No More Learning

It was only when the ‘God-seeker gangs’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries burst into this universe, built entirely on discretions, that the pathos of graded distance disappeared. The efforts of a world consisting of ranks, scales and ascents have since become incomprehensible to most people. Deregulated desire wants a ‘flat hierarchy’ – or even completely level ground. It no longer accepts any reason why it should not have everything on its own level immediately. Status and stasis evaporate here too – not, however, to force individuals to view their relationships with others through
sober eyes,8 but rather to leave them behind in a previously unknown state of defencelessness. In this condition they succumb first to the temptations of the extreme, then to those of a vulgarity without limits.
One could make similar observations in the case of prestige-laden negative theology. Its origins among the Greek church fathers,
Rainer Maria Rilke also showed his familiarity
of the Übermensch’.
with the traditions of the upward glance when he invoked the ‘pollen
7
specifically the Cappadocians and Dionysius Pseudo-Areopagita, support the assumption that it was intended to mitigate the obsession with ascension in a spirit-metaphysically aroused monastic community of a Hellenistic-Christian variety. Though the educated among today's religion-lovers almost treat it like God's last intellectual chance, it actually served in its heyday as the ascetic's last chance to prevent spiritual infiltration by the frenzied masses. Its method was the slow pondering of lists consisting of concrete negations of the properties assigned to the Highest, whose constant repetition was meant to give meditators an awareness of their own distance from the pinnacle. Negative theology can only be productive as an intellectual litany that makes humans aware of the immeasurable distance between the unrecognizable God and his recognizable attributes. It cannot really be studied, only recited like a logical rosary. The exercise has the dual purpose of ensuring the transcendence of the super-objective object and coaxing the meditator away from the target area of deificatory frenzy. This satisfies the interest in polyvalence, as the faithful subject situates itself in a third position between a complete exclusion from God and a complete inclusion in him. As far as the modern use of this form of thinking is concerned, I shall restrict myself to observing that – as usual – the intention of those interested in it today is the opposite of the original exercise, as the highest can never be immanent and ego- near enough for them.
The various hermeneutical approaches stemming from an engagement with the Holy Scriptures can equally be considered schools of polyvalent thought behaviour. This is due primarily to the fact that professional scriptural exegetes are confronted with a dangerous alternative. The business of interpretation naturally calls for third options, as it is almost immediately faced with an unacceptable decision: either an excessively good or an excessively bad understanding of the divine message. Both options would have disastrous consequences. If one were to understand the scriptures as well as only their own author could, it would seem as if one wanted to clap God on the back and declare agreement with him – a claim that would hardly appeal to the guardians of holy traditions. If one's interpretation goes against the consensus, however, and in fact considers them completely opaque or nonsensical, it could be a case
of demonic obstinacy. In both cases the recipient falls short of his duty, incurring the wrath of the orthodox establishment – which, as we know, was never squeamish when it came to laying down the law for heretics. Religious hermeneutics is thus located a priori in the space between two blasphemies and has to remain in limbo there. No situation could provide a better motive for committing oneself to a third option. If one cannot become one with the author's intentions as if one understood him better than he did himself at the moment of dictation, but is equally forbidden to miss his message as if he were some stranger with nothing to tell us, an escape to some middle ground is almost inevitable. The striving for a truthful understanding of the holy symbols is at home in the intermediate realm of interpretation, and its fundamental imperfection is its opportunity, its element. There is no need for any long-winded explanations of why such work, which takes place in the twilight of a meaning that is only ever partially revealed, has the strongest anti-extremist qualities – it can take its practitioners to the threshold between religious text
9
rather exposes itself.
sometimes admitted that he no longer knew what he had meant in some line of his poetry, Alexander Kluge observed: ‘You switch off your ears and pronounce verses. ’ This surely means that there is more sense in the world than the authors themselves can understand. The possibility of relaxing the hold of the absolute text in multiple readings has been most significant in the Jewish culture of commentary, whose richness stems from the proliferation of perspectives. Hence the profound jest: two Talmudic scholars, three opinions.
These effects are rounded off by the humour that develops in the shadow of the monotheisms. It shows a number of similarities with humour under dictatorships, as all totalizing systems, religious and political alike, provoke a popular backlash against the supposedly sublime that is forced on them. Humour can almost be considered the school for polyvalence, as it trains its apprentices to view every possible situation, in particular the more unpleasant ones, from a third perspective. This third view comes neither purely from below – from anxiety – nor purely from above – from indifference – but
Paul Celan refers to the word's abstinence from
and literature.
oppressive authority when he states that poetry does not impose, but
10
In a conversation with Heiner Müller, who
rather combines the upper and lower views in such a way that it has a liberating effect on the observer. Thus the subject can share in a more confident attitude towards its own situation. While philosophers have mostly used the motif of being superior to oneself in praise of self-control, humorists emphasize the aspect of self- therapy. In the context of cognitive theory, one would describe the practice of the third view as the reframing of a data mass in order to prevent consciousness from being overwhelmed by a paralyzing point of view. It is no coincidence that typical zealots instinctively recognize humour as the enemy that spoils business for the forces of militant one-sidedness. Wiser fighters compensate for their lack of humour with the assurance that laughter will be reserved for times of peace – just as Lenin considered it advisable to postpone listening to Beethoven's music until the fulfilment of Communism, as it seduces us into embracing our neighbour, even if he is a capitalist, instead of cracking his skull for the sake of a better future.
If one takes the effects of these disciplines as a whole, one can speak of civilization through institutionalization. For the participants of mature religious cultures, the good manners of informal polyvalence become second nature to such a degree that many passages from their own sacred texts which voice holy fury seem like embarrassing archaisms to them. In this predicament they resort to the discreetly heretical method of citing only those passages that are compatible with dominant sensibilities. A similarly selective approach to the whole text is also necessary among contemporary Catholics: it is not without reason that the controversial psalms of vengeance were recently removed from the Roman church's liturgy of the hours. The time will come when Muslims also decide to overlook the more sinister passages of the Qur'an. The civilizing process of the monotheisms will be complete once people are ashamed of certain statements made by their respective god and unfortunately documented, like the public appearances of a generally very amiable, but also irascible, grandfather who has not been allowed to mix with people without an escort for a long time.
