God's Zeal Read online

  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 sharing a single planet.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 ‘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 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.

  2 Ibid.

  3 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.

  4 Cf. Jan Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder Der Preis des Monotheismus [The Mosaic Distinction or The Price of Monotheism] (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 2003).

  5 Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity or The Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion.

  6 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).

  7 Hegel, ‘Entwürfe über Religion und Liebe’ [Sketches on Religion and Love] (1797/8) in Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. I, p. 243.

  8 Elements of a similar historical compromise form the basis for the entente cordiale between Habermas and Ratzinger, which is only surprising to those who fail to see that present Catholicism and the civil-religiously committed second incarnation of Critical Theory cultivate the same bogeymen.

  9 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion II. Vorlesungen über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes [Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion II. L
ectures on the Proofs of God's Existence] in Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. XVII, section entitled ‘Die Bestimmung des Menschen’ [The Destiny of Man], p. 253.

  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 of the earth by the Europeans. (Cf. [Sloterdijk] Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals, p. 252.) Without the seafarers' faith in a navigable earth, the world in its modern system could not have been established. The expression states that the mere fact of the number one is absolutely binding with reference to the earth, while remaining problematic with reference to God – whose numerical value fluctuates between zero and one, even extending to three and the symbol for many. This means that, compared to monotheism, monogëism constitutes a more stable cognitive object.

  12 Boris Groys, Das kommunistische Postskriptum (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).

  8

  After-zeal1

  Following the collapse of Communism, the question of monotheism remained unresolved. Instead of leaving it behind, forgotten, the implosion of the movement treated here as the fourth manifestation of militant universalism in fact redirected attention to the historical monotheisms – which, more or less discreetly, used the situation to their advantage. At the same time, it laid the foundations for a new series of religion-critical investigations whose significance has gone largely unnoticed by the wider audience. These provide a contrast to the ubiquitous theories about the ‘return of religion’. They also address once more (following the interrupted attempts at a critique of fanaticism in the eighteenth century) the polemogenic effects of monotheistic zealotry, the intolerance and hatred of otherness as such, with a suitably fundamental and comprehensive approach. The gravity of the debate stems from the now widely justified suspicion that the acts of violence carried out by the followers of Christianity and Islam were not mere distortions, falsifications of the true nature of essentially benign religious doctrines, but rather manifestations of a polemogenic potential that is inseparable from their existence.

  In this situation, the cultural sciences are attracting attention once again. With his sensational books Moses der Ägypter and Die mosaische Unterscheidung,2 the Egyptologist Jan Assmann not only initiated a vigorous world-wide debate on the psychohistorical costs of monopolistic claims to truth in post-Mosaic religious developments, but also provided general religious and cultural science with a new, hermeneutically powerful concept in the form of his idea of ‘counter-religion’. But it seems that Assmann, in keeping with the idiosyncratic nature of his themes, only connected a part of his term's possible semantic content to the present. First he presents the monotheistic Aten cult, founded in the fourteenth century BC by the Pharaoh Akhenaten, as the first example of an explicit counter-religion; then he advances and supports the fascinating argument that this episodic prototype was followed, in the form of Mosaic monotheism, by the first model of a counter-religion that stood the test of time – at a high price for its carrier people, as we know. It is in the elusive nature of the subject that the connections between the Akhenatic prelude and the act of Moses cannot be disentangled entirely. In order to shed more light on them, cultural science must show its worth as the art of indirect proof and operate in a twilight zone between histories of effect, motive and memory. Particular complications arise from the chronological circumstances, which now make it difficult to endorse wholeheartedly Sigmund Freud's speculative identification of Moses with a priest of the Aten religion. The virtuosity with which Assmann carried out his task made no small contribution to sensitizing contemporary reflections on the stability of different cultures anew to the questions raised by political theology.

  The high level of argumentation and the variety of perspectives evident in the answers provoked by Assmann's venture convey a clear message. They prove no less than the fact that the disciplines of ancient history are in the process of regaining the culture-political pathos lost since the decline of the humanist educational paradigm and the marginalization of classical studies after 1945. While the European battle of cultures known as the Renaissance, however, which lasted from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, was fought mainly on the front between returning Greek culture and fading Christian culture, it is an older, more radical and more complicated front between Egyptian and Jewish culture that is becoming visible once more today.

