“The Path that Leads to the One God, Must be walked in Part Without God”

Abstract

In her well-known review of The Star of Redemption, poet, cultural critic, and philosopher Margarete Susman characterizes Rosenzweig’s project as theology that has “gone beyond the zenith of atheism” and articulates her view of this unique piece of work as the crowning achievement of the philosophical project of that time. But Susman’s assessment also addresses another issue of great significance: the fact that the atheism addressed by Rosenzweig’s book is the atheism of Goethe, and that the redemption that lies beyond this atheism becomes clear and gains voice only in light of the words of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, as we will see below. Susman’s assessment is consistent with Rosenzweig’s letter to Ehrenburg and identifies contending with atheism as a fundamental element of understanding The Star of Redemption. This article seeks a better understanding of Rosenzweig’s book based on Susman’s work. It also offers greater insight into Goethe’s significant role in the book and, in doing so, provides readers with a unique key for navigating the book that can also help understand the change in conception proposed by Rosenzweig in his Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus Lehrhaus (Free Jewish House of Learning). In this context, the word “free” has meaning on more than one level and can be understood as applying to both the House of Learning as an independent institution and to the freedom of human consciousness. This article is based largely on Susman’s review article on The Star of Redemption and her essay marking the celebratory publication of another installment of Rosenzweig and Buber’s German translation of the Bible. Here, however, I also seek to understand the deeper meaning of the claim regarding atheism’s role on the path to monotheism using the terms of Rosenzweig himself, as well as the language and thinking of Emmanuel Levinas.