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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
The idea of a connection between poetry and religion is as old as civilization. Homer consulted the Olympian gods on the fate of the fighters on the plain before Troy, and the poet made the heavenly ones speak. It was through poetry that the gods were brought within reach of human hearing. In the centuries after Homer, the Athenian stage became the setting where gods made their poetic interventions, resolving human impasses and contributing to the emotional synchronization of the public life of the city. Sloterdijk argues that, as with the culture of the Ancient Greeks, all religions inscribe a kind of "theopoetry" at the heart of their cultural life and thought, even as they strenuously obscure these poetic origins through the cultivation and enforcement of orthodox norms. Sloterdijk also shows how, in conditions of religious pluralism, religions poetically reshape themselves to accommodate the demands of the religious marketplace. This highly original study of the poetic devices that inform accounts of the otherworldly offers a new interpretation of religious practice and its theological elaboration through history, as well as a fresh perspective on our contemporary age in which collective life, interwoven with imaginative fabrications, is fraying under critical stress.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Preface
Notes
I
Deus ex machina, Deus ex cathedra
1 The gods in the theatre
Notes
2 Plato’s contestation
Notes
3 Of the true religion
Notes
4 Representing God, being God: an Egyptian solution
Notes
5 On the best of all possible heaven dwellers
Notes
6 Poetries of power
Notes
7 Dwelling in plausibilities
Notes
8 The theopoetical difference
Notes
9 Revelation whence?
Notes
10 The death of the gods
Notes
11 “Religion is unbelief”: Karl Barth’s intervention
Notes
12 In the garden of infallibility: Denzinger’s world
Notes
II Under the high heavens
13 Fictive belonging together
Notes
14 Twilight of the gods and sociophany
Notes
15 Glory: poems of praise
Notes
16 Poetry of patient endurance
Notes
17 Poetry of exaggeration: religious virtuosos and their excesses
Notes
18 Kerygma, propaganda, supply-side offense, or, when fiction is not to be trifled with
Notes
19 On the prose and poetry of the search
Notes
20 Freedom of Religion
Notes
In lieu of an afterword
Notes
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Preface
Figure 1. The sky goddess Nut, studded with stars, overarching the reclining earth god Geb...
In lieu of an afterword
Figure 2. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio,
Conversion on the Way to Damascus
(160...
Guide
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Table of Contents
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Making the Heavens Speak
Religion as Poetry
Peter Sloterdijk
Translated by Robert Hughes
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen. Über Theopoesie © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2020.
All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4749-4 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4750-0 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937905
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Dedication
In memory of Raimund Fellinger
Acknowledgments
The first part of this book is based on a lecture I gave on May 5, 2019, at the invitation of the Institut für soziale Gegenwartsfragen in Freiburg, as part of a lecture series entitled “After God: Lectures on Religion after its Disenchantment” at Theater Freiburg (in cooperation with Radio SWR2). I would like to thank the organizers, and Christian Matthiessen in particular, for making this opportunity possible.
When Jan Assmann celebrated his eightieth birthday in July 2018, I was invited to contribute an article to a Festschrift devoted to him in a journal of Egyptology. What I had in mind was a short essay on the subject of “theopoetry,” but, since I did not finish this task on time, I promised the jubilee that I would dedicate the finished piece to him when it finally became available. The piece has now become rather longer than initially conceived and the delay has been considerable; nonetheless, my wish to dedicate this writing to him persists. However belatedly, I take the liberty here of offering it to the great scholar as a gesture beyond the occasion of the anniversary of his birth.
This context calls to mind Goethe’s well-known declaration in his letter to Schiller on December 19, 1798: “As for the rest, I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or indirectly rousing my activity.”1 As a long-time reader of Jan Assmann’s work, I can attest to its power for direct instruction – accompanied, as always, by the joy of understanding – as well as to its power for indirect stimulation, manifest in long-term effects – not least in keeping open the “Egyptian question.”
The association between instruction and stimulation necessarily also calls to mind the grand master in studies of late classical and medieval philosophy, Kurt Flasch. For four decades, his work has given me ever-renewed inspiration for thought, from his work on Augustine up through his enormous new Dante translation and its lavish commentary. As a faithful reader, I owe the author more than the endnotes in this book can say, so I would like to extend my special gratitude to him here as well.
Notes
1
[Translator’s note] See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe: From 1794 to 1805.
Vol. II:
1798
–
1805
, trans. L. Dora Schmitz (London: George Bell and Sons, 1879): 182.
Preface
Since the title of this book might give an ambiguous impression, let me declare from the outset that what follows will treat neither the heavens of the astrologers, nor those of the astronomers, nor yet those of the astronauts. As we will find, the heavens that can be made to speak are not a possible object of visual perception. And yet, from the most ancient times, figurative ideas, attended by vocal phenomena, have imposed themselves upon the heavenward gaze: the tent buzzes with the voices of everyday life, the cave walls echo with the old magic chants, the vaulted dome resounds with cantilenas in honor of the Lord on high.
The whole of the heavens, through day and through night, has always given rise to archaic conceptions of the all-embracing. In this one figure, the monstrous, the open, and the vast could all be thought together with the protective and the domestic in a symbol of cosmic and moral integrity. On the Greenfield Papyrus (950–930 bce), the image of Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the heavens, makes a forward-facing bridge arching over the earth. Down from antiquity, her image offers the most beautiful emblem of the protection offered by the all-encompassing. Through the figure of her likeness, the heavens are likewise present on the inside of coffins. Any of the dead, upon opening their eyes inside the coffin, would see the image of the goddess there and would thus be attended into a soothing openness.
