Sven-Eric Liedman

The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism

Europe is the exception to the global de-secularization of politics; at the same
time, theoretical interest in theological issues has been rising in Europe over the
past fifteen years. Placing Habermas's "soft naturalism" against the "militant
atheism" of Michel Onfray and Richard Dawkins, and borrowing Diderot's
concept of matrialisme enchant, Sven-Eric Liedman warns against trivializing
life's wonders, be they of a technical nature or beyond our present conception.
A while ago, I was talking to a friend about religion. We agreed that we both
were atheists. But he added: "I am a Jewish atheist". I myself would have to
specify my own position in a corresponding manner: I am a Lutheran atheist.
Such is the immediate limitation of atheism. The word "atheism" is in itself a
negation: not God. Moreover, the atheist has freed him or herself from a fixed
belief; normally the one that is dominant in the culture that has permeated his or
her childhood and youth. Atheism is at first like the negative of the photo which,
according to the believer, depicts the world.
Naturally, the non-believer is also a non-believer in relation to other faiths. I do
not believe more in Allah or Vishnu than I do the Christian God. Still, I have
never been posed with the alternative of seeking my faith in the Koran or the
Vedic scriptures.
It is atheism's constant challenge to appear singularly as a negation. It states
what it does not believe but not what it positively represents. This is what makes
atheism seem grey and dull. Where religion paints our existence in bold colours,
where it seeks its significance in wonderful tales, and where the difference
between right and wrong is anchored outside of the world of humans, the
atheist claims that the truth of the world is rather trivial and considers the holy
scriptures as fine literature amongst other fine literature and morals an
altogether human affair.
Finally, I will try to outline an atheism that does not appear bleak and does not
have an antagonistic atheism's lack of tolerance and blindness to the religions'
aesthetic and cultural values. In recent years, some spirited atheist confessions
have come to light, chiefly the English biologist Richard Dawkins' The God
Delusion[1] and the French philosopher Michel Onfray's Trait d'athologie[2]. I
will, in concluding, consider my position on them. The immediate reason for
Dawkins's and Onfray's books is the rebirth of the religion, which has been so
apparent throughout virtually the entire world these past decades. Politics is
today permeated by religious sentiments and beliefs in a way that my
generation at least has not seen the likes of. US president George W. Bush is a
Born Again Christian and does not pass up a chance to justify his political
decisions with reference to God. Islam has become a political power on the
world stage. Even for the Chinese state, religion is becoming a growing
problem, impossible to fit into to the official ideological alloy of capitalism and
communism.
Religion's increasingly obvious presence in politics corresponds to a great
popular commitment to different religious movements. Principally two religions

are conquering new souls: Islam and Christianity. Different branches of Islam
are winning ground in several places around the world; here, the emphasis is
mainly on the Sunni branch of Salafism. However, riding the greatest wave of
success is the branch of Christianity called Pentecostalism. It is gaining strength
not only in the United States, but yet more in Latin America and Africa. If the
current pentecostal wave of success were to continue, three quarters of
mankind would be included in some form of Christianity by the year of 2050. [3]
And it is expressly Penecostalism that constitutes the dynamic power in this
development, while the Catholic church for example, ostensibly so firm, is losing
ground.
The past decades' successful movements within Christianity and Islam have
many common denominators. The principal among them is an unflinching
conviction of what indispensable essence their own religion has, but also a
certain anti-intellectualism, manifested in a shared aversion to Christian or
Islamic theology (kalam) and to academic endeavour in general. Moreover, both
are highly dependent upon new media such as TV and Internet for their own
dissemination. Both also correspond to a tendency within modern
secularization: religion is freeing itself more and more from the culture in which
it was previously rooted and is gaining new followers who live under entirely
different cultural conditions than those prevalent in the previous ambits of these
faiths.
In view of the triumphs of certain religious movements during the past decades,
it has been proposed that the tendency towards an increasing secularization in
modern development is being broken; the most well known example of this
notion is found in the volume published by the American sociologist and
theologian Peter L. Berger, fittingly called The Desecularization of the World.[4]
But there is also an opposite interpretation according to which, on the contrary,
we have entered a new and even stronger phase of secularization; institutions
like school and politics, during modernity still secure, are losing their privileged
position, whereby religion becomes an individual resort in a reality without
touchstone. A key proponent of this theory is the French expert on Islam, Olivier
Roy in, for example, his book La lacit face l'Islam.[5]
Evidently, Berger and Roy place different meanings into the difficult word
"secularization". It is not my intention to go deeper into how to best define that
word; on the other hand, I will touch on the perspectives Berger and Roy apply
to the current situation, which, in my view, greatly complement each other. But I
focus my attention upon another word here which is equally central when
discussing modernity, namely "disenchantment", as well as its opposite, "reenchantment".[6] The former was initially coined as the German Entzauberung,
by Max Weber and, in a slightly different way, by Franz Rosenzweig, and ever
since the Second World War has played an important part in the discussion on
the development of modern society. The idea that there was an enchantment, at
least in Weber's use of the word, in modernity itself, surfaced early on, and I will
argue here that there is great justification for that theory. But I will also contend
with equal assertion that its applied relevance is more limited today, and for that
reason less in conflict with the type of enchantment evidently felt by followers of
a newborn Pentecostalism or Islam.

The image of the world heading into an ever deepening religious enchantment
exhibits one big and important exception: Europe. In most European countries,
particularly those within the EU-region, de-Christianization seems to progress
unchanged. Pentecostalism's advances are merely marginal in most areas and
while Islam is indeed advancing, it is mainly due to immigration from countries
where Islam is a dominant religion. The spread of both certainly display the
same patterns as on other continents; however, in a global perspective, the
most noteworthy is nevertheless the confinement of these progressions. The
major international surveys on people's religious attitudes and practices, in
Europe the European Values Survey and globally the World Values Survey,
give an unequivocal picture: Europe is far more de-Christianized than other
parts of the world, where Christianity has gained wide distribution, and other
religions do not fill the gap that de-Christianization has left behind.
At the same time, Europe has over the past ten or fifteen years experienced an
odd, renewed interest in traditional theological questions amongst many
prominent intellectuals otherwise associated to irreligious, or at the least nonreligious currents. It is not the aforementioned Onfray and Dawkins who with
their atheist tracts appear typical. It is rather Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou,
Jrgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, Giorgio Agamben and numerous others who
have written important works on religion in general, and Christianity in particular.
Several of the aforementioned have openly declared that they are atheists, or at
least agnostics; Habermas has by Max Weber's example stated that he is
"unmusical" when it comes to religion.[7] But they all display a noticeably
positive interest in the many religious expressions of our age and of the past.
Their intention is not to fight religious faith, but rather understand it and its
inherent power. To a great extent, their attention is caught by the political
potential in religious faith. Though that attention is not set primarily on
Pentecostalism or Salafism, but rather on a more moderate, intellectually, and
ethically well-balanced faith. Slavoj Zizek takes at once an extreme and
customarily ideal position when he suggests that Christianity and Marxism are
the only serious challengers to the dominating militant neoliberalism of our age.
[8]

It would be an exaggeration to claim that European intellectuals are subject to

the same enchantment with religion as the most successful religious
movements of the day so openly prove to be. But one can, just the same,
acknowledge a fascination that belongs in the same historic situation. The
situation is normally characterized by an array of terms containing the attributive
"post-", as in post-modern, post-secular, post-Christian, and so on.
It is also, of course, within this situation that I am trying to suggest what a
positive atheism, borne by a wonderment for the riches of our world and
existence, could look like.
Enchantment lost and re-found
The word Entzauberung was used by writers during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries in poetic fairy tales about people who had been released
from a curse or a spell. One might say that Cinderella, when awakened from her

millennial sleep by the prince's kiss, has thereby become entzaubert. This is the
word that Max Weber remodels into a technical term, referring to the change in
society and thought experienced in modern times. The implication he gives it is,
in fact, more precise even than that. It includes the legitimacy of social actions.
According to Weber, there are principally two ways to justify one's behaviour.
The one is a magical justification, the other a rational. The magical implies
avoiding certain types of measures because, according to a public fancy, they
lead to misfortune or damnation, and choosing other actions that instead
suggest fortune and divine favours. A rational justification does not take any
superhuman or otherworldly powers into account whatsoever. It points solely to
detectable consequences any act might cause, advantages it involves and
disadvantages its alternatives might entail. According to Weber, the magical and
rational incentives in fact constitute the endpoints on a consecutive scale along
which actual justifications could be plotted. His theory is that Europe, over the
last centuries, has experienced a constant shift towards the rational end. [9]
Weber's conception has been widely acknowledged and is now part of the
standard repertoire when it comes to clarifying how modern reality differs from
one more burdened by tradition. It is linked to the Weberian theses of
rationalization and implies more specifically that those processes which
previously were assumed to be subject to the gamble of uncountable forces are
now mastered with the aid of rational knowledge. On a positive end, this shift
amounts to a diminished fear of the unknown; on a negative, that the fantastic
and alluring succumbs to dry calculation and soul-destroying routine.
One glance at the present age betrays that its lost rapture is not absolute, even
ostensibly. There is still a market for horoscope, crystals, and tarot. Even
prominent politicians can entertain superstitious notions on fortune and bad
luck. But one can easily deduce that almost everyone, in the end, lets
themselves be guided by modern rationality. People may be calmed by the
thought that there is no row thirteen in passenger aeroplanes. Yet it is finally the
cold, rational technology that they confide in as they set out into the skies.
It isn't necessarily so, either, that technology and natural sciences, or modern
life on the whole, must be characterized by words like "dry" or "cold". On the
contrary, they can instil both their users and observers with bliss and rapture
and stir an insatiable appetite for knowledge. In a broader sense, they can
immerse people in a sentiment of comfort, facing constant advances that will
make their lives better.
As early as in the 1930s, Martin Heidegger talked about the enchantment of
modern times. Contemporary human beings are bewitched by technology and
its constant advancements. Yes, they are obsessed with the conviction that
everything must surely be calculable, usable and made manageable. [10]
Yet Heidegger's line of thought appears to be unfulfilled, seeing as it is sprung
from a, for him, typical reluctance towards exact science and technical
calculation. The concept may, however, be valuable even without this
programmatically negative stance. The enchantment of modernity lies in the
actual concept of progress as such.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, innumerable people, not least
those in position of power, were compelled by the conviction that our existence
is improving. The most assured optimism, expressed consummately by the
mathematician and politician Jean Antoine Condorcet at the end of the
eighteenth century, proclaimed improvement in virtually all areas, including
morals and the arts, and that there was a close connection between the
improvements to different areas of life.
The actual enchantment in such a notion lies in one's conviction that today's
unsolved problems will be solved tomorrow, thanks to developments. That
attitude led to a remarkable nonchalance, not least regarding technological
development, but also different forms of experiments with society. Hoping that
the course of progress will solve our problems at some point, we have taken out
a mortgage on future.
The past decades have in that respect implied a shift. Fewer let themselves
believe in promises of an in every respect improved future. On the contrary,
dark clouds are accumulating. Doomsday prophets have always been around.
But not only have they increased in numbers: their gloomy predictions are now
based on solid knowledge with regard to, for example, environmental ruination.
The untarnished optimism for progress has demanded, as we have witnessed,
that all of life's and society's integral components be ingested into the same
process. In effect, that construction proved early on to not hold water. Nazi
Germany and The Soviet Union managed to combine stern dictatorship with
economic, technological, and scientific progress. The People's Republic of
China embodies a ready example of the same thing today.
Thus, the great development project that the Enlightenment philosophers once
launched does not appear to be cast in a single slab. One might say that
contains a hard component the hard enlightenment consisting of science (at
least the exact one), technology, the economy, and modern rational
administration; these elements are indeed closely connected. In these fields,
the development process has persisted. For us, it goes without saying that
today's computers are better than yesterday's, but that they will be surpassed
by tomorrow's. Each research grant is more or less expected to render a
significant scientific breakthrough. Economists take for granted that a country's
GNP will grow each year. If it does not, something must be wrong.
Within this hard enlightenment, when considered singularly, the enchantment of
modernity remains; that which cannot be solved today can be solved tomorrow.
But there are also the soft parts to development, where no advances can be
taken for granted or considered natural. The classic development optimists now
seem naive in their belief in humanity as morally ascending. And stranger yet,
the notion that art should consistently be winning new conquests who
surpasses Dante or Shakespeare? Politics still has its development optimists
who believe it to be natural that democracy triumphs. But, at the same time,
signs are beginning to pile up that indicate that democracy, even where it is long

