Past and Present Political Theology (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) [1 ed.] 9780367407551, 9780367808907, 0367407558

Citation preview

Past and Present Political Theology

This book demonstrates how discussions of Political Theology have been a constant feature throughout philosophical modernity and that they continue to impact contemporary political debates. By tracing the historical roots and detailing the contemporary outworking of Political Theology in Europe, it contends that this growing field requires a broader “canon” in order for it to mature. Political Theology is shown here to be about the diversity of relationships between religious beliefs and political orientations. First engaging with historical debates, chapters re-examine the relationship between personal conviction and societal orientation on such topics as the will to believe, evil, individualism, the relationship between church and state, and the relationship between belief and natural science. The volume then establishes the relevance of these debates for the present day. As such, it invites engagement on the back and forth between religion and politics in a liberal democracy and a communist state, on how communitarianism relates to religious language, on the diversity of Christian and Jewish political theology and the politics of toleration. By broadening out the field of Political Theology this book offers the reader a more nuanced understanding of its sustained influence on public life. As such it will be of interest to academics working in Political Theology, but also Theology, Philosophy and Political Science more generally. Dennis Vanden Auweele is Lecturer in Philosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium). Miklós Vassányi is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Károli University of the Reformed Church, Hungary.

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border A Borderland Hermeneutic Gregory L. Cuéllar Paradoxical Virtue Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Ethics Tradition Edited by Kevin Carnahan and David True Theology and Evolutionary Anthropology Dialogues in Wisdom, Humility, and Grace Edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and Agustín Fuentes Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity Religious Autoimmunity David Kline Past and Present Political Theology Expanding the Canon Edited by Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RCRITREL

Past and Present Political Theology Expanding the Canon Edited by Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-40755-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-80890-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Péter Losonczi (1970–2015), dearly missed colleague and friend

Contents

List of contributors

ix

Introduction

1

DENNIS VANDEN AUWEELE AND MIKLÓS VASSÁNYI

1 Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran

11

MIKLÓS VASSÁNYI

2 The subject’s perspective in Leibniz’s philosophy

35

DÁNIEL SCHMAL

3 From a pagan theologia civilis in Rome to a fictitious political theology in Kant: epochal metamorphoses of a theological underlay of political thought

58

MARTIN MOORS

4 On evil and political theology: reflections on Kant and after

76

WILLIAM DESMOND

5 The political theology of witnessing: the Canaanite woman and Kierkegaard’s tax-collector

94

ORSOLYA HORVÁTH

6 The politics of religious commitment: pascal and Dostoevsky

111

DENNIS VANDEN AUWEELE AND HANNA VANDENBUSSCHE

7 The East-West divide in the European Union and its overcoming BALÁZS M. MEZEI

126

viii  Contents   8 Spiritual communism: the career of a theory from Saint Augustine to MacIntyre

142

GÁBOR KENDEFFY

  9 Dispositives of political theology: analyzing non-discursive elements of the Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power

154

MICHAEL HOELZL

10 Theological motives in Hannah Arendt’s thought

176

CSABA OLAY

11 A political theology “of Doubtful Solidity”: Leo Strauss on Rousseau via Spinoza

185

GÁBOR BOROS

12 Religious moral languages, secularity and hermeneutical injustice

199

GORAZD ANDREJČ

13 “State-persecution” in the works of Raffaele Pettazzoni: a religious history

217

VALERIO SEVERINO

14 Christ versus the Llama sacrifice: Rodolfo Kusch’s theological criticism of the colonization of Latin America

229

PÉTER SZAKÁCS

15 Religious atheism: assessing political religion through Critchley’s Faith of the Faithless

242

DENNIS VANDEN AUWEELE

Index255

Contributors

Gorazd Andrejč - RU Groningen (Netherlands) Gábor Boros - Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary (Budapest) William Desmond - KU Leuven (Belgium), Villanovu University (USA) and Maynooth University (Ireland) Michael Hoelzl - University of Manchester Orsolya Horváth - Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary (Budapest) Gábor Kendeffy - Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary (Budapest) Balázs M. Mezei - Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Budapest) Martin Moors - KU Leuven (Belgium) Csaba Olay- Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) Valerio Severino - Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma (Italy) Dániel Schmal - Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Budapest) Péter Szakács - Babes¸-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania) Hanna Vandenbussche - Independent scholar Dennis Vanden Auweele - KU Leuven (Belgium) Miklós Vassányi - Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary (Budapest)

Introduction Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi

We have asked many in the last few months, but we have yet to receive a straightforward answer to the question: “What is political theology and who does it?” Creston Davis had it right when he spoke of the nebulousness of political theology (2010, p. 5). Trouble started when we tried to figure out where we were to go and who we were to ask. Is political theology a discipline mostly of concern to political theorists? Or is it a discipline practiced in those musky dens that occasionally retain a whiff of their former glory, the grand faculties of theology? Perhaps a more suitable home for the discipline is in the religious studies departments, those faculties of theology for non-believers? Or perhaps it could find a place where everything-that-isand-that-is-not is discussed, unendingly and without resolution, the faculty of philosophy? We felt at a loss. A cynical person might take from that waywardness or homelessness of political theology that it is a very “plastic” discipline: to be sculpted, re-located and anchored at whatever port. Instead, we have come to believe that the indeterminacy of political theology might signal that its nature is intrinsically multidisciplinary in such a radical way that to fix it in one of its aspects is to annihilate it. Political theology is by its essential nature a vagrant, always between disciplines, between cultures, between histories. To write sensibly and with finesse on the subject would then be taxing, and it is a sign of a good bit of self-overestimation that one hopes to shed some fundamental light on the discipline by approaching it from an altogether new angle. This is nevertheless what this volume hopes to achieve, namely, to be a new multidisciplinary investigation of the key components and discussions from the past to the present of political theology. Why approach political theology in a historical fashion, you ask? Most basically, political theology discusses and evaluates the diversity of possible relationships between religion and politics. It asks questions such as regards the permissibility of religion in the public sphere, the theological foundation of political power, the private and public use of religion in liberal society, the relationship of the individual agent to religious belief, the relationship between science, politics and religion, the nature of political and religious suppression, the foundations of and exceptions to the law, etc. In name,

2  Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi the discipline is relatively young. The term was coined by in 1922 by Carl Schmitt in his Politische Theologie. This does not seem to be a lot of history. The purpose of this volume, and its emphasis on the past to the future, is to show that this field did not emerge suddenly in the 20th century, but that there were not only historical debates within political theology well before the 20th century, but also that these very debates continue to influence and impact our understanding of the relationship between elements of religion and political orientation. Not just time, but also history is of the essence. Let us in this introduction outline some of the topics of political theology that are engaged from a variety of angles in this volume. Perhaps the most important topic in contemporary political theology relates to what is often called the crisis of democracy and the problem (or lack) of political representation. The last few decades have noticed that the foundational principles of liberal democracy have lost some of their appeal. Some point fingers at the neoliberal course of Western liberal democracies and the concurrent “depoliticisation” of liberal democracy,1 but others – often with more of a focus on the dangers of identitarian politics (politics that privileges group identity over individuality) – believe that the crisis of liberal democracy is really a crisis of representation.2 Citizens fail to recognize the political sphere as representative of their concerns. Carl A. Raschke in his Force of God mirrors this problem of political representation to the more general problem of representation in modern thought, that is, that there is a general disconnection between the subjective and objective sphere (Raschke 2015). This is sometimes called the “problem of the bridge” in Descartes’ philosophy, where the disconnect between the subjective and objective invites the question of their interaction. For political theology, this means that the object (politics) is to justify itself to the subject (citizen) in terms that are comprehensible to the subject. This is a move from political sovereignty to political accountability. But this invites, in turn, the question as to what ultimately justifies political power: if the ultimate sanction of political power lies with the people, then liberal democracy is ultimately dependent upon the choice of the people for liberal democracy. This is an unresolvable conflict: the right of the people to decide depends upon the will of the people to have the right to decide. Its foundation is not particularly foundational when the right of choice depends upon choice. This disconnect creates what Jürgen Habermas has called a “legitimation crisis” in that the objective sphere is to justify itself to the subjective sphere in terms that are comprehensible to the subject. This is the problem of the general authorization of political power which, from the modern epoch onwards, is to offer a (theological) justification of its power in a principally non-theological fashion: politics is now the force of man, not the force of God. This crisis of legitimation, authorization and representation requires a stronger theological reflection on the ultimate foundation of political power. This issue will be a main thread throughout many of the contributions in this volume, many of which explicitly or implicitly attend to the matter on

Introduction  3 a variety of levels. Another issue that merits mentioning is the way that theology when it turns political can be seen as a threat to society. It is then to be taken as a hard-won victory of Western society that it separated, in principle, politics from theology and religion. This is what Mark Lilla has called “The Great Separation” in his The Stillborn God (2007). There is, however, no particular reason to be more fearful of a theological politics than of a secular politics. Many contributors of this book have been first row witnesses of the destructiveness of the 20th century’s foremost secular political ideology (Communism) and some of them discuss how a secular political ideology could in some way benefit from the corrective of religion. Furthermore, there are no strong reasons to draw a sharp and radical distinction between secular and theological politics. William Cavanaugh, for one, notes that there is no reason to suppose that ‘religious politics’ are any more inherently dangerous than ‘secular’ politics, because there is no essential difference between the two. The religious/secular distinction is not simply a universal fact about human life, but is an ideological tool that can be used to privilege certain kinds of politics and anathematize others (2015, p. 237). The line between a secular and a religious foundation of politics is thin indeed. While there are good pragmatic reasons to make the distinction, there is no intrinsic reason to prefer either absolutely to the other. When Carl Schmitt pondered these questions of the ground of political power and sovereignty in 1922, he came to his famous conclusion that the sovereign is “he who decides on the exception” (2005, p. 5). The one who founds and sustains the political order must be somehow above and beyond the political order. It is no coincidence that Schmitt saw this as a fundamentally religious concept, bound up with the notion of the sacred. Some say that it is the primary achievement then of a secular foundation of political power that it allows for no exception to the rule of law: no one is above the law. The worldwide surge in populist politics can make one question this argument. Saul Newman has recently argued that these problems of legitimation of political power in current day western states are bound up with the vacant place of transcendence left by theology. Liberal democracy hopes to fill this place with different forms of political and economic power.3 This book compliments Newman’s reflection in that it adds further historical dimensions to this point of view, it provides an analogy of sorts to the replacing of divine with economic power. It was one of the major achievements of the late Hungarian philosopher Péter Losonczi to warn against the deeply self-centered attitudes of much work in political theology and so he urged to open the debate in all sorts of directions. In his editorial introduction (with Aakash Singh and Mika Luoma-aho) to the volume The Future of Political Theology, he laments

4  Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi that much of the work in political theology these days is whiggish, Eurocentric and overly reductionist when it comes to defining the terms “political” and “theological.” Rather than following the general definition of political theology, offered by among others Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, as an investigation into the foundation of political power, Losonczi proposes to think of political theology as “a ‘discipline’ that analyzes and criticizes political arrangements from the perspective of different interpretations of God’s way with the world” (2011, p. 3). While The Future of Political Theology is concerned predominantly with the present and future trajectories of political theology, our present volume aims to show how our present discussions in political theology have developed from past discussions. It is our hope to continue Péter Losonczi’s line of work and spirit. We are dedicating this volume to his memory as a philosopher. The papers in this contribution are put in more or less chronological rather than thematic ordering. This was done to the benefit of creating a consistent timeline, but it results in that the papers do not obviously display a systematic argument. Each reflection then starts anew, from a specific timeframe with a specific problem. And yet, there are some clear and present concerns that pervade all of these papers. Let us close with showing how all of these papers are actually woven together to provide a comprehensive discussion of the past to present of political theology. Our first contribution begins at the dawning of the modern era. Miklós Vassányi’s quest is to understand how the astronomer Johannes Kepler sought to clarify his stance with respect to religious toleration and church communion in the period between 1598 and 1628. In order to do that, he is considering in detail how Kepler related to his native Lutheran church and theology (and tangentially, Calvinist doctrine and Roman Catholic dogma and practice) over these years of religious and political unrest in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Part of his analysis is dedicated to Kepler’s issue with the doctrine of divine omnipresence, incorporated in the Lutheran interpretation of the Eucharist and understood as a symbol of irreducible denominational difference among the Christian churches. This issue is then embedded in the context of Lutheran luminary Johannes Brenz’s political theology. As a final upshot, Vassányi draws a parallel between Kepler’s personal theological position and his natural scientific methodology and interprets Kepler’s carefully honed posture towards church communion in general. Dániel Schmal’s paper, then, leads us on into the second half of the 17th century, and displays a more metaphysical approach to political theology as he analyzes Leibniz’s Monadology. Though this text seems to offer a paradigmatic metaphysical background for all political theories starting from the individual in order to construe larger communities, he argues that Leibniz’s ambition was very different. Instead of establishing mutual links between already existing building blocks, what he did intend was to find a principle which would give birth to both the individual and the community at the same time. On this reading, the doctrine of the preestablished harmony

Introduction  5 points to a source of coordination which is neither anterior nor posterior to the things to be coordinated. In Leibniz’s thought perspectivism takes priority over such fundamental concepts as ego, consciousness and personality. The result is that social relations are not superadded to the monads but are internal to them as constituting their nature. Notwithstanding Leibniz’s claim that monads do not have windows and cannot exchange information with each other, Leibnizian substances are social beings by their very nature. In the next reflection, we are given a glimpse of how some of the first experiments in political theology in Augustine transition towards a fictionalized political theology in the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Martin Moors shows how Augustine engaged with and criticized a pagan version of civil theology (theologia civilis). The critique, further developed in Medieval thought, is that from now on the logos behind political orientation is defined through Christology. All political reality is captured under the spell of several Christian concepts such as revelation and eschatology. Modern philosophy famously complains that this is a heteronomous determination of politics that ought to be emancipated through reason. This shift is paradigmatically affected through the thought of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Yet, and this might appear odd to those who see in Kant a great secularizer, Kant did still find it necessary to link his politics with the theological idea of a divine obligator. He did so, however, in terms of a “fictional” rather than a “real” political theology. In this paper, Moors shows how even the paradigmatic shift from a pre-modern to a modern political theology cannot entirely let go of theological concepts, and thus stays indebted to theological ways of thinking. The next reflection does not end but starts with the thought of Immanuel Kant. Here, William Desmond shows how it is the consideration of evil that could move philosophers invested in a project of autonomous reason nevertheless towards the heteronomous space of theology. This is evident in the thought of Kant. Traditionally, the problem of evil was tackled in terms of theodicy, which is a host of strategies that justify the justice (diké) of God in the face of the reality of evil. Some political thinkers continued such a line of thought, in more of a secularizing vein, when they suggested that the “mortal God” (the state) could ultimately justify the occurrence of evil. This becomes manifest in different forms in the thought of Hobbes and Hegel. Desmond’s reflection on Hegel shows how Hegel would ultimately “take sides with the serpent,” when he collapses the difference between worldly and divine time: it is, ultimately, for Hegel the self-redemptive and dialectical process of history that provides the redemption of evil. Hegel’s views ushered in their own reactions, some approvingly radicalizing his thought (Marx), some contesting it by Augustinian considerations (Kierkegaard) and others speaking out against the self-redemption of the world (Schopenhauer). As a next step, Orsolya Horváth’s study carries on with reflections on 19th-century political theology, depending especially on Søren Kierkegaard’s

6  Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi account of the tax-collector in his Fear and Trembling. Horváth introduces this inquiry with an analysis of the Canaanite woman’s story as known from the Bible. Though placing the Canaanite woman head to head with the taxcollector may seem unusual, she argues that there is a strong connection between them insofar as they are both “knights of faith” when they find themselves in the field of a salvific paradox. Horváth’s purpose is, first, to determine how the witnessing of the Canaanite woman influences her community, and then to analyze Kierkegaard’s description of the tax-collector, in order to find out finally what testimony means if those to whom the testimony is offered reject the witness. Which invites the ultimate question of how a (political) community may be formed under such circumstances? The next contribution brings together two thinkers known for their impact upon existential philosophy: Blaise Pascal and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In their contribution, Dennis Vanden Auweele and Hanna Vandenbussche continue the previous questions as regards the proper response to witnessing divine truth. Pascal’s apology for Christianity in his Pensées is often read as a rationalist, calculating approach to Christianity (most evident from his famous “wager”) and Dostoevsky, in turn, is easily misread as the reverse, a fideist (most evident from his admittance that if the truth were outside of Christ, he would stay with Christ rather than the truth). This paper, however, investigates the politics of how to commit to religious truth in Pascal and Dostoevsky, which shows remarkable similarities. Both of them recognize the limitations of argumentation when it comes to religious commitment and appeal to other things (for Pascal, proper custom; for Dostoevsky, literary persuasion) to bring the human being to the threshold of religious belief. With Dostoevsky in the previous contribution, we have been brought to the threshold of the 20th century. For that reason, it becomes particularly relevant to reflect broadly on the troubled interaction of politics, ethics and religion throughout that century. In his paper, Balázs Mezei argues that the self-experience of post-Communist countries in the later 20th century shows that liberal democracy requires religion otherwise it might face new forms of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. The principled political values of liberal democracy might become devoid of content if not some form of religion – traditional or renewed – helps revitalize these values. By virtue of its title “Spiritual Communism,” Gábor Kendeffy’s paper also alludes to an Eastern European context but its take is in fact much more general. In a large-scope historical investigation, Kendeffy sets Augustine’s and Alasdair C. MacIntyre’s views on what has been called “spiritual communism” side by side and draws political theological conclusions from this parallel. As regards Augustine, “spiritual communism” refers especially to being in communal possession of God in the form of a win-win game. For the Church Father, possessing God in the form of religious faith is able to ground a community in which God is in a way a communal good. This configuration bears resemblance to MacIntyre’s concept of “practice” as

Introduction  7 an activity which gives context to the virtues. Since in After Virtue, “practice” is understood as “socially established cooperative human activity through which internal goods are realised,” a concept of “internal goods” emerges which runs parallel to what Augustine says on account of “common goods.” A final analysis yields that the two conceptions of community resemble each other and characteristically differ from each other at the same time: while MacIntyre’s version of community is, of course, a secularized and politicized one, Augustine, rather, conceives of a more spiritual, faithbased community. This query concerning the value of political communities brings out the question of institutionalized religion. In his essay, Michael Hoelzl offers a new methodological approach to political theology that promises to provide a new window into the study of pastoral power. This framework is called a “dispositive analysis” which roughly follows the conceptual framework outlined in the late work of Michel Foucault. Understanding political theology through its dispositives promises to provide an epistemological surplus value to traditional discourse analysis by examining the discursive and nondiscursive elements which were involved in the formation of the modern concept of pastoral power. Hoelzl further argues that this modern form of pastoral power emerged during the era of Enlightenment and gave birth to a specific institutional political theology legitimizing a progressive restoration of absolutist rule. Although Hannah Arendt’s political thought is not organized around major questions of political theology, there are several topics that heavily interested her with regard to religion and religious faith. In his paper, Csaba Olay specifies the aspects under which Arendt theorizes religion and its relationship to politics. The claim he argues for is that Arendt cannot attribute special importance to religious faith because of her conviction of the pluralistic character of the public space. Furthermore, there is in Arendt’s thought an almost sacral interpretation of that public sphere. In this framework, political activity obtains the highest significance among human activities. The paper analyzes, then, Arendt’s description of the role of Christianity in the decline of the public sphere, and next, her view on religion in connection with tradition and authority. Political theology has a tendency – as undoubtedly any discipline in ­philosophy – of appropriating its history in ways that do not necessarily reflect that history accurately. The philosophy of Hegel comes to mind, a thinker who was canonized as the father of totalitarian thought – perhaps an epitaph undeserved? Other figures who have come to suffer under different forms of appropriation in the 20th century are Spinoza and Rousseau. In his reflection, Gábor Boros discusses the odd absence of Spinoza in Strauss’ Natural Right and History. Boros argues that this is a bit of self-censure that follows from Strauss’ own hermeneutical methods. Spinoza is missing because of Strauss’ ambiguous relation to the secularization that Spinoza came to represent.

8  Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi The problems of secularization and the appropriation of history discussed in the contribution of Boros are testament to a dire need to navigate with more finesse the complex interactions between the individual, religion and society. One recent approach to do so in Jeffrey Stout’s “modest pragmatism,” which has come under attack by more theologically-minded and more secularism-minded thinkers. Each side argues that Stout’s approach concedes too much to the opposite side. Stout’s view is evaluated and defended by Gorazd Andrejč. This can only be done by engaging in more depth with Stout’s epistemology and philosophy of language, from which Andrejc argues that Stout’s framework has to be further developed by giving a more robust grounding for some of the democratic principles that are presupposed, such as freedom of religion and inclusion. Andrejc does so by relying primarily on the work of Elisabeth Anderson and José Medina so as to answer the question how religious language can be included in public moral deliberation. By contrast, Valerio Severino’s paper investigates the issues of political communalism through a concrete case study as it delves into how the Italian historian of religions, Raffaele Pettazzoni construed the state-persecution of religions. At the eve of the rise of Fascism in Italy, and from the beginning of the fifties, Pettazzoni was engaged with the question of fundamental religious diversity. He addressed the clash between two types of religions, the “religion of the state” and that of the “individual” with a comparative historical approach. He considered it the conflict of yesterday and of today, one of all times and traced its origins back to one of the milestones in the history of persecutions, that is, the repression of the Bacchanalia and Christianity by the Roman state. Severino’s paper recalls this theory with reference to the debate on religious persecutions and focuses on tentative solutions of the conflict and their failures, among them the failure to achieve religious unity in a Christian state. While most studies in our volume concentrate on European approaches to political theology, the penultimate paper, Péter Szakács’s Christ versus the Llama Sacrifice opens up a transatlantic perspective as it sets forth Argentinian philosopher Rodolfo Kusch’s criticism of colonial political and religious practices in Latin America in early modern times. Inspired by Heidegger’s analysis of being, Kusch’s conception of existence is nevertheless autonomous as it opposes the Aboriginal understanding of the values of life to their European counterpart. Doing so, he also offered a philosophical analysis of Andean Aboriginal religion as a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, a religion which he was keen on criticizing and which he viewed as a politically engaged complement to colonialism. Intent on creating an authentic Latin American philosophy, Kusch anticipated the great schools of thought of the decades after him, the philosophy of liberation and decolonialism. The final contribution looks at a very recent trend among atheist philosophers to recognize the salience of (some aspects of) religion for ­

Introduction  9 political society. Dennis Vanden Auweele explores how this new trend has arisen from the radical consequences of nihilism, which undoes both religious and political hope. In dialogue with the “faithless faith” of Simon Critchley, the argument is made that liberal democracy needs a sort of authorizing faith else it could easily slide into demotivated cynicism and political disconneciton. This should be a faith that religiously allies citizens to liberal principles. In a final move, this argument is evaluated on the basis of the efficacy of a faithless faith and it is shown that it has issues with creativity, authenticity and longevity. Departing from the individual’s freedom of religion in the case of Kepler, and passing through a wide panorama of early modern and modern philosophy, we are now closing the circle on the same tone of the liberty of religion and the right to self-determination in political theological terms. We sincerely hope that the reading of the texts presented in our volume will contribute to a broadening of the canon and perspective of political theology, and that it will enhance the significance of this many-sided, Protean discipline. The Editors

Notes 1 Depoliticization is the process wherein policy choices and decisions are moved from the public to the private sphere (for example, the privatization of health services, public transportation, etc.). See especially the work of Laclau (2014) and Mouffe (2013). For a contemporary review of the situation, see Toplišek (2019). 2 For more detail on decline in support for liberal principles, see Wike and Fetterolf (2018). 3 See especially the conclusion of Newman (2019).

Bibliography Cavanaugh, William. 2015. ‘Political Theology as Threat’. In: The Cambridge Companion to Christian Political Theology. Edited by Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Philips. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 236–254. Davis, Creston. 2010. ‘Political Theology – The Continental Shift’. Political Theology 11: 5–14. Laclau, Ernesto. 2014. The Rhetorical Foundations of Society. London: Verso. Lilla, Mark. 2007. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West. New York: Knopf. Losonczi, Péter, Aakash Singh and Mika Luoma-aho. 2011. ‘Introduction’. In: The Future of Political Theology. Edited by Péter Losonczi, Aakash Singh and Mika Luoma-aho. Farnham: Ashgate: 1–8. Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso. Newman, Saul. 2019. Political Theology: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Raschke, Carl A. 2015. Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.

10  Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklós Vassányi Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Toplišek, Alen. 2019. Liberal Democracy in Crisis: Rethinking Resistance Under Neoliberal Governmentality. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Wike, Richard and Janell Fetterolf. 2018. ‘Liberal Democracy’s Crisis of Confidence’. Journal of Democracy 29: 136–150.

1 Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran Miklós Vassányi

“Dann Ich bin ja weder Lutherisch noch Calvinisch, oder Jesuitisch auff jhren schlag . . . ”*

In this paper, I would like to go after how Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) sought to clarify his stance with respect to religious toleration and church communion in the period between 1598 (the year religious persecution began in Styria) and 1628 (the year when Kepler corresponded with the UpperAustrian Jesuit Father, Paul Guldin). In order to do that, I shall consider in detail how he related to his native Lutheran church and theology (and tangentially, Calvinist doctrine and Roman Catholic dogma and practice) over these years of religious and political unrest, which saw, among other things, the gradual increase of denominational persecution in the Austrian Habsburg provinces, the emission of Emperor Rudolf II’s progressive Majestätsbrief (1609), the formation of the Catholic League (1609), the Defenestration of Prague (May 1618) and the Battle of White Mountain (1620) – some of them sinister events conducive to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), determined by political and ecclesiastic concerns on a European scale. My analysis will be specifically dedicated to Kepler’s issue with the doctrine of divine omnipresence, incorporated in the Lutheran interpretation of the Eucharist and understood as a symbol of irreducible denominational difference among the Christian churches. I will then embed this issue into the context of Lutheran luminary Johannes Brenz’s political theology. Converging on that, I shall also try to draw a parallel between Kepler’s personal theological position and the natural scientific methodology by which he defended the Copernican system in his astronomical works. As a final upshot, I shall interpret his carefully honed posture towards church communion in general.

1. Kepler’s general attitude towards the three major Western Churches: a bird’s eye view Kepler’s personal religion and his relation to theological dogma and church establishments are all indices of his deep suffering from the out-and-out

12  Miklós Vassányi conflict between the recently born confessional theologies and from the intrusion of the secular arm into the forums of religious life in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. A non-conforming Lutheran, Kepler spent the best part of his life in Catholic lands whose administration was aggressively inimical to his confessed religion. In his quality of Imperial Mathematician, he served three Holy Roman Emperors of the Habsburg family – Rudolph II, Matthias and Ferdinand II – the latter two of who were fervent supporters of the Counter-Reformation as it had been surging in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Towards the end of the period we are discussing here, Upper-Austrian Jesuit Fathers were in fact trying to win his confidence and persuade him to accomodate to the Catholic church. Kepler’s reaction was ostensibly jovial yet intrinsically devastating – he remained a coveted but not converted asset.1 His Lutheranism, on the other hand, was not orthodox enough for the Stuttgart-based Württemberg Lutheran Consistory to grant him church communion, despite the fact that he was literally begging for (re-)admission. In the eyes of the Consistory, the irremediable crux in his posture was that while he unstintingly adhered to the Augsburg Confession (1530), he repeatedly rejected to endorse the Formula of Concord (1577). Hereby, he himself ended up being rejected by the Consistory. In the meantime, Calvin’s spiritual interpretation of the Lord’s Supper – a heresy for Lutheran orthodoxy – apparently never ceased to magnetize his theological attention. His nonviolent if embittered endeavors to come to terms with his native church thus failed, running parallel with violent and successful efforts of the Habsburg princes and emperors to ban Protestants from their hereditary lands (as of 1598). So, while he desperately wanted to keep his church membership and at the same time, rise above church conflict, he ultimately either lost or refused all church communion available or thinkable for him.2

2. Documentary sources The documentary sources for my query are multiple but the importance of Kepler’s correspondence is paramount. Some seven items or groups stand out from the crowd of his epistles that have a bearing on religion: 1. Kepler’s correspondence with H. von Hohenburg, C. Zehentmair and S. Gerlach (1598–1609); 2. His letter to Duke Johann Friedrich of Württemberg (1609); 3. His correspondence with the Stuttgart Lutheran Consistory (1611–1612); 4. A letter of his to Michael Mästlin (1616); 5. The all-important correspondence with Matthias Hafenreffer, Rector of Tübingen Academy (1618– 1619); 6. The terse order of the Upper Austrian Estates to Kepler and his response (1627–1628); and 7. The very significant correspondence with Paul Guldin SJ (1628), in which Kepler explains his irenic attitude toward religious belief and recuses himself from accommodating to Catholicism.3 The Stuttgart Consistory’s internal memoranda and counsel to the Duke of Württemberg about Kepler may be regarded as a group of documents which also belongs here. Besides these private sources, at least three printed

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  13 texts are also essential for reconstructing Kepler’s non-conforming Lutheran theology: His detailed interpretation of the Lord’s Supper published under the title of Unterricht Vom H. Sacrament des Leibs und Bluts Jesu Christi unsers Erlösers. Für meine Kinder, Hausgesind, und Angehörige (Prague: 1617); his anonymous confession of faith titled N. N. Glaubensbekandtnus vnd Ableinung allerhand desthalben entstandener vngütlichen Nachreden (Strassburg: 1623); and his comments on Tübingen Rector Matthias Hafenreffer’s severely critical letter, the Jo. Kepleri notae ad Epistolam D. D. Matthiae Hafenrefferi, quam is ad Keplerum scripsit (Tübingen: 1625). A surviving document of the so-called Hexenprozess, that is, Kepler’s manuscript defense of Catharina, his aged mother (Stuttgart: 1621) is, to my mind at least, less relevant here.4

3. Kepler’s external predicament around the turn of the century As this story begins in December 1598, Kepler, now a district mathematician in the city of Graz (Styriae procerum mathematicus), reports to a friend on the political and ecclesiastic conditions in Styria, deeply grieving that the freedom of religion has been abolished, Protestants have no access to the sacraments and many have even been expelled from the province: What shall I do? Stay in Styria? or leave? . . . I am a Christian who has received the Augustan Confession straight from home, this is the creed that I embrace as I have not learnt hypocrisy. . . . What am I faced with? Whoever I depended on so far for interceding for me with God has been expelled from these provinces while others who I could huddle up with before God will not be allowed to enter. . . . In such a predicament, with so many good people exiled, how shall I find a higher-flown topic for my meditations?5 Besides the two cornerstones of his faith that Kepler considers himself a Christian and that he will never let go of the Augustan Confession, it is remarkable in this passage how he insists on his need to have fellows in faith and on that it is tragical to be left alone, without a community of believers to belong to. Although at this moment, he himself has not yet been exiled, the time is now approaching when that will happen, as he announces in a 1599 letter written to his dear master in mathematics and astronomy at the Tübingen Academy, Michael Mästlin:6  . . . cannot loom larger than it does now, so long as this constitution persists. Citizens have been expelled . . . the Prince is not going to allow any Lutheran to stay in the city or, if they decide for leaving, to freely take away or sell or exchange their possessions. Snares will be contrived whereby citizens

14  Miklós Vassányi can be indicted for high treason, in order that theft may be covered up by the semblance of justice. First, prison sentences will be delivered; but a pecuniary fine will be accepted as a settlement; in the end, when the convict has been deprived of all they had, they will be exiled anyway. . . . Whoever takes an infant for baptism to a minister staying in a nearby city, whoever takes the Lord’s Supper as ordered by the Anointed, whosoever participates in Evangelical assemblies, has committed high treason. Who chants a Psalm within the city walls, who reads Lutheran homilies or the Lutheran Bible, deserves to be banned from the premises of the city.7 By the summer of 1599, Kepler has definitively lost his previous partial immunity from religious persecution and has to leave Styria as Archduke Matthias Habsburg, the ruler of Inner Austria, wants to secure the Catholic homogeneity of his province. As Kepler points out in the quoted passage, the political perspective now is that the state power is determined to use foul play to involve Protestants in high treason. All external tokens of Lutheran faith are herewith prohibited by the secular arm; and as Kepler, summoned to publicly reveal his church adherence, openly confesses his Lutheran faith in Graz, he has to leave Styria, heading for Prague. There, he will join Tycho Brahe as an assistant and later, will hail with enthusiasm the emission of Emperor Rudolph’s benevolent and profoundly liberal Bohemian Majestätsbrief (early July 1609).8

4. Kepler’s issue with Lutheran Church discipline: a series of baleful events These external circumstances were aggravated by Kepler’s early, personal doubts especially about how the Lord’s Supper has to be conceived of in clear and “orthodox” theological terms. To believe the Notae ad epistolam Hafenrefferi, his apology printed after Tübingen Rector Matthias Hafenreffer’s theological missive to Kepler had been published (1625),9 Kepler as a 12-year-old boy had already been mentally vexed by the fact of the schism,10 and as an adolescent, even before arriving at the Tübingen Stift, he endorsed a Calvinistical conception of the Lord’s Supper without identifying it as a Calvinist doctrine.11 After earning his magister artium degree at Tübingen University in 1591, the young man continued to study theology at the same institution, as was customary.12 He had almost graduated when in 1594 he was invited to Graz to serve as a district mathematician, and mathematics teacher at the Protestant Stiftsschule there. In the Notae, he points out that during his theological studies, he sympathized with Lutheran theologian Aegidius Hunnius’ (1550–1603) conception of Christ’s person, which derived the ubiquity of His human nature from the hypostatical union with His divine essence, the Logos.13

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  15 Next, in 1609, Kepler shared his doubts concerning divine presence in the communion wafer with the Württemberg theologians and Prince Johann Friedrich;14 while in 1612, as he moved to Linz upon the death of Emperor Rudolf II (1612), he was banned from Lutheran church communion by the local pastor, the Reverend Daniel Hitzler (1575–1635).15 The reason for this was, again, that he shared with Hitzler his reservations concerning the Lutheran doctrine of divine ubiquity, taking “exceptions,”16 that is, stipulating conditions on which he was willing to endorse the Formula of Concord as it had been set out in the Book of Concord (Concordia, Dresden: 1580).17 Kepler appealed to the Stuttgart Consistory, to thwart scandal,18 but the Consistory’s response dissuaded him from harboring alternative theological opinions.19 Besides the interpretation of divine omnipresence, another difficulty was Kepler’s unwillingness to excommunicate the non-Lutheran denominations on account of their respective interpretations of the Lord’s Supper.20 He was allowed to take communion for the last time in Prague, 1617.21 Traveling to Tübingen in the same year, he again asked for permission from Tübingen Academy Rector Matthias Hafenreffer to be admitted to the Lord’s Supper. Hafenreffer furthered Kepler’s quest to the Tübingen Church, which answered that Kepler had to endorse the Formula Concordiae in order to be admitted to communion.22 Finally, in 1619, Kepler’s reaction elicited definitive rejection from Rector Hafenreffer.23 Hereby, Kepler, a conscientious objector to at least one major article of the Concordia, lost the battle for church communion, remaining isolated with a personal faith that was not endorsed by any particular church but was as it were composed piecemeal from the respective creeds of the three great Western Christian churches. However, he would see it the other way around: for him, the contemporary situation of Christian theology had resulted from a fragmentation of truth that should never have happened in the first place. This situation poignantly left the burden of reconstructing the original whole and unblemished truth to the individual believer.24 That, in turn – Kepler would say – ultimately proved the incapability of the new churches to represent the spirituality of original Christendom, the universal agapeic faith of the Church Fathers.

5. Kepler’s struggle with the omnipresence of the flesh: a christological fray In his letter addressed to M. Hafenreffer in April 1619, Kepler identified 60 hot spots in the relevant part of the Formula Concordiae that were related to the person of the Christ and seemed spurious or at least dubious to him.25 More specifically, his main concern was the Lutheran dogma about the omnipresence of the Christ’s flesh, which had originally been developed by Martin Luther in the course of the Eucharistic controversy he conducted against Ulrich Zwingli and other Reformed sacramentarian theologians like Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531) and Andreas Bodenstein von

16  Miklós Vassányi Karlstadt (1486–1541) in the years 1527–1528.26 In the polemical essay That These Words of Christ: “This Is My Body” etc. Still Stand Firm against the Fanatics (1527),27 Luther first argues for the real presence of the Christ’s flesh in the communion bread on Scriptural grounds.28 Referring to divine omnipotence, he then refutes the Calvinist idea that the real presence contradicts divine ubiquity;29 and asserts the omnipresence of the divine nature of Jesus Christ.30 From this, he ultimately draws the conclusion that even Christ’s human nature, that is, His body is – visibly or invisibly – everywhere,31 and it is by this reason that it is also there in the wafer. In a final analysis, this proposition relies upon the inseparable union of the divine nature with the human nature in the person of the Christ. The Augsburg Confession of 1530, then, plainly declared the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper without offering any argument in justification.32 It is no wonder Kepler found no fault with that. The Concordia of 1580, however, went to great lengths in explaining, on the basis of Luther’s arguments, that Christ’s body could be really present (warhafftig gegenwertig) in several different places simultaneously by virtue of the divine omnipotence.33 Yet the Concordia also took care to curtail an absolute omnipresence of the human flesh, reserving only the possibility that it could be in several different places at the same time—a thesis of the potentially simultaneous multiplicity of Christ’s body.34 Next, Hunnius, a towering and prolific author, and a theological lighthouse for Kepler, took a position on Christ’s omnipresence in at least two texts of his immense life work: the Commentarivs in epistolam divi Pavli Apostoli ad Ephesios (Frankfurt: 1587)35 and the later Widerlegung des Caluinischen Büchleins (Wittemberg: 1600). A militant Lutheran, Hunnius still spelled out a concept of corporeal ubiquity with no relation to physical space,36 that is, one resulting from a divine mode of omnipresence (divina et illocalis praesentia).37 He conceived of this as a consequence upon the personal union of the two natures in Christ (praesentia personalis).38 In this manner, he avoided the implications of introducing a ubiquitous body – and thereby gained Kepler’s approval. Rector Hafenreffer, then, in his repartee (July 1619) to Kepler’s positions on the Lord’s Supper (April 1619), repeated Luther’s often-stated thesis that faith supersedes and abolishes natural reason, and made it very clear that the Saviour is corporeally ubiquitous because of the binding force of the indissoluble union of His human flesh with the divine Logos in His person.39 But this did not make any sense to Kepler, who in his April 1619 letter had nevertheless also presupposed by anticipating faith that the divinity is really present in the communion bread.40 But the reason must be different – to a physicist’s mind at least, it cannot be the ubiquity of a physical body. It is safe and sound to say, from a Keplerian theological point of view, that in the bread, a finite body has received the infinity of the Godhead. This is a mystery but one that is endorsed by faith, supported by ancient church doctrine, included in the Augsburg Confession, and not stumbling on a sort of

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  17 impossibility that natural science just cannot tolerate.41 What autonomous natural science cannot accept is that an individual body is infinite and therefore ubiquitous.42 Here, Kepler draws the line. Crossing this line would be buying into ecclesiastic authority rather than allowing the logic of independent natural science to inquire freely: ne videar authoritati potius subscribere quam veritati.43 On top of this methodological requirement of the new science, the doctrine of the omnipresence of the Christ’s body smells of a heresy of dangerous novelty for Kepler as the Early Church did not hold it.44 As Hafenreffer argues in defense of the Lutheran position on the ubiquity of Christ’s body, his argument also strives to be rational even though his determining ground is visibly Luther’s authority. On the one hand, he is right in pointing out that Kepler as a physicist conceives of body as a finite thing but on the other, Kepler is also right in maintaining that Scripture never asserts Christ’s body to be omnipresent. Hafenreffer’s quest that Kepler should endorse the Lutheran postulate despite contradictory natural scientific principles seems, indeed, theology’s illegitimate intrusion into pious physics. Keplerian physics is ready to confess that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us but unwilling to acknowledge that an individual body can be infinite – and hence be present in the communion bread by virtue of its omnipresence. To Kepler, this seems a contradiction in the terms, contradictio in adiecto. While Kepler as a theologian recognizes that the divine Logos is infinite, Kepler as a physicist will never allow that body can be ubiquitous because physics says bodies have boundaries.45 In this respect, Hafenreffer’s query is like what Galilei was faced with in Italy at approximately the same time. As the Italian scholar points out, e.g., in his Letter to Cristina di Lorena (Lettera a Cristina di Lorena, summer of 1615), the Granduchess of Tuscany, his ecclesiastic opponents in Florence and Rome actually seek to establish methodological rules and criteria of truth for physics as a natural science.46 In other words, Galilei in Catholic Italy and Kepler in Lutheran Württemberg face essentially the same situation. Württemberg and Roman theologians rely on the same methodological presupposition in their pursuit: the supremacy of theology as an all-embracing science and the exclusive mediating mission of the church. Lutheran theologians represent these positions in spite of the sola Scriptura-principle, Catholic theologians in the spirit of the canons of the Council of Trent. However, the church’s legitimate scope of control de fide et moribus should not cross over into the physics of the natural bodies, says Galilei explicitly, Kepler implicitly in the face of this challenge. As a matter of fact, Kepler is trying to interpret, much in the spirit of the Lutheran principles sola Scriptura−sola fides, the words of the Lord’s Supper on his own. He points out that I ground and build my faith . . . only and exclusively on clear and distinct statements of the written and perfectly well known Word of God as it is there in its original language. . . . And then, as far as certain points

18  Miklós Vassányi are concerned, with respect to the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, an explanation must be sought for a couple of statements in order that such expressions as contradict each other literally may be compared with reference to some undisputed position.47 Hence the question is, for both Galilei and Kepler, what degree of autonomy the natural scientist has in respect of Biblical interpretation and confessional dogma? Where are the boundaries of interpretive autonomy when it comes to examining a cross-section of the physical sciences with theology – like in the case of the real presence in the communion bread? Kepler and Galilei alike fall victim to their respective churches’ claims for exclusivity within the domains of Scriptural and dogmatic interpretation. Hafenreffer repeatedly repudiates Kepler for his allegedly illegitimate inquiry into church-endorsed dogma. In the face of Galilei, the Trent canons backed up by the 1564 Profession of Faith assert the Catholic Church’s exclusive right to interpret Scripture in the widest sense.48 Further, Kepler emphasizes several times that his quandary is after all not that he has to endorse a thesis (the omnipresence of the Christ’s flesh) he has examined and found unlikely and even absurd but that on top of that, he is even expected by the Concordia to label as heretical, excommunicate and curse a position that was occupied by the ancient Church Fathers.49 For him, this is a point where landlord-backed church politics just guts the message of the Gospel and where the church annihilates the mainspring of the religion it pretends to protect.

6. A political theological horizon behind Kepler’s query: Johannes Brenz’s theory of the secular power in ecclesiastic affairs Kepler’s imbroglio in relation to confessional theologies and church practices is better understood when set against the backdrop of Johannes Brenz’s (1499–1570) political theology. This is set forth at length in the so-called Prolegomena (Frankfurt: 1555)50 of this immensely productive Lutheran church father, first ordinarius in the Faculty of Theology and Chancellor of the University of Tübingen (1534–1561).51 The Prolegomena itself was an extensive precursor to a many-volume vindication of Brenz’s major work, the so-called Confessio Wirtembergica (Tübingen: 1552).52 Composed with a view to be presented at the Council of Trent in early 1552, the Confessio itself is also an interesting read in the present context (see especially the chapter titled “De Sacra Scriptura”). But primarily the first section of the Prolegomena – “De officio Principum in Ecclesia Filij Dei” – will give us more insight into the political theological background of Kepler’s problematique. The main objective of that section is to drive home the point that secular princes are actually more entitled to settle theological disputes and regulate

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  19 church affairs than councils or other ecclesiastic authorities. First and foremost, however – argues Brenz – the individual believer is morally obliged to probe the purity of every church-endorsed doctrine by the standard of the Gospel, relying on the free and gratuitous intervention of the Holy Spirit. In a second instance, princes are vested with an even higher-ranking authority to control religious doctrine: The universal church of God, and the congregation gathering in Christ’s name . . ., are not the only authorities entitled to pass judgment on religious doctrine, and distinguish a true doctrine from a false one but every private person, being a church member, is also entitled to do that. And it is especially the Prince’s duty to keep off any pseudo-prophets or impious teachers from the churches of his territory. . . . Insofar as one’s eternal salvation is at stake, it is by any standard illicit to resign oneself to someone else’s opinion without scrutinizing it by our own judgment. . . . This principle holds good for individuals: that they are obliged to find out and decide which doctrine to support and which to reject; but in particular, princes are responsible for determining which doctrine should be inculcated to their people and which should be banned. . . . It is conspicuous that as a private individual should have a private power to consider and take decisions in matters of religious doctrine, so the prince should have a public power to the same effect.53 In this section, Brenz almost terminologically applies the political theological doctrine of cuius regio eius religio, which is only an implicit though still foundational precondition of §§ 15 and 24 of the 1555 Augsburg Settlement. However, Brenz’s formulation of the duty of personal control in matters of religion reveals a latent tension in that principle. As the individual believer and the territorial prince are both expected to reject false doctrine, an individual may deem necessary to accept a thesis that their territorial, landlord-endorsed church may find just as necessary to reject. Exactly such would be Kepler’s case. As a good Tübingen alumnus, he essentially applies the previously-cited Brentian principle ad unumquemvis hominem privatum pertinet de doctrina religionis iudicare just as he is trapped by the continuation of the same Brentian principle – the territorial prince’s ecclesiastic authority. In short, just as Kepler applies the first part of the principle the second part is being applied to him. This clash of the Brentian political theological principles was well noticed towards the close of the 16th century by the Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). On the basis of the lectures he read in two Roman colleges, he composed his influential Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei (Ingolstadt: 1587–1593)54 as a summary of all Protestant doctrines and their respective refutations. On account of the interpretation of Scripture, he delineates the positions taken by Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Brenz and M. Chemnitz (Kemnitius),55 in order to extensively refute them

20  Miklós Vassányi one by one. Before counter-arguing at length for exclusive papal, synodal and episcopal authority in respect of Scriptural interpretation, Bellarmine points out what paradoxical consequences Brenz’s political theology might have. On such principles, he says, the Emperor might legitimately punish the Protestant princes for religious non-conformity, who might legitimately punish individual believers for the same reason – who in turn are none the less entitled to free inquiry in matters of religion. Bellarmine thus notices that secular power in ecclesiastic policy and individual liberty in theological inquiry mutually exclude each other.56 It is in this tight squeeze that Kepler is caught.

7. Conclusion: articles of Kepler’s personal religion and a parallel with his natural scientific method Kepler’s position relies on an overarching methodological principle whose validity extends to both theology and astronomy. In de fide affairs, he considers the voice of the inner man, the voice of personal conscience the ultimate criterion of truth, instead of external doctrinal authority; and in astronomy alike, he depends on internal, rational, natural scientific evidence instead of, again, external ecclesiastic authority or even astronomical authority or tradition. (Even in the Mysterium cosmographicum, Kepler presupposes that God’s project of creation is rationally comprehensible – it is even the task of the natural philosopher to discover why God arranged the solar system in this particular manner). Hence in both cases the decisive momentum is a scrupulous autonomous and highly personal investigation which is conducted by an individual in order to reach a rational argument that is intuited and recognized as true by them. In other words, the criterion of the truth is personal inquiry-based rationality as opposed to heteronomous authoritative instruction. For Kepler, this is the methodology of personal faith and personally verified science alike. Galilei applies essentially the same criterion of truth as he argues in the Lettera a Cristina di Lorena that astronomy is a discipline that is methodologically self-founding and self-controlling insofar as it makes no propositions de fide et moribus. So, for Kepler at least, the validity of a statement depends on personal rational intuition and therefore, he anticipates to a considerable extent the methodology of his younger contemporary, René Descartes. Kepler’s methodological suggestion is that truth cannot come into sight without one’s personal intuition, truth and an Ego are inseparable – you can only speak of a truth in first-person singular. On the other hand, Kepler is a grand natural scientist exactly by virtue of the meticulous ­control he exercises over the ideas of others on the touchstone of his personal rationality. He is simply applying the same method in the domain of theology as well because it has been his experience as a natural scientist that precision, the critical revision of others’ ideas, the personal rational

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  21 control over the theses of others is the way of achieving true insight and creating new knowledge.57 At the same time, however, it is also clear from the fruitless struggle he conducted for his re-admission to Lutheran church communion that Kepler was unprepared to being left alone with a decidedly personal creed.58 A complementary to this fact is that he was also clearly unwilling to join any of the existing churches without condition; but neither could the Lutheran or the Catholic church accept his conditions or exceptions, that is, in short, the Keplerian personal creed. In other words, despite the importance he attributed to personal rationality, Kepler did not want to stay a lonely believer without church communion, one-on-one with God. For him, apparently, belonging to a religious community was a matter of life and death. Being part of the many-member spiritual body of Christ was for Kepler a condition of meaningful religious life and practice, and thereby, a precondition for life in general to have a meaning. Though being a member of a community of believers was for him prerequisite to the exercise of his religion, Kepler was unable to locate such a community because he found the existing churches mutually exclusive and not universal enough. What he needed was a universal church community, a religious body which is catholic in the original sense of the word, which regards the theological virtue of charity as the highest of all, which is latitudinarian or at least more latitudinarian than either the Lutheran or the Catholic or the Calvinist church. A Christian church for him must be universal like astronomy is universal. By virtue of this perspective, Kepler belongs into the company of John Locke and Isaac Newton, that is, among the great scholars of early modernity who refused to accept some (fundamental) Christian doctrines, with the difference that Locke and Newton kept their doctrinal divergence secret while Kepler as it were made a public affair of his personal creed and thereby almost forced out his own excommunication.59 On account of the ubiquity of the Saviour’s flesh, Kepler’s query is fundamentally directed at how believers become one community, the Pauline mystical body of Jesus Christ. For him, taking the Lord’s Supper is the token by excellence, of being a member of a Christian church: communion just is community. Hence it is through physically incorporating the communion bread that you become spiritually and morally incorporated into the spiritual body of the Christ. This stance is endorsed by authoritative ancient church doctrine, which is a crucial point for Kepler – for Denys the Areopagite, for instance, koinōnia is realized by participating in the Eucharist at the divine service (The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 3, Theory 1 and 13).60 While, however, Kepler keeps regarding the Lord’s Supper as essentially a symbol, there are no lengths to which he would not go for taking it. More precisely, he positions himself between the respectively Catholic and Calvinist interpretations of the communion bread. For him, it is neither in itself sacred nor the flesh of Christ but as soon as it is taken in, it is transformed

22  Miklós Vassányi into the flesh of Christ. Which is to say that inside the body of a believer, the bread is the flesh of the Christ whereas outside a believer’s body it is not. In still other words, it has to be incorporated by the believer for them to be incorporated by the divine and ecclesiastic community (Hübner 1975, p. 119). In itself, it is no transcendent or mystical body while it will turn a mystical body inside my body – and conversely, it turns my body into a part of a mystical body as it realizes the powers of its divine essence as soon as it becomes part of my essence.61 This is, then, the theory which ultimately could not be realized in practice by Kepler. Unable to go communionless, he became extra-confessional because he aspired to be supra-confessional among strongly confessional churches as he strove to define his own religion with reference to a traditional theological framework while at the same time tearing himself out of that interpretive frame.62

Bibliography Primary sources 1: Kepler’s (theologically) relevant printed works in chronological order: Unterricht Vom H. Sacrament des Leibs und Bluts Jesu Christi unsers Erlösers. Für meine Kinder, Hausgesind, und Agehörige, Auß deren Vermahnung, so in den Evangelischen Kirchen vor der Außthailung fürgelesen würt, hergenommen, und Frag- und Antworts weise verfasset. GW XII: Theologica – Hexenprozess, 12–18. Jo. Kepleri notae ad Epistolam D. D. Matthiae Hafenrefferi, quam is ad Keplerum scripsit, Anno 1619. ultimo Julii, Extat autem impressa in Actis Mencennanis, fol. 62 & seqq., 31 July 1619: GW XII, 48–62

N. N. Glaubensbekandtnus vnd Ableinung allerhand desthalben entstandener vngütlichen Nachreden. Gedruckt im Jahr 1623: GW XII, 22–38 Johannes Kepler: Gesammelte Werke [GW], Bände 1–22. Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft und der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften unter der Leitung von Walther von Dyck † und Max Caspar †. München: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1937−present. 63 Primary sources 2: Relevant epistles to and from Kepler in chronological order: • Kepler to Herwart von Hohenburg December 16, 1598: GW Vol. XIII, no.107, 264–270.

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  23 • • • •

• • • • • • • •

Colmann Zehentmair to Kepler June 23, 1599: GW Vol. XIII, no. 125, 364–367. Kepler to Duke Johann Friedrich of Württemberg early May 1609: GW Vol. XVI, no. 528, 240–243. Kepler to Stephan Gerlach July 18, 1609: GW Vol. XVI, no. 532, 247–248. Stuttgart Lutheran Consistory to Duke Johann Friedrich of Württemberg April 25, 1611: GW Vol. XVI, no. 609 Nachbericht, 464–465. Stuttgart Lutheran Consistory to Kepler September 25, 1612: GW Vol. XVII, no. 638, 27–33. Kepler to Michael Mästlin December 22, 1616: GW Vol. XVII, no. 750, 197–207. Kepler to Matthias Hafenreffer November 28, 1618: GW Vol. XVII, no. 808, 283–287. Matthias Hafenreffer to Kepler February 17, 1619: GW Vol. XVII, no. 829, 331–333. Kepler to Matthias Hafenreffer April 11, 1619: GW Vol. XVII, no. 835, 342–351. Matthias Hafenreffer to Kepler July 31, 1619: GW XVII, no. 847, 367–371 = GW Vol. XII, 41–45. Upper Austrian Estates to Kepler October 20, 1627: GW Vol. XVIII, no. 1058, 312. Kepler to Father Paul Guldin SJ February 24, 1628: GW Vol. XVIII, no. 1072, 330–333.

Primary sources 3: Other texts in chronological order of composition: Corpus Dionysiacum II G. Heil and A. M. Ritter, eds.: PseudoDionysius Areopagita: De coelesti hierarchia – De ecclesiastica hierarchia – De mystica theologia – Epistulae. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991. (Patristische Texte und Studien, Bd. 36) Luther, Martin: Das diese Wort Christi (Das ist mein Leib etce) noch fest stehen widder die Schwerm geister. Wittemberg: Lotther, MDXXVII.