When, in the course of secularization, the heavens lost their significance as a cosmic symbol of security, they came instead to embody cosmic caprice, in the face of which human plans and purposes must fall into eclipse. Thereafter, the silence of infinite space comes to evoke a metaphysical horror in thinkers who hearken to the void. In his verse epic, Germany: A Winter’s Tale (1844), Heinrich Heine painted this tendency with a coat of mild irony when, with his little harp girl singing her heavenly lullaby and the old “song of renunciation,” he resolved to leave heaven to the angels and birds.1 A contrasting image is offered by “The Pot Lid,” from the third edition of The Flowers of Evil (1868), in which Charles Baudelaire introduced a neo-Gnostic prisoner’s panic in describing the heavens as the “black lid of the enormous pot where vast, amorphous Mankind boils and seethes.”2
Given the opposed diagnoses offered by these two poets, we might consider opinions from third parties. The discussion that follows in this book will concern primarily communicative, bright heavens inviting uplift, because, in accord with the task of poetic enlightenment, the heavens constitute the common provenance of gods, verse, and the uplifting of spirits.
Figure 1. The sky goddess Nut, studded with stars, overarching the reclining earth god Geb and the kneeling air god Shu. An Egyptian representation of the heavens and earth, from an uncredited illustration after ancient Egyptian papyrus, in: The Popular Science Monthly 10 (March 1877): 546. Photo: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.
Notes
1
[Translator’s note] See Heinrich Heine, “Germany: A Winter’s Tale.” Trans. Aaron Kramer.
Poetry and Prose
, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 1982): 231–97.
2
[Translator’s note] See Charles Baudelaire, “The Pot Lid.”
The Flowers of Evil
, trans. James McGowan (Oxford University Press, 1993): 333–5.
IDEUS EX MACHINA, DEUS EX CATHEDRA
Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing.
Matthew 13:34
1THE GODS IN THE THEATRE
The association between poetry and notions of the world of the gods is as old as the earliest European tradition – indeed, one finds it among the oldest written sources in civilizations the whole world over. Those who remember the eternal waves in Homer’s verse will likewise recall how the poet consulted the Olympian gods with regard to the fate of the fighters on the plains before Troy. Without standing on ceremony, the poet has his heavenly ones speak – and not always with the gravitas one might expect from beings of such exalted rank.
Elsewhere, at the beginning of the Odyssey, Zeus takes the floor to deplore a wayward declaration from his daughter Athena. He strikes a majestic tone as he takes her to task: “My child, what sort of word escaped your teeth’s barrier?”1 Even the first among the dwellers of Mount Olympus cannot simply order the goddess of wisdom to be quiet. To express his displeasure, the father of the gods is driven to some rhetorical effort – to the deployment, even, of poetic formulas.
Might we claim that it was Homer, the poet, who begot the poetic gods? However one might take up such an indelicate question, it must be said that, as poets, Homer’s gods would have composed only in the mode of amateurs, inasmuch as poetry is a métier requiring study – notwithstanding the common prattle one hears about one or another miracle of unskilled inspiration. Insistence upon the amateur position bears witness to Olympian aristocracy and underscores the point: no power in the world could compel a power-wielding god to learn any trade to the level of mastery.
Gods of the ancient Olympian type mostly comport themselves toward the world in the mode of detached spectators. They wade into earthly affairs no further than away-fans are wont to do; during wars, they sit in their boxes like visiting spectators backing their favorites. Entanglements are not their thing. They are like magicians, equally good at appearing and disappearing in a flash. Even if they are no longer mere embodiments of diffuse natural forces, meteorological phenomena, and the driving forces of botanical and animal fertility, even when they help to personify more abstract ethical, cognitive, and political principles, still the gods retain this lightweight character – as if the Olympian gods were something like a society of oligarchs, winking and nodding at each other as the fragrance of sacrificial fires rises to their senses.
Their choice of residence betrays them as creatures of antigravity. They have forgotten the existence, the abidance in the field of gravity, which afflicted their forebears among the generation of titanic gods. The amorphous power titans were destined to sink into darkness as the well-formed Olympian gods gained their ascendancy – excepting the mobility-impaired god Hephaestus, who never quite became socially acceptable as a blacksmith and a limping workshop rat. Since the fall of their predecessors, the gods of the second generation – the Olympian gang – have been troubled by the presentiment that the vanquished titans could eventually return. Gods at this level know that all victories are merely provisional. If the gods had an unconscious, it would bear an inscription: We are spirits of the dead who have come a long way – we owe our ascendancy to a nameless vital impulse, and nothing excludes the possibility that one day it will show us to the door.2
One aspect here is especially important for what follows – namely, that Homer’s gods were gods who spoke. They were, as Aristotle said of human beings, living beings who “have language.” And it was through poetry that they were brought within range of human hearing, even if this perhaps mostly consisted in conversations among immortals overheard by chance – as if the horses were listening in as spectators placed their bets before the race.
In the centuries after Homer, the phenomenon of speaking gods comes to be incorporated into the culture of Greek theatre. The Athenian stage set its storylines in motion before the assembled citizenry and, through the general intelligibility of the action, thereby contributed to the emotional synchronization of the public life of the city. Democracy began as affective populism, and from the outset it made use of the communicable effects of emotion. As Aristotle would later sum it up, the audience in the theatre felt “pity and fear,” éleos and phóbos – or, better, a lament and a shudder, often together in the same passage of the tragedy. The emotional agitation portrayed by the actors was lived through in unison by most of the patrons, men and women alike, and they purged themselves of their tensions through an almost detached sympathy with the sufferings of the torn or dismembered figure on the stage. The Greeks had a specific verb for this effect – synhomoiopathein: simultaneously feeling the same suffering.3 Likewise in the comedies that followed the tragedies: the people laughed together, as a rule, and in the same places. The decisive factor for the edifying effect of the drama was that, when contemplating the twists and turns of fate on the stage, it was precisely together that people arrived at the limit where one ceased to ask further questions. The veiled, the suprasensible – the numinous, one might say – filled the scene in the real present. As this effect rarely occurred and perished with the mediocre pieces of the post-classical period, the Athenian public eventually lost its interest; by the fourth century bce, audience members who sacrificed a day for exhausted performances on the Dionysian stage were compensated with a theatre coin, an obol.