  Assmann's intervention describes and supports a paradigm shift that led to a change of emphasis from a Hellenocentric to an Egyptocentric renaissance. As a renaissance constitutes a polemical form of cultural comparison that takes place not only in the fields of philology, epistemology and art, but also, and especially, as a competition between the old and new schools of theology, it is quite understandable if such a declared ‘rebirth’ creates a very strong critical tension. A phenomenon of this kind can only ever assert its own value at the expense of the host cultures. The idea of something old being reborn implies a demand for a right of return for exiled and forgotten ideas, arts and virtues – a right that can only be asserted and granted if the later culture's claim to being more complete in every respect can be challenged with convincing arguments. This occurred in exemplary fashion in fourteenth-century Europe, when philologists, artists, engineers and scientists of the burgeoning Modern Age united to defend the right of the Greek scientific cultures and arts to be renewed against the inadequacies of Christian world knowledge and artistic skill. The partisanship of innumerable scholars and artists for the ancient ideas' right of return resulted in the civilization of modern Europe, which owes its wealth primarily to its bipolar disposition as a dual culture based on Judeo-Christian and Hellenic-humanist sources.

  In analogy to the events beginning in fourteenth-century Europe, we must ask today whether the conditions are given for an import of ideas from an even more remote antiquity, and, if so, what these are. One would have to establish to what extent Egyptian motifs would be considered significant – as Assmann suggests with his liberal ethical flair and comprehensive erudition. In order to answer this question, we must examine the concept of counter-religion and its still only partly explored consequences. Even in Assmann's argumentation, it does not simply serve as an ad hoc characterization of the caesura that suddenly imposed itself on the world of ancient polytheisms – first through the Akhenaten disaster, then through Mosaic Judaism. Rather, it identifies a historically influential type of polemically zealotic religions whose effects are still making their partly beneficial, partly destructive virulence felt today. An evaluation of these is indispensable if one wishes to investigate whether an authentic Renaissance motif actually supports the older religious formations abolished by the counter-religions.

  In this context we shall now shift our attention from the anti-Egyptian, anti-Canaanite and anti-Babylonian counter-religion of the Jews to the multiple counter-religion of the Christians, which combined anti-Roman, anti-Hellenic, anti-Jewish and anti-Pagan qualities. It will also be directed at the counter-religion of the Muslims, which primarily unified anti-polytheistic, but also partly anti-Christian and anti-Jewish motifs of protest. In addition, the bourgeois Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, specifically in the zealotic strand
s of the French Revolution with their totalitarian cult of reason and virtue, displayed unmistakably counter-religious traits, in some cases with a fanatical, anti-Catholic and anti-feudal direction. Nor is there any doubt that the militant atheism of the Communist movement showed all the hallmarks of a zealotic counter-religion based on a rejection of most previous cultural traditions. It was above all the ‘bourgeoisie’ that now became the heathendom of Communism. Even the fascist movements episodically presented themselves as nationalist-apocalyptic counter-religions, with an anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-capitalist zealotry setting the tone. This means that substantial parts of occidental religious and intellectual history were commensurate with the campaigns of the counter-religions, whose cross-party banner is always found in that combination of combativeness and claim to truth which naturally stimulates intolerance.

  I think that the problem I am, following Assmann's suggestions, hinting at here, with the catchword of a renaissance under the sign of Egypt, is sufficiently clearly defined for a provisional understanding. It implies a cultural comparison in which the cultures of intolerance in the Middle East and Europe would have to deal with the right of return of a forgotten and suppressed culture of tolerance of an Egyptian (potentially also a Mediterranean or Indian) type – not only in ethical terms, but also at the level of ontology and cosmology. Assmann has suggested the expression ‘cosmotheism’ for this complex that is capable of a virtual renaissance (or at least needs to be remembered). It denotes a religious world design that, owing to its internal qualities, especially the principle of multiple representations of the Highest, prevents the inception of one-sided zealotic reductions.