24  Miklós Vassányi “Confessio Augustana” (1530): Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelischlutherischen Kirche, herausgegeben im Gedenkjahr der Augsburgischen Konfession 1930 in deutscher und lateinischer Sprache. ­Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1930, 44–137. “Decretum de libris sacris et de traditionibus recipiendis” Denzinger, Henricus – Schönmetzer, Adolfus, SJ, eds.: Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum. Editio XXXVI emendata. Barcinone – Friburgi Brisgoviae – Romae: Herder, 1976, 364–366. Confessio Piae Doctrinae, Qvae Nomine Illvstrissimi principis ac domini D. Christophori Ducis VVirtembergensis & Teccensis, ac Comitis Montisbeligardi, per legatos eius die XXIIII. mensis Ianuarij, Anno M.D.LII. congregationi Tridentini Concilij proposita est. Tvbingae: Per Vlrichum Morhardum, 1552. Assertio catholicae fidei circa articvlos confessionis nomine illvstrissimi dvcis Wirtenbergensis oblatae per Legatos eius Concilio Tridentino, XXIII. Ianuarij Anni MDLII. Autore F. Petro a Soto, ordinis sancti Dominici, professore Theologiae. Coloniae: Ioannes Nouesianus excudebat, Anno MDLV. In apologiam Confessionis Illustrissimi Principis ac Domini, D. Christophori, ducis Vuirtenbergensis &c. ПРОΛΕΓΟΜΕΝΑ, Avtore Ioanne Brentio. Francoforti: apud Petrum Brubachium, Anno 1555. Apologiae Confessionis Illustriss. Principis ac Domini d. Christophori Ducis Vuirtenbergensis &c. ΠΕΡΙΚΟΠΗ ΠΡΩΤΗ /δευτέρα /Posterior pars secundae pericopes /Postrema pericope . Avtore Ioanne Brentio. Francoforti: Excudebat Petrus Brubachius. Examen decretorum concilii Tridentini. In quo ex Sacrae Scripture norma, collatis etiam orthodoxis uerae & purioris Antiquitatis testimonijs ostenditur, qualia sint illa Decreta, & quo artificio sint composita: Avtore Martino Kemnicio. MDLXVI. Secunda pars: Tertia pars: Frankfurt: MDLXXIII. “Formula concordiae” (FC, 1577): Concordia. Christliche Widerholete, Einmütige Bekentnues nachbenanter Churfuersten, Fuersten und Stende Augspurgischer Confession, und derselben zu ende des Buchs underschriebener Theologen Lere und Glaubens. Dresden: Gedruckt durch Matthes Stoeckel und Gimel Bergen, 1580.64 Antonius Arimathæensis: Isagoge brevis et perspicua monstrans usum atque vim verae salutaris et immotae doctrinae de invocatione Dei & filii Dei Jesu Christi . . . Scripta . . . ad

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  25 analysin Thesium D. Aegyd. Hunnii . . . Refutantur simul plurimae theses confessionis, exhibitae ab eodem Hunnio. Neustadt in Palatino: Matthias Harnisch, 1586. Commentarivs in epistolam divi Pavli Apostoli ad Ephesios, Scriptus ab Egidio Hvnnio, S Theologiae Doctore et Professore in Academia Marpurgensi. Francofvrti ad Moenvm: Excvdebat Ioannes Spies, MDLXXXVII. Dispvtationes Roberti Bellarmini Politiani, Societatis Iesv, De controversiis Christianae fidei, adversvs hvivs temporis haereticos, Tribus Tomis comprehensae. Ingolstadii: Ex officina typographica Davidis Sartorii, Anno Domini MDLXXXVI. Widerlegung Des Caluinischen Büchleins, so in vergangener Herbstmeß, wider die zur Christlichen Visitation, der Kirchen vnnd Schulen im Churfürstenthumb Sachsen verfaßte vier Artickel durch den Truck ausgesprenget worden. Zur rettung ermelten Arickel, Gestellet durch Egidium Hunnen, der D. Schrifft Doctorn vnnd Professorn zu Wittemberg. Gedruckt durch M. G. Müller. Anno 1600.65 Gindely, Anton: Geschichte der Böhmischen Brüder 2. Band (1564–1609). Prag: Carl Bellmann’s Verlag, 1858, 447–458. Bucciantini, Massimo – Camerota, Michele, eds.: Galileo Galilei: Scienza e religione. Scritti copernicani. Roma: Donzelli Editore, 2009, 35–84. (Saggi. Scienza e Filosofia) Acta Mentzeriana, Hoc est: Justa et necessaria defensio contra primam partem Injustae & non-necessariae defensionis Balthasaris Mentzeri D. quae fuit Historia certaminis Tubingensis. Tubingae: Apud Theodoricum Werlinum, Anno MDCXXV. Interpretive literature in alphabetical order: Barker, Peter and Bernard R. Goldstein. 2001. ‘Theological Foundations of Kepler’s Astronomy’. In: Osiris, Volume 16: Science in Theistic Contexts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 88–113. Burke-Gaffney, M. W. SJ. 1944. Kepler and the Jesuits. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company. Caspar, Max. 1948. Kepler. Edited and translated by C. D. Hellman, with a new introduction, bibliography and references by O. Gingerich. Bibliographic citations by O. Gingerich and A. Segonds. New York: Dover Publications, 1993 (Original German edition: M. Caspar. Johannes Kepler. Stuttgart). Connor, James A. 2004. Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer’s Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother. San Francisco: Harper.

26  Miklós Vassányi Hausenblasova, Jaroslava, Jiři Mikulec and Martina Thomsen (eds.). 2014. Religion und Politik im frühneuzeitlichen Böhmen: Der Majestätsbrief Kaiser Rudolfs II. von 1609. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Hübner, Jürgen. 1975. Die Theologie Johannes Keplers zwischen Orthodoxie und Naturwissenschaft. Tübingen: Beiträge zur historischen Theologie no. 50. Köhler, W. 1904. Bibliographia Brentiana. Berlin: Schwetschke und Sohn. Kozhamthadam, Job SJ. 1994. The Discovery of Kepler’s Laws: The Interaction of Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press. Mayes, Rev. Robert. 2005. ‘St. Hilary’s Trinitarian Theology and Luther’s Theology of Incarnate Omnipresence’. Logia: A Journal of Lutheran Theology XIV, 4: 31–40. Mazer, Arthur. 2010. Shifting the Earth: The Mathematical Quest to Understand the Motion of the Universe. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Methuen, Charlotte. 1990. Kepler’s Tübingen. Stimulus to a Theological Mathematics. Aldershot: Variorum (Saint Andrews Studies in Reformation History). Nelson Burnett, Amy. 2016. ‘That These Words of Christ, “This Is My Body,” etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics 1527’. In: The Annotated Luther, Vol. 3: Church and Sacraments. Edited by Paul W. Robinson. Minneapolis: Fortress Press: 163–274. Voelkel, James R. 1999. Johannes Kepler and the New Astronomy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Notes * Kepler’s statement from his Glaubensbekandtnus (on which see next) = Gesammelte Werke (herafter GW), Vol. XII, 22–38, 29. – The writing of this paper was made possible by a grant of the Hungarian Fulbright Commission, which supported a research stay at the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Howard Louthan. My most sincere thanks go to the Fulbright Commission, to Professor Louthan and to Professor James Oberly. 1 For Kepler’s relation to Catholicism, see his letter to Johannes Pistorius, of June 15, 1607 = GW Vol. XV, no. 431, 488–492, more specifically 489–490; and his letter to Father Paul Guldin SJ, of February 24, 1628 = GW Vol. XVIII, no. 1072, 330–333. For a presentation of Kepler’s relationship with Father Guldin, see James Connor 2004, p. 349–354. See further Job Kozhamthadam SJ 1994, p. 38. 2 For a vivid summary of the political events relevant to Kepler’s life, see Chapter 7 (“Renegades”) of Arthur Mazer 2010, especially p. 117–131. 3 GW XVIII, no. 1072, 330–333. On Father Guldin, see Burke-Gaffney 1944, p. 128–130. 4 See a step-by-step explanation of the witch trial in James R. Voelkel 1999, p. 98–107. 5 “Quid enim? In Styria maneam? an discedam? . . . Christianus sum, Augustanam confessionem ex institutione parentum hausi, hanc amplector, simulare non didici . . . Quid autem? Ejecti sunt hisce provinciis, quibus internunciis hactenus cum Deo egi: quibus aliis agere me posse cum Deo persuasum habeo, ii non admittentur. . . . In tanta exacerbatione, tot bonorum virorum exiliis, qua fronte . . . meis speculationibus amplius quippiam petiero?” (Kepler’s letter to Herwart von Hohenburg, December 16, 1598 = Johannes Kepler: Gesammelte

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  27 Werke [hereafter GW], Vol. XIII: Briefe 1590–1599, Edited by Max Caspar, München: Beck, 1945, no. 107, 269. All translations by the author of this paper.) 6 On Mästlin’s role in forming Kepler’s ideas of a theologically-based astronomy, see Barker and Goldstein 2001, p. 88–113, p.97–99. 7 “. . . atrociorem non futuram, quam quae nobis impendet, durante hac Reip forma. Ventum est jam ad exilia civium . . . nunquam commissurus est princeps, ut vel Lutherano locus in urbe sit, vel libera migranti potestas, avehendi, commutandi, vendendi bona sua. Confingentur doli, quibus in crimina majestatis implicentur cives, ut rapinae praetextum habeant justitiae. Carceres primo parati erunt; tum multae pecuniariae, quibus illi redimantur; denique bonis dissipatis, exilia. . . . Qui infantem ad verbi ministrum, in arce aliqua vicina degentem defert, baptismi causa, qui S. Caenam accipit ex institutione Christi, qui conciones Evangelicas adit; majestatem laesit. Qui psalmum intra urbem cantat, qui postillas, qui Biblia Lutherana legit, urbis territorio meretur arceri.” (Kepler’s letter to Michael Mästlin, August 29, 1599 = GW Vol. XIV, no. 132, 56–57.) 8 See Kepler’s letter to his Tübingen professor of theology Stephan Gerlach, written in the wake of the emission of the Majestätsbrief, on July 18, 1609: “Nova accurate ad vos perscribuntur. Vicimus uno verbo, per Dej gratiam. Habentur publicae conciones germanicae in templis et aedibus.” (GW Vol. XVI, no. 532, 247.) For a broader historical context with regard to the ecclesiastic scene in the Graz of the late 16th century, see Max Caspar 1993, p. 53–54. For the church policies of the new ruler of Inner Austria, the young Archduke Ferdinand (inaugurated at the end of 1596), see ibid., 77–84. For the text of the Bohemian Majestätsbrief, see Anton Gindely 1858, p. 447–458. For state-of-the-art contextual analyses of the Majestätsbrief, see Jaroslava Hausenblasova, Jiři Mikulec and Martina Thomsen (eds) 2014. 9 Acta Mentzeriana, Hoc est: Justa et necessaria defensio contra primam partem Injustae & non-necessariae defensionis Balthasaris Mentzeri D. quae fuit Historia certaminis Tubingensis. Tubingae: Werlin, 1625, 62–68. 10 “. . . magna sollicitudine fuerim divexatus super dissensu Ecclesiarum.” (Jo. Kepleri notae ad Epistolam D. D. Matthiae Hafenrefferi, quam is ad Keplerum scripsit, Anno 1619. ultimo Julii, GW Vol. XII, 48–62, 49.) 11 “. . . elicui rationem eam ipsam, pro sana, quam paulo post audivi de suggestu pro Calviniana rejici.” (Ibid.) The Glaubensbekandtnus specifies that Kepler consorts with the Jesuits and Calvinists on account of the person of Christ: “. . . ich den Jesuitern und Calvinisten im Articul von der Person Christi, recht gebe, mit dieser maaß, wa diese mit jenen einstimmen, und beide mit einander ja sagen, oder sich wider die bezüchtigung deß Nestorianismi bescheidenlich schützen” (Glaubensbekandtnus = GW Vol. XII, 25–26). 12 For an impressive analysis of Kepler’s entire education, and the profoundly political tendency of the Reformation in Württemberg, see Charlotte Methuen 1990, p. 29–59. 13 On Hunnius, first a student in Tübingen, then a Marburg and later Wittenberg theologian, see the next section of the main text together with the footnotes. 14 “. . . et ipsi tunc Principi per libellum testatus sum meum de hac controversia moderanda, adque morem antiquitatis revocanda judicium.” (Kepleri notae, GW Vol. XII, 49.) See Kepler’s letter to Prince Johann Friedrich of Württemberg, on Kepler’s conditional acceptance of the Formula of Concord, and on his fascination with the Calvinist doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, of early May 1609: “Als hab ich . . . mir einmahl, und zwar gewissens halben fürgenommen, der formulae Concordiae nit anders als conditionaliter, de non

28  Miklós Vassányi oppugnanda, und cum exceptione tractandae pacis nachmahlen zu underschreiben. . . . In sonderlichem bedenckhen, das ich auch sonsten von Jugend auff in articulo de coena nie befinden khönden, das ainer der Calvinischen mainung beygethan . . . von diser ungleichen mainung wegen nit solte unser Bruder in Christo genennet oder gehalten werden . . .” (GW Vol. XVI, no. 528, 240–243, 242.) 15 On Rev. Hitzler, catechist and superintendent in Linz, see the Notes section of GW Vol. XII, 317. 16 “hae inquam caussae me perpulerunt, ut in primo ingressu et communionem ab illo cum Ecclesia Lincensi peterem, et meas tamen exceptiones circa hunc articulum interponerem . . . vidi me excludi . . .” (Kepleri notae, GW Vol. XII, 50.) 17 The Lutheran creed Formula Concordiae (FC), essentially a much more detailed elaboration on the Augsburg Confession, was first worked out in 1577 and then printed in a finalized form in 1580 together with other doctrinal material under the title Concordia. Christliche Widerholete, Einmütige Bekentnues nachbenanter Churfuersten, Fuersten und Stende Augspurgischer Confession, und derselben zu ende des Buchs underschriebener Theologen Lere und Glaubens. Dresden: Gedruckt durch Matthes Stoeckel und Gimel Bergen, 1580. For our query here, see especially Part VII (Vom heiligen Abendmal: 292v–304v) of the section entitled Gründtliche, Lautere, Richtige, und endtliche widerholung und erklerung etlicher Artickel Augspurgischer Confession (256r–330). See analysis of the relevant passage next. On the gradual composition of the text of the Concordia, see Methuen 1990, p. 42–46. 18 “. . . statui provocare ad Consistorium Stuccardianum, si forte ejus authoritate apud Hizlerum interposita, communionem . . . impetrare, scandalum publicum, quod Wirtembergensibus diligenter inculcavi, amoliri possem. . . . communionem per confessionem ingenuam petebam.” (Kepleri notae, GW Vol. XII, 50.) 19 The Consistory’s annihilating rebuttal of Kepler’s appeal against exclusion from communion in Linz was dated on September 25, 1612 = GW Vol. XVII, no. 638, 27–33. 20 “Nec enim locum habebat ipsorum adhortatio, ut discederem ab hoc dissensu: nam conscientiae causa dissentiebam ab iis, circa damnationes virulentas ob hunc articulum.” (Kepleri notae, GW Vol. XII, 50.) 21 “Cum ergo iter Tubingam haberem anno dicto, nec ita pridem Pragae communione fuissem impertitus a D. D. Garthio, speravi et hoc exempIo et oblivione veterum posse me redire in gratiam cum Wirtembergicis.” (Ibid., 51.) 22 “. . . tandemque impetravi responsum, in quo ille sententiam Ecclesiae Wirtemberg Tubingensis mihi proposuit; ea conditio dicta communionis, si ego per subscriptionem illis accederem.” (Ibid.) 23 Matthias Hafenreffer sent off his raw-worded response to Kepler on July 31, 1619 = GW Vol. XVII, no. 847, 367–371 = GW Vol. XII, 41–45. 24 As Kepler says in his personal creed, “es thut mir im hertzen wehe, daß die drey grosse factiones die Wahrheit under sich also elendiglich zurissen haben, das ich sie stucksweise zusamen suchen muß, wa ich deren ein stuck finde.” (N. N. Glaubensbekandtnus und Ableinung allerhand desthalben entstandener ungückließen Nachreden. Gedruckt im Jahr 1623 = GW Vol. XII, 22–38, 27.) 25 “Sunt etiam plurima in quibus dubia est constructio, dubiae particulae relativae; de quibus si quaeram, curiosus habeor, si non quaeram, ignoro, quî igitur subscribam. Collegi talium dubiorum LX ex articulo de persona Christj.” (Kepler’s letter to M. Hafenreffer, containing Kepler’s interpretation of the Scriptural passage Verbum caro factum est, April 11, 1619 = GW Vol. XVII, no. 835, 342– 351, 344.) Kepler is referring to the 20-page-long chapter VIII, titled Von der

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  29 Person Christi (305r-315r), of the section Gründtliche, Lautere, Richtige, und endtliche widerholung, of the Concordia, on which see next. 26 For a detailed historical introduction into the Eucharistic debate, see Amy Nelson Burnett’s Introduction preceding the annotated translation of Luther’s “That These Words of Christ, ‘This Is My Body,’ etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics 1527.” Paul W. Robinson (ed.) 2016, p. 163–274. 27 Martin Luther: Das diese Wort Christi (Das ist mein Leib etce) noch fest stehen widder die Schwerm geister. Wittemberg: Lotther, MDXXVII (edition without page numbering). For a historical theological analysis, with reference to Luther’s Patristic authority in the text, St Hilary 2005, p. 31–40. As Professor Burnett points out (see above), Luther also published, as a definitive clarification of his position, the long treatise titled Vom Abendmal Christi / Bekentnis a year later, in 1528. 28 In this fairly repetitive text – a combination of an anti-sacramentarian invective and a treatise in systematic theology – Luther first argues, on page for the real presence of the Christ’s flesh in the bread: “So sagen wir nu auff unserm teyl / das lauts der wort / Christus warhafftiger leib und blut da sey / wenn er spricht / Nemet / Esset das ist mein leib etc. . . . Unser widder teil sagt das eitel brod und wein da sey / nicht der leib und blut des herrn.” 29 As sacramentalists perceive an impossibility between the Christ being seated in heaven and His human flesh simultaneously being present in the bread (page ), Luther points them to true religious faith as opposed to corporeal sensation and natural reason, and puts it on record that “nirgent kan sie an einigem ort sein . . . Denn wo sie yrgent einen etlichem ort were / mueste sie daselbs begreifflich und beschlossen sein . . . Die Goettliche gewalt aber mag und kan nicht also beschlossen und abgemessen sein / Denn sie ist unbegreifflich und unmeslich / ausser und uber alles das da ist und sein kan / . . . Widderumb mus sie an allen orten wesentlich und gegenwertig sein / auch ynn dem geringesten bawmblat.” (Ibid., ) 30 “Ist das nu war . . . das die Gottheit ynn Christo auff erden wesenlich / personlich / selbs / gegenwertig ist an so viel orten / und doch zu gleich ym hymel und bey dem vater / so folget draus / das er zugleich allenthalben ist / und wesentlich / personlich hymel und erden und alles erfulle mit seiner eigen natur und maiestet . . .” (Ibid. ) 31 Luther first floats the idea of incarnate omnipresence on page “Wie werden wir aber gewis lieben herrn / das ein leib nicht muege durch Gotts gewalt zu gleich ym hymel und ym abendmal sein / weil Gotts gewalt kein mas noch zahl hat / und solche ding thut / die kein vernunfft begreyffen kan / sondern schlecht muessen gegleubt werden / Weil er denn sagt / Das ist mein leib / Wo mit wil ich mein herz stillen / das Gott keine weise noch krafft habe solchs auch zuthun / wie sein wort lautet / Und villeicht ob ein leib itzt hier sichtbarlich nicht ist an vielen orten / doch er wol weise haben moechte und wissen / wie er unsichtbarlich / ia auch sichtbarlich muege einen leib an vielen orten halten.” He makes this even clearer as he says “Christus leib ist zur rechten Gotts / das ist bekand / Die rechte Gotts ist aber an allen enden . . . So ist sie gewislich auch ym brod und wein uber tissche / Wo nu die rechte hand Gotts ist / da mus Christus leib und blut sein / . . . so erzwingens diese wort (Christus sitzt zur rechten Gotts) das sein leib und blut da muege sien / wie an allen andern oertern . . . Wie aber das zu gehe / ist uns nicht zu wissen / wir sollens gleuben . . .” (Ibid., ) 32 Article 10: “De coena Domini docent, quod corpus et sanguis Christi vere adsint et distribuantur vescentibus in coena Domini; et improbant secus docentes.” Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, herausgegeben im

30  Miklós Vassányi Gedenkjahr der Augsburgischen Konfession 1930 in deutscher und lateinischer Sprache (1930, p. 44–137, 62–63). 33 The Concordia, in chapter VII: Vom heiligen Abendmal, first identifies and reproduces Luther’s logical steps in the argumentation almost literally as it says that “ichs in keinen weg leugnen wil / das Gottes gewalt nicht solte soviel vermuegen / das ein Leib zugleich an vielen orten sein muege / auch leiblicher / begreifflicher weise / denn / wer wils beweisen / das Gott solches nicht vermag” (Concordia, 302v). Then it proceeds to say “Also ist unser Glaub in diesem Artickel / von der waren gegenwertigkeit des Leibs und Bluts Christi im heiligen Abendmal / auff des warhafftigen Allmechtigen Gottes / unsers Herren und Heylandes Jhesu Christi Warheit und Allmechtigkeit gebawet . . .” (Ibid., 303r). Next, the text anathematizes the respectively Roman Catholic (transsubstantiatio) and Calvinist conceptions (unio sacramentalis) of the Lord’s Supper. 34 In chapter VIII, the Concordia treats again of the question of the real presence. Item 2 of the anathemata on page 314v denies that Christ’s human body could be omnipresent by virtue of its own potency as an infinite being: “2. Item / Das die menschliche Natur in Christo auff solche weise wie die Gottheit / als ein unendtlich wesen / aus wesentlicher krafft / auch eigenschafft irer natur nach allenthalben gegenwertig sey.” Anathem no. 4 in turn re-interprets the corporeal omnipresence of the human nature of Christ, rejecting a de facto universal spatial extension but reasserting the Christ’s capacity to be bodily present wherever He wants to: “4. Item / Das die menscheit Christi in alle ort des Himmels und Erden reumlich ausgespannet sey / welches auch der Gottheit nicht sol zugemessen werden / das aber Christus durch seine Goettliche Allmacht mit seinem Leibe / den er gesetzet hat zu der rechten der Maiestat und krafft Gottes / gegenwertig sein koenne / wo er wil / sonderlich da er solche seine gegenwertigkeit / als im heiligen abendmal in seinem Wort versprochen / das kan seine Allmacht und Weisheit wol verschaffen / one verwandlung oder abtilgung seiner waren Menschlichen natur.” (Ibid.) How this is produced, however, remains an entirely impenetrable secret for the human intellect (315r). For a general presentation of Kepler’s relation to the Konkordienformel, see Jürgen Hübner 1975, p. 108–111. 35 As even its introduction points out, the Commentarivs may be viewed as a single discursive development on divine presence directed against Joseph Grabe’s (1541–1620) pamphlet Isagoge brevis et perspicua (Stade: 1586). The Commentarivs addresses the problem of Christ’s presence and ubiquity in several passages like, e.g., on p. 89–101 (“De omnipraesentia”) and p. 175–177 (“Argu contra omnipraesen soluuntur”). 36 “Christum etiam ratione exaltatae suae naturae creaturis omnibus esse praesentem. Non autem per ubiquitatem localem, nec per Humanae Naturae diffusionem & extensionem; que tum demum accideret, si locali modo crederetur ubique praesens. Tum enim iuxta locorum diuersitatem ab vno in alterum extendi illam necesse foret. . . . Humana Christi natura extra & supra omnem localitatem est & sedet ad totam Dei dextram. Ergo nulla localitas hoc efficiet, vt Humana in Christo natura vspiam locorum a dextra Dei absit, sed vbique cum illa praesens sit.” (Ibid., 100.) 37 “In hac autem Diuina & illocali praesentia, quam D. Lutherus & Orthodoxi iuxta modum dextrae Dei definiunt, non potest metui haec diffusio de loco vno in alterum, cum in dextra Maiestatis nec vnus nec alter locus vel sit, vel cogitari pie recteque possit.” (Ibid., 176.) 38 “Praesentia personalis vero non ex naturae proprietate aliqua, siue essentiali, siue accidentali, quam cum caeteris hominibus communem obtineat, oritur: Sed

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  31 ex vnione personali, qua non solum ab hominibus, sed etiam ab angelis caelorum distinguitur.” 39 “Carnem suae Naturae proprietate esse in vno loco; sed respectu vnionis personalis, qua λόγος, extra suam carnem nunquam et nullibj est, esse omnipraesentem. Lutherus ait; wo du mir Christum Gott hinsetzest, da mustu mir auch Christum den Menschen hinsetzen. Haec enim Caro ipsius τοῦ λόγου Caro est, et vbi λόγος ibidem eiusdem est Caro. Vel soluta est vnio personalis, et divisus Christus. . . . impossibile est (salva veritate scripturarum) fingere, λόγον incarnatum esse ubique, carnem autem λόγῳ personaliter vnitam, in vno certo tantum loco esse; quae res totum ingenium tuum, rerum sacrarum adorandis mysterijs non subditum, miserandum in modum perturbat: Eam ob causam neque Ego, neque Dominj Collegae et fratres mei, absurdas et blasphemas imaginationes tuas approbare possumus . . .” (Matthias Hafenreffer’s last missile to Kepler, in which he refutes Kepler’s argumentation and rejects him from communion with the Lutheran Church, July 31, 1619 = GW Vol. XVII, no. 847, 367–371, 369.) 40 As P. Barker and B.R. Goldstein point out, “early Lutherans never attempted to found their religious belief on a purely rational or empirical basis” (2001, p. 95). 41 “Si rationem geometricam intueor, videor mihi contradictoria dicere, Non deserere ubiquepraesentiam, et tamen totum in uterum descendere, totum uniri carni circumscriptae, totum Verbum habitare in nobis, totum verbum, etiam quod in coelo est, etiam quod in supermundanis locis est, pendere in una localj cruce pro salute hominum, nec tamen crucem, in qua suffixa omnium peccata, alibi nisi in Judaea defixam. Haec tamen omnia credo quia praescribit clarum Dej verbum, interpretaturque Dej Ecclesia, Patres ex ordine omnes, non excluso neque Luthero . . .” (Kepler’s letter to Hafenreffer, April 11, 1619 = GW Vol. XVII, no. 835, 346.) 42 “Quia verbum ubique est, caro autem ejus ubique non est, apparet, unum eundemque Christum utriusque esse Naturae. Talia cum scribant Patres, non tamen negant Filium hominis et de caelo descendisse et in caelo esse.” (Ibid., 347.) 43 Ibid., 344. 44 “Mysterium adoro quod proponit scriptura, quod vero Theologi jubent subscribere, id examino ad normam scripturae et antiquitatis.” (Kepleri notae = GW Vol. XII, 58.) 45 See also Hübner’s analysis of the vexed point of omnipresence (1975, p. 111–115). 46 “. . . ho stimato necessario . . . discorrer circa a quei particolari che costoro vanno producendo . . . volendo pur interessar le Scritture Sacre . . . col voler . . . estendere, per non dir abusare, la loro autorità, sì che anco in conclusioni pure naturali e non de Fide, si deva lasciar totalmente il senso e le ragioni dimostrative per qualche luogo della Scrittura, che tal volta sotto le apparenti parole potrà contener sentimento diverso. . . . Ora, se la teologia non discende alle più basse ed umili speculazioni delle inferiori scienze. . ., non dovrebbono i ministri e professori di quella arrogarsi autorità di decretare nelle professioni non essercitate né studiate da loro . . .” Galilei: “Lettera a Cristina di Lorena,” Massimo Bucciantini − Michele Camerota, eds.: Galileo Galilei: Scienza e religione. Scritti copernicani. Roma: Donzelli Editore, 2009, 40 and 55. See introduction to text for precise datation. 47 “. . . ich den grund meines Glaubens . . . einig und allein auff helle und klare Sprüche deß geschriebenen allerseits bekanten Worts Gottes, in ihrer original sprach, setze und bawe . . . Unnd demnach in etlichen Puncten, anlangend die Person unsers HErren Christi, notwendiglich eine außlegung etlicher Sprüche gesucht werden muß, damit die wider einander lauffende Sprüche, nach dem Buchstaben, auff eine einhellige meinung verglichen . . . werdden möge . . .” (Glaubensbekandtnus, GW Vol. XII 22–38, 24.)

32  Miklós Vassányi 48 As a decree of the Council of Trent, the Decretum de libris sacris et de traditionibus recipiendis (April 1546) points out, “decernit ut nemo . . . in rebus fidei et morum . . . sacram Scripturam ad suos sensus contorquens, contra eum sensum, quem tenuit et tenet sacra mater Ecclesia, cuius est iudicare de vero sensu et interpretatione Scripturarum sanctarum . . . ipsam Scripturam sacram interpretari audeat . . .” (H. Denzinger – A. Schönmetzer, eds.: Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum. ­Barcinone – Friburgi Brisgoviae – Romae: Herder, 1976, no. 1507, 366.) Part of this passage is almost literally taken over into the Professio fidei Tridentina (1564) as it affirms that “sacram Scripturam iuxta eum sensum, quem tenuit et tenet sancta mater Ecclesia, cuius est iudicare de vero sensu et interpretatione sanctarum Scripturarum, admitto . . .” A significant difference is, however, the omission of the restrictive clause “in rebus fidei et morum.” (Ibid., no. 1863, 426.) By virtue of this omission, the church apparently acquired an unlimited interpretive competency with respect to Scripture. 49 “Hingegen halt ichs im Articul von der Person Christi nicht mit den Lutherischen bis auff verketzerung deß gegentheils, und annehmung der Newen weise zureden: die Augspurgische Confession thut es auch nicht.” (Glaubensbekandtnus = GW Vol. XII, 29) 50 In apologiam Confessionis Illustrissimi Principis ac Domini, D. Christophori, ducis Vuirtenbergensis &c. ПРОΛΕΓΟΜΕΝΑ, Avtore Ioanne Brentio. Francoforti: apud Petrum Brubachium, Anno 1555. Directed against Petrus a Soto’s (cca 1495–1563) Assertio catholicae fidei circa articvlos confessionis nomine illvstrissimi dvcis Wirtenbergensis oblatae per Legatos eius Concilio Tridentino, XXIII. Ianuarij Anni MDLII. Coloniae: Ioannes Nouesianus excudebat, Anno MDLV. 51 Brenz was “also theological advisor to the Duke, and effectively head of the church in Württemberg. He thus shaped the theological climate within which the university functioned, and in the second half of the 16th century was influential in the wider landscape of Lutheran Konfessionsbildung as well. . . . Thus, Brenz helped to plan and to establish the system which was then enshrined in the Große Kirchenordnung of 1559, which was based upon his theological principles. Outside the duchy, he had been one of the delegates sent by Württemberg and the Reichsstädte to the second session of the Council of Trent. . . . Furthermore, he was entrusted by Christoph with seeking to reconcile the doctrinal differences between the churches which subscribed to the Confessio Augustana.” (Methuen 1990, p. 41–42) – A very useful resource for studying Brenz is W. Köhler (1904). 52 Confessio Piae Doctrinae, Qvae Nomine Illvstrissimi principis ac domini D. Christophori Ducis VVirtembergensis & Teccensis, ac Comitis Montisbeligardi, per legatos eius die XXIIII. mensis Ianuarij, Anno M.D.LII. congregationi Tridentini Concilij proposita est. Tvbingae: Per Vlrichum Morhardum, 1552. – The vindication of the Confessio came out only after the Augsburg Settlement of 1555, in four parts, under the respective titles Apologiae Confessionis Illustriss. Principis ac Domini d. Christophori Ducis Vuirtenbergensis &c. περικοπη πρωτη / δευτερα / Posterior pars secundae pericopes / Postrema pericope (Francoforti: P. Brubachius, 1556–1559). 53 P. 23: “Non solum autem ad uniuersam Ecclesiam Dei, & ad eum coetum, qui in nomine Christi . . . conuenit, uerumetiam ad unumquemuis hominem priuatum, qui est Ecclesiæ membrum, pertinet de doctrina Religionis iudicare, & ueram a falfa internoscere. Ac præsertim Principum officium est, ne dent ullum locum pseudoprophetis, ac impijs doctoribus, in ecclesijs suarum regionum.” P. 24: “. . . nulIo modo licitum est, in causa æternæ salutis, alienæ sententiæ

Kepler, the supra-confessional Lutheran  33 ita inhaerere, ut eam sine nostro ipsorum iudicio amplectamur.” P. 25–26: “Hoc præceptum pertinet, cum ad singulos, ut cognoscant & iudicent, quam doctrinam probare, quam refutare, tum præcipue ad Principes, ut sciant quam doctrinam in populo suo tueri, quam profligare debeant.” p. 29: “. . . perspicuum est, q ut priuatus, priuatam, ita Princeps publicam habeat de doctrina Religionis potestatem Iudicandi & decidendi.” (Brenz: In apologiam ПРОΛΕΓΟΜΕΝΑ, part one.) 54 Dispvtationes Roberti Bellarmini Politiani, Societatis Iesv, De controversiis Christianae fidei, adversvs hvivs temporis haereticos, Tribus Tomis comprehensae. Ingolstadii: Ex officina typographica Davidis Sartorii, Anno Domini MDLXXXVI. (Vol. 2: 1588, Vol. 3: 1593. Title of 2nd and 3rd volume modified into Disputationum . . . Tomus secundus / Tomus tertius. Countless later editions.) Controversio I: “De verbo Dei,” Liber III: “De verbi Dei interpretatione” (p. 155–196), Caput III: “Proponitur quaestio de judice controversiarum, & simul disseritur de sensibus Scripturarum” (p. 167–172). 55 Martinus Chemnicius: Examen decretorum concilii Tridentini. In quo ex Sacrae Scripture norma, collatis etiam orthodoxis uerae & purioris Antiquitatis testimonijs ostenditur, qualia sint illa Decreta, & quo artificio sint composita I-III. Frankfurt: 1566–1573. 56 “Similiter Brentivs docet in confessione VVirtembergica, capite de sacra Scriptura: & copiosius in prolegomenis contra Petrum a Soto . . . Et toto fere libro haec duo probare nititur, quod Princeps saecularis teneatur cogere subditos, etiam mortis supplicio, ad eam Fidem, quam ipse judicat esse veram. Et simul quod subditi obligentur sequi proprium judicium, non alienum, cujuscunque sit; nec aduertit Brentius, quam sint haec absurda & pugnantia, vt teneatur Princeps iubere, & subditi teneantur non obedire. Nec illud aduertit, si haec sententia vera sit, recte facturum Caesarem, & alios Catholicos Germaniae Principes, si etiam mortis supplicio cogant omnes Lutheranos ad fidem Catholicam.” (Dispvtationes Roberti Bellarmini Politiani, 171.) 57 Consider in this respect Kepler’s letter to Matthias Hafenreffer (Kepler’s reproach to Hafenreffer for not allowing him to take communion), of November 28, 1618 = GW Vol. XVII, no. 808, 283–287. 58 In the Glaubensbekandtnus, he admits that he has been accused by the several churches of carving out a personal creed for himself: “O wie viel der fürnemisten auß allen Partheyen dieser zeit, haben mich mit diesem einwurff beschmützet, . . . daß ich nemlich einen besondern Glauben habe . . .” (GW Vol. XII, 24). 59 Consider Kepleri notae, GW Vol. XII, 48–62. 60 According to the Dionysian theory, the celebrating priest partakes of a thoroughly unifying communion with the Christ by taking the Eucharist, whereby a salvific union is realized between him and the Saviour: ὡς ἡ καθ’ ἕξιν ἀληθὴς ἐπὶ τὰ θεῖα προσέλευσις τὴν πρὸς τὸ ὅμοιον αὐτῶν κοινωνίαν τοῖς προσιοῦσι χαρίζεται (The Ecclesiastic Hierarchy III, Theory 1 = G. Heil – A. M. Ritter, eds.: Corpus Dionysiacum [CD] II, Berlin – New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991, 82 = Patrologia Graeca [PG] 3, 428 B 12–14). On the other hand, he also partakes of a unificatory communion with the concelebrating presbyters by sharing the Eucharist with them, whereby they all receive the same inspired disposition: ἡ δὲ θειοτάτη τού ἑνὸς καὶ ταὐτοὺ καὶ ἄρτου καὶ ποτηριοὺ κοινὴ καὶ εἰρηναία μετάδοσις ὁμοτροπίαν αὐτοῖς ἔνθεον ὡς ὁμοτρόφοις νομοθετεῖ. (Ibid., CD II, 81 = PG 3, 428 B 5–7) As the celebrant divides the holy host among his fellow celebrants, he, conversely, unites them in a perfect union with the Eucharist: τὸ δὲ ἑνιαῖον αὐτῶν εἰς πολλὰ διαιρῶν καὶ τῇ τῶν διανεμομένων πρὸς τὰ ἐν

34  Miklós Vassányi οἷς γίνεται κατ’ ἄκρον ἑνώσει κοινωνοὺς αὐτῶν ἀποτελῶν τοὺς μετέχοντας. (Ibid., Theory 13 = CD II, 93 = PG 3, 444 C 3–5) 61 Kepleri notae, GW Vol. XII, 48–62. 62 Kepler to M. Hafenreffer, November 28, 1618 = GW Vol. XVII, no. 808, 283–287. 63 Download from here: http://kepler.badw.de/kepler-digital.html 64 Download from here: http://bookofconcord.org/fc-sd.php 65 Download Aegidius Hunnius’ works from the Post-Reformation Digital Library: www.prdl.org/author_view.php?s=120&limit=20&a_id=570&sort=

2 The subject’s perspective in Leibniz’s philosophy* Dániel Schmal

Political theories that begin with the “lonely individual” as the building blocks of our societies, are likely to encounter the problem of the selfcentered, monadic ego.1 The term monadic, as is known, goes back to the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The Leibnizian universe consists of metaphysical unities which seem to provide the real fundament of all collectivity. This way of looking at our societies is out of date, and for good reasons. It has been under attack for more than two centuries on the grounds that the ego, in its individuality, cannot be interpreted without reference to the context of the society in which it takes place and to which it owes its development. This criticism of the political individualism is often meant to be a challenge against the concept of the monadic ego. Although it rarely takes the form of a claim against the historical Leibniz, the concept of monadic individuality is certainly associated with his philosophy. The goal of this paper is to show that the monadic concept of society (a “whole” based on the interactions of a number of primitive unities) is alien form Leibniz’s thought. This claim could be substantiated in at least two different ways. One option would be to turn directly to Leibniz’s extensive social and political thought, while another line of thought could address the problem right at its metaphysical roots, by examining the concept of a monad which has been supposed to provide the ultimate components of the society. The present paper takes the second – and in my view – more promising route. Instead of analyzing Leibniz’s political or social ideas, I shall be concerned with its theoretical fundaments, arguing that Leibniz’s use of the term monad points towards a pluralistic understanding of the political community. There is no denying that monadic individuals have a central role to play in Leibniz’s concept of society – individual agents, in a sense, are certainly prior to the plurality they constitute – but a deeper insight into the grounds of their individuality may show that their existence is connected with others from the very beginning. Accordingly, a monad’s “social” connections and interactions are not only not consequent upon its existence, but they constitute the condition sine qua non of its coming about precisely as a monadic individual.

36  Dániel Schmal The key notion making a connection between monadic individuality and the society of monads in a non-individualistic way is perspectivism. The problem of perspectivism is one of the central issues in Leibniz’s metaphysics, and artificial perspective is omnipresent in his writings, typically as a metaphor presenting every individual substance or monad as having a particular point of view or a limited perspective on the whole universe. Thus, on the face of it, perspective is a term bound up with the individual. But this is just half of the truth. In this paper I examine the way in which perspectivism is deployed as a model for a non-Cartesian concept of mind. The claim will be that Leibniz’s criticism of the Cartesian res cogitans does not leave unaffected his conception of the individual ego and the way it is interconnected with other egos. Leibniz’s account is thoroughly anti-Cartesian because in his view the basic feature of the mental is neither consciousness, nor object-directedness, but perspective, a complex relationship that can be captured in this formula: “to take a possible point of view in the world.” In Leibniz’s thought perspectivism takes priority over such fundamental concepts as ego, consciousness and personality. The latter, in spite of all the challenges leveled against them, are still central to our self-understanding. It is all the more significant, that in Leibniz these concepts prove to be secondary and derived in comparison with perspectivity.

1. Monads as Cartesian subjects Monads in Leibniz’s view are simple substances which constitute the basic elements of reality. They are, in Leibniz’s words, soul-like entities. They can be described on the analogy of a soul whose different perceptions are produced automatically and according to an internal law.2 This conception of the monad as a soul-like entity is closely connected to Cartesianism. Descartes’s res cogitans could have served as a model for it, since for the res cogitans all other beings – even the world itself in its totality – can only be perceived by means of its own ideas or internal perceptual states. Leibniz is quite straightforward as to the internalism of his approach. Monads, he stresses time and again, are causally closed substances, they “have no windows through which anything could enter or depart” (The Monadology 7. §, GP VI. 607, L 643). They have “no holes or doors” (point de trous ni portes).3 Each of them counts as a mundus separatus, so their perceptions cannot stem from external sources.4 Hence it is small wonder that the perceptions of an individual mind can subsist in the selfsame form, whether or not they correspond to the external world. That is why giving criteria for telling mere appearances from true perceptions was considered by Leibniz as a legitimate philosophical task, and it is not surprising that all the marks he offers are internal to the mind. Those perceptions – he says – which refer to truly existing objects are “vivid, complex and internally coherent” and in accordance with Leibniz’s claim that the “most valid criterion is a consensus

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  37 with the whole sequence of life,” they dovetail with the common course of nature (On the method of distinguishing real from imaginary phenomena, GP VII. 319–320; L 364). Nevertheless, Leibniz is keen to point out (and this is another claim which is characteristic of the internalist approach) that these internal criteria, even taken together, are insufficient for demonstrating the existence of the external world. “Thus by no argument can it be demonstrated absolutely that bodies exist, nor is there anything to prevent certain well-ordered dreams from being the objects of our mind . . .”5 Hence, each individual substance exists “as if there were only God and itself in the world” (Correspondence with Arnauld, GP II. 57, L 337). Entailed by this self-enclosed nature – open only towards God – is that the Leibnizian self perceives the phenomena in its own inner realm, even if the I, the subject of the perceptions, cannot be found among the appearances perceived. Rather than being one of their constituents, the I is the center and the source of the phenomena. Leibniz holds that it is this relationship that gives rise to the concept of substance. This thought of myself, who perceive sensible objects, and of my own action which results from it, adds something to the objects of sense [. . .], it is by this that I conceive what is called substance in general. (On what is independent of sense and of matter [Lettre touchant ce qui est indépendent des sens et de la matière] GP VI. 502, L 549, emphasis in the original) The concepts of selfhood and substantiality are closely knitted together in Leibniz’s thought. We will see soon that although not all substances can be characterized as selves in the strictest sense of the word, he maintains that for us – finite human beings – the concept of substance is always dependent on some rudimentary understanding of our selfhood. To sum up, many of Leibniz’s texts suggest that the notion of the soul, along with the perspective representations belonging to it, hang on an internalist conception of the quasi-Cartesian subject. In the next section I explain why this suggestion is to be resisted.

2. An alternative reading Although many texts of Leibniz seem to foster the previous view, the way in which the concept of perspective is introduced either in the 1685 Discourse on metaphysics or Leibniz’s 1714 “Monadology” sits uneasily with the picture canvased in the previous section. The reason is made manifest in the following quote: Just as the same city viewed from different sides appears to be different and to be, as it were, multiplied in perspectives, so the infinite multitude of simple substances, which seem to be so many different universes, are

38  Dániel Schmal nevertheless only the perspectives of a single universe according to the different points of view of each monad. (“The Monadology”, GP VI. 616, L 646, emphasis added) Although in this passage from the “Monadology” perspective representation is connected to simple substances, it has nothing to do with the privacy of the first-person view. Rather, it provides the tools for a third-person, objective characterization of the world. What Leibniz is driving at here is not a perspective image on its own, but a series of images, a whole matrix of transformations belonging to the same city. The result is not a static projection (a single view of the object from a particular angle), but a dynamic movement across the possible viewpoints and – in result – a whole array of projections engendered by the continuous shift of the point of observation. What is in the focus of the Leibnizian conception is a dynamic change. The continuous shift of the angle of observation – the matrix produced by the systematic transposition of the observer’s point of view – gives rise to a function relating one and the same reality to the various representations thereof. Because in this function simple substances serve as variables, an individual Cartesian mind with its self-enclosed structure can be regarded as only one of the possible function-values. Thus, although the previous description of the monads as closed worlds is not unjustified, it may distort Leibniz’s approach seriously by focusing on a restricted part of his account in an exclusive manner. Mental internalism, to be sure, is a part of the story, but it captures just a special case which flows from more general principles. Granted that perceptions can be described as states internal to the monad, this approach should never be divorced from a more sweeping theory of relations to which it belongs. That is why internalism in Leibniz’s system never gained that methodological autonomy, which is peculiar to Descartes’s conception of mind. In contrast to the latter, the Leibnizian account of the internal life of a monad is embedded in an externalist framework. Leibniz’s goal is to understand the algorithm that gives rise to various perspectives, rather than to provide the analysis of any of the particular values that may be produced as an outcome of the overall transformation. Characteristic of this approach is that the term connoting perspective is usually used in the plural:6 [S]o it is with unities of substance, and consequently souls, which are like centers, represent in themselves what happens in the multitudes which concern them, according to the point of view of each unity or soul. (Extract from Leibniz’s response of 12 June 1700 to Sophie Charlotte, S 201, GP VII. 555; emphasis added) The suggestion is that if monads are taken to be centers in the plural, their appropriate characterization does not refer to Cartesian or quasi-Cartesian

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  39 minds but represents them as mutually distinct – albeit interrelated – units which are the outputs of a general rule. They can be regarded as products of a systematic transformation7 giving rise to a set of viewpoints. The general rule concerned is the source of their generation in the very same sense as Desargues and Pascal use the geometrical term “generatio conisectionum” when talking about the systematic deduction of the conic sections. Compared to Descartes’s theory Leibniz’s account seems to break new ground. When pondering the Cartesian doctrine about the nature of mind, the first critical issue Leibniz puts his finger on was Descartes’s claim that thoughts can be divorced from their purported objects – a doctrine that became the basis of Descartes’s internalism. Leibniz disagrees with this approach. His doubt as to “whether thought can be understood without thinking of extension” (Ibid. S 202, GP 7.555.) makes sense in light of the previous. If any single mind can only be accounted for in virtue of the relation it bears to the general rule which gave rise to it together with an infinite number of other minds, then the representations harbored in any individual monad cannot be isolated from a whole series of equally possible viewpoints, that is to say, from the world. They belong together as possible values of the same function. The claim is, then, that instead of starting from the internal nature of a single mind à la Descartes, Leibniz was interested in the way in which a plurality of monads was hanging together via a generative rule. Briefly put, the analysis of the correlations that may occur among possible beings had a theoretical priority over the analysis of the related beings themselves. For this reason neither individual representation, nor subjective point of view are basic concepts in Leibniz’s philosophy.8 The priority of the relation-engendering principles over the related items themselves sheds some light on the fact that what can be considered as more or less permanent in Leibniz’s thought, is the abstract logical structure of the relations, and not the nature of the individual items connected by them. The theoretical role of the latter was subject to continuous change over the decades of Leibniz’s life.9 The variation in the metaphysical assessment is salient in two contexts. The first one concerns the problem of how monads relate to the physical world. One of the most characteristic features of Leibniz’s thought is the alternation of the internal and the external approaches when it comes to spelling out the details of this relation. Sometimes the material world – the infinite congregation of the monads – unfolds before the eyes of the reader “from within” as it were, as it appears to a single monad. From this internal perspective the description concentrates on the phenomenal world seen from a first-person view. In other cases the reader is invited to look at the monads from an external vantage point. Starting from the material world the analysis gets into its ultimate constituents, the monads, which, as simple units of the composite, give rise to the whole world as their aggregate. In that case, monads do not only express the material world from their point

40  Dániel Schmal of view, but “enter” the common world which is constituted as their aggregate.10 On Leibniz’s intention these internal and external approaches are in perfect harmony with each other because both provide the description of the same state of affairs. Starting from within, the monad comes first, and the bodies in the world prove to be nothing else than well-founded phenomena (phaenomena bene fundata) of which the reality consists merely in the harmony of the monadic perceptions. Conversely, looking from without, the world seems to boil down into monads in such a way that the manifold of the monads appears to be the multiplication of the universe. As Leibniz put it in a 1705 letter to De Volder, monads are concentrationes universi. Seen in this light, the world itself is depicted as condensed into units which in turn compose the whole (GP II. 278). While the macroscopic world, taken in its entirety, is nothing but the aggregate (hamas) of many different units or separate worlds (mundus separatus), the units themselves – as microcosms – are expressions of the whole. The complemetarity of these two accounts explains the apparent ambiguity in Leibniz’s approach. While in those descriptions which treat the material world as phenomena the universe is construed in and through the perceptions of the monads, the opposite approach presents the universe as a real whole which can be glimpsed from different angles. In the latter case monads can be construed as various viewpoints, giving different perspectives on the same reality. What we are seeing here is the same constructive operation seen from two directions. The complementarity of the descriptions (starting either from the world or from the monad) is warranted by the sameness of the logical structure which underlies the transformations in both cases. The mutual convergence of these seemingly different approaches has a pivotal role in Leibniz’s philosophy. I venture to say that convertibility was a much more important issue to him than either of the opposing approaches taken separately. The universe in its macroscopic reality results from monads, and monads as microcosms are but representations of the universe condensed into units. The universe and the units cannot be divorced, they are all products of the same generative process, they come into being at the same time and, thanks to the same algorithmic rule in the background, they suppose each other as opposing poles of the same structure. In the next section we are going to see that what is common in these approaches of either direction is the abstract structure of mapping one set of elements (the world or the monads) into another.

3. “Cartography” of transformations As is seen, the model of perspective transformations can be regarded as the basis of Leibniz’s theory, providing a fairly permanent structural frame for all other elements of the system, allowing for a wide range of freedom and variety in the details. Seen against this unchanging background, the first

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  41 free-moving part has been identified as the direction to be taken on the road leading from the monads to the physical universe or vice versa. It is exactly the identity of the road – the sameness of the relationship construed from either direction – that gives rise to the second ambiguity, now with respect to the ontology of the elements connected in this system of transformations. One of the most perplexing enigmas in Leibniz’s thought concerns his considered view about the nature of the physical objects. Was he after all an idealist or a realist? The puzzle concerns the metaphysical status of the physical universe as a whole and that of the physical bodies, in particular, which, belonging to a public realm, are accessible to any observer. The cause of the perplexity is that Leibniz, especially in his later years, seems to have entertained different conceptions about the reality of the physical world. On the reading suggested here, the plurality of these conceptions does not simply reflect Leibniz’s inability to solve this metaphysical problem until his death (as Garber 2009 suggests), but comes from the fact that once the relation itself is fixed, a great amount of uncertainty can be tolerated with respect to the related items. Thus, the methodology is not so much an accomplished system as a flexible means of trying out different paths in the field of metaphysics in a heuristic manner. It provides a theoretical framework within which different metaphysical experiments can be made, giving rise to different – idealist and realist – approaches to the same problem. One of the possibilities is to take for granted that “there is nothing in the world except simple substances and, in them, perception and appetite” (Leibniz to De Volder, June 30, 1704. GP II. 270, L 537). This would be the phenomenalist or the idealist interpretation of Leibniz’s system. In some cases, indeed, Leibniz comes close to an immaterialism à la Berkeley. Following this line of thought he proposes, for instance, that matter and motion “are not so much substances or things as they are the phenomena of percipient beings” (Ibid.). On this approach matter and bodies are nothing else but perceptions, mere phenomena, the reality of which hinges on the internal states of the monads. Although the laws governing the phenomena can be phrased in the language of mechanics, from an ontological point of view they do not describe an independent reality (cf. Adams 1994). By contrast, the opposite approach tends to attribute some degree of reality to matter as well. Seen from this angle, it is true that the existence of the material world (the object of physics) is rooted in the reality of simple, undivided substances, still the realm that is built upon the basis of the monadic perceptions cannot be completely reduced to the inner states of the monads themselves, but constitute a “supervenient” sphere of its own. These opposing interpretations and their ramifications have been the subject of unending debates from Leibniz’s first readers down to our age. In a survey of the possible choices Glenn Hartz made a distinction between compatibilist and incompatibilist readings. According to the first the idealistic and realistic passages in Leibniz cannot be harmonized, so that the

42  Dániel Schmal tension between these two approaches is real and cannot be mitigated or reduced by any interpretative strategy. This claim as to the incompatibility of the relevant texts may go together either with favoring one or the other of the relevant options or with adopting a contextualist stance in order to explain away the tension by appealing to Leibniz’s changing intellectual commitments. By contrast, the compatibilist reading denies the contradiction between the realist and the idealist accounts. It is characteristic of this strategy to take the idealist passages at face value and, starting from the stronger claim, to read the realist texts in their light. Although his sympathies are on the idealist side, Hartz takes a pluralistic stance with respect to the issue. In his view Leibniz’s real intention was not to solve the tension between the different approaches, but to find a common ground: In fact, Leibniz seldom saw a dilemma he didn’t want to engulf. He assimilates the claims and suggests ways to minimize cognitive dissonance. Or he just lives with the dissonance. There is much more tolerance for inconsistency and ambiguity than is typically allowable. In this, Leibniz is very much a child of his times – when “there was no such thing as a specialist” (Hartz 2006, p. 7. The last quote is from Reston 1995, p. 25) On Hartz’s account, Leibniz’s views are in permanent flow to the extent that his way of reasoning – not being bound by the logical constraints expected by the modern reader – is much more reminiscent of a Renaissance style of thinking: “But no matter how much the contemporary mind rebels against it, the desire to meld the unmeldable and bridge the unbridgeable is indomitable.” (Ibid.) As it must be clear by now, my preferences go to the compatibilist side. I agree with those interpretative strategies which take the dissonance between the different renderings of Leibniz’s central message to be apparent, but as opposed to the accounts alluded to by Hartz, I give no preference to the idealist approach over the realist one. The reason is obvious: on my interpretation the one and the other are both symmetrical, albeit equally temptative, representations of the same abstract structure: the same set of operations called perspective transformation. Let me enumerate some of the reasons behind my suggestion. First of all, I believe that metaphysical realism with respect to matter cannot provide the final answer to the problem, nor can that constitute the only reading of the “perspective model” since in spite of all complications, so much is clear that the physical world is not an independent realm for Leibniz, but hinges on the perceptions of the monads. For, as we have seen in a passage cited previously, “there is nothing in the world except simple substances and, in them, perception and appetite.” (Leibniz to De Volder, June 30, 1704. GP II. 270, L 537, emphasis added) This “nothing in the world” indicates that

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  43 matter along with its mechanical properties (extension, shape, movement, etc.) can be reduced to the perceptions of the monads. By implication, all that God had to produce at the beginning of the world is just an infinite number of monads, and by doing so he produced the whole created universe as well. Conversely, phenomenologism or idealism too cannot provide the only true reading of Leibniz’s system of perspective transformations, because the physical realm, which supervenes on the basis of monadic perceptions, has its own laws (the derivative laws of the mechanics), lending themselves as so many reasons for the divine consideration. Carrying weight on their own they contributed to God’s choosing the best possible world at the moment of creation. At a higher level then, the physical world is an emergent reality11 which, having some distinctive features of its own, constitutes an autonomous metaphysical domain. Although the laws of physics ultimately derive from more fundamental metaphysical principles (so physics, in the final analysis, depends on the monad), it remains true that the physical phenomena can be explored independently and many texts indicate that this relative independence is not illusory. What is responsible for it is not so much the finite power of the human intellect, which is unable to grasp the truth in its full complexity, but the fact that the emergent features of the physical world constitute an autonomous domain which matters to God when trying to find the best possible world. As Leibniz puts it in the “Monadology”: God has had regard for each part in regulating the whole and in particular for each monad. (“The Monadology” 60. §, GP VI. 617, L 648, emphasis added) The phrasing of this claim makes it clear that two different considerations motivated the divine decision when creating the world. He had regard for each part on the one hand, and for each monad on the other. What these two considerations indicate is that God took into account not only the fundamental realm represented by the monads, but even the reality referred to by the term parts. Given that parts are mentioned as a separate topic, even the realm of the composites seems to have entered the process of calculation as an autonomous factor. For part in Leibniz’s terminology is a welldefined term. What it refers to is not the monad (the final unit of which composites are made up), but the composite itself. Composites are aggregates which (except for the world which is the highest one of them) exist as parts of larger wholes and are divisible to ever smaller parts ad infinitum. Monads, in contrast, are not the parts of a whole. Now, as parts represent composites which are mereological constituent of larger wholes, Leibniz’s claim in saying that God takes into consideration each part as well as every monad, amounts to saying that besides the metaphysical units, which exist at the most basic level of the creation, even upper levels count as realities on their own.

