“Gershom Scholem: From Gnostic Myth to Modern Messianism”

Kirsten Grimstad

Invited lecture delivered at the University of Minnesota, Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch.

November 13, 2001

Let me begin by saying what a pleasure it is to be here. Many thanks go to the

members of the special events committee, to the Department of German, Scandinavian,

and Dutch, and to the Center for Jewish Studies for this welcome invitation. This is the

first occasion I have had to share a part of the work that began with a doctoral project in

1993 and that will be published in a book that is coming out this month. I appreciate the

interest that has brought you here today and the opportunity, at last, to bring what has

been a long-term solitary study to public discussion.

For today's talk I will be focusing on that aspect of the project that spans the

interests of German studies and Jewish studies, namely, Gershom Scholem's place in

the revival of interest in ancient Gnosticism in the twentieth century and its extension

into the secular messianism of the Weimar era. If time allows, we will look at critical

theorists Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and others, whom I like to round up under the

catchphrase "modern Gnostics of the left."

Gnosticism, briefly, is a religious sensibility dating from the Greco-Roman era

that features two extremes. It combines a pessimistic view of life and the world with an

optimistic belief that the human spirit is itself divine, though lost and trapped in a hostile

world ruled by an evil deity. The displaced human spirit exists in a condition of cosmic

exile and longing for its true home in the godhead. The ancient Gnostics believed that

the created world came about not as the good creation of a good God, as told in

Genesis, but through a mysterious catastrophe in the godhead and the bungling efforts

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of a Demiurge. The transcendent and true God of the Gnostics is an absolutely remote,

alien, and unknown divinity who has no connection to the created world at all. Coupled

with the utmost pessimism of Gnostic writing we find radiant hymns of ecstasy and vivid

renderings of the heavenly journey of the soul. Gnostics espoused a dream of ultimate

liberation; they made no compromises with the status quo. This dualistic and world-

rejecting but also transcendent and subversive worldview took root among the early

Christian heretical sects that blossomed during the second through fifth centuries and

among eastern Mandaean and Manichaean variants that continued much longer. A

community of about 15,000 Mandaeans survives today in southern Iraq and now also in

cyberspace via the World Wide Web.

One of the Gnostic creation myths as told in The Apocryphon of John accounts

for the origin of the world through a process of emanation by which masculine/feminine

pairs of spiritual energies radiate and multiply themselves out of the primordial godhead,

an androgynous father/mother source of all being. These brother/sister pairs are called

syzygies, and they make up the pleroma, that is the heavenly fullness of divine reality.

As this process unfolds, the divine light progressively darkens until a crisis occurs at the

outer periphery. This crisis began when the last aeon Sophia was overcome by wild

longing to create a likeness out of herself alone, without the participation of her

masculine counterpart. In short, Sophia’s unruly, destabilizing longing becomes

objectified into a lower, fallen version of herself, which is then expelled from the pristine

realm of the pleroma. The lower Sophia is forced to wander in the outer darkness,

where she suffers unspeakable grief, repentance, and longing for the lost realm of light.

The residue of her passion congealed into a freakish monster god named Ialdabaoth

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who takes a portion of Sophia’s spiritual light into the void, where he proceeds to

fashion the world of materiality as a grotesque imitation of the perfect realm of the

pleroma. He implants the divine spark in Adam, in order to trap it in the perishable

human body that also scatters the luminous substance through the stream of

generations with each newborn child. These are the lost sparks that must be restored

in order for the godhead to become whole once again.

Throughout this account (which is just one of many), Sophia appears as the

primordial “other,” the first divided soul, and the unwitting author of the existential

condition of creatureliness, born of her transgressive desire. She also becomes a

feminine redeeming force, “das ewig-Weibliche” of Goethe’s Faust, who draws the lost

sparks back to their home in the godhead. This occurs in part through the numinous

experience called gnosis, a Greek term meaning "knowledge." Gnosis is a moment

flooded with remembrance of the divine spirit within and its true home in the heavenly

fullness that lies beyond the world. The Gnostics regarded themselves as a spiritual

elite, the “knowers,” also called pneumatics, meaning those who have the spark.

