God's Zeal Read online

  The oldest and most enduring examples of how to return from the post-Adamite position to the humanly impossible monovalent language can be found in early monotheistic prophethood. This is no surprise, as the prophets claimed to express nothing more than God's view of the world, not their own personal opinions. The prophetic word begins interventionistically and ends absolutistically: it contradicts what specific people do or say in specific situations – yet it cannot be contradicted by anything, as it claims to come from a sphere devoid of reflection or second opinions. The word borrowed from the Highest, then conveyed by the speaker to the unjust prince or the misguided people, is no mere village gossip. It brings every debate to an end by saying what is and what should be. It appears to be critique – some modern theologians like to exalt prophecy as the source of social critique – but, as monovalence does not allow the critical word, any egalitarian debate or expression of opinion, it becomes the last word on the matter – not dramaturgically, before an audience, but rather eschatologically, before the Highest.

  Alphabetization takes care of the rest. The founding of great religions takes place, as has often been observed, on the boundary between medial galaxies. The classical prophets, from Moses to Mohammed, are located on the thresholds between regimes of cultural memory. Medially musical, they play upon two instruments while allowing themselves to be played upon from both sides. They look back into the universe of orality and make its legends and trances sound (‘speaking means playing with the other's body’, according to Alfred Tomatis); at the same time, they look ahead to scriptural culture and bring forth its hidden relationships between literality and truth. They testify to the pressure of coherence that increases through scripturality, and to everything else that accompanies the ‘advances in spirituality’ caused by alphabetization. The central concern, however, is that the great mediators themselves want to be viewed as living texts. What is a prophet if not a registered letter to humanity? He embodies a piece of writing whose receipt is often refused and which, once accepted, can usually not be read correctly by its first recipients. Not reading correctly: that means treating the undeniable text as if it were a debatable one, a text on which salvation depends like an everyday document. If a prophet is without honour in his own country, it is because nobody can believe that ‘one of us’ can change over to the realm of monovalence overnight.

  Describing Judaism, Christianity and Islam as prophetic religions means observing that they constitute three stages of God's inlibration – and if the book seemed for an aeon to have been assigned a metaphysical surplus value, this was not least because it could be seen as a vehicle for the absolute. One can consider the monotheisms pure religions of faith if faith refers to the internal operations through which believers act in relation to the inlibrated God. They are usually acts of inner collection to prepare one for the encounter with the overwhelming – and why not also with the disarmingly simple? Through faith, the infinite regress of doubt and a drifting in unbelief is stopped. It helps to secure a foundation from which all other thoughts and actions can ‘emanate’.12

  The paths of the believers diverge when it becomes time to decide whether the word of God is not only monovalent, but also monolingual, as Islam states in its doctrine of divine Qur'anic Arabic (and as, slightly further in the background, the Cabbalists also claim in their accounts of God experimenting with Hebrew letters during the creation), or whether monovalence and multilinguality can coexist, as Christians believe. In fact, the tale of Pentecost provides the latter with the paradigm of a multilingual and monovalent spiritual outpouring – which could justify an initial suspicion of intellectual and communicative superiority. They diverge even further faced with the question of how close God and humans, or the book and humans, are allowed to get to each other: while Jews and Muslims remove God to the realm of the incomparable and carefully allow humans to approach the book, Christianity created a transitive ménage à trois. Here the inlibration of God is replaced by his incarnation. Hence further transitions are pre-programmed, and their unfolding is only a matter of time and conjuncture.13

  In terms of its history and its subject, prophetism belongs to the category of personal supremacism. It calls upon its participants to submit completely to the word of the Lord; in the best case, this submission takes place in the mode of comprehending conformation. In Islam, God has the sole rights to the holy text, being its author (Mohammed acts as a radiant model of the pure medium); in Christianity they are transferred to Christ as the co-author (‘the eternal word of the father’); while Jewish scriptural scholars sometimes act as if the prophets had given notable interviews to which the rights, if they cannot be completely in the hands of the interviewer, should at least be divided equally among the partners. All variations show a clear hierarchical difference between the sender and the recipient. The pronouncements from above are received as revelations and preserved in sacredly guarded copies. They are read in a cultic context, and exegetes carry out their interpretations on their knees in constant fear of blasphemy. It was only with the reformers of the sixteenth century that laypersons were permitted to read the scriptures; the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries went further, making it possible to profane them with impunity by securing the freedom to engage in non-cultic, even critical, interpretation.

