God interrupted : heresy and the European imagination between the world wars / Benjamin Lazier.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lazier, Benjamin, 1971-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jonas, Hans, 1903-1993.

Jonas, Hans.

Scholem, Gershom, 1897-1982.

Scholem, Gershom.

Strauss, Leo.

God (Judaism)--History of doctrines--20th century.

God (Judaism).

Jewish philosophy--History--20th century.

Jewish philosophy.

Heresy--History--20th century.

Heresy.

Pantheism--History--20th century.

Pantheism.

Gnosticism--History--20th century.

Gnosticism.

Europe--Intellectual life--20th century.

Europe.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (271 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Could the best thing about religion be the heresies it spawns? Leading intellectuals in interwar Europe thought so. They believed that they lived in a world made derelict by God's absence and the interruption of his call. In response, they helped resurrect gnosticism and pantheism, the two most potent challenges to the monotheistic tradition. In God Interrupted, Benjamin Lazier tracks the ensuing debates about the divine across confessions and disciplines. He also traces the surprising afterlives of these debates in postwar arguments about the environment, neoconservative politics, and heretical forms of Jewish identity. In lively, elegant prose, the book reorients the intellectual history of the era. God Interrupted also provides novel accounts of three German-Jewish thinkers whose ideas, seminal to fields typically regarded as wildly unrelated, had common origins in debates about heresy between the wars. Hans Jonas developed a philosophy of biology that inspired European Greens and bioethicists the world over. Leo Strauss became one of the most important and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of religion, radically recast what it means to be a Jew. Together they help us see how talk about God was adapted for talk about nature, politics, technology, and art. They alert us to the abiding salience of the divine to Europeans between the wars and beyond--even among those for whom God was long missing or dead.

Contents:

The Gnostic return

God interrupted: Romans in Weimar

Overcoming Gnosticism

After Auschwitz, earth

Pantheism revisited

The Pantheism controversy

From God to nature

Natural right and Judaism

Redemption through sin

Jewish Gnosticism

Raising Pantheism

From nihilism to nothingness

Scholem's golem.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN:

9786612964787

9781400837656

1400837650

9781282964785

128296478X

OCLC:

705945740