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Abstract
Although my essay is devoted mostly to Schmitt’s theology of sovereignty as the ultimate theory of power, reflecting the hidden ‘metaphysical image’ of modernity, it also wants to explore a possibility of venturing beyond the theology of power into an alternative theology of promise. By sketching this possible exodus out of the modern power fixation, I first analyse Schmitt’s claim about the persistence of political theology, which provides a rationale for modern political practice, and confront it with the critique formulated by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Abbr: LM). But then I try to paint a broader picture of modern cryptotheologies; by expanding Blumenberg’s critique, I show how it paves the way for an alternative pursuit of political theology which seeks to get ‘beyond sovereignty.’ For Blumenberg, this quest means mostly the attempt to ‘overcome Gnosticism,’ which in my paraphrasing indicates ‘overcoming of the nominalistic cryptotheology.’ In order to secure a proper exorcism of the Gnostic-nominalistic spectre, I want to go back to the sources of a truly alternative, messianic vision which actively opposes the logic of sovereign power with the logic of a yet unrevealed promise. This different theology of the ‘hidden God,’ developed mostly by Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, replaces the ‘mystery of power’ with the ‘mystery of promise’ which gets us ‘beyond sovereignty’ for good – which also coincides with the promise of the true historical novum lying at the origin of modernity.
Notes
1. As it was put later by Walter Benjamin in the opening thesis of his ‘On the Concept of History,’ picturing the secular puppet and the theological dwarf. And although Benjamin meant mostly the relationship between Jewish messianism and Marxism, the very image of a hidden theology pulling the strings of the official political and philosophical discourses fits perfectly Schmitt’s (Citation2006) intentions in Political Theology (Abbr: PT) which, as I will claim here, does not deliver a full-blown theory of secularisation, but merely offers a loose metaphor of correlation or mutual influences between theological and political doctrines.
2. This second point constitutes the variant of the original critique turned again Schmitt by Eric Peterson who, in Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Theologie im Imperium Romanum (Leipzig 1935) accused the former of completely ignoring the trinitarian dimension of the properly Christian political theology, which counteracts the absolutist monopolisation of power and as such serves what Blumenberg would later on call pluralistic diffusion and depletion. But Schmitt did not know or care for theology very much; all he wanted to suggest in Political Theology was a clear line of continuity between Hobbes’ apology for absolutism and the ‘counterrevolutionary philosophers of the state,’ arguing for modern dictatorship – de Maistre, Bonald, and Donoso Cortes – who all happened to be Catholic.
3. In the original: ‘Alle prägnanten Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre sind säkularisierte theologische Begriffe’ (Schmitt, Citation2002, p. 43). I modify Schwab’s translation by proposing ‘vital’ instead of ‘significant’ in order to convey the generating power of the German word prägnant. According to Schmitt, nominalistic analogy is still valid in modernity as a ‘vital hypothesis’ in the sense used by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience.
4. Hence, when William Ockham says in Quodlibeta: Deus multa potest facere quae non vult facere, he defends divine absolute freedom; and when he adds in Commentary on the Sentences: creatio est simpliciter de nihilo, he protects God’s omnipotent capacity to create the world out of nothingness, without the help of any pre-existing materials, or pre-existing forms called ‘secondary causes’ (quot. in LM, p. 609).
5. Compare Blumenberg’s account of the nominalistic ‘perpetual miracle’: ‘Divine spirit and human spirit, creative and cognitive principles, operate as though without taking each other into account. The gratuitousness of the Creation implies that it can no longer be expected to exhibit any adaptation to the needs of reason. Rather than helping man to reconstruct an order given in nature, the principle of economy (Ockham’s razor) helps him to reduce nature forcibly to an order imputed to it by man … It is only from this point of view that it becomes possible to characterise nominalism as the system of breaches of system, as the shift of interest and accent onto the miracle, the paradigmatic reduction of the bindingness of nature.' (LM, pp. 154; 189; my emphasis).
6. Although Mutasilite kalam stresses the importance of God’s justice and paves the way to the nominalistic concept of the potentia ordinata, it must also be stated very firmly that it has nothing to do with the Thomistic tradition of fides et ratio. Quite to the contrary, making ordination a part of the divine activity on the same level with God’s ability to create miracles only emphasises the need for pure faith, sola fide of the future Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine. We need to believe even more strongly in God’s justice which manifests itself in his obligation towards us, even if we know that God is not bound by anything and may just as well act towards us as the devious deus fallax. The nominalistic belief in God’s justice is thus emphatically not the same as the Thomistic reliance on God’s rationality which follows the eternal laws of reason and nature; it requires an even more radical ‘leap of faith’ than believing in miracles. In the light of the potentia ordinata, order emerges as a miracle to the second power: it is a wonder of wonders that there is indeed a ‘repetition’ which, as Kierkegaard argues, testifies to God’s miraculously constant will to maintain creation in existence and keep it in its once given shape. On the opposition between the repetition and the law, see also Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, especially his extremely nominalistic interpretation of Kierkegaard.
