God's Zeal

by Peter Sloterdijk

  The theological reaction of post-Babylonian Judaism to the experience of slavery crystallized into a cult of exhilaration in defeat. The first real monotheism, which grew from this situation, can therefore be understood first and foremost as a protest theology. It could only be what it was by representing not the ruling religion, but rather the religion of resistance against the ruling power. The purpose of Jewish theocracy was to exalt its own hidden, transcendental kind above the manifest kings of the others. It was only now that Abraham's summotheistic striving for the Highest and Moses' monolatric zeal for the One merged – in an anti-Babylonian and anti-imperial context – to produce a subversive form of devotion critical of, but inevitably also nostalgic for, power. From that point on, it expressed itself as a yearning for superiority over the superior.

  The second position in the field of monotheistic conflict has been clearly marked since the appearance of the Christian antithesis to the Jewish thesis. Although the God proclaimed by Paul and the other apostles retains a number of attributes connecting him to his Jewish predecessor, the subversively new Christological emphases lend his image entirely unexpected, even provocative and scandalous aspects.

  The crucified God will forever remain a challenge to the worldly understanding of victory and defeat. From a historical perspective, it is decisive that the universalist elements of post-Babylonian Jewish theology were only focused on and invested in an ambitious proselytistic movement as a result of Paul's intervention. The dual event evoked by the names of Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus constituted no less than the escape of the One God from the provincial Middle East: it resulted in the alteration of the religious impulse from an ethnically restricted cult to an empire-wide form of telecommunication. The people's apostle could no longer content himself with local Jewish conversations about holy matters. Following a clear strategic instinct, Paul identified the entire Roman Empire, which at the time meant the whole world, as the field of operation for his mission – enough of a reason for Paul to be an idol for lovers of abstract militancy to this day: one could almost call him the first Puritan, the first Jacobin and the first Leninist all rolled into one. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Paul's work is documented primarily in the form of epistles, as that genre testifies to his long-distance apostolic effect more than any other. Even today, the reader can observe in them the gradual formulation of Christianity in the very act of writing.

  This shift to the global scale dissolved the conventional folk basis of the faith in a single god. Israel, the first covenant people, could no longer be the sole carrier of the specifically new, Christologically inverted monotheism. Paul's stroke of genius transferred the covenant with God to a new people ‘called out’ from among the believers of all peoples – this new collective was hence to call itself ekklesia or New Israel, and embody the historically unprecedented model of a pneumatic people. It formed the prototype of the communio: a large spiritual body joined through baptism. In this collective, following the same Lord now took precedence over tribal lineage and gender. With a grand gesture, the differences between Jews and Greeks, free men and slaves or men and women were declared meaningless among the ‘children of God’ (Romans 10:12 and Galatians 3:28). A new associative model, the ‘holy community’, pushed back the ethnocentrism that, until then, had been the only conceivable option – people were first of all disciples of Christ; their identities as clan members and national comrades were secondary. The underlying belief in the imminent return of the Lord in glory, furthermore, led to a shift of emphasis in which futuristic motives restricted genealogical ones and superseded them de jure. God had promised Abraham descendants ‘as numerous as the stars in the heavens’ after Isaac had been freed; for Paul, however, the model of friendship took precedence over that of succession. Spiritual adoption replaced physical descent.

  It was Paul who originated the enthusiastic universalism taken up by later generations of apostles as the motor for their eternally incomplete missionary work. One could use the term ‘apostolic integrism’ to describe the existential model used by Christ's successors, where the bearer of the message allowed himself to be consumed by his evangelical work. It was not without reason that some claimed one could only call oneself a Christian if one had made a Christian out of at least one other person; through the mission, the way of life became its content. Profane subjectivity had to be exchanged for holy personhood: ‘it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). What looks from the outside like idealistic overexertion is, viewed from the inside, actually the privilege of being allowed to wear oneself out for a great cause, thanks to the most intimate of convictions. Like revenge, the missionary faith approaches the ‘utopia of a motivated life’.14 The believer, it is said, could never develop his zeal for God of his own accord if God's own zeal for his coming kingdom were not working within him. With the Pentecost event, Christianity entered the realm of high mediality. Subsequently the church became a place of exchange where one could hand over one's old identity and receive a spirited new self.

  Only with the advent of Christianity did the zealous form and the universal content of the message grow together into an effective unity – due especially to the irresistible psychodynamic synthesis that was found with the apostolic form of life; the motif of the Holy War, prefigured by devout Jews, was now lifted onto a universal stage. Consequently, the new telematic monotheism had to develop a permanent state of taking the bull by the horns as its own peculiar modus vivendi. Externally it conceived of the world as the reception area for the message it sought to disseminate, while internally it consolidated itself as an employer for kerygmatic and diaconal work – today one would speak of public relations work and therapeutic professions; in this respect the early church anticipated the postmodern service society, whose most important ‘product’ is the social relations themselves. Finally, as a result of its encounters with the philosophical theology of the Greeks, Christian doctrine also incorporated the provocations of theoretical monotheism, drawing on this fusion to develop an intellectual strength that was to spawn ever-new syntheses of biblical and philosophical ideas over a period of almost eighty generations.

