God's Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms

by Peter Sloterdijk

The conflicts between the three great monotheistic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – are shaping our world more than ever before. In this important new book Peter Sloterdijk returns to the origins of monotheism in order to shed new light on the conflict of the faiths today. Following the polytheism of the ancient civilizations of the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians, Jewish monotheism was born as a theology of protest, as a religion of triumph within defeat. While the religion of the Jews remained limited to their own people, Christianity unfolded its message with proclamations of universal truth. Islam raised this universalism to a new level through a military and political mode of expansion. Sloterdijk examines the forms of conflict that arise between the three monotheisms by analyzing the basic possibilities stemming from anti-Paganism, anti-Judaism, anti-Islamism and anti-Christianism. These possibilities were augmented by internal rifts: a defining influence within Judaism was a separatism with defensive aspects, in Christianity the project of expansion through mission, and in Islam the Holy War.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher, cultural theorist, television host and columnist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe.

Peter Sloterdijk studied philosophy, Germanistics and history at the University of Munich. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg. Since 1980 he has published many philosophical works, including the Critique of Cynical Reason. In 2001 he was named president of the State Academy of Design, part of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. In 2002 he began to co-host Das Philosophische Quartett, a show on the German ZDF television channel devoted to discussing key issues affecting present-day society.

The Kritik der Zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason), published by Suhrkamp in 1983, became the best-selling philosophical book in the German language since the Second World War and launched Sloterdijk's career as an author.

The trilogy Spheres is the philosopher's magnum opus. The first volume was published in 1998, the second in 1999, and the last in 2004.

Reviews

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um livro que começa tematizando as disputas religiosas monoteístas. Discorrendo sobre as religiões como envoltórios imunológicos que em certo momento se alçam a verdades impositivas, Sloterdijk pensa o que seria possível em uma condição pós moderna: um cosmoteísmo.

[Pablo]

Mientras leía al Sloterdijk que piensa en la Edad Moderna, a modo de intermezzo, he elegido este ensayo, claramente modelado tras Nietzsche (estructura) y Foucault (proceder), sobre el celo de Dios donde lee hermenéuticamente el concepto de celo hasta la secularidad.

Las lecturas sobre el Yahvé judio como fundamentalmente incompatible con el Dios cristiano y sobre catolicismo e islamismo son particularmente brillantes. Luego el libro toma una dirección, hacia otro discurso de la Modernidad, para entender el celo de Dios convertido en celo de la razón en lo que comienza como apunte de Dawkins y deviene crítica (inteligentísima) sobre comunismo y hasta el raro "post-celo" que habitamos. Es un libro, aunque no lo parezca, claro, en diálogo con Fukuyama.

[Ogi Ogas · Rating 3 out of 5]

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.

[Manuel A. Crespo-Rodríguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, written by Peter Sloterdijk, dives into a philosophical analysis of the three monotheisms that have existed in Western Culture: Judaism, Christianity and Islamism. What is interesting about Sloterdijk’s analysis is to include the concept ofzeal into the equation. This analysis, then, is similar to a previous book, called Rage and Time, in which he analyzed rage as a form of thymotic disposition and how modernity never solved the problem of rage in its facade of rationality.

The book is divided in eight chapters: 1: The premises, 2: The formations, 3: The battle fronts, 4: The campaigns, 5: The matrix, 6: The pharmaka, 7: The parable of the rings and 8: After-zeal. The book is surprisingly simple to read, even with the mention of some philosophical concepts and religious ideas. It has an Index and endnotes at the end of every chapter. Also, the book is short, so it could be read in one sitting.

First, he dives into some premises and a historic description of the origin of the three religions. He wants to show the similarities and differences they had, and how they wanted for themselves the worship of a single god. In this manner, Sloterdijk shows how God’s zeal plays out in particular manner in those three forms; or, in other words, shows us the development of those monotheisms.

The point of showing all of this is to portray the conflict between the monotheisms as one that was full of bloodshed and war. Every iteration of the monotheistic zeal wanted, in some way, to reform the previous one, to purge it from its defects. Later, in Sloterdijk’s work, we see him define the ideas preached by these monotheisms as a monarchic ontology. This means that (it doesn’t matter if it is real or not) that these monotheisms had a vertical asceticism and that ontologically there was a higher being that was absolute in all of its truths. Meaning: that at the higher level there was no criticism or anything, reality displayed itself as it was.

But the three monotheisms displayed this kind of stuff in different ways. One example Sloterdijk uses is the mono-linguistic interpretation used in Islamism and the poly-linguistic interpretation Christianity used for its evangelization. Islamic interpretation of the ontological monarchism makes it read the koranic texts in an antique form of the arabic language, while Christians interpret that God’s word is understandable in any language, displayed in the apostle’s ability to evangelize in any language thanks to the Holy Spirit.

In pointing out these differences Sloterdijk tries to explain the development of God’s zeal. Somehow, Sloterdijk sees that contemporaneously the three monotheisms have lost force due to the change in thought brought forth in the Enlightenment, and then in its critique.

As a food for thought, there is a slight deviation in The parables of the rings, where Sloterdijk describes a fourth ideology, which was communism interpreted through Marx, put on as an example of atheistic zeal. He used this as an example of a failed form of zeal in the secular realm.

All in all, this short book serves as a new critique of religion. I do not think it is the best critique, but the effort of using the concept zeal and see its historical development in the three monotheisms proved to be interesting. This book proved that Sloterdijk still moves in the coordinates of psychopolitical interpretations, for he still works in themes that go beyond rationality. I still think that the best critique of religion was made by Nietzsche, even if sometimes Sloterdijk downplays it a little by showing that it was somehow narrow in its scope of critique.

[Zoonanism · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice metaphors and coinages, but very reductive, and perhaps intending to be, in so far as it focused on supremacist tendencies of monotheism which cannot be divorced from the disciplinary strength and fitness advantage they lend to subscriber/believer/infected community.