Between Religion and Religiosity: Between the Death and Resurrection of God

Abstract

The main thesis presented in this article rejects the identification of the “death of God” idea with atheism. Atheism is a metaphysical claim stating that the signifier God has no signified. By contrast, the “death of God” notion conveys a moment of crisis in believers’ lives where the God that had been present in their lives is dead. The “death of God” idea led, on the one hand, to the negation of God’s relevance in human life, as presented by Nietzsche, and, on the other, to its perception as a constitutive moment for religion itself due to God’s presence in the believer’s inner life, as outlined by Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, and others. Both approaches agree on the crucial role of religiosity, whether or not it has a transcendent object. This analysis challenges the dichotomy claiming that, on the one hand, believers cannot accept the idea of the death of God and, on the other hand, those who endorse the death of God negate the idea of religiosity.

1. The Early History of the Death of God

The death of God idea is sometimes viewed as challenging faith in God, but Georg Friedrich Hegel notes that the “death of God” is a meaningful notion within Christianity:

“God Himself is dead,” as it is said in a Lutheran hymn; the consciousness of this fact expresses the truth that the human, the finite … is itself a divine moment … the finite, the negative, is not outside of God, and that in its character as otherness it does not hinder unity with God; otherness, the negation, is consciously known to be a moment of the Divine nature. The highest knowledge of the nature of the Idea of Spirit is contained in this thought.

(Hegel 1895, p. 98)

The death of God that Hegel speaks of is the crucifixion of Jesus, referring to the Lutheran interpretation of the central event in the history of Christianity. This interpretation involved a controversy hinging on whether it was God who had died or, as the Orthodox believed, only the human embodiment of God—the son. Hegel cites the Lutheran hymn of Johannes Rist stating that God had died—the passion and the death were indeed God’s (Williams 1992, p. 57, n. 34). According to Hegel, this is not only a historical–religious event that happened in the past but one that reflects the movement of the spirit, which is basically manifested in the displacement of the transcendent to the immanent. What is perceived as outside the spirit is contained, in a process at once historical and epistemological, within the spirit. The death of God, then, implies that the immanent movement of history, culture, and knowledge replaces the transcendent aspect of the divine. Hegel understands that the term “God” denotes, above all, his transcendent otherness. Hence, the historical–cultural and epistemological process through which the transcendent element is revealed as immanent—that is, as an act of the spirit—implies the death of God. Hegel holds that the death of God is the death of natural, metaphorical thought about God. The God of this thought must die so that the God of knowledge can come to life in the depth of human consciousness (Hegel 1977, pp. 475–76).

Hegel’s analysis neither negates nor destroys the significance of Christianity. Hegel ascribes eternal value to the “death of God” in the crucifixion, which is independent of its actual historical occurrence since God’s death is not perceived as a dismissal of the eternal divine foundation (Crites 1982, p. 51). Indeed, Hegel emphasizes that the death of God as a historical–cultural process implies that the finite is also a moment in the eternal, in the infinite. The crucifixion, then, is not only the movement of the infinite toward the finite but also implies an acknowledgment of the value of the infinite within the finite. For Hegel, the divine itself turns to the human; the divine, the infinite, is realized in the finite, in the concrete, in its death (Fackenheim 1982, p. 140), and Hegel can therefore argue that “the finite is itself a divine moment.” Not only was Christianity not weakened, then, but it indeed became the quintessential manifestation of the perfect synthesis between the finite and the infinite (Wyschogrod 1985, pp. 141–42). Religion, then, rather than a random human creation liable to disappear, represents a key moment in the history of the spirit—the mediation between the infinite and the finite. The products of history and culture thus bear absolute value.

Pointing out that the “death of God” was not a recent invention, Hegel cites Blaise Pascal in Pensées: “For nature is such that she testifies everywhere, both within man and without him, to a lost God and a corrupt nature” (Pascal 1954, p. 124). The death of God, then, was not a new crisis in the nineteenth century. God had already been dead for centuries, ever since the human creature discovered that it was a sovereign subject, an ego cogito whose knowledge conditions everything.

Although Hegel relates to Pascal, Buber justly argues that Nietzsche, Pascal, and Hegel “actually mark three very different stages on one road” (Buber 1957, p. 20, note). Pascal speaks of a God that is lost to universal reality. It is not God as such that is lost but the natural, human reality that has lost him, though it can still find him by faith. Hegel, by contrast, uses the “death of God” notion to point to a world entirely void of God. This, then, is a new stage in God’s death. In the passage from Hegel cited above, the death of the Christian God is reinterpreted in a way that dictates the later use of the term. For Christians and Hegel himself, the “death of God” was meant to open the way to human redemption. Christians believe that God died to redeem humans, and Hegel believes that, in dying, God outlined the paradigm of the spirit. And yet, when Hegel speaks about the death of God in this passage, he deeply transforms this idea. Now, the death of God is not part of divine history but part of a cultural–historical process that makes God redundant. A traditional Christian doctrine is thus reversed and denied its theological–religious meaning.