In the interest of time economy, I would like to draw your attention to just a few of

the many points of interest contained this myth. First, in The Apocryphon of John and

some other Gnostic texts, the blind and malevolent Demiurge Ialdabaoth is identified

with the Hebrew God in a stunning inversion of the biblical creation story. Critic Harold

Bloom has taken these accounts as the earliest examples of literary revisionism by

which the ancient Gnostics deconstructed and overthrew the canonical tradition, making

them, in Bloom’s eyes, the first modernists (Agon 87). The second point, which is

important to the discussion of Scholem, is the dialectical structure in the account of

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creation unfolding in three stages: differentiation, externalization through the rupture

and fall causing the loss of a portion of divinity, and final restitution. This dialectical

process of the divine bears striking resemblance to the theosophy of Jacob Boehme

teaching, Hegel’s dialectic of the Absolute, and even Jung’s theory of individuation.

The doctrine of the two gods inverts the biblical account and marks Gnosticism

as a radical and subversive religious sensibility. According to many sources, some

Gnostic sects took this teaching as a warrant for revolt against the iron laws of the world

and its tyrannical creator as an assertion of the absolute freedom of the divinity of the

human spirit. “Antinomianism” is the term used for violation of the moral law as an act

of protest against worldly constraint. It is a key concept in Gnosticism taken from the

Greek word nomos, meaning “law.” The moral nihilism implied in the libertinism,

anarchism, and other forms of antinomian revolt advocated by some Gnostic sects

against the cosmic condition is important for understanding Scholem's position in the

discussion that follows. A key question driving my study: what are the consequences of

a religious belief that the world was created in error, as a divine and cosmic

catastrophe? How does this idea “play out?” And why did this sensibility resonate so

powerfully in the early 20th century?

Now let's look at some examples attesting to this modern revival that carried live

seeds of this supposedly long-forgotten and marginalized religious heresy into

mainstream modern literary texts and into mainstream modern schools of psychology

and philosophy as well. In the prelude to his Joseph tetralogy, Thomas Mann

incorporated a Gnostic creation myth, sometimes called Roman der Seele (Romance of

the Soul), at the final station of the descent into the well of the past with which the work

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begins. The narrator frames the myth as a tradition of human thought deriving from

earliest time and based on humanity's truest self-understanding. Its strategic placement

in the prelude implies that the Gnostic account of creation contains the ultimate answer

to the search for our origin and end; moreover, it serves as a touchstone for the entire

work in which Mann engages and "corrects" the world-rejecting message of Gnosticism.

Hermann Hesse also appropriated Gnostic myth for his fiction in a way that would have

raised the eyebrows (if not the hair follicles) of any genuine Gnostic. In Demian, a novel

that reached a wide popular audience following WWI, Hesse employed the Gnostic god

Abraxas as a liberating deity that encompasses both good and evil. Hesse's ideal of a

paradoxical good and evil deity actually reverses the usual Gnostic theology and may

have contributed to widespread misconceptions about Gnosticism.

These and many other literary appropriations of long-dead Gnosticism are much

more than just a curious footnote to the well-told tale of the revival of mythic awareness

in the twentieth century. The appearance of specifically Gnostic themes in modern

literature coincided with the work of pioneering figures in the 1920s, who found in

ancient Gnosticism the earliest precursor for diverse modern schools of thought. The

most well known example is C. G. Jung. During the period 1918-1926, Jung probed

ancient Gnosticism for a prefiguration of his model of individuation as the path to

psychic wholeness. In the ancient Gnostics, Jung believed he had found his earliest

forerunners, "modern" psychologists of the second century who were encountering the

unconscious in their mythic revelations. Almost simultaneously, Hans Jonas was

beginning his groundbreaking study of ancient Gnosticism, which he insightfully viewed

as the precursor of existentialism, based on the central experience of exile,

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homelessness, and estrangement in the world. Jonas began his study in the late 1920s

as a doctoral candidate at Marburg, working under Heidegger. In an epilogue to his

book The Gnostic Religion, Jonas discreetly suggested that certain motifs from Gnostic

Mandaean literature may have found their way into Being and Time, as key concepts

shaping the manifesto of existentialism, which was taking shape during these years.

