Hope, Despair, and the Angel of History

Angel of History

“Angelus Novus” (1920) by Paul Klee , CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1940, not long before he committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis, Walter Benjamin wrote a haunting description of what he called the angel of history: “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” [Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (Schocken Books, 1969), p. 257].

The angel’s image comes from a 1920 monoprint by Paul Klee. Benjamin had purchased it in 1921. After he died, Benjamin’s friend Gershom Sholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, inherited it and later gifted it to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. For Benjamin, a German Jewish messianic Marxist who witnessed two world wars and the fascists’ destruction of Europe, so-called progress in history did indeed look like one unending catastrophe. Any hope for a better future—when the angel of history could close its wings in tikkun olam, in repairing a shattered world—seemed futile.

And yet: Benjamin ends his famous essay with a Jewish mystical image of tentative hope: “every second of time,” he suggests, can be “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Illuminations, p. 264). Benjamin does not say this, but when the Messiah enters, everything is different.

Despair

I first studied Benjamin’s essay in West Berlin during a 1979 seminar led by the Jewish philosopher of religion Jakob Taubes. Later, Taubes would become famous for The Political Theology of Paul (2003), his influential lectures on the revolutionary and apocalyptic potential of Romans. But already in the late 1970s, when I was writing a dissertation on Benjamin’s colleague Theodor Adorno, Taubes was sorting out the unique entanglement of Western Marxism and Jewish mysticism in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

Photo by Anderson Rian on Unsplash

At the time, I don’t think I fully grasped the deep despair that drove Benjamin’s critique of leftist progressivism. It resounds in his image of the irresistible and catastrophic storm called progress. It also echoes in the philosophical fragments titled Dialectic of Enlightenment that Adorno and Max Horkheimer authored soon after they received Benjamin’s essay and news of his death. Writing in Southern California during their nearly two-decade exile from Nazi Germany, they begin with equally somber words: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant” [Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 1, translation modified].

After November 5, however, I get it. Although still comfortably situated in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and not yet fleeing for my life or forced by fascists into long-term exile, I am in despair. By returning Donald Trump to power, with all the double trouble described in my previous post, we American citizens have helped create a national and global catastrophe. It would be too mild to call this storm “regress.” It is a tsunami of hate-filled destruction: destruction of democracy; destruction of international alliances and agreements; destruction of the Earth; destruction of all who dare resist such destruction.

Direct Assault

My entire life as a scholar and educator I’ve aimed to practice what, in a previous post, I called Critical Hope. As I said there, I’ve tried to offer “redemptive criticisms of contemporary society” that refuse to “give in to despair.” I have repeatedly pointed toward societal principles such as solidarity, justice, and stewardship as shared human expectations “about what makes for goodness in social life.” And I have continually embraced the prospect of “a society in which all creatures flourish in interconnection with each other,” the prospect of shalom. As I said in a blog post titled Longing for the Wholly Other, all humans are called to be “co-creators of shalom.”

“The Mothers” (1921?), lithograph print by Käthe Kollwitz, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The re-election of Donald Trump feels like a direct and decisive assault on that social vision. He does not care about solidarity. Rather than welcome the stranger, he wants to deport millions and go after the “enemies within.” He does not care about justice. Rather than uphold equality under the rule of law, he wants to pardon January 6 violators and criminalize his opponents. He does not want to encourage stewardship of limited resources or creatively address Earth’s climate crisis. Rather, he wants to “drill, baby, drill.”

A staggering number of American voters have just given his administration carte blanche to do just that. Perhaps solidarity, justice, and stewardship are not the shared human expectations that I’ve claimed they are. Perhaps many of us really do not long for shalom.

Earth Song

So I’m in despair. Perhaps you are too. I haven’t given up hope for a better future. But I don’t see paths to get there. The forces of political reaction are rapidly raising roadblocks to every strait gate the Messiah might enter.

I’m also bereft. You might be too. Sources of solace are hard to find. But at least we can listen to a piece I sang last year in a Choral Connection concert. It’s called “Earth Song,” by Frank Ticheli. Here are links to an interview with the composer and a video performance by VOCES8.  And here are the lyrics:

Photo by Louis Maniquet on Unsplash

Sing, Be, Live, See.
This dark stormy hour,
The wind, it stirs.
The scorched earth
Cries out in vain:
O war and power,
You blind and blur,
The torn heart
Cries out in pain.

But music and singing
Have been my refuge,
And music and singing
Shall be my light.
A light of song
Shining Strong: Alleluia!
Through darkness, pain, and strife, I’ll
Sing, Be, Live, See…
Peace.