God's Zeal Read online

  If, having completed our brief rundown, we cast a glance at the conflict area as a whole, two concluding observations seem inescapable: firstly, one can see that the classical monotheisms clearly did not make the most of their polemogenic potential. Even if one believes that the inter- and intra-monotheistic struggles cost too many lives anyway, studying the formally prefigured likelihood of different enmities between these religions in a structural overview reveals just how far the historical reality fell short of the script's possibilities. It should be clear why this insufficiency was beneficial to mankind, which would otherwise have fought many more battles.

  Secondly, we should not neglect to mention the non-combatant observers on the edges of the tripolemic field, who have always cast astonished and disapproving glances at the warlike formations of the participants. In their own way, these also belong to the scene of the battling monotheisms. For them, admittedly, the state of consciousness among the ‘common people’ is decisive, as the masses' blissful lack of opinion (as God is too enormous a subject) or principles (as fundamental issues always lead to overexertion) makes them keep their distance from the tiring theatre of hyper-motivation among the faithful and the chosen.

  Notes

  1 Christian Delacampagne, Islam et Occident. Les raisons d'un confl it (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), p. 27.

  2 Hans Küng, Der Islam. Geschichte, Gegenwart, Zukunft [Islam: Past, Present and Future] (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 2006), p. 152.

  3 Régis Debray, Einführung in die Mediologie [Introduction to Mediology] (Bern Stuttgart and Vienna: Hauph Verlag, 2003), p. 98.

  4 F. E. Peters, The Monotheists. Jews, Christians and Muslims in Confl ict and Competition, vol. I: The Peoples of God (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 161.

  5 Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2000.

  6 Excerpts from the ‘Letter to Bin Laden and al Zawahiri’ in Al Quaida. Texte des Terrors, edited with a commentary by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli (Munich, 2006), p. 459. English edition: Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2008).

  4

  The campaigns

  If it is accurate to characterize the classical monotheisms as vehicles of zealous universalism, this inevitably raises the question of their world strategies. Naturally, each of these religions has a well-developed reality of life or, as Ivan Illich puts it, a vernacular side in which the charm of non-zealous, everyday religious life enforced by cult and tradition can take effect. As is well known, Chateaubriand celebrated the ‘beauties of the Christian religion’,1 and Jewish and Islamic apologists could equally have dealt with the attractions of their religions. As well as the aesthetic merits, such defences would have emphasized above all the moral or social achievements that unfolded within the local communes in more or less impressive ways. As open as we may be to the charms of the monotheistic forms of life in the ‘rear line’, however (without overlooking its compulsive aspects, for example the Islamic custom of circumcision among young girls, ultimately motivated simply by a rule-obsessed attachment to a malign tradition, coupled with the need to pass on one's own lack of freedom), all three must primarily be defined as front-line religions owing to their polemical beginnings. The fact that their offensive potential sometimes lay dormant for centuries under certain historical conditions does not change the expansive orientation of the programmes. Each of the monotheisms has its own specific quality of ‘world-taking’, to use a term coined by Carl Schmitt in a different context. The truth is that the One and Only, though first discovered in the regional cult, inevitably ends up being promoted as a god with imposing worldly representation and increasing claims to sovereignty. Because of its predication on a concept of God that emphasizes the uniqueness and omnipotence of the Highest, religious universalism produces surpluses of meaning that erupt in encroachments of monotheistic communes on their political and cultic environments.

  In the following, I shall distinguish between three main forms of expansion that are evident in the historical development of monotheistic campaigns. The first, that of theocratic sovereignism, which came to exert a defining influence on Judaism throughout its many times and spaces, has predominantly defensive and separatist characteristics, while the second and third forms, namely expansion through missionary activity and through the Holy War, show a clearly offensive approach, one that also encompassed such means as persuasion, coercion and subjugation, even open blackmail (‘Baptism or death!’, ‘Qur'an or death!’). I do not think any formal proof is required that the latter two forms are not atypical of the two more extroverted monotheisms.

  One can only speak of a Jewish campaign in the limited, even paradoxical, sense that the surpluses of meaning found in post-exile monotheism show a clear anti-Babylonian, and later also anti-Hellenic, anti-Roman and generally anti-imperial, thrust. One cannot, on the other hand, speak of any missionary expansion or proselytistic dynamic in Judaism as a whole. The post-Babylonian theology of Judaism is sovereignist in so far as it claims a supreme position for the god of the enslaved people – a provocation that became unforgettable especially through the book of Genesis, whose final version was produced in the post-exile era. The basic position of Judaism in relation to the rest of the world, however, remained a separatist one in so far as it refused any form of cultic communality with the other religious peoples and evaded any ecumenical mixture or levelling out – an approach that, especially in the families of the Jewish priests, the kohanim, maintained a high degree of biological stability over millennia.2 It proves the effectiveness of a closed religious community as a ‘selective genetic force’.3 The necessity of an outward missionary shift was only conceded for relatively short periods – it is perhaps no coincidence that the only proselytistic episode in the history of Judaism was in the time directly before the messianic sect of Jesuans broke away from the main movement (from c.150 BC to AD 50). For the majority of its historical existence, however, Judaism occupied a position that can best be described as defensive universalism. With this self-enclosed stance, the people of Israel produced – initially on the basis of tribal and small-state forms of life, later (after what Harold Bloom terms the ‘Roman holocaust’) under the conditions of exile and dispersion – a massive theological surplus that would have been sufficient for a large empire, even though the originators of these teachings could not even rely on their subsistence as a people on their own territory for many centuries. By following the notion of living under the eyes of a watchful god, the Jewish people developed a sensorium for the counter-observation of this god, through which a theologically tinged, eccentric positionality (concentrated in the idea of the covenant) became second nature.

