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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
In this second volume of his groundbreaking new work on the history of philosophy, Jürgen Habermas traces the development of Western thought from the reception of Platonism by early Christian thought, through the revolution in medieval philosophy and theology triggered by the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works, up to the decoupling of philosophical and theological thought in nominalism and the Reformation that ushered in the postmetaphysical thinking of the modern age. In contrast to conventional histories that focus on movements and schools, Habermas takes the dialectic of faith and knowledge as a guiding thread for analysing key developments in the thought of major figures such as Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and Luther that constitute milestones in the genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking.
A distinctive feature of Habermas’ approach is the prominence he accords practical philosophy, and in particular legal and political ideas, and the corresponding attention he pays to social, institutional and political history, especially as these bear on the relationship between church and state. As a result, the central preoccupations of Christian thought are shown to be original responses to questions raised by the Christian worldview that exploded the framework of Greek metaphysical thinking and remain crucial for the self-understanding of contemporary philosophy.
Far from raising claims to exclusivity, completeness or closure, Habermas’s history of philosophy, published in English in three volumes, opens up new lines of research and reflection that will influence the humanities and social sciences for decades to come.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
IV. The Symbiosis of Faith and Knowledge in Christian Platonism and the Emergence of the Roman Catholic Church
Notes
1. Early Christianity: The Proclaiming and the Proclaimed Jesus
(1) The relationship of the early Christians to Judaism
(2) Jesus: self-image and teaching
(3) The Pauline interpretation of Christianity
Notes
2. The Encounter of Christianity with Hellenism in the Graeco-Roman Environment of the Empire
(1) The spread of Christian congregations and worship
(2) The Roman Empire – the political and social environment
(3) In the field of tension between philosophical and religious teachings
(4) Hellenization of Christianity?
Notes
3. Plotinus and Augustine: The Christian Transformation of Platonism
(1) The foundation of absolute idealism: the concept of the One
(2) Christianity as the better philosophy: faith and knowledge
(3) The sinful will, experienced time and performative knowledge
Notes
4. Augustine and the Church between Institution of Salvation and Secular Power
(1) The position of the state church in the Roman Empire
(2) World history and process of salvation
Notes
V. Christian Europe: Progressive Differentiation of Sacerdotium and Regnum, Faith and Knowledge
Notes
1. Church, Society and State in ‘Christian Europe’
(1) The church as a formative force in early medieval Europe
(2) Christian reform movements, Gregorian reform and the differentiation of imperial and papal authority
Notes
2. The Challenges posed by Aristotle for Thirteenth-Century Theology
(1) The delayed Christian reception of Aristotle in the High Middle Ages
(2) The revolutionary conception of science of the ‘Posterior Analytics’
(3) The god of the philosophers and the god of Abraham
(4) The decoupling of practical reason from theoretical reason
Notes
3. The Answers of Thomas Aquinas
(1) The theological appropriation of Aristotelian basic concepts
(2) The modes of belief and knowledge
(3) Theology as a science
Notes
4. Ontologization of Aristotelian Ethics and Reconstruction of Practical Philosophy
(1) From the theory of action to guidance of the will by practical reason
(2) Ethics and the ‘highest good’
(3) Sublation of ‘politics’ in the philosophy of the social
(4) ‘Treatise on Law’ and philosophy of law
Notes
VI. The Via Moderna: Philosophical Orientations for Scientific, Religious and Sociopolitical Modernity
Notes
1. Ushering in a Paradigm Shift: Duns Scotus
(1) Rejection of the metaphysical concept of God – critique of the analogia entis
(2) The transcendental-semantic turn of ontology
(3) God’s omnipotence, contingency of nature and empirical knowledge
(4) Freedom as self-commitment to the absolutely binding law
Notes
2. William of Ockham: The Janus Face of the ‘Nominalist Revolution’
(1) Critique of Duns Scotus and the limits of natural reason
(2) Discussion of numerical and personal identity
(3) Preparation of the mentalist turn
(4) The revolutionary political writings: poverty controversy and church constitution
Notes
3. The Functional Differentiation of Law and Politics and a New Form of Social Integration
(1) Differentiation of state and capitalist economy in Northern Italy
(2) Marsilius of Padua on the relationship between church and state
(3) Legal codification of politics and depersonalization of rule
Notes
4. A Functionalist Theory of State Power (Niccolò Machiavelli) and New Legitimation Problems (Francisco de Vitoria)
(1) Abstract power and the conditions of its stabilization
(2) Politicization of natural law (Peasants’ War) and founding of European international law (in the course of the colonization of ‘heathen peoples’)
Notes
VII. The Separation of Faith and Knowledge: Protestantism and Philosophy of the Subject
Notes
1. Luther’s Break with Tradition and the Transformation of Theology
(1) The indulgences controversy and the doctrine of justification
(2) Sola fide and the transformation of theology
(3) The doctrine of the sacraments and the semanticization of the sacred event
(4) The dispute with Erasmus and Luther’s conception of freedom
Notes
2. Theological, Social and Political Orientations for Modern Rational Natural Law
(1) Luther on law, church and state, freedom of religion and the right of resistance
(2) Calvinist doctrines of the right of political resistance
(3) Excursus on thinking in terms of natural law
Notes
3. The Context of Rational Natural Law: Sociohistorical Dynamics and Scientific Development
(1) Trends towards the juridification of political rule
(2) From theology to natural science: Francis Bacon
(3) Descartes and Pascal
Notes
4. The Paradigm Shift to Philosophy of the Subject and the Resulting Problem of the Justification of Binding Norms
(1) Thomas Hobbes
(2) Benedict de Spinoza
(3) John Locke
Notes
Second Intermediate Reflection: The Caesura of the Separation of Faith and Knowledge
Bibliography
Overview: Volumes 1–3
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Begin Reading
Second Intermediate Reflection: The Caesura of the Separation of Faith and Knowledge
Bibliography
Overview: Volumes 1–3
Index
End User License Agreement
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Also a History of Philosophy
Volume 2: The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge
Jürgen Habermas
Translated by Ciaran Cronin
polity
Originally published in German as Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, Band 1: Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glauben und Wissen and Band 2: Vernünftige Freiheit. Spuren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen. The contents of the present volume correspond to pp. 481–918 of Volume 1 and pp. 1–211 of Volume 2. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2019. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2024.
