7 Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen [The Holy: On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and Its Connection to the Rational] (Munich, 1917/1987), pp. 13–28.
8 See Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären II, Globen, Makrosphärologie [Spheres II: Globes, Macrospherology] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), ch. 2, ‘Gefäß-Erinnerungen. Über den Grund der Solidarität in der inklusiven Form’ [Container Memories: On the Reason for Solidarity in the Inclusive Form], pp. 197–250, and ch. 3, ‘Archen, Stadtmauern, Weltgrenzen, Immunsysteme. Zur Ontologie des ummauerten Raums’ [Arks, City Walls, World Borders, Immune Systems: On the Ontology of the Walled Space], pp. 251–325; also Sphären III, Schäume, Plurale Sphärologie [Spheres III: Foams, Plural Spherology] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), ch. 3, ‘Auftrieb und Verwöhnung. Zur Kritik der reinen Laune’ [Impetus and Spoiling: On the Critique of Pure Mood], pp. 671f.
9 See pp. 17 and 141 below.
10 See Sloterdijk, Sphären II, ch. 7, ‘Wie durch das reine Medium die Sphärenmitte in die Ferne wirkt. Zur Metaphysik der Telekommunikation’ [How the Centre of the Sphere Affects Things Distant Through the Pure Medium: On the Metaphysics of Telecommunication], pp. 667–787.
11 Translator's note: the use of lichten in the original refers to Heidegger's existential notion of a clearing (Lichtung), i.e. to clear in the sense of opening or illumination rather than ordering.
12 See Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Neuigkeiten über den Willen zum Glauben. Notiz über Desäkularisation’ [News of the Will to Faith: A Note on Desecularization], Bochum, 10 February 2007.
13 Martin Mosebach, Häresie der Formlosigkeit. Die römische Liturgie und ihr Feind [The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and its Enemy], new extended edition (Munich, 2007), p. 25.
14 Translator's note: the German Ministry of Education declared 2007 ‘das Jahr der Geisteswissenschaften’.
2
The formations
Having laid out these conditions, I would like to turn my attention to the trio of monotheistic religions, whose war and dialogue form the object of these reflections. I shall begin with a genetic observation intended to show how those religions developed in sequence from one another, or from older sources – in a manner comparable to a three-phase explosion (or a series of enemy takeovers). The fact that such a rapid sketch inevitably contains only elementary and highly schematicized observations does not require an explanation of its own, and as we are not dealing with a history of religion, but rather a presentation of ‘conflict parties’, I can restrict myself to descriptions of a typological nature. Nor will I be focusing on the history of the holy texts, which is why there is not the slightest attempt here to relate the unfolding of Christianity and Islam as the adventure novel of misreading that literary critics recognize in the approach of the two later monotheisms to the holy books of their predecessors.1 There is no need to emphasize that, from the perspective of faith, the following reflections will no doubt seem grossly unjust in many places – in so far as most things said about faith without allowing it a chance to revise them are unjust. A fitful shaking of heads by all three parties as a readers' commentary on the thoughts that follow can scarcely be avoided. One should bear in mind that the topic as such encourages one-sidedness, as it demands a foregrounding not of the awe-inspiring foundations of the monotheistic teachings, but rather of their potential for competition and conflict.
