After God. Peter Sloterdijk

his theses before the appearance of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. By contrast, it makes sense to observe that, when Hegel formulated his vision of the idea as it makes its way through history, he did so from a position that came after Luther in history.

Luther’s historical effects can be described as a regression with progressive consequences. His unanticipatable and undesired progressivity is bound up with the interplay between his retrogressive tendencies and the proleptic political and media constellations of his time. From a politological perspective, Protestantism was the front desk of a squabble that took place among theologians on the terrain of princes – and within the space of provincial universities. It was the German imperial princes who took a conflict about questions of religio and turned it into a vector of world history. The princes (and their learned tutors at universities) were the ones who developed Luther’s offensive potential by discovering how useful it would be for them and their political practice to take on the premodern, state-forming element of confession. In confessions, parties cast their shadows in advance. Seemingly marginal questions, such as whether God is present or merely remembered in the Eucharist, become a scandal of epochal significance. Europe assumed a prominent place in the history of surrealism when it began to sacrifice countless lives for invisible differences.

      In order to speak further about a Lutheran difference, one must investigate whether it can still be connected with the basic moods of contemporary feelings about the world and life. The answer can be given almost without qualification: no. Luther was lucky in point of history of ideas and psychohistory; for, in and of itself, his overwhelmingly dark legacy was dubious in terms of the psychology of religion, theologically unoriginal, and philosophically regressive. It was also reshaped by ever new levels of the Enlightenment, of civilization, and of cheerfulness. Luther could not prevent a theological frenzy from becoming a sort of evening song. Here the forest had learned to fall silent in a dark, unmistakably German way, while the fog ascended from the meadows as whitely as the moonlight would allow and as wondrously as world-weary souls believed was merited. Luther was lucky to have new virtuosi appear after him. These, however, were not virtuosi of religio but rather grand masters of thought, language, and affirmation.

      We will not sufficiently understand the history of the world, of ideas, and of the production of cheerfulness if we do not realize to what extent Luther, who preferred to invoke biblical allies, became a favorite of pagan Fortuna. The new theologians felt that they were guided by the Holy Spirit. But from this point on the Holy Spirit entered the stage wearing the mask of the goddess of luck. Success – and success equals causality plus luck – ensues only as a result of Fortuna cooperating cum spiritu sancto, with the Holy Spirit. Luther had such luck with Erasmus, in whom he found a contemporary opponent who knew how to articulate the universally legitimate concerns of the Reformation without making an uncivil­ized racket. He was lucky when, more than a century later, a Jewish dissident named Baruch de Spinoza called for the evacuation of the sad passions from the rational soul and broke with the traditions of clerical world denial. He was lucky when Johann Sebastian Bach brought jubilation back into the bleak churches with his “Jauchzet, frohlocket!” [“Exult, rejoice!”]. He was lucky, seeing that Leibniz, as an advocate of God, minimized the share of irrationality in creation. He was lucky when, in the monumental collection Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott [An Earthly Pleasure in God], Brockes taught that we should joyfully perceive the presence of the Highest even in the least of things. He was lucky, given that, as a cultural, climatic whole, the German classicism of Klopstock, Lessing, and Herder up until Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling – to say nothing of the Olympians in Weimer – was able to present a more cheerful transposition of the Wittenbergian missive to the world, three hundred years post eventum; the transposition was bound in cloth, with gilt edging and tail bands.

      Luther was also lucky when the romantic theologian Schleiermacher made religion into a matter of talent and disposition so as to make it accessible again to the educated among those who despised it. He was still lucky when Nietzsche, the preacher’s son, invented a figure named Zarathustra, who preached to his friends: “Remain true to the earth!” – and beware the teachers of ressentiment! He was lucky, even if he did not earn it, when Albert Schweitzer explained why the western ethics of brotherly love need not hide from the eastern mysticism of the contemplative life.²⁸ He had more luck than understanding when it turned out that, despite Luther’s late words against Judaism, he was not responsible for that pathetic former Catholic, Adolf Hitler. He was lucky when the evangelical church in Germany issued the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in October 1945, taking responsibility for their lack of courage and love in resisting the National Socialist catastrophe. Finally, he was lucky when Martin Luther King declared before an exalted crowd that he had a dream.

      *

      If the beginning of the Reformation was characterized by the move of gaining energy through diminution, entropy remained characteristic of its development. Irrevocably and with remarkable haste, religious entropy dismantled the overexertions of the forms of world denial and life denial of the axial age. It had taken thousands of years to establish these forms; their demolition took less than two hundred. Now a life that has been flattened out comes to affirm itself. Yet it does so without specifically making much ado about its self-affirmation – leaving aside the episode of inflated philosophy of life that was inspired by Nietzsche. Eccentric positionality has advanced a few steps further: a massive quest for horizontal attention takes the place of burdensome vertical scrutiny under the eyes of God. In this situation Protestantism cannot expect its historical luck to continue. It would get off well if, five hundred years from now, one could say that it has shown itself to be an intelligent third power in the confessional war of our times, in the resistance – disguised as a campaign of the unsatisfied against the “elites” – that mass culture offers to high culture.

Notes

1 Dante placed hypocrites in the sixth circle of the penultimate levels of hell, where they circle about in gilded robes of lead (Inferno, Canto 23). A later Enlightenment will serenely note: “Hypocrisy is the mother of civilizations” (Régis Debray, Dégagements, Paris: Gallimard, 2010, p. 283). 2 Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1928). 3 [TN: This clause is in English in the original.] 4 See p. 11 here. 5 Bonds: Schuld, Schulden und andere Verbindlichkeiten, edited by Thomas Macho with the collaboration of Valeska Neumann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014). 6 Starting in 1860, the ethnologist Adolf Bastian developed an empirical universalism on the basis of so-called “elementary thoughts.” See Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 3 volumes (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1860). 7 [TN: “Terms of trade” is in English in the original.] 8 See Heiner Mühlmann, Die Natur des Christentums, with a foreword by Bazon Brock (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017). 9 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).10 See Jan Assmann, Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion, translated by Robert Savage (Cambridge: Polity, 2014).11 Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, translated by E. B. Ashton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), p. 66.12 Saint Augustine, Confessions, 3.6.11.13 On the complex of axial-age world pictures shedding themselves of archaic cults, see Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).14 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: Part II, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 349.15 See Francesco Petrarca, Secretum meum.16 Karlheinz Stierle, Francesco Petrarca: Ein Intellektueller im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hanser, 2003).17 [TN: “Age of anxiety” is in English in the original.]18 Lotario de Segni, Vom Elend des menschlichen Daseins: Aus dem Lateinischen übersetzt und eingeleitet von Carl-Friedrich Geyer (Hildeshim: Georg Olms, 1990). The introduction contains an overview of the literature of the Middle Ages on conditio humana that extends up to twentieth-century anthropology.19 Ibid., p. 11.20 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, revised student edition, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): “Third Essay,” §11, p. 85.21 Hugo Ball, Byzantinisches Christentum: Drei Heiligen-Leben (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011 [1923]).22 Ibid., p. 7.23 See Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, translated by Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity,