I’m not sure if this is the cover art for the very first edition of Heschel’s Man is Not Alone, but it’s definitely the best. There’s an early cover in yellow with Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. The marketers must have chosen that one as it flies against the face of Heschel’s iconoclasm. The most recent edition with the Byzantine era Helios image makes even less sense, given the way the artist figured God in the middle of the mosaic decorating the synagogue. This image here does the work better. It throws better light at the abstraction, the mysterious and allusive symbolization of the human figure as the image of God in Heschel’s thinking. “Allusion” is one of the key but under-analyzed terms in Man is Not Alone, whereas “symbols” are discussed by Heschel in his book on prayer, Quest for God.
if you’ve covered this in this series and I missed it I apologize but what do you make of the fact that these sorts of books aren’t in the public (if not pop) realm/market anymore?
I had no idea that they were not. What’s your take,
ah pardon if I wasn’t clear my sense is that these sorts of books aren’t marketed (and so not packaged) for mass consumption anymore, not sure what the market-share ever was for say a book by Erich Fromm was so maybe just a matter of economics in our age of consolidation/monopolization?
by the way have you ever talked with David Miller about his work with Stanley Hopper on these sorts of symbol/icon look at the moon not the pointing finger theologies?
http://www.sarcc.org/Hopper.htm