It is only logical to begin the nomination of candidates in the monotheistic field of theses by determining the position of Judaism. The question that will concern us here was given its quintessential expression by Thomas Mann in an inspired chapter of Joseph and his Brothers under the heading ‘How Abraham discovered God’. In the literarily reconstructed primal scene of the Abrahamic tradition, we observe the forefather of monotheism struggling with the question of whom humanity should serve: ‘… and his strange answer had been: “The highest alone” ’.2 In a strenuous meditation, Abraham reaches the conclusion that Mother Earth, as admirably diverse as her fruits may be, surely cannot be the first and highest authority, as she is obviously dependent on the rain that falls from the sky. Led to the sky by his thoughts, he concludes after a while that, in spite of its sublime constellations and all the terrifying meteorological phenomena, it too cannot quite embody what he is looking for, as those phenomena constantly change and negate one another – the moonlight, for example, fades when the morning star rises. ‘No, they too are not worthy to be my gods.’ Finally, through his sheer ‘urge for the highest’,3 Abraham arrives at the concept of an absolutely sublime, powerful and otherworldly God who rules over the stars and thus transpires as the foremost, mightiest, only god. From this point on, Abraham, having himself become the ‘father of God’,4 so to speak, through his investigations, knew to whom all should now rightfully pray: ‘There had only ever been He, the most high, who alone could be the rightful God of men and the one and only object of their cries for help and songs of praise.’5
In his poetic exploration of the psychodynamic source of monotheistic belief in the soul of the progenitor of the Jewish people, Thomas Mann placed a highly fitting emphasis on an impulse that has been referred to as the summotheistic affect. Long before there was such a thing as theoretical theology, it was this feeling that provided the template for authentic monotheistic belief. It creates a resonance between a God who is serious about his dominion over the earth and a human who is serious about his desire to belong to such a sovereign deity. Thomas Mann does not omit to mention that a quest for God of this kind is inseparable from the striving for human significance: so there can be no monotheism without a certain self-importance. ‘In order to make some kind of impression and achieve a certain significance before God and men, it was necessary to take things – or at least one thing – very seriously. Father Abraham had taken the question of whom man should serve absolutely seriously …’6
Strangely enough, Abraham's momentous elevation of God (as shown by his portrait in the books of the Yahwist) did not immediately remove him to a completely superhuman realm. Certainly he is described as a god above, but there is no doubt that he is in touch with earthly reality. He retains all the attributes of a human who is no stranger to anything all too human, ranging from the wild temper he displays in his dealings with his subjects to the unpredictable explosiveness of his early utterances. His despotic irony and constant fluctuation between presence and absence make him appear more like an insufferable father than a principle of divine justice. A god who loves gardens and basks in their cool evening air, who fights bloody battles and imposes sadistic tests of subordination on his believers, could be almost anything – but not a discarnate spirit, let alone some neuter otherworldly being. His affective life vacillates between joviality and tumult, and nothing could be more absurd than the claim that his intention is to love the human race in its entirety. If there was ever a figure that could be said to be wholly god and wholly human, it was Yahweh as represented in the Yahwist. Harold Bloom rightly characterized him as the most untameable figure in religious history – the King Lear of the heavenly rulers, one could say. The notion that a charismatic dreamer like Jesus, of all people, could have been his ‘beloved son’ – even one and the same being, as the Nicene theologians claimed – is theopsychologically unthinkable.7 No one can be homoousios with such a paragon of wilfulness, least of all a ‘son’ like Jesus. What the Christian theologians called God the Father was actually a late reinvention for trinity-political purposes; at that time it was necessary to introduce a benevolent father to match, at least to a degree, the amazing son. The Christian redescription of God naturally had very little to do with the Yahweh of Jewish scripture.
At the start of the monotheistic chain of reaction we find a form of contract between a great, serious psyche and a great, serious God. There is no need to dwell on his other qualities – his choleric temperament, his irony and his taste for thunderous hyperbole – in this context. This all
iance creates a major symbol-producing relationship without which most of what have, since the nineteenth century, been termed ‘advanced civilizations’ (since Karl Jaspers, also known as ‘axial age civilizations’) would be inconceivable. One of the secrets of the summotheistic alliance certainly lies in the satisfaction of believers that, by submitting to the highest, they can share in some part, however modest, of his sovereignty. Hence the pronounced joy at submission that can be observed among partisans of the strict idea of God. No one can take the step towards such a God without being intoxicated by the desire to serve and belong. Quite often, resolute servants of the One are enraptured by pride at their own humility. When the faithful bloom in their zealous roles, this is partly also because nothing dispels the ghosts of existential disorientation as effectively as participation in a sacred enterprise that creates jobs and promises advancement. In this sense, the system known as ‘God’ can be viewed as the most important employer in the Holy Land – in which case atheism constitutes a form of employment destruction that is, understandably, fought bitterly by those affected.
