By PETER SLOTERDIJK*
Author's introduction to the newly edited book
Preliminary observation
As the title of this book sounds ambiguous, it is necessary to clarify that in what follows we will not talk about the heaven of astrologers, nor the heaven of astronomers, nor the heaven of astronauts. The sky we are talking about is not an object capable of visual perception. However, since time immemorial, when looking up, representations in the form of images accompanied by vocal phenomena were imposed: the tent, the cave, the vault; in the tent the voices of everyday life resound, the walls of the caves echo ancient songs of magic, in the dome the chants in honor of the Lord in the heights reverberate.
The totality of the day and night sky has always resulted in an archaic conception of what is comprehensive. In it it was possible to think of the mysterious, the open, the broad, together with the protective, domestic in the same symbol of cosmic and moral integrity. The image of the Egyptian goddess of the sky, Nut, who, covered with stars, launches a bridge inclined forward over the earth, offers the most beautiful emblem transmitted from Antiquity of the protection offered by something that encompasses. Thanks to the reproduction of this image, the sky is also present inside sarcophagi. A dead person who opened his eyes inside the sarcophagus would have the company of the goddess looking at a beneficent open space.
In the course of secularization, the sky lost its importance as a cosmic symbol of immunity and became, then, the epitome of voluntariness, in which, little by little, human intentions cease to resonate. The silence of infinite spaces begins to provoke metaphysical terrors in thinkers who listen to the void. Heinrich Heine, in his verse narrative Germany, a winter's tale (1844), he still tinged this tendency with fine irony, when he decided to leave the sky at the mercy of the angels and sparrows, about which a girl sang the “old song of renunciation” to the sound of the harp.
Charles Baudelaire, in turn, in Evil flowers (1857), produced the image of a neo-Gnostic panic typical of prisoners, when describing the sky with a black lid placed over a large pot, in which the vast invisible humanity was cooking.
Detail from the Greenfield papyrus (10th century BC). Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The sky goddess, Nut, bows over the earth god, Geb (lying down), and the air god, Shu (kneeling). Egyptian representation of heaven and earth.
Considering the opposite diagnoses of the poets, it is advisable to listen to opinions from third parties and others. What we intend, in what follows, is to talk about communicative, luminous skies that invite raptures, because, corresponding to the task of poetological enlightenment, they constitute zones of common origin of gods, verses and pleasures.
GodSeS in the theater
“Deus ex machina, deus ex cathedra and without parables he said nothing to them” (Matthew 13, 34)
The link between representations of the world of the gods and poetry is as old as the beginning of the European tradition; dates back to the oldest written sources of civilizations around the world. Anyone who remembers the timeless ripple of Homer's verse will know how the poet makes the Olympic gods deliberate on the fates of the combatants on the plain of Troy. He makes the celestials speak bluntly, not always with the composure expected of beings of their level.
Even at the beginning of Odyssey one hears how Zeus takes the floor to disapprove of his daughter Athena's willful manifestations. He speaks majestically to her: “My daughter, what word has escaped the barrier of your teeth?”[I] Not even the first of the inhabitants of Olympus can, out of the blue, order a goddess, who is responsible for wisdom, to remain silent. To express his indignation, the father of the gods needs to make a rhetorical effort and even resort to poetic formulas.
Can it be said that Homer was the poet who brought gods who make poetry into the world? Whatever the answer to this tricky question, as poets Homer's gods would have acted only in a dilettante way, insofar as poetry is a craft that needs to be studied, despite the rumor of the wonders wrought by unlearned inspiration. Persevere in the position of beloved spoke in favor of the Olympic aristocracy. No power in the world could have forced a practicing god to learn a craft until he achieved the degree of mastery.
The Olympic-type gods of ancient Greece behave towards the world, most of the time, like distracted spectators. They do not interfere in earthly actions any more than civilians who accompany an army out of curiosity or fun tend to do; they watch the wars from their boxes like visitors betting on their favorites. Getting involved is not up to them.
