpstra,

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

salvation of humankind. This end of history (Eschaton) is not just a destruc-

tion of the present world but, in the Christian tradition, it can also be the
fulfillment of world history by divine providence. In this regard, the story
of time that commences with the creation of the world is completed by
the salvation of humanity at the end of history. Both Taubes and Löwith
emphasize that the eschatological theology of salvation radically breaks
with the classical, cyclic interpretation of time.11 History no longer appears
as an infinite repetition of recurring patterns but rather as a linear and
progressive evolution from a beginning towards an end, that is, from cre-
ation towards redemption. Furthermore, both thinkers maintain that this
linear structure determines, until today, our modern experience of time. By
the same token, they recognize this experience as being fundamental for the
modern interpretations of history and progress.
In spite of this general agreement about eschatology’s nature, Taubes
and Löwith emphasize different historical aspects of eschatology. Taubes,
for one, homes in on the eschatology of Apocalypticism. The apocalyptic
speculations of Judaism and early Christianity were probably the first mani-
festations of eschatological thinking. Paradigmatically, Apocalypticism
does not proclaim the end of time as a fulfillment of world history in a
distant future, but rather as the imminent destruction of an inferior world.
As such, the Apocalypse is either the catastrophic annihilation of im-
manence, or the establishment of God’s kingdom on Earth after the
destruction of the present world. In both cases, Apocalypticism has a
straightforward political and moral import that is expressed in a historical
and theological framework. The proclamation of the end of time is almost
always an act of political resistance of a violently suppressed minority—the
Jews in Babylon, the early Christians in the Roman Empire. In his studies
on the relation between monotheism and violence, Jan Assmann empha-
sizes that ‘‘Apocalypticism and oppression go hand in hand. Apocalyptic-
ism is a form of religious and intellectual resistance, and [. . .] requires
violent oppression and persecution in order to exist.’’12
Because the powerless apocalyptic minorities cannot expect a political
or military overthrow of the oppressive regime by any worldly power, they
put their faith in a revolution by a transcendent reality. In other words,
evil has to be overthrown cosmologically by the catastrophic coming of a

‘‘God’s Love for his Enemies: Jacob Taubes’ Conversation with Carl Schmitt on Paul,’’
International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 70 (2009): 185–206.
11
Löwith, Meaning in History, 1–7; Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 3–9.
12
Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 122.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

redeeming God. In this respect, political impotence is not a weakness, but

it ultimately attests to the spiritual superiority of the Apocalypticist. His
political impotence in an evil and inferior world only confirms the immi-
nence of the apocalypse, and the existence of a spiritual force that tran-
scends this world. In this regard, Apocalypticism assumes an ontological
experience of evil. Not until the Apocalypticist realizes that the current
world is evil and godless can he discover the hidden God (Hester Panim)
who will appear at the end of time. If, by contrast, he conforms, just like
the ruling class, to the current state of reality, the road to revolution, and
the access to a remote transcendence is blocked. In this sense, the apocalyp-
tic experience of evil entails a radical separation between the historical past
and the apocalyptic age. While world history is sinful and depraved, the
Apocalypticist believes that a transcendent force will settle a new and better
world by destroying the immanent order.
Obviously, the main difficulty for every apocalyptic faith is the failed
occurrence of the end of time. Being primarily concerned with Christian
eschatology, Löwith, unlike Taubes, argues that this problematic delay of
the end is in Christianity combined with the ambiguous ontological and
eschatological nature of incarnation. In Christian orthodoxy, Christ is not
just considered to be a prophet proclaiming the end of history and the com-
ing of God; rather, he is the incarnated God himself. Christ cannot just
proclaim salvation, as he himself is supposed to be the Savior. In this regard,
Christianity, unlike any other apocalyptic or eschatological religion, has
not answered the non-occurrence of the apocalypse either by recalculating
the end, or by univocally postponing it to a later future. Paradoxically,
Christian orthodoxy has situated the eschatological events in the past,
namely in Christ’s incarnation and resurrection: ‘‘What really begins with
the appearance of Jesus Christ,’’ says Löwith, ‘‘is the beginning of an
end.’’13 Accordingly, Christian eschatology is directed to the past as if it
were a future, that is to say, Christianity remains faithful to the temporal
and future-oriented structure of eschatological hope by, at least partly, redi-
recting this spiritual futurity to the past. Löwith indeed emphasizes in
Meaning in History, that Incarnation is the most important eschatological
event in the Christian history of the world. As such, the current state of the
immanent world is the last phase of world history, and incarnation was the
last historical event that was significant for the history of salvation. After
Christ’s resurrection the world retires and waits patiently for its immanent
end. No truly historical change will or can still take place.

