Divine Democracy
Political Theology after Carl Schmitt
MIGUEL VATTER
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miguel Vatter, author.
Title: Divine democracy : political theology after Carl Schmitt / [Miguel Vatter]. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020018270 (print) | LCCN 2020018271 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190942359 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190942366 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190942380 (epub) | ISBN 9780190942397 (online)
Subjects: LCSH: Schmitt, Carl, 1888–1985—Influence. | Political theology. | Democracy—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Christianity and politics. Classification: LCC BT 83.59 .V38 2021 (print) | LCC BT 83.59 (ebook) | DDC 261.7—dc23
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Acknowledgements
Introduction: Political Theology and Democratic Legitimacy in the 20th Century
1. Carl Schmitt and Sovereignty
2. Eric Voegelin and Representation
3. Jacques Maritain and Human Rights
4. Ernst Kantorowicz and Government
5. Jürgen Habermas and Public Reason
Acknowledgements
Many friends have generously discussed political theology with me and commented on my texts on this subject over the years: Hauke Brunkhorst, Gonzalo Bustamante, Julie Cooper, Renato Cristi, Mick Dillon, Jorge Dotti (†), Roberto Esposito, Andreas Greiert, Agnes Heller (†), Nicholas Heron, Lucien Jaume, James Martel, John McCormick, Cary Nederman, Diego Rossello, Quentin Skinner, Helen Tartar (†), José-Luis Villacañas, Samuel Weber, and Jessica Whyte. Not being myself a historian, I was lucky to have encountered early on two medieval historians who opened new horizons for me: in high school, Jack Ullman, who suggested I read Kantorowicz’s biography of Frederick II, and in college, Francis Oakley, who gave me my early training in the history of ideas. I am fortunate to count on the friendship and advice of Simona Forti, who read through the whole manuscript. The ideas found in these pages have been presented at several conferences over the years, but one in particular, “Sovereignty, Religion, and Secularism: Interrogating the Foundations of Polity,” Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, Munich, July 2018, stands out for the intense and productive discussions I had with some of the participants, including Bruce Rosenstock, Cécile Laborde, Montserrat Herrero, and Vincent Lloyd. I thank the organizer, Robert Yelle, for his generous invitation. Finally, I am grateful to my editor at Oxford, Angela Chnapko, for believing in the project. My greatest debt of gratitude, as always, is to Vanessa Lemm, who shepherded an amorphous book project to its current form, and to our children Lou, Esteban, Alizé, and Sebastian, who make it all worthwhile.
The germ for this book is found in a series of lectures I delivered in the graduate seminar of Roberto Esposito at the Istituto Scienze Umane, Naples, Italy, in November 2009; in a long paper I presented in September 2010 at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, entitled “Political Theology without Sovereignty: Some 20th Century Examples (Voegelin, Maritain, Badiou)”; and in the Introduction to my edited volume from 2011, Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism (New York: Fordham University Press). I consolidated my interpretation of Maritain in the 2013 article “Politico-Theological
Foundations of Universal Human Rights: The Case of Maritain,” Social Research 80 (1): pp. 233–60. Chapter 3 in this volume is a much revised and expanded version of this article. This book is anchored on the reading of Schmitt’s conception of political theology that I proposed in the 2016 chapter “The Political Theology of Carl Schmitt,” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, edited by Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons, pp. 245–68 (New York: Oxford University Press). Chapter 1 is a considerably revised and updated version of the above text. The interpretation of Kantorowicz offered in Chapter 4 draws upon some material from my 2019 essay “Liberal Governmentality and the Political Theology of Constitutionalism,” in Sovereignty in Action, edited by Neil Walker and Bas Leijssenaar, pp. 115–43 (New York: Cambridge University Press). Lastly, the Conclusion is based on my 2019 discussion of Blumenberg in “ ‘Only a God can resist a God’: Political Theology between Polytheism and Gnosticism,” Political Theology 20 (6): pp. 472–97. I thank all the editors and publishers for permission to use this material.
Introduction
Political Theology and Democratic Legitimacy in the 20th Century
The problem of democratic political theology
Political theology is a discourse developed in the 20th century that looks back on a millennial history in which western societies tightly interwove religion and politics, as political rulers sought support in religion and religions pursued political power. Have we left this past behind because we are now living in a secular age? Political theology takes a critical view on the claim that the modern Atlantic republican revolutions, responsible for the emergence of modern representative democracy, led to a definitive divorce of the political from the theological. But political theology is also a postmodern and post-secular discourse that seeks to reconfigure both religion and politics in a new democratic constellation.1 Nearly forty years ago, the French theorist of democracy Claude Lefort penned a remarkably influential article on the problem of political theology. He concluded that religion resists and insists in modern secular politics because it is ‘an expression of the unavoidable . . . difficulty democracy has of reading its story’ (Lefort 2006, 187). What makes it difficult for modern democracy to tell its own secular story is the problem of the legitimacy of power.
Carl Schmitt, who first coined the term, argued that political theology was inevitably implied in any legitimation discourse. Legitimacy assumes that the activity of ruling and being ruled, at some basic level, is good and should be sanctified. The idea of legitimacy intertwines political rule and spiritual salvation.2 For this same reason, Schmitt believed that power is legitimate
1 For one recent and influential narrative bringing these three elements of political theology together see (Taylor 2007).
