The Lonely Man of Faith

by Joseph B. Soloveitchik

AND YET, NOTWITHSTANDING his praise for Adam the First, Rabbi Soloveitchik believes that in contemporary times Adam the First is to blame for a new type of loneliness afflicting the man of faith. This type of loneliness is due not to the permanent nature of the human condition (“ontological” loneliness), which requires oscillation between two communities, but to specific man-made historical circumstances, the circumstances of modernity. Contemporary Adam the First rejects his dialectical nature. He regards himself as the totality of the human personality. He is narcissistic, “arrogant,” “demonic.” He cannot hear Adam the Second; he “dismisses the covenantal faith community as something superfluous and obsolete”; he ignores “the unique and strange transcendental experience which resists subservience to the cultural interests of majestic man.”