In this context, one ingenious invention of Attic theatrical art calls for discussion in greater detail. The dramaturges (the “event makers”) – still largely identical with the poets – had understood that conflicts between people fighting over irreconcilables tend to come to a dead end. Because human means were powerless to resolve such moments, they were exploited by ancient theatre as pretexts for the introduction of a divine figure. But because a god could not simply appear from the wings like any old messenger, it was necessary to devise a method for making the god soar in from above. For this purpose, Athenian theatre-engineers built a machine that made it possible for gods to appear from out of the heavens. Apò mekhanês theós: a crane swiveled over the scene, to the boom of which was attached a platform or lectern – and, from there, the god could address the human scene below. The Athenians called this device a theologeion.
Those who performed on this astounding crane were, of course, not priests educated in theology – there were no such persons as of yet, and the very term had not been coined. Instead, they were actors performing behind sublime masks, and they portrayed the god or goddess as an awe-inspiring, problem-solving authority. Obviously, the dramaturges were not afraid to become “theurgically” active – they saw gods as effects that might be contrived, much as some practical Kabbalists were later convinced that they could perform theotechnical procedures by reproducing the Creator’s own devisings with letters. Other Hellenic venues were content with arranging the theologeion as a kind of gallery, or as an elevated balcony on the rear wall of the theatre – though this, of course, would oblige them to forgo the fascinating effect of the gods’ hovering entrance.
The most powerful stage epiphany comes to pass, toward the end of Aeschylus’ Eumenides (performed 458 bce in Athens), when the goddess Athena enters to intervene in the affair of Orestes the matricide, breaking a stalemate between the party of vengeance and the party of conciliation and supplying a congenial alternative, whereby the avenging “Furies” (the Erinyes) transform themselves into “the gracious ones” (the Eumenides). Something quite similar is staged in Sophocles’ Philoctetes (performed 409 bce), when the divine Heracles floats in to change the mind of the Greeks’ obstinate enemy, the title character who up to that moment has persisted with his grief and bitterness, but who now finally surrenders the bow necessary for a Hellene victory in the Trojan War.
A theologeion is not an orator’s lectern, nor a sermon pulpit, but rather a device specific to the theatre. It represents a trivial “machine” in the original sense of the word – a special effect, a trick of scenography, devised to capture the attention of the audience. Functionally, however, it is decidedly non-trivial: it shifts a god or goddess from a state of invisibility into one of visibility. Moreover, one not only sees the god or goddess hovering above the scene, one hears the deity speak and issue instructions. There is no doubt that this is mere “theatre,” but that initial theatre would never have existed without the assumption that all the actors and characters, mortal and immortal, could be represented as real for the duration of the play. If the gods do not appear on their own, their advent will have to be arranged. The later Latin term deus ex machina deals with effects of this type and, considered in its technical dramatic sense, means simply this: only a figure who intervenes from the outside can supply the extricating slip from a hopelessly knotted conflict. That the god or goddess appears coram publico, in full view of the public, at the pivotal point of the action, is at first nothing more than a dramaturgical requirement; however, this appearance also signifies a moral postulate – indeed, something like a sacred task of the theatre. One might call it the “dramaturgical proof of God”: to disentangle the knots of the conflict requires a divine figure, hence the god or goddess exists. It would be irreverent – but not entirely wrong – to describe them as “happy-ending providers.” Indeed, the solutions we long for, in whatever the sphere, can often only be achieved with the help of higher powers, even if only by way of the good fortune of enjoying clear presence of mind. In this way, “solutions” become noteworthy as heavenly services4 long before they come to our attention as answers to mathematical functions and business problems. Let us add the observation that a great number of eighteenth-century opera libretti would, in their aversion to tragedy, have been inconceivable without a god or goddess issuing from the machina.
Given this context of Greek theodramatic art, one might ask whether the more theologically elaborated “religions” had some kind of equivalent to the theatre crane or the balcony for the presentation of their own divine figures. For present purposes, we must content ourselves with the unhappy term “religion,” despite it being overloaded with confusion, speculation, and imputations – especially in the years since Tertullian, with his Apologeticum (197 ce), inverted the expressions superstitio and religio against common Roman usage: he calls superstition the traditional religio of the Romans, while Christianity, he asserts, should be called “the true religion of the true God.” With this, he gave Augustine the template for his epoch-making treatise Of True Religion (De vera religione, 391 ce), in which the Roman concept was definitively appropriated for Christianity. Since then, it has come to stand for all those suggestions of shadowy things and twilit matters that darken the daylight of understanding5 – although, we might also observe that, in order to save the concept of religion,6 much effort has also been devoted to the task of demonstrating the possible congruence of rationality and revelation. Certainly, the theologeion in the narrower sense of the word was devised only once – and only once so named. In a broader sense and under other names, however, devices that produce an appearance of the higher gods and make them speak are, if not ubiquitous, still discernible across a range of phenomena.