44  Dániel Schmal The same point can be brought out by considering one of Leibniz’s statements in a letter of his to Des Bosses. If bodies are phenomena, and are judged by our appearances, they will not be real, since they will appear differently to others. Thus, the reality of bodies, space, motion, and time seems to consist in this: that they are the phenomena of God, that is, the object of his knowledge of vision. [scientia visionis] And the difference between the appearance of bodies with respect to us and their appearance with respect to God is in some way like the difference between a drawing in perspective [scenographia] and a ground plan [ichnographia]. For whereas drawings in perspective differ according to the position of the viewer, a ground plan or geometrical representation is unique. (Leibniz to Des Bosses, February 15, 1712., GP II. 438, Leibniz 2007, p. 231, 233) What Leibniz is making clear in this complex passage is, in the first place, that bodies cannot be judged by upon what they seem to be from a finite observer’s point of view. As the reality of bodies exceeds everything that can be detected from a subject’s limited perspective, so their reality cannot be exhausted by what appears to be the case to a single monad at any given moment, or even in a whole series of moments. They cannot be resolved into the perceptions of an individual substance because it belongs to the nature of bodies that they can be observed from different points of view, and that is why their reality has to be ascribed to the totality of the monads at a minimum. But there is something more to them. What Leibniz is doing here is not just to define bodies by means of the totality of the finite representations that can be formed about them from all the different points of view. So, bodies in their entirety are not just the correlates of the totality of the monadic representations. Should he presented them as that, the upshot would be indeed just an ideal reality based on the harmony of all finite representations. But this is not Leibniz’s position, what he does claim is something more: the reality of bodies, in his view, is based on the fact that God beholds them.12 Now, it is evident that God’s vision of the bodies does not stem from his knowledge of their perspective projections (the finite monadic views) taken either individually or globally. For the reality seen by God exceeds not only the whole series of perceptions belonging to any single monad, but even the totality of the finite monadic perceptions. Obviously, it represents something external to all. Hence the fact that bodies are objects of the divine knowledge in this transcendent manner – i.e., in a way that transcends all particular representations – indicates that they are irreducible to any particular viewpoint or even to their totality. This seems to be the gist of Leibniz’s claim, that what God sees is not only the scenographical projection of an object, but also its ichnographical rendering, which cannot be reduced to the former. Although the ichnographic image13 is the source of all

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  45 the scenographic expressions of an object (say a building), it is not identical with any of them. To rephrase this point in the famous terms of Blaise Pascal’s philosophy – and these terms also come from projective geometry – the ichnographic image belongs to another order of the things. The significance of this approach is also underscored by the scholastic expression used by Leibniz in describing the divine knowledge in question. He speaks about scientia visionis, a technical term which had been employed to refer to the divine knowledge of those objects which exist actually. What this traditional language seems to reinforce is that the reality grasped by God when seeing a body is not just the sum total of the individual perspectives, but something more, a reality which is transcendent to all of the limited projections.14 Finally, the same point is suggested by Leibniz’s arguments against the position later to be called solipsism. When trying to distance himself from such a view, his ambition is not to prove the mind-independent reality of the phenomena by giving the marks of their truth. Instead of looking for something inherent in the perceptions which would rule out their being illusions, he invokes the principle of sufficient reason. The reason is obvious. Leibniz, as we have seen, agrees with the Cartesians (in a rare moment of benevolence towards them) that no internally accessible mark exists within the sphere of the mental which could warrant the truth of the perceptions. However, his claim is that although the whole world may be resolved into the perceptions of a single monad and thus prove to be a dream, the fact that a monad could exist alone (solus ipse) will not rule out the possibility of other monads. Leibniz’s argument draws on the modal concept of possibility. His question is this: in the face of the possibility of an infinite number of other beings, what kind of reason could justify the radical restriction of the existence to one’s own in detriment of all other entities? Such a limitation would be arbitrary, without any reasonable foundation, and would harm the principle of the sufficient reason. On the basis of the latter Leibniz makes a case for the plurality of spirits. Thus, although it is not an absolute necessity that every organic body be animated, it should nonetheless be judged that God did not neglect an opportunity for a soul, since his wisdom produces as much perfection as possible. (Leibniz to Des Bosses, July 31, 1709, GP II. 378, Leibniz 2007, p. 139) Leibniz’s argumentation in this passage is compact but clear. Firstly, he suggests that organized bodies – which appear as phenomena – could in principle subsist as mere aggregates without any unifying and governing monad. Then in the second part of the passage he goes on to say that should that happen, the ensuing world would be much more impoverished than the best

46  Dániel Schmal one that could be achieved in the creation. The reason is that organized bodies offer themselves as so many occasions or “opportunities” for God to join a soul to them, endowing them thereby with substantial unity. Although the soul’s joining to the organic body does not change the physical phenomena (cf. Leibniz to Des Bosses, 30 April 1709, GP II. 371), it attributes to the perfection of the universe. Should God miss this opportunity – or should he seize it just in favor of a single soul – he would unduly impoverish his work, without giving any reason for this restriction. What Leibniz’s argumentation is drawing on in addition to the principle of sufficient reason is the general claim that any being of which the existence is possible and not excluded by anything else, ought to obtain without any further requirement.15 Seen from this angle, monads cannot be characterized merely as “soullike entities,” more important to them is the fact that they provide so many possible perspectives on the same reality. They “pop up” in the divine mind as different occasions to enrich the creation with unified representations that endow the manifold of the bodies with substantial unity, enhancing thereby the overall value of the world. The point to be stressed is that in Leibniz’s reasoning the plurality of the monads is introduced by way of a modal concept, that of possibility. Since the world to be produced by the divine wisdom is such that no part of it should be left barren, the highest possible number of monads is to be produced. Therefore, each individual substance comes as a member of a class of compossible substances. That is why individual perceptions (or finite viewpoints) and the world perceived are so closely bound up with and cannot be divorced from each other in Leibniz. Any being can exist just in case it is compossible with other possible beings, and this relation – the existence considered in relation to other entities – is constitutive of each. The upshot is, that for Leibniz the world, taken as the object of perceptions, is transcendent to the inner states of the perceiver, but not in such a way that its existence should be guessed or inferred from private data of the senses; far from it, Leibniz’s point is that the innermost essence of any given monad is grounded in its possibility, the same possibility which in turn gives rise to the existence of other beings too. Any given monad can exist just in virtue of its aptitude to coexist with other substances or souls. These results have some bearing on the notions of viewpoint and perspective as well. What they suggest is that for Leibniz the concept of perspective does not belong to the inner realm of the subject. Leibniz assumes that over and above the monadic perceptions of a given monad there exists a common reality – the society of other substances – without which it would be pointless to talk about perspective and viewpoint. This being so, what takes the center of Leibniz’s interest is not the Cartesian problem of how to bridge the gap between the ego and the external world – actually, he does not commence with the I in order to make his way through the subject’s perceptions to the external world of bodies – what he focuses on instead, is the generative principle which produces these two realms – the mapping and the

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  47 mapped object – at the very same time as two interrelated realities. Hence, the conclusion is that perspectivism in Leibniz, was not meant to suggest anything like the illusory nature of the world. What it did suggest was that the world existed as a system of transformations governed by rational rules and allowing for a calculative method to harmonize contradictory – or seemingly contradictory – aspects of reality.

4. Origin of the first-person viewpoint In the first three sections of my paper I attempted to show that even if many tenets of the Cartesian concept of mind are present in Leibniz’s philosophy, he maintains that the subject’s point of view is derivative, it exists just as a special value produced by a more general rule of transformation. In the remainder of the text I review the steps of the previously mentioned “construction” so that we gain some understanding as to how the Cartesian self is engendered as a derived reality. The fact that the Cartesian model of the ego does not serve as an unqualified point of departure for Leibniz is partly explained by the impact of Thomas Hobbes who influenced certain aspects of his views about the mind more than Descartes. Notwithstanding the fact that after a short period of enthusiasm Leibniz adamantly rejected Hobbes’s materialism, some opinions of the latter still provide a cue to Leibniz’s insights.16 The hallmark of Hobbes’s approach is the exclusive emphasis on the representative nature of the mental to the detriment of its other features. He held that mental states are first and foremost related to various objects and all other marks of the mental – consciousness, for instance – is based on their object-related nature. The same approach is characteristic of the Leibnizian theory. Although individual substances in Leibniz are not material, they are similar to the minds described by Hobbes in that their most important feature is their representativity: substances perceive, represent or express the universe. A further common point is that intentionality (to use a term never employed by Hobbes and Leibniz) does not imply consciousness. Perceptions for Leibniz are intentional states without phenomenology. To put it in modern terms, for lower-level substances “there is nothing like” being in this or that intentional state. Nor are we necessitated to posit an alleged subject – an I – for whom the intentional object would be (re)presented. These views can be contrasted with that Cartesian approach which, having wedded the nature of the res cogitans to consciousness, regarded the various intentional states of the subject as so many modifications of the subjective awareness. What Leibniz meant by representation without consciousness can best be highlighted by his definition of the term expression: That is said to express a thing in which there are relations [habitudines] which correspond to the relations of the thing expressed. But there are various kinds of expression; for example, the model of a machine expresses

48  Dániel Schmal the machine itself, the projective delineation on a plane expresses a solid, speech expresses thoughts and truths, characters express numbers, and an algebraic equation expresses a circle or some other figure. (What is an idea? [Quid sit idea?] GP VII. 263–264, L 207) As the definition and the examples make it clear there are many kinds of representation, but consciousness and its subject – the I to whom things are represented – are not included in their general explanation. The model expresses the machine without being aware of doing so. Likewise, the projective image is unaware of the fact that it is a representation of a solid. Of course, Leibniz’s intention was not to deny that there are conscious representations, all he claims is that they belong to a narrower class within “representations in general,” and for this reason their conscious nature stands in need of further explanation. At this juncture a terminological clarification is in order. Leibniz seems to hold that one can talk about minds (mens, esprit) in the strictest sense of the term only if there exist an ego to whom the world is represented. If the term mental is taken in this narrow sense, having perceptions is a necessary, but by itself insufficient condition for something’s being a mind. Notice, however, that Leibniz sometimes talks about minds in a less proper sense, even when the subject of the representation is not yet an I in stricto sensu. Notice, however, that in this case, i.e., if it comes to talking about the lowest level of monadic hierarchy, it is more appropriate to call these substances which lack consciousness souls or soul-like entities.17 Now, what we have here is a two-level ontological structure with simple monads on the lower level – bare substances characterized by perceptions – and full-blown minds at the higher one. In contrast to the former the latter exhibits some degree of consciousness. But it is worthwhile to note that, irrespective of the level of consciousness displayed, extenzionally all monads represent in the same way: they all express the same world, and what makes them differ is just the way in which their representations refer to the objects. As Leibniz put it in the Monadology: “it is not in the object, but in the modification of their knowledge of the object that the monads are limited.” (“The Monadology” 60 §, GP VI. 617, L 649.) Leibniz’s point is clear. If all monads represent the same object (or the infinity of the same objects), their representations differ only in virtue of their relative clarity and distinctness. On Leibniz’s account the principle of limitation is the body. Each substance represents the whole universe from a special point of view which is peculiar to it, a point fixed by the body to which it belongs. Bodily nature, limitation and perspectivity hang together in a systematic manner. But their complex relationship requires more thoroughgoing explanation. Leibniz shares Spinoza’s radical view that what a particular mind directly expresses is just the subsequent states of its own body. For the

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  49 mind, says Spinoza, is the idea of the body (Ethics 2t26, cf. 2t13). But as the body is always in contact with the surrounding world, it represents the whole environment indirectly through the impressions received from other bodies. Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz all subscribe to the principle of plenitude, according to which there is no empty space in the universe (no vacuum is given). They all agree, therefore, that even the tiniest bodily motion, be it in the remotest corner of the world, makes some impact on all other particles through the chain of physical intermediaries. Hence the representation that mirrors the mind’s own body also mirrors the whole universe in virtue of its connectedness with the whole universe. That is why the mind, expressing its own body, expresses the totality of other beings from the perspective of its own. It can be seen that without the notions of the body (and the viewpoint belonging thereto), representation and intentionality would not serve the purposes intended by Leibniz. For without the limitation implied in these notions all representations would coincide as to their contents. This would have disastrous consequences for Leibniz’s philosophical goals, since the upshot would be one unlimited substance, a God à la Spinoza. In addition to the foregoing, there is a further problem which also calls for the concept of perspective. If in light of the Leibnizian definition representation is taken in the broadest sense – that is if all that is required for the representative relation is the one-to-one correspondence between the related terms – then it will be a matter of arbitrary choice one of the components is regarded as the object represented and which as the representation. The reason is that the projective transformation which constitutes the core of the representational relation can be made in both directions. The machine can be the representation of its model as well as the other way around. The worry is, however, that the relation between the mind and the body cannot be reversed: although, in a certain sense, the body also expresses its mind, representations belong to the mind more eminently than to the body. The latter, considered apart, that is without the mind lending it true unity, is nothing else but an infinite number of particles or (to put it in Leibnizian terms) just an aggregate. Leibniz’s point is that the one-way character of the relation, pointing from the mind as the bearer of representations to the bodies as things represented, cannot be warranted unless the concepts of perspective and viewpoint are added to that of representation. For what is required here for true representation is not just a correlation between two sets of variables (which would leave us with a two-way relationship) but a representation tied to a certain point of view. Bodies are just aggregates of ever smaller bodies, and do not have any unifying principle or unified point of view. That is why entities, which do not qualify as “soul-like beings,” do not have a perspective upon the world. In order for something to be a mind, it is not enough to have intentional states – to be a mind is to have a certain point of view on other beings.

50  Dániel Schmal In the light of the previous, Leibniz seems to be an early proponent of what is nowadays one of the current positions as to the nature of mind. As Tim Crane puts it: The minded creature is one for which things are a certain way: the way they are from that creature’s perspective. A lump of rock has no such perspective, the daffodil has no such perspective. We might express this by saying that a minded creature is one which has a world: its world. Its having a perspective consists in its having a world. (Crane 2001, p. 4) In Leibniz, the close connection between perspective and having a world is also a definitive feature of the mind. Perspectivism enables him to contrast the resulting unity, a real unity bestowed on the body by a singular point of view, with the apparent unity of a heap of stones. Notice that the contrast is made in such a way that it does not deploy the concept of consciousness. What it does draw on is something more fundamental: a “protomental” structure, which consists in a special kind of connection between the elements of the representation. What imports then for Leibniz is not the Cartesian consciousness, but, more deeply, the structural conditions of the mental. Substantiality is modeled on these conditions. Thus, “plurality in unity” and “unity in the manifold” presents an a priori structure adumbrating what will be called mental when a higher degree of development will be attained. “Having a world,” “having a point of view,” “focusing on something,” etc. are all elements of a crude framework which will be the bearer of consciousness later on. But, for the time being, these elements just delineate an a priori structure, a spotlight on the stage, the center of which can be taken by a Me, once all further requirements are in place.

5. The ego’s entering the stage On Leibniz’s account the basic condition for having consciousness is some contrast between the perceptions of the monad. This is what can be gathered from the 24th paragraph of the Monadology: [I]f we had nothing distinctive in our perceptions, and nothing lifted out, so to speak, and of a higher flavor, we should always be in a state of stupor. This is the state of the naked monads.18 It can be seen that according to Leibniz the stupor, which is the default state of the “bare” monads, is not caused by a complete lack of perceptions, rather it issues from the fact that none of the perceptions sprang to the foreground to allow the perceiver to discern a pattern or make out something of the information contained. So long as no perceptions are brought into relief against the homogenous background of the rest, nothing can be discerned,

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  51 since all perceptions represent alike. At this point again, Leibniz’s reasoning was influenced in no small measure by Thomas Hobbes. In order to appreciate the role intensity differences are playing here, it will be helpful to cast a glance at the theory of the latter. As we have seen, Hobbes identified sensations with physical motions, or – more precisely – with infinitesimal beginnings of a motion which he termed conatus in Latin and endeavor in English. The endeavor is nothing else than the resistance in the matter of the heart (or in the brain) against physical impressions coming from without. Inasmuch as sensations are endeavors in this strict materialist sense, they can be explained in terms of what will be referred to, after Newton, as the action-reaction law. As a ball impressed by a stick acts upon the end of the stick with equal force, so the organ of the sense pushes back the external object which affected it with the same force as the one with which it has been pressed upon. On Hobbes’ account sensations are to be identified with this counter-pressure tending opposite to the incoming impression, i.e., tending outwards. Sensations, in short, are physical forces acting against the motions produced by the external object in the sense-organ. Hobbes’s naturalistic approach gives rise to a problem. Granted the equation between sentience and outward pressure it is far from being clear why perceptions cannot be attributed to all colliding bodies in general, whenever they respond to the impacts received with opposing motions. In reply, Hobbes invokes the faculty of memory. Ordinary physical bodies undergo a large number of physical interactions in every moment, but the effects produced gradually fade away after the interaction. In contrast, living bodies – thanks to their special constitution – keep the received impacts for a long time. They are preserved as “residual motions” much in the same way as the waves caused by a stone thrown into the water remain long after their generation. Residual motions in the brain serve as vestiges, or “memory traces” connected to past actions. It is clear from Hobbes’s account that memory traces are not static images, but evanescent sensations which survive in the wet substance of the brain as dynamic motions so long as the animal body functions properly. In their quality of representations preserved, they are something more than momentaneous counteractions: they can be used as useful pieces of information encoded in the tiny motions of the brain, motions that are poised to undergo further processing later on. It is noteworthy that the fact that on Hobbes’s account motions left over from past interactions exist together with new ones presented him with a problem. He needed to explain why subjects do not perceive all motions indiscriminately at any given moment. This is how he replies in the De corpore IV. 25. 6. From hence it is manifest, that every endeavor of the organ outwards, is not to be called sense, but that only, which at several times is by vehemence made stronger and more predominant than the rest; which

52  Dániel Schmal deprives us of the sense of other phantasms, no otherwise than the sun deprives the rest of the stars of light, not by hindering their action, but by obscuring and hiding them with his excess of brightness.19 What Hobbes is suggesting here is that certain physical impressions produce sensations by becoming stronger than other motions in the same body. Weaker motions are also present, but fading away, they form a kind of background against which stronger ones can be discerned. This is how contrast is produced in the perceptual field. Viewed in this light, what is needed for conscious perception is not just the presence of the stimuli, but a contrast among them as well. The difference in their relative force allows some of the motions to come to the fore and take the center-stage, while other perceptions gradually fall out of consciousness and disappear. This process of differentiation does not occur in lifeless objects because it requires the appropriate construction of the bodily organs. Leibniz follows in Hobbes’s steps. The first condition of consciousness for him too is memory, the power of retention that allows some perceptions not to disappear as floating and transitory states of the substance but helps them endure and undergo further processing. In this respect the crucial step is that the perception preserved may become the object of another perception directed at it at a later time. Leibniz seems to believe that reflection is involved in the process of acquiring consciousness, and there is no reflection without memory (cf. A VI4a, 563; Kulstad 1991, p. 61). The latter claim highlights the fact that Leibniz – in contrast to the official Cartesian doctrine – did not regard consciousness as belonging to the essence of each act of perception. In his opinion, it comes about as the outcome of an additional act of reflection which may or may not accompany the original one. This additional element is referred to by Leibniz with the term apperception. Apperception is an act of perception the object of which is a former act of perception. Thus, external objects – irrespective of the reality they may enjoy in the final analysis – cannot serve as the immediate objects of apperception. They can serve as direct objects only for the earlier acts of perception. [A]nd since we perceive our perceptions when awaking from a stupor [on s’apperçoit de ses perceptions], it follows necessarily that we have had these perceptions immediately before, even though we did not then perceive them [on ne s’en soit point apperçû] for a perception can come naturally only from another perception, just as one motion can come naturally only from another motion. (“The Monadology” 23 §, GP VI. 610, L 645) Leibniz’s point in this passage seems to be clear: the transition from the unconscious to the conscious mind is continuous, permits no leap, so that the difference between being aware and being unaware is infinitesimally small

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  53 in the moment of awakening. In order for the consciousness to develop, some pieces of information have to be detached from the bulk of the petitesperceptions. It is just as a result of this gradual differentiation that the contrast in question is produced, to become the object of another perception. It is time to bring together the threads. The picture that emerged from our scrutiny seems to confirm what had been argued for previously: if apperception is not synonymous with perception, but refers to a further act – a reflect one directed at a previous perception – then perspectivity cannot stem from apperception, and cannot depend on apperception-based consciousness. The reason is that apperception can bring into the light only what was present all along in the earlier perception. The upshot is again that perspectivity cannot be defined as the point of view of a conscious ego, it is rather something to be localized at the level of the most simple, unconscious perceptions. As a primordial structure, it precedes consciousness which will supervene on it as the higher level of the Cogito. Hence, the conscious ego for Leibniz was not the basic reality, which had been for Descartes. Nor did it emerge from the mechanical reality of the matter as Hobbes had attempted to prove it. It emerges rather from the metaphysical limitations which, thanks to the body belonging to each monad, is the lot of each finite being. Substances without apperception exhibit perspective representations which, although they define a point of view, remain “empty” so to speak. So long as no higher apperception is added to them, this rudimentary viewpoint is not taken by anybody. It is just with the additional moves outlined previously, i.e., only after taking the steps described, that the Cartesian ego enters the stage. The I for whom the appreciation of her existence seems to be the first undeniable truth is not the final ground for her own existence, since – as is seen – it can be deduced from – or added to – the more basic structures of perspective which, according to Leibniz’s thought, underlies our whole conscious life.

6. Conclusion In conclusion, let me spell out the consequences of the metaphysical approach to the problem of subjectivity for Leibniz’s general concept of the relationship between the individual and the society. In Leibniz’s view perspectivity – along with terms like intentionality and representation – belongs to the most basic structure of the mind. Consciousness does not. When consciousness appears it arises on the basis of more basic properties. Monads in Leibniz’s view provide just the groundwork for the conscious mind; instead of implying awareness, the way in which monadic perceptions represent can be described in terms of perspective mapping (or to use Leibniz’s metaphor: “mirroring”). Perceptions mirror the whole universe, and perspectivism is introduced by way of some limitations in the clarity of the monadic representations. The reason is that monads are bound up with a body that provides them with a point of view. Bodies – regardless of their ultimate ontological status – can be approximated to Hobbesian type

54  Dániel Schmal entities, physical beings which directly or indirectly are subject to the effects made on them by all other bodies. Thus, monadic perceptions express the body and mirror the whole universe from a certain angle. This is how perspectivism comes into play as a term belonging to the most fundamental level of the monadic representations. The approach proposed makes sense only if the logical structure of the cognition can be studied apart from the ontological value of the elements of the structure. As I argued, structural and ontological issues should be kept separately. Not that they can be divorced in the final analysis, but they offer two different points of entry to the same ontological structure. From the ontological perspective Leibniz’s philosophy is clearly opposed to Hobbes’s materialism. As is seen, Leibniz maintains that physical entities are incapable of consciousness, because a mechanical body, lacking true unity, is just a multitude of particles without any unified viewpoint. By contrast, if only the transformational relations are concerned, Leibniz’s account comes close to Hobbes’. I have argued that questions as to the projective structure of the universe are more fundamental to Leibniz than the metaphysical interpretation of the nature of the substances connected by the perspective structure itself. But be that as it may, one thing is clear: monadic subjects are to be interpreted from the very beginning as belonging to such a system of projective rules, which produces all possible viewpoints simultaneously, at the same time. Thus, perspectivism in Leibniz has its roots not so much in the individual, as in a general system of transformations. If Leibniz’s most fundamental insights concern the generative rule which produces the individual viewpoints dynamically, then a good case can be made for the need for a revision of the historiographical cliché, alluded to at the outset, associating modernity with the Cartesian subject and its internal viewpoint.*

Notes * Leibniz’s frequently cited works can identified by the following abbreviations (in alphabetical order): A = Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Leibniz 1923). GP = Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Leibniz 1875–1890, 1965). L = Philosophical Papers and Letters, (Leibniz 1989). S = Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence, (Leibniz 2011). 1 The debates for instance on the individual versus collective memories evoke the concept of the monadic “I” – the modern subject – who, considered as the basic unit of the society, may or may not be the bearer of the memories of a common past. See, for example: Assmann 2013, chapter 1. 2 Cf. “so that we must think of them in terms similar to the concept which we have of souls.” A New System of the Nature and the Communication of Substances, as weIl as the Union between the Soul and the Body (3 §). GP IV. 479, L 454, (unless otherwise indicated emphasis is in the original). 3 Extract from Leibniz’s response of June 12, 1700 to Sophie Charlotte, GP VII. 554, S 200. 4 GP II. 444: Unaquaeque est velut separatus quidam mundus . . . Cf.: Discours de métaphysique 14.§.: un monde à part, indépendant de toute autre chose hors de Dieu. (GP IV. 439.)

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  55 5 Ibid. GP VII. 320–321, L 364. Cf.: “That a beast is animated cannot be demonstrated, nor even proved, since it cannot even be proved that other human beings are not mere machines, inasmuch as we cannot see into their minds.” Leibniz to Des Bosses, July 31, 1709, GP II. 378. English translation: Leibniz 2007, p. 139. 6 The question of the unity’s plural form is discussed in the correspondence between Leibniz and Sophie Charlotte, see for example GP VII. 557. 7 The same opposition is excellently captured by Deleuze’s distinction between a subject considered either as sub-iectum or as super-iectum, the latter being the correlate of a transformation. Deleuze 1988, p. 27. (with reference to Whitehead). 8 Or they are primary notions in a limited sense, inasmuch as they provide the subject with the first quaestio facti. 9 The priority of relationships seems to contradict to a certain extent to Leibniz’s claim that relations are grounded in the substances. In terms of metaphysics, it is certainly true that substances have an ontological priority over the relations which exist among them. But this does not compromise the fact that the structure of mutual relationships is particularly stable and consistent in Leibniz’s system where the metaphysical value of the connected items is subject to considerable instability and variation. The shift from the substance toward a relation-based approach was not left unnoticed by Ernst Cassirer who in his 1931 essay Mythischer, ästhetischer und theoretischer Raum states that Leibniz, in his metaphysical writings, subordinates all beings to the monad’s point of view. But in its capacity of a logician and mathematician Leibniz takes another approach. His logic (as mathesis universalis) does not remain under the auspices of the substance but expands into a comprehensive theory of relations. (Aber als Logiker und als Mathematiker folgt er bereits einer anderen Richtlinie. Denn seine Logik und seine ›Mathesis universalis‹ stehen nicht mehr ausschließlich unter der Vorherrschaft des Substanzbegriffs, sondern beide haben sich ihm zur umfassenden Lehre von der ›Relation‹ erweitert. (Cassirer 1931/2006, p. 489.) The same point is made by Hidé Ishiguro who discusses in detail the progressive reification of the relations Leibniz’s thought. See Ishiguro 1990, p. 130. 10 See the first paragraph of “The Monadology”: “The monad which we are to discuss here is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds.” “The Monadology” 60. §, GP VI. 607, L 643, emphasis added. 11 Or to make in less anachronistic, of the physical world is an emanation, cf.: “the created substances depend on God, who preserves them and indeed even produces them continually by a kind of emanation, as we produce our thoughts.” (Discourse on Metaphysics 14. §. GP IV. 439, L 311. emphasis added.) 12 At this juncture, it would be tempting to draw a parallel between Leibniz’s view and Berkeley’s argument for the existence of God based on the reality of sensible things. As he says in the Third Dialogue: “Now it is plain they [sc. sensible objects] have an existence exterior to my mind, since I find them by experience to be independent of it. There is therefore some other mind wherein they exist, during the intervals between the time of my perceiving them: as likewise they did before my birth, and would do after my supposed annihilation.” (Three Dialogues, Berkeley 2008, p. 211–212; Luce and Jessop 1949, II. p. 230–231.) But notice that this parallel may be misleading since the scientia visionis in Leibniz is directed at beings that exist outside the divine mind. 13 Concerning the distinction between ichnographic and scenographic representations – a distinction handed down from the classical antiquity – see Geminos’ account cited by Panofsky in his Perspective as Symbolic Form (Panofsky 1991, p. 98–99). See also Vitruvius’ explanation in De architectura 1.2.2. and Senseney 2011, passim.

56  Dániel Schmal 14 In light of this passage, the above line of thought mutatis mutandis holds for time and space as well. Leibniz’s controversy with Newton and the Newtonians concerned not so much the reality as the substantial or relational nature of time and space. See Earman 1979. 15 “But the cause which brings it about that something exists, or that possibility demands existence, also brings it about that every possible has a tendency towards Existence, since in general a reason for restricting this to certain possibles cannot be found.” (Résumé de métaphysique [Metaphysical Theses] 5. §, C 534, English translation: www.leibniz-translations.com/theses.htm) 16 On Hobbes’s impact on Leibniz’s philosophy see Rross 2007, especially p. 27–28. 17 On occasions Leibnz calls them souls without further ado, see for example in a letter of his to Sophie Charlotte in GP VII. 540. 18 “The Monadology” 24 §, GP VI. 611, L 645. Because of the different renderings of the crucial terms let me cite other English translations as well: “One sees from this that if we had in our perceptions nothing distinct and, so to speak, heightened and of an enhanced flavor, we should always remain in unconsciousness. And this is the state of the totally bare monads.” (Leibniz 1991, p. 20.) “From this we see that if, in our perceptions, we had nothing distinct or, so to speak, in relief and stronger in flavor, we would always be in a stupor. And this is the state of bare monads.” (Leibniz 1989, p. 216.) 19 Elements of philosophy the first section, concerning body (De corpore) IV.25.6, in Hobbes 1839, p. 396. emphasis added. (for the Latin original see Hobbes 1839, p. 322.) * My research was supported by OTKA (NKFIH) projects No. 104574, 120375, 112542, 123839, 125012 and 116234.

Bibliography Adams, Robert Merrihew. 1994. Leibniz – Determinist, Theist, Idealist. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Assmann, Aleida. 2013. Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur: Eine Intervention. München: C.H. Beck Verlag. Berkeley, George. 1949. The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne. Edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. Vol. II. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. ———. 2008. Philosophical Writings. Edited by Desmond M. Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1931/2006. ‘Mythischer, ästhetischer und theoretischer Raum’. In: Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Edited by Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel Hrsg. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag: 485–500. Crane, Tim. 2001. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Le Pli – Leibniz et le baroque. Paris: Minuit. Earman, John. 1979. ‘Was Leibniz a Relationist?’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4, 1: 264–265. Garber, Daniel. 2009. Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartz, Glenn A. 2006. Leibniz’s Final System – Monads, Matter and Animals. New York: Routledge. Hobbes, Thomas. 1839. ‘Elements of Philosophy the First Section, Concerning Body (De corpore)’. In: The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Edited by William Molesworth. Vol. I. London: John Bohn.

Subject’s perspective, Leibniz’s philosophy  57 Ishiguro, Hide. 1990. Leibniz’s Philosophy of Logic and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kulstad, Mark. 1991. Leibniz on Apperception, Consciousness, and Reflection. München, Hamden and Wien: Philosophia Verlag. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1875–1890. Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Hrsg. von C. I. Gerhardt. 7 vols. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. Reprint: Hildesheim: Georg Olms. 1965 (= GP). ———. 1923. Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. Hrsg. von der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Darmstadt, Leipzig and Berlin: Akademie Verlag (=A). ———. 1989a. Leibniz’s Philosophical Essays. Edited by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. ———. 1989b. Philosophical Papers and Letters. Edited by Leory E. Loemker. 2nd Edition. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers (= L). ———. 1991. Monadology. Edited by Nicholas Recher. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ———. 2007. The Leibniz – Des Bosses Correspondence. Edited by Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ———. 2011. Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence. Edited and translated by Lloyd Strickland. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (= S). Panofsky, Erwin. 1991. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books. Reston, James Jr. 1995. Galileo: A Life. New York: Hamper Perennial. Ross, George MacDonald. 2007. ‘Leibniz’s Debt to Hobbes’. In: Leibniz and the English-Speaking World. Edited by Pauline Phemister and Stuart Brown. Dordrecht: Springer: 19–33. Senseney, John R. 2011. The Art of Building in the Classical World: Vision, Craftsmanship, and Linear Perspective in Greek and Roman Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press.

3 From a pagan theologia civilis in Rome to a fictitious political theology in Kant Epochal metamorphoses of a theological underlay of political thought Martin Moors 1. Initial query: which logos directs the project of a political theology? Philosophical criticism targeting, on the one hand, political representations of authority and its purpose, and, on the other hand, theology-based representations of authority together with their proper purpose brings to light, when these targets get interconnected, an inner ambiguity in the project of a political theology. In essence, the ambiguity originates from the fate of logos as principle of intellection engaged in such a project. Indeed, in theology, logos is supposed to discern the properties of God upon which religious beliefs and practices are founded. The adjective “political,” instead, does deviate the interests of this logos from its initial object and orients towards the discernment of properties of a political body and determinations of the latter’s practice. Philosophically speaking, the initial engagement of logos pertains to the speculative interests of reason in religious matters, while the deviated engagement is determined by reason’s practical interests. The ambiguity of the project of a political theology is, hence, the mirror image of a conflict of interests of reason within itself. What theology discerns in theory, namely, can in political theology be of no use in practice, and, conversely, what is politically considered to be of use in practice can essentially clash with what reason in its essential freedom reveals of God and religion in theory. The following two questions complement each other. On the one hand, how can logos be attached in theory to its ideas on God without being an ideo-logy (which does not understand the sense of freedom leading to truth)? On the other hand, how can logos be attached in practice to political ideals without being an ideal-logy (which does not understand the truth leading to a human being’s freedom)? In both alternative cases, logos is, as a principle of discernment, internally challenged by opposites which carry with them their proper deteriorations.

From theologia civilis to Kant  59 May this concise diagnosis of the livability of the project of a political theology suffice for judging why in fact this project throughout its history has effectively shown a most diverse and confusing amalgam of attempts which in one way or another schematize every possible relationship between politics and theology? In his book Epirrhosis. Festgabe für Carl Schmitt (1968, 2002), dedicated to the innovator of a Catholic line of thought in these matters by his epoch-making book Politische Theologie (1922), the editor, Hans Barion succinctly characterizes in this sense the history of political theology as a jumble of politico-religious brainstorms. The expression “political theology” can, therefore, only have an indicative meaning which, in strict sense, is prefigured in its meandering history.1 Agreeing on the fact that only a historical vantage point can indicatively reveal any insight into what political theology represents corresponding to its differing appearances, from a methodological perspective we therefore compose our article on a historical line focusing on the epochal metamorphoses of that historic development. Indeed, a historic inquiry can effectively reveal some essentialia that mark, in general, the changing profiles of such an endeavor. Stated that the foundational principle of intellection, logos, is ambiguously involved in each of the historic endeavors, this situation entails that any search for those essentialia must specifically be conferred to a critical philosophy using an analytic method. The analysis we are about to undertake will thus be carried out in foro interno, that is, within the philosopher’s niche in which historic research is done with a philosophical aim. From the point of view of content, we are faced with the following two major philosophical issues: justification and function. At either side of the relation between politics and theology, there is a logos of justification at work with respect to, respectively, politically sanctioned determinations of religious teachings and practices, and, conversely, theologically sanctioned determinations of political ideals. Two questions must be raised: Which idea of politics can be taken as the ground of justification to impact the religious life of the citizen, and, conversely, which idea of divine authority can be the ground of justification to impact the political ideals of politicians and the political life of subjects as well? In historically variable forms, we see a logos of justification “at work” in accordance with equally variable conceptions of “sanctioning” grounds that claim absoluteness. Going along with legitimation, there is the aspect of function. If somehow legitimized, what may be the proper function or purpose of the interconnected political or, respectively, theological determinations? The first (i.c., political) determinations are obviously supposed to be “factors” in the establishment of a political body and the functioning of the latter’s executive power. The second (i.c., theological) determinations are purposively meant to be “factors” of a “city of God” on earth. Their mutual interpenetration in the idea of a political theology is serving a certain practical idea of unification by which, on the one hand, theology functionally strengthens the civil

60  Martin Moors virtues of the citizens, and, on the other hand, political authority concretizes the religious virtues of the latter. It must be clear from the outset that the justification as well as the functioning of politico-theological determinations must be thought on both sides as originating from within the absolutely self-asserting idea of politics (“political absolutism”) or, conversely, theology (“theological absolutism”). This means that out of themselves alone, these absolutisms empower their respective authority to meddle with religious, resp. civil matters. The manner, namely, in which a political authority literally “sanctions” (literally from sancire) on theological grounds its determinations regarding “divine affairs” signals that it considers itself to be the caretaker of something “holy”, i.c., a holy law, not according to virtue (as in moral religion) but according to right. In its holiness, the civil law is destined, first, to impact the constitution of a political body: i.e., the city of man considered, under the condition of an “eschatological reserve,”2 as the city of God;3 and, second, to guard and secure the stability and prosperity of this body functionally.4 Our investigation – as “a historic inquiry with a philosophical aim” – is composed of three parts. We first give an exposition of Saint Augustine’s critical dealings with the Roman theologia civilis so as this became known to him by Marcus Varro’s (now lost) Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum (Antiquities of human and divine affairs). This pagan version of “political theology” will then in Part Two be contrasted with its Christian counterpart. With the arrival of Christianity, the logos proper to a theo-logy becomes “in principle” defined by the Logos (Christ) featuring at the center of Christology: “In principio erat Verbum [Logos]” (John 1, 1). From then onwards, in the patristic and medieval era, political reality, being a “human affair” in the order of creation is reflected under the spell of typically Christian determinants such as Revelation, eschatology, soteriology, Providence and so on. In Modernity, the epochal shift from a heteronomous determination of logos to its emancipated (or “enlightened”) autonomous version is most paradigmatically performed by the critical philosopher Kant.5 In our Part Three, we will expose in what critical way and especially why Kant in the Prussian Age of Enlightenment still links politics – which he understands as a “doctrine of Right put into practice” (Kant 1996b, [8:370]) – with a theological idea, namely a divine Obligator.

2. Theologia civilis: Augustine’s dealings with Varro’s theologia tripartita In his De Civitate Dei (426), Books IV and VI, Augustine deals with the issue of a theologia civilis, referring to the systematic presentation of it in Marcus Varro’s Antiquities of Human and Divine Affairs. The system that Varro established in the Second Part of his Antiquities (“On Divine Affairs”) is presented by Augustine as follows: “There are three kinds of theology, that is, of the account that is given of the gods. Of these one is called mythical,

From theologia civilis to Kant  61 another physical and the third, civil. . . . They call the theology that is used chiefly by poets ‘mythical,’ that used by philosophers ‘physical,’ and that used by city-states ‘civil’ ” (Augustine 1963, p. 307–309). Varro’s system of theologia tripartita is itself based “[O]n the three kinds of gods of which pontiff Scaevola wrote ‘that three kinds of gods are handed down to us: one by the poets, another by the philosophers and a third by statesmen’ ” (Ibid., p. 99). The mythical gods and the corresponding theologia mythica belong to a class that for Scaevola and Varro “is mere rubbish, because the poets invent many disgraceful stories about the gods” (Ibid.). For Augustine, in this theology, named fabulous or – in connection with civil theology – theatrical, “everything is ascribed to the gods that can befall a man, even the very lowest of men” (Ibid., p. 309). For the bishop of Hippo, the priests as servants of a theologia civilis leading the ceremonies for the gods of the temple, are enacting for the benefit of the State’s welfare exactly the same performances as those of the actors on stage in the theater enacting for the gods of the poets giving pleasure to the spectators.6 Varro’s discussion of the gods, of which an account is given in the theologia physica of the philosophers, also relates to civil theology. What is at stake in the “natural theology” is no longer the public theatrical divine performances based on tales chanted by the poets and enacted by players on stage in the temples but, rather, those gods and the corresponding theological accounts about them which suit “to the universe” (ibid., p. 313). As this theologia naturalis of the philosophers also connects with civil theology, Augustine is particularly interested in Scaevola’s view on this connection. The latter states (in Varro’s wording) that the class of the gods of the philosophers “is not suited to citystates, because it includes some superfluous doctrines and some also that are harmful for the people to know” (ibid., p. 99). The harm in question could be caused by the critique of the philosophers stating “that the city-states do not have the true images of those who are really gods, because the true god has neither sex nor age nor well-defined bodily parts” (ibid.). Natural theology which for this reason – “not being in the advantage of the city” (ibid.) – is put at a distance from the alleged superior civil theology, motivates Augustine to react furiously: “What a splendid religion [theologia civilis] for the weak to take refuge in for deliverance – a religion which includes the belief that if the refugee seeks for the truth by which he may gain freedom, it is better for him to be cheated” (ibid.). Augustine’s indignation concerning Varro’s mockery about the issue of truth with regard to the teachings of civil theology coheres with his blaming of Seneca. Augustine blames the latter for his dishonesty and public hypocritical behavior. While, namely, thanks to the philosophers, Seneca “slashed so thoroughly” (ibid., p. 357) the civil theology for the double reason that he considers the deities of the city as “monsters” and the customary ceremonies in the temple as “performed by mockers and madman,” (ibid., p. 353) in his real life, however, as a distinguished senator of the Roman people, “he worshipped what he rebuked, did what he denounced, invoked

62  Martin Moors what he accused” (ibid., p. 359). Augustine harshly condemns such an outrageous practical denunciation of living a true life as hypocritically mixing oneself up in a hoax. From Augustine’s critical reaction, on the one hand, to Scaevola’s view regarding the connection between theologia civilis and the philosophical theologia naturalis and, on the other hand, to Seneca’s practical hypocrisy regarding “divine affairs,” a first philosophical conclusion can be drawn. Augustine’s assessment of theologia civilis predominantly focusses on a “natural rule of truth.” In this regard, one aspect with regard to theologia civilis needs more clarification. It concerns the critical issue of justification with regard to civil theology’s purposes. Quoting Varro, Augustine states that “the third kind [of theology, i.c., theologia civilis] is that which citizens in the states, and especially the priests, have an obligation to learn and carry out. It tells us what gods are to be worshipped by the state and what rites and sacrifices individuals should perform” (ibid., p. 313). In this respect, justification concerns, from the point of view of truthfulness, the state’s determinations that should regulate, on the one hand, the people’s representations of the deities of the city and, on the other hand, the ceremonial performances in the temples. If it is the case, indeed, that the “civil” justification of political determinations is presented as being indifferent to any “natural” (philosophical) foundation of truthfulness, then the legitimacy of the sanctioned civil determinations of “divine affairs” can merely be found in their function. But in this Roman case, a justification by function turns out to be a paradoxical attempt. It is paradoxical, indeed, to ask for grounds (ratio) on the basis of which a prevailing “political absolutism” defines the truth of what it formally commands. Any absolutism refuses the search for an antecedent determining ground (ratio antecedenter determinans). Because of the fact that in the Roman case, the latter ground which pertains to either metaphysics (theologia naturalis) or Revelation is explicitly put aside as being insignificant, a consequent determining ground (ratio consequenter determinans) can still provide grounds for justification: “[T]he deities are needed to keep cities safe” (ibid., p. 343).7 This functional justification is also expressed in the following statement: “[A] knowledge of the gods is useful if it is known what strength, what skill and what power the particular god has in the particular case” (ibid., p. 343). Augustine counters all these dubious attempts of pragmatical justification which in no way do right – just-ify – to the truth of divine worship, by stating: “In this way, they [rulers] bound them [peoples] with tighter chains, as it were, to the civil society, in order that they might possess men similarly enthralled” (ibid., p. 123).

3. The idea of a Christian state shaped by a heteronomous principle of revelation In the preceding reflections we sketched the critical philosophical issue of justification and its corresponding ground that were provoked by Varro’s

From theologia civilis to Kant  63 theologia civilis. These reflections contain all the necessary elements that are involved in the paradigm-shift which took place when Christianity first made its appearance. A new epoch in the history of the idea of a political theology begins when on new theological bases the central idea of order will be subverted, i.c., the political order of a holy law-based civitas and the order of logos as well through which the political order is “rendered” (rationem reddere) to its divine ground. Most especially is at stake the doublelayered order which was so dominant in the Roman paradigm: “Law (Nomos) precedes reason (Logos).” When, namely, in the Christian era the Christ-Logos – “The Word through which all things are made”8 − took over the dignity of a first principle – “In the beginning was the Word [Logos]”9 – it substituted the Roman primacy of the autonomous “rule of Law” by the Christian primacy of a heteronomous “rule of (revealed) Truth.” Through this epoch-making substitution, Christianity initiated a completely new definition of how political reality (“the political”)10 was going to be envisaged by Christian theology. Essential aspects of the newly envisaged relation between politics and theology ensue directly from the Christological principle, for example: how creation is related to the Creator, reason is related to faith, natural truth to Revelation, felicity to redemption, world-history to the story of salvation.11 What also ensues directly from the dominating Christological principle understood according to its nomo-thetical significance are, on the one hand, the theological dogmatic and, on the other hand, the theological practical views regarding political reality. From a dogmatic point of view, namely, the theological component of a political theology as redefined by a Christo-Logos, will bring the political reality under the spell of determinants which were all unknown in Varro’s pagan theologia civilis: eschatology, soteriology, the kingdom of God, freedom (“of the children of God”), Providence.12 Also from a theological practical point of view, Christian political theology will bring political reality under the spell of specifically theological virtues. In this regard, J.B. Metz proposes “faith, hope and love as the forms of freedom to criticize society” (Rahner et al. 1970, p. 38).13 In order to pinpoint, philosophically, how exactly the paradigm-shift from a pagan theologia civilis towards a Christology-based project of political theology could effectively occur, we must focus on the one single constitutively important element of Logos which both specimina of political theology have formally in common. As we have explained, the law-based logos in the Roman case functioned essentially according to a “sanctioned” logic of pragmatic justification rendering the State’s prosperity back to the State’s gods of the Capitol. In the Christian era, on the other hand, in contradistinction to this Roman autonomous idea of logos will be put “to work” a Logos that will justify its political claims according to a heteronomous (i.e., Christological) Principle. In theologia christiana, namely, the historical manifestation of the divine Word has the significance of a peremptory principle determining heteronomously in thought and in action the logic

64  Martin Moors of a theology on man as a political being and civitas as a political body. By the same token, the epochal mutation from an autonomous “logic” about political affairs towards a heteronomous one that originates from the divine Word, yields a significant topological shift regarding the location of the goals of their respective functioning. From a topological perspective, Augustine made the topos of truth and happiness constantly an issue of critique against Varro’s theologia civilis, saying: “Eternal life, that is, a life happy without end, is given by him alone who gives true happiness. And since this is something which those gods who are worshipped in the civil theology have been proved unable to give, it follows that they should not be worshipped for temporal and earthly blessings, . . . and much less should they be worshipped for the eternal life which is to follow after death” (Augustine 1963, p. 365). Continuing the topological interpretation, Augustine reallocates the benefits the seekers of truth enjoy into the inner life of the soul. He is turning away, namely, from the aimed-at objects of theologia naturalis (which Augustine sees falsely conjoined with theologia civilis),14 which are all “what can be referred to temporal and earthly affairs, and to corporeal beings, invisible perhaps, but still mutable” (ibid., p. 475). Instead, Augustine states that true worship can only be rendered to “the true God, by whose indwelling alone the soul is made happy” (ibid. – my emphasis). This typically Augustinian topological shift (“conversion”) towards the interiority of the soul has a peculiar importance within the frame of our current philosophical inquiry on Logos. Indeed, in a Christian era, the “rendering” (rationem reddere) or justification is destined to meet with the divine Logos from which the worshiper receives, by grace, the initial motivation for establishing a civitas in accordance with the holy commandments (nomoi). It is far beyond the reach of our contribution to give an outline of Augustine’s “metaphysics of the soul” that focusses on the topos where the Logos (the divine Word) meets the human logos of a political theo-logy (see Wohlfarth 1969). One aspect of this topic, though, that persists throughout medieval scholasticism, must be selected because it will most dominantly mark the subsequent passage to Modernity. In the frame, namely, of a patristic and medieval metaphysical epistemology, the issue of legitimacy is essentially intertwined with a metaphysics, not a metaphysics of nature (as in the Roman theologia naturalis) but, instead, a metaphysics of the rational soul which, in turn, rests upon Revelation, i.e., the dogma of creation. Therefore, applied to the political domain, rationality (order, harmony) will be established in virtue of a hetero-logos that stems from a theology of creation, i.c., of the created rational soul. Such a political theology will consequently consider its project, civitas, as somehow an emanation of a divine Logos, and thus a city of God. From the point of view of justification, the truth-claims from a hetero-logos on political reality can only be justified by super-natural faith infused by God’s grace. As we will see, in Modernity it is precisely this intrinsically unifying linkage between human reason and predominant

From theologia civilis to Kant  65 theological determinants that will be most radically broken. In his critical philosophy, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) made this break peremptory.

4. Kant on the imperative form of civil laws and divine authority In Part I of his Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant elaborated upon Metaphysical Principles of the Doctrine of Right (Kant 1996b, [6:203–372]) whereupon he grafted his idea of politics: “[P]olitics, as doctrine of right put into practice [Politik als ausübender Rechtslehre]” (Ibid., [8:370]). Although he formulated these principles by strictly deriving them from the fundamental law of pure practical reason (wherefore he also calls them metaphysical),15 Kant holds to the idea that metaphysical principles of public right should not at all in every respect be opposed to a certain theological reference. An aspect of Kant’s theologico-political legacy, namely, consists in having elucidated the fact that within the categorical imperative form of all civil laws, there is necessarily – but only on mere subjective grounds – implied a certain reference to theology. Neither function, nor content, but rather the modality of imperative form reveals in a philosophically reflective manner (in foro interno), for Kant, an intrinsic linkage between the civil law’s categorical authority and the mere subjectively acknowledged authority of God. From the outset, I will bring to the fore the basis upon which Kant, in his doctrine of the metaphysical principles of public right, comes to deal with a theological issue.16 The latter appears, namely, when he investigates into the grounds of authority, first, regarding the self-legislative, unified will of the people (potestas legislatoria – see Kant 1996b, [6:313–318]), and secondly, by consequence, with respect to the authority of the executive power of the sovereign (potestas executoria). Regarding the concept of authority proper to the civil legislative power, it is the inner form of a categorical imperative that defines this concept in a twofold way. First, passively, as this form determines the legislator’s obligation to strive after the well-being (Heil) of a state. In this regard, Kant states: “By the well-being of a state is understood that condition in which its constitution conforms most fully to principles of right; it is that condition which reason, by a categorical imperative, makes it obligatory for us to strive after” (Kant 1996b, [6:318]). The unconditional authority of a categorical imperative also defines, actively, the modality (i.c., practical necessity) by which juridical laws promulgated by the lawgiver (legislator) ought to be obeyed by those who are subject to them in a state (civitas) and are ruled by the state’s executive power in accordance with these laws. When Kant reflects On the effects with regard to rights that follow from the nature of the civil union (ibid., [6:318–323]), he first draws the attention to the issue of the legislator’s irreproachability regarding the origin of his supreme authority to which the people is subject. It is exactly when reflecting on the grounds of the irreprehensible supremacy of the legislator’s

66  Martin Moors authority that Kant introduces its theological “origin.” In this regard, he states: A law that is so holy (inviolable) that it is already a crime even to call it in doubt in a practical way, and so to suspend its effect for a moment, is thought as if it must have arisen not from human beings but from some highest, flawless lawgiver; and this is what the saying ‘All authority is from God’ means. (ibid., [6:319]) What we intend to bring to light is the ratio in this argument, by which Kant reflectively states the idea of a divine lawgiver at the origin of all moral authority. Within his metaphysical a priori determination of the modality (i.c., practical necessity) of coercive civil laws and by the same token, of their authority, Kant introduces along the epistemic line of “thinking as if” a theological reference, namely, the idea of God as “some highest lawgiver.” The duty to obey the currently existing legislative authority is for Kant a duty which becomes in its formal – i.e., categorically imperative – nature upgraded to the status of a divine command. In a relevant note in his Religion within the Bounds of mere Reason, Kant brings forth significant nuances of interpretation regarding statutory civil laws that are seen17 “as if” they were divine commands. He states: As soon as something is recognized as duty, even if it should be a duty imposed through the purely arbitrary will [Willkür] of a human lawgiver, obeying it is equally a divine command. Of course we cannot call statutory civil laws divine commands, but if they are legitimate, their observance is equally a divine command. (Kant 1996a, [6:99n]; see also ibid., [6:154n]) What Kant is explicitly excluding, though, is any objective equalization of civil laws with religious commands. Such an objective equalization would bluntly contradict the basic principle of Kant’s ethics of autonomy. He only equalizes them on the subjective basis of obedience according to the consciousness of constraint put on my will by duty. What counts in this respect is only the subjectively determining ground [subjective Bestimmungsgrund] of the will, that is, pure respect for the law (see: Kant 1996a, [4:400]), which is holy (inviolable – see ibid., [5:87]). Kant does not bring forth the “political” idea of God in a speculative way in order to allocate the absolute origin of all civil supreme legislative authority. He would definitely never confer any objective, albeit undetermined reality on this “political” idea of God in the way he does in his speculative transcendental theology in the first Critique (Kant 1998, [B693ff.]). In this sense, Kant would completely endorse the modern predicament of a “political absolutism,” as he elaborates his Metaphysics of Civil Right only

From theologia civilis to Kant  67 on the basis of “the state in idea, as it ought to be in accordance with pure principles of right” (Kant 1996b, [6:313–318]). The latter is, by definition, emptied from all theological, religious or historical contingent determinants. Not upon any theological idea but only on the a priori principles of pure reason are based – idealiter speaking – the maxims of a moral politician (Kant 1996b, [8:372]). If in principle, as Kant states (in thesi), a moral politician will adjust his principles of political prudence by the universal pure a priori principles of morality, and that furthermore the latter are postulated to be of a categorical imperative nature, and finally that on its turn this categorical modality refers reflectively to a certain theological idea, then one must consequently acknowledge the fact that for Kant a theological referent must be allocated within the common core that binds politics with morals in public right. A critical question arises: which is the epistemic status of this theological idea to be allocated in ethico-civil duties? We have seen that in Kant’s metaphysical doctrine of Right, the theological referent is asserted on mere reflective grounds, projecting, namely, categorical imperative’s authority (duty) that is certainly18 implied in promulgated Right, onto a divine “origin.” By mere reflection no determinative truth whatsoever is asserted. In order, now, to find out which philosophical status this theological idea has among all transcendent ideas featuring in his practical philosophy, one must rely on his philosophy of reflective judgment.19 In this regard, two aspects must be distinguished. On the one hand, in so far as the reflective nature of Kant’s argument is concerned, it is our contention that the theological idea has the status of an intuitively grasped aesthetic idea. On the other hand, from the point of view of objective reality, there are good reasons to characterize this idea as a “good fiction.” All in all, I interpret the idea of God that features in Kant’s metaphysics of civil right and via the latter gets implied in his political philosophy, as a specimen of religious fictionalism on an aesthetic basis.20 Let us further inquire into both aspects. Applied to our theologico-political issue, one must assert – according to Kant – as if, on subjective grounds, our productive imagination when it assumes our intuition of empirically demonstrable representations of political authority, is put in motion and brings in view (focus imaginarius)21 a representation of a divine Obligator surpassing and uniting transcendently22 all contingent instantiations of this concept. With regard to the latter, imagination incites us to consider them as defective copies (ectypa) of the original divine image (prototypon) of every duty-bound authority. The political idea of God functions in Kant’s metaphysics of public right as a, so to say, reflectively established “ideal of authority”: “It is supposed to be the unattainable model for possible empirical intuitions, and yet, at the same time, it is not supposed to provide any rule capable of being explained or tested” (Kant 1998, [B 598–599]). Indeed, nothing within the political domain can be conceptually explained by this political idea of God, nor may this idea be used in assessing concrete given manifestations of political authority.

