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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 to be with Christ.”22

      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.

      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.

      *

      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.

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