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4518-6
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IV.THE SYMBIOSIS OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN CHRISTIAN PLATONISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
The first century of the Christian era witnessed the emergence of a unique constellation in the Mediterranean region, the geographical birthplace of the future West. Here, in the porous ideological milieu of Hellenism, which had been on the advance since Alexander, and within the political framework of the Roman Empire, two doctrines met that formed a tension-laden opposition within the spectrum of the axial age: Christianity and Platonism. In terms of their respective contents, this was an encounter of a theocentric with a cosmocentric worldview. Christianity, which was forthwith organized ecclesiastically in the forms of Roman law, was ritually firmly anchored in the vibrant cult of the rapidly growing and socially mixed religious communities; conversely, the de-ritualized forms of Greek philosophy – in addition to Neoplatonism, the Stoic and Epicurean currents in particular – found a sympathetic audience among the educated elite and assumed the role of an individualized and enlightened learned religion. Among the populace, belief in the world of the Roman gods – a counterpart to the Homeric pantheon – initially continued uninterrupted. As had already occurred in Greece, religious cults from the Near and Far East mixed with this indigenous religion. Gnostic currents and mystery cults, in particular, exerted a certain, though sometimes overestimated, influence on early Christianity.
Of crucial importance for the genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking is the constellation of ‘Athens’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Rome’, which has shaped Western culture and thought to the present day. The Jewish and Greek intellectual formations of the axial age encountered each other in the milieu of a Roman civilization that was itself shaped by Greek culture; they did not close themselves off from each other – as Hinduism and Islam would later do in India, for example – but learned from each other through polemics and cross-fertilization. The synthesis they achieved under the tutelage of Christian theology, itself influenced by Hellenism, will be of interest to us in its role as a catalyst for the emergence of independent modern intellectual formations. However, Roman Catholic Christianity, as a dogmatically developed and thoroughly rationalized doctrine, made itself vulnerable to attack from the philosophical side not only from within, as it were, through its connection to metaphysics, but as a temporal power, it also became vulnerable to political attack. For it was in the organizational form of the church shaped by Roman law that Christianity acquired political influence; after the collapse of the Roman Empire, it entered into political competition with secular powers. These institutional links between ‘Rome’ and ‘Jerusalem’ contributed to the global spread of Christianity and its impact on world history; at the same time, however, this led to the Roman Church becoming so deeply involved in the development of Western legal culture that, in an ironic twist, Christian natural law paved the way for the secularization of the early modern period under the influence of rational natural law.
The Western theme of ‘faith and knowledge’ can be explained in terms of the division of labour between Christianity and Platonism in late antiquity. In both cases, the cognitive dissonance between the knowledge that had accumulated in profane spheres of life, on the one hand, and the explanatory power of mythologies, on the other, had played a destructive as well as a constructive role. While the violation of moral-practical sensibilities spurred the moralization of the sacred in all axial cultures, there were significant differences in how these cultures responded to the excessive demands placed on mythical and magical thought by advanced technical and natural philosophical knowledge. By opening up epistemic access to the divine, cosmological worldviews apparently stimulated curiosity about what holds the world together. Their comprehensive notion of ‘wisdom’ laid the groundwork for linking mundane knowledge with the religious promise of salvation. The Jewish prophets and scribes, on the other hand, were more concerned with the events of salvation and misfortune unfolding in the dimension of history. For them, communicative access to God was primarily a matter of securing revealed truths of relevance for salvation. Thus, mundane knowledge did not enjoy priority, even though it had to remain compatible on the whole with the character of nature as God’s creation.
Platonism and Buddhism in particular, but also some of the Chinese wisdom teachings, attempt to integrate mundane knowledge into the categorial framework of salvific knowledge. These wisdom teachings are geared to processing mundane knowledge, i.e. to the inclusion of knowledge. Monotheism, on the other hand, can be content with a blanket elimination of cognitive dissonance, leaving a de-demonized nature to be explored by mundane knowledge that has no further theological relevance. This situation changed in the Hellenistic period. Even if Aristotle’s scientized philosophy had not yet received the attention it deserved, the challenge that the encounter with Greek philosophy posed to the Jews and Christians was not only to oppose its highly developed theories. Rather, this encounter made them aware of their deficiency in learned knowledge that necessitated an unbiased appropriation of Greek philosophy. Among Jewish thinkers, it was Philo of Alexandria who undertook this task, while among the Christian thinkers, it was above all the Alexandrian church fathers. But the more carefully we examine the complementary fusion of Christian theology with Greek metaphysics in terms of its freedom from contradiction, the more fragile appears the unity of pistis and sophia claimed by both sides. At the end of a long path, the tension – exacerbated by the reception of Aristotle in the High Middle Ages – between the two opposing conceptual frameworks of the theocentric and the cosmocentric worldviews could only be stabilized in the form of the Thomist synthesis; this was achieved through the differentiation – with the communicative and the epistemic modes of access to the absolute and the two corresponding, but not mutually contradictory, forms of affirmation [Für-wahr-Halten] – of two attitudes and types of cognition, namely, faith and knowledge.
