God's Zeal

by Peter Sloterdijk

  Anyone looking for the prototype of the resulting fundamentalism will find it in Rousseau's sketch of a religion civile as expounded in his text on the social contract from 1758. It provided the most rigorous neo-monotheism with form and content – and its consequences were much more far-reaching than any of the first Enlightenment thinkers could have foreseen. Its formulation constituted an admission that even post-Christian ‘society’ must be rooted in certain human moral intuitions. Whoever uses the world ‘society’ is implicitly also saying ‘social religion’. When Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Catholicism as the French state religion following the anti-Catholic excesses of the revolution, he de facto declared it the new civil religion, thus subjecting the ‘substantial truth of faith’ to an incurable functional irony. Since then, Christianity itself has been the substitute religion for Christianity.

  But that was not all. In keeping with its highly active nature, the Enlightenment prepared its transition to post-monotheistic positions. It was inevitable that it would strike the item ‘God’ from its budget and fill the resulting vacancy with the ‘human being’. Even when it pushed ahead to atheism, however, its structure initially remained a copy of the monotheistic projects. Consequently it released an immanent zealotry that – because it was incapable of grace – even surpassed the religious variety in strictness, anger and violence. This escalation of fury for the greatest of human causes is what is meant when people refer to the historical sequence extending from Jacobin rule to the frenzy of Maoism as the age of ideologies. Ideologies in the strong sense of the word are movements that ape the form of zealous monotheism with atheistic world projects.

  This enlightened para-monotheism set itself apart critically from the historical religions by revealing the general quality present in all concepts of God that conformed to the personal-supremacist type: the new movement undoubtedly argued most convincingly when it pointed to the fact that every one of the historical monotheisms was based on projections, and thus still constituted a cult of images: they invite people to enter into an imaginarily determined relationship with the Highest – even, and in fact especially, in cases where the absence of images in dealings with the supreme being had been of the utmost importance. In this sense Marx was right to claim that all critique is based on the critique of religion. The projective quality of the concept of God in the sphere of the subjectivist supremacisms is evident in the elementary observation that God, in spite of all bans on representation, is consistently understood as a person and addressed as the Lord. It is precisely the aniconic religions based on an avoidance of images, namely Judaism and Islam, that seem like bastions of the most tenacious idolatry from this perspective. Just as Malevich's Black Square remains a picture even as a non-picture, the Black Person of monotheistic theologies is still a portrait as a non-portrait, and an idol even as a non-idol.

  It is more important now than ever to beware of psychology, which tends to attribute even the greatest projects to small mechanisms in those carrying out the projection. In its view, the smaller element reveals the truth about the greater one. Monotheistic projects, on the other hand, express the fact that people, whether they like it or not, are inevitably always in a state of vertical tension. They not only want to elevate themselves to something greater, even the greatest; they are also enlisted, through spiritual experiences and evolutionary challenges, to assist events taking place on a higher level. Thus projects of this type exert an upward pull on humans, which is why they are damned to be superior to themselves (as Socrates explains in Plato's Republic) – even if they often do not know how to deal with this superiority.

  The statement ‘man infinitely transcends man’ was already a product of the crisis that revealed the general aspect of the historical monotheisms. As soon as its principle was formulated with sufficient clarity, it could be detached from its traditional forms. From that point, further modification of the monotheistic programmes became the business of extra-religious agencies: one half of the formulating work was taken over by great politics, the other by great art. Now it was possible for people to come along and declare that politics is destiny – while others claimed the same for art. Since the dawn of Romanticism, great art has meant a transferral of the provoca-tion of humans to the eminent work by means of the law. Since the American Revolution, great politics has meant the entrance of monotheism into the age of its artificial stageability.

  In its deep structure, Lessing's tale of indistinguishable copies is speaking about these very transitions. The story of the two duplicate rings does not simply contain the message that even wonderful things are artificially produced; it also communicates in a fairly blunt fashion that the question of authenticity is rendered trivial by the interest in effects. Only incorrigible fetishists are still interested in originals and proofs of origin. In the world of currentness, however, effects are all that matter.

  I now feel compelled to present a third version of the ring parable, despite having just returned to the original, where everyday human judgement is one of the decisive factors in the evaluation of the religions. This additional correction will now give the zealous party another chance to be heard. This time the people in question are zealots who fight against humanity for the sake of humanity – or to put it more precisely: in the name of the true human being of the future against the historically developed, misguided human being.

