No More Learning

The motive of the court of judgment originated in the conceptions of the beyond in Ancient Egypt and the Near East. During its culmination in the late Middle Ages and the baroque period, it advanced to become the most aston- ishing of visual illustrations. If one had to define the, historically speaking, exceptionalism of Christian intelligence, one could put it as follows: Christian thinking is (or was until very recently) that thinking that in its concern for salvation also conceives of its opposite, hell. Even in the twentieth century, the Catholic Irishman James Joyce depicted, with the shiniest and blackest of
2 colors,themetaphysicalhorroroftheexperienceofsufferingforeternity. In
light of the influence of this idea, the concept of eternity became associated with a final penal and torture institution, based on a vast divine memory of injustice and corresponding rage competence. With the help of this set of
3 ideas,anxietybecamepartofthespiritualhistoryofChristianity. Itisprob-
ably correct to assume that theology secretly dispensed with the unfavorable ballast of dogmatic conceptions of hell during the twentieth century. Insofar as traces of the idea of a wrathful God have seeped into our contemporary memory, it still conjures up the memory of the most Christian of hells.
If the wrath of God is translated back into historical time and taken up by a human, universal direction, "history" comes into being. It enters the scene with a revolutionary climax whose meaning consists in avenging the injustice that provokes rage against those who caused the injustice and, even more so, against its structural conditions. One could define modernity as the epoch in which the motives of rage and immanence become fused. This liaison generates the coming into existence of a globally operative rage agency. In the next chapter, I will describe as the embodiment of such an institution the party that is always in the right. Only a control center of such a scale could realize what Schiller referred to with his dictum that world his- tory is the world's court of justice. But first I want to examine not the trans- lation of Holy Wrath into secular history but its accumulation in eternity.
PRELUDE: THE WRATH OF GOD AGAINST THE SECULAR WORLD
IF IT IS CORRECT THAT THE GLOBALIZATION OF RAGE HAD TO PASS through an extended theological starting phase before it could be translated into secular control, we are faced with an essential difficulty of understanding.
71
THE WRATHFUL GOD
In the introduction to this work, I attempted to show why it is impossible for modern human beings to understand the rage of Achilles within the parameters of the age of Homer. What follows is an analogous demonstra- tion in regards to the prophetism of rage in the tradition of Judaism docu- mented in the Bible, as well as in the Christian tradition in the Scholastic and Puritan theology of rage. For our contemporaries it is impossible to appreciate the rage of the One God as it has been preached by the interpret- ers of triumphant monotheism at the highpoints of their self-confidence. It is fundamentally mistaken to believe that it would be possible to do with- out a reconsideration of the early history of the horror metaphysicus because contemporary Islamism provides an example. The wave of violence that is carried out by Islamists at most tells us something about the most recent performances of the well-known tropes of the wrathful God, as well as the agitating God known since the early days of Judaism. It does not help us to diagnose how it was ever possible that God could acquire the attribute ofwrathfulness.
To appreciate the authentic teaching concerning God's rage, two con- cepts are necessary, and their meaning is, if at all, only metaphorically understandable for us: glory and hell. The content of these terms, which formerly depicted the extremes of high and low in a world formed by God's presence, cannot be concretized by contemporaries. We cannot clarify them even given our best efforts. If a modern human being were to be capable of using these concepts according to their metaphysical meaning, he would have to affirm the most horrible sentence of world literature—he would have to agree to the inscription above the gates of Hell in Dante's Inferno, where we can read for eternity: "Divine power made me, / highest wisdom, and primal love. " The impossibility of deliberately agreeing to these words of terror provides an inkling of the complexity of the task that has to be solved. The solution can no longer be achieved. To see this difficulty means to enter into an investigation concerning the price paid for monotheism. This much needs to be said in advance: the price for monotheism had to be paid by two transactions, of which it is not easy to say which was the more deadly. One was the introduction of resentment into the teaching of last things, the other the internalization of terror into Christian psychagogy.
Before approaching these dangerous domains, we should attempt to ease the censorship of the Zeitgeist. Because of this censorship, that theological issues of all kinds are excluded from the domain of topics to be seriously discussed by enlightened human beings. "God talk" has been banned from
72
THE WRATHFUL GOD
European high society for more than 150 years. This is the case in spite of
periodically circulating rumors of a return of religion. Flaubert's bon mot
in his Dictionary of Received Ideas concerning "conversation"—that "poli-
tics and religion are to be excluded from it"—is still an apt description of
4
the state of affairs. However often one speaks of a "revitalization" of the
religious, the truth remains that simply because there is a widespread dis- satisfaction with the disenchanted world, this does not at all lead to a new belief in extra- or superworldly entities. When John Paul II often remarked in a melancholic tone that human beings in Europe live as if God does not exist, he revealed a better understanding of the real conditions than the subversive crypto-Catholics who publish in the culture sections of Ger- man newspapers, who would like it the most if they could elect the Lord in Heaven as the Person of the Year.
We can specifically say about the Christian message that it has not been admissible in the secular realm for a long time; it is no longer plausible. The only way to get a hold of its audience is through marginal means of communication, such as TV channels owned by certain sects. This remark will provoke the protest of one or another representative of the church who does not like to admit the possibility that belief in the Redeemer could be a hobby similar to enjoying horror movies or breeding fighting dogs. This reservation can be easily understood, yet it does not change the fact that the Christian cause survives only as a subculture. What is at issue here cannot anyhow be expressed by sociological or statistical data. The alienation of the public from the Gospel goes far beyond Paul's concession that God talk is a nuisance for Jews and a foolishness for Greeks. Apart from nuisance and foolishness, embarrassment is perhaps the best characterization of the contemporary mode of being of the religious. For some time now, religious sensibilities have retreated into the intimate regions of the psyche and are regarded as the true pudenda of the moderns. After the Enlightenment, one has to cross a great threshold of embarrassment to still be touched by the question concerning a praiseworthy Higher Being. Theologians like to react to this situation with the profound remark that modern man still lives in the historical situation of a "distance" to God. However beautiful this phrase is, it is already mistaken. The problem that exists between God and us contemporaries is not that we are too far away from him. Rather, God would get too close if we were to take his offerings seriously. No quality of the God of the theologians reveals this better than the most embarrassing among them: God's wrath.
