God's Zeal

by Peter Sloterdijk

  One can therefore agree – not without a grain of salt – with Alfred N. Whitehead when he reaches the following conclusion in his lectures on the philosophy of religion (Boston, 1926): ‘On the whole, the Gospel of love was turned into a Gospel of fear. The Christian world was composed of terrified populations.’11 One should append the question as to whether it was really a matter of turning a fundamentally good thing into its opposite, or rather an ambivalence that was present from the start. In this case, the motives of Christian missionary successes should be interpreted more critically than is generally the case in official church histories. They should no longer be attributed exclusively to the infectious effects of evangelical proclamations, which undeniably had an innate tendency towards improving the world's moral climate at first. They would then be attributable equally to the threats used to enslave intimately those who received them. That would make the mission more than simply the externalization required in order to spread the message of salvation; it would then also be the form in which the church, opposed to the ‘world’, worked through its irresolvable conflict with that ‘world’. The corresponding formula should be: going on the offensive by fleeing from the world – or, to put it more mildly: serving the world from a position of scepticism towards the world.

  One can assess how far these somewhat uneasy suppositions are justified with reference to the effects of the church teacher Aurelius Augustinus. He can claim the privilege of having contributed more than any other individual believer – except Paul – to the confusion, and in fact the neuroticization, of a civilization. This diagnosis by no means refers only to the sexual-pathological distortions that were forced on Christian forms of life for one and a half centuries. The metaphysics of predestination taught by Augustine was even more harmful: upon closer inspection, it reveals itself as the most unfathomable system of terror in the history of religion.12 As the doctrine of the eternal predestination of Adam's children was based on an axiom stating that only very few would undeservedly be saved, while the majority would deservedly be cast into the flames, weighed down by the ‘burden of damnation’, the edifice of Christian faith after Augustine could only be erected over the tormenting uncertainty of one's own predetermined salvation. The only vague indication for individuals of possibly being chosen came from the fact that, with God's help, they could progress from fearful trembling to zealotry. It is no coincidence, then, that with Augustine – following preludes in the deserts of the Near East – the flight of believers to the monastic orders in late antiquity also began in the Western sphere; these orders offered a liveable form for the total absorption of being through the religious imperative. Yet even if Augustinism declared complete subservience to the gospel as the precondition for salvation – a compacted anticipation of Islam – neither resolute zealotry nor strict self-renunciation could guarantee the salvation of the individual. Conversely, the slightest trace of indifference to the good news could be read as an almost certain indication of predestination to damnation.

  Whoever desires to trace the underlying modus operandi of Augustinian Christianity with analytical clarity will find it, brilliantly disguised by the winning discourse of God's all-encompassing love, in the devious and systematic combination of a rational universalism of damnation and an unfathomable elitism of salvation. In order to do the theologian's doctrine greater justice, it may be useful to realize the ways in which all great religions have a part in a general economy of cruelty. Its application lies in ostensibly lowering the general level of cruelty by inducing believers to take a certain amount of suffering upon themselves voluntarily in order to avoid or hold back greater unwanted terrors. This forms the basis for the transformative effects of spiritual asceticisms. One of the most attractive aspects of early Christianity was its dissolution of the standards of the Roman culture of cruelty – especially through its resistance to the brutalizing gladiatorial games, which had developed into a ubiquitous form of decadent mass culture in the Roman Empire (comparable only to the perversions of top-level sports in the second half of the twentieth century). Augustine intensified this resistance by striving for a moderation of human behaviour through the threat of maximum cruelty in the life beyond. With this approach, however, he fell prey to the danger of overshooting the mark: with his unflinching theological absolutism, this most influential of all the church fathers inflated the diabolical aspect of God to the point of sacred terrorism. It can therefore be said that Augustinian Christianity proved a victim of fatal losses: because metaphysical terror inevitably translates into psychological, and ultimately also physical, terror, Augustine's ungracious doctrine of grace contributed to raising the level of cruelty in the Christianized world through the gospel, rather than lowering it. In this sense, Christianity's critics touch on a raw nerve when they argue that Christianity often furthered the evil from which it subsequently offered deliverance.

