Weber seized upon Nietzsche’s intuitions when he ascribed the faintly parodic title of “religious virtuosos” to the spiritual heroes of the axial age, the protagonists of world renunciation, of self-rejection, and of resettlement to a blessedness that was not of this world. With their exercises that were eccentric in every possible sense of the word, these artists of a high-culture religio set standards by which subsequent generations had to direct themselves if they wished to learn from the claims of the masters. Indeed, only now does the concept of master acquire its pregnant meaning: that of teacher of something nearly impossible.23
Whoever is taken by the evidence that being a human among humans is no longer sufficient can train to be a virtuoso of religio. In the future this will come down to reworking the raw materials found in the human being in the direction of a conformity to the cosmos, a conformity to nirvana, and a conformity to God. The individual who is humbled and spurred on by the absolute will thereby experience herself as the being who has a relation to what is without relation. The adventure of individualization begins with such alterations. Above the door to the world there is now the inscription: “Know thyself!” Under it are the lines: Etiamsi omnes non ego. Even if all run in one direction, I will not.
Everything that comes after the “axial age” is therefore, spiritually, an age of “virtuosos.” It forms the laboratory in which acute despair is distilled from a vague disgruntled mood. Psychic efforts extending beyond all rational measure grow from the concentration of despair. Ultimately, with the discreet help of the Highest, the effort turns into a relaxation beyond trivial humanity. This relaxation is sometimes called wisdom, sometimes holiness, sometimes illumination.
Martin Luther does not clutch the peaks of despair so tightly for the state of the soul. He contents himself with the conventional term “faith” (fides); yet he removes from the word its tone of relaxation. He redeploys it as if he were standing at the source of its meaning. He thereby recommends that the following be held for certain, beyond any established religio: that God, who sees human beings from without as from within, will in the end not only judge them according to the records, but also be merciful to the remorseful, in accordance with the promised grace.
2.3 The derivation of the Reformation from the spirit of tempered despair
It has often been noted, correctly, that Luther’s intervention reduced the ostentatious Roman Catholic papal church to a church that was, if not invisible, then at least inconspicuous.24 In this new church the priestly class was to be thoroughly disempowered. It offered as little space for a self-serving clerical apparatus as it did for an instituted theology that was right ex officio. It was based on the fundamental experience that had spread among the spiritual elite after the high-culture revolution – namely that the soul, in its insufficiency, stands alone and unarmed before the Highest.
Through the pathos of its sola gratia [by grace alone] credo, the Lutheran doctrine pushes to the extreme the eccentric positionality of the faithful. It demands of them an extreme degree of remorsefulness, which it explains to them at the same time that they cannot accomplish on their own. By urgently holding them to an ultimately impossible repentance, it forces them on the path toward a new version of hypocrisy. Being able to regret is, itself, already a work of grace. You should be lost, as if you were saved. Reformation thus essentially rhymes with reduction. This holds consistently for the Lutheran sphere, and even more so for the Reformed (whence it turned out that, in the long run, the Wittenbergians were not a patch on the Genevans when it came to hypocrisy). The vanishing point of the reduction consists in nothing but the question of how the faithful discover the Archimedean point at which despair over one’s salvation passes over into the certainty of having attained it. In Luther’s language, what has to be discovered is called “justification.”
Nota bene: systems of belief can be passed on so long as they are successful in making invisible the paradoxes from which they draw their power.
The basic figure of the axial-age revolution is hereby repeated; it should be made explicit once and for all how matters stand with the human being who realizes that he is dealing with a superworld that cannot be manipulated. Once the Highest has become incorruptible, the minds that wish to take seriously the idea of existing “in the truth” are forced to consider the initially prerevolutionary, then revolutionary question of what to do. Luther cast his vote on the matter long before Chernyshevsky and Lenin; and the decisive thinkers of the axial age did so long before Luther. It is not just the Enlightenment that can be predated by two and a half millennia; in point of fact, the Reformation, too, began around the middle of the first millennium before Christ.
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In the reductionism of the fledgling Reformation during the Luther era, energetic activity and the extreme ability to do nothing became entangled in a manner almost unparalleled in the history of ideas and of the soul. The reduction proceeds from the now firmly internalized evidence that sacrifices and courtesies cannot sway the incorruptible Highest. The only method of drawing the absolute to one’s side consists in delivering oneself to him wholly, as the mystics teach – in the West and East alike. Yet, as long as the gesture of self-deliverance remains a self-conscious act, it would be, for its part, nothing more than a speculative transaction with an increased wager: it would trade blood sacrifice for self-sacrifice. It would seek to domesticate the absolute by fusing with it. This diagnosis would, however, be accurate only so long as one were dealing with an inert absolute. A communicative absolute could have preempted the human attempt at encounter. In the linguistic space of western ecumenism, such a scoop is called “Christ.” His love would be the unmerited thing that cannot be compelled, no matter how great the effort.
Following the Augustinian schema of revolt in heaven, Protestant reductionism is content to simplify the issue of God into an eccentric love story. In a nutshell, one day human beings stopped placing God above all things, because they decided to emulate the example of Satan and chose themselves as the object of their predilection. In doing so, they warped ordo amoris [the order of love] to a point beyond repair. In contrast, God continues to love human beings, albeit not without placing certain conditions on them. If they turn back with enough remorse, they should be welcome. If they remain as they are, their damnation is irreversible.
Whoever espouses this screenplay as an interpretation of her being in the world must brace herself for complications. The young Luther read himself into this scenario, under pressure from his pre-religious, existential mood of disgruntlement. He could not guess that the schema of the troubled love story was elaborated without exception within high cultures. According to this schema, the lovers originally belong together, but must become estranged and fail for some unknowable reason. The young Luther obviously brought into play a high potential that was set up for estrangement and failure. In modern parlance, one would call his point of departure a severe neurosis. It became historically decisive that Luther’s disturbed state was suited for a recoding of religion, and even more for a religious–political translation.
We should not see it as an accident that Luther first made a name for himself by handling the question of how to deal with the facts of guilt, penance, and despair. All in all, the October 1517 theses on indulgences represent no more than zealous – and, seen from a historical distance, hairsplitting – statements on questions about the external and internal administration of penance.
Luther drops the air of nitpicking in three of his theses, however. They concern the human’s acute despair of himself, a despair that does not allow him to assume two positions at the same time. Some of the theses read as though they were a proleptic answer to Plessner’s theorem on the eccentric positionality of the human being: when the individual, once compacted into a single point, hears that human existence and doing penance should become the same, he feels subject to Jesus’s saying, Poenitentiam agite etc. [sic] [Repent etc. [sic]].25 Technically and from the perspective of the disputation, Luther had already won with his first thesis. In the