With the accumulation of mundane knowledge the increasing polarization of faith and knowledge shattered the unity of theology and philosophy. In the early modern period, this legacy would give rise to the methodologically independent natural sciences, and, at the same time, to philosophical systems that, as a result of reflection on the separation of faith and knowledge, would establish epistemology and rational natural law as disciplines in their own right, independent of theology. This differentiation already provides the answer to Luther’s prior decoupling of theology from mundane knowledge; theology itself brings about the ‘end of the age of worldviews’ and adapts itself to the secular authority of the sciences and to a secular, rationally legitimized state authority. Philosophy, having renounced metaphysical certainties, now had to compete with religious conceptions of self and the world. Moreover, it had to answer the question of how its own scientific character is to be understood: as an assimilation to the sciences, or as a scientific way of thinking that upholds the perspective of self-understanding and defends it against the exclusive claim to mundane knowledge of the objectifying sciences?
In the controversies between the Christians and the Jewish and the Platonic heritage during the Roman Empire, the creativity of the axial age at first continues and focuses attention on the spiritual form of Christianity. However, the dynamics of Christianity’s development into an ecclesiastically constituted world religion and world power can only be explained by its encounter with its political, societal and cultural environment. For the most part, the Roman state was tolerant of the influx of religious currents and cults from the Orient. In the early imperial period, however, the intellectual and cultural life of the elite in general was shaped by Greek educational traditions. Rome was not one of the original axial cultures. This last, socially and politically highly advanced ancient civilization did not produce a metaphysical or religious worldview of its own. The productivity of Roman culture manifested itself in another area. The Romans achieved a combination, unique in the ancient world, of an increasingly inclusive citizenship with an effective large-scale administration that enabled them to ensure the cohesion of their vast empire, which had grown out of and was modelled on a city-state. They were, above all, the political creators of a world empire centred on and modelled on the city of Rome, and the inventors of the admirable form of organization of a geographically extensive and functionally differentiated social and economic network of communication and trade based on civil law.
The rationalization of legal relations was accompanied by a further differentiation of the legal medium compared to the Greek polis, so that it stood out as a distinct layer of norms from religious and everyday moral precepts. For the first time, legal experts were trained to practise law as a profession and to teach jurisprudence. The great compendiums of case law testify to the fact that the mass of judicial decisions were systematically collected albeit initially only for practical purposes. With the separation, of relevance for everyday interaction, of civil law from morality, a new, profane regulation of behaviour took shape. Interestingly, public law in the modern sense did not yet exist as a counterpart to civil law; the role of public law continued to be played by the ius sacrorum, which was shaped by the old Roman popular religion. This Roman legal culture would have a twofold effect on Christianity in its ascent towards becoming the state religion. On the one hand, Christianity used Roman law to stabilize itself; it provided the medium through which Christian communities gradually organized themselves into the large church in which they first found institutional support. The church based its organizational structure on the hierarchical model of the imperial ruling apparatus. In this institutional form, Christianity as a world church survived the decline of the Roman Empire – and in some ways even became its successor. On the other hand, the canon law developed in the womb of the church first created a continuity of legal development on which the canonists and Romanists of the twelfth century could rely in their systematic appropriation and dogmatic elaboration of the corpus iuris civilis.
Gregory VII would base his ‘papal revolution’ on this Roman achievement when he initiated the change in the form of the ‘political’ and, with his ecclesiastical reform, inaugurated the transformation of the political complex familiar from ancient empires and cities. The church played a catalytic role in the emergence of the modern state. This improbable constellation explains, on the one hand, the legal codification of political rule and thus the constitutionalization of public power and, on the other hand, the moral permeation of public law and its transformation from a mere means of organizing rule into a medium of social reform. To be sure, the basis of legitimacy of political rule was already shifting in the axial age, since now rulers themselves also had to measure up to the norms that legitimized their rule. In all axial civilizations, the more or less universalistic notions of justice gave rise to an institutionally contained critical potential that normally remained latent, but could be ignited under certain circumstances and erupt in protest. Whether and when this potential would be used by radical leaders to inspire mass protests against impoverishment and oppression depended on many factors that I cannot go into in detail here. But orientations in one direction or the other are already implicit in the worldviews themselves: in the major world religions, personal expectations of salvation are linked in different ways to notions of a collective redemptive destiny. Max Weber developed an economic and sociological analysis of those dimensions of the paths of salvation that lead either to the affirmation or to the negation of the world, thus encouraging the individual believer to become more or less active in shaping the world.1 Something analogous holds for impulses towards the collective amelioration of the world. While the eschatological teachings of the church in the High Middle Ages inspired the mobilization of the discontented poor in the cities of northern Italy, the church itself was by no means per se oriented towards innerworldly revolutions. The opposition between this world and the world to come leads to a more pronounced decoupling of personal salvation from the redemption of the people in Christianity than it does in Judaism. Moreover, the commandment of peace is of paramount importance in Christian ethics. From the beginning, therefore, a quietist submission to the sword of secular rule was the preferred option of the Christian population. Despite the persecutions they suffered, Christians also tended to embrace pacifist conformism in the Roman Empire.
