No More Learning

While the rulers in power, like all happy tyrants before them, paid unwavering tribute to worldly success and accumulated reports of victories like holy trophies, the spirit of the defeated withdrew to a sanctuary in which it dreamt of justice and dictated the conditions for its imminent satisfaction. In this context, the concept of truth took on a futuristic tinge and opened itself up for reversal fantasies of a partly therapeutic, partly retributionist nature. Post- Babylonian theology discovered the counterfactual and utopian mode of thinking. Truth and reality parted ways, presenting the option of propagating values at odds with reality in the name of truth, which was henceforth treated as the sharpest weapon of the weak; these values were doomed to failure on the stage of real events, yet they could not, and did not want to, stop anticipating their hour of triumph.
The theological reaction of post-Babylonian Judaism to the experience of slavery crystallized into a cult of exhilaration in defeat. The first real monotheism, which grew from this situation, can therefore be understood first and foremost as a protest theology. It could only be what it was by representing not the ruling religion, but rather the religion of resistance against the ruling power. The purpose of Jewish theocracy was to exalt its own hidden, transcendental kind above the manifest kings of the others. It was only now that Abraham's summotheistic striving for the Highest and Moses' monolatric zeal for the One merged – in an anti-Babylonian and anti-imperial context – to produce a subversive form of devotion critical of, but inevitably also nostalgic for, power. From that point on, it expressed itself as a yearning for superiority over the superior.
The second position in the field of monotheistic conflict has been clearly marked since the appearance of the Christian antithesis to the
Jewish thesis. Although the God proclaimed by Paul and the other apostles retains a number of attributes connecting him to his Jewish predecessor, the subversively new Christological emphases lend his image entirely unexpected, even provocative and scandalous aspects.
The crucified God will forever remain a challenge to the worldly understanding of victory and defeat. From a historical perspective, it is decisive that the universalist elements of post-Babylonian Jewish theology were only focused on and invested in an ambitious proselytistic movement as a result of Paul's intervention. The dual event evoked by the names of Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus constituted no less than the escape of the One God from the provincial Middle East: it resulted in the alteration of the religious impulse from an ethnically restricted cult to an empire-wide form of telecommunication. The people's apostle could no longer content himself with local Jewish conversations about holy matters. Following a clear strategic instinct, Paul identified the entire Roman Empire, which at the time meant the whole world, as the field of operation for his mission – enough of a reason for Paul to be an idol for lovers of abstract militancy to this day: one could almost call him the first Puritan, the first Jacobin and the first Leninist all rolled into one. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Paul's work is documented primarily in the form of epistles, as that genre testifies to his long- distance apostolic effect more than any other. Even today, the reader can observe in them the gradual formulation of Christianity in the very act of writing.
This shift to the global scale dissolved the conventional folk basis of the faith in a single god. Israel, the first covenant people, could no longer be the sole carrier of the specifically new, Christologically inverted monotheism. Paul's stroke of genius transferred the covenant with God to a new people ‘called out’ from among the believers of all peoples – this new collective was hence to call itself ekklesia or New Israel, and embody the historically unprecedented model of a pneumatic people. It formed the prototype of the communio: a large spiritual body joined through baptism. In this collective, following the same Lord now took precedence over tribal lineage and gender. With a grand gesture, the differences between Jews and Greeks, free men and slaves or men and women were declared meaningless among the ‘children of God’ (Romans 10:12
and Galatians 3:28). A new associative model, the ‘holy community’, pushed back the ethnocentrism that, until then, had been the only conceivable option – people were first of all disciples of Christ; their identities as clan members and national comrades were secondary. The underlying belief in the imminent return of the Lord in glory, furthermore, led to a shift of emphasis in which futuristic motives restricted genealogical ones and superseded them de jure. God had promised Abraham descendants ‘as numerous as the stars in the heavens’ after Isaac had been freed; for Paul, however, the model of friendship took precedence over that of succession. Spiritual adoption replaced physical descent.
It was Paul who originated the enthusiastic universalism taken up by later generations of apostles as the motor for their eternally incomplete missionary work. One could use the term ‘apostolic integrism’ to describe the existential model used by Christ's successors, where the bearer of the message allowed himself to be consumed by his evangelical work. It was not without reason that some claimed one could only call oneself a Christian if one had made a Christian out of at least one other person; through the mission, the way of life became its content. Profane subjectivity had to be exchanged for holy personhood: ‘it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). What looks from the outside like idealistic overexertion is, viewed from the inside, actually the privilege of being allowed to wear oneself out for a great cause, thanks to the most intimate of convictions. Like revenge, the
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Only with the advent of Christianity did the zealous form and the universal content of the message grow together into an effective unity – due especially to the irresistible psychodynamic synthesis that was found with the apostolic form of life; the motif of the Holy War, prefigured by devout Jews, was now lifted onto a universal stage. Consequently, the new telematic monotheism had to develop a
missionary faith approaches the ‘utopia of a motivated life’.
believer, it is said, could never develop his zeal for God of his own accord if God's own zeal for his coming kingdom were not working within him. With the Pentecost event, Christianity entered the realm of high mediality. Subsequently the church became a place of exchange where one could hand over one's old identity and receive a spirited new self.
The
permanent state of taking the bull by the horns as its own peculiar modus vivendi. Externally it conceived of the world as the reception area for the message it sought to disseminate, while internally it consolidated itself as an employer for kerygmatic and diaconal work – today one would speak of public relations work and therapeutic professions; in this respect the early church anticipated the postmodern service society, whose most important ‘product’ is the social relations themselves. Finally, as a result of its encounters with the philosophical theology of the Greeks, Christian doctrine also incorporated the provocations of theoretical monotheism, drawing on this fusion to develop an intellectual strength that was to spawn ever-new syntheses of biblical and philosophical ideas over a period of almost eighty generations.
The most important victory of the new religion, however, was in the field of ritual. It was achieved through the transformation of the Jewish Passover feast into the Christian communion – a piratical operation that must be understood as the most world-historically significant example of ‘refunctionalization’, in the sense propagated by the dramatic artist Brecht. Communion does not simply constitute a strong ‘misreading’ of the Jewish pattern. It is more than that: its tragic parody. The consequences of this appropriation cannot be stressed enough: it was only through this blasphemous counter- Passover, in which the Son of Man placed himself in the position of the lamb that would normally have been sacrificed (as if he wanted to reveal the secret of that terrible night in Egypt), that Christianity came into possession of an unmistakable maximum stress ritual that guaranteed its participants the most lively form of memoactive empathy – and has by this point been doing so over a period of two
15
As far as the question of the ‘price of monotheism’ in the case of Christianity is concerned, a question often discussed in recent times, we consider it sufficient here to point to two well-known complications. The first relates to the ambivalence of Christianity towards the Jewish mother religion – Paul supplied the formula for
millennia.
that is quoted, but rather the intimate memorability of faith itself. Analogously, the feast of Whitsun parodies the handing over of laws at Mount Sinai, which the Jews celebrated fifty days after Passover – as if to prove that the preservation of the law is itself the law.
In every mass it is not simply the commemorative meal
this in his letter to the Romans, where he defined the Jews as enemies in terms of the gospel, but as ‘beloved for our fathers' sakes’ (Romans 11:28) in terms of their chosen status. Even as late as the twentieth century, Paul's thesis was renewed by Pope Pius X, who died in 1914; like many theologians before him, he declared that Judaism had been ‘replaced’ by Christianity, and that one could consequently no longer ‘grant it any continued existence’ – which did not form any obstacle to his canonization through Pius XII in 1954. In addition, Christians dealt with Jewish sources in the manner of a hostile take-over – in particular through the appropriation of the Tanach, which, now known as the Old Testament, was annexed, canonized and reinterpreted in the light of Christian needs.
The second indication concerns the fact that Christianity, which saw
itself in principle as a religion of love, freedom and warm-hearted
inclusion, in fact also practised ruthlessness, rigorism and terror on
a large scale. The liaison between the Western world of faith and the
spirit of Roman law spawned a legally thoroughly regulated church
system that was not infrequently attacked, including by critics among
16
its own ranks, as an anti-Christian monstrosity.
From the
perspective of Eastern Christianity, the Roman power apparatus
sometimes seemed like the incarnation of the Antichrist in the shape
of a perversely showy corporation. In his late works, Ivan Illich went
as far as identifying the estrangement of the church from the gospel
as the source of all the estrangements, reifications and
dispossessions that had been twisting the lives of modern people for
17
centuries.
In defence of Roman Catholicism (though certainly also
to prove its beneficial weakening), one should point out that it did
not, ultimately, remain indifferent to the wealth of critical
reflections: of all the memories of John Paul II, those moments in
which the pontifex maximus apologized to the whole world for the
aberrations of a fallible church's ‘sons and daughters’ will be among
18
It is thus all the more understandable that, from the eighteenth century onwards, a post-Christian scepticism spread throughout Europe, which sought to distance itself from the extremes of zealous faith, often even from faith as a whole. The alienation from the church prevalent on the continent today does not, therefore, merely
the most lasting.
show the hallmarks of institutional criticism and anti-dogmatism; the proponents of a purely secular way of life frequently launch open attacks. Some resolute heirs of the Enlightenment hold the conviction that Christianity still deserves to be showered with the most vicious blasphemies for centuries to come. Did Robespierre not declare in his speech before the assembly in 1794 that priests are to
morality what charlatans are to medicine? 19 The churches and their dogmas have had to put up with caricatures and malice for 200 years – without being able, as they still were in the Middle Ages, to escape from ‘this world’ through a fundamental withdrawal. On critical days, this anti-clerical sentiment is released in such satirical statements as this one: ‘The existence of Christians proves the non-
existence of God. ’20 The fact that some Christians today can even laugh at such jokes shows that they are capable of learning.
With the advent of Islam, the third exclusive monotheism appeared on the scene. Its establishment was defined by the fact that it viewed itself emphatically as the latest and most perfect manifestation of the Abrahamic one god complex. Islam took its late arrival as its most precious spiritual chance, as it claimed the advantage of seeing and correcting the errors, both alleged and real, of the two preceding monotheisms. This is why Muslim clerics refer to the founder of their religion as the ‘seal of the prophet’. The idea of correction in the process of monotheistic revelations is constitutive for Islam, as it permits it to make a virtue out of necessity by converting the deficit of non-originality into the advantage of a later clarification. Just as the Christian message before it could only come about through a partial abrogation, a corrective revocation of Jewish teachings (literary critics would add: through a severe misreading), the Islamic revelation presupposes the partial abrogation of the two older versions of monotheism. (Here this misreading of its two predecessors is taken to a spectacular level; yet it is precisely the success of Islam that shows that the adepts of this new holy book had more important things to do than draw on the sources of existing cults in a philologically correct fashion. ) Consequently the religion of the Qur'an, like that of the New Testament, was substantially characterized by a position of theological contrast; its first front stood in the tradition of the Jewish and Christian zealots who waged war against the gods and idols of their polytheistic surroundings,
while the second opposed the Jews and Christians directly. The former were accused of being frivolous and hypocritical, as they did not even take their own prophets seriously, while the latter were presented with the charge of falsely declaring the prophet Jesus ‘the Son of God’ in their deludedness, whereas all true knowledge of God, according to Islam, begins with the realization that the Highest is alone for all eternity and has no child. The pathos of the Islamic thesis of God's solitary position is based primarily on the polemic against the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which was regarded with suspicion as a form of tritheism.
As a corrective of Christology, and simultaneously its functional
equivalent, Islam developed a prophetology intended to lend the new
religion the vigour of legitimacy. It would not only be the Arab
recipients who would find the idea that God had sent a human
ambassador to those willing to embrace this faith more convincing
than the suggestion that this ambassador was God himself, albeit in a
second mode. In that case, admittedly, the prophet would have to be
given an incomparably elevated status that would soon reach
dizzying heights. This demanded no less than a doctrine of
inlibration, God's embodiment in book form, which in turn called for
the dogma of the dictation of that book by the angel of God.
Obviously, such a directive could only be received by a single pure,
devoted medium – from a Catholic perspective, this suggests an
analogy between Mohammed and Mary. Devotees of the virgin will
have an idea what Muslims might mean if they occasionally speak of
21
Islam was also dependent on the creation of a maximum stress myth. It produced this in the form of the duty for all Muslims to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca: the climaxes of this gruelling undertaking lie in the pilgrim's personal participation in the stoning of the devil and the slaughter of a sacrificial animal. Thanks to these forms of ‘deep play’ (as one sometimes calls deeply involving ritual acts), Islamic doctrines are connected to a heavily emotional memoactive
22
a ‘virgin birth of the Qur'an’.
Needless to say, Islam could never have survived through
engram.
one and a half millennia if the dramatizations of its teachings had not made such a lasting impression.
