God's Zeal

The Battle of the Three Monotheisms

Peter Sloterdijk

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745645070, 9780745645063
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The conflicts between the three great monotheistic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – are shaping our world more than ever before.

In this important new book Peter Sloterdijk returns to the origins of monotheism in order to shed new light on the conflict of the faiths today. Following the polytheism of the ancient civilizations of the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians, Jewish monotheism was born as a theology of protest, as a religion of triumph within defeat. While the religion of the Jews remained limited to their own people, Christianity unfolded its message with proclamations of universal truth. Islam raised this universalism to a new level through a military and political mode of expansion.

Sloterdijk examines the forms of conflict that arise between the three monotheisms by analyzing the basic possibilities stemming from anti-Paganism, anti-Judaism, anti-Islamism and anti-Christianism. These possibilities were augmented by internal rifts: a defining influence within Judaism was a separatism with defensive aspects, in Christianity the project of expansion through mission, and in Islam the Holy War.

1
The premises

When studying the writings of philosophical authors that demand a thorough inspection of one's own discourse, one occasionally stumbles upon paragraphs that are conspicuous because they are obviously not necessitated by the course of a particular idea, but rather stem from a sudden associative urge that interrupts the development of an argument. In Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, for example, in the section dealing with the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, the author includes that now famous reference to ‘life's Sundays’ – meaning those exceptional states of existence relished with such demonstrative sensual enjoyment by the people he depicts. Obviously it is not Hegel the dialectician speaking here, the thinker who knows most of what he knows systematically, rather than simply having ‘picked it up’ somewhere. In this passage, he is bypassing his logical apparatus and speaking as a descendant of Swabian Protestantism encountering a welcome echo of his youthful impressions in the relaxed indecency of Dutch everyday life. So even if these boisterous philistines from the damp North are anything but saints, they surely cannot be entirely bad people with such good cheer – and, when the occasion arises, he will tell the reader this in the manner of a declaration of faith. If one so desired, one could see a hidden doctrine in Hegel's formulation: as highly as we cherish what is wonderful, it is the duty of art to let the commonplace have the last word. Does the value of that trivial Sunday feeling not increase to the same degree that we grow tired of the cult of exceptional states, these continuations of the wonderful by the most extreme means?

To take a much darker example – and at the same time a much more current one – of a digression that breaks the boundaries of its context in the work of an otherwise highly controlled, even obsessively careful, author, I shall introduce a few lines from a lecture given by Jacques Derrida in spring 1993 in Riverside, California; the extended version was published as a book that same year in Paris under the title Spectres de Marx.¹ There, in a passage that has become notorious since, Derrida gets carried away for a moment and makes the following comment: ‘The war over the “appropriation of Jerusalem” is today's world war. It is taking place everywhere, it is the world, it is the singular figure of its “out of joint”-ness today.’ This eruptive statement can only be understood with reference to two pieces of information concerning Derrida and his context. Firstly, one needs to know that, in order to explore the possibility of the inextinguishable significance of Karl Marx for the post-Communist era, he had embarked on a meditation upon Hamlet's comment ‘the world is out of joint’ that runs through his overlong deliberations as a leitmotif. Secondly, he engaged polemically with Francis Fukuyama's theory of the ‘end of history’ (first put forward in 1989, then expanded into the book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992), in which he sees (mistakenly, I would argue) a form of liberal-technocratic evangelism and a somewhat rash, perhaps even irresponsible, version of American triumphalist rhetoric. This marks the start of a torrent of ideas culminating in the passage quoted above.

