God is dead" is probably Nietzsche's most famous sentence, as he analysed the events of his time and took a critical view of the Christian church. When Friedrich Nietzsche speaks of the death of God, he means that the idea of a God seems implausible in the modern world.
Today's generation - and even the previous generation - is said to be disinterested in and indifferent to religion, if not outright rejecting it. For me, as a frequent reader, it is striking that fiction makes use of religious motifs. Religious motifs can be found in many books that I have read, apart from specialised literature. This is particularly noticeable in crime novels, but this is a different topic for this event, in which we deal with questions of literature and media. There are a lot of them - the list of titles alone would exceed my speaking time here.
I would like to go into more detail on a few that seem to me to be groundbreaking in order to bring a common thread into my lecture. In particular, I would like to refer to some of Joseph Bernhart's works that are related to my dissertation on a similar topic, which I am currently working on. This is the reason why the name Joseph Bernhart, which may have been completely unknown to you until now, will be heard frequently. He is a man whose pioneering thoughts and works have received far too little attention to date.
Religion and technology
To begin with, however, please accompany me on a short journey through various epochs of literature and their connection to religion or religious motifs.
In the early Middle Ages, until around the end of the Carolingian Empire (911), literature consisted almost exclusively of religious literature, written in Latin, which was intended to convey the Christian doctrine of faith. This was soon followed by German translations of religious texts such as the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, confessions and baptismal vows for the people. Bible and legend poems, rhyming sermons and, above all, Marian poetry were literary companions during this spiritual period. Examples include Williram's paraphrase of the Song of Songs, dated to around 1061, and the attempt at a memento mori by Heinrich von Melk, written around 1160, the latter of which is already based on courtly poetry and contains elements of minnesong.
Wolfram von Eschenbach's best-known verse novel of Middle High German courtly literature, Parzival, which was written between 1200 and 1210, is steeped in religious motifs: For it is only when Parzival has put aside greed and learnt humility that he succeeds in redeeming the Fisher King by asking the right question. According to the Middle High German dictionary Lexer, diemuot (diemüete or dêmuot) also means condescension, mildness and modesty.
The enormous influence of the Church in the Middle Ages can be seen in the literature of the late Middle Ages in the two most influential schools of thought: scholasticism, one of the main works of which was Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, written in the 13th century, and mysticism. The outstanding Meister Eckhart should be mentioned here.
While the Middle Ages were seen as a time of dark superstition, the people of the 18th century in the Age of Enlightenment now wanted to bring light into this darkness that had lasted for centuries. Immanuel Kant's answer to the question: "What is Enlightenment?" in the December 1784 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift seems to be easy for everyone to understand: Man should free himself from his self-inflicted immaturity and come of age. Have the courage to think for yourself. "Have the courage to use your own intellect!" became the leitmotif of the 18th century. The Prussian censorship authorities considered his writings to be incompatible with the prevailing power structures and the Bible. Schiller, Voltaire, Rousseau and Lessing are representatives of this period, whereby Lessing must already be categorised as belonging to the movement of sensibility resulting from the Enlightenment. It is known that Kant was familiar with their writings and corresponded with them. Kant's influence on philosophy and intellectual history should not be neglected. Joseph Bernhart also refers to this philosopher, particularly in his criticism of technology.
In some eras, such as the Empfindsamkeit or the Vormärz, the confrontation with religion played a constitutive role. In particular, odes and elegies were written. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, in particular, characterised the literature of the Empfindsamkeit period with a religiousness close to nature, as exemplified by the epic poem Messiah (1748-1773). Some literary genres, such as the baroque tragedy or the medieval passion plays, some of which you may have seen in Oberammergau this year, cannot be understood without their religious context.
In modern German literature, in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta disagree on the question of the relationship between spirit and nature. Naphta is of the opinion that nature is completely free of spirit. Settembrini, on the other hand, is of the opinion that nature itself is spirit. The arguments between the two, often in the context of Nietzsche, also include discussions about religion, among many others. Leo Naphta is of Jewish origin, converted to Christianity and has found a home in the Jesuit order, while Settembrini appears as a spokesman for democracy and progress. Religious motifs can be found in many of Mann's works. Just think of Joseph and his brothers, or the novella Death in Venice.
