@riyeff @BremenBod @MassimoFaggioli Ultimately, the arc ripens into a messianic claim—judgment, mercy, liberation—that gathers up and surpasses Abrahamic registers, reaching beyond “religion” altogether. Benjamin remains our patron saint in that regard, even as the image is now planetary, the text not yet in print.
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3/ Adorno rightly defined Benjamin as a thinker ‘standing apart from all tendencies’. Scholem held him as an almost canonical source, noting to Arendt, “just how far [his work] distances itself from every traditional conception of philosophy.” Why was he utterly ‘unclassifiable’? “In the idea of the messianic kingdom one finds the greatest image of history, on which infinitely profound relationships between religion and ethics are built. Walter said once: The messianic kingdom is always there. This insight contains the greatest truth – but only in a sphere which, to my knowledge, no one since the prophets has attained to.” - G. Scholem, Über Metaphysik, Logik und einige nicht dazu gehörende Gehiete phänomenologischer Besinnung. Mir gewidmet. 5, Oktober 1917–30. Dezember 1917, unpublished (61 pp.), p. 27 Tweets: 4/ Perhaps Benjamin put it best, describing his use of a kind of alchemical, theological-atheological fusion or emergent reconciliation catalyzed in the ‘sudden paradoxical change of one form of [religious or political] observance into the other (regardless of which direction)’. 5/ ..."the better to grasp the complex and subtle relationship between redemption and revolution in his philosophy of history" (Löwy), "mutually activating – or, rather, reactivating – one another, and together leading the charge against alleged historical necessity." (Ivernel)
Open original document@RichardRohrOFM Ungoverned by religion, nor rivaled by politics, incarnation detonates the wall between God and history, inaugurating a new stratum of reality for all to walk in, embodied as the common life of the world—kinship beyond every earthly throne: messianic reign without rule. Live it!
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Copy of tweets here: 9/ Benjamin may find his closest contemporary counterpart in the Iranian, Ali Shari’ati, who similarly affirms that neither politics nor religion alone suffice to furnish the world a means of liberation and redemption involving the fusion of their respective messianic traditions. The New Testament. Cayley: "What is revealed in the New Testament, according to Illich, is a summons beyond all cultural or religious containment." Quote tweet: 4/ Turning the page. "Jesus is not the creator of another religion but the victor over religion. He is not the maker of another law but the conqueror of law. He is the end of religion, above Christianity and non-Christianity." - #PaulTillich