The Rejection and the Meaning of the World
Max Weber
1. MOTIVES FOR THE REJECTION OF THE WORLD
IN strongest contrast to the case of China, Indian religiosity, which we are about to consider, is the cradle of those religious ethics which have abnegated the world, theoretically, practically, and to the greatest extent. It is also in India that the 'technique' which corresponds to such abnegation has been most highly developed. Monkhood, as well as the typical ascetic and contemplative manipulations, were not only first but also most consistently developed in India. And it was perhaps from India that this rationalization set out on its historical way throughout the world at large.
Before turning to this religiosity it may be expedient to clarify briefly, in a schematic and theoretical way, the motives from which religious ethics of world abnegation have originated, and the directions they have taken. In this way we may clarify their possible 'meaning.'
The constructed scheme, of course, only serves the purpose of offering an ideal typical means of orientation. It does not teach a philosophy of its own. The theoretically constructed types of conflicting 'life orders' are merely intended to show that at certain points such and such internal conflicts are possible and 'adequate.' They are not intended to show that there is no standpoint from which the conflicts could not be held to be resolved in a higher synthesis. As will readily he seen, the individual spheres of value are prepared with a rational consistency which is rarely found in reality. But they can appear thus in reality and in historically important ways, and they have. Such constructions make it possible to determine the typological locus of a historical phenomenon. They enable us to see if, in particular traits or in their total character, the phenomena approximate one of our constructions: to determine the degree of approximation of the historical phenomenon to the theoretically constructed type. To this extent, the construction is merely a technical aid which facilitates a more lucid arrangement and terminology. Yet, under certain conditions, a construction might mean more. For the rationality, in the sense of logical or teleological 'consistency,' of an intellectual-theoretical or practical-ethical attitude has and always has had power over man, however limited and unstable this power is and always has been in the face of other forces of historical life.
Religious interpretations of the world and ethics of religions created by intellectuals and meant to be rational have been strongly exposed to the imperative of consistency. The effect of the ratio, especially of a teleological deduction of practical postulates, is in some way, and often very strongly, noticeable among all religious ethics. This holds however little the religious interpretations of the world in the individual case have complied with the demand for consistency, and however much they might integrate points of view into their ethical postulates which could not be rationally deduced. Thus, for substantive reasons, we may hope to facilitate the presentation of an otherwise immensely multifarious subject matter by expediently constructed rational types. To do this we must prepare and emphasize the internally most 'consistent' forms of practical conduct that can be deduced from fixed and given presuppositions.
Above such an essay in the sociology of religion necessarily aims at contributing to the typology and sociology of rationalism. This essay therefore proceeds from the most rational forms reality can assume; it attempts to find out how far certain rational conclusions, which can be established theoretically, have been drawn in reality. And perhaps we will find out why not.
2. ASCETICISM AND OF MYSTICISM
The great importance of the conception of the supra-mundane God and Creator for religious ethics has been touched upon. This conception has been especially important for the active and asceticist direction of the quest for salvation. It has not been so important for the contemplative and mystical quest, which has an internal affinity with the depersonalization and immanence of the divine power. However, this intimate connection, which E. Troeltsch has repeatedly and rightly stressed, between the conception of a supra-mundane God and active asceticism is not absolute; the supra-mundane God has not, as such, determined the direction of Occidental asceticism, as will be seen from the following reflections. The Christian Trinity, with its incarnate Savior and the saints, represented a conception of God which fundamentally was rather less supra-mundane than was the God of Jewry, especially of later Jewry, or the Allah of Islamism. Jewry developed mysticism, but it developed hardly any asceticism of the Occidental type. And early Islamism directly repudiated asceticism. The peculiarity of Dervish religiosity stemmed from quite different sources than from the relation to a supra-mundane God and Creator. It stemmed from mystic, ecstatic sources and in its inner essence it was remote from Occidental asceticism. Important though it was, the conception of a supra-mundane God, in spite of its affinity to emissary prophecy and active asceticism, obviously did not operate alone but always in conjunction with other circumstances. The nature of religious promises and the paths of salvation which they determined were paramount among these circumstances. This matter has to be discussed in connection with particular cases.
We have had repeatedly to use the terms 'asceticism' and 'mysticism' as polar concepts. In order to elucidate this terminology we shall here further differentiate these terms.
In our introductory comments we contrasted, as abnegations of the world, the active asceticism that is a God--willed action of the devout who are God's tools, and, on the other hand, the contemplative possession of the holy, as found in mysticism. Mysticism intends a state of 'possession,' not action, and the individual is not a tool but a 'vessel' of the divine. Action in the world must thus appear as endangering the absolutely irrational and other-worldly religious state. Active asceticism operates within the world; rationally active asceticism, in mastering the world, seeks to tame what is creatural and wicked through work in a worldly 'vocation' (inner-worldly asceticism). Such asceticism contrasts radically with mysticism, if the latter draws the full conclusion of fleeing from the world (contemplative flight from the world). The contrast is tempered, however, if active asceticism confines itself to keeping down and to overcoming creatural wickedness in the actor's own nature. For then it enhances the concentration on the firmly established God-willed and active redemptory accomplishments to the point of avoiding any action in the orders of the world (asceticist flight from the world). Thereby active asceticism in external bearing comes close to contemplative flight from the world. The contrast between asceticism and mysticism is also tempered if the contemplative mystic does not draw the conclusion that he should flee from the world, but, like the inner-worldly asceticist, remain in the orders of the world (inner-worldly mysticism).
In both cases the contrast can actually disappear in practice and some combination of both forms of the quest for salvation may occur. But the contrast may continue to exist even under the veil of external similarity. For the true mystic the principle continues to hold: the creature must be silent so that God may speak. He 'is' in the world and externally 'accommodates' to its orders, but only in order to gain a certainty of his state of grace in opposition to the world by resisting the temptation to take the ways of the world seriously. As we can see with Lao-tse, the typical attitude of the mystic is one of a specifically broken humility, a minimization of action, a sort of religious incognito existence in the world. He proves himself against the world, against his action in the world. Inner-worldly asceticism, on the contrary, proves itself through action. To the inner-worldly asceticist the conduct of the mystic is an indolent enjoyment of self; to the mystic the conduct of the (inner-worldly active) asceticist is an entanglement in the godless ways of the world combined with complacent self-righteousness. With that 'blissful bigotry,' usually ascribed to the typical Puritan, inner-worldly asceticism executes the positive and divine resolutions whose ultimate meaning remains concealed. Asceticism executes these resolutions as given in the God-ordained rational orders of the creatural. To the mystic, on the contrary, what matters for his salvation is only the grasping of the ultimate and completely irrational meaning through mystic experience. The forms in which both ways of conduct flee from the world can be distinguished by similar confrontations. But we reserve the discussion of these for monographic presentation.
3. DIRECTIONS OF THE REJECTION OF THE WORLD
We shall now consider in detail the tensions existing between religion and the world. We shall proceed from the reflections of the introduction, but we shall now give them a somewhat different turn.
We have said that these modes of behavior, once developed into a methodical way of life, formed the nucleus of asceticism as well as of mysticism, and that they originally grew out of magical presuppositions. Magical practices were engaged in, either for the sake of awakening charismatic qualities or for the sake of preventing evil charms. The first case has, of course, been more important for historical developments. For even at the threshold of its appearance, asceticism showed its Janus-face: on the one hand, abnegation of the world, and on the other, mastery of the world by virtue of the magical powers obtained by abnegation.
The magician has been the historical precursor of the prophet, of the exemplary as well as of the emissary prophet and savior. As a rule the prophet and the savior have legitimized themselves through the possession of a magical charisma. With them, however, this has been merely a means of securing recognition and followers for the exemplary significance, the mission, or the savior quality of their personalities. For the substance of the prophecy or of the savior's commandment is to direct a way of life to the pursuit of a sacred value. Thus understood, the prophecy or commandment means, at least relatively, to systematize and rationalize the way of life, either in particular points or totally. The latter has been the rule with all true 'religions of salvation,' that is, with all religions that hold out deliverance from suffering to their adherents. This is more likely to be the case the more sublimated, the more inward, and the more principled the essence of suffering is conceived. For then it is important to put the follower into a permanent state which makes him inwardly safe against suffering. Formulated abstractly, the rational aim of redemption religion has been to secure for the saved a holy state, and thereby a habitude that assures salvation. This takes the place of an acute and extraordinary, and thus a holy, state which is transitorily attained by means of orgies, asceticism, or contemplation.
