Richard J Moss (Durham University)
“The first ages was that of the servitude of the law, that of the father and his Old Testament. The second age is an intermediate condition between flesh and spirit. It is the third age which precedes the end of the world, is now in the process of being born; it is inhabited by monks, that is, by the viri spirituals, by the freedom of the spirit.” (Ernst Bloch on the Theology of Joachim of Fiore, On the Origins of the Third Reich)
In Ernst Bloch’s essay On the Origins of the Third Reich, he explores the European concept of the ‘Reich’, and how the term has a long tradition of revolution in the psyche of European history. As Bloch writes, “in its original form the Third Reich has denoted the social-revolutionary ideal dream of the Christian heresy: the dream of a third Gospel and the world corresponding to it.” Bloch’s essay explores the origins of the Reich concept, and demonstrates how the messianic prophecies of Methodius, and the legends of Kyffhauser and Prestor-John transmit the classical saviour myths regarding messiah like leaders into the German imagination. In regards to this paper, Bloch explores the doctrines of Joachim of Fiore, in whose works Bloch draws from this the three stages of European utopianism (paraphrased in the quote above), and equates them to the conceptual three Reichs of the German/European imagination, and the way this philosophy formed the beginnings of the Enlightenment in Europe.
The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how this history of ideas in Europe forms a parallel to Pynchon’s own interpretation of the European imagination, specifically in regards to Bloch’s essay. Pynchon’s dialectic with the Frankfurt School is heavily covered in criticism, and I have brought together these facets of the texts with the more esoteric heretical philosophy and theosophy of the Middle Ages.
The first section covers Pynchon’s exploration of Germany in Gravity’s Rainbow, and how he builds up his imaginative vista of Germany, and its intellectual and conceptual history. The Zone forms a chaotic playground for such ideas, for example in the conversation between Säure and Gustav, in which the allegations of failure towards the European Ideal create a synergy with the critical and disillusioned view of the Enlightenment shared by the majority of the Frankfurt School. The Zone forms a blank canvas, an area for Pynchon to exercise a common theme in his work, the impossibly brief moments at the zero point of vast historical transition, of which Slavoj Zizek calls ‘mediating zones’. The turnover of eras – be they theological, historical or conceptual – create the chaotic, primordial moment that Pynchon’s imagination occupies.
The second section deals with the details of the Christian cosmology interpreted by Bloch from the writings of Joachim of Fiore. The key text is Against the Day, which I argue works in tandem with Gravity’s Rainbow, at least thematically. Joachim’s third age is one of “freedom of spirit”, of the divine departing God (and therefore law), and ‘becoming’ the world. According to Bloch, the ideology moves against the traditional two-world Catholic view, of a creation of a worldly paradise instead of a transcendent one beyond. As a result Bloch states that these ideas, alongside other European religious revolutionaries, form the bedrock of European socialism. In Against the Day, the ‘mediating zone’ is the collapse of this utopian ideal, the fall of Enlightenment to the 20th century darkness. The socialist world longed for by the European imagination begins to depart and collapse, seems most clearly in the alluded transcendence-like death of Cyprian Latewood and the Bogomil monks. This section concludes the paper with the discussion of how Pynchon’s interpretation of the transitional age that Against the Day occupies, shows a breakdown of the third stage of this particular European ideal, and cements the same criticism at work in Gravity’s Rainbow.
Theology and Pynchon have been strange bedfellows in Pynchon criticism, often ignored, downplayed and even dismissed. This paper means to go some way to remedy this, by dealing head on with the rebellious religious European tradition that forms so much of the continent’s history, and therefore so much of Pynchon’s historical, conceptual and revolutionary writing. With the recent surfacing of theology in Pynchon criticism, I aim to highlight this important and overlooked aspect of the corpus.