This connection between religion and nihilism was for Scholem reflected most intensely in the writings of Franz Kafka: “For, like no one else before, he expressed the limit between religion and nihilism.” He argued that Kafka bore witness to the modern experience of a meaningless world where God is completely absent and where revelation and salvation are unrealizable. Kafka’s nihilistic experience, paradigmatic for modernity in general, was not the atheistic realization that there is nothing beyond this world; it was ultimately a religious experience of divine nothingness: “This is the experience of modern man, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, for whom nothing has remained of God but the void, in Kafka’s sense, to be sure, the void of God.” This divine nothingness is manifested first and foremost in the meaninglessness of revelation. Again, this modern meaninglessness does not mark the end of religion but uncovers the true nihilistic nature of revelation itself.

For Scholem, the significance of God’s revelation is by definition inexhaustible, infinite, and as such incomprehensible and meaningless to human understanding. God’s word is overdetermined and gains its concrete meaning only in its mediation by tradition and interpretation. Although God’s word is essentially void of meaning, this meaninglessness is initially masked by religious traditions—in Scholem’s case, the rabbinic tradition— that establish certain interpretations of revelation as absolute. However, when religious traditions start to lose their authority in secular modernity the “nothingness of revelation” (das Nichts der Offenbarung) becomes apparent.

Kafka’s writings represented this condition where the crumbling legitimacy of Jewish law and tradition problematized revelation. The concept of the law was absolutely central in his stories and novels but always appeared as fundamentally inaccessible and incomprehensible. According to Scholem’s interpretation of Kafka, revelation therefore does take place in Kafka’s universe and in the modern world but is absolutely void of meaning.

Similarly, the law absolutely determines Kafka’s main character K., but it is impossible for him to know its meaning or its lawgiver. In a letter to his friend Walter Benjamin, Scholem characterized this as “a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance.” This empty and meaningless revelation reveals literally nothing, but is a manifestation of divine nothingness.

More than that, secularism paradoxically appears as a fully religious phenomenon. Modernity, in this respect, is neither opposed to religion nor is it the result of religious transformations; rather, it is religion. Modernity is just another episode, probably even the most interesting, in the long history of religious evolutions.

What was ultimately at stake in Scholem’s fascination with Gnosticism was therefore not just the possibility of a modern religiosity but a precept for modernity as such. If the modern worldview is characterized by an absolute absence of the divine and accordingly by a nihilistic conception of the world as devoid of any meaning, the crucial question is what our comportment with this world is. In other words, how do we make sense of the world and our lives if meaning is no longer given?

Someone who rejects the immanent world as meaningless in favor of an exclusive focus on transcendence still has to live in this world. A mere passive resignation might be speculatively attractive, but it is practically impossible. However hard the Gnostic hoped for salvation, he still lived in an unredeemed world and inevitably had to decide how exactly he wanted to do this in a meaningful way that squared with his Gnostic convictions. Paradoxically, even the most extreme negation of the world requires us to take a position within this world. In spite of its exclusive emphasis on transcendence, the Gnostic speculations necessarily had implications for the way one had to live in the immanent world. In other words, the dual schema of rejection and escape requires a third move: a return to immanence. This return can obviously not involve a simple acceptance of the profane, but it will be a dialectical return mediated by the initial rejection.

Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World