Now if a religious community emerges in the wake of a prophecy or of the propaganda of a savior, the control of regular conduct first falls into the hands of the charismatically qualified successors, pupils, disciples of the prophet or of the savior. Later, under certain very regularly recurrent conditions, which we shall not deal with here, this task falls into the hands of a priestly, hereditary, or official hierocracy. Yet, as a rule, the prophet or the savior personally has stood in opposition to the traditional hierocratic powers of magicians or of priests. He has set his personal charisma against their dignity consecrated by tradition in order to break their power or force them to his service.
In the aforementioned discussion, we have taken for granted and presupposed that a large and, for the historical development, an especially important fraction of all cases of prophetic and redemptory religions have lived not only in an acute but in a permanent state of tension in relation to the world and its orders. This goes without saying, according to the terminology used here. The more the religions have been true religions of salvation, the greater has this tension been. This follows from the meaning of salvation and from the substance of the prophetic teachings as soon as these develop into an ethic. The tension has also been the greater, the more rational in principle the ethic has been, and the more it has been oriented to inward sacred values as means of salvation. In common language, this means that the tension has been the greater the more religion has been sublimated from ritualism and towards 'religious absolutism.' Indeed, the further the rationalization and sublimation of the external and internal possession of--in the widest sense--'things worldly' has progressed, the stronger has the tension on the part of religion become. For the rationalization and the conscious sublimation of man's relations to the various spheres of values, external and internal, as well as religious and secular, have then pressed towards making conscious the internal and lawful autonomy of the individual spheres; thereby letting them drift into those tensions which remain hidden to the originally naive relation with the external world. This results quite generally from the development of inner- and other-worldly values towards rationality, towards conscious endeavor, and towards sublimation by knowledge. This consequence is very important for the history of religion. In order to elucidate the typical phenomena which recur in connection with greatly varying religious ethics, we shall consider a series of these values.
Wherever prophecies of salvation have created religious communities, the first power with which they have come into conflict has been the natural sib. The sib has had to fear devaluation by the prophecy. Those who cannot be hostile to members of the household, to father and to mother, cannot be disciples of Jesus. 'I came not to send peace, but a sword' (Matthew 10:34) was said in this connection, and, it should be noted, solely in this connection. The preponderant majority of all religions have, of course, regulated the inner-worldly bonds of piety. Yet the more comprehensive and the more inward the aim of salvation has been, the more it has been taken for granted that the faithful should ultimately stand closer to the savior, the prophet, the priest, the father confessor, the brother in the faith than to natural relations and to the matrimonial community.
Prophecy has created a new social community, particularly where it became a soteriological religion of congregations. Thereby the relationships of the sib and of matrimony have been, at least relatively, devalued. The magical ties and exclusiveness of the sibs have been shattered, and within the new community the prophetic religion has developed a religious ethic of brotherliness. This ethic has simply taken over the original principles of social and ethical conduct which the 'association of neighbors' had offered, whether it was the community of villagers, members of the sib, the guild, or of partners in seafaring, hunting, and warring expeditions. These communities have known two elemental principles: first, the dualism of in-group and out-group morality; second, for in-group morality, simple reciprocity: 'As you do unto me I shall do unto you.' From these principles the following have resulted for economic life: For in-group morality the principled obligation to give brotherly support in distress has existed. The wealthy and the noble were obliged to loan, free of charge, goods for the use of the propertyless, to give credit free of interest, and to extend liberal hospitality and support. Men were obliged to render services upon the request of their neighbors, and likewise, on the lord's estate, without compensation other than mere sustenance. All this followed the principle: your want of today may be mine of tomorrow. This principle was not, of course, rationally weighed, but it played its part in sentiment. Accordingly, higgling in exchange and loan situations, as well as permanent enslavement resulting, for instance, from debts, were confined to out-group morality and applied only to outsiders.
The religiosity of the congregation transferred this ancient economic ethic of neighborliness to the relations among brethren of the faith. What had previously been the obligations of the noble and the wealthy became the fundamental imperatives of all ethically rationalized religions of the world: to aid widows and orphans in distress, to care for the sick and impoverished brother of the faith, and to give alms. The giving of alms was especially required of the rich, for the holy minstrels and magicians as well as the ascetics were economically dependent upon the rich.
The principle that constituted the communal relations among the salvation prophecies was the suffering common to all believers. And this was the case whether the suffering actually existed or was a constant threat, whether it was external or internal. The more imperatives that issued from the ethic of reciprocity among neighbors were raised, the more rational the conception of salvation became, and the more it was sublimated into an ethic of absolute ends. Externally, such commands rose to a communism of loving brethren; internally they rose to the attitude of caritas, love for the suffer per se, for one's neighbor, for man, and finally for the enemy. The barrier to the bond of faith and the existence of hatred in the face of a world conceived to be the locus of undeserved suffering seem to have resulted from the same imperfections and depravities of empirical reality that originally caused the suffering. Above all, the peculiar euphoria of all types of sublimated religious ecstasy operated psychologically in the same general direction. From being 'moved' and edified to feeling direct communion with God, ecstasies have always inclined men towards the flowing out into an objectless acosmism of love. In religions of salvation, the profound and quiet bliss of all heroes of acosmic benevolence has always been fused with a charitable realization of the natural imperfections of all human doings, including one's own. The psychological tone as well as the rational, ethical interpretation of this inner attitude can vary widely. But its ethical demand has always lain in the direction of a universalist brotherhood, which goes beyond all barriers of societal associations, often including that of one's own faith.
The religion of brotherliness has always clashed with the orders and values of this world, and the more consistently its demands have been carried through, the sharper the clash has been. The split has usually become wider the more the values of the world have been rationalized and sublimated in terms of their own laws. And that is what matters here. The tension between brotherly religion and the world has been most obvious in the economic sphere.
All the primeval magical or mystagogic ways of influencing spirits and deities have pursued special interests. They have striven for wealth, as well as long life, health, honor, progeny and, possibly, the improvement of one's fate in the hereafter. The Eleusian mysteries promised all this, just as did the Phoenician and Vedic religions, the Chinese folk-religion, ancient Judaism, and ancient Islam; and it was the promise held out to the pious Hindu and Buddhist laymen. The sublimated religions of salvation, however, have been increasingly tense in their relationships with rationalized economies.
A rational economy is a functional organization oriented to money-prices which originate in the interest-struggles of men in the market. Calculation is not possible without estimation in money prices and hence without market struggles. Money is the most abstract and 'impersonal' element that exists in human life. The more the world of the modern capitalist economy follows its own immanent laws, the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of brotherliness. The more rational, and thus impersonal, capitalism becomes, the more is this the case. In the past it was possible to regulate ethically the personal relations between master and slave precisely because they were personal relations. But it is not possible to regulate--at least not in the same sense or with the same success--the relations between the shifting holders of mortgages and the shifting debtors of the banks that issue these mortgages: for in this case, no personal bonds of any sort exist. If one nevertheless tried to do so, the results would be the same as those we have come to know from China, namely, stifling formal rationality. For in China, formal rationality and substantive rationality were in conflict.
As we have seen, the religions of salvation have had a tendency to depersonalize and objectify love in the unique sense of acosmism. Yet these same religions have watched with profound suspicion the deployment of economic forces which, in a different sense, have likewise been impersonal, and because of this they have been specifically opposed to brotherliness.
The Catholic Deo placere non potest has always been the characteristic attitude of salvation religions towards the profit economy; with all rational methods of salvation the warnings against attachment to money and goods have pushed to the height of tabooing goods and money. The dependence of religious communities themselves, and of their propaganda and maintenance, upon economic means, and their accommodation to cultural needs and the everyday interests of the masses, have compelled them to enter compromises of which the history of the interdiction of interests is but one example. Yet, ultimately no genuine religion of salvation has overcome the tension between their religiosity and a rational economy.
Externally, the ethic of religious virtuosos has touched this tense relation in the most radical fashion: by rejecting the possession of economic goods. The ascetic monk has fled from the world by denying himself individual property; his existence has rested entirely upon his own work; and, above all, his needs have been correspondingly restricted to what was absolutely indispensable. The paradox of all rational asceticism, which in an identical manner has made monks in all ages stumble, is that rational asceticism itself has created the very wealth it rejected. Temples and monasteries have everywhere become the very loci of rational economies.
Contemplative seclusion as a principle has only been able to establish the rule that the propertyless monk must enjoy only what nature and men voluntarily offer: berries, roots, and free alms. Labor was something which distracted the monk from concentration upon the contemplated value of salvation. Yet even contemplative seclusion has made its compromises by establishing districts for begging, as in India.
