No More Learning

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 sources). 10 An encompassing genealogy of militancy would first of all have 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.
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
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 stubbornly prepares his own hell. 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
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.
For my concerns it is crucial that with the discovery of evil--as exempli- fied in the devil and in the form of religion in general--radically new possi- bilities of storing and applying rage become opened. Because of its increase in power, the kingdom of evil gains a diversity and colorfulness that is singular in the history of ideas and anxieties. As we have already seen, the didactic, therapeutic, and majestic-political use of threat was not unknown to the older monolatric and monotheistic religious life. However, only with the emergence of evil in Christian theology can we speak of a common his- tory of religion and terror.
VESSELS OF RAGE AND INFERNAL DEPOSITORIES: ON THE METAPHYSICS OF DISCHARGE
LET ME END THIS PSYCHOHISTORICAL DISCURSION WITH A BRIEF summary of the Christian doctrines of the wrathful God and the corre- sponding character of the devil of rage. As indicated, both have their point of origin in the apocalyptic convictions of the epoch of Seleucid, when the Ascidians forcefully articulated the dramatic concept of the imminent end of the world. The precondition for the creation of this new religious arche- type was a deepened individualization of faith. Such a change of emphasis became necessary in light of a political and social horizon that did not show the slightest sign of external change for the better.
Apocalypticism is the religious form of abandoning the world. It can only come into being in a situation in which individuals and groups feel them- selves to be the impotent spectators of struggles between superior powers. There are good reasons for the thesis that the invention of the spectator during antiquity came to an end with Jewish apocalypticism. Even if the Greeks created the theater and the stadium, and the Romans added bloody gladiator fights to the arena, it was only with the emergence of the apoca- lyptic idea of the final game of the chaotic world that a form of watching emerged that points far beyond the witnessing of artistic, cultic, sporty, or cruel spectacles.
The apocalyptics invent an irony that reaches deeper than Socratic irony. They imagine themselves to be in agreement with the will of God, who has a different plan for his world than what his earthly children want to believe. Part of this irony is the refusal of existing values; the consequence of apoca-
94
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
lyptic sensation is the freezing of any form of spiritual investment in "this world. "14 In the meantime, the political apocalyptics and anarchic mille- narians, whom I will address in a moment, dedicate themselves actively to worsening the situation. After the believer has withdrawn his affective investments from the world, he surrenders the world to its own irresist- ible course, which is aimed at the imminent end. To witness such a process means to become a special kind of theatergoer. Among all kinds of possible spectacles (Schauspielen) the end of the world is the only one for which one does not need to invest any resources to get a special seat. It suffices to be born during the last days of humanity and to know that one lives during these days, in order to constantly sit in the first row. If one has taken a seat there, one can be assured of getting one's money worth when it comes to one's anti-imperial, anti-cosmic, and anti-ontological resentments, as long as the play unfolds in the expected way.
The hope of the apocalyptics can be traced back to a simple and exu- berant conviction. They expect to experience the downfall of "this world," sooner or later but in any case during their lifetime. Their intelligence is stimulated by the drive to read the signs that announce the intensely desired disaster. This disposition is the breeding ground for the kind of thinking that makes diagnoses based on apocalyptic assumptions, the thinking that transforms things into signs and signs into omens. The apocalyptics' atti- tude is dominated by a fever of expectation, a happy sleeplessness of those dreaming of world annihilation and hoping that they will be spared. This is the reason that apocalyptics can overlook pretty much all earthly miser- ies with the exception of one: that the world refuses to follow its destiny and be annihilated. What refrains from being annihilated will one day be called the "status quo. " To sustain itself is the vice of the world. This is the reason for the code word of insiders, "the fact that it continues in this way is the catastrophe. "
If apocalyptic predictions do not come true, if the announced day of rage does not arrive in due time, then the beginning of the kingdom of God needs to be backdated. In this case, the vengeful apocalyptic impatience with the world and the hope for "what would be different" need to engage in posta- pocalyptic compromises with the "status quo. " In such arrangements, the Christian age started. Thus every introduction to the history of Christianity should be preceded by a chapter called "When Apocalypticism Fails. " This explains why Christianity and gnosis are parallel phenomena that mutu- ally interpret each other insofar as both draw their consequences from the
95
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
nuisance that the world (why not just call it the Roman empire from now on? ) has proven to be resistant to its downfall despite the hastiness of the partisans thirsting for its end.