since established, is facing new, difficult challenges, leading to a growing

uncertainty about the future.
Strangest of all, is the changed view on religion. The dominating figure of
thought was, for a long time, that modernity and religion were incompatible.
Religious beliefs were to perish, as society grew more modern. Its perspectives
were to be entirely replaced by those of science, while art was to satisfy
people's need for reverence and meaning.
Today, that notion occurs as outmoded. Religion has a stronger hold now than
for a long time in many parts of the world. Often, it is paired with hard modernity
it is successfully distributed in the new media, many of its enthusiastic
followers themselves, are educated within technology or natural sciences, and
its connection to the global economy is evident.
It is warranted here to speak of a renewed enchantment with the modern world.
It doesn't at all collide with the rapture in hard modernity itself. On the contrary,
both can coalesce in a seemingly harmonious way. George W. Bush could be
considered a case in point of the highest level of this synthesis. The president's
faith that economy and technology have the ability to overcome current and
future challenges is not lesser than his faith in God.
Obviously, religion satisfies important needs in the world that are often referred
to as postmodern, but also late modern; for my own part, I prefer the latter
denotation. But which are these needs? The ones normally mentioned are the
need for context and meaning, and firmly linked thereto the need to find or
encounter something that is greater than man.
It is also reasonable to view the fascination for religion among European
intellectuals in that light. Religion has become a challenge also to them. Even
though they do not submit themselves and their belief to it, they recognize it as
something to consider with profound sincerity.
Religious anti-intellectualism
The political consequences of a newly aroused religiousness has become
subject to an unceasing current of books; perhaps the most voluminous of
which is the nearly 800 page Political Theologies, including a long list of studies
dealing with both historical and contemporary problems. [11] But I do not intend
here to focus so much on its political as its intellectual challenges, within which
one can discern two somewhat contradictory tendencies. The one concerns a
more or less extensive anti-intellectualism, the other, a serious, intellectually
responsible discussion on how religion and secular philosophy, religion and
modern science, and religion and late modern society relate to each other.
Jrgen Habermas, who has come to occupy a central position in the more
philosophically applied debate on religion, has in his voluminous essay
collection Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion distinguished two opposing
tendencies in the present age: on the one hand a wave of success for religious
orthodoxies, on the other hand a strong tendency towards an unabashed
naturalism, according to which humankind's psychological life is reduced to

physiology of the brain, and its behaviour simply an emanation of its genetic
make up.[12] The latter tendency, which we will get back to in concluding, is
adopted by a significantly thinner strata of society than the religious
orthodoxies, but it plays an important social roll. Moreover, practically all people
come into contact with it when they are subject to medical and care services. In
that area, naturalism can appear to be an ideal sidekick to economic
rationalization. The human being becomes nothing more than an object to both.
One might question whether or not the term "orthodoxy", which Habermas uses,
is the most suitable for the movements that currently challenge faith in science.
Naturally, they are not related to the different churches, mainly in eastern
Europe, referred to as Orthodox, nor are they reminiscent of seventeenth
century orthodoxy in western Europe. They do indeed strive for piousness, but
they do it with entirely different tools than the Aristotelianism which Jesuits,
Calvinists, and Lutherans developed a couple hundred years ago. An alternative
term, which has gained significantly greater popularity, is fundamentalism. But
even its suitability may be contended. It is often used in a wide and rather
indeterminate sense, and has thereby acquired an altogether demeaning,
polemic tone.[13]
Theologically speaking, the term "fundamentalism" originally indicates an
unabridged literalism, and is therefore appropriate for neither Salafism nor
Pentecostalism. The Salafi's guiding principle is primordial Islam, for
Pentecostalists, the initial pentecostal Whitsun. It is not the literal, but rather the
steadier foundation that is sought in both branches. In English, the term
"foundationalism" has been suggested.[14] It is often used to describe
philosophical endeavours to find a steady foundation for human knowledge, and
could in this case be extended to cover the field of religion, however not entirely
admissibly.
The term "fundamentalism", with its enormous currency, will surely remain the
customary one to encompass a substantial portion of the religious
developments of our times. But persons who use it should keep its insufficiency
in mind.
The Salafi's apply themselves back to the initial stages of Islam. Backed up by a
Hadith from Mohammed, they assert that Islam, as a teaching and principle,
reached its perfection during the faith's first three generations (where
Mohammed and his contemporaries constituted the first). All later additions
must be regarded as distortions and digressions. That is one of the reasons
why the Islamic theology, kalam, is rejected, seeing as it introduces foreign,
Platonic, and Aristotelean elements into the Islamic teachings. Another, broader
reason, is the repugnance towards everything that can be seen as intellectual
hairsplitting. Islam is to be simple, resolute and not open to dialectic
ambiguities.
One needs hardly to add, that contemporary Salafism plays an important
political role both within most traditionally Islamic countries and around the
world. That role is not unambiguous Salafism encompasses many more
variations than that represented by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda but it is

substantial. Salafis are, ideologically speaking, anti-modernists, but utilize

modern technology to spread their message. TV and Internet are as proverbial
facilities to them as to the Pentecostalists. It is by means of these media that
both have achieved global reach.
In one considerable respect, however, the Muslim line differs from the Christian,
namely in its position on capitalism. While the Salafi's regard capitalism as an
expression of Western spiritual poverty and sinfulness, the Pentecostal global
movement is permeated through and through with capitalist thought. Its many
churches are normally run as corporations, with maximization of profit as
principle, and individual, pecuniary success regarded in the same spirit as a
sign of being favoured by God. He who, despite wholehearted faith, still remains
poor is faced with two alternatives: either his faith is not strong enough, or
something is wrong with the particular church he belongs to. Pentecostal
churches in Africa primarily procreate by dividing; there is a constant pursuit for
an even greater devotion and still more ecstatic sermon activity.[15]
To the shallow observer, Pentecostalism may appear to be a branch tailored for
the rich and successful. It is, true enough, the faith to which George W. Bush
and many of his counterparts adhere. But its successes are mainly owing to its
immense appeal among society's lower classes. The growing slums in the world
metropolises constitute the best breeding grounds for evangelical Christianity,
as well as for Salafism. Industrialism, with its fierce urbanization, once brought
about a rapid secularization. Socialism partially filled the void left after religion.
But today, it is, as Mike Davis points out, "populist Islam and Pentecostal
Christianity (and in Bombay, the cult of Shivay)" that fills the same space filled
by Socialism and Anarchism a hundred years ago. [16]
Thus, in the United States, under the latest Bush administration, the new
evangelical idea has reached the highest summits of power and worldly
prosperity. Fundamentalist thought is allowed to justify not only the bloody war
in Iraq, but also legislation concerning, for example, stem-cell research.
The name "Darwin" has gained a special significance in American debate.
President Bush has himself, in interviews, expressed the sentiment that schools
in USA should let students be exposed not only to the theory of evolution, but
also the Christian Right's own version of biblical creation theory, the one going
by the name "Intelligent Design".[17] The theory of "Intelligent Design"
acknowledges evolutionary theory to the extent that it presupposes that life on
earth accumulated over a considerably much longer period of time than one
week. On the other hand, its advocates claim that the processes of life are so
complex that it is inherently logical to trace an intelligent creator.
From an intellectual perspective, the argumentation for "intelligent design" is
utterly weak. Those supporters who have some form of background in natural
sciences do not get their articles published in scientific periodicals for the
reason that their contributions are far too full of dubious conclusions or abstruse
mathematical reasoning. It is also evident that these advocates are not primarily
interested in influencing the scientific, but rather the wider, public debate. They
are aware that the great layer of American society, categorized in political terms

as rightwing, are greatly influential, not least in regards to important institutions

