Around Sinai — Ernst Jünger
It is not a monologue in which the intellect tests itself against matter and carries itself beyond it — no: the matter answers. The hand shapes the tool, and the tool shapes the hand. A third thing is always present. The call and its echo; neither would be possible without the rock face and the air.
The testimonies that remain — the bones, the shards, the ruins of temples and palaces — offer no more than clues. They resemble snapshots taken in the bustle of a marketplace. Only a single moment of its abundance has survived. And even if these fragments were complete, if they formed an unbroken series of skulls, or the layers of Knossos or Troy, we could merge them only into a rigid mosaic, and however countless the moments might be, they could be animated only into an artificial life. We comb the canyons for the bones of the dinosaurs, the graves for the mummies of kings, we decipher the oldest writings — yet they do not betray to us the secret of time. The knowledge remains fragmentary: bark, anatomy. The urn holds ash; the wine of the amphora has evaporated. This becomes especially clear in the moments when we sense the kinship concealed behind the transformations. Anyone who has ventured into the gamble of history is familiar with that pain.
Stone also answers. There is no form of matter so suited to history as stone; it belongs among its prerequisites. Wherever events became history, it is stone that bears witness above all. Cultures without metals are possible, but none without stone. Stone stands for endurance; it preserves the law. Even ore may be regarded as a kind of stone, a vein within the rock.
Since the earliest days, since the first dawn, stone has answered. The questions posed to it, the tasks demanded of it, are inherited and transformed with the cultures; it serves as hand axe, as cathedral, as repository of uranic energy. It has belonged to the human inventory ever since the first flake was struck from it. Fire, too, has burned on from the beginnings in which it was tended — no matter what dishes were cooked upon it.
With tools, with the hearth, with clothing, human beings appropriated functions that cosmos and nature bestow upon creatures as part of their endowment. The knowledge needed to procure these things is certainly developed and cultivated with labor, yet it first presupposes a new level of understanding.
The extraordinarily long and arduous development of knowledge and the abilities linked to it stands on a different side than the lightning-like flash of insight, yet on the same page. As a comparison, we might imagine ourselves sitting in a dark library that is suddenly illuminated. We now see the walls lined with books, all at once. Let us also assume that we already know how to read letters, just as the hominid knows how to use a club or a hand axe. But the texts are new: manuals for technical or even magical operations; even the rudiments would, in a pinch, require a thousand years of study. Yet they are readable, because light is present.
The lightning had to come first, the dazzling intrusion of light into time. In an instant, one sees and receives — through intuition in the spiritual realm, through conception in the maternal realm. Intueri means: to look at something in a special way, or also (Cicero): to regard with wonder. It presupposes that an object appears to the observer. Concipere means: to receive, to become pregnant, to take in.
Tools, fire, and clothing are obtained and at the same time withdrawn from nature; in the Garden of Eden they were not needed. Need, and with it necessity, began in the moment the fruit of knowledge was touched. That in the beginning there was perfection is a common assumption; among the Greeks the golden age is followed by the silver and the bronze. Their myths, however, attribute the creation of human beings partly to the gods and partly to the Titans. In part they are thus closer to Genesis, in part closer to our science. The creatures of Prometheus are struck by need from the very beginning. They dwell in sunless caves where they drift along in a dreamlike state until their creator and protector steals fire from heaven for them. With that, he incurs guilt; his role is similar to that of the serpent in Genesis.
That need provided the impulse for technological development is one of the standard explanations. But need alone cannot have sufficed to account for the unique character of human existence, because, bound as it is to life itself, it governs the actions not only of human beings but of all creatures. Nature grants them what is necessary of its own accord, yet need persists; it is always redistributed anew. It explains much, but not the special position that humanity has conquered. Certainly there is development here as well, yet some kind of divergence must have preceded it, through which a part of natural history was transformed into intellectual history, and moral aspects began to accompany the mere struggle for existence. With this, a fan unfolded that extended far beyond what was necessary, indeed came into contradiction with it. The granting of the necessary would not have required knowledge. The care for an existence like that “of the lilies of the field” lies within the domain of nature.
If, as we may assume, there were epochs of uniform earth warmth, something like an Amazonian climate, then body warmth must also have been constant. Hibernation, fur, feathers, brooding were unnecessary, as was the complicated apparatus that guarantees birds and mammals their blood warmth independent of external temperature. These were responses of life to harsher conditions of nature; yet they did not go beyond its bounds. They may explain ascents from the inconspicuous and great downfalls like that of the dinosaurs, but not the first fire, the first tool, to say nothing of the first moral doubt.