2 Schmitt considered Jacob Burckhardt’s claim that power is always evil as the highest expression of atheism (Schmitt 1988, 57; 2007, 60). For examples of wide-ranging discussions of the connection between the exercise of legitimate power and salvation in political theology, see (Taubes 1983; Esposito 1988; Assmann 2002; and Kahn 2011).
Divine Democracy. Miguel Vatter, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190942359.001.0001.
only when it assumes the form of sovereignty and obeys the principle that salus populi suprema lex esto (‘the salvation of the people shall be the supreme law’). The global resurgence of sovranists and sovereignism suggests that this belief is gaining ground within liberal, secular societies. At the same time, if modern democracy is characterized by any single trait, it is surely the insight that ‘power belongs to none of us’.3 Theorists of democracy are sceptical whether there exists any real evidence or full-proof demonstration that justifies why some privileged individual or group ought to rule over any other. The regular deployment of democratic elections is not about choosing the true representatives, but about assuring that we can always get rid of them.4 This tension between the idea of legitimacy and representative democracy is the terrain on which political theology operates. Schmitt sought to understand and exploit this tension. He claimed that it gave rise to a congenital ‘crisis’ of legitimation in liberal democratic regimes. His first formulation of political theology was a plea to reinstate absolute sovereignty and maintain the monarchical principle under conditions of modern mass democracy. It led him to support the Nazi dictatorship.
The focus of this book is the development of political theology after Schmitt and in reaction to the emergence of totalitarian regimes.5 It puts forward two general hypotheses about this development. The first hypothesis is that after Schmitt political theology takes a ‘democratic turn’. It seeks to overcome the tension between democracy and legitimacy by displacing the primacy of sovereignty as the locus of solutions to the modern crisis of legitimation. In the western political tradition, the legitimacy of rule connects to democracy in two basic senses. Ruling is legitimate as far as it meets with the approval and support of those subject to it. Legitimacy therefore depends at some basic level on the possibility of unifying a group of individuals into a people. Schmitt believed that this unification required the representative to
3 See (Rancière 2009; and Ober 2010) for arguments with respect to ancient democracy. Lefort formulates the point as follows with regard to modern democracy: ‘of all the regimes we know, [democracy] is the only one to have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an empty place’ (Lefort 2006, 159). On the inbuilt demand for the contestation of power in modern democracies, see also (Pettit 1997; and Rosanvallon 2006). Contemporary political science has shown that there exists a fundamental indeterminacy about who is the ‘people’ that is supposed to exercise the supreme power in modern democracy. For some aspects of this debate, see (Rosanvallon 1998; Espejo 2011; and Näsström 2015).
4 See (Pitkin 1967; and Przworski, Stokes, and Manin 1999).
5 My study of political theology does not have a ‘comparative’ aspiration, much less does it present an ‘encyclopaedic’ overview of the ways in which politics and religion were combined either in western or in world history. It seeks to explain the interest and pertinence of political theology as a discursive regularity in contemporary political theory.
be sovereign. After Schmitt, the discourse of political theology orients itself around the task of developing forms of political representation that unify a people without or beyond sovereignty. These forms of unification can be either representative or direct; they can have a rational ground based on the public exercise of discussion and debate, but they can also have a mystical ground based on the exercise of charismatic qualities and ritual practices of acclamation. In this book I suggest that a consideration of this ‘political theology without sovereignty’ is particularly useful to understand the nonelectoral forms of popular participation that are linked up with the phenomenon of populism.
The other root along which legitimacy connects with democracy is broadly constitutional. Rule is legitimate as far as the laws and commands it issues are authorized in accordance with a ‘higher’ law. Legitimacy here is a function of legality or the ‘rule of law’, where the legal rights and obligations have the peculiarity of being somehow inherent or natural to the people rather than a product of the institutions that rule over them.6 Schmitt believed that the rule of law stands or falls on the authority of the sovereign whose commands are taken as law. After Schmitt, the discourse of political theology is more interested in the converse proposition, namely, in the idea that sovereignty depends on normative orders that underlie it and exceed the control of the state. In this book I suggest that this ‘political theology without sovereignty’ can help us understand the emergence of forms of constitutionalism that seek to establish a pre- or supra-political government over the state itself associated with the phenomenon of neoliberalism.
The second hypothesis is that the displacement of sovereignty in 20th century political theology takes two distinct paths: one follows the hegemonic role of Christianity in the western approach to the legitimacy of power and its relation to democracy. The other path takes its bearings from the traditions of Judaism and Islam as they flow into western philosophical and political culture in late antiquity and in the medieval period. Generalizing to an extreme degree, one can say that Christian political theology after Schmitt displaces sovereignty by pivoting on the idea that legitimacy is a function of the political unity of a people achieved through its political representation, as befits its Christological doctrinal structure.7 In this sense, from my perspective
6 I mean this description to be wide enough to include the idea of ‘natural right’ in the Greek philosophical tradition and in the Jewish tradition, but I also take it to refer to the Roman and medieval republican idea that peoples are products of their constitutions.