68  Martin Moors Expressed in Kant’s terminology of his Third Critique, this idea remains an unexpoundable presentation (“eine inexponibele Vorstellung”).23 The question why it is at all conceptually legitimized to posit reflectively such an “aesthetic” idea of God in a metaphysical doctrine on civil laws and civil authority, will be treated in the next paragraph. For now, I state that the transition from a metaphysics of public right to theology represents in Kant a philosophically reflective movement performed on mere subjective grounds towards the “vacant place” that one finds open when one reflects on the origin where all legitimate political authority imaginatively originates from. The fact that this “vacant place” for lawgiving is aesthetically or intuitively occupied by an outspoken theological idea (“God as supreme lawgiver”)24 creates in Kant’s philosophy a conceptual problem which he himself is very well aware of. In his argument, namely, for a republican constitution in On Perpetual Peace, Kant states clearly that this “is the only constitution which can be derived from the idea of an original contract, upon which all rightful legislation of a people must be founded” (Kant 2000, [349–351] – my emphasis, see also Kant 1996b, §47). It is as if practical reason’s idea of “original contract” from which all civil rights metaphysically considered originate, is antinomically related to the alleged theological idea of the Lawgiver, which equally designates the origin of civil law. For Kant, the solution of this antinomy consists in the following: “We must show that the concept to which we refer the object in such judgments is understood in different senses” (Kant 2000, [5:339]). Regarding the antinomy under investigation, its solution effectively depends on the specific signification of the concept of “lawgiver.” A definition of this term is given in Kant’s Lectures on Ethics (delivered in 1784–1785, from the notebook of G.F. Collins) and in the Introductory Chapter IV of his Metaphysics of Morals: “One who commands (imperans) through a law is the lawgiver (legislator). He is the author (autor) of the obligation in accordance with the law, but not always the author of the law” (Kant 1996b, [6:227]).25 The difference Kant makes regarding the meaning of the concept of “lawgiver” reveals an important nuance with respect to the meaning of “giving” and of “what is given.” The giver (of the law) is giving an obligation, he is obligator, although he does not sui generis “give” the law itself as its author. Obligator is anyone who declares that a law in conformity with his will obliges others to obey it, is giving a law. The lawgiver is not always simultaneously an originator of the law; he is only that if the laws are contingent. But if the laws are practically necessary, and he merely declares that they conform to his will, then he is a lawgiver. (Kant 1997, [27:282–283] According to Kant, giving a law amounts to making this law categorically imperative. This is specifically what Kant is claiming with regard to

From theologia civilis to Kant  69 the “political” idea of God as lawgiver: God obligates but without being thought of as the originator of the law. Metaphysically, one can, therefore, state a priori and without contradiction that the “original contract” is the one and only, absolute origin of all civil legitimacy as such and of political authority as well. Accordingly, one can think of all laws as binding us a priori, universally and unconditionally by our own reason in virtue of a general, united will, and yet think reflectively the imperative character of this law as coming from a divine will. Taking into account the results of our foregoing examination, one may finally ask: which are the subjective grounds (logical motivation) for necessarily introducing a theological idea into a metaphysics of civil right, itself being the basis of his idea of politics? What motivates Kant’s philosophical transition from a metaphysics of legality towards a theological aesthetics? As we have made clear already, there is no “objective reality” that would give, in a determinate manner, a firm basis of truth to the idea of divine Obligator. However, lacking any objective reality does not per se mean nonsensical or mere fabulous.26 The idea of divine Obligator does not belong to the figments of the brain (Hirngespinste) used chiefly by dreaming poets. As indicated already, what is leading the imagination to a theological idea – be it in a mere aesthetic and projective way – bears firstly upon the real moral awareness of duty that is bestowed upon reason’s moral laws. Grafted upon this given moral intuition, there are subjective reasons that feed the faculty of imagination in its moving beyond the confines of a metaphysics of right, entering the theological domain. About these subjective reasons, Kant is explicitly clear when he refers to “only a subjectively logical ground” in the following statement: “The ground on which a human being is to think of all his duties in keeping with this formal aspect of religion [their relation to a divine will given a priori] is only subjectively logical” (Kant 1996b, [6:486]). His argument for justifying this “logic” is the following: “We cannot very well make obligation (moral constraint) intuitive for ourselves without thereby thinking of another’s will, namely, God’s (of which reason in giving universal laws is only the spokesman)” (ibid.). It must be remarked, first, that in this proposition, Kant has implicitly engaged the faculty of imagination, which he calls the faculty of “making something intuitive for ourselves.”27 Consequently, the idea of “God’s will” − “the will of Another, sc. Obligator” − gets the epistemic status of an ideal of productive imagination. Moreover, nothing but a mere idea is needed “since we still abstract from his [God’s] objective existence” (Kant 1996b, [6:486]). And lastly, the logical content of this idea is mimetically related to reason itself. Indeed, Kant repeatedly refers to “the relation of reason to the idea of God which reason makes for itself,” (ibid., [6:487] or, some lines further down: “[T]he idea we ourselves make of such a being” (ibid.).28 All in all, taken together all the epistemic characteristics that are designing Kant’s political idea of God – the epistemic modus of

70  Martin Moors “as-if,” “ideal created on aesthetic basis,” “focus imaginarius” − suffice to consider this idea as a “good fiction.” The valuation why the fiction of divine Obligator is “good” rests on the following two grounds: its epistemic potential of truth (in speculative respect) and its moral potential for boosting virtuousness (in functional respect). By these two grounds of excellency, the notion of fiction becomes rescued from the suspicion of arbitrariness or superfluousness or fake fanciness. On the one hand, the fictitious idea of divine obligator borrows its potential of truth from two facts that are intentionally emphasized in Kant’s argumentation: first, the fact that this idea originates (in imagination) from within every human being’s unconditional awareness of what “categorical imperative” means, and, secondly, the fact that the logical ground for bringing forth this theological idea is a subjective but necessary one. These two facts justify a certain veridical claim by which every Nietzschean-inspired nihilistic interpretation of Kant’s “as if” is reproved.29 On the other hand, regarding its functional excellency, the religious fiction of the divine Obligator represents a particular example of the moral potency that Kant allocates within all religious representations that are contained in a “moral religion.”30 In one of his notes on the philosophy of religion (Reflexionen zur Religionsphilosophie), Kant explicitly values good fictions for moral purposes when he states: “The very beneficent fiction [sehr wohlthätige Tauschung] guiding the understanding almost mechanically by alleged sacred instructions from God himself.”31 The beneficence of good fictions in moral affairs can only be measured in their effects. For him, the idea of a divine will, namely, is functionally beneficent “for the sake of strengthening the moral incentive in our lawgiving reason” (Kant 1996b, [6:487]; see also Kant 1996a, [7:36 and 6:154n], 2000, [5:482]). As is known from his earlier works on practical philosophy, the only moral incentive (which is of aesthetic, i.e., sensible nature) is the moral feeling of respect. Expressed in terms of his Religionbook, it concerns concretely the respect for laws represented in “the ethicocivil duties of humanity” (Kant 1996a, [6:154]). These laws incite in the moral politician to “guilt-inspired awe [schuldige Ehrfurcht] before God [as this awe is] the religious disposition which universally accompanies all our actions done in conformity to duty” (ibid.).

General conclusion From a historic point of view, the foregoing sketch of the metamorphoses of the project of political theology reveals at least two things. What is evidenced in the first place is the fact that such a project undergoes passively the multifarious conceptions of logos that are supposed to give a firm doctrinal basis at this shape of theology and a justification of its political claims as well. But in the end the firmness of this basis proves to be a delusion. The mode, for instance, in which a Roman theologia civilis “firmly” established its claims on the formation of the city-state was totally destroyed

From theologia civilis to Kant  71 by the Barbarians. Nothing survived of the weak theological foundation of the Roman “rule of law.” Later in history, when a modern principle of rationality was established that in the domain of political philosophy took place when Hobbes construed on the “firm” basis of calculative reasoning his doctrine of the State and the role of religion in it, the former scholastic doctrine of a city of God build on the rock of a Christo-Logos collapsed. Finally, subsequent to Kant’s criticism of practical reason, the “firm” basis of any dogmatic mode of thinking about foundations for a perfect State and the theological justification of this, are again teared down. At that historic moment, after Kant’s criticism, the relic of a political theology represents nothing more than an imaginary idea(l) of God as Obligator needed as a “firm” basis for subjectively strengthening the moral incentive of respect for the law of reason. Thus, it may be clear that the critic of history again and again subverts the objectivity of a theological foundation for the formation of a State and the justification of its executive power. What we learn from this history boils down to a sceptic reservation with regard to the livability of a political theology as a “firmly” established branch of a logos on God. However, what is evidenced too by this critic of history is the important fact that, nevertheless, the lived through religious faith is manifestly and constantly engaged with the key-issue of universally establishing an ethical community of which a juridico-civil community represents the schema. Hence, if there does not persist any universal doctrinal logos (account) on God that can regulate a practical (political) logos to sustain the formation and functioning of a State, there does certainly exist a rather protreptic logos pertaining to religious faith that will take over for that sake the provision of a firm motivational basis. If, indeed, religious faith will not in an unworldly fashion loose itself in a mere ethereal mysticism, the principle of reality of this faith will bind this faith to an ethical engagement, especially in political affairs. In this sense does the biblical commandment “give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Mt 22, 21) not only express the Lord’s acknowledgment of the autonomy of Caesar’s affairs, but also expresses in this regard a universal moral imperative. The Lord’s imperative obligates the Christian believers to behave accordingly. Nonbelievers, though, also are seized by this obligation because it has a morally autonomous status of its own. As the cited commandment harbors thus a universally justifiable practical truth, religious faith on its behalf mediates in the knowledge of this truth. In its ethical dimension, religious faith indeed mediates in the rational discernment of the good, also regarding the issues that properly belong to the State’s welfare. In this sense, the philosophical personage of the “moral politician” that Kant has portrayed in Perpetual Peace (Kant 1996b, [8:372]), can very well, on the one hand, acknowledge the principles of political prudence in such a way that they can, in general, coexist with morals, and, on the other hand, be firmly motivated for this political praxis by the incentives of religious faith. In sum, it is our contention that practical (i.c., political) reason of the “moral politician” can get

72  Martin Moors empowered by the protreptics of religious faith. The latter is on its turn itself empowered by the rational faith in God, postulated as a necessary condition of the possibility of conceiving the highest political good in its full realization.

Notes 1 In so doing, we adopt – as Hans Barion expresses it – Carl Schmitt’s “methodical master-trick to keep up in matters concerned with political theology with what is historically given and follow his good counsel to remain silent in munere alieno” (1968, 2002, p. 53 [my translation from German]. 2 A chief representative of 20th century political theology, J.B. Metz formulates this reserve as follows: “[Instead of being] a theology dabbling in politics, i.e., in direct contact with socio-political public life, [i]t is in fact one of the aims of political theology and its society-directed thinking to prevent the Church and theology being saddled as it were unwittingly with this or that political ideology.” (Rahner et al. 1970, p. 35, see also p. 37). 3 Cf. Kant’s statement: “Without the foundation of a political community [under juridico-civil laws], it [i.e., an ethical community as the Kingdom of God] could never be brought into existence by human beings.” (1996a, [6:94]) 4 Cf. D. Diderot and d’Alembert in their Encyclopédie, lemma théologie politique: “[elle est] la science la plus utile et la plus necessaire pour la sûreté, la tranquillité et la prospérité de l’état.” (cited after R. Hepp 1998, p. 1106). 5 From a historical perspective, it is rather Thomas Hobbes who shook up the foundations of the scholastic teleological system. His philosophical doctrine on the State, construed after a method of calculation which principally denies all teleology, was built on the principle of conservatio sui. 6 For this Augustinian agreement of the mythical and civil theology, see Augustine 1963, p. 323–331. 7 About the consequently determining ground(s) that convey(s) a functionally justifying significance to the gods and their public worship, we find plentiful information in De civitate Dei, Bk. IV. For example, “the extent and duration of the Roman empire” is attributed to Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the goddesses Victoria (in Ch. 3, 7–9, 15), Felicity (Felicitas Imperii), Happiness (Fortuna, in Ch. 18), Fortitude (Virtus and Fides, in Ch. 20–21), and many more which are all listed in the indigitamenta. 8 John 1, 3, 10; Kol. 1, 16. 9 John 1, 1. 10 A term initiated by Claude Lefort in contradistinction to “politics” understood as an institution. 11 Literal translation of K. Löwith’s Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen (1953), published in English in 1949 as Meaning in History. The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. 12 The issue of Providence received particular importance in G. Vico’s Scienza nuova (§§ 342, 385) in which he supplemented Varro’s theologia tripartita with teologia cristiana. From this mixture is emerging a teologia civile ragionata della provvedenza divina. More on this in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, o.c., 1106. 13 See also op cit.: “Dogmatic faith appears here as acceptance of doctrinal propositions in which a perilous past is remembered and revived, which means that the claim of promises held out and hopes experienced are called to mind to break the spell of the predominant mentality – and its ‘repressions’ – by a critical trust.

From theologia civilis to Kant  73 Hope appears as the protective criticism which liberates the individual so that he can definitely reject any totalitarian view of history and society. For in the foresight of hope, the totality of history is reserved to the eschatological action of God. Love is not merely an interpersonal happening. It is a social matter, being the unconditional and selfless resolve to work for freedom and justice for others.” 14 See ibid., p. 473–477. 15 See Metaphysics of Morals, Right, Introduction II (Kant 1996b, [6:216–217]). 16 An earlier elaboration of this theme which is now substantially revisited, appeared in my article “’All Authority is from God’. An Aspect of Kant’s TheologicoPolitical Legacy” (Moors 2006, p. 142–151). 17 “seen as” is in Kant defined after the meaning of instar (denoting an equality). Cf. Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, Conclusion (Kant 1996b, [6:487]). 18 See Religion: “For anything permissible, which civil authority commands, is certainly a duty” (Kant 1996a, [6:154] – Kant’s emphasis). 19 As elaborated in Critique of Judgment, especially Part I: Critique of aesthetic Judgment. On the nature of reflective judgment in general, see Kant 2000, [5:179–181]. 20 In an earlier version of my argument on religious fictionalism in Kant (see my article “Religious Fictionalism in Kant’s Ethics of Autonomy” (Moors 2010), I concentrated on religious fictions in Kant’s ethics of autonomy from the viewpoint of objective reality and justifiable truth. In this respect, I discussed the “objective” meaning (truth) of the representation of Obligator (in the context of Kant’s Metaphysics of Virtue (Kant 1996b, [6:227 and 6:487]), Son of God (Kant’s Christology in Part Two of his Religion-book (Kant 1996a, [6:60–66]), Gods existence (as postulated in the Critique of practical Reason (Kant 1996b, [5:124–132] and the Opus Postumum) and even Kant’s definition of religion which is based on a fictitious “seeing as” (“moral duties seen as divine commands” in the Critique of Practical Reason (Kant 1996b, [5:129], Religion (Kant 1996a, [6:154], Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1996b, [6:487]). In my current argument on religious fictionalism, I am broadening the scope of my premises including now the referent “God” in Kant’s Metaphysics of Public Right (“All authority is from God” in Kant 1996b, [6:319]) and the aesthetic or intuitive (though not sensible or artistic) representation of it. 21 Cf. Critique of pure Reason (Kant 1998, [B 672]). 22 As far as unification is concerned, this motion towards transcendency occurs in the realm of aesthetics in a similar way, mutatis mutandis, as what Kant teaches in the Critique of pure Reason about the noumenal Ideal of pure Reason (God) of which he states that it “(as a mere idea) is nothing more than a projected unity, which in itself must be regarded not as given but only as a problem.” (ibid., [B 675]). 23 Kant 2000 [5:342–343]. 24 Worth noting is that Kant in Toward perpetual Peace, Second Section, First Definitive Article, Footnote (Kant 199b, [8:350]) is referring to “Aeon” in an imaginary representation of “a most high being of this world, apart from God.” He discusses the consequences the acceptance of such a being would have with regard to right (especially the principle of equality). 25 See also Kant’s chapter Of the Lawgiver (Kant 1997, [27: 282–283]). 26 In the way Augustine was judging Varro’s first kind of theology (theologia mythica) (“utterly mendacious fables”) in De Civitate Dei (Augustine 1963, p. 309). 27 cf. Critique of pure Reason: “Imagination is the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition” (Kant 1998, [B151].

74  Martin Moors 28 Not surprisingly, we indeed discover in Kant a “republican” God, an idea modeled after the a priori rational elements of public right. 29 As Dieter Henrich argues in his essay “On Fiction and Truth” (Henrich 1999, p. 146). 30 See Kant 1996a, [6:51–52]. This idea runs through the four parts of Kant’s Religionbook. I have given an exposition of this in my article “The Fate of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” (Moors 2017, p. 539–654). 31 Reflexio 8094 in: Reflexionen zur Religionsphilosophie, 19: 639 (translation mine)

Bibliography Arquillière, Henri-Xavier. 1934, 1956. L’Augustinisme politique. Essai sur la formation des theories politiques au Moyen-Age. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. Augustine. 1963. The City of God Against the Pagans. Translated by William M. Green. 7 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barion, Hans (ed.). 1968, 2002. Epirrhosis. Festgabe für Carl Schmitt. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Beiner, Ronald. 2011. Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beyer De Ryke, Benoît. 1999. ‘L’Apport Augustinien: Augustin et l’Augustinisme politique’. In: Histoire de la Philosophie Politique. Naissance de la Modernité. Edited by A. Renaut. Tome II. Paris: Calman-Lévy: 43–86. Blaquart Jean-Luc et Boudin, Bernard (ed.). 2009. Théologie et Politique: une relation ambivalente. Origine et Actualisation d’un Problème. Paris: l’Harmattan. Capelle, Philippe (éd.). 2008. Dieu et la Cité. Le statut contemporain du théologicopolitique. Paris: Les Editions de Cerf. Dyck, John, Paul Rowe and Jens Zimmerman. 2015. Whose Will Be Done? Essays on Souvereignty and Religion. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books. Fetscher, Iring und Herfried Münkler (hrsg.) 1988. Pipers Handbuch der Politischen Ideen. Band 1: Frühre Hochkulturen und europäische Antike. München: R. Piper GmbH & Co. Hammill, Graham and Julia Reinhard Lupton. 2012. Political Theology and Early Modernity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Henrich, Dieter. 1999. ‘On Fiction and Truth’. In: Bewusstes Leben. Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Subjektivität und Metaphysik. Edited by Dieter Henrich. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam. Hepp, Robert. 1998. ‘Theologie, Politische’. In: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Edited by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Basel: Schwabe. Howard, Dick. 2010. The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French & American Revolutions. New York: Columbia University Press. Johnson, Kristen Deede. 2007. Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1996a. Religion and Rational Theology. Edited and translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996b. Practical Philosophy. Edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

From theologia civilis to Kant  75 ———. 1997. Lectures on Ethics. Edited by Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, translated by Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Löwith, Karl. 1949. Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen. Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtsphilosophie. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Moors, Martin. 2006. ‘ “All Authority Is from God”: An Aspect of Kant’s TheologicoPolitical Legacy’. Bijdragen: International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 67: 142–151. ———. 2010. ‘Religious Fictionalism in Kant’s Ethics of Autonomy’. In: Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy. Edited by Stephen Palmquist. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter: 475–484. ———. 2017. ‘The Fate of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason’. In: The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Edited by M. Altman. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 539–564. Nemo, Philippe. 2013. A History of Political Ideas: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Translated by Kenneth Casler. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Ottman, Hans. 1990. ‘Politische Theologie als Begriffsgeschichte’. In: Der Begriff der Politik. Hrsg by Gerhardt Volker. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag: 169–188. Pangle, Thomas L. 2003. Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Rahner, Karl, Cornelius Ernst and Kevin Smyth. 1970. Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology. Vol. V. Basle and Montreal: Herder and Herder. Schmitt, Carl. 1922. Politische Theologie. Vier Kapittel zur Lehre von der Souveränität. München und Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot. Seifart, Arnulf. 1978. Der Gott der politischen Theologie. Die Entwicklung der Gottesdiskussion vom kämpfenden Nationalgott bis zur christlich motivierten Strategie des Guerillakrieges. Zürich, Einsiedeln and Köln: Benziger Verlag. Taubes, Jacob, Hrsg. 1983, 1985. Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie. Band 1. Der Fürst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen. München, Paderborn, Wien and Zürich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh. Taylor, Mark Lewis. 2011. The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Wohlfarth, Karl Anton. 1969. Der metaphysische Ansatz bei Augustinus. Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2012. The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yelle, Robert A. 2019. Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

4 On evil and political theology Reflections on Kant and after William Desmond

In my reflections to follow first I will focus on political theology and the question of theodicy. Second, I will turn to dimensions of the question of evil and political theology in Kant and Hegel. Third, I will remark on some post-Hegelian thinkers in the 19th century. Traditional ways of addressing the relation of evil, theodicy and the political are differently formed and reformed in these thinkers. It is best then to start with these traditional ways.

I Professional philosophers tend to think of the problem of evil as a question to be tackled within the philosophy of religion as a distinct domain of reflection and not primarily in moral or political philosophy. It is not absent from the latter domains, but standardly philosophers in the Western tradition have defined the problem of evil in connection with the belief in God’s absolute goodness and power, and their compatibility with the given fact of evil. Standardly also, a variety of so-called theodicies have tried to articulate and defend that compatibility. The difficulty is raised to a height of importance in the measure that the highest God is said to be absolutely good. Moreover, what that God has brought to be, the finite creation, is essentially good, by virtue of its being created by such an absolute origin. In response to the difficulty a variety of theodicies have been proposed and the following four most notably. First, there is the famous definition of evil as privatio boni. Evil is not a positive reality or substance, but the absence or privation of what is good. It is a view easy to caricature. We then think of privation as a powerless possibility merely, and do not see the reversed energy of nihilation involved in privation. Augustine ascribes evil to a deficient cause, but we might see this as a de-effecting cause, a defecting cause – the willed betrayal of the good intends the undoing of the given good, its de-creation. Important in this view is the asymmetrical priority of the good. In the face of this priority, the parasitical power of evil, battening on good as its presupposed host, calls for our deep thought. Second, there is what is sometimes called the free-will theodicy. In this case, our power to

On evil and political theology  77 affirm good or negate it, indeed revolt against given good, is central. The enigma of the mysterious letting be of freedom, by the endowing God, is central. Our free allowance to refuse good is not itself refused by the goodness of the endowing God. There are philosophies of history, Hegel’s for instance, that see the true beginning of world-history not in divine allowance, but in human transgression. Third, there is what has been called the virtue theodicy: the world is not just a vale of tears but a “vale of soulmaking,” as the poet Keats put it. Evil does not destroy the promise of the good, and the promise is given again, though we must ourselves contribute to the redemption of the promise. If we refuse the given good, we become good in transcending the broken condition of the first good refused. There is a condition of being already given that is not the fully realized good, but more the promise of a fuller realization of the good. This is especially true of us humans, who have to cooperate in the fuller realization of our own good. We can, of course, fail to cooperate in this fuller realization. Fourth, there is what has been termed the aesthetic theodicy. Vision of the whole exceeds us, and the whole, like a work of art, contains the blending of light and dark, in whose complex composition we stand, but we do not now fully see the beauty of the whole, for we lack the “God’s eye” view. The art of the endowing God raises the question not entirely unlike that posed by Blake’s poem Tyger: “Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”1 The poetics of the created world communicates of the daring of the divine art. All these four “theodicies” can be presented in caricatured form, but they each are pictures that carry promises not entirely beyond redemption. That is a story for another occasion.2 Perplexity about evil predates modernity, and indeed earlier periods, and the archaic torment of Job comes over us from of old. And yet it comes on all of us, in all times, as much now as then. The matter notably perplexed, perhaps tortured, Augustine, but in modern times the affirmation of theodicy in Leibniz and the criticism of all possible theodicies by Kant are notable. Kant in particular marks a trend in calling into question the traditional project of theodicy, a calling into question generally in tune with a skepticism about any philosophical claims about God that we witness in much recent thought.3 Kant does have laudatory things to say about Job’s sincerity, his “authenticity,” as we might call it today, but he is notably silent about the aweful majesty of the Voice in the whirlwind. The Voice does not give an answer to Job but humbles him with more perplexing questions than Job could even voice through himself alone.4 Such an anti-Leibnizian trend against traditional theodicy, as one might call it, has only been pushed further since Kant. Hegel is the challenging exception, of course, since he explicitly presents his speculative philosophy of history as a theodicy. The fortunes of theodicy, of metaphysics, of speculative philosophy of history, all seemed to have waned together. With this waning has also been weakened the explicit recognition that ethical and political matters are secretly

78  William Desmond tied to hidden metaphysical and indeed theological presuppositions. An autonomous moral philosophy or political science will be tempted to claim exemption from such concerns. This exemption is not possible when we come to political theology, however we understand this. Political theology means different things to different thinkers, but if we take seriously the inclusion of theology in the enterprise of political theology, then we inevitably face the problem of evil. We face it diversely also, depending on what God, secret or proclaimed, finds itself devotees in the particular political theology that is espoused. One does sometimes get the impression that discussions of political theology are much less interested in the finesses of theology than in the real politics of worldly powers. And yet even when one’s God is the “mortal god” (in Hobbes’ immortal phrase for the Leviathan, his over-aweing political state), the perplexity about evil is never far away, never can be kept at a far distance. It insinuates itself in serpentine ways in all endeavors. This is evidently the case with the mortal god of Hobbes and with the distinction of friend and foe on which turns much of Carl Schmitt’s famous, or infamous, excursions into political theology. The political vision that tends to result is too often a kind of theodicy of the mortal god. Or perhaps a kakodicy of the mortal god, given that it is often the hard ways of a violent “justice” that are exonerated, sometimes regretfully, sometimes with relish. It is true that not a few have turned away from traditional theodicy, giving one the impression that theodicy is a kind of ideological construct offering God a dubious alibi. In addition, it seems to be suggested that human beings interested in theodicy are also interested in securing an alibi for themselves, by exculpating God. “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” (Browning). We can euphemize the mess the world is, the mess to which we ourselves have contributed, and meanwhile we can continue with our own bad, smug ways. But surely this picture is a flattening of what was at issue in the traditional theodicies. Our thought of God heightens rather than deflates our perplexity about evil, to the point of agony. Without the secret thought of God, there is no “problem” of evil, in this hyperbolic sense. If then there are problems of evil(s), problems are determinate difficulties that look to their appropriate determinate solutions. The hyperbolic perplexity about evil is more in the nature of mystery than problem, to call upon the important distinction of Gabriel Marcel. We are dealing with what of old was more rightly called: mysterium iniquitatis. Unde malum? Boethius asked. Si malum est, Deus est, Aquinas rejoined. In the end there is no mystery of evil if there is not also the mystery of God, and as traditionally has been held, the mystery of given freedom, that is, endowed freedom. Endowed freedom is free to deny its being endowed, and nihilate thus the endowment of its being gifted at all. The original and ultimate Endower is denied. And yet still evil is evil because it is not good; and even if perhaps the evil would nihilate the good, it still secretly pays its complement to the priority of the good that it would consign

On evil and political theology  79 to secondary determination. “Evil be thou my good,” Milton’s Satan proclaims. The secret complement consists also in that evil would that it itself were the good. The evil is ineluctably willed as good by the evildoer. We fear death because we love life. We hate evil because we are the love of the good. The love of life and the love of the good are mysteries hyperbolic to all determination merely as problems, whether soluble problems or insoluble. Nevertheless, one does hear outrage at the effort to even raise the suggestion of a divine justice, still mysteriously at work, after Auschwitz, at work in the darkest intimacies of infernal deeds and events, at work redemptively even in hell. We are quick to give expression to our fascination with evil, while the good comes across as bland. The banality of good makes many yawn. Our taste for radical good has been dulled. The thought of radical evil makes us sit up, as if here at last there will be some thrilling adventure in transgressive transcendence. The astonishing idea of radical good finds itself homeless. Radical: an original good at the roots of things – but can we be honest about radical evil without honestly addressing this promise of original good? It is true that our being is stunned when confronted with evil and we cannot quite take it in mindfully. If God seems to be elusive, traditional theodicies seem to function as ways to take the sting out of evil, to make it rationally and religiously comfortable for us, even to explain it away entirely. Theodicy thus seen comes across as the rationalization of evil in a bad sense. It seems to give an answer, but in so doing it covers up the agony of the perplexity that is in question. But can we honestly address the issue in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment terms, given the poverty of religious resources to raise the question in the terms required? A secularized rationality will not do; a moralization of human existence will not do; approaches informed by scientistic reductionism least of all will do. And when it comes to politics, there might be managements of evil or its effects, but there is no saving, there will never be any saving, from evil, for the political means of management themselves will also carry the seed of the problem they claim to have overcome. There is something here that we cannot determine through ourselves alone, cannot make subject to our self-determination, understood either ethically or politically. There is no answer, we seek an answer, and we are not the answer. If there is nothing more, if there is no genuine opening to the sacred, no porosity to a transcendence that exceeds us, a transcendence that answers to the seeking for radical good, it is understandable why the sense of transcendence of human beings should shift from the good to the dark side. Evil touches on something recalcitrant, a negative otherness, so to say, a negating otherness, exceeding determination and self-determination. With this shift there will be the temptation also to offer a counterfeit double of the good, and politically it will make sense to proclaim the priority of the fear of death, and to define the love of life in terms of the priority of this fear. The mortal god is made the counterfeit double of the God of radical good. We are always making

80  William Desmond mortal gods, but with the occlusion of the God of radical good in modernity, our epoch is more consummately a time of the secretion of counterfeit doubles. “Political theology” is sometimes in the business also of manufacturing such counterfeit doubles, sometimes in the business of endorsing and rhetorically propagating them. Sometimes in a kind of metanoia that entails a dying to its old self, a “political theology” can enter purgatory and begin to discern the difference of the counterfeit and the good original. I take Augustine’s City of God as political purgatory in that sense. The mortal gods of empire are counterfeit doubles, some better than others, of the God of true good, though often we find it hard to tell the difference. In the field of history the wheat and the darnel grow together, and must be let grow, lest in desiring to cut the evil, we destroy the promise of the harvest.

II I now want to remark on Kant and Hegel in connection with political theology and evil. First to Kant who has a distinctive take on theodicy, though it mingles aspects of the second and third type of traditional theodicy outlined previously. Kant is more explicitly interested in God in connection with morality but what would be the connection with political theology? The relation of religion and politics shadows his Religion book, in so far as that tries to offer its own version of what the Kingdom of God might look like, suitably reconfigured along relatively immanent lines and divested of more recognizable religious reference.5 The moral God is postulated on the basis of morality: we must think as if there is a (moral) God if we are to overcome the antinomy of pure practical reason, that between virtue and happiness. This moral God is an as if God, and one must wonder what possible role such a God might play in the circulation of political power. In what sense can a political sovereign take seriously an as if God. Can such a sovereign take such a God seriously? An as if god might well be useful as a communal fiction, overarching his subjects and seeming to overarch the sovereign. And yet if the sovereign becomes self-conscious of the as if nature of the God, would he not have to play a game of heavenly pretend with himself? Such an as if God would be weak in divine power to chasten the temptation to political hubris on the part of the sovereign. In such a situation, it is hard to see the political sovereign taking kindly to the bridling of his own will to power, under the judgment of a higher power, putatively beyond will to power. The higher power would not be truly above us, but only be an as if higher power. I find it characteristic that Kant praises Job’s sincerity while being silent on the awful majesty of the Voice from the whirlwind. Perhaps it is true that the moral law provides a rod sufficiently sharp to chasten the self-conceit of all humans, but the temptation to self-conceit in the case of the political sovereign is not homogenous with the selfconsciousness of the many. And this, to the degree that his will to power is tempted to expand without limit, indeed to find itself augmented in the faces

On evil and political theology  81 of his subjects who submit – submit to him, that is, and not to the moral law. A political sovereign is not a moral saint, and indeed need not be one at all, in so far as the just distribution of legal right is regulated under his reigning power. As Kant famously suggests in On Perpetual Peace (Kant 1983, p. 124), a race of intelligent devils could well do the job of such a reign. This might seem to be a quiescent nod to the Prince of this world to whom, on one account, all the things of this world have been given. At the same time, held in reserve is resort to the Prince of peace who has been said to have vanquished the Prince of the world. In the reign of the as if God, however, there is a thorn in the side of faith in such a Prince of peace, and that thorn, not pulled out, can fester in the body of the sovereign, fester too in the body politic. Who rules the world? Which prince? One or other, or neither, if both are registered in the reign of the as if? A suitably crafty sovereign, a sovereign who knows the working of the as if, who sees through the fictional qua fiction, might well wake up to the superior self-consciousness that there is no higher power, and that hence there is no limit from above on the reign of the immanent sovereign. There is a resultant humanization of political power that can disgorge monsters as freely as it can disgorge statesmen, more freely in fact, since Kant’s own solution to the radical evil he acknowledges seems also to have something of the same equivocating character as the as if God. The moral problem of evil as thus granted, is equivocally resolved by Kant: on the one hand, he grants the possibility of something like a saving grace to reverse the inversion of the moral incentive and the incentive of self-love that defines radical evil; on the other hand, he suggests in practice that we cannot be certain of the assistance of that saving grace. This latter, while not excluded in principle, in practice rebounds back on our moral earnestness in doing the best we can to better ourselves morally, and to will ourselves forward to continual moral improvement. Why call this an equivocal resolution? The problem of radical evil shows the moral will to be immanently debilitated, perhaps not quite as much at war with itself as in the Pauline understanding, yet unable entirely to determine itself in a fully moral sense. And now here at the end of Kant’s exploration of radical evil, the ultimate resort is to this same will to self-determination in the direction of continual moral betterment. In a word: it is not God’s grace but our works that count most at the end. But our works still remain potentially in service to the Prince of the world, even when they seem to be serving only the moral law. In fact, the pretension to be in service to the moral law may just be the dissimulating service to the Prince of this world, since in practice we act in our self-determining self-betterment as if there were no higher power above us. From this redoubling of the equivocal, it is hard to see how any political theology other than an instrumental one could emerge. My sense of Kant is that his republican tendencies in politics point towards the separation of the political and the theological. At the same time, he wants to distinguish the moral and the legal realms, the latter being

82  William Desmond very hard finally to separate entirely from political arrangements of power. And yet his sense of the moral in relation to the theological weakens the theological, a weakening which makes unstable the theological in relation to the legal and the political, as well as to the moral. If the as if character of his moral theology is taken in a certain direction, we get no strong sense of political theology. But this too is equivocal because at the heart of the moral, legal and political exercises of power, the as if place of God is hard to prevent from a turn about where its as if character reverses into a not as if character. We are more than halfway along the road to a more fully atheistic political theology. Kantian “theodicy” seems finally to turn on, turn to a will to self-­ betterment: soul-making in a rationalistic modality, whether with or without God’s grace. If we think of this as a half-hearted “theodicy” which devolves into our sincerity, sincerity with or without God, we need only turn the page to find atheistic sincerity asking to be inscribed on the human projection of time. Given our radical evil (in the Kantian sense) this projection must itself be also a half-and-half atheistic projection, certainly a project for the more thoroughgoing humanization of history. The darnel and the wheat grow together, to be sure, but now they grow in all of us, and are so intimate to us we can no longer see their difference. A politics of the moral saint merges with a politics of the intelligent devil, and in the half-and-half light of the political fluctuations of (will to) power, we find it hard to tell the difference of saint and devil. To be sure, Kant says nothing like this explicitly. My use of the term “counterfeit double” is intended to describe a process in which the original and double are very like each other, almost identical; but something is missing or has been hollowed out in the counterfeit double which, while like the original, is more like a changeling than a genuine child or offspring. I take the political effect of Kant’s moral theology to enable a consequence like this. Analogously I see his Religion book as trying to rewrite, overwrite, traditional Christianity with the programmatic script of Enlightenment rationality and morality. In this regard, I also see his as if God as preparing the way for the God of Hegel’s rational system; but now the as if aspect is more hidden by being airbrushed out of the picture. The God-man of the speculative system completes the equivocation between the human and the divine by hiding the equivocation through a philosophical process named as speculative dialectic which in due course gives birth to the Man-god. Needless to say, there are extraordinary dimensions to Hegel’s way of thinking, not least his hyperbolic ambitions, in a good sense as well as in a bad. His Science of Logic has been studied as a political theological doctrine (by Theunissen, for instance), and his most extensive discussion of evil is to be found in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. His rational theodicy of history contains modified elements of all the traditional theodicies, with perhaps the important exception of his lack of feel for the original good of the “to be” as such. His theodicy converts the felix culpa of

On evil and political theology  83 transgressing freedom into the free will that wills the free will; the nihil as privation is transformed into the negativity of work – through negation as determination, history becomes the “soul-making” of the human spirit, governed by the dialectical necessity of evil; finally we are offered a speculative aesthetic theodicy of the whole, marked by holistic immanence, holistic selfdetermination, holistic self-justification. Not unlike Kant, Lutheran grace converts to immanent, world-historical work. I have written on Hegel’s God as a counterfeit double, in all the dimensions of his systemic work as a whole. I have also offered an extended treatment of his view of evil in relation to dialectic.6 Hegel is different to Kant in many regards, but he both accepts and rejects the as if God and the implications for political theology. He accepts in the sense of going along with the weakening of divine transcendence and aboveness suggested by the as if God; he accepts the need for immanent work on our side to bring the divinity to be, no longer now an as if being, but actualized in the becoming of spirit in the human spirit. The dualistic equivocation in Kant begets dialectic which itself claims to make intelligible the actualization of spirit in the human spirit. What is begotten here, is not a dualistic equivocity but a dialectical equivocity. This system claims the unity of human and divine, but it is not clear if this means the divine becoming human or the human becoming divine, not clear if we have to choose between these. It does seem clear here that the divine cannot become fully spirit without the human, hence in that regard the human has a necessary role in the becoming divine of the divinity. God could not be God without the human, without the world, as Hegel explicitly says. And evil? This has its source in an immanent cleavage, an Entzweiung in the divinity itself, and not just in the human, normally considered. Indeed, this cleavage is at the origin of self-consciousness in the human, and without it there would be no history, that is to say, specifically human becoming or self-becoming at all. God and the human being fall together because they are originally together, and their fall is the emergence of otherness and alienation, without which there would be no becoming of progress, no self-becoming of spirit. There is a saving restoration of the original togetherness; for through the original cleavage there comes to be the re-constituing self-becoming of the original. This is mirrored in religious representation (Vorstellung), but for Hegel this latter is itself not the fulfilled overcoming of alienation, given that religious representation is always burdened by some sense of a “beyond.” This is true also of the religious community. This at its best in modern Protestantism offers us freedom but in the form of the spirit, and not always in the more fulfilled form of the worldly state. The political state, by contrast to the religious community, is the fullest historical concretion of immanent freedom in the world. It is more absolute as a worldly concretion of freedom as realizing social self-determination. In Hegel the voiding of religious transcendence, and the immanent appropriation of its alienated power, is made possible by the political theology of Protestantism which returns humanity

84  William Desmond and Christianity to the immanence of the spirit, and so spiritually prepares for what the state will realize most fully in immanence itself: socially selfdetermining freedom. It comes back again to self-determination, in this instance that of spirit. Everything is work – the work of spirit, including the state. Nothing is grace in any sense resembling the gift of a godsend. One might think everything is a godsend in Hegel, since everything seems to be the self-manifestation of the divine. But since we cannot finally distinguish the human and divine, Hegelian godsends are the sending of the divinity, also known as humanity, in communications with and to itself. I find it remarkable that Kant and Hegel, being philosophers with deep roots in Lutheranism, end up offering us not an opening to grace as divine gift but philosophies in which work is king. Hegel’s absolute is also an erotic absolute, not an agapeic absolute. This has repercussions in relation to political sovereignty as well, and hence with respect to political theology. As Hegel’s absolute is an erotic absolute, so is his sovereignty one of erotic sovereignty. There is a crucial difference between the erotic sovereign and the agapeic servant, or, if you like, Caesar and Christ, and it is clear that Hegel’s system of politics is more inflected by the former rather than the latter. It is entirely wrong in my mind to call Hegel the last great philosopher of Christianity. He may be the last great philosopher of a counterfeit double of Christianity, but that is an entirely different matter. This means that much of the latter will look like or mimic the former, but it will be void of something essential: I take this missing something to be a true sense of divine transcendence. Hegel expects from the political realm what I call the community of erotic sovereignty and mingles equivocally this community with appeals to a Christianity which, in his rendition, has been more or less evacuated of divine transcendence and the superiority of the agapeic servant. This is evident in his early theological writings (in his lifetime unpublished) – they should rather be called political theological writings: they ask about the role of Christianity in constituting a true social totality. Early Christianity, and later medieval Catholicism, fail to be true communities of erotic sovereignty in different ways, and not least in what Hegel takes to be their lack of proper commitment to the actualization and fulfillment of the promise of immanence. The darnel and the wheat are dialectically inseparable in time, and always will be, and there is no final judgment beyond the judgment of the historical world by which they will be separated: die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht (Schiller). As I would put it in connection with Hegel’s account of the fall in Genesis: This account amounts to endorsing the serpent.

III Turning now to some thinkers in the aftermath of Kant and Hegel, Marx echoes this last judgement: he too endorses the serpent. Point of the dialectical logic of communistic freedom? You too shall be as gods!7 In the case of

On evil and political theology  85 Hegel and Marx, the matter of freedom is one of social self-determination, a socialization of the logic of autonomy. Nested at the heart of that logic of the nomos of to auto is a secondary place for the other, to heteron, indeed the communal instability of an equivocal recognition of the other as such. Out of this instability the erotic sovereignty of the political masters might feel no compunction in turning in the direction of an eros turannos. I myself would sustain a sense of erotic sovereignty that is aware of the temptation and danger of eros turannos, but I doubt this temptation can be resisted, if we are devoid of finesse for the superiority of agapeic service. And this finesse is lost when the mortal god becomes the only god, the reigning god of modernity, namely, autonomy. The power, the virtus of the erotic sovereign is not to be done away with but rather to be transformed in relation to what exceeds its virtue, namely agapeic service. There is a goodness beyond moral and ethical goodness that touches on the divine. A truer political theology in the sense of a theology which is truly a theology, one that has a redeeming sign to give to the political, is at work on this threshold between erotic sovereignty and agapeic service, often in an entirely incognito way. As in the case of Hegel, with Marx and others but more crudely, this threshold becomes retracted into an immanence proclaiming itself to be the one and only reality, the frame of all significance. Immanence is postulated as the horizon greater than which none can be thought. War is the father of all things, Heraclitus said. Class war became the father of all things with Marx. Heraclitus also said that the things which are good and evil for us are not quite so for the god. I take the inference that there is a goodness of the divine beyond our moral good and evil – an insight half of which Nietzsche got, half of which he did not get, namely, a good and evil in the hyperbolic dimension which are a matter of sacred blessing and monstrous curse. The innocence of becoming is a very innocent fancy. Beyond good and evil, the innocence of becoming can become the evil of being. Being beyond God, with theft of the divine fire as one’s bent, or victory over the sun, brings on an infernal night, not at all an innocent becoming, beyond good and evil. I look on Kierkegaard as an exception to this line: he is more truly Augustinian in a feel for the irreducibility of the kingdom of God. There is an absolute beyond politics, and beyond political theology, if by this we mean the political configuration of an immanent social order claiming God as only on its side. God is not one-sided. Kierkegaard’s growing fury at Hegelianism is intimately tied up with the idolization of the state in Hegel. The ethical order in Hegel is most richly actualized in terms of immanent worldly freedom in the modern state. When this state is the going of God in the world (der Gang Gottes in der Welt), in the precise concatenation of meanings intended by Hegel, a counterfeit double of the God of history is manufactured, and a counterfeit community of Gottesdienst as its ideological buttress: Christendom for Kierkegaard. I doubt if Kierkegaard is entirely fair to “Christendom.” To be sure, he is not frequently seen as a political thinker, with his stress on the singular individual, and the singularity of the

86  William Desmond religious relation to God, but this is to simplify some of his complexity. It is the reconfigured ethical and political ethos of Lutheran Christianity that seeds many sources of his struggle against his epoch. Kierkegaard is a voluminous writer, but I will only refer to his little essay The Present Age which is immensely perceptive of his own time and what was going on and immensely prescient of what was going to come, including our own time. I think of themes such as the mass averaging of humanity, the substitution of conversation with gossip, the anonymity of the crowd, the smug conformity of journalistic “opinion-makers.” If one reads Heidegger’s Being and Time in the 20th century, we find a secularized Kierkegaard – without God, but with many of the same constitutive distractions with their more contemporary accentuation: anxiety, chatter, das Man and so on. True, Heidegger pays Kierkegaard a sly complement that amounts almost to a slap in the face: “Kierkegaard says the same things as I do, for instance, about anxiety, but when he says these things he is wearing the hat of a religious thinker, but I am wearing the hat of a fundamental ontologist. We say the same things but the hat you wear saying them makes all the difference.” The human being may be the shepherd of being, but during his time of political commitment to National Socialism Heidegger was not a good shepherd but a German shepherd. At the heart of it all for Kierkegaard is sacred insubordination and revolt against God. How quaint that word “insubordination” sounds in our epoch when freedom as autonomy has become for many, paradoxically for the many-too-many, the default position of the reigning gods. I take it that in Kierkegaard the qualitative difference of the human and divine, the robust sense of transcendence that keeps the difference open, without negating the possibility of some communication, indirect or otherwise, is that these militate against every absolutization of politics. On the issue of evil, Kierkegaard would be at one with the longer Biblical tradition: there is the dizzy fall of freedom, but the saving of freedom is first not a work of ours alone; there are works of love, but such works are always secretly companioned by the divine; they are never ours alone.8 Of course, how Augustinian Kierkegaard is finally may be disputed. There are more hymns of praise to creation and to God in Augustine, there is more of the south, more of Africa in him. In Kierkegaard there is more of the cold white north, and more often than one would like to admit, his song of irony comes out too sharp and sarcastic. One thinks of the pastor who does not quite like, to say nothing of love, his wandering, wayward sheep. If the sun of Francis of Assisi’s Canticle shone a little more into this northern clime, the good time of the good news might be lived with more joy in being. With Schopenhauer, gloomy atheist who could not quite have done with religion, we wonder if we have to confront the beyond of politics – precisely because of the evil of being. He cultivated himself as beyond politics and might be called an atheistic conservative, not entirely unlike Kierkegaard perhaps, but in a godless rather than Christian register. The excellence of the

On evil and political theology  87 better religions was just their nihilistic attunement to the evil of being, the original evil of the human being. Kierkegaard, as is evident from a journal entry, was cock-a-hoop when Schopenhauer began late to enjoy a certain renown. At last a dark man who was intimate with the darkness of man – a darkness that no politics would ever dispel. Kierkegaard did have to add, however, that Schopenhauer’s darkness was as child’s play to the darkness Kierkegaard himself had to suffer and endure. The kettle telling the pot it is black? No. The kettle glorying in the fact that it is blacker than the poor tarnished pot.9 Suffering and evil: their shadows continue to disturb the bright high noon of idealistic enlightenment – and there are serious thinkers who relish all this. How could politics be a saving enterprise for Schopenhauer? Nothing can really save from the Will, perhaps art episodically, perhaps some forms of ascetic religion more permanently. But politics by its nature is an organization of will, of power, of will to power. It is often the necessary evil to save us from the worse evil of ungoverned will, but even so, it is still a form of will and hence not neutral, and rather more evil than good. Will in Schopenhauer plays a structural role not unlike the absolute or Geist in Hegel: original and ultimate and in a sense unsurpassable, and inextirpable: being at its most ontologically deep and intimate, and secretly being at its most universally broadcast. There seems no escape. Indeed, there is something like the inverse of Hegel, or more generally the idealist reason here: Will is more primordial than the principle of sufficient reason. As itself ultimate it is without any reason. It is without a why. It is what it is. It does not say: I am who am. It is what it is, and there is nothing personal about it in any respect like the personal God of monotheism. Will: before reason, exceeding reason, if we were to call it a god, it would be an evil god, not neutral, but more like the evil genius of Descartes. The effect of the latter supposition, we recall in Descartes, would be to reverse all the signs, positive and negative, good and evil and in the process make us the dupe of a kind of universal dissimulation. Images of the original seem like light but this original is a dark origin and so the images are images of nothing but this darkness. We too are made in the image and likeness of the darkness of this dark origin. Interestingly, the language used to describe it is the language of eros turannos. Schopenhauer is not at all inhibited in putting it thus. Ravening want: want – a lack; it wants, an energetic insistence on what it wants, and which it seems to get circuitously when it does not get it directly. The ways of the Will are mysterious to man. The human being is its unwitting host. And all the while, chasing after beauty, we are being groomed for death. It is true that in Schopenhauers’s early notebooks (between 1812 and 1814), under the influence of Plato, Kant and the Upanishads, he talks about a “better consciousness” which seems to give us access to something higher than ordinary consciousness; but there is controversy about the meaning of this, as well as its coherence with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics as a whole.10 I myself wonder if perhaps this issue is connected with the absence of terms

88  William Desmond in this metaphysics that would allow us to make some acknowledgment, if not a kind of philosophical sense, of a goodness to being, of our porosity to this good, and hence a view of our desire not any longer to be seen as the voracious will that will itself and nothing but itself. Schopenhauer speaks of being beyond the separation of subject and object, knower and known in death, as we were once before birth: “we are shifted only into the original state which is without knowledge, but is not for that reason absolutely without consciousness; on the contrary, it will be a state that is raised above and beyond that form where the contrast between subject and object vanishes.” How relate to politics at all in such terms? If you were to construct a political theology on the basis of the Schopenhauerian Will as dark counterfeit god, then two of the main options would seem to be: instrumentalize the Will in the form of the religious to protect or shield humanity from its darkness; instrumentalize the people, since people too are puppets of this darkness, even though they know it not. But in the first instance, why be morally concerned for the many at all? Why feel compassion for them? The Will is without a why? Why this compassion then? In the second instance, what justifies the dissimulating reign of the (knowing) few over the many? If not the welfare of the many, the good of the few? But what good is this, if the world and the nature of being is described as this amoral, indeed evil eros turannos, beyond which nothing more ultimate can be thought or willed? Whether it is an evil demiurge or the Prince of this world who reigns in this vale of appearances, this self-cannibalizing immanence, Schopenhauer’s darker vision has many characteristics of a gnostic sense of the evil of being, and hence he can only be suspicious of any saving promises made on behalf of politics. He could not accept any theodicy of the divine. And any theodicy of the political seems only to be the fraud face of a kakodicy. Nietzsche forthrightly proclaimed that only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the world justified. Aesthetic theodicy here is an atheistic theodicy from the monotheistic perspective, though not so from the pagan. It reverences the orgiastic ceremonies of Dionysus. The aesthetic surface of Nietzsche’s theodicy, however, masks the deeper kakodicy. In this he continues to be a Schopenhauerian, perhaps bringing more honestly to the surface some of the political implications of the evil of being, already present in Schopenhauer but not quite so overtly stated. The two previous possibilities noted in connection with Schopenhauerian Will are also not absent here. On the one hand: While we are familiar with Nietzsche’s hatred of the servility of Christian pity, there is a kind of compassion for the people, the many: pity for the fact that the many cannot endure the darkness of the real truth. Looking directly on this darkness, we would be petrified like those who got frozen in the look of the Medusa’s head – we need art, that is, lies, to protect us from this truth. Nietzsche takes more pity on the many than Schopenhauer does. On the other hand: alternatively, why not let those of monstrous will to power loose from the bridle of ordinary morality. Let Thrasymachus

On evil and political theology  89 have his day or rather night. Release the erotic sovereign from any inhibition induced by the false higher measure of the agapeic servant. Again one asks: What good is all of this, if there is no good in any sense that is more than the eros turannos of will to power? Let us call Napoleon the synthesis of the subhuman and the superhuman, but what really is “super” anymore, what above us? What relevant superiority can there be at all in a monstrous whole that is will to power and nothing but will to power? And Nietzsche does not shrink from the thought of tyranny, dissimulating to the many, non-dissimulating to the few and to itself. Has there ever been an epoch of great creativity without tyranny, without slavery as a condition of its possibility? Let Cesare Borgia shock the bland bourgeois Christian. “Dionysus versus the Crucified.” Finally, the dialectical knot is cut by Nietzsche, but then he both separates Caesar and Christ and rejoins them. Dionysus versus the Crucified now becomes the “Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ.”11 I have elsewhere explored this brilliant but perplexing phrase of Nietzsche (Desmond 2005, chapter 6). Here I take it up again, linking the theme of the counterfeit double with aesthetic theodicy and the dissimulations of political power. These dissimulations are intimately connected with the equivocities of political theology, and especially in relation to mendacity with respect to God. I am put in mind of René Girard’s defense of Christianity in encounter with Nietzsche in terms of the latter’s antithesis between Christ and Dionysus. Girard identifies this as the antithesis of modernity as such. I would add a stress on the problem of the counterfeit double, and this as concentrated in the complete difference of Christ and anti-Christ in their almost complete likeness. Nietzsche offers his own self-nomination as antiChrist(ian), but if the question of the counterfeit double concerns how antiChrist and Christ are (almost) indiscernible, how tell the difference at all? The erotics of Nietzschean will to power are energized by mythic violence about which Nietzsche reveals a remarkable frankness, not always honored by his admirers. If Nietzsche is caught in a logic of counterfeit doubles, it is worthy of note how in madness he signed himself as both Dionysus and the Crucified. The “either/or” gives way to a “both/and.” As if caught in the promiscuous circulation of a counterfeit double of the divine, Nietzsche becomes incapable of discerning the difference of Dionysus and Christ, and comes to identify himself with both. It has been said that in the Enlightenment ideal of rationality we find a separation of the light of reason from the heat. There is a cold light that does not do justice to the warmth of life. By contrast, from ancient times light and heat were conjoined. When we think of the light of the sun in Plato’s Republic, we find an appreciation of light that not only illumines but also gives life and nourishes all growing with the warmth of its fire. Bernard of Clairvaux has it: “To shine only is useless, and to burn only is insufficient; but to burn and to shine – that is perfection.” Light might be separated from sheltering and nourishing heat and become a sterile light – without nourishing heat. Of course, one recalls that fire can also be dangerous. And indeed,

90  William Desmond the image of the stealing of fire, long associated with Prometheus, the thieving Titan, is also connected with the origin of evil. This is the Aryan, masculine account of the origin of evil rather than the Semitic, feminine account of Genesis, as Nietzsche puts it in the Birth of Tragedy. The later Nietzsche wanted to be a great “yea-sayer.” But to what was he saying “yes”? What is the warmth, where is the warmth, in his fiery “yes”? If we go by the icy solitude of Zarathustra’s Nachtlied, it is hard to know what warmth could come from the cold suns and stars circling in the void spaces. Not surprisingly, many before Nietzsche in modernity and after him in post-modernity find it difficult to reecho the affirmation of the God of Genesis: it is good. This is not Nietzsche’s “yes.” A “yes” can mimic a “yes,” and yet one “yes” will be warm with love of what it affirms, while the other will be cold. Is the cold “yes” the counterfeit double of the warm? For that matter, how can light mimic light? One recalls the name of “the shining one, the morning star”: Lucifer – bearer of the light. This is an important part of the problem of the counterfeit double. It is perhaps a variation on the way fear of death can mimic love of life. While Enlightenment reason seems unimpeachable in terms of its advocacy of light, there is also, as we know, such a thing as light pollution. To turn one last time to Nietzsche’s striking phrase: “A Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ.” This can capture and occlude some of the deepest issues at stake with political theology. We might take the Roman Caesar as the epitome of political sovereignty and the soul of Christ as the solicitation and witness of agapeic service. In the way Nietzsche formulates it, we see the silhouette of a certain kind of political theology. For finally it is the Roman Caesar who qualifies the conjunction with the soul of Christ, the Roman Caesar who arches over the difference between the two and transfigures himself by taking the soul of Christ. This would be the outcome if we were to follow what Nietzsche means by will to power which always, in the first instance, in the last instance, is self-affirming. This will to power – and this is even true of the “gift-giving virtue” about which Zarathustra discourses – is not released for the other as other, in an agapeic letting that gives beyond itself, allowing most deeply the endowed freedom of the other. Agapeic freeing would be merely servility for Nietzsche. Rather we are led to a form of erotic sovereignty, in so far as power comes to self-affirmation in and through the others who serve as the media of its own fuller and fuller self-manifestation. By contrast, the soul of Christ, the agapeic servant, releases goodness beyond itself, in an allowing radiance that makes a way, that makes the way, for the others to come to their true good. If Caesar were to have the soul of Christ he would no longer be Caesar. If Caesar were to insist that the soul of Christ be appropriate(d) to him, it would no longer be the soul of Christ. Apropos the secretion of counterfeit doubles, it is remarkable that Nietzsche named his “auto-biography” Ecce Homo. This is not an Augustinian Confession before God, but a mocking gesture of showing, borrowed

On evil and political theology  91 from the mocking Pilate. Before whom is Nietzsche displaying himself, exposing himself? Ecce homo are the words of Pilate as he shows Christ, the innocent criminal, to the crowd, before Christ is given over to sacrificial violence. Who is the judge and executioner, who is the sacrificial offering in Nietzsche’s own Ecce Homo? Is Nietzsche changing places with the criminal God, as he gives himself over to sacrifice and self-divinization? Ecce Homo: the new myth, now mythologizing Nietzsche himself as the scapegoat of the Dionysian god? The point about political theology is not that the difference of Caesar and Christ is a necessary hostility, for there can be excellences of the erotic sovereign, when a just ruler intermediates a political order which circulates social power for the good of a human community. For the agapeic servant no hostility is necessary; for the political sovereign perhaps well. I take this again as witness to the asymmetrical priority of the good. If there is a difference of the two, it is not a univocal separation either; for the generosity of the agapeic servant can pass incognito along the sometimes muddy and turbulent ways of immanent power. It is a matter of a delicate threshold of the political and the trans-political, and how to pass along this. For at one moment this threshold might ask that the field of the erotic sovereign be leavened from within with yeast beyond political power. And at another moment the threshold might ask that the field of erotic sovereignty be transcended, for the locusts of immanent power have devoured the harvest, and we must pass into a space of agapeic fertility beyond this waste. Traversing the threshold between the political and the trans-political cannot be determined in accord with an a priori rule. The beyond of politics yet can have an intimate effect in politics. There is an “in-and-beyond” character to it that cannot be defined either by any univocal dualistic opposition, or by any dialectical holism, no matter how totalizing. If you like, the memoria passionis (with a bow to Metz, and of great importance to Péter Losonczi) keeps alive this “in-and-beyond” character. It reveals a kind of metaxu, a between. Interestingly, the word “meta” also has this double meaning of being “in the midst” as well as being “beyond” or “over and above.” One is tempted to say: There is a political theology of erotic sovereignty, but there is no political theology of erotic sovereignty. In an important sense, the community of agapeic service is beyond every political theology – if by the latter we mean to suggest any divine endorsement of a particular order of political power. Finally, there is no theodicy, and no eschatology of the mortal god. The transcendence of God as agapeic is the beyond of political theology. It is a “beyond” that cannot be fully incarnated in an immanent political order. Yet this is not to say that particular political orders may not participate, most often in an incognito or unknowing way, in something of the gift of agapeic service, and hence the divine is there too. “Immanent” now names the transforming power – the mustard seed of the Kingdom. Of course, the doubleness of the equivocal haunts us still: for it is true that monstrous social and political forms also begin their lives as seeds.