such as schools, libraries, and to some extent also the mass media. Thus,
"Intelligent Design" has no scientific nor any general intellectual credibility. [18] It
is in an entirely other respect that the rebirth of Christianity, symbolized mainly
by the new wave of Pentecostalism, poses a challenge for both scientific
thought in a more limited sense and for a reality which asserts itself on what
human reasoning can conjecture on its own and nothing else. Pentacostalism's
harrowing criticism is not on the intellectual content, but for what risk of
dehydrating the actual spirit of life intellectualism can lead to. It puts the tales of
The Bible up against a world that can seem grey and rationally cold, a world
that does not naturally make room for a joie de vivre, far less the ecstasy so
important within the Pentecostal movement. It is unclear if this intellectual world
can offer any moral guidance, and it certainly entails making the questions of
what is good and evil, right and wrong, subject to discussions where one never
can hope for any final outcome. Anyone who wishes to come to a simple and
seemingly definitive understanding is not comfortable with such ambivalence.
And what good is it in regards to suffering, mourning, and death?
Salafism does not pose quite the same sort of challenge it does not hold
ecstasy as an ideal but its criticism of a strict intellectual attitude is similar.
Instead of endless reasoning, it offers solid guidelines and a resolute belief.
The Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb is for Salafism by now a classic source of
inspiration. Qutb, who was executed in 1966 under the rule of Gamal Abdels
Nasser, was a thoughtful opponent of both capitalism and communism. The
world is only superficially divided into an Eastern Bloc and a Western Bloc, he
wrote in 1949. Both Blocs are only fighting over worldly influence and market
advantages, not about ideas and convictions. The real border has both these
heavyweights on the one side, both impregnated with the same materialistic
disposition, and Islam on the other.
Qutb did nevertheless imply that Islam is compatible with modern technology.
Solely western values pose a deadly threat. The goal of life may never be
material profits without fidelity to Islam's original commandments. To these, he
also counts caring for other people's wellbeing; there is a social program in the
Muslim brotherhood which Qutb belonged to and to which he still must be the
most important thinker.[19]
Qutb's thoughts reverberate throughout Salafism but often in a more militant
form. The belief that the power of human reasoning in itself can come to lasting
conclusions is rejected with the same degree of certainty as within fundamental
Christianity.
The capacity of reasoning, and its limits
The wave of fundamentalism aggregates an immediate background to the
renewed interest in theological questions so considerable among the western,
and particularly European thinkers over the past decades. But critique of the
secular rationale comes also from different religious adherents who in no way
discredit the guiding power of human rationale as such. Their point is rather that
this rationale is not sufficient, but must hence be enriched with a religious

perspective.
The leading theological traditions within both Islam and Christianity as within
Judaism are pervaded by that the religious decree is to be interpreted with
help of philosophical tools with origins in Greek philosophy. A secular rationale
has come to serve as a guide, but has also always been described as
insufficient. In order to arrive at the complete truth about the world and life one
needs revelation or in a broader sense, those guidelines given by the holy
scriptures.
This position was recently, with a next to paradigmatic clarity, assumed by the
German theologian Joseph Ratzinger the current pope Benedictus XVI in
his dialogue with Jrgen Habermas in January 2004. [20] Ratzinger, who is a
typical exponent of the learned Catholic, in particular of the Thomist tradition,
brings up the question of whether or not natural law, by custom important in
both Catholic and secular thought, has lost its appeal in present day. The word
"nature" no longer represents something unquestionably reasonable
evolutionary biology renders such a notion impossible. That which remains of
the original thought applies only to human rights, which according to Ratzinger
must be complemented by a corresponding set of "human duties". But rationale
alone cannot in the long run guarantee that either rights or duties are defended.
Rationale, if left by itself, can be abused in many different ways. Ratzinger's
conclusion is that rationale needs religion in order to not go astray. But,
correspondingly, religion also proves to rely on rationale, without which it is
prone to degenerate into unruly fanaticism.[21]
Habermas, for his part, places his trust in the idea that both rights and
obligations will arise out of actual human interaction, that is to say: the activity of
communication. But at the same time, he admits that what he calls "postmetaphysic thought" is clearly at a loss when it comes to notions of the good or
exemplary life. Such notions must be discernible in order to give people tangible
guidelines for their conduct and their dreams.
This philosophy has something to learn from religion, under the premise that it
is freed from dogmatism and coercive guilt. Secular thought still has insufficient
expressive potentiality and lacking sensitivity in dealing with unsuccessful lives,
unreasonable life plans, or polluted societal conditions. Religion stands as
better equipped. When Christianity once was united with the Greek
philosophical tradition, the latter was enriched with crucial concepts by the
former; Habermas mentions as an example "embodiment", "disposal", and
"fulfilment". Post-metaphysical thought has renounced all claims, and
Habermas anticipates the need for translations from religious language. He
mentions one example, namely how the Jewish-Christian notion that mankind is
the effigy of God is translated to a secular notion of human value. Of course,
this is no new translation, but Habermas feels that its power must be renewed,
perhaps in such a way that a human being must be treated as if they were the
image God, even if there doesn't happen to be any God. [22]
This is not so enlightening; tangibility is not the German philosopher's strong
point. He does, however, refer to an earlier master of precisely this tradition,

namely Walter Benjamin. Benjamin could endow secular notions with the entire
power of the religious imaginary world. In another text, Habemas mentions
Benjamin's "anamnestic solidarity". This anamnestic solidarity becomes the
equivalence of the notion of the final judgement. At the final judgement, all
wrongdoings shall come to light and be punished. But when the notion of such a
definitive jurisdiction is set aside, a void emerges. That is when the collective
memory must come into effect: people must feel the deepest solidarity with
those who in the past have been victims of wrongdoings and suffering. [23]
In a more general sense, one can assume that Habermas has Benjamin's so
called messianism in mind. This messianism, which grew strong during
Benjamin's final years, when his confidence in the Communist utopia had been
ruptured and Nazism directly threatened his life, can be seen as a belief or a
hope despite everything or contrary to all reasoning.
When Habermas gives examples of Benjamin's secularizing of the religious use
of language, he is in a rather more relaxed state of mind. It is not unreasonable
to here compare his connection to Benjamin with that which his former
opponent, Jacques Derrida, made in some of his later writings. Thereto, one
thinks not least of Spectres de Marx (1993) Derrida's book on Karl Marx, or
rather, on different ways in which Marx, according to Derrida, still proves to be
indispensable, even since the failure of his great program. In it, the messianist
motif appears as some sort of utopia in a world full of injustice. But the strange
thing here is that Marx's theses on mankind's emancipation is given what one
might call a post-Marxist signification: it is not that a new world shall arise, but
that the old world shall light up in hope of justice. [24]
Both Benjamin, Habermas, and Derrida are here situated close to a tradition
which can be traced to Marx himself, and even further back, to an emphasis on
giving religious tales, symbols, and affirmations an altogether inner-worldly
meaning. This is central to Marx' entire ideology project, with its ambition to
translate the "heavenly" content to solid reality. The modern master of the
tradition is Ernst Bloch, who Habermas also mentions. [25] Bloch uses central
elements of of the Jewish-Christian conceptual field in his thought, but he does
so solely to thereby clarify mankind's conditions in the visible, material world.
That is an example of how he gives hope, so central to Jewish Messianism as
well as Christian faith, a vital secular importance in his great work Das Prinzip
Hoffnung.
When Habermas mentions Bloch, he mentions both Benjamin and Adorno in the
same breath. But I would like to concede that there lies an important difference
between Bloch and the others (as between Bloch and Derrida). The difference
can be expressed in terms of modernity's enchantment. Bloch is still totally in
awe at modernity and is convinced that development will imply not only
scientific, technological, and economical improvements, but also a world without
injustice and without exploitation. Benjamin and Adorno are in that respect
disillusioned. The world will always be an arena for overwhelming problems and
actual or impending injustices, to be combated as best one can. In this fight,
religious symbols and stories can play an important and guiding roll, even
though they ultimately are human creations.

Among those philosophers who have over the past years been fascinated by
religion's, and more specifically Christianity's, ability to arouse people's
enthusiasm and make them devoted to a great assignment, is Slavoj Zizek. He
portrays himself as a convinced atheist and even claims that atheism is
pronounced in the actual key moment of Christianity, on the cross where Jesus
cries: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" God has abandoned
mankind, however the notion of God lives on. It fills them with Geist and Zizek
uses the word Geist here, in its rich and ambiguous, Hegelian sense, which
includes both imaginable transcendental perspectives, but which also and in
Zizek's case, undoubtedly can be interpreted entirely inner-worldly sense,
namely as the spirit which fills a group of people, a parish or a collective project.
This is how he seems to read Christianity's principal immediate significance.
Christianity is able, in an era of inordinate capitalism, to gather devoted
multitudes with sights set on something other than consumption and
exploitation. Christianity, parallel to Marxism (or Marxism-Leninism, which Zizek
still adheres to) can for this reason be seen as the only effective counter-force
to capitalism.[26]
A chapter on its own deals with the fascination exerted by one of Christianity's
key figures, Paul, on numerous European philosophers in recent years, among
them Zizek.[27] This interest takes on many expressions: from Giorgio
Agamben's meticulous close reading of the Roman in Il tempo che resta (2000)
[28]
to Alain Badiou's considerably freer account on Saint Paul (1997). [29]
Common to all of them, however, is the fascination with Paul as the creator of
something entirely new; a Church, a community across borders, a project with
the whole charge of eschatology. Badiou is above all captivated by the idea that
Paul, who never met Jesus but who, among those who stood close to him,
managed to enforce his conviction that the Messiah also was also the Messiah
to the pagans and not only to the Jews. In Badiou's view, Paul thereby becomes
the first universalist. Agamben, for his part, is mainly occupied by Paul's
messianism, and poses the question in relation to our own times: what type of
Messianism would there be today? He places messianism against the
apocalyptic attitude. The apocalyptic is certain about the future: the final days
are nigh. Paul, with his messianist attitude speaks of an uncertain future, the
time that remains. Agamben draws a parallel to the insurgent on the one hand,
and the revolutionary on the other. The revolutionary knows what shall come
after the revolution. The insurgent sees only that the current condition must be
vanquished.
The interest in Paul emerges as a sort of focal point of the renewed interest
among secularized European intellectuals for religion's, and in particular
Christianity's purely inner-worldly potential.
Devotion, distance, and the enchantment of reality
The attitude which Zizek, Agamben, Badiou and others hold is miles away from
Michel Onfray's and Richard Dawkins' militant atheism. Simplified, one might
say that while the former write in light of the secularized European society, the
latter rather have our times' religious mass-movements, with their
fundamentalist intolerance in view. Dawkins, the biologist, feels the threat of the

anti-Darwinist plots from various self-proclaimed specialists on the origins of life.

Onfray, the philosopher, turns with rage against the anti-intellectualism he finds
within the three monotheist religions.
For my part, I feel a great apprehension towards antagonistic atheism. Is it
really a productive disposition: doesn't it just cause more pain? It is easy to
understand Dawkins's agitation over the attacks on evolutionary biology. This
grand theory, which over the past decades has gained further informational
force and internal beauty, is threatened not by any scientific competitor but by
what would appear to be pure ignorance. But isn't the British biologist's tone of
voice much too overwrought? Onfray, for his part, engages in a type of
malevolent interpretation of the Bible and the Koran which hardly contributes to
any deeper understanding of the importance of religion today.
Jrgen Habermas's attitude seems considerably more productive. He confesses
to what he calls a "soft naturalism".[30] By that he implies a belief that the
human world has its origins in nature but that everything within it cannot be
reduced to natural courses of events. Consciousness is not just an insignificant
by-product of different mental processes, as a "hard" naturalism would maintain.
It does indeed originate from a biological evolution, but well used constitutes a
precondition for the entire human civilization. Within this civilization, religion also
plays an important part, and thereto not only by way of thought-disorder and
intolerance, as Onfray and Dawkins would have it, but also as creator of
indispensable cultural values.
For my own part, I am also apprehensive about the term "naturalism" and prefer
to use the older term "materialism", even if it also is ambiguous. The synthesis
"non-reductive materialism" is on the other hand unambiguous: it is the
conception that reality is comprised of a number of levels where each one has
its origin in the closest, lower level, but where each higher lever implies new
qualities and conditions which cannot be explained with reference to lower
levels. What levels one wants to distinguish relies, in the end, upon the human
knowledge. For now, it seems reasonable to differ between inorganic and living
material; and to a majority, it is self-evident that the human world is regarded as
its own level. But the number of levels, also depends on how closely we
observe an object of study. The development of a particular biological species
or humanity itself can be seen as a great number of levels where new
constellations are constantly created. Non-reductive materialism is, in the end, a
theory of development, according to which it life manifests a time-based
continuity back to a comparably simple beginning (today, it is "big bang"), but
where constantly new conditions can arise.[31] One normally speaks of
emergent qualities.
It is also possible to equip this world view with a greater emotional force than
that which the dry term "non-reductive materialism" can provide. Dnis Diderot,
the great French Enlightenment thinker, can speak of "le matrialism enchant".
[32]
It is a suitable alternative name for the same notion. The attribute
"enchanting" adds a suggestion of the bewildering and the wonderful in this
great process of reality.

We may interject that Diderot lived in an age when the conclusions of research
really could invoke awe. Are we not inevitably more blas today? We know that
the universe is so infinitely great. We know that its smallest known elements are
so staggeringly small. We know that biological evolution has proceeded over
billions of years; our genealogical tables lose their way off across the savannah,
down into the water, all the way off to the warm, primordial soup of life. We can
easily find information on all of this on the web, as surely as my neighbour's
blog. We can see programs about it on TV when we want. It has become trivial.
But it is precisely this trivialization we must overcome. All knowledge begins
with wonder, Aristotle says in his Metaphysics. One might add that it is also kept
alive by wonder. A Swedish biologist and writer, Stefan Edman, has recently
published a book called just that "Wonder" (Frundran) [33] within which he
tries to awaken in us a renewed fascination for the strange affinity of the
universal and everything living. Stefan Edman is a Christian and ultimately
regards the wonderments of the world as a sign of a creative hand.
I can be smitten by his fascination but not by his belief. To imagine a creator
behind all of this is to set up a simple explanation to something much greater.
To say that someone has in one or another way made the world, in remote
analogy to what people can achieve with their tools and machines doesn't that
render the world shrunken and too humanized?
When we say that the universe arouses wonder, we have nothing else to
compare it to other than its parts, and particularly to those that humans can
create. The entirety is greater than the parts. Does that lead to the conclusion
that there must be an other entirety which is even greater than the entirety, and
which we call God?
One of the most important functions of religious faith is to face human beings
with something that is greater than the human being itself. Self-overestimation
is otherwise one of the greatest risks human beings face, imprisoned as they
are in themselves, their times, and their civilization.
But the notion of God's greatness can only be exposed through the greatness of
the universe. Do we then need God?
The great challenge lies on another level: what guiding principles might there be
for mankind in a world without God? Thereby, we are back to the debate
between Habermas and Ratzinger. Ratzinger believes in a divinely sanctioned
moral. Habermas regards moral, at best, as a result of free communicational
activity.
But, if we don't believe in God why would we then believe in a divinely
sanctioned moral? Furthermore, we see that moral which is built on religious
grounds, proves to give far from unequivocal answers.
We have to comply with that the human society is an enterprise free from
guarantees. Singular human life is also devoid of guarantees. We are adults
and not children in this world, and as adults we are, in a sense, at the mercy of

ourselves, both as individuals and as a collective, in an existence which holds

both cruelty and love, suffering and enjoyment, happiness and grief.
There is an image of God in which God is not manifest as the ruler of the world,
but as a God who, together with the humans, fights evils. It is an image I have a
great weakness for; it is very beautiful. But what reason do we have to believe
in such a God? Is he (or she) more than an idealized human?
Mankind emerged late as a species on a geological scale, it was just recently.
During this short period, it has achieved a lot. At first perhaps we think of the
negative: all the suffering that people have caused people through war and
oppression. But mankind's historical development is also an enchanting tale of
ever new accomplishments, from the rock-paintings, agriculture, the potter's
wheel and the written word to the Internet and biotechnology. It has created a
culture where she through the arts and religion and science established for
herself a universe of symbols, which is as remarkable as the visible universe.
All of this also deserves our wonderment. So much has been able to evolve
from so little.
This wonderment is constantly being balanced with a fear: that all of this can be
destroyed. Mankind is as much a destroyer as a creator.
To express our wonderment and our fear, culture, distinctly, presents an
inexhaustible repertoire. A great deal of it is clad in the robes of religion. That
does not make it less usable. In the same way as a religious content could be
extracted out of the entirely inner-worldly love poem Song of Songs, in the
same way, can the Book of Revelations, Bach's Christmas Oratorio, or the great
Sufi poets, express thoughts, feelings and atmospheres which to us are devoid
of the religious correlate, God, and still lose nothing in value or intensity.

[1]

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

Michel Onfray, Trait d'athologie (Paris: Editions Grasset, 2006).
[3]
Blandine Chelini-Pont, "le renchantement discret des mondialisations
religieuses", Esprit 3-4, Mars-Avril 2007, p. 163.
[4]
Peter L. Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the world: Resurgent
Religion and World Politics (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center,
1999). Another, more recent book on the same topic is Hans Joas and Klaus
Wiegand (red.), Skularisierung und die Weltreligionen (Frankfurt: Fischer
Tascenbuch Verlag, 2007).
[5]
Olivier Roy, La lacit face l'Islam (Paris: Stock, 2005), in particular
p. 14. Jean-Paul Willaime regards this wave of secularization as typical for what
he calls ultramodernity; see his article "Reconfigurations ultramodernes", Esprit
3-4, Mars-Avril 2007, p. 149 and pass. See also Olivier Roy's own article, "Le
dcouplage de la rligion et de la culture: une exception musulmane?", ibid. p.
242-52.
[6]
Interestingly enough, the French translation of Berger is called Le
renchantement du monde (Paris: Bayard, 2002).
[2]

[7]

See: http://www.unibonn.de/www/Evangelische_Theologie/Dekanat/Dekanatsrede_WS_2004_200
5.html
[8]
Slavoj Zizek in Creston Davis, John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek (ed.)
Theology and the Political (Durham & London: Duke University Press 2005).
[9]
Weber brings up the term Entzauberung in, among other places,
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1920, 4th edition, Tbingen 1956), p. 735ff. W. M.
Sprondel gives a brief overview of the term in the article "Entzauberung" in
Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie (Bd 2, Darmstadt 1972) column 564f.
[10]
Martin Heidegger, Beitrge zur Philosophie (in Gesamtausgabe, Bd
65, Frankfurt a.M. 1989) p. 124f.
[11]
Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (ed.), Political Theologies.
Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press,
2006).
[12]
Jrgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion.
Philosophische Aufstze (Frankfurt a.M.; Suhrkamp, 2005), p. 7 and pass.
[13]
Contemporary literature on the topic fundamentalism is growing at an
explosive rate. The foundation was laid by the Martin E. Marty and R. Scott
Appleby led The Fundamentalism Project, which was presented in a number of
volumes with the same title; among them see particularly the first,
Fundamentalisms Observed (Ed. Martin E. Marty och R. Scott Appleby,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Peter Berger criticises the use
of the word "fundamentalism" which he finds demeaning and not fully apposite;
a.a. p.6f. This opinion, which has been presented also by many other authors, is
important. "Fundamentalism" easily becomes an insult.
[14]
Niels Henrik Gregersen did so when he commented on this article,
when I presented it as key-note at the conference Religion in the 21st Century
9.22.2007.
[15]
An influential presentation of this development is Andr Corten and
Ruth Fratani (eds.), Between Babel and Pentecost: Pentecostalism
transnational in Africa and Latin America (London: Hurst, 2001). See also the
excellent and rich section "La vague vanglique et pentectiste", in Esprit 3-4
(Mars-Avril, 2007) p. 156-230 with articles by both Corten and Marshall(Fratani). Well worth reading is also David Martin, "The Evangelical Upsurge and
Its Political Implications", in Berger, a.a. p. 37-49.
[16]
Mike Davis, "Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal
Proleariat", in New Left Review nr 26/2004, p. 5-34; the quotation from p. 30.
[17]
About the interview, and reactions on it, see for example Peter Baker
and Peter Slevin, "Bush Remarks on 'Intelligent Design' Theory Fuel Debate",
Washington Post 3.8.2005. The Bush administration's careless way of dealing
with science is depicted in Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New
York: Basic Books, 2005, revised ed. 2007).
[18]
There are a few extinguishing settlements with the matters of the
theses on "Intelligent Design". An excellent example of such is Matt Young and
Taner Edis (eds.), Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New
Creationism (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press,
2004)
[19]
A meticulous, close to near-sighted examination of Sayyid Qatb's
political thinking and relationship to Islam is given by Sayed Khatab, in The

Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb: The Theory of jahiliyyah (London and New
York: Routledge, 2006) His take on the world situation from 1949 is
represented there as a motto for the entire book. It hails from the period when
Qutb was situated in USA; see thereof p. 138-46.
[20]
Habermas's and Ratzinger's introductory contribution is reproduced
in Jrgen Habermas - Joseph Ratzinger, Dialektik der Skularisierung. ber
Vernunft und Religion (Mit einem Vorwort herausgegeben von Floran Schuller,
Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder, 2005).
[21]
Ibid. p. 50-57.
[22]
Ibid. p. 31ff.
[23]
Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, p. 250.
Habermas's introduction to the discussion with Ratzinger is by the way also
inserted in Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion; the reference to Benjamin and
the need for translation, p. 116.
[24]
See first and foremost Derrida's list over unjust conditions which
must be contravened, Spectres de Marx. L'tat de la dette, le travail du deuil et
la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: ditions Galile, 1993), p. 124-55.
[25]
Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, p. 240.
[26]
Zizek has written several articles on religion and held innumerable
lectures on the same topic. The most important among his writings on the topic
is "The 'Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy'", in Davis - Milbank Zizek (eds.)
Theology and the Political: The New Debate Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2005), p. 25-71 and "Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea
for Ethical Violence", in Zizek Santner Reinhard (eds.), The Neighbor: Three
Inquires in Political Theology (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press,
2006), p. 134-190, as well as the part on Christianity as a "lost case" in In
Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2007).
[27]
An excellent summary of this interest is found in the periodical sprit
theme issue "L'vnement saint Paul: juif, grec, romain, chrtien" (Fvrier 2003)
with articles by, among others Stanislas Breton, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Claude
Monod.
[28]
Giorgio Agamben, Il tempo che resta: Un commento alla lettera ai
romani (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000).
[29]
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. La fondation de l'universalisme (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).
[30]
Habermas, a.a. p. 157ff, p. 171f and p. 215.
[31]
I refer to my own Motsatsernas Spel: Fredrich Engels filosofi och
1800-talets vetenskaper (Staffanstorp: Cavefors, 1977) Bd II, p. 112-17 and p.
236ff or Das Spiel der Gegenstze: Friedrich Engels Philosophie und die
Wissenschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, Campus, 1986), esp. p. 16266.
[32]
lisabeth de Fontenay, Diderot ou le matrialisme enchant (Paris:
Grasset, 1981).
[33]
Stefan Edman, Frundran. Tankar om vr stund p jorden (rebro:
Cordia, 2006).
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/article_2007-03-22-bmuller-en.html
Burkhard Mller

The concept of God and why we don't need it

In these newly religious times, it no longer seems superfluous to rearm the
atheists with arguments. When push comes to shove, atheists can only trust
their reason, writes Burkhard Mller.
Some years ago I wrote a book entitled Drawing a Line A Critique of
Christianity [Schlustrich Kritik des Christentums], which argued that
Christianity was false: not only in terms of its historical record, but
fundamentally, as a very concept. I undertook to uncover this falsity as a
contradiction in terms. While I do not wish to retract any of what I said at the
time, I would now go beyond what I argued then in two respects.
For one thing, I no longer wish to adopt the same aggressive tone. The book
was written at the beginning of the 1990s, when I was still living in Wrzburg (in
Bavaria), a bastion of Roman Catholicism. It is a prosperous city, powerful and
conscious of the fact, which made it more than capable of provoking my ire;
whereas for thirteen years now I have been living in the new East of Germany,
where roughly eighty per cent of the population no longer recognize Christianity
even as a rumour, where it appears as the exception, not the rule, and where
one has the opportunity to reflect on the truth of the claim "this is as good as it
gets".
The second point is this: it seems to me that institutionalized, dogmatic
Christianity, as expressed in the words of the Holy Scriptures and more
succinctly still in the Credo, is losing ground. This is not only at the expense of
a stupid and potentially violent strain of fundamentalism, as manifested in Islam
and the American religious Right, but in Europe mostly at the expense of an
often rather intellectually woolly and mawkish eclecticism. I will not be dealing
here with any theological system in its doctrinal sense. I want rather to sound
out the religious impulse, even and especially in its more diffuse form, and
to get to its root. That is to say, to enquire of the concept of God whether in
practice it accomplishes what is expected of it.
For people do not believe in God because they have been shown the proof of
his existence. All such proofs presented by philosophers and theologians
through the millennia have, by their very nature, the regrettable flaw that a proof
can only refer to the circumstances of existing things, whereas God, as the
predecessor of all circumstances, comes before, so to speak, and outside the
realm of the demonstrable. These proofs, then, all have the character of
something tacked on, giving the impression of a thin veneer on a very hefty
block of wood. Belief in God, where it does not merely arise out of an
unquestioned tradition, demands a spontaneous act on the part of the believer
which the believers themselves will tend to describe as an act of faith, their
opponents as a purely arbitrary decision; one, nevertheless, that always stems
from a need of some kind. People believe in God because along with this belief
goes an expectation that a particular wish will be fulfilled for them, a particular
problem solved. What kinds of need are these, and how can God meet them?
First of all, of course, we ought to come to an agreement on who or what this
God might actually be not in the sense of a definition or pointed theological
explanation, but simply so that we do not talk at cross purposes. I would say:

the source of the world, personified. In Christianity, God is most often expressed
as the Creator. His two most important specifications are contained within this
idea: first, that he is separate, in substantial terms, from the world in contrast
to pantheistic ideas which see him as a kind of refined fluid that is dissipated
everywhere and which, as Goethe rightly observed, represent nothing more
than a polite form of atheism. Second, that despite this separation the world
remains entirely focused on him. This rules out the gods of Epicurus, who
inhabit the wedge-shaped spaces between the spherical worlds and do not
concern themselves with anything, as it does the Theistic concept that sees
God as the watchmaker who has constructed and set up the world, and
thereafter left it to its own devices. It is also questionable to what extent the
deus absconditus, the "hidden God", who has gained his popularity through the
horrors of the modern age and who is supposed to gain veracity paradoxically
precisely through his absence, might fit into this concept, or whether it would
be better to put him aside, just like the god of the Theists, as a kind of pensioner
of the cosmos. I propose to stick to what both classical Christianity and any
dogmatically unencumbered present-day believer mean when they talk of
"God".
People think they can find something in God that they feel is sadly lacking in the
visible world. This urge must be very old, perhaps as old as mankind itself; for
allusions to religious belief can be found even in the traces of the most ancient
civilizations. People who think of themselves as atheists have to consider the
following argument: you are back in the same position as animals before
anything began to dawn in their heads; is this really what you call progress, and
the entire history of mankind merely a confused detour, starting out from brute
physical laws only to return from whence it came? It is not easy to answer this
question in the affirmative.
And what are the qualities ascribed to God in order to satisfy that great human
thirst? A catalogue, necessarily somewhat approximate, might run as follows:
God provides the explanation for the world as it is, which would otherwise
remain utterly inexplicable; God is the guarantor of good, in the heart of man as
well as in the way of the world; it is God the Eternal no less and none other
that is set in opposition to the alarming emptiness of time.
That there is something and not nothing is actually the great miracle. In
comparison, all the other remarkable things, including the existence of living
things and of human beings, pale into insignificance as mere modifications. The
world cries out for a reason, for an explanation. Yet if one thinks about it, one
will realize that this yearning must, at an absolutely fundamental level, remain
insatiable: for to explain, to account for something, is to do nothing more or less
than to relate two facts to each other, one as a consequence, the other as its
precondition. Yet where does this precondition come from? The earth, say the
Hindus, rests upon an elephant's back; that is why it does not fall into an abyss.
But where is the elephant standing? Well, upon the shell of an even bigger
tortoise. And the tortoise? It rests upon the coils of an immense winding
serpent. And the snake? When one gets to this point, says the old wag Bertrand
Russell, one is told by the devout Hindu: "Suppose we change the subject!"

Russell can smile, because the Hindus have failed to recognize the nature of
gravity, which does not, of course, simply operate downwards, but into the
centre of the attracting mass, thereby enabling the globe to balance freely. But
where, then, did gravity come from, and how does it exert its effect? Modern
science has not come any closer at all to explaining this; indeed, it is precisely
gravity that has shown itself especially resistant to all attempts at reduction. It
does what it always has done: present itself to the observer as an immovable,
primary fact, impossible to elucidate any further: this is as far as it goes. Or, as
is said in Faust (Part Two, Act IV), "Der Philosoph, er wei es nicht zu
fassen,/Da liegt der Fels, man mu ihn liegen lassen" ["As wise men know, their
reason it surpasses. / The rock lies evermore where it has lain"], with the bitter
afterthought "Zuschanden haben wir uns schon gedacht" ("We've racked our
brains, to our disgrace, in vain.").[1] And even if it did go any further what
would be the use? Every scientific model that is advanced affords nothing more
than a breathing space, before we descend to the next turn of the screw in the
ceaseless regression, like a ladder in a stocking that can never stop unravelling.
Everything that exists wants an explanation, and every explanation turns round
and presents itself as a new riddle.
At this stage it seems highly advisable to stipulate that it was God who created
the world. This is how the Holy Scriptures begin. So what purpose devolves
upon God? To bring the endless regression of questions to a conclusion. Yet
this is only achievable through the concept and manifestation of God as the end
to all questions. God is that which needs no further justification or explanation;
God is what is there. Belief in God entails the desire to have things this way;
love of God entails experiencing this as a blessed relief. But if one treats the
matter not from a psychological point of view, but a logical and economic one, it
will be noticed that the same outcome can be reached for considerably better
value: one does not see God, one has to explicitly summon up the courage to
believe in the invisible. That takes strength. Were we to stick with the visible and
were we willing to acknowledge its intransigent majesty, allowing it to be
founded upon nothing but itself, we would still have to deal with the
inaccessibility of the original mystery, albeit this time with considerably less
expenditure of reverence and assertive energy.
Strictly speaking, anyone who believes in God is immediately faced not with
one, but three basic unexplained facts: first, God himself; then, the creative
impulse that starts out from him (for why should the Almighty condescend to
such small-scale handicraft?); and finally, the disparity between the perfect
original creator and such a botched job. Plato sensed this problem of a perfect
God having created the imperfect world and introduced the intermediate
authority of his "demiurge" the craftsman to whom God delegated the creation
of the world; this is an attempt to dodge the question by creating a buckpassing, pseudo-official hierarchy. It can't work.
To spare God such embarrassments, our world has been dubbed "the best of all
possible worlds", which from the very outset represents an untenable claim, as
we have no possible point of comparison. Schopenhauer described it, more
cogently, as the worst of all possible worlds, because, he argued, if it were even
just a little worse, it would no longer be capable of existing. Let us consider it

calmly and on its own terms, without the fruitless yearning described by
Nietzsche as the behaviour of "backworldsmen" ("Hinterweltlertum"); that is to
say, the desire to find out at all costs what is behind the world, as if it were a flat
faade. Then we can be content with our existence, just as it is. The Latin book
I use to teach states "He who looks up to the stars does not deny the existence
of God". But why should the stars not be enough for the observer? Their
spheres are gigantic beyond all imagining; they outlast us and are silent. In that
respect they resemble perfectly the thing which we generally imagine as God.
They render him as a mere duplication of their majesty dispensable. Let us
show ourselves worthy of their great silence by replying, as best we can, with a
small silence of our own. They are mysterious, yes; but a compact, single
mystery. As mysteries go, that is the least we must expect.
Incidentally, it is not only believers, but scientists too, who cannot stand this
silence; they insist on replacing it with a Big Bang. Nothing before it, no space,
no time; then everything develops in an expansive act of monumental scope.
And beyond that, we are not to be permitted to ask where it came from: it is this
above all that the theory of the Big Bang has in common with the old God. I
have no means of verifying how good or bad the mathematics and empirical
data are that are being used here; it is enough for me to see how urgent a need
is gratified by the Big Bang to be convinced that we are dealing with a pure
theological fantasy one, moreover, rasher than theology itself, since it is
unaware of what it is doing and does not realize that nothing is achieved by
deriving the world from within the world.
God explains nothing; he explains less than nothing, since the assumption of
his existence introduces more problems than if one were to assume nothing.
Amazement was the act that gave birth to philosophy. Why was it, then, along
with everything that followed, especially science, so keen to make that
amazement disappear at all costs as if it were its inverse duty, when it came
to the crunch, to see to it that amazement was no more? I suggest leaving
amazement well alone, just as it came into the world: no other emotion that
accompanies the realization will turn out to be more satisfying.
Secondly, let us consider God as the foundation of good. That would make him,
first of all, the guarantor of morality. He is said to have established morality
through the enactment of appropriate commandments, to keep watch over their
observance, and to sit in judgement at the end of time, or at the end of each
individual life, on every single person according to the stipulation of the
commandments (though, since humans must inevitably fall short of these
rigorous demands, divine grace also plays its part). To what degree morality is
an exclusive property of humans, set up expressly by God for men, I shall not
discuss further here; at any rate it seems to me that very clear intimations of it
can be found among the animals that live socially.
One point in particular is worthy of interest: that the possibility of moral
behaviour is bound up with one's regard for the law and that there is no chance
of ever doing and respecting what is right unless it is marked and sanctioned as
such by the higher authority. Such a form of morality is no different from criminal
law. It holds that the good do good because they love the good, and the bad