  In this latest revision of the parable we hear of the production of a fourth ring, symbolizing a political atheism that will stop at nothing. This atheism claims it is fulfilling the truth of the three monotheisms by transferring them back to earth from heaven. It appears under the name of Communism, whose root communio evokes the synthesis of past peoples of God – Israel, the church and the ummah. The term itself implicitly expresses the new political universalism's objection to the historical folk traditions, which, from the perspective of avant-garde morality, merit only contempt: only people who are too stupid to become general producers, i.e. true human beings, carry their communal membership around with them like the flag of an organization. Similar ideas had been anticipated by Christianity and Islam. The new faith went further, propagating the thesis that it had shown the valid basis for every membership in God's community that was still possible among humans, with the international industrial proletariat at its centre as its miserable and creative elite. Consistently enough, Communism could – for a while – claim the advantage of being the ring that was far more than simply an identical replica of earlier rings. Its production could only be undertaken once interest in the older rings had begun to diminish due to new insights and the accompanying new hopes.

  This brings us to Communism's strongest argument, which, when explicitly laid out, leads to the fiery centre of modern thought. Whoever acknowledges the possibility of fundamentally new insights is admitting something that older historical metaphysics would not have accepted at any price: that truth itself is subject to evolution, and that the succession of events is more than simply a random sequence. It is in the nature of truth itself that it cannot be fully revealed from the start, but rather comes to light consecutively, bit by bit, as a cumulatively developed result of investigations that may never reach an end.

  This reflection leads to a new definition of the sense of the revealed religions: holy scriptures of this type can only be legitimated as catastrophic interruptions or extreme accelerations of human research history. By supporting its case with the claim of a divine intervention in the investigations of humans, each becomes an organ of holy impatience. They express the sentiment that the truth is too important to wait for the research to be completed. As time-honoured as these religions may seem to us today, they are all early comers by nature; they set faith the tasks that the science of the time could not handle by itself.

  The term ‘revelation’ itself makes this prematurity clear, as it contains a statement about the condition of human spirituality: it must show an adequate level of development to be receptive to a revelation of the monotheisti
c variety, but should still be in a sufficiently undeveloped state to require help from above. Indeed, all revelations would be superfluous if they did not convey something that the human spirit could not access on its own strength in the respective status quo. It is in this ‘not yet’ quality that the whole significance of the revealed religions lies. What they have in common is their quasi-putschist determination to break out of the openness of a life full of experimentation in order to jump ahead to the end of all attempts and errors. In terms of their status in the world process, the historical monotheisms can be understood as petrified interjections in the continuing sequence of experiences where experiment and apocalypse coincide. They draw their authority from the certainty with which they claim to be speaking from the perspective of the true end. They embody the attempt to anticipate, in the middle of the world experiment, the result of everything that can ever be achieved in a learning life – at least, in moral and eschatological terms. Their existence stands or falls with this risk; it is their sole source of legitimacy.

  Thus the revealed religions tend not only towards a devaluation of everything so far understood and achieved to a more or less useless prelude – this is the purpose of their sometimes fanatical anti-Pagan polemic (whose exaggerations later have to be corrected through retroactive retrievals of something supposedly devalued, but in fact often superior and indispensable – one need only think of Greek philosophy and the results of the pre-Christian and pre-Islamic sciences) – but additionally deny the possibility and inevitability of finding new truths, if these happen to produce results leading to revisions in the text of the holy scriptures. Such religions, as noted above, can therefore only be understood as vehicles of hastiness; and their evaluation hangs by the thread of how far it can be shown that there are anticipations which resist all attempts at revision – and that such anticipations form their substance. If there is a convincing justification for the theological profession in all religions, it is presumably only through an explanation of their true activity: it is their job to prevent the revelations from being rendered obsolete through later, newer events by constantly showing anew the undiminished currentness of aspects that are seemingly outdated. Only if the religious scholars can show plausibly how the holy texts in fact contain leaps into the realm of the absolutely final that one can partially catch up with, but never overtake, will they be able to assert their claims to truth.

  This reflection leads to a slightly more technical reinterpretation of the concept of revelation. A reformulated notion of revelation provides an explicit basis for the relationship between what is revealed and the ongoing learning period of intelligent collectives. In process-logical terms, revelation means the elevation of a prejudgement to a final judgement. It combines a symbol from the relative sphere with the level of the absolute. Such an operation makes it necessary to replace the classical concept of eternity with that of absolute velocity. The term ‘revelation’ hence implies an acceleration of insight to absolute velocity. It postulates the synchronization of human insight with the transrapid intelligence of God. Only through this can prejudgements and final judgements coincide. A holy scripture would then simply be a vessel for conclusive and trustworthy statements through which all insights taking place at relative velocities would be overtaken. Even in so eminent a text, however, the few unovertakeable statements will inevitably be surrounded by numerous others that can potentially be overtaken or have in fact been overtaken. The margin of difference between the strong and weak statements in a sacred body of text makes room for ways of adapting faith to the respective day and age.

