The Airless Vice

Theodicy and Witness in the Works of Jonas and Pilinszky

Abstract

This study compares János Pilinszky’s poem Apokrif (1956) with Hans Jonas’s essay The Concept of God after Auschwitz (1984). The starting point is that the image of the airless press in the poem’s third part expresses in poetic language the same thing that Jonas describes conceptually through the Jewish mystical notion of tzimtzum, namely a God who withdraws into himself and thereby becomes incapable of intervention. Both authors arrive at the same insight, that God is present within creation yet unable to intervene in it, though each states this in a different register. Jonas develops the idea through philosophical argument in the form of a speculative myth, surrendering God’s omnipotence in order to preserve divine goodness and intelligibility. Pilinszky, by contrast, neither argues nor explains, but presents the same condition from within the experience itself. The study frames this difference through the distinction between inhabited silence and explained silence, and argues that this asymmetry is generative rather than a shortcoming. The poem discloses something Jonas’s system cannot reach. The essay traces Pilinszky’s poetic trajectory from Apokrif through his theological essays in Új Ember to the reduced formal language of the 1972 collection Szálkák, and brings in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face as a counterpoint, showing that while for Levinas the face of the other obligates, in Apokrif the silent divine gaze does not call out, yet still results in witness. The study’s method combines close reading with intellectual-historical contextualization, drawing on Pilinszky’s and Jonas’s primary works alongside relevant secondary scholarship. It concludes that neither the poem nor the essay resolves anything, and that this very irresolution, the gesture of naming and showing precisely what cannot be named or shown, constitutes the ethical act that can be carried out authentically after Auschwitz.