[Myths and Riddles: Some Observations about Literature and Theology: Introduction]Author(s): DAVID STERNSource: Prooftexts, Vol. 7, No. 2 (MAY 1987), pp. 107-109Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689177 .

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ARTHUE A. COHEN

Myths and Riddles: Some Observations about Literature and Theology

Introduction

The following essay was first delivered by the late Arthur A. Cohen (1928 1986) at an international conference, "Continuity and Transformation: Jewish

Writing Since World War II/' sponsored in 1982 by the Rockefeller Foundation and held at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center (Bellagio, Italy). Several other essays presented at the Bellagio Conference were published in 1984 as a

special issue of Proof texts (vol. 4, no. 1). For permission to publish the present essay, the editors of Proof texts wish to thank the Rockefeller Foundation and Elaine Lustig Cohen.

The Bellagio conference brought together Jewish writers from diverse countries and literary traditions along with scholars and critics of contempo rary Jewish literature. Typically, Arthur Cohen fit into both categories, a fact that alone made him different from most of the other participants. A prolific novelist, theologian, and cultural critic, Cohen was a figure in the American

Jewish intellectual world who was truly sui generis. His work dealt with

questions that few other writers and intellectuals even raised. The subject of the essay printed here, the relationship between theology and literature, is a case in point.

Educated at the University of Chicago and the Jewish Theological Semi

nary, Cohen began his intellectual career as a theologian of Judaism. In his earliest books?The Natural and the Supernatural few (1962) and The Myth of the fudeo Christian Tradition (1970), among others?he presented a searching critique of modern Jewish theology in the last century as well as an agenda for the renewal of Jewish religious thought. Influenced by Martin Buber and Franz Rosen

zweig, as well as by contemporary Christian theologians, Cohen offered a vision of Jewish belief that was existential in tone yet also deeply sensitive to

PROOFTEXTS 7 (1987): 107-122 ? 1987 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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108 ARTHUR A. COHEN

the reality of history, particularly to the modern historical experience of the

Jewish people in the Nazi death camps and in the aftermath of the war. Cohen continued to write on theology and Jewish thought throughout his

career; in addition to The Tremendum (1981), a theological interpretation of the Holocaust, Cohen edited several important readers and collections: Arguments and Doctrines: A Reader of Jewish Thinking in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1970); The

Jew: Essays from Der Jude (1980); and (with Paul Mendes-Flohr) the recently published Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, a massive collection of essays that define Jewish concepts and their theological relevance. From the late sixties onward, however, Cohen turned increasingly to writing fiction. In five novels

and several novellae, he explored further the questions that had dominated his earlier writing?the shape of belief in the modern world, the possibility of art and the imagination, the situation of the Jewish artist and intellectual.

In the Days of Simon Stern (1973), Cohen's most ambitious and perhaps representative novel, narrates the life of Simon Stern, a millionaire business

man in New York City who, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, attempts to save the survivors of the death camps and ensure the renewal of Judaism by building for them what is in effect a new Temple. By the book's end, however, this temple is destroyed just like the temples of Solomon and Herod. More than

simply an attempt to recast the messianic theme in Judaism in contemporary

terms, Simon Stern is actually a fictional elaboration of a theological concept, the

idea of the "failed," as opposed to false, messiah. This concept Cohen would

later extend in his post-Holocaust theology to the notion of a God who is

imperfect but not impossible, less than omnipotent yet not utterly powerless or dead. In the novel, the idea is elevated to myth; or more precisely, the fictional life of Simon Stern turns, in the course of the narrative, from novel to

hagiography to theological myth, acquiring a compelling force that exceeds its success judged solely as a novel or a theological treatise. If one wished to define the book's genre, one would probably have to invent a new name, something on

the order of the theological epic. For what Cohen was primarily attempting was to use narrative to recover for theology its epic grandeur, a monumentality of

form comparable to its subject matter.

In his last published novel, An Admirable Woman (1983), Cohen found the fictional persona closest perhaps to his own voice?in the character of a

German-Jewish emigre intellectual who was reminiscent of Hannah Arendt and other emigre scholar-writers who came to America from Europe during and after the war. That Cohen should have found his voice in such a persona

was not accidental: In many ways, his own literary career was more typical of a

European intellectual than of an American. For one thing, Cohen eschewed the academic establishment: he did not hold any advanced degrees and he never held a formal academic appointment, making his living instead as a publisher (of Noonday Press and Meridian Books, two houses he founded) and as a dealer in rare art books and documents. He was very much a type of the homme de lettres, devoted to an enormously wide range of interests and ideas that held passion ate, personal concern for him rather than to a specialized discipline of

knowledge and its professional scholarship. "Myths and Riddles: Some Observations about Literature and Theology" is

also an essay more continental than Anglo-American in style and preoccupa

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Some Observations about Literature and Theology 109

tion. Organized in numbered theses, which range in form from epigrammatic meditations to traditional-like stories, the essay is in fact a series of juxtaposed

positions and reflections rather than a single, sustained argument?indeed, as

Cohen says in the final passage, the passages consist of sample-entries from his

notebooks. For all their discontinuity, however, the separate passages nonethe

less explore a number of connected questions: What does it mean for a Jewish writer to write either theology or literature, or to write either one "Jewishly"? How is the Holocaust to be assimilated, not only into Jewish literature but into Jewish liturgy as well? What, then, is the relationship between literature and

liturgy, between the truth we attribute to the imagination and to religious belief? If we are unable to define what is Jewish literature, what constitutes Jewish blasphemy?

In the concluding section of the essay, Cohen describes the entries as "in substance ... all textual commentary," that is, quotations, allusions, inter

pretations, and reworkings of earlier texts. The quotations are sometimes

explicit (as of Sutzkever and Derrida), at other times half-hidden (as in the discussion of God and language about God*), and at times utterly mysterious in

origin (as in the case of the story about the printer from Podolia). Yet by characterizing the essay's entries as types of commentary, Cohen was doubt

less trying to locate his own writing in a tradition that was historically Jewish. For this tradition, Cohen obviously had first in mind midrash, the exemplary form of commentary in classical Jewish literature, but he was probably thinking as well of Gershom Scholem's famous essay on revelation and tradition in

Jewish exegesis, and of Scholem's close friend Walter Benjamin, "that diver after pearls," as Hannah Arendt once described him, whose greatest ambition

(it is said) was to compose a work consisting entirely of quotations. Cohen's

attachments to Benjamin are several: Like Benjamin, Cohen was a devoted

collector, and knew first-hand the torments and pleasures of collecting (citing quotations being in essence a species of collecting); both men held analogously uneasy relationships towards tradition in general, and Jewish tradition in

particular; both were unclassifiable in a similar way. If Benjamin wrote in order

to unfold the metaphysical dimensions of literature, it would be fair to say that Cohen attempted in his writings to restore to literature the consequentiality, the significance and aura of metaphysics.

Elusive and obscure as Cohen's writing may sometimes appear, its remark

able character lies in Cohen's attempt to invent a literary discourse for the

singular matters that obsessed him, a language that would at once be suffi

ciently expressive, articulate, and grand to meet the requirements of the

difficult and sublime subjects he wrote about. The passionate, idiosyncratic writing that resulted was like nothing else in contemporary American Jewish literature.

DAVIDSTERN Dept. of Oriental Studies

University of Pennsylvania

*Cf. Arthur A. Cohen, "Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption: Mystic Epistemol ogy Without Kabbalah," ]AAR Thematic Studies 48 (1980): 65-81.

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