92  William Desmond Fascism and totalitarian communism were such monstrous growths whose sources were in the idiotic intimacy of seeds. This is true of capitalism too. The wheat and the darnel grow together. The project of political theology emerges from their growth together, their concrescence. And while there is no political theology of the agapeic God, there is always political theology at work in this concrescent doubleness in the sublunary world, in whose time of groaning the darnel and the wheat are twisted together.

Notes 1 www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger 2 I hope to do this in a book anticipated now under the title Desecrations: Philosophical Nocturnes. 3 Here is a sample of recent works which diversely deal with evil but are generally hostile to theodicy: Copjec 1996; Lara 2001; Neiman 2002; Bernstein 2002; Matuštík 2008. 4 See Kant 1996, p. 24–37. 5 See Michalson 1999. 6 On Hegel’s God more fully, see, Desmond 2003; on Hegel and evil, see Desmond 1992, chapter 4 “Evil and Dialectic: On the Idiocy of the Monstrous.” 7 One might further remark on the young Hegelians here. It would be interesting to look at Max Stirner as the atheistic Kierkegaard (though he is often seen as a precursor of Nietzsche). Also Mikhail Bakunin whose account of evil, Hegelian avant la lettre, ends in celebrity anarchism. 8 See Merold Westphal’s still illuminating book on the social Kierkegaard (Westphal 1991); also: Bukdahl 2001. 9 See Kierkegaard 1965, p. 77–79, 170–172, 218–219. The entry 170–172 is more abbreviated than the same entry from 1854 as more fully translated in Kierkegaard 1958, p. 234–240; there it comes across that Kierkegaard is struck also by a certain inversion between himself and Schopenhauer, manifested in their names A.S. (Arthur Schopenhauer) and S.A. (Søren Aabye Kierkegaard). One senses in Schopenhauer that he felt a certain humiliation suffered by rational autonomy relative to eros. Compare to Kierkegaard (1958, p. 68–70) where his views of woman come across as no less misogynist than Schopenhauer’s: “First and foremost men are humiliated by women. One may generally assume that every married man is in his inner heart crestfallen, for he feels that he has been made a fool of, when all that high-flown stuff of the days of falling in love, all that about Juliana being the very incarnation of beauty and grace, and the possession of her being the summit of blessedness, end in a false alarm. This is the first blow the man receives.” See Schopenhauer “On Women” in his Parerga and Paralipomena (Schopenhauer 2015, p. 550–561). 10 See Neill and Janaway 2009, p. 10, n. 2 where Christopher Janaway helpfully lists the persistent references to the “better consciousness” from Schopenhauer (1988). 11 The tie with Fascism is not mentioned much now by snowflake Nietzscheans. It is interesting to think of Italian fascism having roots in Gabriele d’Annunzio, with his glorification of war, indeed his love of it and the rapture of proximity to death, his Dionysian fascism and efforts to turn poetry into politics (in)famously at Fiume. The family tie with fascism was certainly understood by many, among both enemies and admirers (not least Mussolini). One wonders if the political whitewashing of Nietzsche since WW II has something of chercez la femme – blame the woman: his sister Elisabeth, the evil one.

On evil and political theology  93

Bibliography Bernstein, Richard. 2002. Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation. Oxford: Blackwell. Bukdahl, Jorgen. 2001. Soren Kierkegaard and the Common Man. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Copjec, Joan (ed.). 1996. Radical Evil. London and New York: Verso. Desmond, William. 1992. ‘Evil and Dialectic: On the Idiocy of the Monstrous’. In: Beyond Hegel and Dialectic: Speculation, Cult and Comedy. Albany: SUNY: Chapter 4. ———. 2003. Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers. ———. 2005. Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy. Bronx: Fordham University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1983. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Translated by Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. ———. 1996. Religion and Rational Theology. Translated by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1958. The Journals of Kierkegaard, 1834–1854. Edited and translated by Alexander Dru. London: Collins Fontana Books. ———. 1965. The Last Years: Journals 1853–1855. Edited and translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. London: Collins Fontana Books. Lara, María Pía (ed.). 2001. Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Matuštík, Martin Beck. 2008. Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Michalson, Gordon. 1999. Kant and the Problem of God. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Neill, Alex and Christopher Janaway (eds.). 2009. Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Neiman, Susan. 2002. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Modern Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1988. Manuscript Remains: Volume 1. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2015. Parerga and Paralipomena: Volume 2. Edited and translated by Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westphal, Merold. 1991. Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

5 The political theology of witnessing The Canaanite woman and Kierkegaard’s tax-collector Orsolya Horváth My study intends to examine some aspects of what the relationship is between community and a witness. To analyze this problem I shall look at two witnesses closely, one of whom is the Canaanite woman known from the Bible, while the other is the tax-collector from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Though placing these two figures together in one study might seem unusual, the connection between them is that in their respective contexts they are both knights of faith, or more precisely, characters, who do not take offense but believe, when they find themselves in the field of the paradox manifesting itself in Jesus Christ. In the description of the former figure, we examine thoroughly the nature of this paradox by analyzing Jesus’ behavior. Our purpose is first to depict and determine how the woman becomes a witness of her faith, then to examine the effect her witnessing has on the community. Kierkegaard’s description of the tax-collector is discussed, then, as in his text the question which only indistinctly appears in the Biblical description is put clearly: namely, what does a testimony mean if those for whom the testimony is made do not understand the witness so she or he becomes isolated? What is the community like which is formed on this premise?

1. The Canaanite woman Confusion The description of Jesus’ meeting with the Canaanite woman1 perplexes the reader. The reason for this perplexity is that in this situation, Jesus appears to repeatedly and categorically reject the Canaanite – non-Jewish – woman on the single basis that she is not a member of the Chosen People. This behavior of Jesus contradicts everything that we can learn about him from the descriptions of the Gospels. That is the reason why this Biblical narrative has to stand in the interest of political theology. I know, first and foremost, about two explanations which somehow try to dissolve – and, at the same time, unintentionally, cover – the tension hidden in the portrayal of Jesus. According to one of them the story focuses on the disciples and depicts how Jesus destroys the prejudice against “pagans” of his disciples.

The political theology of witnessing  95 According to the other explanation, this meeting is a turning point for Jesus concerning his own approach to his mission. He rejects the woman, because he has been sent only to the house of Israel; however, seeing the faith of the “pagan” woman, he expands his mission to the non-Jewish as well. In my approach, I do not wish to obscure but rather unfold the unusual portrayal of Jesus of the text. I intend to achieve this by placing the rejected woman – instead of Jesus – into the focus of my research. I examine the situation and Jesus himself through her perspective. In order to open up the perplexity, I interpret the Biblical description from a hermeneutical angle, which means I take the meeting as a story of understanding; I focus on this understanding as an ongoing process. So the unconventional exegesis2 working with this viewpoint of literary theory tries to compass the ambiguity that appears in the biblical narrative (Thiselton 1997, p. 475–479). The structuralistic elements of this research are also subordinated to this aim. The hermeneutical aspect of the present exegesis is based on the philosophical-phenomenological course, which looks at the human being in his or her everyday life-experience as a subject of different fields of meaning. Through this aspect, I shall try to build on the common basis that the reader and the Canaanite woman share. Meanwhile it seems important to premise that, accordingly, my approach is not a feminist one: I do not look at her as a subject experiencing this rejection as a woman, but concentrate on the experience of rejection in itself, which, in this way, is simply accentuated by the fact that the subject of the rejection is female. Structure According to Matthew, the description of the meeting is the following (15:21–28):3 21 And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22 And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” 23 But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26 And he answered, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” 27 She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28 Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

96  Orsolya Horváth The conversation is tripartite as it involves the participation of the Canaanite woman, Jesus and his disciples. Let us take a closer look at the structure of the description. The “pagan” woman approaches Jesus, she is the initiator; it is her, who addresses him. We hear her three times. And we hear Jesus four times: first his silence, then he speaks after the intervention of his disciples, next he directly enters into conversation with the woman, whose questions he answers twice. His disciples speak only once. If we highlight the verbal communication from the text – interpreting even its absence as a kind of communication – then we witness the following conversation: I CW (1.):4 Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. JC (1.): But he did not answer her a word. II D: JC (2.):

Send her away, for she is crying out after us. I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

III CW (2.): Lord, help me. JC (3.): It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. IV CW (3.): Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table. JC (4.): O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire. Thus the summary of the content structure of the conversation is as follows: I II III IV

pleading (CW) → rejection pleading (D)5 → rejection pleading (CW) → rejection pleading (approving reasoning) (CW) → acceptance

Jesus rejects the woman who turns to him three times. The first time the woman is already within earshot, she calls out his name, but he pretends not to hear her. The second time, while the woman is approaching Jesus, the disciples intervene on her behalf, but Jesus tells his disciples (and does so in a way that the woman can most probably hear him too) that his mission concerns only the house of Israel. Thus, he explains the reason for his previous silence. The third time the woman is right beside him and expresses her

The political theology of witnessing  97 adoration towards him by kneeling down in front of him and repeats her pleading for help in this manner. This is the first time that Jesus addresses her directly: in his answer, emphasizing what he previously said, he differentiates between two groups of people. One is the house of Israel, the children; the other is the group whose members do not belong to this nation, the dogs, which is the name commonly used for “pagans” at that time. The bread, which in this context symbolizes the goods necessary for prosperity, is for the children and it should be taken from them if we wished to give it to the dogs as well – and it is not right. Interpretation. First circle: the faithful lover The woman contrary to previous apprehension is rejected by Jesus on several occasions. In this sense she becomes a victim and exactly so in her relation to Jesus! The singularity of the situation can be found in the consideration that the mission of Jesus is to help the ill, the poor, the discriminated and the hopeless; in short, those who are in need. The woman addressing Jesus belongs to this group, too: a single woman, a “pagan” and the mother of an ill child. Nevertheless, Jesus resists her pleading for quite a long time as if repelling the woman – with his repeated rejections – even deeper into her already existing vulnerability. This kind of experience is well known for all of us. I approach someone with an impression, idea or knowledge gained from previous direct or indirect experience, and I have hopes for this person based on my previous experience. I am convinced that this impression, idea or knowledge will not deceive me otherwise I would not dare to act, that is to engage in direct contact with the person from whom I am expecting something. Therefore, I possess something based on which I have trust in the addressed person. However, the addressee, because of his reaction to my initiative, does not seem to be the same person as the one whom I have my previous impression about. In such a situation the most urgent question is: experiencing this, how long I should insist on my previous knowledge, and when I should admit that I was wrong. The stronger the previous impressions are, the harder it is for the actual experience to override them. A good example for just how strong insistence on previous knowledge can be is love. (The parallel between God – man relationship and love is applied consistently throughout the Bible itself.) When everybody else thinks that I was wrong, I, the person in love, still cling to my previous knowledge, even when actual experience has thousand-fold contradicted that. I simply ignore it. In spite of repeated rejections, the Canaanite woman maintains her previous trust with which she has approached Jesus. By suffering this rejection, namely, not leaving and not feeling offended by it, she herself deepens her own vulnerability. She consciously chooses the role of a victim. However, she does not do so because she wants to make herself a victim! Undertaking this role has a purpose: to obtain what she has come for, to be able to

98  Orsolya Horváth hear those words, which she has expected from Jesus based on her previous knowledge. The woman clearly craves to hear these words. And although craving is close to aggression, we should not disregard their distinctive form. The woman cannot decide whether she is rejected by Jesus or not, however, she can decide whether she stays in this rejected situation or not. Thereby, the woman holding on to her vulnerability is not a victim to be pitied, on the contrary, a heroine to be admired – as we will later see: the heroine of faith. (And she would certainly have been that even if she had not obtained the words she was craving for.) Interpretation. Second circle: appearance and reality Why is it so? How is it possible? The triple rejection appearing in the description can only be revealed through the dialectics of appearance – reality. The Biblical theological root of this approach can be found in The Old Testament, where the authors are acquainted with God as a God in hiding (see Isaiah 45:15; cf. Jeremiah 23:23). The hiding God plays with the duality of appearance – reality. He does not present himself in an obvious way regarding the living conditions and prospering of a god-fearing man. Here concrete experience shows that God is at a distance or even that God has left and forgotten man. However, this assumed Godless reality proves to be just an appearance for a believer, because the God-reality stated in promises unveils this assumed-reality, or I might as well say: life-reality, as appearance only. Not in the sense as if it were not real, rather in the sense that the experience conveyed through it does not provide reliable knowledge of God. Life-reality (experience) can only seem like appearance from the aspect of God-reality (promise). We try to unfold the story of the meeting between Jesus and the Canaanite woman according to this scheme. On the level of life-reality three rejections are pronounced. Yet this does not mean rejection on the level of God-reality as well. Since the self-distancing God does not wish to reject, on the contrary: he intends to attract. It is exactly the meaning of his self-distancing, to open space for the following.6 Following God who is moving away, that is seeing God-reality instead of life-reality can only be made possible by faith. However, faith in its unique meaning can only have its effect where experience contradicts promise. Therefore, distancing is unavoidable, exactly so that faith can be put into work. No one spoke more beautifully about it than Luther, who, in one of his sermons of the spring of 1525, describes the dialogue that Jesus had with the Canaanite woman as a play between yes and no (Luther 1958, p. 271–275; WA 17 II: p. 200–204).7 In this dialogue, the hiding of God is symbolized by the gestures signifying rejection. However, these gestures, even though they appear to be rejection, in reality attract, which means they make it possible for the woman to understand Jesus more thoroughly. The rejecting gestures of Jesus therefore promote closeness, that is more thorough understanding. To put things more sharply: the phases of

The political theology of witnessing  99 rejection prepare the pronunciation or more precisely the pronounceability of the craved words. Interpretation. Third circle: luring and attracting This hermeneutical play with the duality of appearance – reality described in the Gospel8 is in close connection with the example of a faithful lover discussed earlier. The appearance says: no, the reality is, nonetheless, says its exact opposite: yes, and the challenge is whether I have the courage to decide between appearance and reality and persist in what I consider to be real contrary to appearance, even if I cannot for a minute forget the risk that what I consider as reality might prove to be appearance at the end. However, the play between yes – no can be of two kinds. One lures or entices, while the other attracts. The aim of the former is to maintain the floating between yes – no, so as one player can bind the other one to himself by the ever present uncertainty (this could be referred to as horizontal play).9 The latter one, however, plays between yes – no in order to stop the floating, that is the aim of uncertainty is exactly to help find certainty (this could be referred to as vertical play). Differentiating between luring and attracting is considered unavoidable by Kierkegaard. He sees the difference – in relation to Jesus – in that in the luring, the lured player loses himself, while attraction helps him become himself. Kierkegaard says that the smallness of Jesus is inevitable so as in his humiliated state his words could be repulsive. It is only in this repulsion that man can become himself, which condition is vital for him to become the addressee of the attraction.10 Hence in this case the dynamics of the duality of appearance – reality (the vertical play) is not deception, quite contrary it is the way to avoid deception. In case of luring, or enticing (the horizontal play), I think even if the luring is mutual, and both party participating in the play holds the other afloat between yes – no, the aim is the deception, which is achieved by envisaging, that is flirting with, the craved – in our case – word. In the meeting between Jesus and the Canaanite woman the description does not talk about luring but attracting. Jesus does not float the woman in order to allure his victim to himself, rather, on the level of appearance, he repulses with his triple rejections in order to attract the woman – first to herself then – to himself. How can all of this be observed from the text? From the aspect of our examination the observation of Jesus’ sentences of rejection, which – apparently – make room for the interpretation in question, is decisive. For in none of his answers does Jesus reject the woman directly. He says: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” not that: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but not to you.” He says: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” not that: “You are a dog, and I will not take the children’s bread to throw it to you.” His answers, thus, are general and not personal, that is in none of his answers does Jesus express the rejection of the woman unambiguously; instead, by

100  Orsolya Horváth the generalities of his answers he leaves room for her interpreting them to her own situation. This openness in this sense is not floating, rather general negation without individual application. The task is for the woman to adapt the pronounced general statements of rejection to her own life. Exactly the fact that these sentences are impersonal makes room for and, meanwhile, urges this personal adaptation. Therefore, with his three rejections, this indirect way of repulsion, Jesus attracts in order to make the woman his partner in the situation. Interpretation. Fourth circle: total vulnerability However, the herein examined repulsion, whose aim is to attract differs greatly from the one with – let us call it – a pedagogical purpose, which leaves the vulnerable person absolutely alone. A great example of this is Kafka’s parable: Before the Law (Vor dem Gesetz). In his story there are also two characters, and they are not equal either: one of them, the gatekeeper, knows what the other one, requesting admission, does not. The countryman is totally at the mercy of the gatekeeper. He wishes to enter, but the guard sets three different obstacles in his way: first he forbids (“he cannot grant him entry at the moment”), then he floats the countryman (he answers to the question of the countryman whether he might enter later this way: “it is possible”), finally he deters (“If it tempts you so much – he calls to the countryman who is trying to peep in the gate – try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note – he continues – : I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper” etc.). Through the passing years the distance between the two men seems to be more and more insurmountable (see the change in their heights resulting from the ageing of the countryman), until the last question is asked by the one seeking admission: “Everyone strives after the law, so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” And the gatekeeper answers shouting so that the old man can hear him: “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”11 In this case – it appears – the repulsion, the rejection expressed in different ways by the gatekeeper serves one purpose, namely, to test the countryman’s resolution. He does not enter the gate assigned just to him and at encountering rejection he retreats. (Of course, the questions, whether he would have been allowed to enter at all or would have possessed the superhuman power necessary – according to the description – to enter, by the lack of which entrance was predestined to failure, still remain.) This parable is interesting for our examination in that it presents us the way of repulsion, that is rejection, which, ultimately, does not want to repulse at all. What is the difference then between the previously discussed parable and the Biblical description? They differ in that while in the former the vulnerable man does not receive any clue or help to make his decision, in the latter, parallel to being rejected, the vulnerable woman is invited to

The political theology of witnessing  101 participate in the play, and, at the same time – as we have seen – she receives encouragement not only to enter but also to be able to stay in the play. In the former case, we might say that the gatekeeper is playing, but the countryman is not able to join in the play, he is totally left alone as he receives no help from the gatekeeper who has initiated the play. Interpretation. Fifth circle: the witnesses A further reason to support my interpretation based on the dynamics of appearance – reality is the situation of the conversation. From this aspect a decisive piece of information for the reader is that the conversation between Jesus and the woman takes place in the presence of his disciples. Their one intervention on behalf of the woman is surely induced by the fact that they have had enough of the woman’s shouting and they wish Jesus to fulfill the woman’s request so that she would leave them alone. If our premise is that during his mission Jesus sees each and every man not as a tool but as a purpose, then in this conversation Jesus fights for not only the Canaanite woman but also the understanding of his disciples. His fight for them is done in an indirect way: he does not deny their existing prejudices towards strangers, on the contrary: he himself says it aloud and displays the real face of this perception by claiming it as his own. With his attitude, he causes disturbance in his disciples, to whom – and present readers alike – this behavior seems as such that is not in harmony with their impression about Jesus so far, while, at the same time, it is very much in accordance with their own attitude. This disturbance, in this situation, appears unavoidable as only in this way is Jesus able to help his disciples most effectively to grow in their understanding. And the forthcoming reason leads us to the turning point in the conversation, which – as we have seen – is brought about by the woman’s reaction to Jesus’ third rejection. Interpretation. Sixth circle: reciprocation The woman answers the first rejection of Jesus addressed directly to her. From this answer we can perceive – what I have already referred to – how she applies the statements previously formulated by Jesus to her own life: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” We can consider this answer as a reason supporting the previously mentioned, because it indicates that the woman does understand Jesus’ statements. Jesus is distancing himself, yet she does not leave his side, because she sees, behind the appearance of Jesus’ rejections, his desire to say the word.12 What is interesting in the answer is that it also remains at the level of generalities, yet, at the same time – just like in Jesus’ answer – it seems obvious who is referred to by the name of dog. So the woman’s answer also carries a strange duality. On the one hand, she does not take Jesus’ words to be reflective of herself, and does not say that “yes, I am a dog” or “no, I am

102  Orsolya Horváth not a dog”; while on the other hand, she does understand that the name dog could refer to her. Her sophisticated and multi-layered answer proves that the foreign woman understands Jesus’ intentions. So it seems that Jesus plays with the duality of appearance – reality in order to attract his speaking partner closer to himself. However, the woman – considering the previous – is not a victim but a partner in this hermeneutical play, as Jesus helps her to become one. The stake of this play, of course, is most serious. The woman understands this too. Taking the risk, she enters the play, and holds on until her previous knowledge becomes perceptible reality. Hence, she becomes a heroine of faith in her undertaken role of a victim. Jesus’ behavior looks like exclusion proved to be acceptance. The Canaanite woman and the community For our present investigation the fifth and sixth circles are significant. As we intend to look for references to communities, first we examine the sixth circle. In the conversation Jesus, as we have seen, uses the children – dogs contrast, by which – as I have tried to indicate previously – he does not define the children as the sole target group of his mission contrasting them with the dogs, quite the contrary: he expresses his wish to elevate the dogs to the status of the children. The woman does not resist this differentiation in the conversation, though it is quite obvious that she is not considered to be a child. Moreover, she not only does not resist, but agrees with Jesus’ words: “Yes, Lord” she says. So far it seems that the woman understands that Jesus does not exclude her. If this understanding had not happened, the woman would have taken Jesus’ words about the children – dogs contrast on herself. This children – dogs differentiation does not refer to individuals but to communities and peoples. According to this, if you belong to the house of Israel then you are a child (an heir, a member of the family) whereas if you belong to another people, you are a dog. Thus, an individual is judged by the community they are members of. If Jesus’ partner had only heard this much, she would have left. And probably not because Jesus rejects her so she has nothing to do with him; rather, because she is humiliated because of her affiliation to her people since Jesus calls them inferior to his own. However, the woman does not leave and, what is more, she agrees with his words, namely, that as compared to the house of Israel, her people are inferior. How is that possible? Who would not feel indignant on hearing such an offense? In the conversation, Jesus’ partner agrees with Jesus as she believes that Jesus does not wish to exclude, quite the opposite: to include. However, this inclusion can only occur, or be fulfilled – as in this case – if individuals in approaching to Jesus are willing to risk everything that is part of their identity or defining character, be it their affiliation to the people, or – I might as well add – a Church. Naturally, not even in this approach can we erase the self’s own identity as it would mean that the person is erasing themselves in their approach; still, according to Jesus’ radical wish,

The political theology of witnessing  103 every characteristic, whether individual or common, that previously seemed unquestionable must be questioned. As a Christian’s real identity is to be defined by their own personal relation to Christ, and only from there, taking it as the origin, can any other layers of their identity be re-created anew and question marks made disappear. “I can be a dog in my affiliation to my people,” the woman could tell Jesus, “but even this cannot stop me from pleading with you.” Then later the peoples of dogs will attain their dignity when their people are invited one by one to Jesus’ bread. Now we return to our premise. Surely, we can only talk about a witness if there are other people present to witness this testimony. Examining the communal aspects of the conversation now we look at the fifth circle. According to the description the conversation between Jesus and the woman occurs in front of his disciples. As we have seen it, Jesus teaches them in an indirect way; however, his words would not mean a lot without the woman’s faith as it is the woman who becomes the direct witness to Jesus’ intention to include, not to exclude. Through this testimony the disciples can understand that the people of dogs are also to become children since Jesus’ last remark makes it clear how the woman’s behavior is to be interpreted. In this way the woman as a witness helps to form a community and becomes the tool that will induce the collapse of the walls between the peoples. The astonishing in all this is that the woman becomes a witness while her testimony is not understandable for the disciples, for those, who her testimony is intended for. In our analysis so far, our intention was to uncover the different layers which could explain why the conversation seems incomprehensible. The woman, becoming involved in the contradiction, does not take offense and pursues her original intention. The disciples, however, are not involved in this contradiction, since they have no such interest – like the healing of the woman’s sick child, or like the wish of Kafka’s character to enter the gate – as would prompt them to be so. They observe the situation from the outside, and as the description implies they only see that the way a “pagan” woman approaches Jesus becomes an example to follow, but how exactly they arrive at this point, they most certainly do not understand. Thus, the woman is taken into the circle of the disciples, and the wall between the dogs and the children collapses in such a way that the disciples do not understand how the woman becomes an instrument of this. In short: the witness becomes a witness while those who she is a witness for do not understand how this has happened. On the basis of this, we can say that a community so established has no rational foundation. To return to our starting-phrase: a community that is somehow (we do not know exactly how yet) based on a paradox cannot have a solely rational foundation. Hopefully, the meaning of this latter expression will unfold hereafter.

2. The tax-collector We move on to another witness in order to define more clearly the question concerning the emerging community in the description of the Canaanite

104  Orsolya Horváth woman. Previously, we have thoroughly analyzed the paradox appearing in the conversation of Jesus and the woman. This paradox unfolds through a differentiation of appearance as against reality, which – as we stated – the woman understands whereas the disciples do not. Still, without the woman’s testimony, which is her faith, it could not be possible to form a community between the peoples of the children and the dogs. This community, as we see, ultimately originates from a paradox: the woman’s approach to the paradox opens up the possibility of a community for the disciples present, too, who do not understand what the woman does. Our question first of all looks into the idea of how one person whose relation to someone – in this case to Jesus – cannot be understood can become the founder of a community. We try to elaborate this question through Kierkegaard’s parable of the tax-collector. Abraham is in the focus of attention in Fear and Trembling, who in Kierkegaard’s term is a knight of faith. He becomes one because when ethical norms and God’s indirect wish clash he is ready to obey God’s will, that is to sacrifice his only son.13 In this situation Kierkegaard emphasizes that Abraham defies the general (ethical) norm and chooses to be an individual, that is, to make a decision based on his absolute relation to the Absolute, namely, to God. When Kierkegaard poses the question whether nowadays we have the chance to meet such a knight of faith the example of the tax-collector appears as follows: I candidly admit that in my practice I have not found any reliable example of the knight of faith, though I would not therefore deny that every second man may be such an example. . . . As was said, I have not found any such person, but I can well think him. Here he is. Acquaintance made, I am introduced to him. The moment I set eyes on him I instantly push him from me, I myself leap backwards, I clasp my hands and say half aloud, ‘Good Lord, is this the man? Is it really he? Why, he looks like a tax-collector!’ However, it is the man after all. (Kierkegaard 2013, p. 80–81) Thus the tax-collector is a knight of faith. The contrast is obvious and highlights the point that the existence of the knight of faith is absolutely hidden from the outside world. In everyday life he acts like everyone else, blends into his environment, his extraordinary qualities go unnoticed. That is why Kierkegaard says that he himself has never encountered such a man and can only imagine him though he might well have met one as every second man is like that. At the same time Abraham is not the only Biblical counterpart of the taxcollector as the contemporary knight of faith in Fear and Trembling, but the Virgin Mary is one as well. We make this reference to point out the connection between the tax-collector and the Canaanite woman in an immanent way. Who was ever so great as that blessed woman, the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary? . . . To be sure, the angel was a ministering spirit, but it

The political theology of witnessing  105 was not a servile spirit which obliged her by saying to the other young maidens of Israel, “Despise not Mary. What befalls her is the extraordinary.” But the Angel came only to Mary, and no one could understand her. After all, what woman was so mortified as Mary? And is it not true in this instance also that one whom God blesses He curses in the same breath? . . . Nevertheless, when she says, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” – then she is great. (Ibid., p. 125–126) Kierkegaard sees Mary, too, as the Biblical counterpart of the tax-collector, because (1) she is blessed and at the same time cursed, and therefore she becomes part of the paradox in her meeting with God; as a result, (2) nobody understands her; and knowing this in advance, (3) she is willing to say yes to the calling, without avoiding it. So Mary is also “great,” that is, a knight of faith as Kierkegaard sees it. We can find these determinations in the case of the Canaanite woman as well, though – to the best of my knowledge – Kierkegaard does not refer to the story. (1) Jesus rejects her and at the same time includes her, humiliates her because of her people and at the same time elevates her; (2) the woman’s behavior is incomprehensible to those outsiders who do not participate in the conversation; (3) yet she is willing to keep herself in the paradox, which is clearly defined so in Jesus’ concluding statement. Therefore, in the analyzed conversation the Canaanite woman is great just like Abraham and Mary are great in Kierkegaard’s opinion. In her own time she is just as inconspicuous in her everyday life before this conversation as Mary and Abraham are. None could discover that they are “great,” the knights of faith. Kierkegaard writes that in their hiddenness they are isolated from society: because of the individual’s absolute relation to the Absolute they cannot be understood and are unable to speak (Ibid., p. 117). If the Canaanite woman is, so to speak, a tax-collector, how can we speak about any kind of testimony, not to mention such a testimony that is able to form a community? Through the example of the knights of faith, Kierkegaard makes it obvious that they are neither community people nor ones forming communities. Their essential determination is that their encountering the Absolute takes them away from the general, that is, their communities. By saying yes to the paradox they no longer determine themselves by their communities’ norms but by their individual relations to God. That is why others do not understand them, why they are isolated and it is only logical that they no longer have any connection with their communities. However, in one part of Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard describes the knight of faith as someone who is, if not a teacher (being unable to express their situation verbally), at least a witness (Ibid., p. 150). And now we can accentuate our previously posed question: how can a person, isolated in such a way, become a witness for others? How can one

106  Orsolya Horváth be a witness to the incomprehensible, the unspeakable, to the paradox? Furthermore: how can a paradox become the source of forming a community? Kierkegaard, quite surprisingly after all that has been mentioned previously, describes the tax-collector as someone who differs from his companions in everyday life inasmuch as he accepts the disappointments or even annoyances of his everyday life peacefully: his contentment is incessant. On his way he reflects that his wife has surely a special little warm dish prepared for him, e.g., a calf’s head roasted, garnished with vegetables. If he were to meet a man like-minded, he could continue as far as East Gate to discourse with him about that dish, with a passion befitting a hotel chef. As it happens, he hasn’t four pence to his name, and yet he fully and firmly believes that his wife has that dainty dish for him. If she had it, it would then be an invidious sight for superior people and an inspiring one for the plain man, to see him eat; for his appetite is greater than Esau’s. His wife hasn’t it – strangely enough, it is quite the same to him.” (Ibid., p. 82–83) It seems, however, that this incessant contentment, the way the tax-collector remains steady in face of the unexpected occurrences and annoyances of his everyday life somehow implies the presence of a knight of faith hidden under the tax-collector’s coat. It is even more decisive what Kierkegaard says about the incomprehensibility of the paradox. In my opinion, the answer to our original question lies here. He writes the following at the end of his analysis in Fear and Trembling when we start to believe that we understand his argumentation in the book: “Here again it appears that one may have an understanding of Abraham, but can understand him only in the same way as one understands the paradox” (Ibid., p. 214). Moreover, as we learn, Abraham also speaks in a “foreign language” (Ibid., p. 213).14 What “again” means in this context, in my opinion, remains a question as – in a sense – this statement opens a new horizon compared to Kierkegaard’s chain of thought so far. He says here that contrary to the previous concept, the paradox can be understood! It is true that the person keeping themselves in the paradox speaks in a foreign language; however, this foreign language is not incomprehensible. To comprehend it, we simply have to find the way which is adapted to the nature of the paradox. This comprehension, as the thorough analysis of the Canaanite woman also reveals, cannot be one that tries to comprehend this language with natural reason, which considers appearance to be reality. It has to be one which, by adapting itself to the nature of the paradox, takes into account that appearance in itself might not be reality. This way of thinking, eventually, is characteristic of faith only. According to this, there can be witnesses to a paradox in a foreign albeit not incomprehensible language. This can occur when the paradox is pictured in a way which reveals

The political theology of witnessing  107 the uselessness of the existing interpretation of the world. The tax-collector, the knight of faith is a witness exactly in their incomprehensibility, since they invite people to a new adaptation, a new way of thinking.15 And in so far the witness to the paradox intends to form a new community, one which understands the paradox and whose members all speak a “foreign language.” However, this foreign language can only be mastered by those who take the risk of becoming individuals of the kind the Biblical descriptions – and those of Kierkegaard’s as well – indicate.

Conclusion In our study we have investigated the communal aspects of testimonies. We have concentrated on testimonies in which a witness becomes a witness by becoming part of a paradox. We have tried to find the answer to the question whether being a witness is possible in such a situation, and if so, what the community built around them would be like. In the first part of our study, following the traces of the Canaanite woman, we undertook the task of unfolding the nature and different aspects of the paradox, which in this case manifests itself in the incomprehensible behavior of Jesus. However, it is not only the paradox that is in the focus but also the woman, the witness herself: we have investigated how she relates to the paradox during her meeting with Jesus, that is, we tried to find out how the witness becomes a witness. Our conclusion was that she can become a witness by remaining in the paradox. In other words, as we could observe during the conversation in spite of the seemingly words of rejection of Jesus, she is able to keep her faith and understands the intention of Jesus to include her. After observing the woman’s attitude, we turned our attention towards the disciples, who are present at the conversation. According to the Biblical description, it seems they do understand Jesus’ intention to include but, however, they cannot comprehend the woman’s behavior. Does she really become a witness, then? In order to see the problem more clearly, in the second part of our study we focused on Kierkegaard’s analysis in Fear and Trembling, which is based on Biblical descriptions. The first approach to these descriptions about the second witness, the tax-collector shows that as a knight of faith becomes one because they liberate themselves from the general and become individuals, their isolation is absolute, to speak – and, consequently to testify – is impossible to them. However, the confusion between the paradox and the testimony is dissolved by Kierkegaard’s statement that the paradox can also be understood – but only in a “foreign” way. Therefore, we cannot say that such a community has rational foundations since it is based on a “foreign,” new rationality. The analyses indicate that the community which is created around a paradox has one integral characteristic and that is the transition from the general to the individual. And even if we construe the individual’s absolute relation to the Absolute as strictly as Kierkegaard does (namely,

108  Orsolya Horváth that it is close to the impossible), the readiness and openness, the inspiring adoration concerning this relation seem essential (cf. Kierkegaard 2013, p. 112). Thus, the community in question is formed in a paradoxical way: its members first have to become individuals by liberating themselves from their community to be able to form a community. The paradoxical in this is that they have to maintain this state of liberation as members of the community, too, so the individual is part of the community and at the same time he or she is not. Along this idea it would surely be inspiring to reconsider the nature and relationship between the two great communities so essential for faith: the Church (as the new-rational community formed around the paradox) and the State (as the community based on rationality). However, this would only make sense if we could continuously keep in sight the concrete operation of the paradox as analyzed also in this study.

Notes 1 Matthew 15:21–28 and Mark 7:24–30. 2 As antecedent to a phenomenological exegesis see Heidegger 1995, p. 3–156. 3 ESV. Parallel place: Mk 7:24–30. To compare the descriptions at Matthew and Mark see Hagner 1995, p. 439–440. 4 The explanation of abbreviations: CW: the Canaanite woman; JC: Jesus Christ; D: Disciples. The numbers in brackets show which speaking of the participant(s) in question they are. 5 The disciples’ words to Jesus can be interpreted as pleading, intervention or rejection as well. If we understand their words as pleading then we do not consider their motivation, but the fact that they want Jesus to help the woman so as they could get rid of her as soon as possible. However, if we understand their words as rejection then we consider their motivation; moreover, we can interpret their request for her dismissal as one that does not necessarily involve granting the woman her plead (see Talbert 2010, p. 189). In this case we can talk about four rejections. This study follows the former approach. 6 The question just how large this space can be for a man to be able to follow God, and where does this distance reach that spaciousness where a god-fearing man may lose the trace of a distancing God seems unavoidable. Is the promise, as the document of God-reality, really enough proof for a believer never to lose absolutely the voice of God that becomes silent in the realm of experience? 7 The word play does not appear in this sermon. 8 The expression hermeneutical play can be applied widely, that is not only for verbal communication; in this case it covers the whole everyday life of a man that is realized in a community. (That is why the possibility of mathematical modeling appears to be an interesting topic, namely, whether game theory can add to the more thorough understanding of the hereby discussed, or similar, special hermeneutical situations – without regarding these situations as simple behavioral models.) 9 Cf. Sartre’s description of a first date (Sartre 1977, p. 91ff.) Even though emphases are placed elsewhere at Sartre, through this example the presently discussed floating can be perceived. Even more in Simmel’s analyses of female coquetry (Simmel 2001, p. 37–50.) These latter considerations would be worth comparing in detail to the above discussed situation, since in them, the dynamics of yes – no, the play and the notions of appearance and reality have emphatic roles.

The political theology of witnessing  109 10 Kierkegaard writes in connection with Christ’s “littleness and humiliation” (“Geringheit, Niedrigkeit”) that: [Christus] “will sie alle zu sich ziehen; sie zu sich ziehen, denn locken will Er keinen zu sich. In Wahrheit zu sich ziehen heißt in einem gewissen Sinne von sich fortstoßen” (Kierkegaard 1962, p. 145). Later: “Wenn das, was gezogen werden soll, in sich selbst ein Selbst ist, bedeutet ein in Wahrheit zu sich Ziehen zuerst ihm helfen, daß es in Wahrheit es selbst werde, um alsdann es zu sich zu ziehen . . .” (Ibid., p. 151). Kierkegaard discusses the same dynamics in his comment to Romans 8:28 as well, where in relation to “if” in the statement “If we love God, all things must serve us” he writes: “Sie ist ein wenig bänglich . . .; sie ist in gewissem Sinne so kühl, so gelassen in ihrer Zweideutigkeit; es ist weder ein Ja noch ein Nein” (Kierkegaard 1959, p. 208). In Kierkegaard’s approach encountering this ambiguity is the precondition for the certainty of faith. 11 The parts of the parable cited in this study are in the translation of Ian Johnston. 12 This is supported by the woman’s behavior (kneeling down) and address (“Lord!”) at the meeting, and the fact itself, that she turns to Jesus in her need for help, which all show that she has already heard about him and his healings. These together provided for her the basis for her trust which she relied on throughout the apparent rejections. Besides, we should remember the importance of the non-verbal communication too, as Leon Morris calls our attention to it citing Barclay (Morris 1995, p. 404–405.): the intonation, the smile, the look cannot be recorded in writing. 13 Gen 22:1–19. 14 Here is what Abraham exactly says: “God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Jeffrey Hanson interprets this sentence in his “’He Speaks in Tongues’: Hearing the Truth of Abraham’s Words of Faith” (Hanson 2015). As the author claims, “these words both in form and in content encapsulate one of the key features of Abraham’s faith,” (Ibid., p. 229) his investigation might be grasped as an analysis of the “foreign language” of the paradox. 15 Kierkegaard’s self-reflections and Kierkegaard’s position as writer would invite new questions in the analysis of verbal witness. Cf. Rasmussen 2005, p. 149–177.

Bibliography Hagner, Donald. 1995. Matthew 14–28, Word Biblical Commentary, Volume 33b. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. Hanson, Jeffrey. 2015. ‘ “He Speaks in Tongues”: Hearing the Truth of Abraham’s Words of Faith’. In: Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a Critical Guide. Edited by Daniel Conway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 229–246. Heidegger, Martin. 1995. ‘Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion’. In: Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann (Gesamtausgabe, Band 60): 3–156. Kafka, Franz. Vor dem Gesetz. Translated by Ian Johnston. www.kafka.org/index. php?aid=165. In German: www.kafka.uni-bonn.de/cgi-bin/kafka8c7f.html?Rubr ik=werke&Punkt=geschichtensammlungen&Unterpunkt=landarzt&Teil=gesetz (accessed 14.10.2019). Kierkegaard, Søren. 1959. Christliche Reden 1848: Gesammelte Werke Abt. 20. Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederichs Verlag. ———. 1962. Einübung im Christentum: Gesammelte Werke Abt. 26. Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederichs Verlag.

110  Orsolya Horváth ———. 2013. ‘Fear and Trembling’. In: Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press: 1–233. Luther, Martin. 1958. Bibelübersetzung, Schriftauslegung, Predigt: Ausgewählte Werke 6. München: Chr. Kaiser (WA 17 II). Morris, Leon. 1995. The Gospel According to Matthew. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Rasmussen, Joel D. S. 2005. Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love. New York and London: T&T Clark International. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1977. L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. Simmel, Georg. 2001. ‘Psychologie der Koketterie’. In Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918: Band I (Gesamtausgabe Band 12). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp: 37–50. Talbert, Charles H. 2010. Matthew. Grand Rapids: Baker. Thiselton, Anthony C. 1997. New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

6 The politics of religious commitment Pascal and Dostoevsky Dennis Vanden Auweele and Hanna Vandenbussche Suppose it is possible to recognize rationally the benefit of entertaining Christian faith. The question then is: Does this consideration by itself bootstrap one into piety or is something else required? This is a question that goes to the heart of the political theology of Blaise Pascal and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Pascal’s answer to this question was unsatisfying to many.1 Put somewhat simplistically, he suggests that if one recognizes the merits of Christian faith but one does not believe, one has to act as if one believes (faire comme si).2 The argument advanced in this contribution will use the philosophical prose of Dostoevsky to demystify and consolidate Pascal’s suggestion. It tends to be very difficult to remain neutral on matters of religion, as James Wood expresses cunningly in his novel The Book against God: [Thomas says:] ‘It’s a matter of the utmost importance, life-or-death, to you as for anyone else?’ I felt my hand shaking a little. Timothy looked with alarm for a second, and then breezily said: ‘Oh you know, it’s as Pascal has it – impossible to believe in God, impossible not to’. [Thomas answers] ‘But that won’t do, in the end, will it? We have to decide, no’? (Wood 2004, p. 161) If we cannot stay neutral, how do we decide upon matters of belief? Is it at all possible to decide upon one’s beliefs? Can an atheist start to believe by his or her own volition? Despite the fact that there are some who would univocally say that “religion poisons everything,” (Hitchens 2009) there are also numerous atheists who besides its dangers also recognize the potential boons of having a certain religious faith. Alain de Botton, for one, argues that certain aspects of religion such as community, institutions, pessimism and caretaking are highly beneficial to individual human beings as well as to society at large (de Botton 2013). De Botton’s argument is purely instrumental: certain aspects of religious life are beneficial for individuals and society. A more compelling argument is advanced by Simon Critchley in his

112  Vanden Auweele and Vandenbussche The Faith of the Faithless, where the point is that democratic politics needs a religious commitment to liberalism: The political question . . . is how such a faith of the faithless might be able to bind together a confraternity, a consorority or, to use Rousseau’s key term, an association. If political life is to arrest a slide into demotivated cynicism, then it would seem to require a motivating and authorizing faith which, while not reducible to a specific context, might be capable of forming solidarity in a locality, a site, a region. (Critchley 2012, p. 4) Critchley’s argument clearly differs from de Botton’s argument in that the latter is happy to reduce religion to its instrumental uses and Critchley is more self-consciously aware of the fact that the fruits of religious life cannot be harvested without proper cultivation: “Faith [is] a declarative act, as an enactment, a performative that proclaims” (ibid., p. 161). This means that the positive effects of religious life only occur when this is embraced authentically, and not merely for instrumental purposes. This leads us to the central question of this contribution: How exactly can religious faith emerge authentically? Can this at all emerge from the recognition that religious faith is beneficial for an individual or society? This will be investigated in the work of Blaise Pascal and Fyodor Dostoevsky. An argument generally attributed to Pascal on the basis of his wager (pari) argument is that the potential benefit of belief in (the Christian) God is much higher than non-belief in (the Christian) God. From this, Pascal hopes that a disposition of self-humiliation (s’abêtir) might follow that renders human agents receptive to divine revelation and grace. This argument was famously criticized by William James in The Will to Believe who held that insofar as faith is perceived as merely beneficial to human beings, it cannot emerge authentically: In Pascal’s Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in literature as Pascal’s wager. In it he tries to force us into Christianity by reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the stakes in a game of chance. . . . We feel that a faith in masses and holy water adopted willfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the inner soul of faith’s reality. (James 1979, p. 5) Similarly and more recently, Alain Badiou objects to Pascal’s reliance on Old Testament prophecies and stories as proof of faith; for Badiou, “there is no proof of the event; nor is the event a proof” (Badiou 2003, p. 48–49). Pascal is a target favored by many who would want to distance the realm of faith from the realm of reason. The reverse is often claimed about the political theology that emerges in the philosophically saturated prose of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The politics of religious commitment  113 Most, we fear, would intuitively misread Dostoevsky as a critic of Pascal. The reason for this is Dostoevsky’s emphasis that proofs and arguments are no use to belief – they can only strengthen already present belief, not engender belief.3 This point of view of Pascal and Dostoevsky as one an apologist and the other a fideist is insufficiently complex. Dostoevsky was univocally appreciative of the philosophy of Pascal, which can be taken as a first clue that the Saint Petersburg writer and the Clermont theologian have more in common than appearances would suggest. Rather than rehearse a dry juxtaposition between Pascal and Dostoevsky, this paper will be a back and forth between their arguments in order to mine their respective philosophies for insight into what is at work in religious commitment.

1. Apologizing for belief Blaise Pascal recognizes that most human beings have a tendency to be illdisposed towards religion: “Human beings experience disdain [mépris] for religion: they hate and fear that she might be true” (Laf. 12). One reason for this is that many religions, and especially Christianity, strike down human beings’ self-conceit by emphasizing their finitude and weaknesses. The overarching purpose of Pascal’s Pensées, originally entitled “an apology for Christianity,” is then to create appeal for the Christian religion through rhetoric and argumentation. This inclines the reader to the point of view that Pascal’s only strategy is to offer rational argumentation so as to defend the veracity and prudential benefit of belief in Christianity. That is too simple. The situation is rendered more complex and perhaps even self-­ contradictory because of some of Pascal’s Augustinian-Jansenist presuppositions. Pascal recognizes the egregious impact of the imagination on human reason and consequently admonishes his readers not to trust their reason, because it is overwhelmed by our imagination. Pascal writes: “This mighty power [i.e., the imagination] has established in man a second nature. The imagination is the enemy of reason and delights in controlling and dominating reason in order to show of how much she is capable in all things” (Laf. 44). Reason is determinatively under the sway of the imagination to such an extent that it takes over our capacity to “believe, doubt and deny” (ibid.). If now the imagination is not wholly trustworthy – at times right, at times wrong – then how can we trust a reason completely overpowered by the imagination? With regard to our present investigation, this question morphs into another: What could be the value of an apology for Christian faith if rational argumentation is by its very nature suspect?4 In the philosophical prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky, we witness a similar ambiguity in terms of the capacities of rational argumentation.5 While Dostoevsky would at one time be accused of anti-Christian sentiment (predominantly in his pre-Siberian socialist enthusiasm), his extended stay in the Siberian work camps led him away from his paternalist socialism so as to embrace, wholeheartedly or not, Slavophile, Russian Orthodoxy. After

114  Vanden Auweele and Vandenbussche his Siberian imprisonment, Dostoevksy disavowed his youthful utopian socialism and became an apologist for Russian Orthodoxy. For instance, Dostoevsky conceived of The Brothers Karamazow as the decisive counterargument against the socialist and atheist agenda.6 Ironically, a central aspect of Dostoevsky’s counterpoint to socialism is that, in the words of the character Zosima, “there is no proving [religious beliefs],” but only “can [one] be convinced of [these]” (Dostoevsky 2007, p. 60). So while Dostoevsky clearly intends an apology for Christianity in The Brothers Karamazow, he cannot take recourse in rational argumentation alone to do so because rational argumentation is, by itself, incapable of moving human beings. What has to be borne in mind, however, is that the two Christian traditions at play here – Dostoevsky’s Russian, Slavophile Orthodoxy and Pascal’s Catholic Jansenism – are distinct and therefore proper caution is required when the Christian concepts of both authors are engaged. One cautionary note, for instance, is that the term “reason” has a remarkably different connotation as Pascalian raison and the Dostoevskian разум (usually transliterated as razum). In the context of Pascal’s Pensées, raison is the weakest faculty of the human soul and, because of its servitude to the imagination and the senses, it is inadvertently bound to error. For Dostoevsky, when razum operates in isolation from faith (вера), the same difficulties emerge as with Pascalian raison; when reason is dialectically engaged with faith, there arises the possibility of a truthful philosophy inspired by divine Sophia.7 Ultimately, this point of view will be shown to be not at all as distinct from Pascal’s view. Despite the remarkable differences between their Christian traditions and the way they view the interrelationship between faith and reason, Pascal and the post-Siberian Dostoevsky aim to accomplish similar things. They hope to show that Christian faith is the proper recourse for humanity while at the same time acknowledging that rational argumentation is not particularly helpful for authentic belief. If we accept that rational argumentation cannot initiate authentic faith, what happens then if it is recognized that to have some sense of religious faith is beneficial for individual or societal purposes? Does this insight really amount to nothing with regard to belief?