There is a difference between nature clothing human beings with a pelt and human beings providing themselves with one. Here a gap yawns open between nature and spirit. The study of behavior, especially of primates, can only widen this gap, not fill it. This is the basis of the aversion Goethe and Nietzsche felt toward apes; it resembles the discomfort before a distorted mirror image. It is the same in families: the closer the kinship, the more painfully one becomes aware of what is amiss. This sense of estrangement can be observed everywhere apes are put on display.
Nature has approached spiritualization in other, bolder attempts; puzzlingly, it was precisely here that the spark leapt across, igniting the torch. The subtle speculations tied to this proceed from human anatomy. Upright gait, opposable thumb, the formation of the speech organs—these are all taken from an inexhaustible arsenal and belong among the tools. They may exist without any spiritual performance, as in the idiot, or be at the service of the highest cultivation. And it is equally conceivable that this performance could make use of entirely different organs in order to realize itself. That would still remain within the sphere of technical experience and untouched by the supposition of an absolute spirit that is independent of organs.
It may be true that out of billions of possibilities the species humana came into being and that fortunate coincidences aided the process. Yet this still leaves open the question whether the lottery was fully drawn, and whether it does not contain other, perhaps even better winning numbers. Corresponding to this is the suspicion—indeed the conviction—of human beings that they have drawn a poor lot, the constant lament that accompanies their kind, which already found expression in the Ninetieth Psalm. Hence the longing for completion, which reason hopes for from the future and faith from the beyond.
Stone answers. When it first began to flake into obsidian points and blades, or to nestle into the hand in moss-green polish, spiritualization must already have progressed far. Illnesses announce themselves this way, as do stages of life, such as puberty. They bring new sufferings, new knowledge. What previously appeared as brother and sister deepens in a powerful way. At the same time a loss is felt, heralding itself as suffering, grief, guilt. Origen holds that creation is a precipitation from a higher into a lower state of being.
When a path within nature goes astray, destruction threatens. Life withers or languishes. In the state of knowledge, going astray is felt as guilt; this sense of guilt accompanies, more or less, every Promethean act. It must be atoned for through sacrifice. This is also the question posed today in relation to the environment.
The great dawns are difficult to grasp; the curtain has not yet risen behind which perception moves in different layers. They are more akin to dreams than to day.
In his commentary, Delitzsch describes Genesis as “an inexhausted sea of knowledge,” and one might add: indeed an inexhaustible one. It deserves this because it has always convinced the faithful, inspired artists, given scholars much to ponder, and because, like an abyss into which the intellect scarcely dares approach, it awakens fear and terror.
The vision of a Dante, Michelangelo, Milton, Klopstock, Handel comes closer to the mystery than the problematic that, since antiquity, has repeatedly been brought to Genesis by laymen and theologians, the orthodox and the enlighteners, enthusiasts and eccentrics, philologists, historians, mythologists, and textual critics—each according to the aims and aversions of their time.
Much ingenuity has been devoted to the documentary hypothesis, whose modern founder, Astruc, the personal physician of Louis XIV, entered the history of textual criticism. He was, as Goethe put it, the first to “apply knife and probe to the Pentateuch.” In a treatise published in Brussels in 1753, he sought to demonstrate that Moses composed Genesis out of two main documents, supplemented by ten additional versions.
This documentary hypothesis, which also occupied Herder, was placed alongside the fragment hypothesis, which regarded the Pentateuch as a mosaic of fragments by various authors. The supplementation theory attempts to arrange this diversity chronologically by assuming an original “source” that experienced revisions and additions. This seems all the more plausible since a temporally indeterminable succession of oral traditions must have preceded the fixing of the text in writing.
In contrast, Delitzsch, like Ranke, appeals to the living unity of Scripture. Before its compelling force, dates and orientations grow pale. This is the standard that also determines the relationship between any great work of art and its critics. As everywhere doubt arises, Hamann proves unshakable here as well. In many places, particularly in connection with Revelation, he discusses the relation of origin and science, as in the following:
”Just as all forms of unreason presuppose the existence of reason and its misuse, so must all religions have a relation to the faith in a single independent and living truth, which, like our existence, must be older than our intellect, and therefore cannot be known through the genesis of the latter, but only through a direct revelation of the former.
Because (still used in the sense of ‘while’) our reason draws the material of its concepts merely from the external relations of visible, sensible, unstable things — the ground of religion lies in our entire existence and beyond the spheres of our cognitive powers, which, taken together, constitute the most accidental and abstract modus of our existence. Hence the mythical and poetic vein of all religions, their folly and aggravating appearance in the eyes of a heterogeneous, incompetent, ice-cold, scrawny philosophy, which brazenly ascribes to its educational art the higher purpose of our dominion over the earth.”