73
THE WRATHFUL GOD
This said, the following thesis should make sense: what seemed to be the clearest manifestation of a new weight of religion, of a new religiosity as such—the attention that was paid to the dying and death of Pope John Paul II and the choice of his successor, Benedict XVI, in April 2005—actually had little to do with the religious side of the changing of the guard in the Office of the Saint Peter. In fact, the fascination was exerted largely, if not exclusively, by the pompous Roman liturgies based on relics of the impe- rial Caesarian myth. Without being able to give themselves a clear account of what they were doing, the masses, as well as the media, felt during the course of events how the personal aura of the pope still radiates with the charisma of Caesar. To a diligent observer of the pontificate of John Paul II," it is clear that the papal cult, which the pope cleverly updated, was essen- tially characterized by a media Caesarism. In spite of all the assertions of the mystic intensity of the event, it was how the Christian message pro- vided a religious form to Caesarian content. Only because of the latter was it possible that Roma aeterna could appear as the most successful content
provider for all secular networks. But what else does this show than that the Church only wins the struggle for attention when it presents a program that can be misinterpreted in a secular, tragic, and spectacular way? Because Catholicism, at least in its Roman form, is in the last instance still more an empire—or, more specifically, a copy of an empire—than it is a church, the embarrassment of religious speech retreats into the background during its main events and completely cedes the floor to the pompous apparatus.
Once again: in a post-Enlightenment atmosphere "God" cannot be a topic under any circumstances, with the exception of special issues of elitist culture journals. A fortiori, a public discourse concerning the "attributes" of the impossible object remains unthinkable. Yet more impossible, if such a comparative form exists, would be the demand to conceive of a wrathful God or a God of rage in a time in which a friendly God is already an implau- sible hypothesis. But we precisely have to deal with this unpopular entity, which I will refer to from now on in a preliminary fashion as a "thought figure," in order to understand the emergence of the modern economy of rage. We have to trace the preliminary stages of its transformation into a formal banking system.
The most recent opportunity to witness the configuration of the con- cepts "God" and "rage" was the debate concerning the new forms of reli- gious and political fundamentalism, a debate more than usually visible in the late 1980s. A significant publication from that time was La revanche de
74
THE WRATHFUL GOD
Dieu (The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Juda- ism in the Modern World), which appeared in French in 1989. The French subtitle did not just mention an advance but, more straightforwardly, a ureconquete du monde"—this was of course reminiscent of the historical pattern of the Reconquista. The author of the book, Gilles Kepel, who has been one of the most important voices in matters of culture and politics in the Middle East since this publication, investigates the strategies of the radi- cal monotheist mobilization in various corners of the world. The oriental aspect of the topic seems to be couched in an ecumenical register of old and new fanaticisms.
The ironic tone of the term "revanche de Dieu' cannot be missed. The author makes it clear that he discusses his subject matter solely with the means available to a cultural scientist of his time. When he mentions the "vengeful God," he does not affirmatively refer to the theology of the wrath- ful God. At the center of the investigation is the return of militant religious groups onto the stage of world politics. In the meantime, we have become accustomed to interpreting the resurgence of these groups as "fundamental- ist reactions"—they are the expressions of revenge from a heated religious milieu against the dominant secular milieu. Chronologically, the return of fundamentalisms begins with the appearance of evangelical fundamental- ists in the United States and their adamant denunciation of the worldview of modern natural science as diabolic. For decades, these groups have been increasing their influence on American society. The trend is continued by the ultraorthodox Jews of Israel, whose agitations can no longer be ignored by any government and who would like to see their secular nation trans- formed, sooner rather than later, into a rabbi-ocracy; the trend finds its inevitable end in more recent Islamist phenomena. Although the Islamists, just like their Christian counterparts, reveal a tendency toward militant big- otry, particularly unmistakable are the similarities to the years of fighting and defiance of Roman Catholicism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; however, they add a new element to their political appearances. They draw on historical Islam as a "readymade" in order to arbitrarily instrumentalize it in a terrorist advertising campaign throughout the global public sphere. What Marcel Duchamp achieved for art history during the early twentieth century, Osama Bin Laden repeats with the sup- port of religious technicians for the Islam of the late twentieth century. The significance of the readymade procedure for the modern cultural economy has been laid out in the subde analyses of Boris Groys, and the effects of his
75
THE WRATHFUL GOD
5
work on contemporary cultural science have barely begun. As a result of
the subversive interpretation of the sacred tradition, we see that Islam, and in particular the traditional authority of the Ulema, the council of scholars and jurists, is undermined by the rebellious fascination of religious pirates.
This "revenge of God" is launched by the various political surrealists, ter- rorists, and fanatics through the media of Western entertainment societies, which are always hungry for events. This rage constitutes only a semicomi- cal, semimacabre spectacle compared with to the millennia-old theological traditions, in which mention of the wrath of God and his interventions in human affairs bears a tone of sympathetic seriousness. These interventions were conceived of in both historical and eschatological terms. The memory of this tradition is the first step of the descent into the catacombs of the his- tory of ideas.
