Redemption and the Church of St. John: Futurity and Narrative Philosophy from Schelling to Rosenzweig

Abstract

This article attempts to sketch the conditions of ‘narrative philosophy’, an idea rooted in the philosophies of Friedrich Schelling and Franz Rosenzweig, insofar as it is both a historical philosophy and a messianic–eschatological utopianism. The two contradictory perspectives unite around the idea of narrativity and a shared idea of the future as incessantly deferred u-topos. The article examines Schelling’s late sketch of the ‘three ages of the church’ (Kirchenalter) and its origins in Schelling’s Ages of the World (Weltalter) project, before detailing Rosenzweig’s relationship to this philosophy, specifically his grafting of the triadic Kirchenalter into his own philosophy. The focus is on the structural affinity between Schelling and Rosenzweig, insofar as they both have established open-ended utopianism, or messianism, which lies concealed in their nonetheless ‘purely rational’ systems of philosophy. The article plots the course of the entanglement, while also bringing out the originality of the ‘narrative philosophical’ enterprise, which in both cases was never fully systematized. Schelling never completed—or else abandoned—the Weltalter, while Rosenzweig died young before he could expand his ‘New Thinking’ system, which was first introduced in the Star of Redemption (Stern der Erlösung). The article also attempts to show how this narrativity depends on both an aesthetic framework and a political vision.