There have been only two consistent avenues for escaping the tension between religion and the economic world in a principled and inward manner: First, the paradox of the Puritan ethic of 'vocation.' As a religion of virtuosos, Puritanism renounced the universalism of love, and rationally routinized all work in this world into serving God's will and testing one's state of grace. God's will in its ultimate meaning was quite incomprehensible, yet it was the only positive will that could be known. In this respect, Puritanism accepted the routinization of the economic cosmos, which, with the whole world, it devalued as creatural and depraved. This state of affairs appeared as God-willed, and as material and given for fulfilling one's duty. In the last resort, this meant in principle to renounce salvation as a goal attainable by man, that is, by everybody. It meant to renounce salvation in favor of the groundless and always only particularized grace. In truth, this standpoint of unbrotherliness was no longer a genuine 'religion of salvation.' A genuine religion of salvation can exaggerate brotherliness to the height of the mystic's acosmism of love.
Mysticism is the other consistent avenue by which the tension between economics and religion has been escaped. This way is represented quite purely in the mystic's 'benevolence,' which does not at all enquire into the man to whom and for whom it sacrifices. Ultimately, mysticism is not interested in his person. Once and for all, the benevolent mystic gives his shirt when he is asked for his coat, by anybody who accidentally happens to come his way--and merely because he happens to come his way. Mysticism is a unique escape from this world in the form of an objectless devotion to anybody, not for man's sake but purely for devotion's sake, or, in Baudelaire's words, for the sake of 'the soul's sacred prostitution.'
The consistent brotherly ethic of salvation religions has come into an equally sharp tension with the political orders of the world. This problem did not exist for magic religiosity or for the religion of functional deities. The ancient god of war as well as the god who guaranteed the legal order were functional deities who protected the undoubted values of everyday routine. The gods of locality, tribe, and polity were only concerned with the interests of their respective associations. They had to fight other gods like themselves, just as their communities fought, and they had to prove their divine powers in this very struggle.
The problem only arose when these barriers of locality, tribe, and polity were shattered by universalist religions, by a religion with a unified God of the entire world. And the problem arose in full strength only when this God was a God of 'love.' The problem of tensions with the political order emerged for redemption religions out of the basic demand for brotherliness. And in politics, as in economics, the more rational the political order became the sharper the problems of these tensions became.
The bureaucratic state apparatus, and the rational homo politicus integrated into the state, manage affairs, including the punishment of evil, when they discharge business in the most ideal sense, according to the rational rules of the state order. In this, the political man acts just like the economic man, in a matter-of-fact manner 'without regard to the person,' sine ira et studio, without hate and therefore without love. By virtue of its depersonalization, the bureaucratic state, in important points, is less accessible to substantive moralization than were the patriarchal orders of the past, however many appearances may point to the contrary. The patriarchal orders of the past were based upon personal obligations of piety, and the patriarchal rulers considered the merit of the concrete, single case precisely with 'regard to the person.' In the final analysis, in spite of all 'social welfare policies,' the whole course of the state's inner political functions, of justice and administration, is repeatedly and unavoidably regulated by the objective pragmatism of 'reasons of state.' The state's absolute end is to safeguard (or to change) the external and internal distribution of power; ultimately, this end must seem meaningless to any universalist religion of salvation. This fact has held and still holds, even more so, for foreign policy. It is absolutely essential for every political association to appeal to the naked violence of coercive means in the face of outsiders as well as in the face of internal enemies. It is only this very appeal to violence that constitutes a political association in our terminology. The state is an association that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, and cannot be defined in any other manner.
The Sermon on the Mount says 'resist no evil.' In opposition, the state asserts: 'You shall help right to triumph by the use of force, otherwise you too may be responsible for injustice.' Where this factor is absent, the 'state' is also absent; the 'anarchism' of the pacifist will have then come to life. According to the inescapable pragmatism of all action, however, force and the threat of force unavoidably breed more force. 'Reasons of state' thus follow their own external and internal laws. The very success of force, or of the threat of force, depends ultimately upon power relations and not on ethical 'right,' even were one to believe it possible to discover objective criteria for such 'right.'
In contrast to naive, primitive heroism, it is typical of the rational state systems for groups or rulers to line up for violent conflict, all quite sincerely believing themselves to be 'in the right.' To any consistent religious rationalization, this must seem only an aping of ethics. Moreover, to draw the Lord's name into such violent political conflict must be viewed as a taking of His name in vain. In the face of this, the cleaner and only honest way may appear to be the complete elimination of ethics from political reasoning. The more matter-of-fact and calculating politics is, and the freer of passionate feelings, of wrath, and of love it becomes, the more it must appear to an ethic of brotherliness to be estranged from brotherliness.
The mutual strangeness of religion and politics, when they are both completely rationalized, is all the more the case because, in contrast to economics, politics may come into direct competition with religious ethics at decisive points. As the consummated threat of violence among modern polities, war creates a pathos and a sentiment of community. War thereby makes for an unconditionally devoted and sacrificial community among the combatants and releases an active mass compassion and love for those who are in need. And, as a mass phenomenon, these feelings break down all the naturally given barriers of association. In general, religions can show comparable achievements only in heroic communities professing an ethic of brotherliness.
Moreover, war does something to the warrior which, in its concrete meaning, is unique: it makes him experience a consecrated meaning of death which is characteristic only of death in war. The community of the army standing in the field today feels itself--as in the times of the war lords 'following'--to be a community unto death, and the greatest of its kind. Death on the field of battle differs from death that is only man's common lot. Since death is a fate that comes to everyone, nobody can ever say why it comes precisely to him and why it comes just when it does. As the values of culture increasingly unfold and are sublimated to immeasurable heights, such ordinary death marks an end where only a beginning seems to make sense. Death on the field of battle differs from this merely unavoidable dying in that in war, and in this massiveness only in war, the individual can believe that he knows he is dying 'for' something. The why and the wherefore of his facing death can, as a rule, be so indubitable to him that the problem of the 'meaning' of death does not even occur to him. At least there may be no presuppositions for the emergence of the problem in its universal significance, which is the form in which religions of salvation are impelled to be concerned with the meaning of death. Only those who perish 'in their callings' are in the same situation as the soldier who faces death on the battlefield.
This location of death within a series of meaningful and consecrated events ultimately lies at the base of all endeavors to support the autonomous dignity of the polity resting on force. Yet the way in which death can be conceived as meaningful in such endeavors points in directions that differ radically from the direction in which the theodicy of death in a religion of brotherliness may point. The brotherliness of a group of men bound together in war must appear devalued in such brotherly religions. It must be seen as a mere reflection of the technically sophisticated brutality of the struggle. And the inner-worldly consecration of death in war must appear as a glorification of fratricide. The very extraordinary quality of brotherliness of war, and of death in war, is shared with sacred charisma and the experience of the communion with God, and this fact raises the competition between the brotherliness of religion and of the warrior community to its extreme height. As in economics, the only two consistent solutions of this tension are those of puritanism and of mysticism.
Puritanism, with its particularism of grace and vocational asceticism, believes in the fixed and revealed commandments of a God who is otherwise quite incomprehensible. It interprets God's will to mean that these commandments should be imposed upon the creatural world by the means of this world, namely, violence--for the world is subject to violence and ethical barbarism. And this means at least barriers which resist the obligation of brotherliness in the interest of God's 'cause.'
On the other hand, there is the solution of the mystic's radical anti-political attitude, his quest for redemption with its acosmic benevolence and brotherliness. With its 'resist no evil' and with its maxim 'then turn the other cheek,' mysticism is necessarily vulgar and lacking in dignity in the eyes of every self-assured worldly ethic of heroism. It withdraws from the pragma of violence which no political action can escape.
All other solutions to the tensions of politics and religion are full of compromises or of presuppositions which must necessarily appear dishonest or inacceptable to the genuine ethic of brotherliness. Some of these solutions are nevertheless interesting in principle and as types.
Every organization of salvation by a compulsory and universalist institution of grace feels responsible before God for the souls of everyone, or at least of all the men entrusted to it. Such an institution will therefore feel entitled, and in duty bound, to oppose with ruthless force any danger through misguidance in faith. It feels bound to promote the diffusion of its saving means of grace.
When salvation aristocracies are charged by the command of their God to tame the world of sin, for His glory, they give birth to the 'crusader.' Such was the case in Calvinism and, in a different form, in Islamism. At the same time, however, salvation aristocracies separate 'holy' or 'just' wars from other, purely secular, and therefore profoundly devalued, wars. The just war is engaged in for the sake of executing God's commandment, or for the sake of faith, which in some sense always means a war of religion. Therefore, salvation aristocracies reject the compulsion to participate in those wars of the political authorities which are not clearly established as holy wars corresponding to God's will, that is, wars not affirmed by one's own conscience. The victorious army of Cromwell's Saints acted in this way when it took a stand against compulsory military service. Salvation aristocracies prefer mercenary armies to compulsory war service. In case men violate God's will, especially on behalf of the faith, the faithful draw conclusions in favor of an active religious revolution, by virtue of the sentence that one should obey God rather than man.
