God's Zeal

by Peter Sloterdijk

  One must therefore assume that Derrida either went astray or was referring to something else. It is probably the second notion that takes us along the right path. In referring to the numerous militant appropriations of Jerusalem, the founder of deconstruction, which produces a critique of the manic element of violence in ‘texts’, was thinking less of the physical occupation of that territory than an access to the exemplary transmitting station for universalist missions. ‘Appropriating Jerusalem’: under late monotheistic conditions, that can only mean seeking to take hold of certain symbolic potentials that authorize their bearers to embark on campaigns of the global kind described above. If one chooses the city of the Wailing Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock as the historical capital of messianic complexes, one can immediately see why there is more than one party that wants to seize, under the code word ‘Jerusalem’, the privilege of splitting mankind into those who are For Us and those who are Against Us. The world was, and still is, full of minorities that claim to constitute humanity and are anticipating the kingdom. It is teeming with chosen peoples, including more than a few who contest the declared chosen people's prerogative. There is also no shortage of messianisms that see the Lord coming from this direction or that. The fact that Derrida thought first of the liberal messianism of certain American ideologues, who had concluded from the recent implosion of the Soviet Union that the ‘Western way of life’ had triumphed, lends his critical-explosive reverie concrete geopolitical content. What he considered dangerous and repulsive was the confiscation of messianic rhetoric by representatives of a saturated imperialism, as if politicians and their speechwriters were now claiming the right to stammer about the Kingdom come like drunken Adventists. Next to the positive philosophers and embedded journalists, who marched both verbally and physically into the countries of the disbanded Second World with the liberal troop, Derrida was naturally also thinking of the Middle Eastern scene, where anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish confessions led by old and new Arab zealots have become rampant – in their case, the ‘appropriation of Jerusalem’ would not occur without a corresponding dispossession. One should not rule out the possibility that Derrida was also referring to the Christian Right in the USA, in which the apocalyptic sects and their obligatory ‘battle for Jerusalem’ rants are increasingly setting the tone.2

  In the current competition of manic propulsive systems, it is only useful to cite the name ‘Jerusalem’ to the extent that it refers to a certain amount of that supremacist potential which transforms the world into the scene of religious and ethical campaigns. It is not sufficient in this field to name only one symbolic address, as a considerable number of enthusiastic projects and revivals to force an overarching meaning are currently underway. On the global scale, there are probably several hundred, maybe even several thousand of them (a significant proportion of these are Christian-evangelical, neo-Gnostic, para-Hinduist, apocalyptic-Islamist, neo-Communist and syncretistic sects, which all share the same high, manic drive), though only a few attain the status of world-famous spiritual brands. Together with Rome, Mecca, Wittenberg and names of a similar quality, Jerusalem represents the quintessence of personal supremacism. It is from such centres that the ecstasies of the will to serve are sent out into the world. From a positive point of view, some of these toponyms indicate a widening of empathetic circles: they testify to the increasing ability of religiously and idealistically motivated people to take an interest in the fates of strangers as if they were relatives.

  In the following I intend to show why the battle over the ‘appropriation of Jerusalem’ will not take the form of an inter-monotheistic war. Certainly we are witnesses of, and to a degree also combatants in, a conflict on a ‘spiritual front’, yet the gravity and inevitability of the current collisions do not result from what has been referred to in the debates of recent years as the ‘clash of monotheisms’. The battle is concerned far more with how to ensure control of the extremist potentials within each of the zealotically disposed religions – and the raging ideologies that came after the universalist religions. I say control, not elimination, as such tensions cannot be made to disappear, only diverted into less harmful expressions. In so far as the aforementioned extremisms regularly arise from the applications of personal supremacism to the lives and environments of the zealots, diverting in practice means: working to dampen the extremism of service at the centre of those movements that desire to plunge into the extreme. This demands a decoupling of affect and religious code; the risk of becoming a zealot oneself in the fight against zealotry is an occupational hazard here. Whoever participates with sufficient expertise in the de-supremacization of the supremacisms must get close to their burning centres.

  The first step in this process is to show that the concept of the Highest is only useful as an upper limit – and therefore cannot belong to anyone or be appropriated by any ‘representative’ or ‘successor’, any custodian of faith, in an exclusive manner. One would think this an easy hurdle to clear, as it hardly seems conceivable that anyone could believe themselves in a position to put their own stamp on the supreme power. And one must even maintain this objection when the greatest good is ‘evident’ as the revealed word of God. Such things, it would seem, are part of the ABC of any theology and should be assertable everywhere without any great effort. A brief glance around, however, shows how little the mindset of the actors on the current zealotic stages confirms these assumptions.

  The reflections on the intertwinement of logic and ontology in the monotheisms developed above show that the task to which I have referred as de-supremacization does not lie in the jurisdiction of psychologists. Rather, it must begin with a logical clarification – at least in the first round. This is the only way to obtain the pharmaka that will help combat supremacist fury. The long-term goal is admittedly more challenging: it must lie in dissolving the time-honoured matrix in which monovalently conceived being is necessarily and compulsively joined with the positive value of the bivalently conceivable statement. This system, as we have seen, was responsible for the numerous historically documented attempts to impose monovalent information from without and above by eliminating the negative value. One need hardly point out that the terror of our own times still functions according to this scheme.

