No More Learning

Its condition proves that there can be not only imperial, but also simultaneous spiritual, ‘overstretching’.
With increasing success comes increasing entropy. Under its influence, the universalist potential of faith is confirmed and simultaneously pensioned off by the great church organizations. Entropic phenomena are also unmistakably responsible for the changing face of faith in the USA, where, as Harold Bloom incisively observed, the last fifty years have seen a reshaping of Protestant Christianity into a post-Christian ‘American religion’ with
17
pronounced gnostic, individualistic and Machiavellist aspects.
Here, the faith in the Father has almost entirely disappeared, while the narcissistic realm of the Son no longer tolerates resistance. If there were an American trinity it would consist of Jesus, Machiavelli and the spirit of money. The postmodern credo was formulated in exemplary fashion by the Afro-American actor Forest Whitaker when he gave his speech of thanks upon receiving the Oscar for the best leading role in 2007, closing with the words: ‘And I thank God for always believing in me. ’
The intentional universalism of Christianity, however, was inevitably foiled in the twentieth century by the pragmatic necessities arising from coexistence with other creeds – and the charitable weakening of the churches through the development of self-confidently secular forms of life. The Christian confessions attended the school of pluralism and became predictable factors in the world ecumenical movement. From this perspective, Christianity, at least with regard to its broad central field, has entered its ‘post-imperial’ period, and – as far as one can tell – irreversibly so. The radical sects are an excep- tion to this, especially at the evangelical end of the spectrum: they
18
‘use fundamentalism as a means of re-universalization’.
profit from them as unwitting enlighteners by listening to them as informants on the universalism of the lunatics. This is not, however, the place to discuss – let alone decide – whether one should take
One can
their example as representative of the hysterical nature of all militant universalism.
Finally, I would like to turn to the question of whether Islam too is committed to its own specific campaign. The obvious answer would seem to be in the affirmative, but any more precise elaboration comes up against various obstacles for fundamental and historical reasons. The historical complications result from the fact that, after an initial phase of rapid expansion and great imperial prosperity, the Islamic world, whose fate was initially identical to that of the Arab sphere as a whole, fell into a long period of stagnation and regression whose possible end only became foreseeable with the demographic explosiveness and fundamentalist reform dynamic of the twentieth century. As far as the difficulties of a fundamental nature are concerned, these are combined above all with the contentious interpretation of the term jihad, whose appropriation by radical Islamic terrorist sects in recent times continues to spawn polemics and counter-statements.
A first indication of the inherent offensive dynamic of Islamic preaching can be gained through the observation that the earliest suras, which followed the divine revelations of 610 and the years immediately after it (such as the famous Meccan sura 81 al-Takwirk, The Folding Up), predominantly follow the tunes of apocalyptic escalation, the final decision and the threat of the terrors of
19
Judgement Day.
unconditional separation from conventional religious practices in Mecca and elsewhere: ‘Say to them: you unbelievers! I do not honour what you honour, and you do not honour what I honour’ (Sura 109:1f. ). It is equally evident that the starting point of the Islamic commune as a small, sworn community did not constitute an ideal, but was intended to be overcome as quickly as possible. Furthermore, the first ummah of Medina that gathered around the prophet was anything but a contemplative idyll. Its chronicle tells of numerous martial confrontations, starting with the ominous skirmish at the waterhole of Badr. It deals with the prophet's controversial caravan raids, shifting strategic alliances, an attack on the palm grove of a rival party that was scandalous for Arabs, and the casual massacre of a Jewish minority. But whatever religious meanings might be read into these episodes, they already give clear
The tendency of the other early suras is one of an
indications of what was to follow. The imperative of growth was no less intrinsic to this religious foundation than it was to Paul's mission – with the difference that the political–military and religious dynamics here formed an inseparable a-priori unity. Mohammed followed on from the escalation of post-Babylonian Judaism, which lived on in the zealotic escalation of Paul, developing these elements further to form an integral militantism. He achieved this by making
– like an Arab Paul – the apostolic form of life, the self-consumption in the proclamation and the proclaimed, binding for all the members of his commune. In this way, the maximum religious existence, the complete devotion to God's instructions, was declared a standard expectation of all people – in fact, almost the bare minimum of service to the Almighty that humans should carry out. That is why the word islām, which literally means ‘submission’, also gave the religion its name.
The binding nature of this guiding concept for all Muslims has foreseeable consequences: it transfers the prophet's zealotry normatively to his followers' way of life – and inversely to the fates of the unbelievers. The constitutive role of the martial factor is reinforced by the fact that the canonic writings on the prophet include a subgroup, known as the maghazi literature, that deals exclusively with Mohammed's military campaigns; in them one finds a normative inflation of sacred militantism. This final escalation finds its most vivid expression in the compulsory prayer (salāt) to be carried out 5 times per day, each time with 17 bows and 2 prostrations. Thus every practising Muslim performs 85 bows to Allah and 10 prostrations daily, making 29,090 bows and 3,540 prostrations per lunar year, as well as the corresponding recitations. In Christianity, such intensive rehearsal is only demanded within monastic orders, with a daily quota of seven hours of prayer. Logically enough, the Arabic word for ‘mosque’, masjid, means ‘place of prostration’. One should not underestimate the formative effect of frequent ritual actions. The prophet says so himself: Ad-dînu mu'amala – ‘religion is behaviour’. This is why some Islamic scholars are right in going so far as to claim that ritual prayer is a
20
form of jihad.
psychosemantically evident reality. What goes on in Muslim houses of prayer thus serves not only the manifestation of faith. The
That may sound effusive, but it describes a
relationship with transcendence celebrated physically and psychologically on a daily basis becomes equally effective as a way of keeping in shape for projects of holy dispute. From an ethical and pragmatic perspective, Islam succeeded in absorbing zealotry completely into daily life through the universal duty of ritual prayer. The greatest of all duties is memoactive fitness: it equals the spirit of the law itself.