7. This instrumental approach would explain Schmitt’s all too simplistic view of nominalism which, as Blumenberg rightly observes, can also spell a danger to his own doctrine. While for Schmitt nominalism is most of all a theology of miracle, i.e. the only truly theistic theology – for Blumenberg it is mostly an extreme apology for ‘theological absolutism’ and as such a threat to any meaningful worldly order. This is why Blumenberg, who understands his adversary as the follower of Hobbes, i.e. a thinker concerned mostly about social peace, claims that decisionism must ‘derive its legitimacy from the negation of voluntarism – because voluntarism is, as it were, the institutionalised instability of absolute power’ (LM, p. 98; my emphasis), which would simultaneously mean the negation of the very essence of the nominalistic theology. By simply equating political exception (implicitly understood as something to be removed for the sake of the restoration of order) with theological miracle (implicitly understood as something to be rejoiced as the divine modus operandi) Schmitt would thus appear insensitive to the essential ambiguity of his shadow political theology which may just as well pave the way to the apocalyptic rubble, destruction, inner instability, and all other sorts of metaphysical horrors.
8. ‘Das metaphysische Bild, das sich ein bestimmtes Zeitalter von der Welt macht, hat die selbe Struktur wie das, was ihr als Form ihrer politischen Organisation ohne weiteres einleuchtet’ (Schmitt, Citation2002, p. 43); ‘The metaphysical image of the world that a particular epoch makes for itself, has the same structure as that which immediately appears to it as the form of its political organisation’ (PT, p. 46).
9. Such is also the intuition of Paul W. Kahn who argues for the weakly ‘analogical’ interpretation of Schmitt’s ‘sociology of concepts’ against any monistic, identitarian and coherentist approach: ‘Coherence is not only too heavy a demand to place upon ourselves, it was already too heavy a burden for Schmitt. His own work is actually a good demonstration of the incommensurabilities of belief systems. There is no single, grand analogy that orders the whole … Schmitt rejects Kelsen’s approach, insisting instead on the vitality of the concepts of sovereign decision and exception. That Kelsen’s theory accords with the thought of the epoch is of interest to a sociology of the concept – ideas come from ideas – but Schmitt’s own work marks a broader point: there are multiple forms of thought operating in contemporary Western political communities. The autonomy and completeness of law is one possible position; so is the idea of the sovereign as the power to decide upon the exception’ (Kahn, Citation2011, p. 119; my emphasis). Still, Kahn insists on the priority of metaphysics within the Schmittean system of correlations: ‘Yet, he does think that every epoch has its characteristic understanding of order: “metaphysics is the most intensive and the clearest expression of one epoch” (PT, p. 46) … We will bring our deepest beliefs about the way in which order operates in the world into our theories about the normative order of the state. Politics is always both a part of the larger order and a microcosm of that order. We read each through the other’ (Kahn, Citation2011, p. 117).
10. On the intricacies of Benjamin’s sense of elected affinity with Schmitt which was never reciprocated, see the revealing article of Samuel Weber: ‘Taking Exception to Decision. Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt.’ Against Schmitt Benjamin claims that the ‘baroque naturalisation of history profoundly affects the figure of the sovereign,’ by eliminating the whole theological dimension of transcendence, and thus leading to the ‘dislocation of sovereignty as such’ (Weber, Citation1992, p. 9). Weber comments: ‘But the very same desire to exclude transcendence also condemns the function of the sovereign to malfunction: for unlike the political-theological “analogy” of Schmitt, the German baroque defined his sovereign precisely by difference from God, just as baroque immanence sets itself up in contradistinction to theological transcendence. At the very point in time when the political sovereign successfully gains his independence vis-a-vis the Church, the difference between worldly power and that of the divine can no longer be ignored. The result, as Benjamin formulates it, turns out to be directly contrary to the conclusion of Schmitt: “The level of the state of creation, the terrain on which the Trauerspiel is enacted, also unmistakably exercises a determining influence on the sovereign. However highly he is enthroned over subject and state, his status is confined to the world of creation; he is the lord of creatures, but he remains a creature” (Weber, Citation1992, p. 13; my emphasis). A similar point against Schmitt on the radical dislocation of the concept of sovereignty in the immanent conditions of the creaturely realm was made by Jacob Taubes in the volume of Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie he himself edited under the telling title: ‘The Prince of This World' (see Taubes, Citation1985).