In the letters falsely attributed to Pope Clement I, which are especially instructive because of their Gnostic influences, Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch is denied; the books are said to have been composed five hundred years after him, repeatedly burned, repeatedly edited, and falsified.
These falsifications, though attributed to the devil, were nonetheless sanctioned by God “so that the disposition of men might be revealed.” For everyone finds in Scripture what is appropriate to them and is thus recognized. The cunning of this arrangement is entirely credible in a Master who tends the tree of knowledge and the serpent in his garden. This was a stumbling block for many, which they only imperfectly overcame. Pseudo-Clement seeks to solve the problem by assuming interpolations inserted into the holy texts through satanic guile.
It is more likely, however, that Moses himself produced the contradiction by imperfectly issuing the documents. The “stumbling block” would then have remained in the text as a witness to an older world. The impression of “rumor,” from which we cannot entirely free ourselves even today, would be caused by elements he left intact. Thus colors shine through overpainted images.
Such ideas were especially advanced by the Gnosis, the highly branched movement of early Christianity, which interwove oriental imagery and philosophical—especially Platonic—problems with Scripture. Studying its numerous sects is like walking through a gallery of images; Flaubert spent years on it. Time and again, one encounters the Demiurge, the master craftsman. He works on coarse material, which remains beset with imperfections. Gnostics like Marcion therefore attributed to him the origin of evil.
The Demiurge, then, does not act as the true Lord, but as an intermediary, at best as a steward who does not master the secret of the garden.
It is not surprising that individuals and sects arose who interpreted the Fall as a misstep of the gardener. The freedom granted by the tree of knowledge is difficult to reconcile with perfection. That such ideas arose precisely in the early Christian centuries is no coincidence, for it was then that the innocence once extended to the gods, along with their faults, was lost; this applied not only to Olympus and the hierarchies bordering the Mediterranean, but also to the Lord of the Old Testament.
Through such reinterpretations, the serpent in particular found its justification. Various Gnostic sects took it up. It was venerated in mystery cults—materially as earth and goddess mother, spiritually as a symbol of the world-spirit winding through all physical and dialectical opposites. That it taught humanity the distinction between good and evil, the Ophites praised as an invaluable service.
On the other hand, the terror its image evokes is incomparable; and it is clear that the natural snake must serve as its proxy. Even the harmless snake inspires an inexplicable, profound fear.
Did Moses, besides the documents that reached him by whatever means, also benefit from the general rise of the flood of images that characterized the era? The personal intercourse of gods with humans is peculiar to the mythical age—“Christ, however, is the end” (Hölderlin).
We must regard the Pentateuch, with de Wette, as “the theocratic epic of the Hebrews,” and Yahweh as equal to the Homeric deities. This view is also approached by G. A. H. von Ewald, one of the “Göttingen Seven,” Orientalist and theologian, a congenial figure to Hammer-Purgstall. Already at twenty he published his Composition of Genesis.
“That the divine appears actively and visibly in history is precisely the peculiarity of the Hebrew myth; it is of no use to deny that the Hebrew saga thereby approaches the manner of pagan mythology.”
A breath of the epoch, especially of its manifest force, must have touched Moses. Just as mountains seem closer before a föhn wind, so there are times when images draw near. Yet the otherness—or indeed the uniqueness—of Moses is unmistakable; it sets him apart from the infinite fertility of the worlds of the gods and their mythical retinues, even in late antiquity and contemporary India.
In contrast, what astonishes and terrifies about Moses is the captivating power that denies all contradiction. The law is received on stone tablets in the desolation of Sinai.
The monolithic rigidity is a hallmark of the ancient Orient, already present in the black diorite stele erected by Hammurabi half a millennium before Moses. It reappears in pyramids and obelisks, intensified by a special atmosphere, the impression of a vacuum. It is not a stylistic form, but the transformation of rock, immediately before it begins to speak or to yield water. The purpose is the same: magical stillness during the incantation, tense expectation before the curtain rises.
In lapidary art, there is less a style than a fundamental stage of spiritual evolution. It is expected that the stone will respond from a kind of puppet-like repose. This can happen “late,” as before the Kaaba, or “early,” as in Aztec Mexico. Presumably, the arrival of the “White Gods” there affected the imprint of one of the great civilizations, yet more profoundly undermined its generative power.