As in Athens, the state shaped the structure of Roman society and simultaneously provided the political framework of the cult community. Even after his official conversion to Christianity, Emperor Constantine continued to see himself as Pontifex Maximus; for him, Christianity remained a civil religion based on traditional authority – mos maiorum [ancestral customs]. In Roman times, the Christian church did not really change the formation of the political. But I want to show how the spiritual-political Janus face of the Catholic Church developed at this time. With its dual character as a divine governorship on earth exercising power and influence in the world, papal rule already contained the seeds of a revolutionary transformation of the complex of law and political rule. This incipient transformation of ‘the political’ would only come to fruition in the course of the High Middle Ages. The internal tension between the status of a now influential universal church and the radical ethos of poverty of the monastic orders struck the spark that jumped from the reforming orders and heretical movements to the reforming popes of the church. It was the church, as it was reformed at the turn of the twelfth century, that created the model for the juridification of public authority and inadvertently provided the impetus for the separation of regnum and sacerdotium. The church was able to play this role thanks to an unlikely combination of three elements: the reverse side of the political power through which the universal church constituted itself as the supreme public authority with the help of canon law was the spiritual power of an egalitarian ethos of poverty preserved in the monasteries, which not only from time to time triggered impulses for reform within the church, but on occasion itself unleashed protests and inspired revolutionary forces in society through religious foundations and heretical movements.
The two perspectives alluded to already extend beyond the era of ecclesiastical reform into a period of a genealogy of postmetaphysical thought and modern state power. Looking back from the beginning of modernity, the decisive European cultural programme developed in late antiquity. While societal complexity diminished after the fall of the Roman Empire, the cultural knowledge preserved in monasteries and religious orders, which was taken up and developed in vital ways by the universities, ensured a powerful continuity in the understanding of self and the world of the West across the ruptures of political and economic development. I will offer only a brief sketch, with a passing reference to Roman law, of the features of Graeco-Roman civilization that distinguished ‘Rome’ from both the ancient oriental empires and the Hellenic league of cities, before examining the intellectual innovations in more detail.
But first we need to examine how early Christianity emerged in the course of the first century from a Jewish reform sect that initially sought only to renew and radicalize the teachings of the Old Testament. Going beyond what Jesus himself proclaimed, his shameful death by crucifixion led the disciples and contemporaries to develop a new theological interpretation. God’s messenger, proclaiming the approach of the kingdom of God, was transformed into Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whose appearance was supposed to herald the beginning of a new world age. This transformation from prophet into saviour was the productive and momentous response of Pauline theology to the death on the cross. At the same time, this response laid the groundwork for a mission to the Gentiles that heralded both the gradual organizational separation of Christians from the synagogue and the spread of Christian communities throughout the territory of the Roman Empire (1.). It was not only its origin in Judaism and its relation to the ‘old’ Testament that forced Christianity to distinguish itself from ‘strong’ traditions in a way that amounted to a new advance in reflection compared to the original axial religions. The Christian communities and their theologians had to learn to assert themselves both socially and intellectually in their Graeco-Roman environment and, above all, in competition with a superior Hellenistic educational culture. This provided the stimulus for Christian theology, on the one hand, to engage in apologetics against philosophical and gnostic currents and, on the other hand, to clarify its own doctrines in terms of Greek metaphysics. This dialectical relationship touches on an ongoing controversy over an alleged ‘Hellenization of Christianity’ (2.). The controversy with Neoplatonism can be exemplified by Augustine, who had turned away from Plotinus. Augustine marks the beginning of a process of conceptual osmosis that we will continue to trace up to the present day – namely, the appropriation of motifs of Christian thought by philosophy. This applies both to the complex formed by the consciousness of sin, grace and freedom of the will, and to the new relevance of the consciousness of time and, more generally, of the sphere of subjective inwardness (3.). The development of the ecclesiastical organization unfolded in the forms of Roman law and followed the path laid down by the administrative structures of the Roman Empire. The Constantinian turn also marked the beginning of a ‘Romanization of Christianity’, with the papacy and hierarchy developing into the mirror image of imperial rule (and even temporarily representing it during the decline of the Empire). The problem posed by the temporal-spiritual duality of the papacy provides the key to the dualism between secular and spiritual power with its extraordinarily far-reaching historical and political repercussions. Augustine addresses these problems at the theological level in the context of salvation history, and arrives at the equally far-reaching conclusion that the City of God cannot be identified with the institutional form of the actually existing church (4.).
Notes
1.
Wolfgang Schluchter,
The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History
, trans. Guenther Roth (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981).