Notes
1 2
3
Cf. above, p. 2.
Cf. Victor and Victoria Trimondi, Krieg der Religionen. Politik, Glaube und Terror im Zeichen der Apokalypse [The War of Religions. Politics, Faith and Terror Under the Sign of the Apocalypse] (Munich: Fink [Wilhelm], 2006).
4
Cf. Klaus Heinrich, Tertium datur: eine religionsphilosophische Einführung in die Logik [A Religion-Philosophical Introduction to Logic] (Basle: Stroemfeld, 1981). In addition to the non-technical arguments for polyvalence hinted at here, one should also point out the technical analysis of polyvalent logical structures in the work of Lukasiewisc and the Polish school, as well as in recent computer science. Gotthard Günther has taken a path of his own to establish a non-Aristotelian logic, though so far his work has been read more by systems theorists than philosophers.
5
6
7 8
Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colour-blind (London: Picador, 1997).
Translator's note: this is a reference to a poem written by Rainer Maria Rilke in 1922. It begins ‘Solange du Selbstgeworfenes fängst, ist alles Schicklichkeit und lässlicher gewinn’, and the published translation of the full poem reads as follows – ‘As long as you catch self-thrown things / it's all dexterity and venial gain – ; / only when you've suddenly caught that ball / which she, one of the eternal players, / has tossed toward you, your center, with / a throw precisely judged, one of those arches / that exist in God's great bridge-system: / only then is catching a proficiency, – / not yours, a world's’: Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems, trans. Edward Snow (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1996).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra I, Zarathustra's Prologue, part 9.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Elegy 2.
‘All that is based on status and stasis evaporates, all that is holy is profaned, and humans are finally compelled to view their position
in life and their relationships with others through sober eyes’: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, part I.
9
10 Paul Celan, ‘The Meridian. Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Georg Büchner Prize’ in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001), pp. 401–13.
The most resolute equation of holy text and poetry can be found in the writings of the American literary critic Harold Bloom, who has no qualms about comparing the God of the Yahwist with King Lear and Jesus with Hamlet. Cf. also Odo Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen. Philosophische Studien [Farewell to the Fundamental. Philosophical Studies] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), pp. 127–32.
7
The parables of the ring
Nowhere is the programme of a domestication of the monotheisms in the spirit of the good society evident more suggestively than in the parable of the ring from Lessing's 1779 dramatic poem Nathan the Wise. It tells the story of a father in the distant past who bequeathed a precious ring to his son. The ring possessed the magical ability to make its wearer agreeable to God and men, thus proving his identity as the legitimate heir. Following the model of this first handing- down, the ring wandered for a long time from each successive father to his son, regularly displaying its pleasing effects. In one generation, however, the owner of the ring had three sons who were all equally obedient and thus equally beloved, so that he promised the ring to each of them. The loving patriarch's virtuous weakness could only be balanced out by a virtuous deception: the old man had two imitations produced ‘by an artist’ that were of such perfection that not even he could tell the original apart from the two new rings. He then gave one to each of his sons with the appropriate blessings and promises.
After the father's death the inevitable happened: the sons began to quarrel, for each now staked his claim as the sole legitimate heir. The conflict was inescapable, but also irresolvable, for all three parties had equally valid reasons for their demands. A wise judge was called in to settle the matter. He found a solution by decreeing that all three should be put to the test. For this it was necessary to shift the focus from the level of religious claims and their proofs to the level of concrete effects. If ‘the right ring can no longer be found’ – and eo ipso the right faith, as Nathan emphatically adds – both the ring owners and their observers would have no choice but to submit to the pragmatic criterion. The power of the ring to ‘make its wearer agreeable to God and men’ would one day be the decisive factor. The candidates were left only with the advice to assist the inner virtues of the ring with their own efforts and ‘sincere warmth’. Assessing the results would naturally have to wait until the distant future, when a further judge would summon the warring parties once again – an unmistakable allusion to an Enlightenment version of Judgement
Day, on which not only individual believers, but the monotheistic religions as a whole would have to take responsibility for their actions.
From today's perspective, this parable, rightfully celebrated as the Enlightenment's equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, shows its complete postmodernity: it combines primary pluralism, the positivization of simulation, the practical suspension of the question of truth, civilizatory scepticism, the shift from reasons to effects, and the priority of external approval over internal claims. Even the most hard-boiled reader cannot help admiring the wisdom of Lessing's solution: by postponing the final verdict until the end of time, it prevents the candidates for the truth from being sure of their selection. Thus Lessing's pious scepticism takes the religions seriously by giving them the hint not to take themselves too seriously.
It should not impair the venerability of the document if I note a few
difficulties that complicate its seemingly straightforward meaning.
What Lessing is suggesting amounts to a reception-aesthetic
transformation of religion. This heralds the rise of mass culture in
religious matters. In this context, ‘Enlightenment’ is no less than a
codeword for the belief that the elite and the masses will one day,
after overcoming their historically grown estrangement, come
together in shared perceptions and value judgements. It was
precisely this convergence that the young heroes of German Idealism
invoked as a civilizatory opportunity on the way to their goal of doing
away with ‘the blind trembling of the people before its wise men and
1
‘And so the enlightened and the unenlightened must join
priests’.
hands, mythology must become philosophical and the people must
become reasonable . . . ’2 If, however, the potential for popularity becomes a criterion for truth – and the mouthpiece of the elite clings to this demand expressis verbis – one can expect a shift of the competition between the religions to the humanitarian field: it is not for nothing that the religious taste of the masses has always been gratified by the spectacle of charity, assuming it does not make an excursion to the theatre of cruelty in the middle.
If one looks at the matter in the cold light of day, then, Lessing could have dispensed with the figure of the second arbiter who passes
judgement in the distant future, for, since the Enlightenment, the
trial of the religions has occurred not at the end of days, but rather as
a daily plebiscite. This is expressed in the fluctuations of sympathy
that have, since the early twentieth century, been ascertained
through surveys. The prerequisite for this was that civil society itself,
3
discreetly or indiscreetly, was declared a deity on earth.
enough, none of the monotheistic religions fares particularly well before the court of popular taste, as the criterion of effect does not usually act in their favour – it no longer requires great acumen, after all, to realize that there is a significant correlation between monotheism and unrest (or discomfort) in the world – and the possible popular forms of the monotheistic religions, as we shall see in a moment, are also a precarious affair. The meditative religions of the East, on the other hand, most prominently Buddhism, enjoy great popularity and respect – which does not, admittedly, tell us whether the sympathizers have any desire to become practising members of their preferred cults.
