Messianism and Anarchy
On messianism and anarchy: what do we mean by these terms? And what do they have to do with one another?
“There is an anarchic element in the very nature of messianic utopianism: the dissolution of old ties which lose their very meaning in the new context of messianic freedom. The total novelty for which utopianism hopes enters thus into a momentous tension with the world of bonds and laws…”
So said the Jewish historian of religion, Gershom Scholem in his brilliant essay Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea. This very Jewish essay has been of predictably little interest to Christian thinkers, alas; I think it opens all kinds of fascinating boxes.
I’ll be holding a zoom gathering on this subject.
Sun 27th August, 8pm BST.
This event is free to patrons on substack and patreon.
Fiver for the one-timers.
Free for anyone who wants to come and has no dough. Just wave.
Send me a message with your email for a spot.
xapis kai eipnvn
DBB xxxxx
I am your huckleberry, baby. How can I wave? Is this a wave?
That is to say..."May I sign up?"
I killed one post-moot comment as it just seemed dead-mouthed. Another tussle here:
Anarchy is not chaos. So there is order, which I think is Law/Lore in some sense. But, if Holy, then an order born to twinned to freedom not necessity and its servant violence. In trying to think about this post-messianic law it is hard not to think of that Hebrews bit about a law written on hearts that is the biome of a people actually being a people of G-d. This seems to be the antithesis of the move away from the Wild into the Monarchy. Samuel's reaction to the people seeking the State (a king like all the other nations) ws to recoil and for G-d to proclaim His/Her own exile.
Is there a clue about this post-apocalyptic law/lore in human language itself. Adam's naming of the Others was not an imposed domination that bent or formed from without, but a symbiotic sounding out of what was/should be/will be. It was sonic movement, like music that lacks either/or of the top/down bottom/up divide as subject and subject both speak and listen in full, more chant than monologue.
Law as we know it now seems like a makeshift directing due to the lack of sight while whatever is not yet and maybe becoming seems more like a re-membering of the eye, the spit of G-d making a sea in the ash at our feet and, next year in Jerusalem, opening the windows of the soul to vision.
I did find myself recoiling from the end of law in some sense. Not in any need alleged love of the Pharasaic bindings but more in key with Chesterton's Ethics of Elfland. In Fairy there is never a lack of Law. One must be back by midnight, or enter only through the one door. There is so much deep pleasure in these constraints in our dream-stories. They prepare us for Here but also There I think. Law for the sheer love of the way it may shape the enternal Telling we are in? I am sure I will want to change half of this but two cents on the thing we did.