In The Shadow of Mount Sinai

Peter Sloterdijk

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745699271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this short book Peter Sloterdijk clarifies his views on religion and its role in pre-modern and modern societies. He begins by returning to the Mount Sinai episode in the Book of Exodus, where he identifies the emergence of what he calls the Sinai Schema. At the core of monotheism is the logic of belonging to a community of confession, of being a true believer - this is what Sloterdijk calls the Sinai Schema. To be a member of a people means that you submit to the beliefs of the community just as you submit to its language. Monotheism is predicated on the logic of one God who demands your utmost loyalty. Hence at the core of monotheism is also the fear of apotheosis, of heresy, of heterodoxy. So monotheism is associated first and foremost with a certain kind of internal violence Ð namely, a violence against those who violate their membership through a break in loyalty and trust.

On the basis of this analysis of the inner logic of monotheism, Sloterdijk retraces its historical legacy and shows how this account enables us to understand why we react so nervously today to all forms of fundamentalism - whether that of radical Islamists, the Catholic Pius Brotherhood or evangelical sects in the USA

1
Narrowing the Battle Zone

Anyone planning to say something about a controversial matter such as the violent implications of what we call ‘monotheism’, both those proven and those merely asserted, would be well advised to follow a few rules of caution. Theology is demonic terrain. What Thomas Mann noted about music in his big Washington speech of 1945 about ‘Germany and the Germans’ applies no less to speaking about divine matters and about this-worldly and other-worldly things. The observation made in the same speech that music is ‘the most remote from reality of all the arts and, at the same time, the most passionate’ can be transferred without any noteworthy changes to the nature of many theological lessons. They often deal with the most distant and evasive factors, such as God, omnipotence, salvation and damnation, with a vehemence that only the most intimate motifs of passion can ignite. What music and theology have in common is that, when things get serious, they can both be closer to the affected person than the person themselves – as expressed by Saint Augustine in his confessional phrase interior intimo meo (‘more inward than the most inward place in my heart’).¹

With this warning in mind, I would like in the following to jot down some reflections that can be read as footnotes to two of my religio-theoretical publications from recent years: God’s Zeal ² and You Must Change Your Life.³ Nonetheless, the deliberations below should also be comprehensible without reference to these books. Some of the theologians’ reactions to God’s Zeal reminded me that one evidently cannot raise certain topics without bringing them to life through such a discussion. It seems that, by speaking of religious zeal systems in the monotheisms, I had aroused an inclination towards zealous rebuttal, or even the warding-off of demons, among certain readers, namely those from Christian theological circles. These ‘rebuttals’ generally proceeded from the allegation that I had indiscriminately ascribed to the monotheistic ‘scriptural religions’, namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam, an ‘intrinsic’ (thus the established debating term) or, differently put, an irremovable violent component, thus confusing the timelessly benign essence of these religions with their sometimes unappealing historical manifestations. The most determined opponents of this thesis they themselves had posited countered it with the claim that the aforementioned religions, Christianity in particular, wanted to be understood both in their nature and in their self-image as liberating and peacemaking movements. They had, however, been temporarily distracted from their authentic mission by heretical distortions and political instrumentalizations in the course of their respective histories.

In the light of the discussion’s development, which was characterized largely by projections, misreading and apologetic interests – and augmented by the numerous, usually very interesting reactions to Jan Assmann’s theses on the ‘Mosaic distinction’ published slightly earlier – I began to doubt that it would be productive to continue the debate as an argument over the correct use of the term ‘monotheism’. Above all, the opposition cited ad nauseam between a purportedly violence-inclined monotheism and a purportedly violence-averse polytheism constituted a caricature that is best met with silence. In the following remarks, then, I will avoid the term ‘monotheism’ as far as possible⁴ and focus instead on discussing the phenomenon of zealous and potentially violently manifested motivation with reference to certain religious norms without addressing once again the logical construction of the one-God faith.⁵ I will also put aside my reservations about the term ‘religion’, which were explained in You Must Change Your Life (I consider it a pseudo-term or, more precisely, a false abstraction with a high potential to mislead) and use the term conventionally and without irony here and on the following pages, as I do not wish to complicate the already sufficiently controversial topic by opening a second front. I therefore cannot engage with the accusation that the latter work of mine is ‘the most fundamental attack on religion since Feuerbach’⁶ – which would be an ambiguous complement in the best case, but in reality constitutes a polemical warning call to the rest of the theological world. For the moment, I shall make do with noting that the practicetheoretical reflections in You Must Change Your Life are precisely not an attack on religion but rather a sympathetic attempt to explore the facts of the religious field through a second description that stays close to its object – in the language of a general practice theory, albeit combined with the aim of contributing to a clarification of the misunderstanding of religions consolidated on all sides.⁷

In the present essay, I operate on the assumption that it is not the single or plural nature of conceptions of God among collectives or individuals that plays the decisive part in releasing acts of violence. Rather, what determines a disposition towards the use of violence is the form and intensity of the absorption of faith practisers by the system of norms to which they subordinate their existence. If the term ‘monotheism’ still crops up occasionally in the following reflections, then, it refers not so much to a group of theological or metaphysical conceptions. To the extent that it cannot be entirely avoided, I use it for the time being simply as a historically successful complex of heightened psycho-religious motivation.

Notes

1. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Frank J. Sheed, ed. Michael P. Foley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), p. 44. 2. Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 3. Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). 4. Concerning the distinction between relevant concepts such as henotheism, summotheism, monolatry, the ‘Yahweh alone movement’, poly-Yahwism, inclusive, exclusive, prophetic, practical and philosophical monotheism, and so on, see Michaela Bauks, ‘Monotheismus (AT)’, in Wissenschaftliches Bibellexikon (WiBiLex), ed. Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, available at www.bibelwissenschaft.de/wibilex/das-bibellexikon (accessed 12 January 2015); Bernhard Lang, ‘Monotheismus’, in Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, vol. 4: Kultbild – Rolle, ed. Hubert Cancik, Burkhard Gladigow and Karl-Heinz Kohl (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1998), pp. 148–65. 5. More on this and the thought figure secundum non datur in God’s Zeal, ch. 5, ‘The Matrix’, pp. 82–104. There I develop the thesis that the phenomenon of zeal not only has psychologically relevant motives but is also based on a logical grammar. 6. Klaus Müller, ‘Generalangriff im Tarnanzug: Peter Sloterdijk über Religion’, in Communicatio Socialis 42/4 (2009), pp. 345f. 7. Practice should be understood as autoplastic action, meaning a kind that acts back on the actor. Without consideration of practice aspects, acculturation processes in general are as incomprehensible as religio-ritual phenomena in particular. The general theory of practice can be directly related to the humanities and social sciences, as it makes no unnecessary concessions to naturalism. It consistently rests on culture-theoretical premises, though it emphasizes the aspect that ‘culture’ would remain an empty term without examining the dimension of incorporation procedures. The cliff of reductionism is avoided by introducing the theory of practice (as a hermeneutics of repetition) into a shared understanding of cultural, especially theopoetic procedures. If practice analysis initially unsettles theologians, this is probably because it deals less with questions of truth than with states of being-in-shape.

2
On the Genesis of Peoples in General

There is surely still a consensus in the science of religion that early religious cult systems – whatever else they might be – can be viewed in their primary manner of effect as ethnoplastic systems of rules. By imposing shared narratives, rituals and norms on a collective, they mould the practising collectives into carriers – into the subject-object, philosophically speaking – of those same conceptions and procedures. Thus the phenomenon of religion (in the era before its individualistic differentiation in modernity, at least) seems initial...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• 1 Narrowing the Battle Zone
• 2 On the Genesis of Peoples in General
• 3 The Sinai Schema: Integral Swearing-In
• 4 Phobocracy: On the Proliferation of the Principle of Total Membership
• 5 Metamorphoses of Membership
• Index
• End User License Agreement