At about the same time, in 1928, Gershom Scholem began publishing studies

arguing that the central myth incorporated into the Kabbalah in the sixteenth century

was a form of Gnosticism. Moreover, he maintained, this revival of ancient Gnostic

beliefs became the guiding theology of the messianic revolt against the existing world

that gripped Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora from 1665 for more than a

century. In sum, in the years following WWI we find wide-ranging attempts to trace the

forerunners of modern schools of thought back to Gnosticism or to find in this

marginalized, heretical chapter of history the ultimate explanation for the human

condition. The return of a specifically Gnostic imagination in the twentieth century is,

moreover, especially striking because its unique and haunting extremism echoed the

mood of the years encompassing WWI and its aftermath, a period saturated by a sense

of catastrophe and trauma.

We now turn for a closer look at Gershom Scholem's place in these

developments. As many of you know, Scholem is widely recognized as the foremost

pioneer of the study of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. Born in 1897 to an

assimilated middle-class family in Berlin, Scholem rejected the bourgeois liberalism of

his background by committing himself to Zionism and his Jewish identity in 1911 at age

14 under the influence of Martin Buber. He began learning Hebrew and studying the

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Talmud. Scholem’s fascination with Jewish mysticism began in 1915. That year he

obtained a copy of the Zohar, that is, the masterpiece of Spanish kabbalism dating from

the late 13th century. This acquisition launched what eventually became Scholem’s

legendary library of Jewish esoterica, along with his dedication to uncovering what he

called "the secret life of Judaism."

This same year also marked the beginning of his long, deep, and often troubled

friendship with Walter Benjamin that was rooted in their profound intellectual rapport, as

well as in their mutual involvement with the Berlin youth movement and fervent

opposition to the war. Scholem’s interest in the Kabbalah ripened during the next two

years, spent in close companionship with Benjamin in the anti-war exile community in

Bern, where they also befriended Ernst Bloch. Following the end of the war, Scholem

returned to Germany with the intention of shifting his academic focus from mathematics

to Jewish studies and philology, with the intention of writing a dissertation on the

Kabbalah. Scholem planned to subject the tradition of the Kabbalah to rigorous

standards of historical and philological analysis. He wanted to rehabilitate the secret life

of Judaism from the long-standing image of contempt painted by scholars in the

Enlightenment camp of Jewish historiography that had repressed the mystical and

subversive tradition in the thrust toward progress, reform, and assimilation. In the

cultural climate of rising anti-Semitism and youthful revolt, Scholem regarded the liberal

agenda built upon rationalist biases in historiography as moribund.

With his decision in 1919 to undertake a doctoral study focusing on the

Kabbalah, Scholem began excavating the hidden history of Judaism for the sources of

its continuing vitality in the dynamic struggle between rational and irrational,

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constructive and destructive forces. In groundbreaking studies authored over the

course of his career, Scholem exposed the heartbeat of Gnostic myth that, he argued,

had vitalized the mystical currents within Judaism at virtually every stage of its history.

Scholem traced the course of these Gnostic impulses from the mystical speculation

about the chariot /throne of God of late antiquity through the medieval Kabbalah, the

messianic movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and into modern

Hasidism. For Scholem, the Gnostic imagination in Jewish mysticism follows from the

historical trauma of exile.

In the interest of time, I will have to skip over the development of these ideas in

order to concentrate on Scholem’s treatment of the kabbalist school of Isaac Luria,

which formed in the sixteenth-century exile community in upper Galilee following the

expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Isaac Luria offered a radically original

teaching of the Kabbalah as, in Scholem’s words, “a great myth of Exile” (Trends 286)

and “an extreme case of Gnostic reaction” (Kabbalah 74). In Luria’s Kabbalah, the

Jewish exile became a symbol for the self-estrangement of God and the cosmic exile of

the soul. Similarly, the hope of redemption from the catastrophe of historical exile

seemed to signify the redemption of the Godhead itself from its dispersal in the cosmos

and return to the purity of its original wholeness (Trends 281).

Scholem identifies two stages in the evolution of the Kabbalah, which establish

the special place occupied by Luria and his school. The early Kabbalah, as seen in the

Zohar, centered on a simple Neoplatonic type of emanation system that forms what is

called the Sefirot, that is, the dynamic structure of the divine that means, figuratively,

“God’s radiance.” According to this teaching, the hidden divinity proceeds outward

toward the creation of the world. Luria’s teaching marks the advent of the second stage

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that dominated kabbalist thinking from the seventeenth century into the modern era

(Kabbalah 87). In contrast to all previous tradition, Luria posited an initial movement of

divinity’s withdrawal into the depths of itself, called tzimtzum (contraction) as the first

step preceding emanation. In this way, by abandoning a region within itself, so to speak,

divinity established a primordial space in which the created world could emerge.

