Messianic: Cessation

I am making some progress in a journal article submission on loss and eschatology (which is building upon my piece at Church Life Journal) and managed to get some work done on a segment that deals with the sociopolitical significance of the messianic.

While those in religious contexts would have come across the term “messianic”, fewer would be familiar in the role the messianic plays in political thought, particularly in the the thought of the political left. There is a fascinating genealogy, explored in The Messianic Idea in Judaism by the Jewish philosopher Gershom Schlolem, that tracks the secularisation of Kabbalistic conceptions of the messianic within political thought in the tradition of Marx.

Interestingly, Schlolem makes note that in both its religious and secular versions, messianism coincides with the experience of loss. In Schlolem’s words

The stronger the loss of historical reality…the more intensive became consciousness of the cryptic character and mystery of the messianic message…Jewish messianism is in its origins and by its nature…a theory of catastrophe (7)

The upshot of this secularisation is that instead of a messianic person, we have instead a messianic perspective on history, in particular our broken history marked by war and ethnic cleansing.

I hope to provide a glimpse of what this messianic perspective furnishes, but for now, it is important to note the first move that such a perspective puts into effect. Because such a perspective coincides with the trauma of loss, it inserts the perspectives of those who experienced the trauma into the reading of history. In other words, it prevents any simplistic or triumphalistic readings of history, as if those were the only ways in which history is understood. More to the point, it interrupts the ongoing monopoly of such readings of history, what Walter Benjamin called a “messianic cessation of happening”.

Put another way, the messianic brings history to an end, or more accurately, it brings to an end the endless nature of self-enclosed conceptions of any particular history. This is the important space within which other perspectives on the same history are allowed to emerge.

Click to read Matthew Tan’s other articles on Church Life Journal.