13
Löwith, Meaning in History, 197.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

According to Löwith’s interpretation, Christian eschatology is thus

oscillating between the past and the future. On the one hand, the eschato-
logical expectation of salvation is redirected to the past; on the other hand,
Christians still hope for future salvation, as they do not yet live in the per-
fect Kingdom of God. Referring to Saint Augustine, Löwith shows that the
true Christian Kingdom of God is not to be realized in a future realm com-
ing after this world. The Augustinian City of God is rather a transcendent
reality beyond profane history—beyond the City of Man.14 Accordingly,
the epoch that begins with the incarnation of Christ, though the last one in
the history of the world, is not the political realization of the millennial
Kingdom of God. Christian eschatology cannot be conceived apocalypti-
cally, for salvation is not a cosmological intervention in political history,
which occurs publicly as an immanent end of time. Löwith agrees with
Augustine that ‘‘the historical destiny of Christian peoples is no possible
subject of a specifically Christian interpretation of political history.’’15 Dis-
arming the political and revolutionary dimension of Apocalypticism, the
dogma of incarnation transforms the conception of salvation into a purely
transcendent, apolitical, and spiritual fulfillment or forgiveness of the indi-
vidual believer16: ‘‘In Christianity the history of salvation is related to the
salvation of each single soul.’’17 In The Messianic Idea in Judaism, Jewish
theologian Gershom Scholem makes the same traditional distinction be-
tween the spiritual, individual eschatology of Christianity and the political
eschatology of Apocalypticism, which he sees at work in Judaism.18 With
Scholem in mind, Taubes has explicitly problematized such a straight-
forward distinction between Christianity and Judaism in The Political The-
ology of Paul. In the same vein, he already emphasized the apocalyptic
features of (early) Christian eschatology in Occidental Eschatology.
In this regard, Löwith’s interpretation of eschatology remains more
ambiguous about the problem of evil than Taubes’s. To the extent that
Christian eschatology, in the former’s perspective, breaks with the apoca-
lyptic interpretation of eschatology, it also discards the apocalyptic ontol-
ogy of evil. The end of history no longer appears as the destruction of an

14
Ibid., 160–73.
15
Ibid., 195.
16
For the (a)political role of incarnation also see Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment
of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 76–86; Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the
Modern West (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 31–39.
17
Löwith, Meaning in History, 195.
18
Gershom Scholem, ‘‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,’’ in
The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York:
Schocken Books, 1971), 1.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

evil world, but as the providential fulfillment of the transcendent history of

salvation. Therefore, the oscillation between past and present in Christian
eschatology coincides with an ambiguity of the interpretation of evil. On
the one hand, Christians do not believe that this world is intrinsically
depraved. In medieval Christian theology, evil is not even considered to be
a real ontological problem. In a world created by a benevolent God, evil is
just the absence of the good, the privatio boni.19 The problem of evil is, on
the other hand, certainly not absent in Christianity and Christian eschatol-
ogy. Instead of interpreting evil as an ontological dysfunction of the world,
Augustine attributes it to the immoral behavior of the individual human
being, and to God’s just punishment of the moral agent’s evil deeds.20 In
this perspective, salvation no longer appears as the historical redemption
from an intrinsically evil world, but as the individual and transcendent for-
giveness of human sinfulness.

II. KARL LÖWITH: THE MEANING OF EVIL IN HISTORY

In the introduction to Meaning in History, Löwith explicitly emphasizes

that eschatology’s linear interpretation of time assumes the experience of
evil. If evil and suffering are experienced as fundamental and insurmount-
able, our perception of time as it were demands a progressive interpretation
of history. Because the present evil seems insuperable, salvation is projected
into the future. The course of history obtains meaning and direction to the
extent that an evolution from an evil to a better world can take place:

The outstanding element, however, out of which an interpretation

of history could arise at all, is the basic experience of evil and
suffering, and of man’s quest for happiness. The interpretation of
history is, in the last analysis, an attempt to understand the mean-
ing of history as the meaning of suffering by historical action.21

Consequently, a radical experience of evil makes it impossible to conceive

time as a purposeless course of ever returning and immutable patterns. The

19
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: Volume I—Part I (New York: Cosimo,
2007), art. 49.
20
Aurelius Augustine, On the Free Choice of Will, On Grace and free Choice, and other
Writings, ed. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
21
Löwith, Meaning in History, 3.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

hope for a better, and hence significantly different future has to be imagin-
able. Since this projected future presupposes an ontological subversion in
the course of time as the linear transition from evil to good, history has to
allow for structural change. Meaning in history is thus indissolubly con-
nected to the possibility of historical change proper.
Consequently, the interconnected problems of evil, hope, and salvation
are for Löwith absent in a non-eschatological conception of time—he has
the Greek-Nietzschean eternal recurrence in mind.22 Observing that ‘‘no
similar hope and despair can be found in any classical writer,’’ Löwith
maintains that the classical cosmologies, and Greek philosophy combined
an ontological optimism with a cyclic conception of time.23 Not unlike his
teacher Martin Heidegger, Löwith obviously had a very monolithic and
idealized conception of ‘‘the Greeks.’’ In his perspective, the optimism of
Greek cosmologies guaranteed that the ancient experiences of evil could
not have had ontological bearing. These cosmological presuppositions are
also reflected in the ancient experience of time. Because cosmological evil is
absent, the hope for a better and different future did not exist, or was con-
sidered to be a form of Hubris.24 Since Löwith, not unlike Nietzsche, char-
acterizes the Greek experience of time as a continuous repetition of the
same cycle, the past, present, and future are even structurally indistinguish-
able in Greek thought: ‘‘According to the Greek view of life and the world,
everything moves in recurrences, like the eternal recurrence of sunrise and
sunset, of summer and winter, of generation and corruption.’’25As such,
significant events in the political or cultural history could never be con-
ceived as real evolutions. For Löwith, structural historical changes, let
alone progress, are philosophically inconceivable in ancient thought: ‘‘To
the Greek thinkers a philosophy of history would have been a contradiction
in terms.’’ Philosophical knowledge can only be about the unchangeable:
‘‘The immutable, as visible in the fixed order of the heavenly bodies,
had a higher interest and value to them than any progressive and radical
change.’’26
According to Löwith, the problem of evil that gave history its eschato-
logical meaning is thus absent in antiquity. Apparently, the eschatological