1.Early Christianity: The Proclaiming and the Proclaimed Jesus
(1) The relationship of the early Christians to Judaism. The circle of twelve apostles appointed by Jesus formed the core of any loosely organized, mobile community of followers not tied to any specific place who gathered around the itinerant prophet. These apostles, who met with Christ for a final meal before his ‘ascension’ (Acts 1:4–8), enjoyed the authority of ‘witnesses of the resurrection’. But soon a hierarchy seems to have crystallized within the early Christian community in Jerusalem. The disciples Peter, John and James, together with Paul, were the authoritative figures in the ‘Apostolic Conference’ held in the year 48. Stephen, the spokesman for the Christians in the Greek-speaking synagogues of Jerusalem, must also be included in this cohort.1 They had all died by the time the gospels were written down in the post-apostolic period between 70 and 100 CE.2 Thanks to the successful missionary activities of the first two generations, Jewish and Gentile-Christian communities spread throughout virtually the entire territory of the Roman Empire. The well-developed infrastructure for the activities of traders, soldiers and officials facilitated the extensive missionary journeys to Syria, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Greece, Egypt and Rome, above all the activity of Paul and his associates. During the first century CE, the Empire flourished culturally and economically under relatively peaceful conditions and the status of Greek as a lingua franca opened up the contemporary oecumene to the missionaries. In many cities, the Jewish diaspora communities served as points of contact and springboards. At the beginning of the second century, the pagan environment began to identify members of the baptismal communities as ‘Christians’ in contrast to other Jewish currents. However, this does not relativize the importance of the fact that Christianity grew out of a messianic reform movement that was initially perceived in the province of Judaea as just one among several Jewish sects and currents, alongside the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots and Essenes. The first Christians, of course, were Jews – and thought of themselves as such.
Despite the early polemics,3 recent research emphasizes that the separation of Christianity, still rooted in the Old Testament, from Judaism was a rather slow process,4 and that early Christianity and early prerabbinic Judaism influenced each other.5 The Old Testament initially provided an extensive basis for dogmatic commonalities: belief in the one transcendent god of creation and salvation, the promise of salvation linked to obedience to the law, the internal connection between sin, repentance and forgiveness, the conception of salvation history between the Fall and the Apocalypse, the dawning of the kingdom of heaven, the Last Judgement, and so on. The organizational form of the synagogue community also provided the model for the early Christian community. From Jewish cultic practice, Christians adopted the central role of preaching and biblical interpretation, as well as prayer formulae, hymns and the beatitudes. The Christians structured the church year, as in ancient Israel, according to the memorable dates of salvation history. And the life of the Christians, like that of the Jews, was separated from the continuous flow of time of the surrounding pagan cultures by a caesura otherwise unknown to antiquity, namely, a weekly holiday dedicated to the worship of the Lord. The Babylonian exile community had introduced the Sabbath in the sixth century BCE. Precisely because the Passover narrative (Exod. 12) strikes a chord not unlike that of the Christian hope of salvation, the custom, documented since 165 CE, of moving the Christian feast of Easter in principle from Friday to Sunday, the dies solis, has been interpreted as a sign of a break with Jewish tradition. This separation of Easter from Passover, whose date was still calculated according to the Jewish calendar, was apparently the first sign of a definitive estrangement between the two religions.6
The relatively slow emergence of Christian doctrine and practice from Judaism may also be explained by the fact that the theologoumena that actually separated the two religions concerned an interpretation of the crucifixion that could only have been formulated posthumously, from the point of view of the disciples and contemporary witnesses. Initially, Jesus must have appeared to his wider environment as one of the many eschatologically inspired itinerant teachers who, in view of the imminent dawn of the kingdom of heaven, preached the renewal and radicalization of Jewish religious beliefs with prophetic words. Of course, the evangelists are convinced that Jesus was the Son of God (Matt. 17:5), but even these accounts do not indicate that the historical Jesus himself anticipated his violent death on the cross and interpreted it as the scandalous act of God’s expiatory self-sacrifice. From the narrator’s point of view, the texts written by those born after the death of Jesus do indeed put scattered intimations into his mouth. But before the crucifixion and its mythical interpretation as a resurrection by the distraught and dejected disciples, the idea of God performing the act of forgiving sins, not by virtue of his divine authority but by becoming human, that is, through a self-abnegating incarnation, would have been inconceivable. The idea of God himself suffering vicariously on behalf of sinful humanity could only be linked posthumously to the events of the crucifixion, the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearance of the risen Christ, that is, to the event of Pentecost.7 Since the Enlightenment, historically informed approaches have emphasized that Jesus himself did not proclaim a Christology.8 Jesus calls upon all his disciples and the crowd whose faith is faltering not to be ashamed of him: ‘This, however, does not mean that he invites men to believe in himself. He does not, for instance, proclaim himself as Messiah. In fact, he points to the Messiah, the “Man”, as the Coming One distinct from himself.’9 Jesus proclaimed his teaching with the intention of renewing Judaism (2). However, the writings produced after his death and canonized only in the course of the second century, above all the letters of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles written by a disciple of Paul, construct a theology of the death on the cross that has shaped the history of the influence of Christianity at least as much as Jesus’s renewal of the Jewish message of salvation and its radical ethics, expressed in condensed form in the Sermon on the Mount (3).