  Objective or ontological supremacism, on the other hand, cannot possess any holy scriptures for internal reasons. It points quietly to the library of classics, whose statements remain within the sphere of the debatable, even when dealing with first and last things. If one were to give individual authors, for example Plato, such epithets as ‘the divine’, this would display a mixture of effusiveness and calculation. When it comes to philosophers, one tends to be closer friends with the truth than with the author who formulated it. Pure being is certainly nothing that can be blasphemed – which is why someone who desires to mock it need not fear any reprisals: to those in the know, it is obvious that ignorance is its own punishment. A double penalty would be beneath philosophy (to say nothing of the infamy of asymmetrical punishment in the zealotic religions, which like to repay finite offences with infinite penitential suffering). The ascent to monovalence occurs here with the calmness that is native to positivism as a whole. Its mantra: ‘it is what it is’14 – for, may Erich Fried forgive us, it is not love that says this, but rather a wisdom undistorted by a desire for anything different. It views things as it finds them, and lets them be what they are for the meantime – the question of how they are altered will arise soon enough. Ontological positivism moves effortlessly from each corner of what is into silence. The highest, to which this silence refers, is the whole, as it is for itself when there are no subjective, negative or reflexive impulses to distort it. The substance is always what it is – the good, which presents itself in sublime neutrality, or the perfect, which we encounter in the guise of the ordinary. Not forgetting that even a grain of sand is what it is, because, on its own level and in its own way, it participates in the convergence of being and being good.

  Above all else, however, substance is discreet. It does not demand the christening of children and advises against book burnings. It would send pilgrims home, as Santiago, Lourdes or Mecca cannot be any closer to it than any other point in space. There is, as mentioned above, no known bible of objective supremacism. If there were such a thing, it would be substance itself in written form; but how can one conceive of writing, this supplement to a supplement to a supplement, in such an essential role – this near-nothing of ink, which fixes a near-nothing of sound, which is turn articulates a near-nothing made from aspects of consciousness through modulations of the air? The answers to these questions are to be found primarily among the Hegelians, who, for their project of developing substance as subject, can use anything that helps to dissolve the block of being into subtler relationships.

  In the thinking of being, it is this last thought that is the most dangerous. The substance of the philosophers does not become a
curse for those who dissect or ignore it; it only sucks in those who have understood enough about it to seek absolute immersion in it. Ontological extremism becomes attractive for the spirited, the nervous, whose constitution reduces their chances of finding peace in being. It is the most pathos-laden and contemplative searchers who espouse an apathetic, unreflexive substance most ardently. They have the loftiest ideas about the block of silence, which they want to resemble yet are so unlike. In their reflexivity and agitation, they take themselves for the blemish that taints being. Finally, they seek to combat the disturbance of the substance's peace within them by eliminating the subject that is in the way – namely themselves. These martyrs of ontology want to pull off the trick of dissolving the non-idiocy of the human condition in the idiocy of pure being. If philosophy has its own form of piety, it is found in such sacrifices. Heidegger's well-known statement against the god of the philosophers – namely that, being the fetish of the self-spawning substance, it is a god to whom one cannot pray – omits the possibility of dissolving oneself in this very god.15 It is furthermore, with all due respect, an objection of limited wisdom, for the feeling of belonging to a great whole and the anticipation of returning to it are the natural prayer of contemplative intelligence.