What was dramaturgically negotiated on the Attic stage, almost as if it were a surrogate on behalf of all human cultures, was nothing less than the question of whether spectators of ritual dramatic action must be content with theotechnical effects, or whether ultimately the gods themselves might manifest their presence from behind the magic of the drama. From time immemorial, shamans, priests, and theatre people have shared the sense that profounder emotion lies within the realm of the practicable. Setting aside those who succumb to the latent cynicism of their professions, these shamans, priests, and theatre people believed that whatever was deeply moving, as such, might gain an even greater intensity of presence in the course of the sacral operation. As in any “profound play,” ritual acts hold forth the possibility that what is represented might awaken to life within the very thing representing it. The gods may indeed be “near and difficult to grasp,”7 as the poet says, but such nebulousness does not preclude the seriousness of our devotion and our immersion in their atmospheric presence.8
Counterparts to the Hellenic stage machinery emerge when gods of varied provenance, including those of monotheistic constitution and those of powerfully exalted character, begin to comply with their obligation to make appearances – when they answer to one or another summons and deign to render themselves perceptible to human senses. In principle, the gods could have remained almost completely hidden, since their essence is latent and transcendent and escapes mundane perception. It is not without reason that the gods are referred to as the Unseen. The subterranean gods in particular were deeply reticent to reveal themselves, even if the coming of every spring brought forth a display of their power. This was re-enacted with cultic amplification among the Mediterranean peoples – for example in the Athenian phallophoria, the springtime phallic processions of the cult of Dionysus, in which the matrons of the city would carry huge phalli, sewn from red leather, and parade about in an atmosphere of adoring mockery.
For denizens of the great Beyond in ancient times, “making appearances” would have been a secondary activity at most. Epicurus hit the point when he remarked that the gods are too blessed to much interest themselves in human affairs. For his part, his predecessor Thales of Miletus is said to have held that “All things are full of gods” – though this could mean very different things: either that, of the hundreds of Greek deities, there was always one on duty at the threshold of the human world, like a heavenly on-call clinician, or else that we are always and everywhere surrounded by divinities, except that our everyday insensibility fails to mark their presence. Homer notes in passing that the gods loved to take part in human feasts and to meet lonely wanderers without being recognized9 – or, as it may be, allowing themselves to be recognized only after the fact from their enigmatic aura.
From epiphanic episodes, however one might interpret them, there arose, over time, cultic obligations. Once the cults arrived at some state of stability, the gods were fitted into an ecosystem of evidence that circumscribed the space for their appearances. The gods are vaguenesses that are assigned their specificity by a cult. In ancient times, they were summoned (if not compelled) to “appear” almost anywhere, but they were invited especially to make their appearances in places established for this very purpose, spaces suitable for epiphanies and designated as temples (Latin: templum, a place cut out and reserved), and on fixed occasions called “festivals.” They fulfilled their roles of appearance and revelation through the mediation of human oracles, by way of gnomic utterances and ambiguous prophecies, or through messages in scripture wreathed in an aura of holiness. Some were willing to appear in lucid dreams, in sleep temples, or on the eve of important decisions.
Their preferred disposition was the same patience bordering on indifference with which they endured the appeals made to them by mortals. One could pray to them, shame them with great sacrifices, denounce them, accuse them of injustice, question their wisdom, even swear and curse at them without risking immediate response.10 The gods could afford to behave as if they weren’t there. Thus, the crowded heavens drifted through the ages in a spirit of forbearance.
In the end, however, the gods found they could not refuse the call to appear in the form of personal embodiment: not infrequently, they felt themselves free to take possession of a host body that they might then use and abandon as they pleased – or else, “in the fullness of time,” they might desublimate into a redeeming Son of man, a Messiah. The spiritual elite among the Jews became more receptive to messianic messages in 539 bce, after Cyrus the Great, the king of Persia famous for his religious tolerance, allowed them to return to Zion after almost 60 years of captivity in Babylon. Deutero-Isaiah set the tone for this. Messianic ideas emerged from eulogies for Cyrus, the instrument of God, and remained powerful for two and a half thousand years. What Adolf von Harnack wrote about the Gospel of Marcion, announcing the doctrine of an unknown god, proves true for an entire age of the world: “Religion is redemption – the indicator of the history of religion in the first and second centuries points to this position; no longer can any be a god who is not also a savior.”11 The epithet “Redeemer” or “Savior” (soter) had already been applied to Ptolemy I Soter, who rose to rule Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great and who inaugurated the cult of the “redeeming gods.” His son, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, bore the Golden Horus name to which a pharaoh was entitled: “He whose father made him appear.”
Gods who made an appearance gave their clients just as much to see and hear, and occasionally to read, as seemed necessary for their loyalty, guidance, and instruction – so generally enough to uphold the “plausibility structure”12 and, for a community informed and given shape by ritual, to thereby secure adherence to their cultic ideas (in the classical period: hoi patrioi nomoi, mos maiorum, respecting ancestral custom; in the Christian period: fides, “faithfulness in holding fast to that which holds”). Here, plausibility means the theory-free acceptance of conventionality, including those conventions that relate to otherworldly things.
The invention of the theologeion by the Greeks (and the mechanical device that made it possible) thus made explicit an awkward situation that all higher religioid entities had to contend with. It clarified the task of bringing into the human lifeworld some visible manifestation of the hereafter, the higher plane, the beyond – or however one wishes to refer to the space inhabited by vague powers and suspended over the world of human experience. The earliest stage of evidence from sensible–supersensible sources was manifest by the way that participants’ affect was aroused from a theatrical “play,” a ceremonial rite, a fascinating blood sacrifice. In order to produce such effects, early cultures made frequent recourse to mediumistic procedures and mantic practices – either of which gave great occult powers an opportunity to make their intentions known.