  The familiar methods developed in advanced civilizations for reaching authoritative, monovalent theses – whether through an oracle, mathematics or the theory of forms, through prophecy, illumination, informative trance or finally through such doctrines as the incarnation of the word or the inlibration of God – were all characterized by a striving to break out of the sphere of fallible knowledge, to anchor human existence eccentrically in the absolute. Its aim was always an inconcussum that would be reached not through the introspective self-confirmation of the subject, but rather by ecstatically overwhelming it. A foundation is considered unshakeable once it makes the breakthrough to an absolute anchor point. In order to force access to this, absolutists use a sleight of hand that, though always the same in formal terms, allows material executions in many directions: they choose the exaggeration of passivity as the ideal path of being. The word ‘being’ here refers to the totality of connections that encompasses, reaches through and validates us mortals. If one is to find some point of orientation from without, passive ecstasy is indispensable. How else should one attain such a state than through the postulation that, when playing with God or being, there are throws where humans catch something they have not thrown themselves – not even as ricochets of their own throws?3 At the decisive moment, the person who catches the ball is supposed to be a pure recipient and nothing but a recipient. If he goes about it correctly, he is no longer himself in the instant of catching, but rather the medium of a transcendental sender. What he receives is then supposed to determine everything else – even the profane states following the ecstasy, in which it is once more his turn to serve the ball.

  One can state, in the most cordial possible tone, that every one of the aforem
entioned figures used to force such a pure reception has become problematic. This becomes clearest whenever there is an attempt to reinstate them. Either one tries to find substitute forms of plausibility, usually taken from anthropology, sociology or psychoanalysis, or one supports one's defence using means that go subversively beyond the horizon of what is actually being defended. But even if conservative thinking has always chosen refinement in order to preserve the simple, that simplicity is damaged by its conservation. That applies equally to the need to cling to the myth of passivity. If one is to recognize the role of the radical monotheisms in moral and cognitive evolution, it is only fair to meet them on the field of their own strengths – their greatest, however, the apparent predication on the foundations of religious and ontological authority, consists (as noted above) in precarious methods of forcibly obtaining transcendent information. If one follows these procedures all the way back to their tangible origins, the strengths turn into weakness. The authorities regularly transpire as borrowers who are unconcerned with paying their debts as long as they have the power to intimidate the trusting lenders. However good one's intentions may be, the results of an examination are unequivocal. After a comprehensive acknowledgement of all the evidence, after listening patiently to the witnesses and advocates, the conclusion is inescapable: the matrix of traditional religious and philosophical metaphysical systems has been exhausted. On the one hand, ‘exhausted’ means fully developed and realized, while on the other it means entirely used up and seen through in its fundamentally limited and erroneous nature.

  In this situation, the path of polyvalent thinking is the only viable one. It is hardly necessary to explain the meaning of polyvalence to interested parties as if it were a complete novelty; any non-pedantic form of intelligence practises it implicitly from childhood, with reference to both things and ideas. While traditional logic stands or falls with the dictum tertium non datur (there is no third option between yes and no), everyday thinking has always found ways to reach precisely such a tertium datur.4 The universal procedure in this field is the de-radicalization of alternatives: if one confronts someone with an either/or they consider unwelcome, one will observe how they remodel it into a both-and sooner or later. If one removes all colours from the world – an assumption that, as Oliver Sacks has shown, does apply for some people on the ‘island of the colour-blind’5 – the result will be a visually trivalent universe in which a halfway world of graded shades of grey mediates between the extremes of white and black. This may seem trivial, and yet it is informative in the present context. Grey here means a release from the obligation to choose between black and white. It embodies the reality of thirdness. In a world characterized by shades of grey, furthermore, one can predict the appearance of extremists who, weary of intermediate values, fight for a pure black or white world. If a party of radicals comes to power, the grey option will be declared counter-revolutionary propaganda. Generations may pass before a change in the wind once more permits an open espousal of the grey world's merits.

  The terrain of the zealotic monotheisms also contains occasions for a transition to polyvalent thinking. Islam in particular, normally known for its pathos of strict monovalence, achieved an exemplary breakthrough in the creation of a third value. This took place when it was decreed that people of the book no longer had to choose between the Qur'an and death. The creation of dhimmi status, which effectively constitutes subjugation without conversion, established a third option between a yes or no to the Muslim cult. This has occasionally been misunderstood as a form of tolerance – a fairly un-Islamic concept, as well as a fairly un-Catholic one – whereas it should sooner be understood as a primitive manifestation of polyvalent thinking. For the subjugated it was tantamount to survival, while for the subjugators it meant the discovery of a way to circumvent the duty of mass murder. If the Islamic leaders had applied the alternative specifically prescribed by their laws – conversion or liquidation – to the many millions of Christians and the Jewish minorities that became subjects of Arab rulers in the seventh and eighth centuries (when the Byzantine Empire, as noted above, lost half of its population to expanding Islam), this would have led to the greatest bloodbath in the history of mankind. The realization that God, the merciful one, could not have wanted this, and that the elimination of useful subjects would also have weakened Arab power interests, would not have been especially problematic for the Islamic scholars of the time. So they made use of the classic tool by which intellectuals solve an unwelcome dilemma: they de-radicalized the alternative by inventing a middle option. Accordingly they introduced a poll tax (jizya, which would have been roughly the same as the tithe) for Jews, Christians and followers of Zoroaster; hence these groups were set apart from Muslims, who had a duty to give alms (zakat), but made equal to them in other respects – like scholars, treasuries are quick to learn the ways of polyvalence.