THE KING OF RAGE
NATURALLY THE COUNTLESS REFERENCES TO THE FIGURE OF THE wrathful God in the Old Testament interest us here only in a limited man- ner. The source of the New Testament, as well as sources from later Catho- lic dogmatism, are only selective and should be consulted from a different point of view. The traces of these traditions in the Koran will be left out here completely because when measured against the bulk of Jewish and Chris- tian remarks they do not provide anything that would be genuinely new. In this chapter we can thus only pursue a few of those theological terms that have been important in the development of the one "God" and the corre- sponding transformation of God's people into memory devices. The other abundant references to the divine life of affects in the euphoric as well as the dysphoric sense do not concern us in this context.
For professionals as well as amateurs it is a trivial fact that the early depictions of Yahweh, the Lord of Israel, are marked by clear anthropomor- phisms (or better, anthropo-psychisms). Every reader of the Bible could make sure that the God of Exodus was still capable of combining the traits of a theatrical weather demon with those of a furious, unrestrained war- lord. What is decisive for what follows is, of course, the question of how the first signs of a superior moral view characterize this primitive and ener- getic, meteorological and military conception of God. Part of this change is the formation of a retention function, which is supposed to prevent the disappearance of the past into what is truly passe and, because of the lack
76
THE WRATHFUL GOD
of memory, was never real. Through the divine act of retention, the first project culminating in a "history" means more than the recurrence of the same; it also means more than an expression of megalomania and forget- ting, in which empires come and go. The historical progression culminating in the "omniscient God" runs for a long time parallel to the path leading to
6
a god of good memory. The emergence and gaining shape of a retaining,
deferring, preserving, and recording activity in God signals the transforma-
tion of his exercise of power away from the eruptive style to the habitus of
7
a judge or a king. Rage might have been a plausible but incidental attribute
for a God who from time to time slips into the roller of thunders. For a God, however, who is supposed to be a royal judge and demands respect and fear in an aura of numinous majesty, the ability to rage becomes constitutive. About such a God we can say for the first time that sovereignty requires that one is believably threatening.
Through the account concerning the function of God as judge, the tem- poral profile of his actions change: while he used to be conceived of as a protector of his people, as an impulsive interventionist (one can think of the destruction of the Egyptian army at the Red Sea or the eradication of all of humankind with the exception of Noah during the flood), he initially distinguishes himself through his righteous upsurges—from a psychologi- cal perspective, one would speak of momentous decompensations. Between God's aggravation with sinful humanity and the downpour of deadly rain there is but a blink of an eye. The passage concerning the remorse that God felt after having created human beings points to a misunderstanding between expectation and fulfillment insofar as remorse implies a modifi- cation to the divine sense of time. The situation drastically changes if one takes into account the final scene of the great flood. Here God raises with the rainbow an important symbol of patience for both sides, a symbol that expresses his intention to never repeat such a destructive action, even though humanity does not significantly differ after the flood, at least in its moral character. Riidiger Safranski summarizes this fact with the fitting remark, which is respectfully unrespectful: that God transformed himself from a "fundamentalist to a realist. " The realist (der Realo) is the one who concedes that everything in need of improvement needs time—and which things are not in need of improvement? 8
As a result of the change of direction toward a conception of God as judge and avenger, the "retentional" qualities of the Lord in heaven increasingly became emphasized. Just as intentions aim at what is present, retentions
77
THE WRATHFUL GOD
aim at what is past, and pretentions at what is futural. The royal archival and judicial competences of God from now on become decisive character- istics. They include the abilities to remember what is just and what is unjust and to record violations of the law. But most important, they included the willingness to reserve judgment concerning the just sentence, including the right to pardon or leave the exact moment in which the sentence will be executed undetermined. Such conceptions can only occur in a culture that has for some time possessed two archetypes of "reserving" technologies. On the one hand, it has to possess a granary or, more generally, a stock of supplies. On the other hand, it requires a book or, more generally, writ- ten language and the collection of written works in libraries. These need to be complemented through judicial technologies that can determine what is right and what is wrong. The function of the archive is based on these basic patterns. The archive as an institution and in terms of its cultural function unfolds as soon as nervous systems interact with external storage spaces and recording devices, in other words, when it is necessary to organize the coop- eration between subjective and objective memories in formal procedures. The judging God is thus naturally the original registrar in the kingdom of ethical life. His office consists in holding on to the memory of controversial
9
Although the early immanent theology of the Bible tends to posit Yah- weh as existing beyond time and, in particular, beyond the fantasies of the permanent persistence and pompous genealogies of surrounding empires, as a judge and chairperson of a court for his own followers, he remains an agent who "breaks in" to the historical destinies of his followers and other peoples. For this reason, the Jewish God of judgment consistently needs to be envisaged as a ruling king, regardless of the empirical nonsense of a kingdom that is, in principal, invisible. Making God into a king introduces a tension to the temporal horizon of his interventions. Divine records of injustice and attempts to preserve rage allow for long distances between the moment of "transgression" and the moment of "revenge. " However, they still do not imply that punitive violence is postponed until the end of time or even transposed to eternity.
THE INTERRUPTION OF REVENGE
THE BOOK OF GENESIS MENTIONS A BREAK THAT CAUSED LASTING consequences for the organization of the human memory of rage. The
events so that they can be taken up again later.