They are like sorcerers who perfectly master both the sudden appearance and the sudden disappearance. Even when they no longer embody mere diffuse powers of nature, meteorological phenomena and driving forces of botanical and animal fecundity, but provide the personification of more abstract ethical, cognitive and also political principles, they maintain a trace of lightness. We could consider the Olympic gods as a society of oligarchs winking at each other as the fragrance of sacrificial fires rises to them.
The choice of their place of residence indicates that they are antigravity creatures. They have unlearned how to exist, how to be in the field of gravity with which their predecessors of the generation of titanic gods were afflicted. The amorphous strong titans were predestined to perish in the darkness as the beautiful ones conquered supremacy - except Hephaestus, who, among the gods, was the one with limited mobility, who as a blacksmith and limping workshop dweller never moved. made it entirely sociable.
The bearers of the Olympic crown, the people of second generation gods, have been restless since the fall of their predecessors with the premonition that, one day, what was defeated could return. The gods of this stage know that all victories are provisional. If gods had an unconscious mind, it would be engraved on it: we are spirits of the dead who have come far away.[ii] We owe our ascension to an anonymous impulse in life, and it is not possible to rule out that, one day, it will transcend us.
In all of this, one aspect in particular is important for what follows: that Homer's gods were speaking gods. And they were also what Aristotle said about human beings: living beings “that have speech”. Poetry placed them within the reach of human hearing. The higher beings may have communicated only among themselves most of the time, but eventually the conversations of the immortals were also heard by mortals – like horses listening to spectators' bets before the race.
Centuries after Homer, the phenomenon of speaking gods was welcomed into Greek theatrical culture. The Athens theater promoted performances in front of the assembled citizens that, due to their universal comprehensibility, favored the emotional connection of the city public. Democracy began as affective populism; From the beginning, she took advantage of the contagious effect of emotions. As Aristotle would later summarize, in the theater the audience felt “fear and compassion”, phobes e eleos, or better: trembling and pity, generally in the same passages as the tragic plays.
The commotions staged by the actors were experienced in unison by the majority of attendees, both men and women; they purged themselves of their tensions, participating, almost without any distance, in the pain of those torn apart on stage. The Greek language had a specific verb for this purpose: synhomoiopathein[iii], suffer in the same way at the same time. Also in the comedies that followed the tragedies, the people generally laughed at the same passages.
To achieve the edifying effect of the drama, it was essential that, in anticipation of the twists of fate on stage, everyone reached the limit together, after which no more questions were asked. The occult, the suprarational or, as they also say, the numinous filled the scene with their real presence. As this effect was rarely achieved and foundered in the mediocre plays of the post-classical period, the Athenian public lost interest. In the fourth century before our era, spectators who had sacrificed an entire day watching the boring performances of the theater of Dionysus were compensated with a theatrical obol.
Against this background, it is necessary to discuss in more detail an ingenious invention of Attic theatrical art. Playwrights (“crafters of events”) – still almost identical to poets – had understood that conflicts between people who fight for incompatible things tend to reach a dead end. In this case, there is no way out with human means. These moments were assimilated by ancient theater as pretexts to introduce an actor into the role of god. But, as a god could not simply enter the scene from the side as if he were a messenger, it was necessary to devise a procedure that would make him levitate from above.
For this purpose, the engineers of the Athenian theater built a machine that enabled appearances of gods from above. After mechanès theós: a crane was tilted into the scene, at the end of which was fixed a platform, a pulpit — from there the god spoke into the human scene below. Among the Athenians, the apparatus was called theologeîon.
Whoever acted in the amazing crane was not, by nature, any priest who had studied theology – there was nothing of the kind, and its concept had not yet been coined –, but an actor behind a sublime mask. He should represent the god or goddess as an authority that resolved problems imperiously.
Of course, playwrights had no qualms about acting in a “theurgical” way – for them, appearances of gods were feasible effects, in the same way that some Kabbalists, later on, would be persuaded of being able to perform theotechnical procedures, repeating the lyrical tricks of the Creator. Other Hellenic theaters were content to install the theologeîon like a kind of gallery or higher balcony on the back wall of the theater, in this case, renouncing the fascinating dynamic of the act of hanging inwards.