Thus Lessing and his source Boccaccio, from whose Decameron the story is taken (as the third tale of the first day), must face the question of whether they are on the right track in their interpretation of symbols. Could it not be that both have succumbed to an illusion in their depiction of the ring's effects? Let us recall: Lessing has his judge state that only the ring with the power to makes its wearer agreeable to God and men can be the genuine ring. Nathan himself emphasizes that if all three ring-owners were to prove agreeable only to themselves, they would all be ‘deceived deceivers’ – the liberality of the eighteenth century already permitted such things to be said. Only the one who gained the approval of his fellow humans would have plausible evidence of truly being on the right path. In fact, the duty of altruism has been inseparable from the classical religions ever since the surrender of the ego and the devotion to a great or small Other came to be considered the sign of true faith. That would mean that God alone could decide whether a believer is agreeable to him. Lessing, however, takes a risk – albeit one strongly supported by the zeitgeist – and expands the jury deciding the success of religion by including people in it. But who can guarantee that the quality of being agreeable to God is the same as that of garnering approval among humans?
Ironically
In reality, no aspect expresses the essence of monotheism more
succinctly than the willingness of the zealots to be hated by their
fellow humans if that is how they can please God more. With his
carefree equation of ‘agreeable to God’ and ‘popular among people’,
Lessing was perhaps misled by early Enlightenment optimism, which
took the convergence of elite and mass interests for granted as a
natural result of progress. The actual development of modernity
paints a completely different picture: it deepens the divide between
high culture and mass culture with each new generation, making the
hatred of high culture, or at least the majority's suspicion towards it,
reveal itself ever more openly as a fundamental characteristic of
recent events in civilization. If one draws the logical conclusions
from this, one will understand why monotheism will one day be
forced to lay its high-cultural cards on the table – and if it does not
admit to its elitist streak, and indirectly also its polemogenic nature,
4
The religion of the exclusive One must then admit, as if at the last minute, what it was never supposed to say openly: that it would go against its very nature to be popular. Any kind of popularity it enjoys stems from sentimental misunderstandings – the most famous example is Chateaubriand's rousing promotion of the ‘genius of Christianity’. To him, the Romantic poet, even the strictest Catholic
sacraments seemed like ‘paintings full of poetry’,5 and he read the life stories of the saints as if they were the most fascinating novels. To balance out this idealized view, one should call to mind certain culture-historical principles: a monotheistic religion that defends the extent of its claims can only come to power and remain in power by forcing the masses implacably to yield to its norms – which is impossible without a clerical dictatorship (usually under the patronage of a sacred or semi-sacred monarchy). In such an order of things, gentle and less gentle methods are equally in evidence. A regime of this kind was firmly established in Europe from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century – and it took long, extremely hard battles from the start of the Modern Age on to break the ubiquitous power of the church. Since then, the only way for both religious and aesthetic ‘high culture’ to reach the emancipated masses has been to switch to the mode of inner mission and dream of the golden age of mediaeval dominion.
it risks having others do so for it.
The perspective of general cultural theory can help us to understand why the acceptance of monotheism by entire peoples and cultural circles has always required an extensive system of coercive methods. Once at the helm, a clericocracy stabilizes itself through the usual and inevitable ‘culture-political’ means: first and foremost, control of
education6 and an inquisitorial monitoring of orthodox obedience in all social strata. In addition to this, popular semi-Pagan compromises provide what is necessary to pacify the sensual needs of the masses. If high religion succeeds in converting the general antipathy towards them into rituals of admiration, this is the greatest possible achievement that lies within its means. A popular monotheism is a contradiction in terms.
In a corrected version of the ring parable, the father would have to order two completely identical new rings that would be tested practically for their power to make their wearer hated among people. Furthermore, the ring should convey to its wearer the certainty of his election. The bearer of the magic symbol, however, will receive the confirmation of his special status at no extra charge: the antipathy of the many, who play their role more or less reluctantly in the comedy of admiration, will show him beyond doubt that he has chosen the right path. In this experiment, the monotheistic religions would be freed from any considerations of wanting to please one's fellow human beings – they could devote themselves unreservedly to their main project, i. e. being pleasing to the transcendent God alone. Each of the three would be at liberty to present itself as the most perfect form of personal supremacism; and if there were no way around a coexistence with the two other versions of the one-god-cult, each religion would at least be free to claim the crown of hatefulness for itself.
The history of the existing monotheisms fits unmistakably into a more clearly contoured picture if one takes this second version of the ring parable as its secret script. Behind the façade of a dispute over metaphysical truth, these religions have de facto waged a bitter contest of noble hatefulness – each one having the others as its audience, whose predictably negative reactions confirm their own respective successes. Admittedly, the ranking of the contestants has clearly fluctuated throughout history. While Judaism seemed for centuries to be the sure winner, and had to tolerate corresponding
reactions on the part of the others, more recent history has seen dramatic changes of position – without a thorough examination of these, the spiritual and intellectual development of the West since the Renaissance is all but incomprehensible. When the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century turned their attention back to the fires of the holy inquisition and its learned instigators, Catholicism suddenly leapt far ahead: its apologists now seemed like shady characters, rising from the torture chambers of clerical absolutism and declaring terror the only way of forcing people towards salvation – one cannot help thinking of the figure of Naphta from Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, who was intended to embody a satirical synthesis of Jesuitism and Communism. In the course of the twentieth century there was, surprisingly, another change at the forefront of the field. Islam, usually noted here only for its more violent expressions, had seemingly taken leadership overnight – which at least testifies to its undiminished capacity for provocation. It is now followed at some distance by Christianity, which gambled away its chances of taking the title of the most unpopular religion through the highly successful sympathy offensives of recent decades. Far behind the rest of today's field lies Judaism, which is almost being overwhelmed by hordes of admirers from all camps.