While the monotheistic escalation in Paul's case had triggered the shift from a defensive to an offensive universalism, the Islamic escalation led to the further development of offensive universalism from the missionary to the military-political form of expansion. The beginning of Islam was already triumphant; it managed to hurdle the
phase of ecclesia oppressa23 at the first attempt. In the case of Christianity, the metaphysics of the strong sender developed further by Paul had resulted in the belief that the crucified one was God's divine envoy and equal; the apostles could follow on from him as second-degree messengers. The same sender formula was used by the Muslims in order to honour a prophet who combined the roles of spiritual spokesman and military commander in a single person. In both cases, the strong sender on the other side was tied to a privileged mediator on this side, whose path was to be followed and made useful by countless later mediators of faith – the systemic point of departure for all those phenomena placed in such categories as clergy and clerical rule. While Paul had occasionally referred to the faithful as the athletes of Christ (1 Corinthians 17:24f. ) – a metaphor that manifested itself in Christian monastic life with the fury of the literal – the militant followers of Allah viewed themselves as voluntary recruits in a holy expansion campaign. From a distance, they remind one of the Puritan cavalry of Oliver Cromwell, an army for whom praying and fighting were as close together as they were for the religiously aroused warriors of the early Caliphate. The social form of the new movement was the ummah, the non-tribal commune to which one was admitted not by birth, but through the recitation of the creed of allegiance (shahadah) to Allah and his prophet before witnesses. The explosive expansion of Islam in the two centuries following the death of the prophet shows what powers were unleashed through the unexpected alliance between the clan system and universalism.
Islam in its original form owes its dynamics to the circumstance that in its case – in contrast to the initially oppositional, state-critical stance of Christianity – religious and politico-military impulses were practically acting in unison from the outset. This did not prevent Islam from developing a surrealism of its own kind – unlike Augustinian Christianity, however, it never managed to formulate a doctrine of the two kingdoms. It sought to project the opposition
between religious space and worldliness outwards, so to speak, and distinguish between the ‘house of Islam’ and the ‘house of war’. Rousseau still praised the close complicity of religion and state policy in Mohammed's legacy, attempting to imitate it in his own plans for a ‘bourgeois revolution’. Going on these indications, the religion of the revolutionaries of 1794 was intended to establish a post-Christian non-differentiation between state and ‘church’ in order to force – in France, the cradle of totalitarian temptations – a comprehensive identification of citizens with their community. This endeavour was foiled not only by the liberalism of the enlightened bourgeoisie, but also by the resistance of deep-seated Catholic traditions. The author of the Contrat social showed foresight and logical consistency in attacking Christianity as a hotbed of political disloyalty and social divisions. Whoever speaks of totalitarianism today should never forget that it acted out its dress rehearsal as a revolutionary civil religion. Rousseau had been its prophet, and his faithful disciple Robespierre followed in his footprints in presenting himself as the first caliph of a modern republic of conviction.
Notes
1
2
3 4 5 6 7
Regarding the Christian misreading of Jewish sources, especially in the cases of Paul's epistles and the gospel of John, see Harold Bloom, Jesus and Jahweh. The Names Divine (New York, 2005).
Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder, Die Geschichten Jacobs. Der junge Joseph (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983), p. 316. English edition: Joseph and his Brothers, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Everyman's Library, 2005).
Mann, Joseph und seine Brïder, p. 317. Ibid. , p. 319.
Ibid. , p. 318.
Ibid. , p. 316.
See Bloom, Jesus and Jahweh.
8
9
10 Regarding ‘hetero-Egypticism’, see Peter Sloterdijk, Derrida ein Ägypter. Vom Problem der jüdischen Pyramide [Derrida, an Egyptian. Concerning the Problem of the Jewish Pyramid] (Polity Press, 2009).
11 This aspect is emphasized by Gottfried Schramm in his study Fünf Wegscheiden der Weltgeschichte [Five Turning Points in World History] (Göttingen, 2004), pp. 28–30, in order to explain the way in which innovative groups push on towards new fundamental insights which they then follow spontaneously; this phenomenon is only genuinely evident among the early Christians, the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the American revolution of the eighteenth century, however, though one could almost cite early Mosaism as a counterexample.
12 For information on ritually induced memoactive stress as a vehicle for the inculturation of culturally specific teachings, see Heiner Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin [Jesus Outwits Darwin] (Vienna and New York, 2007).
13 Matthias Albani, Der eine Gott und die himmlischen Heerscharen. Zur Begründung des Monotheismus bei Deuterojesaja im Horizont der Astralisierung des Gottesverständnisses im Alten Orient [The One God and the Heavenly Host. The Foundation of Monotheism in Deutero-Isaiah in the Horizon of the Astralization of the Concept of God in the Ancient Orient] (Leipzig, 2000); also André Lemaire, Naissance du monothéisme. Point de vue d'un historien [The Birth of Monotheism. A Historian's Point of View] (Paris, 2003).
14 Sloterdijk, Zorn und Zeit, pp. 96f.
For a reintroduction of thymotic psychology into current discourse, see Peter Sloterdijk, Zorn und Zeit. Politisch- psychologischer Versuch [Anger and Time. A Politico- Psychological Essay] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).
See Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft [The Religion of Society], ed. André Kieserling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), pp. 152f.
15
16
17 18 19
20 21
22 23
Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin. One must also insist that the doctrine of the ‘lamb of God’ was derived not from the near- sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, but from the monstrous reinterpretation of the slaughter ritual at Passover.
The most assured representation of Catholic Romanism is to be found in Hans Küng's magnum opus Das Christentum [Christianity] (Munich, 1994), in the third section of the historical part, which, under the title ‘The Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages’, shows in particular – like a book within a book – the process of ‘Romanization at the expense of Catholic identity’ with reference to centralization, juridicization, politicization, militarization and clericalization.
David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005).
Especially in the extensive request for forgiveness on 12 March 2000.
Maximilien Robespierre, ‘Rapport sur les idées religieuses et morales’ (7 May 1794) in Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, ed. Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez and Pierre- Célestin Roux-Lavergne (Paris: Paulin, 1834–8), vol XXXII, pp. 353ff.
Louis Scutenaire, Mes inscriptions 1943–1944 (Paris: Allia, 1982).
See, for example, I. S. Hussain, The Qur'an and Modernism. Beyond Science and Philosophy (Lahore, 2000), pp. 1f. : ‘The Qur'an: An Immaculate Conception’.
Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin.
According to the narrative scheme ecclesia oppressa, ecclesia militans, ecclesia triumphans – from the church under pressure to the fighting church, then from the fighting to the triumphant church – used in church history to summarize the political fate of Christianity between the death of Christ and the Constantinian shift.