22
Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans.
Harvey Lomax (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
23
Löwith, Meaning in History, 61.
24
Julian Potter, ‘‘Meaning in Eternity: Karl Löwith’s Critique of Hope and Hubris,’’ The-
sis Eleven 110 (2012): 27–45.
25
Löwith, Meaning in History, 4.
26
Ibid.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

search for meaning in history only arises if humanity can no longer conceive
the world as a harmonious cosmos. When the experience of evil is so funda-
mental, historical change first becomes conceivable, and eventually even
necessary. For Löwith, the relation between linear time and the problem of
evil, however, is also valid in the opposite sense. The meaning of history is
not just an answer to the problem of evil, but the experience of evil itself is
only conceivable within the eschatological perspective of the ultimate
meaning of history: ‘‘it is only within a pre-established horizon of ultimate
meaning, that actual history seems to be meaningless. This horizon has been
established by history, for it is Hebrew and Christian thinking that brought
this colossal question into existence.’’27 Without the touchstone of a future
that gives meaning to history as a whole, the present state of affairs cannot
be experienced as evil or meaningless. Singular historical events in their
own right do not have any meaning at all—as such, they are neither good
nor bad.
In the Christian tradition, the eschatological interpretation of history
is initially present without an explicit emphasis on the problem of evil. As
the dynamics of evil remain latent or at least ambiguous in (medieval)
Christianity, the linearity of eschatological time seems to be more primor-
dial than the problem of evil. This is why, in Scholasticism, the optimism
of Greek cosmology could still be reconciled with Christian eschatology.
Nonetheless, the historical structure of Christianity will eventually allow
the problem of evil to resurface. Once a better future is thinkable, inevita-
bly, the depravity of the present world becomes conceivable. Such conse-
quences of Christian eschatology will only be manifested after the rise of
modernity and modern eschatology.
In sum, the fundamental intertwining of evil and history is pivotal for
Löwith: there can be no history without evil, no evil without history. This
discovery shows that the comparison between the modern philosophies of
history and Christian eschatology assumes an interpretation of the role of
evil in modernity. Because the problem of evil is the driving force of escha-
tology, this problem will also play a crucial role in the genesis of modern
progress. Without a pessimistic attitude to the present world or to human-
ity, the need for future salvation and progress would expire. For Löwith,
‘‘the starting point of the modern religions of progress is an eschatological
anticipation of the future salvation and consequently a vision of the present
state of mankind as one of depravity.’’28 To the extent that Löwith’s Mean-
ing in History is primarily concerned with the problem of secularization, he

27
Ibid.
28
Ibid., 61.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

obviously does not present the question of evil as the key problem for mod-
ern thought. However, in order to grasp the full scope of Löwith’s argu-
ment, it is crucial to understand how he considers evil to be constitutive for
eschatology, both in its pre-modern and in its modern guise. In Evil in Mod-
ern Thought, Susan Neiman also favors such a reading of Löwith’s thought.
Observing ‘‘the absence of explicit discussion of the problem of evil’’ in
twentieth-century philosophy, she finds that the ‘‘post-war German history
of philosophy, by contrast, offered rich and significant work related to
many aspects of the problem.’’29 She even refers explicitly to Löwith, as
well as to Jacob Taubes, for that matter.30 This emphasis on the role of evil
in Löwith’s work keeps us from reducing his comparison between modern
progress and eschatology to the mere formal resemblance between their
respective orientations towards the future. By defining progress as secular-
ized eschatology, Löwith rather discovers a substantial continuity of onto-
logical problems between modernity and pre-modernity. As such, both the
eschatological problem of evil and the possibility of salvation remain fun-
damental for modern thought.
Nonetheless, Löwith argues that modern thought rejects the Christian
interpretation of salvation, and tries to solve the problem of evil by new—
now secular—means. The modern overcoming of evil is not a spiritual sal-
vation of the individual believer; rather, it becomes a historical and
controllable progress towards an immanently perfect world. Modernity
thus formulates a radically original answer to a problem that is fundamen-
tally entwined with the Judeo-Christian tradition. On this account, Löwith
radically criticizes modernity and modern progress. He argues that the
modern secularization of Christian eschatology corrupts the transcendent
and individual meaning of Christian salvation. The modern notion of prog-
ress is therefore an illegitimate heir of Christian theology: progress is escha-
tology’s bastard. The modern philosophers of history, such as Voltaire,
Condorcet, Hegel or Marx, borrow the theological framework of the his-
tory of salvation, but apply it to the immanent course of profane history.31
These modern thinkers attribute meaning and direction to history by trans-
forming the spiritual faith in the transcendent fulfillment of history into
the rational belief in a historical progress towards a perfect world. This
immanent, and hence politico-historical eschatology is inconceivable in

29
Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002),
288–90.
30
Ibid., 334 n. 19.
31
For Hegel and Marx also see: Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, part I, chap. I, III,
and V.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