When given the opportunity to make an appearance, otherworldly powers would respond, as a rule, by way of trance-induced presences – sometimes following frenzies in which a host might overstep the limit of deliberate self-harm. Those transmitting from the other side seemed to have appointed their cult medium as a kind of ambassador on the threshold between the spheres. They were occasionally heard through voices resounding among the celebrants; later, the stammering of the medium was replaced by the hushed reading of passages from scripture. The gods gave instructions in the shape of a sheep’s liver or in the direction of birds in flight – all of these preludes to the arts of reading signs and close reading. Mesopotamian astrology celebrated an early triumph of reading when it gained the ability to decipher the relative position of heavenly bodies as texts and as powers influencing human destinies. The zone of signs waxes in parallel with the art of interpretation.13 That it is not accessible to everyone is explained by its semi-esoteric nature: Jesus already reproaches those who came to test him for their inability to interpret “the signs of the times” (semaia ton kairon).14 He himself was certainly more than a constellation; yet, when Jesus was born, the star of Bethlehem was there as a sign in the heavens to guide the (still-popular) astrologers from the East15 – at least, insofar as one takes this account as more than just a fantasy of the Gospel of Matthew.16
Ecstatic practices and mantic methods of inquiry constituted procedures for submitting questions to the great beyond that the beyond itself could not leave entirely unanswered. As a rule, interpreters would be found who could assign a practical meaning to the encrypted symbols. As recent research shows, the lore of political signs operated at a highly refined level in western antiquity – in particular, among the Greeks and Romans.17 “Political theology” had yet to find expression in the discourse of the day, but the gods were thought to have opinions about human affairs and would take sides in them – indeed, in special cases, they would plan long-term political undertakings in which the cooperation of earthly actors was indispensable, as in the indirect founding of Rome by the Trojan prince Aeneas. The existence of such interventions was beyond any doubt for those skilled in the art of reading signs. No imperialism arises without rulers and aspirants placing interpretations of the day’s heavenly constellations into the frame of current events. To which might be added counsel issuing from the underworld. Aeneas, mythical antecedent to the Roman people, hears an admonition addressed to him from the mouth of his dead father, urging him to impose a benevolent regime upon the peoples of the Earth: Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento.18 With this imperative, the poet Virgil, who had been commissioned to transfigure his contemporary, Caesar Augustus, created the model of a “prophecy after the event,” so to speak. Historians are the modern successors of the augurs; they decipher “historical signs” with great powers of understanding and dedicate themselves to the task of presenting seemingly blind successions of events as meaningful sequences of a “world history.”
The inventors of the theologeion have the merit of having clarified the epiphanic pressure exerted upon the heavens since they were first assigned the role of supporting the emotional and symbolic (or “religious”) integration of larger social units: of ethnicities, cities, empires, and supra-ethnic cult communities – whereby the latter could also assume a metapolitical – even counter-political – character, as might be shown, for example, among Christian congregations in the centuries before Constantine the Great. The early Christian communities would have disintegrated into a confusion of individual ancillary inspirations, and would have remained ungovernable, had the first dioceses not striven for a certain degree of liturgical and theological coherence and had they not borrowed, from the Roman provincial and military administrations, techniques for managing territory and personnel. The bishops (episcopoi: overseers) were basically something like praefecti (commanders, governors) decked in religious garb; their dioceses (Greek: dioikesis: administration) resembled the former imperial districts following the Diocletian reforms around the year 300 ce; it was not least through these that the principle of hierarchy entered into the burgeoning organization of the church. With it, came the haute couture of ecclesiastical vestments that had first costumed public officials.
The stage technology, or the principle of religious dramaturgy and mediology, called apò mekhanês theós or deus ex machina, was in fact already in use in some rituals of the Near East, long before the emergence of Athenian theatre. Consider the most famous example: the Ark of the Covenant (Aron habrit), which had been carried along on the wanderings of the Israelites and housed in the tabernacle until it found a permanent place in the inner sanctuary of Solomon’s Temple, to be entered only once a year, on Yom Kippur, the post-exilic high holiday of atonement. As a technology of revelation, this appears as a classic sacred mekhane that brings into presence a God who is capable of speaking and writing. According to its functional purpose, the Ark was a theologeion ante litteram. According to reports, it contained the two tablets “written with the finger of God”19 that Moses had received on cloudy Mount Sinai. Later, the Ark was a repository of the holy scriptures of Israel – the Torah: more precisely, the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses.
The monolatry of ancient Israel did not permit, or even grant, the possibility of any further epiphany – at the time, the law was that those who see God, the devastating Prince of fire and the elements of air, and see him in his real presence, would lose their lives. The presence of the god made itself felt numinously, but it could not be translated theatrically in any way. As regards making appearances, YHWH or Elohim was limited to writing and to “nature” – both understood under the sign of authorship, and both only to be grasped as the perpetually unfolding revision of what had already been written and created. The written characters reposited inside the gilded chest of acacia wood made its proximity both sacred and dangerous: those who accidentally touched the Ark of the Covenant would be killed. From this, it can be inferred that the function of taboo, observed by nineteenth-century European ethnologists in Polynesia, existed among Semitic peoples (as with many others) from time immemorial, which is to say ever since ancient cult groups came to take “sanctifying–cursing” prohibitions with the utmost degree of seriousness. The early religio, if one might be permitted to extend the Roman concept, has always concerned processes on the threshold of life-giving and death-bringing things. Here, as is typical of religion, the indistinct touches upon the absolutely serious.
The writings of the ancient Israelites conformed to the schema of a deus in machina; one of these attained new distinction in the seventeenth century, when Christian engineers were seeking a perpetual motion machine in order to demonstrate proof of God by way of mechanics. When, in the myth, the God of Israel gave over the tablets on Sinai, he fulfilled his obligation to appear. The commandments laid down on the tablets were first repeated orally; it was only much later that copying, reading, studying, and commentary entered the discussion. The God of the people of Exodus was evidently prepared, during the years of wandering in the desert, to draw his followers along at night in the form of a pillar of fire, and by day in the form of a pillar of smoke on the horizon. The wanderers were said to have been on desert paths for 40 years before the “conquest and occupation” of their promised area of settlement – this very fact expresses a portentous tarrying before the final attainment of success. The long errancy is comprehensible only as a penitential pilgrimage: the swift path to the promised land would have been manageable at a moderate pace within 40 days or a little more, presuming the logic of a purposeful trek. That cannot be assessed here – only that the whole concept of a direct path seems not to have been one of the terms of the agreement between Israel and its Lord on high.
