History as Inner Life

Spengler writes in a blog post:
When Christian theology declares that the New Testament fulfills the Old, they mean in effect that the history of Israel is a map to the inner life of every Christian. And this history is not simply a record interred in a book. The history of the Jewish people is manifest in the life of the Jewish people, for we are our history: Every one of us stood with Moses to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai, and all who clung to YHWH are alive today, as we pray before reading the Torah in public. We, the living people of Israel, are a flesh-and-blood map to the salvation of every Christian.

Can't the history of Israel be a map to the inner life of a Jew? Take the following passage from an essay by Bernard-Henri Lévy:
The Kabbalists go further still in recognizing in the prolonged stay in Egypt a ruse of Providence to incorporate in the Spirit of Israel all the "sparks" lost in the temples of impurity.

What better way to interpret a bad relationship that taught us about human depravity than to view it as a ruse of providence? What better way to view the modern world than as a temple of impurity to which we are exiled, which nonetheless contains isolated sparks of the divine? I would see myself as "Israel among the nations" even if I lived in Israel.

Lévy goes on to write:
Exile can first be literally understood as the test of an ego which withdraws unhesitatingly from human intercourse, with its grimaces of complacency. . . . For there is no other abode for lucidity . . . than to become a hermit and to prepare to be right in the face of the entire city. . . . the work of exile is to deport the specious groupings which are the product of the ideologies, the better to return to a more authentic solidarity, one engaged face-to-face between solitary individuals.

If viewing "the history of Israel as a map to the inner life" is a uniquely Christian innovation, then it is one of those lost sparks I have incorporated into my own ethos. But I don't think it is - and I would add that the history of Israel is only a microcosm of the history of Man, which is a map to the inner life the size of the territory it covers, to borrow a trope from Borges. Israelite history is simply more manageable in scope, and was the first to be neatly compiled in literary form.

Comments

  1. DudeJanuary 6, 2010 at 10:31 AM

    Good post. I've sometimes seen the history of Israel as a metaphor for the history of mankind.

    Typos: "If viewing "the history of Israel AS a map to the inner life" is a uniquely Christian innovation, THEN it is one of those lost sparks I have incorporated into my own ethos." Yes?

    ReplyDelete
  2. ¡Benjaminista!January 6, 2010 at 11:04 AM

    You are right. Thank you sir.

    ReplyDelete

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