In this light, it becomes clear why Christianity initially appeared as a bold dissolution of apocalyptic constellations of end time (Restzeit) and the wrath of God. Initially, Jesus' message was quasi-naturally premised on the assumption that God has lost patience with the world. This is the reason for the warning that the Day of Judgment would soon arrive, although the day and the hour were still concealed. That at the Day of Judgment large parts of humanity will prove to be beyond rescue is not doubted by anyone infected with end-time fever. John the Baptist believes it as much as Jesus himself, and certainly John, the author of the Christian story of the apocalypse. (In this sense, the later father of horror, St. Augustine, should not be thought of as the inventor of awful additions to a teaching that was originally good in nature. He is only the most attentive and most ruthless interpreter of the foundational documents. ) If the Kingdom of God is nigh, then the catastro- phe must certainly be waiting. From now on the term "actuality" can no lon- ger be uttered without fear and shivers. After the execution of the Messiah, the rescuing catastrophe is equated with the glorious return ofthe abject. This is how the thesis concerning the wrath of God can be strengthened through Christian premises. Christ himself will appear as the bringer of the sword at the end days, and he will preside over the court of Judgment Day.
If it were legitimate to ascribe "originality" to figures of sacred history, it would characterize the Christian innovation of a new, ingenious dating and characterization of the Kingdom of God. The genuinely new message is that the coming kingdom is already in place, that it exists "within us" and "among us. " This invocation sustained and suspended the apocalyptic excitement over the coming end. The question concerning the precise date could thus be put on the back burner, which in fact happened in the genera- tions after Christ. This turn initially made the community of Jesus possible. Paul's network of missions followed, and finally the Christian church came into existence. All three are versions of the same manifest idea. From the perspective of spatial extension, this idea can be summarized by the thesis that "the new world appropriated space already in the old world. " From a temporal perspective, it entails the proposition that "the coming world is already present in the actual world. " That the entire old world deserves to be dissolved and destroyed should not be forgotten for a second, in spite of the consolidation of the church as a sacred establishment. In this respect,
96
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
the compromise that resulted from the fusion of apocalypticism and messianic doctrine of salvation, Christianity, is nothing other than a long practice for the revolution. As a result of the association of the themes of presence and advent, closeness and distance, present and future are inter- twined in a way that has far-reaching consequences. Ever since, it can be said, the course of events has been under the influence of these conceptions and was shaped by the temporal form of Adventist presentism. Nothing comes into being that has not in some sense already been there. Nothing is actual that is not in some sense still to come.
The price that was paid for the historical compromise of Christians between patience and impatience, or love and rage, was, of course, rather high. How high could only be seen by someone knowledgeable about the consequences of the Christian division between the two "empires"--usually distinguished since Augustine as the community of God, on the one hand, and the worldly empires, on the other. The costs are literally beyond what can be counted: throughout the millennia they have been accredited to the account of the enemy. The term "church tax" gains a terrifying meaning in the light of these benefits. It does not only refer to the economic costs of secular groups for the ecclesiastic parallel community but to the psychic burdens that paid for the existence of the church and its transcendent world behind the world. One can rightly speak of it as the most expensive transfer in the history of the global economy.
Postapocalyptic Christianity secured its survival as a church by subject- ing the place of its survival, the world or saeculum, to a thoroughgoing devaluation. In order for God to acquire his property from the church, the primary world needed to be ceded to a demon who would assume responsi- bility for it. This devil is correctly addressed according to Christian protocol as the Prince of This World. In the betrayal of the real world, a betrayal ratified by Augustine, motifs of apocalypticism, Gnosticism, and dualism are interwoven in an extremely damaging manner. Voltaire's saying that the history of mankind is tantamount to excerpts from the annals of hell elegantly summarizes the consequences (or at least the side effects) of the Christian dismissal of the world.
For my purposes, it would be inappropriate to provide a detailed history of the conception of hell. What is important to note in this context of the Christian depictions of the Inferno is that the increasing institutionalization of hell during the long millennium between Augustine and Michelangelo allowed the theme of the transcendent archive of rage to be perfected. The
97
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
introduction of the deceased into this great collection is a metaphysical necessity. From now on, no one will die without a final examination. The transcendent locations are organized, as readers of Dante well know, into three categories: the hell of perdition, the hell of purgation, and paradise. Arriving souls are assigned to the appropriate section by the most authori- tative of judges. All three sections share the character of an archive. While paradise and the hell of perdition constitute static archives in which the eternal presence of rage, or beatitude, dominates, the hell of purgation is a dynamic, intermediary realm in which the great multitude of average sin- ners are tossed through a purifying torture that comprises seven stages (cor- responding to the seven primary sins) before finally reaching the gates of heaven. This process is in precise accordance with each sinner's respective and carefully documented files of transgression.