78
THE WRATHFUL GOD
report of the first murder, committed by the farmer Cain against his younger brother, Abel, the shepherd who had been favored by God, is also the oldest record on the secrets of injustice. In this history, God appears for the first time openly as the master of facticity: he looks on Abel's sac- rifice favorably while ignoring Cain's. For this difference, there is no trace of a motivation. The freedom to discriminate against whomever, wherever he wishes is part of the concept of God. The next, similarly far reaching example of this thesis is provided in the story of Esau and Jacob. Without any documented reason, God loves one and hates the other one, while the created is not allowed to ask his creator: "Why did you create me in such a way that you needed to reject me? " It is expected that the person who is discriminated against needs to master his affects of humiliation: "And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him" (Genesis 4:6-7). The meaning of this story, which has been inserted at front of the record of action, is obvious: the murder of the brother is not supposed to be misunderstood as a spontaneous impulsive act; it is supposed to count as a result of a suspension of the explicit and clear warning. The deed does not occur in the relative innocence of being overtaken by agitated feelings. In order to commit the deed, the perpetra- tor has to intentionally transgress a clearly drawn line—only such an act of transgression makes it into a case of true violation in the first place. One can hardly emphasize it enough: Cain does not abide by the law of grav- ity inhering in a strong affective action; he takes time for his action—he uses a pretense to lure his brother onto an open field in order to strike him dead. From this time on, he lives in the exceptional time of guilt; he is chained to his own dead: "You will be restless and uneasy on this earth," the lord speaks to him. "I will be restless and uneasy on this earth. Who- ever finds me will strike me down," the perpetrator responds (Genesis 4:12, 14). Thereupon God leaves Cain with a sign, "so that no one who finds him will strike him down. "
Historians of religion associate the sign of Cain with the warning symbol of an ancient oriental tribe in which strict blood feuds were common. It sig- nals that whoever raises the hand against the bearer of the symbol has to be aware that he will suffer from sevenfold revenge. The threat of revenge esca- lates among Cain's offspring in grotesque quantities. His great-great-grand- child Lamech announces heroically: "I will murder a man for a wound and
79
THE WRATHFUL GOD
a young boy for a bruise. If Cain will be avenged seven times, then Lamech will be avenged seven times seventy" (Genesis 4:23-24).
The exploding numbers express an ambivalent situation: although the sign of Cain can be interpreted as the symbol of a universal prohibi- tion against revenge, is this is violated, there exists the threat of excessive revenge. On the one hand, revenge is suspended, but, on the other hand, we can expect an extreme form of revenge if this commandment is not fol- lowed. This can only be understood as a symptom for the lack of an effec- tive monopoly over violence. Where there is no central penal authority, the revenge prohibition can only be experimentally instituted through the forceful threat of an excessive reaction. One needs to wait for the intro- duction of a stable juridical culture with a formal body of law before tali- onic equations can come into effect: "A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise" (Exodus 21:23-25). The equality between the sides of these formulas show that justice is to be understood as appropriateness. The measure presupposes someone who enforces it, a role usually fulfilled by early forms of government as the guarantors of the law.
If the degree of the sentence is directly and materially deduced from the suffering of injustice committed, a concept of justice as a simple form of equivalence comes into being. The compulsion to enhance the amount of retribution can thus be dismissed. Instead of the outdated one-to-seven, or even one-to-seventy-seven, from now on the sublime and simple one-to- one will be exercised. To secure retribution, a strong judicial authority is necessary, which initially manifests itself only in the sovereignty of a king. It may be that modern observers will regard such a system as a form of economy of natural goods or, rather, a primitive and inhuman economy of horrors. However, the Mosaic commandments were an important step in the rationalization of strategies of retaliation. Additionally, equality between the value of injustice and that of retribution has an implicit tem- poral meaning, since order can be reestablished only after the equivalence of the suffering from deeds and the suffering from penalty has been reestab- lished. This waiting for justice comes to characterize the meaning of time. Through the equation of guilt and penalty, which has been effected by the judicial system, there is a dissolution of local vengeful tensions of the vic- tim or prosecutor, at least as considered from an ideal-typical perspective. When the sun comes up afterward, it still shines on just and unjust people;
80
THE WRATHFUL GOD
at the same time, this sunrise signals the new beginning for the parties who have paid their bills.
THE ORIGINAL ACCUMULATION OF RAGE
THE SITUATION JUST PRESENTED STARTS TO LOOK VERY DIFFERENT if suffering from injustice is accumulated only on one side, without those sacrificed to the injustice having an effective way to reestablish equality. In such situations, it is likely that strong and chronic tensions of rage will emerge and accumulate into a form of negative capacity. For this possibil- ity we can find at least two significant examples in the Old Testament. The first one is connected to the memories of Israel concerning the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B. C. , to which the word "exile" refers with a richness of subtle connotations. The second example refers to the Jew- ish conception of apocalypse. Starting with the second century B. C. , this conception led to an intensification of propheticism that, through its exces- sive exaggeration, in turn led to the demand for the destructive rage of God against the incurably corrupt world as a whole.
The mental sediments of Israeli exile and the apocalyptic exaggerations of prophetic anti-imperialism (which initially turned against Hellenic and then Roman foreign rule) have left deep marks in the religious tradition of Western civilization. Both themes remain incomprehensible without assuming the creation of a treasury of rage. Its peculiar dynamic led to a structural transformation of the rage of victims into a lasting resentment. This transformation has a significance for the specific tuning of Western religion, metaphysics, and politics that can hardly be overestimated.
The books of the Old Testament provide ample evidence for the cre- ation of a treasury of rage during the Babylonian captivity and subse- quent epochs, in a sometimes sublime, sometimes more direct voice. An example for a sublime articulation of this development written during the age of Babylon and included in the Gospel only later is the narration of Genesis. It is mistaken to assume that Genesis necessarily constituted the beginning of the Jewish canon. In reality it is the result of a relatively late theological attempt to surpass the state of heteronomy. With this attempt the spiritual spokesmen of Israel claimed the cosmic superiority for their God over the gods of the dominant empire during the forced period of exile. What at first seems to be a casual report about last things is in real- ity the result of an editorial work on matters of competitive theology.