Heinrich Heine takes a further step in the shaping of the death of God narrative. He grasps the spirit of Hegel’s statement and is well aware of the transformation that modern culture was undergoing. In an essay dealing with the history of religion and philosophy in Germany, Heine argues that, in the modern era, “the ultimate fate of Christianity thus depends on whether we still need it” (Heine 2007, p. 14). This statement fully reflects the transformation in the status of religion and God in the modern era. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the status of religion did not depend on the need it satisfied. Religion was binding because believers thought it embodied God’s word, and obedience to God and religion rested on the deep acknowledgment of an obligation of absolute compliance. The human–God relationship was constituted hierarchically and asymmetrically—God is the sovereign and humans are his subjects. Human fate was in God’s hands, and compliance, therefore, was unconditional. Now, however, the situation is reversed: humans have become sovereign. This reversal reshaped the status of religion and God: in order for God and religion to have a place in human life, they must satisfy a human need. The status of religion and God thus became permanently conditional, hence the assertion above: “The ultimate fate of Christianity thus depends on whether we still need it.” Without this human need for religion and God, they will disappear.

This statement by Heine reflects a deep modernist mood: the modern individual refuses to be a subject in God’s kingdom and aspires to be the sovereign. This aspiration does not necessarily dismiss religion and God but locates them in relation to the subject, who endows them with meaning. The recognition of sublimity in the divine, the human awe of the sacred, and the sense that we are dust and ashes vis à vis God are replaced by a new consciousness. This consciousness is not yet necessarily secular since human beings may still find room in their lives for God and religion, which supply their needs. However, it does clear the way for secularization in the profound sense of the term: the creation of spaces entirely unconditioned by religion and God, spaces that embody human sovereignty. This basic insight leads Heine to one of the earliest and deepest articulations of the “death of God.” In rhythmic sentences that probably influenced Nietzsche, Heine writes the following:

Our heart is full of terrible compassion—it is old Jehovah himself who is readying himself for death.—We have gotten to know him so well, from his cradle, in Egypt. … We saw him bid farewell to the playmates of his childhood … and become a small God-King in Palestine, over a poor shepherd people, living in his own temple palace. We saw later how he came into contact with Assyrian-Babylonian civilization and gave up his all-too-human passions, no longer spewed pure wrath and vengeance, or at least no longer went into rages about every little trifle.—We saw him emigrate to Rome, the capital city, where he gave up all national prejudice and proclaimed the heavenly equality of all peoples. With such splendid phrases, we saw him form a party in opposition to old Jupiter, intrigue long enough to come to power and rule from the Capitol over city and world, urbem et orbem.—We saw how he became even more ethereal, how he gently whined, how he became a loving father, a general friend of mankind, a benefactor of the world, a philanthropist—none of this could help him.

Do you hear the bell ringing? Kneel down—Sacraments are being brought to a dying God.

(ibid.)

The “death of God” notion is thus the succinct expression of a natural process, pointing to the empowering of immanence over transcendence. The human subject gradually expanded God’s transcendence to the point of making the divine redundant. As Peter Berger points out, Protestantism played a special role in this process through its description of God as a transcendent entity unconnected to the world, thereby giving rise to the secular space where God ceased to be relevant (Berger 1969).

2. The Death of God Between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard

A detailed description of the ancient history of the death of God exceeds my scope here (for an extensive discussion, see Sagi 2016, pp. 17–66). In this article, I relate to this notion as denoting a desire for God in tandem with a decision to remove God from the world. This depiction conveys two opposite instances of the “death of God” notion as outlined by two major thinkers—Søren Kierkegaard on the one hand and Friedrich Nietzsche on the other. According to Kierkegaard, the death of God means God’s removal from the world, a perception at the basis of religious belief. By contrast, according to Nietzsche, the death of God conveys the victory of humans over God—humans replaced God.

Despite the differences between these two thinkers, both acknowledge the distinction between religiosity and institutionalized religion. For both of them, the term religiosity denotes a subjective personal experience, while the term “religion” refers to the institutional system. Moreover, both acknowledge that the key existential human question touches on religiosity, and the belief in God is a fundamental challenge in human life. Beyond that, however, they part ways. For Kierkegaard, the death of God in the world is the moment of God’s resurrection in religious belief. In contrast, for Nietzsche, the death of God marks the moment that humans are liberated from the divine yoke and become the sovereign creators of themselves.

I open by presenting Kierkegaard’s position. For Kierkegaard, religiosity is a primary ontological stance—humans recognize their dependence on God. Kierkegaard develops Friedrich Schleiermacher’s view on this issue but clearly takes a turn. According to Schleiermacher, the feeling of infinite dependence on God conveys an unmediated human experience. By contrast, for Kierkegaard, this is an ontological position that is translated into an ethical–existential demand: people must realize this consciousness of dependence in their own lives.1 This inner recognition, however, is not necessarily realized in institutionalized religious life. Kierkegaard’s struggle against institutionalized religion, which spans all his writings, is an ongoing attempt to restore the religious desire that is both a primary foundation of life itself and a foundation of religious life. Since religiosity is a primal ontological element, it is recurrently realized in human existence in all contexts of life (see, at length, Sagi 2000). It expresses a basic component of human ontology and is, therefore, purportedly a foundation of institutionalized religious life.

In Kierkegaard’s view, religiosity dwells in the subject’s inner being: “religiousness is inwardness, that inwardness is the individual’s relation to himself before God” (Kierkegaard 1992, p. 436). Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the religious person’s inwardness rests both on his Protestant religious stance and his existential outlook. Religious individuals grapple with their inner life before God. For Kierkegaard, this characterization of the religious experience constitutes the basis of the religious thesis about the death of God. The “death of God” means that the center of gravity in religious life shifts from the world to the individual, from the objective to the subjective. Kierkegaard, who preceded Nietzsche, held that, from a religious perspective, the “death of God” means that the responsibility for God’s presence in the world shifts from God to humans. Human beings will determine whether God is alive or dead in their world:

Immanently (in the imaginative medium of abstraction) God does not exist or is not present—only for the existing person is God present, i.e., he can be present in faith … If an existing person does not have faith then [for him] God neither is nor is God present, although understood eternally God nevertheless eternally is.2

The thesis of the death of God, then, is not the concern of atheists or apostates; it is deeper in that it reverses the hierarchical order—human beings become sovereign under God (see also Sagi 2008, pp. 111–13).