Given the familiarity of the subject, I will be permitted to refrain from recounting the astounding history of Islamic expansion leading to the foundation of the various caliphates under the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Ottomans, etc. The explosive spread of Islam in the one-and-a-half centuries following the prophet's death is undeniably one of the political-military wonders of the world, surpassed only by the extensively and intensively even more significant expansion of the British Empire between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It cannot be doubted for a moment that this rapid, albeit regionally limited, world conquest was based on the most authentic intentions of Islam and its holy scriptures. What
some have referred to as ‘the venture of Islam’21 was founded on a
vigorous ethic of expansion. Never was this more successful than in
the time of the early caliphs; all practical realizations of Islam-
22
specific dreams of a world empire originate from them.
The
frequently read claim that the Arab conquests were of a purely
political nature, that forced conversions of the conquered only took
place very rarely, and certainly not with people of the book – because
Islam rejects the use of force in religious matters – is a well-meaning
protective statement whose true core lies beneath a thick shell of
contradictory facts. Otherwise it would be inexplicable why,
following the Arabian peninsula, such countries as Syria, Palestine,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Spain, but also large parts
of Anatolia, Iran, the Caucasus and North India were taken up, with
lasting or at least long-term consequences, into the Islamic religious
space. Here one can apply Rousseau's theory that in earlier times,
‘since there was no means of converting people except by subduing
23
them, the only missionaries were conquerors’.
people would have embraced the Islamic faith because of their own inclination and conviction, but it can hardly be denied that, for most new believers, conversion began with an armed invitation to prayer.
Certainly some
Later generations found Islam as the ruling religion, experiencing it as a fact of culture that one acquires through the mild tyranny of education. What began with devout conventions came to fruition through the internalization of the memoactive stigma.
The history of the campaign of Islam can, despite regional setbacks and schisms verging on civil war, be related as a consistent success story until the fifteenth century AD (the ninth century by the Muslim calendar). Up to that point, the supremacy of Arab and Islamic civilization was incontestable in most areas, starting with their superior military power. In its golden age, Islam was also the most important economic force in the world, as can be seen from the intercontinental connections it cultivated. Its colourful bazaars were legendary, and the variety of the selection at its slave markets was unparalleled. Furthermore, Islamic scientists and artists embodied the highest level of achievement up to the turn of the thirteenth century. The assimilative power of Islamic culture for knowledge and skills from other parts of the world seemed to know no boundaries – until the bigoted reactionary movements in the thirteenth century (not forgetting the disastrous effects of the Mongol attack of 1258)
24
In their seemingly well-founded sense of superiority, most members of the Islamic cultural realm had missed the fact that they were in the process of being outdone by the ‘miserable infidels’ of the north-west – in the fields of theology, philosophy and worldly science from the thirteenth century on; in the visual arts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on; as well as economically from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on, which was due particularly to the superior European seafaring and the transition to modern property economy alias capitalism, with its dynamic of constant innovation. The achievements of the distant enemy could seemingly be ignored with impunity as long as people were living under the protection of timeless revelations and sublime governments. They were not able or willing to see that they had locked themselves in the prison of tradition. Finally, in the eighteenth century, the military supremacy
brought this high-cultural splendour to an end.
took centuries for the heirs of the Islamic heyday to notice the stagnation. When Constantinople was conquered by Ottoman troops in 1453, there was a general conviction that Christian Europe was now also ripe for conquest.
Nonetheless, it
of the Europeans was made shockingly clear – the trauma of Napoleon's Egyptian expedition in 1798 is still acute more than two centuries later. From the moment that Europe's ascent to global dominance could no longer be overlooked, the proud chronicle of Islam's campaigns turned into a never-ending history of insult. The disappointment of those left behind grew into bitterness from the eighteenth century on, and the noisy European expansionism of the nineteenth century was hardly likely to mitigate this sentiment. Since then, the extremely thymotic culture of the Islamic countries has been cloaked in a veil of anger woven from the conflicting sentiments of a longing for splendour and dominance on the one hand and a chronic feeling of resentment on the other. From that point on, pride in the past was always accompanied by a scarcely concealable shame at the current state of affairs.