81
THE WRATHFUL GOD
The meaning of this endeavor consists in reinterpreting the God of the political losers as the a priori winner. Even if the heathen kings are able to rule over their territories and slave populations with the support of their polytheistic entourage, none of their decrees will even approximate the domain of the truly divine "It will be. " Through Genesis, Jewish theology was able to celebrate its most subtle victory over the teachings of the gods of the Mesopotamian empires.
AN EXAMINATION OF THE LESS SUBLIME BIBLICAL DEPICTIONS OF THE accumulation of rage can be limited to the infamous psalms of lamenta- tion and prayers for the sake of destroying the enemy. These can be found in the Psalms of the Old Testament, a collection of 150 exemplary hymns, praises, and invocations of God that have served the Jews, as well as Chris- tians, for more than a thousand years as the primary source of their prac- tices of prayer. This body of texts presents a spiritual treasury that can easily be compared to the most sublime documents of religious world literature. Although the individual pieces are consistently formulated in the mode of a prayer and thus in the habitus of a nontheoretical relationship to God, they present psychological, theological, and spiritual riches—as is proven by the great history of their reception, reaching from the Ennarrationes in Psalmos of Augustine to the studies of Hermann Gunkel and Arnold Stadler. Psalm 139, to take just one example, belongs to the most moving and substan- tive sources ever recorded. It addresses the being-surrounded of human existence by a creative milieu and the becoming-enveloped of human consciousness by a knowledge of a higher kind. With regards to its latent metaphysical and existential insights, this lyric text is not superior to any spiritual testimony, be it from India or China. Nonetheless, it is precisely this meditation that is torn apart by an appeal to revenge, the force of which is singular in the history of religious literature.
Initially the praying person assures himself of his own creation:
My substance was not hidfromthee, when I was made in secret, and curi- ously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet
there was none of them.
(Psalms 139:15-16, AV)
82
THE WRATHFUL GOD
IMMEDIATELY AFTER, THE MEDITATION TURNS TO THE ENEMIES OF
the praying person. The pious one points his attention to them without interruption. He is subject to a double "compulsory relationship" because, on the one hand, he faces the enemy, the Babylonian oppressor, as an inevitable political opponent. On the other hand, the political enemy also embodies a religious opponent insofar as he enjoys the freedom to hold onto the gods or idols of his own culture and thus despise Jewish monola- try. Both aspects of this front are present when the prayer suddenly passes over into the harshest lamentations:
Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.
For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain.
Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?
I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies. (19-22)
This poetic description of enemies would be completely misinterpreted as a spontaneous eruption of sentiments against domination. Such feelings are only one of many knots in a network of remembrance that records memories of abuse and humiliation. The same network stabilizes expres- sive impulses of revenge into repeatable forms. The initial formulation of Psalm 94, "God who is revenge appear" (cited according to the unrevised rendition of Luther) could be used as a leitmotiv and guide to a great part of the Psalms. It returns, in addition to many other places, in Psalm 44. There the following words are addressed to the God of the confederation: "With you we will throw down our oppressors. With your name we smash our opponents" (44:6). Then we read, "Wake up! Why do you sleep, my lord? Awake! Do not condemn us forever! " (24). The most massive inten- sification of this rhetoric is in Psalm 137, at the end of which we find the following lines:
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the
stones.
(8-9)
83
THE WRATHFUL GOD
THIS IS AN ARTIFICIAL FORM OF POLEMIC PRAYER THAT APPEARS foreign to the modern understanding of religion. Nevertheless, it can be understood once such formulations are translated (or better, retranslated) into what, in today's language, would be referred to as "psychological war- fare. " Because ancient Israel was for long periods in chronic situations of war, its religion was necessarily one at the front. Since warfare always devel- ops a psychosemantic dimension, its development and transcription is to be done by religious leaders, at least insofar as religion and psychoseman- tics converge. The harsh phrases of the Psalms are intended to compensate for the psychopolitical unlikelihood of the survival of Israel during a time of defeats.
This explains the initially disconcerting observation that prayers can also be polemics. Not less disconcerting, and yet psychodynamically plausible, is the fact that even meditation can be used as a means of propaganda. By turning inside themselves, those praying discover their hatred and thus entrust it to God so that he may draw the right consequences from it. These consequences should have been primarily violent, given the context. The autoplastic function of supplicatory prayer emerges most clearly when the praying group envisions itself in a destructive wish-image in which the oppressor has been overcome. This is revealed particularly well by the prob- lematic meaning of the incomparable psalm of lamentation, Psalm 58:
Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD.
Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces.
As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.
Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in his wrath.
The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.
So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth. (6-11)
BECAUSE OF THEIR FUNCTION ONE COULD DESCRIBE SUCH FIGURES as endo-propaganda. Although they seem to present nothing but hate
84
THE WRATHFUL GOD
speeches, they only aim indirectly at the real enemy, at least according to their effective dynamics. It is likely that no Babylonian ever took notice of the unfriendly phantasms of the Jewish slaves. It is also rather unlikely that any member of the enemy peoples suffered psychological harm from such prayers of hatred. The meaning of these verbal acts lies almost exclusively in their repercussions for the speaking collective. By participating in the language games of lamentation, the endangered group mobilizes the auto- plastic effects of collective recitation (more specifically, the hearing of the reciter or singer) and thereby reconstitutes itself as the sender/receiver of the message of war and rage.