This religiosity locates the individual’s inner relationship with God as the sole space for God’s presence in the world. Institutionalized religion is only the realization of the religious disposition, but this realization challenges religiosity because it implies the rendering of inner life in ecclesiastical terms. Kierkegaard unhesitatingly demands a makeover of the Christian world in order to revitalize religiosity, which he ranks higher than institutionalized religion: “Christianity is spirit; spirit is inwardness; inwardness is subjectivity; subjectivity is essentially a passion, and at its maximum an infinite, personally interested passion for one’s eternal happiness” (Kierkegaard 1992, p. 33).

According to Kierkegaard, religiosity is an existential, subjective human commitment expressing constant care and concern. In line with this approach, Paul Tillich clearly states, “Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements” (Tillich 1957a, p. 4). Tillich justifiably claims that Kierkegaard does not propose a philosophy of faith but a philosophy of existence where faith is the central concept when he determines that “religion is the true humanity” (Kierkegaard 1962, p. 108).

Simone Weil formulates Kierkegaard’s position in rather sharp terms: “A method of purification: to pray to God, not only in secret as far as men are concerned, but with the thought that God does not exist” (Weil 1952, p. 66). Weil, however, holds that prayer does have God as an addressee, but pure prayer is one where the worshipper assumes that God does not exist. The non-existence of God means God’s absolute absence as an object in the world. In Weil’s terms, “God can only be present in creation under the form of absence” (ibid., p. 161). Elsewhere, she writes, “God exists. God does not … I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion” (ibid., p. 167). A pure prayer, according to Weil, is one where humans do not objectify God. They pray to the unknown God and yet are sure of God’s existence.

Kierkegaard’s critics essentially claim that religious life is based on obedience to God rather than on subjective experience. Subjective religiosity makes humans the foundation of religious life, while religion places God at the center (see Garelick 1965, p. 59). Leaving aside the content of this critique, its importance lies in its recognition of religiosity as creating a problem for institutionalized religion by setting the individual before God: God is the entity that believers long for, but their longing is anchored in their inner experience, which is the foundation of religiosity, and not in the religious institution—the church.

Nietzsche, the thinker most closely identified with the “death of God” thesis, proposes a contrary position. The “death of God” stance is a fascinating attempt to characterize religiosity in a way that obstructs any possibility of its realization in institutionalized religion. It should not, however, be identified with an atheistic stance stating that the signifier God has no signified in reality. Atheists do not claim that God is dead and view religious faith as nothing more than a groundless superstition. By contrast, the signifier “death of God” relates to the personal experience of loss of faith in God as a moment of crisis and distress, which actually reveals the desire for God: “He who loved and possessed him most, he has now lost him the most also” (Nietzsche 1961, p. 272). God does not die because faith grows old. He does not die a natural death because secularization makes him superfluous. The death of God is a traumatic event in human life, tied to the angst and distress of those who “ran around the market crying incessantly: ‘I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!’” (Nietzsche 2001, p. 119). The search for God ends with a proclamation that God is dead or, more precisely, that humans have murdered him: “We have killed him—you and I. We are all his murderers” (ibid., emphasis in original).

Yet, God’s death is not necessarily the death of the desire to transcend beyond the human. The death of God enables the emergence of a pure, no longer limited, religious desire. Thus, the “old pope,” Zarathustra’s interlocutor, can tell him, “O Zarathustra, you are more pious than you believe, with such an unbelief! … Is it not your piety itself that no longer allows you to believe in a god?” (Nietzsche 1961, p. 274).

Camus describes the Nietzschean world after the death of God as cruel and dangerous, even if full of might and power. It leaves humans alone to dare:

Because his mind was free, Nietzsche knew that freedom of the mind is not a comfort, but an achievement that one aspires to and obtains, at long last, after an exhausting struggle … It can be said that Nietzsche rushes, with a kind of frightful joy, towards the impasse into which he methodically drives his nihilism. His avowed aim is to render the situation untenable to his contemporaries … The death of God accomplishes nothing and can only be lived through in terms of preparing a resurrection … He knew in fact that creation is only possible in the extremity of solitude and that man would only commit himself to this staggering task if, in the most extreme distress of mind, he must undertake it or perish.

(Camus 1953, pp. 62–63)

The death of God is indeed a trauma but necessary for shaping a creative life. But precisely because this is a trauma and a bleeding wound, it points to the power of metaphysical passion. The death of God does not destroy this passion—the individual struggles with it and against it in order to turn it into a constitutive foundation of a life striving to be divine.

Heidegger consistently points to the passion of Nietzsche’s search for God and directs attention to the madman’s opening sentence: “I seek God!” This madman, claims Heidegger, has nothing in common with the men “who do not believe in God.” They, argues Heidegger,

are not unbelievers because for them God, as God, has become unworthy of belief, but because they themselves have abandoned the possibility of faith since they are no longer able to seek God. They can seek no longer because they can no longer think … [They] have abolished thinking and replaced it with gossip … The madman, in contrast, is seeking God by crying out after God.