Christianity. By definition, Christian eschatology and providence are not

concerned with the immanent course of history (Weltgeschichte) but with
the structure of the transcendent history of salvation and the possibility of
a spiritual redemption (Heilsgeschehen).32 Therefore, Christianity does not
allow for a real philosophy of (world) history. Because Christian eschatol-
ogy is essentially transcendent, an immanent Christian eschatology is a con-
tradiction in terms.
The modern confusion between world history and the history of salva-
tion, however, is not just an innocent category-mistake; for Löwith, it is a
potentially dangerous illusion. By illegitimately applying the eschatological
structure of Heilsgeschehen to Weltgeschichte, modernity generates the illu-
sion that the meaning of world history and the possibility of salvation are
immanent and therefore essentially malleable. Although Löwith is not as
explicit on this point as some of his contemporaries, such as Eric Voegelin
or Norman Cohn, he assumes that this modern illusion is actualized most
radically in the totalitarian movements—the secular religions—of the twen-
tieth century.33
For Löwith, the modern philosophies of history are not misguided
because of their unconscious continuity with the pre-modern framework of
Christianity, whose influence they categorically try to renounce. Rather this
continuity is preeminently a corruption, and a dangerous deformation of
the original Christian message. By secularizing eschatology, modernity
negates Christianity’s most essential feature: its transcendent God. For Löw-
ith, modernity’s rejection of transcendence ultimately leads to radical nihil-
ism and groundlessness.34 In Heidegger’s Children, Richard Wolin perfectly
summarizes Löwith’s criticism of modern nihilism: ‘‘For the Greeks, the
structure of the world was eternal; for Christianity, it was created by God.
Modernity, as an ideology of radical immanence, brusquely dismisses both
standpoints and finds itself, unsurprisingly, destitute and disoriented, lack-
ing a permanent ground.’’35 Although Löwith sees his former teacher Mar-
tin Heidegger as a prime example of this nihilism, Wolin also emphasizes
how his critique of the history of Western thought as degeneracy and

32
See the later German translation of Meaning in History: Karl Löwith, Weltgeschichte
und Heilsgeschehen: Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtphilosophie (Stutt-
gart: W. Kohlhammer, 1953).
33
See Jeffrey A. Barash, ‘‘The Sense of History: On the Political Implications of Karl
Löwith’s Concept of Secularization,’’ History and Theory 37 (1998): 69–82.
34
Karl Löwith, Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin and trans. Gary
Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
35
Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and
Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 78.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

decline is fundamentally influenced by Heidegger’s history of being.36 These

metaphors of decline are indeed omnipresent in Meaning in History. For
Löwith, modernity copies Christian theology, but also distorts its original
meaning: ‘‘The modern world is as Christian as it is un-Christian[. . . .] The
whole moral and intellectual, social and political, history of the West is to
some extent Christian, and yet it dissolves Christianity by the very applica-
tion of Christian principles to secular matters.’’37
In a way, the immanent ideology of modern thought, and the philoso-
phy of history in particular, seem to entail a return of the pre-Christian
eschatology of Apocalypticism. Just like the modern philosophies of prog-
ress, Apocalypticism is concerned with an ontological change within the
course of history rather than with the individual and transcendent salva-
tion of Christianity. Furthermore, unlike the Christian providential inter-
pretation of history, Apocalypticism shares a revolutionary and political
vigor with, for example, Marxism and social utopianism. In Meaning in
History, Löwith has not explicitly made this distinction between the
eschatology of Apocalypticism, and Christian eschatology that empha-
sizes providence and individual salvation. In this sense, Hans Blumen-
berg’s criticism of Löwith’s theory of secularization is revealing: ‘‘In
regard to progress, the advocates of secularization theory should have
decided early on whether they were going to make the Last Judgment
[Eschaton] or Providence the Terminus a quo[. . . .]’’38 Blumenberg argues
that if Löwith wants to appeal to Christian providence in his analysis of
modern historical thought—and very often he does so, stating: ‘‘The
belief in an immanent and indefinite progress replaces more and more
the belief in God’s transcendent providence’’—he cannot at the same time
maintain that ‘‘the starting point of the modern religions of progress is an
eschatological anticipation of a future salvation.’’39
Since providence and eschatology are not necessarily mutually exclu-
sive in Löwith’s perspective, Blumenberg’s criticism might sound too radi-
cal. Nonetheless, the latter’s remark is useful to the extent that Löwith’s
position, precisely because of his appeal to Christian eschatology, does
indeed oscillate between the two. More important, this oscillation tends to
obscure his interpretation of the role of evil in modernity. While Löwith

36
Ibid., 97.
37
Löwith, Meaning in History, 201–2.
38
Blumenberg, The Legitimacy, 32. Also see: Amos Funkenstein, Heilsplan und natür-
liche Entwicklung: Formen der Gegenwartsbestimmung im Geschichtsdenken des hohen
Mittelalters (Munich: Nymphenburg, 1965).
39
Löwith, Meaning in History, 60–61 (my emphasis).

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

often emphasizes that the modern and eschatological interpretations of his-

tory assume an ontology of evil, in Christianity and in the Christian concept
of providence, this ontological evil seems lacking or, at least, less pressing.
As already indicated above, Jacob Taubes’s Gnostic and apocalyptic analy-
sis of modern eschatology will prove to be more coherent on this point.

III. JACOB TAUBES: APOCALYPTICISM,

GNOSIS, AND MODERNITY

In 1949, Hans Jonas, the most important Gnosticism scholar at the time,
received an invitation from Jacob Taubes to discuss the latter’s recently
published book Occidental Eschatology. In this book, Taubes referred
repeatedly to Jonas’s monumental two-volume work on ancient Gnosti-
cism, Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist (Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late
Antiquity).40 Not unlike Jonas, Taubes’s eschatological analysis of the his-
tory of Western thought recognizes Gnostic features in modern philosophy.
Jonas, however, neither knew Taubes, nor the book in question, and asked
his colleague Karl Löwith whether he was familiar with Taubes’s work:

Before the meeting I asked Karl Löwith, ‘‘Do you happen to know
a Jacob Taubes?’’ ‘‘Of course I know him,’’ he replied. ‘‘Well could
you tell me something about him? He’s sent me a letter. I’ve never
heard of him, but he refers to a book he’s written and asks to meet
me. Do you know the book?’’ ‘‘Oh, yes,’’ he said, ‘‘I know the
book.’’ ‘‘Well, is it any good?’’ At that he said, laughing, ‘‘Oh, it’s
a very good book. And that’s no accident—half of it’s by you and
the other half’s by me.’’41