Characteristically, the growth of a new zealotry in Islam can be traced back to the eighteenth century, when even the most introverted Muslims could no longer overlook the exhausted state of both their culture and their religion. Wahabbism, which sought redemption in a return to a literal interpretation of the Qur'an, was typical of the reactionary tendencies of the time, while in the nineteenth century the most characteristic movement was Salafism, which can best be understood as an ascetic romanticism and whose followers dreamed of the early ummah and the righteous predecessors (salaf as-salih) of Medina. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, then, a temptation had been in the air to alleviate the plight of Islam in the age of confrontation with the superior West through zealotic escalation and restorative collectives. By claiming more adamantly than ever to be under the just guidance of Allah, the new zealots resolutely chose not to learn from the enemy – and thus likewise to ignore the voices of the present. Perhaps they thought that bowing to God's authority entitled them to oppose the authority of the rest of the world. The Arabocentrism of these reactions was a further factor in weakening the Islamic world, as it encouraged the tendency to ignore the internal diversity of the Muslim universe, as exemplified by the spiritual and cultural treasures of the Persian- Shiite and Turkish-Ottoman epicentres. The consequences of this choice proved disastrous for the entire Islamic hemisphere, as they reinforced the tendency towards defiant intractability in the face of
the demands made by an age of new openings. Viewing oneself as a victim of foreign powers became a widespread approach, and when victims come together with other victims, it does not take long for culprits to be named. Bernard Lewis describes the harmful effects of these reactionary tendencies. It is only with great delay and in tentative forms that people in the Middle East are becoming willing to examine their own behaviour: ‘The question “Who did this to us? ” has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other question – “What did we do wrong? ” – has led naturally to a second question: “How do we put it right? ” In that question, and in the various answers that are being found, lie the best hopes for the
future. ’25
The campaign-like qualities of the ‘venture of Islam’ can thus, as we have seen, be established historically with somewhat clear contours. They also, however, invite an evaluation at a fundamental level in so far as they are connected closely to orthodox and orthopractically lived religion. This is where the meanwhile infamous concept of jihad comes into view, that ‘striving on the path of God’ through which Islam seeks to train its believers, generally without exception, as zealots for the kingdom of God. This tradition makes militantism a part of Muslim life from the outset, and the only reason it is not officially included among the famous five ‘pillars’ of Islam is that it is implicitly understood in all of them. Islam therefore constitutes not only the most pronounced final form of offensive religious universalism (rivalled only, temporarily, by Communism); its design practically makes it a religion of encampments. Permanent movement is inherent in it – and any stasis must be viewed with suspicion as the beginning of a falling away from faith. In this respect Mohammed faithfully followed Paul's model, with the significant difference that the latter, as a civilian and Roman citizen, preferred peaceful zealotry. Islamic zealotry has always had an element of martial devotion, underpinned by a richly embellished mysticism of martyrdom. It would be an exaggeration to describe the aggressive mujaheddin of the Caliphate as professional revolutionaries of God, but their willingness to use force for the noble cause certainly increases the similarities. The contemporary Egyptian author Sa'id Ayyub postulates the God-given duty for Muslims to shed their blood
in the Holy War against the anti-Muslim Satan: ‘That is our destiny, from the battle of Badr (in 624) to the day of the antichrist. ’26
It may be that the internalization of jihad taught from the twelfth century on, following the efforts of the Sufi mystic Al Ghazali, bore fine fruits in the peace of the Islamic rear lines. But the fact that one could describe the inner battle as the major jihad and the external battle as the minor only proves that even Islam, normally known for its sobriety, was not immune to excessive enthusiasm. The popularization of jihad in the conflicts of the present results in the desublimation of the concept and thus the return to its first meaning, regardless of all objections from spiritual exegetes. The idea of a battle against the base self gave rise to a conceptualized militantism without any external enemy, as one can also observe in the reshaping of the Far Eastern art of war into spiritualized fighting disciplines. The subtle jihad needed to be waged as a campaign against the heathen residue within one's own soul – with the believer discovering rebellious oases and anarchic provinces within himself that have not yet been reached by the dominion of the law. With the return of the real enemy, even if only on the level of misunderstandings and projections, the metaphorical meanings disappear. These are replaced once more by concrete acts of war against physical opponents both near and distant. The modern agitators say it loudly and clearly: the believer should not sleep as long as he is living within a non-Islamic political system; his life can only take on meaning if it is devoted to the abolition of foreign
27
All commentaries on Islamic neo-expansionism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would remain idle speculation had Islam, as a religion and a cultural model, not been bolstered by two recent developments that have, within a short time, made it politically significant once again. The first of these changes is of an economic-technological nature, the second of a biopolitical one. Firstly, a number of states under Islamic rule – more specifically, the
dominance.
paradise; unbelievers who die in the unjust battle against Muslims, on the other hand, go directly to hell. Although they have no scholarly authority, the activists in the militant organizations of today know which suras to refer to. Their actions may be appalling, but their quotations are perfect.
Those who fall in this battle have secured their place in
upper classes of such countries as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, and to a lesser extent also Libya and Egypt – have profited both economically and politically from the fact that up to 60 per cent of the world's oil reserves either have been found or are believed to be located within their borders. In the age of fossil fuels, this situation has, despite the well-known inefficiency of their governments, the often-criticized backwardness of their social structures and the insecurity of their legal systems, provided the oil-producing countries of the Middle East with the resources to live far beyond their means. The second tendency reinforces this dubious economic situation. Between 1900 and 2000, the population of the Islamic hemisphere has increased from roughly 150 million to 1. 2 billion people, eight times as many – a dynamic of increase that is unprecedented, even with the broadest historical view. One part of this explosion can be attributed to conditions that support a reproduction of poverty, while another part is culturally and religiously determined, as an abundance of children is still valued highly by conservative Muslims; a further part can probably be attributed to a more or less conscious policy of militant reproduction, as there have long been numerous ideologues in Islamic countries who are proud to carry the ‘banner of reproduction’. These factors shape the conditions under which the resumption of offensively universalist programmes by elements of militant Islamism could become the order of the day. The frequent fantasies in militant circles of re-establishing the world caliphate also show, admittedly, that more than a few radicals live in isolated alternative realities. For them, the surrealism that lies in all religions grows into a reverie with open eyes. They work on a purely imaginary agenda that can no longer be reconciled with any actual history. The only link between their constructs and the rest of the world is the terrorist attack with as many dead as possible, whose scenic form corresponds to a raid from the dream world into reality.
To summarize, one cannot reach any definite judgement on the campaign of Islam in its fifteenth century. The chances of a further expansion of its external mission can only be viewed with reserve – even if Europe's current vulnerability dictates certain fear scenarios. Its current successes are, as far as one can tell, restricted primarily to underprivileged classes in European and African societies – and,
when they do involve the educated, to the descendants of immigrants
from Islamic countries who have returned to their original religion
after a period of estrangement. Its main motor is the growing
28
radicalization of its own rampant excess of young men.