11. Blumenberg writes: ‘Nominalism is a system meant to make man extremely uneasy about the world – with the intention, of course, of making him seek salvation outside the world, driving him to despair of his this-worldly possibilities and thus of the unconditional capitulation of the act of faith, which, however, he is again not capable of accomplishing by his own power’ (LM, p. 151). The Cartesian cogito is thus the first defensive gesture of human self-assertion against the overwhelming power of the theistic Absolute, thus inaugurating modern age as the ‘second overcoming of Gnosticism’ (LM, p. 126). Again, this is a good moment to demonstrate Schmitt’s lack of sensitivity to the ambivalence of his chosen nominalistic idiom. While Blumenberg takes great pains to show Descartes’ complex wrestling with the divine power, Schmitt simply quotes Atger saying: ‘The prince is the Cartesian god transposed to the political world’ (PT, p. 47).
12. And while for Blumenberg, the defensive structure of the Cartesian philosophy testifies to the modern ‘vitality’ of the nominalistic theology – for Schmitt, this ‘vitality’ will be proven by the state theory of Thomas Hobbes who, definitely more than Kierkegaard, is the true dwarf-theologian of Leviathan, hidden behind Political Theology and pulling its seemingly secular strings (here see most of all Schmitt, Citation1996). Also, on Hobbes as a theological nominalist, but a slightly different one than Schmitt, i.e. leaning towards the security of potentia ordinata (this difference was already spotted by Blumenberg in his polemic with Schmitt), see Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, esp. the chapter ‘Hobbes’ Fearful Wisdom.’
13. The gripping story of this epochal reversal is given by Ernst Bloch in his Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke. Bloch’s coinage, the Aristotelian Left, as opposed to the Aristotelian Right whose main representative is Thomas Aquinas, covers the crucial transformation of the Aristotelian doctrine regarding the issue of potentiality which, from the time of Islamic kalam, becomes the highest attribute of the transcendent God, while actuality gets dethroned and now applies to the ontology of creation (Bloch, Citation1952).
14. The same logic of deactivation-at-the-limit applies to Agamben’s interpretation of messianism which he sees as the limit concept of the religious tradition, thanks to which this tradition can finally come to an end (Agamben, Citation2000, p. 162).
15. By partly agreeing and partly venturing beyond Blumenberg, I am following here the strategy pioneered by Michael Allen Gillespie in his Theological Origins of Modernity where he criticises the author of The Legitimacy for ignoring the alternative metaphysical and theological potential hidden in the modern ‘overcoming of Gnosticism’: ‘Blumenberg’s account points us in the right direction, but he does not understand the metaphysical significance of his own argument and thus does not appreciate the way in which modernity takes form within the metaphysical and theological structures of the tradition’ (Gillespie, Citation2011, p. 12). In my take on Blumenberg I want to go even further than Gillespie and say that the very gesture of self-assertion, far from being anti-theological, is precisely the gist of modern cryptotheology which constitutes the religious alternative to the medieval double of Thomism versus Nominalism.
16. It is not an accident that while there were numerous Jewish Mutasilites, there was not a single Jewish thinker of the Asharite denomination; the resistance to the idea that transcendence should be understood in terms of hyperpower is structural here and this is why it is worth exploring as a strong alternative to any nominalistic temptation.
17. Here see most of all Benjamin’s and Scholem’s letter exchange on Franz Kafka (Scholem, Citation1989, p. 142). Compare also Blumenberg’s critique of the nominalistic theology of omnipotence: ‘The Gnosticism that had not been overcome but only transposed returns in the form of the “hidden God” and His inconceivable absolute sovereignty’ (LM, p. 135).
18. Searching for this different transcendence – a God beyond or without sovereignty – is also one of the most frequent Derridean themes. See, for instance, his confession: ‘I have tried again and again to dissociate two concepts that are usually indissociable: unconditionality and sovereignty. I would like to think about something unconditional in forgiving, in grace, in forgiveness, in the gift, in hospitality – an unconditionality that wouldn’t be a sign of power, a sign of sovereignty… One has to dissociate God’s sovereignty from God, from the very idea of God. We would have God without sovereignty, without omnipotence’ (Derrida, Citation2005, p. 42). See also Derrida, Citation2011.