God's Zeal Read online

  Naturally it would be unfounded to speak of a rebirth of the Egyptian gods today, either literally or metaphorically – in any case, the necessary conditions for the conceptual and experiential form of world-godliness are no longer given. On the whole, a serious return to polytheistic standards in the ancient style is not on anyone's agenda. What could develop under the heading of ‘Egypt’, however, is an active remembrance of a lighter religious climate in which the poison of declarations of enmity towards alternative cults, in particular the image-worshipping religions, had not yet filtered through to the rest of society.

  One could very reasonably voice the objection that what I have here described as an Egyptocentric renaissance has, in fact, long since taken place. And indeed, the rebirth of antiquity among Europeans has not stopped at the revival of Greek and Roman patterns. Almost from the start, Egyptian paradigms also attracted the attention of European scholars, who had wanted to learn a second language to meet their metaphysical needs since the end of the Middle Ages. Their fascination with the Nile culture reached such a high level that no cultural history of the Modern Age was considered complete without an appropriately detailed consideration of the universe of hieroglyphophiles, Egyptosophers and Pharaonomaniacs. The Masonic Enlightenment in particular often fell back on Egyptian motifs to satisfy its need for symbols, which it used to flesh out a post-Christian religion of reason and tolerance.3 The decisive aspect of these re-animations was not their exotic decor, but rather the prospect of an old-new paradigm of wisdom that would destroy the foundations for religious fanaticism of an exclusive monotheistic variety.

  Ironically enough, the pinnacle of the liberal and cosmophile renaissance manifested itself in neither the language of Egypticism nor that of Hellenism. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who, with his didactic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5), drew the religion-philosophical conclusions from the modern critique of intolerance. In this work – which he himself described as a sort of ‘fifth “Gospel” ’4 – he not only summed up a movement in the European history of ideas that has long been referred to as the ‘renaissance of Zoroaster’;5 he also provided the first pattern for a fully formulated counter-counter-religion. This marked the beginning of the era of enlightened counter-zeal best characterized as after-zeal. Its central article of faith is the overcoming of binary or dualistic schematicism, which, as described above, holds the logical premise for all monotheistically inclined zealotry. The choice of the figure of Zarathustra as the mouthpiece of a post-monotheistic culture of wisdom expresses Nietzsche's idea that the first dualist is more qualified than anyone else to present the post-dualistic position – the one who errs first has the longest time to correct himself.

  This is why Nietzsche was thinking less of the Mosaic than the Zarathustrian distinction – otherwise he would have had to entitle his counter-counter-religious manifesto of emancipation Thus Spoke Moses. The new Zarathustra was also meant to speak for a new Moses. Using the voice of the great Persian – who was once considered a contemporary of the Jewish leader – Nietzsche conceived a culture-therapeutic programme intended to put an end to the metaphysical misuse of the numbers one and two. In a fully developed form, Nietzsche's intervention in classical metaphysics and the ideology of the one ruler would have led to a pluralistically intended critique of perspectival reason – a few chapters have survived under the title Der Wille zur Macht, but these are barely more than sketches. In Nietzsche's case, the logical clarification of fundamentals is accompanied by a strong psychohygienic project devoted to the erosion of the resentment that leads to metaphysics. This includes the deconstruction of the obsession with the beyond, as well as every kind of Hinterweltlerdom, i.e. insistence on a world behind our own, whose price is the betrayal of real worldly life. The author invested his best civilization-critical energies in this project, seeking to prove the statement that the philosopher is the doctor of culture.

  Nietzsche's critique of resentment is based on an argument that draws on the psychological Enlightenment via the notion of affective displacement. In his diagnosis, the author sees in all forms of metaphysical-religious zealotry a crypto-suicidal urge towards a world beyond in which, understandably enough, all those who failed to cope with the facts of their earthly lives hope to be granted success. Viewed from its vital and energetic side, then, zealotry is defined as a pathological symptom. When the upward glance turns into a malign fixation on the beyond, it is nihilism that lies behind the mask of religious idealism – that is to say, the compulsion to pass devaluation on to others. The name of God is then revealed as the pretext for a desire for extermination that is transferred from the inside to the outside. In its attempt to be rid of itself, the afflicted soul also seeks to prevent the world around it from continuing to exist.