Islam
seems to be rather less attractive to the elites of Asia, America and
Europe. Statistics show that conversions to Islam increase at times
when this religion comes under greater criticism – which points to
the psychodynamics of an identification with a threatened cause. In
the longer term, the poor organization and disunity of the Islamic
states and associations make successful political expansion unlikely.
Even if there were such results, no one would know how to make use
of them in the sense of any centralized planning. If Islam reached the
same number of followers as Christianity by the end of the twenty-
first century, which statisticians and strategists by no means
consider impossible, this would be due almost entirely to its self-
cultivated population growth, and only to a very small degree to its
spiritual aura. As far as the religious authority of Islam in its two
main movements is concerned, it is increasingly being crushed by the
implosion of hierarchies and the dissolution of the traditional order
29
of knowledge.
Furthermore, it has been damaged so heavily by the
almost automatic association between Islamism and terror in the
world's consciousness that it is difficult to imagine how Islam in its
totality, as a religion and a matrix of cultures, could recover from this
in the foreseeable future. At any rate, the ‘house of Islam’ will be
faced with modernization crises of frightening intensity. It has
transformed itself into the ‘house of war’, which Muslims
traditionally liked to believe pointed to the extra-Islamic dimensions
30
Notes
of the world.
2050, observing the chronic convulsions of Islamic ‘societies’, will occasionally be reminded of the battles of the reformation age – but even more strongly of Catholicism's anti-modern phase of defiance, which lasted from 1789 until the Second Vatican Council and which, one is still amazed to recall, ended to the advantage of all concerned with a reconciliation of theocentrism and democracy.
Perhaps educated Europeans living around the year
1
2
3 4
5
6
7
8 9
10 This passage contains what is considered the earliest appearance (c. AD 115) of the word christianismós, which was formed in analogy to the older term judaismós.
11 Alfred N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), p. 74. This statement echoes Rousseau's claim (The Social Contract, book 4, ch. 8) that ‘Christianity preaches nothing but servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that tyranny always profits from it. ’
François-René de Chateaubriand, Le génie du christianisme (Paris, 1802). English translation: The Genius of Christianity or The Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion, trans. Charles I. White (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975).
See Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Anchor, 2005), ch. 10, ‘The DNA of the Jews’.
Ibid.
Leo, Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, 10th edition (Wiesbaden, 1991), p. 290.
Ibid. , p. 279.
Ibid. , pp. 294f.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Das Leben ist die Guillotine der Wahrheiten. Ausgewählte Sprengsätze [Life Is a Guillotine of Truths. Selected Explosives], ed. Martin Mosebach (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), p. 28.
Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, p. 264.
Schalom Ben-Chorin, Paulus: der Völkerapostel in jüdischer Sicht [Paul: the People's Apostle From a Jewish Perspective] (Munich, 1997).
12 Logik des Schreckens [The Logic of Terror]. Augustinus von Hippo: De diversis quaestiones ad Simplicianum I, 2. Die Gnadenlehre von 397 [The Doctrine of Grace from 397], trans. Walter Schäfer, and edited with notes and an afterword by Kurt Flasch (Mainz: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1990), Latin–German.
13 Peter Sloterdijk, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung [In the World Interior of Capital. For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).
14 Horst Gründer, Welteroberung und Christentum. Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der Neuzeit [World Conquest and Christianity. A Handbook for the History of the Modern Age] (Gütersloh, 1992).
15 Ernst Benz, Beschreibung des Christentums. Eine historische Phänomenologie [Description of Christianity. A Historical Phenomenology] (Munich, 1975), pp. 29 and 302.
16 Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, p. 266. Also ibid. , p. 261: ‘The true history of the world is the history of good. ’
17 Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 184.
18 Cf. Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: Fundamentalism, De- territorialisation and the Search for a New Ummah (London: C. Hurst & Co. , 2004), p. 331: ‘Fundamentalism is a means of re- universalising religions (whether it be Islam or Christianity) that has ended up being closely identified with a given culture. ’
19 Annemarie Schimmel, Die Religion des Islam. Eine Einführung [The Religion of Islam: An Introduction] (Stuttgart: Reclaim, 1990), pp. 14f.
20 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘The Spiritual Significance of Jihad’ in Traditional Islam in the Modern World, ed. Nasr (London: Kegan Paul, 1987).
21 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vols.
I-III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
22 Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 178.
24 A later symbol of triumphant bigotry is the destruction of the observatory in Istanbul, built in 1577 on the initiative of the mathematician and astronomer Taküyiddin Efendi, by the sultan's naval artillery in 1580.
25 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 159. Lewis attributes Turkey's path towards modernity to Atatürk's constructive answers to the second question.
26 Quoted from David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. 210.
27 Sayyid Abdul A'la Mawdudi, The Islamic Way of Life (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1986).
28 Gunnar Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht. Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen [Sons and World Power. Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations], 4th edition (Zurich, 2006).
29 Cf. Roy, Globalised Islam: Fundamentalism, De- territorialisation and the Search for a New Ummah.
30 Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press, 2006).
5
The matrix
What has so far been said about the formations, fronts and campaigns of the three monotheisms demands integration within an overview of the logical patterns of the faith in one god and the blueprints for zealous universalisms. It would be misleading to assume that monotheistic zeal is a matter determined first and foremost by emotional laws and therefore calls primarily for a psychological analysis. Naturally the affect-dynamic aspects of zealotry are open to psychosemantic probing. It would be reckless to ignore the depth-psychological insights into religio-neurotic and clericopathic phenomena gathered in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – to name only the well-studied examples of God's helper syndrome and spiritual masochism. Psychoanalysis also specialized in revealing the parallels between individual people's images of God and their images of their parents. Furthermore, such authors as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger and others showed that what is generally presented as faith is often a form of hysteria – an act whose protagonists muster their entire existences in the hope of gaining desired roles at the religious vanity fair. Where there is zeal, there is competitive zeal, and what initially seems to be an intimate affair between God and the soul is not infrequently also fuelled by the jealousy of ambitious souls regarding the real and imagined advantages of their rivals in the battle for the best seats. On the other hand, more recent religio-psychological research – supported by new hybrid subjects like neuro-theology and
neuro-rhetoric1 – has given indications of the ‘biopositive’ effects of religious affects that, if one is to avoid a one-sided view, cannot be ignored.