I shall place that statement by Derrida, who left us in 2004, at the head of the following reflections – not as a motto, but rather as a warning sign pointing out a particularly explosive semantic and political danger zone in today's world: the Near and Middle East, where, if Derrida was right, three messianic eschatologies embroiled in rivalry are ‘directly or indirectly’ mobilizing ‘all the powers in the world and the entire “world order” for the ruthless war they are waging against one another’.² I am not sure whether I would like to adopt the thesis of the war of eschatologies unreservedly, and am well aware that it is more an example of dangerous thinking than a stylistically assured philosophical explanation, whether casual or committed. Here, Derrida of all people – that author whose reputation is tied to the procedures of ‘deconstruction’, the meticulous dissection of metaphysical hyperbole and one-sided discourse used as a means of power – indulged in an excursus based around one of the most pathos-ridden exaggerations ever formulated by a philosopher of recent generations.

It is clear, however, and this brings us to our subject: Derrida is here referring, directly and indirectly, to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He is concerned with identifying the group of monotheistic religions as ‘conflict parties’ entangled with one another in world-historical terms. His synopsis anticipates the meanwhile popular theory of a ‘clash of monotheisms’, though one cannot accuse him of wanting to confront the three religious complexes with one another in their dogmatic and social totalities. He refers primarily to their missionary aspects, which are sometimes also known as their ‘universalist potential’, and hence those elements in each of the individual belief structures that one could describe as its ‘radioactive material’, its manic-activist or messianic-expansionist mass. It is with these dangerous substances that we shall concern ourselves especially in the following.³

My intention in placing a quotation of this kind at the start is to make it clear that none of what will be said here can, whether theologically, politically or religion-psychologically, be thought of as harmless. The following deliberations could be compared to open heart surgery – and will only be chosen by those who have reason to prevent their convictions from suffering a metaphorical heart attack. I would therefore consider it advisable to agree on some form of safety procedure with the readers before we begin. This will take the form of an arrangement as to which aspects of religion and religious faith can and must be discussed with the help of scientifically founded distortions – and which aspects most likely can or should not. I would suggest a sort of blasphemy clause, and invite the reader to decide, after taking some time for reflection, whether he or she wishes to continue reading. According to this agreement, a number of phenomena traditionally assigned to the realm of the transcendent or holy would be released for non-religious reinterpretation (of potentially blasphemous appearance, albeit not intended as such). Other areas of sacred speech and religious sentiment, however, will remain untouched for material, formal and moral reasons.

I shall address – provisionally, and without systematic intentions – seven aspects of the phenomenon of transcendence. The first four of these, as will be demonstrated shortly, are capable of being critically translated into worldly and functional categories without their religious side risking the loss of more than is always lost through the acquisition of better knowledge. I will distinguish between four incorrect interpretations of the fact of transcendence and two further aspects that I would not wish to present as entirely immune to misunderstanding, but which, owing to their objectively mysterious character, offer resistance to any simplistic projection onto natural and social contexts. I will then address a seventh, highly sensitive aspect, showing that its undecidable nature places it beyond the difference between knowledge and faith – though it is faith, conspicuously enough, that profits most often from this state of affairs.

Let us begin with a thesis presented not long ago by Heiner Mühlmann, in a recent essay on cultures as learning units, in the form of a resolute question followed by a succinct answer: ‘How does transcendence come about? It comes about through the misunderstanding of slowness.’ The author clarifies: ‘A movement is slow if it takes longer than a generation. In order to observe it, we must depend on co-operation with those who lived before us and those who will live after us.’⁴ As co-operations with previous and subsequent generations have been either only rarely achieved or structurally impossible, and at best remained precarious episodes, it is understandable that, in previous times, most of these slow phenomena were consigned to the realm of transcendence, which here means: to the realm of the unobservable. As a result, they could be declared subject to the otherworldly plans of some transhuman or divine intelligence, and no objection would have had any chance of success. As soon as technologically and scientifically matured civilizations develop effective methods for the observation of slow phenomena, however, the concept of transcendental planning loses a considerable part of its plausibility – whether it is known as creation, prediction, predestination, salvation history or the like – and makes room for immanent procedures serving the interpretation of long-term processes. These means can encompass biological or socio-systemic evolution theories, wave models and crack theories that allow a description of oscillations and mutations in the realm of the longue durée. Only then can the difficulties and failures of evolution be assessed in their full extent, without the forced positivism of the creation idea compelling us to look away. In orthodox communities where identification with the edifying notion of transcendental planning is still very intense, one can observe militant resistance to the conceptual means leading to the secularization of those slow phenomena previously consigned to the hereafter. This is exemplified most clearly by the creationists in the USA, who are known to resort to all manner of methods in order to immunize their doctrine of sudden, intentional creation against the new sciences of slow, self-organized becoming.⁵