The liaison of seriousness and greatness corresponds to the growing pressure to which the religious sensibility is subjected as soon as the requirements for the status of divinity increase. And their evolutionary increase is inevitable when, as in the Middle East of the first and second millennia BC, several ambitious religions begin to come into conflict with one another – until the phase of diplomatic niceties is over and the question of final priority and absolute supremacy becomes unavoidable. Under these conditions, the connections between the psyche and the world take on a new dynamic: the expanded scene of the world and God demands greater powers of comprehension among the faithful souls – and, vice versa, the increasing demands for meaning directed at God and the world by those souls call for increasingly interesting roles in the general dramas. The monotheistic zealots of all periods testify to this development with their entire existence: if they had their way, their subservient passion would not simply be their private contribution to the glory of God. It would be the zeal of God himself reaching through them and into the world. This zeal, correctly understood, is an aspect of God's regret at having created the world. In its milder form, it shows his benevolent will to salvage what he still can of a creation that has got out of control.
Abraham's choice of religion, then, is extremely thymotically determined – if it is indeed legitimate to bring the Greek concept denoting the activity centre of the psyche's ambition- and pride-based impulses, the thymós, into play in the interpretation of the Middle Eastern theodramas.8 In demanding that his God should be the absolute highest, so high as to be above the world, Abraham ruled out – to the great advantage of his self-confidence – all lesser alliances in his search for a sovereign lord and partner. The price of this singular alliance was monolatry: honouring a single God, raised above a wealth of rivals whose existence and effect could not, for the time being, be denied. Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), the great linguistic and theological researcher influenced by Schelling, to whom contemporary Indology still owes a great deal today, suggested the term henotheism for this position devoted to the cult of the One and Only, and identified it as the evolutionary forerunner of monotheism. In so far as this One takes on the pre-eminence of the only significant one, the remaining gods are naturally relegated to the lower ranks. In time they come to be seen as no more than obsolete forces, or at most helpful celestial functionaries, but more often as rebellious parasites – points of departure for the tracts on demons and devils whose blossoming was to become so typical of the later, more developed monotheistic doctrines. One can understand, therefore, why there can never be monotheism without ranking-based jealousy. As the figure of the One and Only could be guaranteed exclusively through the subordination of other candidates, keeping the rejected ones under control was to remain a perennial task. The earliest monotheistic matrix already contains the outlines of the areas that would later be filled by the One and Only's adversaries on duty. This new opposition showed its polemic tendencies early on: the transcendent, true One against the inner-worldly, false many.
The aspect that lends monotheism its bold difficulty from a theoretical perspective – it's a-priori decision to imagine transcendence as a person – shows its greatest advantage on the practical side of things: that any potential or actual believer can fall back on a wealth of intuitions that make God's actions towards the world comprehensible. If God is a person, he can create, destroy, love, hate, allow, forbid, reward and punish like a person – and, while doing all those things, observe.9 As long as one was merely dealing with household and family gods, it was easy to make this seem plausible. In order to equip a world god with such personal attributes, however, it was probably inevitable that one would at least have to refer to great kings as an analogy. Without any counter-intuitive efforts, however, nothing would be achieved in this field. One thing, at any rate, is certain: only by suggesting a personified God was early monotheism able to carry out its most ambitious manoeuvre, namely setting up something utterly improbable as the greatest certainty of faith.
Looking at the establishment of Jewish monotheism, one must also take into account two psycho-political complications of no little consequence. Firstly, a suspicion was voiced that it was based on an exported idea that the Jews had taken with them on their semi-mythological exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses – a suspicion that Sigmund Freud expanded into the daredevil theory that Moses himself, as his name suggests, was an Egyptian, possibly from a noble family, who was continuing the large-scale religio-political experiment of the Amarna period, the solar monotheism of Akhenaten, among the Jews. Then the Jews of the post-Mosaic period would, in spite of their anti-Egyptian self-image, have remained a hetero-Egyptian collective10 with which – semi-consciously at first, then unconsciously – a chapter of experimental High God theology was enacted with all its consequences – consequences of which the internal genocide carried out by the faithful followers of Moses against the worshippers of the golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai (assuming this incident is not simply a concoction to edify and terrify) would perhaps have been an extreme, but not entirely ineffective, example.