With all due respect for the findings in the fields of psychological and biological research, the monotheism of the exclusive and totalitarian type under debate here contains one primary logical problem for us to decipher, and this problem follows its own strictly internally conditioned grammar. One of the points of departure in gaining an
understanding of the laws that determine the construction of the exclusive monotheisms has already been touched on in the references to Abraham's quest for a god worthy of his adoration. The typical summotheistic climb to the final, the highest and the utmost contains the logical implication that one must move from the plural to the singular, from the many gods to the one God. A deity that was the Highest but not the One would be inconceivable at this level of reflection. Religious supremacism, the ascent to the Highest and the Only, is necessarily tied to ontological monarchism – the principle that a single being can and should rule over everyone and
2
everything.
ensures that nothing can resist the overlord, in keeping with the theorem omnia apud deum facilia – ‘naturally everything is easy for God’. From this dynamism follows optimism (or perfectionism, to put it more precisely in idea-historical terms), which states that the dominant one is the perfect and the best, and always acts in accordance with his perfect nature. The best is the one who is better than everything good – or more than that: better than everything that is merely better than good.
This monarchism is joined by a dynamism which
This supremacist thought climbs numerous steps to reach the peak of the hyper-best, which ultimately subjugates all things and beings both de facto and de jure. It culminates in a figure known in the language of faith as God, the eternal and almighty. It is to him and only to him that the rule applies: the elevation to the Highest must consistently follow the trail of a personal transcendence. In this scheme, God alone can be placed as a person above all other persons, as the author, the creator, the lawmaker, the ruler and the director of the world's theatre, the one without whose command not a single hair falls from a human head – and without whose support no
3
As long as we are dealing with Abrahamites, then, we are operating within the sphere of the subjective highest, whose condensate
household appliance works.
strong preponderance of you qualities – accompanied by underdeveloped id elements. His invitation is more to a relationship than to insight. Once the believer, like Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin, has become wholly childlike and wholly idiotic in relation to the almighty other, the last traces of God's cognitive determinacy dissolve.
A conspicuous feature of this God is a
appears in the idea of a transcendent kingship. This is expressed as
much in the Jewish idea of the theocracy of Yahweh as in the
doctrine of Christ's royal reign (see the encyclical Quas primas
published by Pius XI in 1925) and the idea, ubiquitous in Islam, of
Allah's omnipotence, which is supposed to apply in both the political
4
It is easy to understand now why the relationship between humans and a highest being of the personal type is subject to completely different laws from those in the case of an impersonal supreme power. It is part and parcel of this form of personal supremacism that those who think and believe cannot be any more than mere vassals or employees of the divine sovereign – the only other option being the despicable role of infidels and disobedients. Whether they like it or not, the supremacization of the personal God inevitably assigns humans an inferior status. The most important asymmetry between servant and master manifests itself in the fact that God remains unfathomable to humans, even once he is revealed, whereas humans cannot keep any secrets from him. The cosmological and moral asymmetries are equally overwhelming: God's dominion encompasses the entire universe, while humans are often not even able to keep their own lives in order. Islamic preachers still like to invoke the following edifying image: before the throne of God, the seventh heaven is no larger than a grain of sand; compared to the seventh, the sixth heaven is only as large as a ring in the desert; compared to the sixth, the fifth is also no larger than a ring in the desert and so on, until the first heaven, which the earthlings believe to be all-encompassing when they look up at it – in these humbling sermons for Muslims, the Aristotelian worldview is kept alive poetically and therapeutically. Then one normally asks the individual believer: so how big are you compared to all those things? The correct answer can only be one like the exclamation of Lessing's
Saladin: ‘I, dust? I, nothing? O God! ’5 Nonetheless, the exegetes do not tire of insisting that God is profoundly close to us and cares for each human being like his own child; and he carries most of the load for the members of his flock, whom he looks after with love and
and everyday pragmatic spheres.
supremacism is not only the creator, ruler and preserver of the world, but also its archivist, saviour, judge and – in extremis – its avenger and destroyer.
The monarch of personal
compassion. For the willing, all that is left in this scenario is the role of the servant who, trembling with requited love, places himself at his lord's disposal. This kind of relationship has been referred to in Christian contexts as a ‘patriarchy of love’, but this expression is more or less applicable to all situations that bear the hallmarks of patriarchy.