Scholem describes the doctrine of tzimtzum as “one of the most amazing and far-

reaching conceptions ever put forward in the whole history of Kabbalism” and “the

deepest symbol of Exile that could be thought of . . .” (Trends 260-61). Citing the church

father Hippolytus, Scholem points to early prototypes of tzimtzum in the Gnostic “Book

of the Great Logos,” where God leaves a shining world of light behind when he

contracts into himself. In this ancient text attributed to the school of Basilides, Scholem

writes, the “withdrawal that precedes all emanation is repeatedly stressed” (264).

Scholem highlighted the dialectical dynamism of Luria’s teaching that proceeded

from the initial contraction to the emanation of the primordial man, called Adam

Kadmon, as the first configuration of divine light that flows into the primeval space

created by the withdrawal. From his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth the divine light

streamed out and pooled in the ten vessels constituting the Sefirot. But the force of the

streaming light energy shattered the six lower vessels, causing the sparks of light to fall

from the divine realm into the depths below. There they became mixed with the

scattered fragments of the vessels, from which gross matter and the dark forces of evil

gained substance. The creation of the world through these events was, in Scholem’s

words, “nothing less than a cosmic catastrophe” (Kabbalah 139).

Scholem observes the strong parallels linking Luria’s teaching of the breaking of

the vessels with the Gnostic teaching of the devolution of the divine leading to a crisis

on the outer periphery, a break in the wholeness of the divine realm, and the ensuing

tragedy of cosmic exile (Trends 266-68). In both Gnosticism and Luria’s school, the

catastrophic descent of divine sparks of light into the abyss unleashes a cosmological

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drama pervaded by the reality of evil. Both teachings moreover establish the role of

humankind in reversing the tragedy and achieving not only salvation for the exiled spirit

but restitution of the Godhead itself.

In his introduction to an anthology of essays about Scholem, Harold Bloom

dwells on Scholem’s rejection of the Neoplatonic theory of emanation in favor of a

Gnostic dialectics of negation and creation by catastrophe. Bloom sees Scholem as

agreeing with Luria and his followers who located the disaster within the Godhead.

From this premise followed a preoccupation with the tropes of catastrophe and exile, of

a God who “dispersed himself among the shattered vessels of creation even as he

dispersed the Jews among the nations” (Scholem 217). Bloom points to Scholem’s

emphasis on the Gnostic treatment of creation as catastrophe as “the technical center”

of Scholem’s theosophical legacy and “his most vital act as a revisionist of Jewish

esotericism” (215-16).

In the dialectics of Luria’s teaching, the moment of catastrophe initiates the

movement toward redemption through restoration of the lost wholeness. This moment in

the divine process, called tikkun, fulfills the dynamic, three-stage process of the divine in

a way that shows the structural parallels I mentioned earlier to the theosophy of Jacob

Boehme, Hegel’s dialectics, and Jung’s psychology of individuation. Through mystical

acts of devotion, which we cannot consider in detail here, the scattered and exiled

sparks of divinity are uplifted and restored to their rightful place once again. In this way,

the doctrine of tikkun charged humankind with responsibility for fulfilling the messianic

task and thus opened the door to the eschatological hopes and mood of the popular

movements that followed. The parallels between the teachings of near contemporaries

Luria (1534-1572) and Boehme (1575-1624) point to the striking conclusion that the

main currents of German and Jewish mysticism shared a common dialectical platform

that unfolded in subsequent messianic and millennial movements.

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While Luria construed redemption as a mystical and spiritual process, the hope

for the redemption of Israel stood as the visible symbol for the fulfillment of tikkun. The

more conservative side of this messianic hope was for the restoration of political

sovereignty, as once existed during the kingdom of David. The more extremist version

of messianism longed for an apocalyptic end of history, followed by an entirely new

utopian world. Toward this end, Israel’s mission was to uplift the lost sparks, wherever

they have fallen. Scholem notes that this doctrine “raised every Jew to the rank of a

protagonist in the great process of restitution, in a manner never heard of before”

(Trends 284). According to Scholem, as Luria’s teachings spread throughout the Jewish

world, kabbalism exploded from an esoteric teaching for the elite to a popular religion

that nourished an extravagant utopian dream of the transformation of the wretched

world into the Kingdom of God.