Löwith and Jonas suggest that Taubes’s analysis, though interesting, is not
a very original contribution. One has to admit that Taubes, indeed, relies
heavily on Jonas’s conception of Gnosticism and on Löwith’s interpretation
of eschatology and modernity. Nonetheless, precisely because of Taubes’s
idiosyncratic combination of these two perspectives—Gnosticism and
eschatology—his position can be very revealing, especially with regard to
the role of evil in modern eschatology. Unlike Christian eschatology, which

40
Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Die mythologische Gnosis (Göttingen: Van-
denhoeck und Ruprecht, 1934–35).
41
Hans Jonas, Memoirs, trans. Krishna Winston (Lebanon, N.H.: Brandeis University
Press, 2008), 168.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

is pivotal for Löwith, the ancient heresy of Gnosticism explicitly emphasizes

the fundamental depravity of the immanent world, and the absolute neces-
sity of eschatological salvation from this evil world.42
In light of this, Taubes’s conception of eschatology is apocalyptic
rather than Christian. He even argues that the traditional Christianity of
medieval Scholasticism does not have an eschatology at all. As a purely
transcendent and individual salvation, traditional Christian eschatology
has lost its fundamentally historical nature. For Taubes, the imminent and
revolutionary threat of the eschaton is discarded in a Christian providential
interpretation of history. Since the imminence and the historicity of the end
of time are essential in Taubes’s concept of eschatology, he primarily refers
to Apocalypticism and Gnosticism that behold ‘‘the turning point not in
some indeterminate future but entirely proximate.’’43 In Occidental Escha-
tology, he uses the notions of eschatology, Apocalypticism and Gnosticism
even almost interchangeably. For Taubes, these religious movements have
introduced a new way of thinking that radically breaks with the ancient
experience of time, and even with classical metaphysics in general. Precisely
these apocalyptic ways of thinking also return in modern thought: ‘‘Apoca-
lypticism and Gnosis inaugurate a new form of thinking which, though
submerged by Aristotelian and Scholastic logic, has been preserved into the
present and was taken up and further developed by Hegel and Marx.’’44
For Taubes, the early modern age and German idealism are thus escha-
tological to the extent that Apocalypticism and Gnosticism resurge in mod-
ern culture; not because a Christian theological system is secularized. In this
respect, Taubes is less concerned than Löwith with the question of secular-
ization, and with the way it has disfigured eschatology. Rather, he wants to
fathom, in a much more substantial way, what it means for modernity to be
eschatological. By equating eschatology, Apocalypticism and Gnosticism,
Taubes also emphasizes the role of evil in eschatology and modernity more
explicitly than Löwith. The problem of evil, which is only implicitly opera-
tive in Christian eschatology, becomes more explicit in Apocalypticism, and
even becomes the cornerstone of the Gnostic ontology. For Taubes, Gnosti-
cism and Apocalypticism are rooted in a double alienation. First, the tran-
scendent God is estranged from the world to the extent that he is radically

42
For Taubes’s notion of Gnosticism see Carsten Colpe, ‘‘Das eschatologische Wieder-
lager der Politik: Zu Jacob Taubes’ Gnosisbild,’’ in Abendländische Eschatologie. Ad
Jacob Taubes, ed. Richard Faber (Würzberg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001),
105–29.
43
Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 10.
44
Ibid., 35.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

separated from it. This metaphysical alienation causes, secondly, an exis-

tential alienation. Being separated from God, the human being is also
estranged from himself. On the one hand, he is a prisoner in a godless
world; on the other hand, he is undeniably also part of it.
This Gnostic idea of God’s absence or hiddenness was also a central
topic in interwar Jewish and Protestant theology. Criticizing liberal theolo-
gy’s rationalization of God, Karl Barth’s Protestant theology of crisis, for
one, paradigmatically stresses God’s radical otherness and transcendence.
In a similar vein, Gershom Scholem, with whom Taubes studied in Jerusa-
lem between 1949 and 1952, emphasized that ‘‘religion signifies the cre-
ation of a vast abyss, conceived as absolute, between God, the infinite and
transcendental being, and Man, the finite creature.’’45 In this regard, inter-
war theology is often considered to revive the ancient heresy of Gnosti-
cism.46 In Scholem’s work, for example, the notion of Gnosticism is indeed
omnipresent. Being as dismissive about liberal theology as his teacher,
Taubes’s theological motivation for referring to Gnosticism seems much
closer to Scholem than to Jonas’s existential reading of Gnosticism, even if
he gets the concept itself from the latter. The topic of God’s absence was
also omnipresent in the postwar philosophical-historical debates about sec-
ularization. Both Gnosticism and the idea of a Deus Absconditus (hidden
God) are central in Hans Blumenberg’s interpretation of modernity.47 These
topics also return in Jewish Holocaust theology, and its notion of Hester
Panim (the hiding face of God). Given this emphasis on God’s absence, it is
hardly a coincidence that Taubes’s reading of modernity appeals to Gnostic
dualism, which he describes as follows:

God and the world are not distant but estranged and divided, and
therefore hold each other in mutual tension. Just as there is noth-
ing of God in the cosmos, so God is the nothing of the world. In
the world God is the one who is ‘‘unknown,’’ ‘‘hidden,’’ ‘‘without
a name,’’ and ‘‘other.’’48

In Gnosticism, says Taubes, this radical separation between God and world
will result in an extremely pessimistic ontology that reverses Greek cos-
mology:

45
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books,
1946), 7.
46
Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the
World Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
47
See Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, part II.
48
Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 39.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

