God's Zeal

by Peter Sloterdijk

  Notes

  1 Regarding the Christian misreading of Jewish sources, especially in the cases of Paul's epistles and the gospel of John, see Harold Bloom, Jesus and Jahweh. The Names Divine (New York, 2005).

  2 Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder, Die Geschichten Jacobs. Der junge Joseph (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983), p. 316. English edition: Joseph and his Brothers, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Everyman's Library, 2005).

  3 Mann, Joseph und seine Brïder, p. 317.

  4 Ibid., p. 319.

  5 Ibid., p. 318.

  6 Ibid., p. 316.

  7 See Bloom, Jesus and Jahweh.

  8 For a reintroduction of thymotic psychology into current discourse, see Peter Sloterdijk, Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch [Anger and Time. A Politico-Psychological Essay] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).

  9 See Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft [The Religion of Society], ed. André Kieserling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), pp. 152f.

  10 Regarding ‘hetero-Egypticism’, see Peter Sloterdijk, Derrida ein Ägypter. Vom Problem der jüdischen Pyramide [Derrida, an Egyptian. Concerning the Problem of the Jewish Pyramid] (Polity Press, 2009).

  11 This aspect is emphasized by Gottfried Schramm in his study Fünf Wegscheiden der Weltgeschichte [Five Turning Points in World History] (Göttingen, 2004), pp. 28–30, in order to explain the way in which innovative groups push on towards new fundamental insights which they then follow spontaneously; this phenomenon is only genuinely evident among the early Christians, the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the American revolution of the eighteenth century, however, though one could almost cite early Mosaism as a counterexample.

  12 For information on ritually induced memoactive stress as a vehicle for the inculturation of culturally specific teachings, see Heiner Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin [Jesus Outwits Darwin] (Vienna and New York, 2007).

  13 Matthias Albani, Der eine Gott und die himmlischen Heerscharen. Zur Begründung des Monotheismus bei Deuterojesaja im Horizont der Astralisierung des Gottesverständnisses im Alten Orient [The One God and the Heavenly Host. The Foundation of Monotheism in Deutero-Isaiah in the Horizon of the Astralization of the Concept of God in the Ancient Orient] (Leipzig, 2000); also André Lemaire, Naissance du monothéisme. Point de vue d'un historien [The Birth of Monotheism. A Historian's Point of View] (Paris, 2003).

  14 Sloterdijk, Zorn und Zeit, pp. 96f.

  15 Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin. One must also insist that the doctrine of the ‘lamb of God’ was derived not from the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, but from the monstrous reinterpretation of the slaughter ritual at Passover.

  16 The most assured representation of Catholic Romanism is to be found in Hans Küng's magnum opus Das Christentum [Christianity] (Munich, 1994), in the third section of the historical part, which, under the title ‘The Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages’, shows in particular – like a book within a book – the process of ‘Romanization at the expense of Catholic identity’ with reference to centralization, juridicization, politicization, militarization and clericalization.

  17 David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005).

  18 Especially in the extensive request for forgiveness on 12 March 2000.

  19 Maximilien Robespierre, ‘Rapport sur les idées religieuses et morales’ (7 May 1794) in Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, ed. Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez and Pierre-Célestin Roux-Lavergne (Paris: Paulin, 1834–8), vol XXXII, pp. 353ff.

  20 Louis Scutenaire, Mes inscriptions 1943–1944 (Paris: Allia, 1982).

  21 See, for example, I. S. Hussain, The Qur'an and Modernism. Beyond Science and Philosophy (Lahore, 2000), pp. 1f.: ‘The Qur'an: An Immaculate Conception’.

  22 Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin.

  23 According to the narrative scheme ecclesia oppressa, ecclesia militans, ecclesia triumphans – from the church under pressure to the fighting church, then from the fighting to the triumphant church – used in church history to summarize the political fate of Christianity between the death of Christ and the Constantinian shift.