Churchly Lutheranism, for instance, has taken the very opposite stand. It has rejected the crusade and the right to active resistance against any secular coercion in matters of faith; it has considered such coercion an arbitrary wilfulness, which entangles salvation in the pragmatism of violence. In this field Lutheranism has known only passive resistance. It has, however, accepted obedience to secular authority as unobjectionable, even when this authority has given the order for war, because the responsibility for war is on the secular authority and not on the individual and because the ethical autonomy of the secular authority, in contrast to the inwardly universalist (Catholic) institution of grace, was recognized. The insertion of mystic religiosity peculiar to Luther's personal Christianity stopped short of drawing the full conclusions in this matter.
The religious virtuosos' genuinely mystic and charismatic search for salvation has naturally and everywhere been apolitical or anti-political in nature. Such quests for salvation have readily recognized the autonomy of the temporal order, but they have done so only in order to infer consistently its radically diabolic character, or at least to take that standpoint of absolute indifference in the face of the world which has been expressed in the sentence: 'Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's' (for what is the relevance of these things for salvation?).
The widely varying empirical stands which historical religions have taken in the face of political action have been determined by the entanglement of religious organizations in power interests and in struggles for power, by the always unavoidable collapse of even the highest states of tension with the world in favor of compromises and relativities, by the usefulness and the use of religious organizations for the political taming of the masses and, especially, by the need of the powers-that-be for the religious consecration of their legitimacy. As we may see from history, almost all the platforms of religious organizations have been religiously relative so far as sacred values, ethical rationality, and lawful autonomy are concerned. In practice, the most important type of these relative forms has been the 'organic' social ethics. This type has been diffused in many forms and its conception of vocational work has been, in principle, the most important contrast to the idea of 'calling,' as found in inner-worldly asceticism.
Organic social ethics, where religiously sub-structured, stands on the soil of 'brotherliness,' but, in contrast to mystic and acosmic love, is dominated by a cosmic, rational demand for brotherliness. Its point of departure is the experience of the inequality of religious charisma. The very fact that the holy should be accessible only to some and not to all is unbearable to organic social ethics. It therefore attempts to synthesize this inequality of charismatic qualifications with secular stratification by status, into a cosmos of God-ordained services which are specialized in function. Certain tasks are given to every individual and every group according to their personal charisma and their social and economic position as determined by fate. As a rule, these tasks stand in the service of the realization of a condition which, in spite of its compromise nature, is pleasing to God. This condition is interpreted as being at the same time utilitarian, social, and providential. In the face of the wickedness of the world, such a condition facilitates at least a relative taming of sin and of suffering; the preservation and salvation of as many souls as possible for the kingdom of God is thereby facilitated. We shall soon learn of a theodicy of far greater pathos, which the Indian doctrine of Kharma has imparted to the organic doctrine of society from the standpoint of redemptory pragmatism oriented solely to the interests of the individual. Without this very special linkage, every organic social ethic unavoidably represents an accommodation to the interests of the privileged strata of this world. At least that is the view of the radical, mystical ethic of religious brotherliness. From the standpoint of inner-worldly asceticism, the organic ethic lacks the inward drive for an ethical and thorough rationalization of individual life. In such matters, it has no premium for the rational and methodical patterning of personal life in the interest of the individual's own salvation.
The organic pragmatism of salvation must consider the redemptory aristocracy of inner-worldly asceticism, with its rational depersonalization of life orders, as the hardest form of lovelessness and lack of brotherliness. It must consider the redemptory pragmatism of mysticism as a sublimated and, in truth, unbrotherly indulgence of the mystic's own charisma. The mystic's unmethodical and planless acosmism of love is viewed as a mere selfish means in the search for the mystic's own salvation. Both inner-worldly asceticism and mysticism ultimately condemn the social world to absolute meaninglessness, or at least they hold that God's aims concerning the social world are utterly incomprehensible. The rationalism of religious and organic doctrines of society cannot stand up under this idea; for it seeks to comprehend the world as an at least relatively rational cosmos in spite of all its wickedness; the world is held to bear at least traces of the divine plan of salvation. For the absolute charisma of virtuoso religiosity, this relativization is indeed objectionable and estranged from the holy.
As economic and rational political actions follow laws of their own, so every other rational action within the world remains inescapably bound to worldly conditions. These conditions are remote from brotherliness and must serve as means or as ends of rational action. Hence all rational action somehow comes to stand in tension with the ethic of brotherliness, and carries within itself a profound tension. For there seems to exist no means of deciding even the very first question: Where, in the individual case, can the ethical value of an act be determined? In terms of success, or in terms of some intrinsic value of the act per se? The question is whether and to what extent the responsibility of the actor for the results sanctifies the means, or whether the value of the actor's intention justifies him in rejecting the responsibility for the outcome, whether to pass on the results of the act to God or to the wickedness and foolishness of the world which are permitted by God. The absolutist sublimation of religious ethic will incline men towards the latter alternative: 'The Christian does right and leaves success to God.' In this, however, the actor's own conduct when it is really consistent, and not the lawful autonomy of the world, is condemned as irrational in its effects. * In the face of this, a sublimated and thoroughgoing search for salvation may lead to an acosmism increasing to the point where it rejects purposive-rational action per se, and hence, all action in terms of means-ends relations, for it considers them tied to worldly things and thus estranged from God. We shall see how this has occurred with varying consistency, from the Biblical parable of the lilies in the field to the more principled formulations, for instance, of Buddhism.
The organic ethic of society is everywhere an eminently conservative power and hostile to revolution. Under certain conditions, however, revolutionary consequences may follow from a genuine virtuoso religiosity. Naturally, this occurs only when the pragmatism of force, calling forth more force and leading merely to changes in personnel, or at best to changes in methods of ruling by force, is not recognized as a permanent quality of the creaturely. According to the coloration of the virtuoso religion, its revolutionary turn may in principle assume two forms. One form springs from inner-worldly asceticism, wherever this asceticism is capable of opposing an absolute and divine 'natural law' to the creaturally, wicked, and empirical orders of the world. It then becomes a religious duty to realize this divine natural law, according to the sentence that one must obey God rather than men, which in some sense holds for all rational religions. The genuine Puritan revolutions, whose counterparts can be found elsewhere, are typical. This attitude absolutely corresponds to the obligation to crusade.
It is a different matter with the mystic. The psychological turn from possession of God to possession by God is always possible and with the mystic it is consummated. This is meaningful and possible when eschatological expectations of an immediate beginning and of the millennium of acosmic brotherliness are flaming up, hence, when the belief is dropped that an everlasting tension exists between the world and the irrational metaphysical realm of salvation. The mystic then turns into a savior and prophet. The commands, however, which he enunciates have no rational character. As products of his charisma, they are revelations of a concrete sort and the radical rejection of the world easily turns into radical anomism. The commands of the world do not hold for the man who is assured in his obsession with God: 'panta moi exestin.' All chiliasm, up to the revolution of the Anabaptists, rested somehow upon this substructure. For him who 'possesses God' and is thereby saved, the manner of action is without significance for salvation. We shall find that similar states hold in the case of the Indian djivanmukhti.
The religious ethic of brotherliness stands in dynamic tension with any purposive-rational conduct that follows its own laws. In no less degree, this tension occurs between the religious ethic and 'this-worldly' life-forces, whose character is essentially non-rational or basically anti-rational. Above all, there is tension between the ethic of religious brotherliness and the spheres of esthetic and erotic life.
Magical religiosity stands in a most intimate relation to the esthetic sphere. Since its beginnings, religion has been an inexhaustible fountain of opportunities for artistic creation, on the one hand, and of stylizing through traditionalization, on the other. This is shown in a variety of objects and processes: in idols, icons, and other religious artifacts; in the stereotyping of magically proved forms, which is a first step in the overcoming of naturalism by a fixation of 'style'; in music as a means of ecstasy, exorcism, or apotropaic magic; in sorcerers as holy singers and dancers; in magically proved and therefore magically stereotyped tone relations--the earliest preparatory stages in the development of tonal systems; in the magically proved dance-step as one of the sources of rhythm and as an ecstasy technique; in temples and churches as the largest of all buildings, with the architectural task becoming stereotyped (and thus style-forming) as a consequence of purposes which are established once for all, and with the structural forms becoming stereotyped through magical efficacy; in paraments and church implements of all kinds which have served as objects of applied art. All these processes and objects have been displayed in connection with the churches' and temples' wealth flowing from religious zeal.