The most impactful of stage epiphanies occurs when, in the play Eumenides, by Aeschylus (performed in Athens in 458 BC), Athena appears at the end of the drama to intervene in the case of the matricidal Orestes, deciding the impasse between the party that wanted revenge and the one that wanted forgiveness in favor of the reconciling option – converting , thus, the vengeful Erineas in the “well-intentioned”. Something analogous is enacted (in the year 409 bce) when, in the Philoctetes, by the old Sophocles, Hercules, deified, hovers over the stage to convince the stubborn enemy of the Greeks, who persisted in his suffering, to hand over the bow without which the Trojan War could not, in accordance with the will of the gods, have an end favorable to the Greeks.
O theologeîon It is not a speaker's tribune nor a preaching pulpit, but an installation absolutely specific to the theater. It represents a trivial “machine”, in the original sense of the word, a special effect designed to capture the audience’s attention. Its function is not trivial: to transpose a god from the state of invisibility to that of visibility.
Furthermore, not only do you see the god, the goddess, hovering over the stage, but you also hear him or her speak and give instructions. Without a doubt, it is “mere theater”, but there would be no incipient theater if all actors, both mortal and immortal, had not been temporarily taken over by the assumption of representability. If the gods do not show themselves on their own initiative, they must be made to appear.
Effects of this type are addressed by the later Latin term deus ex machina, whose meaning, in dramatic technique, could be defined as follows: only a figure who intervenes from the outside can point out the liberating twist in an irremediably intricate conflict. At first, the fact that the god or goddess appears public blush [in front of the public] at the point where the plot changes, it is nothing more than a dramaturgical requirement; however, his appearance also represents a moral postulate and even the duty of the theater.
This could be called “dramaturgical proof [of the existence] of god”: god is used to untie the knot of the drama, therefore, he exists. It would be disrespectful, but not entirely wrong, to designate the god who suddenly appears as the provider of happy end. Desirable solutions, no matter in what field, are often only achieved with the help of higher powers, even if they are mere ideas arising from the presence of mind.
“Solutions” became memorable as providing services from heaven[iv]– long before they entered circulation as answers to mathematical tasks and business problems. Let us add here the observation that numerous opera librettos from the 18th century, a time averse to tragedy, could not even be conceived without the god originating from the machine.
With Greek theodramatics as a backdrop, the question can be raised whether most developed “religions” had an equivalent for the theater crane or the balcony reserved for superior entities. For now, I maintain my preference for the nefarious term “religion”, even though it is overloaded with confusion, speculation and assumptions – especially since Tertullian reversed, in his Apologeticum (197), the expressions “superstition (superstition)” and “religion (religion)” against Roman linguistic usage: he called the religion traditional tradition of the Romans, while Christianity should be called “the true religion of the true god”.
In this way he produced the model for the Augustinian treatise Of true religion [Of true religion] (390), which marked an era, through which Christianity definitively appropriated the Roman concept. Meanwhile, it amounts to everything that nullifies everyday common sense with suggestions coming from the penumbra and dark matter.[v], although there is no shortage of efforts to demonstrate the possible congruence of rationality and revelation, aiming to save the concept of religion.[vi]
Surely, the theologeîon, in the strict sense of the term, was invented only once and so named only once. In an expanded sense and with other names, the procedures to pressure the superior gods to appear and speak can be proven in multiple ways, if they are not omnipresent.
What dramaturgy dealt with on the Attic stage, in order to be representative of almost all other cultures, was nothing less than the question of whether the spectators of a solemn action always had to be content with theotechnical effects or whether, “in the end After all, the gods themselves” were present behind the magic of the theatrical spectacle. Since time immemorial, shamans, priests, and theater people have shared the observation that even the deepest emotion lies in the realm of the doable.
It is true that, to the extent that they did not succumb to the latent cynicism of their office, they themselves believed that the moving as such acquired a more consistent presence in the course of the sacred procedure. As with all “deep games”, ritual actions also have the possibility that what is represented awakens to life as what it represents. Even though the god “is close and difficult to capture”, his lack of clarity does not exclude the seriousness of our surrender to him and our immersion in his atmospheric presence.[vii]
Equivalents to the machine of the Hellenistic stages appear, in which gods of the most diverse origins, including those with a monotheistic constitution and endowed with strong predicates of sublimity, begin to fulfill the duty of appearing, that is, of responding to the call to condescension with the perception of human senses. In principle, the gods could have remained completely hidden, since, by their nature, they are latent, transcendent and removed from mundane perception.