In his pivotal essay “Redemption through Sin,” first published in 1937, Scholem

developed his controversial case that Luria’s teachings provided the seedbed for the

antinomian revolt of the movement centered on Sabbatai Zevi that erupted in 1665

when he was proclaimed the Messiah by his prophet Nathan of Gaza. From its inception

in Palestine, the Sabbatian messianic movement soon spread through the entire

Diaspora. Scholem understood the Sabbatians as a movement of religious nihilists

inspired by the dialectics of Luria’s Kabbalah in their revolt against the status quo of

exile. In what Scholem regarded as the utmost sincerity of their faith, they embraced an

ethic of rebellion against the law and even the holiness of sin rooted in a desire to

negate the shattered cosmic condition.

The Sabbatians followed Luria’s teaching that the divine sparks fell into the realm

of darkness and evil at the time of Adam’s primordial sin, which recapitulated the

moment of the breaking of the vessels. In the midst of this fallen world rushing toward

the abyss, there exists an heroic vanguard, those spiritual individuals or pneumatics as

found in Gnostic literature. They possess the sparks of divinity, which radiate within

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them as a true homeland that is irreconcilable with the ordinary reality of cosmic and

historical exile. Hidden in the believer’s soul, Scholem writes, “was a precious jewel, the

pearl of Messianic freedom, which shone forth from its chamber of chambers to pierce

the opaqueness of evil and materiality” (Idea 91). Illuminated by the light of the divine

wisdom within, the believers considered themselves as already inhabiting the restored

realm of tikkun promised by Luria’s Kabbalah. In the inner world of redemption there

can be no sin, they reasoned, and therefore they were released from the laws of the

outer world, even those ordained by the Torah. In fact, in keeping faith with the inner

truth of redemption, some argued, the pneumatic had an obligation to subvert the

ordinary morality of the everyday world and even to violate the Torah in order to fulfill

the tikkun. This is the teaching of the holiness of sin that distinguished the Sabbatian

movement in the chapters of the history of Judaism (110-13).

As the final step in Sabbatai Zevi’s holy sinfulness, he converted to Islam in 1666

when the Turkish Sultan had him arrested and offered him the choice of apostasy or

martyrdom. Rather than repudiate their Messiah for betraying their faith, many of

Sabbatai Zevi’s believers embraced this paradoxical act of sacrilege. They affirmed his

apostasy as their Messiah’s final descent into the underworld of nations where he alone

could gather up the remaining sparks of the holy and bring them home to complete the

redemption (Idea 61). Guided by his prophet Nathan of Gaza, they regarded his actions

not as a betrayal but rather as a secret mission framed as a religious mystery that could

only be understood when the redemption was complete.

Sabbatian religious nihilism and the belief in the sanctifying power of sin reached

its final extreme in a Polish sect attached to Jacob Frank (1726-1791). Frank’s teaching

condemned the entire cosmic aeon as the work of an evil power that introduced death

into the world. According to Frank, the fact of death stands as proof that the created

world is not the work of the good and living God. The radical metaphysical dualism

inherent in Frank’s teaching places it squarely within a Gnostic ethos that opens the

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door to the antinomian spirit of revolt that defined the Frankist movement. “The place

that we are going to tolerates no laws, for all that comes from the side of Death,

whereas we are bound for Life,” Frank wrote (cited in Idea 131). Scholem adds, “the

way to Life is not easy, for it is the way of nihilism and it means to free oneself of all

laws, conventions, and religion . . . and to follow one’s leader step for step into the

abyss” (130). Only there can the light of knowledge, the divine wisdom and lost sparks

of divinity again be found.