For the religious ethic of brotherliness, just as for a priori ethical rigorism, art as a carrier of magical effects is not only devalued but even suspect. The sublimation of the religious ethic and the quest for salvation, on the one hand, and the evolution of the inherent logic of art, on the other, have tended to form an increasingly tense relation. All sublimated religions of salvation have focused upon the meaning alone, not upon the form, of the things and actions relevant for salvation. Salvation religions have devalued form as contingent, as something creaturely and distracting from meaning. On the part of art, however, the naive relation to the religious ethic of brotherliness can remain unbroken or can be repeatedly restored as long and as often as the conscious interest of the recipient of art is naively attached to the content and not to the form as such. The relationship between a religious ethic and art will remain harmonious as far as art is concerned for so long as the creative artist experiences his work as resulting either from a charisma of 'ability' (originally magic) or from spontaneous play.
The development of intellectualism and the rationalization of life change this situation. For under these conditions, art becomes a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right. Art takes over the function of a this-worldly salvation, no matter how this may be interpreted. It provides a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism.
With this claim to a redemptory function, art begins to compete directly with salvation religion. Every rational religious ethic must turn against this inner-worldly, irrational salvation. For in religion's eyes, such salvation is a realm of irresponsible indulgence and secret lovelessness. As a matter of fact, the refusal of modern men to assume responsibility for moral judgments tends to transform judgments of moral intent into judgments of taste ('in poor taste' instead of 'reprehensible'). The inaccessibility of appeal from esthetic judgments excludes discussion. This shift from the moral to the esthetic evaluation of conduct is a common characteristic of intellectualist epochs; it results partly from subjectivist needs and partly from the fear of appearing narrow-minded in a traditionalist and Philistine way.
The ethical norm and its 'universal validity' create a community, at least in so far as an individual might reject the act of another on moral grounds and yet still face it and participate in the common life. Knowing his own creaturely weakness, the individual places himself under the common norm. In contrast with this ethical attitude, the escape from the necessity of taking a stand on rational, ethical grounds by resorting to esthetic evaluations may very well be regarded by salvation religion as a very base form of unbrotherliness. To the creative artist, however, as well as to the esthetically excited and receptive mind, the ethical norm as such may easily appear as a coercion of their genuine creativeness and innermost selves.
The most irrational form of religious behavior, the mystic experience, is in its innermost being not only alien but hostile to all form. Form is unfortunate and inexpressible to the mystic because he believes precisely in the experience of exploding all forms, and hopes by this to be absorbed into the 'All-oneness' which lies beyond any kind of determination and form. For him the indubitable psychological affinity of profoundly shaking experiences in art and religion can only be a symptom of the diabolical nature of art. Especially music, the most 'inward' of all the arts, can appear in its purest form of instrumental music as an irresponsible Ersatz for primary religious experience. The internal logic of instrumental music as a realm not living 'within' appears as a deceptive pretension to religious experience. The well-known stand of the Council of Trent may in part have stemmed from this sentiment. Art becomes an 'idolatry,' a competing power, and a deceptive bedazzlement; and the images and the allegory of religious subjects appear as blasphemy.
In empirical, historical reality, this psychological affinity between art and religion has led to ever-renewed alliances, which have been quite significant for the evolution of art. The great majority of religions have in some manner entered such alliances. The more they wished to be universalist mass religions and were thus directed to emotional propaganda and mass appeals, the more systematic were their alliances with art. But all genuine virtuoso religions have remained very coy when confronting art, as a consequence of the inner structure of the contradiction between religion and art. This holds true for virtuoso religiosity in its active asceticist bent as well as in its mystical turn. The more religion has emphasized either the supra-worldliness of its God or the other-worldliness of salvation, the more harshly has art been refuted.
The brotherly ethic of salvation religion is in profound tension with the greatest irrational force of life: sexual love. The more sublimated sexuality is, and the more principled and relentlessly consistent the salvation ethic of brotherhood is, the sharper is the tension between sex and religion.
Originally the relation of sex and religion was very intimate. Sexual intercourse was very frequently part of magic orgiasticism or was an unintended result of orgiastic excitement. The foundation of the Skoptsy (Castrators) sect in Russia evolved from an attempt to do away with the sexual result of the orgiastic dance (radjeny) of the Chlyst, which was evaluated as sinful. Sacred harlotry has had nothing whatsoever to do with an alleged 'primitive promiscuity'; it has usually been a survival of magical orgiasticism in which every ecstasy was considered 'holy.' And profane heterosexual, as well as homosexual, prostitution is very ancient and often rather sophisticated. (The training of tribades occurs among so-called aborigines.)
The transition from such prostitution to legally constituted marriage is full of all sorts of intermediary forms. Conceptions of marriage as an economic arrangement for providing security for the wife and legal inheritance for the child; as an institution which is important (because of the death sacrifices of the descendants) for destiny in the beyond; and as important for the begetting of children--these conceptions of marriage are pre-prophetic and universal. They therefore have had nothing to do with asceticism as such. And sexual life, per se, has had its ghosts and gods as has every other function.
A certain tension between religion and sex came to the fore only with the temporary cultic chastity of priests. This rather ancient chastity may well have been determined by the fact that from the point of view of the strictly stereotyped ritual of the regulated community cult, sexuality was readily considered to be specifically dominated by demons. Furthermore, it was no accident that subsequently the prophetic religions, as well as the priest-controlled life orders, have, almost without significant exception, regulated sexual intercourse in favor of marriage. The contrast of all rational regulation of life with magical orgiasticism and all sorts of irrational frenzies is expressed in this fact.
The tension of religion and sex has been augmented by evolutionary factors on both sides. On the side of sexuality the tension has led through sublimation into 'eroticism,' and therewith into a consciously cultivated, and hence, a non-routinized sphere. Sex has been non-routinized not solely or necessarily in the sense of being estranged from conventions, for eroticism is a contrast to the sober naturalism of the peasant. And it was precisely eroticism which the conventions of knighthood usually made the object of regulation. These conventions, however, characteristically regulated eroticism by veiling the natural and organic basis of sexuality.
The extraordinary quality of eroticism has consisted precisely in a gradual turning away from the naive naturalism of sex. The reason and significance of this evolution, however, involve the universal rationalization and intellectualization of culture. We wish to present, in a few sketches, the phases of this development. We shall proceed with examples from the Occident.
The total being of man has now been alienated from the organic cycle of peasant life; life has been increasingly enriched in cultural content, whether this content is evaluated as intellectually or otherwise supra-individual. All this has worked, through the estrangement of life-value from that which is merely naturally given, toward a further enhancement of the special position of eroticism. Eroticism was raised into the sphere of conscious enjoyment (in the most sublime sense of the term). Nevertheless, indeed because of this elevation, eroticism appeared to be like a gate into the most irrational and thereby real kernel of life, as compared with the mechanisms of rationalization. The degree and the manner in which a value-emphasis was thus placed upon eroticism as such has varied enormously throughout history.
To the unrestrained feelings of a warriordom, the possession of and the fight for women has ranked about equally with the fight for treasure and the conquest of power. At the time of pre-classic Hellenism, in the period of knighthood romance, an erotic disappointment could be considered by Archilochos as a significant experience of lasting relevance, and the capture of a woman could be considered the incomparable incident of a heroic war.
The tragedians knew sexual love as a genuine power of destiny, and their lore incorporated lingering echoes of the myths. On the whole, however, a woman, Sappho, remained unequalled by man in the capacity for erotic feeling. The classic Hellenic period, the period of the Hoplite army, conceived of erotic matters in a relatively and unusually sober manner. As all their self-revelations prove, these men were even more sober than the educated stratum of the Chinese. Yet it is not true that this period did not know the deadly earnestness of sexual love. Rather, the contrary was characteristic of Hellenic love. We should remind ourselves--despite Aspasia--of Pericles' speech and finally of the well-known statement of Demosthenes.
To the exclusively masculine character of this epoch of 'democracy,' the treatment of erotic experience with women as 'life-fate'--to speak in our vocabulary--would have appeared as almost sophomoric and sentimental. The 'comrade,' the boy, was the object demanded with all the ceremony of love, and this fact stood precisely in the center of Hellenic culture. Thus, with all its magnificence, Plato's eros is nevertheless a strongly tempered feeling. The beauty of Bacchian passion as such was not an official component of this relation.