The literature of modernism/postmodernism, to which I also count Max Frisch, is dedicated, especially in the period after the Second World War, to highly praised technology, with the help of which it should be possible to revitalise the economy and regain the quality of life lost during the war as quickly as possible - and even improve it. The changing zeitgeist accelerated this development of technological optimism.
Max Frisch's Homo Faber is a classic school read, published in 1957. Faber, the protagonist, is an engineer with a pronounced rationalist view of the world. Typical of the time, he says: "We don't need so many people any more. It would be wiser to raise the standard of living". After an accident, when he has to make an emergency landing in the desert with his aeroplane, this world view begins to waver for the first time. Since ancient times, the anthropological term "homo faber" has referred to man as a craftsman, as a tool-making being. Whether the character in the novel can free himself from his technology-fixated world view remains an open question and is disputed by critics. The following passage is said to be found in one of Frisch's diaries: "We can do what we want, and the only question is what we want; at the end of our progress, we stand where Adam and Eve stood; all that remains is the moral question."
The fear that we have long since allowed ourselves to be taken over by machines, that robots are beginning to undermine our self-determination in everyday life, gradually but with ever more threatening consequences, not only raises the question of whether humans and machines will soon merge, or whether machines will even replace humans, who could soon no longer be the "crown of creation". Where are we on the scale right now, and how much further can we go? What actually makes humans human now? If machines become more and more human-like, are they still machines? Is it possible to optimise body and mind to such an extent that we might even achieve immortality? Advocates certainly see a possibility in the use of computer chips or artificial organs in the human organism. Of course, this raises a number of ethical and political questions.
In his utopia New Atlantis, which only appeared posthumously in 1627, Francis Bacon equated the development of technology to master nature with the completion of divine creation on earth, in which scientists of the early modern era - right up to Charles Darwin - also sought proof of God's rational plan.
Religion and technology in Joseph Bernhart
Joseph Bernhart, of Swabian origin, was born in Ursberg in 1881, ordained a priest in 1904, but married in a civil ceremony in 1913 and died in 1969 after an eventful life. The critical theological thinker and writer reflected on the curse and blessing of technology. Der technisierte Mensch is a booklet of just 47 pages, which I would like to discuss in more detail below, packed with knowledge, forebodings of developments and warnings. It was published in 1946, but he seems to have been thinking about this explosive topic as early as 1932, as can be seen from his unpublished notes in his estate, which can be found in the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
Deus ex machina is the title of a fragment on the eschatology of technology. He writes: "The bad tragedians have incurred the ridicule of Socrates for all time. They take refuge, he says, in machines when they are embarrassed, and call upon the gods to solve their play. Deus ex machina is the name of the Athenian joke." For when there were unsolvable conflicts in Greek drama, these conflicts were resolved by the surprising intervention of a deity who, held by a kind of crane, hovered above the theatre stage and thus brought unexpected help to the otherwise unsolvable situation.
Deus ex machina: A machine god? Or a saviour in times of need?
At the time, Bernhart perhaps had no idea how explosive this topic would be, that in 2015, based on his play on words, a scary film entitled Ex Machina would flicker across the screens, about a Silicon Valley billionaire and people who mercilessly strive for perfection, and that androids would be swarming around, which, after reading Mark O'Connell's book Unsterblich sein. Journey into the Future of Man, published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2017, could well reflect the near future. For he takes us into a world that seems to have come straight out of a science fiction film, where, for example, heads are waiting in warehouses to be brought back to life, where humans have become cyborgs, where technology has created billionaires who are working feverishly to achieve what humans have not yet succeeded in doing - ultimately becoming immortal. "A digital eclipse," writes one reader in his review on Amazon of the 279 pages.
