Peace, All. Here's a bit more on Ernst Bloch's hope, taken from An Unpromising Hope. Glad folks are finding it helpful. I'll keep sharing here and there when I get a minute. Much love. Peace. ~Tom
[It is] in Gothic cathedrals that Bloch finds a deep well of surplus hopes and dreams.* In addition to their shape and their presentation of space, these buildings also allude to stories of faith which, although they hold the possibility of being corrupted by fascism, still often hold in themselves the feeling of a certain longing for something which is beyond.
Bloch notes, in a surprisingly polemical fashion, that at the center of a pyramid is a dead person, a lifeless body prepared for the underworld—in other words, at the center of the pyramid is death. This is the god of slave-holding empire. In contrast, Bloch lifts up, at the center of the cathedral, that wherever there is a crucifixion (an image of the right now), there is also the body that is again alive. There is at the center of all of the bloodied bodies, still a glimpse of resurrection. There are vines in the woodwork. There are grapes carved into the altar. In other words, for Bloch, even in static materials, there is the feeling of growth, of liveliness, and of becoming. There is a yearning to live more fully wherever we look. Everything in the cathedral screams the secret desire of those who pray: the body hungers for resurrection. The body wants life. The images of a messiah, the apostolic confession about the resurrection of the body—these are wishful images and ideas, day-dreams that, like music and art, feed hope. Bloch does not need to believe them to find their value. It is not the dogmas, but the hunger for a better life, the Utopian Surplus contained in the art, and the space, and the images, and even the spoken words, that Bloch wishes to imbibe. “The last shall be first” (Matt 20:16; Luke 13:30), “The tyrants shall be torn from their thrones,” “Now the whole group . . . were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection” (Acts 4:32–35). These holy words are filled with utopian surplus and so they should be tapped for the sake of hope, and for the sake of messianic longings among and within the hungry.
Bloch’s work is very much the product of this activity: mining history, art, theology, mythology, anything he can get his hands on, for Utopian Surplus, for traces of utopia, for residual hope. All of these might be utilized to feed hope and instigate hunger and heimweh today.* Indeed, in all of his encyclopedic tediousness, this is his primary objective: to drill into cultural expressions of generations now deceased, to find in them the sweet syrup that longs for a liberated world, a classless society, something better beyond what currently is, and to pull that syrup to the surface so that it may be tasted and so that it may feed hope, increasing the hunger and the heimweh, that resides within those who dream, or who would dream of a better life and a better world.*
In his digging through German history, for example, in search of a German “heritage of hope,” a task which he held like a heavy weight as he saw fascism rising around him, fascism which claimed that Bloch was no longer German himself, Bloch will comment: “Our German heritage is not Hansel and Gretel!” It is not blood and soil. The true German heritage, if there is one, is obvious: “it is the peasant’s revolt!”* With Müntzer and the peasants, and with Bloch, the poor and the persecuted cry: Omnia sunt communia! This is the heart of Bloch’s revolutionary hope.
Thomas R. Gaulke, "Hope in the Key of Heimweh," An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021), 17-19.
Footnotes
*Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 20.
*Bloch, “Man as Possibility,” 65.
*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:236
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