(2) Jesus: self-image and teaching. Rudolf Bultmann contrasts a Judaism that still includes the preaching of Jesus, on the one hand, with the syncretism of Hellenized Christianity influenced by gnosticism, on the other. We do not have to accept this rather stark, at times even biased, juxtaposition10 in order to do justice to the difference in perspective between the proclaiming Jesus and the proclaimed Jesus: ‘Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian and his intention was not to found a new religion or church … Jesus did not proclaim himself, but instead the coming and the presence of the kingdom of God.’11 To be sure, the evangelists, especially John (1:30–34; 3:17f.; 8:12–19) and Luke (24:7), draw on Pauline theology and recognize the historical Jesus as the ‘Son of God’. But Jesus himself was evasive when confronted with expectations that he was the Messiah (see, for example, Luke 7:18–22).12 Jesus’s frequent use of the expression ‘Son of Man’ – a name for the Messiah that already appears in the Old Testament – is provocative. Insofar as the evangelists let him speak in his own voice, Jesus refers in many places, but completely in line with the Old Testament vision (Dan. 7:13–14), to the ‘Son of Man’ as the Messiah, whom all peoples, nations and languages will one day serve. In his apocalyptic predictions, Jesus refers to the coming of the Son of Man in the third person (Matt. 24:25–44; Mark 13:24–27; Luke 12:40; 17:22–37). While the Synoptic Gospels only hint, from the point of view of the author, at the identity of Jesus with the Son of Man in a few places (Matt. 8:20; Luke 6:22), the Gospel according to John makes this equation unswervingly and consistently (John 3:14–18; 5:27).13
In his home town of Nazareth, where no one was willing to accept him as a prophet, Jesus presented himself as the one sent and anointed by the Lord, referring to his predecessor Isaiah (John 6:1-13): ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free’ (Luke 4:18). This remark probably best captures the social commitment and self-image of the itinerant preacher, exorcist and faith healer from northern Palestine, who tended to avoid the cities and recruited his followers mainly among the rural population of the poor villages of Galilee.14 Some historians emphasize the social-ethical tenor of his message, which, coupled with the eschatological expectation of the approaching kingdom of God, may have acquired a social-revolutionary resonance among his addressees from the impoverished lower classes. Resentment of the Roman occupation, especially of the payment of taxes to the Roman emperor, which contradicted the traditional theocratic ideas, may have played a role. In any case, the original message seems to have had political connotations – connotations that Christianity immediately shed as it spread to the predominantly urban and socially mixed populations of the Hellenistic Roman Empire.15
Jesus was an awakened spirit who, like many prophets before him, radicalized the message of salvation in the light of the imminent expectation of the kingdom of God in order to shake his brothers and sisters in faith out of the rigid routines of their lives and lead them to repentance. As a follower of the baptismal sect of John the Baptist, Jesus had the appropriate symbolic instrument to mark such a caesura of rebirth. With baptism, the Christian community sealed the repentant sinner’s decision to break with his former life; at the same time, the forgiveness of sins was associated with this rite of a new beginning. Conversion in the sense of a radical awakening to a new life was unknown to pagan antiquity. In contrast, ‘conversion’ in the sense of joining the synagogue community had been a recognized practice in Judaism since the Babylonian exile and subsequently under the conditions of the diaspora. But such ‘proselytes’ did not play a major role and did not coalesce into a religious movement, as happened in the time of John and Jesus.16 With the collective practice of baptism, which began in a sense as an echo of Jesus’s call to ‘follow me’, Jesus and his disciples radicalized the scope and meaning of the conventional model of conversion.
The effectiveness and appeal of Jesus’s teachings probably had little to do with the fact that they were authenticated by his systematic miracle working;17 for the widespread belief in the plausibility, indeed the self-evidence, of reports of miracles in antiquity was shaken only much later, with the consolidation of modern natural science during the European Enlightenment.18 Faith healings and exorcisms, miracles of nature and gifts, and epiphanies (such as the apparition of the risen Christ) certainly had the character of ‘signs’, but the habitual horizon of the lifeworld provided a self-evident scheme of interpretation for these peculiar occurrences, namely the influence of a higher or demonic power on empirical events in the world. It seems that minds were probably more moved by a doctrine which, through a radicalizing interpretation of the requirements of the well-known and long-practised path of salvation – that is, the ethos of obedience to the law – achieved an unprecedented deepening and intensification of this ethos and its requirements. We can distinguish three levels of radicalization. First of all, Jesus, like other prophets before him, turned against the mere lip service of conventional moral behaviour that is only concerned with keeping up appearances – what counts, on the contrary, is ‘the heart’, a good will and the right attitude (Matt. 6:1; Mark 7:15). It is at this reformatory level of ethical renewal that we find the remarks on the prohibitions of killing (‘if you insult a brother or sister’ [Matt. 5:22]) or adultery (‘everyone who looks at a woman with lust’ [Matt. 5:28]). Jesus wants to renew the meaning of the Decalogue: ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil’ (Matt. 5:17).
For Jesus, however, ‘fulfilling’ the covenant made by Israel with Yahweh at Sinai does not simply mean filling an ossified, conventional law with its original spirit. Covertly, as it were, his critique of the apparently widespread instrumental misunderstanding of post-conventional, law-based morality – namely, the confusion of just punishment with pre-conventional retribution (‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ [Matt. 5:38])– extends to a widening of the scope of the morality of law itself.19 The admonition to love not only those who love you (Matt. 5:46) seems at first sight only to follow the universalistic impulse that also resonates in the strident criticism of the ethnocentrism of an obsolete tribal morality (Matt. 10:34–36). Jesus undoubtedly sharpens the sensitivity to general laws that claim to apply to everyone without exception, rather than being based solely on mutual love for those closest to us. But in fact, Matt. 5:46 must be read in the context of a requirement that not only renews the familiar Old Testament commandment to love one’s neighbour, but radicalizes it by according it a new status: ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ (Matt. 5:43–44).
