Rethinking the Modern and Modernity with Jacob Taubes

Abstract

Jacob Taubes’s book Occidental Eschatology (1947) offers a unique framework for examining cultural patterns across the line often construed as separating ‘the religious’ from the ‘non-religious’. This article highlights the implications of the application of this framework for our understanding of modernity: With Taubes, the ‘modern’ conception of history, totality and sovereignty can be traced to the emphatic distinction between ‘world’ and ‘God’ in the Hebrew Bible. In this perspective, ‘the modern’ appears as a cultural element that is analytically dissociated from any particular later historical period and from any cultural or geographical context, such as ‘the West’. Messianic thinking appears integral to the modern rather than as a source of fundamentally opposing insights. Competing appeals to reject the world are a source of instability and violence in modernity. Further research can address how the modern is linked with other cultural elements and with institutional arrangements in different contexts.

Introduction

Occidental Eschatology (2009 [1947]) is the first and only book by the Jewish philosopher and sociologist Jacob Taubes, originally written as his PhD and published in 1947. It presents us with an account of the origins and specificity of eschatological questions in the Hebrew Bible and traces some of the intellectual and social consequences of a strong distinction between ‘God’, on the one hand, and ‘the world’, on the other hand until the late 19th century.

As I will try to show in this article, the book offers a distinctive methodology for analysing cultural elements across the dividing line that can be construed as separating ‘the religious’ on the one hand from the ‘non-religious’ on the other hand. Based on this methodology, it offers a unique perspective on the modern and on modernity, which is highly relevant today.

Before I develop this argument in the context of pertinent current work, a few preliminary words of clarification and justification for the focus on Occidental Eschatology may be in order. Reading and rereading Taubes could be justified with respect to the impact that he and his work have had on the current intellectual landscape: Taubes’s work and teaching preceded and indeed inspired some now classic work in the sociology of religion: He became a friend of Robert Bellah when Bellah was a graduate student at Harvard and also knew the young Peter L. Berger (Muller, 2022: 242) during his time in the United States. Taubes later played a role in connecting German-speaking, American and French intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work inspired some of the interest in apocalypticism and in Paul in Marxist and post-Marxist intellectuals like Badiou, Agamben and Zizek.

Objections may legitimately be raised to the focus on Occidental Eschatology not only on account of some of the author’s personal flaws, which are discussed in some detail in Muller’s (2022) recent biography, but also with reference to problems with the work itself: It has to be acknowledged that Taubes’s book, already at the time of publication in 1947, was less original than he implied through his bold and direct presentation of ideas: Taubes draws on Löwith’s (1991 [1941]) ‘From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought’, Hans Jonas’s (1958 [1934]) research on Gnosticism as well as the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar (1998 [1930]) in ways that he not always acknowledged (Muller, 2022: 80).

The book has also been criticized for its lack of scholarly rigour and undue generalizations. To the chagrin of his erstwhile mentor Gershom Sholem and others (Muller, 2022: 415–16; Styfhals, 2018), Taubes did not manage or choose to pursue a career of carefully annotated scholarship. He never published a second book and his record of occasional talks and papers circled around his interest in Jewish mysticism, the Gnostics, and in Paul in a way that did not amount to the execution of a research agenda in conventional terms (Kopp-Oberstebrink and Von Sass, 2022; Von Sass, 2022).

Despite these issues, I highlight the book as a distinctive entry point into a discussion that is also connected to broader sociological discussions about the axial age (Jaspers, 1953 [1949]; Bellah and Joas, 2012; Eisenstadt, 2012), religious studies, Jewish studies, and the field of political theology. I argue that in the body of the text of Occidental Eschatology, Taubes presents as a voice with a unique combination of empathy and critical distance towards the kind of thinking in which eschatological questions arise. Unlike Löwith (1991 [1941]) and other sociological and philosophical observers, the author of Occidental Eschatology displays a deep empathy for the meanings and passions of messianic thought. Unlike Gershom Scholem (1974), who is much more careful with and sensitive to theological and historical details, he is willing to make observations that speak to sociological debates about broader cultural patterns. With this, I argue, Taubes allows for a specifically sociological investigation into the messianic as an element of cultural discourses and practices, as a cultural option, the inclusion of which allows for a fuller investigation and understanding of all the other cultural options.