The possibility of problems and of tragedy of a principled character came about in the erotical sphere, at first, through certain demands for responsibility, which, in the Occident, stem from Christianity. However, the value-accentuation of the erotic sensation as such evolved primarily and before all else under the cultural conditioning of feudal notions of honor. This happened by a carrying over of the symbols of knightly vassalship into the erotically sublimated sexual relation. Eroticism was given a value-accent most frequently when, during the fusion of vassalship and erotic relations, there occurred a combination with crypto-erotic religiosity, or directly with asceticism as during the Middle Ages. The troubadour love of the Christian Middle Ages is known to have been an erotic service of vassals. It was not oriented towards girls, but exclusively towards the wives of other men; it involved (in theory!) abstentious love nights and a casuistic code of duties. Therewith began the 'probation' of the man, not before his equals but in the face of the erotic interest of the 'lady.' The conception of the 'lady' was constituted solely and precisely by virtue of her judging function. The masculinity of Hellenism is in strict contrast to this relation of the vassal to the 'lady.'
A further enhancement of the specifically sensational character of eroticism developed with the transition from the conventions of the Renaissance to the increasingly non-military intellectualism of salon culture. Despite the great differences between the conventions of Antiquity and the Renaissance, the latter were essentially masculine and agonistic; in this respect, they were closely related to antiquity. This was due to the fact that by the time of the Cortegiano and of Shakespeare, the Renaissance conventions had cast off the asceticism of Christian knighthood.
Salon culture rested upon the conviction that inter-sexual conversation is valuable as a creative power. The overt or latent erotic sensation and the agonistic probation of the cavalier before the lady became an indispensable means of stimulating this conversation. Since the Lettres Portugaises, the actual love problems of women became a specific intellectual market value, and feminine love correspondence became 'literature.'
The last accentuation of the erotical sphere occurred in terms of intellectualist cultures. It occurred where this sphere collided with the unavoidably ascetic trait of the vocational specialist type of man. Under this tension between the erotic sphere and rational everyday life, specifically extramarital sexual life, which had been removed from everyday affairs, could appear as the only tie which still linked man with the natural fountain of all life. For man had now been completely emancipated from the cycle of the old, simple, and organic existence of the peasant.
A tremendous value emphasis on the specific sensation of an inner-worldly salvation from rationalization thus resulted. A joyous triumph over rationality corresponded in its radicalism with the unavoidable and equally radical rejection of an ethics of any kind of other- or supra- worldly salvation. For such ethics, the triumph of the spirit over the body should find its climax precisely here, and sexual life could even gain the character of the only and the ineradicable connection with animality. But this tension between an inner-worldly and an other-worldly salvation from rationality must be sharpest and most unavoidable precisely where the sexual sphere is systematically prepared for a highly valued erotic sensation. This sensation reinterprets and glorifies all the pure animality of the relation, whereas the religion of salvation assumes the character of a religion of love, brotherhood, and neighborly.
Under these conditions, the erotic relation seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfillment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other. This boundless giving of oneself is as radical as possible in its opposition to all functionality, rationality, and generality. It is displayed here as the unique meaning which one creature in his irrationality has for another, and only for this specific other. However, from the point of view of eroticism, this meaning, and with it the value-content of the relation itself, rests upon the possibility of a communion which is felt as a complete unification, as a fading of the 'thou.' It is so overpowering that it is interpreted 'symbolically': as a sacrament. The lover realizes himself to be rooted in the kernel of the truly living, which is eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavor. He knows himself to be freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine. This consciousness of the lover rests upon the ineffaceability and inexhaustibleness of his own experience. The experience is by no means communicable and in this respect it is equivalent to the 'having' of the mystic. This is not only due to the intensity of the lover's experience, but to the immediacy of the possessed reality. Knowing 'life itself' joined to him, the lover stands opposite what is for him the objectless experiences of the mystic, as if he were facing the fading light of an unreal sphere.
As the knowing love of the mature man stands to the passionate enthusiasm of the youth, so stands the deadly earnestness of this eroticism of intellectualism to chivalrous love. In contrast to chivalrous love, this mature love of intellectualism reaffirms the natural quality of the sexual sphere, but it does so consciously, as an embodied creative power.
A principled ethic of religious brotherhood is radically and antagonistically opposed to all this. From the point of view of such an ethic, this inner, earthly sensation of salvation by mature love competes in the sharpest possible way with the devotion of a supra-mundane God, with the devotion of an ethically rational order of God, or with the devotion of a mystical bursting of individuation, which alone appear 'genuine' to the ethic of brotherhood.
Certain psychological interrelations of both spheres sharpen the tension between religion and sex. The highest eroticism stands psychologically and physiologically in a mutually substitutive relation with certain sublimated forms of heroic piety. In opposition to the rational, active asceticism which rejects the sexual as irrational, and which is felt by eroticism to be a powerful and deadly enemy, this substitutive relationship is oriented especially to the mystic's union with God. From this relation there follows the constant threat of a deadly sophisticated revenge of animality, or of an unmediated slipping from the mystic realm of God into the realm of the All-Too-Human. This psychological affinity naturally increases the antagonism of inner meanings between eroticism and religion.
From the point of view of any religious ethic of brotherhood, the erotic relation must remain attached, in a certain sophisticated measure, to brutality. The more sublimated it is, the more brutal. Unavoidably, it is considered to be a relation of conflict. This conflict is not only, or even predominantly, jealousy and the will to possession, excluding third ones. It is far more the most intimate coercion of the soul of the less brutal partner. This coercion exists because it is never noticed by the partners themselves. Pretending to be the most humane devotion, it is a sophisticated enjoyment of oneself in the other. No consummated erotic communion will know itself to be founded in any way other than through a mysterious destination for one another: fate, in this highest sense of the word. Thereby, it will know itself to be 'legitimized' (in an entirely amoral sense).
But, for salvation religion, this 'fate' is nothing but the purely fortuitous flaming up of passion. The thus established pathological obsession, idiosyncrasy, and shifting of perspectives and of every objective justice must appear to salvation religion as the most complete denial of all brotherly love and of bondage to God. The euphoria of the happy lover is felt to be 'goodness'; it has a friendly urge to poeticize all the world with happy features or to bewitch all the world in a naive enthusiasm for the diffusion of happiness. And always it meets with the cool mockery of the genuinely religiously founded and radical ethic of brotherhood. The psychologically most thorough portions of Tolstoi's early work may be cited in this connection. In the eyes of this ethic, the most sublimated eroticism is the counter-pole of all religiously oriented brotherliness, in these aspects: it must necessarily be exclusive in its inner core; it must be subjective in the highest imaginable sense; and it must be absolutely incommunicable.
All this, of course, is quite apart from the fact that the passionate character of eroticism as such appears to the religion of brotherhood as an undignified loss of self-control and as the loss of orientation towards either the rationality and wisdom of norms willed by God or the mystic 'having' of godliness. However, for eroticism, genuine 'passion' per se constitutes the type of beauty, and its rejection is blasphemy.
For psychological reasons and in accordance with its meaning, the erotic frenzy stands in unison only with the orgiastic and charismatic form of religiosity. This form is, however, in a special sense, inner-worldly. The acknowledgment of the act of marriage, of the copula carnalis, as a 'sacrament' of the Catholic Church is a concession to this sentiment. Eroticism enters easily into an unconscious and unstable relation of surrogateship or fusion with other-worldly and extraordinary mysticism. This occurs with very sharp inner tension between eroticism and mysticism. It occurs because they are psychologically substitutive. Out of this fusion the collapse into orgiasticism follows very readily.
Inner-worldly and rational asceticism (vocational asceticism) can accept only the rationally regulated marriage. This type of marriage is accepted as one of the divine ordinations given to man as a creature who is hopelessly wretched by virtue of his 'concupiscence.' Within this divine order it is given to man to live according to the rational purposes laid down by it and only according to them: to procreate and to rear children, and mutually to further one another in the state of grace. This inner-worldly rational asceticism must reject every sophistication of the sexual into eroticism as idolatry of the worst kind. In its turn, this asceticism gathers the primal, naturalist, and unsublimated sexuality of the peasant into a rational order of man as creature. All elements of 'passion,' however, are then considered as residues of the Fall. According to Luther, God, in order to prevent worse, peeks at and is lenient with these elements of passion. The other-worldly rational asceticism (active asceticism of the monk) also rejects these passionate elements, and with them all sexuality, as a diabolic power endangering salvation.
The ethic of the Quakers (as it is displayed in William Penn's letters to his wife) may well have achieved a genuinely humane interpretation of the inner and religious values of marriage. In this respect the Quaker ethic went beyond the rather gross Lutheran interpretation of the meaning of marriage. From a purely inner-worldly point of view, only the linkage of marriage with the thought of ethical responsibility for one another --hence a category heterogeneous to the purely erotic sphere-- can carry the sentiment that something unique and supreme might be embodied in marriage; that it might be the transformation of the feeling of a love which is conscious of responsibility throughout all the nuances of the organic life process, 'up to the pianissimo of old age,' and a mutual granting of oneself to another and the becoming indebted to each other (in Goethe's sense). Rarely does life grant such value in pure form. He to whom it is given may speak of fate's fortune and grace--not of his own 'merit.'