7 On Christian political theology as a discourse on politics that arises because of theology, see (Scott and Cavanaugh 2008; Cavanaugh, Bailey, and Hovey 2011; and Hovey and Phillips 2015),
what makes a given political theology ‘Christian’, in the last instance, is the focus on the ‘representative’ character of democracy. By way of contrast, and once again generalizing, one can say that non-Christian, alternative political theologies displace sovereignty by pivoting on the idea that democracy is a function of a people’s fidelity to a higher law, as befits a prophetological and messianic doctrinal structure. From this perspective, what makes a given political theology ‘Jewish’ or ‘Islamic’, in the end, is the focus on the ‘direct’ character of democracy.8
Argument and structure of book
Does liberal democracy require a politico-theological foundation? This book will not pretend to answer this complicated and controversial question head on.9 Rather, I propose to approach the problem by considering the following: if contemporary democracy requires legitimacy, and if legitimacy is a politico-theological construction, then the question of the possibility of a democratic political theology acquires substantial importance. For if it turned out that political theology cannot be democratic, as Schmitt initially surmised, then raising the question of the legitimacy of liberal democracy risks the conclusion that liberal democracy is in a permanent crisis or is
among others. Their approach to the discourse of political theology does not focus on the problem of legitimacy and government as I do in this book. Influenced by theologians like Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jürgen Moltmann, Stanley Hauerwas, etc., this approach to Christian political theology tends to assume that politics and theology are separate spheres with their autonomous logics. My discussion of Christian political theology, instead, takes seriously a point pioneered by the U.S. historian of religion Erwin Goodenough and the German theologian Erik Peterson, for whom Christian theology was always already traversed by Hellenistic and Roman philosophical, political, and legal categories (Goodenough 1969; and Peterson 1997). Thus, my focus is on Christian political theology as a jurisprudential discourse first, and a theological discourse only secondarily. What interests me are the productive tensions and exchanges between political theology and political theory. By political theory I understand a discourse that offers a genealogy and an archaeology of the legitimacy of legal and political orders.
8 I discuss the development of Jewish political theology in Living Law. Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt (Oxford University Press, 2021). Hereafter referred to as Living Law
9 For different attempts and strategies to address this question that refer to political theology, see (Asad 2003; Böckenförde 2006; Milbank 2006; Agamben 2007a; Gillespie 2008; Cavanaugh 2009; Kahn 2011; Lupton and Hammill 2012; Havers 2013; Kahn 2014; and Gregory 2015), among others. For a recent critique of postsecular claims about the religious foundations of liberalism and their normative consequences, see (Laborde 2017). Like Seyla Benhabib and Jean Cohen, Laborde also considers Schmitt’s political theology to lie at the basis of the postsecular critiques of liberalism. See (Benhabib 2010; Cohen 2013; and Laborde 2014).
caught up in a performative contradiction.10 So this book is concerned with answering the question: can political theology be democratic?
I argue that in the 20th century, several significant political philosophers answered this question by saying: ‘Yes, provided that political theology can discard sovereignty.’ Christianity, Judaism, and Islam contain teachings that can be employed to articulate a political theology without sovereignty: Christianity because of the message of universal love and peace expounded by its founder, Judaism and Islam because of their theocratic foundations, according to which the only real sovereign is a radically transcendent and ultimately unknowable God. But this remark is only the start of the problem, not only for the obvious reason that all three monotheistic religions also have been employed to offer a foundation to sovereignty. Rather, the more serious problem is that in order to develop a conception of democratic legitimacy it is not enough to reject sovereignty on ‘religious’ or ‘theological’ grounds. One also needs to show, positively, how the transposition of certain theological concepts and teachings into the sphere of law and politics leads to the kind of concrete institutions and practices that make up modern democracy. These are concrete institutions like free elections of representatives, legal systems based on the protection of individual rights, practices of government and administration, and a public sphere in which a public use of reason holds sway. For this reason each chapter discusses a major contributor to the 20th century discourse of Christian political theology (viz., Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, Jacques Maritain, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Jürgen Habermas) by pairing them with a fundamental political concept for modern democracy (viz., sovereignty, representation, universal human rights, government, and public reason). This democratic development of political theology means that the political ‘presence’ of God in the secular world is no longer figured by hierarchical and sovereign lieutenants like Church, Empire, Nation, but in a series of political institutions, practices, and conceptions of modern democracy that call into question the primacy of sovereignty. Conversely, by reconstructing the different ways in which a series of crucial political concepts are transformed when they become part of a discourse on political theology, I hope to show the overdetermined role that
10 See elaborations of this Schmittian trope of the crisis of liberal democracy in (Mouffe 1999; and Geuss 2001). For Weberian socio-economic arguments as to why political theology no longer has purchase on democratic legitimacy, see (Habermas 2011) and for analogous considerations, (Espejo 2010). But see later in this chapter on the persistence of political theology in Marx and Weber.
Christian religion and theology still play in contemporary democratic political and legal theory.
Chapter 1 discusses the origins of political theology in Schmitt’s efforts to refute Hans Kelsen’s monistic approach to jurisprudence. Kelsen rejected all dualisms between state and legal system. For him, the idea that the sovereignty of the state stood above and separate from the self-referential system of legal norms produced by a democratic legislative power was an illegitimate transposition of the theological image of God and His Creation into legal science. In order to answer Kelsen’s withering critiques of sovereignty, Schmitt makes a juridical recourse to Christology, arguing that it was no coincidence that legal science in the West began with Church law since its scientific character ultimately rested on the transposition of Christian theological concepts into legal and political ones. The chapter proceeds to discuss the contested question whether Schmitt’s own political theology is Christian in an orthodox sense, or whether Schmitt simply meant to defend Hobbes’s unorthodox idea that the legitimacy of the sovereign rests on its capacity to represent as State the unity of a People much like Christ is the Head of the Church as His mystical body.11 Erik Peterson rejected Schmitt’s attribution of political theology to Christianity because for him the intention behind Trinitarian doctrine was anti-sovranist: it sought to prohibit all identification of the State with the Church. Peterson tried to rescue the democratic credentials of the Christian Church. However, we owe to Giorgio Agamben the insight that a Christian conception of democracy employs the doctrine of the Trinity and a conception of the Christian Church as Christ’s mystical and political body not in order to abolish political theology, but so as to displace its discourse from absolute sovereignty to liberal, limited government.12 The subsequent chapters show in what ways the arc between Peterson’s critique of Schmitt and Agamben’s identification of the political theology of liberalism was bridged by other theorists of Christian political theology who, in a more concrete fashion, flesh out the connections between Christian theologemes and apparatuses of liberal democratic legitimacy.
