Crisis, Catastrophe, and the Shaking of the World (5/7)

This essay explores the figures of crisis and catastrophe, from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of the world’s upheaval. Bringing together the Greek, Biblical, and Indian traditions with the thought of Jan Patočka, it examines how civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the very possibility of action when meaning itself begins to falter. Published here as a series of seven essay-chapters, the text follows a demanding yet essential thread: to understand whether catastrophe is a sudden rupture, a slow disintegration of the world, or the deepest truth of our age. What follows is the fifth part.

From Tohu va-Bohu to Sodom: A Critique of “Political Science”

The first eleven chapters of Genesis replay, as though in cascading succession, the struggle between structure and dissolution, between creation and rupture. Man leaves the Garden: a crisis of the bond. Cain kills Abel: a crisis of fraternity. The Flood: a cosmic catastrophe. Babel: a crisis of language and of the collective. At every stage, it is tohu va-bohu that creation represses without ever causing it to disappear. When Abraham appears, he enters into this history of crises. He is not its survivor; he becomes its witness, indeed its respondent. Before him unfold once again familial and political fractures, famine, sterility, war, and sacrifice. Yet only once does the full face of catastrophe stand revealed: the divine punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, as though all the tohu va-bohu of origins, contained since Bereshit, were there to find its final conflagration before contracting around a single man, Abraham, and a promise.

The world was born from a disaster internal to God’s own work. Tohu va-bohu is its scar, the visible trace of a primordial disorder that the Word contained without ever abolishing. Before the world was spoken, it wavered. The earth was not nothingness; it was formless, trembling, still awaiting the Word that would summon it into existence.

The Eternal did not create the world out of emptiness, but out of trembling. For creation does not erase the abyss; it domesticates it. This tohu va-bohu is not evil; it is the field in which God experiences Himself as Creator, a potentially inhabited chaos.

Thus, between Nothingness and Being stretches the zone of beginning: there the divine Word traces its frontier and, from that which resists, brings form into being. Reality opposes its weight to Creation; God does not deny it, but orders it. And ever since, the world has remained fragile: at every moment it may come undone and fall back into its original chaos. Here the mystery of tohu va-bohu reveals itself: Creation is never complete; it begins anew with every breath. The world is sustained not by its own strength, but by the faithfulness of the Word that maintains it in being. Thus Scripture begins: “The earth was tohu va-bohu, and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2).

As the narrative advances toward the announced punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, it never explicitly names tohu va-bohu, yet its shadow becomes perceptible: fire and brimstone, overturning and sterility. What emerges is not chaos itself, but its memory; not creation unraveling, but the world recalling what it had been before it was ordered. To annihilate Sodom is to effect a regression toward the pre-Genesis, toward that “pre-creational beginning” where light had not yet divided the darkness. The plain of the Jordan, once exalted as the “Garden of the Lord,” undergoes an ontological metamorphosis: it becomes a desert of bitumen, a land of absolute barrenness. Here we witness chaos in its fullness. It is the withdrawal of the divine presence, giving way to a world undone. Sodom reenacts, as an inverted mirror, the paradox of Genesis: where blessing had ordered life, Judgment establishes emptiness. The use of the Hebrew verb hafakh (“to overturn,” “to upend”) to describe the city’s fall designates not merely an archaeological ruin, but a subversion of the cosmic order. What the Word had structured, the passage from chaos to order, wrath restores to the formless. Abraham stands upon the breach, between the cosmos that still endures and the returning chaos. His question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” is a metaphysical cry: can the Demiurge consent to seeing His own work become Tohu va-Bohu once more? The destruction of the cities of the plain is a reactivation of primordial emptiness, a “joyful de-creation” from which only the Patriarch’s prayer succeeds in distinguishing a return to absolute nothingness. Sodom is not merely destroyed; it is ontologically dissolved, returned to the cosmic draft, to primordial chaos, where light still hesitates to exist. Abraham saves humanity from total annihilation, not through the sheer force of prayer, but because he reminds God that a world requires a minimum of coherence.