(Heidegger 2002, p. 199)

The madman, holds Heidegger, is one who yearns for the being. He is uncomfortable with the self-deception that explains everything. He experiences the terror of existence, which deconstructs all that had long ago been clear and intelligible. And it is precisely this terror that is the beginning of thought. Heidegger concludes his essay on Nietzsche with a question: Does the madman’s cry still resonate? (ibid.).

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche assume a tension between religiosity and religion. For Kierkegaard, this tension can be resolved. Believers, therefore, arrive at their destination and reach the object of their desire—God. For Nietzsche, however, the fact that God can no longer become an object of desire enhances the meaning of religiosity as an autonomous experience. Both thinkers delineate the space of the religiosity experience: its focus is the individual. Religiosity does not derive from religion and is not an offshoot of religious life. This approach contradicts the stance of many Christian believers who hold that human faith is attained through God’s grace, which resides in the church. Religiosity, as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche understand it, precedes the church and is not contingent on it. Humans will attain nothing without previous relevant experience. Furthermore, religiosity is an expression of the existential concern of individuals for themselves and their existence.

Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche shift the weight of religiosity to human immanence and the transcendence typical of human existence, which finds routine everyday life unsatisfactory. This transcendence, as Kojève points out, entails an element of self-negation that drives individuals beyond their particular concrete being and leads them to transcend it, conveying human existence itself (Kojève 1980, especially 3–8). For Nietzsche, this constant negation will purportedly lead to a transformation in the way we take a stand in immanent existence—humans will now replace God as the creator of the universe. By contrast, for Kierkegaard, latent in this transcendence is the connection between humans and their God. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche embody the two typical patterns of thought about religiosity—religiosity mediating religion (Kierkegaard) and religiosity rejecting religion (Nietzsche). However, no matter whether they affirm it or reject it, the element of institutionalized religion is present in their thinking. Both have Christianity in mind and set the concept of religiosity vis à vis this specific religion. Furthermore, both assume that religiosity, rather than being contingent on a particular historical religion, is an independent phenomenon.

3. Religion, Religiosity, and the Death of God: Simmel and Buber

A crucial reflective moment in the discourse on the relationship between religion and religiosity was the publication of Georg Simmel’s article “Fundamental Religious Ideas and Modern Science: An Inquiry” in 1909. In this article, Simmel characterizes religiosity, for the first time, as an epistemic and hermeneutical phenomenon, pointing out that “religiosity is a particular way of being” (Simmel 1997, p. 5). In his view, religiosity’s patterns of existence are not necessarily contingent on the object—God:

Just as an erotic person is always erotic in nature, whether or not he has created—or ever will create—an object of love, so too is a religious person always religious, whether or not he believes in God. What makes a person religious is the way in which he reacts to life in all its aspects, how he perceives a certain kind of unity in all the theoretical and practical details of life.

(ibid.)

Simmel devotes considerable effort to the characterization of religious existence, which he compares to other modes of human existence, such as that of the artist or the erotic person (ibid.). Religiosity is a feature of the person, a kind of fundamental attribute of the subject. Consequently, it can only be grasped by analyzing people’s subjectivity, that is, by analyzing how they relate to themselves, their experience, and the world. Individuals who are characterized by religiosity seek to transcend personal subjectivity toward certain kinds of demands and ideals, assume a stance that requires an all-encompassing point of view, and long for a spiritual life. Religiosity has a cognitive content that it creates and designs by itself and is not a fleeting emotion coursing through our life experience (ibid.).

But religiosity is realized not only in the cognitive space: “If religion is to have a significance clearly distinct from speculation, it is surely a state of being or happening within the part of the soul that belongs to us” (ibid., pp. 9–10, emphasis in original). The characteristics of religiosity are attributes of the individual:

Such a person not only has religion as possession or an ability. His very being is religious; he functions in a religious way, so to speak, just the human body functions organically. This state of being not only adopts religious dogma as its mere content, realized in various forms; it also adopts the specifiably detailed qualities of the soul: the feelings of dependence and hopefulness, humility and yearning … fear and distress, love and dependence, the desire for well-being on earth and eternal salvation.

(ibid., pp. 10–11)

Simmel’s study of religiosity is a crucial step in the extraction of religiosity from religious institutionalism. He cannot release himself completely from institutionalized religions, given the role they have played throughout human history in the realization of religious existence. Unlike Nietzsche, however, who held that religiosity can only be understood after it is liberated from the shackles of religion, Simmel found religiosity within institutionalized religion and pointed to its primal initial status.

Simmel strikes a delicate balance between the stance outlined by Kierkegaard, who sees a necessary connection between the religious experience and the object, and that of Nietzsche, who tries to reject this option out of hand. Unlike them, Simmel views institutionalized religion as the basic platform—“the given” in phenomenological terms—from which the primal and independent element of religiosity can be extracted. Yet, Simmel does not map out the precise relationship between religiosity and institutionalized religion and does not clarify the role of these two aspects in establishing a person’s identity. Tracing this relationship, as shown below, would emerge as one of Eliezer Schweid’s most notable achievements.

By this stage of the discussion, the distinction between religion and religiosity had been cemented without clarifying the nature of the connection between them. This issue re-emerges in Buber’s analysis of religiosity. Buber, who adopts Simmel’s distinction, does not renounce the claim that religiosity is definitely a subjective symptom of the connection with God:

I say and mean: religiosity. I do not say and do not mean: religion. Religiosity is man’s sense of wonder and adoration, an ever anew becoming, an ever anew articulation and formulation of his feeling that, transcending his conditioned being yet bursting from its very core, there is something that is unconditioned. Religiosity is his longing to establish a living communion with the unconditioned, his will to realize the unconditioned through his action, transposing it into the world of man. Religion is the sum total of the customs and teachings articulated and formulated by the religiosity of a certain epoch in a people’s life; its prescriptions and dogmas are rigidly determined and handed down as unalterably binding to all future generations, without regard for their newly developed religiosity, which seeks new forms.