  It is telling that India has not only provided a home for the most radical holy fools, but also been a fertile environment for the most extreme ontologies since time immemorial. The ones found in Greece were only ever the shallower varieties, as the Greeks – like Mediterraneans in general, if such blanket statements are permitted – have little talent for extremism. Only Empedocles, the yogi among the Hellenes, strove for an enlightened suicide – not without making sure, in an act of effect-aesthetic alertness, that his sandal, left behind in the crater of Mount Etna, would provide evidence of the all-signifying leap into being. The European sceptics did not fail to note that piece of footwear left behind at the moment of the holy marriage of subject and substance – and this doubt was still alive centuries later, when Brecht glossed the account of the sandal trick with suspicion; even later, Bazon Brock suggested re-enacting it by means of a disclosive performance. What is being if it leaves such a blatant remainder? It would take aeons to find an adequate answer – it can be calculated by adding the remainder to the whole. This operation deprives being of its supposed simplicity – it now transpires as the non-one, cleft by nothingness, a more-than-whole and simultaneously less-than-whole. From this moment on, its primitive monovalence is a thing of the past. Such concepts were to be reserved for late periods, however – times in which people would say of God that he was not even one with himself, and had thus given up his transcendental reserve and opted for finitude and the capacity for suffering. It was only with the Christologists of the twentieth century that such thoughts could be uttered – by scholars who made no secret of their conviction that God, being entirely of the world beyond, could only profit from becoming human. From the fifth century BC, however, the philosophers in the Hellenic hemisphere pursued careers as educators, orators and moral trainers in the name of the well-ordered essential cosmos. Despite Plato's melancholy and Aristotle's sourness, none were ever allowed to question their status as worldlings.

  The Indian ontologies, by contrast, branched out early on into highly divergent schools, each of which produced its own self-effacement artists. It became apparent that Greek thinking too was not without extremist potential when non-Greeks intervened – such as the African Plotinus and his followers. These were followed by the post-Greek zealots, especially Christian theologians and Arab metaphysicians, whose reception of the supremacism of being and spirit served its fusion with the religiously established supremacism of service to a personal god. This constellation has been referred to as the encounter of Athens and Jerusalem or the gradual Hellenization of Christianity – often without taking into account that, for centuries, the encounter of Athens and Mecca, or, more generally speaking, an urbanization of Islam through Greek theory, had been no less of an issue. Combining different procedures of effacement was the order of the day for the cultivated zealots of the time – they searched for ways to co-ordinate self-dissolution in being or spirit with self-consumption in service to the Lord. It should be noted that these dialogues between cities are among the most influential in earlier intellectual history. The summit meetings of the self-effacers spawned hybrid extremists who combined several supreme authorities. They led to waves of new recruits – first for the monastic orders of Egypt, Syria and Old Europe, then for the crusaders who renounced their selves for Jerusalem, and finally for the early modern partisans of the imitatio Christi, who have been described as mystics. Their contemporary descendants have been satirized by Bazon Brock as ‘God-seeker gangs’ in his critique of art religion. They embody the organized form of an unwillingness to count to three.

  Notes

  1 For critical positions, cf. Detlev B. Linke, Religion als Risiko. Geist, Glaube und Gehirn [Religion As Risk. Spirit, Faith and the Brain] (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2003); Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes; Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili and Vince Rause, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001); Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin.

  2 Erik Peterson, Theologische Traktate [Theological Treatises] (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1951).

  3 Cf. Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft, p. 160.

  4 A late example of monotheistic symbolism was provided in December 2006 by the forty-six ‘conservative’ members of the Polish parliament who applied for Christ to be declared King of Poland.

  5 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Act III, scene 7.

  6 Karlheinz Deschner, Opus Diaboli. Fünfzehn unversöhnliche Essays über die Arbeit im Weinberg des Herrn [Fifteen Inconciliatory Essays on Work in the Lord's Vineyard] (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2001), p. 173.