  One can observe something formally comparable centuries later in medieval Europe, when Christian theologians had to grapple with the task of toning down the terror factor in the alternative of salvation or eternal damnation that had been in force since Augustine. The theme was dictated by a change in the ‘zeitgeist’ – if it is permissible to transfer a concept from the early nineteenth century to circumstances in the twelfth and thirteenth. From that era on, it became clear that the inhabitants of the reforming European towns were no longer prepared to accept the psycho-politics of holy terror that had gone unchallenged until then. The change of consciousness was a harbinger of the Reformation, in the broader sense of the word – if one takes it to mean the restructuring of the Christian church according to the demands of an urban clientele that had gained literacy and self-confidence, and was no longer a priori subservient or susceptible to intimidation. Such people are able to plan, calculate and give orders; they have a sense of proportion and possess a clear idea of business on a reciprocal basis. They do not trade with half the world and lead moderate, active lives full of sacrifices in the proud restrictions of guild structures to have some gloomy cathedral preachers threaten them with the horrors of everlasting damnation.

  Faced with the discrepancy between supply and demand, the theologians of the High Middle Ages realized how unbearably crude their eschatological teachings were. Finally they resorted to the method that becomes necessary in such situations: they de-radicalized the alternative and created a third value by expanding the realm beyond this life to include a purifying hell, better known as purgatory. By inventing this third place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the designers of the Christian doctrine of last things managed to remodel the system of religious intimidation in such a way that there would still be sufficient terror to maintain control of the spiritual lives of believers, yet without completely snubbing their increased expectations of moderation, coherence and respect for their achievements. Part of the dangerous secret of Augustinism that lay hidden in the doctrine of grace from 397 could now be aired: now one could, in most cases, replace eternal hell with the purifying hell, a place open to all sinners – except for the irretrievable candidates for Lucifer's kingdom. Only those who had been transfigured during their lifetimes – if anyone – would be exempted from this post-mortal follow-up treatment in the new regime; in their cases, even heaven itself could not turn down the call of paradiso subito. The decisive fact was that the creation of purgatory marked the establishment of a third option between the inferno and paradise that assumed characteristics of both places: the grisly décor and gruesome punishments of hell, but also the confidence and the certainty of a favourable conclusion found in heaven. At the same time, the notion of purgatory lent weight to the highly influential idea that, after death, souls entered a transitional period between the first and second lives – assuming they belonged to the main group of middling sinners with a realistic chance in the hereafter. This marked the first religious appearance of the motif of a ‘second life’. It was only a matter of time before someone would ask: why should there not be a similar intermediate per
iod before death as well? One only need to have believed in purgatory long enough to believe in history one day – that second goddess in the post-Christian world of ideas who conquered the European stage towards the end of the eighteenth century (the first goddess had borne the promising name of Fortuna and, since the Renaissance, has been present whenever humans raise their standards for a life before death). To live in ‘history’ can only occur to people who are convinced they are existing in a third time: a necessarily uncomfortable phase of transition between hereditary misery and a promised era of happiness and fulfilment.

  The practice of de-supremacization can be traced back to the early phases of the expanding monotheisms, when extremism was still viewed as arrogance and any attempts to reach directly for the highest seemed to be the devil's work. Interest in controlling religious excesses was an automatic result of the force applied in the institutionalization of the exclusive monotheisms. Such religions discovered early on that it was necessary to suppress the same prophetic fire from which they had come, but without extinguishing it. The secret of their survival lay in their ability to curb their inherent immoderation by methods that were in their own repertoire. They had to become Classical in order to ritually absorb the Romanticism from which they had sprung – assuming one can typologically assign their initial apocalyptic upheavals, without which both Christianity and Islam would be inconceivable, to the Romantic end of the spectrum. From this perspective, those religions that subjected themselves to thorough dogmatic reflection provide the best antidotes to their own endogenous excesses – as well as their secularized versions and political parodies. This is the source of the hope that Islam will one day deal with the political metastases so rampant today in the same way earlier Christianity dealt with its Anabaptist and evangelical excesses, the Jacobin cult of the highest being, and finally also with the atheist church of Communism. What is here referred to as monotheistic Classicism has always included – alongside the ubiquitous reminders of the humbling duties of believers – a series of spiritual exercises that contributed implicitly to overcoming the dangerous rigidity of the founding matrix. Among the most notable preparatory disciplines in formal plurivalent thinking are the principles of hierarchical steps and negative theology, then hermeneutics as the art of reading from a variety of perspectives, and last but not least the development of monotheistic humour.