because they are afraid of being punished. Only the second group fall foul of
the Criminal Code or rather, all humans are regarded as villains, as a
precaution. Fair enough as far as it goes, as no injustice is done to the good.
They too are reliant in the end, in terms of their lifestyle, on wrongdoers being
curbed in the cold, reasoned form of an "if X, then Y", which leaves no doubt
as to the seriousness of Y.
Now it is certainly those cases dealt with by criminal law that represent the hard
core of what any moral code must regulate. But this law has nothing to do with
true ethics. Ethical behaviour is its own reward; it neither hopes for reward nor
fears punishment. In this sense the Holy Scriptures do not justify any ethics;
someone who does what is approved and refrains from what is frowned on only
because he is thinking of heaven and hell is and remains an egoistic opportunist
and nothing more. An ethical code that finds authentication through law is
practical, but worthless as ethics. It could be said, with only slight
overstatement, that a female monkey with children of her own who adopts
another monkey's child (a far from rare occurrence) is behaving more ethically
than a believer who does the right thing because of God since there is no
room in her brain for the concept of a judging God. At any rate I would, however,
acknowledge, in the believer's favour, that the notion of "good" is no more alien
to him than it is to a monkey and that he misunderstands himself if he believes
that he must attribute his natural goodness to God.
Having come this far, I fear that it is impossible to avoid the old subject of
theodicy. To complete the picture I have to discuss it, even though I cannot hope
to say anything new in this area that has been covered so comprehensively by
others. Albert Camus expressed the problem in the pithy sentence "Either God
is good, and therefore not all-powerful; or else he is all-powerful, in which case
he is not good." Older religions, for instance Judaism, can be content with an
ambivalent God who has room in his nature for darkness and even evil think
of the Angel of Death sent by Jehovah over Egypt to strangle all first-born. This,
at any rate, is not the God that Christianity takes for granted; its God is Love.
Here, the difficulty presents itself that there is manifestly so much hate in the
world. How could God allow Auschwitz to happen? To this there can be no
answer that acquits God, in his capacity as God. There should, of course, be no
attempt to talk one's way out of this with reference to the "Lord in his mysterious
wisdom"; everything about this "mysterious wisdom" may indeed be obscure, if
indeed it is God's but the glaring fact remains that a God who has allowed
such things to happen to his children cannot have loved them.
It would be better, for us and for him, if he did not exist, and if everything had
just happened, as if all mankind's suffering were just a careless accident. For if
one seeks to connect such events with a preordained global order, one
increases the physical pain which is what it is, and which ultimately wears off,
one way or another making it something uncontrollable and metaphysical into
the bargain. One remains stunned, one's focus hopelessly drawn back to these
events. The tribulations of the world will always remain a heavy burden but it
would be so much lighter if we could simply understand the world as chaos,
instead of seeking to find sense in it.

At the same time, the hate and malice of history is still by no means the worst
thing one is confronted with in the putative heavenly kingdom. For these things
can always be understood, if need be, as degeneracy, as surplus, as the
exception as the sad, but not inevitable result of the metaphysical freedom
unleashed on man by God which also entails the possibility of choosing the
wrong thing. Whether a creator who has made his creatures such that they can
even forfeit their wellbeing is not in truth playing a cruel game with them, is not
a question that will be examined more closely here worthwhile though the
discussion would be.
Instead I wish to draw attention to how the world was set up before ethics and
before mankind. All animal life supports itself exclusively by means of the
continual destruction of other life. That a different model can also flourish is
shown by plants, which quite literally live on light and air alone. Why would God
have designed us and the million or so other animal species in such a way that,
in order to exist for longer than even a few days, we need to kill plants at the
very least and often enough other animals? The mere word "food chain"
provokes a shudder, expressing as it does the notion of eating and being eaten,
right up through each link of the chain, as the very system of the world from
single-celled organisms through worms to songbirds and ultimately to what
ends up on our tables as our Sunday roast. Every animal, says Nietzsche, is the
walking grave of thousands of others.
The living world is an infernal miracle. Hyenas start consuming their steaks
while their prey is still trying to flee them. The female praying mantis bites off its
male partner's head during the act of copulation and begins to devour it. Many
ichneumon flies will paralyse a caterpillar by means of a well-aimed sting in a
ganglion and lay their egg, thus preparing the way for their larva to gradually
consume the immobile yet still living body (thus kept fresh the whole while) from
within. What is more, if it is unlucky it will fall victim to another kind of
ichneumon fly in the process, which in turn lays its own egg in the larva, with the
result that, like a Russian doll, three creatures are contained within one another:
the original caterpillar, followed by fly larva A, followed by fly larva B. Finally,
having matured into a full-blown imago, B hatches out of the victim's double
skin, leaves its own skin behind and begins the cycle anew. This extraordinary
phenomenon is known as hyperparasitism. This, as I have observed, is not
sadistic excess, but a vitally necessary rule of life for entire genera and species.
Is this God's world?
We like to conjure up old visions of Paradise whereby in the redeemed world
the lion will lie down next to the lamb. That may be an ideal from the lamb's
point of view, but in such a world the lion would have to perish, since unlike the
lamb he cannot digest the green diet that is all that is available in Paradise. In
order to refrain from eating lambs he would be obliged to cease being a lion.
Lions are, at the most fundamental level, not capable of redemption. Are
humans? Our anatomical endowments, our omnivorous set of teeth, would
suggest otherwise even before we begin to define ourselves as ethical and
historical beings, with the peculiar and highly imaginative horrors which that
entails.

Thus the concept of God proves to be one unfit to satisfy both the need for a
foundation of the world and the need for a foundation of good. In both cases we
are better off without God. The same cannot be said of the third, and strongest,
need, out of which the idea of God was born: renouncing this is not possible
without great pain. God God the Eternal is conceived of as the one and only
bulwark against that absolute void, the nihilism of time. The fact that he is
considered to be eternal does not have to mean that he is simply without
beginning and end, immortal like the gods of antiquity and unborn besides; but
rather that he, along with everything to which he grants this grace, is a concept
above and beyond time in general.
We become aware of the terror of time without having any particular
philosophical inclination, but inescapably as a result of our own mortality. All
experience teaches us that man lives for a time before falling victim to a sudden
misfortune or to a long-drawn-out ageing process, whereupon his deceased
body decays, ultimately leaving behind no trace. What on earth was the point of
his living at all? As Goethe's Mephistopheles says with such diabolical clarity:
"Past" 'tis a stupid word.
Past why?
Past and pure Naught, sheer Uniformity!
Of what avails perpetual Creation
if later swept off to annihilation?
"So it is past!" You see what that must mean?
It is the same as had it never been... (Faust, Part Two, Act V) [2]
This explanation is as close as he comes to admitting to being the adversary of
God that he is. If there is no God, he is right. The nihilism inherent in time goes
far beyond the empirical fact of the universal mortality of all human beings;
human life is, as Jean Amry put it, the project that is always futile, the building
of a house that is promptly torn down at its own completion ceremony.
If this startles us, as it is bound to, then the door is opened to an even worse
realization. Space holds no riddles for us, or at least none that might ever go
beyond the mysterious nature of the world; it is equal in extent and matter to
what it contains. But what does time have a comparable relationship with?
Nothing at all. It too holds sway over its material; yet it casts its evil spell of
dissolution over everything that enters it. Even the most apparently definite
things, such as our internally consistent self, enter an atomizer and are
transformed into the vague mist of memory and the even vaguer mist of our
plans. Philosophy talks of time as an a priori category, while classical physics
sees the equivalent series of numbers at work (and as for what modern physics
makes of it, it is best not to even ask here).
All of which has little to do with time as we experience it. As far as we are
concerned it appears rather as a chimera, as a monster formulated out of the
three entirely different bodies of past, present and future. The past no longer
exists it appears to lie plainly before us, albeit untouchably distant; the future
does not yet exist it hovers in the air, an insubstantial haze. Both, each in its
own way ungoverned by what is supposed to define it, are unreal precisely
because of this. But the present forms only an infinitesimally short space of
linear time; no sooner does it come into existence than it has vanished again, a
mere turning-point between both the other nullities. Here, too, the basic

certification of existence cannot really be assigned. It is only in time that we

exist and yet, precisely through its nature, we do not exist. Maybe it would be
best if, like animals, we were simply to forget, in order at least to perpetuate our
present. But even that won't work. One cannot resolve to forget, for memory is
at work even in the act of intention.
Time slips away from us, flows towards us, happens to us, runs away. But
where might the many drops of this rivulet end up? After all, they must be
somewhere! Time that would be real even as the past: this is where God comes
into play as the great well of history. To see him as such is to depict him as even
more majestic than he would be were he the mere creator of the world and
repository of all good: for in this sense a power is attributed to him which we
cannot even begin to imagine.
It is easiest if this eternal God manifests himself as a judging God for in this
capacity he must represent eternal memory. The idea that there is a judgement
"at the end of time" is not only supposed to validate the idea of "the good" but,
almost more than that, to provide some assurance that not a single hour of the
past has truly been annihilated: it has all remained faithfully stockpiled.
Resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgement, eternal life: this is how the
otherwise perfectly meaningless succession of generations brought about by
birth and death acquires its meaning. For this way in which humanity serves in
shifts means that an incomparably greater number of souls can be blessed with
salvation than if Adam and Eve along with their children had simply never had to
die. Thus history, otherwise nothing but a wild army of racing clouds, gains the
backdrop of a heaven which captures its transient figures like a photograph.
One of Baron Mnchhausen's tall tales goes like this. He was travelling by
stagecoach one bitter winter's day when the driver sounded the horn to play his
songs but there was not a sound to be heard from the frozen horn. The coach
driver tried again and again before eventually giving up, dejected. At last they
reached the nearest postal station and went in to warm up, hanging the
posthorn on a nail near the stove. And as it became warm, all of a sudden the
horn began to play all the songs that had earlier been frozen and had refused to
sound now they filled the heated room all on their own. We should probably
think along the lines of this parable when the frost of time thaws at eternity, all
the sweeter for never having been lost, and yet, now quite different.
It would be wonderful if this were the case, instead of our half falling into an
abyss of nothingness while still alive, and in death vanishing completely. In
contrast to the two other points, it has to be said here that God, if he existed,
would indeed satisfy this last need. But what pledge would we have that this is
the case? We should be on our guard against letting the strength of our own
desire induce us to infer a corresponding truth. We have not been shown even
the smallest sign that this restitution and resurrection, so fervently longed for as
they are, will ever really take place. A handful of such cases (if, in fact,
amazingly few in total) reported in the New Testament scarcely constitutes
irrefutable proof in the eyes of the unprejudiced. Moreover, the suspicion has
found its way into the text itself that it was ultimately the disciples who stole the
body of Christ. It would be so nice. It would be nice, too, for a man dying of

