Between the end of World War I and the outbreak of World War II, Christian and Jewish theologians became preoccupied with heresy. The postwar years saw a revival of two very old rebellions against a present and interventionist version of God: the heresy of Gnosticism, which banished God from the earth and pronounced that earth the creation of an evil “demiurge” or demon, and that of Spinozist pantheism, which made the world and God coextensive with one another. If these heresies had premodern origins, the Weimar theological preoccupation with them was an artifact of modernity, as the rapid transformation of cultural and political life, the decline of tradition, and, most especially, the bloodshed of the Great War forced theologians to inquire about God's will and capacity for intervention. The project of Benjamin Lazier's brilliant book is to explore the meanings of this interwar preoccupation with heresy, both in its interconfessional modes and as it appeared in German Jewish thought. Lazier follows three thinkers in particular—Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Gershom Scholem—and their writings become lenses through which he reconstructs their intellectual, political, and theological worlds. Lazier describes how the preoccupation with heresy effectively became a theological expression of the modern crisis of legitimacy and authority, and a sign of rising doubts about the increasing potential of human artifice. With so much attention recently lavished on Weimar Jewish thought, it is surprising that so little has been said about heresy during this period. Lazier's pathbreaking book demonstrates that even as political life, social thought, and philosophy were radicalized during the Weimar years, so was theology, and those theological transformations cast very long shadows into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The new Gnosticism arose through the efforts of Protestant theologians, including the “crisis theologians” Friedrich Gogarten and Karl Barth, who promoted das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, “the gospel of an alien God.” Their gospel was a deliberate move away from earlier versions of liberal theology, which had kept God and the world close together and took social progress as a sign of divine approval. In contrast, Spinoza was often celebrated by Catholic theologians whose God, instead of fleeing the natural world, became coextensive with it. No matter how God was evacuated from the scene, however, it was the evacuation itself that was crucial, making it impossible either for God to judge man, or for man to judge God. However, in such a heretical world, human will and self-assertion were left exposed. With God no longer an immediate and potentially interventionist lawgiver, fresh doubts were raised about the proper scope and limits of human action. Many younger Jewish thinkers found both the Gnostic and Spinozist heresies fascinating, and adapted different versions of them for use in their rebellion against liberal forms of Judaism. The origins of Jonas's, Strauss's and Scholem's thought are situated, for Lazier, in the heretical Weimar “interruption” of God. If this divine absence troubled these future titans of scholarship, it also became a crucial catalyst for their thinking.

Lazier's book will reward scholars of Jonas, Strauss, and Scholem, as well as newcomers to their works. His examination of Hans Jonas is especially valuable because Jonas, of all of his generation of German Jewish thinkers, may be the most unjustly ignored.Footnote ¹ Not only did Jonas make a significant philosophical contribution through his work on the philosophy of science and nature, but also his work on early Gnosticism has inspired generations of scholars. Perhaps Lazier's most intriguing contribution to our understanding of Jonas lies in his challenge to Jonas's own account of his intellectual development. As Jonas told his story, he began his scholarly career fascinated by theology and then turned to questions of biological life because of his life-and-death struggles as a soldier both in World War II and in Israel's War of Independence. Lazier shows that, in fact, Jonas developed his interest in nature by first exploring the Gnostic condemnation of the natural world. Jonas effected a new, twentieth-century “overcoming of Gnosticism” (Lazier borrows the phrase from the intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, a crucial influence on God Interrupted) by rejecting the “gospel of an alien God” and exploring nature as a field of almost, though not quite, divine meaning. This overcoming of Gnosticism had important Jewish dimensions, for Jonas was a critic not only of the “Gnostic” (because hostile toward the flesh) theology of Paul—which he studied with his teacher Rudolf Bultmann—but also of the “Gnostic” existentialism of his other important teacher, Martin Heidegger.

Celebrants and enemies of Leo Strauss usually read him as a follower of Plato who began his career with a strong interest in Judaism but ultimately made Nature rather than God into his “God-term” in his classic 1953 defense of natural right, Natural Right and History. Through a careful investigation of Strauss's correspondence (including letters exchanged with both Jonas and Scholem), Lazier shows that this story is far too simplistic. In fact, Strauss's ultimate turn to Nature should be understood as a continuation of his early search for an absent God. While there has been a proliferation in the literature on Strauss in recent years, including two excellent intellectual biographies by Eugene Sheppard and Daniel Tanguay, Lazier makes an original contribution by showing that despite Strauss's avowed atheism, he nevertheless held Jewish categories to be enormously important. As Lazier shows, the language of God and the language of natural right were not in fact opposing languages for Strauss, but instead were dialects of the same language. Thus, Lazier not only makes a historical point about Strauss's development, which Strauss scholars would do well to heed, but also shows that the distinction between religion and philosophy that Strauss maintained in all of his writings cannot be taken entirely at face value. Like Jonas, Strauss engaged with philosophy in ways that were shaped by the categories of Judaism and Jewish experience, and he worked toward the recovery of some version of physis—purposive nature—in order to effect the overcoming of the Gnostic impulse. Lazier also deserves praise for noting the importance of Strauss's attitudes toward Epicureanism, which escapes most commentators.

For Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish heresies and committed Zionist, there was a direct link between the self-assertion of the heretic and the self-assertion of the modern Jewish people. Thus, there was indeed “Redemption through Sin,” of a sort (to cite the title of one of Scholem's famous essays), for as Lazier writes, “[Heretics] could be mobilized in the service of a Jewish peoplehood understood as prior to religious creed or practice” (141). For Lazier, Scholem's entire history of Jewish mysticism should be read as a conflict between Gnostic and pantheistic versions of heresy against Jewish law. It was the Kabbalah that enabled him to imagine these two heresies coexisting within one system of thought. The necessity of heresy, for Scholem, derived from its capacity to encourage the self-empowerment of the Jewish people. Indeed, so long as heretics remained within the compass of Judaism broadly considered—so long as their heresies augmented Judaism rather than breaking from it completely—they had to be considered a boon. Scholem's history of the Jewish people can be understood, Lazier suggests, as though it were a kind of Golem mdash;an expression of the same self-creative impulses that fueled Scholem in his most Nietzschean and Zionist moments. Like the creation of a Golem, which in some legends emulates the divine act of creation, Scholem's history flirted with heresy.

Intriguingly, in his preface and epilogue, Lazier invokes a question asked by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, effectively making her a spectral interlocutor of Jonas, Strauss, and Scholem: would the modern turn away from God be followed by a turn away from Nature? This was a worry for both Jonas and Strauss, for whom the autonomy and dignity of Nature stood as a check against the autonomy of man. Jonas, certainly, was as concerned about environmental heresy as about theological variations. He was troubled by any exercise of human will that ignored not only the divine as a source of limits and laws, but also the natural world as a source of limits and a phenomenon worthy of respect in and of itself. Lazier ends his book by suggesting that we may have no choice but to live in a world in which God is interrupted, but he also suggests that the natural world remains a “channel” through which the divine might yet speak to us. If the arguments Lazier chronicles may seem arcane—a collection of premodern heresies refracted through the lens of early twentieth-century German Jewish historical and theological scholarship—his concern about human assertion is strikingly relevant as biotechnology brings us closer and closer to determining our own biological telos and thus, perhaps, inventing new heresies.