CHRISTIAN FALLACIES: WHY THE SEARCH FOR REASONS FOR THE RAGE OF GOD IS MISLEADING
IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT THE DIDACTIC PLAY ABOUT THE WRATH of God already required additional explanations at the time of the first Chris- tian communities. Because Christianity presented itself in its first advertise- ments as the religion of loving one's enemy, forgiveness, renouncement of rage, and warm-hearted inclusiveness, the conflict between its happy mes- sage and its furious eschatology quite soon led to irritations. The promi- nent position of apocalyptic threat speeches in the collection of authentic words of Jesus inevitably leads to a conflict. Even if one does not agree with Oswald Spengler that the threatening words of Jesus presented his real spirit in the most authentic way,15 it cannot be denied that the apocalyptic fury lends a characteristic tone to his speeches.
The oldest theological documents of the new movement, the letters of Paul, thus already discuss this dilemma in an all but arbitrary way. Sub- sequent explicators of rage, who are led by Tertullian and Lactantius, also take on the task of making compatible God's thymos, or rather his orge, with the other qualities of the most sublime. There are three threads that con- nect the available explanations. According to the opinion of the authors, these threads only have to be rightly woven in order to understand why the God of the Christians is not only potentially capable of rage but also needs to unleash this rage at the present moment. Each thread corresponds to a theological concept: the first explains the implications of divine omnipo-
98
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
tence, the second explains divine justice, and the third explains divine love. The theologians seek to show with sufficient evidence why rage cannot be excluded from the spectrum of divine attributes.
However, the necessity of the wrath of God cannot be justified convinc- ingly from within theology. It does not at all follow from the "qualities" of God, which we know, as negative theology has always told us, only indirectly and by analogy. The nature of the rage thesis needs to be shown exclusively through a functional analysis, from a metatheological perspective, or in the language of psychopolitics. In fact, the Christianization of the wrath of God leads to a transcendent bank for the purpose of depositing deferred human thymotic impulses and deferred projects of rage whose global design lies beyond the conceptual horizon of the employees of these banks. Moreover, the employees were not supposed to understand the way the bank func- tioned because transcendent payback transactions could only be carried out in naivete. The bank undertook these transactions in the form of speech acts, which emphasize the existence of divine rage as well as the reasons to take it seriously. Such acts naturally need to be carried out bona fide because this is the only way through which they can unfold the desired effect, which is to threaten the recipient. Exaggeration is an essential part of this effect, while the slightest bit of irony would be its undoing. The speeches about the wrath of God present themselves as counseling in the shape of insistent prayers. From the point of view of theology, these prayers are dogmatic discourses that provide evidence for the proposition of Catholic ontology according to which the actually existing hell is a necessary and indispensable institu- tion. From this perspective there is a closer relationship between hell and the entire plan of creation than between Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican.
All the theological deductions of rage consist of pseudo-arguments that are of only a psycho-historical concern. They become intelligible when sub- jected to a functional analysis of dogma, even if some dogmas have been reformulated and presented as the most cutting-edge results of theologi- cal sophism up until the twentieth century, though they still allow insights into obscure areas of historical anthropology. In this context, we can think of the modes of world creation of the homo hierarchicus, the psychology of deliberate servitude, the mental dynamics of ontological masochism, the economy of resentment and, generally speaking, the cultural and economic preconditions for the preservation of rage.
Only faith provides an asylum for the three stereotypical deductions of rage: from omnipotence, justice, and the love of God. On the open field of
99
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
logical evaluation, however, these rage systems quickly collapse. The oldest record of a Christian embarrassment in light of the quality rage reveals the fragility of the foundation. It is well known that in the ninth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, Paul wrote down the first Christian word in defense of the wrath of God. The occasion was an uncomfortable discovery, which after having been made needed to be immediately concealed because of its fatal implications. The discovery was that God's qualities, omnipotence and justice, are not compatible.
One becomes conscious of this dangerous incompatibility the moment one checks God's omnipotence against its ontological implications. It becomes apparent that absolute power creates an access of free decisions (from a human point of view, arbitrary decisions) that cannot be traced back to rational and universally agreeable criteria. Otherwise, God would only be the secretary of the concepts that human reason comes up with. Consequently, the free omnipotence of God is responsible for infinitely more things in the world than could ever be explained by the principle of justice. Examples for this pervade the Old Testament and apologetic litera- ture. God in fact loves Jacob and dedicates his hatred to Esau; if the sources are credible, he prefers Israel and lets Egypt fall by punishing the pharaoh. Of course he could have reacted otherwise in each of these cases, and all others. However, he did not want to act differently than he acted. But why?
The only truthful answer is (according to Paul and his followers) that one is not permitted to ask "why" questions about the decisions of the Almighty. "Who are you, human, that you dare to dispute God? " From the perspective of the architecture of worldviews, God is precisely what func- tionalists call the foundation of contingency: all logical regresses end with him. The intellect may rest next to this last information: God's will and chance coincide in the infinite. Here we come across the aforementioned secret of discrimination. Theologians call it under their breaths "mysterium ininquitatis. " Indeed ,we can only talk of ultimate power if it expresses itself in absolute freedom of discrimination or preferential treatment. Once it becomes realized, expectations of justice and equal opportunity are sus- pended. Omnipotence stands for unfairness in the realm of the absolute.