Even if in the earliest statements of Apocalypticism the world is

still within the sphere of God’s omnipotence, then God’s alien-
ation from the World progresses until the World is identified with
the fullness of evil, which God opposes as the fullness of good. The
equation cosmosskotos, worlddarkness, expresses the concept
of life to be found in Gnosis.49

Being characterized by the most radical dualism between God and the
world, Gnosticism claims that material reality is created by an inferior,
fallen or even downright evil principle. In addition, the Gnostics believe in
a transcendent salvation from this evil through the knowledge of this sad
cosmological truth. Gnosis is the mystical knowledge of the immanent
world’s depravity and the transcendent deity’s unaffected goodness.
In light of this, Gnosticism casts the historical basis of Apocalypticism
in an ontological mold. The historical separation between the present world
and the future kingdom of God becomes an ontological antithesis between
transcendence and immanence, between good and evil. Taubes argues that
Gnosticism gives a theoretical and speculative framework to the apocalyp-
tic myths and narratives about human alienation and the end of time: ‘‘In
their narration of the history of the world the apocalyptic myths introduce
self-estrangement as a dramatic leitmotif, and it is on this very theme that
the more theoretical, ontological speculations of Gnosis are founded. The
boundaries between Apocalypticism and Gnosis are, of course, fluid.’’50
The ontological perspective of Gnosticism, however, does not abolish
the historical and eschatological features of Apocalypticism. On the con-
trary, according to Taubes’s interpretation of Gnosticism, the ontological
evil of Gnostic cosmology is only conceivable as historical evil. Just like
Löwith, Taubes argues that the problem of evil is fundamentally inter-
twined with historicity and with the linear direction of time—no evil with-
out history, no history without evil. The latter’s reading of Gnosticism
shows that the immanent world is depraved because it is finite. In Taubes’s
perspective, this finitude can only be conceived historically. The world is
finite to the extent that its existence is essentially temporary, that is to say,
to the extent that its history has a beginning and an end. When we refer to
the end of the world, we always mean the end of time. Moreover, because
of its essential temporality, the world—both temporary and temporal—is

49
Ibid., 28.
50
Ibid., 36.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

the antithesis of God’s eternity. In this respect, Taubes argues that time is
by definition the absence of the divine. Therefore, world history, being the
total absence of God and its divine goodness, is radically evil: ‘‘History is
identical with the aeon of sin, which is embedded between creation and
redemption.’’51 Finally, the end of time is only conceivable as salvation. The
end of history is indeed the transition from temporality to eternity, that is,
from godlessness to God, and from evil to good. In this respect, the end of
time is the redemptive end of sin.
For Taubes, this pessimistic cosmology of Gnosticism and Apocalyptic-
ism as well as their historical structure returns in what he calls the ‘‘apoca-
lyptic waves of the modern age.’’52 The discovery of the genealogical
connection between modernity and eschatology is thus also the discovery
of the epochal role of evil in modern thought and German idealism: ‘‘It is
vitally important for the history of German idealism that the eschatology
of early Christianity, even if clandestine and apocryphal, continue [. . .]
alongside the Enlightenment, so that knowledge of the radical nature of evil
is preserved.’’53 Modernity breaks with traditional Christianity, and revives
the Gnostic and apocalyptic spirit of early Christianity. In this regard,
Gnostic modernity radically rejects medieval Scholasticism’s static and
ahistorical rationality. In the same vein, however, Taubes’s interpretation
of modernity is also highly critical of rationalism and enlightenment. Refer-
ring to the earthquake of Lisbon, he claims that modern man is confronted
with experiences of evil and irrationality ‘‘which the system of reason is
unable to fathom.’’54 Thus rejecting enlightenment as well as Scholasticism,
Taubes maintains that modern man can neither interpret the world as a
good and rationally ordered universe, nor as a reflection of a transcendent
reality. In other words, the modern world is cut off from transcendence,
and becomes a de-divinized, meaningless, and possibly evil facticity that is
not created for the sake of the human being. In this nihilistic worldview,
Taubes recognizes, not unlike Hans Jonas, the modern return of Gnosti-
cism.55
Because of this disappearance of transcendence, however, the modern
world does not only lose its goodness and rationality, but the traditional
Christian hope for a transcendent salvation also becomes insignificant. For
this reason, says Taubes, modernity reintroduces history:

51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 85.
53
Ibid., 130.
54
Ibid., 86.
55
Hans Jonas, ‘‘Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism,’’ Social Research 19 (1952): 430–52.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

The Copernican world is an earth deprived of the heaven, which

used to be an archetype to the earth[. . . .] Because the space
between heaven and earth has become meaningless, Copernican
man seeks to revolutionize the world according to an ideal that
can become reality in the course of time.56