  If, in spite of all our reservations, it were permissible to speak of a Jewish campaign, this expression could only refer to what Leo Baeck termed, in Das Wesen des Judentums [The Nature of Judaism] (1905), the ‘struggle for self-preservation’. Certainly, according to Baeck, it is impossible to conceive of Judaism as a whole without the ‘force of instruction and conversion’, but this potential was only able to take effect in an introverted and defensive direction during almost 2,000 years of diaspora. ‘People understood that mere existence can already be a declaration, a sermon to the world … The mere fact that one existed posited some meaning … Self-preservation was experienced as preservation through God.’4 One Christian author exaggerated these statements to the most obvious extent by declaring that, for him, the continued existence of Judaism in the world of today constitutes no less than a historical proof of God's existence. Advocates of evolutionist neuro-rhetoric would say that the longevity of Judaism proves the precise vertical duplicability of the memoactive rituals practised among this people. As Judaism invested its religious surpluses of meaning in its self-preservation as a people and a ritual community, its physical existence became charged with metaphysical ideas that amounted to the fulfilment of a mission – one more reason why the physical attack on Judaism can go hand i
n hand with the desire for its spiritual and moral eradication.

  Formally speaking, the relationship between Judaism and the two religions that followed it could be viewed as a spiritual prefiguration of the asymmetrical war. Henry Kissinger supplied the latter's strategic formula in 1969 with the observation that the guerrillas win if they do not lose, whereas the regular troops lose if they do not win. The Jewish position corresponds to that of a guerrilla movement that takes the non-defeat it constantly achieves as a necessary, albeit inadequate, condition for its victory. By securing its survival, it creates the preconditions for its provisional – and who knows, perhaps one day even its ultimate – success. The ‘preservation of Judaism’ takes place, as Leo Baeck notes with prophetic pathos, according to the ‘strict laws of life’ in a historical selection process. ‘History chooses, for it demands a decision; it becomes the grand selection among humans.’ ‘When the gravity of circumstances calls upon humanity, it is often only the few who are left … The remainder is the justification for history.’5 Hence the real Jewish campaign resembles a swift gallop through many times and realms with heavy losses. This anabasis of the just has the form of a test undergone by each new generation. Here, a minority is filtered out from within a minority in order to continue the monotheistic adventure in its original form, life under the law and behind the ‘fence around the doctrine’6 as unadulteratedly as possible. Here, the fundamental paradox of this religious structure, the fixation of the universal god on a single people, is prevented, with all its practitioners' power, from unfolding.

  The state of Israel proclaimed in 1948 secularized the motif of tested survival. It presents itself as the political form of a ‘society’ of immigrants that claims (after the people's ‘return’ to the region of its former historical existence) an additional, discreetly transcendental significance for its physical existence. To many Jews, founding a state of their own seemed the only possible way of securing their future survival after the Shoa. As one of the conflict parties in the permanent crisis in the Middle East, Israel is paying a high price for this. In this role, it is inevitably losing a large part of the moral advantages it could still claim as long as it perceived itself as a dispersed, suffering community. The number of those still willing to accompany Israel through the complications of its new position is not especially great. In this position, it suffers from the compulsion to show strength just as it formerly suffered from its ability to survive mistreatment. Here too, there is no doubt as to the primacy of the defensive. Let us bear in mind that this hypothesis concerns Israel's reason of state, not the obstructed universalism of Jewish religiosity.

  One can speak far more directly of a Christian campaign, as its appearance was accompanied by a shift towards offensive universalism. Within it, one finds the paradoxes of monotheistic system formation still suppressed in Judaism being developed bit by bit. Its appearance on the stage of earth-shattering forces teaches us that ideas of this level embody themselves in autopoietic processes that, on the basis of their results, one reads as success stories. The administrators of the imperium Romanum realized early on how dangerous the Christian provocation was when they suppressed the new religion and its missionary efforts in several waves of persecution, while generally leaving the non-missionary Jews in peace. During the period of repression, the Christians remained true to their non-violent, ecstatically passive stance. They only formed alliances that resorted to violence once their faith had become the state religion. One can certainly understand what historians critical of the church mean when they date Christianity's own Fall to the moment when it began to cohabit with worldly power.