thirst to be able to summon an oasis into existence by the force of his thirst; but
unfortunately, whether the oasis exists or not is entirely independent of his
thirst. The utmost that thirst is capable of producing on its own is a mirage. It is
as such, as a delusion, that God hovers on the horizon of human history.
Unlike believers of all persuasions, atheists are scarcely accustomed to
manifest their beliefs in organized or vigorous fashion. There are several
reasons for this. For one thing, after the heroic early days, they felt less
threatened and disturbed in their views by the continued survival of religions
than the religions conversely felt threatened by atheism. After all, everyone has
to find his own salvation. For a long time thereafter, in Europe at least, time
seemed to work in atheism's favour. Rather than waste time in futile battles of
words with unreasonable people, one could simply wait for their position to
crumble and decay of its own accord, following historical gravity as it were.
But this golden age is now coming to an end, perhaps; and in future it may once
again be the atheists who are expected to account to society for their point of
view that is to say, if discussions are still taking place and not replaced by a
range of sanctions. At all events, it now no longer seems to me unnecessary to
re-equip atheism so that it does not stand completely naked in the face of a
growing new culture of religion. For one thing should be clear: if it comes to a
real battle, it will be the atheists who have to manage without help from on high.
They have no God, no holy texts; they are promised nothing that would make it
worth venturing into the fray with the blindness of a true believer they must
rely on their arguments, and their arguments alone. Granted, the believer has to
stand up for his beliefs with more energy than his adversary, deploying his
whole person; but in doing so, he has the benefit of his strength of will. Those
who do not believe in something may seem to have it easier than those who do;
conversely, those who do not want something have to work far harder than
those who do. Atheists be on your guard!

[1]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Parts One and Two, translated
by George Madison Priest, New York, 1932.
[2]
Ibid.
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/article_2000-08-28-gellner-en.html
Ernest Gellner

Religion and the profane

Ernest Gellner looks for the cause of some surprising developments in the
twentieth century: the rising strength of Islam (in particular, Muslim
fundamentalism); the upsurge in nationalism; and the unexpected and total
collapse of Marxism. Behind both Muslim fundamentalism and nationalism,
Gellner sees a break from local communities and hierarchies. And the main fault
in Marxism, says Gellner, was the abolition of the profane. The big success

stories today, he writes, "are the plural, liberal societies what I call the unholy
alliance of consumerist unbelievers."
Tonight I will try to explain a few of the major striking events of our century
some very surprising, some a little less surprising. Very surprising is the
tremendous success of Islam in maintaining and strengthening itself. Most
social scientists accepted the secularization thesis, which argued that in modern
or industrial societies the hold of religion over society and over the hearts and
minds of men declines. This seems more or less true with one striking
exception: the world of Islam, where the hold of religion over society and over
men in the past hundred years has certainly not diminished and seems to have
increased.
The other equally surprising event of the century is the unexpected and total
collapse of Marxism. Marxism is often and correctly compared to religion,
sometimes even described as secular religion, as it had many of its features
total vision, the promise of righteousness on earth, etc. It did, however, lack one
prominent feature of religion that is, when religions are established, they
retain a hold on the hearts and minds of men, and do not collapse easily. When
they do collapse, there is some resistance and struggle; some people remain
loyal to them. Marxism succeeded in retaining the loyalty of a remarkably small
number (perhaps none at all). In the post-communist world, there is, of course,
the frequently noted return of the ex-Communists. But these merely stand for
the maintenance of their own position, less radical change, keeping the welfare
provisions, and so on they are basically conservatives. The really interesting
thing about them is that none of them have returned under the "banner of
Marxism". In those societies that were under Marxist domination for forty to
seventy years, the Bolsheviks utterly failed to emulate the Jesuits and other
representatives of the Counter-Reformation in leaving deep marks in the souls
and the societies of their adherents. This is also an interesting and important
fact that is worth trying to understand.
Then there are some facts that are just slightly less surprising, though they were
not properly anticipated: the strength of nationalism in this century (which is no
longer surprising). But of course, for a long time the decline of nationalism was
confidently predicted. The syllogism that entails the demise of nationalism has
two features. First of all, it is shared by Marxists and liberals, and secondly, it is
absolutely cogent. The premises are correct, the conclusion follows from the
premises; the only thing that is wrong with the conclusion is that it does not
correspond to the real world. The argument is very simple: nationalism depends
on ethnic, cultural, and national differences, which it turns into principles of
political membership and loyalty. This is unquestionably true. Secondly, the
conditions of the industrial world, with the tendency towards mobility, dissolution
of local communities, instability, standardization of communication, and so on
erode cultural, linguistic, and ethnic differences. Thus one can conclude that
nationalism ultimately collapses in the modern world because the foundations
upon which it is built are gradually eroded.
Unfortunately, as I said, the conclusion does not correspond to the facts. Thus
there must be some additional factors that are working; I shall try to point them
out. The proposition that nationalism would ultimately collapse was, on the
whole, shared by Marxists and Liberals. These two camps disagreed only about

the precise causes of its collapse. For the Liberals, it was the international
division of labour and the advantages thereof, and for the Marxists, it was the
terrible melting pot of the pauperized international proletariat, which through its
pauperization and alienation would be separated from its erstwhile ethnic roots
and would have loyalty only to that terrible melting pot. In their cultural
nakedness, there would be something like a pure essence of humanity that
would reassert itself in the proletariat.
The fourth feature of our century is the relative success of semi-secular,
pluralist, liberal "democracies" which have won the wars in which they were
involved. They won the military war that ended in 1945 (which was a close call)
as well as the economic war that ended in 1989. This was one of the most
conclusive conflicts in the history of mankind. Perhaps the fifth feature, the rightwing alternative vision of how to run an industrial society (which was eliminated
in 1945) also deserves some comment.
Islam
Let us now examine Islam. Why is lslam so astonishingly successful? Why is it
resistant to secularization? I shall begin by offering a model of what traditional
Islam was like (without going into the early History of Islam). To put it simply,
Islam, at least that of the arid zone between the Hindu Kush and the Atlantic
and the Niger bend, was divided between a high culture and a low culture a
high Islam and a low Islam and these two coexisted in an unstable way. Most
of the time they were peaceful, but nevertheless had conflicts at fairly regular
intervals. The chief difference between the two is that high Islam does not
permit mediators (it has a special name for the sin of mediation: shirk), while the
world of low Islam is full of them. High Islam encourages a direct relationship
between a unique deity and the individual believer; it is not attached to ritual,
contains little magic and supernatural belief, and is heavily moralistic,
scripturalist, puritan, monotheistic, and individualistic. It is the Islam of the
scholars the high Islam recognized as valid by the believers but not practiced
by them. It is not practiced because it does not correspond to the needs of the
lower classes and above all the rural Muslims, who for obvious reasons require
a much more Durkheimian religion in other words, a religion in which the
sacred has its mediators, its incarnation, and which mirrors the social structure.
Most of the rural Muslims were encadrs, incorporated in rural autonomous or
semi-autonomous congregations, village lineages, tribes, clans, and the like.
For their internal organization and life, they had a Durkheimian religion where
the sacred is incarnated in periodic rituals, in sacred objects, sacred practices,
sacred persons. One can say that an upper-class, urban, individualistic, puritan,
"protestant" Islam (which is strangely united by the theologians and jurists who
are its main carriers, despite the lack of a central organization and any kind of
central secretariats and hierarchy) coexisted with a fragmented, "Catholic" Islam
which had the "Catholic" characteristics of hierarchy, ritualization, employment
of the sensuous forms of religion, of mystical exercises, and so on. One can see
how this fits well with Durkheim's theories of religion having the function of
underwriting, rendering visible, and legitimating the communal organization in
which Muslims lived. During periodic attempts at self-reformation, these two
forms came into conflict, but most of the time they coexisted harmoniously. On
this issue I agree with the theory best formulated by David Hume about the

oscillation in the religious life of mankind between Protestant-type and Catholictype religions. In periodic outbursts of zeal and self-reformation, the puritans
would temporarily prevail, but the exigence and the demands of social life would
again lead to a swing-back to a personalized, hierarchical, ritualized, nonscriptural religion with an ethic of loyalty rather than an ethic of rules. Thus
Islam existed in a permanent oscillation between unsuccessful reformations and
reversions to the old cultural habits. And, of course, there is a specific difference
between Islam and western European Christianity in this matter: in western
Europe, the hierarchical, ritualized loyalty-ethics is at the centre and carried by
an institution rather than by abstract doctrine, while the individualist,
scripturalist, puritan version is fragmented and relatively marginal. In Islam, it is
the other way around; the central tradition is individualist and scriptural, and the
fragmented deviationists are hierarchical, ritualistic, and so on a kind of mirror
image.
As far as I can see, there is nothing to stop Islam oscillating between these two
forms. The oscillation was noted by the superb Muslim sociologist lbn Khaldun
around 1400, and echoed by Friedrich Engels in a passage where he obviously
uses lbn Khaldun without actually quoting him. He says contradicting the main
thesis of Marxism that all classes and class-societies are inherently unstable
and due for internal destruction through their internal contradictions. In this
passage, the dreadful ethnocentrism of the two founding fathers of Marxism
comes out as he specifies that the instability of classes and class-societies
applies to "us" Europeans, whereas "those" Orientals, especially Arabs and
Muslims, are locked in a kind of cyclical world which never manages to break
out. And, admittedly, our social conflicts are distorted through the prism of
religious language, but at least when the religious conflict is over something
new emerges and we reach a higher level. All the Orientals do is go around in a
circle.
My theory of why Muslim fundamentalism has the astonishing strength that it
does is the following: modern conditions unhinged the pendulum of this
unstable oscillation and permanently and definitively shifted the centre of gravity
away from the pluralistic, hierarchical, organizational, Durkheimian style to that
of high Islam. Of course, the reason why this happened is that the process of
modernization, the political and economic centralization employed by the
colonial and post-colonial states, destroyed those communities that had
provided the basis for the Durkheimian or low- culture style of Islam. By turning
clansmen, lineage members, villagers, and tribesmen into labor migrants and
shantytown dwellers, it atomized the population and prompted them to find their
identity in a high religion, in a high culture, that provides an identity shared by all
Muslims, uniting them against the outsiders. Previously there did not exist a
national identity in Muslim countries. Most people were first and foremost
members of a local community under a local authority. Modern Muslim nations,
especially in ex-colonial countries, are simply the summation of Muslims in a
given territory. But this does mean that lslam provided the identification against
the other.
It provided a ratification of their transition from a rural to an urban world, and it
provided an idiom for expressing their change of status from that of rustic

