Philosopher of Revelation: The Life and Thought of S. L. Steinheim (review)

Volume 9, No.4 Summer 1991 127 philosophy from a Spinozistic perspective is too restrictive to be helpful in understanding the basic ideas of these philosophers. However, since all of these philosophers mention Spinoza, and a number of them call special attention to their affinities to some of Spinoza's ideas, Yovel's discussion should provide a good starting point for further discussion. In spite of these reservations, Yovel's book is a "must-read" for anybody interested in Spinoza and his possible effects on Western thought. The book is forcefully written, and it should serve to call attention to a part of Jewish culture that deserves more attention. Manfred Kuehn Purdue University Philosopher of Revelation: The Life and Thought of S. L. Steinheim, by Joshua O. Haberman. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989. 332 pp. $29.95. In the world that has been taught by the Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola that man has no essence, that he is capable of infinite possibilities and that he has become an earthly deity, we might find it a bit anachronistic to speak again of Revelation as a meaningful act that restores man's dignity through prudence, limitation, and humility. The struggle against Revelations, the divine authority of the Bible, has a long history, but for us it is necessary only to refer to the Enlightenment, to Voltaire, and the devastating materialism and skepticism that levelled Revelation into reason and conferred upon it a divinity that gave it control over all human activities. It made it possible for us to think that with reason, all the barriers to human happiness and knowledge would finally fall and disappear. Revelation was absorbed into consciousness, and revealed faith became natural religion. A veritable revolution had occurred and man felt the surge of change that occurs only when from the mountain peak a new view and attitude comes into existence. But the clouds never dissipated, and, like all human changes, the good merged into the bad and the greys beclouded the blacks and the whites. Who was Solomon Ludwig Steinheim (1789-1866)? He was a practicing physician in Altona. In 1833, he became deeply interested in Jewish philosophy and in 1835 published the first volume of The Revelation According to the Doctrine of Judaism. In 1845, he retired to Rome. He lived there until his death in Zurich in 1866. But the reader has only to think of these years of his life and names appear from everywhere. Here is Hegel and Schelling, there Kant and Fichte, but we must not forget Schleiermacher and Twesten and the ever-present Schiller and Goethe. Steinheim saw the end of the Catholic 128 SHOFAR domination in theology and the meteoric use of Protestant thought, natural theology, pantheism, and a deification of reason that could only have been imagined in dreams. We read Joshua O. Haberman's adequate introduction and we are led into this arena of revolution and speculation achieved rarely in human history. Already in 1756, Edmund Burke, in his first book, A Vindication ofNatural Society, described the struggle between natural and revealed religion and realized that it would have monumental consequences for human society. Man's attempts to reduce Revelation to a world soul, to postulates of reason, to necessary laws of society and nature, would exalt human autonomy to idolatry , would eliminate any measure to man's belief that he bore in him the divine essence. With this belief, Revelation was relegated to an inner phenomenon , to consciousness and its development, allowing every individual to determine the measure of responsibility which he owed to his fellow man and society, in other words, to anarchism. In the fullest sense of the term, man became the measure of all this is, was, and could be. The momentum was against revealed faith, the French Revolution like the American, had transferred the divine to natural rights which later became "privileges." Hegel's "divine logic" put an end to the separation between God and man. Who took up the battle for Revelation? There was the Catholic theologian August Christian Gfr5rer and the Jewish thinker Steinheim. There would always be those who recognized that the destruction of Revelation meant the end of the...