The second step lies in recognizing the following: transcendence also arises from the misunderstanding of vehemence. In order to clarify this idea, I shall draw once again on a concept introduced into the cultural sciences by Heiner Mühlmann – namely the link between stress analysis and the theory of the determinate formation of rituals and symbols laid out in his epochal programmatic text The Nature of Cultures. This work – encouraged by suggestions from Bazon Brock – introduced a radically new paradigm for the combining of cultural science and evolution theory into the debate.⁶ The phenomenology of the great stress reaction in homo sapiens and the ways in which cultures have sought to cope with it make it clear why, to the subject of stress, the conditions experienced often seem be of a transcendent nature. The vehemence of endogenous processes – which are initially strictly biologically determined, though very often cloaked by symbolism – can, in some cases, reach such a level that what is experienced is inevitably attributed to external forces.

Within our space of tradition, the model for this is provided by the wrath of Achilles as recounted by Homer, invoked throughout millennia by the warriors of the old Europe as the numinous origin of their noble and cruel profession. Undoubtedly heroic wrath is part of the same phenomenon as the manifestations of battle frenzy found in numerous cultures, which can in turn be compared to prophetic ecstasies. In physiological terms, the episodes of heroic fury show the result of an identification of the warrior with the propulsive energies that overcome him. It belongs within the spectrum of berserker enthusiasms, which includes the well-known amok syndrome of the Malaysian peoples (eagerly taken up by Western mass culture and pop-psychologically instrumentalized from within as an example of the wild), alongside the ecstatic rapture of the Vedic warriors or the battle rage of the Germanic heroes, which extended even to a lust for their own demise. In almost every case this fury, in the eyes of its bearers, seems to take, almost by necessity, the form of an obsession inspired from above, in which the martial energy of the agent is completely absorbed, making the battle appear to him as a mission. As a primal form of endogenous revelatory experience, fury constitutes something like the natural religion of the impassioned. As long as the transcendental misunderstanding of vehemence predominates, it is impossible to see how something that is experienced as an inspiration of strength could arise from a psychosemantically influenced process initiated from within the organism when it is subjected to extreme stress – a description that would presum-ably also apply to a considerable number of prophetic ecstasies.

Furthermore, this massive reaction to stress manifests itself in not only an explosive, but also an implosive, mode. There was an example of this a number of years ago, at a bullfight in one of the most important arenas in Madrid. The matador had made three failed attempts to deal the deadly blow to the charging bull – upon which he was seized by a sort of dumbfounded numbness, a state in which he would have been run down or killed by the raging animal if his colleagues had not carried the paralysed bullfighter from the arena. The scene can best be understood by recognizing in it the reversal of the stress reaction into an ecstasy of self-rejection. In that moment, shame revealed itself to the failed matador (in Spanish: the killer) like some otherworldly force. Although the physiological side of the incident is thus not especially mysterious, its spiritual aspect is at least somewhat harder to pin down. But we can certainly speculate: if one established a connection to the religious sphere, this should remind us to what extent the God who judges humanity also has the power of damnation. Whoever finds themselves wishing the ground would swallow them up not only feels the disadvantage of being visible, but also has an immediate understanding of what it means for one's own name to be erased from the Book of Life. This much is clear: the connection between guilt, shame and stress, without which the fervour of some religious subj...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• 1: The premises
• 2: The formations
• 3: The battle fronts
• 4: The campaigns
• 5: The matrix
• 6: The pharmaka
• 7: The parables of the ring
• 8: After-zeal
• Index