I will begin by situating Taubes’s account in the context of the history of critically interrogating secularist understandings of modern societies and in the context of a contemporary revival of interest in eschatology and the messianic in philosophy and political thought (Agamben, 2005; Badiou, 2003; Berardi, 2019; Derrida, 2006).

I explain Taubes’s diagnosis of the innovation and specificity of apocalyptic thought before discussing implications for our understanding of the modern and of modernity. I will argue that, with Taubes, phenomena that are often thought to be central to modernity, such as the ‘modern’ conception of history, totality and sovereignty, can be traced to the distinction between ‘world’ and ‘God’ in the Hebrew Bible.

This challenges us to reconceptualize ‘the modern’ as a cultural element that is analytically dissociated from any particular later time period and from any particular cultural or geographical context, such as ‘the West’. Messianic thinking appears as an integral part of the modern rather than as a source of fundamentally opposing insights. As a result of these analytical moves, the period conventionally discussed as modernity appears as much less stable than in conservative or critical accounts (see Weinman and Reed, 2022). Competing appeals to reject the world are a source of creativity but also of instability and violence.

This conceptualization paves the way for a comparative investigation into the ways in which the modern as a cultural element is linked with other cultural elements and with institutional arrangements in a range of contexts. This investigation is highly relevant at a time when the institutional embedding of the modern in this sense seems to be changing, with grave consequences.

The Critique of Secularism and Beyond

In its very title, Occidental Eschatology announces a point that was not entirely new at the time, yet is even today recognizable as an intervention with some provocative potential: (Western) modernity, which is often narrated as having broken with a religious past, contains religious elements at its core. This point is made in different ways in some of the classics of sociological and political theory (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]; Löwith, 1991 [1941]); Schmitt, 2010 [1922]; Weber, 2013 [1905]).

It has been made again with distinctive emphases in the late 1990s and early 2000s in a debate on ‘secularism’. In this debate, critics highlighted the Christian elements of the distinction between the secular and the religious itself (Asad, 1993; Asad et al., 2013; Calhoun et al., 2010, 2011).

Given normative associations of the term ‘secular’ and its ties to notions of ‘the modern’, and with that to notions of rationality, the claim that ‘the secular is not secular’ can have considerable critical force; the claim has been particularly useful for rethinking the self-understanding of the Western ‘secular’ state (Asad, 2003), the rationalism of some leftist political projects (Asad et al., 2013; Gorski, 2017; Mahmood, 2005) and representations of Islam in the West (Asad et al., 2013; Mahmood, 2015).

Whether intended as such or not, evidence about the religious behind the secular can be received as a kind of taunting. It is then often responded to in defensive terms. Both the taunting and the defensive response – I would name, for example, Blumenberg’s (1983 [1966]) response to Löwith (1991 [1941]) and Schmitt (2010 [1922]) in the so-called secularization debate in Germany in the 1960s (see Griffioen, 2019) – can leave the underlying dualisms intact.

Taubes’s book brings a distinctive lens to these discussions, which is in many ways compatible with the critique of secularism and the critical examination of secularization but moves beyond polemics to offer a framework for the examination of religious, philosophical and political thought on the same terms, an attempt to construe a position from which both can be observed after secularist self-presentations have been questioned. Most broadly and moving out of any ‘sociology of religion’ as the study of a specific area of life, questions can be asked as to what patterns emerge when we consider religion, philosophy and culture together, patterns more specifically in how ascriptions of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are allocated across entities and how these are related to conceptions of time.

In many ways, Taubes’s approach rests on classic sociological foundations. At the time of Taubes’s writing, Durkheim had already established a tradition precisely of looking at the secular and the religious together in terms of underlying patterns. In Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim (1995 [1912]) set out to replace an analysis of religion in terms of institutions set up to worship higher entities with an analysis of how the distinction between the sacred and the profane operates across society. His discussion of human rights and sociology as quasi-religious forces in French society at his time is very relevant to the concerns of this article.

