God's Zeal Read online

  A third form of transcendence that is open to elucidation stems from a misunderstanding of what I call the ‘inaccessibility of the other’. I shall briefly illustrate what this means with an example from a classic work of modern literature. Towards the end of the second part of his novel tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers, written in 1934, Thomas Mann describes how Jacob, having received the news of his favourite son Joseph's alleged death, embarks on an excessive ritual of mourning: he perches himself on a rubbish heap in his courtyard, as Job later did, and hurls laments, accusations and protests at God and fate over endless days and weeks. Once the first wave of grief has subsided, Jacob realizes how improperly he has behaved – and now begins to see it as a great advantage that God did not react like some offended spouse or partner to everything he said in his heated state, rather choosing to conceal himself through remoteness; Thomas Mann speaks subtly of Jacob's provocative ‘impetuous misery’ [Elendsübermut], which God fortunately ignored ‘with silent tolerance’. Clearly one should first of all interpret God's calm non-reaction, which some theologians make quite some fuss about, in a more plausible fashion, both here and elsewhere. It is initially no more than a simple case of inaccessibility, and a number of substantial conditions would have to be met before one could conclude that someone who does not react is therefore a superior, indeed transcendent, other. If one were to tell a deaf-mute the story of one's life, one should not conclude from his silence that he prefers to keep his comments to himself. In such situations, transcendence arises from an over-interpretation of unresponsiveness. It results from the fact that some others are initially – and largely – unreachable, and therefore remain independent from us. Hence they lie outside of the fantasies of symmetry that determine our usual notions of reply, understanding, retaliation and the like. This discovery can lead to the formation of sensible relationships between people, relationships characterized by the hygiene of proper distance. The independence of the other is the stumbling block for any delusional search for partnership – this failure, however, constitutes a great step on the way to a freedom capable of relationships. The appropriate response to an encounter with an intelligence that remains free even in the act of co-operation is therefore gratitude for the independence of the other. So even if we are dealing here with a conception of transcendence marked by misjudgement, one should honour ‘God’ – in so far as this means the ultimate other – as a morally fruitful concept that attunes humans to dealing with an unmanipulable communicative counterpart.

  Finally, the development of an important part of immanently transferable transcendence can be traced back to an overlooking of immune functions. Immune systems are the embodiments of expectations of injury. At the biological level they manifest themselves in the ability to form antibodies, at the legal level in the form of procedures to compensate for injustice and aggression, at the magical level in the form of protective spells, at the religious level in the shape of rituals to overcome chaos – the latter show people how to carry on when, by human reckoning, there is no way forward. From a systemic point of view – and perceived through the prism of functional distortions – religions can be defined as psychosemantic institutions with a dual focus. On the one hand, they specialize in dealing with impairments of integrity and devote themselves, thus viewed, to a wide range of psycho- and socio-therapeutic causes. On the other hand, they serve to channel and encode the human talent for excess – a function that, since European Romanticism, has largely been handed over to the art system.

  At the centre of the first functional circle lies the need to give meaning to suffering, death, disorder and chance. This service, which combines the consolation of individuals with the ritual consolidation of groups, is often granted at the price of an unpredictable side effect: the edifying effects of religions are inevitably tied to ritualized speech acts, and thus attached to the level of symbolic generalization. Something that should function as a cure must simultaneously present itself as a symbolically structured conception of the world, i.e. as an ensemble of truths with claims to practical and theoretical validity. This contains the seed of a confusion of categories with virtually explosive consequences. It is the same as the temptation to elevate a pharmakon to the level of a deity. Because several symbolically stabilized immune systems normally exist alongside one another, all circulating their generalizations simultaneously, it is inevitable that these will question – or even, depending on the intensity of their respective claims to generality, partially or totally negate – one another. When there are collisions between such systems, the task of instilling edifying thoughts – or more generally, of imposing order on life by placing a frame around it – is combined with the need to be right. In order to do justice to conflicts of this type, one would have to imagine Prozac patients and Valium users accusing each other of heresy and warning of grave loss of health if the other does not convert to using the same medication. I have chosen the names of sedatives that, as we know, occasionally fail to achieve the desired effect and trigger manic states instead. The phenomenon known since St Paul's day as ‘faith’ has always been accompanied by a comparable risk. The welcome psychosemantic effects of religious conviction, namely the spiritual stabilization and social integration of believers, are tied to dangerous effects that correspond closely with the aforementioned manic reaction – since long before the beginning of monotheistic religions, one should add. One should therefore not take the well-documented fact that the formulation of the expansive monotheisms arose from their founders' states of manic-apocalyptic arousal lightly. The overlooking of the immune function here has a direct effect on the notion of truth. Whereas the pragmatic mentality contents itself with the belief that whatever helps is true, zealous behaviour insists on the axiom that truth is only to be found in a belief system which is entitled to demand universal subordination. Here the danger comes from the zealous tendency of a misunderstood claim to theoretical validity.