Instead of seeking personal and spiritual salvation in Christian transcen-

dence, modern humanity redirects its gaze towards fulfillment in the future.
To the extent that the future is the touchstone of modern thought, moder-
nity recovers Apocalypticism’s historical conception of salvation. Conse-
quently, the meaning of the modern world is no longer determined a priori,
but solely depends upon its historical development. The historical realiza-
tion of this meaning is not gradual, but it is a revolutionary, apocalyptic
rupture at the end of history as the eschatological transition from evil to
goodness.
Unlike Löwith, Taubes does not criticize modernity on account of this
eschatological nature. On the contrary, Taubes recognizes in these apoca-
lyptic waves of modernity the fundamental dynamics of Western thought.
The modern renaissance of eschatology is thus not a corruption of theology
but merely its legitimate transformation. Both in his personal life, as well as
in his philosophical writings, Taubes was fascinated with the antinomian,
revolutionary, and nihilistic nature of Apocalypticism, which he recognized
in religious as well as in secular phenomena. In one of the few English
articles that appeared on Taubes’s early writings, Joshua Robert Gold
argues that the scope of Taubes’s account of Apocalypticism goes beyond
the domain of theology: ‘‘Taubes transforms the theological concept of
Apocalypse into a critical category, and he does so by thinking through the
political and ethical implications of the claim that there is an end to time.’’57
In this regard, Taubes’s notion of eschatology does not function as a general
definition of the nature of modernity. Very much like Carl Schmitt, Taubes
is, for example, interested in the different continuities between the concepts
of theology and secular politics. From a political perspective, the apoca-
lypse would be the ultimate state of exception that overcomes liberal nor-
mativity’s static lawfulness. Taubes is also typically sympathetic towards
political revolution, whether it is on the far left or right. He is, however,
just as much concerned with the ways in which the structure of apocalyptic
theology returns in modern aesthetics, and in the artistic avant-garde, for

56
Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 137.
57
Joshua R. Gold, ‘‘Jacob Taubes: Apocalypse From Below,’’ Telos 134 (2006): 142.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

example, in Surrealism and Dadaism.58 In this regard, the Gnostic and

apocalyptic conception of evil is for Taubes not just moral or ontological,
but it also signifies everything about this world that is politically or aestheti-
cally restrictive, boring, chaotic, and ugly.
Although Taubes is less pessimistic about modernity than Löwith, he is
highly critical of any ahistorical or static mode of thought, and hence of the
moments in modern and pre-modern history where the eschatological and
apocalyptic dynamics of Western thought are absent or artificially fixed.
According to Taubes, Western eschatology can be brought to a halt only by
the illegitimate historical proclamation that the Kingdom of God is realized
in the present, that is to say, by making a certain perspective absolute and
inviolable by history: ‘‘Medievalism and the Enlightenment are two static
spheres of life in Europe. The Medieval Church and the church of the
Enlightenment establish themselves as absolute and are based on the equa-
tion the church is the Kingdom of God.’’59 For Taubes, however, the
strength of Western eschatology is the impossibility for historical positions
to claim absoluteness. In the light of redemption, everything that is histori-
cal can be reversed, overthrown, and annihilated. As such, Taubes warns,
not unlike Löwith, ‘‘to beware of the illusion that redemption happens on
the stage of history.’’60 Although Taubes does not mention a possible third
moment after the Enlightenment and the Middle Ages where the illusion of
a historical salvation was created, it is not hard to imagine what Taubes
might have had in mind when he was writing his dissertation in Switzerland
during and after the Second World War. Could he not have written, as some
of his contemporaries did, that ‘‘Nazism established itself as absolute and
was based on the equation: the Third Reich is the Kingdom of God’’?

IV. CRITICISM VERSUS APOLOGETICS

OF POLITICAL ESCHATOLOGY

Given the particular historical context of Löwith’s and Taubes’s discussions

of eschatology—two Jewish thinkers, writing only a few years after the end
of the Second World War—it is hardly a coincidence that their concern with

58
Jacob Taubes, ‘‘Notes on Surrealism,’’ in From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards a
Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 98–123.
59
Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 86.
60
Jacob Taubes, ‘‘The Price of Messianism,’’ in From Cult to Culture, 9.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

the problem of evil was so central. Unlike Hannah Arendt’s more concep-
tual analyses, Taubes’s and Löwith’s historical outlook kept them from
confronting the evils of the Holocaust head on.61 Nonetheless, these events
must have been in the back of their minds when they tried to make sense of
the history of Western thought. Although neither thinker developed an
explicit interpretation of totalitarianism, their respective positions can be
thought through in such a way that they do allow for an implied evaluation
of it. Relying heavily on Taubes and Löwith, Eric Voegelin, for example,
explicitly connected totalitarianism to the secularization of eschatology and
to Gnosticism.62
Strikingly, however, neither Taubes’s nor Löwith’s philosophical
framework allows for any real consolation, or even hope to overcome the
evils of the Second World War. For Löwith, hope is no longer an option
today. On the contrary, it was the modern eschatological structure of hope
itself that had made the horrible events of the Second World War possible in
the first place. In this regard, totalitarianism appears as the ultimate human
attempt to create a historical eschaton as the immanent overcoming of evil.
For Löwith, this is the most explosive and dangerous feature of modern
Hubris, as it paradoxically generates new and even greater forms of evil:
‘‘There are in history not only ‘flowers of evil’ but also evils which are the
fruit of too much good will and of a mistaken Christianity that confounds
the fundamental distinction between redemptive events and profane hap-
penings, between Heilsgeschehen and Weltgeschichte.’’63 Because the fund-
amentalist faith—‘‘too much good will’’—in a ‘‘final solution’’ for the
problem of evil has proven to be fraught with dangers, Löwith proposes to
abandon the eschatological principle of hope altogether. In view of its mod-
ern and totalitarian excesses, every form of eschatology has now become
suspect. He thereby rejects any simple return to Christianity or, for that
matter, to Judaism as a solution for the modern crisis. In contrast to many
of his Jewish contemporaries, including Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, or
Taubes himself, Löwith wonders ‘‘whether the future is really the proper
horizon of a truly human existence.’’64 The Judeo-Christian perspective of
future-oriented hope has been perverted to such an extent that it has