But Taubes’s work brings distinctive strengths, which can be highlighted through a comparison with Durkheim and Weber. Taubes combines a sociological sensitivity with some of the virtues more usually on display in other disciplines. The tendency to relate ‘ideas’ as ‘culture’ to ‘society’ leads Durkheim and later authors in his tradition (Lynch, 2012; Shils and Young, 1953; Smith, 2014) to limit engagement with the intellectual content of what is investigated when compared to practices in intellectual history, for example. The desire to establish functional links between culture, on the one hand, and society, on the other hand, has limited attention to details of interpretation and to dynamic and contradictory elements of culture that may or may not define and serve the whole.

Unlike Durkheim, who very deliberately underemphasizes the specificity of monotheism in Elementary Forms, Taubes takes the innovations of monotheism very seriously. In this, he builds on Max Weber’s sociology of religion, which he had studied in depth, but delivers a reading of the history of monotheism, which is influenced by his familiarity with Jewish intellectual traditions and with a perspective on Christianity and modernity shaped by this familiarity.

Considering Eschatology

There has been a marked revival of interest in the messianic in continental social thought in recent decades, most explicitly in Derrida (2006), Agamben (2005), Badiou (2003) and, with a particular emphasis, also among thinkers in the autonomist Marxist and anarchist traditions (Berardi, 2019; Fians, 2023). This wave of interest is associated with a renewed interest in an earlier generation of thinkers who took eschatological questions seriously, such as Benjamin (Khatib, 2013; List, 2021; Löwy, 1992; Tagliacozzo, 2022; see Greenberg, 2008), Rosenzweig (2005; Dubow, 2021; Lash, 2021), and Bloch (1968).

In these discussions in philosophy and political thought, the messianic is usually embraced as a source of oppositional intellectual commitments, which can provide insights opposed to linear conceptions of time (Benjamin, 2003 [1942], see also Hall, 2009), universal identities and the rational Judaism of the law (Badiou, 2003; Scholem, 1974), sovereignty and governmentality (Milbank, 2008; Prozorov, 2012, 2024) or the various catastrophes associated with capitalism (Berardi, 2019).

In these conversations, the question that is usually asked is how messianism, as a positive commitment, should be understood in the right way. Derrida, for example, proposed the concept of an ‘abstract’ messianic, which is not tied to a particular religious content (Derrida, 2006; Glazier, 2017; Hollander, 2008; Ware, 2004).

Sometimes Taubes is enlisted as part of this conversation, and indeed Taubes has always been connected to it, having inspired interest in Paul in others in the 1960s and 1970s (Loland, 2020; Styfhals, 2019). There is a reading of Taubes that sees him as writing from a position actively embracing Jewish mysticism (Babich, 2007) or a fusion of left-Hegelian thought with Jewish mysticism (Bielik-Robson, 2022; Gold, 2006; Lebovic, 2011). This version of Taubes seems to be consistent with some of the ways in which he presented himself. From the early 1950s onwards, he was explicitly interested in messianism as a source of egalitarian and democratic thinking. He described himself as thinking ‘apocalyptically from the point of view of those below looking up’ (Taubes, 1987: 22). Referencing the opposition between law-oriented and messianic thinking in Judaism, Taubes described himself as interested in antinomian thought but he also saw himself as an ‘antinomian’ thinker.

The text of Occidental Eschatology itself, however, offers the basis of another reading, a reading of Taubes as a sociologist who emphasizes observation of patterns in thought at a relative distance. At this point in his life, Taubes writes about the history of Judaism, Christianity and Western philosophy not as a religious Jew or as a left-Hegelian but in a way that includes left-Hegelian thought, which shapes much of the discussion above, as an object of analysis. As Muller (2022: 80) notes, ‘Taubes’s book sought to recapture the antinomian and radical pathos of religious eschatology and the influence of such movements in history. But for the most part it seemed to do so from a stance outside of religious belief.’ (There is a shift in tone in the conclusion.) ¹

This step makes observations about left Hegelianism in a long historical perspective possible that are not possible from within left Hegelianism. Taubes, at this stage, does not write from within the search for the true ‘progressive’ position but offers reflections on the assumptions and preconditions of such a search. It is the sociological version of Taubes’s analysis which allows us to question the positive and negative implications of messianic thought in a more open manner.