GENEALOGY OF MILITANCY
IN THIS CONTEXT, THE RELEVANCE OF THESE OBSERVATIONS ON THE
Psalms is the evidence for the primary history of the phenomenon of mili-
tancy in the form of the Jewish prayers (in recent times, there have been
noteworthy attempts at interpretations devoted to the rescue of these
10
The phenomenon of a loser whose comments are not in line with his defeat is apparently as old as political spirituality itself. In the twentieth cen- tury, this pattern came to be called the "resistance. " If one does not know what resistance means, one has nothing to do with the spirit of the left. In the context of Western civilization, evidence for this at least goes back to the theology of the Jews in and after the exile; the most recent evidence is almost contemporary, found in the writings of Marxist and post-Marxist romantics. For these romantics, the fight will be continued especially once everything has been lost. At the visible forefront today we find such furious veterans as Antonio Negri. With his suggestive reflections in the field of "multitude," he wants to unfold a rainbow of micro-oppositions that span an earth allegedly integrated by global capitalism into one unified empire.
Militancy provides one of the most important keys for the configuration of rage and time. With its first appearances the effective history of cumulative
sources).
to pay attention to the psychological dynamics of the communication among losers. This dynamics reveals how the inferior transformed their defeats into programs of survival during times of historical confrontation between peoples, empires, or ideological factions. Among these, attitudes of eccentric arrogance recur as regularly as the figure of postponed hope and the dream of a final revenge.
An encompassing genealogy of militancy would first of all have
85
THE WRATHFUL GOD
memories of rage emerge. It thus belongs to the primary history of what Nietzsche refers to as resentment. This begins to emerge when the venge- ful rage is prevented from expressing itself directly and is forced to take a detour through sublimation, internalization, transference, and distortion. Wherever feelings of being set back are subject to the force of deferral, cen- sorship, and metaphor, local repositories of rage are created whose sole aim is a later release and retranslation. The preservation of rage creates a chal- lenge for the psyche of the inhibited avenger to connect the storage of rage with the need to keep it ready for a time that has been deferred but not defi- nitely determined. This can only be achieved by an internalization, which rests on successful divestiture. The Jewish culture of prayer shows how this is possible. In this culture of prayer, the wish for revenge becomes at the same time inward and advances to the most intimate conversation of the soul with God. Simultaneously, the patterns of such inner dialogues solid- ify into collections of texts that can then be passed down from generation to generation.
More recent defenses of the Psalms by Catholic theologians create an analogy between Jewish prayer and free association as it is practiced on the psychoanalytic couch. These authors refuse the potential need for censor- ship by arguing that openly stated wishes of destruction possess a mea- sure of authenticity, which attests to a productive therapeutic relationship with Yahweh as the analyst and supervisor. It is thus not legitimate to take away from the humiliated their calls for revenge and fierce accusations against their oppressors. Today this is said to be as true as it was in ancient times because "the Bible, the revealed word of God, already bestows them with rage. "11
The Psalms represent an authentic creation of a treasury of rage. A trea- sury is a stock of values that can be drawn on during times of lack. To draw on a treasury of rage means to bring back the conserved suffering of the past for new use today. Such a treasury fulfils its goal when fading rage can be reanimated from the accumulated savings.
Under no circumstances can the accumulation of rage value be limited to human matters and mortal memories. The depository of rage that has been set up by zealots is not merely imprinted into the memories of those yearning for revenge documented in texts. Essential is the conception of a transcendent archive, which operates parallel to the inevitably complete secular archives in which the deeds and crimes of the Jews and their ene- mies have been meticulously recorded. As we have seen, the God of the Jews
86
THE WRATHFUL GOD
was elevated above the gods of the surrounding empires by postcaptivity theology—in terms of both his cosmological competence as Creator and his political and moral competence. Because of these competencies it is expected that he has full access to the records of everyone's life as judge and king of these archives. In particular, he has access to the complete records concerning the lives of sinners and arrogant enemies. In this way the empir- ical rage fund, which includes the national traumatic memory as well as its corresponding demands for revenge, can be connected to the transcendent archive, that is, to the divine memory of injustice. The pathos of fidelity, which is typical for the religion of the old covenant, thus not only expresses that the alliance between God and the people has to be internalized anew from generation to generation but also underlines the demand that the old debts should not be forgotten as long as they are listed in the book of rage, as long as they have not been paid.
THE AUTO-AGGRESSIVE RAGE MASS
THE PILING-UP OF JEWISH RAGE WITHOUT WHICH THE CONCEPT of justice, with its persistent religious tinge, is difficult to grasp—proceeds in almost equal parts in two separate depositories, between which there are complicated transactions. In the first one we can find the already mentioned rage masses, which are mainly directed against external enemies, invaders, oppressors, and believers of other gods. The prophetic books that are listed in the Bible under the heading "words concerning foreign people" include a whole archive of hate discourses and sacral curses. The wish of destruction that is directed at the external world is declined for all cases. It is important to note that in these works it is not just hatred as such that is carefully artic- ulated. Rather, the justifications of hatred, including bad memories, dislike, and religious accusations are hoarded and kept ready in order to be used again when the time comes.
The second collection point is best described as a depository for auto- aggressive quantities of rage. This treasury of rage naturally needs to be stored with God himself. It will mainly be the Jewish people who will suffer from these collections of rage during times of plight. This time the prophetic "words about Israel and Judah" will accompany the exercise of God's wrath against his own people. In God's case, the accumulation of rage proceeds according to a simple principle: by closely observing the lives of his children of Israel, he is filled with such a large rage potential that its activation can
87
THE WRATHFUL GOD
literally be only "a question of time. " At the crucial moment prophets are needed whose purpose it is to announce the coming disastrous penalty—or identify political disaster, natural catastrophes, and dissipation of the life world that have already befallen the population as signs of penalty.