The more the believer is taken over by this supremacization of the lord, the more radically he will be inclined to make his own will subject to instructions from above. An intense form of personal supremacism leads to an extremism of the will to obedience that is typical of zealotic movements. The obedience that embraces this intensification extends so far that a servant prepared to go to any lengths will prefer the most rigid laws and the most unpleasant commands, these offering the necessary material to carry out the work of radical subordination. One still finds traces of this servant syndrome everywhere in the world of today: in malign forms, as exemplified most currently by the suicide attack; in intermediate manifestations as observed in worthy zealous systems such as Opus Dei; and in curious variations, for example the rumour among Vaticanists that, under Pope Paul VI, some Vatican City employees even knelt during telephone conversations with their highest
6
One should note that the disposition referred to does initially make room for non-neurotic intensifications of the idea of service, though
7
superior.
the pathological escalations are usually not long in waiting. A product of this type of supremacization that is initially psychologically inconspicuous is an affinity for majesty and splendour, in both moral-political and aesthetic areas. But the irrationalist tendency is also part of the structure: for if God demands sacrifices, why not sacrifice reason too? This is manifest in the willingness to believe that even the deepest darkness contains holy meaning and to obey the instructions from above against all doubts, even – and especially – when the command remains unfathomable, as it was for Abraham when God demanded the sacrifice of his son Isaac. In the realm of the personal supreme power, everything hinges on trust in the integrity of the commander. No one is granted the right to obstinacy. In such a universe, it must
sound like an incitement to anarchy when Hannah Arendt, following on from Kant, states: ‘No one has the right to obey. ’
The history of resorting to the highest also displays an impersonal
variant that I will refer to as objective or ontological supremacism.
Here, ascent to the pinnacle – as Plato described in his reflections on
the stages of rapture, from a single beautiful body to disembodied
beauty and goodness ‘itself’ – brings the believer to a supreme power
that does not have the properties of a personal being, but rather
those of a principle or an idea. This supremacy, which culminates in
a nameless highest being, can only be spoken about in terms of first
and final justifications of an object-like, suprapersonal and structural
nature. Concisely put: the ascent to the objective highest leads to the
god of the philosophers. Even its crudest portraits show that it has
little or nothing in common with the Abrahamic versions of God (El,
8
The position of human beings in an ontologically and cosmologically supremacized world context therefore can not be interpreted as bondage or willingness to serve. Rather, true being-in-the-world demands an awareness of one's participation in universal systems of order. Now it is a matter of understanding in an advanced sense: an adaptation of the understander to the superior exigencies of being. The ascent takes place on the ladder of general concepts. Therefore God can bear conceptual names such as the unum, the verum, the bonum, the maximum, the simplicissimum or the actualissimum. Even such titles are sufficient to inspire believers – Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling still swore on the hen kai pan [One and All] in their youthful ardour, like revolutionaries on their watchword.
Like the first supremacism, the second also draws believers towards extremes – not in the form of blazing servility, nor a yearning for death in flames as mentioned by Goethe in the subtlest of his Islamically inclined poems, but rather as the willingness to push oneself back to the objective level in order to let things glow of their
Yahweh, God the Father, Allah).
nor judge; it is a source of that which is, and from its unsurpassable bestness radiates a derived best, the cosmos. It does not have the power to command; it has the power of self-revelation through superabundance. Its creative potency realizes itself according to the scheme of a causality through goodness.
It is neither creator nor monarch
own accord. This presupposes that the reproduction of these things in the clouded mirror of subjectivity, the interested will and biased sensuality is replaced by an objective, desensualized thinking cleansed of all wilfulness. The ontological supremacism that characterizes Greek – and, even more, Indian – metaphysics releases a passion for depersonalization that can grow into the ambition to merge the human subject with the anonymous origin of the world. While the striving for the personal highest follows the super-you in order to be absorbed fully by its will, the First Philosophy seeks to lose itself in the super-id. Objective supremacism – which, since Heidegger, is often labelled as onto-theology and viewed with suspicion like a subtle form of idolatry – is ultimately concerned with dissolving the subject into a substance.
In order to complete the picture, we should speak of a third supremacism in the old European culture of reason whose point of departure lies in the experience of thought and inner speech – and later also of writing. Here we become acquainted with a second face of philosophy, in so far as the latter can begin with the self- exploration of thinking instead of taking the world as its focus. Since Heraclitus' discovery of the logos and the introduction of the concept of nous by Anaxagoras, logical or noetic supremacism has been working towards an alternative ascent that leads, in its own way, to the god of the philosophers; but this time not through the north face of substance, but rather along the fine line of spiritual articulations. This line also leads to the One and Ultimate – this time, however, the supreme being is not interpreted from the perspective of substantiality, let alone in terms of majesty and omnipotence. Here it is the all-pervading intelligibility and constructive force of the spiritual principle that lies at the centre. One must be careful to avoid the mistake of equating this non-theologically highest power too readily with the divine attribute of omniscience found in religion. For in terms of its dynamist origin, God's knowledge within the system of personal supremacism possesses, as well as the quality of creation wisdom, the more significant quasi-political function of universal supervision and total bookkeeping of all deeds done and undone by believers and non-believers alike – its decisive application will therefore be on Judgement Day, when God himself opens the files for public viewing. The ascent to the highest, on the other hand,
in accordance with noetic supremacism, leads to theoretical perceptions that accompany the divine intellect on its innermost folding into itself and its unfolding into the world. It is not uncommon for mathematics to be brought into play in this sublime endoscopy, as it depicts structures as they are before any sensuality and hence before any subjectively determined ambiguity.
The theory of the highest intellect, like that of being, strives to present itself as strictly supra-personal and beyond the profane human sphere. The extremism that lies in the nature of this matter too manifests itself in a striving for the final formula. It does not let up until the human spirit is granted a connection to the higher intellects, and ultimately even a knowledge of God's procedures in the creation of the world. Even Hegel's seemingly hubristic statement that his logic contained the thoughts God entertained before the creation does not go any further than what is customary in the supremacism of the spirit. Furthermore, Hegel's programme of developing substance as subject perfectly expressed the aim of noetic supremacism. It is part of the long history of Christian receptions of Yahweh's self-assertion: ‘I am that I am’ (Exodus 3:14). With this, theologians add a divine ego character to the being of the ontologists
and allow the human ego to take part in it epicentrically9 – an operation in which the German Idealists attained mastery. A part of the image of the corresponding extremism is the radicality of the will to a logical penetration of all circumstances that has always characterized pneumatic thinkers. It has often been interpreted as arrogance – though one could equally view it as a higher form of irony. For the partisans of the spirit, most of what issues from the mouths of humans is nothing but inane air movement in any case – just as they almost always consider everyday life a mere rolling around in gravity. To them, the ordinary descendants of Adam are no more than upright worms. What is a human being before it is transformed by the spirit? A decorated intestine with God knows what delusions about its own substance. Little wonder that the advocates of such views rarely lack a tendency to logical flights of fancy.
When supremacists of this kind explain themselves, one hears the postulation that where matter was, spirit shall be – or that a planned order of reason must replace the chaos that has grown over time. The
third disappearance of humans (following their eradication in the
service of the Lord and their dissolution into the anonymous
substance) is supposed to be achieved by their spiritual evaporation
on the way to the divine omega point. The fact that noetic
supremacism has occasionally resembled its substance-ontological
partner does not negate its autonomy. In effect it formed a
community of tradition with it in which it risked misunderstanding
itself substantialistically. This was only brought to a halt by the
transcendental shift following Descartes and Kant, that is to say
through the depotentization of the theory of intellect to the critique
of reason. This approach, as Kurt Flasch has shown in critical
interventions, reached one of its most sublime manifestations in the
intellect-theoretical speculations of Dietrich von Freiberg and
Meister Eckhart, who were inspired by Arab Aristotelianism – in
particular Averroes – and are often misinterpreted by the life-
philosophically stimulated public in their own country as ‘German
10
mystics’.
changed the premises of the third supremacism in the wake of the Enlightenment; but the fate of such ideas as the dialectical thinking made current by Hegel has shown that the battle over the interpretation of the cognitively highest still continues in modern times. The tensions between the three leading noetic supremacisms of the twentieth century – the dialectical, the phenomenological and the grammatological – would require an examination of their own.
Naturally, the secularization of the intellect inevitably
In the light of what has been said so far, the matrix of logical operations that result in zealotic monotheisms can be shown without much additional effort. I have already hinted that the three supremacisms correspond to three extremisms that should be understood as three ways of overcoming resistance to a union with the One and Only. The methods, praised as ‘realizations’, of eliminating the human will in service, substance and spiritualization share a positivization of death, in so far as death offers the most direct route to the Lord, to being and to the spirit. The question of whether an affirmation of death should be assigned symbolic or literal meaning may remain unanswered. None of the resolute have ever contradicted the statement that some form of self-elimination is a prerequisite for reaching higher regions. Albert Camus's thesis that suicide is the central philosophical problem shows that its originator
was one of the dying breed of metaphysically talented authors in the twentieth century, and the sneering of some philosophically unmusical thinkers only served to underline this.
The extremisms, for their part, are especially consistent applications of high cultural grammar, which was based on the rigid combination of a monovalent ontology and a bivalent logic. Monovalence of speech about that which is means: the things of which it is said that they are actually are, and are not not; nor are they anything other than what they are. Hence they share in being, both in the fact that and the fact of what and how. Hence they can best be expressed in tautologies. In this area one cannot aspire to originality, and if one is asked what being is, one should – referring to Heidegger – simply answer that it is itself. In the realm of monovalence a rose is a rose, and it lies in its nature that it flowers without any reason or consideration for its observer. The only other things that meet such strict standards of identity are the choirs of angels when they exalt the Highest in a monovalent language. This language forms a medium that neither requires nor permits contradictions, nor does it show any weak spots that could allow an infiltration by error, false statements or unstable structures. Thus the angels can speak eternal truth about eternal being. Unlike human ontologists, they never risk missing the point when they praise God.
Terrestrial speakers dream in vain of such achievements, as our languages are destined to be bivalent in their constitution. It is not inconceivable that, before the expulsion from Eden, Adam's language also consisted purely of adequate names and well-formed affirmations, so that everything he uttered in paradise became a natural hymn to that which is. The expulsion introduced a second value, however; indeed, logicians view the myth of the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden of identity as no less than a poetic attempt to narrate the growth of human reflection as a tragedy. This is not implausible, for whoever eats their daily bread in the sweat of their brow will separate the true from the false even as they frown – a burden that can be compared to the curse of farming. Let us note, then, that the first negation came not from the human spirit, but rather from God's command not to eat from the tree.
The introduction of this second value made the human capacity for true statements unstable, as these – being a reflection in the other of that which is – were now accompanied by the fatal possibility of being false. The fact that the capacity for untruth clings to the act of statement is one of freedom's dowries – if freedom means being exposed, in a postlapsarian state, to the inclination to speak falsely, whether due to an honest mistake, for strategic reasons or simply out of an enjoyment of untruth for its own sake. Even if one takes pains to present things in – as far as we can establish it – the way their own state dictates, one should fundamentally expect some gap through which falsehood can enter. Metaphorically expressed, the true sentence does not grow on the branch of real conditions – it is no growth at all, no continuation of what naturally is in what naturally is. Rather, sentences are always, in a way that is specific to humans, artificial, daring and unnatural – in fact, they are always potentially perverse. According to the majority tradition of the classical logicians, they constitute a reflection of nature in a more or less murky medium, that is to say mirrorings that lack any substantial weight of their own, and are thus in constant danger of multiplying the host of phantoms. How else could one interpret the fact that for every true statement, there are an infinite number of possible false ones? What does a sentence mean in the cosmos anyway? It seems like a necessary, but fundamentally hazardous, supplement that, with an artificial effort and an inevitable delay, joins the collection of things that truly are. A sentence is always so remote from that which is that its formulation inevitably risks missing the mark. One can turn it on its head and back again, one can stretch, twist and squash it, and nothing seems simpler than making it express the opposite of its actual intention. In the best case, the double negation leads back to the original sentence, though even this may itself also have been false. Under such circumstances, how is it that one occasionally has the impression certain statements are nonetheless true and correct? Probably only because particular speakers manage to evade the danger and temptation to present falsehoods, clinging instead to those aspects on the side of being that seem to be in a state of simple identity with themselves, as if there were no mistaken, deceitful or self-contradictory people – or, in the jargon of philosophers: as if the identical could be represented
undistorted in the non-identical, or as if being could be transformed into corresponding signs without any loss of substance.