The Innovations of Apocalyptic Thinking

In Occidental Eschatology, Jacob Taubes analyses the distinctive emphases of the Hebrew Bible in the context of the civilizations of the Near East and North Africa and classical antiquity and traces their impact up until Marx and Kierkegaard.

In what follows, I will present Taubes’s analysis while acknowledging ongoing debates about what precisely was new and distinctive about the thought style that Taubes calls ‘apocalyptic’ and others have called ‘monotheistic’, as well as related debates about how specific geographical, historical and cultural contexts can be allocated to these categories (Assmann, 1997; Bellah and Joas, 2012; McGinn et al., 2003; Muesse, 2013; Thomassen, 2010). Within this broader debate, Taubes’s own focus is compatible with a broader focus on Abrahamic religions, thus including Islam and Christianity as well as Judaism, which have been shown to have been in very close dialogue in late antiquity (Kluge, 2014; Neuwirth, 2019; Schaefer, 2012). Later work has highlighted that this focus has to be complemented by attention to sites such as Egypt under Akhenaten (Assmann, 1997, 2005a, 2005b), Zoroastrian Iran (Shaked, 1995), and other Asian examples (see Carey, 2007; Sila-Khan, 1997, cited in Subrahmanyam, 2015).

In this context, it is important to note that Taubes sees a sharp break between Judaism and the Greece of antiquity, which scholars of the axial age have tended not to emphasize (Bellah, 2011; Bellah and Joas, 2012; Eisenstadt, 2008, 2012; Jaspers, 1953 [1949]). This contrast leads Taubes in a direction that is very different from evolutionary and quasi-evolutionary accounts of the axial age as the onset of ‘modern rationality’. The emphasis on this break and on the difference between the two traditions also contrasts with homogenizing depictions of ‘the West’ in the critical literature. For Taubes, the Islamic tradition is modern, whereas Aristotle is not.

According to Taubes, apocalypticism introduces a relatively new opposition between ‘God’ on the one hand and the ‘world’ on the other hand, which represents an audacious sorting when compared to the localized ways in which sacred and profane are distributed in older traditions, and also when compared to sacralized or teleological notions of nature or the cosmos. In this way of thinking, ‘the world is a totality which keeps itself distinct from the divine, forming its own autonomy in relation to god . . . the world is that which stands in opposition to God, and God is that which stands in opposition to the world’ (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 10)

Taubes highlights the holism in the notion of ‘the world’ when ‘God’ and ‘the world’ are opposed; this also seems to create an invitation not only to affix the attributes of ‘real’ and ‘not real’ to these entities but also to allocate the labels ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Indeed, the very opposition raises the world as a whole as a problem. The ‘entire world’ is labelled negatively; the world is negated ‘in its fullness’ (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 9). The opposition invites a rejection of and contempt for the world, which has been a recurring but not constant theme in cultural history since.

When humans think about themselves within this opposition between ‘world’ and ‘God’, they find themselves in-between. ‘In the world seen as history, mankind stands in the middle between God and the world. As far as the world is concerned he is oriented entirely toward God; as far as God is concerned, he is oriented entirely toward the world’ (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 19). The world is alien to the part that seeks God. ‘The theme of self-alienation is to be heard for the first time in the context of apocalypticism. Alienness or exile [die Fremde] is the first great base word of apocalypticism . . . the common ground is God’s alienation from the world and the ensuing self-alienation experienced by mankind’ (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 26).