  Against this background, it is necessary to make a diagnostically important distinction: it makes a great difference whether one is dealing with the conventional, mild and chronic forms of world-sickness, which are embodied in convivial people's churches and can be reconciled with the joys of longevity, even a certain secularism – as has always been evident in traditional Italian Catholicism –, or rather its acute manifestations, whose followers wish to force a final decision for the good and the otherworldly. One example of the latter would be the highly active Protestant ‘Doomsday sects’ in the USA and their partners in the pop-culturally inflamed areas of Islamic apocalyptic thought. In such cases, the comfortable metaphysics of remembrance becomes a draft call to the holy war. Uplifting meditation is replaced by bitter activism, and religious patience with one's own imperfections and those of others gives way to zealotry in a messianic and apocalyptic setting.

  For Nietzsche, such dramatizations are no more than high-flown pretexts spawned by the morbid impatience to break with reality as soon as possible; they act to fuel the suicidal fires. The apocalyptic scripts for the last days of humanity show quite clearly how suicidal and globalicidal dynamics overlap: they constitute a theatrical development of the secundum non datur.6 Once one has driven into the apocalyptic tunnel, the horizon is lost, and with it at once the feeling of sharing in an environment that can be shaped. At such high levels of estrangement, any trace of responsibility for the existing world disappears. From that point on, all that counts is the hypnosis through which the activists prepare themselves for the end in holy black. With reference to these monomythical reductions, Zarathustra's approach is as current as ever. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a time stirred up by new religious turbulence, his warning to remain faithful to the earth and send the tellers of otherworldly fairy tales to a doctor is even more relevant than it was at the end of the nineteenth.

  If one applies Nietzsche's observations to today's danger zones, however, it also becomes apparent that his diagnostic instruments, as valuable as they may be for purposes of historical analysis, only reach a small part of the total phenomena. Certainly the fury of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim apocalyptic zealots of our times conceals a religiously veiled weariness of the world and life. Just as there is an endgame schema known as ‘suicide by cop’ among desperate criminals, one would surely find the pattern ‘suicide by antichrist’ among more than a few apocalyptic warriors. The vast majority of the many millions standing in line at the entrance to the final tunnel do not show any symptoms of pre-suicidal morbidity, however, but rather those of a faux-religiously channelled build-up of anger. For the time being, the much-vaunted dialogue of religions can hardly exert any influence on such energies. Inter-religious dialogues would only show results if they induced each organized religion to keep its own apocalyptic house in order. Moderates will observe that their respective zealots and apocalyptic warriors are usually activists with only a brief training whose anger, resentment, ambition and search for reasons to be outraged precede actual faith. The religious code exclusively serves the textualization of a socially conditioned, existential rage that demands to be let out. Only very rarely will it be possible to restrain it through religious exhortati
ons.

  What seems to be a new religious question is in fact the return of the social question on a global biopolitical level. Neither a better religion nor the best intentions can achieve anything here – as those Europeans who recall the often messianically dressed-up political troubles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should know. The tools of the moment are demographic enlightenment7 – as a critique of both the naïve and the strategic overproduction of humans – and an updated politics of development that also exports the secrets of the production and distribution of wealth to those countries previously inaccessible as a result of poverty, resentment and the machinations of perverse elites. The monotheisms know nothing about either of these – on the contrary, they are suspected of being counterproductive on all fronts.

  In such a situation it is the duty of the reasonable religions, those that have passed into their respective post-zealotic phases, to seek an alliance with secular civilization and its theoretical collections in the cultural sciences. Only this alliance can provide the forces that must be established and clarified in order to neutralize the apocalyptic directors. This requires the creation of symbolic terminals that give all parties in the monotheistic campaigns a feeling of victory. Only non-losers can pass through the arrival hall of history and subsequently find a role for themselves in the synchronized world. They alone will be prepared to take responsibility for tasks that can only be managed by grand coalitions.

  Globalization means that cultures civilize one another. The Day of Judgement leads into everyday work; the revelation becomes an environmental report and an assessment of the state of human rights. This brings us back to the leitmotif of these reflections, which is grounded in the ethos of general cultural science. I shall repeat it like a credo, and wish it the power to spread with tongues of fire: the path of civilization is the only one that is still open.

  Notes

  1 Translator's note: the original title ‘Nach-Eifer’ suggests a play on words. While the hyphenation sets it apart from the verb nacheifern, meaning ‘to emulate’, the choice of words implies that both a post-zealotic state and certain examples of emulation are meant here.

  2 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), as well as Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder Der Preis des Monotheismus.

  3 Jan Assmann, Die Zauberflöte. Oper und Mysterium (Munich: Hanser, 2005).

  4 Peter Sloterdijk, Über die Verbesserung der guten Nachricht. Nietzsches fünftes ‘Evangelium’ [On the Improvement of the Good News. Nietzsche's Fifth ‘Gospel’] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).

