God's Zeal Read online

  To summarize, one cannot reach any definite judgement on the campaign of Islam in its fifteenth century. The chances of a further expansion of its external mission can only be viewed with reserve – even if Europe's current vulnerability dictates certain fear scenarios. Its current successes are, as far as one can tell, restricted primarily to underprivileged classes in European and African societies – and, when they do involve the educated, to the descendants of immigrants from Islamic countries who have returned to their original religion after a period of estrangement. Its main motor is the growing radicalization of its own rampant excess of young men.28 Islam seems to be rather less attractive to the elites of Asia, America and Europe. Statistics show that conversions to Islam increase at times when this religion comes under greater criticism – which points to the psychodynamics of an identification with a threatened cause. In the longer term, the poor organization and disunity of the Islamic states and associations make successful political expansion unlikely. Even if there were such results, no one would know how to make use of them in the sense of any centralized planning. If Islam reached the same number of followers as Christianity by the end of the twenty-first century, which statisticians and strategists by no means consider impossible, this would be due almost entirely to its self-cultivated population growth, and only to a very small degree to its spiritual aura. As far as the religious authority of Islam in its two main movements is concerned, it is increasingly being crushed by the implosion of hierarchies and the dissolution of the traditional order of knowledge.29 Furthermore, it has been damaged so heavily by the almost automatic association between Islamism and terror in the world's consciousness that it is difficult to imagine how Islam in its totality, as a religion and a matrix of cultures, could recover from this in the foreseeable future. At any rate, the ‘house of Islam’ will be faced with modernization crises of frightening intensity. It has transformed itself into the ‘house of war’, which Muslims traditionally liked to believe pointed to the extra-Islamic dimensions of the world.30 Perhaps educated Europeans living around the year 2050, observing the chronic convulsions of Islamic ‘societies’, will occasionally be reminded of the battles of the reformation age – but even more strongly of Catholicism's anti-modern phase of defiance, which lasted from 1789 until the Second Vatican Council and which, one is still amazed to recall, ended to the advantage of all concerned with a reconciliation of theocentrism and democracy.

  Notes

  1 François-René de Chateaubriand, Le génie du christianisme (Paris, 1802). English translation: The Genius of Christianity or The Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion, trans. Charles I. White (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975).

  2 See Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Anchor, 2005), ch. 10, ‘The DNA of the Jews’.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Leo, Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, 10th edition (Wiesbaden, 1991), p. 290.

  5 Ibid., p. 279.

  6 Ibid., pp. 294f.

  7 Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Das Leben ist die Guillotine der Wahrheiten. Ausgewählte Sprengsätze [Life Is a Guillotine of Truths. Selected Explosives], ed. Martin Mosebach (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), p. 28.

  8 Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, p. 264.

  9 Schalom Ben-Chorin, Paulus: der Völkerapostel in jüdischer Sicht [Paul: the People's Apostle From a Jewish Perspective] (Munich, 1997).

  10 This passage contains what is considered the earliest appearance (c. AD 115) of the word christianismós, which was formed in analogy to the older term judaismós.

  11 Alfred N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), p. 74. This statement echoes Rousseau's claim (The Social Contract, book 4, ch. 8) that ‘Christianity preaches nothing but servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that tyranny always profits from it.’

  12 Logik des Schreckens [The Logic of Terror]. Augustinus von Hippo: De diversis quaestiones ad Simplicianum I, 2. Die Gnadenlehre von 397 [The Doctrine of Grace from 397], trans. Walter Schäfer, and edited with notes and an afterword by Kurt Flasch (Mainz: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1990), Latin–German.

  13 Peter Sloterdijk, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung [In the World Interior of Capital. For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).

  14 Horst Gründer, Welteroberung und Christentum. Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der Neuzeit [World Conquest and Christianity. A Handbook for the History of the Modern Age] (Gütersloh, 1992).

  15 Ernst Benz, Beschreibung des Christentums. Eine historische Phänomenologie [Description of Christianity. A Historical Phenomenology] (Munich, 1975), pp. 29 and 302.

  16 Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, p. 266. Also ibid., p. 261: ‘The true history of the world is the history of good.’

  17 Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 184.

  18 Cf. Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: Fundamentalism, De-territorialisation and the Search for a New Ummah (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2004), p. 331: ‘Fundamentalism is a means of re-universalising religions (whether it be Islam or Christianity) that has ended up being closely identified with a given culture.’

  19 Annemarie Schimmel, Die Religion des Islam. Eine Einführung [The Religion of Islam: An Introduction] (Stuttgart: Reclaim, 1990), pp. 14f.