  Considering all this, one can understand why countless Christians have only been able to adopt Augustine's doctrines by repressing their unpalatable aspects. The history of the Christian faith since the early Middle Ages is nothing but a series of attempts to mask the sinister dimensions of the Augustinian legacy through a more optimistic interpretation of the question of humanity's chances of salvation. Hardly any Christian ever had the necessary cold-bloodedness to realize why heaven had to remain almost empty – as far as human dwellers were concerned, at least – during the era dominated by Augustine's theology. It was only with the age of discoveries that believers were presented with the task of exploring the practically untouched continent of divine generosity. From that point on, the aim was to depict the realm of God beyond this world as a densely populated area – Dante would have been one of the first to encounter more than a ghost town on his journey to heaven. The current results of the search for a generous God were expressed in the Polish pope's well-known statement: speriamo che l'inferno sia vuoto – ‘let us hope that hell is empty’. The antithesis between Augustine and John Paul II encapsulates the whole drama of Christian theology: it shows the long way from the well-guarded terrorist secret of faith, in which God remained virtually alone in heaven, to the civil-religiously tinged hypothesis by which hell – in which one is still supposed to believe owing to the fact of our ‘distance from God’ – should remain empty in future.

  The question of whether the full blame for the darkening influence of Augustinian doctrines on Christianity should be laid upon their originator will be left open here. In his way, he was the medium of a bad time that made superhuman demands on his brilliance; it is hardly surprising that this resulted in some inhumane solutions. It is only regrettable that the fifth century did not produce any author with sufficient understanding to formulate the thesis: whoever did not live before Augustine knows nothing of life's sweetness. Douceur de vivre, however, is a concept that could only become meaningful again once one had reached the safe shore of post-Augustinian, in a way even post-Christian (in the sense of post-clericocratic), times. This marked the start of an age in which popes would feel obliged to point out that Christianity should not revolve primarily around compulsion and self-denial, but rather a positive way of life.

  On the whole, Christianity's campaign to conquer the ‘globe’ owes its success to its episcopal guidance, which sought a balance between eschatological extremism and magical populism in the course of a learning process that continued for centuries. During its first expansion cycle, the secret of the Christian missions' success lay primarily in its alliances with political rulers and a specific strategy of converting nobles – the Constantinian shift provided the most brilliant and most questionable model for this. Whoever was interested in spreading Christianity in the age of monarchy had to follow the maxim that one can only win over the people if one has the local ruler on one's side.

  As far as the infamous crusades or the Holy War are concerned, these are of secondary significance compared to the proselytistic or missionary mode of expansion – if, that is, one wishes to credit them with an
y genuine offensive significance at all. Certainly the crusade, as the prototype of a war inspired by Christianity, unleashed enormous resources and is often believed by internal and external critics alike to exemplify the religion's inherent aggression. A single glance at the historical connections, however, shows that the (conventionally counted) seven major ventures of this kind between 1096 and 1270 were, from the crusaders' point of view, primarily measures to contain the Islamic offensive – and their lack of success underlines the relative accuracy of this judgement. They were intended to take over what Christians viewed as the centre of the world – Jerusalem – or protect it from a supposedly inappropriate occupation, but not to open the entire world to Christianity by force. The claim one occasionally hears that the crusades to Jerusalem caused the deaths of more than 20 million people seems itself to be zealous in its exaggeration.

  The most favourable account of the ‘armed pilgrimages’ to the Holy Land was probably penned by Hegel, who saw them as an indispensable experience for the curriculum of the spirit. In dialectics, experience is synonymous with productive disappointment, in so far as it reverses consciousness and enlightens it as to the falsity of its still badly abstract preconceptions. Hegel argues that, by seeking to force the holy and subtle by profane and crude means, the crusaders ‘combined opposing elements without any reconciliation’ in their battles; hence their failure was in the nature of the enterprise. The only lasting value lay in the realization of how misguided it is to seek the Highest in such an external form – here one can discern firstly the enlightened Protestant critique of the love of fetishes in Catholic populism, and secondly the speculative philosopher's declaration of war on the mechanics of ‘positive religion’. It is fitting, then, that the crusade as a behavioural pattern had a purely metaphorical meaning from the Modern Age onwards. General Eisenhower was able to publish his memoirs from the Second World War in 1948 under the – to Anglophone ears – entirely conventional title Crusade in Europe without anyone suspecting an underlying Christian agenda.

  In previous centuries, on the other hand, there had been no lack of compulsive Christianizing enterprises that directly combined a war of aggression with mission, for example in Charlemagne's Saxon Wars or the conquest of Prussia and the Baltic by the Teutonic Knights. With Christanity acting as the imperial religion and state cult, the imposition of church uniforms was the order of the day. In addition, such factors as the maintenance of Latin as the church language, Thomism and canonical law played a part in enforcing Roman Catholic standards with sublimely compulsive homogeneity.