It can be said of all forms of zealotic monotheism that they are inconceivable without the figure of the scoffer, the one who rejects salvation and resolutely refuses to participate in its cults – in a word, the shadowy figure of the unbeliever. Such monotheism has thus shown two faces from the outset. It not only sets itself apart aggressively from all other cults, but also makes the rejection it encounters through its non-participants one of its driving motives – or more than that: it pragmatically assumes from the start that it will be unacceptable for many. To use one of Luhmann's phrases: it speculates on rejection. In order to reap its profits, it relies on the schema of exclusion through inclusivity: thanks to this, it can state with a clear conscience that it was never the one to turn others away – on the contrary, those people isolated themselves by refusing to participate. It shares this tactic with all avant-garde movements, which cannot possibly consider themselves at the vanguard without the majority lagging behind. In this sense, monotheism is only
possible as a counter-religion in the first place, just as the avant- garde always constitutes a counter-culture. In fact, the development of a monotheistic position defined by the majority's resistance to it is constitutive, and without the constantly maintained awareness of the non-assimilable others, it would not be able to raise its internal tension to the necessary level. There can be no universalism without set-theoretical paradoxes: one can only invite everyone if one can be sure that not everyone will come.
The fully formed monotheistic cult stabilizes its metaphorical muscle tone by constantly reminding its followers of heresy within and the Pagan threat outside. Certainly it does not tire of invoking the virtue of humility before the Lord, but the sermon would be incomplete without the injunction that heathens and false teachers must be met with proud intransigence. If no real threat from without can be found, it can easily be replaced by imaginary sources of hatred. Without the daily state of emergency provoked by the temptations of the enemy, the high tension of religious life would rapidly decline into a state of ponderous non-aggression. Normally this field is characterized by the development of a two-enemy-economy that allows a back and forth between real and imaginary stressors. The highly current Islamic concept of a near and a remote enemy (in which the USA and Israel currently occupy the role of the external evil) is derived from this. Only Judaism managed largely without the devil, as it had the Egyptians and, after them, the Canaanites. These were followed by a long line of concrete oppressors, from the Babylonian kings to the German racists, who spared their victims the effort of merely imagining evil.
As a rule, however, one can always be sure of non-imaginary opponents, as the monotheistic provocation inevitably stirs a backlash among those provoked, sooner or later. There can be no Aten cult without the reaction of the Amun priesthood, no Judaism without the displeasure of the other peoples, no Christianity without the scepticism of the non-Christians, and no Islam without the unwillingness of the non-Muslims. Even in the early days of the Empire, educated Romans were so disturbed by the separatism of the Jews that they gave them the title ‘enemies of the human race’ (originally coined by Cicero to ostracize pirates). The young Hegel still noted, entirely conventionally: ‘A people who spurns all other
gods must carry the hatred of the entire human race in its heart. ’7 The two later monotheisms also provided their detractors with ample material for disapproval. In all cases, one can assume a co-evolution of thesis and antithesis. Here too, as is generally the case with over- determined and fed-back processes, reality seems to be dancing to the tune of the symbolic structure.
The consequences of these reflections for the trialogue of the monotheistic religions are obvious. At this point they need each other too much to fight any longer. In order to adjust from hostile coexistence to some kind of discussion, they must strike themselves from the list of ‘hate providers’, on which each has so far been the most important item for the others. This gesture is only conceivable on two conditions: either the moderately zealous monotheisms agree on a common foreign policy in relation to the non-monotheists – which would mean casting the role of the infidels with the indifferent (of which there is no lack in our times) in future, and replacing the heathens with the exponents of polytheisms, meditative cults and ethnic religions, whom one considers inferior from the outset. The advantage of this position for its defenders would be that of putting their rivalry on hold while still keeping universalist provocation alive: while shifting from mission to dialogue at the internal level, one could insist on expansion and spiritual priority at the external
8
level.
itself of the zealotic side of universalism and change into a non- zealous cultural religion – as has been the case in liberal Judaism since the eighteenth century, in the great majority of Protestant churches since the nineteenth century, and in the liberal manifestations of Roman Catholicism since the Second Vatican Council. There have been analogous developments in Islam, especially in Turkey since 1924, but also in the Western diaspora, where it is always advisable to present oneself as capable of dialogue. This option demands no more than a transition from militant universalism to a civilized ‘pretend’ universalism – a tiny shift that makes all the difference. One can recognize the incorrigible zealots because they would carry out such a change tactically, but never out of genuine conviction; that would mean giving up the privilege of radicality that alone satisfies their pride. Those who remain zealous to the end would rather die than be simply one party among others.
Or, to posit the second condition, each monotheism can divest
When the path of civilization is the only one still open, the transformation of the zealotic collectives into parties must be put on the agenda. If one says ‘parties’, that automatically means a competition between them. Amidst such competition, the candidates must at least sacrifice their claims to universal dominance, if they are not going to stop believing in the superiority of their convictions. At the same time, exposing oneself to comparisons implies an admission that human standards are binding at their own level. It is inevitable that the popularity criteria of everyday humanity will also apply once more, and – why not? – the rules of play in a mass culture fluctuating between sentimentality and cruelty. It is one thing to strive to please the zealous God; it is another matter when one is dealing with a rediscovered necessity to please the common people in spite of everything, always bearing in mind that zealous monotheisms are not generally to their taste.
This takes us back to the ring parable in its original version. On our excursion into the secret history of unpopularity, we have discovered motives to find out more precisely who that wise judge who finally assesses the results of the competition might be – a contest that will turn out to have been a double fight for both popularity and hatefulness. Lessing's information that the final test will be taken ‘after one thousand times one thousand years’ removes any reasonable doubt that he is thinking of a large-scale world trial. This would involve not only the apocalypse of guilty souls, but also a final judgement of the guilty religions. Although Lessing's first referee speaks discreetly of a future colleague who would have to know much more than he does – which seems to point to a human – it is absolutely clear that the figure of the second judge is intended to be equated with God. What God is he then referring to? Can the second judge in the ring parable really be the God of Abraham, who was supposedly also the God of Moses, the duo of Jesus and Paul, and the prophet Mohammed?