The rejection of all naive surrender to the most intensive ways of experiencing existence, artistic and erotical, is as such only a negative attitude. But it is obvious that such rejection could increase the force with which energies flow into rational achievement, both the ethical as well as the purely intellectual. It must be noted, however, that the self-conscious tension of religion is greatest and most principled where religion faces the sphere of intellectual knowledge.
There is a unity in the realm of magic and in the purely magical image of the world, as we have noted in the case of Chinese thought. A far-going and mutual recognition is also possible between religion and purely metaphysical speculation, although as a rule this speculation easily leads to skepticism. Religion, therefore, frequently considers purely empirical research, including that of natural science, as more reconcilable to religious interests than it does philosophy. This is the case above all in ascetic Protestantism.
The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. In principle, the empirical as well as the mathematically oriented view of the world develops refutations of every intellectual approach which in any way asks for a 'meaning' of inner-worldly occurrences. Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power. The extent of consciousness or of consistency in the experience of this contrast, however, varies widely. Athanasius won out with his formula--completely absurd when viewed rationally--in his struggle against the majority of the Hellenic philosophers of the time; it does not seem inconceivable, as has been said, that among other reasons he really wanted to compel them expressly to make the intellectual sacrifice and to fix a limit to rational discussion. Soon afterwards, however, the Trinity itself was rationally argued and discussed.
Because of this apparently irreconcilable tension, prophetic as well as priestly religions have repeatedly stood in intimate relation with rational intellectualism. The less magic or merely contemplative mysticism and the more 'doctrine' a religion contains, the greater is its need of rational apologetics. The sorcerers everywhere have been the typical keepers of myths and heroic sagas, because they have participated in educating and training young warriors in order to awaken them for heroic ecstasy and heroic regeneration. From them the priesthood, as the only agents capable of conserving tradition, took over the training of youth in the law and often also in purely administrative technologies, and, above all, in writing and in calculus. The more religion became book-religion and doctrine, the more literary it became and the more efficacious it was in provoking rational lay-thinking, freed of priestly control. From the thinking laymen, however, emerged the prophets, who were hostile to priests; as well as the mystics, who searched salvation independently of priests and sectarians; and finally the skeptics and philosophers, who were hostile to faith.
A rationalization of priestly apologetics reacted against all of these developments. Anti-religious skepticism, per se, was represented in China, in Egypt, in the Vedas, in post-exilic Jewish literature. In principle, it was just as it is today; almost no new arguments have been added. Therefore, the central question of power for the priesthood became the monopolization of the education of youth. With the increasing rationalization of political administration, the power of the priesthood could increase. In the early times of Egypt and Babylon, the priesthood alone procured the scribes for the state. It was the same for the medieval prince when administration based on documents began. Of the great systems of pedagogy, only Confucianism and that of Mediterranean Antiquity have known how to escape the power of priesthood. The former succeeded by virtue of its powerful state bureaucracy the latter through the absolute lack of bureaucratic administration. With the elimination of priests from education, priestly religion itself was eliminated in these cases. With these exceptions, however, the priesthoods have regularly furnished and controlled the personnel of schools.
It has not only been these genuinely priestly interests that have made for ever-renewed connections between religion and intellectualism. It has also been the inward compulsion of the rational character of religious ethics and the specifically intellectualist quest for salvation. In effect, every religion in its psychological and intellectual sub-structure and in its practical conclusions has taken a different stand towards intellectualism, without however allowing the ultimate inward tension to disappear. For the tension rests on the unavoidable disparity among ultimate forms of images of the world. There is absolutely no 'unbroken' religion working as a vital force which is not compelled at some point to demand the credo non quod, sed quia absurdum--the 'sacrifice of the intellect.'
It is hardly necessary and it would be impossible to treat in detail the stages of the tension between religion and intellectual knowledge. Redemptory religion defends itself against the attack of the self-sufficient intellect. It does so, of course, in the most principled fashion, by raising the claim that religious knowledge moves in a different sphere and that the nature and meaning of religious knowledge is entirely different from the accomplishments of the intellect. Religion claims to offer an ultimate stand toward the world by virtue of a direct grasp of the world's 'meaning.' It does not claim to offer intellectual knowledge concerning what is or what should be. It claims to unlock the meaning of the world not by means of the intellect but by virtue of a charisma of illumination. This charisma is said to be imparted only to those who make use of the respective technique and free themselves from the misleading and deceptive surrogates which are given out as knowledge by the confused impressions of the senses and the empty abstractions of the intellect. Religion believes that these are in truth irrelevant for salvation. By freeing himself from them, a religious man is said to make himself ready for the reception of the all-important grasp of the meaning of the world and of his own existence. In all the endeavors of philosophy to make this ultimate meaning, and the (practical) stand which follows from grasping, demonstrable redemptory religion will see nothing but the intellect's desire to escape its own lawful autonomy. The same view is held of philosophical attempts to gain any intuitive knowledge, which, although concerned with the 'being' of things, has a dignity which principally differs from that of religious knowledge. Above all, religion sees all this as a specific product of the very rationalism that intellectualism, by these endeavors, would very much like to escape.
Salvation religion, however, viewed from its own position, is to be blamed for equally inconsistent trespasses as soon as it surrenders the unassailable incommunicability of mystic experiences. If it is consistent, such religion can only have the means of bringing mystic experiences about as events; it has no means of adequately communicating and demonstrating them. Every attempt to influence the world must entice mystical religion to run this danger, as soon as the attempt assumes the character of propaganda. The same holds for every attempt to interpret the meaning of the universe rationally, but nevertheless the attempt has been made again and again.
9. WORLDVIEW AND CULTURAL VALUE
Religious postulates can come into conflict with the 'world' from differing points of view, and the point of view involved is always of the greatest importance for the direction and for the way in which salvation will be striven for. At all times and in all places, the need for salvation-- consciously cultivated as the substance of religiosity--has resulted from the endeavor of a systematic and practical rationalization of life's realities. To be sure, this connection has been maintained with varying degrees of transparency: on this level, all religions have demanded as a specific presupposition that the course of the world be somehow meaningful, at least in so far as it touches upon the interests of men. As we have seen, this claim naturally emerged first as the customary problem of unjust suffering, and hence as the postulate of a just compensation for the unequal distribution of individual happiness in the world. From here, the claim has tended to progress step by step towards an ever-increasing devaluation of the world. For the more intensely rational thought has seized upon the problem of a just and retributive compensation, the less an entirely inner-worldly solution could seem possible, and the less an other-worldly solution could appear probable or even meaningful. In so far as appearances show, the actual course of the world has been little concerned with this postulate of compensation. The ethically unmotivated inequality in the distribution of happiness and misery, for which a compensation has seemed conceivable, has remained irrational; and so has the brute fact that suffering exists. For the universal diffusion of suffering could only be replaced by another and still more irrational problem, the question of the origin of sin, which, according to the teaching of prophets and priests, is to explain suffering as a punishment or as a means of discipline. A world created for the committing of sin must appear still less ethically perfect than a world condemned to suffering.
In any case, the absolute imperfection of this world has been firmly established as an ethical postulate. And the futility of worldly things has seemed to be meaningful and justified only in terms of this imperfection. Such justification, however, could appear suitable for devaluating the world even further. For it was not only, or even primarily, the worthless which proved to be transitory. The fact that death and ruin, with their leveling effect, overtake good men and good works, as well as evil ones, could appear to be a depreciation of precisely the supreme values of this world--once the idea of a perpetual duration of time, of an eternal God, and an eternal order had been conceived. In the face of this, values --and precisely the most highly cherished values--have been hallowed as being 'timelessly' valid. Hence, the significance of their realization in 'culture' has been stated to be independent of the temporal duration of their concretion.
Thereupon the ethical rejection of the empirical world could be further intensified. For at this point onto the religious horizon could enter a train of thoughts of far greater significance than were the imperfection and futility of worldly things, because these ideas were fit to indict precisely the 'cultural values' which usually rank highest. These values have borne the stigma of a deadly sin, of an unavoidable and specific burden of guilt. They have proved to be bound to the charisma of the mind or of taste. Their cultivation has seemed inevitably to presuppose modes of existence which run counter to the demand for brotherliness and which could only be adapted to this demand by self-deception. The barriers of education and of esthetic cultivation are the most intimate and the most insuperable of all status differences. Religious guilt could now appear not only as an occasional concomitant, but as an integral part of all culture, of all conduct in a civilized world, and finally, of all structured life in general. And thereby the ultimate values which this world offered have seemed burdened with the greatest guilt.