(Buber 1967, p. 80)

Unlike Simmel, Buber sees religiosity as a fundamental anchor in the human connection to God. Buber relates to Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that God is dead: “He spoke to us and now is silent” (Sartre 1947, p. 153). Against this claim, Buber writes, “Sartre has started from the ‘silence’ of God without asking himself what part our not hearing and our not having heard has played in that silence. From the silence he has concluded that God does not exist, at any rate not for us” (Buber 1957, p. 69). Humans find God in the I–Thou relationship. In this relationship, the Thou can become an object to the I, as the I becomes an object to the Thou: “It is not so, however, with that absolute Other … that I call ‘God.’ God can never become an object for me; I can attain no other relation to Him than that of the I to its eternal Thou” (ibid., p. 68). It is only when humans lose this relationship and God does become an object that God is dead (ibid.).

In Buber’s view, the death of God is an inadequate response since the fundamental question is whether “the perseverance of the ‘religious need’ does not indicate something inherent in human existence” (ibid., p. 67). He sees this primal ontological anchoring as the very foundation of human life, and, if God dies, humans must ask themselves what their share is in this event. He thus tries to relocate transcendence in the depths of the immanent experience.

Despite this difference between Buber and Simmel, Buber supports Simmel’s assertion that institutionalized religion is only a particular mode of shaping religiosity, at whose center is the attachment to God. Buber thereby creates a tension between three elements: religiosity, religion, and God. God can, as it were, disappear, but this disappearance is random and conveys the collapse of religion, which is not necessary for the characterization of human existence. God, as such, cannot disappear from the human space: he is present in the human desire for him, as well as in human interrelations.

4. On the Passion for Religiosity in Hebrew Literature

Buber’s stance influenced Hebrew literature in the first decades of the twentieth century. The study of this literature is important because it explicates fundamental questions about religiosity. These questions were at the center of the cultural–literary discourse of notable figures for whom institutionalized Jewish religion had become problematic. I will focus here on two writers—Yosef Haim Brenner († Ukraine 1881–Palestine 1921—see Sagi 2011) and Hillel Zeitlin († Mogilev 1872–Poland 1942)—due to their significant contribution to the understanding of religiosity.

Brenner’s metaphysical starting point is the recognition that life has a cryptic, concealed dimension—the secret of being. This secret is essential, not a temporary enigma to be eventually resolved. Religiosity takes a stand vis à vis this secret: “The tragic souls” are those “that penetrate the secret, ascend to the haze, to the mystery” (Brenner 1985, vol. 3, pp. 178–79). The essence of the experience of religiosity is the discovery of the finality of consciousness, which faces an insurmountable barrier. This barrier is fundamental to human consciousness, especially after Kant’s “Copernican revolution”: we cannot go beyond the human experience, which human consciousness identifies as finite and limited. Hence, this is a negative religiosity, revealing existence in its duality. On the one hand, it is constituted by the consciousness of immanence that encloses us within the borders of our actual, experiential existence. On the other hand, it is founded on the recognition that this immanence is not its totality. The totality is doomed to remain in its mystery. In Brenner’s lucid formulation,

The various worlds, the various combinations, the various processes, the various ascriptions, the various powers, the various creatures—all bear some mystery within, some internal side, intrinsic, invisible. … A mysterious, hidden soul is in every ray, every manifestation, every simple, seemingly unspiritual thing. All bear traces of light that human creatures do not imagine. … For the sensitive, all is mystery, all is wonder and amazement.

(Brenner 1985, vol. 3, p. 247)

Brennerian religiosity does not transcend toward the divine object. Indeed, wherever religiosity is directed toward God, God rejects it (see, for example, ibid., pp. 401–2, 89, 91). Therefore, Brenner resolutely states, “The seekers of God … do not seek him at all … they speak in his name” (Brenner 1978, vol. 2, p. 71). According to this view, religiosity is a fundamental metaphysical experience. It conveys the desire to transcend the ordinary, the dissatisfaction with immanence, and the constant striving to understand and experience the meaning of existence: the “where from” and the “where to” of human life. Religiosity, however, rather than God, is directed to real life.

Brenner holds that, ultimately, the meaning of religiosity is epitomized in the attitude toward others. In Penueli’s formulation, “Religiosity in the attitude to humans is a sign of their positive character in Brenner’s stories, and its absence, a sign of its negation. Brenner, the secular prose writer, seeks holiness in humans. … The holiness he addresses is dynamic, acquired at the price of enthusiasm and devotion” (Penueli 1965, p. 37).

Hillel Zeitlin was deeply influenced by Nietzsche and was also close to Brenner. He proposes a view of religiosity that combines the views of Nietzsche and Brenner on the one hand and, on the other, the stance of positive religiosity that views God as the object. He writes as follows:

Man wishes to solve the riddle of life and of the world, to understand the mystery of creation, its purpose and existence, to hear a clear answer to the universal questions that trouble him and torment him, to gain great and wonderful insights from time to time, to expand his spiritual wholeness, to climb one step after another.