  The most important victory of the new religion, however, was in the field of ritual. It was achieved through the transformation of the Jewish Passover feast into the Christian communion – a piratical operation that must be understood as the most world-historically significant example of ‘refunctionalization’, in the sense propagated by the dramatic artist Brecht. Communion does not simply constitute a strong ‘misreading’ of the Jewish pattern. It is more than that: its tragic parody. The consequences of this appropriation cannot be stressed enough: it was only through this blasphemous counter-Passover, in which the Son of Man placed himself in the position of the lamb that would normally have been sacrificed (as if he wanted to reveal the secret of that terrible night in Egypt), that Christianity came into possession of an unmistakable maximum stress ritual that guaranteed its participants the most lively form of memoactive empathy – and has by this point been doing so over a period of two millennia.15 In every mass it is not simply the commemorative meal that is quoted, but rather the intimate memorability of faith itself. Analogously, the feast of Whitsun parodies the handing over of laws at Mount Sinai, which the Jews celebrated fifty days after Passover – as if to prove that the preservation of the law is itself the law.

  As far as the question of the ‘price of monotheism’ in the case of Christianity is concerned, a question often discussed in recent times, we consider it sufficient here to point to two well-known complications. The first relates to the ambivalence of Christianity towards the Jewish mother religion – Paul supplied the formula for this in his letter to the Romans, where he defined the Jews as enemies in terms of the gospel, but as ‘beloved for our fathers' sakes’ (Romans 11:28) in terms of their chosen status. Even as late as the twentieth century, Paul's thesis was renewed by Pope Pius X, who died in 1914; like many theologians before h
im, he declared that Judaism had been ‘replaced’ by Christianity, and that one could consequently no longer ‘grant it any continued existence’ – which did not form any obstacle to his canonization through Pius XII in 1954. In addition, Christians dealt with Jewish sources in the manner of a hostile take-over – in particular through the appropriation of the Tanach, which, now known as the Old Testament, was annexed, canonized and reinterpreted in the light of Christian needs.

  The second indication concerns the fact that Christianity, which saw itself in principle as a religion of love, freedom and warm-hearted inclusion, in fact also practised ruthlessness, rigorism and terror on a large scale. The liaison between the Western world of faith and the spirit of Roman law spawned a legally thoroughly regulated church system that was not infrequently attacked, including by critics among its own ranks, as an anti-Christian monstrosity.16 From the perspective of Eastern Christianity, the Roman power apparatus sometimes seemed like the incarnation of the Antichrist in the shape of a perversely showy corporation. In his late works, Ivan Illich went as far as identifying the estrangement of the church from the gospel as the source of all the estrangements, reifications and dispossessions that had been twisting the lives of modern people for centuries.17 In defence of Roman Catholicism (though certainly also to prove its beneficial weakening), one should point out that it did not, ultimately, remain indifferent to the wealth of critical reflections: of all the memories of John Paul II, those moments in which the pontifex maximus apologized to the whole world for the aberrations of a fallible church's ‘sons and daughters’ will be among the most lasting.18

  It is thus all the more understandable that, from the eighteenth century onwards, a post-Christian scepticism spread throughout Europe, which sought to distance itself from the extremes of zealous faith, often even from faith as a whole. The alienation from the church prevalent on the continent today does not, therefore, merely show the hallmarks of institutional criticism and anti-dogmatism; the proponents of a purely secular way of life frequently launch open attacks. Some resolute heirs of the Enlightenment hold the conviction that Christianity still deserves to be showered with the most vicious blasphemies for centuries to come. Did Robespierre not declare in his speech before the assembly in 1794 that priests are to morality what charlatans are to medicine?19 The churches and their dogmas have had to put up with caricatures and malice for 200 years – without being able, as they still were in the Middle Ages, to escape from ‘this world’ through a fundamental withdrawal. On critical days, this anti-clerical sentiment is released in such satirical statements as this one: ‘The existence of Christians proves the non-existence of God.’20 The fact that some Christians today can even laugh at such jokes shows that they are capable of learning.

  With the advent of Islam, the third exclusive monotheism appeared on the scene. Its establishment was defined by the fact that it viewed itself emphatically as the latest and most perfect manifestation of the Abrahamic one god complex. Islam took its late arrival as its most precious spiritual chance, as it claimed the advantage of seeing and correcting the errors, both alleged and real, of the two preceding monotheisms. This is why Muslim clerics refer to the founder of their religion as the ‘seal of the prophet’. The idea of correction in the process of monotheistic revelations is constitutive for Islam, as it permits it to make a virtue out of necessity by converting the deficit of non-originality into the advantage of a later clarification. Just as the Christian message before it could only come about through a partial abrogation, a corrective revocation of Jewish teachings (literary critics would add: through a severe misreading), the Islamic revelation presupposes the partial abrogation of the two older versions of monotheism. (Here this misreading of its two predecessors is taken to a spectacular level; yet it is precisely the success of Islam that shows that the adepts of this new holy book had more important things to do than draw on the sources of existing cults in a philologically correct fashion.) Consequently the religion of the Qur'an, like that of the New Testament, was substantially characterized by a position of theological contrast; its first front stood in the tradition of the Jewish and Christian zealots who waged war against the gods and idols of their polytheistic surroundings, while the second opposed the Jews and Christians directly. The former were accused of being frivolous and hypocritical, as they did not even take their own prophets seriously, while the latter were presented with the charge of falsely declaring the prophet Jesus ‘the Son of God’ in their deludedness, whereas all true knowledge of God, according to Islam, begins with the realization that the Highest is alone for all eternity and has no child. The pathos of the Islamic thesis of God's solitary position is based primarily on the polemic against the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which was regarded with suspicion as a form of tritheism.

