God's Zeal by Peter Sloterdijk

Author:Peter Sloterdijk
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780745645063
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-08-25T17:31:17+00:00

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 hysteria – 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.

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