3
The battle fronts
Having presented the main candidates on the field of monotheistic faith and zeal (a fourth, the Communism expanding in the nineteenth century, does not require consideration at this point), it is not very difficult to subject the potential and actual confrontations between the monotheisms to systematic examination. Gaining the freest view of the field requires not a historical report, but rather a combinatorial scheme detailing all the formal possibilities of confrontation between the protagonists. In the following structural exercise – which, I hope, will not shock readers with its methodical callousness – I shall present twelve, or perhaps eighteen, basic possibilities of inter-monotheistic and intra-monotheistic formation of fronts, pointing here and there to the historical or diachronic contents of the synchronously schematized constellations. Their order is arbitrary and does not convey anything about the historical or moral weight of the individual figures in the conflicts. As I shall begin with the Christian positions, it is fitting that the oldest and most harmful manifestation of inter-monotheistic polemic should be mentioned first.
The first figure of confrontation on the inter-monotheistic field is Christian anti-Judaism (1), whose founding document, the proto- apostle's letter to the Romans, has already been mentioned above. One of its oldest sources is also the Gospel of John, which already displays the most vehement anti-Jewish sentiment – here the Jews are openly condemned as the ‘children of Satan’ and viewed as part of a counter-world that has been rejected. Needless to say, such statements are more than simply the darkest blot on the history of the world's favourite religion; beyond that, they also make it clear what price was paid for this new idea of the Messiah. From an evolution-dynamic perspective, religious anti-Judaism constitutes a special case within a more general law, namely that the inception of an innovative ‘spiritual movement’ will inevitably leave behind slower groups, whose delayed or reluctant manner is taken as a ruinous sign by those already ahead. As the conservatives of the old
covenant, the Jews were to embody this law and suffer under it, just as they looked back upon the Egyptians and the idolaters of Canaan as allegedly spiritually backward. As the history of the Christian hostility towards Jews fills entire libraries, archives of villainy that taught generations of academics to doubt Christianity, if not humanity at large, there is no further need to speak about it in the context of a formal enumeration – except for the conceptual criticism that one often describes these phenomena completely mechanically with the word ‘anti-Semitism’, which still gives the absurd fabrications of the political racism of the nineteenth century too much credence.
The next figure is that of Christian anti-Islamism (2), whose beginnings can be traced back to the Byzantine reactions to the Arab- Islamic attacks of the seventh and eighth centuries. The Byzantine Empire had already lost two-thirds of its territories and half of its population to the Islamic conquerors by this point. In the High Middle Ages, the denigration of Islam was commonplace in Europe. When Dante wrote the twenty-eighth Canto of Inferno, which depicts the prophet Mohammed, together with the sowers of scandal and schism, being hacked to pieces by a sword-wielding devil for all eternity, he was most likely able to draw on the Islamophobic clichés of his time without having to rely on any inspiration himself – if one leaves aside the commedia's typical schema of analogy between the manner of blasphemy and the mode of infernal punishment. A further document of Christian Islamophobia from the early fifteenth century was made famous by the speech given by Pope Benedict XVI in Regensburg in September 2006, in which he quoted the statement – or rather the sigh – of the unhappy emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos (whose daughter had once sat in the harem of the enemy as they besieged Byzantium), that the prophet Mohammed had added nothing but evil and inhumanity to Christian revelation.
Next we should mention Christian anti-Paganism (3), a prototype for all monotheistic religious polemic. The Christian opposition to the pagani, i. e. the followers of the ‘backward’ religion of the villages and fields in the Roman Empire (like the opposition to the gentiles, the yet unconverted foreign peoples), was determined by two factors: firstly, it stemmed in a more indirect manner from the traditional Jewish rejection of the idolatrous and cultic religions that had
previously dominated. Secondly, it developed from the urbane design of the ‘God's people’ project as conceived by Paul, with a clear imperial instinct in analogy to the Roman–Hellenistic ecumenical model. In this project the new figure of God, designed for the maximum mediality and transportability, inevitably came into great conflict with anything that recalled the magical circles of the older rural relics and local cults. The entire history of Christianity is thus characterized by a polemical tension between itself and all forms of folk religion with its magical-polytheistic dispositions, extending to the atrocities of the inquisition trials and extermination of witches – a tension that also permitted compromises, such as the cult of saints and relics and other manifestations of the semi-heathen, reterritorialized, folkloric and national-Catholic religion of the people.
In the next round we encounter Islamic anti-Christianism (4) and Islamic anti-Judaism (5). As much as Islam was aware of its later historical position in relation to the two other exclusively monotheistic movements, and consequently saw fit to cultivate the knowledge of those connections, it nonetheless insisted on displaying its specific differences from the earlier religions of the book. I am not sure whether Christian Delacampagne is right to speak of a ‘radically
anti-Jewish logic’1 informing Muslim culture from its beginnings to the present day. One can, however, diagnose a far-reaching ambivalence towards the Jewish legacy, for which the history of both ideas and actions in the corresponding field of conflict provides ample evidence. In fact, an emphatic distancing from Judaism can be traced back to Mohammed's Medina period. Not only was Jerusalem replaced by Mecca as the direction of prayer; there were also ‘cleansings and massacres’ of Jewish citizens – I have taken these two qualifications from Hans Küng's very empathetic and well-
2
disposed monograph on the third of the Abrahamic religions. Whether one considers it constitutive or conjunctural, anti-Jewish sentiment in Islam has been reinforced by the texts of such writers as the Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), who held the view that the West was waging a war of conquest against the Islamic world, and that this war was controlled primarily by Jewish interests. Such agitated interpretations of the time have recently been augmented by the loud, apocalyptic Muslim sects that are
omnipresent in Arab pop culture and burn with anticipation for the extermination of Judaism as if it were a salvation-historical event.
While Jews and Christians, as ‘people of the book’, were treated with greater tolerance, even a certain respect in classical Islam (especially when they lived as dhimmi, wards who were protected under Islamic law and paid the poll tax), the monotheistic polemic against all that was alien or archaic showed itself all the more virulently in Islamic anti-Paganism (6). Unlike its Christian counterpart, this was not directed at the country-dwellers with polytheistic origins, whom believers in the city and the rest of the empire viewed as a thorn in their side. This time its impulses came from the religiously inflamed nomadic cultures of the desert, aimed at the confusion of the cities with all their cultic polyvalence, wealth of images and architectural excesses. There was an attempt, not entirely without substance, to attribute the attacks of 11 September 2001 to the imaginary idea of the original Islam (although contemporary Islamic extremism seems most prevalent in cities and among students). It is no secret that certain passages in the Qur'an openly urge believers not only to kill polytheists (Sura 2:191, Sura 9:5, etc. ), but also to destroy their cities and towers if they refuse to accept the holy word (Sura 17:58: ‘And there is no city that we would not ravage before the day of resurrection’). One of the sources of religiously coded anti-urbanism in Islam was pointed out by Régis Debray in his uncovering of the close connection between original monotheism and the experience of living in the desert: ‘God is a nomad who has been extended to the
heavens, remembering his dunes. ’3
The next item on the list of inter-monotheistic conflict areas is Jewish anti-Christianism (7) – a position presumably connected to a wide range of historical realities that were not, to the best of our knowledge, explicitly documented. There is at least evidence, however, that the reactionary rabbinical factions in Judaism prayed in their synagogues for the destruction of the ‘Nazarenes’ from the second century AD onwards: ‘May their names be struck from the
Book of Life.
