Writing Sacral IR: An Excavation Involving Küng, Eliade, and Illiterate Buddhism
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298000290031101 |
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| Author | Stephen Chan |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
© Millennium: Journal of Int ernational Studies, 2000. ISSN 0305-8298 . Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 565-589
565
Writing Sacral IR: An Excavation
Involving Küng, Eliade, and
Illiterate Buddhism
Stephen Chan
It was a curious secularism that infused the eighte enth cent ury Euro pean
Enlighten ment. Humanist and scientific, it was simultaneousl y concerned t o
romanticise the individual who had been e mancipated from the medievalism of
religion. T his romanticism pro ceeded almost simpl y. Spiritual or sp iritualised
motifs were d eployed, either as metap hors to illuminate the human condition, or as
direct substitutes for received Christian ity: new anthro pomorphic figures in the
expandin g scientific cosmos. We see the remnants even today: masoni c symbols on
US dolla r bills; occasio nal references to Ro sicrucian faiths; the intellect ual maze of
Umberto Eco’s bo ok, Foucault’s Pendulum. We see also the additiona l, fussy
romanticisms—almost sentimentalisms—that the nineteenth century added: the
preRaphael ite knights of Arthur, abandoning their democ ratic court to search for
the holy grail. Throughout , there was the i dea that new symb olisms could act t o
reinterpret entire theologies and philosophies. Even Hegel was forced to admit, in
his prefaces, that the spirit of history reflected its met aphorical cousin, God’s Hol y
Ghost; and Niet zsche, to whom we will re turn, imposed upon his rea ders the figure
of Zarat hustra in place of Christ and the Ch ristianity that Fri edrich Nietzsche saw
as nihi listic, unable in i ts ‘truth’ anymo re to seem moral in the face of humanity’s
changed condition.
What of hu manity’s changed and global ised condition as the twenty -first century
commences? It is a world whi ch may be sa id to be g lobalised in the technological
sense, perhaps also in the sense o f capital movemen t and cap ital dependency;
although it is a step too far to assert that a ny form of global governance exists1 or
even that there may be, in th e Rwandas and Balkan s of the world, a ny sustained
global civil society.2 And, even if there is some sort of global technology and
capital valu es, it is a lot messier un der the surface than first a nd casual impressions
suggest.3
1. This has been asserted by Chris Brown, Understanding Internat ional Relations (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1997 ), 121.
2. See th e argument by Colin Gray, rebu tting Brown in ‘Clausewitz rules, OK? Th e futu re is the
past—with GPS’, Review of International Studies—Special Issue 25 (1999): 165.
3. A point eloq uently made b y Martin Shaw, ‘The Global Revolutio n and the Twenty-first Centu ry:
From International Relation s to Global Politics’, in Twentieth Cen tury International History, eds.
Stephen Chan and Jarrod Wiener ( London: I.B. Tauris, 1999).
Millennium
566
It seems only a s hort time ago that Cornel West was writi ng about the different
cultural and spiritual v alues of th e world and that, whethe r they were or were not
incommensu rable, they just clashed. Not only that, but the t hrust towards a
universalisa tion of critica l judgement see med essentially secular: the processes of
‘modernisat ion, ratio nalisation, commodificatio n and natio nalisation’ seemed to
some t o have d issolved the prerequisites fo r religious belief.4 It seems to me that
the no tional, that is the unst udied acceptance of secularisatio n, lies at t he heart of
any globalist view. Rational tech nology, in any case, is hardly the stuff of
sectarianisms: one registered intellectual prope rty dra ws profit from the entire
world. The pro blem wit h this, from International Relati on’s viewpoint , is that
religions an d religious value s still keep clash ing. International Relat ions (IR)
simply has no articulation for the rise of Islam. It c annot und erstand th e Falun
Gong in China. It has nothing to say about the contest between China and Tibet to
ordain and maint ain La mas. Nor has it said anythi ng abo ut fu ndamental
Christianit ies, the embarrassment wit hin the West’s own enlighte ned sense.
What, then, is to be d one at the dawn of a new epoch that seems so lacking in
optimism and t he possib ility of newness? Is it to trawl again within past po nds,
using weathered instruments, loving the familiar a nd using it to make the discip line
of IR familial? Or is it to comme nce a d esultory series of fragmentary
comparisons: find ing that parts of Buddh ism rese mble even Hume;5 that it i s
possible to compose ent ire books cont rasting, in a manner of sp eaking, Buddhism
with Kant;6 t hat in the theolog y of Zarathustra there was the archet ypical metaphor
for Model ski’s long cycle? Th ere will be more of Zarathustra bel ow. Before,
however, declaring the int ention of this essay, it migh t be rewarding to note so me
animation s for Nietzsche’s use of Za rathustra in the first place.
Nietzsche and Sacr al Philosophy
In a way, i t was ironic for Nietzsche to choose Zarathustra above Christianity.
Even if chosen for purposes of symbolism, Zarathustra’s message of an eternal
return was ec hoed in the later go spels of Christ’s resurrectio n, and even more so in
Christendo m’s labo ured anniversaries o f it, combi ning the basic liturgy with
antique, orp hic celebrations of rebirth. Zarathustra was bo rn from a virgi n as well,
but at lea st the annual Zarathustrian ri tual of jumping through fire has n ot been
adulterated with bun nies (nor the stories of his birth subli mated by reindeer,
dwarves, and men in red).
Nietzsche, it may be said, chose Zarathustra because Zarathustra was a blank
page. I mean this in three ways: first, the Europe of hi s da y kne w nothing of
Zarathustra, so Nietzsche did no t have to write a gainst p reconception a nd other
interpretati on; se cond, Nietzsche’s rend ition of Zarathustra co uld be stated as
4. ‘Interview with Cornel West: American Radicalism’, Radical Philosophy, no. 71 (1995 ): 36.
5. David E. Cooper, World Philosophies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 40.
6. S.G.M. Weerasinghe, A Comparative Study of Early Buddh ism and Kantian Philo sophy (Colombo:
Godage and Brothers, 1993 ).
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