  The essence of Christianity's historical successes can be expressed in a trivial observation: the majority of people today use the Christian calendar, or refer to it as an external guideline in so far as they follow other counting systems that define our current year as 2007 post Christum natum – which corresponds roughly to the Jewish year 5767 or the Islamic year 1428. Only few contemporaries realize that, in doing so, they are acting in relation to an event that marks a caesura in the ‘history of truth’. In this counting system, the year AD 0 reminds us of the moment at which the ‘world’ became the broadcasting area for a radically inclusive message. This message was that all people, in accordance with their common nature as creatures, should view themselves as members of a single commune created by God, destroyed by human sin and restored by the Son of God. If understood, this news should result in the dissolution of the enmities that arise among individuals and groups; it would also annul the hermetic self-enclosure of the different cultures and make all collectives follow a shared ideal of sublime justice.

  Morally speaking, this was one of the best things humanity had ever heard – which did not, admittedly, prevent a number of the worst conflicts from growing out of the rivalries between those groups who sought to secure the privilege of bringing the good news to the non-believers. In noting that ‘the world changed into a site of cockfights for apostles’,7 the subtle reactionary Dávila recognized one of the primary aspects of monotheistic conflicts. He underestimated the potency of such ‘cockfights’ for making history, however. In fact, this ‘history’ results from the project of the monotheistic will to total communication. From an internal point of view, it means the process of opening all peoples up to the news of the One God, whose portrait is differentiated into a trinity. All that has gone before now sinks down into aeons past, and only retains validity in so far as it can be interpreted as a preparation for the gospel. Whereas human life until then had hardly consisted of anything except obedience to the cycles of nature and the rise and fall of empires, it would now be integrated into a purposeful process. The world is set in historical motion, in the stricter sense of the word, from the moment in which everything that happens is supposed to be governed by a single principle. What we call history is the campaign of the human race to achieve consenting unity under a god common to all. In this sense, Leo Baeck was right that there is ‘no monotheism without world history’.8 This concept of history presupposes that Christianity is the executive organ of messianic work. In fact, the significance of the messianic only becomes genuinely clear once it is fulfilled through the evangelical. Messianism post Christum natum testifies not only to the Jewish non-observance of the Christian caesura, it also shows that, despite the arrival of the good news, there is still enough room for the expectation of new good, even among Christians. Whether there can and should be a collection of the good news of new good in a Newer Testament remains to be seen.

  The special role of Paul in overturning the Jewish privilege of sole access to the One and Highest has already been mentioned in the section on the battle formations. Characteristically, there has been no lack of exegetes among the Jewish theologians of recent times who no longer see Paul as a mere traitor, the role he has always embodied for the majority of Jewish commentators. He is increasingly being acknowledged as the zealot who, in bringing the universalist potential of the post-Babylonian Jewish doctrine of God into the world through an ingenious popularization, actually showed that he took the fundamental clerical vocation of the Jewish people seriously. An author such as Ben-Chorin states that even Jews should ultimately applaud the fact that Israel's monotheistic zeal proved infectious for other peoples of the world – albeit at the price that the Christians were lamentably deluded in their play with the messianic fire.9 The shift to the global scale remained irrevocably tied to the Christian caesura. In his Letter to the Magnesians (10:3–4), Ignatius of Antioch, an author of the early second century, stated in no uncertain terms that Judaism leads to Christianity, not vice versa. In this thesis one hears the voice of the resolute cleric who, beyond the martyrdom he aspired to for his own person, demanded and predicted the triumph of the Christian cause on a grand scale.10

  Under the magnifying glass of success, the dark sides of zealous monotheism also develop into world powers. The zealotic militancy of the early Christians soon came into severe conflict with the circ
umstance that these devout few were inevitably faced with a vast majority of people to whom the faith of this new sect meant nothing. The zealots took revenge by branding those who did not share their faith ‘infidels’. The latter's unperturbed insistence on their previous ideas was thus declared a spiritual crime with grave metaphysical consequences – especially when they chose to decline Christianity's offer after extensive reflection. This is why, from its earliest days, the message of salvation has been accompanied by an escort of threats predicting the worst for unbelievers. Certainly the gospel speaks of wanting to bring blessings to all sides; but Christian militantism has wished the curse of heaven upon the unconverted from its inception. On the one hand, Paul writes to the Corinthians: ‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal’ (1 Corinthians 13:1). On the other hand, in the second epistle to the Thessalonians (1:8–9) – whose authenticity is not uncontested – one can already observe the apocalyptic shadow that grows with the spreading of the message: when the Lord is revealed from heaven in blazing fire, ‘He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord.’ So the writings of the people's apostle already promote a love that, if not requited, turns into scorn and lust for extermination. The physiognomy of the offensive universalist monotheisms is characterized by the determination of the preachers to make themselves fearsome in the name of the Lord. Possibly this corresponds to a rule of universalist religious communication, namely that every gospel must inevitably cast a dysangelic shadow in the course of its proclamation. Thus the non-acceptance of its truths in fact becomes a dangerous indicator of imminent disaster. The message divides the world as a whole into the unequal halves of church and world. The Christian offensive's ambition to define that whole cannot be fulfilled without excluding ‘this world’ from the holy community. What constitutes a paradox in logical terms, however, amounts to horror in moral terms.