  The arguments mentioned thus far follow, of course, the tradition of David Hume's work The Natural History of Religion from 1757, though – unlike the early Enlightenment – they no longer reduce religious ideas merely to primitive ‘hopes and fears’. Certainly wishful thinking and affects of avoidance are still important factors, but they do not fully explain the religious phenomenon. The renovated version of the criticism of religion follows on from certain concepts in general cultural theory, which asks under what conditions cultural programmes achieve horizontal coherence, vertical capacity for continuation and personal internalization within a given populace. Thanks to its complex view, the new approach also permits detailed insights into the natural and social history of false conclusions. In contrast to the classics of the Enlightenment, the new descriptions of religious aspects sketched here do not explain certain manifestations of faith through natural human error; rather, they see them as surplus phenomena that chronically expose humans to an excess of uplifting and unifying energies. The updated natural history of religion falls back on an anthropology of overreaction; this permits an illumination of the evolution of Homo sapiens through a theory of luxuriating surplus drives within insulated groups.8 These surpluses would include those of consciousness that make human existence effusive or enigmatic. The concepts of surplus and overreaction do not only help to understand the energetic side of religious phenomena – they also shed light on the actual tenets of faith, as every single theopoesis is based on the universals of exaggeration.

  I shall also mention a fifth aspect of transcendence for which, in my opinion, there are no functionalist or naturalist substitute descriptions of a binding nature that can be brought into the debate. Some philosophical and religious authors have articulated the thought that one element of human intelligence is the ability to imagine another intelligence superior to itself. This uplift, even if it often takes place as a mere formality, carries intelligence beyond its normal level. It shows it that understanding itself properly depends on recognizing the vertical tension to which it is subject. It
is in this tension that it can grow – assuming it chooses the risk entailed by learning. Intelligence always lives within its internal surplus or deficit, and through the gesture of taking the higher pole as its model, intelligence declares its own peculiar form of transcendence. There is no need for us to concern ourselves with the variety of such gestures in the monotheistic religions (typically expressed as an insistence on studying the scriptures) and in classical philosophy (which equates suffering with learning) in the present context – it lives on in the world of books as the piety of eager readers.

  Taking into account people's responses to the provocation of thinking through the inevitability of death brings us into contact with a further irreducible aspect of religious behaviour. It is above all the topological aspect of the death question that opens the door to transcendence in an entirely different sense. Mortals – to use the Greek title for humans – have always been under pressure to imagine the place the departed have ‘gone to’, and to which they too will ‘migrate’ post mortem. It is undeni-able that this subject stimulates the imagination to bring forth remarkable fruits, as is particularly evident from the detailed depictions of places in the hereafter, of both paradisaic and infernal varieties – but the problem here goes far beyond a diagnostic observation of projective fantasies. One cannot create a simple continuum between the spatial and locative understanding of the living and their imaginary ideas of ‘places’ in the beyond. Therefore, the place of the dead remains transcendent in a sense of the word that requires clarification. It constitutes a heterotopic standard – if it expresses the belief that the dead are ‘dwelling’ in an elsewhere that eludes the alternatives of somewhere and nowhere. Tradition offers highly divergent encodings for this ‘xenolocative’ elsewhere, ranging from the phrase ‘with God’ to ‘in Nirvana’ or ‘in the memory of those who love’. As illustrative, ambiguous and vague as these characterizations may be, their obstinate peculiarity resists any hasty reductions to a trivial nowhere.

  Finally, I would like to mention a seventh meaning of transcendence that likewise cannot easily be disposed of in favour of a simple naturalistic explanation. It is coupled with the belief that a higher power beyond, usually known as ‘God’, turns its attention to individual humans in special moments – out of love, sympathy or outrage – and chooses them as recipients of messages that, following certain criteria of authentication, are interpreted as revelations. This is not the place to discuss the implications of the concept of revelation.9 The expression only takes on meaning in a mode of thinking – based on many presuppositions – that I have referred to elsewhere as the ‘metaphysics of the strong sender’.10 In this context, transcendence indicates the provenance of a message of life-altering significance to humans. The idea of revelation implies a rather dramatic scenario in which a ruler who is willing to communicate addresses himself to a group of recipients through dictates that are presents, or presents that are dictates, using selected media – prophets, lawmakers and holy superhumans – in order to convince them to accept his message. At a first reading, then, revelation means a message ‘from beyond’ that obliges its recipient to submit gratefully.

