I watched a documentary on Walter Benjamin two nights ago. Last night, I watched another documentary, on the scientific investigation of the possible explanations of our sense of morality. And at 2.58 am this morning (according to the time on my phone) I found myself laying awake in bed, restless with lower back pain, wondering about the distance we’ve travelled from the image of a bespectacled Benjamin, pen in hand above a manuscript (last of the Kabbalists..?), to that of a scientist in a white coat holding up a vacutainer of blood and saying that the origin of our sense of right and wrong has a neurochemical foundation, specifically in Oxytocin. Somewhere along the timeline between those two images the 20th Century clicked shut and receded into history, taking with it a variety of assumption, views, and outlooks which have long nurtured me. I’ve wanted to talk about Benjamin for a while. It is of course a notoriously difficult thing to do and my knowledge of his work is inconsistent and in no way original in it’s interpretation. In fact, I have no working interpretation of Benjamin. I first encountered, not his name, but his two initials, W.B., in the title of a poem by Bertolt Brecht in a volume of Brecht’s poetry given to me by a friend, Karen Crossan, on my sixteenth birthday. Here it is:

On The Suicide of the Refugee W.B.

I’m told you raised your hand against yourself
Anticipating the butcher.
After eight years in exile, observing the rise of the enemy
Then at last, brought up against an impassable frontier
You passed, they say, a passable one.

Empires collapse. Gang leaders
Are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples
Can no longer be seen under all those armaments.

So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right
Are weak. All this was plain to you
When you destroyed a torturable body.

Now, there is a lot to be said about this poem, but I’m not going to go over it in any great depth: it’s pretty much staring you in the face. I am simply glad that I have so far never been put in a position where the choice made in the final sentence seems like the only one left. It is of course a choice that many with severe mental illness or a physical terminal illness find themselves having to make. But what gripped me most within this poem was the defeated future that confronted the man who made the final choice. He died with no knowledge that what he believed in would not also die. This troubled me. For years. And when I eventually found out who WB was, and learned more about him, it troubled me even more. I first read him directly in his essays on Kafka. Which is a good place to start. It is probably where he was most at home, unhoused, pondering the work of a fellow European assimilated Jew who was also a late Kabbalist engaged in a search for the sources of meaning. (How conscientiously Kabbalistic were both Kafka and Benjamin? I don’t know in particulars, though Kafka was acquainted with Jewish mystical literature and one of Benjamin’s most enduring friendships was with Gershom Scholem, the scholar largely responsible for pioneering the systematic academic study of Kabbalah, and who was later the first professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.) The hermeneutic procedures of both Benjamin and Kafka are inescapably influenced by a culture that spent two millennia and more wrestling with exile and alienation. Kabbalah explains creation as a process of tsimtsum, the self contraction of God in order to make room for Creation. However, creation is not thereby generated within a nihilistic vacuum. What is left after the necessary absence of God is His Shekinah, or Glory, an echo of his former immanence. And this constitutes a form of exile, both of creation and of elements of the divine from itself. (A template almost, for subsequent experience of exile, though in real historical time Kabbalah is backwards formulated after…, after the destruction of the Temple, after the eviction from Jerusalem, after the the bureaucracy of the Pale…) It is the work of the Kabbalist to reconcile God with His Shekinah, to bring Creation back to God in a process of redemption. To do this the Kabbalist must break open the mundane to release the divine sparks of God’s Shekinah contained therein, he must shatter the Qelipot to release His glory. Crucially, to embark on this project is to seek to engage with fragments in a gradual reconstruction of the whole. And this theme, along with that of meaning exiled from its source, are what can be detected in both Kafka and in Benjamin, and in Benjamin on Kafka. Kafka famously wrote in his Diary: there is a goal, but no path. And also that there is hope, but none for us… Both the parable of Before the Law and his short story The Great wall of China attest to a source, and the absurdity of seeking contact with it. Because our lives are not lived contiguous with this source of meaning, there is an inherent imbalance between what we intend in this world and what are actions actually effect. Our actions have consequences far beyond what we have willed, and are open to interpretations that are impossible to end stop. Consequently, we are all potentially Infinitely guilty no matter how small we are. One can only interpret, furiously, constantly, in an attempt to minimise the gap between will and act, intention and consequence, to ameliorate the guilt. But is rationality enough? One senses it is not. And in Kafka particularly one senses that it is first and foremost a symptom, and only secondarily an imperfect cure. Similarly, Benjamin had a conception of language as being the fragmented remnants of an original language, an Ursprach, towards which the provisional languages of man indicate as a distant source of meaning, the way iron filings will orient in a pattern when exposed to a magnetic field. Careful reconstruction of the fragments, their cryptographic arrangement, can bring us closer to a day of comprehension, to contact with a truth both underlying and transcendent. What snagged my interest as I considered the two documentaries was the difference between what the scientist was seeking to do, and what Benjamin, and before him, Kafka, was searching for. The scientist was seeking an explanation. Benjamin was engaged in a search for meaning. There is a difference between these two things. Or is there? To proceed carefully: the first is reductive, and part of an infinite regressive chain. The other is somehow ultimately outside the order of contingent things that indicate and explain each other. The point is perhaps made clearer by analogy with the Argument from Contingency, one of Thomas Aquinas’ ‘five ways’ to demonstrate the existence of God from the starting point of the evidence of creation itself. This way differs from his similar Argument from Causation in a crucial aspect: while the argument from causation attempts to convince the reader of an ultimate first cause to explain the chain, the argument from contingency treats contingent beings as a set which in itself requires something external to it as a whole to explain its existence. Rather than arguing backwards within a chain as with causation, an explanation for the chain in its entirety is sought. The argument depends on our not identifying causation with contingency (and what divides them here is…time). The subtlety of this distinction was grasped by Liebniz, when he formulated his own version of a Cosmological Argument, which he summarised as the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Causal explanations mapped out within the set are not sufficient to explain the contingency of the set itself, as a whole. (And for this reason, it has been argued that Liebniz’ question is not a scientific one, or one that answerable within the realm of natural causes where science busies itself.) What is here sought is perhaps not an ultimate first cause, which is a temporal explanation insofar as it refers to a sequence, but something that ‘cradles’ everything in its entirety, including time, which is itself part of the created order. Most theologians would agree that God exists outside of time (and for two in particular, Saint Augustine and Meister Eckhart, the relation of God and Eternity, or God’s Eternity, to time and creation, are issues of fundamental wonder) and the Argument from Contingency is one that accounts for this and is so distinguished from the Argument from Causation. The difference entails a matter of perspective, one that was well summed up by Czeslaw Milosz in a poem he wrote in memory of a friend, deceased.

To Jozef Czechowicz

It is possible that the dead do not need reports from the earth, and see in one symbol all that occurred later.

This echoes a famous passage by Julian of Norwich

He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.

This is the viewpoint from eternity.