“I look upon the earth, and behold, it is Tohu va-Bohu; and to the heavens, and their light is gone.” (Jeremiah 4:23)

The vision of the prophet Jeremiah echoes the Sodomitic apocalypse. Here, the language of primordial chaos is no longer merely a cosmogony, but the very grammar of Judgment: when humanity corrupts the Covenant, the earth loses its foundation and once again sinks into the undifferentiated state of the first day.

To think catastrophe, to think disaster: this is where the human passion for philosophy, mythology, and religion has never ceased to test itself. Two visions confront one another while simultaneously responding to each other: one cyclical, in which crisis and catastrophe are the pulsations of a cosmic respiration; the other linear, in which time advances toward a telos and eschatology becomes the necessary passage between crisis and fulfillment. Within this second regime, history replaces the cosmos: the end is no longer a beginning anew, but a revelation. From that moment onward, eschatology becomes immediately political, and political science, at its deepest level, is nothing other than an applied eschatology. In order to exist, every political project must invoke its own idea of catastrophe: an end to be averted, a disaster to be named. Whether it be the collapse of capitalism, ecological breakdown, or the dissolution of collective identity, politics is often grounded in this anticipation of the worst, not in order to accept it, but in order to provide itself with the very necessity of action.

The tragedy of modern political science lies in its constant effort to repress, or at least conceal, its own eschatological background. By constituting itself as an empirical and rational discipline, devoted to the analysis of facts and to methodological neutrality, it sought to purify itself of every form of teleology. Yet, as Eric Voegelin demonstrated, modernity did not destroy religious structures of thought; it “immanentized” them.^[1] What once belonged to transcendent salvation became a historical process: politics became the substitute for soteriology. Far from being abolished, eschatology was translated into the promise of progress, the utopia of reconciliation, or the horizon of complete autonomy. Hans Blumenberg, in response to this reading, saw in this immanentization not a corruption of theology but a legitimate reappropriation: modernity would thereby endow itself with its own narrative autonomy, relocating the myth of the end onto the plane of the human project. Yet this “self-assertion” (Selbstbehauptung) of reason, by denying the sacred from which it nevertheless proceeds, has had the effect of rendering the symbolic foundations of political action invisible.^[2]

Modern political science has remained dependent upon the aspiration to transfer to humanity the prerogatives of creatio ex nihilo once reserved for God. The merit of reflecting upon primordial catastrophe, that of Tohu va-Bohu and its recurrences, whether they appear implicitly in the narrative of Sodom or explicitly in Jeremiah’s prophecy, is to reveal that the God of the Old Testament creates not ex nihilo, but ex confusione. Creation is not the emergence of being out of nothingness, but an act of differentiation, of bringing order to a pre-existing reality. Chaos, therefore, is never abolished; it remains the latent matrix of being, always capable of re-emerging in different forms: catastrophe, judgment, or the loss of meaning.

This Biblical Tohu Bohu corresponds, under a different regime of temporality, to the phase of return to the unformed within the cyclical temporality of Indian thought: the moment when name and form (nāma-rūpa) dissolve into the undifferentiated principle (avyakta, “the unmanifest”). Tohu Bohu evokes chaos before creation; pralaya, by contrast, designates chaos after creation, that into which the world folds back at the end of each cosmic cycle (kalpa). In both cases, it is not a question of nothingness, but of a liminal state: form disappears, yet remains in potency.

Within Biblical thought, Tohu Bohu represents a metaphysically negative disorder: it stands in opposition to light and to the creative Word; it is that which God contains, orders, and holds at bay. In Indian thought, by contrast, pralaya and avyakta designate states of pure potentiality: disorder does not stand in opposition to order; it constitutes its necessary reverse.

Thus, in both traditions, disorder is never external to order, but rather its very condition. To think Tohu Bohu together with pralaya is to recover the point of equilibrium at which every cosmology, whether theological or philosophical, reveals itself to be inseparable from the political: to govern the world is always to strive to preserve a fragile order poised upon the edge of primordial chaos.

To think Tohu Bohu together with pralaya is to perceive that disorder is not an accident of the world but its deepest dimension, the region where the possibility of meaning is endlessly reenacted. If every cosmology remains inseparable from the political, it is because it always entails a particular way of situating oneself before this depth: to preserve an order is already to negotiate with a ground that forever exceeds it.