It is no coincidence that they are called invisible. Above all, the underground gods liked to be discreet; they were content with the annual test of spring's power; they were staged especially among the Mediterranean peoples with reinforcement of the cultic aspect, as in the Athenian phallophores, that is, in the erection parades, which offered the city's matrons, on the occasion of the spring cult of Dionysus, the opportunity to carry huge phalluses sewn with scarlet leather through the city in a state of devotional mockery.
For the inhabitants of the beyond, the “appearance” could not have represented more than a secondary activity; Epicurus got the essential point right when he commented that gods would be too blessed to be interested in the affairs of human beings. His predecessor, Thales, even stated: “Everything is full of gods” – but this could mean very different things: or that of the hundreds of Greek deities there was always one providing service at the crossing point to the human world, comparable to an ambulance celestial, or that, on all sides and constantly, we are surrounded by the divine, without us, dulled by everyday life, noticing its presence.
Homer observes and passant that the gods liked to attend human banquets unnoticed and to meet solitary pilgrims[viii] – they are only recognized at some later point by their enigmatic luminescence.
From the epiphanic episodes, however they were interpreted, over time, cultic commitments resulted. As soon as the cults became stable, the gods fit into the ecosystem of evidence that circumscribed their space of manifestation.
Gods are vagueness delineated more precisely by the cult. In ancient times, they were almost always invited, not to say compelled, to “appear”, generally in places created exclusively for this, that is, spaces suitable for the epiphany that were associated with them as temples (in Latin: templum, restricted area) and at fixed times which, for this very reason, were called “festivities”. They fulfilled their tasks of apparition or revelation preferably thanks to oracles that uttered aphorisms or prophecies with multiple meanings or with the help of communications through writings surrounded by an aura of holiness; Some of them did not dislike the idea of appearing in lucid dreams, during a nap in the temple or on the eve of important decisions.
Their preferred condition was patience that bordered on indifference, which allowed them to tolerate the invocations of mortals. It was permitted to address them in prayer, shame them with hecatombs, accuse them, attribute injustices to them, question their wisdom and even curse and curse them, without running the risk of receiving immediate answers.[ix] The gods could afford to pretend they didn't exist. Thanks to his abstinent stance, the excessively invoked heaven migrated through the ages.
Finally, those who were invoked too much also made themselves known through personal incarnation: sometimes they took the liberty of resorting to apparent bodies that came and went as they pleased. Or they condensed themselves, “in the fullness of time”, into a Son of Man, into a saving Messiah.
After Cyrus II, the king of the Persians famous for his religious tolerance, allowed the Jews who had been taken captive to Babylon to return to Palestine in 539 BC, putting an end to an exile of almost sixty years, the spiritual elite of the Jews became much more receptive to good news of a messianic nature – Second Isaiah set the tone for this. Panegyrics to Cyrus, the instrument of god, gave rise to ideas of Messiah that resonated for more than two and a half millennia.
What Adolf von Harnack observed about Marcion, the proclaimer of the doctrine of the unknown god, applies to an entire world era: “Religion is redemption — in the 1st and 2nd centuries, the needle in the history of religion pointed to this point; no one could be god without being a savior.”[X] The code names “savior” or “redeemer” (sotér) had already been used by Ptolemy i, who had risen to the position of regent of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great; he instituted the cult of the “redemptive god”. His son, Ptolemy II, received the “name of the golden horus” that belonged to the pharaoh: “His father made him appear”.
Gods who appeared allowed their clientele to see, hear and, occasionally, read only what was necessary for their guidance, bonding and instruction – as a rule, enough to maintain the “structure of plausibility”, through which the adherence of a community with a ritual nature to its cultural representations (in ancient terms: attachment to the customs of the ancients, patriot nomoi, mos Maiorum; in Christian terms: fides, “fidelity in maintaining what provides support”). Plausibility means here: the non-theoretical acceptance of the validity of usualities, including those relating to transcendent things.