  Against this background, we can explain the philosophical meaning of the project known as Communism once again. In accordance with its dogmatic quality, it consisted in an abrogation of all earlier prophetic statements and their reformulation in a language of realism, where the latter was conceived in a dual sense – both as economic production, a metabolic exchange between humans and nature, and as political practice, as an appropriation of the humanly possible by real human beings. The expressions ‘real human being’ and ‘revolutionary’ now become synonymous. That would mean the baton of prophetism was handed from Moses to Jesus, from Jesus to Mohammed, and from Mohammed to Marx. Marx would have rejected the religious narrowness of his predecessors and sought to put an end to all mystified forms of revelation. He would have placed the truths of the religions on trial before the worldly sciences and proletarian passions. He would, like any fair judge, have allowed them to act as the ‘soul of a heartless world’, but nonetheless rejected the majority of their statements in order to replace them with a political practice that acted in favour of real human beings.

  The fourth ring, then, can only indirectly be compared to the older ones. At most, one could say that the other three were melted down for its fabrication in order to take the best qualities from the moral substance of each. Its claim to superior validity is based on the thesis that its production no longer takes place under the law of religious projection, but rather due to an insight into the productive nature of humans. The prophet of the fourth ring postulated a world in which all people would become free producers of their own destiny, both as individuals and collectively.

  It was precisely this expectation that had to remain essentially unfulfilled in the spheres of activity of the religions that have existed so far, as they always involved classes of people, the ones known as rulers, who prevented the vast majority of others, those known as the oppressed and exploited, from freely producing and appropriating their own selves. Ironically enough, the clerics of the three-ring religions, especially the extremely feudalized high clergy in Christianity, were also among the oppressed classes, which meant that one could not expect any direct help from them in reaching the goal of general emancipation. Is that not why the Protestant Reformation revolted against the arrogance of the ruling Roman church? Did the theologian Martin Dibelius not see valid reasons, even in the middle of the twentieth century, to refer to the church as the ‘bodyguard of despotism and capitalism’? Understandably, depriving the exploitative clergy of its power must be declared a fundamental prerequisite for the realization of those prophecies through which the wearers of the fourth ring sought to make themselves agreeable to their fellow humans. In order to establish this ‘religion of man’ (to apply a phrase of Rousseau's reference to Communism), however, it became inevitable that the pleasant would be preceded by the terrible. Only one thing was certain for the zealots of humanity: as long as the lords of the older rings exercised their power over people's souls, human beings would not infinitely transcend the human, but rather fall infinitely short of themselves.

  The Communists worked consistently on the development of an anthropological supremacism of a resolutely anti-religious character. In this undertaking it was allowed – in fact necessary – to blaspheme the imaginary Highest in the name of the real highest. Each effective blasphemy meant an overstepping of the ‘existing’ towards liberating excess. This is the meaning of the ‘passion for the real’ (passion du réel), which, according to a shrewd observation by Alain Badiou, was the hallmark of the twentieth century.10 In the parlance of the zealots of humanity, the movement through which human beings with a low standing could potentially attain the level of the highest human being was known as ‘revolution’. Because revolution constituted a translation of revelation into political practice, however, it shared its risk of excessive haste. It too, while still caught up in the experiment of creating wealth, ignored the question of whether the conditions were right and the means sufficiently tested and sought to force results that would be impossible to overtake at later stages of the world's development.

  The rest of the story is well known. Within a few generations, after some successful conversions at the start, the fourth ring made its wearer the object of almost unconditional disgust without giving him any chance to make himself agreeable to God as a compensation. The hatefulness of what was done in the name of Communism was demonstrated to the extreme for
judgement by all normal humans – and if one still occasionally encounters the opinion that the atrocities committed on the other side surpassed those of Communism, it is primarily because those in the corresponding circles refuse to accept the facts: with over 100 million lost lives, the degree of human extermination achieved in Communist systems is several times higher than that of Hitler's regime, which has – understandably – been given the title of absolute evil. The question arises whether a co-absolute evil should not have been added to the collective consciousness long ago.

  For the majority of people at that time, it remained unclear to what extent the Soviet and Chinese dramas constituted a parody of religious history since the caesura on Mount Sinai. Moses' command ‘let every man kill his brother, his friend and his neighbour’ was obviously only followed on a grand scale by the ideologues of humanity in the twentieth century; one had to wait until the advent of monohumanism to witness the hubristic seeds of monotheism bloom. The lesson of this unprecedented episode would prove difficult to forget: if it is already precarious to make people feel enthusiasm for a God who demands too much of them, even if it is to their own advantage, then it is completely impossible to turn people into zealots of humanity beyond brief moments of hysteria – least of all by the methods with which the Russian and Chinese Communists sought to achieve their goals.