Paul understands the implications of his topic and sees that the other indispensable attribute of God, justice, is endangered. Because God cannot be unjust, one must concede that his omnipotence from time to time over- shadows his justice. Thus Paul writes in Romans 9 concerning the revealed truth that God himself obdurated the mind of the Pharaoh (obdurare):
100
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory. (Romans 9:19-23, AV)
The ambiguity is obvious: the apostle needs to use the omnipotence of the creator in order to explain the unequal treatment of different people; yet he needs to revert to the justice of God, as well as his love, in order to lessen the intolerability of this omnipotence. That this to-and-fro movement fails to provide a justification for the wrath of God is self-evident. If countless human beings have been created to be vessels ofrage, this can only be logically justified by inferring that rage precedes its reasons or causes. In one sense, God becomes furious simply from thinking that one of his yet-uncreated creations will one day deny him his due respect. At the same time, he does create such disrespectful vessels in order to then practice his righteous rage against them. Whoever then asks how rage can arouse itself against the heartened sinner, before the predestined sinner has even been born, should prove whether he is not a vessel that is destined to be shattered.
The solution of the riddle can be found when looking at the vocabulary of the author of the Epistle to the Romans; for this purpose, verses 9:22 and 9:23 are of particular importance. There God's "glory" (potentia, divitiasglo- riae) is emphasized just as much as his will to "make known" (notam facere) his own power and glory and to "show" (ostendere) these. One needs to take these expressions literally. The divine business of rage rests on the need to expose the power of being able to express rage as forcefully as possible. According to its depth structure, it is "ostentatious"--only as the show of power, as fame, and as a demonstration of glory can it be kept alive and its authority sustained.
This rage show is, however, a mere prelude to a continuously deferred feature presentation. This fits another aspect of making threats for the sake of appearance, an aspect that is rarely missing even in the case of the most profane expressions of rage. In performance, rage announces that in the end things will be even worse. Rage is in itself an affect that likes to show
101
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
itself and to impress others. This starts at the level of animal expressivity, a fact that Seneca emphasizes in De ira by mentioning the irrepressibility of physical symptoms of rage. Every interference with its inherent impulse to manifest itself leads to a shifting of wrathful energies.
Here, we are dealing with a shift from the human to the divine level. To the degree that Christians internalize the prohibitions against rage and revenge that have been imposed upon them, they develop a passionate interest in God's ability to be full of rage. They realize that it is a privilege to practice rage, a privilege they renounce in the interest of the one and only furious one. Their identification with this glory becomes all the more intense because it will reveal itself on the day of rage. Christians always fail to imagine the rage of the lord fiercely enough because they are only allowed to let go of the prohibition of rage on the dies irae in order to fully enjoy the last spectacle. It is not accidental that the depiction of the Day of Judgment became the paradigmatic topic in the Christian imagination.
The two other derivations of the wrath of God, from justice and from the love of God, equally lead us into rushed contradictions and vicious circles. Simply pointing to the principle of proportionality is sufficient to show that the wrath of God cannot be derived from justice. The principle of propor- tionality serves as a regulative idea in the domain of what is considered just and appropriate: finite guilt can never lead to infinite penalty. However, because penalties of this kind are used as a threat, God's abysmal injustice (once again: his omnipotence) is used in order to demonstrate his justice. The failure of this argument is obvious. It is only the transition into a per- formative register that is responsible for the rage-theological intensification. For nothing could create a stronger impression than the imagining and depiction of divine terrors. These enter the game as soon as the conception of unbearable torment is combined with the idea of eternity. Rage, which is depicted as a consequence of justice, in reality obeys a magisterial political logic. It is embodied in an imaginary theater of horror that preserves for eternity that which could not be endured for a second in time. This is the reason fire has a prominent significance for the terror perpetuus. The psy- chopolitical necessity that was already evident for the early Christians, the need to present God at the height of his capacity to be enraged, was little by little reinforced by theological arguments. This is most obvious in the writ- ings of the great polemicist, Tertullian, who had no problem in promising total satisfaction in the beyond via a thirst for revenge stimulated through a renunciation of revenge. I will return to this topic soon.
102
? THE WRATHFUL GOD
What remains to be discussed here is the derivation of the wrath of God from his love, and what is interesting about it are the forms in which it fails. For it is here that the dynamics of resentment responsible for the entire domain becomes especially evident. Since Lactantius, apologists for the theorem of rage have inferred from the love of God the fact that he is not indifferent to the actions of humanity.