It must be permissible to doubt these identities in both directions – retrospectively, because equating Abraham's El with the YHWH of the Mosaic religion, the father of the Christian trinity and Mohammed's Allah cannot be more than a pious convention, or rather an echo effect that appears beneath the resonating domes of religious semantics – and prospectively, because the entire history of religion proves that, even within
monotheistic traditions, the later God retains only a very slight resemblance to the God of the early days.
This makes it uncertain whether God the judge can still be the ally of his earliest zealots at the moment of the final trial. Has he himself remained the zealous and jealous God? In the end, his benevolence towards his earlier partisans can no longer be unquestioningly assumed, as he has clearly moved beyond an immaturely wrathful phase. At the most, he would acknowledge extenuating circumstances – for his followers, and via this detour also for himself – by pardoning their zealotry as a transitional neurosis that served an evolutionary purpose. The first exponents of zealous mono-truth may genuinely have had legitimate motives for snubbing their fellow humans and burdening them with a fundamental opposition in the name of the totally other. For the cultural historian, it is certainly understandable why primitive monotheism had to attack both the natural and the cultural thusness of humans. Its task was to destroy their overly self-assured rooting in lineage, their trust in the world and love of images, and their life in a state of moral approximation, in order to confront them directly with the steep wall of the law. It is at this wall that the worldling nature fails – and it is supposed to, for the holy warriors firmly believe that worldly self-satisfaction as a whole must be destroyed. For any true zealot it is evident that humans can only be heathens at first, and forever if one leaves them alone – anima naturaliter pagana. Without a collision with the ‘true God’ and his demanding messenger, the most they will ever achieve are splendid vices. Hence one must never leave them alone, and should interrupt their habits whenever possible. As pre-monotheistic habits somehow always happen to be bad ones, the re-education of the human race became the order of the day after the monotheistic caesura. Then the following dictum applies: ‘The Lord disciplines those he loves’ (Proverbs 3:12 and Hebrews 12:6). Hegel still referred to this as ‘the higher standpoint that man is evil by nature, and evil
9
because he is natural’.
known in other contexts as the ‘symbolic order’, humans cannot, in the view of their monotheistic disciplinarians, become what they are supposed to. Robespierre's trend-setting dictum ‘whoever trembles is guilty’ is still very much in the spirit of this sublime pedagogy, where punishment is considered the honour of the blasphemer. In a related
Without the punitive resistance of the law,
sense, Kierkegaard would later instruct his readers that whoever wishes humans well must place obstacles in their path.
Everything else transpires from the duty of scandal. One has to admit that the followers of the One God have not made things easy for themselves in this respect. The offending peoples, the chosen, the baptized, the militant and, last but not least, the analysed, carried the burden of their task along with them and undertook the daring, but thankless, business of advancing spiritualization by unpopular methods. In their eyes, humans are creatures to whom one can only do justice by overtaxing them. They are creatures that only come to their senses when one demands more of them than simply what is customary among speaking apes.
Then, however, something happened that no old-style zealot could have reckoned with: once provoked, people suddenly began to learn more quickly than their provocateurs had believed possible. The European Renaissance marked the start of a cycle of new examinations of God and the world that points beyond the historical monotheisms. The thinkers of the century after the Reformation discovered the general of which monotheism was the particular. What we call the Enlightenment was, from a religion-historical perspective, no more or less than a rupture of the symbolic shells that had imprisoned the historical style of zealous universalisms. To put it as paradoxically as it appears: with its growing self-assurance, the Enlightenment not only broke away from the historically developed monotheisms; it in fact produced a higher-level monotheism in which various universal articles of faith attained dogmatic validity. These include the a-priori unity of the species, the indispensability of the state under the rule of law, the destiny of humans to control nature, solidarity with the disadvantaged and the disabling of natural selection for Homo sapiens. ‘Enlightenment’ is simply the popular name for the perpetual literary council in which these articles are discussed, fixed and defended against heretics.
Anyone looking for the prototype of the resulting fundamentalism will find it in Rousseau's sketch of a religion civile as expounded in his text on the social contract from 1758. It provided the most rigorous neo-monotheism with form and content – and its consequences were much more far-reaching than any of the first
Enlightenment thinkers could have foreseen. Its formulation constituted an admission that even post-Christian ‘society’ must be rooted in certain human moral intuitions. Whoever uses the world ‘society’ is implicitly also saying ‘social religion’. When Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Catholicism as the French state religion following the anti-Catholic excesses of the revolution, he de facto declared it the new civil religion, thus subjecting the ‘substantial truth of faith’ to an incurable functional irony. Since then, Christianity itself has been the substitute religion for Christianity.
But that was not all. In keeping with its highly active nature, the Enlightenment prepared its transition to post-monotheistic positions. It was inevitable that it would strike the item ‘God’ from its budget and fill the resulting vacancy with the ‘human being’. Even when it pushed ahead to atheism, however, its structure initially remained a copy of the monotheistic projects. Consequently it released an immanent zealotry that – because it was incapable of grace – even surpassed the religious variety in strictness, anger and violence. This escalation of fury for the greatest of human causes is what is meant when people refer to the historical sequence extending from Jacobin rule to the frenzy of Maoism as the age of ideologies. Ideologies in the strong sense of the word are movements that ape the form of zealous monotheism with atheistic world projects.
This enlightened para-monotheism set itself apart critically from the historical religions by revealing the general quality present in all concepts of God that conformed to the personal-supremacist type: the new movement undoubtedly argued most convincingly when it pointed to the fact that every one of the historical monotheisms was based on projections, and thus still constituted a cult of images: they invite people to enter into an imaginarily determined relationship with the Highest – even, and in fact especially, in cases where the absence of images in dealings with the supreme being had been of the utmost importance. In this sense Marx was right to claim that all critique is based on the critique of religion. The projective quality of the concept of God in the sphere of the subjectivist supremacisms is evident in the elementary observation that God, in spite of all bans on representation, is consistently understood as a person and addressed as the Lord. It is precisely the aniconic religions based on an avoidance of images, namely Judaism and Islam, that seem like
bastions of the most tenacious idolatry from this perspective. Just as Malevich's Black Square remains a picture even as a non-picture, the Black Person of monotheistic theologies is still a portrait as a non- portrait, and an idol even as a non-idol.