The sharp separation of ‘God’ as a whole and ‘world’ as a whole raises the question of how the two can be brought together again; the ‘contradiction between godless world and the idea of a godly kingdom’ gives rise to questions about the eschaton, which can be the site of intense hopes and fears. ‘The mixture inherent in this world enables the drama of redemption because the mixture is caused by the Fall, which is synonymous with self-estrangement’ (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 29). Taubes argues that this leads to the emergence of ‘history’ itself, which is conceived as ‘the middle between creation and redemption’ (Taubes, 2009, [1947]: 13) and a struggle between good and evil.

The rejection of the world in apocalyptic thinking is a basis of the ‘revaluation of values’, the creation of cultural value in opposition to the values of the world, which Taubes remained interested in for all his life. The apocalyptic god ‘is not beyond this world [überweltlich] but essentially against this world [gegenweltlich]’ (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 39).

This raises the question of worldly rule in particular ways. Existing institutional arrangements can be rejected along with ‘the world’; Taubes discusses Israelites’ and Bedouins’ opposition against human rule, their ‘belligerence against social order’ (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 19). Apocalyptic thinking is antinomic and anarchic, indeed nihilistic with regard to the values of ‘this world.’ Religion thus emerges as a threat to existing orders, as a counter-religion (Assmann, 1997, 2003; Bellah, 1964) for the first time, a possibility that is not visible from a functionalist perspective on religion.

The new religions are opposed to the world and to worldly rule, but counter-religion does become part of projects of governance. Indeed, one way to rebel against rule that is labelled as ‘merely’ of this world is theocracy. ‘Theocracy is built upon the anarchical elements in Israel’s soul. It expresses the human desire to be free from all human, earthly ties and to be in covenant with God’ (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 19). The law given by God claims authority over the details of individual conduct as well as over communal affairs in opposition to the world and worldly rule.

The tension between established authority and claims towards an order that is radically in opposition and is indeed defined simply by that opposition can thus recur within the world defined by the new counter-religions as ‘against the world’. The nomic element of religion is opposed to worldly law. Both can be opposed with the messianic.

Taubes reads Jesus as part of an apocalyptic wave within Judaism, positioned in opposition to the world shaped at his time by the Roman Empire and, in line with elements of the Jewish tradition itself, opposed to Jewish law. The rejection of the world is evident in Jesus’ demands for his followers to cut ties with their previous lives and in his rejection and revaluation of established categories, such as, very prominently, the categories of ‘rich’ and ‘poor’. It has been tempting to read these passages as a socially revolutionary message, and this is a plausible reading that has had its own effects, but more fundamentally, for Taubes, the revaluation of categories serves Jesus to mark the break from the world for himself and his followers.

In the history that follows the apocalyptic innovations, nomic authority is threatened by the messianic fear and hope of a fundamental change in the status of the world. Messianic authority is threatened by the power of the everyday, the push and pulls from the secular world, and by the non-occurrence of the messianic or apocalyptic event. In Taubes’s reading, Jesus himself is beginning to negotiate the fact that the world has not ended after his trip to the desert. According to Taubes, the gospel shows Jesus gradually shifting to a story that is about his personal sacrifice. In the centuries that follow, the question of the end of the world and a reunification with God becomes transferred to questions about the individual soul (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 72), which is helpful for the establishment of the church as an institution of the world.

Taubes traces these tensions forward to Joachim de Fiore, Thomas Müntzer (see Bloch, 1921), and then Hegel, Marx and Kierkegaard. At the time of Taubes’s writing, it was not new to point to the religious and messianic elements in Marx, which Marx himself consciously played with, but Taubes goes beyond the usual polemics. Taubes makes the link between the cultural message of Marxism and the broader context of anti-bourgeois cultural movements in the 19th century, pointing also to similarities with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in this regard. This bears some similarity with the account of ‘cultural Marxism’ by later conservative critics (Bloom, 1987), which also has echoes on the political right today. But Taubes’s account traces these rejections of the ‘ordinary world’ back much further, which guards against a conservative story of a modern fall from Christian virtues. Taubes also does not reject or denounce Marx but rather situates his form of eschatology in the context of other versions of eschatology and in the context of the radical alternative of cosmotheism.