The auto-aggressive direction of these collections of rage is expressed clearly in the prophetic literature starting with Isaiah. This rage, which operates top-down, is entrusted to selected orators for interpretation. The prophet Ezekiel is assigned by God to announce the following:
Alas for all the evil abominations of the house of Israel! for they shall fall by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence. He that is far off shall die of the pestilence; and he that is near shall fall by the sword; and he that remaineth and is besieged shall die by the famine: thus will I accomplish my fury upon them. Then shall ye know that I am the Lord, when their slain men shall be among their idols round about their altars. So will I stretch out my hand upon them, and make the land desolate, yea, more desolate than the wilderness toward Diblath, in all their habitations: and they shall know that I am the Lord. (Ezekiel 6:11-14, AV)
The people of Israel are regularly compared to a whore who has slept with countless suitors. These suitors will one day be called to form a court and judge the sinner. The consequences of the judgment are described by the prophet in horrible detail:
They. . . shall stone thee with stones, and thrust thee through with their swords. And they shall burn thine houses with fire, and execute judgments upon thee
in the sight of many women So will I make my fury toward thee to rest,
and my jealousy shall depart from thee, and I will be quiet, and will be no
more angry. Because thou hast. . . fretted me in all these things; behold, there- fore I also will recompense thy way upon thine head. (Ezekiel 16:40-43)
IT WOULD BE MISTAKEN TO INTERPRET THESE THREATENING SPEECHES as mere symptoms of an immature extremism. The harsh tone of this prophetic speech should not divert one from acknowledging how much God himself works on acquiring the qualities of being patient, graceful, and tolerant, even though from a modern perspective these do not seem to be plausible characterizations. In fact, even the most upsetting threats
88
THE WRATHFUL GOD
of destruction uphold a pedagogical perspective. The One God begins to understand that faith in him cannot be created overnight, even with his most chosen of peoples. His grace, which is often appealed to, always already contains a reflection on his educational goals, which have been raised too high. Thus in his memories of his acquaintance with the people of Israel he remembers a crucial moment. After the exodus from Egypt, he wanted to destroy his people because they neglected the commandment to celebrate the Sabbath:
Then I said, I would pour out my fury upon them in the wilderness, to con- sume them. But I wrought for my name's sake, that it should not be polluted before the heathen, in whose sight I brought them out Nevertheless mine eye spared them from destroying them, neither did I make an end of them in the wilderness. (Ezekiel 20:13, v)
HOWEVER, IT IS WRONG TO CHARGE MONOLATRIC PEDAGOGY WITH half-heartedness. It includes the partial extermination of that people as well as the most extreme acts of reeducation. The battle over extermination at the foot of Sinai provides an unforgettable example: the recidivist part of the people, the part that followed the Egyptians by basking in front of the golden calf, is denigrated in dutiful zealousness by the loyal portion stand- ing under the leadership of Moses. On the other hand, the educational hor- ror does not have any limitations when it comes to incorporating the rage of the Lord against his own people. Isaiah proclaims:
Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against his people, and he hath stretched forth his hand against them, and hath smitten them: and the hills did tremble, and their carcasses were torn in the midst of the streets. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly. (Isaiah 5:25-26)
Isaiah also crieth concerning Israel, Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved. For he will finish the work, and cut it short in righteousness: because a short work will the Lord
make upon the earth.
(Romans 9:27-28)12
89
THE WRATHFUL GOD
The auto-aggression articulated by the prophets through attacks on for- eign peoples is unflinchingly directed to the moral reeducation of the peo- ple in the sense of Deuteronomic right. Because a people of saints does not come into being overnight, nor in a few decades or centuries, most methods of conversion seem to be necessary again and again. This is expressed by the warning of Ezekiel:
As they gather silver, and brass, and iron, and lead, and tin, into the midst of the furnace, to blow the fire upon it, to melt it; so will I gather you in mine anger and in my fury, and I will leave you there, and melt you. Yea, I will gather you, and blow upon you in the fire of my wrath, and ye shall be melted in the midst thereof. As silver is melted in the midst of the furnace, so shall ye be melted in the midst thereof; and ye shall know that I the LORD have poured out my fury upon you. (Ezekiel 22:20-22, AV)
THE METAPHOR INVOLVING METALLURGY AND ALCHEMY AIMS LESS AT the extermination of those who have failed than at their purification and re- creation. Even though the fire of rage burns the majority of those who want to stay as they always have been, there is regularly a remainder of those who can continue the history of religious revolts against political and anthropo- logical plausibilities. Today theologians sometimes still possess the admi- rable capacity to present such issues in a favorable light. The claim that the God of Israel is precisely not "a burning fire of ethical energy," a fire that aims to ignite the love of one's closest people. He who prefers it a bit chillier
13
HYPERBOLIC RAGE:
THE JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN APOCALYPSE
HOWEVER ONE MAY EVALUATE THE TWO CORRELATED DEPOSITORIES of rage in the universe of post-Babylonian Judaism from the vantage point of psychological, sociological, and psychopolitical factors (leav- ing the question of its spiritual evaluation aside for the moment), it can hardly be denied that they have contributed to the survival of Israel in an age of chronic distress through their offensive, expressive, autoplas- tic, and military effects. They provide the reason the religious people par excellence could become the bearer of—permit the expression—a
stubbornly prepares his own hell.
90
THE WRATHFUL GOD
complex wisdom concerning rage. Furthermore, together with Greece, Israel was able to become the most important export nation for rage- manufacturing systems.