  3

  The battle fronts

  Having presented the main candidates on the field of monotheistic faith and zeal (a fourth, the Communism expanding in the nineteenth century, does not require consideration at this point), it is not very difficult to subject the potential and actual confrontations between the monotheisms to systematic examination. Gaining the freest view of the field requires not a historical report, but rather a combinatorial scheme detailing all the formal possibilities of confrontation between the protagonists. In the following structural exercise – which, I hope, will not shock readers with its methodical callousness – I shall present twelve, or perhaps eighteen, basic possibilities of inter-monotheistic and intra-monotheistic formation of fronts, pointing here and there to the historical or diachronic contents of the synchronously schematized constellations. Their order is arbitrary and does not convey anything about the historical or moral weight of the individual figures in the conflicts. As I shall begin with the Christian positions, it is fitting that the oldest and most harmful manifestation of inter-monotheistic polemic should be mentioned first.

  The first figure of confrontation on the inter-monotheistic field is Christian anti-Judaism (1), whose founding document, the proto-apostle's letter to the Romans, has already been mentioned above. One of its oldest sources is also the Gospel of John, which already displays the most vehement anti-Jewish sentiment – here the Jews are openly condemned as the ‘children of Satan’ and viewed as part of a counter-world that has been rejected. Needless to say, such statements are more than simply the darkest blot on the history of the world's favourite religion; beyond that, they also make it clear what price was paid for this new idea of the Messiah. From an evolution-dynamic perspective, religious anti-Judaism constitutes a special case within a more general law, namely that the inception of an innovative ‘spiritual movement’ will inevitably leave behind slower groups, whose delayed or reluctant manner is taken as a ruinous sign by those already ahead. As the conservatives of the old covenant, the Jews were to embody this law and suffer under it, just as they looked back upon the Egyptians and the idolaters of Canaan as allegedly spiritually backward. As the history of the Christian hostility towards Jews fills entire libraries, archives of villainy that taught generations of academics to doubt Christianity, if not humanity at large, there is no further need to speak about it in the context of a formal enumeration – except for the conceptual criticism that one often describes these phenomena completely mechanically with the word ‘anti-Semitism’, which still gives the absurd fabrications of the political racism of the nineteenth century too much credence.

  The next figure is that of Christian anti-Islamism (2), whose beginnings can be traced back to the Byzantine reactions to the Arab-Islamic attacks of the seventh and eighth centuries. The Byzantine Empire had already lost two-thirds of its territories and half of its population to the Islamic conquerors by this point. In the High Middle Ages, the denigration of Islam was commonplace in Europe. When Dante wrote the twenty-eighth Canto of Inferno, which depicts the prophet Mohammed, together with the sowers of scandal and schism, being hacked to pieces by a sword-wielding devil for all eternity, he was most likely able to draw on the Islamophobic clichés of his time without having to rely on any inspiration himself – if one leaves aside the commedia's typical schema of analogy between the manner of blasphemy and the mode of infernal punishment. A further document of Christian Islamophobia from the early fifteenth century was made famous by the speech given by Pope Benedict XVI in Regensburg in September 2006, in which he quoted the statement – or rather the sigh – of the unhappy emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos (whose daughter had once sat in the harem of the enemy as they besieged Byzantium), that the prophet Mohammed had added nothing but evil and inhumanity to Christian revelatio
n.

  Next we should mention Christian anti-Paganism (3), a prototype for all monotheistic religious polemic. The Christian opposition to the pagani, i.e. the followers of the ‘backward’ religion of the villages and fields in the Roman Empire (like the opposition to the gentiles, the yet unconverted foreign peoples), was determined by two factors: firstly, it stemmed in a more indirect manner from the traditional Jewish rejection of the idolatrous and cultic religions that had previously dominated. Secondly, it developed from the urbane design of the ‘God's people’ project as conceived by Paul, with a clear imperial instinct in analogy to the Roman–Hellenistic ecumenical model. In this project the new figure of God, designed for the maximum mediality and transportability, inevitably came into great conflict with anything that recalled the magical circles of the older rural relics and local cults. The entire history of Christianity is thus characterized by a polemical tension between itself and all forms of folk religion with its magical-polytheistic dispositions, extending to the atrocities of the inquisition trials and extermination of witches – a tension that also permitted compromises, such as the cult of saints and relics and other manifestations of the semi-heathen, reterritorialized, folkloric and national-Catholic religion of the people.