The polemical extension of the traditional commandment to love one’s neighbour (Lev. 19:18) is what first allows the opposition between forgiveness and retribution. But the rhetorical opposition cannot hide the really new element – namely, that the ethic of law abidance [Gesetzesethik] is now subordinated to the commandment of love [Liebesgebot]. The love of one’s neighbour is demonstrated by the willingness of those who have themselves done wrong to forgive those who have done wrong to them. Indeed, God’s forgiveness depends on people’s willingness to forgive one another (Matt. 6:14–15). In this sense, ‘true justice’ is fulfilled in love of one’s neighbour. This form of justice is not apt to resolve practical conflicts under existing social conditions; rather, love manifests itself –in imitation of the life of Jesus – in an ethos that should spread among the followers of Christ and rupture the dynamic of violence in human relationships through a reconciling way of life that goes beyond mere justice.20 Only love for one’s enemy and the willingness to suffer unjust violence without reacting violently can break the cycle of violence. An ethic of reconciliation must spread, fostering conditions of solidarity and awakening the willingness to resolve conflicts peacefully, before the standards governing the just resolution of conflicts can even come into play. In this radicalism, the Christian ethic of love can be compared to the Buddhist ethic of compassion. But because it was developed against the background of the Old Testament ethics of duty, it sows the seeds for a differentiation between two perspectives that Kant would later distinguish as dimensions of justice and happiness (of a life in ethical community under laws of virtue). Because of its origins in Judaism, there is a tension within Christianity itself between an ethic of law abidance, which aims at the just coexistence of the people of the covenant, and an ethic of love, which, by transforming the potential for aggression in society, is intended to create the willingness to settle conflicts justly. Both dimensions are still interwoven in the path of salvation of a religious ethos. Only when positive law has been differentiated from this complex, and the question of political justice has been brought into sharper focus, can the dimensions of justice and of happiness – as the goal of a moral way of life – be separated from the shell of the religious ethos as two profane aspects of practical reason. In this way, Enlightenment philosophy would distinguish the ‘just’ from the ‘good’ and define their relationship independently of the telos of eternal life.
Finally, Jesus’s desire to retain the laws, but to convert their religious and moral substance from individual exemplary commandments to principles, and to subordinate the ritual laws to these principles, can be understood as a further sublimation of the Jewish ethos. When asked about the most important commandment in the law, he mentions the love of God and the love of one’s neighbour in the same breath: ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul …” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these’ (Mark 12:29–31; cf. Matt. 22:37–40). Although Jesus is quoting the commandments literally from the Old Testament, this emphasis serves as a bridge to a momentous abstraction. The superficial meaning is that the commandment to love God refers to the first, the commandment to love one’s neighbour to the second ‘table’ of the Ten Commandments. But in this way, Jesus also takes up the above-mentioned triadic structure realized in Yahweh’s covenant with his people, which consists of two complementary relationship patterns. The noncentric but inclusive network of horizontal relationships of all believers among themselves is overarched by the nexus of vertical relationships of each individual with God, converging concentrically on the unifying point of reference. The individual reference to God and the reciprocal knowledge of each person’s individual reference to God, taken together, are constitutive both of the inner forum of conscience and of membership of ‘God’s chosen people’. But whereas in the Old Testament obedience to the laws of the redeeming god constituted conscience, now love for the reconciling god, who forgives human beings their sins, and the reciprocal relations of love between human beings ready to be reconciled take precedence over God’s justice towards human beings and human beings’ justice towards one another.
Whether Jesus can also be said to have radicalized Jewish teaching in the sense of universalizing God’s commandments beyond Israel to the whole of humanity is not altogether easy to answer. It is true that in the gospels references to the Jewish people already recede into the background considering the baptized ‘Gentiles’. Individual salvation is still bound up with the eschatological destiny of the people of the covenant; the coming of the kingdom of God is an event of collective significance. But the personal decision to be baptized and the relevance of the theme of resurrection reinforce the tendency towards the individualization of faith inherent in monotheism.21 It is also true that Jesus subordinates the divisive commandments of purity and ritual to the commandment of love and reconciliation. Nevertheless, it must be observed that the strictly universalistic interpretation of the divine law was only generally accepted as a result of the mission to the Gentiles, for which Paul had to obtain the consent of Peter and James in the original Christian community in Jerusalem. It was only with the recognition of Gentile-Christian congregations, which were content with the sacrament of baptism and no longer felt bound by the constitutive requirement of circumcision for belonging to Judaism, that Christian doctrine acquired an inclusive character, extending to all inhabitants of the oecumene of that time. Jesus himself still scoffed at the missionary intentions of the Pharisees; he probably saw himself solely as a reformer of Judaism. He sent the twelve apostles forth with the words: ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles … but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matt. 10:5–6; see also 15:24).22
(3) The Pauline interpretation of Christianity. What Jesus proclaimed according to the gospels is, of course, an essential element of the Christian doctrine that has been handed down since that time. But the canonized doctrine contains a further, equally essential component – namely, the theological interpretation of the death on the cross, which was developed only after Christ’s death. Although the gospels established a new literary genre, the synoptic books in particular contain an embroidered account of the life and activities of the religious founder, a phenomenon familiar from older axial traditions. What distinguishes Christianity is that theological reflection on the orally transmitted teachings of the founder played a role in the constitution of the tradition from the outset. Of course, the church fathers were already aware of the role of Paul; Augustine would speak of him as ‘the’ apostle. This Paul was a member of the Jewish diaspora who received a Hellenistic education; unlike the author of the Gospel according to Luke, he did not apply the familiar biblical interpretive scheme of a prophet who suffers injustice to the execution of Jesus. The Jewish tradition had provided the model of the unjust suffering of a righteous man as an interpretive template for the shameful death of a servant of God nailed to the cross for treason.23 Paul, on the other hand, understands the Easter event as a theological challenge. The identification of Jesus with the Son of Man inspires him to a literal interpretation of divine sonship. This idea, which would later give rise to the problem of the triune God but which held nothing objectionable for Paul, forms a bridge to the scandalous idea of the vicarious expiatory death [Sühnetod] through which God, in the incarnated figure of his son, takes upon himself the sins of humankind: ‘But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ’ (Eph. 2:4–5).
