Divine Creativity in the Early Writings of Walter Benjamin

Scholarship on the theological in the work of Benjamin has largely focused on highlighting the absent dimension of his concept of the divine. The divine represents the gap between pure and fallen language, or between current society and a redeemed world. In this chapter, I argue that there is an additional aspect to the divine for Benjamin beyond its role as an absent totality of history and language. As emphasized in his early writings, Benjamin depicts the divine as having an agency responsible for the sudden appearance of the totalities of experience. Here the divine represents a transcendent unknown from which language, color, and revelation are inspired. The divine creativity appears in ethical life as the revelation of the possibility of a redeemed world. This revelation does not diminish human responsibility or automatically fix the world but inspires us to critique the dominant narrative of history. His early notion of divine creativity helps to understand his later work on the messianic moment and the dialectical image, articulating how these images strike us from beyond our current historical situation. For Benjamin, the pursuit of redemption involves employing our own power of critique alongside an openness to the reception of messianic images.