The departure from Egypt implies an arrival into the realm of YHWH’s punitive power. Way and wayward now become synonymous. God writes straight with crooked lines, according to a proverb sometimes attributed to Augustine of Hippo. The Lord, whom one cannot call by name, manifested himself in the military and domestic triumphs of his adherents, in the bounty of births in their herds, and in the brief splendor of the royal houses of David and Solomon. Very little was missing for YHWH to have become an imperial god, with secondary temples and numerous tributary peoples all around. In the actual event, it turned out rather differently, however, and this created an insoluble tension between the never-abandoned suprematist claim of the God of Israel and the permanently precarious situation of his small and (after the diaspora of 135 ce) landless, disarmed people. Needless to say, it manifested itself in his own people as defeat, pestilence, deportation, and depression. Scriptural experts interpreted the dark events lege artis, as well-deserved punishments visited upon a notoriously disobedient people, and in some instances as trials of the righteous. The archetypal figures of punishment and trial served the Jews in their times of suffering, contemptuous treatment, and dispersion, allowing them to cast themselves as a “boat people” upon the sea of history, however many perished nameless and sunk into unvisitable graves.
The Christianity that branched off from Judaism had to find a way to dramatize heavenly indications in its own fashion. Even in its early writings, it made an astonishing use of the schema of the theologeion when it equated the appearance of Jesus, as the Messiah expected by the Jews, with the “Word of God.” In this way, the Christian message went decisively beyond the examples of Greek theatrical poetry for speaking gods and, at the same time, it dramatized the idea of a Torah that transits or returns from the written word into living being. The “sources” that highlight the difference can be found above all in Jesus’ I-am declarations (ego eimy) in the Gospel of John, and in the You-are declaration of Simon Peter reported in Matthew 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” The fact that these expressions were “secondary” formulations subsequently put into the mouths of Jesus and Peter does not matter for our purposes.20 What is decisive is that they authorized the binding together of the Jewish Messiah motif with the doctrine of Logos from Middle Platonism, something already put into effect by John the Evangelist around the year 100 ce (perhaps earlier). Thanks to this convergence, which later developed into a relation of equation, the god or God wholly entered into his human appearance and linguistic utterances. Jesus was therefore not only a theologeion in his person – that is, the source of heavenly speech on an earthly stage – he was also, at least viewed retrospectively, the speaking God himself, and not as an actor reciting the lines of his role, but as a performer who succeeds in speaking his text ex tempore. When theology began to assign Jesus authorship in the metaphysical sense, his earthly presence would not only testify to an appearance of God in human form – this might be considered a standard religious event in the region stretching between the Nile and the Ganges (even if there with a different sense) – it aimed to represent nothing less than the descent of the absolutely transcendent Logos into immanence, and consequently an act of a singular ontological “condescension,” in the christological sense.
The Gospels of the New Testament report a great theo-anthropological event that showed itself, in the first place, in the fact that the God-Man making his appearance had entered into this epiphany without reserving any option for withdrawal. Jesus had no dramaturge, no tragic poet at his side, to feed him the words that went along with his “role.” There was no mask he could remove backstage. It was only after the fact that his poets became his poets – i.e., when the evangelists later told his story. Their teacher’s words had resonated with them before the fatal events of his entry into Jerusalem and they did not hesitate to let him say what he must have said if his earthly appearance were to have its proper meaning (because otherwise it would be material for the report of only a failure).21
Almost 300 years after the death of the man his followers venerated as the Messiah come, the First Council of Nicaea established the creed that the Lord Jesus Christ was God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made – whatever that might mean. This is followed a few lines further on in the Nicene Creed by the phrase et homo factus est: and was made man. Only here do we find explicitly expressed the precipitous metaphysical declivity of Jesus’ coming into the world. In a singular case, an actual man might come into being without ceasing to be Light from Light, notwithstanding his also being human. The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (4 bce–65 ce), tutor to the young emperor Nero22 and later his victim when ordered to commit suicide, was a contemporary of Jesus, and in one letter he suggested the state of affairs implied in what ordinary language calls “becoming human.” After subtracting out the idealized exaltations, what one is left with is this: Sine missione nascimur23 – in other words: We are born with an assured prospect of death.
The missio is a gesture begging for “dismissal” in the context of the arena – and, by raising their thumbs, the mob might, as an exception, indicate that a gladiator who had fought bravely should not have to fight his fight to the last, fatal blow.24 The phrase sine missione serves to indicate that those who have been born into the world will find no reprieve from their doom through any sign granted by the fickle crowd. This is no mere triviality – a fact to which the philosopher attests, pointing to the forgetting of death in everyday life. Don’t mortals behave, from the start and for the most part, so rashly and so much besotted with the ephemeral, as if they thought they might live forever? And when the end comes at last, don’t they commonly cling to the belief that they will somehow get away regardless?25 What Seneca and Jesus have in common is the conviction that it is time to grasp the seriousness of life – its finality, its oppressiveness, its brevity, and its dependence on decisions. Everyday heedlessness is a mask of the phantasm of indestructibility, removed from time. The preacher in Judea and the philosopher in Rome put aside this mask in order to testify that there is something indestructible that is not of a fantastical, frivolous nature.
The God-Man, under the influence of Persian and Jewish sources, called himself the “Son of man” – possibly a messianic epithet, but maybe just a turn of phrase for “I” – and, one might say, he was born so that he might, with his very life, attest to his teaching and imprint it with his signature. This applies likewise to philosophers such as Socrates and Seneca and to numerous witnesses (martyroi) of more absolute beliefs. True: since ancient times, death’s testimonial signature has been vulnerable to forgery. Some rushed into it under the pretense that they suffered it for the sake of a supreme good – wasn’t it the case, already in late antiquity, that bishops had to exhort their charges not to make an exhibition of themselves as imitators of the holy martyrs? In the centuries that followed, many more people suffered witness deaths without wanting to bear witness. Anyone who studies the twentieth century will discover among its signatures false and distorted martyrdoms in large numbers.