Wherever the external order of the social community has turned into the culture community of the state it obviously could be maintained only by brutal force, which was concerned with justice only nominally and occasionally and in any case only so far as reasons of state have permitted. This force has inevitably bred new deeds of violence against external and internal enemies; in addition, it has bred dishonest pretexts for such deeds. Hence it has signified an overt, or what must appear worse, a pharisaically veiled, absence of love. The routinized economic cosmos, and thus the rationally highest form of the provision of material goods which is indispensable for all worldly culture, has been a structure to which the absence of love is attached from the very root. All forms of activity in the structured world has appeared to be entangled in the same guilt. Veiled and sublimated brutality, idiosyncrasy hostile to brotherliness, as well as illusionist shifts of a just sense of proportion have inevitably accompanied sexual love. The more powerfully the forces of sexual love are deployed the less they are noticed by the participants, and the more veiled they are in a Pharisaic way.
Ethical religiosity has appealed to rational knowledge, which has followed its own autonomous and inner-worldly norms. It has fashioned a cosmos of truths which no longer had anything to do with the systematic postulates of a rational religious ethic; with the result that the world as a cosmos must satisfy the demands of a religious ethic or evince some 'meaning.' On the contrary, rational knowledge has had to reject this claim in principle. The cosmos of natural causality and the postulated cosmos of ethical, compensatory causality have stood in irreconcilable opposition.
Science has created this cosmos of natural causality and has seemed unable to answer with certainty the question of its own ultimate presuppositions. Nevertheless science, in the name of 'intellectual integrity,' has come forward with the claim of representing the only possible form of a reasoned view of the world. The intellect, like all culture values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy. Worldly man has regarded this possession of culture as the highest good. In addition to the burden of ethical guilt, however, something has adhered to this cultural value which was bound to depreciate it with still greater finality, namely, senselessness--if this cultural value is to be judged in terms of its own standards.
The purely inner-worldly perfection of self of a man of culture, hence the ultimate value to which 'culture' has seemed to be reducible, is meaningless for religious thought. This follows for religious thought from the obvious meaninglessness of death, meaningless precisely when viewed from the inner-worldly standpoint. And under the very conditions of 'culture,' senseless death has seemed only to put the decisive stamp upon the senselessness of life itself.
The peasant, like Abraham, could die 'satiated with life.' The feudal landlord and the warrior hero could do likewise. For both fulfilled a cycle of their existence beyond which they did not reach. Each in his way could attain an inner-worldly perfection as a result of the naive unambiguity of the substance of his life. But the 'cultivated' man who strives for self-perfection, in the sense of acquiring or creating 'cultural values,' cannot do this. He can become 'weary of life' but he cannot become 'satiated with life' in the sense of completing a cycle. For the perfectibility of the man of culture in principle progresses indefinitely, as do the cultural values. And the segment which the individual and passive recipient or the active co-builder can comprise in the course of a finite life becomes the more trifling the more differentiated and multiplied the cultural values and the goals for self-perfection become. Hence the harnessing of man into this external and internal cosmos of culture can offer the less likelihood that an individual would absorb either culture as a whole or what in any sense is 'essential' in culture. Moreover there exists no definitive criterion for judging the latter. It thus becomes less and less likely that 'culture' and the striving for culture can have any inner-worldly meaning for the individual.
The 'culture' of the individual certainly does not consist of the quantity of 'cultural values' which he amasses; it consists of an articulated selection of culture values. But there is no guarantee that this selection has reached an end that would be meaningful to him precisely at the 'accidental' time of his death. He might even turn his back to life with an air of distinction: 'I have enough--life has offered (or denied) all that made living worthwhile for me.' This proud attitude to the religion of salvation must appear as a disdainful blasphemy of the God-ordained ways of life and destinies. No redemption religion positively approves of 'death by one's own hand,' that is, a death which has been hallowed only by philosophies.
Viewed in this way, all 'culture' appears as man's emancipation from the organically prescribed cycle of natural life. For this very reason culture's every step forward seems condemned to lead to an ever more devastating senselessness. The advancement of cultural values, however, seems to become a senseless hustle in the service of worthless, moreover self-contradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends. The advancement of cultural values appears the more meaningless the more it is made a holy task, a 'calling.'
Culture becomes ever more senseless as a locus of imperfection, of injustice, of suffering, of sin, of futility. For it is necessarily burdened with guilt, and its deployment and differentiation thus necessarily become ever more meaningless. Viewed from a purely ethical point of view, the world has to appear fragmentary and devalued in all those instances when judged in the light of the religious postulate of a divine 'meaning' of existence. This devaluation results from the conflict between the rational claim and reality, between the rational ethic and the partly rational, and partly irrational values. With every construction of the specific nature of each special sphere existing in the world, this conflict has seemed to come to the fore ever more sharply and more insolubly. The need for 'salvation' responds to this devaluation by becoming more other-worldly, more alienated from all structured forms of life, and, in exact parallel, by confining itself to the specific religious essence. This reaction is the stronger the more systematic the thinking about the 'meaning' of the universe becomes, the more the external organization of the world is rationalized, and the more the conscious experience of the world's irrational content is sublimated. And not only theoretical thought, disenchanting the world, led to this course, but also the very attempt of religious ethics practically and ethically to rationalize the world.
The specific intellectual and mystical attempts at salvation in the face of these tensions succumb in the end to the world dominion of unbrotherliness. On the one hand, their charisma is not accessible to everybody. Hence, in intent, mystical salvation definitely means aristocracy; it is an aristocratic religiosity of redemption. And, in the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.
10. THE THREE TYPES OF THEODICY
The individual redemption ethics of the past which have rejected the world have applied their rejection of the world at very different points of this purely rationally constructed scale. This has depended upon numerous concrete circumstances which cannot be ascertained by a theoretical typology. Besides these circumstances, a rational element has played its part, namely, the structure of a special theodicy. The metaphysical need responded to the awareness of existing and unbridgeable tensions, and through theodicy it tried to find a common meaning in spite of all.
Among the three types of theodicy we have already designated as alone consistent, dualism could well serve this need. Dualism maintains that always the powers of light and truth, purity and goodness coexist and conflict with the powers of darkness and falsehood, impurity and evil. In the last analysis this dualism is only a direct systematization of the magical pluralism of the spirits with their division of good (useful) and evil (harmful) spirits which represent the preliminary stages of the antagonism between deities and demons.
Zoroastrism was the prophetic religiousness which realized this conception most consistently. Here dualism set out with the magical contrast between 'clean' and 'unclean.' All virtues and vices were integrated into this contrast. It involved renouncing the omnipotence of a god whose power was indeed limited by the existence of a great antagonist. The contemporary followers (the Parsees) have actually given up this belief because they could not endure this limitation of divine power. In the most consistent eschatology, the world of purity and the world of impurity, from the mixture of which the fragmentary empirical world emanated, separated again and again into two unrelated realms. The more modern eschatological hope, however, makes the god of purity and benevolence triumph, just as Christianity makes the Savior triumph over the devil. This less consistent form of dualism is the popular, worldwide conception of heaven and hell, which restores God's sovereignty over the evil spirit who is His creature, and thereby believes that divine omnipotence is saved. But, willy-nilly, it must then, overtly or covertly, sacrifice some of the divine love. For if omniscience is maintained, the creation of a power of radical evil and the admission of sin, especially in communion with the eternity of hell's punishments for one of God's own and finite creatures and for finite sins, simply does not correspond to divine love. In that case, only a renunciation of benevolence is consistent.
The belief in predestination realizes this renunciation, in fact and with full consistency. Man's acknowledged incapacity to scrutinize the ways of God means that he renounces in a loveless clarity man's accessibility to any meaning of the world. This renunciation brought all problems of this sort to an end. Outside of the circle of eminent virtuosos the belief in this consistency has not been permanently endured. This was the case because the belief in predestination--in contrast to the belief in the irrational power of 'fate'--demands the assumption of a providential, and hence a somehow rational, destination of the condemned, not only to doom but to evil, while demanding the 'punishment' of the condemned and therewith the application of an ethical category.
We have dealt with the significance of the belief in predestination [elsewhere]. We shall deal with Zoroastrian dualism later, and only briefly--because the number of the believers is small. It might be omitted entirely were it not for the influence of the Persian ideas of final judgment, as well as of the doctrine of demons and angels, upon late Judaism. Because of such influences, Zoroastrism is of considerable historical significance.
The third form of theodicy which we are going to discuss was peculiar to the religiosity of Indian intellectuals. It stands out by virtue of its consistency as well as by its extraordinary metaphysical achievement: It unites virtuoso-like self-redemption by man's own effort with universal accessibility of salvation, the strictest rejection of the world with organic social ethics, and contemplation as the paramount path to salvation with an inner-worldly vocational ethic.