It is more important now than ever to beware of psychology, which tends to attribute even the greatest projects to small mechanisms in those carrying out the projection. In its view, the smaller element reveals the truth about the greater one. Monotheistic projects, on the other hand, express the fact that people, whether they like it or not, are inevitably always in a state of vertical tension. They not only want to elevate themselves to something greater, even the greatest; they are also enlisted, through spiritual experiences and evolutionary challenges, to assist events taking place on a higher level. Thus projects of this type exert an upward pull on humans, which is why they are damned to be superior to themselves (as Socrates explains in Plato's Republic) – even if they often do not know how to deal with this superiority.
The statement ‘man infinitely transcends man’ was already a product of the crisis that revealed the general aspect of the historical monotheisms. As soon as its principle was formulated with sufficient clarity, it could be detached from its traditional forms. From that point, further modification of the monotheistic programmes became the business of extra-religious agencies: one half of the formulating work was taken over by great politics, the other by great art. Now it was possible for people to come along and declare that politics is destiny – while others claimed the same for art. Since the dawn of Romanticism, great art has meant a transferral of the provoca-tion of humans to the eminent work by means of the law. Since the American Revolution, great politics has meant the entrance of monotheism into the age of its artificial stageability.
In its deep structure, Lessing's tale of indistinguishable copies is speaking about these very transitions. The story of the two duplicate rings does not simply contain the message that even wonderful things are artificially produced; it also communicates in a fairly blunt fashion that the question of authenticity is rendered trivial by the interest in effects. Only incorrigible fetishists are still interested in
originals and proofs of origin. In the world of currentness, however, effects are all that matter.
I now feel compelled to present a third version of the ring parable, despite having just returned to the original, where everyday human judgement is one of the decisive factors in the evaluation of the religions. This additional correction will now give the zealous party another chance to be heard. This time the people in question are zealots who fight against humanity for the sake of humanity – or to put it more precisely: in the name of the true human being of the future against the historically developed, misguided human being.
In this latest revision of the parable we hear of the production of a fourth ring, symbolizing a political atheism that will stop at nothing. This atheism claims it is fulfilling the truth of the three monotheisms by transferring them back to earth from heaven. It appears under the name of Communism, whose root communio evokes the synthesis of past peoples of God – Israel, the church and the ummah. The term itself implicitly expresses the new political universalism's objection to the historical folk traditions, which, from the perspective of avant- garde morality, merit only contempt: only people who are too stupid to become general producers, i. e. true human beings, carry their communal membership around with them like the flag of an organization. Similar ideas had been anticipated by Christianity and Islam. The new faith went further, propagating the thesis that it had shown the valid basis for every membership in God's community that was still possible among humans, with the international industrial proletariat at its centre as its miserable and creative elite. Consistently enough, Communism could – for a while – claim the advantage of being the ring that was far more than simply an identical replica of earlier rings. Its production could only be undertaken once interest in the older rings had begun to diminish due to new insights and the accompanying new hopes.
This brings us to Communism's strongest argument, which, when explicitly laid out, leads to the fiery centre of modern thought. Whoever acknowledges the possibility of fundamentally new insights is admitting something that older historical metaphysics would not have accepted at any price: that truth itself is subject to evolution, and that the succession of events is more than simply a random
sequence. It is in the nature of truth itself that it cannot be fully revealed from the start, but rather comes to light consecutively, bit by bit, as a cumulatively developed result of investigations that may never reach an end.
This reflection leads to a new definition of the sense of the revealed religions: holy scriptures of this type can only be legitimated as catastrophic interruptions or extreme accelerations of human research history. By supporting its case with the claim of a divine intervention in the investigations of humans, each becomes an organ of holy impatience. They express the sentiment that the truth is too important to wait for the research to be completed. As time- honoured as these religions may seem to us today, they are all early comers by nature; they set faith the tasks that the science of the time could not handle by itself.
The term ‘revelation’ itself makes this prematurity clear, as it contains a statement about the condition of human spirituality: it must show an adequate level of development to be receptive to a revelation of the monotheistic variety, but should still be in a sufficiently undeveloped state to require help from above. Indeed, all revelations would be superfluous if they did not convey something that the human spirit could not access on its own strength in the respective status quo. It is in this ‘not yet’ quality that the whole significance of the revealed religions lies. What they have in common is their quasi-putschist determination to break out of the openness of a life full of experimentation in order to jump ahead to the end of all attempts and errors. In terms of their status in the world process, the historical monotheisms can be understood as petrified interjections in the continuing sequence of experiences where experiment and apocalypse coincide. They draw their authority from the certainty with which they claim to be speaking from the perspective of the true end. They embody the attempt to anticipate, in the middle of the world experiment, the result of everything that can ever be achieved in a learning life – at least, in moral and eschatological terms. Their existence stands or falls with this risk; it is their sole source of legitimacy.
Thus the revealed religions tend not only towards a devaluation of everything so far understood and achieved to a more or less useless
prelude – this is the purpose of their sometimes fanatical anti-Pagan polemic (whose exaggerations later have to be corrected through retroactive retrievals of something supposedly devalued, but in fact often superior and indispensable – one need only think of Greek philosophy and the results of the pre-Christian and pre-Islamic sciences) – but additionally deny the possibility and inevitability of finding new truths, if these happen to produce results leading to revisions in the text of the holy scriptures. Such religions, as noted above, can therefore only be understood as vehicles of hastiness; and their evaluation hangs by the thread of how far it can be shown that there are anticipations which resist all attempts at revision – and that such anticipations form their substance. If there is a convincing justification for the theological profession in all religions, it is presumably only through an explanation of their true activity: it is their job to prevent the revelations from being rendered obsolete through later, newer events by constantly showing anew the undiminished currentness of aspects that are seemingly outdated. Only if the religious scholars can show plausibly how the holy texts in fact contain leaps into the realm of the absolutely final that one can partially catch up with, but never overtake, will they be able to assert their claims to truth.