The Long History of Key Aspects of Modernity

Like other classical and early post-classical authors (Knöbl, 2017), Taubes does not use the term ‘modern’ other than as an adjective describing events he sees as roughly contemporaneous to him. He had studied the work of Max Weber closely with Rene Koenig before writing Eschatology. In later talks, he would also import elements of a Frankfurt School-style analysis of the loss of individuality and freedom associated with capitalism, but he never integrated these elements within the terms established in his earlier work.

While it would thus be somewhat misleading to say Taubes offers a theory of modernity, Eschatology does discuss phenomena and trends that others have described as part of the core of what is modern. It is therefore not hard to establish a dialogue between the book and theories of modernity. The book offers an account of some key features of modernity that dates their origins to around 1400 BC. This is considerably longer than the – already very long – time frames of other narratives of ‘modernity’, including ‘colonial modernity’, but does not entirely lack analytical and historical specificity and can, as I shall argue in the conclusion, be a stepping stone towards greater measures of both.

The resonance of the innovations of the Hebrew Bible, which Taubes highlights, with phenomena that feature prominently in discussions about modernity is perhaps clearest for the case of the ‘modern’ conception of history. This conception is usually characterized as ‘linear’ by contrast to cyclical conceptions of time and is usually dated to the late 18th century (Konersmann, 2004, 2006; Koselleck, 2002, 2004; Trüper et al., 2015). History, it is argued, is newly imbued with a sense of direction in this period – hence the idea of progress, which is so prominent in the 19th century. The new prominence of issues of change and development and of notions of the future can be seen to take up versions of eschatology, as Löwith (1991 [1941]) has also argued.

Philosophers have tried to formulate positions that highlight the difference between eschatology and ideas about progress (Blumenberg, 1983 [1966]; Jaeggi, 2023), but from the perspective of a sociology of culture, it is also worthwhile to diagnose the similarities while continuing to rethink the opposition between cyclical notions of time and progress in terms of the range of options within the non-cyclical and how they relate to eschatology. Taubes himself does acknowledge the specificity of the 19th century in a passage that also raises questions about and begins to offer an account of how different cultural elements coexist and codevelop: ‘Apocalypticism 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’ (Taubes, 2009 [1947]: 35).

This emphatic notion of history raises the question as to what is at the centre of that history, which brings me to the second aspect of modernity, which Taubes discusses. What is the entity or subject undergoing that history? The notion of history seems to almost require a notion of totality, which both in Marxian accounts and in anti-Marxian accounts is often traced back only as far as Marx. Yet it is clearly also the totality of Hegel, and Taubes convincingly traces this Hegelian notion back to the separation between ‘God’ on the one hand and ‘world’ on the other hand: The opposition between God and world is the basis for the abstraction involved in construing the resulting totality.

The strong opposition between ‘world’ and ‘God’ and the rejection of the world can, thirdly, be connected to new forms of critique. The opposition between ‘world’ and ‘God’ can be replicated as an opposition between ‘world and false ideas’, on the one hand, and ‘true ideas’, on the other hand, with the true ideas being as radical a break with the false world as possible. It is the possibility of the total rejection of the world, together with the promise of total salvation, that invite programmes that reimagine the world as a whole. This maps on to what historians describe as the distinction between pre-modern and modern critique at the turn of the 19th century (Jung, 2012). This often entails the explicit demand that we do not consider ethical consequences within the world or dilemmas that arise from them (Cohn, 1961; Eisenstadt, 1999, 2012; Weber, 1999).

Jan Assmann, who was heavily influenced by Taubes but does not usually acknowledge this, has most explicitly emphasized the intolerance of the new monotheistic religions (Assmann, 2003, 2005b), which was new in a context of polytheistic and cosmotheistic coexistence whereby other people’s gods were accepted more matter-of-factly. This absolutism is a feature not only of some religious ideas but more generally of modern ‘ideologies’. Taubes’s account of theocracy resonates with accounts of totalitarianism, which Arendt (1951), among others, was to describe as a specifically modern phenomenon.

