"The Greeks" - excerpt from the novel "The Dark Messiah 4.0," adapted from the exchange with Hans Küng on a new theology

To classify first:

F. as in "Fehlfunktion" (malfunction), the protagonist of the novel "The Dark Messiah 4.0", is a misguided university professor.

His field of research is the new logic of the new economy and intra- and inter-firm collaboration. In this capacity, he also advises public institutions and heads an international network of experts on new organizational structures for counter-terrorism.

At the same time, however, his alter ego is "Dark Messiah 4.0," the spiritus rector of Terrorism 4.0, which he sees as a healing catharsis to ward off technological and societal aberrations and whose violence he - unlike the Unabomber - actually rejects, avoids as far as possible and accepts only as a necessary evil.

In chapter 8 of the novel, F. meets the "great theologian" in Tübingen, whose real-life model is Professor Hans Küng, and discusses with him the new theology and logic that F. sees as the basis for a recovery of society - after the catharsis of terror.

Excerpt from chapter 8:

There he sat. With the role model of his youth, the great theologian. Earlier he had said that in his youth Ratzinger and Robespierre were his role models, but it was never the Ratzinger of the second Vatican alone and especially not the misguided late Ratzinger, who had deviated from the path of renewal and whose function F. could actually see only in preparing Francis as an antithesis. He, on the other hand, the theologian of paradigms, the father of the global ethic, Ratzinger's congenial companion, he had followed the path of renewal in all consistency early on, even to the point of withdrawing his teaching license. And this path had made him a beacon for a dialogue of cultures that the leaders of the world's religions accepted. Now, however, in the last years of his life, the theologian had to witness the new "holy wars". He would have wished that his peaceful way would have been successful. But perhaps the way of the great theologian had to fail because it was only a way of the elites and he did not take the masses with him.?Had he and others been more successful, F. and the catharis of terror would have been unnecessary. But the humility in him had gotten out of the habit of asking what-if questions. It made him accept plans of the great planner, even those he had difficulty accepting because they seemed to him paradoxical intervention at best.?

The theologian had grown old, life and especially Parkinson's was drawing him. But he was still full of spiritual clarity and in some moments endowed with an inner glow that made him shine for moments. F. felt an almost affectionate attachment to him, the unknown, who until then had been above all an icon for him.??But now and here he was real. The icon had become human and humanized, "like you and me," this trivializing thought flooded into his consciousness for a moment. They had previously exchanged emails and an overlong electronic interview on the theology of paradigms. Now, however, he sat before him. They were now in dialogue. Over tea and pastries. In his large office with its heavy sofas and reams of books. In between, they stepped out on the balcony overlooking the unclouded beauty of Tübingen and the Swabian Alb. From time to time, assistants and assistants of the Foundation joined them, but this did not disturb the intimacy of the moment.

It was peaceful. Full of peace. Full of presence. Absolutely. "Shall we go inside". F. would have liked to enjoy the vastness and the last silence for a few more moments, but he took into account the illness and knew that this moment had another task, another purpose. So, as expected, he answered, "Gladly." For the Dialogue of Cultures, F. planned a complete work and the theologian's theory of paradigms was to be the foundation and at the same time the keystone for it. Hence the interview and hence his visit - among others! More than ever the Paradigmatic Theology was for him an undiscovered bearer of hope for a better communication ability of the cultures. Especially to understand "Islam", "the West" needed more than simple truths from amateur historians and exegetes. Even the media failed to interpret world events, because in condemnation or appeasement they repeatedly fell into sweeping judgments that at best still knew how to distinguish between Salafists and Alevis, but otherwise knew little of the global and historical diversity of religions. In Islam, there were almost all the developments in time and space that also characterized other religions, besides the backward orientation and orthodoxy that dominate today, a modernity long before the Enlightenment of the West, or mystical currents that also inspired mystics of Christianity. Rumi and Meister Eckhardt were brothers in spirit as were the rationals in religions. This was known to F. The great theologian has often been reduced to his impact on church and society, overlooking the fact that he had achieved revolutionary things in the core field of theology: Within the framework of his paradigmatic approach, he never saw religions, especially the great Abrahamic religions, as an unchangeable block, but rather illuminated the changing paradigms in religions and compared paradigms between them.?

F. was early aware of how much healing there was in it. For this reason he was for him the "great theologian", because he gave to old theology a new "meta-theology". And this new perspective had the power to change world politics as well. If, in retrospect, theologies had developed paradigmatically like sciences, then no theology could lay claim to (eternal) immutability. At the same time, we understand each other better if we can understand and systematically reflect on our paradigms: This was the conviction of F. and it was the conviction of the theologian. Moreover, if partly the same paradigms in different religions were closer to each other than different paradigms within one religion, how did one still want to justify "religiously" the clash of civilizations? Thus the paradigmatic theology of the great theologian could be a bearer of hope for a modern world society.

The interview, which they had painstakingly fine-tuned over weeks, had been completed in time for the meeting. F. had remarked to the theologian and his co-workers at the end how much this process was taking its toll on them, but F. knew that the work, the opus, would justify their joint suffering. What he did not suspect, however, was that the theologian now also valued the strange interview as much as he did at the end. "I have something for you" says the theologian. "About our interview, I sent something to my friends. See my letter".

The theologian pulled out a letter. F. read:

F. was full of joy. He would never have thought that. He thought that the theologian had at first only reluctantly surrendered to his persistent wooing. And perhaps it was indeed so.

And now this. There was joy in F. He knew which top-class minds would read these lines. Vanity, the devil's favorite sin, was also his sin, and perhaps this sin also connected him with the great theologian. But F. also knew that the new paradigmatic view could only be a first step.?Lifting the illusion of monolithic religions was an important step. But it was not enough. And that's why he was here. It was the second part of his Hidden Agenda.

Mankind needed not only a new theology, but also a new philosophy and a new logic, and this time it was not the philosophers and theologians, but the new technologies that prepared the revolution unnoticed by the normative of the factual of their new thinking. And this new thing was not less than the overcoming of the old Greeks and their all dominating Hellenistic tradition of the rational, which seemed irrational today. Only a new-thinking promised peace. In their email correspondence, he had tentatively tried to open him up to a trans-Hellenistic philosophy and theology. At first he - the great theologian, anchored for so many years in the classics - still reacted indignantly, rejecting any "trans-classicism." How could he be astonished at this! A no-name suggested to him, THE theologian, to think about changing the foundations of philosophy and theology, in an email! To endure this at the age of 86 was more than an imposition.?It was actually unacceptable.

He tried to open the perspectives as humbly and personally as possible.

"The term trans-classical was certainly irritating. It simply explains itself out of my work. Classical logic with its binary, unambiguous thinking and its A or non-A and the excluded third, and classical ontology with its absolute concepts: In our modern IT systems and in our models, we have to go beyond that to be able to represent the complexities more adequately. A terrorist is not simply a terrorist, and a customer is not simply a customer."

It would depend on that. Here Plato simplified with his theory of ideas and also Aristotle with his absolute, unconditional logic. It depends, that was for him also almost the central "relative" wisdom of the Cologne Basic Law, even if it had not found its way into the 11 wisdoms. It had left its mark on him, and not much more was said by the undiscovered scientific geniuses, minds like the mathematician Gotthard Günther, the companion of the greats like Maturana, Ashby and G?del, with his polycontextural logic as an alternative to binary logic, or the cyberneticist Magoroh Maruyama with his universe of relations and relevance as an alternative to the old universe of categorization. But they remained unheard.

The absolute and limited would be illusions, so F., one must see everything relative to the context and to the observer as a network in the network, whose borders would be defined only perspectively or relatively-relevant by the observer or by the polycontext. The Rhinelanders know that, he joked. Being a terrorist or a customer depended on the accompanying circumstances, and it was also not something imperishable, certain and unconditional, rather time-related, probable and conditional. It also did not depend on a single entity, but in the wholeness of the relative-relevant sub-network. A relative theory of philosophy would therefore be overdue. Its IT systems were already running ahead of philosophy, logic and ontology here, not only in state protection. They also used the new logic to optimize market observation and processing in his projects for large marketing departments. "We have to get used to pigeonholing people based on probability, whether it's Schufa or drone warfare," F. said, "But we should do that as intelligently or reality-adequately and humbly as possible." There were not the isolated people and objects and the idealized, absolute statements about them. Everything was one, a network and conditioned by the network, and the implicit patterns in the networks, their emergent spirit, and the environment determined the future, but only relatively, never absolutely, never imperishably, but fluidly, open to error and its overcoming. Its systems understood this. This was the new time for a new worldview, beyond all limits of the material and objects. Humans, too, would have to start thinking abstractly in interconnected capability networks, against their inituition and their simple pigeonholes, as his systems already did. Therefore, was it not generally also the basis for the paradigm of post-modernity, for a new post- or trans-platonic thinking? Wouldn't philosophy and theology have to follow now. Of course, he was aware that he was relativizing the centuries of footnotes of philosophy - as Whitehead put it - but also of theology as well as the centuries of success of the West.

The theologian was silent for some time after F. Then he got up with the help of his assistant and went to the huge wall with his collected life works. "I wrote about it". F. had never hoped that their conversation could go in such a direction. "How to think God today", unfortunately I have the book only once more, otherwise I would give them that too. "There have been major critics of binary logic and absolute categories before, and the East has always had a different perspective. Nagarjuna and Cusanus, read what I wrote about Nagarjuna's four-step dialectic of affirmation, negation, affirmation and negation, affirmation or negation. And about the "coincidentia oppositorum," the coincidence of opposites, in Cusanus. Perhaps this is a way". A way! As if electrified, F. scanned the text and what he read flooded his mind: "Strange to think that Christian theologians have not always eloquently glossed over their own tradition of negative theologians, but taken it more seriously: How much of dispute over doctrines, dogmas, definitions, demarcations would have been superfluous over the centuries." F. was paralyzed. "How much of deepened understanding would have been possible towards the foreign religions already at the beginning of the discovery of new contingents and peoples. And what would the conversations with Japanese Buddhists have looked like if the first Jesuit missionaries had operated with the highly reflective experience of God of Nicolaus Cusanus, whose writings they could have known, instead of with scholastic proofs of God." He loved the theologian for that message of salvation, which had escaped F., although he thought he knew his work.

When he himself still wanted to become a priest or even - in his modesty - president of the Curia, he was only concerned with freeing Catholicism from the aberrations of the Hellenistic, especially the Trinity. But here the great theologian showed a future in which a new philosophy and a new theology could become the promise of salvation for a new tolerance. F. had always loved Popper for criticizing the fascism of the Platonic doctrine of ideas and the elitist, anti-democratic philosopher-state in his Open Society. But how much more powerful was this perspective?! Democracy, a more just society, and the global ethic, would they not all benefit if a philosophy stopped idolizing the illusion of the absolute and the one truth? If a philosophy would much humbly recognize that in our limitedness we can always know and express only partial truths and partial aspects of the whole, and profit from diversity instead of demanding simplicity with fire or the demagogy of the mass media? The "Journalist" later described in terms of the new paradigmatic logic "that the true "Clash of Culture" is not the contradiction of the religious and cultural worlds, but the clash between the new and the old sense, the clash between the context as equalizer, as leveler and the contexts. The war between the ambiguous and the unambiguous.

The moment of euphoria alternated with a moment of shock. Was Pandora's box open? Where would still be the reason that carries? Would not the absolute, even the absolute of golden rules and categorical imperatives, be revealed as an aberration in ethics? The belief in any contextless deontology without respect to the interconnectedness of conditionalities and consequences, all illusion? Did the new logic have to be ventured here as well, or was the fall into the relativism of the utilitarians imminent? Could ethics really be no more than discourse and a product of the collaboration of the many erring? Beyond divine revelation, was human erring inevitable? The order in his mind disintegrated - once again .

He hoped for a moment of divine spark, but it failed to materialize. As so often. What remained was the destruction of certainty and many beloved patterns of his thinking. But maybe that was a good thing. Surely it was good so - "absolutely sure" he smiled into himself. Now, in great relaxation, he again enjoyed the coffee and sweets that the theologian and his associate offered him.?This room with the many books radiated so much of his grown wisdom, but at the same time also a great humanity, sometimes also a little vanity in view of the dominance, but who was perfect. F. could well understand this venial sin.

Of course, the great theologian was happy about the many successful books, about the translation into all relevant languages of the earth, as well as not. At the same time, he had something warmly grandfatherly, professorial about him, which the room also reflected. ... It was with great satisfaction that he left Tübingen, where he had actually only wanted to have a coffee. With the example of his youth. Actually, he had a third point in the Trinity, the Trinity, of his agenda, where it was necessary to overcome the previous Greek heritage. The Greeks had not only given mankind theology as a doctrine of God and logic as a thinking art. Their masterpiece, the crowning achievement was democracy and it was certainly not a coincidence that the conflict between democracy and fascism, between closed and open society, was for Popper a conflict between Pericles and Plato. Didn't we need in the end on the basis of new logic and new philosophy and theology also a new inclusive network democracy, in society, but also in the church? But he did not want to touch on this subject again. On the way to Cologne in the train, he knew that the day had given him more than could be expected. And he had no idea that his other companion, the "hoodie," would close the Trinity. The new network democracy, not inspired by the Greeks, but the Icelanders.?

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)