This reflection leads to a slightly more technical reinterpretation of the concept of revelation. A reformulated notion of revelation provides an explicit basis for the relationship between what is revealed and the ongoing learning period of intelligent collectives. In process-logical terms, revelation means the elevation of a prejudgement to a final judgement. It combines a symbol from the relative sphere with the level of the absolute. Such an operation makes it necessary to replace the classical concept of eternity with that of absolute velocity. The term ‘revelation’ hence implies an acceleration of insight to absolute velocity. It postulates the synchronization of human insight with the transrapid intelligence of God. Only through this can prejudgements and final judgements coincide. A holy scripture would then simply be a vessel for conclusive and trustworthy statements through which all insights taking place at relative velocities would be overtaken. Even in so eminent a text, however, the few unovertakeable statements will inevitably be surrounded by numerous others that can potentially be
overtaken or have in fact been overtaken. The margin of difference between the strong and weak statements in a sacred body of text makes room for ways of adapting faith to the respective day and age.
Against this background, we can explain the philosophical meaning of the project known as Communism once again. In accordance with its dogmatic quality, it consisted in an abrogation of all earlier prophetic statements and their reformulation in a language of realism, where the latter was conceived in a dual sense – both as economic production, a metabolic exchange between humans and nature, and as political practice, as an appropriation of the humanly possible by real human beings. The expressions ‘real human being’ and ‘revolutionary’ now become synonymous. That would mean the baton of prophetism was handed from Moses to Jesus, from Jesus to Mohammed, and from Mohammed to Marx. Marx would have rejected the religious narrowness of his predecessors and sought to put an end to all mystified forms of revelation. He would have placed the truths of the religions on trial before the worldly sciences and proletarian passions. He would, like any fair judge, have allowed them to act as the ‘soul of a heartless world’, but nonetheless rejected the majority of their statements in order to replace them with a political practice that acted in favour of real human beings.
The fourth ring, then, can only indirectly be compared to the older ones. At most, one could say that the other three were melted down for its fabrication in order to take the best qualities from the moral substance of each. Its claim to superior validity is based on the thesis that its production no longer takes place under the law of religious projection, but rather due to an insight into the productive nature of humans. The prophet of the fourth ring postulated a world in which all people would become free producers of their own destiny, both as individuals and collectively.
It was precisely this expectation that had to remain essentially unfulfilled in the spheres of activity of the religions that have existed so far, as they always involved classes of people, the ones known as rulers, who prevented the vast majority of others, those known as the oppressed and exploited, from freely producing and appropriating their own selves. Ironically enough, the clerics of the three-ring religions, especially the extremely feudalized high clergy in
Christianity, were also among the oppressed classes, which meant that one could not expect any direct help from them in reaching the goal of general emancipation. Is that not why the Protestant Reformation revolted against the arrogance of the ruling Roman church? Did the theologian Martin Dibelius not see valid reasons, even in the middle of the twentieth century, to refer to the church as the ‘bodyguard of despotism and capitalism’? Understandably, depriving the exploitative clergy of its power must be declared a fundamental prerequisite for the realization of those prophecies through which the wearers of the fourth ring sought to make themselves agreeable to their fellow humans. In order to establish this ‘religion of man’ (to apply a phrase of Rousseau's reference to Communism), however, it became inevitable that the pleasant would be preceded by the terrible. Only one thing was certain for the zealots of humanity: as long as the lords of the older rings exercised their power over people's souls, human beings would not infinitely transcend the human, but rather fall infinitely short of themselves.
The Communists worked consistently on the development of an
anthropological supremacism of a resolutely anti-religious character.
In this undertaking it was allowed – in fact necessary – to blaspheme
the imaginary Highest in the name of the real highest. Each effective
blasphemy meant an overstepping of the ‘existing’ towards liberating
excess. This is the meaning of the ‘passion for the real’ (passion du
réel), which, according to a shrewd observation by Alain Badiou, was
10
the hallmark of the twentieth century.
of humanity, the movement through which human beings with a low standing could potentially attain the level of the highest human being was known as ‘revolution’. Because revolution constituted a translation of revelation into political practice, however, it shared its risk of excessive haste. It too, while still caught up in the experiment of creating wealth, ignored the question of whether the conditions were right and the means sufficiently tested and sought to force results that would be impossible to overtake at later stages of the world's development.
The rest of the story is well known. Within a few generations, after some successful conversions at the start, the fourth ring made its wearer the object of almost unconditional disgust without giving him any chance to make himself agreeable to God as a compensation. The
In the parlance of the zealots
hatefulness of what was done in the name of Communism was demonstrated to the extreme for judgement by all normal humans – and if one still occasionally encounters the opinion that the atrocities committed on the other side surpassed those of Communism, it is primarily because those in the corresponding circles refuse to accept the facts: with over 100 million lost lives, the degree of human extermination achieved in Communist systems is several times higher than that of Hitler's regime, which has – understandably – been given the title of absolute evil. The question arises whether a co- absolute evil should not have been added to the collective consciousness long ago.
For the majority of people at that time, it remained unclear to what extent the Soviet and Chinese dramas constituted a parody of religious history since the caesura on Mount Sinai. Moses' command ‘let every man kill his brother, his friend and his neighbour’ was obviously only followed on a grand scale by the ideologues of humanity in the twentieth century; one had to wait until the advent of monohumanism to witness the hubristic seeds of monotheism bloom. The lesson of this unprecedented episode would prove difficult to forget: if it is already precarious to make people feel enthusiasm for a God who demands too much of them, even if it is to their own advantage, then it is completely impossible to turn people into zealots of humanity beyond brief moments of hysteria – least of all by the methods with which the Russian and Chinese Communists sought to achieve their goals.