2. Belief, practice and rituals Let us first address Pascal’s answer to the previous question. Pascal must necessarily appeal to something besides reason in order to persuade his readers of the worth of religion. He makes use of a twofold strategy: on the one hand, to induce disdain or revolt for the natural condition of humanity; on the other hand, to take up certain customs and habits that turn the human being towards God. Pascal’s first step is to confront readers of the Pensées with the misery of their present condition, something to which they often stay happily

The politics of religious commitment  115 oblivious through self-deception. Pascal does not mince words when discussing the misery of humanity’s natural conditions, both individually and socially. In his view, the human self is hateful (moi haïssable) and society is built on a revolting foundation (vilain fond).8 Pascal is convinced that the very roots of human nature and society are corrupt, which means that no amount of education, adaption, progress or reform is going to assuage this corruption. There remains some grandeur in (human) nature, but these are at best signs, traces of the angel that we are supposed to be.9 These signs can help in inducing a desire to distance ourselves from our misery. As such, the combination of disgust for human nature and the appeal of the angelic makes human beings uncomfortable with their natural condition. This strategy appeals to a desire for greatness. In order to overcome corruption more completely, one has to rebuild human nature from the ground up: not reform, but revolution. One of the telltale signs of humanity’s corruption is the dislike many naturally have of religion because religion reminds human beings that their fate is miserable. In fact, most human beings positively prefer a hypocritical state of self-deception over the cold, hard and inconvenient truth revealed about them in religion.10 Indeed, Pascal is adamant to show how human beings willfully obscure any misery in their present condition; they are under a spell that makes them project their will upon imaginary objects in order to satisfy their desire for greatness. They seek out fake greatness in order to hide their misery. Through doing so, human beings derive their self-worth from illusory (and often quite nonsensical) feats such as certain types of clothing, wealth or social standing. Instead of directing their will towards God, humanity has acquired a propensity to revel in earthly, finite objects which can never satisfy their infinitely restless desire for blessedness. These phrases betray that Pascal allies to Augustine’s notion that the heart can only find rest with God – inquietas est deum inclina cors est ­nostrum – not with transitory objects. Pascal’s next move is also strikingly Augustinian: to move from the exterior, inwards and then from the lower, upwards. Turning to Christianity starts with recognizing the nullity of material objects, which could incline the human being to turn inwards for true value and worth. But like the infinite spaces outside are ultimately silent, so is the interior of man similarly void of meaning: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me” (Laf. 201). This dread can have wholesome effects, however. We will return to Dostoevsky more fully next but this image of outer and inner silence as potentially redemptive is echoed in the transformative moment of Alyosha: “The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars” (Dostoevsky 2007, p. 418).11 Through such apophatic self-denial and close awareness of that miserable condition where neither the world nor inner life provides guidance, there can arise a strong aversion to oneself that inclines the human being to humility. Pascal is clear on this point: “This will naturally make you believe and stupefy you”

116  Vanden Auweele and Vandenbussche (Laf. 418). From this, the human being might recognize that the lower things, such as material objects and the self, will not provide the solace or redemption required and that clarity of mind can allow the human being to use his reason more appropriately in service of Christian faith, where reason becomes aware of its own limitations. There are truths that are felt by the heart to which reason has no access: “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know” (Laf. 423). Only when reason is appropriately subjected to the human heart by recognizing its limits, then reason can play a beneficial function in the service of faith.12 This is where Pascal’s famous wager comes in. Instead of proving God’s existence, Pascal invites the reader to consider the possible benefits of belief and unbelief in God. By means of a simple balancing of the benefits and downsides of Christian faith, Pascal demonstrates that it is far more prudential to believe than not to believe in God. This is an appeal to the selfinterest of unbelievers who can, now assisted by properly sanctioned reason, recognize the possibility of infinite gain through faith. But Pascal at the same time recognizes that such a prudential calculus does not give rise to authentic faith, which only emerges through grace.13 This does not mean that human agency has no role to play whatsoever since Pascal assigns a non-negligible role to certain rites and rituals. When these rituals do not derive from the corrupted imagination but from the heart, then such rituals can play an important propaedeutic function in receiving grace. Even when one is without genuine faith, these rituals can serve to assist in emptying the human being of corruption by making him act as a machine (automate). In this mode of existence, human life can amount to a sense of value in faithful hope of religious grace. Indeed, through this process of kenosis, the human being can come to the vivid recognition and the strong conviction of the veracity of faith: Because we should not be fooled, we are at least at much machine as we are spirit. Because of that, we are convinced not merely through the instrument of demonstration. How much can really be proven? The proofs only convince the spirit, the customs make for the strongest and most convincing proofs. Custom inclines the machine, which then drags the spirit with it. (Laf. 821) This solution might appear not very satisfying. If one is unable to believe by means of rational demonstration or pre-existing faith, then one is just to pretend until one becomes a Christian? This seems to be Pascal’s solution: “It is by acting as if one believes, by taking the holy water, by attending mass, etc. . . . You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, benevolent, friendly, sincere and truthful” (Laf. 418 – our emphasis). Not many can follow Pascal in this: is this a case of faking it, until you make it? An interpretation offered by Jon Elster links Pascal to the Jesuits of his day, who

The politics of religious commitment  117 saw that the process of accustoming oneself to belief through practice must have a component that allows us to forget the original decision to abide by that custom. In his words, the process of abêtir “refers to the capacity of habitual belief to induce forgetfulness about its own origin” (Elster 2003, p. 69). This is similar to how the Jesuits emphasized that “deciding to forget [is central] in order to be able to believe” (ibid.). While Elster’s argument explains how authentic faith might potentially arise through following custom, it does not yet account for the porosity Pascal suggests between acting in a certain way and thinking in a certain way. William Desmond frames this Pascalian insight as follows: “Act in an angry way, and the anger comes, act in a loving way and the loving can come, act in a gentle way and consideration comes. Pascal made the point that by taking holy water, even if one does not believe, the action will seed something that communicates of belief. Kneel and prayer may come” (Desmond 2016, p. 264–265). Pascal does not elaborate much further on this issue and it is here that Dostoevsky’s prose can be helpful.

3. Practice makes belief Pascal’s answer should be clear by now: by recognizing the nullity of material objects and the vacuity of the own self, the human agent can be brought to the threshold of openness to Christian faith. However, since human beings are at least as much body as soul, rational argumentation alone does not sway the unbeliever. In order to remedy this, the unbeliever can act as if he believes in the hopes of receiving grace that initiates him into authentic faith. This last step is undoubtedly the most difficult and perplexing: how does the mimicking of Christian rituals and virtues initiate one into authentic faith? How do such things as neighborly love give rise to faith? The answer to this can perhaps be found in one of Pascal’s greatest admirers, namely Dostoevsky. Though both apologists for Christian faith, Pascal and Dostoevsky became known for their respective descriptions of the condition of unbelief. The desperation in Pascal’s philosophical prose of the “mute universe” and the “eternal silence of the infinite spaces” proves palpable to existentialist philosophy; Dostoevsky’s Underground Man’s famous tirade in Notes from the Underground against societal custom and Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion against theodicy and the Roman Catholic church have unceasingly intrigued believers and non-believers alike – Albert Camus believes that Dostoevsky narrates so powerfully the atheist condition, that Dostoevsky should be read as an atheist (Camus 2008, p. 107–150). Dostoevsky’s alliance does not lie with socialism or atheism, but with Christian faith. He had the honesty to recognize his occasional lack of simple faith. In a famous letter to Natalia Fonvizina upon his release from the fortress at Omsk, Dostoevsky confessed to being “a child of [his] age, a child of unbelief and doubt up to this very moment and (I am certain of it) to the grave” (Jones 2002, p. 155–156). He

118  Vanden Auweele and Vandenbussche does clearly recognize the merit of faith and he is tormented by a “thirst to believe . . . burning more strongly in my soul the more contrary arguments there are” (Ibid.). He recognizes that “there is nothing finer, profounder, more attractive, more reasonable, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but I tell myself with jealous love that there cannot be,” a love of Christ that takes such dramatic proportions that “even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth” (ibid.). Needless to say, this final line naturally reads as if Dostoevsky is willing to dismiss all philosophy and science if only he could have faith in Christ. The situation is more complex. Dostoevsky does not claim that there is no conclusive proof of the existence of God or the veracity of faith, but that no amount of proof would ever sway the unbeliever. This is especially vexing for the unbeliever who recognizes the importance of faith, which is why the “thirst to believe” pains Dostoevsky. Therefore, Dostoevsky reaches out to something other than rational argumentation so as to inspire authentic believe, namely praxis: where Pascal admonishes his readers to invest in the rituals of Christian religion, Dostoevsky creates literary characters that live through the consequence of certain philosophical ideas. The dialectical (self-) development of these embodied ideas and ideals then creates rhetorical and aesthetical appeal for a certain way of thinking. To put things more concisely, Dostoevsky’s characters create either affinity or dislike for a certain ideal. One of the first commentators to notice this was Mikhail Bakhtin in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (originally in 1929 as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art; heavily expanded in 1963). In his view, Dostoevsky’s novels are primarily characterized by a polyphony of different voices that develop and interact, but do not merge: “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novel” (Bakhtin 1984, p. 6). Because of writing in Communist Russia, Bakthin downplayed the importance of the Christian element in Dostoevsky’s philosophy but his general point is very much accurate. Dostoevsky presents characters that are utterly possessed by certain philosophical ideas (which makes them seem rather otherworldly) and live through the consequences of their ideas.14 The (self-) destruction of certain characters therefore naturally results in the abhorrence of their ideas, while the elevation of other characters creates affinity for their philosophical and religious views. Before attending to how Dostoevsky then provides an apology for Christian faith through his literary characters, it might be helpful to clarify one more underlying aspect of his philosophical prose. This aspect is most powerfully expressed in his short story, The Dream of the Ridiculous Man (1877). The plot of the story roughly goes that a certain individual has set his mind on killing himself. After having resolved to do so, his attempt is upset by the cries of desperation of a young girl in trouble. Unable to attend to the deed because of this distraction, the Ridiculous Man falls asleep and

The politics of religious commitment  119 has a dream that brings newfound love of life. The dream roughly reveals a certain alternative history of earth where the fall from Eden had not taken place. These people lived in a joyful society in which they had a “real living and uninterrupted sense of oneness with the whole of the universe” (Dostoevsky 2008, p. 21). In their prelapsarian state, these people knew neither lie nor immorality, but at one point these people are inexplicably corrupted by the presence of the Ridiculous Man. The first sign of corruption was how they began to “struggle for separation, for isolation, for individuality, for mine and thine” (ibid., p. 25). This signals that the very view of humanity as composed of monadic individuals is a lamentable effect of sin; from such sin, humanity ought to aspire to a more unitary society under divine providence (which is what Dostoevsky’s contemporary Solovyov called God-manhood through Sophia). These people are in a state of unbelief about the wholesome unity of mankind with divinity. Dostoevsky reveals that such a reversal only occurs when and to the extent that a people elevates “knowledge over feeling” (ibid., p. 26). This is what upsets the harmony of things, namely that all feeling would have to pass through the critical buffer of rational thought. Against this point of view, Dostoevsky believes that critical thought can only develop properly when it is jolted into action by feeling (and necessarily then takes this initial and equivocal feeling seriously). To put things differently, it is feeling that should model thought, not thought that models feeling. This means that the disposition to believe should not follow rational consideration but that rational consideration should accord itself to the will to believe. If one succeeds in this, then the strong barriers between thought and feeling, or between reason and will, disappear. This is why great reversals in human beings’ lives do not occur through rational consideration, but through recognizing the profound truth in feeling and then appropriately reacting to such a feeling.

4. Belief in practice Taking the surplus importance of feeling over thought into account, we can now come to a better understanding of what is involved in the will to believe and how it relates to practicing belief. Dostoevsky’s rhetorical brilliance understood very well that if he simply displayed a “holy disposition” of firm belief in Christianity, then the appeal of such a “holy person” would be minimal. Affinity is generally felt for those who struggle, not for those who are beyond doubt: “The hosanna must be tried in the crucible of doubt” (Dostoevsky 2007, p. 743). In order then to create the most profound apology for Christian faith, Dostoevsky must necessarily provide the most daunting challenge possible. Malcolm Jones notes something similar when reflecting on Ivan’s rebellion against Christianity: These two chapters [of The Brothers Karamazov] have been widely seen as containing powerful and irrefutable arguments against the Christian

120  Vanden Auweele and Vandenbussche faith: the first, that a God who permits such suffering is unworthy of worship; the second, that Christ fundamentally over-estimated the spiritual resources of members of the human race and their ability to act as morally free agents. Dostoevsky was aware of the strength of these arguments and anxious lest he fail to refute them effectively in the rest of the novel. Refutation was to be achieved not by logical argument, however, but indirectly by the juxtaposition and interaction of alternative forms of life. (Jones 2002, p. 170) While the obvious characters to illustrate the emotional appeal of Christian faith are Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazow, the issue can similarly be illustrated by means of a different protagonist of Dostoevsky, namely Rodion Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment. Rodion Raskolnikov is a destitute university student whose mental state is impressively erratic. His mania is likely caused by physical illness and the numerous psychological challenges to his well-being. For instance, he is asked to accept his sister’s self-sacrifice for his own benefit trapping herself in a loveless marriage so he could get a job (Dostoevsky 2006, p. 49); he wavers whether he should be charitable to a family that has a “rich vein” of income in the prostitution of their daughter (ibid., p. 34); he is paralyzed whether or not to save a woman from drowning (ibid., p. 203–205); and, most importantly, Raskolnikov wonders whether he is, as a superhuman being (a Napoleon), allowed to transgress societal laws by murdering an old, useless woman. What is common to all of these psychological conundrums is the question whether one is allowed to treat other human beings as objects of little to no intrinsic worth. In the first part of the novel, Raskolnikov would live a life of singular separation from other human beings. He would test whether it is possible for him to live as a monad that owes explanation nor justification to anyone. Obviously, this is the state of mind which Dostoevsky illustrates as the effect of sin, namely a life of separation where rational argumentation models our emotional state. As such, Raskolnikov tests whether or not he is capable of committing murder without regret. He sets himself to murdering a despicable old woman that will be missed by no one. Raskolnikov wants assurance that his intellectual superiority translates in a guilt-free emotional state after this most heinous act. To put it bluntly, Raskolnikov wants his emotions to follow his intellectual considerations. To Raskolnikov’s dismay, his emotions do not fall in line.15 He is haunted by his conscience and tormented by a psychological delirium after he takes the life of the “filthy old moneylender” and her sister. Raskolnikov had prophetically predicted this to happen in a scholarly article he published where he claimed that, on the one hand, “the enactment of a crime is invariably accompanied by illness” and, on the other hand, “there may exist in the world certain persons who are able . . . or rather, who are not only able, but have a perfect right to commit all sorts of atrocities and crimes,

The politics of religious commitment  121 and that I’s as if the law did not apply to them” (ibid., p. 307). Previously, Raskolnikov had asserted that certain pangs of conscience would wane over time as human beings could accustom themselves to anything: “They have shed a few tears and now are used to it. Man can get used to anything, the villain. . . . What if man, the whole human race is general, isn’t really a villain at all? That means that all the rest is just a load of superstition” (ibid., p. 34). Broadly speaking, these considerations – that some are superhuman and that human being can accustom themselves to anything – are what Dostoevsky identifies as atheism.16 But since Raskolnikov is haunted by his conscience, something does not add up. Either even the extraordinary do not have the right to use other human beings as instruments of their selfdevelopment or Raskolnikov is not an extraordinary human being. Either of these considerations has the potential to shatter Raskolnikov. The dramatic moment of disclosure occurs in a protracted and incremental conversation between Raskolnikov and the prostitute Sonya (Dostoevsky 2006, p. 374–394, 621–656). Sonya had taken it upon herself to provide for her family after her father repeatedly lost his job. Her chosen profession, prostitution, had her expelled from her family’s house, but she continues to provide for them. Her magnanimity appears the polar opposite of Raskolnikov. While Raskolnikov is generally self-possessed, Sonya is constantly overtaken by, what is at one point called, a “voracious compassion” (ibid., p. 378). Raskolnikov is characteristically annoyed when others try to play a role of importance in his life without his approval; he is particularly annoyed by his friend Razumikhin, sister Dunya and his mother’s interventions. Robert Jackson even describes the main motif of Crime and Punishment as the “dialectical of consciousness in Raskolnikov” (Jackson 1981, p. 198). This comes to something of a turnaround with Sonya: through her reminder to Raskolnikov that there is the possibility for a different, higher kind of life, Raskolnikov is opened to the possibility of gradual renewal. Raskolnikov is revived – a term reminiscent of the story of Lazarus, which Sonya recites to Raskolnikov – by a very peculiar sense of love, namely “the heart of the one containing an infinite source of life for the heart of the other” (Dostoevsky 2006, p. 655). This revival is possible, not because of any convincing counterargument that Sonya provides to Raskolnikov’s dialectics of consciousness, but through awakening Raskolnikov to the inner link that human beings share. This sheds light upon Pascal’s views of the “heart” and “rituals” of Christian religion. While a Christian life is infinitely more valuable than one of self-deception, this does not initiate faith. Faith might emerge spontaneously through acting and interacting with those actions that reveal one’s dependency on Christianity. The more one is exposed and accustomed to the rituals and virtues of Christian faith (such as compassion and asceticism), the understanding of the worth of Christian religion grows stronger.17 As long as one refuses such rituals that render one porous to the other, one remains like Raskolnikov an isolated monad. The hateful self can be overcome only

122  Vanden Auweele and Vandenbussche by recognizing the intricate connection to others. Only through the other is one saved, not through oneself. Rituals allow one to becomes porous to the other. Here, the hateful, inauthentic self clears way for the true, universal self as a member of the universal body of Christ. Pascal evokes in this context the metaphor of the “Body full of Thinking Members” (un corps plein de membres pensants). Only if one recognizes one’s dependency upon the bigger whole, one is capable of loving oneself and the other in a proper way.18

5. In conclusion A short contribution such as this one cannot do justice to all the nuances and intricacies of the political theology of Pascal and Dostoevsky. The main objective of this contribution was to point out how there is a similar conundrum in Pascal and Dostoevsky. Both of these consider themselves to be apologists for Christian faith but both equally emphasize the poverty of philosophical argumentation when it comes to believing. Pascal’s suggestion of pretending to believe can seem awkward, but it can be clarified by the appeal to the profound emotional attraction of the life of faith. Dostoevsky sought to enliven and cultivate such affinity through the creation of literary characters that find themselves at the crossroads. They are capable of taking the more promising path, not because of dialectical logic, but because of becoming receptive to the profound truth in religious feeling.

Notes 1 References to Pascal are given in the footnotes according to the editions of Lafuma (Pascal 1963) and are abbreviated as Laf. Translations are our own. 2 “C'est en faisant tout comme s'ils croyaient, en prenant de l'eau bénite, en faisant dire des messes, etc. Naturellement même cela vous fera croire . . .” (Laf 418). 3 See for instance: Williams 2008, p. 15–62. 4 For a discussion of this problem: Moriarty 2003, p. 144–161. For a discussion of the rhetorical elements of Pascal’s Pensées: Hammond 2003, p. 235–252. 5 The proximity between Dostoevsky and Pascal has often been asserted, but hardly ever expounded at length. For instance: Scanlan 2002, p. 16, 27n12. At times, Pascal and Dostoevsky are name-dropped as precursors to Existentialism, but this point of view is hardly ever elaborated upon beyond a few marginal notes. A good case in point with regard to Dostoevsky on this subject is the relatively recent Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (where Pascal is mentioned nowhere): Malpas 2012, p. 296–300; Westphal 2012, p. 334; Harries 2012, p. 187. 6 At one point, Dostoevsky was associated with groups of people that vocally advocated in favor of socialism (and he paid a dear price for this!). After he served his time in Siberia, Dostoevsky became an advocate for Christianity. The focus in his novels is usually on those who attack Christianity, rather than those holy Christians. This is likely so because the atheist is in need of conversion, not the Christian. Dostoevsky intended especially The Brothers Karamazow as

The politics of religious commitment  123 the best possible argument against atheism by exposing the self-destruction of Ivan, Dimitri and Smerdyakov. For this: Jones 2002, p. 165–173. 7 James Scanlan shows insightfully that Dostoevsky’s attack on reason is only directed at a certain Enlightenment interpretation of reason, one that inevitably leads to nihilism. This did not lead Dostoevsky towards fideism or irrationalism but to a position, not totally dissimilar from Kant, in which he pointed out the limits of reason and the need for faith to inform reason. See: Scanlan 2002, p. 234–241. For more on the mutual interpenetration of faith and reason in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: Vanden Auweele 2016, p. 279–296. 8 “Mais dans le fond, ce vilain fond de l'homme, ce figmentum malum n'est que couvert. Il n'est pas ôté” (Laf. 212). 9 “il y a eu autrefois dans l'homme un véritable bonheur, dont il ne lui reste maintenant que la marque et la trace toute vide” (Laf. 148). 10 Even though Descartes appears remarkably more optimistic than Pascal, he was aware of this fact as well. At the close of the First Meditation, Descartes notes that he has a hard time to keep up his methodological doubt in search for certainty. He is like a prisoner who prefers an imaginary freedom over the realization of his imprisonment: “But this is an arduous undertaking, and a kind of laziness brings me back to normal life. I am like a prisoner who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep; as he begins to suspect that he is asleep, he dreads being woken up and goes along with the pleasant illusion as long as he can. In the same way, I happily slide back into my old opinions and dread being shaken out of them, for fear that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labor when I wake, and that I shall have to toil not in the light, but amid the inextricable darkness of the problems I have now raised” (Descartes 1986, p. 15). 11 Malcolm Jones points out that the topic of inner and outer silence in Dostoevsky derives from the latter’s hesitations regarding the accuracy of language when it comes to things transcendent. According to the apophatic tradition to which Dostoevsky was well-disposed, only honest and utter silence could inform one truthfully about God (Jones 2002, p. 171). But silence and contemplation are not the whole story for Dostoevsky; indeed, a Christian life must necessarily result in social action wherein one takes up the guilt of “everyone for everything.” Only this latter spirit of social commitment ultimately supports Christian life, not any revelatory fideism. This will be developed further next, but it is attended more in full here: Wyman 2016. 12 For more on how reason plays a function in Pascalian faith: Pavlovits 2007. 13 This view likely stems from Augustine. Among other places, see: Augustine 2010, p. 155–156 [7.17–18] and 162–163 [13.25–26]. 14 See also: Lauth 1950, p. 18; Eltchaninoff 1998, p. 69. James Scanlan suggest, however, that while Dostoevsky’s style might be dialogical, his philosophy is monological (Scanlan 2002). For a more recent discussion of this issue: Blank 2010. 15 This is the main source of Raskolnikov’s distress. His emotions refuse to adhere to his conscious thought. The turnaround happens in Crime and Punishment when Raskolnikov gradually learns to model his thought after his emotions rather than the other way around. For an overview of the emotional development of Raskolnikov: Furtak 2019, p. 46–69. 16 Dostoevsky’s main opposition is not to socialism per se, but to atheism (which usually accompanies socialism). This explains how and why Dostoevsky constantly argues against any theory that is reductive of human life – such as scientism, utilitarianism, atheism, socialism – on behalf of something more. This something more finds a psychological content in Raskolnikov’s crime and his

124  Vanden Auweele and Vandenbussche punishment: if atheism were true then Raskolnikov’s conscience should not torment him. For more on this: Thiess 1971, p. 214. 17 “Il y a trois moyens de croire: la raison, la coutume, (l')inspiration. La religion chrétienne qui seule a la raison n'admet point pour ses vrais enfants ceux qui croient sans inspiration. Ce n'est pas qu'elle exclue la raison et la coutume, au contraire; mais il faut ouvrir son esprit aux preuves, s'y confirmer par la coutume, mais s'offrir par les humiliations aux inspirations” (Laf. 808). 18 “Pour régler l'amour qu'on se doit à soi-même il faut s'imaginer un corps plein de membres pensants, car nous sommes membres du tout” (Laf. 368).

Bibliography Augustine. 2010. ‘On Grace and Free Choice’. In: On the Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings. Edited by Peter King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by R. Brassier. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by C. Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blank, Ksana. 2010. Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Botton, Alain de. 2013. Religion for Atheists. London: Vintage Books. Camus, Albert. 2008. ‘L’homme revolté’. In: Oeuvres Complètes: Volume III. Edited by Raymond Gay-Crosier et al. Paris: Gallimard. Critchley, Simon. 2012. The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. London: Verso. Descartes, René. 1986. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desmond, William. 2016. The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity Among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1972–1990. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: Nauka. ———. 2006. Crime and Punishment. Translated by David McDuff. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2007. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by C. Garnett. New York: Signett Classics. ———. 2008. The Dream of the Ridiculous Man: And the Little Orphan. Translated by Constance Garnett. Gloucester: Dodo Press. Elster, Jon. 2003. ‘Pascal and Decision Theory’. In: The Cambridge Companion to Pascal. Edited by Nicholas Hammond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eltchaninoff, Michel. 1998. Dostoïevski. Roman et Philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Furtak, Rick Anthony. 2019. ‘Love, Suffering, and Gratitude for Existence: Moral and Existential Emotions in Crime and Punishment’. In: Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment: Philosophical Perspectives. Edited by Robert Guay. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 46–69. Hammond, Nicholas. 2003. ‘Pascal’s Pensées and the Art of Persuasion’. In: The Cambridge Companion to Pascal. Edited by Nicholas Hammond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 235–252.

The politics of religious commitment  125 Harries, Karsten. 2012. ‘The Antinomy of Being: Heidegger’s Critique of Humanism’. In: Cambridge Companion to Existentialism. Edited by Steven Crowell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 178–198. Hitchens, Christopher. 2009. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve. Jackson, Robert. 1981. The Art of Dostoevsky. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. James, William. 1979. The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, Malcolm. 2002. ‘Dostoevskii and Religion’. In: The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii. Edited by W. J. Leatherbarrow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 165–173. Lauth, Reinhard. 1950. Die Philosophie Dostojewskis. München: Piper Verlag. Malpas, Jeff. 2012. ‘Existentialism as Literature’. In: Cambridge Companion to Existentialism. Edited by Steven Crowell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 296–300. Moriarty, Michael. 2003. ‘Grace and Religious Belief in Pascal’. In: The Cambridge Companion to Pascal. Edited by Nicholas Hammond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 144–161. Pascal, Blaise. 1963. Oeuvres Complètes. Edited by Louis Lafuma. Paris: Seuil. Pavlovits, Tamás. 2007. Le rationalisme de Pascal. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Scanlan, James. 2002. Dostoevsky the Thinker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Thiess, Frank. 1971. Dostojewskis Realismus am Rande der Transzendenz. Stuttgart: Seewald Verlag. Vanden Auweele, Dennis. 2016. ‘Existential Struggles in Dostoevsky’s the Brothers Karamazov’. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 80: 279–296. Westphal, Merold. 2012. ‘Existentialism and Religion’. In: Cambridge Companion to Existentialism. Edited by Steven Crowell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 322–341. Williams, Rowan. 2008. Language, Faith + Fiction. Waco: Baylor University Press. Wood, James. 2004. The Book Against God. London: Vintage Books. Wyman, Alina. 2016. The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

7 The East-West divide in the European Union and its overcoming Balázs M. Mezei

1. The East-West divide Speaking about the north-south divide has been widespread in political thought. There is indeed a significant economic and political gap between the more developed northern parts of the world, such as North America, Europe and Japan and the less developed southern parts, especially Latin America, the Indian subcontinent and Africa. However, this is not the only significant rift among various parts of the world. We find a different divide in Europe itself between the western and the eastern parts of the European Union. This gap opens up between the group of the developed Western countries themselves, which have flourished for centuries and the eastern countries that joined the European Union after the long decades of Soviet oppression. While in what follows I focus on the latter divide, I do not deny the existence of other differences, even minor ones, inside the Western world. My aim in this text is simple: I want to outline the form and content of this division between the eastern and western countries in the European Union and suggest a complex way to overcome this divide not merely economically or politically but rather on the intellectual and ultimately on the philosophical level. Despite the triumphalism of various platforms in the European Union, the difference between the old and the new members of the Union is significant. By the new members of the European Union I refer especially to the countries which used to be under Communist rule after 1945, i.e., the Baltic states, the Visegrád countries and the Balkan (with the exception of Greece). In fact, this difference is much deeper and manifold than the differences between the states of the US; or between some of the old members of the European Union, such as the Netherlands and Italy or Germany and Spain. In the latter cases, the common European traditions have been maintained and the economic differences do not go beyond a certain level. Even in our present situation, when the economic crisis hits such countries as Greece or Italy, the consequences remain relatively modest for everyday life. For instance, the annual average income per capita is still beyond 30,000 USD in countries harmed by severe financial difficulties in the group of the Western countries of the European Union. In contrast, in the newly joined countries,

East-West divide in the European Union  127 the same average income is below, sometimes significantly below the level of the more developed Western countries (see the OECD statistics 2019). The economic differences between Denmark and South Italy may be quite considerable; yet the structure of the economy, the functioning of the state and the mentality of the population remain in the framework of traditionally developed differences between territories of various traditions, namely the northern Protestant and the southern Catholic ones. The differences between the eastern and western parts of the European Union, however, are of a different kind and nature. It is of a different kind, because the western parts of the Union did not go through the specifically Soviet type of political, cultural and economic oppression; and it is of a different nature, because this kind of oppression lastingly influenced not only politics and economy, but the strength and the role of tradition, religion, cultural memory and the daily moral of the population. We should not underestimate these differences, because they affect the present situation of the Union and may become more significant in the future. In contradistinction to the popular view, the differences have not been abolished by the new democratic period even in the most developed ex-Soviet countries, such as the Czech Lands and there are signs that they will determine the future course of events as well.

2. The lasting effects of Soviet communism on Eastern Europe The two decisive historic events, which have determined our present culture in Eastern Europe are the Holocaust and Soviet Communism. My family has been victimized in both: my mother hardly survived the Holocaust in 1944, and my father was sentenced after the 1956 revolution against the Soviets. I consider this coincidence of the two kinds of historic oppression symptomatic: my generation carries a double burden and we have the responsibility to explain it to others hardly involved in any of these events. Indeed, the Holocaust is a historic trauma, and Communism is a shaking experience of a meaningless tyranny. In both cases, human wickedness came to the fore with such intensity we hardly find in other historical epochs in Europe (Mezei 2013, especially p. 3–29). Economy and religion have been equally involved in these traumas. On the level of economy, monolithic structures were created during the Communist period, structures which survived the collapse of the system and received new forms after 1990. To put it into simple terms: the earlier statecontrolled monopolies have been substituted by similarly monopolistic economic structures of influential business groups from the Western world. And these structures have in many cases continued the one-sided economic policies in a different, but perhaps in many cases even more inhuman ways than was the case before. For instance, before the change in 1990 energy was supplied by the central state system of production and distribution. After the change, this structure was sold to private and state-owned Western

128  Balázs M. Mezei groups, which formed latent syndicates to keep their prices as high as possible to the detriment of the interest of the consumers. The result has been the impoverishment of the population after the early 1990s. Similar examples can be abundantly mentioned.1 In other words, the structures of the previous system have been used to develop modernized yet equally exploitive structures in economy, the finances and the services, which contributed to the rapid growth of poverty in a once flourishing region.2 Today, it is not only the relative poverty of the population that is perspicuous, but also the cultural and spiritual impoverishment. Religion, as is known, was officially persecuted under Communism and even if the system became softer during the 1980s, the direct control of the Christian churches by the Communist state did not change. There are reliable reports to the effect that almost all leaders of the Christian churches were controlled by the secret police in some way.3 Obviously, under such circumstances religious life could not flourish, since the priests and ministers had little energy left to contribute to the cultivation of spiritual life. After the change in 1990, an overall purification and reconstruction of the spiritual presence of the churches in the new societies remained merely a hope. Facing sincerely the past under Communism proved to be too hard a challenge. We must admit that the task would have been difficult in the moral, ecclesiological and political terms; and we must admit that the reorganization of church institutions, such as schools and hospitals, needed heroic effort. One should not underestimate the institutional success the Christian churches reached after 1990; we need to see, however, that the institutional reorganization is not the same as facing mistakes of the past, a precondition of a maintained spiritual revival (as to the “Ostpolitik” of the Vatican see Adriány 2005; Melloni 2006). The exception here is Poland, which had a characteristic situation with important historical roots. The Polish Catholic Church functioned not merely as the visible organization of a spiritual reality, but also as the cement of national identity during the centuries of the Russian oppression before 1919. The Church was the motor of the opposition against the German occupation after 1939 as well. Thus, the Communist state, established in 1945, had to respect the church and secure a certain, yet ambivalently maintained, position to its members during the Soviet period. As the most important consequence, even during the Soviet period the majority of the Polish population remained religious and attached to the church. This situation has led to the election of Karol Wojtyła to be Pope John Paul II, an event culturally deeply influential in the history of the collapse of Soviet communism in Eastern Europe (cf. John Paul II 2017).

3. Two waves of secularization There have been two important waves of secularization in the Eastern European countries. The first was under the atheistic regimes between 1945 and

East-West divide in the European Union  129 1990. After 1990, in most of these countries a surge of interest in religion and spirituality appeared. The revival of the renewed religious interest lasted more or less a decade. I emphasize here the expression “interest,” because what we witnessed was not a genuine religious revival, but rather a new curiosity for, and an attention to, the phenomena of religion, the churches, the spiritual and liturgical life previously discouraged, forbidden or even persecuted. After a decade, a second, even more forceful wave of secularization emerged in these countries. This secularization is of a double kind: on the one hand, the institutional structures of the churches have been re-established to a certain extent – for instance the Catholic Church established new universities in Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine and further developed her most important institutes in Poland. On the other hand, attitudes and behaviors of extreme secularism have begun to imbue society. The figures of church attendance show the two waves very clearly: during the 1990s, church attendance rose and reached a level higher than the average figures in more religious Southern European countries. After 2000, however, the tide turned, the church attendance began to sink and it is now very low in some countries, such as Hungary and not very high in other countries, such as Slovakia; even in Poland there is a gradual decrease. The numerical level of church attendance in the whole region shows a slow but constant decline.4 Secularization is fundamentally similar in various countries. It is about the growing indifference to traditional religious and spiritual values, morally focused life in terms of traditional virtues, and faith and hope in a power transcending the frames of this world (Taylor 2007). The use of the internet rules all. However, the nature of secularization in Eastern Europe is different from the Western kind. In Western Europe, we see a parallelism between the growth of material well-being, the spread of technology, the popularity of a superficial egoism on the one hand, and secularization on the other hand. In Eastern Europe, nevertheless, we meet a paradox: material and technological well-being has not been conspicuously increased during the past two decades; material security even sunk, sometimes dramatically. The liberal face of life has not become popular, because if millions have to struggle to pay the bills every month, they are less perceptive to the sunny side of life. Yet secularization has grown and even accelerated among such circumstances. This is so much so that this second wave of secularization seems to be deeper and more permanent than the first wave used to be under Communism. For under Communism, traditional attitudes and behaviors were maintained, often out of a historic defiance. But in our days, and especially after 2000, the attraction of traditional ways of life, patterns and ideals has drastically dwindled. The two waves of secularization are certainly different in nature. The first was the consequence of a totalitarian political form, which persecuted religion and uprooted religious structures of the society. The second wave

130  Balázs M. Mezei of secularization, however, appears to be the consequence of the spread of technology, which contains as a secondary cause the powerlessness of various churches facing this spectacular change. Nevertheless, the two waves belong together historically, because the emergence of totalitarianism and technology are just the two faces of the same coin, as reliable analyses show (Arendt 1951; Husserl 1956; Jonas 1984). In Eastern Europe, the two waves of secularization have an intrinsic connection: the drive for new technologies of the Communist period has been continued by a general modernization after 1990, which has resulted in an explosion-like proliferation of new technologies in all walks of life (for the internet use see Internetworldstats 2019). Concerning the main causes of the second wave of secularization one possible explanation is the spread of a culture the central expression of which is the internet (perhaps we may today also say: Facebook, Google, etc.). It belongs to a different analysis to show the nature of this new culture, its structures and contents, but one important feature is very obvious: viewed on this platform, reality changes into an often chaotic set of briskly emerging and disappearing data.5 I do not think, however, that this factor has very strong explanatory force; among the youth, no doubt, the internet culture has changed traditional patterns and attractions importantly. But the second wave of secularization has not only reached the younger generation; it involved the older ones as well. Thus, in my estimate, there are the following factors behind the new secularization: • The dramatic expansion of material insecurity in Eastern Europe after 2000; • The delayed effects of the collapse of the last big narrative, Communism; • The failure of joining Western Europe’s efficiency of economic and political organization; • The collapse of general forms of religious and spiritual orientation.

4. Polarities in Europe: countries on the periphery Let me focus on the previous factors in turn. The dramatic expansion of material insecurity in Eastern Europe after 2000. The main element here is the following fact: while the general level of prices in Eastern Europe is on the average level of 80% of the prices in Germany, average salaries are on the level of 30% of the corresponding level in Germany. In more concrete terms, salaries adjusted to the cost of living differ strongly in these countries. In terms of proportions, the relation of average salaries between Poland and Germany is 1:3, between Hungary and France is 1:4, between Slovakia and Luxembourg is 1:5. In the circle of the new Eastern European members of the Union the same average figure is about 1:5. It must be noted that these figures were about 1:2 before 1990; and 25 years after the change, the trends are clearly about the growing gap between old and new members of the European Union.6

East-West divide in the European Union  131 The delayed effect of the collapse of the last big narrative, Communism. We should take into consideration that Communism, especially the construction of Marxism-Leninism, was the last “big narrative” dominant in whole societies in Europe. While the plausibility of Marxism-Leninism was very low – only a small percentage of the population found it credible – still, as a pattern it maintained the general belief that there was a possibility of a meaningful understanding of the world, history, society and human life and there is a rationally formed and just structure one is called to realize in economy. After 1990 most of the intellectuals in Eastern Europe believed that, once Marxism-Leninism collapsed as a plausible structure, a new pattern of interpretation, a new “big narrative” would emerge. “Capitalism,” “liberalism,” “democracy” were natural candidates for this role. Nevertheless, these candidates failed in the eyes of the majority of the population. No plausible substitute for Marxism-Leninism has been given in societies where traditional structures were mostly destroyed and moral patterns were significantly invalidated. The logical result is as follows: a general pessimism prevails concerning the importance of rationality, justice, economic possibilities and in general the Western type of democracy. Today, the popularity of the European Union is relatively low in most of these countries.7 It must be a different task to assess the value of some “big narratives” of Western history and their relation to totalitarian forms of power. Generally, I claim that a “big narrative” does not necessarily involve political or cultural totalitarianism; and the criticism of narratives, such as MarxismLeninism, does not cancel the plausibility of the natural human drive to understand the universe and man’s place in it in their entirety and interaction. For instance, Darwinism is certainly a “big narrative” especially in its neoDarwinian and cultural forms; yet scholars and scientists of culture would reject a view which construes a necessarily link between neo-Darwinism and totalitarianism (cf. especially Nagel 2012). The failure of joining Western Europe’s efficiency of economic and political organization. The dubious popularity of the European Union among its new members has two sides. On the one hand, this is the consequence of the failure of joining the efficiency Western economic and political organizations. On the other hand, the increasingly centralized character of the European Union, with its objective of creating a higher-level political community in form of a centralized federation, has met dissatisfaction or even defiance in many Eastern European political communities. The European Committee, the European Parliament, the Venice Commission and other institutions launched sharp criticisms of the legal and institutional developments of some Eastern European countries, such as Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland and Hungary. However, both the content and the form of such criticisms prompted dissatisfaction not only in the political elite of these countries, but in the population itself as well. The expression of this dissatisfaction is often labeled as “populism” on the journalistic level. However, populism is not about certain contents but rather about a certain method of communicating

132  Balázs M. Mezei political messages equally shared by various segments of the political spectrum (Kaltwasser et al. 2017). The European Union is increasingly seen as an overcentralized bureaucratic power with peculiar interests not identical with the interests of individual countries or the whole of the community. This perception has led to the result of the referendum about the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. This event may prove to be the watershed event in the history of the European Union. Without the United Kingdom, the development of the Union may point to an ever growing process of centralization based on the axis of French-German political cooperation, even some kind of unification (Jacobs 2018). Yet given the traditional plurality of the European peoples, languages and cultures, it is doubtful if an overstrained centralization can work in this historical and cultural context. It is even more questionable if a new big narrative, based on the fragments of Marxism, liberalism and “green cultures” can in fact take over the role of previous totalitarian ideologies, even if with the assistance of a fully reshaped Catholic church (Febvre 1999; Gregg 2013; Murray 2017; for the Catholic “revolution,” see O’Hanlon 2018). The collapse of general forms of religious and spiritual orientation. As a parallel effect, the trust in general religious and spiritual forms has been significantly weakened in these countries. What I call the second wave of secularization is relevant here. I want to focus on the role of the churches in this process. In many countries, such as those in Latin America, the churches and especially the Catholic church function as a mediating and reconciling power between strong economic and political pressure groups on the one hand, and the often-defenseless majority of the population on the other hand. Charitable and educational institutions are maintained by the churches to help the poor and the weak in many ways. However, a similar role of the churches has been only weakly realized in Eastern Europe. The reason is simple: the churches in these countries did not expect the overall drastic social developments after 1990. They were and remained largely unprepared to face such deterioration of social and political conditions. There have been important efforts to develop structures in the form of charity organizations. It would be a mistake to undervalue the efforts and the effects of these organizations. Nevertheless, due especially to the unexpected critical turn of developments after 2000, these organizations struggle to satisfy the needs they have to face (see for instance the activities of Hungarian Maltese Charity Service 2019). More importantly, the churches were not sufficiently prepared to fill the gap resulting from the collapse of the big narrative of Marxism-Leninism. The general expectation may have been that Christianity would automatically reenter the “naked public square” and regain its previous influence. It was not only the structural problems of the churches that hindered the fulfillment of such hopes. The age has also changed; and in it, human beings. Big narratives did not seem to be missing for the generation born around 2000.

East-West divide in the European Union  133 Instead, the culture of the internet in its various forms (popular music, film series of various kinds, movie culture, messaging community platforms, etc.) seemed to be able to reorient the young generation all over the world, so also in Eastern Europe, from any interest in big narratives to special forms of consumption. In some constitutions of the new European Union members, such as the Polish or the Hungarian one, Christianity is named as the official focus of tradition and culture. Nevertheless, the societies of these countries have become largely secularized and religion as a big narrative does not seem to be capable of filling the psychological, theoretical and cultural gap. I keep mentioning this fact in view of the probable consequences: if in these countries both the level of welfare and the nature of popular culture prove to be unable to answer the needs derived from a unique historical structure, as Communism was, new forms of ideology may become dominant, such as extreme nationalism – a real danger for the future of the European Union (see specially Breuilly 2013, Chapter 1).

5. The cry of the weak: how the Church can react The situation in Eastern Europe may be labeled as “South-Americanization.”8 This label must be specified in many ways and the differences have to be clearly seen. In a general sense, however, the description is not incorrect. In the perspective of economy, the gap between the real costs of living and the average level of income is close to the proportions in Latin-American societies. The gap between wealthy groups and average people is again of a similar measure (Hoffman 2011). In the perspective of culture, we see a different situation, given the two waves of secularization and the fate of the big narratives in the Eastern European countries. In political terms, institutional democracy is still fairly strong in Eastern Europe, but we see the growing influence of pressure groups favoring weak governments and low level state organization, which help the uncontrolled mechanisms of gaining the highest possible profit in detriment to the well-being of the consumers. Just as in Latin America, we witness here strong political reactions to this development in the form of some governments’ anti-monopoly policies. It is noticeable that such efforts meet political and economic opposition from important organizations of the European Union, an opposition often visibly generated by influential economic and financial groups. Christians living in Eastern Europe today need to adopt attitudes corresponding to the situation I described. “South-Americanization” in this perspective may be understood in a unique way as a pattern for Christian individuals and churches as well, a pattern – and here I turnaround the merely negative meaning of the term – emphasizing love, solidarity, empathy and the ability of listening to the Cry of the Weak (cf. Francis 2019). I do not mean to incorporate the long tradition of the Catholic Church in Latin America into this notion of “South-Americanization.” We are all aware

134  Balázs M. Mezei of the role the Church played for centuries in these countries, its troublesome loyalty to the power of kings and dictators. However, the tradition of the Committed Church, the church of social justice in all its psychological, individual, spiritual and institutional forms, is to be studied and used with all the necessary caution and adaptation (cf. Central Intelligence Agency 1969). The results of the Medellin Conference in 1968 (Medellín Conference Statement 1968) may become important in this context. The follow-up conference in Puebla in 1979 (cf. John Paul II 1979) reaffirmed the Church’s commitment to social justice without Marxist overtones (Pawliková 1997). The main feature of the social role of the Committed Church and its present day legacy is the Church’s taking seriously the difficult social and political situation of these countries and acting not only for the otherworldly salvation of human persons but also for the bettering of their social, economic and political situation. On this basis, the South American churches developed complex structures of education, social assistance and spiritual care. In a similar way, though under fairly different circumstances, the Eastern European national churches are called to develop concrete structures of love and solidarity and attempt to defend the weak and the poor in a determined way. In economy, Christians have to call attention to the dramatic situation of big parts of the population. For instance, in Hungary predatory lending after 2004 has destroyed the prospects of a whole generation. Due to the growing burden of interest and capital paying, members of this generation have lost their capability for contributing to economic development. About two million people of a population of ten million have been victimized of predatory lending, which blocks the normal functioning of an economy. It is a sad fact that representatives of the churches have not weighed in on this burning problem. The reason is obvious: the structures of these churches, the attitude of their agents could not face such a situation. The same can be said about the second wave of secularization and the political situation of an increasingly centralized European Union – our churches have so far little to say about them. The significant change may be expected from Pope Francis and his new attitude explained for instance in the Instrumentum laboris for the so-called Pan-Amazon Synod in Rome in 2019 (Working Document 2019). It is therefore an urgent task to develop what I term the concrete structures of Christian solidarity in these countries. In view of the present situation, this call may come late; however, if the economic and political trend of South-Americanization can be turned around – which calls for determined actions – then it is a task for the coming two decades to express Christian solidarity in concrete terms. This is not only about the economy; it is about the plausibility of Christianity in these countries some of which now feel mistreated by various organs of the European Union. Given nevertheless the general cultural level of the population of these countries, and given the responsibility many members of the Christian intelligentsia possess, my conclusion is not pessimistic: we need to build up renewed structures which

East-West divide in the European Union  135 make possible that the churches turn to individuals, families, minorities and help them with all the means of charity to change the trend of a process which victimize them. Most importantly, the specific value of human persons must be put into the center in our Christianity – a value often neglected by economic predation and the emerging forms of a new European ideology (see again the Working Document 2019). If we as members of the Church recognize not only the need for action but also the right form of concrete structures of solidarity, such as institutions and cultural activities, then the political and economic South-Americanization can be contained and turned around. In this case, the European Union may survive the present political, economic and cultural crisis. Indeed, a new European narrative can be developed, but only on condition that it cannot inherit any sign of a totalitarian political ideology and it must contain the legacy of Christianity (with a critical eye see Kaeding et al. 2019). The culture we need is what Pope Francis termed “the culture of encounter.” As he declared in Rio Janeiro, being with Christ does not mean isolating ourselves from others. Rather, it is a ‘being with’ in order to go forth and encounter others. . . . In many places, and in general in this economic humanism that has been imposed throughout the world, the culture of exclusion, a ‘throwaway culture,’ is spreading. There is no place for the elderly or for the unwanted child; there is no time for that poor person in the street. At times, it seems that for some people, human relations are regulated by two modern ‘dogmas’: efficiency and pragmatism. . . . Have the courage to go against the tide, against this throwaway culture. Let us not reject this gift of God which is the one family of his children. Encountering and welcoming everyone, solidarity – a word which is hidden in our society, as if it were a bad word, solidarity, and fraternity: these are what make our society truly human. . . . Be servers of communion and of the culture of encounter! (cf. Fares 2015; the quotation is from the Vatican News Agency, 28.7.2013) The right understanding of South-Americanization in Eastern Europe today, accordingly, is the development of the concrete structures of this “culture of encounter.” We need to fight the “throwaway culture” in the sense that the rich cultural legacy of Eastern Europe should not be thrown away – it needs to be maintained, cherished and further developed in the genuine community of the European nations. If and only if this legacy can be rediscovered, acknowledged and further developed it may become possible to overcome the east-west divide in the European Union in the best possible way, i.e., through the cultural heritage common to the peoples of this region (cf. Mezei 2013, p. 201–219).

136  Balázs M. Mezei

6. The philosophy of revelation as the way to overcome the intellectual divide The “culture of encounter” as a central idea is especially inviting on the intellectual level and, in particular, in the context of philosophy. In my work on the notion of divine revelation (Mezei 2017), I offer a historical and systematic overview of the philosophical importance of divine revelation in the framework of various cultural and intellectual developments. In a further step, I have developed the philosophy of revelation with special respect to the Central European tradition (Mezei forthcoming). I argue that Central European traditions in thinking, especially the tradition of integral and dynamic developments in philosophy, can contribute to the rise of the new form of European culture in which philosophy, especially phenomenology, plays the central role. Phenomenology is the kind of thinking that is open to infinite self-enrichment not only in a given setting but also in an intercultural and interdisciplinary sense. More concretely, the history of phenomenology can be reconstructed in terms of the emergence of the understanding that phenomenology, in its essence, is the intercultural understanding of revelation. Revelation is the most central notion in our European legacy, with Hebrew and Greek origins, which can be reinterpreted in a unitary fashion on the basis of a radical understanding. From Franz Brentano through Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger to Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion, the philosophical development shows the materialization of revelation as the central subject of European philosophical thinking (for more details see, again, Mezei 2017). There is another way leading to the proper elaboration of the philosophy of revelation, a way interculturally receptive to various approaches. This is the path of the filosofía del pueblo, “philosophy of the people.” I include this path not only because the thought of Pope Francis emerged from this background, but also because I see here a possibility to elaborate the question of the cultural and intellectual plurality of the sources of a philosophy of divine revelation. As among others Rafael Luciani have shown (Luciani 2017), the teología del pueblo, i.e., a complex development of liberation theology, contributed to the formation of the intellectual background of Pope Francis. Instead of teología, however, I want to speak of filosofía. Logically, if there is a teología del pueblo, there is also a filosofía del pueblo, a kind of philosophy of liberation. By entering this realm, we perform a move parallel to the discovery and elaboration of the notion of the life-world by the later Edmund Husserl. Husserl recognized that, in order to reach the transcendental realm, we need to begin with the most elementary experiences of our everyday life. The result was his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, published in 1938 (Husserl 1970). The life-world of Husserl is the vivid realm of the richness of local experience. This experience naturally tends to give birth to the unitary framework in which truth can be properly conceived. In a thoroughgoing fashion,

East-West divide in the European Union  137 Husserl demonstrates that the richness of local experience – also intercultural experience – calls for the unitary understanding of reality in a transcendental sense. This transcendentalism points to the central role of human personhood in its egological structure, i.e., to what I call the ultimate source of truth. This source is pre-phenomenologically called “revelation” and in my own approach I apply this term in order to describe the emergence, the form and the content of the ultimate source of truth. The philosophy of the people also needs to begin with the experience of fundamental richness. What we see in this experience is the emergence of the sensus communis pointing to the ultimate unity of all knowledge. This unity emerges first in the form of distinctive traditions of local experience, characteristically reflected in philosophical traditions. The philosophy of the people means therefore to rediscover these traditions and liberate them from the exploitation of intellectual and cultural invasions. To become aware of our own traditions means again to contribute to the richness of the common heritage on the basis of which we can build of a common language and a common culture in the radical perspective of the ultimate source of all truth; in the perspective of “radical revelation.” The “philosophy of the people” as a philosophy of liberation reclaims the traditions of Central European philosophy, i.e., those forms of thinking which originate in the distinctive cultural situation between East and West and North and South. This central position is indeed very important to create new connections among all sides of the various divisions fracturing the European Union. Central European philosophy includes Austrian, Southern German, Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Croatian philosophy. I am not suggesting a national, geographical or historical approach to philosophy here. I am merely pointing out that the natural context of a philosophy of revelation is phenomenology; and the natural context of phenomenology is the variety of philosophies of Central European origin – criticism as opposed to dogmatism, transcendentalism as opposed to local realism, ontology as opposed to epistemology, philosophy of religion as opposed to dogmatic theology. It is important to rediscover these traditions and formulate their central message, a message pointing to a unified understanding of truth as the forming power of the cultural unity in the European Union. This philosophy of liberation receives a meaning somewhat different from the meaning of the filosofía del pueblo. We need to return to the things themselves, but also to our own traditions in philosophy; we need to liberate them from misunderstanding and misuse. If this endeavor is successful, the result is, in some form, a philosophy of divine revelation, an audacious philosophy of truth and reality, indeed the implicit philosophy about which the encyclical letter Fides et ratio offers some most impressive insights. There is much work to be done here, and this work entails the further interpretation of the work of St John Paul II (cf. John Paul II 2019), himself an important representative of Central European thought.

138  Balázs M. Mezei If we find the way to this understanding of philosophy, we can hope to regain the very meaning of truth, the meaning of philosophy itself. Consequently, we may perceive again the meaning of the unity of culture in Europe above all divisions. The discovery of the life-world meant for Husserl an important step in the way to overcome the alienation of various scientific disciplines from one another. It also meant to reach a new and unified understanding of intellectual life, i.e., philosophy as the final framework of all sciences which can define the real meaning of a science. In a similar fashion, we can overcome the various divisions in our current European culture, especially the east-west divide, by rediscovering our philosophical life-world, the Central European traditions with their original richness, dynamic and integral nature and also with its capacity to create a unified form of thinking. Thereby we can contribute to the reclaiming of the overall meaning of philosophy and, on this very basis, the intellectual unity of our common European home. We may also become able to liberate ourselves from the negative effects of the second wave of secularization, i.e., the effects that tend to turn our attention away from the necessity to find, beyond all richness and plurality, the common themes and motives of our culture, the common horizon which define the world in which we are to build up our common home. While we need to respect and receive the richness of various approaches and the abundance of intellectual diversity, we may also emphasize the importance of the Central European traditions as the matrix of a unifying thinking, a receptive and developing kind of philosophy, a phenomenology of the future, which opens the new perspective of the radical understanding of divine revelation in the midst of our human reality.

Notes 1 A good indicator of the level of corruption is the CPI or Corruption Perception Index. It is interesting that among the new member countries, Hungary and Poland are a little less affected than the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Rumania or Bulgaria – here again cultural differences must play an important role. See: Corruption ­Perceptions Index 2018. 2 As the world statistics of Angus Madison shows, the per capita GDP of the countries now belonging to the western region of the new Union members (Poland, the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia) were at the level of France, Germany or Denmark in 1913. Today, the same data shows a 1:3 or even a 1:4 difference to the detriment of the new members. (However, the GDP does not express the per capita income, about which see some figures next.) See ­Madison 2003, p. 59 ff. 3 Stefano Bottoni writes in his article on the connection between the Hungarian secret agency and the Vatican that “according to cautious estimates,” ten of 13 bishops of the Catholic Church in Hungary were collaborators of the Communist secret police in 1987. See Bottoni 2013. 4 The only thoroughgoing statistics we have of the region is of 2004 (www.gallup. com/poll/13117/religion-europe-trust-filling-pews.aspx). This shows that church attendance is very low in the Czech Lands and Hungary, and very high in Poland (accessed August 28, 2019).

East-West divide in the European Union  139 5 An important characteristic of the internet is that data just a few years old are hardly detectable for average users; one needs special tools to download documents uploaded to some internet segment just a few years earlier. The world of the internet is like the ocean; its rapidly changing nature is conspicuous. 6 To pick out just a few figures, I mention that a university professor beyond 15 years of experience earns an annual gross salary of 19,620 Euro in the Czech Lands; 15,862 in Hungary; 9,178 in Slovakia; and 6,286 in Romania. In contrast, the corresponding salaries in some western members of the Union are 62,406 (Austria); 50,879 (France); 56,132 (Germany) or 34,908 (Spain). For the figures see European University Institute 2019. 7 For the spectacular spread of Euroscepticism see the figures of the European Council of Foreign Relations 2020. 8 “South-Americanization corresponds to an orientation of the liberal capitalist type. It consists of a reinforcement of a class, or certain propertied or privileged classes, who benefit from economic relationships with external markets either by direct association with them or through the power and indirect profit which they derive from economic colonialism. Between the privileged minority and the rest of the population, the economic and social gap remains very wide, or continues to increase, since the channels of upward social mobility are practically blocked. This is the type of society that continues to prevail in South America after a ­century of political independence, and this is the origin of its name” (Rocher 2004, p. 265).

Bibliography Adriány, Gabriel. 2005. Die Ostpolitik des Vatikans 1958–1978 gegenüber Ungarn. Herne: Verlag Tibor Schäfer. Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bottoni,Stefano.2013.www.academia.edu/243024/Egy_kulonleges_kapcsolat_tortenete_ A_magyar_titkosszolgalat_es_a_Szentszek_1961-1978 (accessed 28.08.2019). Breuilly, John. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Central Intelligence Agency. 1969. The Role of the Committed Church in Latin-America After the Second World War. www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/ document_conversions/14/esau-42.pdf (accessed 28.08.2019). Corruption Perceptions Index. 2018. http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/ (accessed 28.08.2019). European Council of Foreign Relations. 2020. https://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/ECFR79_ EUROSCEPTICISM_BRIEF_AW.pdf (accessed 27.01.2020). European University Institute. 2019. www.eui.eu/ProgrammesAndFellowships/ AcademicCareersObservatory/CareerComparisons/SalaryComparisons.aspx (accessed 28.08.2019). Fares, Diego SJ. 2015. The Heart of Pope Francis: How a New Culture of Encounter Is Changing the Church and the World. New York: Herder & Herder. Febvre, Lucien. 1999. L’Europe. Paris: Perrin. Francis, Pope. 2019. ‘Message of His Holiness Pope Francis’. Third World Day of The Poor. 34 Sunday in Ordinary Time, 17 November. http://w2.vatican.va/content/ francesco/en/messages/poveri/documents/papa-francesco_20190613_messaggioiii-giornatamondiale-poveri-2019.html (accessed 10.12.2019). Gregg, Samuel. 2013. Becoming Europe. London and New York: Encounter Books.