  20 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘The Spiritual Significance of Jihad’ in Traditional Islam in the Modern World, ed. Nasr (London: Kegan Paul, 1987).

  21 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vols. I-III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

  22 Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

  23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 178.

  24 A later symbol of triumphant bigotry is the destruction of the observatory in Istanbul, built in 1577 on the initiative of the mathematician and astronomer Taküyiddin Efendi, by the sultan's naval artillery in 1580.

  25 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 159. Lewis attributes Turkey's path towards modernity to Atatürk's constructive answers to the second question.

  26 Quoted from David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. 210.

  27 Sayyid Abdul A'la Mawdudi, The Islamic Way of Life (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1986).

  28 Gunnar Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht. Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen [Sons and World Power. Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations], 4th edition (Zurich, 2006).

  29 Cf. Roy, Globalised Islam: Fundamentalism, De-territorialisation and the Search for a New Ummah.

  30 Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006).

  5

  The matrix

  What has so far been said about the formations, fronts and campaigns of the three monotheisms demands integration within an overview of the logical patterns of the faith in one god and the blueprints for zealous universalisms. It would be misleading to assume that monotheistic zeal is a matter determined first and foremost by emotional laws and therefore calls primarily for a psychological analysis. Naturally the affect-dynamic aspects of zealotry are open to psychosemantic probing. It would be reckless to ignore the depth-psychological insights into religio-neurotic and clericopathic phenomena gathered in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – to name only the well-studied examples of God's helper syndrome and spiritual masochism. Psychoanalysis also specialized in revealing the parallels between individual people's images of God and their images of their parents. Furthermore, such authors as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger and others showed that what is generally presented as faith is often a form of hys
teria – an act whose protagonists muster their entire existences in the hope of gaining desired roles at the religious vanity fair. Where there is zeal, there is competitive zeal, and what initially seems to be an intimate affair between God and the soul is not infrequently also fuelled by the jealousy of ambitious souls regarding the real and imagined advantages of their rivals in the battle for the best seats. On the other hand, more recent religio-psychological research – supported by new hybrid subjects like neuro-theology and neuro-rhetoric1 – has given indications of the ‘biopositive’ effects of religious affects that, if one is to avoid a one-sided view, cannot be ignored.

  With all due respect for the findings in the fields of psychological and biological research, the monotheism of the exclusive and totalitarian type under debate here contains one primary logical problem for us to decipher, and this problem follows its own strictly internally conditioned grammar. One of the points of departure in gaining an understanding of the laws that determine the construction of the exclusive monotheisms has already been touched on in the references to Abraham's quest for a god worthy of his adoration. The typical summotheistic climb to the final, the highest and the utmost contains the logical implication that one must move from the plural to the singular, from the many gods to the one God. A deity that was the Highest but not the One would be inconceivable at this level of reflection. Religious supremacism, the ascent to the Highest and the Only, is necessarily tied to ontological monarchism – the principle that a single being can and should rule over everyone and everything.2 This monarchism is joined by a dynamism which ensures that nothing can resist the overlord, in keeping with the theorem omnia apud deum facilia – ‘naturally everything is easy for God’. From this dynamism follows optimism (or perfectionism, to put it more precisely in idea-historical terms), which states that the dominant one is the perfect and the best, and always acts in accordance with his perfect nature. The best is the one who is better than everything good – or more than that: better than everything that is merely better than good.

  This supremacist thought climbs numerous steps to reach the peak of the hyper-best, which ultimately subjugates all things and beings both de facto and de jure. It culminates in a figure known in the language of faith as God, the eternal and almighty. It is to him and only to him that the rule applies: the elevation to the Highest must consistently follow the trail of a personal transcendence. In this scheme, God alone can be placed as a person above all other persons, as the author, the creator, the lawmaker, the ruler and the director of the world's theatre, the one without whose command not a single hair falls from a human head – and without whose support no household appliance works.3 A conspicuous feature of this God is a strong preponderance of you qualities – accompanied by underdeveloped id elements. His invitation is more to a relationship than to insight. Once the believer, like Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin, has become wholly childlike and wholly idiotic in relation to the almighty other, the last traces of God's cognitive determinacy dissolve.

  As long as we are dealing with Abrahamites, then, we are operating within the sphere of the subjective highest, whose condensate appears in the idea of a transcendent kingship. This is expressed as much in the Jewish idea of the theocracy of Yahweh as in the doctrine of Christ's royal reign (see the encyclical Quas primas published by Pius XI in 1925) and the idea, ubiquitous in Islam, of Allah's omnipotence, which is supposed to apply in both the political and everyday pragmatic spheres.4 The monarch of personal supremacism is not only the creator, ruler and preserver of the world, but also its archivist, saviour, judge and – in extremis – its avenger and destroyer.