’4 Such polemics are undoubtedly more than simply the inversions of Christian anti-Judaism. If, on the one hand, Christianity inevitably saw the mere existence of Judaism as a provocation, as the Jews' continued adherence to their traditional doctrine could only mean a harsh rejection of the Christian message,
then conversely, on the other hand, the new faith of Christians in Jesus as the envoy of God was destined to be met with more or less open disapproval among the Jews. In more recent times, Jewish authors writing from a religion-psychological perspective have occasionally proposed that Christianity is fundamentally regressive in comparison to Judaism, as it exchanged the more mature belief in a life under the law for an illusory bond with a messiah who had ‘come’. One can see just how far such anti-Christian polemic in Jewish sources can extend in a book by the psychoanalysts Béla Grunberger and Pierre Dessuant entitled Narzissmus, Christentum,
Antisemitismus,5 in which the authors suggest that there is a continuum of malign Christian narcissism leading straight from Jesus to Hitler. Although the authors stepped onto the field of universal polemic with this claim, there was no scandal; those under attack simply shook their heads. Here one could observe with bafflement how psychoanalysis was being appropriated by a zealous Judaism without boundaries.
As far as Jewish anti-Islamism (8) is concerned, its historical manifestations have remained faint and presumably little-examined. Whatever their nature may have been, they would have been balanced out by occasional Jewish–Islamic alliances, which can be traced back to the time of the crusades. At any rate, the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim attacks of the New York ‘hate preacher’ Meir Kahan (1932–90) only expressed a marginal position within Judaism. The ideal and real manifestations of Jewish anti-Paganism (9), on the other hand, are far clearer: they lead us to the exophobic origins of any exclusive monotheism. One can justify it by pointing to its defensive character. If Judaism had not withdrawn behind the ‘fence of the law’, it would hardly have survived the countless trials of history. On the other hand, the antithetical relationship between the Jewish faith and the conventions of those with other beliefs in the Middle East would never have grown into the vicious conflict that has meanwhile become familiar without this. One could say that the division of mankind into Jews and gentiles (goyim) still common today (a distinction that seems to pass the lips of German Sunday speakers especially easily) highlights aspects of a very old attitude, both fearful and contemptuous, towards the followers of other gods and depraved cults.
Finally one must take into account the possibility and reality of
internal schisms, which extended the polemical range with three
further positions: Christian anti-Christianism (10), Islamic anti-
Islamism (11) and Jewish anti-Judaism (12). As far as the first of
these is concerned, we primarily recall the deep gulf between the
Christian confessions from the century of the Reformation onwards
(prefigured by numerous dogmatically and politically motivated
schisms in early church history). Nonetheless, this is only one of
many manifestations of the potential for intra-Christian conflict.
Like all monotheisms, the Christian variety is no stranger to the
tension between the rigorist and laxist interpretations of the
scriptures on the one hand, and the chronic friction between
orthodox and heretical tendencies on the other. In the case of Islam,
one naturally thinks of the breaking away of the Shia, which,
according to the contemporary Sunni leader Abu Mus'ab al Zarkawi,
has as little to do with Islam as Judaism with Christianity, ‘which are
6
This overview outlines the twelve main battle fronts that could transpire from an identitary, collective-forming and polemogenic use of the three monotheistic syntheses. If one considers possible two- against-one coalitions, a further three figures can be added to the list: Christians and Muslims against Jews (13), Jews and Muslims against Christians (14), and Jews and Christians against Muslims (15). I shall refrain from supplying historical indications of such alliances.
With reference to real and virtual religious history, one should also note the development of three atheisms corresponding to the three monotheisms, a process that took place with evolutionary necessity. In order to understand this, one must acknowledge the fact that atheism does not usually stem from a context-free logical examination of the existence or non-existence of God. It practically always comes from idiosyncratic negations of particular theistic tenets and their organized cultic contexts. In this sense, atheism
likewise based on the same scripture’.
well as the Cabbalistic and mystical deviations from orthodoxy, the most obvious choice would be the opposition between the legalistic and messianic schools of thought. The schism between the conservative and the liberal synagogue is also not without certain polemogenic effects.
In the case of Judaism, as
constitutes a regional phenomenon. We must therefore take into account a Christian atheism and its damnation by orthodox Christians (16), then Islamic atheism and its damnation by Islamic zealots (17) and Jewish atheism with its damnation by pious Jews (18). The term ‘damnation’ here encompasses the darkest of meanings: for Thomas Aquinas, falling away from the Christian faith was a crime that deserved to be punished with death; even at the end of the seventeenth century, the constitution of the Puritan theocracy in Massachusetts stated that the crime of atheism called for the death penalty; in the Islamic republic of Pakistan, non-believers and followers of other faiths can still be sentenced to death on charges of apostasy and blasphemy. Admittedly Rousseau, the totalitarian prophet of the Enlightenment, also proposed the death penalty for those who broke away from the ‘civil religion’ – and even in the enlightened Western ‘societies’ of today, there is no shortage of examples showing how readily the civil-religiously committed centrists begin a witch hunt whenever individuals blaspheme against the liberal consensus: a witch hunt whose practitioners happily take into account the social death of their victim. It is much rarer to encounter an abstract atheism free of any presuppositions, one that adopts a stance against the historical theisms as a whole – for example in the Treatise on the Three Impostors (these being Moses, Jesus and Mohammed) from the eighteenth century, whose anonymous author, inspired by Spinoza, takes the common Enlightenment doctrine of clerical fraud to the point of prophet fraud, even fraud by the religious founders – and actually implies that these founding fathers were not only deceivers, but also the first to be deceived. The recent case of the biologist Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion (2006) is a monument to the eternal shallowness of Anglican atheism, shows how avowed deniers of God can in turn be duped by their own zeal.