The extraordinary aspect of Moses is not so much his power to transcend time as his power to bind it. The staff transforms, and it enchants. The serpent moves and injects venom. It kills in motion, yet whoever lifts their eyes to its image remains unharmed. This enters into the fate of the people: the Red Sea ebbs and flows according to how Moses raises his hand. The sun stands still at Gibeon.
The serpent freezes: “Then he stretched out his hand, and it became a staff in his hand.” This is a true initiation, the triumph over time. The staff will guide through the Red Sea; it will strike water from the rock.
Time can be bound. This does not yet mean the overcoming of death; death is not conquered, it is suspended. Were the Jews no longer a Semitic people, they would long since have been absorbed into the melting pot of the Near East. That they are more than this—that has always been valued by themselves and their enemies. They are not only a Semitic people; they are the Mosaic people.
A great beginning simultaneously sets a significant end; every gain is reflected on the side of loss. The lapidary quality of Moses’ figure is also evident in the fact that with him a standstill is imposed. From the great host of gods, one becomes sovereign: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
If one accepts the idea that Moses benefited from a turning point in time—namely, that in which gods appeared in human form and interacted with heroes—then, on the other hand, one must not overlook his claim to sole rule. By choosing, he limits. The other gods are not yet denied, but they are negated. This signifies the pruning of the infinite abundance of the mythical world to a single eye, a mighty drive.
In this sense, Moses is the first demythologizer, a spirit who began his work with extraordinary force and carried it through, not only against the resistance of foreign peoples but also of his own. The journey to the Promised Land is a story of miracles and relapses.
The relapses: these are the uprising of images against the spirit. One must imagine the presence of images along the Nile Valley as immensely strong. Yet it was not through them that the people relapsed; they were not intrinsic to them. Their idol was not the bull, as venerated in Memphis, but as it was sacred in Ugarit, Tyre and Byblos, Nippur and Babylon.
Aaron knew immediately, when the people demanded a visible god, how it should be formed. Remarkable is Moses’ behavior after discovering the sacrilege: he crushes the Golden Calf into powder, scatters it on water, and gives it to the people to drink. This recalls procedures in modern medicine, for example vaccination: disease is prevented through the administration of traces of its own substance.
If we imagine the power of images and contrast it with the triumph gained over them, this allows a conclusion about the force of the encounter that must have preceded it. It cannot be attributed solely to a progress in abstraction.
Even the patriarchs were familiar with dealings with their Lord. He remained within the bounds of the pastoral life, of which similar accounts are still reported today. Only Jacob’s nocturnal wrestling with the deity at the ford of the Jabbok can be regarded as a preliminary flood. Mosaic is the mighty influx of pneumatic power. It creates the claim and the separation that are experienced as a grievance by foreigners, until Titus disperses the people. As a god among gods, Yahweh was no problem for the Romans, but as the only one, he was.
The peculiarity of the Mosaic law lies in the close connection of pneumatic and spermatic characters; grace and mission remain restricted to the chosen people. Christianity broke through the spermatic barrier, as the dream of Peter concerning the consumption of unclean animals so vividly demonstrates. Thus, on the basis of the Mosaic, a second, Christian demythologization begins, the now worldwide overthrow of gods.
“God himself became a Jew,” said Nietzsche. “Christ, however, is the end”: Hölderlin.
At Sinai, the claim of the Father becomes absolute. Here he is the sole God; elsewhere he appears with a great retinue of gods, heroes, and mythical figures. Like Zeus, and if one were to place an equal alongside Moses, then Heracles. Although vastly different in form, they are epochally related.
Both are thoroughly patriarchal. Both are conquerors of serpents: Heracles already crushes the snakes sent by Hera, daughter of the Earth Mother, against him in the cradle. Both are conquerors of bulls; this is especially evident in the seventh labor of Heracles: the seizure of the favorite bull tended by King Minos in Crete. Both are rams in the astrological sense. Heracles sets out with the crew of the Argo to capture the Golden Fleece in Colchis, where Jason tames the fire-breathing bulls of the volcano.
The “horns” of Moses are said to be due to a translation error: facies cornuta instead of coronata—this may be correct, yet one should not simply assume a gain through error. We also find such echoes in nature and language, although they cannot be justified either historically or spiritually. They connect, as in dreams, without reason, not as stages of development, but as motives of composition. In any case, the horns belong to Moses, and specifically those of the ram, ideally just emerging from the forehead, as art has often depicted them.
“Heracles is like princes.” Just as Moses precedes the prophet and the Messiah, so Heracles precedes kings and the Caesar. Power and knowledge as princely and priestly mandates—these are the two great, widely branching, and often intersecting, yet rarely united veins that myth pours into the historical world. When they run dry, events too must change the meaning in which they were once history.