The mythical origin of the idea of the ‘sacrificial death’24 is no more objectionable to Paul than the idea of the Trinity.25 For he quite naturally sees himself as a Jew and not as an apostle of a new religious doctrine when he understands the transmitted words of Jesus as a radical renewal of Judaism and, in the light of this radicalization, invests the death of the Son of Man on the cross with a revolutionary meaning –but one that is in no way intended to rupture the tradition of the Hebrew Bible. He was probably largely unaware of the explosive effect of the Christian belief in the Trinity; and a fortiori he could have no inkling of the historical consequences of the break in continuity that would emerge in Christian anti-Semitism: ‘It is a continuing tragedy for Christian theology that in the course of its history it lost this awareness of its permanent rootedness in the religious history of Israel, that it itself insistently promoted the thesis of the replacement of the synagogue by the church and thus became complicit in anti-Semitism and its murderous consequences.’26 Paul still sees himself as an interpreter of traditional doctrine, even when he interprets the dramatic events in Jerusalem as death and resurrection and sums up the content of the gospel in the following words: ‘Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, … he was buried, and … he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures’ (1 Cor. 15:3–5). This dialectic of Good Friday and Easter became constitutive for Christian doctrine, as is shown by the fact that, of the twenty-seven titles in the New Testament, thirteen are linked to the name of Paul (moreover, Acts of the Apostles was written by one of his disciples).
On the other hand, Paul’s intention in writing his letters was not that they should be included in the canon of holy texts; rather, the ‘Apostle to the Gentiles’ only wanted to set his extensive network of congregations on the right dogmatic path and to dissuade them from heresy.27 This testifies to the intention of a theologian who reflexively classifies and posthumously rationalizes a salvific event that could not yet be deduced from Jesus’s own words. Certainly, Paul shares with Peter the canonical status conferred upon him as a theologian by the ecclesiastical tradition. But Peter, ‘the rock’, owes this distinction not only to his authority as a disciple and witness of the resurrection, but above all to the ecclesiastical-historical significance of his – only retrospectively established – role as the first Bishop of Rome; Paul, on the other hand, owes his authority not only to the success of his missionary activity, but above all to the ‘light’ of his preaching and writing, that is, to his theology.28 Paul’s theology is based on a completely original grace-based conception of faith in the expiatory death of Christ (a); he universalizes the divine promise of salvation without questioning the primacy of Israel in the history of salvation (b); and he shifts the caesura of the new beginning from the messianic end of time to the present age, which began with the appearance of Jesus (c). Finally, probably under gnostic influence, he constructed a notion of salvation history that has raised the question of the syncretism of Christian doctrine (d).
(a) Central to Pauline theology is the ground-breaking idea that, through the vicarious sacrifice of his son, God anticipates the active repentance of sinful humanity, which can achieve nothing by its own efforts: ‘But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8). This unmerited ‘anticipation’ on God’s part was necessary because human beings were too deeply mired in sin – far too deeply mired to be able to hope for forgiveness if God merely made a just assessment of their own merits. It is the unholy course of the history of the Jewish people, as described in the Bible itself, that leads the Jew Paul to utter the prophetic words: ‘There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one’ (Rom. 3:10–12). Humanity, bearing the mark of Adam’s original sin and mired in sin, is so weak, even where it lives under the law, that it needs forgiveness through grace. While the Old Testament demands obedience to the Mosaic laws, the more far-reaching principles of the Christian ethic of love – that is, love of one’s enemies and unconditional willingness to forgive – overtax human powers all the more.29 Even religious virtuosos cannot live up to Christian principles and are dependent on God’s grace. Humankind could therefore be saved only by God’s self-giving, and therein lies the promise of the crucifixion: ‘They are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 3:24). But if human beings in need of grace are so ‘under the power of sin’ (Rom. 3:9), the relationship between obedience to the law and faithfulness must also change. ‘Righteousness of faith’ – and this is the justification that can be hoped for through faith in the merciful God alone – takes absolute precedence over the righteousness of works. And with this the path of salvation itself also changes: ‘Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law; for “The one who is righteous will live by faith”’ (Gal. 3:11).