Now we can clarify what the zealotic monotheisms and their universalist missions mean from a logical perspective. They rest on the intention of eliminating the risk of failure introduced by the second value at all costs – even if that implies removing the errant along with the error. In fact the errant himself, viewed in terms of the ideal of monovalent being and its reflection in the true sentence, is merely a form of real nothingness whose liquidation is no great loss – just as the massif of being continues to exist unharmed, as it was and will be, whenever an incorrect statement about one of its details is annulled.
This disposition is, as we have seen, given through the combination of classical ontology and classical logic. If the second value is only a reflexive one, a value that enables a surplus of potentially untenable statements and superfluous negations beyond the number of real facts counted out by being or by God himself (but also serves to verify these, as Plato's dialogues show), it should suffice to eliminate the parasitic sentences, the lies, the errors, the ideological and the fictitious, and if need be also the accompanying speakers, in order to bring human speech back to the core content of legitimate statements – legitimate, as we have seen, because they are supported by being and spawned by the spirit in the spirit. Essentially, all supremacist zealots have only one concern: the mission of expelling the insolent traders from the temple of monovalence. Does Dante Alighieri not tell us that everything superfluous displeases God and
nature? 11 The necessity of such an intervention becomes evident as soon as, owing to various requirements of the evolution of ideas (warning: axial age! ), a strictly monovalent ontology is systematically bound together with a strictly bivalent logic.
This configuration permits the first appearance of the phenomenon of strictness. When strictness coincides with lack of complexity, zealotry is in its element. Thinking becomes strict as soon as it insists that only one of two options can be right for us. Then it guards its cause jealously to make sure that the side of being is taken, not of nothingness; of the essential, not of the inessential; of the Lord, not of the lordless and lawless. The logical origin of zealotry lies in
bringing everything down to the number one, which tolerates no one and nothing beside itself. This number one is the mother of intolerance. It demands the radical either in which the or is ruled out. Whoever says ‘two’ is saying one too many. Secundum non datur.
These reflections take us into the deep structure of the iconoclastic syndrome. If the rigid monotheisms frown upon the use of images, this is not simply because they embody the danger of idolatry. More importantly, the unacceptable nature of images stems from the observation that they never serve purely to reproduce that which is represented, but always assert their own significance in addition. The autonomous value of the second aspect as such becomes visible in them – and the iconoclasts will go to any lengths to destroy this. They empathize with a God who has regretted his creation ever since his creatures began to have minds of their own. They come to his aid by exterminating whatever distracts the creatures from an exclusive bond to the One. As humans ‘misuse’ their freedom to craft images, the iconoclasts wish to put an end to this misuse by restricting the creatures' freedom by force. This is supposedly done to show humans the way back to the true God. In reality, however, iconoclasm seeks to attack the autonomy of the world, in so far as ‘world’ represents the epitome of the emancipated second aspect. In iconoclasm, which is actually a cosmoclasm, one finds the articulation of a resentment of any human freedom that is not prepared to accept immediate self- denial and obedience.
The zealotic monotheisms (like the zealotic Enlightenment and zealotic scientism in later times) draw their momentum from the fantastic notion that they could succeed, in the face of all the delusions and confusions of our controversially lingualized and multiply pictorialized reality, in ‘reinstating’ a monovalent primal language. They want to make audible the monologue of things as they are, and reproduce the unconcealed facts, the first structures, the purest instructions of being, without having to address the intermediate world of languages, images and projections with its independent logic. The followers of the revelational religions even seek to make the monologue of God himself reverberate in the human ear, the listener being a mere recipient who does not involve
his own ego – and hence does not acquire any share in the author's rights.
Now one can also understand why there need to be several varieties of zealotry. Depending on the type of supremacization they tend towards, their agents choose typical procedures for returning from ambiguity to certainty, from the fallibility of idle talk to the infallibility of the original text. At any rate, the aim of this motto of ‘back to a time before reflection! ’ is to block out human language as it was spoken after the Fall. Its replacement is a code still untarnished by the negations, contradictions and capacity for error inherent in bivalent speech. Hence the interest of logical, moral and religious extremists in a language beyond human speech. In striving for the extrahuman and superhuman, the religious zealots join hands with the mathematical rigorists, and the advocates of self-dissolution within being also follow along.
The oldest and most enduring examples of how to return from the post-Adamite position to the humanly impossible monovalent language can be found in early monotheistic prophethood. This is no surprise, as the prophets claimed to express nothing more than God's view of the world, not their own personal opinions. The prophetic word begins interventionistically and ends absolutistically: it contradicts what specific people do or say in specific situations – yet it cannot be contradicted by anything, as it claims to come from a sphere devoid of reflection or second opinions. The word borrowed from the Highest, then conveyed by the speaker to the unjust prince or the misguided people, is no mere village gossip. It brings every debate to an end by saying what is and what should be. It appears to be critique – some modern theologians like to exalt prophecy as the source of social critique – but, as monovalence does not allow the critical word, any egalitarian debate or expression of opinion, it becomes the last word on the matter – not dramaturgically, before an audience, but rather eschatologically, before the Highest.
Alphabetization takes care of the rest.