Hans Blumenberg's 1988 book The Saint Matthew Passion, while ostensibly concerned with the possible, secular reception of Bach’s masterpiece, pursues a series of 'theological lines of flight' via anecdotes, insights, and apercus generated by often heterodox theological debates and their literary receptions. One such line of flight is the retraction of the passion itself in Gersholm Scholem’s anecdote about the advent of the messiah in which almost nothing changes, as retold by Benjamin, Bloch, and now Blumenberg. Here Blumenberg returns to his earlier concerns with Gnosticism (Legitmacy, 1966) and considers a different answer to what has gone so wrong with creation that it needs to be destroyed.

Paul Fleming is Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies as well as the Taylor Family Director of the Society for the Humanities. He has published monographs on Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (2009) and The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (2006) along with edited volumes on Hans Blumenberg, Siegfried Kracauer, the scholars around Stefan George, and Ulrich Peltzer. He is currently co-translating Blumenberg’s The Saint Matthew Passion for Cornell Press as well as completing a book-length project that examines the use of the anecdote in and as theory with respect to questions of exemplarity, evidence, history, and rhetoric.