If, having completed our brief rundown, we cast a glance at the conflict area as a whole, two concluding observations seem inescapable: firstly, one can see that the classical monotheisms clearly did not make the most of their polemogenic potential. Even if one believes that the inter- and intra-monotheistic struggles cost too many lives anyway, studying the formally prefigured likelihood of different enmities between these religions in a structural overview
reveals just how far the historical reality fell short of the script's possibilities. It should be clear why this insufficiency was beneficial to mankind, which would otherwise have fought many more battles.
Secondly, we should not neglect to mention the non-combatant observers on the edges of the tripolemic field, who have always cast astonished and disapproving glances at the warlike formations of the participants. In their own way, these also belong to the scene of the battling monotheisms. For them, admittedly, the state of consciousness among the ‘common people’ is decisive, as the masses' blissful lack of opinion (as God is too enormous a subject) or principles (as fundamental issues always lead to overexertion) makes them keep their distance from the tiring theatre of hyper-motivation among the faithful and the chosen.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5 6
Christian Delacampagne, Islam et Occident. Les raisons d'un confl it (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), p. 27.
Hans Küng, Der Islam. Geschichte, Gegenwart, Zukunft [Islam: Past, Present and Future] (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 2006), p. 152.
Régis Debray, Einführung in die Mediologie [Introduction to Mediology] (Bern Stuttgart and Vienna: Hauph Verlag, 2003), p. 98.
F. E. Peters, The Monotheists. Jews, Christians and Muslims in Confl ict and Competition, vol. I: The Peoples of God (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 161.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2000.
Excerpts from the ‘Letter to Bin Laden and al Zawahiri’ in Al Quaida. Texte des Terrors, edited with a commentary by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli (Munich, 2006), p. 459. English edition: Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press, 2008).
4
The campaigns
If it is accurate to characterize the classical monotheisms as vehicles of zealous universalism, this inevitably raises the question of their world strategies. Naturally, each of these religions has a well- developed reality of life or, as Ivan Illich puts it, a vernacular side in which the charm of non-zealous, everyday religious life enforced by cult and tradition can take effect. As is well known, Chateaubriand
celebrated the ‘beauties of the Christian religion’,1 and Jewish and Islamic apologists could equally have dealt with the attractions of their religions. As well as the aesthetic merits, such defences would have emphasized above all the moral or social achievements that unfolded within the local communes in more or less impressive ways. As open as we may be to the charms of the monotheistic forms of life in the ‘rear line’, however (without overlooking its compulsive aspects, for example the Islamic custom of circumcision among young girls, ultimately motivated simply by a rule-obsessed attachment to a malign tradition, coupled with the need to pass on one's own lack of freedom), all three must primarily be defined as front-line religions owing to their polemical beginnings. The fact that their offensive potential sometimes lay dormant for centuries under certain historical conditions does not change the expansive orientation of the programmes. Each of the monotheisms has its own specific quality of ‘world-taking’, to use a term coined by Carl Schmitt in a different context. The truth is that the One and Only, though first discovered in the regional cult, inevitably ends up being promoted as a god with imposing worldly representation and increasing claims to sovereignty. Because of its predication on a concept of God that emphasizes the uniqueness and omnipotence of the Highest, religious universalism produces surpluses of meaning that erupt in encroachments of monotheistic communes on their political and cultic environments.
In the following, I shall distinguish between three main forms of expansion that are evident in the historical development of
monotheistic campaigns. The first, that of theocratic sovereignism, which came to exert a defining influence on Judaism throughout its many times and spaces, has predominantly defensive and separatist characteristics, while the second and third forms, namely expansion through missionary activity and through the Holy War, show a clearly offensive approach, one that also encompassed such means as persuasion, coercion and subjugation, even open blackmail (‘Baptism or death! ’, ‘Qur'an or death! ’). I do not think any formal proof is required that the latter two forms are not atypical of the two more extroverted monotheisms.
One can only speak of a Jewish campaign in the limited, even
paradoxical, sense that the surpluses of meaning found in post-exile
monotheism show a clear anti-Babylonian, and later also anti-
Hellenic, anti-Roman and generally anti-imperial, thrust. One
cannot, on the other hand, speak of any missionary expansion or
proselytistic dynamic in Judaism as a whole. The post-Babylonian
theology of Judaism is sovereignist in so far as it claims a supreme
position for the god of the enslaved people – a provocation that
became unforgettable especially through the book of Genesis, whose
final version was produced in the post-exile era. The basic position of
Judaism in relation to the rest of the world, however, remained a
separatist one in so far as it refused any form of cultic communality
with the other religious peoples and evaded any ecumenical mixture
or levelling out – an approach that, especially in the families of the
Jewish priests, the kohanim, maintained a high degree of biological
2
stability over millennia.
It proves the effectiveness of a closed
3
religious community as a ‘selective genetic force’.
an outward missionary shift was only conceded for relatively short periods – it is perhaps no coincidence that the only proselytistic episode in the history of Judaism was in the time directly before the messianic sect of Jesuans broke away from the main movement (from c. 150 BC to AD 50). For the majority of its historical existence, however, Judaism occupied a position that can best be described as defensive universalism. With this self-enclosed stance, the people of Israel produced – initially on the basis of tribal and small-state forms of life, later (after what Harold Bloom terms the ‘Roman holocaust’) under the conditions of exile and dispersion – a massive theological surplus that would have been sufficient for a large empire, even
The necessity of
though the originators of these teachings could not even rely on their subsistence as a people on their own territory for many centuries. By following the notion of living under the eyes of a watchful god, the Jewish people developed a sensorium for the counter-observation of this god, through which a theologically tinged, eccentric positionality (concentrated in the idea of the covenant) became second nature.
If, in spite of all our reservations, it were permissible to speak of a Jewish campaign, this expression could only refer to what Leo Baeck termed, in Das Wesen des Judentums [The Nature of Judaism] (1905), the ‘struggle for self-preservation’. Certainly, according to Baeck, it is impossible to conceive of Judaism as a whole without the ‘force of instruction and conversion’, but this potential was only able to take effect in an introverted and defensive direction during almost 2,000 years of diaspora. ‘People understood that mere existence can already be a declaration, a sermon to the world . . . The mere fact that one existed posited some meaning . . . Self-preservation was
experienced as preservation through God. ’4 One Christian author exaggerated these statements to the most obvious extent by declaring that, for him, the continued existence of Judaism in the world of today constitutes no less than a historical proof of God's existence. Advocates of evolutionist neuro-rhetoric would say that the longevity of Judaism proves the precise vertical duplicability of the memoactive rituals practised among this people. As Judaism invested its religious surpluses of meaning in its self-preservation as a people and a ritual community, its physical existence became charged with metaphysical ideas that amounted to the fulfilment of a mission – one more reason why the physical attack on Judaism can go hand in hand with the desire for its spiritual and moral eradication.
Formally speaking, the relationship between Judaism and the two religions that followed it could be viewed as a spiritual prefiguration of the asymmetrical war. Henry Kissinger supplied the latter's strategic formula in 1969 with the observation that the guerrillas win if they do not lose, whereas the regular troops lose if they do not win. The Jewish position corresponds to that of a guerrilla movement that takes the non-defeat it constantly achieves as a necessary, albeit inadequate, condition for its victory. By securing its survival, it creates the preconditions for its provisional – and who knows,
perhaps one day even its ultimate – success. The ‘preservation of Judaism’ takes place, as Leo Baeck notes with prophetic pathos, according to the ‘strict laws of life’ in a historical selection process. ‘History chooses, for it demands a decision; it becomes the grand selection among humans. ’ ‘When the gravity of circumstances calls upon humanity, it is often only the few who are left . . . The remainder
is the justification for history. ’5 Hence the real Jewish campaign resembles a swift gallop through many times and realms with heavy losses. This anabasis of the just has the form of a test undergone by each new generation. Here, a minority is filtered out from within a minority in order to continue the monotheistic adventure in its original form, life under the law and behind the ‘fence around the
doctrine’6 as unadulteratedly as possible. Here, the fundamental paradox of this religious structure, the fixation of the universal god on a single people, is prevented, with all its practitioners' power, from unfolding.
The state of Israel proclaimed in 1948 secularized the motif of tested survival. It presents itself as the political form of a ‘society’ of immigrants that claims (after the people's ‘return’ to the region of its former historical existence) an additional, discreetly transcendental significance for its physical existence. To many Jews, founding a state of their own seemed the only possible way of securing their future survival after the Shoa. As one of the conflict parties in the permanent crisis in the Middle East, Israel is paying a high price for this. In this role, it is inevitably losing a large part of the moral advantages it could still claim as long as it perceived itself as a dispersed, suffering community. The number of those still willing to accompany Israel through the complications of its new position is not especially great. In this position, it suffers from the compulsion to show strength just as it formerly suffered from its ability to survive mistreatment. Here too, there is no doubt as to the primacy of the defensive. Let us bear in mind that this hypothesis concerns Israel's reason of state, not the obstructed universalism of Jewish religiosity.
One can speak far more directly of a Christian campaign, as its appearance was accompanied by a shift towards offensive universalism. Within it, one finds the paradoxes of monotheistic system formation still suppressed in Judaism being developed bit by bit. Its appearance on the stage of earth-shattering forces teaches us
that ideas of this level embody themselves in autopoietic processes that, on the basis of their results, one reads as success stories. The administrators of the imperium Romanum realized early on how dangerous the Christian provocation was when they suppressed the new religion and its missionary efforts in several waves of persecution, while generally leaving the non-missionary Jews in peace. During the period of repression, the Christians remained true to their non-violent, ecstatically passive stance. They only formed alliances that resorted to violence once their faith had become the state religion. One can certainly understand what historians critical of the church mean when they date Christianity's own Fall to the moment when it began to cohabit with worldly power.
The essence of Christianity's historical successes can be expressed in a trivial observation: the majority of people today use the Christian calendar, or refer to it as an external guideline in so far as they follow other counting systems that define our current year as 2007 post Christum natum – which corresponds roughly to the Jewish year 5767 or the Islamic year 1428. Only few contemporaries realize that, in doing so, they are acting in relation to an event that marks a caesura in the ‘history of truth’. In this counting system, the year AD 0 reminds us of the moment at which the ‘world’ became the broadcasting area for a radically inclusive message. This message was that all people, in accordance with their common nature as creatures, should view themselves as members of a single commune created by God, destroyed by human sin and restored by the Son of God. If understood, this news should result in the dissolution of the enmities that arise among individuals and groups; it would also annul the hermetic self-enclosure of the different cultures and make all collectives follow a shared ideal of sublime justice.
Morally speaking, this was one of the best things humanity had ever heard – which did not, admittedly, prevent a number of the worst conflicts from growing out of the rivalries between those groups who sought to secure the privilege of bringing the good news to the non- believers. In noting that ‘the world changed into a site of cockfights
for apostles’,7 the subtle reactionary Dávila recognized one of the primary aspects of monotheistic conflicts. He underestimated the potency of such ‘cockfights’ for making history, however. In fact, this ‘history’ results from the project of the monotheistic will to total
communication. From an internal point of view, it means the process of opening all peoples up to the news of the One God, whose portrait is differentiated into a trinity. All that has gone before now sinks down into aeons past, and only retains validity in so far as it can be interpreted as a preparation for the gospel. Whereas human life until then had hardly consisted of anything except obedience to the cycles of nature and the rise and fall of empires, it would now be integrated into a purposeful process. The world is set in historical motion, in the stricter sense of the word, from the moment in which everything that happens is supposed to be governed by a single principle. What we call history is the campaign of the human race to achieve consenting unity under a god common to all. In this sense, Leo Baeck was right
8
that there is ‘no monotheism without world history’.
history presupposes that Christianity is the executive organ of messianic work. In fact, the significance of the messianic only becomes genuinely clear once it is fulfilled through the evangelical. Messianism post Christum natum testifies not only to the Jewish non-observance of the Christian caesura, it also shows that, despite the arrival of the good news, there is still enough room for the expectation of new good, even among Christians. Whether there can and should be a collection of the good news of new good in a Newer Testament remains to be seen.
The special role of Paul in overturning the Jewish privilege of sole access to the One and Highest has already been mentioned in the section on the battle formations. Characteristically, there has been no lack of exegetes among the Jewish theologians of recent times who no longer see Paul as a mere traitor, the role he has always embodied for the majority of Jewish commentators. He is increasingly being acknowledged as the zealot who, in bringing the universalist potential of the post-Babylonian Jewish doctrine of God into the world through an ingenious popularization, actually showed that he took the fundamental clerical vocation of the Jewish people seriously. An author such as Ben-Chorin states that even Jews should ultimately applaud the fact that Israel's monotheistic zeal proved infectious for other peoples of the world – albeit at the price that the Christians were lamentably deluded in their play with the messianic
9
The shift to the global scale remained irrevocably tied to the
fire.