Frank urged his flock to follow him into the abyss in which all laws and religions

are annihilated as the necessary condition for the final ascent to freedom and “Life.” The

sexual, moral, and religious libertinism practiced by the sect included violation of the

sexual prohibitions of the actual Torah, which they called the “Torah of Creation,” in

order to uphold the higher form of the Torah, the so-called “Torah of Emanation.” The

sexual licentiousness practiced by the sect may have extended to religious orgies,

according to reports of Frank’s activity in Podolia (Kabbalah 288-289). Many Polish

Frankists also became religious apostates by “converting” outwardly to Christianity and

accepting baptism in 1759-1760, while remaining secretly faithful to the Sabbatian

beliefs of their sect. Frank’s logic was that believers had to pass through and discard all

religions as outward stages of no worth compared to the true hidden faith within (293-

300).

In “Redemption through Sin” (Idea 133-34) and in a later paper “Der Nihilismus

als religiöses Phänomen” (Nihilism as a Religious Phenomenon 7-10), Scholem quotes

extensively from Hans Jonas’s study of Gnosticism to illustrate the striking parallels

linking Gnostic nihilism, antinomianism, and libertinism to the religious nihilism of the

Frankists. Scholem draws repeated attention to a passage in which Jonas places the

gospel of libertinism at the center of the Gnostic revolution in religious thought (cited in

Idea 134 and “Nihilismus” 8). Moreover, Scholem’s extended treatment of this link

conveys his insistent affirmation of the subversive spirit of revolt against the existing

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order of the cosmos that manifested in the outbreak of libertine freedom in the ancient

setting as well as among the Sabbatian heretics. They were guided by “instincts of

anarchy and lawlessness that lie deeply buried in every human soul,” Scholem wrote

with unmistakable sympathy (Idea 109). To be sure, Scholem recognizes the dangerous

and destructive aspects of what was ultimately a tragic yearning for total liberation from

the cosmic condition of exile. Yet he also insists on validating this chapter of Jewish

history in a bold challenge to the consensus of previous historians. “Beneath the surface

of lawlessness, antinomianism, and catastrophic negation,” he writes, “powerful

constructive impulses were at work” that paved the way to the reform movement that

followed (Idea 84).

Jonas and Jung also recognized the subversive spirit of the ancient Gnostics. Yet

it was Scholem who connected their religious nihilism to the spirit of revolutionary

messianism that resonated powerfully with the secular messianism of his own day,

promulgated especially by those Scholem identified as the leading ideologists: Bloch,

Benjamin, and Adorno (Crisis 287). David Biale speculates that Scholem tried to find a

precursor for his own anarchist leanings in Sabbatian antinomianism, which he could

appreciate for its radicalism and lived sense of the reality of evil (97). Michael Löwy

makes a similar assessment in his study of Weimar-era Jewish libertarian thought,

Redemption and Utopia. Anarchism was, Löwy writes, “one of the spiritual sources for

[Scholem’s] entire approach to religious phenomena and . . . for his interest in

‘anarchist’ heretical-messianic movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries,” which he shared with Walter Benjamin (67). Scholem’s paper “Nihilism as a

Religious Phenomenon” begins with the anarchist argument for revolt against all

authority found in the writing of Bakunin and Kropotkin as the point of departure for

tracing antecedents in the religious nihilism of the ancient Gnostics through the

Frankists. Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch were likewise probing this field of connections

linking medieval mystical heresies and messianic movements with the utopian dreams

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and revolutionary spirit of their own era. In their uncompromising critique of the

mechanized, rationalized world of bourgeois modernity, their refusal to allow for

reconciliation with the status quo, and messianic longing for a radically other world of

redemption, the basic structure of the Gnostic imagination reappears once again.

To bring this talk to a conclusion, let’s go back to the question I asked earlier,

what accounts for the appeal of Gnosticism in the early twentieth century. The answer

lies at least in part in the perceived failure of the liberal traditions in Christianity,

Judaism, and Western thought that seemed atrophied by excessive rationalism.

According to Scholem, the cold, abstract dogma of progress had supressed the

primitive wellsprings in human consciousness marked by the reality of evil and the

demonic depths that the ancient Gnostics had so clearly recognized. The Great War

stood as an indictment of the liberal tradition for its failure to come to terms with the very

depths that had broken out and laid waste to the pretensions of Western civilization in

the lengthy bloodbath. Seen in the aftermath of this catastrophe of history, the ancient

Gnostics came to be honored as the orginal precursors for a more vital counter-tradtion

and a radical alternative to the Enlightenment tradition that lay in ruins.