  It is easy to understand now why the relationship between humans and a highest being of the personal type is subject to completely different laws from those in the case of an impersonal supreme power. It is part and parcel of this form of personal supremacism that those who think and believe cannot be any more than mere vassals or employees of the divine sovereign – the only other option being the despicable role of infidels and disobedients. Whether they like it or not, the supremacization of the personal God inevitably assigns humans an inferior status. The most important asymmetry between servant and master manifests itself in the fact that God remains unfathomable to humans, even once he is revealed, whereas humans cannot keep any secrets from him. The cosmological and moral asymmetries are equally overwhelming: God's dominion encompasses the entire universe, while humans are often not even able to keep their own lives in order. Islamic preachers still like to invoke the following edifying image: before the throne of God, the seventh heaven is no larger than a grain of sand; compared to the seventh, the sixth heaven is only as large as a ring in the desert; compared to the sixth, the fifth is also no larger than a ring in the desert and so on, until the first heaven, which the earthlings believe to be all-encompassing when they look up at it – in these humbling sermons for Muslims, the Aristotelian worldview is kept alive poetically and therapeutically. Then one normally asks the individual believer: so how big are you compared to all those things? The correct answer can only be one like the exclamation of Lessing's Saladin: ‘I, dust? I, nothing? O God!’5 Nonetheless, the exegetes do not tire of insisting that God is profoundly close to us and cares for each human being like his own child; and he carries most of the load for the members of his flock, whom he looks after with love and compassion. For the willing, all that is left in this scenario is the role of the servant who, trembling with requited love, places himself at his lord's disposal. This kind of relationship has been referred to in Christian contexts as a ‘patriarchy of love’, but this expression is more or less applicable to all situations that bear the hallmarks of patriarchy.

  The more the believer is taken over by this supremacization of the lord, the more radically he will be inclined to make his own will subject to instructions from above. An intense form of personal supremacism leads to an extremism of the will to obedience that is typical of zealotic movements. The obedience that embraces this intensification extends so far that a servant prepared to go to any lengths will prefer the most rigid laws and the most unpleasant commands, these offering the necessary material to carry out the work of radical subordination. One still finds traces of this servant syndrome everywhere in the world of today: in malign forms, as exemplified most currently by the suicide attack; in intermediate manifestations as observed in worthy zealous systems such as Opus Dei; and in curious variations, for example the rumour among Vaticanists that, under Pope Paul VI, some Vatican City employees even knelt during telephone conversations with their highest superior.6

  One should note that the disposition referred to does initially make room for non-neurotic intensifications of the idea of service, though the pathological escalations are usually not long in waiting.7 A product of this type of supremacization that is initially psychologically inconspicuous is an affinity for majesty and splendour, in both moral-political and aesthetic areas. But the irrationalist tendency is also part of the structure: for if God demands sacrifices, why not sacrifice reason too? This is manifest in the willingness to believe that even the deepest darkness contains holy meaning and to obey the instructions from above against all doubts, even – and especially – when the command remains unfathomable, as it was for Abraham when God demanded the sacrifice of his son Isaac. In the realm of the personal supreme power, everything hinges on trust in the integrity of the commander. No one is granted the right to obstinacy. In such a universe, it must sound like an incitement to anarchy when Hannah Arendt, following on from Kant, states: ‘No one has the right to obey.’

  The history of resorting to the highest also displays an impersonal variant that I will refer to as objective or ontological supremacism. Here, ascent to the pinnacle – as Plato described in his reflections on the stages of rapture, from a single beautiful body to disembodied beauty and goodness ‘itself’ – brings the believer to a supreme power that does not have the properties of a personal being, but rather those of a principle or an idea. Thi
s supremacy, which culminates in a nameless highest being, can only be spoken about in terms of first and final justifications of an object-like, suprapersonal and structural nature. Concisely put: the ascent to the objective highest leads to the god of the philosophers. Even its crudest portraits show that it has little or nothing in common with the Abrahamic versions of God (El, Yahweh, God the Father, Allah).8 It is neither creator nor monarch nor judge; it is a source of that which is, and from its unsurpassable bestness radiates a derived best, the cosmos. It does not have the power to command; it has the power of self-revelation through superabundance. Its creative potency realizes itself according to the scheme of a causality through goodness.