(Meir 2006, p. 44)

Given that religiosity is directed toward God, Zeitlin—unlike Nietzsche—recurrently experiences failure when seeking to realize this connection:

To his chagrin, he sees he is still standing outside and that everything is still closed and sealed to him. … And the believer sees this, in his way, as if he were being pushed out, as if heaven were hinting to him that they do not welcome his good deeds and his yearnings and longings for God, as if his sin were so great they do not wish to place him under the wings of the Shekhinah, as if they were banishing him from the heavenly temple so that he might not see the treasures of the King, the King of the universe.

(ibid.)

The experience of failure that Zeitlin attests to only intensifies the desire for the object. Like Nietzsche, Zeitlin feels that the experience of religiosity invariably oversteps the bounds since it is a desire for more.

The basic difference between Nietzsche and Zeitlin is that, for Nietzsche, the failure lies in directing religiosity toward God. The proper realization of religiosity is to be found in the new reflective consciousness that humans shape as religious entities who transcend their day-to-day existence, entities who are not imprisoned within immanence and feel uncomfortable in the world as their home and, therefore, move on to shape it and create it anew. By contrast, for Zeitlin, the failure lies in the thwarting of the religious desire to reach a living connection to God, though this failure should not discourage the individual who yearns for God and an understanding of the meaning of existence.

If we relate to the analysis so far as a “datum” in a phenomenological inquiry, we may be able to outline the basic meaning of the religiosity common to all these approaches. Religiosity is found within subjects as entities who experience themselves and their world in a certain way. The subject is the hero of religiosity, even when it is directed toward God. This experience involves an element that destabilizes everyday life since it subverts the epistemology and the ontology of daily experiences and perceptions. As a fundamental fact of human life, it does not express a reflective process anchored in the real history of human beings or their connection to culture or others. It is a primal, fundamental experience that shapes their lives, originating in several sources: it can be inherent in the nature of the person who experiences religiosity; based on a kind of internal, experiential metamorphosis;3 or based on a revelation experience. The phenomenology that was proposed for religiosity did not link it to the individual’s actual historical–cultural–social identity but, instead, invariably pointed to a primary element unmediated by ontology or the person’s characterization as a subject.

5. The Restoration of Religiosity in the Thought of Eliezer Schweid

Contrary to this widespread phenomenology, Eliezer Schweid, one of the most prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, presents an entirely different conception of religiosity, relocating it at the very core of the subject’s real life as a cultural–historical being. In his view, the entire set of questions related to faith and religiosity is part of the fundamental questions about real identity. Religiosity and religious faith are part of the realm of identity, and faith, according to Schweid, has existential meaning: it is a kind of responsiveness to factual givenness and its absolute affirmation. Belief in God is one of faith’s special expressions but does not exhaust it (Schweid 1974, p. 98).

This conception of faith is prevalent in existentialist tradition and is outlined, as noted above, by Tillich. In this approach, faith is a state of being marked by the acceptance of reality. Religiosity is not characterized by a specific content but by its stand vis à vis existence as a whole. The specific traditional religions are socio-cultural embodiments of an existentialist stance in relation to existence. Schweid, who adopts this approach, assumes that the experience of faith has a defined object; namely, faith is not only the adoption and affirmation of human reality as a whole but a reference to the source, the beginning that human existence is contingent on:

The question “Who am I?” finds its answer in the response to the question “Where am I from?” The final border beyond the family, the people, and history is the border of thought pondering the riddle itself. Where am I from? How am I this particular individual here and now? This question, which exhausts the inquiry into self-identity, points to God as the sole answer.

(Schweid 1992, p. 53)

God, then, is not the beginning of faith but its reflective end. Faith begins with the recognition that the immanence wherein we find ourselves poses a question. Schweid holds that life is fundamentally wonder and amazement. The riddle of existence is the beginning of faith and an expression of this borderline quality of human existence. This quality opens up a new horizon, possibly culminating in faith in God. Faith develops, if it does, as a product of the affirmation of givenness.

This conception of the self locates religiosity within the space of real human identity. Neither transcending nor deviating from this reality, religiosity embodies it: “The beginning [of faith] is the experience of human life” (Schweid 1992, p. 53), which is rooted in the actual life space. It is on this point that Schweid’s phenomenology differs from that of his predecessors. They saw faith as a personal experience that uproots people from their embedment at the heart of history and culture and religiosity as a primal experience where the individual stands in splendid solitude vis à vis the world or God. By contrast, Schweid sees in faith and the experience of religiosity the peak of concrete human commitment, which is social and cultural by nature. Schweid outlines the relationship between the personal and the cultural–historical as follows:

Faith is never only a personal-private experience nor only a public-historical one … The individual does not experience it as a thought or a way of life but according to the modes of a given religious culture … This is a rather simple issue: since self-consciousness only awakens in the individual within a human society, so faith, which is rooted in the beginning of self-consciousness, rises in thought and expression only in a human society. In this sense, a social experience is anchored in culture and history.

(Schweid 1974, p. 100)

Religiosity, as a fundamental experience, is shaped by patterns of human consciousness. Schweid, like many contemporary thinkers, assumes that the patterns of consciousness are first and foremost cultural–historical. No human phenomenon eludes this shaping. Human consciousness does not grow ex nihilo as a private finished product—it is always intersubjective and thus historical–cultural.