Moses' command ‘let every man kill his brother, his friend and his neighbour’ (Exodus 32:27) marks the first appearance of the motto of that zeal for the One and Only that makes long stretches of the history of monotheism (specifically in its Christian and Islamic edits) read like an account of righteous ruthlessness. A new moral quality for killing was invented at Mount Sinai: it no longer served the survival of a tribe, but rather the triumph of a principle. Once God becomes an idea … This innovation was connected to a change in the nature of the victim that led from the offering of a gift to the extermination of an opponent. One can only speak of Israel's breakthrough to the founding of a ‘voluntary community of belief’ if one passes over the faction that was exterminated.11 The system of denunciation set up by the Jacobins after 1793 shows just what ‘communities of belief’ are capable of under stress: it commanded the virtuous among the French populace to report not only their closest neighbours but even their own family members to the organs of revolutionary justice for the slightest of critical remarks.
The myth of the exodus remains constitutive for Judaism as, through its dramatic circumstances that are invoked time and again, it creates a strong psychic engram – not least through the admonitory reminder of the deeds of the angel of death, who passed over the Jewish doorways that had been marked with lamb's blood (Hebrew pessach: leave out, pass over, spare) while entering the houses of the Egyptians and murdering their firstborn. The exodus story is unmistakably embedded within a maximum stress ritual which, because of its powerful memoactivity, guarantees the practising community the greatest possible internalization of laws.12 Anyone looking for the secret of how Judaism was able to survive for over three millennia should begin here. It is nothing other than the high degree of memoactive fitness inherent in this religi
on because of its primary myth: it combines the joy at having escaped with the memory of that most terrible of nights. Numerous secondary forms of rehearsal sup-port these first influences, especially ones centred around scriptural study. The proud painfulness of circumcision may have had a similar effect. Whoever lives under the myth of the exodus shares a stable stigma that distresses, elevates, obliges, bonds and excludes. Its eminent duplicability enables its carriers to pass on their passion and wander through the ages as living transporters of spiritual content.
The second complicating precondition of the monotheistic establishment of biblical Israel stems from its experiences in exile during the sixth century BC. There is a wide-ranging consensus among scholars that Jewish theology entered its critical phase in the time of Babylonian captivity (586–538 BC), when it developed the characteristics that can still be recognized today. Following earlier zealotic preludes and rigorist episodes, these were the years of monotheistic decision. This escalation was triggered by the semantic clinch between the God of the Israelites and the imperial Gods of Babylon. The earlier Yahweh monolatry now brought forth a speculative superstructure that developed into a monotheism that was both theoretically and politically advanced.13 The point of these radicalizations is not difficult to identify. It lies in the emergence of a political concept of God with meta-political overtones that testifies to the resolve to grant the God of the enslaved people – weeping at the waters of Babylon – absolute superiority, albeit one concealed and for the meantime only capable of being asserted symbolically, over the gods of the despotic empire.
This turning point constitutes one of the most significant moments in the intellectual history of the later West. It marks the first separation of spirit and power, previously a diffuse unity, into polar opposites. While the rulers in power, like all happy tyrants before them, paid unwavering tribute to worldly success and accumulated reports of victories like holy trophies, the spirit of the defeated withdrew to a sanctuary in which it dreamt of justice and dictated the conditions for its imminent satisfaction. In this context, the concept of truth took on a futuristic tinge and opened itself up for reversal fantasies of a partly therapeutic, partly retributionist nature. Post-Babylonian theology discovered the counterfactual and utopian mode of thinking. Truth and reality parted ways, presenting the option of propagating values at odds with reality in the name of truth, which was henceforth treated as the sharpest weapon of the weak; these values were doomed to failure on the stage of real events, yet they could not, and did not want to, stop anticipating their hour of triumph.
God's Zeal Page 3