140  Balázs M. Mezei Hoffman, David E. 2011. The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia. New York: Public Affairs. Hungarian Maltese Charity Service (Magyar Máltai Szeretetszolgálat). 2019. www. maltai.hu/ (accessed 22.08.2019). Husserl, Edmund. 1956. Erste Philosophie: Teil I. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Internetworldstats. 2019. www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm (accessed 28.08.2019). Jacobs, Francis B. 2018. The EU After the Brexit. Cham: Springer, Palgrave Macmillan. John Paul II, Saint, Pope. 1979. Apostolic Journey to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and the Bahamas, 25 January–1 February. Third General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate. Address of His Holiness John Paul II, Puebla, Mexico, Sunday, 28 January. https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1979/ january/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19790128_messico-puebla-episc-latam.html. ———. 2017. In God’s Hands: The Spiritual Diaries of Pope John Paul II. London: William Collins. ———. 2019. Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio. http://w2.vatican.va/content/johnpaul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html (accessed 22.08.2019). Jonas, Hans. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kaeding, Michael, Johannes Pollak and Paul Schmidt (eds.). 2019. The Future of Europe: Views from the Capitals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy. 2017:‘Populism: An Overview of the Concept and the State of the Art’. In: The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford ­University Press. Luciani, Rafael. 2017. Pope Francis and the Theology of the People. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Madison, Angus. 2003. The World Economy: Historical Statistics. Paris: OECD. Medellín Conference Statement. 1968. www.we-are-church.org/413/index.php/ library/caring-not-scaring/264-medellin-conference-statement-1968. Melloni, Alberto. 2006. L’Ostpolitik vaticana di Agostino Casaroli. Bologna: Il Mulino. Mezei, Balázs M. 2013. Religion and Revelation After Auschwitz. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017. Radical Revelation: A Philosophical Approach. London: T&T Clark International. ———. forthcoming. ‘Revelation in Phenomenology’. In: The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation. Edited by Balázs M. Mezei, Francesca A. Murphy and Kenneth Oakes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, Douglas. 2017. The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

East-West divide in the European Union  141 O’Hanlon, Gerry SJ. 2018. The Quiet Revolution of Pope Francis: A Synodal Catholic Church in Ireland? Dublin: Messenger Publications. OECD Statistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage (accessed 28.08.2019). Pawliková, Lucia. 1997. ‘The Traditional and Present Role of the Church in Latin America’. Human Affairs 7, 2: 184–193. www.aepress.sk/hum/full/hum297h.pdf (accessed 28.08.2019). Rocher, Guy. 2004. A General Introduction to Sociology: A Theoretical Perspective. Calcutta: Dhur. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Working Document (Instrumentum laboris). 2019. The Amazon: New Paths for the Church and for Integral Ecology: The Synod of Bishops. Special Assembly for the Pan-Amazon. www.sinodoamazonico.va/content/sinodoamazonico/en/­ documents/pan-amazon-synod-the-working-document-for-the-synod-of-bishops. html (accessed 28.08.2019).

8 Spiritual communism1 The career of a theory from Saint Augustine to MacIntyre Gábor Kendeffy

Saint Augustine’s theory on private and common things is at the core of the teaching of the Church Father. In a theoretical sense, on the one hand, he considers all corporeal things, which are only suited to be acquired and possessed in a win-lose game, as private (privatum, proprium). On the other hand, he regards the objects of pure intellection as common, in the sense of being acquired and possessed in a win-win game. In normative terms, this doctrine, labeled as spiritual communism by the outstanding French Augustinian scholar Goulven Madec (1987), exhorts us to turn from the private things to the common ones, eminently to God. This paper aims to point out that Augustine’s moral doctrine concerning private and common things had a certain career in the history of Western thought and that MacIntyre’s famous concept of practice contains fundamental elements of it in a secularized form. By detecting this Augustinian element in this concept of the Scottish-American philosopher, I also intend to give a partial comparison between two concepts of community. To realize this plan, in the first part of my paper I will present Augustine’s doctrine on common and private things, and also examine what it means in terms of political theology. The second part points to the occurrence of some elements of this doctrine in certain medieval and modern philosophers. In the third part, I will investigate what role the concepts of the common and the private play in MacIntyre’s doctrine of practice as expounded both in his After Virtue and his writings subsequent to it.

1. Augustine on common and private things To simplify the Church Father’s train of thought in the dialogue On the Free Choice of the Will: he puts in contrast sense-perception and intellection in terms of their objects. As a matter of course, he considers these two kinds of objects also as objects of love and desire. The objects of sense-perception, being corruptible, are characteristically of private nature and cannot be perceived, acquired or possessed but in win-lose games, through competition. The objects of intellection, being unchangeable and incorruptible, are of common character and cannot be perceived, acquired

Spiritual communism  143 or possessed but in win-win games, though cooperation and without any rivalry.2 This applies to the rules of mathematics, to wisdom as a whole and to the particular rules of wisdom and virtue.3 All these rules “are present and common to be contemplated by all who are able to look upon them.”4 In fact, to the Church Father, wisdom and virtue on the one hand, and the domain of mathematics on the other hand, are two aspects of the same substance of Truth, that is, the substance of God.5 Augustine claims that Divine Truth “is present and offers itself in common to all who discern unchangeable truths, like a light that is miraculously both public and hidden.”6 The divine substance, being unchangeable and incorruptible, without spatial and temporal extension, cannot be lost against one’s will. The desire to acquire and possess God, thus, is never associated by envy and therefore, never gives rise to competition. As Augustine writes in strikingly erotic language: Hence we have something at our disposition that all can enjoy equally in common [qua fruamur omnes aequaliter atque communiter]. It has no restrictions or defects. It welcomes all its lovers who are not envious of each other. It is universally accessible to all [communis], staying chaste [casta] for all. No one says to the other: “Back off so that I too may approach! Take your hands away so that I too may embrace it!” All hold fast to it and all touch the self-same thing. Its food is not divided into portions; you drink nothing from it that I cannot drink. For you do not change anything from its commonness [communione] into something private of yours [privatum tuum], but rather you take something from it and yet it remains intact for me.7 In the Soliloquies, written at least five years before On the Free Choice of Will, Augustine completes this idea by saying that the true “love of the beauty of the divine wisdom” makes the loving subject especially “long for as many as possible to seek it, gaze upon it, grasp it and enjoy it with me.”8 Although he explains here this desire of the lover of God with his awareness that “our friendship will be the closer, the more thoroughly conjoined we are in the object of our love.” This means first that the common love of God can be the basis of a community of love just like anything that is suited to be loved in common. And what is more, this peculiar community of love which is based on the common love for God, exempt of envy and emulation, implies the highest level of solidarity in the sense of assisting others to possess and possess love and possess the object of love.9 In the City of God the Church Father gives an explanation for this desire to share the possession of God with as many fellow humans as possible (which is essential to the love for God) by affirming that, “this being so, he will even possess God to a greater extent.”10 This means that the true love for God is both intrinsically exclusive and inclusive. Exclusive in the sense that, being directed to his object as an end, it excludes all loves of the same category for another

144  Gábor Kendeffy object, and inclusive in terms of involving as many people as possible and being the basis of an interhuman community of love. It is often on the basis of the opposition between common and private things that Augustine defines pride (superbia), the kernel of all sins. Pride is then the will to enjoy private rather than common goods.11 And the most fundamental of all private things in this context is one’s own power. When someone desires to acquire external private goods (greed), or to enjoy corporeal pleasures (concupiscence), or to gather interesting pieces of information about the corporeal world (curiosity), or to acquire dominion over other people, all these vicious desires only follow from the love of one’s own power.12 The love of one’s own power also results in envy, which is the hate of the prosperity of the other.13 It is important to stress here that in Augustine’s works private things are contrasted not only to common ones but also to what belongs to God. Thus, pride is often defined as loving one’s own power rather than that of God or in other words, as preferring to live according to one’s own laws rather than according to those of God.14 This way of thinking may have been inspired by Paul, in particular by 1 Cor 4,7: “What do you have that you did not receive?”15 These two oppositions do not contradict each other, since the Church Father, even while defining pride this way, stresses that God himself is the most “common” thing. This means that God should be loved for himself exactly as the par excellence common thing or, to put it in another way, as the very act of sharing, as the source of all kinds of solidarity among humans. Interpreting verse 10 of Psalm 103 (104), Augustine qualifies the doctrine stemming from the Truth as common to all (communis), and heresies as private, belonging to particulars (proprium, privatum). He evokes John 8, 44, in the version he knows: “He who speaks a lie, speaks of his own.” (Qui loquitur mendacium, de suo loquitur.)16 This “his own” is obviously the same as the proprium and privatum in the writings mentioned beforehand.17 To Augustine, pride as turning inward from the common to the private implies and entails isolation, a preference for the part instead of the whole.18 Further, the right or wrong attitude toward private and common things is decisive as to whether someone belongs to the city of God or to the City of the Devil. These cities are constituted respectively by two opposite loves: “One is social (socialis), the other private. One taking thought for the common good because of the companionship in the upper regions, the other putting even what is common at its own personal disposal because of its lordy arrogance.”19 According to Augustine, it is not wrong in itself to possess a private thing, but the private thing is allowed only to be loved as an instrument, not as a goal. Only common things, that is, only God should be loved for himself. In his miscellaneous work entitled On Eighty-three Different Questions, Augustine puts the concepts of the private and the common in a legal context. There is a private law (ius privatum), Augustine argues here, which allows anything that we want, that is, which permits us either to use private

Spiritual communism  145 things as instruments or to love them for themselves. But this law is subordinated to another law, which is public and universal. In question 79 of his Eighty-three Different Questions, the Church Father draws on the legal connotation of the concept pair private and common.20 He describes here the divine substance as a “law for all” (lex universitatis)21 which prescribes the love of itself. Augustine refers to it metaphorically as public law (lex publica) and considers it to be fulfilled necessarily in the lives of rational beings. Nevertheless, beyond the common field under this law, every rational soul has a confinable sphere of freedom.22 Namely, they decide freely about how to use (uti) temporary things, that is, how to use these as mere instruments. The prideful person refuses the rule of the divine law and his or her subordinated position, intends to be his or her own master and strives for a rule over the temporary things. This ruling position involves the fruition (frui) of the temporary things, that is, their possession for their own sake.23 Paradoxically, as a result of domination and fruition, it will be more difficult for the agent to want what is good. Their perverted desire has transformed into habit, the surmounting of which requires a greater effort to rely on divine grace.24 Therefore the agent who “delights in his private property,” is coerced as a punishment “to follow the public laws.” This means that those violating the universal law do not weaken it but only provoke the particular sanction it prescribes for this case. They get tangled up even more in the bands of necessity. The mode of this coercion is the abuse of the private thing by others. For instance, it is as an instrument of this divine stratagem that, Augustine argues, a demon who desires private things for himself uses the same kind of desire as the practitioner of a magic cult and makes them more passionate about the possession of private things.25 Augustine’s reflection on the relationship between ius privatum and lex universalis or ius publicum can be read as an interpretation of I Cor 6,12: “All things are permissible for me but not all things are beneficial.” The question arises here what follows from this theory in terms of practical ethics and political philosophy. In the treatises On True Religion and On Christian Doctrine, the Church Father claims that one aspect of a fellow human, directed naturally toward God (quod ad Deum pertinet), must be regarded as an end in itself, whereas another aspect of the same person, which belongs to the individual (quod ad se pertinet), should be considered as an instrument only. In other words, the fellow human should be loved for their own sake not as empirical entities that are in such and such biological or social relationships with us but only as human beings created to the image of God.26 Given that one’s being created to the image of God entails one’s ability to love God, the other’s progress in loving God should be evidently regarded as an end in itself. This means that Augustine’s theory of spiritual communism applies only to a relationship between these nuclei of human beings or, in other words, between individuals who share in the love of God, even if not each of them manifests this to the same extent. Whence follows that this theory can hardly be characterized as belonging to the realm of

146  Gábor Kendeffy political theology. Nevertheless, we can say that, paradoxically, it has an important place exactly on the margin of Augustine’s political theology. According to the Church Father, the original sin rendered man who is by nature a social being practically unsocial.27 Man was created to live not in hierarchical but equalitarian relationships, and all kinds of hierarchical domination or inequality emerged as a result of the Fall.28 This means that, as it is obvious from the relationship of Adam and Eve before the Fall, humans were destined to be equal not only in terms of rights, but also in terms of skills and abilities. It is only over the animals that God gave superiority and excellence to the human being, not over their fellow humans. Since the Fall, inequality, hierarchy and domination have become fundamental features of the human life on Earth, so much so that peace consists in the “well-ordered concord regarding who rules and who obeys.”29 Augustine, thus, removed equality, the key element of spiritual communism, from the postlapsarian age and located it into the prelapsarian epoch.30 Nonetheless, the just human being who lives by strives to restore, even though fragmentarily, the initial state of equality. As concerns the inequality of skills, rather than being envious and desiring to excel, one should want all people to be equal in this respect, and should want to enable their fellow human to acquire the same skills as one has.31 In hierarchical relationships, either in the family or in society, the true believer, when they happen to be in an authoritative position, plays a double role: on the one hand, they wield their powers over their inferiors, while on the other hand, they serve them, wanting to take care of their inferiors rather than showing off their own superiority.32 Thus, Augustine recommends spiritual communism not as a practical model for the partakers of everyday social life but as a perspective to be taken in order to realize justice under the circumstances of the postlapsarian word. Given that since the Fall, interpersonal relationships from the familial one through the state-level to the international stratum have been burdened with the difficulty of finding out what others think and intend to do, uncertainty, distrust and strife have become peculiar to all these levels of social life.33 Whence the tragically ambiguous character of some social activities like making a just war or torturing witnesses and culprits during a juridical investigation or a lawsuit: both are irreconcilable with the divine commandments and at the same time necessitated by the corrupted human condition.34 These features of the social life exclude the realization of the ideal of spiritual communism. Only a monastic community can come relatively close to this ideal.35

2. Between Augustine and MacIntyre: Spinoza and Kant Thomas Aquinas, even though he does not take over the whole idea, argues in a passage of the Summa contra Gentiles that from the love of God follows an emotional unity between fellow humans: Whoever loves a person must, as a consequence, also love those loved by that person and those related to him. Now, men are loved by God,

Spiritual communism  147 for He has prearranged for them, as an ultimate end, the enjoyment of Himself [ipsius fruitionem]. Therefore it should be that as a person becomes a lover of God, he also becomes a lover of his neighbour.36 What Aquinas is examining here is not how the love of God is connected to the love of the neighbor, either in psychological or metaphysical terms. Instead of claiming explicitly that the former kind of love implies the latter one, he argues that in order to attain to the common end: the enjoyment of God, everyone needs to love and cooperate with the others. The verb oportere, which he uses several times in this context, means a pragmatic necessity and not a logical or metaphysical one. As a matter of fact, the first argument is meant to show as a fact plausible even to the natural reason that God, who prescribed the love of Himself, also had to ordain the love of the neighbor. Nevertheless, the same argument emphasizes that the two loves can be realized only when they are combined with one another. The second argument goes beyond the original purpose by claiming that the love of God implies necessarily (consequens est ut) the love of the neighbor. Whence follows (provided that the latter is understood eminently as the intention to help one’s fellow humans attain to the fruition of God) that the love of God excludes competition and involves cooperation. In Spinoza’s Ethics the Augustinian idea of spiritual communism recurs in a clear-cut way. According to a passage of part four, our author affirms that the intellectual love for God unites individuals in a blissful and lasting community, because the highest good for those who follow after virtue is to know God; that is a good which is common to all and can be possessed by all humans equally, in so far as they are of the same nature.37 In addition, the person who is striving to know God not only does not enjoy less what they love because others want the same but, on the contrary, the more people they share this enjoyment with, the more perfect their happiness will become.38 We can find a secularized version of the Augustinian idea in Kant. In his short writing An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ he puts forward a contract between common and private similar to that of Augustine.39 He claims that the human being can reach enlightenment, that is, the emergence from their self-incurred immaturity, if the so-called public use of reason (öffentlicher Gebrauch der Vernunft) is free but the so-called private use of reason (Privatgebrauch der Vernunft) is controlled. Someone makes private use of reason “in a particular civil post or office,” for instance, as a lawyer, teacher or pastor. The same person makes public use of his reason when they put their thoughts before a professional, scholarly public, let us say, on better ways of drawing up laws, or on how to innovate the curriculum of a discipline or on how to reform theological tenets. Paradoxically, Kant qualifies as public a sphere of activities which is, in an ordinary sense of the word, less public than the activities in which the so-called private use of reason is embodied. Let us remember how Augustine described the truth identified with God: “A light that is miraculously both public and

148  Gábor Kendeffy hidden.”40 In my understanding, the reason for Kant’s choice of this word is not only the fact that the expression “zu veröffentlichen” can mean “to publish” but also that according to Kant, an intellectual who strives to reach maturity of thinking presents his or her thoughts to the “world” as a citizen of the “world” itself. Kant uses the word “Welt” both for humankind not yet enlightened but on the way of enlightening themselves, and for the state of Reason. In the Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason the expression “Reich Gottes” is reminiscent somewhat of Augustine and has a similarly ambiguous meaning.41 The public use of reason has not empirical but hidden objects and is practiced by members of not an empirical but a hidden community. In addition, as is well known, in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claims that the fellow human as a moral being who gives laws for themselves should never be an instrument but always a goal. This means that between world-citizens there cannot be any competition, only cooperation. Just like between the citizens of the Augustinan City of God.

3. MacIntyre on practices MacIntyre in his majestic book After Virtue (1981) introduces the concept of practice as the activity which gives context to the virtues. In a famous passage he defines practice as any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (MacIntyre 1981, p. 187) Practices, usually accompanied by joy, include characteristically sports, arts, professions, hobbies and even family life. The philosopher means by internal goods those a) which are only accessible through the given practice; b) which can be identified and defined only in the context of the given practice; c) which are produced by the practice itself and which are becoming precise and redefined in the process of the given practice. Internal goods are predominantly kinds of knowledge, and skills, which are the components of the excellence itself. These goods are produced within particular practices according to the standards that are also produced within these practices. This category of goods therefore includes basically objects of cooperation and not of competition. To be sure, there is some competition around internal goods as well, but the issue here is not to deprive somebody of something but to excel. In addition, the internal goods will help those who do

Spiritual communism  149 not excel to participate with greater success in the same practice. External goods, on the contrary, cannot be acquired but in win-lose games and are therefore characteristically objects of competition. Justice, honesty and courage are excellences the lack of which prevents a community from attaining its internal goods. MacIntyre’s provisional definition of virtue is based on the fore-mentioned conceptions of practice and internal good: “Virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods” (1981, p. 191). In his 1990 inaugural lecture entitled The Privatisation of Good MacIntyre criticizes a trend of political thinking which he labels as liberal on the account that, on the one hand, it excludes the possibility to obtain an agreement or even pursue rational discussions on the common good, and, on the other hand, it admits the possibility to attain an agreement on actual moral rules (MacIntyre 1990a). He holds this way of thought responsible for the fact that, as he complains, “central areas of moral concern cannot become the subject of anything like adequate public shared systematic discourse or enquiry.” He expounds that moral rules are to be formed, discussed and followed in the frame of practices, where the morals rules themselves serve as inner goods.42 In addition, the form of community corresponding to this conception, he argues, would have as a main characteristic the lifelong progress of mutual learning (MacIntyre 1990a, p. 358). In 1997, in his study Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good43 the argumentation has as a starting point the problem of what he calls compartmentalization (MacIntyre 1997, p. 236–237). He uses this term to denote a situation in which philosophy and politics are extremely separated: neither are problems of philosophy discussed in politics, nor are questions of politics focused on as issues of discussion among philosophers. This mutual unconcern of politics and philosophy toward each other is quite paradoxical, since every day political decisions do imply particular stances in positions of moral philosophy (MacIntyre 1997, p. 236–237). Here the philosopher complains that Kant’s dream is not realized. Namely, the public use of reason has not spread from academic study to the domain of politics. This passage shows that for MacIntyre, Kant may have been one of the sources of the private-common opposition. Following Foucault, he interprets this use of reason as its “pursuing the goals internal to reasoning: truth, theoretical practical adequacy and the like” (MacIntyre 1997, p. 238). That is to say, the public use of reason implements a practice. Kant’s hope can only be fulfilled, MacIntyre argues, in a community that is constituted by groups participating in practices.44 In this form of community, named polis by the author, the common good is the object of permanent discussions with the purpose of mutual learning. What is more, the members of this community find their “shared and common good” eminently in common mind, in shared deliberation, in mutual learning.

150  Gábor Kendeffy In his essay entitled Aquinas and the Extent of Moral Disagreement (2006), MacIntyre traces this last idea to Aristotle and Aquinas, especially to the latter. MacIntyre quotes the scholastic philosopher pointing to the fact that the words in Greek and Latin for deliberation (boulê, consilium) imply the activity of a community, that is, consultation, common deliberation (ibid, p. 73). In MacIntyre’s interpretation Thomas intimates that the very fact that common enquiry about ultimate goals is possible proves the existence of natural laws. Without some preliminary moral rules, including that of trustworthiness, not even this common enquiry could be carried out (ibid., p. 79–80).

Conclusion In conclusion, let me summarize the analogies between Augustine’s doctrine on private and common on the one hand, and MacIntyre’s theory of practice, on the other. Both Saint Augustine and MacIntyre contrast goods to be acquired in win-lose games, that is, private and exclusive goods on the one hand, and goods to be acquired in win-win games, that is, common goods, on the other hand. Both think that a desirable community is founded on the latter kind of goods. Both associate to the possession of these kinds of goods a pleasure superior to that which accompanies those which can only be possessed by means of a win-lose game. The contrast between private and common remains fundamental in MacIntyre’s thought even after the After Virtue. He remains close to Augustine in thinking that true community is founded on common mind and that all goods accessible outside this form of community are inferior. He also keeps the principle of sharing and cooperation, that is, the concept of internal goods. There are, of course, significant differences as well. To Augustine, common goods are connected to the intelligible and the transcendent world and can be qualified as internal in the sense that the way toward them leads through human intellect. On the contrary, MacIntyre regards internal goods to be internal in relation to a particular practice within a particular community. MacIntyre does not exclude all kinds of competition from the striving after interior good, whereas to Augustine, all the possession of common goods requires is cooperation. Further, whereas Augustine emphasizes that the common goods should be equally accessible, MacIntyre claims that a community based on a practice necessarily has a hierarchical structure depending on who has progressed more and who teaches whom. MacIntyre’s version of spiritual communism is, of course, a secularized one. True community is constituted not by learning from the same master, as it is in Augustine’s theology but by mutual and long-lasting learning within the community. To the Scottish-American philosopher, the social character of the thinking process furnished the paradigm for conceiving true community – and this is not an Augustinian but an Aristotelian idea. Finally, true community for him is far from being merely spiritual: it is constructed by individuals having everyday

Spiritual communism  151 needs, and constructed not only in the networks of mutual learning, but – as he expounded in 1999, in his book Dependent Rational Animals . . . (MacIntyre 1999, p. 124–127) – in the networks of giving and receiving as well (ibid., p. 141–144). Finally, the ideas about common and private things, which had belonged to Augustine’s moral theology and, as I said, had had a paradoxically important place on the margin of his political theology, became central to the political philosophy of MacIntyre (ibid., p. 124–127).

Notes 1 The author wrote this chapter with the support of the program “Conceptions of self in ancient and medieval philosophy” (K 112253) of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office. 2 lib. arb. 2,8,24. 3 Including the following: wisdom exists; everyone wants to be wise and happy; one should live justly; lesser things should be subordinated to better things; equals should be compared to equals; to each his own. Lib. arb. 2,10,28. 4 lib. arb. 2,10,29. (Translation by Peter King, slightly modified.) 5 Cp. conf. 3,8,16. See Canning 1997, p. 53. 6 lib. arb. 2,12,33: “. . . tamquam miris modis secretum et publicum lumen, praesto esse ac se praebere communiter.” (Translation by Peter King.) 7 lib. arb. 2,14,37. For an analysis of this passage see Verheijen 1988a, p. 205– 206; Madec 1987; Torchia 1989, p. 357–358; Canning 1997, p. 51–52. Cp. en. Ps. 131, 5. (Translation by Peter King.) 8 sol. 1,13,22. (Translation by Charles C. Starbuck.) 9 For a detailed analysis of this passage see Madec 1987, p. 226–268; Verheijen 1988a, p. 204–205; Canning 1997, p. 51. 10 civ. 15,5: “For the possession of goodness is by no means diminished by being shared with a partner either permanent or temporarily assumed; on the contrary, the possession of goodness is increased in proportion to the concord and charity of each of those who share it. In short, he who is unwilling to share this possession cannot have it; and he who is most willing to admit others to a share of it will have the greatest abundance to himself.” (Translation by Marcus Dods.) 11 mus. 6,16,53; Trin. 12,12,17; 3. Gen. litt. 11,14, 18–15,20. See Madec 1987, p. 232–233; Markus 1990, p. 248. 12 trin. 12,12,17; 3. 13 gen. litt. 11,14,18. 14 trin. 12,9,14. Cp. ibid. 12,11,16.; Gen litt. 11,14,18. 15 See O’Donovan 1980, p. 100–102. As some scholars pointed out, at a certain point of his spiritual development Augustine came to claim that love of oneself and love of God exclude each other. See O’Donovan 1980, p. 99–100; Markus 1990, p. 248–252. Whence the impression of the reader that in a lot of passages of Augustine, the pronoun suus (her/his own) itself bears a derogative sense. 16 This text differs in meaning from the Greek original: ὅταν λαλῇ τὸ ψεῦδος, ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ. 17 en. Ps. 103, ii, 11. 18 Gen. litt. 11,15,19. 19 Gn. litt. 11,15,20. (Translation by Edmund Hill.) Cp. civ. 15,3–4. 20 div. qu. LXXXIII 79, 1. The quaestio is devoted to interpreting pagan magical practice. 21 Ibid. Cp. lib. arb. 1,6,15, where Augustine defines the eternal law (lex aeterna) as “the law according to which it is just for all things to be completely in order.”

152  Gábor Kendeffy This law, on the one hand, prescribes the love of the eternal things and locates, on the other hand, everything in its due place in the order of all beings. 22 div. qu. 79,1. 23 Cp. conf. 3,8,16. 24 Cp. lib. arb. 3,18,52−19,53; mus. 6,5,13–14. 25 div. qu. 79,1. 26 vera rel. 46,88; doctr. Chr. 1,22,20. 27 civ. 12,28. 28 civ. 19,15. 29 civ. 19,14. 30 Io. ep. tr. 8,5–8. 31 Ibid. 32 civ. 19,14. 33 civ. 19,5–6. 34 civ. 19,6–7. 35 op. mon. 25,32; en. Ps. 131, 5–6. See Verheijen 1988b, p. 125; Madec 1987, p. 236–237; Markus 1987, p. 121–125; Canning 1999, p. 220. 36 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles c. 117. (Translated by Vernon J. Bourke.). See Boros 2013. 37 Summa contra gentiles 117. See Boros 2013. 38 Spinoza, Ethica, pars IV, prop. 35–37 and their demonstrations. 39 Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: was ist Aufklärung? AK, vol. 8, 33–42. 40 lib. arb. 2, 12, 33. See note 5. 41 Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft III. 1, 4, 759. 42 He has recourse here to an Aristotelian-Thomistic idea: “(Moral rules) . . . are not to be understood as specifying types of actions the performance of which as a matter of merely contingent fact will bring about some particular type of endstate. They are not specifications of means externally related to an end. They are rather rules of partially constitutive of a form of life, the living out of which is the peculiar function of human beings as rational animals, and the completion of which lies in that activity which is itself supreme happiness and which makes of the life of which it is the completion a happy life.” (MacIntyre 1990a, p. 344). 43 MacIntyre (1997, p. 236–237). 44 He describes this kind of association as follows: “There are also kinds of association such that the good of association cannot be constructed from what were the goods of its individual members, antecedently to and independently of their membership in it. In these cases the good of the whole cannot be arrived at by summing the goods of the part. Such are those goods not only achieved by means of competitive activity and shared understanding of their significance, but in key part constituted by cooperative activity and shared understanding of their significance.”

Bibliography Boros, Gábor. 2013. ‘Spinoza als Wissensoziologe – Soziologie des göttlichen Wissens’. Orpheus Noster 5, 1: 51–61. Canning, Raymond. 1997. ‘St. Augustine’s Vocabulary of the Common Good and the Place of Love for Neighbour’. In: Studia Patristica. Edited by E. A. Livingstone. Vol. XXXIII. Leuven: Peeters: 48–54. ———. 1999. ‘Common Good’. In: Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald et al. Cambridge: Taylor & Francis Group: 219–221.

Spiritual communism  153 Kant, Immanuel. 1923. Beantwortung der Frage: Was Ist Aufklärung? Vol. 8. Berlin: AK: 33–42. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 1990a. ‘The Privatization of Good: An Inaugural Lecture’. The Review of Politics 52, 3: 353. ———. 1990b. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 1997. ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’. In: The MacIntyre Reader. Edited by K. Knight. Cambridge: Polity Press and Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998: 235–254. ———. 1999. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: Duckworth. ———. (ed.). 2006. ‘Aquinas and the Extent of Moral Disagreement’. In: Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 64–84. Madec, Goulven. 1987. ‘Le communisme spirituel’. In Homo spiritualis. Festgabe für Luc Verheijen zu seinem 70. Geburstag. Edited by C. P. Mayer. Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag: 225–239. Markus, Robert A. 1987. ‘Ascétisme et monachisme selon Saint Augustin’. Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum: 119–125. ———. 1990. ‘De civitate dei: Augustine on Pride and the Common Good’. In: Augustine: ‘Second Founder of the Faith’. Edited by F. van Fleteren and J. C. Schnaubelt. New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main and Paris: Peter Lang: 245–259. O’Donovan. Oliver. 1980. The Problem of Self-love in Saint Augustine. New Haven – London: Yale University Press Thompson, Christopher J. 1995. ‘Benedict, Thomas, or Augustine? The Character of MacIntyre’s Narrative’. The Thomist 59: 379–407. Torchia, Natale Joseph. 1989. ‘The Commune/Proprium Distinction in St Augustine’s Early Moral Theology’. In: Studia Patristica. Edited by E. A. Livingston. Vol. XXII. Leuven: Peeters: 356–363. Verheijen, Luc. 1988a. ‘Comme des amants de la beauté spirituelle dans les oeuvres du jeun Augustin’. In: Nouvelle approche de la Règle de saint Augustin. 2. Chemin vers la vie heureuse. Edited by L. Verheijen. Louvain: Institut Historique Augustinien: 194–219 (= Augustiniana 33 [1983], 86–111). ———. 1988b. ‘La charité ne cherche pas ses propres intérêts’. In: Nouvelle approche de la Règle de saint Augustin. Edited by L. Verheijen. Vol. 2. Paris: Cerf: 220–289 (= Augustiniana 34 [1984], 94–100).

9 Dispositives of political theology Analyzing non-discursive elements of the Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power Michael Hoelzl Political theology has always been understood and conceptualized either from the political or the theological side of the compound noun. Subsequently two types of political theology emerged: a political “political theology” and a theological “political theology.” Therefore, any analysis of political theology is determined by the political or the theological nature of its discourse. Contrary to this exclusively discursive approach the suggestion made here is to conceive political theology primarily through its dispositives. To conceive political theology through its dispositives is to understand political theology as a specific product and instrument of an ensemble of discursive “and” non-discursive elements and practices. Following the late work of Michel Foucault, an understanding of political theology through its dispositives promises to provide an epistemological surplus in addition to traditional critical discourse analysis of political theology. In this essay I will concentrate on just one, but maybe the most significant dispositive of political theology: the Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power. That is the institutionalization of the knowledge of the exercise of pastoral power which occurred within the context of Enlightened Absolutism under Joseph II (1765–1790) known as Josephinism. In the first part of the essay the concept and methodology of dispositive analysis will be discussed by focusing on the question of the epistemological added value that a dispositive analysis claims to contribute to critical discourse analysis. In the second part, the analysis of political theology through its dispositives focuses on the institutionalization of the knowledge of pastoral power in the era of enlightened absolutism. In a case study, in part three, Foucault’s dispositive analysis and its proclaimed added value are tested. This case study is based on a comparative analysis and interpretation of two emblems representing non-discursive elements. One of them can be found in a central document of the Josephinian pastoral dispositive, outlining the establishment of a social institution designed to utilize the knowledge of exercising pastoral power for political ends. The aim of this comparative analysis is to demonstrate the non-discursive manifestation of

Dispositives of political theology  155 political theology produced by the Josephinian pastoral dispositive. In the concluding fourth part it will be argued that this political theology must be understood as “institutional political theology” (Böckenförde 1981, p. 238)1 serving and legitimizing the political ideology of absolutist rule by theological means.

1. The epistemological added value of analyzing political theology through its dispositive Dispositive analysis has established itself within the field of Foucaultian discourse analysis over the last two decades.2 It has received increased attention as an autonomous methodology in social theory, despite the fact that its precise methodological and conceptual status is still a matter of dispute. For example, a positive and constructive development of dispositive analysis as complementary method to traditional discourse analysis is represented by Jäger (2001), Caborn (2007) and Bührmann and Schneider (2008) whereas Reiner Keller (2008) expresses a more skeptical view. The question as to whether dispositive analysis can provide an epistemological added value compared to “critical discourse analysis” (Fairclough 2013) is an open one. To analyze political theology through its dispositives requires an understanding of what a dispositive is. Or, to be more precise, it is necessary to clarify the difference between a discourse analysis and an analysis of dispositives in order to answer the question why a discourse analysis should be complemented by a dispositive analysis. For the moment it is enough to accept the possibility of a dispositive analysis as an epistemologically meaningful method complementing traditional discourse analysis (Jäger 2001), and we will return to this question later. The concept of the dispositive in the late work of foucault The concept of dispositive (dispositif) was introduced by Michel Foucault in his “late work” (Elden 2016). In 1977 Foucault gave an interview, in which he admitted that his theoretical framework based on the concept of episteme (Foucault 1977, p. 191) has led him into phenomenological difficulties which needed to be resolved by a completely new approach (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). Foucault says retrospectively about his attempt to write a history of the episteme: In seeking in The Order of Things [1966 MH] to write a history of the episteme, I was still caught in an impasse. What I should like to do now is to try and show what I call an apparatus (dispositif) is a much more general case of episteme; or rather, that the episteme is a specifically discursive apparatus (dispositif), whereas apparatus (dispositif) in its general form is both discursive and non-discursive, its elements being much more heterogeneous. (Foucault 1977, p. 196–197)

156  Michael Hoelzl In this short passage Foucault defines the key characteristic of a dispositive, here translated as apparatus, in contrast to episteme. A dispositive comprises both discursive and non-discursive elements, whereas episteme is understood as discursive formation of knowledge and concerns “only discursive elements”. Foucault understands a discourse, juxtaposed to its underlying non-discursive elements, as a systematically structured and rationally organized number of verbal or written enunciations following grammatical rules. By this narrow definition of a discourse, which only focuses on the spoken or written text, non-discursive elements, the “Un-spoken” is excluded by definition. The neglect of “non-discursive” elements in Foucault’s earlier work is the reason for the impasse he encountered and which demanded a complete and substantial methodological reorientation in his research. Because Foucault recognized the constitutive function of the unspoken, “non-discursive elements” (Foucault 1972, p. 26–27) which make a statement, or ensemble of enunciations possible. Dreyfus and Rabinow emphasize the profundity of this methodological reorientation by comparing it to the turn (Kehre) that occurred in the work of Heidegger after Sein und Zeit and the pragmatic turn in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). Asked about the exact meaning and methodological function of the dispositive, Foucault gives a very concise systematic answer: What I am trying to pick out with this term, is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus (dispositif). The apparatus (dispositif) is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. Secondly, what I am trying to identify in this apparatus (dispositif) is precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. . . . In short, between these elements, whether discursive, or non-discursive, there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function which can also vary very widely. Thirdly, I understand by the term ‘apparatus’ (dispositif) a sort of – shall we say – formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need (urgence). The apparatus (dispositif) thus has a dominant strategic function. (Foucault 1977, p. 194–195) Apart from the main characteristic of a dispositive, its combination of discursive and non-discursive practices, a dispositive has a power-strategic function too. With the power-strategic function in mind, Deleuze calls a dispositive “a social apparatus [which] consists of lines of force”

Dispositives of political theology  157 (Deleuze 1991, p. 160). In this sense, a dispositive is a “productive” matrix or apparatus, deploying lines of forces, with a specific “powerstrategic function” (Bührmann 2008, p. 117). Deleuze’s interpretation of a dispositive is reflected in Foucault’s elaboration on the strategic nature of a dispositive: I said that the apparatus is essentially of a strategic nature, which means assuming that it is a matter of a certain manipulation of relations of forces, either developing them in a particular direction, blocking them, stabilising them, utilising them, etc. The apparatus (dispositif) is thus always inscribed in a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain coordinates of knowledge which issue from it but, to an equal degree, condition it. This is what the apparatus (dispositif) consists in: strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge. (Foucault 1977, p. 196) A dispositive establishes and organizes power relations among its elements in a strategic way. But this strategy operates without any concrete strategist, it is a strategy “without a subject” (Foucault 1977, p. 196), that is, a strategy “for which it is no longer possible to identify a person who conceived it” (Foucault 1977, p. 203) The strategic function of a dispositive occurs in reaction to an urgent need (urgence) to a greater or lesser extent. Its ultimate purpose is to stabilize power relations and resolve the crisis inherent in a state of emergency. Summarizing Foucault’s concept of dispositive, it can be said that the dispositive comprises discursive and non-discursive elements, it is strategic without a strategist and organizes power relations through types of knowledge. Even the late Foucault after his “turn” accepts the constructivist and post-structuralist presupposition that social reality is constructed by and a result of discursive practices. But, with the concept of the dispositive he attempts to develop this methodological presupposition of social constructivism further by concentrating on non-discursive elements, the anonymous and non-discursive practices which are the essential feature of the dispositive. A dispositive must be conceived as an “infrastructure” (Bührmann and Schneider 2008, p. 118), a vibrant web of relations that the dispositive organizes and establishes between discursive and non-discursive elements. To illustrate such an infrastructure one might think of the view from an airplane during a night-flight. In the darkness of the night, cities, towns, villages and settlements are illuminated and they form a web of lines of light by illuminated streets, highways and flickering streams of traffic. And the discernment of the structural organization of these webs of light, connecting conglomerates of light intensity, depends on the altitude of the beholder. The importance of the standpoint of the observer corresponds to that of the analyst of a dispositive.

158  Michael Hoelzl Discourse analysis and the epistemological added value of complementary dispositive analysis What exactly is the added value of a complementary analysis of dispositives compared to traditional discourse analysis? The answer to this question implies that an exact and meaningful definition of “non-discursive elements” and “non-discursive practices” can be given. Furthermore, it needs to be clarified how these proposed non-discursive elements should possibly be analyzed discursively without compromising their non-discursive nature. The solution to this problem decides whether a dispositive analysis is possible and complements critical discourse analysis or is redundant. As mentioned previously, there is no agreement on the acceptance of dispositive analysis as an autonomous and theoretically consistent methodology among scholars of critical discourse analysis and a commonly recognized theory of dispositive analysis remains a desideratum. According to Foucault the main difference between an analysis of dispositives and a discourse analysis is the way one conceives of power. The concept of the dispositive contributes to the traditional discourse analysis by recognizing non-discursive practices which establish and sustain power relations. Ultimately, dispositive analysis rejects the traditional substantial understanding of power and replaces it with a purely relational concept of power. Power, therefore, must no longer be understood as something that substantially exists, but something that only exists as an effect of social relations. Foucault writes: Power in the substantive sense, ‘le’ pouvoir, does not exist. What I mean is this. The idea that there is either located at – or emanating from – a given point something which is a ‘power’ seems to me based on a misguided analysis. . . . In reality power means relations, or more-or-less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations. . . . then the only problem is to provide oneself with a grid of analysis which makes possible an analytic of relations of power. (Foucault 1977, p. 199) At this point it becomes clear that Foucault is searching for a new way of verbalizing the unspoken mechanisms which tacitly organize and channel knowledge to sustain institutionalized power. When queried about concrete examples of these ‘productive’ non-discursive powers, Foucault refers to either architecture or social institutions to illustrate what he means by a dispositive. The architectural example Foucault gives in the aforementioned interview is the École Militaire designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel in 1752. This example allows him to raise the more conceptual question of how an architectural plan and the concrete building of that social institution of a military school are connected through its encompassing dispositive. According to Foucault, the École Militaire represents a concrete military-educational

Dispositives of political theology  159 dispositive that produces a discursive practice (the architectural design) combined with the non-discursive practice of the social institution made visible in the concrete building (Foucault 1977). In the same interview Foucault also mentions a religious example of a social institution as a dispositive, which he has already discussed in first volume of his History of Sexuality of 1976. In The Will to Knowledge Foucault interprets the Council of Trent as a dispositive (Foucault 1990) which significantly contributed to the birth of a modern Western subject, defined by its knowledge of sexuality in terms of a scientia sexualis, juxtaposed to the ars erotica known to subjects of Eastern cultures (Foucault 1977, 1992). When asked about the repercussions of the dispositive of the Council of Trent with respect to the organization of power relations, Foucault is confronted with the question whether power is organized in a hierarchical and vertical way, beginning at the top of a social institution emanating to its most inferior social strata with the individual subject at the bottom, or in a non-hierarchical, decentralized way. The classic understanding of vertically organized power “from the top downwards, from the center to the perimeter” (Foucault 1992, p. 199) is reminiscent of the traditional “substantialist” concept of power which he rejects and which is juxtaposed to Foucault’s proposed new relational understanding of power. According to the proposed relational understanding, power organizes itself by the little things and has “its beginnings in the ‘little place’ . . . before it gets on to the stage of concentrated organization” (Foucault 1992, p. 199). But how can Foucault reconcile an understanding of vertically and hierarchically organized power, as represented by the Council of Trent, with its opposite? Foucault’s answer is ambivalent: Generally speaking I think one needs to look rather at how the great strategies of power encrust themselves and depend for their conditions of exercise on the level of micro-relations of power. But there are always movements in the opposite direction, whereby strategies which co-­ordinate relations of power produce new effects and advance into hitherto unaffected domains. (Foucault 1992, p. 199–200) In fact the Council of Trent (1545–1563) fulfills more criteria of a dispositive than only the organization of power relations. Despite its clearly defined hierarchical power structure with the pope’s plenitudo potestas at the top, descending gradually down to its accredited members, the Council gave birth to a politico-theological strategy without a clearly defined author. This is partly because it was one of the longest Church Councils in history. In its three meeting periods and 25 sessions it was presided over by three popes, namely Paul III, Julius III and Pius IV everyone of them pursuing their own strategic priorities (Jedin 2017). Seen in its entirety, it is almost impossible to identify a single subject responsible for the overall strategy of the Council. In addition to its strategy without strategist, the Council

160  Michael Hoelzl fulfills another criterion of a dispositive. The Council, like all councils of the Church, clearly responded to a state of emergency (urgence). With the Council of Trent it was a matter of urgency to agree on an official response of supreme authority to the spreading Protestant Reformation. Translated into Foucault’s terminology, the dispositive of the Council of Trent established an infrastructure between discursive practices (discussions, drafts, declarations, etc.) and non-discursive practices (liturgy, religious symbolism, paintings, etc.) manifest in the events of the Counter-Reformation. Moreover, the dispositive of the Council of Trent produced a very specific political theology such as the Jesuits’ and among them Cardinal Bellarmin’s political theology of absolute papal monarchy, designed to overcome the state of emergency and to restore order and stability in the Church and Catholic states (Höpfl 2004). From a methodological and epistemological point of view, the understanding of the Council of Trent as a dispositive provides a grid of analysis that allows an analytic of power relations which, according to Foucault, complements a mere discursive analysis by taking the non-discursive elements and practices and the strategic nature of the dispositive into account. In the following a dispositive analysis of Foucault’s concept of “pastoral power” (Foucault 1983, p. 208–228) is proposed, to test the validity and significance of Foucault’s methodological suggestion. This dispositive analysis focuses on pastoral power in its modern form as it emerged under the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II and seeks to clarify the role that pastoral power plays in the construction of political theology in general.

2. The Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power and its Gregorian roots The discursivation of the knowledge of pastoral power began with the formation of the first Christian communities, but it was not until the Benedictine monk Gregory who, for the first time, outlined systematically the knowledge of the right exercise of pastoral power in his Regula Pastoralis written in 590 shortly after he took episcopal office in Rome as Pope Gregory I. For Gregory I the exercise of pastoral power is conceived as an art and even more, it is the art of all arts (ars artium) and is the highest and most difficult to master. As Peter Brown has argued (Brown 2013), Gregory I’s Regula Pastoralis marks the successful transformation of the classical Greek teaching of the care for one’s own soul, as it can be found in Plato,3 into the knowledge of pastoral care for the souls of others. With this shift in focus, from the care for the individual soul by the individual to the care of the souls of others by one officially appointed individual, emerged the idea of pastoral power in a Foucaultian sense (Foucault 1983). For more than a millennium Gregory I’s ars artium doctrine of pastoral power was regarded as the supreme authority of pastoral government and was referred to as the ultimate moral norm for the righteous guidance of souls.

Dispositives of political theology  161 Almost 1200 years later, in the year 1777 Gregroy I’s ars artium doctrine of knowledge of pastoral power was officially institutionalized in the form of an academic discipline and a modern, scientific form of pastoral power was born. By imperial decree the first professorial chair in Pastoral Theology was established at the University of Vienna. Its spiritual purpose was to provide better pastoral care by better pastoral curators (bishops, priests, deacons), formulated by Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch, the mastermind of the institutionalization of the knowledge of pastoral power. Rautenstrauch was appointed by Empress Maria Theresia and later by her son Joseph II to reform academia and above all, the study of theology. He wrote that “the main purpose,” of pastoral theology, as well as theology as such, is to nurture “worthy teachers of [the] religion and immaculate pastoral curators” (Rautenstrauch 1784a, p. 2, 5).4 This academic institutionalization of the Gregorian ars atrium doctrine of the knowledge of the right exercise of pastoral power by imperial decree is a telling example of how dispositives organize and establish a web of discursive elements. The scholarly reason for the need to systematise knowledge of pastoral power within the context of the University was first of all recognition of its hitherto unscientific nature. Such an unscientific knowledge of one of the key aspects of Christian life and thought was deemed to be no longer acceptable. Especially in times of advanced Enlightenment, a new enlightened (pastoral) theology was needed. Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch writes about his own time, distancing the present from the past: In those days there did not exist such a degree of Enlightenment in the people compared to the degree of Enlightenment which we see ourselves today. In the past one could have been content with a less enlightened theology, because even with a mediocre theological education and knowledge, one has assumed to be capable to teach and defend religion. (Rautenstrauch 1784a, p. 3–4) The Enlightenment Rautenstrauch refers to is of course a very specific type of Enlightenment. In Foucaultian terms the Catholic Enlightenment under Joseph II is itself a dispositive, a massive and wide ranging web of power relations, interweaving discursive and non-discursive elements, in which the newly established academic discipline of pastoral theology is only one visible manifestation of the whole dispositive organization. The other manifestation of this Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power is less discursive in academic terms but more political in its purpose. Shortly after the establishment of the academic discipline of pastoral theology within the Empire’s institutions of higher education, Rautenstrauch was ordered to plan and supervise the foundation of general seminaries (Generalseminarien) across the hereditary lands of the Habsburg Empire (Rautenstrauch 1784b). These general seminaries were an instrument for the production of worthy pastoral curators loyal to the Josephinian state. In

162  Michael Hoelzl fact, the purpose of the general seminaries was twofold. On the one hand, the candidates for priesthood, the future bearers of pastoral power in the service of the Emperor, should be morally perfected, and, on the other, the general seminary was designed to generate patriotism to strengthen social bonds among seminarians recruited from different parts of the Empire. According to Rautenstrauch the final goal of the general seminaries is to create an institution (Ort) in which “the inequality of principles” is standardized and the “moral illiteracy” remedied (Rautenstrauch 1784b, p. 9). The intention of these institutions of education (Bildungsoertern) is to provide education of the servants of religion, to educate and nurture teachers of the people (Volkslehrer) and leaders of the people (Volksführer) on their path to salvation. The former requires “purity of morals”, the latter, “active charity” (Rautenstrauch 1784b, p. 11–12). In addition to the required moral education the political element of patriotism is needed. For the production of excellent teachers and leaders of the people on their path to salvation, Rautenstrauch is in agreement with the Emperor that the creation of an allunifying patriotism among seminarians is crucial. If the general seminaries can “arouse and strengthen patriotism, then they [the future priests] are instilled with the spirit of being a good citizen and thereby become prospective [loyal] pastoral curators. [And] at the same time good citizens will be bestowed upon the state” (Rautenstrauch 1784b, p. 40, italics MH). The institutionalization of the knowledge of pastoral power in its visible manifestations as the academic discipline of pastoral theology and the creation of general seminaries form the backbone of the Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power. As mentioned previously, dispositive analysis provides, according to Foucault, a “grid of analysis.” Applying this grid to the Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power means analyzing its combination of discursive and non-discursive elements, its anonymous strategy and its interventional character. The following analysis addresses these three characteristics of the dispositive in reversed order, leaving the most important and most difficult question of the interplay between discursive and nondiscursive elements to the very end. In Foucault’s and Deleuze’s terminology, the following dispositive analysis of pastoral power attempts to make the invisible lines of force at play in the Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power visible. Analyzing the Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power To what urgent need or emergency situation is the Josephinian pastoral dispositive responding? As mentioned previously, the era of Enlightenment, the advance of scientific knowledge demanded a scientifically justifiable and rationally organized theology. This enlightened theology no longer accepted irrational, almost magic beliefs in the healing powers of relics and dubious practices of popular piety and devotion (Rautenstrauch 1784a). Especially the practical side of theology was in need for a review of content

Dispositives of political theology  163 and reorganization of teaching. There was an pressing demand from within theology, as well as from outside the university, to develop a reasonable, systematic and academically sound pastoral theology, that is, an academic theory of the right exercise of pastoral power (Hoelzl 2017). The aim of this new academic discipline was to establish a practical branch of theology and to provide a rationally organized and useful instrument for direct application of theological doctrine and moral norms. Theology, compared to medicine and jurisprudence for example, was deficient as an academic discipline designed for the utilization of its theoretical knowledge, that is dogmatics and moral theology. Rautenstrauch writes: “it is necessary, that the theoretical teachings of faith and morals are directly followed by pastoral theology, in which genuine application of these theoretical studies to pastoral care is taught clearly and distinctly” (Rautenstrauch 1784a). On an academic level the newly established academic discipline of pastoral theology emerged in reaction to this academic deficit. Subsequently it became an important discursive element of Josephinian pastoral dispositive manifest in the establishment of the first chair in pastoral theology. On a political level the education of future leaders of the people in spiritual affairs was to be brought under state control in order to implement the reforms of Joseph II efficiently and this was to be achieved primarily by the establishment of general seminaries; the Emperor saw the key to a successful reform of the state in terms of a web of parish communities each led by a priest absolutely loyal to his rule, by which he could reach out to all his subjects. State-controlled education and character formation of pastoral curators and all those who exercised pastoral power was, together with the establishment of pastoral theology as an academic discipline, the other political element of the Josephinian pastoral dispositive. The next characteristic of a dispositive mentioned by Foucault is its strategic nature. From a purely chronological discursive point of view, the Josephinian pastoral dispositive follows a political and academic strategy initiated by Maria Theresia, masterminded by Rautenstrauch and continued with even greater zeal by Joseph II. From a Foucaultian perspective, though, this, like any other dispositive consists in a strategy of forces, a play of power relations but without an identifiable strategist. The anonymous essence of the dispositive poses some conceptual difficulties. How can social practices, even if they are non-discursive, be conceived of without reference to an acting subject? Two related interpretations are possible. Foucault either reifies the web of power relations, and therefore ontologises social practices without subjects, or, the anonymous nature of the dispositive’s strategy is a problem of its complexity. The first interpretation is supported by Foucault’s concept of “historical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault 1984, p. 45–47, 49–50) which he developed in a critical re-reading of Immanuel Kant’s essay What is Enlightenment?. For Foucault this historical ontology, which he also called a “critical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault 1984, p. 43), is at the same time an ontology

164  Michael Hoelzl of the present. With respect to the Enlightenment, the wider dispositive in which the Josephinian pastoral dispositive occurs, Foucault writes: We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of European societies. As such it includes elements of social transformation, types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalisation of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word. (Foucault 1984, p. 43, italics MH) Here Foucault does not use the term dispositive in his elaboration on the idea of a critical ontology. But his account of discursive and non-discursive elements of the Enlightenment as an event or set of events, suggests that the word he is looking for is what he calls elsewhere a dispositive. If this is correct, then the main function of the dispositive, that is, its production of a web and infrastructure between its various elements, is granted an ontological status of its own. The reified web of lines of force is the context in which the individual raises the critical ontological question of where we are now in this specific moment. It is the web that enables us to raise this question about the present. It allows the “critique of what we are” and at the same time provides the means for an “analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (Foucault 1984, p. 50) Therefore the Josephinian pastoral dispositive pursues a strategy without a strategist in so far as the web of power relations of the Enlightenment itself, which is the ontology of the present, defines the strategy which the Josephinian pastoral reform embodies. The second interpretation of the anonymous nature of the strategic character of the dispositive suggests that the impossibility of identifying a strategic subject that plans and implements the strategy is an inevitable result of its complexity. Here one has to distinguish between the claim that a dispositive follows a strategy without a strategist and the claim that the strategy followed by the dispositive cannot be traced back to an identifiable author. It either really is without a strategist, or the strategist cannot be identified but there is one. The first proposition is an ontological claim, the second a methodological problem. If the latter is the case then the problem of not being able to name the strategic subject is that of finding the appropriate scope for the analysis. In analogy to the night-flight metaphor mentioned previously, the recognition of webs of light in the darkness and the possibility of identifying single lines of light produced by streetlights and cars depends on the altitude of the plane. Likewise, the clarity of lines of force in a dispositive depends on the scope and the size of the segment of the dispositive analyzed. It has been suggested that the Josephinian pastoral dispositive is itself part of the larger and more complex dispositive of the Catholic Enlightenment and Josephinism in particular. It is impossible to identify one

Dispositives of political theology  165 author of the Enlightenment or dispositive of the Enlightenment, as it is the case with the Council of Trent. The question is not so much whether the Josephinian pastoral dispositive as such is strategic without a strategist but whether the scope, zoom and focus of the segment of the dispositive in question has been appropriately chosen. This is a crucial problem when the strategic and at the same time anonymous nature of the dispositive is claimed. Similar to any complex technical apparatus the dispositive needs to be collimated, too. Every dispositive (Ge-stell) needs a calibration and set up (Einstellung) to function properly. Therefore, a standard reference, an arbitrarily chosen zero level needs to be defined, against which measures can be taken. In a dispositive analysis the standpoint of the analyst needs to be declared, otherwise the same hermeneutical problems occur, mentioned by Foucault, when he spoke of the impasse he encountered in his analysis of different episteme.