  As a corrective of Christology, and simultaneously its functional equivalent, Islam developed a prophetology intended to lend the new religion the vigour of legitimacy. It would not only be the Arab recipients who would find the idea that God had sent a human ambassador to those willing to embrace this faith more convincing than the suggestion that this ambassador was God himself, albeit in a second mode. In that case, admittedly, the prophet would have to be given an incomparably elevated status that would soon reach dizzying heights. This demanded no less than a doctrine of inlibration, God's embodiment in book form, which in turn called for the dogma of the dictation of that book by the angel of God. Obviously, such a directive could only be received by a single pure, devoted medium – from a Catholic perspective, this suggests an analogy between Mohammed and Mary. Devotees of the virgin will have an idea what Muslims might mean if they occasionally speak of a ‘virgin birth of the Qur'an’.21

  Islam was also dependent on the creation of a maximum stress myth. It produced this in the form of the duty for all Muslims to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca: the climaxes of this gruelling undertaking lie in the pilgrim's personal participation in the stoning of the devil and the slaughter of a sacrificial animal. Thanks to these forms of ‘deep play’ (as one sometimes calls deeply involving ritual acts), Islamic doctrines are connected to a heavily emotional memoactive engram.22 Needless to say, Islam could never have survived through one and a half millennia if the dramatizations of its teachings had not made such a lasting impression.

  While the monotheistic escalation in Paul's case had triggered the shift from a defensive to an offensive universalism, the Islamic escalation led to the further development of offensive universalism from the missionary to the military-political form of expansion. The beginning of Islam was already triumphant; it managed to hurdle the phase of ecclesia oppressa23 at the first attempt. In the case of Christianity, the metaphysics of the strong sender developed further by Paul had resulted in the belief that the crucified one was God's divine envoy and equal; the apostles could follow on from him as second-degree messengers. The same sender formula was used by the Muslims in order to honour a prophet who combined the roles of spiritual spokesman and military commander in a single person. In both cases, the strong sender on the other side was tied to a privileged mediator on this side, whose path was to be followed and made useful by countless later mediators of faith – the systemic point of departure for all those phenomena placed in such categories as clergy and clerical rule. While Paul had occasionally referred to the faithful as the athletes of Christ (1 Corinthians 17:24f.) – a metaphor that manifested itself in Christian monastic life with the fury of the literal – the militant followers of Allah viewed themselves as voluntary recruits in a holy expansion campaign. From a distance, they remind one of the Puritan cavalry of Oliver Cromwell, an army for whom praying and fighting were as close together as they were for the religiously aroused warriors of the early Caliphate. The social form of the new movement was the ummah, the non-tribal commune to which one was admitted not by birth, but through the recitation of the creed of allegiance (shahadah) to Allah and his prophet before witnesses. The explosive expansion of Islam in the two centuries
following the death of the prophet shows what powers were unleashed through the unexpected alliance between the clan system and universalism.

  Islam in its original form owes its dynamics to the circumstance that in its case – in contrast to the initially oppositional, state-critical stance of Christianity – religious and politico-military impulses were practically acting in unison from the outset. This did not prevent Islam from developing a surrealism of its own kind – unlike Augustinian Christianity, however, it never managed to formulate a doctrine of the two kingdoms. It sought to project the opposition between religious space and worldliness outwards, so to speak, and distinguish between the ‘house of Islam’ and the ‘house of war’. Rousseau still praised the close complicity of religion and state policy in Mohammed's legacy, attempting to imitate it in his own plans for a ‘bourgeois revolution’. Going on these indications, the religion of the revolutionaries of 1794 was intended to establish a post-Christian non-differentiation between state and ‘church’ in order to force – in France, the cradle of totalitarian temptations – a comprehensive identification of citizens with their community. This endeavour was foiled not only by the liberalism of the enlightened bourgeoisie, but also by the resistance of deep-seated Catholic traditions. The author of the Contrat social showed foresight and logical consistency in attacking Christianity as a hotbed of political disloyalty and social divisions. Whoever speaks of totalitarianism today should never forget that it acted out its dress rehearsal as a revolutionary civil religion. Rousseau had been its prophet, and his faithful disciple Robespierre followed in his footprints in presenting himself as the first caliph of a modern republic of conviction.