61
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951);
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York:
Viking Press, 1964).
62
Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 110–27. For the reference to Taubes and Löwith:
ibid., 111 n. 8.
63
Löwith, Meaning in History, 203.
64
Ibid., 204.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

become impossible to return to the transcendent origin of this value. In line

with another Jewish thinker, Leo Strauss, Löwith rather suggests that the
human being has to recover its place within the ahistorical ancient cosmos
by interpreting his existence as constituted in relation to an eternal and
immutable order. He proposes to abandon the linear conception of time,
and revalue Greek-Nietzschean eternal recurrence.
Taubes, in his turn, rejected such a naive return to Greek philosophy.
In an often quoted interview he stated: ‘‘There is no eternal return, time
does not enable nonchalance; rather it is distress.’’65 In this respect, he
equally dismissed any naive abstract hope for the future. Quoting the same
line in a recent article on Taubes’s time in Jerusalem, Nitzan Lebovic adds:

Two short years after the end of the most horrible destruction the
Jewish people had ever known, Taubes offered no comforting
words. Against the passive hope of those confronting the end of
the world, Taubes emphasized in 1947 the need for an immediate
decision[. . . .] Taubes had in mind a Schmittian operation from
within the destructive situation: it involved using and abusing
destruction as a tool, acknowledging its inevitability.66

In this respect, the evil of the Holocaust would be the ultimate confirmation
of the Gnostic-apocalyptic worldview for Taubes. Paradigmatically, it is in
the most intense moments of violent oppression and radical evil that the
end of time is nearest. In this regard, the Holocaust itself appears as the
apocalyptic catastrophe par excellence.67 The force of the apocalypse is for
Taubes always primarily destructive, nihilistic, and negative. Moreover, it
is only from within this negation itself that an absent God, who is in every
respect opposite to the world, can manifest himself. God’s fundamental
absence is thus the condition of possibility of the apocalyptic redemption.
Some postwar Jewish theologians, many of whom Taubes knew personally,
have indeed argued that God was fundamentally absent from the world
during the Second World War.68 In this sense, Taubes’s Gnostic conception
of God’s absence in many respects prefigures Holocaust theology’s central
notion of Hester Panim.

65
‘‘Jacob Taubes,’’ in Denken, das an der Zeit ist, ed. Florian Roetzer (Franfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1987), 317.
66
Lebovic, ‘‘The Jerusalem School,’’ 106.
67
See Martin Treml, ‘‘Nachwort,’’ in Jacob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie
(Munich: Matthes und Seitz, 2007), 287.
68
Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philos-
ophy (New York: Humanity Books, 1952).

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2015

Unlike Löwith, Taubes would thus emphasize the fundamental impor-

tance of eschatology and Apocalypticism as the only possible response to
totalitarian politics. Western modernity could therefore retain its legiti-
macy, even after the horrors of the Second World War, but only to the
extent that it continues the legacy of occidental eschatology. Contrary to
Löwith, eschatology does not appear as the cause of the modern crisis,
but rather as its solution. By the same token, it is not the presence of (secu-
larized) eschatology, but its absence that would make totalitarianism dan-
gerous for Taubes. In view of these opposed political evaluations of
eschatology, the main difference between Löwith and Taubes can be high-
lighted again. As Peter Gordon sharply puts it: ‘‘Taubes embraced the
eschatological tradition Löwith reviled.’’69 It is also on this point that most
other comparisons between Löwith and Taubes focus.70
Consequently, the real problem for Löwith is not so much eschatol-
ogy’s illegitimate secularization, but eschatology as such, and by extension
even history in general. This is where the traditional Blumenbergian inter-
pretation of Löwith misses the point. Löwith’s theory of modernity does
not just revolve around the concept of secularization, and the way in which
it deprives Christianity from its transcendent eschatology, but rather, in a
more substantial way, around the meaning and illegitimacy of eschatology
itself, and the way it constitutes modernity. As Odo Marquard cryptically
summarizes in his own writings on eschatology and philosophy of history:

For Löwith, the philosophy of history is the legitimate continua-

tion of the illegitimacy of the biblical salvation, for Taubes it is the
legitimate continuation of its legitimacy: for Löwith the theology
of history as such was already bad; for Taubes the philosophy of
history is still, and even a fortiori good: for both the category of
secularization does not, as it does for Blumenberg, function as cat-
egory of distinction.71

69
Peter Gordon, ‘‘Jacob Taubes, Karl Löwith, and the Interpretation of Jewish History,’’
in German-Jewish Thought between Religion and Politics, ed. Christian Wiese and Mar-
tina Urban (Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 351.
70
Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl
(London: SCM Press, 1996), 41–44; Mark Jaeger, ‘‘Jacob Taubes und Karl Löwith: Apo-
logie und Kritik des Heilsgeschichtlichen Denkens,’’ in Abendländische Eschatologie. Ad
Jacob Taubes, ed. Richard Faber (Würzberg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001), 485–
508.
71
Odo Marquard, Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie: Aufsätze (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 15.

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 Styfhals ✦ Löwith and Taubes on Modern Eschatology

While relying heavily on Löwith’s conceptual framework, Taubes thus

reverses its valuation.72 Despite the former’s undeniable influence, Taubes’s
thought is much closer to the messianic legacy of Walter Benjamin and
Gershom Scholem than to Löwith. As his later The Political Theology of
Paul shows even more clearly, Taubes would continue to be fascinated with
exactly those phenomena that Löwith radically mistrusts—not only with
eschatology, but just as much with nihilism, heresy, or the philosophy of
history.

University of Leuven.

72
See Jerry Z. Muller, ‘‘Reisender in Ideeen: Jacob Taubes zwischen New York, Jerusa-
lem, Berlin und Paris,’’ in ‘‘Ich staune, dass Sei in dieser Luft atmen können’’: Deutsch-
jüdische Intellektuelle in Deutschland nach 1945, ed. Monika Boll and Raphael Gross
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2013), 48.

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