After God. Peter Sloterdijk

Didn’t Nietzsche remark, still in the tonality of monotheistic religious satire, that “[t]he world has more idols than realities”?⁶ After the One had pushed the others to the margins, the gods faded into the twilight of exile. The appointed theologians nevertheless continue to believe that they have done the world the greatest service by making a large portion of humanity dependent on an intrinsically riven god, whose uniqueness was paid for by the cleverly masked incompatibility of his highest attributes.

      In their supremacist zeal, the religious theologians had insisted on garbing God with the most radiant attributes: omnipotence and omniscience.⁷ They did not consider that their simultaneous proclamation of these attributes implanted a real and highly explosive contradiction into the Highest. Either God is omnipotent, in which case his creative will is always free to introduce novelty and can be mirrored by his knowledge only after the fact; or he is omniscient, in which case he must have used up all his creative power. Only in the latter case can he take an eternal holiday and look back on the universe of what has been.

Old European thought needed one and a half thousand years to detonate the contradiction concealed in the monotheistic concept of God. The bursting of this contradiction, which had been disguised for so long, was for the most part misunderstood as the atheistic crisis of the modern age. In truth what happened was that power and knowledge, both the higher and the lower forms, were interwoven and reconfigured. However, while the younger theologians, the Protestants above all, embraced modernity’s openness toward the future and, more or less tacitly, reconciled themselves to the loss of God’s omnipotence,⁸ contemporary Islam continues to make much ado about Allah’s omnipotence. Yet, because even Allah has long since become incapable of novelty and remains fixed in his past as creator, he can allow his allegedly still virulent omnipotence to be proven exclusively through the will to obliterate unrighteous creatures.⁹ The young murderers and suicides who break out into open jihad have grasped without any theology to what extent a god like Allah cuts an impossible figure as soon as he is observed against the backdrop of a modern world – that is, a world that has been rendered dynamic by human creativity. Nota bene: the fact that all human beings sooner or later die may be chalked up to nature or fatality, far from any idea of God. Yet the fact that individual mortals engage in premature obliteration and that the obliterators often sacrifice themselves in the process, in a dull and heroic sort of way, is now, in all seriousness, supposed to show evidence of the spirit and power of Allah. The young fanatics do not suspect how much they, through their actions, stand proof of the sterility of a decrepit theological culture. It will be a while before more people realize that the terror practiced by Islamists against the “unfaithful” within and outside the “house of Islam” is a demonstration of how the twilight of Allah is enacted. Assassinations are wayward proofs of a god who no longer understands the world.

      The unresolved question of creativity stands at the center of the theological crisis of Islam. It is at once a question about technology and a question about the right to make images. The problem cannot be solved by means of the Qur’an. The Islamic nations, in total, do in fact take part in the creativity of modernity, especially in its advanced technological accomplishments, but so far only from the standpoint of the user. They have not proceeded to the level of “technological existence.”¹⁰ They do not produce what they use; they do not generate what they take by the hand. They have neither accepted the principle of translatio creativitatis [transfer of creativity]¹¹ nor grasped it as the task of our times.

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It would be an exaggeration to say that, in the implicit theology of Greek mythology, there is an underlying premonition of what other mythological traditions called a “twilight of the gods.” Moira, after all, implies the thought of a regime that grants gods their “constitution.” (Rousseau’s claim that a nation of gods would inevitably govern itself democratically is metaphysically ignorant; for, to judge by everything we know about the gods, they tend to pick out a sovereign on the spur of the moment.) Moira says nothing about a possible end of the immortals.

      Nevertheless, in some of the dramas about the titan Prometheus attributed to the poet Aeschylus, we can glimpse the anticipation of a post-Olympian state of affairs. By virtue of his farsighted intelligence, Prometheus is thought to have looked beyond the regime of Zeus. Legend has it that he offered to share his menacing visions with Zeus if the latter would free him from his eternal torment on the rock in the Caucasus. Zeus – obviously quite far from being omniscient when it came to his own affairs – is supposed to have entered into the deal and “unbound” Prometheus. He did this in order to find out whether a virtual son of his could threaten him with the same fate that he had prepared for his own father Cronus when he, Zeus, emasculated him while Cronus was having sex with Gaia. Zeus subsequently refrained from producing a son capable of imitating his father. He relinquished the spicy nymph who was standing by as the possible mother of his murderer.

      Up to this point, the premonitions of unrest in the houses of the gods remain confined to dynastic phase changes. Without further ado, the Greeks of the classical centuries could imagine a palace coup in the Olympian realm; a twilight of the gods in the Indo-Germanic or Nordic style is foreign to their temperament. The Stoic doctrine of ekpurōsis (world conflagration) is a later exoticism imported from the Middle East.

      Germanic mythology gives us more fecund material for approaching the question of the sort of event that the “twilight of the gods” is. Admittedly, up to the present day scholars have had various reasons to debate whether the poets of the gods in Old Norse had already thought up the idea of a consuming fire at the end of times independently, or whether it was exposure to Christian apocalypticism that gave them an understanding of what it means to take an interest in downfall.

Let us remember that the idea of Ragnarök – a word sometimes translated as “the end of the world” and sometimes as “twilight of the gods” – was ushered in at a time of genealogical deregulations. In the wake of these deregulations, brothers strike one another dead, fathers strangle their sons, and parents sexually abuse their offspring. Something similar happens at the cosmological level. The giant wolf Fenris swallows the sun and moon, and the stars vanish. After a winter of a thousand days when the summer can no longer fulfill its task of separating one winter from next, the earth shakes, mountains topple, the ocean floods the mainland, the world tree trembles, and everything alive is filled with dread. In the final battle between the Muspelheim gods and the archaic monsters, Thor dies from the poison of the giant snake he kills, while the wolf swallows Odin. The battle comes under the law of an almost certain mutual annihilation. Finally, Surtr (“the Black,” Vulcan’s Scandinavian counterpart) sets the world aflame and burns down everything that exists. The only survivors to emerge from the inferno are a few gods and a human couple. It will be their task to establish a new cycle of life.

      There is no reason here to delve into analogies between Ragnarök and the Mahabharata or the Apocalypse of John. Nor are we worried whether the word Götterdämmerung [twilight of the gods] is a correct translation of Ragnarök. According to the scholarly literature, Ragnarök covers a wide range of meanings, which extend from “death of the gods” to “renewal of divine forces.” Even Richard Wagner appears not to have been entirely convinced of the adequacy of the expression. According to a report by Cosima,¹² while he was working on the fourth part of The Ring of the Nibelung, he played with the idea of calling the piece Göttergericht [Court of the gods], “for Brünnhilde holds court over them” (i.e. the gods). Thus at issue for the composer who inaugurated the renaissance of the “twilight of the gods” motif¹³ was not so much a myth of downfall in Nordic garb as the corrective to an ethical mistake that had long ago woven itself into the fabric of the world. His Götterdämmerung is a moral drama of purification; it is not intended as a phenomenology of spirit for the stage. It recognizes no original sin – just an original mistake. There is ingenious symbolism in the fact that the logs from the fallen world tree make Wagner’s location for the gods, Valhalla, go up in flames. The finale of the stage performance exceeds all proportions. It is as though the profane fragmentation of the world’s organism into pieces of wood were the spiritual and material cause for the dying down of the gods.

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