context in which renouncing one’s belonging to the “world” had long been available as an established option. What was called religio at the end of the Middle Ages was identical with the offer to immigrate, in the midst of the world, to a counterworld. The counterworld existed as a spiritual “estate” with its own autonomy vis-à-vis worldly estates. On the basis of his accomplishments as a creator of metaphysical legitimacy, the “cleric,” that is, the ordained elite of the visible church, knew how to reserve the rank of the highest estate for himself – above the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the peasants. (Let me note that, in their day, estates, as degrees of status in the social realm prior to political states, obeyed the imperative to create livable arrangements within segmental societies by means of hierarchization.)
To the extent that Martin Luther’s despair was bound up with a western-style world denial that could be encoded in high culture, we can see him as a distant heir of the exaltations and overshadowings of the axial age. Already in his era, the monastic topos of contemptus mundi [disdain for the world] served as leitmotif in an immeasurable body of literature. To write contemplative books and at the same time not to have contempt for the world: that was almost a matter of impossibility at the beginning of the modern age, namely before Boccaccio. The modern intellectual does not originate in the Dreyfus affair. He emerges from the fourteenth-century literature against being dependent on a world that could not be affirmed.15 An unhappy consciousness is embodied in this individual. He knows how much the world deserves contempt, yet he remains bound to the contemptible through his striving for fame (gloria) and search for love (amor).16
The young monk Luther learned through his own experience that evading the worldly sphere by entering into cloistered counterworldliness was not qualified to brighten up the disgruntled mood of his existence. It did not matter what he read, whether it was the rather sympathetic mysticism of the Theologia Deutsch or Aristotelian ethics, which was distasteful to him owing to its lack of contrition; it was only through the serious climate of a religio behind cloister walls and the passion he felt from his engagement with contemporary theology (namely that of the Augustinian persuasion) that his youthful disorientation was able to mutate into a systematically grounded metaphysical despair. If up to that point the adolescent Martin had experienced the drama of the lost and unloved child, the young monk and theologian Luther – doctor theologiae since 1512 and professor at the young regional University of Wittenberg since 1514 – now developed into an exorbitant case of high-culture eccentrification: as he attempted to compose himself coram deo [before God], the unfathomable extent of his lostness came undone.
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The Augustinian term peccatum originale [original sin] – in German Erbsünde [inherited sin] – summarizes this state of affairs as an anthropological urfact, without making reference to the individual case. In looking inward, the young monk experienced himself as the object of a transcendent scrutiny. Under its effects, he is at first unable to do anything other than petrify into a statue of despair.
Luther’s early spiritual struggles carry the echo of the supremacy of 2,500 years of denying the world and life. This supremacy was defended by the bizarre, always renewable band of ascetics, hermits, penitents, self-dissolvers, dolorists, flagellants, and other character masks of holy extremism. In their ranks we find remote figures such as Gautama Buddha, whose basic saying sarvam dukha – “everything is full of suffering” – resonates throughout more than 2,000 years. Among them we must also count the Greek Silenus, with his tragic piece of wisdom according to which the best thing for human beings would never to have been born and the second best is to die soon. The greater age of anxiety17 includes the lamentations of Job and the discourses of the preacher Solomon, the apocalypticism of the Near East and the tears of Augustine; it extends from the zenith of world denigration – which was reached by Lotario di Segni (1160–1216),18 the future Pope Innocent III (from 1198 on), in his treatise De miseria humanae conditionis [On the Misery of the Human Condition], composed in 1189 – to the nadir of philosophical resignation in Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the denial of the will to live. They all contradict God’s self-praise at the end of each day of creation: they see that for the most part it was not good, and at no time was it valde bonum – very good. With the “breakthroughs” of the axial age, the scope of the denial grows alongside the affirmations.
Within this darkened space, every instance of despair is related to all the others; for millennia, the despisers of the world and of their own world-proximate selves live simultaneously: “Every human being is Job.”19 We are all subject to turpe naturale [what is natural and base] and must continue to pay tribute to the abomination of being caught up in bodily necessities. The sayings of the desert fathers reverberate in the Russian love of beauty; the agony of Golgotha echoes again in devotio moderna [the modern devotion]. It is no accident that the penitential struggles of the young Luther are so directly connected to the salvational uncertainty of the old Augustine that it is as though eleven centuries did not lie between them.
In Lotario’s miserabilistic Summa, nothing that could be deployed against human existence on Earth has been forgotten. It reaches unerringly, from the “misery that is bound up with the entrance of the human being into the world,” though the “guilt that human activity and striving incur,” to the “wanton denouement of human existence,” which risks ending up in the “unspeakable plight of the damned” after the Last Judgment. In its attempt at completeness, this text on the murk and gloom of conditio humana can be read as a masterwork of pious hypocrisy. Already in the first lines, the author recognizes a grave objection to his opusculum, namely that it entertains the idea of an opposite exercise, in which, with the aid of Christ, the “dignity of the human being” should be emphasized. These lines articulate the constitutional hypocrisy of the cleric, who affirms his baseness the more he climbs the bureaucratic ladder. It may have been an accident that Innocent III never found the occasion to write a rebuttal. From a cultural–psychological perspective, it is more plausible that this omission classifies him as a prisoner of the persistent and momentous mood of world renunciation.
Nearly three hundred years were to pass before Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate [Oration on the Dignity of the Person] (1486). Measured against this text’s cosmophilic tendency toward cheerful optimism, Luther’s life and work mark a recursion to the society of the somber bishop of Rome, who reveled in images of human misery. Lotario’s hypocrisy, which is betrayed by the pleasure he took in exaggerating on the dark side, was not necessarily merely a feature of extreme Catholic Tartuffery. It mirrored the ambivalence of transcendent scrutiny. Those who were affected by it were never able to know whether it brought salvation or damnation.
When Nietzsche gave the earth a new name, he was thinking about the spheres of a broken participation in the “existent” – these spheres that, from an evolutionary perspective, were relatively new:
The ascetic treats life as a wrong path that he has to walk along backwards till he reaches the point where he starts; or, like a mistake which can only be set right by action – ought to be set right: he demands that we should accompany him, and when he can, he imposes his valuation of existence. What does this mean? Such a monstrous method of valuation is not inscribed in the records of human history as an exception and curiosity: it is one of the most wide-spread and long-lived facts there are. Read from a distant planet, the majuscule-script of our earthly existence would perhaps seduce the reader to the conclusion that the earth was the ascetic planet par excellence, an outpost of discontented, arrogant and nasty characters who harboured a deep disgust for themselves, for the world, for all life and hurt themselves as much as possible out of the pleasure in hurting – probably their only pleasure.20
In his studies on Byzantine Christianity, Hugo Ball found the appropriate terms when he called the early friars of Upper Egypt “athletes of mourning” and the anchorites “athletes of despair.”21 His portrait of John Climacus stands under the motto: “It is good to disintegrate and