Fourthly, some of the features attributed to the modern state, notably its ‘sovereignty’, also appear less new when considering Taubes’s account. Modern sovereignty is described as uniquely absolutist – in 1576, Jean Bodin uses the term to conceptualize an ‘absolute’ and ‘undivided’ form of power, which he thought the French state at the time had and which he thought it should have because he saw it as an answer to internal conflict (Bodin, 1955 [1576]). This idea of absolute authority recurs in self-descriptions of the state, in justifications of the modern state, such as Hobbes’s (2017 [1651]) or Schmitt’s, and in sociological accounts of the state (Arendt, 1951; Bauman, 1993; Scott, 1998; Weber, 1994 [1919]).

The new counter-religions establish a form of authority that stands in opposition to the world and rejects compromise with the world. Precisely because of its initial opposition to the world and with that to ordinary and established norms and forms of rule, they can be argued to be at the origin of ideas about sovereignty. If the world is bad and to be rejected as a whole, sovereignty is needed in defence against this bad world. Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ can then be read as one specific version of what the world, as the problem to be overcome, is (Taubes, 2017; Zeitlin, 2017). The state in Bodin, Hobbes, Schmidt and its own ideology can also be read as the katechon, that which, according to Paul, is in the way of a bad ending, that is between us and the Anti-Christ, that which is ‘halting, pausing, deferring’ the end and derives its absolutist claims from this extreme vision (Croce de Wilde, 2013; Hell, 2009; Prozorov, 2012; Schmitt, 2003). Both the rejection of the world in service of absolute salvation and the prevention of the end of the world justify a distancing from and to some extent a nihilism towards the values of the world. The state can then be opposed again with reference to alternative forms of sovereignty that are no less absolute in their rejection of the world.

The separation of ‘God’ and the ‘world’, lastly, facilitates modern science. Taubes also highlights the conditions of possibility for the emergence of scientism, the absolutist version of a belief in science, which seems to be particularly strong in discussions about science at some remove from actual scientific practices. Modern science breaks with antique notions of the divinely infused cosmos. Assmann speaks of the ‘emphatic concept of truth’ associated with monotheism, which can be transferred to science and its defense (Assmann, 2010: 3). There are clear parallels between scientism and uniquely monotheistic fundamentalisms in the lack of tolerance of ambiguity, the sensitivity to criticism, the anger unleashed at sceptics and the creation of absolutist claims in the name of particular schools or traditions. Some aspects of scientism are better modelled by the figure of the katechon rather than the eschaton. Science here is not hopeful and believing in progress, but rather driven by fear; defending itself and demanding support so as to impede disaster.

Conclusions

Jacob Taubes explores the social and intellectual consequences of a strong dividing line between ‘God’, on the one hand, and ‘world’, on the other hand, which he sees introduced in the Hebrew Bible. His description of the intellectual patterns associated with this dividing line echo with patterns often emphasized as new, starting at some point after the early 16th century.

What changes as a result of this long story that can also be told about some of the phenomena associated with modernity? What was, or what is, modernity? Following Assmann’s explication of his own position, we can read Taubes’s account as having identified the modern as a cultural ‘moment’ or ‘element’, rather than a ‘historical turn’, a cultural option, not a ‘state of affairs’ that can be assumed to dominate any particular period (Assmann, 2003: 50).

If we read Taubes’s account of apocalypticism as an analysis of the modern as an element of culture rather than a period, this element is analytically separated from any particular time period, from a particular geographical context and from any particular cultural formation. Particular time periods, particular geographical contexts and particular cultural formations are in turn analytically separate from this moment.

The modern, in this view, has only a contingent link with capitalism (or colonialism) and is not defined by the ascription of modern features to ‘the West’ as opposed to the non-West. The association between ‘the modern’ and ‘the West’ is a feature of orientalist discourses, which has initially been analysed by postcolonial critics (Chakrabarty 2000, Said, 1979). Despite Said’s warning to the contrary, it is now repeated, with inverted valuations, also among some critics of ‘Western modernity’. In Taubes’s perspective, classical Greek philosophy is not part of the modern; Islam is as modern as Christianity, though both come in varied instantiations that are always complex mixtures of different elements, modern and less modern.