The ground operation of the prophetic interpretation of disaster is the tracing back of the manifest Jewish misery during times of political distress to the penal and cathartic rage of Yahweh. Sooner or later, this rage needed to reach its own limits. Even during its highpoint, the era of the prophetic authors and the Babylonian and post-Babylonian times of need, its success was always bound to precarious psycho-semantic operations. An atmo- sphere that constantly oscillated among hope, anxiety, and despair was nec- essary in order to lead to a widely shared spiritual acceptance of the rather implausible, immodest, and structurally masochistic interpretations of the prophets. The price for understanding the often disparaging trials of Israel as a part of pedagogy of the wrath of God against his own people consisted in an internalization of the expectations of violence that had far-reaching consequences. Additionally, a hyper-moral confusion was to be expected if the boundary between the sentencing of individual sinners (to use the tradi- tional term without placing too much emphasis on it) and collective exter- mination has been confused again and again. Why should the people as a whole have to suffer because of some individual sinners who were provoca- tive? It was to be expected that the community would cultivate an attitude of guilt as a response to the continuous appeals of propheticism. This attitude was absolutely disproportionate with the alleged transgressions of the mem- bers of this community. Yet however developed this prophetic agitation might have been, it failed to secure the interiorization of the auto-aggressive impulses forever. It is thus not astonishing that the traditional prophetic paradigm collapsed in an especially angry, desperate, and protracted situa- tion of suffering or that it was replaced with a completely novel concept.
This happened during the second half of the second century B. C. , when the Middle East, including old Israel, was incorporated by the Hellenic tyrannies—also known as the Diadochian empires—as a result of the decaying of the empire of Alexander. At the time of the Seleucidian reign over Israel, the deficiencies of the prophetic, moralistic, and auto-aggressive processing of unhappiness became so obvious that it became necessary to search for new possibilities for dealing with pressing misery. The first one consisted in the development of a massive military resistance, which is connected to the name of the Maccabees (who simultaneously introduced terror against collaborators from their own people). The second consists in
91
THE WRATHFUL GOD
the creation of a radically new schema of interpreting world history, which to the present day we refer to as "apocalyptic. "
A community of people concerned for their salvation loses interest in political matters when apocalyptic thinking and feeling fill the stage because they believe that world time has entered a rather limited final phase. During such an end time, prophetic moralism becomes pointless. There will not be any future in which the believer could concern himself for his purification. There will not be any offspring to which the doctrine could be passed on. There will not be any more enemies against whom a people would have to stand up.
The second century B. C. is a key era for the larger history of militancy. The spirit of radical dissatisfaction with the existing situation finds itself confronted with a choice that has essentially remained the same since then. The vengeful must choose between the epochal alternatives of the Mac- cabean and the apocalyptic options. In short, they had to decide between secular anti-imperial revolt and a religious or para-religious hope for the final downfall of the system. Modernity has only added a third alternative, which, however, has proved decisive: a reformist way to apply liberal demo- cratic procedures to overcome, in due time, historically emerged situations of injustice. It is superfluous to explain why the third option presents the only strategy for civilization in the long run.
From the point of view of building a rage depository, the pre-Christian belief in an apocalypse is important in a threefold sense: First, it dissolves the traditional theology of the rage of God, which rested on the equation between the national history of the people of the covenant and the history of penalty. Second, it brings back the accumulated rage quantities from the archive of God into the power centers of politics, and the worldly anger agencies rage against one another to the point that the destruction of the world completely corresponds to the destruction of the self. (This is, by the way, the first implicit idea of a "world war. ") At the last, God brings over the worldly battleground a well-ordered between zone of angelic forces and demons. They engage a subtle world war in the skies, beyond human apoca- lyptic combatants.
At the front of this war on high, a rebellious angel full of pride—Satan, Lucifer, Iblis, or however else he may be called—enters the history of ideas in order to secure for himself the main part for the following one and a half millennia. It should suffice to state at this point that the birth of the devil from the spirit of the apocalyptic warfare would become essential for the
92
THE WRATHFUL GOD
future history of agencies of rage. His appearance changes the topology of the beyond in the most decisive way. Wherever there are devils, their resi- dencies cannot be far away. Wherever devils make themselves a home, hells arise, or, to put it differently, archives of guilt in which rage quantities and revenge impulses are preserved for the sake of constant repetition. Europe- ans can thank Dante's genius for the insight that in this regime, archive and hell are one and the same. Every guilty person is eternally burned alive there for his own personal file.
Through the personification of rage in the shape of the Great Diabolos— "I am the spirit that constantly negates"—a headquarters of rage was cre- ated from which infinite impulses came until the threshold of the Enlight- enment. By becoming responsible for the concerns of human thymotics, the devil provided great support for the Christian dismissal of human crav- ings for recognition, aggression, and competitive behavior—superbia! iral invidia! Nonetheless, he provided the most influential expression of the world domination of rage. The doctrine according to which the devil is the ruler of this world gives an impression of the scope of his competencies. The surrendering of the world to diabolic management and the necessarily connected diabolization of the thymotic was accompanied by both a higher valuation of the image of God and downgrading of the human sphere. Since God's thymotic impulses have been largely outsourced to the diabolic epi- center, God fully ascends to the most sublime of spheres. From now on, the assembly of divine qualifications can fully include the most sublime or arcane qualities, such as those depicted in the celestial rose in the highest room of Dante's Paradiso. Only as much traditional rage needed to be pre- served in God as necessary to proclaim his "glory. "
The price for this release of God from his position as executive of his rage is the emergence of a detailed counter-world of evil. This world was not allowed to take on complete ontological independence; otherwise, one would have had to concede the existence of an Antichrist or a second prin- ciple, something impossible within the framework of monotheism. How- ever, even in its subordinate position evil exercises enough power to gain respect as the source of countless miseries since relationships between God and adversarial forces are determined through a dialectics of subordination and revolt. Both impulses are characteristic of a world in which hierarchy developed into the dominant form of thought and life. Only in a universe in which everything should be ordered according to one's rank could this interpretation of evil as the attempt to reverse rank assert itself. It does not
93
THE WRATHFUL GOD
only characterize die Christian image of Satan, but lives on in Nietzsche's criticism of the reversal of legitimate positions because of resentment.