  7 As already stated, however, one should not attribute the zeal for God's cause primarily to psychodynamic sources – for example the compulsion to gain the attention of a busy father, a common phenomenon among the over-abundant sons of families with many children. The zealotic disposition can ultimately only be understood with reference to the matrix of personal supremacism, which encourages the intensification of service to its extreme of its own accord.

  8 This observation contrasts starkly with the attempts among Catholic theologians and philosophers to prove – against Pascal – that the god of the philosophers was identical to that of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Cf. Robert Spaemann, Das unsterbliche Gerücht. Die Frage nach Gott und die Täuschung der Moderne [The Immortal Rumour. The Question of God and the Deception of Modernity] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007), pp. 13f.

  9 Hence the obsession among theologians from Philo to Augustine with Exodus 3:14, whereas early rabbinical literature shows a complete lack of interest in the ehyeh asher ehyeh. Cf. Bloom, Jesus and Jahweh, pp. 73f.

  10 Cf. Kurt Flasch, ‘Meister Eckhart – Versuch, ihn aus dem mystischen Strom zu retten’ [An Attempt to Save Him from the Mystical Maelstrom] in Gnosis und Mystik in der Geschichte der Philosophie [Gnosis and Mysticism in the History of Philosophy], ed. Peter Koslowski (Darmstadt, 1988), pp. 94ff.; also Flasch, Meister Eckhart. Die Geburt der ‘Deutschen Mystik’ aus dem Geist der arabischen Philosophie [The Birth of ‘German Mysticism’ from the Spirit of Arab Philosophy] (Munich, 2006).

  11 Dante, Monarchia, I, 14.

  12 Translator's note: there is an ambiguity in the original – encouraged by the quotation marks – through the use of the word ausgehen, which can mean both ‘to emanate’ and ‘to (pre)suppose’.

  13 In this matrix there are six possible messages: rejoice, for God has become man; God has become the book; man has become God; man has become the book; the book has become God; the book has become man. The use of this field for alternative gospels is to be expected, especially if one takes into account that ‘book’ can be replaced with ‘machine’.

  14 From Erich Fried's poem ‘Was es ist’: ‘Es ist Unsinn
/ sagt die Vernunft / Es ist, was es ist / sagt die Liebe' [It is nonsense / says reason / It is what it is / says love’]: Erich Fried, ‘Es ist was es ist.’ Liebesgedichte, Angstgedichte, Zorngedichte [Love Poems, Fear Poems, Anger Poems] (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1996).

  15 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  6

  The pharmaka

  If we glance back from this point in our reflections to the alarm signal provided at the start by Derrida's sudden thesis (‘The war over the “appropriation of Jerusalem” is today's world war. It is taking place everywhere …’1), it becomes apparent that the warning sign and the danger spot do not go together. The phrase ‘world war’ evokes misleading associations – as if three monotheistic army columns were marching towards Jerusalem, each determined to conquer the city for one flag, one book and one credo. But the fact that Christians are no longer interested in possessing Jerusalem already invalidates this notion – even Catholics now side with Hegel in his statement that an empty grave holds nothing in store for Christians except inevitable disappointment. The religious power with the most followers does not come into the equation, then, in the supposed battle over Jerusalem (the presence in the holy city of the monotheisms of a few Christian Zionists who want to be in the front row when Christ returns is of purely anecdotal value), and it is questionable whether a world war without Christians is worthy of such a bombastic title. Profanely speaking, the reality is that Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over the capital city of a real and a virtual state. Religiously speaking, Jews and Muslims are fighting over control of various holy sites: roughly million people on one side and by now a similar number on the other, together amounting to barely more than half the population of Tokyo or Mexico City. One could only speak of a ‘world war’ with a large dose of metaphorical freedom – or if one wished to propose that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a façade concealing an all-consuming intra-Arab and intra-Islamic civil war that, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world, has so far claimed some 10 million lives and may possibly cost several times as many before it is over, if the dark predictions of Middle East military experts and demographers prove accurate. But that is a matter for a different discussion.