Chapter 2 focuses on Eric Voegelin’s attempt to think about democratic legitimacy through a politico-theological conception of representation that no longer places the human sovereign at its apex, but instead ‘opens’ society
11 Against the hypothesis that Schmitt’s political theology is Christian, see (Galli 1996; and McCormick 1998). For arguments in favour, see (Meier 2011). For a balanced view, see (Kervégan 2011).
12 (Agamben 2011).
to the idea of transcendent truth once advocated by Greek philosophy and Christian faith. Following Peterson’s critique of Schmitt, Voegelin also believes that the representation of God in and for society exceeds the representative role of the political sovereign. However, for him the veridical Christian representative is no world-denying saint, but rather a freedom fighter against the temptations of Gnosticism encapsulated in secular, revolutionary demands for popular self-rule. This chapter then traces the influence of Voegelin’s conception of representation on the contemporary political science debate around the ‘return of representation’ and the rise of populism, best expressed in the thought of Ernesto Laclau. The chapter shows that contemporary populism manifests the Christian political theological belief in the impossible attainment of popular sovereignty.
Chapter 3 focuses on Jacques Maritain’s formulation of Christian democratic political theology that displaces sovereignty in favour of the primacy of human rights. This chapter traces how and why Christian political theology was at the forefront of the turn towards human rights that characterizes politics after World War II.13 I argue that in the face of the rise of anti-Semitism culminating in the mass extermination of Jews and other minorities, Maritain develops a politico-theological strategy of ‘anti-antiSemitism’ that articulates the Pauline focus on individual salvation through faith in terms of a new democratic charter based on the universal respect for individual human rights as the ground for the legitimacy of power. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Saint Paul’s Christian ‘universalism’ as the ultimate basis of radical democratic thought in Alain Badiou. It shows how Badiou remains caught within Maritain’s strategy of employing human rights to recognize human difference and plurality within a Christian faith in the universal equality of all with all that simultaneously undermines such recognition.
Chapter 4 locates Ernst Kantorowicz’s contribution to the development of Christian democratic political theology in his genealogical explanation for the rise of secular governmentality in modernity.14 Through a discussion of the intense debates in Anglo-American historiography of medieval political ideas from 1930s through 1960s, my interpretation of Kantorowicz shows that the medieval juridical use of Trinitarian doctrine replaced the idea of monarchic sovereignty inherited through the Roman Empire and
13 On the new historiography of human rights, see (Moyn 2012; 2015).
14 On the genealogy of governmentality, see (Foucault 2009; and Lemke 2019).
Roman law with a doctrine of liberal government that works in and through constitution-making. In contrast to Agamben’s hypothesis that democratic political theology is an ‘economic theology’ based on the faith in the providential order of free markets, I argue that modern governmentality works by constitutionalizing politics as a condition of possibility for the reduction of politics to economics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of recent sociology of law that defends the hypothesis according to which the rule of law in the West became a real possibility through the clerical revolution that established the legitimacy of the ‘constitution’ of the Church over against the power of the Christian emperor. My reading of Kantorowicz suggests, to the contrary, that the efforts to constitutionalize Church law were ultimately adopted by secular states in order to develop the forms of democratic governmentality without law that we have come to identify with global normative orders.
Chapter 5 reconstructs the development of Christian political theology put forward by Jürgen Habermas’s postsecular account of the communicative ground of democratic legitimacy. The focus of the chapter is Habermas’s claim that a democratic understanding of public reason—here taken to be identical with the basic apparatus for generating democratic legitimacy— requires a postsecular ‘translation’ of monotheistic insights and intuitions into ‘reasons’ that are also acceptable to a secular or atheist mindset. In giving such a postsecular translation of the religious tradition, Habermas identifies the basis of democratic legitimacy no longer in the ‘secularization’ of religious beliefs, as Karl Marx and Max Weber had done, but in a ‘philosophical’ conception of the universality of faith. The chapter concludes with a comparison between Habermas’s stance of ‘methodological atheism’, Ernst Bloch’s understanding of the internal relation between Christianity and atheism, Karl Jaspers’s idea of a philosophical faith, and Jacques Derrida’s hypothesis that messianic faith is necessary for democracy.
In the Conclusion I return to consider Schmitt’s claim that the ultimate justification for adopting Christian political theology consists in its being the only viable way to deal with the threat posed by Gnostic mis-archy, or the belief in the evil of power and political rule. Schmitt believed that this Gnostic doctrine motivated all modern revolutionary attempts to radically change society for the better and achieve durable social progress. In this last chapter I reconstruct Hans Blumenberg’s strategy in rejecting Schmitt’s construal of political theology of sovereignty as a function of ‘restraining’ the drift of the modern, secular age into increasing anarchy and disorder while at the same
time responding to the Gnostic challenge to political power. For Blumenberg this strategy was captured by Goethe’s motto nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse [against a god, only a god]. Opposing Schmitt’s Christological reading of the motto, Blumenberg’s interpretation shows a new appreciation for the polytheism and pantheism that characterized pagan civil religions. I situate Blumenberg’s interpretation within a republican understanding of worldly power that affirms its value insofar as it is oriented to the ideal of no-rule or non-domination and is institutionalized in the form of constitutional separation of powers. The discussion between Schmitt and Blumenberg on the meaning of Goethe’s mysterious motto stands here as symbol of the limits of all Christian political theology in defending democratic forms of legitimacy.
Question of method: Political theology and the debate on secularization
If the theorems of secularization were true, the discourse of political theology would have no reason to exist. But contemporary thinkers like Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas argue that modern liberal democracies are ‘postsecular’ forms of society in which ‘religious communities continue to exist in a context of ongoing secularization’.15 Schmitt constructed political theology having in view this coming postsecular society, and as a reaction to Weber’s and Marx’s theories of Modernity as a process of secularization that would render religion obsolete. In his classic work, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Hans Blumenberg established that the fundamental starting point for a treatment of political theology lies in the sociological debate on secularization that Schmitt engaged with Weber.16 Schmitt conceived of political theology as a contribution to the ‘sociology of concepts’ that Weber pioneered.17 He understood political theology as the study of the transfer of theological concepts developed within the Christian Church into the secular law and politics of the early modern states.18 Schmitt clearly intended
15 (Habermas 2003, 104). For an alternative vision of postsecularism, see (Taylor 2007; 2011).
16 For a good recapitulation of the debate between Schmitt and Blumenberg, see (Bragagnolo 2011).
17 The first three chapters of Political Theology appeared with the title “Sociology of the Concept of Sovereignty and Political Theology” in a 1922 edited book in honour of the recently deceased Weber, Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber
18 Schmitt presents political theology as ‘a sociology of juristic concepts’ (Schmitt 1988, 37, 42), whereby what is studied are the ‘fundamentally systematic and methodical analogies’ (ibid., 37) between jurisprudence and theology. This study gives rise to hypotheses such as: ‘the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology’ (ibid., 36), or: ‘the modern constitutional state
political theology as a discourse that would rework several signature themes of Weber’s sociology, including: the problem of legitimacy; the question of power as the monopoly of legitimate use of violence (Gewalt); and the process of secularization of Protestantism. But in defining secularization as a function of political theology, Schmitt in fact reversed and rejected the theory of secularization developed during the 19th century by French and German sociology, which receives perhaps its most notable systematization in Weber’s sociology of religion.
Weber’s sociology of religion contains two distinct, even opposite, motifs that are pertinent in order to capture the conceptual horizon within which political theology developed in the early 20th century. The first motif centres on an account of Modernity and modernization as a process of secularization.19 Secularization in this sense is allied with the idea of rationalization as a ‘disenchantment’ of the world through the expansion of means-end practical and scientific rationalities.20 The second motif centres on the charismatic or messianic characteristics of spiritual and political movements that bring into the world absolute, substantive value orientations or standpoints. The dialectical interaction of these two motifs determines the fundamental problem of Weber’s thought, namely, the question of how to conduct one’s life or Lebensführung. 21 Despite Weber’s comparativist approach to the phenomenon of religion, and his willingness to extend ‘ascetic’ and ‘disenchanting’ powers to all so-called world or axial religions, the central religion on the basis of which he builds his hypothesis of the secular rationalization of the world remains Protestantism. For Weber, Protestantism represents a paradigmatic case of inner-worldly asceticism that is ultimately responsible for both capitalism and positivism (as well as liberalism) or, in short, for ‘Modernity’ as we know it. Prophetic Judaism, instead, offers the principal paradigm for his reflections on charismatic authority.
The key concept through which Weber developed his account of secularization is the Pauline conception of ‘vocation’ (Beruf). As Weber famously
triumphed together with deism, a theology and a metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world’ (ibid.), or: ‘all the identities that recur in the political ideas and in the state doctrines of the nineteenth century rest on such conceptions of immanence’ (ibid., 49).
19 On the debate on secularization, see (Monod 2002; Casanova 2013; Gregory 2017; and Hunter 2017).
20 For a classic discussion, see (Habermas 1984a). On the typologies of rationality, see (Kalberg 1980).
21 On the question of Lebensführung as central in Weber’s thought see (Hennis 2000).
illustrates in his book on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this New Testament idea becomes ‘secularized’ by Luther and Calvin whereby it acquires the meaning of a secular or worldly ‘profession’ (Weber 1958, 207–210). What began as a messianic category in Paul ends up being, in the discourse of secularization, the doctrine that the salvation of the individual is no longer dependent on the Messiah, nor even on God, but is achievable solely by ‘following’ the path outlined by one’s worldly vocation.22 As Voegelin puts it: Protestantism offers a path to salvation in and through the progress of ‘civilization’, ‘the discipline and economic success which certified salvation to the Puritan saint’ (Voegelin 1952, 129). Taylor’s recent reconstruction of the Reformation follows Voegelin: ‘there were not to be any more ordinary Christians and super-Christians. The renunciative vocations were abolished. All Christians alike were to be totally dedicated’ to their salvation (Taylor 2007, 77). In the secular age, individual salvation would come about by an autonomous moral re-ordering of individuals (Taylor 2007, 27) achieved by adopting ‘a disciplined personal life’, a ‘well-ordered society’, and a ‘correct inner stance’ (Taylor 2007, 82).23 According to Voegelin’s and Taylor’s narratives, starting with the Reformation the idea of salvation gradually receives a form that lacks all reference to divine transcendence.24
Voegelin believed that Marxism was the most historically effective ‘secularizing’ movement in late modernity. By adopting Ludwig Feuerbach’s thesis that religion is merely the self-alienation of the human being, Marx concluded that the more the human being recognizes its social essence, the more it ‘becomes conscious that he himself is God’. From this follows the Nietzschean ‘consequence [that] man is transfigured into superman’ (Voegelin 1952, 125). From here the step is a short one to divide human beings into inferior and superior ‘races’ or ‘types’, which then feeds into totalitarian ideologies.25
22 See the discussion in (Agamben 2005).
23 These are the elements of what Taylor calls the ‘modern social imaginary’ in (Taylor 2004).
24 Taylor speaks of a ‘secular age’ characterized by an ‘immanent frame’ in which ‘the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable’ (Taylor 2007, 19). Voegelin calls this secular idea of salvation, or ‘the fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton’ (Voegelin 1952, 122) by the name of Gnosticism.
25 According to Voegelin, Gnosticism believes ‘in an expansion of the soul to the point where God is drawn into the existence of man. . . . For the men who fall into these experiences divinize themselves by substituting more massive modes of participation in divinity for faith in the Christian sense’ (Voegelin 1952, 124). Political religions correspond to these ‘more massive modes of participation in divinity’ and which culminate in modern totalitarianism. See also (Voegelin 1994). I discuss the idea of ‘political religion’ and the difference with political theology in the chapters dedicated to Voegelin and Maritain.
The link that Voegelin draws from Marxism to Weberian secularization, and from the latter to totalitarianism, is dubious, even preposterous, if taken as a thesis on intellectual history. Yet it is not entirely lacking in significance if studied considering the question of how the debate on secularization is employed by the discourse of political theology. For Weber’s version of secularization, at one level, cannot be so neatly distinguished from the version of secularization given previously by Marx. According to Weber, Protestantism ultimately stands as a symbol of the possibility that all religious values will eventually receive purely worldly or secular realizations. The Weberian thesis can be rephrased as follows: unless religion—the aspiration to transcendence—is ‘translated’ back into a non-religiously constructed social reality (composed of power and economic relations, the growth of objective knowledge, systems of human law, etc.), then it is religion, and not the world, that shall perish.
This implication of Weber’s secularization principle is precisely the point that Marx had already made in On the Jewish Question. In this early text, secularization receives two meanings. First, it refers to the social and political processes that realize religious values. This idea is captured by Marx’s apparently paradoxical claim according to which the values of Christianity are not realized in the Christian confessional states but only in the liberal, ‘neutral’ state.26 For in the former, those who do not share the official state religion are at best ‘tolerated’, whereas only in liberal states that uphold the principle of non-establishment of religion by the state can everyone be treated according to their proper human dignity as befits the doctrine that all human beings were ‘made in the image’ of God.27 Marx’s point is that to be a true Christian, that is, to live in the truth that all of God’s creatures are equal before God, means to respect the liberty and equality of all, and this just means to live in a liberal state that is ‘methodologically’ atheistic.28
26 “The perfected Christian state is rather the atheist state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to the level of the other elements of civil society” (Marx 1975, 222).
27 Marx’s insight is potentially compatible with Nietzsche’s thesis that the modern and secular struggle for human equality in the form of ‘atheistic’ movements like socialism, liberalism, and feminism all seek to realize the Christian ideal: “the democratic movement is the heir to the Christian movement” (Nietzsche 1989, 202). What is called today ‘postsecularism’ is an elaboration of these insights. Postsecularism points out that the modern state constructs ‘religion’ as a private activity in order to be able to establish itself as a public space of neutrality and equal respect, and, conversely, in establishing itself along these liberal lines, the state becomes the perfect realization of Christian ideals. For an interesting collection of essays on these themes, see (Sullivan et al. 2015).
28 Marx’s insight remains operative in Habermas’s construal of public reason as a function of ‘methodological atheism’.
More polemically, Marx considers that the true realization of Judaism is not the life of ‘Halakhic Man.’ Rather, for Marx Judaism is realized in capitalism and bourgeois civil society, that is, in a system in which universal equality is premised on establishing money as the universal form of exchange value. In sum, for Marx, being a Christian in modernity does not mean ascribing to a given faith denomination. It means—speaking ethico-politically—being a liberal democrat.29 Likewise, being a Jew in modernity does not mean studying and following the Torah. It means—speaking ethico-politically—having to worship the only true God of civil society, namely, capital.30 For Marx, religion lacks a politics and an ethics of its own. The ‘sacred’ has no social effectivity at all: to have any effect on the world, the sacred has to become ‘profane’, it has to secularize itself, it has to cease being sacred.31 That is why capitalism, where ‘everything sacred becomes profane’, can also be understood as the drive to pure effectivity or will to power.32 Marx joins up with Nietzsche once again. The second meaning of secularization that Marx gives in On the Jewish Question is ‘abolitionist’ with respect to religion. If the values of religion acquire reality only in their social-political realization, and if the logic of sociopolitical reality is neither religious nor theological, then it follows that by unfolding its own immanent logic, society will necessarily end up abolishing religion. Borrowing a term from Voegelin, Taylor believes this sense of secularization is inseparable from the belief that the modern world is a ‘closed’ world of immanence.33 Viewed from the perspective of Marx’s historical materialism, if religion persists in Modernity, this only means that the immanent logic of the social world has not yet unfolded completely. Religion is symbolic of the self-division or alienation of society; it gives expression to the continued existence of a form of society that is not fully human, whose conditions block the awareness or recognition of the truth that human nature is through and through a social essence.34 That is why, with the social
29 For readings of “On the Jewish Question” that cover this ground, see (Bosteels 2013; and Brown 2014).
30 For the connection of this point with Walter Benjamin’s fragment “Capitalism as Religion,” see the discussion in (Hamacher 2002; Löwy 2009; and Weber 2013), among many others.
31 On this motif from a politico-theological perspective, see (Agamben 2007b).
32 For an early analysis of this step from Marx to Nietzsche in the context of the debate with Antonio Negri and the Workerist movement in Italy, see (Cacciari 1977). And for Negri’s most recent critique of political theology, see (Negri 2015).
33 See (Taylor 2007, 556; and Voegelin 1952, 158). The distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ worlds originally comes from Bergson. On its meanings in Bergson, see (Lefebvre and White 2012).
34 These not fully human social conditions are experienced as ‘alienation’, ‘reification’, and ‘pathology’. For these categories, see (Honneth 2007).
realization of the human social essence, which must take the form of a social revolution, religion will be dissolved.
The discourse of political theology in the 20th century radically changes the meaning of secularization developed by Marx and Weber. The category of secularization is not abandoned. Rather, political theology exposes the secret reliance on theological ideas and distinctions in Marx’s and Weber’s apparently secular articulation of the idea of secularization.35 It then affirms this theological basis of secularization in order to claim that the process of modernization has both theological conditions of possibility and religious finalities. In sum, for Schmitt, and, more generally, for the 20th-century discourse of political theology, the term ‘secularization’ refers to the fact that were it not for its hidden theological meaning, socio-political reality would be lacking in historical effectivity. Political theology therefore rejects the Marxist and Weberian hypothesis that religious values acquire reality only when they are transposed into social-political reality, which in turn evinces a positivist, social-scientific logic of its own. Political theology aims to refute the abolitionist hypothesis found in the modern theorem of secularization.
The discourse of political theology seeks to undermine, from the inside, the premises of positivist social sciences, first sociology, then political science, and, more recently, political economy, by showing that their constitutive socio-economic-political categories are derivative of theological categories, and not vice versa.36 Thus, Schmitt takes up the crucial feature of all socio-political reality, namely, the persistence of conflict, war, and revolution, and claims to show its inherently theological source.37 Such a reversal of Marx and Weber is also at work in Schmitt’s most famous thesis, namely, his definition of the ‘concept of the political’ in terms of the authority to define who is friend and who is enemy. For Schmitt, all socio-political realities (all ‘political unities’) depend on some representative person having the
35 Thus, from this politico-theological viewpoint, Marx’s discourse on secularization itself relies on religious distinctions between Christianity and Judaism in order to articulate its abolitionist hypothesis. Indeed, the abolitionist thesis has often been understood as if Marx applied a radical form of messianism to his narrative on communism. Similar considerations apply to Weber’s use of theological terms like ‘vocation’ or ‘charisma’. Schmitt considered Weber’s conception of charismatic authority to have been his own original contribution to the discourse of political theology.
36 Claims to the effect that certain theologies already contain a social science, or the related claim that certain theologies offer the theoretical presuppositions of modern social science, are found in the already cited Taylor, Milbank, Gillespie. For political economy, see now (Leshem 2017).
37 On war and revolution as the decisive social categories of modernity, see (Arendt 1990; and Foucault 1997), who reflect the standpoints of Marx (all society is class struggle) and Weber (all politics is a form of war).
sole authority to make the decision on war, and this decision is theologically structured.38
The contemporary discussion on postsecularism has internalized the discourse of political theology in the 20th century and its critique of the Marxist and Weberian secularization theorems. A growing body of work attempts to show that western rule of law, and a fortiori the system of liberal rights, is rooted in the Christian tradition.39 Others argue that the distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ is itself of Christian origin, and therefore its employment in the public sphere stands in tension with the supposed ‘neutrality’ of the liberal state.40 In general, western public intellectuals from Charles Taylor and Talal Asad to Jürgen Habermas and Richard Dworkin have argued that the belief in a purely ‘secular’ foundation of liberalism is an illusion, and that we should move to a ‘postsecular’ vision of the role of religion in the public sphere.
For Cécile Laborde, the most damaging postsecular critique of the liberal ‘two-way protection’ of religious freedom and non-establishment of religion is the Schmittian challenge that liberalism ‘is merely another religion’.41 If this claim were to be true, then liberalism would be both ‘judge and party’ whenever it seeks to defend the freedom of religion or that of association. Liberalism would turn out to be structurally biased whenever it comes to realizing ‘politico-legal values of free exercise and non-establishment’ through its public use of reason (Laborde 2017, 39). Laborde’s response to the challenge of political theology is to argue that this postsecular critique may have a valid point with respect to certain forms of liberal secularism, like the French idea of laïcité, but it does not affect Rawlsian or political ‘egalitarian liberalism’ because the latter is by definition not itself ‘grounded in any comprehensive metaphysical, ontological, or ethical doctrine. It does not seek to enforce a substantively liberal and secular way of life on citizens, but instead affirms political principles of justice. . . . As a political doctrine it can be endorsed . . . from a variety of otherwise conflicting conceptions of the good’ (Laborde 2017, 40).
However, this answer seems to preclude the possibility that politicotheological considerations are at work when it comes to discussing and
38 On the concept of the political in Schmitt I refer to my discussion in (Vatter 2008).
39 For some examples, see (Berman 1983; Tierney 1982; Waldron 2002; and Moyn 2015).
40 For some examples, (Asad 2003; and Anidjar 2006; 2014).
41 (Laborde 2017, 38). She mentions Schmitt’s political theology in the context of the liberalism-asreligion thesis in (Laborde 2017, 25).
deciding on ‘constitutional essentials’ using public reason. Or, put another way, Laborde might not consider seriously enough the possibility that all constitutionalism is ‘religious’ constitutionalism in one sense or another, including liberal constitutionalism.42 In my opinion, this is because the question of political theology and its relation to democratic legitimacy remains underexplored. My analysis of the discourse on Christian political theology undertakes such a preliminary exploration. It does so by adopting as its guiding-thread the problem of democratic legitimacy. For political theology contributes to the discourse on secularization by developing the category of legitimacy. However, there are also good reasons to question whether modern democracy requires the category of legitimacy. Indeed, the upshot of the prolonged debate between Schmitt and Blumenberg on secularization is perhaps just the recognition of the inadequacy and internal tension of the concept of ‘democratic legitimacy’. This debate offers the methodological approach I adopt in this book.
Blumenberg’s first critique of Schmitt’s idea of secularization, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, imputes to Schmitt the fallacy of having projected onto Modernity his own understanding of the dualism between legality and legitimacy. For Blumenberg, ‘legitimacy’ requires by definition a reference to some transcendent source of value and order, transmitted through history, whereas ‘legality’ refers to a synchronic, self-referential system of abstract norms (Blumenberg 1996, 107–8). On this view, ‘for the political theorist Carl Schmitt, secularisation is a category of legitimacy’ (Blumenberg 1996, 108) because the legitimacy of Modernity would necessarily have to be characterized by the transfer of ‘medieval’ theological concepts into ‘modern’ secular concepts.
In his response to Blumenberg’s critique, Schmitt demands a shift from approaching secularization based on ‘philosophy of history’ or ‘sociology of concepts’ focused on ‘Modernity’ as a process of rationalization, towards a properly politico-theological approach to secularization, centred on the question of legitimacy in democratic societies.43 Schmitt reminds
42 As famously suggested in (Stepan 2000).
43 According to Schmitt, Blumenberg conflated political theology with the entirely different question of the relation between theology and ‘philosophy of history’, and the various debates as to whether philosophy of history in modernity is a secularized version of a Christian or Jewish ‘history of salvation’ (Heilsgeschichte). In the second edition of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age Blumenberg in fact criticizes the different versions of the ‘secularization theorem’ that seek to explain the possibility of modern philosophy of history found in Karl Löwith, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Jonas, and Odo Marquard (Blumenberg 1996, 35–72). In the recently published correspondence between Blumenberg and Schmitt, the letter written by Blumenberg on the seventh of August 1975 is particularly telling, insofar as it attempts to establish a bridge with Schmitt on the ground of their mutual
Blumenberg that when he defined ‘secularization’ as the study of the translation or transposition of concepts from theology to jurisprudence he was not making a claim about ‘philosophy of history’ nor about the periodization of the shift from the middle ages to the modern age. Blumenberg’s thesis that modernity is somehow a ‘self-legitimating’ process that requires no such transposition of concepts missed Schmitt’s point. Rather, for Schmitt there is an internal correlation between political theology as transposition of theological into jurisprudential concepts and the project of securing ‘legitimacy’ for the legal and social order of modern society. Schmitt’s point is that what counts is the capital difference between legitimacy and legality. If one accepts this difference, then it does not matter how the project of Modernity finds its ‘legitimacy’, and whether it does so by breaking with the medieval worldview, because in any case it is caught up in a discourse on political theology. To what extent Schmitt may be right about legitimacy, and what follows from it for democratic political theory, is the leading question that motivates the discussion of Christian political theology in this book.
In their correspondence and in his later writings, Blumenberg responded to Schmitt by proposing a different approach to the question of how secularization relates to legitimacy. Blumenberg suggests dropping entirely the category of secularization if one seeks to explain historical transitions between medieval and modern periods. The category of secularization inevitably assumes a ‘wall of separation’ between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. From the Marxist-Weberian viewpoint on secularization, politics will eventually break through the wall and make ‘religion’ superfluous. From the Schmittian and postsecular viewpoints, there exists an underlying need for religion that subverts any claim on the part of politics to determine its destiny entirely autonomously or immanently.44
Blumenberg breaks free from these two viewpoints by pointing out that the distinction between religion and politics as relatively autonomous yet interacting domains is already operative in the Hellenistic age. In this sense, a form of secularism is already found in Hellenism and does not need to wait for Modernity. This same insight is of capital importance to the genealogies
interest in Goethe’s motto Nemo contra deus nisi deus ipse, and their mutual rejection of Löwith’s attempt to identify historical consciousness of the moderns with eschatological themes (Blumenberg 2007, 132–33).
44 This view is now echoed in (Diamantides and Schütz 2018), where the underlying persistence of religion is linked to a supposed human emotional need to assume certain beliefs and rituals on blind trust or faith, which no amount of rationalization can eliminate.