The invention of theologeîon among the Greeks, he explained, with the help of a mechanical innovation, a dilemma that all superior religious formations had to grapple with. It highlighted the task of helping the beyond, the superior, the other – or however the supraempirical space, inhabited by powerful vagueness, is designated – to achieve a manifestation whose evidence would be sufficient in the world of human life.
The earliest stage of evidence from sensitive and supersensible sources appears in the form of commotion among participants generated by a “spectacle”, a solemn rite, a fascinating hecatomb. To produce such effects, older cultures often resorted to mediumistic procedures and divinatory devices – both of which offer hidden greatness opportunities to announce their intentions.
As a rule, those from beyond took advantage of the possibilities of appearance in presences induced by trance, occasionally through frenzies in which the recipients went beyond the limits of voluntary self-mutilation. The transmitters on the other side seemed to call on their cult mediums to be messengers on the threshold between the two spheres. Opportunely, they made themselves heard through voices made by the celebrants; later, the babbling of the mediums was replaced by the serene reading of passages from the Holy Scriptures.
The gods gave guidance through the shape of a sheep's liver or the trajectory of bird flights – preludes to the arts called deciphering signs and reading. An early triumph of reading was celebrated by Mesopotamian astrology when it acquired the ability to decipher the position of celestial bodies in relation to one another as texts and powers exerting influence over human destinies.
The area of signals grows in parallel with the art of interpretation.[xi] The fact that it is not accessible to everyone is explained by its semi-esoteric nature: Jesus already reproached his disciples for not understanding the “signs of the time” (semaîa tòn kairòn).[xii] Certainly he himself was more than a constellation, and yet the star of Bethlehem, insofar as it was not a mere fantasy of Matthew[xiii], would have placed a sign in the sky on the occasion of his birth, which served as a guide to still popular Eastern astrologers.[xiv]
Ecstatic practices and divinatory methods of inquiry constituted procedures for confronting the beyond with questions that it could not leave completely unanswered. In general, it was assumed that there were interpreters capable of associating a practical meaning to the codified symbols. As recent research shows, in Western Antiquity political signology was practiced at a highly elaborate level – especially among the Greeks and Romans.[xv]
There was still no express talk of “political theology”. But for those who knew the signs, there was no doubt that the gods have their opinions on human affairs and take sides based on them, and that, in isolated cases, they even plan long-term political enterprises in which the collaboration of human actors it is indispensable – as in the indirect founding of Rome by the Trojan prince Aeneas.
No imperialism rises without the current positions of the constellations in the temporal sky being interpreted, both in the case of those in power and those aspiring to it. Added to them are advice from the underworld: “You rule populous empire, Roman, memento. "[xvi] From the mouth of his deceased father Aeneas hears the admonition addressed to him, the precursor of the Romans, to impose his beneficent regime on the people. Virgil, a contemporary of Augustus and in charge of his glorification, created with this order of domination a model of prediction after the event.
The modern successors of the augurs who decipher the “signs of history” are the historians capable of having an overview and who are dedicated to the task of presenting the blind succession of events as a meaningful sequence of a “world history”.
*Peter Sloterdijk is a philosopher. Author, among other books, of Critique of cynical reason (Freedom Station).
Reference
Peter Sloterdijk. Making the sky speak: about theopoetry. Translation: Nélio Schneider. São Paulo, Estação Liberdade, 2024, 352 pages. [https://amzn.to/3A57AnI]
Notes
[I] Homer, Odyssey, Rhapsody i, verse 64 (trans. Antônio Pinto de Carvalho, p. 17).
[ii] See Émile Durkheim, Die elementary Formen of religious Lebens, Berlin, Verlag der Welt Religionen, 2017 [1912], p. 427: “A great god is in fact nothing more than an especially important ancestor”, that is, one that goes beyond the scope of a clan. Durkheim's statement refers to the world of representations of Australian aborigines, mainly those from the Arunta tribe.
[iii] Aristotle, Rhetoric iii, 7, 4, 140a.
[iv] Including ransom money (lytron) that heaven pays for the resolution of the knot of sin in the human being or as a sum paid so that the human being can pass from servitude to the devil to freedom under God.
