Le Testament de Dieu by Bernard-Henri Lévy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Declining Resistance to Injustice

This is a book of political theology written by the French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Levy, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Stalin's Terror and Mao's Great Leap and Cultural Revolution, all events that undermine traditional moral analysis. But the book was written before the Left became the governing meritocracy; before that time when fascism again became respectable; before the ideological victories of neo-liberalism and the religious Right; before the recognition of what globalisation really meant for the rich as well as the poor countries; before the ascendancy of post-modernism as a rejection of reasonableness as well as reason; So how does such a book hold up after almost four decades?

The Testament of God is a self-proclaimed statement of hope in the advancement of humanity. It was counter-cultural at the time and still is; not because of its optimism but because of the reasons for its optimism. Levy believed that the "morality of resistance" which he had seen and participated in during the 1960's and 70's had become an established feature of society. He also believed that this ethical innovation was a symptom of what he considered "a return to monotheism," by which he meant the Judaeo-Christian "passion for the Law" (Levy, widely known as a free-thinker, also is quoted as saying "The more law there is the more comfortable I feel").

For Levy, the Law is the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. His reading of the biblical witness is radical: it was written ('invented' is the term he prefers), he claims, by a bunch of heroic resistors to the prevailing mores of their time. This resistance constitutes its core, which is as relevant now as it was when it was written: "Primacy of the Law does not mean theocracy but, on the contrary, mistrust of all embodied norms, all profane gods, of all gods, in which there has appeared again at the end of the twentieth century, the cowardly obscurantism of ancient polytheism." 

A state of permanent mistrust of power, outlined and justified by theology sounds as much like anarchism now as it did in 1979. It doesn’t take much effort of imagination to see that Levy is working backwards, as it were, from a political stance which is ostensibly Trotskyite, to a dogmatic interpretation of the Bible which takes more from 2nd century Christianity than 20th century Judaism. Contemporary interpretations of Jesus as anti-Roman revolutionary are perhaps only slightly less outrageous than that of Jews fomenting political unrest as a matter of tradition.

The details of Levy's position seem less over the top than his headlines: The state is not an issue as such; we need it to avert chaos and brutality just as Hobbes said we did. But, and this is central, all Messiahs are false Messiahs for the Jewish Levy. Messiahs emerge not just from above, but also from below. Populism needs to be resisted as vigorously as dictatorship. 

Historically these two phenomena of populism and dictatorship are linked. They typically converge in the creation of what is usually called civil religion, that species of faith which takes its ethos as prevailing convention, whatever its content might be, and imitates traditional religion, often co-opting it. Certainly, Levy deserves credit here for anticipating the emergence of both trends as well as their intersection in the person of Donald Trump, the least likely leader of a civil religion in history.

Christianity is important for Levy primarily because it did what it intended to do: bring the singular God of Judaism to the pagan world (he prefers not to touch on the Pauline condemnation of the Law and its parody in Christian theology). Levy clearly has 'a thing' about polytheism and fears the return to a "political paganism" in, one presumes, an idolatrous civil religion. Nazism is the archetype of such a return to paganism. WWII is thus justifiably classed as a not just a moral but a religious war. Judaism, considered as the source of Christianity, was the primary target.

In this analysis, Levy understood the fundamental dynamics of Nazi hatred of Judaism. But he missed what more recent historians like Timothy Snyder have seen, namely that Hitler's return to paganism was not to a polytheistic cosmos but to one in which there was no distinction between Nature and Morality. To the extent that Nature and Morality are fused in polytheism, Levy might be correct therefore. But the essential feature of Nazi ethics was the idea that morality had been divorced from natural norms by Judaic monotheism. Since it was Jews who most insistently continued this distinction and did so genetically rather than dogmatically they had to be eliminated.

Levy's personal, ethical question is straightforward in the light of 20th century history to date: how does one avoid becoming either a victim or an assassin? It is in answering this question that I think Levy is both least and most successful. Least successful because despite his search through literature and philosophy he can't find a solution to the problem of oppressive conventionality. But most successfully because he ends up outlining an approach which he eventually pursues in later years. This approach is inadequately described as Kabbalah, the never-ending interpretation of texts and conditions considering the overwhelming divine imperative of Justice.

It is in his discussion of justice that Levy mentions the Kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem, and only there, without an index entry. Yet his closing remarks on justice suggest that he had already assimilated the view of Kabbalah.

"For a Jew, good is not symmetrical to or the antonym of evil. To every evil there does not correspond, there is not opposed, a good that is somehow its other side or its just blood price. The just man is also, above all, the one who knows the vanity, the collateral futility of justice." 

Justice, in other words, must be invented continuously from first principles. Justice, if nothing else, must never become a convention enforced either from above or below, but created within, if necessary against universal opposition. Responsibility for the criteria of justice cannot be delegated or avoided. The Law does not specify what constitutes justice, it merely insists that justice be done.

This indeed is anarchism but of a very peculiar sort. The anarchism of permanent revolution is to be applied to oneself not to one's fellows. It is the defining characteristic of the morality of resistance. This to me is an enduring and intriguing conclusion. But it was not a successful prediction. The gains of the political Right, the cooptation of the Left and the triumph of globalisation have crushed whatever impulse toward the permanent reformulation of justice there was in 1979. Nothing persists of its own momentum; not even the divine.

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