Schweid, however, does not reduce the personal to the cultural–historical, which is in itself a problematic step because it uproots the very concept of the subject. As opposed to the object, the subject always contains an unmediated element that cannot be objectified and is thus not transparent. Just as it is transparent and knowable, the subject is also a constant absence, closed and sealed to others and, at times, even to itself (see Sagi 2018, pp. 47–77). Schweid, who acknowledges this, goes on to write the following:

To be sure, it is a gross mistake … Those who perceive the faith experience solely as participation in a historical legacy are mistaken. After all, the experience of faith is that of an individual with the public, and it emerges from the depth of the person’s one-time experience as this “I.” Indeed, only from the depth of a person’s experience can they establish a connection to culture and history.

(Schweid 1974, p. 100)

Schweid, who is part of a humanistic philosophical tradition, refuses to accept the death of the subject. This refusal comes forth in his fundamental claim: humans are the subject of culture and history, not its object. What makes the space of human life human is that the human subject is primal, and this primal quality is constantly present. It cannot be removed and replaced by culture and history since this replacement would mean the end of culture and history.

From this approach, Schweid derives the mediating relationship between the experience of faith and personal religiosity vs. its realization in history and culture. He agrees with the theorists of religiosity who assume the primal quality of this experience, but he contests their claim that this religiosity can be realized outside a cultural–historical framework. Since religiosity is a permanent element in a person’s actual identity, it is realized in the historical–cultural–social space where identity is realized. The connection between religiosity and religion thus expresses the fundamental tie of our human condition to the historical–cultural–social institutions constitutive of our lives. Religiosity does not stumble upon a particular religion—the religion is already “there,” together with the totality of the contexts constituent of people’s actual being, among them, their religiosity stance.

Schweid, who emphasizes the immanence of faith, recognizes the complexity of the relationship between believers and their faith. In one of the most brilliant formulations of the philosophy of faith, Schweid writes as follows:

Faith is, therefore, a choice. It is voluntary. It constitutes a decision between two alternative attitudes to human life. As such, it demonstrates or, rather, preliminarily fulfills the inner freedom found in the human soul: people can believe whatever they believe in, and they can also avoid a decision or decide not to believe. But even if this decision is spontaneous, it is not arbitrary. The desire itself, which people find in their soul, attests to a given mental reality prior to the choice, where the desire and the choice are anchored.

(Schweid 1992, p. 51)

This paragraph, seemingly an example of circular reasoning, presents the deepest insights into the relationship between choice and desire. Faith is a desire, but it is not a commitment from afar to the object of its choice—faith—since the choice chooses the desire that people discover in their souls. Harry Frankfurt distinguishes between first-order desires and second-order desires (Frankfurt 1971, pp. 5–20). A first-order desire is an inner datum of human existence. The crucial question we face as humans is whether to reaffirm the first-order desire or reject it. The choice of desire or, in Frankfurt’s terminology, the second-order volition, follows the first-order desire. It conveys the adoption and acceptance of the first-order desire that, as such, is not chosen. Nevertheless, it is free will. As Spinoza put it, “That thing is said to be free (liber) which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone” (Spinoza 1992, p. 31, definition 7).

This conceptual framework enables us to understand Schweid’s complex position. Faith embodies an initial, spontaneous, basic personal commitment in the face of reality. It is the believer’s initial perception of reality but also expresses a choice, that is, a second-order desire that corroborates the believer’s initial stance. Faith is thus a primal and also reflective act that returns to the desire, endorses it, and explicates the mode of the believer’s stand in the world.

Faith as a primal act may be an objective action directed toward God but is, first and foremost, an initial disposition toward the world and toward the reality through which we perceive the world (Schweid 1992, p. 52). Faith includes a clear epistemic element, distinct from the initial dispositional element. Schweid endorses the Buberian distinction between “belief that” and “belief in.” The first includes the believer’s metaphysical commitments and epistemic statements or, in Schweid’s terms, the objective aspects. The second conveys the believer’s basic human experience or, in Schweid’s terms, the subjective aspects (ibid., pp. 52–53). In this respect, faith is choices, the believer’s inner certainty, and not a contingent thesis resembling all our other theses about the world (ibid., p. 56). This inner certainty does not extricate faith from its place within the believer’s concrete being. Rather, these choices and certainties are always human, and, therefore, Schweid can state that faith is “flawed and incomplete” (ibid., p. 83).

Schweid recurrently points to a number of subjective sources of faith within the web of the person’s real life: the experience of life’s renewal, the person’s identification as a spiritual entity whose being is not contingent on physical existence, and the experience of God’s presence (ibid., pp. 54–58). All these, as noted, are part of the human experience. In his view, the theological conceptual system, which includes notions such as “creation” and “revelation,” is not the beginning of faith but an extension rooted in “the primal experience of life” (ibid., p. 58). Hence, Schweid sees human existence as both the beginning and the end of faith. At the center of faith are humans and their attitude to God, not the transcendent but the human connection to it. The question incessantly confronting believers, therefore, is the explication of faith to themselves in a way suited to their lives rather than metaphysical answers detached from their life experiences.

This analysis suggests a necessary connection between faith as a primary experience and faith as a second-order form of organization, aware of and responsible for this primary element. The believer’s journey thus extends between the two poles of faith: faith as an experiential primary datum and faith as reflection. This distinction between the two aspects, which Schweid draws in Belonging to the Jewish People, is missing in his early work, The Lonely Jew and Judaism. In this last work, faith is examined primarily through a second-order perspective and is a kind of reflection on the reality of Jewish existence.