Modernity, however, sought to break this primordial pact. By separating the political from both the eschatological and the cosmological, by dissolving the former into administration and reducing the latter to the mathematics of numerical law, it displaced reflection from the question of origin to that of mastery. Governance aspired to become a science of calculation, forgetting that it had once arisen from a relationship to the abyss rather than to certainty. Yet whenever order begins to unravel, whenever crisis becomes the ordinary texture of the world, this repressed cosmological background resurfaces: politics rediscovers that it proceeds not from sovereign will, but from the fracture itself, from the vertigo of the groundless ground.

And what if political modernity had mistaken the very nature of the drama?

What if it had sought to ignore the depth of the indeterminate, of the undecidable, that place where decision itself loses its bearings?

To say that crisis must be resolved, is that not already to misunderstand the fact that it no longer comes to an end? That it extends itself as the condition of the world, as the atmosphere of every present? Perhaps this is the true mark of all modernity: its essence is not novelty but prolongation; it has endured for millennia as a slow passage through the Kali Yuga, an Iron Age extended to the scale of consciousness.

Notes

[1] In The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), Eric Voegelin develops his central thesis of the “immanentization of the eschaton.” Modern ideologies, while presenting themselves as rational and historical, reproduce structures of salvation inherited from religion by transferring them into human history itself. The promise of transcendent redemption is thereby transformed into a political project of total reconciliation, historical progress, or ultimate emancipation.

This interpretation nevertheless differs from those of Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith. For Schmitt, political modernity remains structured by secularized theological categories, sovereignty, decision, exception, but the emphasis lies above all on the formal continuity between theological and political concepts. For Löwith, the modern philosophy of historical progress constitutes a secular transposition of Christian eschatology into the philosophy of history. Voegelin radicalizes this diagnosis: he sees in modernity not merely the survival of theological patterns but a “gnostic” reactivation of the promise of salvation, whereby humanity claims to accomplish within history what once belonged to transcendence. The problem therefore lies not simply in the secularization of religious concepts, but in the transformation of politics itself into an instrument of soteriology.

Voegelin nevertheless tends to adopt a strongly pathologizing interpretation of Gnosticism, understood as a disorder of the spirit and a will toward self-deification leading, in his view, to the modern forms of totalitarianism. The immanentization of the eschaton thus appears as the catastrophic attempt to accomplish within human history a redemption that once belonged to transcendence, at the price of falsifying reality and closing experience to the order of being.

By contrast, Jacob Taubes, while sharing Voegelin’s diagnosis that eschatological structures persist within modernity, refuses to regard them as either a mere spiritual error or a political pathology. In Occidental Eschatology (1947), eschatology is conceived not as illusion but as one of the deepest motors of Western history. The apocalyptic becomes the revolt of spirit against the tyranny of “the world as it is,” against every attempt by politics to establish itself as a definitive order.

Taubes thus rehabilitates the revolutionary figure, from Paul the Apostle to Karl Marx, by way of Thomas Müntzer, as the bearers of an eschatological power of separation and judgment, keeping alive the flame of krinein against the closure of the established world. Defining himself as an “archaeologist of the apocalyptic,” Taubes is less concerned with restoring a transcendent order than with the negative force of messianism: a permanent power of destabilization preventing politics from closing upon its own idolatrous self-sufficiency. Where Voegelin seeks to restore a separate transcendence in order to reorder the city, Taubes sees in the revolutionary impulse the legitimate persistence of a hope irreducible to the finitude of politics. A politics deprived of every eschatological horizon would then risk becoming nothing more than the administration of nothingness. See Occidental Eschatology, especially Part II.

^[2]Hans Blumenberg argues that modernity inherited medieval and eschatological questions, such as the meaning and end of history, to which it was compelled to respond through heterogeneous means, most notably the idea of Progress. This structural displacement gives rise to the optical illusion of a substantial continuity with religion. Blumenberg designates this functional mechanism as “reoccupation” (Umbesetzung): new conceptual frameworks occupy systemic positions left vacant by the collapse of the theological order without thereby constituting its derivatives. See The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 65-71.