  In the next round we encounter Islamic anti-Christianism (4) and Islamic anti-Judaism (5). As much as Islam was aware of its later historical position in relation to the two other exclusively monotheistic movements, and consequently saw fit to cultivate the knowledge of those connections, it nonetheless insisted on displaying its specific differences from the earlier religions of the book. I am not sure whether Christian Delacampagne is right to speak of a ‘radically anti-Jewish logic’1 informing Muslim culture from its beginnings to the present day. One can, however, diagnose a far-reaching ambivalence towards the Jewish legacy, for which the history of both ideas and actions in the corresponding field of conflict provides ample evidence. In fact, an emphatic distancing from Judaism can be traced back to Mohammed's Medina period. Not only was Jerusalem replaced by Mecca as the direction of prayer; there were also ‘cleansings and massacres’ of Jewish citizens – I have taken these two qualifications from Hans Küng's very empathetic and well-disposed monograph on the third of the Abrahamic religions.2 Whether one considers it constitutive or conjunctural, anti-Jewish sentiment in Islam has been reinforced by the texts of such writers as the Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), who held the view that the West was waging a war of conquest against the Islamic world, and that this war was controlled primarily by Jewish interests. Such agitated interpretations of the time have recently been augmented by the loud, apocalyptic Muslim sects that are omnipresent in Arab pop culture and burn with anticipation for the extermination of Judaism as if it were a salvation-historical event.

  While Jews and Christians, as ‘people of the book’, were treated with greater tolerance, even a certain respect in classical Islam (especially when they lived as dhimmi, wards who were protected under Islamic law and paid the poll tax), the monotheistic polemic against all that was alien or archaic showed itself all the more virulently in Islamic anti-Paganism (6). Unlike its Christian counterpart, this was not directed at the country-dwellers with polytheistic origins, whom believers in the city and the rest of the empire viewed as a thorn in their side. This time its impulses came from the religiously inflamed nomadic cultures of the desert, aimed at the confusion of the cities with all their cultic polyvalence, wealth of images and architectural excesses. There was an attempt, not entirely without substance, to attribute the attacks of 11 September 2001 to the imaginary idea of the original Islam (although contemporary Islamic extremism seems most prevalent in cities and among students). It is no secret that certain passages in the Qur'an openly urge believers not only to kill polytheists (Sura 2:191, Sura 9:5, etc.), but also to destroy their cities and towers if they refuse to accept the holy word (Sura 17:58: ‘And there is no city that we would not ravage before the day of resurrection’). One of the sources of religiously coded anti-urbanism in Islam was pointed out by Régis Debray in his uncovering of the close connection between original monotheism and the experience of living in the desert: ‘God is a nomad who has been extended to the heavens, remembering his dunes.’3

  The next item on the list of inter-monotheistic conflict areas is Jewish anti-Christianism (7) – a position presumably connected to a wide range of historical realities that were not, to the best of our knowledge, explicitly documented. There is at least evidence, however, that the reactionary rabbinical factions in Judaism prayed in their synagogues for the destruction of the ‘Nazarenes’ from the second century AD onwards: ‘May their names be struck from the Book of Life.’4 Such polemics are undoubtedly more than simply the inversions of Christian anti-Judaism. If, on the one hand, Christianity inevitably saw the mere existence of Judaism as a provocation, as the Jews' continued adherence to their traditional doctrine could only mean a harsh rejection of the Christian message, then conversely, on the other hand, the new faith of Christians in Jesus as the envoy of God was destined to be met with more or less open disapproval among the Jews. In more recent times, Jewish authors writing from a religion-psychological perspective have occasionally proposed that Christianity is fundamentally regressive in comparison to Judaism, as it exchanged the more mature belief in a life under the law for an illusory bond with a messiah who had ‘come’. One can see just how far such anti-Christian polemic in Jewish sources can extend in a book by the psychoanalysts Béla Grunberger and Pierre Dessuant entitled Narzissmus, Christentum, Antisemitismus,5 in which the authors suggest that there is a continuum of malign Christian narcissism leading straight from Jesus to Hitler. Although the authors stepped onto the field of universal polemic with this claim, there was no scandal; those under attack simply shook their heads. Here one could observe with bafflement how psychoanalysis was being appropriated by a zealous Judaism without boundaries.