Schweid rejects the secularism–religion dichotomy, which sets them as a kind of unmediated contradiction—secularism as opposed to religion on the one hand and discontent with secular contents on the other (Schweid 1981, p. 222). This rejection should not surprise us—if religiosity is rooted in the depths of real human life, how can this dichotomy be substantiated? Even if tension is present, it is not found in the relationship between secularism and religiosity but in that between religiosity and institutionalized religion. According to Schweid, however, this tension is not an antithesis that needs to be resolved; instead, it can create a dynamic space of constant openness and development, just as human life stretches between what it already is and what it can be.

Schweid seeks to replace the negative perception of secularization with a positive one. The focus of his approach comes forth at several levels: epistemically, humans have a privileged status; they are independent, capable of recognizing truth and making moral judgments and distinguishing right from wrong (ibid., p. 223). Ethically, “a person is entitled to aspire to ‘self-realization’ through the discovery of creative forces latent within himself and through free expression” (ibid., p. 224). In practical terms, secularization implies the acknowledgment that humans are allowed to contend with “the conditions of their existence, grapple with them actively, and ensure, as far as possible, the satisfaction of their material and spiritual needs in the future” (ibid.). This perception of secularization conveys a humanistic position, which grants unique weight and value to humans (ibid., pp. 224–25).

This approach grants individuals a unique status in reality without negating the classic religious manifestations of Jewish culture since it is impossible to reduce reality to cultural–historical constructs without negating the value of the person who constituted them. Precisely in the name of this humanistic principle, the demand for secularization should be denied when the primal human value of the person is translated into exclusivity or sovereignty over the totality of existence, including religious existence (ibid., pp. 225–27). As noted, however, this is not a necessary expression of secularism.

Humanistic secularism also releases humans from the Promethean pretension to be God. It allows humans a clear awareness of their condition as entities living with others within a cultural–historical space for which they are responsible. Contrary to Promethean pretensions, humanistic secularism rests on two foundations: “On recognition of the essential limitations of humans and of the responsibility incumbent on them as free creatures in the immediate relationships between them and their surroundings” (ibid., p. 228).

A secular humanistic stance acknowledges that “ultimately, recognizing this responsibility is a primary condition of human existence, and every individual goes through this experience in the web of everyday life” (ibid.). This responsibility rests on the consciousness of human limitations that affect modern humans, too. Modern reality has actually intensified the recognition of human dependence given that “achievements have increased the feeling of dependence that now also involves technological and governmental mechanisms that the individual cannot possibly influence” (ibid.). Humans cannot escape their finality, their fundamental weakness as mortal creatures—they can never become God. This weakness, however, does not exempt them from responsibility for the surrounding reality and, indeed, compels them to make an infinite effort to engage in its repair.

This secular humanism, being open to existence, can open up “to religious contents as such” (ibid., p. 233). However, this openness does not necessarily indicate a process of returning to religion. Schweid suggests viewing the opening up to religious contents as an expression of the desire of humans for what is beyond their existence:

A secular humanist has no reason to give up the most positive and vital contents of secular culture. Hence, opening up to the religious dimension of culture is an expansion warranted from within, and should be seen as a complement rather than an all-out reversal of a worldview and a way of life. We need to recognize the meaning of the dimension beyond, and we need to give this recognition philosophical, emotional, and practical expression.

(ibid.)

Schweid presents a position remarkably close to that of Tillich, who points to the connection between culture and religion. Tillich criticizes Karl Barth, who offered a religious model of religion’s complete detachment and alienation from the culture. In Tillich’s view, this antithesis could lead the culture into the demonic realm of existence by negating that the religious element is a deep foundation of human existence (Tillich 1957b, p. 61). Schweid, who endorses this fundamental position, cannot accept the dichotomy between secularism and religion and sees religiosity as a mediating element. In this view, religion offers contents reflecting the position of religiosity of believers who turn to the transcendent and concretize this turn in a particular way of life. The value of religious content for the secular person, then, is not contingent on reducing them to products of history and culture. Internalizing these contents does not imply adopting all the beliefs created by this system. Nevertheless, this way of life brings closer some possibility of turning to the transcendent. The significance of this connection lies in the very option it raises of expanding human life. In Heidegger’s terms, religious culture represents an opening to the divine entity and a release from the yoke of a subjectivity that went too far.

This fundamental position breaks down fundamental dichotomies characteristic of Jewish life and reflection and, at their center, the religion–secularism dichotomy. People are no longer required to choose one or the other and can live as secular religious or as religious secularists. They can also live as secularists completely uninterested in religion and yet, personally, may be released from the burden of an existence focused on the subject and the subject’s needs, opening up to a deeper and more spiritual existence.

Schweid’s perception of religiosity is far removed from absolute self-concern. It is a constant effort to grapple with the meaning of life and a self-transcendence reflecting the human desire to go beyond the satisfaction of material needs or the narrow scope of the individual’s world. Schweid adopts this framework and sees the discourse of Jewish identity and culture as a religiosity project. Holiness, then, is the religious expression of the immanent desire for a life of meaning beyond the given, for a spiritual life that overcomes it.

The relationship between religion and religiosity conveys a complex spectrum. At one end is the position that religiosity is the basis of religion and belief in God. Religiosity, then, is an intentional experience whose object is God and religion. At the opposite end is the claim that religiosity negates religious institutionalization and belief in God. The religious experience is not at all intentional. These two endpoints do not participate in the debate between theism and atheism. Their concern is more primal: they draw attention to the primal quality of religiosity as a fundamental characterization of human life. This religiosity may lead humans to faith in God. It may also lead them to institutionalized religion, but it can also lead to the death of God and the irrelevance of institutionalized religion. Ultimately, God’s death or resurrection depends on humans and on their grappling with the religiosity experience itself.