Inadaequatio intellectus ad rem. Il marxismo metareligioso di Ernst Bloch

This article examines the biblical figures of Moses and Job in the light of the meta-religious interpretation of Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), especially in his The Principle of Hope (1954) and Atheism in Christianity (1968). A particular focus is on Bloch’s self-labeled «detective method», aimed at interpreting documents from the past as fields of tension between conservation and utopia. Not content with being historically determined, the human being discovers his nature as a “not-yet”. The conflict between theocratic foundationalism and messianic-apocalyptic dynamism in the Bible, and in the Judeo-Christian religious traditions, is a coded representation of such tensions and the nebulous blueprint of a project to overcome them. Thus, in Bloch’s reading, the «underground Bible» hides a utopian and Promethean fil rouge, which aims at a progressive liberation from authoritarian and archaic forms of awe and alienation, ultimately leading to an exodus from Yahweh himself. This process of liberation began with Moses’ intuition: for him, Yahweh ceased to be a volcanic divinity, as was the case for the Midianite tradition that had influenced the primitive Jewish religiosity, and became the exodus God, i.e., the idea of a path of awareness and liberation. But the exodus would lose its raison d’être if it remained crystallized in a ritual memory (even if it were that of the Covenant). The exodic perspective cannot be but a critical and restless look at things. Thus, the exodic questioning finds a new voice in the book of Job, where the Mosaic faith is denied and overcome. In a culmination of the tradition of protest within the Bible, Job questions the morality of God’s authoritarianism, thus revealing that «a human person can be better, and behave better, than God».