In connection with his critique of technology, Joseph Bernhart writes: "Deus ex machina is also the formula for the tragedy of mechanised man, a true, terrifyingly good tragedy, because its action arises from guilt and necessity at the same time. [...] [H]ould we have refrained, or even just refrained, from using the machine once it had sprung from our brains [...]? Was it not good, not human and natural, to raise the procreation from reason and element? But after we have raised it with all our strength, it stands before us, stands against us [...]". In Joseph Bernhart's unpublished notes to his booklet Der technisierte Mensch, there is a wonderful story from the parables of the ancient Chinese Dschuang-Tse, who lived in the 4th century BC: "The scoop wheel had been invented, and the farmers rejoiced at the relief of their daily labour. But one of them said he didn't want to know anything about it and explained why. Such a machine, he said, is a cunning tool, and if I used it, I would get a cunning heart myself - a machine heart - and so I would cease to be a good person."
We may shake our heads with a smile and perhaps call him a fool who would rather struggle than accept the help of this simply constructed machine. But somewhere must lie the origin from which the technology that we have, in Bernhart's words, "grown up", or the way we view it today, whether critically or not, or as Bernhart says, the way we view it, has developed. Ernst Kapp, a liberal, wrote in 1877 in his work Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, which was republished in 2015, that technical devices are extensions of human organs. A hammer thus improves the effect of the fist and the telescope enables further vision that would not be possible with the naked eye. According to Kapp, technology is a central element of progress in civilisation. Not far removed from the story quoted by Joseph Bernhart, and yet already so close to the cyborg.
Religion and sustainability
In my search for clues, I came across an article in the magazine NATUR from 2016, in which the Anthropocene is described as a new age that has now dawned. This term goes back to the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Paul Crutzen. In 2000, the atmospheric researcher argued that the impact of human activity had reached a new dimension, thus justifying the definition of a new geological era. The author of the article, who refers to a study by the Free University of Berlin, says that the geological eras were previously characterised by typical forms of deposits such as chalk or sandstone, whereas now it is waste, dirt and exhaust fumes. "Every year, we produce almost as much plastic as the biomass of all the people living on Earth. Plastic can already be found in all depositional environments on Earth, from mountain ponds to the deep sea, and as a technofossil, it will become one of the most important guide fossils of the Anthropocene," says Reinhold Leinfelder, one of the participating researchers from Freie Universität Berlin. "The human signature will thus be detectable in all sediment layers," he adds. Therefore, a formal establishment of the Anthropocene as a time unit of Earth's history is not only justified, but downright necessary. Once again, I would like to refer to Max Frisch. Namely, to his little-noticed late work Man Appears in the Holocene, which seems particularly plausible after Paul Crutzen's proposal to designate a new geological era as the Anthropocene.
The connection between religion and criticism of technology is understandable. But what about sustainability, which, like religion, should also be part of my search for clues? If we continue to follow the thread that runs from religion to criticism of technology, it leads us purposefully to the topic of sustainability. Increasingly sophisticated technology found its way into agriculture. Tractors made it possible to cultivate fields in far less time and with far less effort. The combine harvester performed two tasks simultaneously and milking machines made it possible to milk far more cows in the same amount of time than by hand. All these things led to mechanisation in the agricultural sector. These machines were expensive to buy and the urgent goal was to maximise profits if they were to pay for themselves. The consequences were particularly devastating in animal husbandry. The animals were kept in ever smaller spaces. Widow Bolte's chickens scratching in the backyard is a rare spectacle these days. The relationship between humans and so-called farm animals has changed. Today, we no longer see any of the livestock dying. It is mechanised, anonymous and isolated from the public. What was once an animal is now meat that has been cut up in no time at all, or 'chicken slurry' processed into funny animal figures that can't be cheap enough for the average consumer. Profit before animal welfare is the motto!