ignoramuses to people aspiring to urban sophistication. It also provided them

as is presently visible in the bitter and tragic conflict in Algeria with a means of
criticizing their current rulers. It provided an idiom for those non-Westernized
people who take their Islam seriously, as against the technocrat Mamlukes who
govern them in virtue of their access to Western technology. I think it is in these
terms the reaction of recently urbanized, disoriented Muslims who are
separated from their previous saint cults and local structures but who need to
define themselves against an exploitative, semi-Westernized upper class that
the wave of Muslim fundamentalism should be understood.
Nationalism
In my opinion, the emergence of nationalism in Europe should not be
understood in its own terms. The self-image of nationalism and the reality of
nationalism are inversely related. Nationalism is a phenomenon of Gesellschaft
that speaks the idiom of Gemeinschaft. It is the byproduct of a new situation,
not dissimilar from what I said about Islam. The main role of culture in an
agrarian society is to underwrite, express and internalize people's status in a
stable world structure in other words, that of an extremely hierarchical society.
People's identity is closely linked to their position in society. Culture reinforces
this and provides an external expression, making it visible and therefore less
frictional. It also helps the members of society to internalize it and to accept it as
an absolute part of the human condition. A stable, hierarchical society has been
replaced by the agents of industrialism and the accompanying science and
technology, by a mobile, anonymous society without an accepted hierarchy, and
above all, in which work has ceased to be physical and has become semantic
(ie work is communication) and therefore culturally homogeneous. In advanced
societies, there is no longer a division between a high culture and a low culture,
rather, the high culture is the culture of the entire society.
I do not mean "high culture" in an evaluative sense, but as indicating a culture
linked to writing and transmitted by formal education and not at the mother's
knee. It has to be standardized over large areas so that people can
communicate in a context-free manner because their work situation consists of
communicating with people whom they do not know and whom generally they
do not even see. So the message has to carry its own meaning independent of
context. For the first time in history, formal education permeates the entire
society rather than being the privilege of a small specialized stratum of
scholastics, talmudists, bureaucrats, or jurists. This is a unique situation. But the
consequence is that social participation and effective economic, political, and
cultural citizenship is a condition of the mastery of a given high culture. The
perpetuation of that high culture is a very expensive business which has to be
undertaken either by the state or at least protected by the state. All this leads to
the link between state and culture, which is the essence of nationalism. This
imposes nationalism on modern man. (I vehemently repudiate the conventional
theory of nationalism, which claims it is an expression of something inherent in
the human psyche and society). Nationalism is inherent to the conditions of
modern industrial life, but it is not inherent in all societies. Of course, the
nationalists accept the fact that nationalism although, according to them,
universal and ever present was for some bizarre reason asleep in the past
and needed to be awakened in order to be politically effective (the most

frequent expression in central and eastern Europe is the notion of awakening

Deutschland erwache!). In reality it could not be awakened because it did not
exist. It was engendered by modern conditions.
Why did the same process of a shift from incorporation in local communities
with their hierarchical expressions of the sacred, into a mobile, anonymous and
semantically standardized society express itself as nationalism in Europe, and
as fundamentalism in the world of lslam? I have no clear answer to this. The
early history of nationalism in Europe does, of course, have its links with
Protestantism. It looks as if the two were aligned. Bernard Shaw expressed the
argument very well in his Preface to St. Joan, where he says that the English
burned St. Joan as a nationalist, while the church condemned her as a
Protestant, and that she was both. This link between Protestant or protoProtestant movements and national consciousness and the stress on the
vernacular was particularly visible in the Hussite movement in Bohemia in the
fifteenth century. But as nationalism progressed, it divorced itself from religion
or only used it in a somewhat opportunistic spirit. Poles used Catholicism
because their enemies and neighbours on either side were non-Catholic,
therefore being Catholic was an excellent definition of being Polish, and of
course provided an admirable rival counter-state and counter-organization
during the days of Communist rule. In the long run, nationalism and religious
doctrine have parted.
Not so in Islam. For a time it was not clear whether fundamentalism or Arab
nationalism was dominant and which was being used in the service of the other.
But by now it is fairly clear that fundamentalism is much stronger than
nationalism. It is not clear to me why the link between a universalized
individualist high culture and the doctrine which inspired it should have been
preserved in Islam and severed in Europe. It is, maybe, a historical accident. My
diagnosis of the two movements is similar, but I have no good explanation as to
why they took such radically different forms in their respective societies.
Marxism
The strength of Islam is one surprise of this century, and the astonishing
collapse of Communism virtually the entire body of Sovietologists and Soviet
scholars failed to foresee it is the surprise in the other direction. What
explanation is there?
Of course I do not know the answer. There are ex-Communists, but nobody
sticks to the ideology. People cling to continuity and to their privileges, but
nobody is clinging to the doctrine. Why is that so? I have a theory on this and I
am happy to try it out on you. What undid Marxism is not its secularism, but on
the contrary, its pantheism that it inherited from Spinoza through Hegel. The
basic Messianic ideal of Marxism which had a particular appeal for the
Russian soul was to abolish the separation of the sacred from the profane in
human life. The idea that the world was bound to be soiled and miserable, while
fulfillment was to be found in another realm, was merely a reflection of a divided
society. The future lay in a unitary world of total consummation. Of course,
Spinoza's image, historicized by Hegel, was taken over by Marx. One
conventional theory is that man cannot do without religion. The theory I bring

forward is that he cannot do without the profane. The failure of Marxism to keep
a hold on the hearts and minds of the people who were subjected systematically
to its exclusive monopolistic propaganda was due to its abolition of the profane.
The striking fact seems to be that the Marxist faith was not destroyed by the
mass and random murdering of the Stalinist period, but rather by the relatively
mild and on the whole acceptable period of stagnation. You only have to read
Andrej Sakharov's memoirs, one of the best accounts of the Soviet world.
Sakharov was a supremely intelligent man who felt deep contempt for most of
the individual theses of Marxism. Nevertheless, as he says in his memoirs, he
accepted the overall vision. Here there was a radical transformation of the
human condition, and if it exacted the price it exacted mass murder,
suppression of liberty, use of slave labour (he knew all about it, because when
he was working on the bomb he used slave labour himself) this was
regrettable but necessary. One cannot expect a radical transformation of the
human condition to be unaccompanied by a bit of blood. The squalor and
sleazyness of the Breshnev period of stagnation, when the comrades stopped
murdering and merely started bribing each other, led to a total erosion of faith,
so that when Gorbachev took off the lid, they suddenly realized that their
ideology was truly a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.
As far as I can see, the difference between the success of Islam and the failure
of Marxism is that Marxism was precisely unitarian, pantheist, and wanted a
total consummation in this world. It sacralized the real world and spurned the
old habit of finding consolation in the sky. This goes to the heart of Marx's
personality; he was the ultimate bourgeois. His vision of the world was a
generalization of the bourgeois vision that the essence of man is work not
aggressiveness, not virility, not status. Fulfillment is through work and work is its
own reward. The bourgeois are people who work not only because they are
paid for it. This stands in opposition to an aristocrat or a working man the
aristocrat does not work at all and the working man works in order to get his
salary. The bourgeoisie has always hoped that there would be a world in which
the rule of thugs and humbugs, of the red and the black, would be replaced by
the rule of the people who really work.
So Marx merely stated that for which the bourgeoisie has always hoped. The
real secret of history is the transformation of work relationships. The relationship
of men to their tools and to production is what determines events. Violence is
merely a servant for radical change. It tells the thugs: you may wave your
swords about, but you have not produced the changes, you are of no
importance. Marxism is a bourgeois fantasy that work is the essence of man,
work relations determine history, work is a fulfillment.
Islam has its merits. It is acceptable to the modern world because of its
unitarian, puritanical denial of magic. At the same time it regulates life. However,
it never claimed that work is sacred. During periods of diminished zeal and
enthusiasm, the Muslim can indulge in business without thinking it sacred. And
if business life is not everything, so what? Nobody ever said it was meant to be.
What are the lessons of the century to be drawn by looking at Islam,
nationalism, and Marxism? Presently the success stories are the plural, liberal

societies what I call the unholy alliance of consumerist unbelievers. That may
sound pejorative, but in fact I approve of those societies that order themselves
in the name of consumption, the expectation of general prosperity, and the
privatization of salvation and virtue. The essence of Marxism was that it
provided a secular counter-answer to the earlier theological absolutism, to total
salvation that is, a social order which is meant to be an implementation of an
absolute morality. The plural societies refrain from this; they live in a kind of
ambiguous shadow world with a compromise between inherited beliefs which
are not taken seriously, and pragmatic consumerist considerations which have
their authority but of course do not have any kind of absolute aura to them.
Whether that kind of society can continue, whether it can survive the saturation
of consumerism, I cannot say. One should not underestimate the value of
technological innovation, but in my view there is a point of diminishing returns.
Large parts of the world are still very hungry for material improvement, and the
differences between the haves and the have-nots are still powerful. I do not
think this can go on indefinitely.
This article is based on the transcription of a lecture Gellner gave in October
1995 in Heidelberg at a conference organized by the Deutsch-Amerikanisches
Institut on "Religion als Kultur und Antikultur" (Religion as Culture and AntiCulture). This was most probably Gellner's last lecture as he died in early
November 1995 in Prague. The eminent anthropologist and philosopher had
been an active participant in many events of the Institut fr die Wissenschaften
vom Menschen, Vienna. In the framework of the TERC-Program, he served as
the first European Chair in Social Sciences and Humanities at Warsaw
University, and he was a contributor to Transit.
The lecture was originally transcribed by Caroline Schmidt Hornstein and
published in the Internationale Zeitschrift fr Philosophie , Ed. Gnter Figal and
Enno Rudolph, 1/1996 .