In the case of Christ, the theologeion-scheme is invoked in several ways. The man who had called himself the “Son of man” handed down essential elements of his message while speaking from the Cross on which he ended his life as deus fixus ad machinam. His narrators and theologians made this death retrospectively take on, through God, the significance of a proof of God – thereby suffusing into the image of the Most High a tendency toward a freely chosen devitalization under the figure of “substitutionary atonement.”
Tellingly, in the “Third Week” program of his Spiritual Exercises (composed 1522–4), Ignatius of Loyola directed retreat participants to school themselves in dying at the side of the Lord; the sense was that Christians should seek the competence to convert dying from something they must do, to something they are able to do – even to something they are willing to do, with eyes fixed on the resurrection of the first conqueror of death. When Hegel outlined alternative exercises from his lectern in Berlin, he expected that those who went through to the end of the course on coming-to-oneself as spirit would also sense an “infinite anguish concerning themselves”26 because, as an untenable individuality, they each have to fill a place in the dialectical process-whole – much as becoming human in the co-absolute Son was necessary for the mediation of God with himself as a spiritual individuality – otherwise God would have had to remain merely a paragon of empty sublimity and a bogey of oriental power. It seems Hegel had calculated humanity’s infinite anguish much as mathematicians after Leibniz might pursue their analyses with infinitesimal calculus.
It was not only the words spoken on the Cross that lent sublimity to Jesus’ message. There was also the fact that the theophanic procedure was carried out right up to the moment of the Descent from the Cross and was interrupted by no miracle, no extricating incident. This god had not made it easy for himself to appear. “Appearing,” says Hegel, “is being for an other.”27 The epiphany of Jesus took upon itself more than would have been expected for a “God from above.” It should be noted here that the death and resurrection of the vegetation deities of the lower sphere (such as Attis or Osiris), associated with mother goddesses (Demeter, Isis, Cybele, and many others), were fixed motifs in the mythological script depicting the course of the year; such deities are figures of vital forces or outlines for possible persons – they are not individuals. The resurrection of the crucified Christ wants to signify more than the regeneration of the vegetative world and its imperishability. The Easter morning message proclaimed that, thereafter, impermanence would no longer have the last word, even for subjects of spiritual individuality. The itinerary of the soul was to be separated from those of the animal and vegetable world, and from the cycles of things caught up in the vernal regreening of the world.
It was from the empty grave that the God-Man established, for a third time, what was distinctive or singular about his earthly appearance. There, at the mouth of the cave, with the stone moved to one side, the theologeion advanced to a higher level. From the stage in Jerusalem there issued a shocking claim in the very absence of a corpse where human judgment would have expected to find one.28 What could an absent corpse signify? What does its lack go to prove? Might one say that Christianity begins as a detective novel in which the negative corpus delicti re-emerged in various avatars, first as a haunted ethereal body on the outskirts of Jerusalem, then as the Eucharistic host, as the Corpus Christi body, and everywhere as a crucifix?29 Inferring resurrection from the emptiness of the grave was factually and methodically overhasty. Paul, himself a man of haste, provided its rationale: Jesus must have risen because our faith would otherwise be in vain. The apostle to the Gentiles would not be the founder of extremism if not for the fact that he looked into the abyss here: we would be the most miserable of people if we were to err on this point.30 But, if he has risen, and if to proclaim that is the only motif for our new beginning, then we are justified in proclaiming that the old world of law, sin, and death has been turned upside down. Whatever lies between Easter morning and Ascension Day – supposing there was such a day – forms an obscure interval in the biography of Jesus, analogous to Holy Saturday. In these 40 days, the rumors, the ravings, and the excesses come in a rush.
But what is Christianity if not a hastiness that ultimately had to take more time than it initially expected? Wasn’t it at first just a trail map for the uprooted and the strivers, a map that remained in use until the church succumbed to the ties binding it to the earth and, rather than clutching at the roots of heaven, preferred to settle an imperial metropolis over the graves of the apostles?31
Notes
1
Odyssey
i
.64, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
2
Cf. Émile Durkheim,
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(1912), trans. Karen E. Field (New York: The Free Press, 1995): “The tribal high god is actually none other than an ancestral spirit that eventually won a prominent place” (299) – that is, one who comes to transcend the circle of the clan. Durkheim’s statement refers to the cosmos of the Arunta tribe among the Australian aborigines.
3
Aristotle,
Rhetoric
3.7.4, 1408a:
http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086.tlg038.perseus-eng1:3.7.4
.
4
Up to the ransom (
lytron
) that heaven pays to loosen the knot of sin in human beings or, from a different perspective, as a transfer fee to deliver humans, from being in service to the devil to existing in freedom under God.
5
Cf. Ludwig Feuerbach,
The Essence of Christianity
(1841), 2nd edn., trans. Marian Evans (London: Trübner & Co., 1881): “Darkness is the mother of religion” (193). A generalized concept of religion emerges after the sixteenth century as a hybrid of Enlightenment anthropology and the Christian world mission. The first concluded, from the universal fact of death, that religion must likewise be universal. The second assumed that all people on earth had been awaiting the gospel of a salvation that would overcome death. It is true that many people in many cultures buried their closest relatives with a certain amount of care (
religio
), occasionally with valuable grave goods – as attested, for example, by the Iron Age graves of princes and children; but this does not change the fact that, for a majority of people in a majority of cultures, a simple, cultically low-profile “corpse disposal” (Jörg Rüpke) had to suffice.
6
Jan Rohls,
Offenbarung, Vernunft und Religion: Ideengeschichte des Christentums
, Vol. I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012).
7
[Translator’s note] The reference is to the opening lines of Hölderlin’s hymn, “Patmos.” See Friedrich Hölderlin,
Poems and Fragments
, 4th Bilingual edn., trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2004): 551–65.
8
In his work
Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Walter Burkert explicates Protagoras’ term
adelótes
(unclearness, nonevidence) as a defining feature of the religious sphere (5–6).
9
Odyssey
vii
.201–5.
10
In the literature of the twentieth century, the
locus classicus
of blasphemy committed at the level of affect is found at the end of the second part of Thomas Mann’s tetralogy
Joseph and His Brothers
, when Jacob, in his grief over the supposed death of his favorite son Joseph, mounts an excess of lamentation, a fact which comes to distress him once his grief abates: “In silent embarrassment he recalled his reckless bickering and arguing with God in that first flowering of his sorrow and found it in no way an act of a God holding to His old ways, but rather regarded it as truly refined and holy of Him that He had not crushed him on the spot and instead in silent forbearance had let him sport with his misery” – Thomas Mann,
Joseph and His Brothers
, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005): 538.
11
Adolf von Harnack,
Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God
, trans. John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1990): 12.
12
[Translator’s note] The reference is to Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann,
The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge
(New York: Anchor Books, 1966). See chapter 7 below.
13
In its own way, “ethnoastronomy” discovers the Saussurean arbitrariness of the sign – only, as it were, from the other side, as an arbitrariness of the signified: the constellation of the seven main stars, which the Greeks called the Great Bear, had the most various names among other peoples. The ancient Egyptians saw in it “the head of a procession, the ancient Romans seven plough oxen, the Arabs a coffin followed by three mourners, more recent North American Indians and French a ‘big dipper,’ the English a plough, the Chinese a court official visited by supplicants, medieval Europeans the ‘Great Wagon.’” Quoted from: Carsten Colpe,
Weltdeutungen im Widerstreit
(Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999): 119.
14
Matthew 16:3.
15
In his work
The Star of Redemption
(1921), Franz Rosenzweig undertook to de-astralize the motif of the heavenly sign in order to classify it, in a continuum of Jewish orientations, as an ethically transcendent model of human history beyond Babylon and Bethlehem.
16
Matthew 2:1–11.
17
Kai Trampedach,
Politische Mantik: Die Kommunikation über Götterzeichen und Orakel im klassischen Griechenland
(Heidelberg: Verlag Antike, 2015).
18
Virgil,
Aeneid
VI.850. The full sentence spoken by Anchises (“Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth’s peoples – for your arts are to be these: to pacify, to impose the rule of law, to spare the conquered, battle down the proud”) is the key expression of Virgilian prophecy. It seeks a retrospective transfer of empire and happiness from Troy to Rome; even beforehand, it proves effective for the translations of the empire from Rome to Byzantium – and thence to Aachen, Vienna, Moscow, London, and Washington. See Rémi Brague’s book
Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization
, trans. Samuel Lester (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002) for (among other things) a consideration of how the series of imperial transfers continued even after the Virgilian operation between Troy and Rome.
19
Exodus 31:18.
20
I-am statements in the mouths of gods belong to the theo-rhetorical conventions of Hellenism at the time when John was writing his Gospel (whether that writing is dated early or late); the best-known model is provided by the self-declaring aretalogy of Isis, which is presumed to have been ritually recited by a priestess of Isis at Cyme. See Jan Bergmann,
Ich bin Isis. Studien zum memphitischen Hintergrund der griechischen Isis-Aretalogien
(Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1968).
21
There are, of course, disputes around the dating of the Gospel of John: whether to the early (and unlikely) year of 69 or 70, as suggested by Klaus Berger in his book
Im Anfang war Johannes: Datierung und Theologie des vierten Evangeliums
(Stuttgart: Quell, 1997), or else to a date around 100, as is more generally accepted. But, with all due respect for the flying sparks of philological argument on both sides, this debate claims little relevance from the point of view of the interpretation assigned retrospectively to the Passion. Whether the canonical evangelists copied from one another or not, and whether John got involved early or late in the interpretation process (if one accepts the trend toward early dating), they were all of them, almost half a century
post eventum
, scenarists and theopoets who shared a common interest in turning the Golgotha debacle into a programmatic act. The question of dating will be taken up again later, in chapter 18, in order to highlight the poetic contribution of witnesses who spoke later.
22
Seneca dedicated his essay
De clementia
(
c
. 55
ce
) to the 18-year-old Nero with the notion of allowing the precocious murderer to contemplate the mirror of an idealistic prince. Just 10 years later, Nero ordered Seneca to commit suicide.
23
Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
, Letter 37.
24
When Caesar Augustus temporarily suspended the
missio
, he wanted to rescind the privilege that had been accorded to the sentimental mob – only the Caesar, he thought, should be entitled to grant reprieve.
25
On the classic theme of the evasion accomplished by drifting thoughtlessly through life, see Martin Heidegger,
Being and Time
, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010): §§51–2.
26
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
, Vol. III:
The Consummate Religion
, ed. Peter Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 305.
27
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
, Vol. I:
Introduction and The Concept of Religion
, ed. Peter Hodgson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007): 329.
28
Frank Morison [Albert Henry Ross],
Who Moved the Stone?
(London: Faber & Faber, 1930).
29
In his novel
L’Évangile selon Pilate
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt developed the criminological perspective on the disappearance of Jesus’ body in order to convert Pontius Pilate, a skeptic, into the “first Christian,” once alternate explanations are revealed as dead ends.
30
See First Epistle to the Corinthians 15:12–20.
31
Agnes Horvath and Arpad Szakolczai,
Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking
