2
The formations

Having laid out these conditions, I would like to turn my attention to the trio of monotheistic religions, whose war and dialogue form the object of these reflections. I shall begin with a genetic observation intended to show how those religions developed in sequence from one another, or from older sources – in a manner comparable to a three-phase explosion (or a series of enemy takeovers). The fact that such a rapid sketch inevitably contains only elementary and highly schematicized observations does not require an explanation of its own, and as we are not dealing with a history of religion, but rather a presentation of ‘conflict parties’, I can restrict myself to descriptions of a typological nature. Nor will I be focusing on the history of the holy texts, which is why there is not the slightest attempt here to relate the unfolding of Christianity and Islam as the adventure novel of misreading that literary critics recognize in the approach of the two later monotheisms to the holy books of their predecessors.1 There is no need to emphasize that, from the perspective of faith, the following reflections will no doubt seem grossly unjust in many places – in so far as most things said about faith without allowing it a chance to revise them are unjust. A fitful shaking of heads by all three parties as a readers' commentary on the thoughts that follow can scarcely be avoided. One should bear in mind that the topic as such encourages one-sidedness, as it demands a foregrounding not of the awe-inspiring foundations of the monotheistic teachings, but rather of their potential for competition and conflict.

It is only logical to begin the nomination of candidates in the monotheistic field of theses by determining the position of Judaism. The question that will concern us here was given its quintessential expression by Thomas Mann in an inspired chapter of Joseph and his Brothers under the heading ‘How Abraham discovered God’. In the literarily reconstructed primal scene of the Abrahamic tradition, we observe the forefather of monotheism struggling with the question of whom humanity should serve: ‘… and his strange answer had been: “The highest alone” ’.2 In a strenuous meditation, Abraham reaches the conclusion that Mother Earth, as admirably diverse as her fruits may be, surely cannot be the first and highest authority, as she is obviously dependent on the rain that falls from the sky. Led to the sky by his thoughts, he concludes after a while that, in spite of its sublime constellations and all the terrifying meteorological phenomena, it too cannot quite embody what he is looking for, as those phenomena constantly change and negate one another – the moonlight, for example, fades when the morning star rises. ‘No, they too are not worthy to be my gods.’ Finally, through his sheer ‘urge for the highest’,3 Abraham arrives at the concept of an absolutely sublime, powerful and otherworldly God who rules over the stars and thus transpires as the foremost, mightiest, only god. From this point on, Abraham, having himself become the ‘father of God’,4 so to speak, through his investigations, knew to whom all should now rightfully pray: ‘There had only ever been He, the most high, who alone could be the rightful God of men and the one and only object of their cries for help and songs of praise.’5

In his poetic exploration of the psychodynamic source of monotheistic belief in the soul of the progenitor of the Jewish people, Thomas Mann placed a highly fitting emphasis on an impulse that has been referred to as the summotheistic affect. Long before there was such a thing as theoretical theology, it was this feeling that provided the template for authentic monotheistic belief. It creates a resonance between a God who is serious about his dominion over the earth and a human who is serious about his desire to belong to such a sovereign deity. Thomas Mann does not omit to mention that a quest for God of this kind is inseparable from the striving for human significance: so there can be no monotheism without a certain self-importance. ‘In order to make some kind of impression and achieve a certain significance before God and men, it was necessary to take things – or at least one thing – very seriously. Father Abraham had taken the question of whom man should serve absolutely seriously …’6

Strangely enough, Abraham's momentous elevation of God (as shown by his portrait in the books of the Yahwist) did not immediately remove him to a completely superhuman realm. Certainly he is described as a god above, but there is no doubt that he is in touch with earthly reality. He retains all the attributes of a human who is no stranger to anything all too human, ranging from the wild temper he displays in his dealings with his subjects to the unpredictable explosiveness of his early utterances. His despotic irony and constant fluctuation between presence and absence make him appear more like an insufferable father than a principle of divine justice. A god who loves gardens and basks in their cool evening air, who fights bloody battles and imposes sadistic tests of subordination on his believers, could be almost anything – but not a discarnate spirit, let alone some neuter otherworldly being. His affective life vacillates between joviality and tumult, and nothing could be more absurd than the claim that his intention is to love the human race in its entirety. If there was ever a figure that could be said to be wholly god and wholly human, it was Yahweh as represented in the Yahwist. Harold Bloom rightly characterized him as the most untameable figure in religious history – the King Lear of the heavenly rulers, one could say. The notion that a charismatic dreamer like Jesus, of all people, could have been his ‘beloved son’ – even one and the same being, as the Nicene theologians claimed – is theopsychologically unthinkable.7 No one can be homoousios with such a paragon of wilfulness, least of all a ‘son’ like Jesus. What the Christian theologians called God the Father was actually a late reinvention for trinity-political purposes; at that time it was necessary to introduce a benevolent father to match, at least to a degree, the amazing son. The Christian redescription of God naturally had very little to do with the Yahweh of Jewish scripture.

At the start of the monotheistic chain of reaction we find a form of contract between a great, serious psyche and a great, serious God. There is no need to dwell on his other qualities – his choleric temperament, his irony and his taste for thunderous hyperbole – in this context. This alliance creates a major symbol-producing relationship without which most of what have, since the nineteenth century, been termed ‘advanced civilizations’ (since Karl Jaspers, also known as ‘axial age civilizations’) would be inconceivable. One of the secrets of the summotheistic alliance certainly lies in the satisfaction of believers that, by submitting to the highest, they can share in some part, however modest, of his sovereignty. Hence the pronounced joy at submission that can be observed among partisans of the strict idea of God. No one can take the step towards such a God without being intoxicated by the desire to serve and belong. Quite often, resolute servants of the One are enraptured by pride at their own humility. When the faithful bloom in their zealous roles, this is partly also because nothing dispels the ghosts of existential disorientation as effectively as participation in a sacred enterprise that creates jobs and promises advancement. In this sense, the system known as ‘God’ can be viewed as the most important employer in the Holy Land – in which case atheism constitutes a form of employment destruction that is, understandably, fought bitterly by those affected.

The liaison of seriousness and greatness corresponds to the growing pressure to which the religious sensibility is subjected as soon as the requirements for the status of divinity increase. And their evolutionary increase is inevitable when, as in the Middle East of the first and second millennia BC, several ambitious religions begin to come into conflict with one another – until the phase of diplomatic niceties is over and the question of final priority and absolute supremacy becomes unavoidable. Under these conditions, the connections between the psyche and the world take on a new dynamic: the expanded scene of the world and God demands greater powers of comprehension among the faithful souls – and, vice versa, the increasing demands for meaning directed at God and the world by those souls call for increasingly interesting roles in the general dramas. The monotheistic zealots of all periods testify to this development with their entire existence: if they had their way, their subservient passion would not simply be their private contribution to the glory of God. It would be the zeal of God himself reaching through them and into the world. This zeal, correctly understood, is an aspect of God's regret at having created the world. In its milder form, it shows his benevolent will to salvage what he still can of a creation that has got out of control.

Abraham's choice of religion, then, is extremely thymotically determined – if it is indeed legitimate to bring the Greek concept denoting the activity centre of the psyche's ambition- and pride-based impulses, the thymós, into play in the interpretation of the...