No More Learning

3, ‘Auftrieb und Verwöhnung. Zur Kritik der reinen Laune’ [Impetus and Spoiling: On the Critique of Pure Mood], pp. 671f.
9
10 See Sloterdijk, Sphären II, ch. 7, ‘Wie durch das reine Medium die Sphärenmitte in die Ferne wirkt. Zur Metaphysik der Telekommunikation’ [How the Centre of the Sphere Affects Things Distant Through the Pure Medium: On the Metaphysics of Telecommunication], pp. 667–787.
11 Translator's note: the use of lichten in the original refers to Heidegger's existential notion of a clearing (Lichtung), i. e. to clear in the sense of opening or illumination rather than ordering.
12 See Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Neuigkeiten über den Willen zum Glauben. Notiz über Desäkularisation’ [News of the Will to Faith: A Note on
See pp. 17 and 141 below.
Desecularization], Bochum, 10 February 2007.
13 Martin Mosebach, Häresie der Formlosigkeit. Die römische Liturgie und ihr Feind [The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and its Enemy], new extended edition (Munich, 2007), p. 25.
14 Translator's note: the German Ministry of Education declared 2007 ‘das Jahr der Geisteswissenschaften’.
2
The formations
Having laid out these conditions, I would like to turn my attention to the trio of monotheistic religions, whose war and dialogue form the object of these reflections. I shall begin with a genetic observation intended to show how those religions developed in sequence from one another, or from older sources – in a manner comparable to a three-phase explosion (or a series of enemy takeovers). The fact that such a rapid sketch inevitably contains only elementary and highly schematicized observations does not require an explanation of its own, and as we are not dealing with a history of religion, but rather a presentation of ‘conflict parties’, I can restrict myself to descriptions of a typological nature. Nor will I be focusing on the history of the holy texts, which is why there is not the slightest attempt here to relate the unfolding of Christianity and Islam as the adventure novel of misreading that literary critics recognize in the approach of the
1
two later monotheisms to the holy books of their predecessors.
There is no need to emphasize that, from the perspective of faith, the following reflections will no doubt seem grossly unjust in many places – in so far as most things said about faith without allowing it a chance to revise them are unjust. A fitful shaking of heads by all three parties as a readers' commentary on the thoughts that follow can scarcely be avoided. One should bear in mind that the topic as such encourages one-sidedness, as it demands a foregrounding not of the awe-inspiring foundations of the monotheistic teachings, but rather of their potential for competition and conflict.
It is only logical to begin the nomination of candidates in the monotheistic field of theses by determining the position of Judaism. The question that will concern us here was given its quintessential expression by Thomas Mann in an inspired chapter of Joseph and his Brothers under the heading ‘How Abraham discovered God’. In the literarily reconstructed primal scene of the Abrahamic tradition, we observe the forefather of monotheism struggling with the question of whom humanity should serve: ‘. . . and his strange answer
2
had been: “The highest alone” ’.
Abraham reaches the conclusion that Mother Earth, as admirably diverse as her fruits may be, surely cannot be the first and highest authority, as she is obviously dependent on the rain that falls from the sky. Led to the sky by his thoughts, he concludes after a while that, in spite of its sublime constellations and all the terrifying meteorological phenomena, it too cannot quite embody what he is looking for, as those phenomena constantly change and negate one another – the moonlight, for example, fades when the morning star rises. ‘No, they too are not worthy to be my gods. ’ Finally, through
In a strenuous meditation,
his sheer ‘urge for the highest’,3 Abraham arrives at the concept of an absolutely sublime, powerful and otherworldly God who rules over the stars and thus transpires as the foremost, mightiest, only god. From this point on, Abraham, having himself become the ‘father of
God’,4 so to speak, through his investigations, knew to whom all should now rightfully pray: ‘There had only ever been He, the most high, who alone could be the rightful God of men and the one and
only object of their cries for help and songs of praise. ’5
In his poetic exploration of the psychodynamic source of monotheistic belief in the soul of the progenitor of the Jewish people, Thomas Mann placed a highly fitting emphasis on an impulse that has been referred to as the summotheistic affect. Long before there was such a thing as theoretical theology, it was this feeling that provided the template for authentic monotheistic belief. It creates a resonance between a God who is serious about his dominion over the earth and a human who is serious about his desire to belong to such a sovereign deity. Thomas Mann does not omit to mention that a quest for God of this kind is inseparable from the striving for human significance: so there can be no monotheism without a certain self- importance. ‘In order to make some kind of impression and achieve a certain significance before God and men, it was necessary to take things – or at least one thing – very seriously. Father Abraham had taken the question of whom man should serve absolutely seriously
. . . ’6
Strangely enough, Abraham's momentous elevation of God (as shown by his portrait in the books of the Yahwist) did not immediately remove him to a completely superhuman realm.
Certainly he is described as a god above, but there is no doubt that he is in touch with earthly reality. He retains all the attributes of a human who is no stranger to anything all too human, ranging from the wild temper he displays in his dealings with his subjects to the unpredictable explosiveness of his early utterances. His despotic irony and constant fluctuation between presence and absence make him appear more like an insufferable father than a principle of divine justice. A god who loves gardens and basks in their cool evening air, who fights bloody battles and imposes sadistic tests of subordination on his believers, could be almost anything – but not a discarnate spirit, let alone some neuter otherworldly being. His affective life vacillates between joviality and tumult, and nothing could be more absurd than the claim that his intention is to love the human race in its entirety. If there was ever a figure that could be said to be wholly god and wholly human, it was Yahweh as represented in the Yahwist. Harold Bloom rightly characterized him as the most untameable figure in religious history – the King Lear of the heavenly rulers, one could say. The notion that a charismatic dreamer like Jesus, of all people, could have been his ‘beloved son’ – even one and the same being, as the Nicene theologians claimed – is theopsychologically
7
At the start of the monotheistic chain of reaction we find a form of contract between a great, serious psyche and a great, serious God. There is no need to dwell on his other qualities – his choleric temperament, his irony and his taste for thunderous hyperbole – in this context. This alliance creates a major symbol-producing relationship without which most of what have, since the nineteenth century, been termed ‘advanced civilizations’ (since Karl Jaspers, also known as ‘axial age civilizations’) would be inconceivable. One of the secrets of the summotheistic alliance certainly lies in the satisfaction of believers that, by submitting to the highest, they can share in some part, however modest, of his sovereignty. Hence the
unthinkable.
wilfulness, least of all a ‘son’ like Jesus. What the Christian theologians called God the Father was actually a late reinvention for trinity-political purposes; at that time it was necessary to introduce a benevolent father to match, at least to a degree, the amazing son. The Christian redescription of God naturally had very little to do with the Yahweh of Jewish scripture.
No one can be homoousios with such a paragon of
pronounced joy at submission that can be observed among partisans of the strict idea of God. No one can take the step towards such a God without being intoxicated by the desire to serve and belong. Quite often, resolute servants of the One are enraptured by pride at their own humility. When the faithful bloom in their zealous roles, this is partly also because nothing dispels the ghosts of existential disorientation as effectively as participation in a sacred enterprise that creates jobs and promises advancement. In this sense, the system known as ‘God’ can be viewed as the most important employer in the Holy Land – in which case atheism constitutes a form of employment destruction that is, understandably, fought bitterly by those affected.
The liaison of seriousness and greatness corresponds to the growing pressure to which the religious sensibility is subjected as soon as the requirements for the status of divinity increase. And their evolutionary increase is inevitable when, as in the Middle East of the first and second millennia BC, several ambitious religions begin to come into conflict with one another – until the phase of diplomatic niceties is over and the question of final priority and absolute supremacy becomes unavoidable. Under these conditions, the connections between the psyche and the world take on a new dynamic: the expanded scene of the world and God demands greater powers of comprehension among the faithful souls – and, vice versa, the increasing demands for meaning directed at God and the world by those souls call for increasingly interesting roles in the general dramas. The monotheistic zealots of all periods testify to this development with their entire existence: if they had their way, their subservient passion would not simply be their private contribution to the glory of God. It would be the zeal of God himself reaching through them and into the world. This zeal, correctly understood, is an aspect of God's regret at having created the world. In its milder form, it shows his benevolent will to salvage what he still can of a creation that has got out of control.
Abraham's choice of religion, then, is extremely thymotically determined – if it is indeed legitimate to bring the Greek concept denoting the activity centre of the psyche's ambition- and pride-
based impulses, the thymós, into play in the interpretation of the
8
Middle Eastern theodramas.
In demanding that his God should be
the absolute highest, so high as to be above the world, Abraham ruled out – to the great advantage of his self-confidence – all lesser alliances in his search for a sovereign lord and partner. The price of this singular alliance was monolatry: honouring a single God, raised above a wealth of rivals whose existence and effect could not, for the time being, be denied. Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), the great linguistic and theological researcher influenced by Schelling, to whom contemporary Indology still owes a great deal today, suggested the term henotheism for this position devoted to the cult of the One and Only, and identified it as the evolutionary forerunner of monotheism. In so far as this One takes on the pre-eminence of the only significant one, the remaining gods are naturally relegated to the lower ranks. In time they come to be seen as no more than obsolete forces, or at most helpful celestial functionaries, but more often as rebellious parasites – points of departure for the tracts on demons and devils whose blossoming was to become so typical of the later, more developed monotheistic doctrines. One can understand, therefore, why there can never be monotheism without ranking- based jealousy. As the figure of the One and Only could be guaranteed exclusively through the subordination of other candidates, keeping the rejected ones under control was to remain a perennial task. The earliest monotheistic matrix already contains the outlines of the areas that would later be filled by the One and Only's adversaries on duty. This new opposition showed its polemic tendencies early on: the transcendent, true One against the inner- worldly, false many.
The aspect that lends monotheism its bold difficulty from a theoretical perspective – it's a-priori decision to imagine transcendence as a person – shows its greatest advantage on the practical side of things: that any potential or actual believer can fall back on a wealth of intuitions that make God's actions towards the world comprehensible. If God is a person, he can create, destroy, love, hate, allow, forbid, reward and punish like a person – and,
9
while doing all those things, observe.
dealing with household and family gods, it was easy to make this seem plausible. In order to equip a world god with such personal attributes, however, it was probably inevitable that one would at least have to refer to great kings as an analogy. Without any counter-
As long as one was merely
intuitive efforts, however, nothing would be achieved in this field. One thing, at any rate, is certain: only by suggesting a personified God was early monotheism able to carry out its most ambitious manoeuvre, namely setting up something utterly improbable as the greatest certainty of faith.
Looking at the establishment of Jewish monotheism, one must also take into account two psycho-political complications of no little consequence. Firstly, a suspicion was voiced that it was based on an exported idea that the Jews had taken with them on their semi- mythological exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses – a suspicion that Sigmund Freud expanded into the daredevil theory that Moses himself, as his name suggests, was an Egyptian, possibly from a noble family, who was continuing the large-scale religio- political experiment of the Amarna period, the solar monotheism of Akhenaten, among the Jews. Then the Jews of the post-Mosaic period would, in spite of their anti-Egyptian self-image, have
remained a hetero-Egyptian collective10 with which – semi- consciously at first, then unconsciously – a chapter of experimental High God theology was enacted with all its consequences – consequences of which the internal genocide carried out by the faithful followers of Moses against the worshippers of the golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai (assuming this incident is not simply a concoction to edify and terrify) would perhaps have been an extreme, but not entirely ineffective, example.
Moses' command ‘let every man kill his brother, his friend and his
neighbour’ (Exodus 32:27) marks the first appearance of the motto
of that zeal for the One and Only that makes long stretches of the
history of monotheism (specifically in its Christian and Islamic edits)
read like an account of righteous ruthlessness. A new moral quality
for killing was invented at Mount Sinai: it no longer served the
survival of a tribe, but rather the triumph of a principle. Once God
becomes an idea . . . This innovation was connected to a change in the
nature of the victim that led from the offering of a gift to the
extermination of an opponent. One can only speak of Israel's
breakthrough to the founding of a ‘voluntary community of belief’ if
11
one passes over the faction that was exterminated.
denunciation set up by the Jacobins after 1793 shows just what ‘communities of belief’ are capable of under stress: it commanded
The system of
the virtuous among the French populace to report not only their closest neighbours but even their own family members to the organs of revolutionary justice for the slightest of critical remarks.
The myth of the exodus remains constitutive for Judaism as, through its dramatic circumstances that are invoked time and again, it creates a strong psychic engram – not least through the admonitory reminder of the deeds of the angel of death, who passed over the Jewish doorways that had been marked with lamb's blood (Hebrew pessach: leave out, pass over, spare) while entering the houses of the Egyptians and murdering their firstborn. The exodus story is unmistakably embedded within a maximum stress ritual which, because of its powerful memoactivity, guarantees the practising
12
community the greatest possible internalization of laws.
looking for the secret of how Judaism was able to survive for over three millennia should begin here. It is nothing other than the high degree of memoactive fitness inherent in this religion because of its primary myth: it combines the joy at having escaped with the memory of that most terrible of nights. Numerous secondary forms of rehearsal sup-port these first influences, especially ones centred around scriptural study. The proud painfulness of circumcision may have had a similar effect. Whoever lives under the myth of the exodus shares a stable stigma that distresses, elevates, obliges, bonds and excludes. Its eminent duplicability enables its carriers to pass on their passion and wander through the ages as living transporters of spiritual content.
The second complicating precondition of the monotheistic
establishment of biblical Israel stems from its experiences in exile
during the sixth century BC. There is a wide-ranging consensus
among scholars that Jewish theology entered its critical phase in the
time of Babylonian captivity (586–538 BC), when it developed the
characteristics that can still be recognized today. Following earlier
zealotic preludes and rigorist episodes, these were the years of
monotheistic decision. This escalation was triggered by the semantic
clinch between the God of the Israelites and the imperial Gods of
Babylon. The earlier Yahweh monolatry now brought forth a
speculative superstructure that developed into a monotheism that
13
was both theoretically and politically advanced.
radicalizations is not difficult to identify. It lies in the emergence of a
Anyone
The point of these
political concept of God with meta-political overtones that testifies to the resolve to grant the God of the enslaved people – weeping at the waters of Babylon – absolute superiority, albeit one concealed and for the meantime only capable of being asserted symbolically, over the gods of the despotic empire.
This turning point constitutes one of the most significant moments in the intellectual history of the later West. It marks the first separation of spirit and power, previously a diffuse unity, into polar opposites. 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
14
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’.