This brings us back to the original version of the ring parable a second time, and this time – if we are not very much mistaken – we shall stick to it once and for all. In the post-Communist situation, people began to understand that they could not avoid participating as jurors in the evaluation of the general religions and their political derivations. In the light of the catastrophe of Communism, it became necessary to pronounce judgement in the middle of the process, and the assessment of the zealots of humanity – like those of revelation and revolution – will inevitably run the risk of prematurity. The jury's verdict leaves no room for doubt: it abrogates the revolution, which was a step backwards, and chooses the lesser evils, namely the liberal state under the rule of law, democracy and capitalism. It is clear that this does not necessarily constitute any final, binding
result; but this intermediate status is significant in itself. As soon as
one accepts its validity, the process that will pave the way for any
possible inhabitable future can, in the shadow of past excesses, begin
once more: that of civilizatory learning towards an existence of all
human beings characterized by the universally imposed necessity of
11
As the rejection of the principles, methods and results of Communism reached a high level of general validity – aside from isolated cases of malign incorrigibility – the jurors could once more turn their attention to the project of civilizing humanity, which had lost momentum through the various instances of totalitarian haste. At the same time, it becomes evident to what extent the relative slowness and apparent triviality of the secular world design increase the general dissatisfaction within civilization. This provides the conventional religions with new recruits. More than a few of yesterday's protagonists who are now on the rise once again are noting with satisfaction that the days are past when it was thought that a critique of religion was the precondition for all critique. They relish the atmosphere in which the cessation of a critique of religion seems to be paving the way for the end of all critique.
This necessitates a sensitive distinction. If the historical religions have been improving their reputations again in certain respects, there are two completely different reasons for this, and their respective legitimacy runs very deep, even though they are mutually exclusive – I do not wish to say whether temporarily or permanently so. For the first group of interested parties, both traditional and synthesized religion are now once more – and will continue to be – what they have always been: a medium of self-care and a participation in a more general or higher life (functionally speaking: a programme for stabilizing the personal and regional-collective immune system by symbolic means). For the second circle, religion remains the guardian of unresolved moral provocations designed to develop each ordinary member of the species into the ‘general human being’ – though one should bear in mind that such classifications as Jew, Christian, Muslim, Communist or Übermensch offer partly problematic and partly false names for the ‘general human being’ (I shall leave aside the question of whether the
sharing a single planet.
‘general human being’ is itself a problematic or false name for the existential form of the competent individual in ‘world society’).
The post-Communist situation holds opportunities for both sides: for the members of the first group, because they can attend once more – undisturbed by the total influence of other collectives – to their personal integration, or, in more technical words: the regulation of their psychosemantic constitution; and for the members of the second group, because they are now free to pursue, under different conditions, the question of whether there might be a less hasty way to generalize forces of human freedom. One could also frame the riddle in the following terms: has Communism left behind a secret last will that still remains to be found and opened by subsequent
generations? 12 In fact, the problem associated here with the fourth ring continues to be the great mystery of our time. The production of the ‘general human being’ through the politics of haste undoubtedly failed; but this does not in any way make its opposite, namely a merely vital existence shrunken down to its bare minimum among people in the despiritualized zones of prosperity, acceptable. The new interest in the great religions can be attributed primarily to the fact that, since the self-renunciation of Communist and Socialist humanity politics, the traditional religious codes have been all that is available when people look for more comprehensive forms of communal consciousness – at least, for as long as there are no transculturally convincing formulations of a general theory of culture on offer.
We should note: the jury deciding on the success of the zealous religions is forced to accept in the course of its work that there is a grave lack of criteria for evaluating the exclusive universalisms, whether religious or worldly in their coding. In this way a programme of making all content explicit becomes the order of the day, enlisting the services of philosophy, theology, religious science and, above all, cultural theory. If it applies that people in the current phase of civilization are faced with the difficulty of having to reach temporarily final judgements on temporarily final results of historical learning, including the shortcuts to eternity that exist in the form of the revealed religions, one should at least facilitate the task through aids to judgement that correspond to the current state of art.
Owing to a malicious dialectic, these facilitating factors seem like hindrances. One can at least hold onto the ini-tial assumption that intellectual and spiritual tools such as Euclidean geometry, Aristotelian logic, the Ten Commandments and fasting in the month of Ramadan, which have endured millennia, contain something that, for better or for worse, can be considered final. As modules of truth for simple logical and moral situations, these norms cannot be overtaken. In a different sense, however, they have been constantly overtaken for some time – certainly not through simple disablement, but rather in the mode of integrating elementary aspects into more complex patterns. The development of non-Euclidean geometries, non-Aristotelian systems of logic and non-decalogical moralities shows clearly in what ways the world can still learn. Another item on this list would be non-Ramadanic dietary science, a discipline through which Muslim women in Turkey and elsewhere learn how to avoid the almost inescapable gain in weight resulting from the opulent feasts after sunset during the fasting month.
Notes
1
2 3
4
5
G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus’ [The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism] in Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. I: Frühe Schriften [Early Writings] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), p. 236.
Ibid.
Cf. Niklas Luhmann, ‘Grundwerte als Zivilreligion’ [Basic Values as Civil Religion] in Religion des Bürgers. Zivilreligion in Amerika und Europa [The Religion of the Middle Class. Civil Religion in America and Europe], ed. Heinz Kleger and Alois Müller (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2004), pp. 175–95.
Cf. Jan Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder Der Preis des Monotheismus [The Mosaic Distinction or The Price of Monotheism] (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 2003).
Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity or The Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion.
6
7
8
9
10 Alain Badiou, Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007 [original edition published in 2005]). The author weakens his case through grotesque errors of judgement, however, for example when he adopts the attitude of an unrepentant revolutionary priest and defends the mass killings instigated by Stalin and Mao. For a partial response to Badiou's book, cf. Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert? Unterwegs zu einer Kritik der extremistischen Vernunft’ [What Happened in the Twentieth Century? Towards a Critique of Extremist Reason], lecture given in Strasbourg on 3 March 2005.
11 Cf. Bruno Latour, ‘La Terre est enfin ronde’ [In the End, the Earth is Round] in Libération, 1 February 2007, p. 28, where the author takes up a word I have suggested, ‘monogëism’, and uses it to formulate a principle of reality for the global age. ‘Monogëism’ is a semi-satirical expression intended to point to both the premise and the result of terrestrial globalization, the nautical occupation
The civil religion of the French Revolution also sought to secure control of the hearts and minds of future generations. In his plans for republican institutions, Saint-Just wrote: ‘Children belong to their mother until the fifth year of their lives, and from then until death they belong to the Republic. ’ Quoted in Friedrich Sieburg, Robespierre the Incorruptible (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1938).
Hegel, ‘Entwürfe über Religion und Liebe’ [Sketches on Religion and Love] (1797/8) in Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. I, p. 243.