This Pathless Hour | 257ogy. The vagueness of the term “religious anarchism,” which Scholem applied
both to Buber and to himself, has worked to veil the theopolitical nature of
these oppositions.^32 Buber’s name for that which opposes the apocalyptic was
the “prophetic.” He articulated this perspective, developed throughout his bibli-
cal writings, most clearly in a 1954 essay entitled “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and
the Historical Hour.” The central attribute of prophecy for Buber, exemplified
by Jeremiah, is its recognition that “the unique being, man, is created to be a
centre of surprise in creation. Because and so long as man exists, factual change
of direction can take place towards salvation as well as towards disaster, starting
from the world in each hour, no matter how late.”^33 Apocalyptic, exemplified by
the Revelation to John and by 4 Ezra, forecloses such natality: “Everything here is
predetermined, all human decisions are only sham struggles. The future does not
come to pass; the future is already present in heaven, as it were, present from the
beginning.”^34 Scholem mentions that Buber sees Marx as a modern secular ver-
sion of an apocalyptic writer; Marx is “indifferent to the inner change of human
beings which precedes the change of the world, being only concerned with the
unalterable course of events that will swallow up previous history in a revolution-
ary way—and who thinks that the coming catastrophe of these events ought, if
anything, to be hastened.”^35 Scholem links this position to the Barthian school
of theology as well; he notes that in his effort to combat this modern Gnosticism
in both its religious and its secular forms, Buber tended not only to play down
its significance in the history of Judaism but also to relax his strict opposition
to the Law, whose antiapocalyptic qualities now seem more positive. However,
Scholem ignores the fact that Buber elsewhere constructs a modern prophetic
counterpart to Marx. This occurs in Paths in Utopia, a work ignored in Scholem’s
forty-four-page essay on Buber.^36 “In the socialist secularization of eschatology,”
Buber writes, the two forms of eschatology correspond to two rival streams of
socialism: “The prophetic form in some of the systems of the so-called Utopians,
the apocalyptic one above all in Marxism.”^37 He elaborates: “All suffering under
a social order that is senseless prepares the soul for vision, and what the soul
receives in this vision strengthens and deepens its insight into the perversity of
what is perverted.”^38 This vision of a better life, which Buber notes is “experienced
as revelation or idea,” religiously or philosophically, emerges from the existing
conditions of humanity and resolves in ideas of a perfect time (the messianic vi-
sion) or a perfect place (the utopian order of the Ideal). Both create images that
seem impossible, but “what may seem impossible as a concept arouses, as an im-
age, the whole might of faith, ordains purpose and plan. It does this because it
is in league with powers latent in the depths of reality. Eschatology, in so far as
it is prophetic, Utopia, in so far as it is philosophical, both have the character of
realism.” Contra Scholem, there is another eschatology beyond the messianic, a
vision of what is not impossible.