  5 Michael Stausberg, Faszination Zarathustra. Zoroaster und die Europäische Religionsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit [The Fascination of Zarathustra. Zoroaster and European Religious History in the Early Modern Age], 2 volumes (Berlin and NewYork: de Gruyter, 1998), vol. I, pp. 35–579.

  6 Cf. p. 96 above.

  7 Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht. Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen.

  Index

  Abraham

  absolutism

  Abu Mus'ab al Zarkawi

  activism

  Adam

  admission ceremonies

  after-life

  Allah

  alphabetization

  apocalyse

  Aquinas, Thomas

  Arendt, Hannah

  Aristotle

  Assman, Jan

  atheism

  Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus)

  Babylon

  Badiou, Alain

  Baeck, Leo

  being

  belief

  Ben-Chorin, Schalom

  blasphemy

  Bloom, Harold

  Brock, Bazon

  Byzantine Empire

  Camus, Albert

  Canaanites

  Celan, Paul

  Chateaubriand, François-René de

  Christianity

  expansionism

  and Greek culture

  internal schisms and counter-religion

  and Islam

  and Judaism

  and militancy

  and monolingualism

  and monotheism

  persecution

  popularity

  and ritual

  state religion

  and supremacy

  and universalism

  and violence

  and zealotry

  see also Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus); Reformation; Roman Catholicism

  civilization

  colour

  Communism

  compromise

  cosmotheism

  counter-religion

  cultural religion

  damnation

  Dante

  Dávila, Nicolás Gómez

  Dawkins, Richard

  death

  Debray, Régis

  Delacampagne, Christian

  depersonalization

  Derrida, Jacques

  Dibelius, Martin

  Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

  ego

  Egypt and Egyptians

  Enlightenment

  and Christianity

  and monotheism

  and zeal

  ethnocentrism

  evolution

  expansionism

  faith

  and belief

  and zealotry

  falsehood

  Flasch, Kurt

  French Revolution

  Freud, Sigmund

  Fried, Erich

  God

  Old Testament

  see also Allah; Trinity; Yahweh

  goodness

  Greeks

  Grunberger, Béla

  haste

  hatred

  Hegel, Georg

  Heidegger, Martin

  hermeneutics

  hierarchies

  high culture

  Holy Scriptures

  human rights

  humanism

  Hume, David

  humour, monotheistic

  hysteria

  Idealism, German

  idolatry/imagery

  Illich, Ivan

  immunity

  inaccessibility

  inhumanity

  inlibration

  intelligence

  Islam

  and Christianity

  and compromise

  as counter-religion

  and enemies/hatred

  expansionism

  influences

  and Judaism

  militancy

  and monolingualism

  and monotheism

  population growth

  and ritual

  schisms and sects

  and supremacy

  and universalism

  urbanism

  and zealotry

  Israel

  Jacobins

  Jerusalem

  Jesus

  jihad

  Judaism

  and Christianity

  and compromise

  and conflict

  as counter-religion

  and idolatry/imagery

  and Islam

  and monolingualism

  and monotheism

  and personal supremacism

  and ritual

  schisms and sects

  and zealotry

  judgement

  Judgement Day

  Kierkegaard, Søren

  Kissinger, Henry

  Kluge, Alexander

  language

  Latin

  law

  Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

  Lewis, Bernard

  logic

  McLuhan, Marshall

  Mann, Thomas

  Marx, Karl

  mass culture

  mathematics

  meditative religions

  memoactivity

  messianism

  militancy

  missionary work

  see also expansionismr />
  modernity

  Mohammed

  monogëism

  monolatry

  monotheism

  and Christianity

  and Enlightenment

  humour

  and Islam

  and Judaism

  and supremacism

  and zeal

  monovalence

  Mosebach, Martin

  Moses

  movements, slow

  Mühlmann, Heiner

  murder, mass

  Nazism

  negative theology

  Nietzsche, Friedrich

  nous

  obedience

  objectivity

  Old Testament (Tanach)

  onto-theology

  Otto, Rudolf

  Paganism

  para-monotheism

  passivity

  Paul of Tarsus (St Paul)

  letters

  perfectionism

  persecution

  Plato

  plurivalent thinking

  politics

  polytheism

  polyvalent thinking

  positivism

  power

  prayer

  predestination

  prophets and prophecy

  Protestantism

  purgatory

  Puritans

  Qur'an

  Qutb, Sayyid

  Ratzinger, Joseph

  reality

  reason

  Reformation

  revelation

  revolution

  Rilke, Rainer Maria

  ritual

  admission ceremonies

  and Christianity

  and Islam

  and Judaism

  Robespierre, Maximilien

  Roman Catholicism