  Viewed from this perspective, the concept of revelation unmistakably belongs to the world of Homo hierarchicus. It sets up an analogy between the feudal relationship of lord and vassal and the cognitive relationship of object and subject, with a clear emphasis on the primacy of the lord and the object. According to this model, the receipt of a revelation corresponds to the extreme of vassalic passivity. It marks a case in which listening and obeying coincide; in other contexts one would speak of an offer that cannot be refused. It is immediately clear why this model loses its plausibility, both socially and epistemologically, in cultures characterized by devassalization. The notion of purely receptive subjects transpires as logically and empirically untenable. The subject could not reply to the angel of the object: ‘May it be as you have said’; on the contrary, it knows that it impresses its own ‘frame of possibilities’ upon all the objects it experiences. For this and other reasons, the idea of a revelation that can be dictated and passively accepted reaches a point of crisis. Whatever is made known to subjects, and whoever does so, it can no longer be conceived of without the contribution of its recipient. It remains to be seen whether, as some constructivists claim, this extends to the point of a primacy of the receptive side.

  The ‘turn towards the subject’ not only makes revelation depassivize itself – it also enables it to free itself increasingly from narrower religious contexts: it can no longer be restricted exclusively to the unique declaration of a transcendent sender, as in the case of a holy scripture – it now takes place at all times and in all places, firstly due to the openness of the world that ‘clears’11 itself, and secondly due to the forced disclosure of something previously concealed that is advanced by enlightenment and organized research. The facts of the science industry and artistic creation in modern times offer unambiguous proof that the era of merely received revelations has come to an end. The activist culture of rationality has seen the development of a strong antithesis to the passivism of ancient and mediaeval times that is waiting to be understood by the advocates of the older concept of revelation. The devotees of the old ways are faced with the task of acknowledging how gravely they have overestimated religious revelation as the key to the nature of all things, and underestimated the illumination of the world through awareness in life, science and art. This places theology under pressure to learn, as it must not allow the connection with the worldly knowledge of the other side to be broken. Without a certain convergence of the tenets of religious revelation and non-religious worldly illumination, the thoughts of the religious would be taken over by irrational arbitrariness. This is of direct relevance to the idea of ‘faith’, as the active aspect grows not only in comparison to the passive, but also relative to it, through progressive modernization – until it finally becomes clear how strongly the ‘will to faith’ asserts primacy over the gift of belief.12

  Space does not permit a development of the point that the permeation of religion through activist motives leads to a reformation – or likewise of the observation that the intellectual-historical figure of ‘counter-reformation’ comes into play whenever there is an attempt to re-enforce passivity. In this sense, a large portion of current mass culture, especially its horrendous side, can be considered part of an undeclared counter-reformation: this is what has paved the way for the much-vaunted ‘return of religion’. All projects aimed at a restoration of passivity show the will to faith acting as a longing to be overpowered. In this context it would be apposite to address Martin Mosebach's striking statement that we believe with our knees – ‘or we do not believe at all’:13 it is symptomatic of a determined quest to find a foothold in the objective realm. If it is true, the knees would be the true Catholic organs and the uplifted hearts would have to content themselves with second place.

  To summarize, I would posit that the study of such phenomena will no longer be restricted to the religious sciences in future. Rather, the field of general cultural science must ultimately expand its jurisdiction to encompass the realm of religion; instead of a year of the humanities,14 one should declare a century of cultural science. Its spiritual mission should become clear as soon as it learns to convert the treasures of transcultural knowledge into live forms of capital that can be invested in all existing cultures. As a science of coexistence, cultural science would be the true moderator of global ecumenism. It has the responsibility of showing why the path of civilization is the only one that is still open.

  Notes

  1 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

  2 Ibid.

  3 Derrida repeats his arguments regarding the war of the monotheistic religions in a conversation with Lieven De Cauter from 19 February 2004 entitled ‘Pour une justice à venir’, in which he sketches the outlines of a formalized or non-religious messianism.

  4 Heiner Mühlman
n, ‘Die Ökonomiemaschine’ [The Economy Machine] in 5 Codes. Architektur, Paranoia und Risiko in Zeiten des Terrors [Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror], ed. Gerd de Bruyn and Igmade (Basle, Boston and Berlin, 2006), p. 227. One could possibly make this thesis more specific by replacing the word ‘generation’ with the phrase ‘learning phase of an average individual life-span’ – this would, in the retrospective dimension, demand a co-operation with the knowledge of ancestors one did not have the chance to know (this normally means one's great-grandparents and earlier), and prospectively also a co-operation with the descendants one will not live to know (starting with one's great-grandchildren).

  5 We are indebted to the creationists for the amazing idea that God created the world around 4000 BC in such a way that it appears immeasurably older than it actually is (theorem of the illusion of age). The spiritual price of the response to the evolutionist challenge is high: it turns God into a genius malignus who, even during the creation itself, did not leave out any opportunity to set the evolutionists on the wrong track one day.

  6 Heiner Mühlmann, Die Natur der Kulturen. Entwurf einer kulturgenetischen Theorie [The Nature of Cultures: Outline of a Culture-Genetic Theory] (Vienna and New York, 1996).