In Taubes’s analysis the modern and the messianic are not opposed to each other. This is in contrast to some contemporary positions that celebrate the messianic as an alternative to modern notions of progress. Counter-movements that draw on the denunciation of the world as whole and the emphatic celebration of notions of absolute alternatives are resting on versions of eschatology that are also part of state projects, as discussed above, and of capitalism (Beckert, 2016). Different versions of the modern are rather analytically opposed to cosmotheistic and polytheistic cultural elements and their secularized versions.

This point has implications for thinking about cultural history or historical sociology most broadly and for thinking about modernity as a period more specifically. Most of these come in the form of further questions, which require both theoretical and empirical specification. It is clear that the highlighting of this long story about the modern as an element of culture makes it important to ask about the links that this cultural element enters into with other cultural elements, but also with specific institutional contexts. If messianic thinking is a cultural element, it exists in different versions in specific authors and movements; it coexists in complex ways with other cultural elements, including different versions of the cosmotheism it opposes.

The modern as an element of culture is connected to humanity’s highest aspirations and is at the same time potentially highly destructive. I have noted the link to ideas about progress and history, science and radical social change. We can also note the links between the messianic and violence. The opposition between world and god can lead to a radical rejection of the world, which not only can lead to a rejection of the ordinary ethical norms of this world, but indeed can establish a duty to ignore them. These features of the modern lend a certain urgency to the otherwise very academic agenda of mapping how the modern is shaped, directed, mediated and mitigated in different historical and institutional contexts.

Some implications about this way of conceptualizing the modern for our thinking about the historical period commonly referred to as modernity can be anticipated. In emphasizing the discontinuity between the Hebrew Bible and the cultural alternatives at the time of its creation, Taubes relativizes the importance of other historical breaks and cultural distinctions. The changes in European societies around 1500 or around 1900 are less of a break than they appear in other accounts, because important underlying cultural patterns precede those moments and continue to be negotiated.

Taubes makes it clear that the problem of the messianic continues to be negotiated in Christianity long after the messiah was supposed to have arrived (Weinman and Reed, 2022). This perspective highlights the tensions within the order of medieval Europe. Medieval Europe has been portrayed as stable and unchanging to better serve as a foil for sociological theories of modernity and for critical theory but has, of course, experienced change, including religious change and periods of intense religious and political violence.

The history of modernity also appears as much less stable than is assumed by conservative, liberal or many radical approaches. If Durkheim looks to religions or ideas as a source of stability for societies, critics, like Asad, also play down differences and tensions within modernity. Critics of Western modernity can tend to reveal a flattened version of ‘Protestantism’ as a stand-in for Christianity under the secular façade, thereby underplaying the continuing force of radical religious elements (Bialecki, 2015; Howell, 2014). Modernity, which liberals hail as an end goal and conservatives and radicals can portray as a relatively stable opponent, appears as riven by deep cultural conflicts and destructive and indeed self-destructive elements.

In the contemporary moment, there is no shortage of examples of violence with distinctively modern characteristics; there is also a widespread sense of a new and distinctive dis-embedding and perhaps re-embedding of the destructive side of the modern, which can be examined critically through more thorough comparative investigation in future research.

By way of notes towards that research, I note that the ‘overcoming’ of ordinary norms is a feature of violence normalized in the name of state sovereignty and nationalism, but also of resistance against it. I have discussed that, within eschatological thinking, the state can be seen as the ‘katechon’, that which is in the way of a bad end of the world. The absolute authority of a protector against threats that are portrayed as extreme and can be specified with a certain degree of flexibility is already used to justify forms of state violence. Following Taubes’s analysis, we can also see how state violence can become especially extreme when the state takes on the role of the hastener of the good end, as has been the case when state institutions have been captured by absolutist ideologies.