In his Spiegel bestseller We are the Climate, the second edition of which was published in 2019, Jonathan Safran Foer researched the fact that, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), livestock is responsible for around 7,516 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year and is therefore a major cause of climate change. Pesticides are used in agriculture around the world to grow fodder. Many are intended for the cultivation of soya and maize, because the many animals on intensive farms want to eat. This means that these toxins end up in our bodies, as humans are at the end of the food chain. And the fact that we humans use 59 per cent of the earth's arable land to grow animal feed can be read in Foer's book, as can the results of a study by Johns Hopkins University, which states the following: "If global trends in meat and dairy consumption continue, the average temperature will most likely rise by more than two degrees, even in the event of dramatic emissions reductions in all non-agricultural sectors." Even those who are not concerned about animal welfare are highly recommended to read this book. Because everyone will realise afterwards that we will not be able to get climate change under control as long as we continue with our immense meat consumption and the resulting intensive farming. The rainforest is being cut down to make room for the cultivation of animal feed and pastures or to produce wood and paper. The animals living there are forced to leave their habitat and move elsewhere - even to areas inhabited by humans. This is how viruses from wild animals are transmitted to humans or farm animals. So-called zoonoses, including Ebola, swine flu, rabies, malaria and the novel coronavirus. The fact that the number of zoonoses is increasing is primarily due to the way in which mankind intervenes in ecosystems and treats animals.
Familiar habit or familiar planet
We cannot retain our familiar habits and at the same time keep our familiar planet. We have to give up one of them. Alexis Carell, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his medical research in 1912, wrote about this in his not uncontroversial book Der Mensch (Man), published in 1955, which reveals its proximity to National Socialism. However, he is right to call for a new human being, because: "As long as he is surrounded by the security, beauty and mechanical wonderland created by technology, he cannot understand how urgent the need for intervention is. He does not really realise that [sic] he is degenerating: so why should he make an effort and change his habits of being, thinking and living?" And he concludes: "We must set out and move forward, we must shake off the yoke of the blind rule of technology and really grasp the diversity and richness of our nature. [...] In a world that is not made for us, because it stems from an error of our reason and from ignorance of our true nature. We cannot find our way into such a world through adaptation, so all that remains for us is to rebel against it."
As Joseph Bernhart warns in his book Der technisierte Mensch, man has allowed the reins to be taken out of his hands, whereby technological progress has taken on a life of its own and its rapid development can no longer be stopped. Anyone who believes that nature can be 'cancelled out' by technology in order to reproduce it at a supposedly higher level has misinterpreted Hegel's words. Bernhart goes on to lament: "It cannot be lamented enough that all the conquest of nature and the overcoming of time and space through science has deafened us to the deepest language of creation. But this language is a single sigh for redemption and the return of the original state of the first power and joy, to which God's 'Become'! [Gen 1:3] has called them to." Since Joseph Bernhart wrote down his thoughts, both the belief in science and mechanisation have progressed and taken up a lot of space.
It's like Goethe's sorcerer's apprentice. The spirits we called upon are growing over our heads and we are no longer in control. Not only humans are affected by this, but animals also suffer from 'progress'. Apart from environmental protection, intensive farming is torture for the animals exploited in this way, something that only seems to have filtered through to the general public in recent years. Prompted by a letter written in the winter of 1940 by the priest Christoph Kaiser from Walchensee in the Allgäu region, who was almost desperately asking himself why the game in the mountains had to suffer so much in the harsh winter months, and who asked Joseph Bernhart for his opinion on this subject, the theologian Joseph Bernhart also thought about these creatures of God and summarised his thoughts in his book Die unbeweinte Kreatur (The unlamented creature), published in the early 1960s. Driven by the question of theodicy, he attempts to clarify the suffering of animals by taking a very close look at the role of animals in creation and the ensouling of the entire earth's population. The answer to the question of the why of suffering was denied to Bernhart - and will remain open in the future.
Currently, religion is no longer naturally identified with the raised index finger of theological dogmatism or Christianity, no, Jewish affiliation, Islamic piety and spiritual knowledge in general can now be found in literature, whereby the term "sustainability", which has now become a buzzword and almost a guiding principle in politics, business and science, is closely linked to religion, The term "sustainability", which has now become a buzzword, almost a guiding principle in politics, business and science, is closely linked to religion, because it is really about nothing other than the mission of creation, packaged in the form of a just civilisation and economic model that bears responsibility for being just to the inhabitants of the earth living today and in the future.
One of my students recently handed in his written contribution to a discourse on sustainability with the spelling mistake "reverberation". Perhaps he is right about the derivation of the word, because we should always make sure that the footprint we leave on this world, our reverberation, makes it possible for future generations to lead a good life on this planet. Perhaps, like Parzival once did, we will succeed with a little more humility. May literature help us in this endeavour!