[v] See Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, Cologne, Jazzybee Verlag, 2014 [1841], p. 347: “The night is the mother of religion.” The generalized concept of religion emerged after the sixteenth century as a hybrid of the Christian world mission and Enlightenment anthropology. That assumed that all human beings on earth would be waiting for the salvific message of overcoming death. This draws from the fact that death is universal the conclusion that religion should also be universal. It is true that many people in different cultures buried their closest relatives with some care (religion), occasionally with valuable tomb accessories — which is attested, for example, by tombs of princes and children from the Stone Age; but this does not alter in any way the fact that most human beings, in most cultures, have had to be content with the simple “disposal of the corpse” (Jörg Rüpke) with a tenuous cultic profile.
[vi] Jan Rohls, Offenbarung, Vernunft und Religion: Ideengeschichte des Christentums,
v. 1, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2012.
[vii] in your work Kulte des Altertums: Biologische Grundlagen der Religion (Munich, CH Beck, 2009), pp. 18 et seq., Walter Burkert explains the concept of adelotes (lack of sharpness, indeterminacy) used by Protagoras, as a defining characteristic of the religious sphere.
[viii] Homer, Odyssey, canto vii, v. 201-205.
[ix] O locus classicus of a blasphemy uttered in the heat of emotion, in 20th century literature, is found in the second part of the tetralogy Joseph and his brothers, by Thomas Mann, when Jaacob, in his mourning for the presumed death of his favorite son, José, engages in excessive complaining that leaves him embarrassed after calming down: “With a silent feeling of shame he pondered his untimely attitude of revolt and dispute with God at the first outburst of lamentation and thought that God was absolutely not slow, but in fact elegant and holy for not having summarily torn him to pieces and for allowing the insolence caused by his misfortune to pass with tacit acceptance” (Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder, roman I: Die Geschichten Jaakobs; roman II: Der Junge Joseph, ed. and rev. crit. Jan Assmann, Dieter Borchmeyer and Stephan Stachorski, contributors. Peter Huber, Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer, 2018 [1933], p. 656).
[X] Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott. Eine Monographie zur Geschichte der Grundlegung der katholischen Kirche, Leipzig, JC Hinrichs, 1921, p. 17.
[xi] “Ethnoastronomy” discovers the arbitraire du signe Saussure's [arbitrary sign] in his own way, as if from the opposite side, that is, as arbitraire du signification [arbitrary of meaning]: the constellation of the seven main stars, called Ursa Major by the Greeks, received the most diverse names from other peoples: the ancient Egyptians saw it as “the group that led a procession; the ancient Romans, like seven threshing oxen; the Arabs, like a coffin followed by three mourners; more recent North American and French Indians, like a shell; the English, like a plough; the Chinese, like a court official receiving beggars; medieval Europeans, like the 'great car'” (apud Carsten Colpe, Weltdeutungen im Widerstreit, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 1999, p. 119).
[xii] Matthew 16,13:XNUMX.
[xiii] Matthew 2,1:11-XNUMX.
[xiv] in your work Der Stern der Erlösung [The Star of Redemption] (1921), Franz Rosenzweig made an attempt to destralize the motif of the sign in the sky, aiming to fit it into a continuity of Jewish orientations as an ethical-transcendent parameter in the History of humanity.
[xv] Kai Trampedach, Politische Mantik: Die Kommunikation über Gotteszeichen und Orakel im klassischen Griechenland, Heidelberg, Verlag-Antike, 2015.
[xvi] Virgil, Aenida, vi, 850. The phrase said by Anchises (“You, Roman, remember to govern the peoples under your empire […], spare the defeated and dominate the proud”) is the key word in the Virgilian prediction. It has retroactive effect for the transmission of the empire and fortune from Troy to Rome; it proves to be an anticipated effect for the transfer of the empire from Rome to Byzantium — and subsequently to Aachen, Vienna, Moscow, London, Washington. That the series of transfers of empire was not finished with the Virgilian operation between Troy and Rome, this is shown, among others, by Rémi Brague's book, Europe, seine Kultur, seine Barbarei: Exzentrische Identität und römische Sekundarität (Wiesbaden, Verlag Für Sozialwissenschaften, 2012).
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