  Christianity's most powerful expansionist campaigns took place during the post-medieval period. What we now call globalization, or rather its terrestrial phase,13 is inseparable from the paradoxical path of Christianity into the openness of modernity. From the sixteenth century on, Rome launched a second apostolic wave with the founding of missionary orders, initiating the operative universalization of religion in the form of Christianity. In practice, the world mission usually acted as a partner and parasite of colonialism, and only rarely as its critic or opponent.14 Ironically, the Roman Catholic world missions, which were accompanied belatedly, but successfully, by the Protestant enterprises, reached the zenith of their effectiveness from the eighteenth century onwards, the century that marked the start of Europe's dechristianization – or, to put it more cautiously, the start of religion's differentiation into a subsystem of its own. And, while the nineteenth century was characterized in the Old World by anti-Christian offensives that looked down on Christianity like a vanquished formation after their rise to cultural hegemony, that same epoch must, in mission-historical terms, be viewed as the golden age of external Christianization. Only now did the spreading of Christian missions across the entire globe and the founding of sustainable church communities in the remotest corners of the world become a practical reality.15 Since then, Christianity has been the leading world religion in numerical terms, not least because of the incorporation of the populous continent of South America into the remotely controlled Roman Catholic empire.

  The second irony of dechristianization is evident in the fact that the new major cultural force in Europe, the Enlightenment, amounted to a continuation of Christianity by rationalist and historico-philosophical means by virtue of its ideological or propagandistic design. It has been plausibly argued that the moral core of the Enlightenment, the doctrine of human rights, can only be explained as the secularized version of Christian anthropology. (I will speak further below about the formation of a fourth wave that flooded modern ‘society’ as a ‘human’ monotheism.) It is no coincidence that the adherents of Protestantism and Catholicism are now quarrelling over the royalties for human rights. The continuities become most vivid if one considers the adoption of Christian monotheistic models by the zealots of secular modernity. This applies in particular to the human-churchly fanaticism of the Jacobins. But the militantism of Lenin's professional revolutionaries or even the fury of the Red Guards in Mao Zedong's China contain elements of a continuation of Christian universalism by un-Christian means. They can only be fully understood as feral imitations of the apostolic modus vivendi. As unbelievable as it may sound, even the Chinese students who humiliated, beat and murdered their professors during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 onwards believed they were ambassadors of a just cause and acting for the good of all. Had that not been the case, it would not have been possible for parts of the Western European intelligentsia to be affected by a collective Maoist psychosis during the 1960s and 1970s – still one of the darkest chapters of recent intellectual history. The members of these circles heard the signature melody of unfettered egalitarianism in the Chinese excesses, a melody that had first sounded in Europe during the Jacobin terror and has since been used as a carrier for all manner of texts around the world. In the light of these phenomena, it is not without a certain anxiety that one recalls Leo Baeck's sublimely naïve thesis that the future is essentially the future of good, a future to which all coming days will lead.16

  Studying the frenzy in China – which consisted of rather more than a few regrettable incidents, as forgetful ex-Maoists in France and elsewhere like to suggest – can provide insight into the dangerous nature of universalist militants: for example, how quickly uncontrolled universalism can lead to a fascism of the good. It remains uncontrolled if it lacks a critical organ to restrain the zealots' urge to absolutize their goals. With this stance, the activist is neither willing nor able to attain the insight on which any enlightened political morality is based, namely that it is not the end that justifies the means, but rather the means that tell us the truth about the ends. As we know, the direst forms of terror are those motivated by the loftiest of intentions. More than a few of those possessed by the demon of goodness genuinely told themselves that crimes can be the highest form of divine service or fulfilment of the duty to humanity. The most effective objection to such enchantments comes from the spiritual core of the Christian religion: from the perspective of paying attention to the means, Jesus' theorem ‘you shall know them by their fruits’ (Matthew 7:16) and Marshall McLuhan's crypto-Christological maxim ‘the medium is the message’ mean the same thing.

  From a synoptic point of view, one should note that Christianity's campaigns, especially after the severe setbacks encountered during the Age of Enlightenment, only seem capable of continuation in a somewhat more muted fashion. After its worldwide expansionist successes, which resulted in roughly one-third of the planet's population living under its influence, without all of these even being conscious or active Christians, one would hardly expect any further spread – unless the intense dynamic of secular reform and its spiritual lacunae in East Asia, particularly China, result in the growth of a new religious market. Thus one can summarize the provisional endpoint of the Christian campaign with the observation that this religion today combines a relative maximum of dissemination with a relative minimum of intensity. Its condition proves that there can be not only imperial, but also sim
ultaneous spiritual, ‘overstretching’.