  As far as Jewish anti-Islamism (8) is concerned, its historical manifestations have remained faint and presumably little-examined. Whatever their nature may have been, they would have been balanced out by occasional Jewish–Islamic alliances, which can be traced back to the time of the crusades. At any rate, the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim attacks of the New York ‘hate preacher’ Meir Kahan (1932–90) only expressed a marginal position within Judaism. The ideal and real manifestations of Jewish anti-Paganism (9), on the other hand, are far clearer: they lead us to the exophobic origins of any exclusive monotheism. One can justify it by pointing to its defensive character. If Judaism had not withdrawn behind the ‘fence of the law’, it would hardly have survived the countless trials of history. On the other hand, the antithetical relationship between the Jewish faith and the conventions of those with other beliefs in the Middle East would never have grown into the vicious conflict that has meanwhile become familiar without this. One could say that the division of mankind into Jews and gentiles (goyim) still common today (a distinction that seems to pass the lips of German Sunday speakers especially easily) highlights aspects of a very old attitude, both fearful and contemptuous, towards the followers of other gods and depraved cults.

  Finally one must take into account the possibility and reality of internal schisms, which extended the polemical range with three further positions: Christian anti-Christianism (10), Islamic anti-Islamism (11) and Jewish anti-Judaism (12). As far as the first of these is concerned, we primarily recall the deep gulf between the Christian confessions from the century of the Reformation onwards (prefigured by numerous dogmatically and politically motivated schisms in early church history). Nonetheless, this is only one of many manifestations of the potential for intra-Christian conflict. Like all monotheisms, the Christian variety is no stranger to the tension between the rigorist and laxist interpretations of the scriptures on the one hand, and the chronic friction between orthodox and heretical tendencies on the other. In the case of Islam, one naturally thinks of the breaking away of the Shia, which, according to the contemporary
Sunni leader Abu Mus'ab al Zarkawi, has as little to do with Islam as Judaism with Christianity, ‘which are likewise based on the same scripture’.6 In the case of Judaism, as well as the Cabbalistic and mystical deviations from orthodoxy, the most obvious choice would be the opposition between the legalistic and messianic schools of thought. The schism between the conservative and the liberal synagogue is also not without certain polemogenic effects.

  This overview outlines the twelve main battle fronts that could transpire from an identitary, collective-forming and polemogenic use of the three monotheistic syntheses. If one considers possible two-against-one coalitions, a further three figures can be added to the list: Christians and Muslims against Jews (13), Jews and Muslims against Christians (14), and Jews and Christians against Muslims (15). I shall refrain from supplying historical indications of such alliances.

  With reference to real and virtual religious history, one should also note the development of three atheisms corresponding to the three monotheisms, a process that took place with evolutionary necessity. In order to understand this, one must acknowledge the fact that atheism does not usually stem from a context-free logical examination of the existence or non-existence of God. It practically always comes from idiosyncratic negations of particular theistic tenets and their organized cultic contexts. In this sense, atheism constitutes a regional phenomenon. We must therefore take into account a Christian atheism and its damnation by orthodox Christians (16), then Islamic atheism and its damnation by Islamic zealots (17) and Jewish atheism with its damnation by pious Jews (18). The term ‘damnation’ here encompasses the darkest of meanings: for Thomas Aquinas, falling away from the Christian faith was a crime that deserved to be punished with death; even at the end of the seventeenth century, the constitution of the Puritan theocracy in Massachusetts stated that the crime of atheism called for the death penalty; in the Islamic republic of Pakistan, non-believers and followers of other faiths can still be sentenced to death on charges of apostasy and blasphemy. Admittedly Rousseau, the totalitarian prophet of the Enlightenment, also proposed the death penalty for those who broke away from the ‘civil religion’ – and even in the enlightened Western ‘societies’ of today, there is no shortage of examples showing how readily the civil-religiously committed centrists begin a witch hunt whenever individuals blaspheme against the liberal consensus: a witch hunt whose practitioners happily take into account the social death of their victim. It is much rarer to encounter an abstract atheism free of any presuppositions, one that adopts a stance against the historical theisms as a whole – for example in the Treatise on the Three Impostors (these being Moses, Jesus and Mohammed) from the eighteenth century, whose anonymous author, inspired by Spinoza, takes the common Enlightenment doctrine of clerical fraud to the point of prophet fraud, even fraud by the religious founders – and actually implies that these founding fathers were not only deceivers, but also the first to be deceived. The recent case of the biologist Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion (2006) is a monument to the eternal shallowness of Anglican atheism, shows how avowed deniers of God can in turn be duped by their own zeal.