Christian caesura. In his Letter to the Magnesians (10:3–4), Ignatius
This concept of
of Antioch, an author of the early second century, stated in no uncertain terms that Judaism leads to Christianity, not vice versa. In this thesis one hears the voice of the resolute cleric who, beyond the martyrdom he aspired to for his own person, demanded and
10
Under the magnifying glass of success, the dark sides of zealous monotheism also develop into world powers. The zealotic militancy of the early Christians soon came into severe conflict with the circumstance that these devout few were inevitably faced with a vast majority of people to whom the faith of this new sect meant nothing. The zealots took revenge by branding those who did not share their faith ‘infidels’. The latter's unperturbed insistence on their previous ideas was thus declared a spiritual crime with grave metaphysical consequences – especially when they chose to decline Christianity's offer after extensive reflection. This is why, from its earliest days, the message of salvation has been accompanied by an escort of threats predicting the worst for unbelievers. Certainly the gospel speaks of wanting to bring blessings to all sides; but Christian militantism has wished the curse of heaven upon the unconverted from its inception. On the one hand, Paul writes to the Corinthians: ‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal’ (1 Corinthians 13:1). On the other hand, in the second epistle to the Thessalonians (1:8–9) – whose authenticity is not uncontested – one can already observe the apocalyptic shadow that grows with the spreading of the message: when the Lord is revealed from heaven in blazing fire, ‘He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord. ’ So the writings of the people's apostle already promote a love that, if not requited, turns into scorn and lust for extermination. The physiognomy of the offensive universalist monotheisms is characterized by the determination of the preachers to make themselves fearsome in the name of the Lord. Possibly this corresponds to a rule of universalist religious communication, namely that every gospel must inevitably cast a dysangelic shadow in the course of its proclamation. Thus the non-acceptance of its truths in fact becomes a dangerous indicator of imminent disaster. The message divides the world as a whole into the
predicted the triumph of the Christian cause on a grand scale.
unequal halves of church and world. The Christian offensive's ambition to define that whole cannot be fulfilled without excluding ‘this world’ from the holy community. What constitutes a paradox in logical terms, however, amounts to horror in moral terms.
One can therefore agree – not without a grain of salt – with Alfred N. Whitehead when he reaches the following conclusion in his lectures on the philosophy of religion (Boston, 1926): ‘On the whole, the Gospel of love was turned into a Gospel of fear. The Christian world
was composed of terrified populations. ’11 One should append the question as to whether it was really a matter of turning a fundamentally good thing into its opposite, or rather an ambivalence that was present from the start. In this case, the motives of Christian missionary successes should be interpreted more critically than is generally the case in official church histories. They should no longer be attributed exclusively to the infectious effects of evangelical proclamations, which undeniably had an innate tendency towards improving the world's moral climate at first. They would then be attributable equally to the threats used to enslave intimately those who received them. That would make the mission more than simply the externalization required in order to spread the message of salvation; it would then also be the form in which the church, opposed to the ‘world’, worked through its irresolvable conflict with that ‘world’. The corresponding formula should be: going on the offensive by fleeing from the world – or, to put it more mildly: serving the world from a position of scepticism towards the world.
One can assess how far these somewhat uneasy suppositions are justified with reference to the effects of the church teacher Aurelius Augustinus. He can claim the privilege of having contributed more than any other individual believer – except Paul – to the confusion, and in fact the neuroticization, of a civilization. This diagnosis by no means refers only to the sexual-pathological distortions that were forced on Christian forms of life for one and a half centuries. The metaphysics of predestination taught by Augustine was even more harmful: upon closer inspection, it reveals itself as the most
12
unfathomable system of terror in the history of religion.
doctrine of the eternal predestination of Adam's children was based on an axiom stating that only very few would undeservedly be saved, while the majority would deservedly be cast into the flames, weighed
As the
down by the ‘burden of damnation’, the edifice of Christian faith after Augustine could only be erected over the tormenting uncertainty of one's own predetermined salvation. The only vague indication for individuals of possibly being chosen came from the fact that, with God's help, they could progress from fearful trembling to zealotry. It is no coincidence, then, that with Augustine – following preludes in the deserts of the Near East – the flight of believers to the monastic orders in late antiquity also began in the Western sphere; these orders offered a liveable form for the total absorption of being through the religious imperative. Yet even if Augustinism declared complete subservience to the gospel as the precondition for salvation – a compacted anticipation of Islam – neither resolute zealotry nor strict self-renunciation could guarantee the salvation of the individual. Conversely, the slightest trace of indifference to the good news could be read as an almost certain indication of predestination to damnation.
Whoever desires to trace the underlying modus operandi of Augustinian Christianity with analytical clarity will find it, brilliantly disguised by the winning discourse of God's all-encompassing love, in the devious and systematic combination of a rational universalism of damnation and an unfathomable elitism of salvation. In order to do the theologian's doctrine greater justice, it may be useful to realize the ways in which all great religions have a part in a general economy of cruelty. Its application lies in ostensibly lowering the general level of cruelty by inducing believers to take a certain amount of suffering upon themselves voluntarily in order to avoid or hold back greater unwanted terrors. This forms the basis for the transformative effects of spiritual asceticisms. One of the most attractive aspects of early Christianity was its dissolution of the standards of the Roman culture of cruelty – especially through its resistance to the brutalizing gladiatorial games, which had developed into a ubiquitous form of decadent mass culture in the Roman Empire (comparable only to the perversions of top-level sports in the second half of the twentieth century). Augustine intensified this resistance by striving for a moderation of human behaviour through the threat of maximum cruelty in the life beyond. With this approach, however, he fell prey to the danger of overshooting the mark: with his unflinching theological absolutism, this most influential of all the church fathers
inflated the diabolical aspect of God to the point of sacred terrorism. It can therefore be said that Augustinian Christianity proved a victim of fatal losses: because metaphysical terror inevitably translates into psychological, and ultimately also physical, terror, Augustine's ungracious doctrine of grace contributed to raising the level of cruelty in the Christianized world through the gospel, rather than lowering it. In this sense, Christianity's critics touch on a raw nerve when they argue that Christianity often furthered the evil from which it subsequently offered deliverance.
Considering all this, one can understand why countless Christians have only been able to adopt Augustine's doctrines by repressing their unpalatable aspects. The history of the Christian faith since the early Middle Ages is nothing but a series of attempts to mask the sinister dimensions of the Augustinian legacy through a more optimistic interpretation of the question of humanity's chances of salvation. Hardly any Christian ever had the necessary cold- bloodedness to realize why heaven had to remain almost empty – as far as human dwellers were concerned, at least – during the era dominated by Augustine's theology. It was only with the age of discoveries that believers were presented with the task of exploring the practically untouched continent of divine generosity. From that point on, the aim was to depict the realm of God beyond this world as a densely populated area – Dante would have been one of the first to encounter more than a ghost town on his journey to heaven. The current results of the search for a generous God were expressed in the Polish pope's well-known statement: speriamo che l'inferno sia vuoto – ‘let us hope that hell is empty’.