3. Speaking emblems: a case study of the visualization of a non-discursive element The primary function of the dispositive is to create a web or infrastructure among discursive and non-discursive elements. Thus, a dispositive analysis promises an epistemological added value because it is not limited to discursive elements such as the body of text. In the case of the Josephinian pastoral dispositive the discursive elements are obvious. Among them are the two drafts by Rautenstrauch, one concerning the establishment of pastoral theology as an academic discipline and the other draft outlines the foundation of general seminaries. Apart from these two drafts, discursive practices of the Josephinian dispositive are manifest in legal documents, written imperial decrees and ordinances requesting the creation of a reform commission for the study of theology and the foundation of general seminaries, for example. These imperial decrees and legal documents are the textual result of various discussions, consultations and exchange of arguments which are nothing else than strategies of power relations, supporting and supported by discursive practices of knowledge. The German word Entwurf, translated here as draft, that Rautenstrauch uses, already alludes to the non-textual dimension of the document which is beyond its purely discursive nature. A draft (Entwurf) can refer to an official document in progress, its draft version, but can also mean an architectural masterplan for the erection of a building or the establishment of a social institution. Thus, the word draft (Entwurf) itself resembles the combination of discursive and non-discursive aspects of a dispositive. But what can be said about the non-discursive element? With regards to the Josephinian pastoral dispositive an illuminating example of a nondiscursive element can be found in the emblematic depictions that conclude the second edition (1784) of Rautenstrauch’s draft of the reorganization,

166  Michael Hoelzl literally the establishment or erection, of theological faculties (Entwurf zur Errichtung der theologischen Schulen, first published in 1782). The image (Figure 9.1a) shows a pyramid which peak breaks through the clouds and is outshined by sunrays. Beneath the clouds 15 insect-like creatures buzz around the pyramid and it seems that they are held back by the cloud in their attempt to reach the light at the top (Rautenstrauch 1784a, p. 246). The message Rautenstrauch intended to send out by the engraving of the pyramid placed at the end of the second edition of the draft concerning the reform of theological studies remains enigmatic. In the first edition of 1782 the depiction of the pyramid is missing and one can find a quite standard icon (pictura) of an open book and a quill of inferior artistic quality instead. Why has Rautenstrauch decided to replace this standard icon of 1782 with a high-quality engraving of a pyramid two years later? And what does the pyramid peeking through clouds and the insects signify? In order to discover the meaning of Rautenstrauch’s pyramid, I suggest comparing it to another contemporaneous depiction of a pyramid (Fig. 1b),

Figure 9.1a Rautenstrauch, Franz Stephan. Entwurf zur Errichtung der theologischen Schulen in den k. k. Erblanden. 2nd ed. Wien: Sonnleithner und ­Hörling, 1784. Source: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (accessed 06.10.2018) http://digital.onb.ac.at/OnbViewer/viewer.faces?doc=ABO_%2BZ59416602

Dispositives of political theology  167

Figure 9.1b  One Dollar Bill Source: Imagediver.org (accessed 06.10.2018) http://s3.imagediver.org/topic/album/4294b0e/one_dollar_bill_5/1/index.html

that is, the pyramid on the reverse of the Great Seal of America and to read both depictions as emblems. Following Henkel and Schöne’s classic definition and methodology of emblem theory (Henkel and Schöne 1996)5 will help to clarify the meaning of Rautenstrauch’s pyramid and the message it conveys. By applying the insights of emblem theory to Rautenstrauch’s engraving, it is possible to transform this non-discursive element of the

168  Michael Hoelzl Josephinian dispositive into a discursive element. That is to say, to make the non-discursive emblem speak. We do not know for sure if Rautenstrauch was aware of the pictorial program of the Great Seal designed by Charles Thomson. The question is intriguing but remains purely speculative, whether Rautenstrauch’s replacement of the standard emblem of a book and a quill in the first edition (1782) by the emblem of the pyramid in the second (1784a) is directly linked to the pyramid of the Great Seal. Despite the different religious backgrounds of their authors – Rautenstrauch was a Benedictine abbot and Thomson a Presbyterian – both pyramids belong to the same pictorial lexicon of the Enlightenment era. Rautenstrauch’s depiction of the pyramid and the pyramid of the Great Seal were produced at the same time with just two years between them. The use of the same pictorial lexicon can be seen in the almost identical use of the corona and its sun rays illuminating the apexes of the pyramids. Despite the fact that the center of the light in Rautenstrauch is beyond and outside the whole picture, whereas the eye of providence is the center of the top of the pyramid of the Great Seal, both emblems are heavily indebted to the dominant light metaphor signifying the superiority of reason in an age of Enlightenment. Thomson presented his design of the Great Seal to Congress on June 20, 1782 when it was approved the same day (Pollio 2010). The pyramid is placed on the reverse of the Great Seal and Rautenstrauch’s pyramid is printed on the last page of the book’s appendix. The pyramid is put beneath a brief outline of a tractate on political and theological tolerance that should conclude the curriculum of the study of theology. Despite the obvious distinction of their geometric shape, both pyramids are Right Square pyramids. Their sunlit apexes with a radiant crown are disconnected from the base. In Fig. 1b the apex is literally disconnected and in Fig. 1a it is separated by a ring of clouds. Given their context of origins and places of display one can argue that in both cases the pyramid symbolize the architectural manifestation of a newly established social institution. Thomson’s pyramid alludes to the young political institution of the 13 federal states of America for which religious tolerance was a prerequisite. The pyramid in Rautenstrauch’s draft to the recently implemented curriculum reform of theology at institutions of higher education. This reform of the theological studies was to support the far-reaching political reform program by Joseph II including his policy on religious tolerance. In Fig. 1a below the clouds one can see the aforementioned insect like creatures busy whirring around the pyramid. One can identify some of them as locusts, ladybirds and bees. But what their meaning is, what message they should send out to the reader, remains enigmatic. One must bear in mind that one of the purposes of the emblem was to convey hidden messages and the learned readership should gain pleasure from solving the riddle presented by pictorial details of the pictura (Henkel and Schöne 1996).

Dispositives of political theology  169 In an email correspondence with Helmut Reinalter he kindly told me that the pyramid with insects can also be found in some high degrees of certain freemasonry lodges, “but seems to be in this case a symbol of the enlightened Josephinian reforms.” Reinalter suggests a connection between Rautenstrauch and Joseph’s board of enlightened advisors, but remains skeptical about a direct link to the foundation of the United States and its symbolic manifestation.6 The main difference between both pyramids, though, is the missing inscriptio and descriptio in Rautenstrauch (Figure 9.1a). It seems the missing interpretation of the inscriptio and explanation of the descriptio are hidden in the image (res pictura) itself. Whereas in the Great Seal the meaning of the symbol of the pyramid seems to be sufficiently explained by the 13 letter inscriptio “Annuit Coeptis” above and the orthographically unorthodox subscriptio “Novus Ordo Seclorum” below the 13 layers of building blocks of the pyramid. All three elements, the motto or inscriptio “Annuit Coeptis,” the pictura of the pyramid and the subscriptio “Novus Ordo Seclorum” designate the reverse of the Great Seal as a classic example of an emblem. And still, one significant meaning of this emblem is subtly hidden in the pictura using the number 13. The year of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 is documented in Roman numerals at the base of the pyramid. Coincidently it was also on that July 4th when the “Continental Congress still had one other resolution on its agenda: the creation of a committee charged with designing a seal to represent the newlycreated nation” (Pollio 2010, p. 137). It is not by chance that the pyramid in its lower part comprises 13 layers and that the Latin phrase “Annuit Coeptis” consists of 13 letters. The number 13 refers to the “number of colonies that gave birth to the new republic” and the reference to these 13 founding states can also be found on the obverse of the Great Seal, which shows the emblematic depiction of an eagle and the inscriptio of the 13 letter phrase “E pluribus Unum” (one out of many).7 Moreover, the olive branch in one claw of the American eagle bears 13 fruits and in the other claw one finds 13 arrows of war. The two phrases “Annuit Coeptis” (“He [God] has favoured our undertakings” [Pollio 2010, p. 137])8 and “Novus Ordo Seclorum” (“A new order of the ages” [Pollio 2010, p. 137]) are inspired by Vergil. David Pollio convincingly argued that the acclaimed Latin tutor Thomson had personally chosen these phrases and he decided to borrow them from Vergil’s Aeneid 9.625 and Eclogues 4.5. The inscriptio “Annuit coeptis” of the reverse of Seal also appears in Georgics 1.40 “da facilem cursum, atque audacibus annue coeptis, (grant an easy course and favour my bold undertakings)” (Pollio 2010, p. 137) And the subscriptio “Novus Ordo Seclorum” in its context reads: “a great order is born anew” (Pollio 2010, p. 137)9. Peter Jackson suggests that “the overall plot of the Aeneid must have appealed to those who witnessed the rebirth and transplantation of Western civilization

170  Michael Hoelzl on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, just as the myth of Aeneas must have appealed to Virgil and many of his contemporaries as a celebration of the mythical foundations of Rome” because “the two mottoes for the reverse of the Great Seal . . . evoke the promising future of a newborn nation” (Jackson 2012, p. 538). If one applies the insights of emblem theory to the reverse of the Great Seal, then the inscriptio “He [God] has favoured our undertakings” is the overall motto which is directly linked to and symbolized by the pictura of the pyramid. God’s favor and approval refers to the new order of the ages. In the Great Seal the favoring, support and approval of the bold undertaking has been granted.10 The bold undertaking of the creation of this new nation has been “blessed” by God, as illustrated by the eye of providence in the disconnected and thus transcendent top of the pyramid Fig. 1b. The new order of ages stands for the beginning of that unfinished creation of the newly established confederation of states in America, symbolized by the pyramid of 13 layers of bricks being distinct and united at the same time. This analysis shows that Thomson’s design of the reverse of the Great Seal does not only follow the classic tripartite construction of an emblem. It also reveals the playful, witty and enigmatic nature of an emblem by, in this case, sending out a political message to the learned audience capable of reading the Great Seal’s allusions to classical sources and to those who are able to decode its theo-political message. If we take Thomson’s pyramid and its message as a hermeneutical key to interpret Rautenstrauch’s emblem of the pyramid, then it should also be possible to find an appeal to a higher authority for the blessing of a new social and political institution the pyramid represents. In Rautenstrauch’s case the new social and political institutions at stake are the general seminaries and the reformed theological faculties. In lieu of the missing inscriptio and descriptio one has to refer to text of the draft itself to find further evidence for the explanation and interpretation of the pictura. In fact, Rautenstrauch makes an unusual personal comment which seems to disclose a further clandestine meaning of the pyramid, the clouds and perhaps also the insect-like creatures. But it certainly gives an interpretation of the corona of the pyramid’s apex and the pyramid itself. In the preface to the first edition to the draft of the reform of theological studies, written on December 26, 1781, Rautenstrauch reflects on difficulties, official opposition and private animosities he encountered over the last decade in his attempt to put his reforms into actions. He writes: The powerful and repeated persecutions which the realisation of the theological structure of reforms (Reformgebäude) was subjected to, and about which I might write separately – if I can find the time and leisure – as a contribution to the history of the new study reform in the hereditary lands of the Empire (k.k. Erblande), are in retrospect an obvious proof that the even more powerful hand of providence has supported

Dispositives of political theology  171 this undertaking, given the attempts to thwart the reform. The construction was interrupted by several incidences – stains were spotted where the healthy eye could not see any – at times attempts were made to undermine my work clandestinely – words of heretical branding and denunciation were spoken; but notwithstanding these and several other occurrences which sadden the philanthropist (Menschenfreund) and adept of [the] true religion [Kenner der wahren Religion], and in the midst of all my numerous other duties the edifice reached its peak. It has grown under Theresia; Joseph’s hand may protect it! (Rautenstrauch 1784a, p. XIII–XIV, italics MH) Apart from the architectural metaphors Rautenstrauch employs to describe the project of the newly built social institution of reform, the appeal to the divine power of the hand of providence and the request for imperial blessing and protection are obvious. The pyramids in both emblems must be understood as a non-discursive element representing each a concrete newly established social and political institution. They are very similar emblematic examples of a non-discursive element using the same pictorial lexicon, even if they belong to two completely different political dispositives of the same era of Enlightenment. The theo-political nature of these two political dispositives, the foundation of the confederation of states in America on the one hand, and the Josephinian pastoral dispositive on the other, is evident in both. Rautenstrauch’s emblem of the pyramid enforces the political theology implied in the Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power and at the same time marks a clear difference to the theo-political message sent out by Thomson’s design of the Great Seal of America. The Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power creates a political theology of “progressive restoration of absolutist rule” whereas the dispositive to which the Great Seal of America belongs gives birth to the political theology of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “democratic and republican religion” (Tocqueville 1841, p. 328).

4. Conclusion: political theology of progressive restoration as discursive product of the Josephinian pastoral dispositive The era of enlightened absolutism under Joseph II has been intensively researched and his program of progressive restoration is well known (Reinalter 2008; Klueting 1995). What then is the epistemological added value of a dispositive analysis of the Josephinian pastoral dispositive and a dispositive analysis in general? Moreover, what are benefits of the Josephinian dispositive of pastoral power for a more general definition of political theology? Firstly, the analysis of the Josephinian pastoral dispositive has shown, that the political theology it produced allows a more nuanced definition of

172  Michael Hoelzl institutional political theology with respect to its underlying power structure. Political theology requires certain knowledge to be exercised efficiently. By analyzing the political theology of the Josephinian pastoral dispositive, interpreted as political theology of progressive restoration, it is revealed that this very specific and concrete political theology has a political, as well as a theological-moral purpose. The political theology of the Josephinian era combines theological knowledge with the political aim of progressive restoration by subordinating the former to the latter. Ultimately, the Josephinian pastoral dispositive produced an institutional political theology that serves, legitimizes and supports this political program of progressive restoration. This progressive restoration can only be achieved by the knowledge of how to exercise pastoral power. It is progressive because it does not look back and seek to return to old forms of absolutist rule by conservative means. On the contrary, the political theology of progressive restoration is progressive and modern because it embraces the spirit of enlightenment and progress of reason. It was modern in its outlook and reactionary in its political conviction. The knowledge of pastoral power, the knowledge of how to rule over the soul of man was deemed the most effective means to promote the progressive restoration of political power under Joseph II. This institutionalized political theology is the exploitation of the knowledge of pastoral power for political ends. Secondly, from a methodological perspective an analysis of concrete political theologies as a product of a dispositive allows non-discursive elements to be taken into account and therefore complements traditional discursive analyses of political theologies. It does not necessarily change the findings of a discourse analysis, but it illuminates the way how certain phenomena came into existence. A dispositive analysis enables us to disclose the secret machinations and the modus operandi of discourses by including non-­ discursive elements of the dispositive and the political theology it produces. By this, invisible power structures and lines of force can be made visible and transformed into discourses. Thirdly, closely related to the complementary added value of a dispositive analysis, the comparative examination of Rautenstrauch’s engraving illustrates how emblematic manifestations of non-discursive elements of a dispositive can be used to augment critical discourse analysis. In addition to Foucault’s examples of architecture and social institutions, the study of emblems in its widest sense and emblem theory in general appears to be a potential area for the study of a dispositive’s non-discoursive elements. Insights of emblem theory prove to be fruitful starting point in the methodologically problematic study of non-discursive elements. It can only be suggested here, to develop a theory and methodology of the study of nondiscursive elements of dispositives, for example by combining emblem theory with the theory of semantic field analysis (Hoelzl 2017), in order to add a new dimension to the study of political theology.

Dispositives of political theology  173

Notes 1 Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde suggested to distinguish between three types of political theology: juridical, institutional and appellative political theology. Institutional political theology refers to all those systematic theological theories and teachings which evaluate the “theological status, legitimacy and duties of political orders and in which the relation between ecclesial and political power [Gewalt], ecclesial and political institutions’ are defined and finally justified.” (Böckenförde 1981, p. 238). 2 In this introduction to a special edition of Historical Social Research on the field of Foucaultian discourse analysis the authors conclude in a joint statement: “. . . one can speak of an emerging field of Foucaultian discourse analysis rather than an emerging paradigm” (Diaz-Bone et al. 2008, p. 12–13). 3 A classic expression of the duty to care for one’s soul is represented by Plato. Apology 29 e reads: “. . . τῆς ψυχῆς . . . οὐκ ἐπιμελῇ οὐδὲ φροντίζεις [. . . but for the soul you do not care nor take thought].” 4 All translations of Rautenstrauch from the German are mine [MH]. 5 Henkel and Schöne outline their influential emblem theory in their seminal book Emblemata in the “editor’s preface” which was first published in 1967. Despite the rapid development of emblem theory since then, Henkel and Schöne’s basic methodological axioms of 1967 are still considered canonical (Daly 2014). The classic emblem of the 16th and 17th century comprises three elements: the picture (pictura) or imago, the title or motto (inscriptio) placed above the picture and a subtitle or subtext (subscriptio) beneath the picture. The latter can either be an epigram or short text in prose in which the meaning of that what is depicted is explained and interpreted. In this tripartite construction of the emblem, pictura, inscriptio and subscriptio all three elements together “fulfill the dual function of representation and interpretation, of description and explanation” (Henkel and Schöne 1996, p. XII). This function, which the tripartite construction of the emblem assumes, is based upon the fact that that which is depicted means more than it portrays. “The res picta of the emblem is endowed with the power to refer beyond itself, it is a res significans.” (Ibid. Translation in [Daly 2014, p. 27]). 6 Email from July 31, 2018. 7 Gentile, Politics as Religion, xi; Pollio, “Vergil and American Symbolism,” 137. 8 Aeneid 9.625: “Jupiter omnipotens, audacibus annue coeptis” (“All-powerful Jupiter, favour my bold undertakings”). 9 Eclogues 4.5: “magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo” (“a great order is born anew”). 10 The Latin verb annuo is related to Greek νεύω, to nod. Its meaning is: “A. To give assent or approval by nodding . . . B. To promise or grant something to one . . . C. To designate a person or thing” either by a nod, a wink, the hand or by the signs made with the eyes (Lewis and Short 1955, p. 126–127).

Bibliography Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. 1981. ‘Politische Theorie und Politische Theologie: Bemerkungen zu ihrem gegenseitigen Verhältnis’. Revue européenne des sciences sociales 19, 54–55: 233–243. Brown, Peter. 2013. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 3rd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell. Bührmann, Andrea D. and Werner Schneider. 2008. ‘Mehr als nur diskursive Praxis? Konzeptionelle Grundlagen und methodische Aspekte der Dispositivanalyse’. Historical Social Research 33, 1: 108–141.

174  Michael Hoelzl Caborn, Joannah. 2007. ‘On the Methodology of Dispositive Analysis’. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 1, 1: 115–123. Daly, Peter M. 2014. The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem. Farnham: Ashgate. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. ‘What Is a Dispositif’. In: Michel Foucault – Philosopher. Edited by Timothey J. Armstrong. New York: Routledge: 159–168. Diaz-Bone, Rainer, Andrea D. Bührmann, Encarnacion Gutiérrez Rodriguez, Werner Schneider, Gavin Kendall and Francisco Tirado. 2008. ‘The Field of Foucaultian Discourse Analysis: Structures, Developments and Perspectives’. Historical Social Research 33, 1: 7–28. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1986. ‘What Is Maturity? Habermas and Foucault on “What Is Enlightenment?” ’ In Foucault: A Critical Reade. Edited by D. Z. Hoy. London: Blackwell: 109–121. Elden, Stuart. 2016. Foucault’s Last Decade. Malden: Polity Press. Fairclough, Norman. 2013. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1972. Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by R. Swayer. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1977. Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Translated by C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1983. ‘Afterword’. In: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 208–228. ———. 1984. ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ In: The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon: 32–50. ———. 1990. The Will to Knowledge: Vol. 1 of the History of Sexuality. Translated by R. Hurley. London: Penguin. ———. 1992. The Use of Pleasure: Vol. 2 of the History of Sexuality. Translated by R. Hurley. London: Penguin. Gentile, Emilio. 2001. Politics as Religion. Translated by G. Staunton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harley, Lewis R. 1900. The Life of Charles Thomson: Secretary of the Continental Congress and Translator of the Bible from the Greek. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co. Henkel, Arthur and Albrecht Schöne (eds.). 1996. Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler. Hoelzl, Michael. 2017 Theorie vom guten Hirten: Eine kurze Geschichte pastoralen Herrschaftswissens. Münster: LIT Verlag. Höpfl, Harro. 2004. Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Peter. 2012. ‘A New Order of Ages: Eschatological Vision in Vergil and Beyond’. Numen 59, 5–6: 533–544. Jäger, Siegfried. 2001. ‘Discourse and Knowledge: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of a Critical Discourse and Dispositive Analysis’. In: Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer. Los Angeles: Sage Publications: 32–61.

Dispositives of political theology  175 Jedin, Hubert. 2017. Geschichte des Konzils von Trient. 5 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Keller, Reiner. 2008. ‘Diskurse und Dispositive analysieren. Die Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse als Beitrag zu einer wissensanalytischen Profilierung der Diskursforschung’. Historical Social Research 33/1, 123: 73–107. Klueting, Harm. 1995. Der Josephismus: Ausgewählte Quellen zur Geschichte der theresianisch-josephinischen Reformen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Lewis, Charlyton T. and Charles Short. 1955. A Latin Dictionary. New York: Harper, 1879. Reprinted. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plato. 1914. ‘The Defence of Socrates at His Trial’. In: Plato I: Loeb Classical Library. Translated by H. N. Fowler. Vol. 36. Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 68–199. Pollio, David M. 2010. ‘Vergil and American Symbolism’. The Classical Outlook 87, 4: 137–140. Rautenstrauch, Franz Stephan. 1784a. Entwurf zur Errichtung der theologischen Schulen in den k. k. Erblanden. 2nd Edition. Wien: Sonnleithner und Hörling. ———. 1784b. Entwurf zur Errichtung der Generalseminarien in den k. k. Erblanden. Wien: Sonnleithner & Hörling. Reinalter, Helmut. 2008. Josephinismus als aufgeklärter Absolutismus. Wien: Böhlau. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1841. Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve and J. C. Spencer. 4th Edition. New York: J. Lengley and H. G. Lengley.

10 Theological motives in Hannah Arendt’s thought1 Csaba Olay2

Although Hannah Arendt’s political thought is not organized around major questions of political theology,3 there are several topics that heavily interested her with regard to religion and religious faith, such as the influence of religion, primarily of Christianism, on the public space and the interdependence of religion, faith and authority. In what follows, I specify the aspects under which Arendt theorizes religion and its relationship to politics. The claim I will argue for is that Arendt cannot attribute special importance to religious faith because of her conviction of the pluralistic character of the public space. In other words, since politics has to do with plurality, the monistic structure of religion cannot support it. Furthermore, we find in Arendt’s thought an almost sacral interpretation of the public sphere. In this framework, political activity obtains the highest significance among human activities – an aspect of Arendt’s philosophy that has already been observed several times as one of the main connections of her work to the republican tradition. In light of this, Arendt’s approach to religion and religious faith can be analyzed along the following main lines: first, the role of Christianity in the decline of the public sphere; secondly, religion in her interconnection with tradition and authority.4 Let us discuss these aspects in turn.

1. Christianity and the decline of the public sphere A major thread of Arendt’s approach to religion is embedded into her overall claim about the decline of the public space in Western thought since its Greek beginnings. She developed this idea in her masterpiece The Human Condition (Arendt 1958), and incorporated into this description Christian faith as a favorable factor for the public space. It is important to note that Arendt observed the beginning of the decline of the public space in the Western tradition of philosophy, more specifically in Plato’s work. She attributed to Plato a fundamental role not only in establishing the tradition of philosophy, but also in initiating the repressive tendency towards the publicpractical life. Arendt is convinced that philosophy, since Plato, can principally be accused of pushing politics and practical public life in general into

Theological motives in Arendt’s thought  177 the background, while at the same time devaluating them in favor of theoretical life. The basis of the devaluation of practical-public activities is the priority of theory which, so Arendt argues, makes philosophy to turn away from the practical-public form of life. And she thinks that Plato successfully determined the Western tradition of philosophy in evaluating the opposite of theoretical activity, viz. political activity as inferior to theory. A further moment in Arendt’s understanding of Plato is that he is the first philosopher trying to interpret political activity with the model of production, i.e., as technè. This move was motivated by the effort to replace the apparently incalculable human action with something more controllable. Plato’s overall influence led the whole history of Western philosophy to become a great process of decline (Verfallsgeschichte),5 and this diagnosis is the reason why Arendt repeatedly refuses to regard herself as a philosopher.6 Nevertheless, what she is doing in her works remains essentially philosophical, and so we need not to take her self-interpretation for granted at this point. In order to clarify the weight of this objection, it is useful to sketch Arndt’s distinction between labor, work and action which make up the three basic conditions under which life is given to us.7 These three kinds of activities correspond to three basic dimensions of human life. First among them is the process of life in a biological sense, and labor, then, is the activity that serves exclusively to maintain this process, having no further end to fulfill. Work is the production of durable objects that constitute the world human beings are dependent on. Finally, the plurality of humans indicates a fundamental dimension of life that makes action possible. It remains, however, ambiguous in Arendt’s analysis whether this trichotomy consists of a classification of activities or of basic dimensions of human life. According to Arendt’s definition, labor belongs to the preservation of life, whereas work produces some object-like result. The most essential feature in making something is for her that the produced is some durable object. It is the basic difficulty of the distinction of labor and work that they cannot be distinguished on the basis of their pure description. This problem might be highlighted if we consider certain peculiarities of Arendt’s conception of production. She seemingly invokes Aristotle’s famous opposition of production (poiesis) and practice (praxis), but her view differs with Aristotle on a decisive point: in the Aristotelian analysis of production, which goes back in every substantive characteristic to Plato, the durability of the product does not play any role while for Arendt it does. Both for Plato and Aristotle the main point is that production embodies a sort of knowledge, and this fact is obviously independent from the final product’s being durable or not. We may illustrate this by means of Aristotle’s favorite model of a physician whose operation does not concern durable things, not even objects, but the health of a person. By contrast, it is in Arendt’s view more important that work produces a stable world of objects that serves as the first level created by humans and that, at the same time, proves to be more durable than humans themselves.

178  Csaba Olay As to Christianity and Christian faith, they simply continue, in Arendt’s eyes, the original sin of philosophy against the “vita activa.” She describes the basic difficulty as follows: with the rise of political theory, the philosophers overruled even these distinctions, which had at least distinguished between activities, by opposing contemplation to all kinds of activity alike. With them, even political activity was leveled to the rank of necessity, which henceforth became the common denominator of all articulations within the vita activa. Nor can we reasonably expect any help from Christian political thought, which accepted the philosophers’ distinction, refined it, and, religion being for the many and philosophy only for the few, gave it general validity, binding for all human beings. (Arendt 1958, p. 85) However, the negative influence of Christian faith to political activity is not merely restricted to the maintenance of theoretical distinctions blurred by the beginnings of philosophy. Christianity established an aversion against the public realm in general which is connected to the weakening of the public realm in Medieval Times and in the modern age. This process of withdrawal of the public sphere into the background was accompanied by the emergence of “the social” in modern times. “The social” is, for Arendt, the entrance of the problems, patterns and organizational forms of everyday necessities in the household, into the public realm. In her controversial diagnosis, she famously stated that the appearance of the social is destructive for the public realm, and consequently for the political as well. The two aspects mentioned previously constitute different obstacles for action in Arendt’s sense. Whereas conformism annihilates the freedom necessary for action, the dominance of the economic sphere ruins the space for action. In Arendt’s interpretation of modernity, the expansion of the economic field negatively affects the public sphere by transforming its motivational structure. The Antique attitude connected to the public realm the ceaseless effort to be excellent, to show oneself as outstanding, whereby this effort was conceived as a free action having no further end to realize. The appearance of the life process in the public realm in modern times, on the contrary, meant the prevalence of activities that have a previously determined end, and so they cannot be regarded to be free. This characteristic structure of modernity weakens the possibilities of action and the public realm in general. The weakening of the public realm, Arendt argues, is a structural difficulty of modernity, since the public realm is the sole medium of all kinds of recollection and preservation: The world is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us. But such a common world can survive the coming

Theological motives in Arendt’s thought  179 and going of the generations only to the extent that it appears in public. It is the publicity of the public realm which can absorb and make shine through the centuries whatever human beings may want to save from the natural ruin of time. (Arendt 1958, p. 55) The function of the public realm, thus, is linked to the overcoming of the transience of human life. The Greek polis for the Greeks – as well as the Roman res publica for the Romans – was “first of all a guarantee against the futility of individual life, the space protected against this futility and reserved for the relative permanence, if not immortality, of mortals” (Arendt 1958, p. 56). It is a consequence of these considerations that Arendt focuses on difficulties in connection with establishing such a public space. As for the modern age, the transience of public recognition becomes a problem, Christian thought and faith, similarly, have difficulty with constituting a public realm. The typical modern reaction to the decline of the public realm, Arendt observes, lies in the growing consumption of worldly goods, whereas another typical reaction can be localized in the Christian withdrawal from the world. The withdrawal is grounded on the special Christian worldlessness that is described in § 7 of The Human Condition: The unpolitical, non-public character of the Christian community was early defined in the demand that it should form a corpus, a “body,” whose members were to be related to each other like brothers and sisters of the same family. The structure of communal life was modeled on the relationships between the members of a family because these were known to be non-political and even antipolitical. A public realm had never come into being between the members of a family, and it was therefore not likely to develop from Christian community life if this life was ruled by the principle of charity and nothing else. (Arendt 1958, p. 53–54) This passage formulates the reason why Arendt does not consider the possibility that religion could provide a framework for a new kind of public space. The community of believers, the church could have been regarded as a kind of public space only in a restricted sense, since the Christian faith constitutes there a unifying moment which, in the final analysis, deletes plurality. Arendt’s basic expectation with regard to “normal” politics is that there be a permanent “public space” – such a space cannot persist either in religious forms of life, or in a consumer society. The former are not interested in, the latter does not believe in such a continuous space. There is a further special problem of Christian religion with regard to political activity as a public effort: the activity of goodness. The difficulty of this central Christian idea from the point of view of politics is its tendency to hide from being seen or heard. If a good deed becomes public, it loses

180  Csaba Olay its character of being done exclusively for goodness’ sake. “When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness” (Arendt 1958, p. 74). Accordingly, the command of the New Testament not to act publicly, but rather in a hidden way, lessens the public character of the public space. Arendt is convinced that what is done in the public space gets by this fact a special quality. And this special quality belongs to the distinctive features of politics. In her work, the metaphors of light always accentuate the distinction between the lightness of the public sphere and the darkness of the private sphere. This approach is diametrically opposite to what Arendt takes to be Heidegger’s view. She summarizes Heidegger’s view on authenticity as follows: In his description of human existence, everything that is real or authentic is assaulted by the overwhelming power of ‘mere talk’ that irresistibly arises out of the public realm, determining every aspect of everyday existence, anticipating and annihilating the sense or the nonsense of everything the future may bring. There is no escape, according to Heidegger, from the ‘incomprehensible triviality’ of this common everyday world except by withdrawal from it into that solitude which philosophers since Parmenides and Plato have opposed to the political realm. (Arendt 1968, p. ix) Consequently, Arendt attributes to Christianity an “opposition to the public realm” which is even greater than that of philosophy (Arendt 1958, p. 75). Given this opposition, it is no wonder that in The Human Condition Arendt claims that the private realm proliferated to a huge extent in the Middle Ages. The opposite dimension to this private realm would be the religious. This means, then, in contradiction to a major claim of The Human Condition, that the proliferation of the private sphere did not take place in the Modern Age. This tension has not found any solution in the work of Arendt. In connection with this, it should be noticed that the concept of the common good developed in the Middle Ages had already included the basic feature that served in Arendt’s eyes as basic model for the common good in the Modern Age: common good is not the public space, but the common interest of private persons. This will be a major thread in Arendt’s analysis of the difficulties of modern politics. Let us look at the connection between religion, tradition and authority more closely. In this context, the positive achievement of tradition for politics should also be clarified.

2. Religion in connection with tradition and authority Arendt several times conceives of “religion” in a Roman framework with corresponding connotations.8 She quotes Cicero in understanding religion

Theological motives in Arendt’s thought  181 in terms of “re-ligare,”9 viz. “to be tied back, obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman and hence always legendary effort to lay the foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for eternity” (Arendt 1961, p. 121). This understanding of religion is intrinsically intertwined with the concepts of tradition and authority. Tradition commits the political body to its founding authority, and tradition obtains durability in time through its being grounded in authority. “Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition” (Arendt 1968, p. 193). Arendt holds the binding power of grounding to be religious in kind, when she quotes Cicero: “In no other realm does human excellence approach so closely the paths of the gods (numen) as it does in the founding of new and in the preservation of already founded communities” (De re publica I, 7. quoted in Arendt 1961, p. 121). Her conception of religion, thus, is entirely functional. Arendt is not interested in the inner perspective of the believer, does not ask what it is like to be a believer, but simply takes religion as a stabilizing factor with regard to political conditions – similarly to such figures of the republican tradition like the Machiavelli of the Discorsi. In order to clarify this functional approach it is worth dwelling a little on the underlying conception of tradition and authority. It is characteristic for Arendt’s view that tradition and authority constitute such pillars of political action and judgment that their disappearance in modernity might be identified as the major reason for the crisis of modern times. To put it otherwise, for modernity it is essential not to have what tradition and authority previously were for a long time. Arendt’s picture of tradition is inspired by the Romans who regarded tradition as the religious imperative for every Roman citizen to hand down (tradere) the public morals and customs validated by the sacral grounding of Rome, to the next generation. Thus, the description of tradition is embedded into Arendt’s argumentative strategy concerning modernity: to give an account of the difference between modernity and the times before, and to criticize modern politics in terms of the description of politics in pre-modern times (Greek polis and the Roman res publica). To the complexity of Arendt’s treatment belongs the fact that there are at least three facets of modernity in Arendt, with different descriptions differing also in the evaluation. First, her The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt 1973) analyzes modernity from the perspective of a catastrophe, viz. from the perspective of the horrors of WWII. Secondly, The Human Condition develops the fundamental thesis that modernity is a decline of the public realm. Thirdly, the book On Revolution (Arendt 1963) regards revolution as the eminent political experience of modernity, and sees in the American revolution the foundation of a political order. The tensions and ambiguities between these views have already been observed in the literature (Benhabib 1996).

182  Csaba Olay Turning back to tradition, its central role in the diagnosed crisis of the modern world is clearly articulated in the following passage: [I]f I am right in suspecting that the crisis of the present world is primarily political, and that the famous “decline of the West” consists primarily in the decline of the Roman trinity of religion, tradition, and authority, with the concomitant undermining of the specifically Roman foundations of the political realm, then the revolutions of the modern age appear like gigantic attempts to repair these foundations, to renew the broken thread of tradition. (Arendt 1961, p. 140) It is important here to underline that Arendt regards modern times as the fundamental breakdown of tradition, the predicament of which she is entirely aware of, even if she observes – echoing an insight of Walter Ben­jamin’s – that the incredibility of tradition makes it possible to read the works of tradition in a new light (Arendt 1961, p. 94). In a series of papers Arendt describes the process in which philosophy in modern times was unable to deliver foundations for politics, and, on the other hand, political action and judgment were no more able to lean on any valid tradition. It is the fundamental breakdown of the Western tradition that Arendt detects here.10

Conclusion This paper has treated different aspects of Arendt’s understanding of religion and its interconnection with politics. It has been shown that the influence of religion, primarily of Christianism, on the public space was a weakening of the public realm, since the monistic structure of religion could not support a space of appearance where excellence could be openly recognized. The basic Christian idea of active goodness turned out to be highly disadvantageous for the maintenance of a public political sphere. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the interdependence of religion, tradition and authority plays a central role in Arendt’s approach to politics and modernity. My focus in this part has been on the Roman understanding of how tradition and authority constitute such pillars of political action and judgment that constitute a stabilizing framework of politics. In connection with this, my essay has developed Arendt’s idea that the disappearance of tradition, authority and religion in modernity might be identified as the major reason for the crisis of modern times.

Notes 1 The research for this paper was supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA K 120375 and OTKA K 129261). 2 Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Center for the Humanities, Institute of Philosophy.

Theological motives in Arendt’s thought  183 3 There is scholarly discussion about the scope, beginning and content of “political theology,” but one of the major reference authors is without doubt Carl Schmitt who famously stated that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” and developed a critique of liberalism on the basis of this idea (Schmitt 2005, p. 63). 4 It is interesting to note that Arendt’s writings on the Jewish question, on what it means to be Jewish, almost never touch upon questions of the Jewish religion (Bernstein 1996). 5 Some, for example Seyla Benhabib, contested this picture: “Hannah Arendt’s understanding of modern society, and of the cultural, economic and political changes initiated by modernity, are much more complex, rich and nuanced than the simple Verfallsgeschichte model, the history of the decline of the public space from the Greek polis to conditions of modern mass society, which dominates The Human Condition. . . . Hannah Arendt was a reluctant modernist, but a modernist nonetheless.” (Benhabib 1996, p. 138) 6 “I have neither claim nor ambition to be a ‘philosopher’ or be numbered among what Kant, not without irony, called Denker von Gewerbe (professional thinkers).” (Arendt 1978, p. 3) 7 See Arendt 1958, sect. 1. 8 Diken and Laustsen (Diken and Laustsen 2019) seek to discern – not in all respects convincingly – three meanings of religion in Arendt work. 9 Cicero explains religio from re-legere, “to read again” (the authoritative statements and sacred texts of the past) and not from re-ligare, “to bind again,” in book 2, chapter 72 of the De natura deorum. I am indebted to Miklós Vassányi for this correction. 10 “(W)herever one of the elements of the Roman trinity, religion or authority or tradition, was doubted or eliminated, the remaining two were no longer secure. Thus, it was Luther’s error to think that his challenge of the temporal authority of the Church and his appeal to unguided individual judgment would leave tradition and religion intact. So it was the error of Hobbes and the political theorists of the 17th century to hope that authority and religion could be saved without tradition. So, too, was it finally the error of the humanists to think it would be possible to remain within an unbroken tradition of Western civilization without religion and without authority.” (Arendt 1961, p. 128)

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1961. Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. New York: The Viking Press. ———. 1963. On Revolution. New York: The Viking Press. ———. 1968. Men in Dark Times. San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1978. The Life of the Mind. Vol. 1: Thinking. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. London: Sage Publications.

184  Csaba Olay Bernstein, Richard J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Diken, Bulen and Carsten Bagge Laustsen. 2019. ‘Arendt’s Political Theology: From Political Religion to Profanation’. Arendt Studies 3: 113–131. Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Camp, Nathan. 2011. ‘Arendt and Political Theology: A Displaced Encounter’. Revista Pléyade 8: 19–35.

11 A political theology “of Doubtful Solidity” Leo Strauss on Rousseau via Spinoza Gábor Boros The direct object of this paper is Leo Strauss’ interpretation of Rousseau’s natural right political theology. Somewhat surprisingly, a secular Rousseau emerges from the presentation, far from Rousseau the deeply religious thinker displayed in the Confession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. For Strauss, however, this is not the main tension in Rousseau’s thinking. What he emphasizes is Rousseau’s contradictory ideals of a natural state without the classical theory of natural right, on the one hand, and the Roman state, on the other, based precisely on the classical natural right theory presented most elaborately in Cicero’s works. To understand this tension in Strauss’ Rousseau, we will analyze first how Strauss interprets Rousseau’s concept of the real state of nature in the frame of a philosophical history of philosophy. Second, we will investigate the foundation of the political organization that corresponds to Rousseau’s state of nature with respect to the analyses of the past and to the recommendations for future states.

1. Preliminaries For the historians of philosophy, Leo Strauss is important first of all as the methodologist who gave his name to a peculiar hermeneutics of “reading between the lines.” This was developed as an instrument for the interpretation of ethical, political and religious works composed in periods of persecution. Strauss employed this method partly for medieval Jewish and Arabic religious-philosophical treatises and partly for such early modern philosophers as Hobbes and Spinoza. His method can be regarded as efficient even today: Edwin M. Curley has argued against Aloysius Martinich along Straussian lines when interpreting Hobbes’ relationship to religion. Early in his career, Strauss dedicated a whole book to Spinoza, concerned mostly with the latter’s Theological-Political Treatise (TPT), which irritated contemporary readers by its radically new conception of natural right. From this perspective, it is surprising that Strauss’ Natural Right and History (NRH) has no chapter on Spinoza. At the same time, even though he did not analyze Rousseau in a separate book, NRH does contain a chapter on Rousseau. In my view, Strauss’ procedure itself can fruitfully be made into

186  Gábor Boros an object of the methodology of “reading between the lines” to the effect that behind Rousseau, Spinoza’s portrait will cross-fade to a certain extent. We will return to this next.

2. Natural right and history, and Rousseau NRH was written in the years after World War II, and already its structure deserves our attention. Strauss opposes vehemently what he believes to issue from the transformation and loss of meaning of the traditional concept of natural right: the idea(l) of Entzauberung and the principle of valueneutrality in the social sciences introduced by Max Weber. At the same time, Strauss analyzes emphatically the transformation and later disappearance of the original idea of natural right during the process of what came to be called secularization. After the investigation of the classic concept of natural right he introduces the concept of a modern natural right. He considers and analyzes Hobbes and Locke as the two main representatives of the new concept. The chapter on Rousseau was put under the heading of “The Crisis of Modern Natural Right.” There are no separate chapters dedicated to Althusius, Spinoza, Pufendorf, Kant and Hegel, among others, whereas Rousseau is presented as such a sharp critic of the traditional concept of natural right and of humankind in general that among later thinkers, Strauss finds only Nietzsche comparable to him in this respect. In the following, I focus on the Rousseau-chapter of this peculiar book. For Strauss, Rousseau’s formulations appear to be clear enough, and so he does not feel obligated to make use of the method of “reading between the lines.” He prepares a type of amalgam as he relies on passages from the main works. He employs mostly the “second discourse” about the inequality among people interpreted as Rousseau’s most audacious philosophical work. He enriches the passages from this work by numerous references to other writings, mostly to the “first discourse” about the arts and sciences, the discourse on the social contract and the Emil. Strauss introduces his analyses of Rousseau by a historical survey. He affirms in the only passage mentioning Spinoza that Lucretius and he were the points of departure for Rousseau, who developed his own concepts of the human being and the state of nature on the basis of their arguments. These concepts were of enormous importance insofar as their task was to render more consistent Rousseau’s theory of humankind in the state of nature than Hobbes’ theory was. In Strauss’ interpretation, the theory of Hobbes is inconsistent, to say the least. Implicitly, this theory makes humanity in its original state of nature a member of two worlds. On the one hand, Hobbes’ human being is evidently characterized by being motivated naturally to action by his strong ­emotions – especially by his fear of violent death. On the other hand, human beings also partake in the principles of reason (dictamina rationis). Reason makes man familiar with the foundations of life in society, both with the

A political theology “of Doubtful Solidity”  187 contract and the basic laws of living together. Therefore, Hobbes is a naturalist on the one side, who anchors his philosophy in matter and motion, whereas on the other side, he applies a concept that originates in a supranatural, universal reason. It is worthwhile quoting the unique formulation of Strauss: “In Hobbes, reason, using her authority, had emancipated passion; passion acquired the status of a freed woman; reason continued to rule, if only by remote control” (NRH 252).

3. Monism versus dualism – Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau Hobbes cannot free himself from a certain dualist metaphysics that Rousseau wants to avoid by any means – at least this is how Strauss presents their relationship. This is also the reason why Rousseau is reluctant to take over the traditional concept of rationality as the main differentia specifica of man. It is a momentous move that, on the one hand, he employs the concept of the free will to play this very role. On the other hand, he reduces rationality to something that originates in human physiology, and it is in this respect that he follows his two main examples: Spinoza the metaphysical monist, and – even more basically – Lucretius whom he interpreted as a thinker developing the societal aspect of human being without recurring to natural right as the dictamina of an eternal reason. If man’s humanity is acquired, that acquisition must be explained. In accordance with the requirements of a ‘physical investigation,’ man’s humanity must be understood as a product of accidental causation. . . . [Hobbes] had distinguished between the natural or mechanical production of natural beings and the voluntary or arbitrary production of human constructs. He had conceived of the world of man as a kind of universe within the universe. . . . His notion of the whole required, however, as Spinoza had indicated, that the dualism of the state of nature and the state of civil society, or the dualism of the natural world and the world of man, be reduced to the monism of the natural world, or that the transition from the state of nature to civil society . . . be understood as a natural process. (NRH 272) As I have mentioned, it is surprising to find only this explicit reference to Spinoza in Strauss’ chapter on Rousseau. Particularly, because the context of this quotation cannot fail to remind the reader of a number of Spinoza’s texts, such as the Preface to Book 3 of the Ethics,1 and the attentive reader will probably immediately associate it also with Ch. 16 of the TPT and the whole of the unfinished Political Treatise as an important attempt to accomplish the same project. Still, we must hasten to add that this sole explicit reference to Spinoza is of crucial importance: it concerns the metaphysical and methodological foundations of Rousseau’s thinking. And since Spinoza

188  Gábor Boros is presented as the thinker who overcame the decisive failure of Hobbes it is plausible to conclude that his thinking is more important for Rousseau than that of Hobbes. We will return to this next.

4. Genealogy of reason(s) The radical break with the natural right tradition based on reason is announced in the previous quotation unambiguously. There remain no more options than the engagement in a genealogical theory of rationality not only in view to social philosophy but also in general. This theory is designed to affirm reason’s development through history instead of its simply being given in a metaphysical and metahistorical manner. Rationality in human beings, “[t]o have reason means to have general ideas” (NRH 270). Strauss reaffirms here Rousseau’s view, according to which these ideas must not be taken to be given eternally and metaphysically. Instead of this, they must be interpreted as results of a thoroughly natural process, the model of which is the acquiring and comparing images in the mind or memory of the individual soul to construe what will mistakenly be identified as eternal ideas. Part of this process is also the mutual exchange of such images by way of the linguistic communication between human beings as purely natural beings. Thus, there is no independent realm of ideas, there is no eternal and immutable reason separated from the manifold formation of those mental phenomena that are acquired or even construed by man. Rousseau believes and Strauss emphasizes that the real task of man is not to collect the general ideas of reason, as if fetching them from their metaphysical abode – literally from beyond nature – but to produce them historically. In my view, Strauss implicitly creates the paradigm of a radically genealogical philosophy. This type of philosophy takes off with Epicurus and Lucretius, and proceeds via Spinoza and Rousseau towards Nietzsche. It is in this sense that Strauss affirms: His [Rousseau’s] passionate and forceful attack on modernity in the name of what was at the same time classical antiquity and a more advanced modernity was repeated, with no less passion and force, by Nietzsche, who thus ushered in the second crisis of modernity – the crisis of our time. (NRH 253) In Strauss’ reading, therefore, Rousseau demands a radically genealogical philosophy carried out as an attack on what he diagnoses in Hobbes and Locke as “modernity” on behalf of “a more advanced modernity.”2 However, this should only be the first attack to be completed on the level of general philosophy through a second attack in the narrower domain of political philosophy, on behalf of the “classical antiquity.”

A political theology “of Doubtful Solidity”  189

5. Systematising the paradigm of genealogical philosophy My own proposal is to complete Strauss’ line of reconstruction systematically, not chronologically. If we proceed in this way, we can theoretically distinguish three layers within the global task of retracing the genealogy of meaning. The first layer is the formation of an individual being as a universal unit of meaning. The second layer is the formation of a people or society as a unit of meaning through its own particular history, whereas the third is the formation of a universal historical meaning through the particular histories of particular peoples. Strauss exemplifies this third layer precisely with Spinoza the metaphysical monist, whereas the first theoretical layer seems to remain void: it may have appeared to be too metaphysical both for Rousseau and for Strauss. How to retrace the second and third layers of the genealogy of meaning according to Rousseau as interpreted by Strauss? Let us begin with the third. The global task of the genealogy of meaning prescribes that if history as a whole has a meaning at all this cannot consist of something independently given but it must unfold through the unfolding of history itself. Rousseau had shown that what is characteristically human is not the gift of nature but is the outcome of what man did, or was forced to do, in order to overcome or to change nature: man’s humanity is the product of the historical process. . . . This solution presupposed that . . . that process is ‘meaningful’. (NRH 274) Thus, if we can trust Strauss then not even the meaning of history can be simply given without presupposing that the agents and the accidental events within the process of history – the only real beings – contribute factually to the formation of meaning. Therefore, two possible answers offer themselves. The one says that history has no meaning at all – namely, if by meaning we understand something that is provided by the Other from beyond history. The other answer is the opposite in a certain sense: there is or there can be a meaning in history if meaning is taken to be originating in the deeds of those who undergo the historical events by eventually triggering them; if the pro-character of progression is produced in history itself or rather in the small-scale histories of the finite agents. In my view, the solution suggested by Strauss can be found in this sentence: To be meaningful, the historical process must culminate in perfect knowledge of the true public right [des wahren öffentlichen Rechts]; man cannot be, or have become, the seeing master of his fate if he does not have such knowledge. It is, then, not knowledge of the historical process but knowledge of the true public right which supplies man with the true standard. (NRH 274)

190  Gábor Boros The solution is, therefore, a type of “Socratic wisdom” that accumulates during History’s unfolding with no immediate origin once and for all in that Other who looks down from a standpoint above history. It is about a political wisdom, which is not given but is being given for those who study profoundly the political systems and their continuous changes during history. This wisdom is not a foundational knowledge of the process of history itself. It is about the way a society can be established and shaped to approach most the ancient Roman model without an attempt to copy it. Thus, this wisdom is neither metahistorical nor historical in the sense of being familiar with history as a scholarly discipline. It is practical wisdom that must always remain capable of modification and correction depending on those contingent circumstances among which the given society is to be established. Strauss sees, therefore, the concept of society in Rousseau as one based on the analysis of the Roman state deprived of its rational-metaphysical natural right foundation in Cicero’s works. In Rousseau, the wisdom of the politician accumulates through reflection on the political history of humankind – “the hypothetical history of governments” (Rousseau 1997, p. 128) – which depends from the mutual causal chains between man in his state of nature – or the subhuman being – and those contingent factors that determine the political development of humankind and its states. These factors bring forth first the real human beings, who develop afterwards their multifarious abilities, languages and the particular forms of reason characteristic to them, forms that essentially depend on the use of language. In Strauss’ view, Rousseau abolished the idea of reason with innate structures, coeval and coeternal with the cosmos and God.

6. Spinoza, the genealogist The second layer of the formation of meaning is even more instructive. It is in this layer that Spinoza’s unique significance for Strauss interpreting Rousseau crossfades most visibly. On the one hand, as we have seen, in Strauss interpreting Rousseau, a paradigmatic line of thinkers can be retraced, who opt for the genealogy of reason within history instead of maintaining a supra-historical origin of reason as an autonomous and eternal set of laws: Lucretius, Spinoza, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Weber and numerous other thinkers constitute this line. On the other hand, it is also obvious that in general, the organon of the philosophers is mutable and changes from period to period. Therefore, despite the common paradigm, it is not the explanatory model of Lucretius, the ancient Roman poet that approaches most the model of Rousseau but that of Spinoza. Evidently, however, one cannot think of the metaphysical Spinoza of books 1 and 5 of the Ethics who claims a type of eternity for the mind nor of the “dangerous dreamer” similar to Hobbes – as Rousseau presents them in the first discourse (Rousseau 1997, p. 26). Just the opposite: it is Spinoza the monist whose significance Strauss calls our attention to – note 39 refers to well-known passages in Spinoza’s

A political theology “of Doubtful Solidity”  191 Epistle 50, TPT, Ch. 4, Ethics, Bk 3 praef. This Spinoza criticizes those who “conceive man as a dominion within a dominion,”3 or in another way, who conceive of human reason as an eternal immutable system independent of everything that man acquires during his contingent history. This Spinoza opposes Hobbes, who is monist in the theory of man and of society whereas he is a halfway dualist in metaphysics. In Ch. 4 of the TPT “Of the Divine Law,” Spinoza’s monism is expressed spectacularly insofar as for him, the principal meaning of “law” is that of the natural sciences. Law in this sense describes the factual behavior of any individual of any species instead of prescribing the distinguished right behavior in the way the jurists, the theologians and the moral philosophers apply the expression “law” while they confine its validity to the beings endowed with reason.4 In the same way, the first paragraph of Spinoza’s epistle 50 stresses the continuity between the state of nature and the civil state: “As far as Politics is concerned, the difference you ask about, between Hobbes and me, is this: I always preserve natural Right unimpaired” (Spinoza 2016, p. 406). Obviously, what he has in mind is his own concept of natural right developed in Ch. 16 of the TPT, which – in Pufendorf’s view – relies in an illegitimate manner on the expression “natural right.” For Spinoza talks about all animals’ natural-physiological abilities qua their “natural right” instead of natural right as a reason-based juristic norm.5 In De jure naturae et gentium, Pufendorf gives a characteristic formulation of the traditional view: “From all these Remarks it is sufficiently evident, that the natural Liberty of Man, such as really and truly agrees to him, and not only in an abstracted Sense, must always be understood as guided and restrain’d by the Ties of Reason, and by the Laws of Nature.”6 As we mentioned earlier, Strauss does not talk about the first layer of the genealogy of the formation of rational meaning. If we accept my proposal – backed by Pufendorf – of involving Spinoza the monist as the main source in the background both for Strauss and for Rousseau, then we can attempt to make up for this dearth. The clue to this is the way in which Spinoza the monist explains the formation of individuals by way of the formation of the basic meaning of individual existence that constrains every individual to strive to preserve the mode of individual existence that is exclusively his own. The only way in which his own mode of individual existence can be identified as the meaning of his existence is by narrating the history of life of this individual. Spinoza maintains this thesis in such a radical way that he claims that someone who became blind all of a sudden has no more – “natural” – right to the sight, which had formerly been his own, than a piece of rock that had never owned sight. The type of lack traditionally termed ­“privation” that presupposes the hierarchy of an eternally given order of specific natures becomes by this move reduced to its traditional conceptpair “negation.” Negation as a type of lack presupposes no eternal order of predetermined natures. It is built on the conception of a radically individual nature in the continual flux of changes. Basically, this explanation could

192  Gábor Boros have been appreciated by Rousseau-Strauss. Along these lines, one could interpret Spinoza’s thought as presupposing the ability to develop rationality included in man without presupposing an independent sphere of rationality. This is, however, a purely theoretical possibility. This line of thought must have appeared too metaphysical both for Rousseau and Strauss. Notwithstanding this, we can pose the question if there is some significance of Spinoza – according to Strauss – in the second layer of the formation of rationality: Can we discover in Rousseau some influence of Spinoza on the “genealogical” theory of politics? First of all, we must reflect on a consequence of what Spinoza affirms about the civil state in Ep. 50. If this state is the continuation of the state of nature then it is more adequate to explain the formation of civil state as continual development, a type of evolution instead of explaining it as a sudden change, a break with the past. The social contract taken in a strict sense must be understood as such a radical break. In his note 37, Strauss calls bk. 5 of Lucretius’ On Nature the model for Rousseau (see NRH 264). The formation of society as described in this work can hardly be interpreted in another way than as a gradual development, even if the Latin term for “contract,” foedus is not missing in it. It is also evident that Spinoza’s theory of the formation of society in his Political Treatise – as A. Matheron convincingly argues (1990) – can be regarded as a precursor to Rousseau’s theory in this respect. Spinoza employs as the foundation of the formation of society precisely the emotion of indignation as a “natural passion” triggered by the sight of the suffering of others – especially if the witness holds it to be undeserved. This line of argument is close to the application of the emotion of pity in Rousseau. As for the role of the particular circumstances in the particular histories of particular peoples, Spinoza spectacularly prepared the theory of Rousseau regarding a rather sensitive issue. In a similar way to the one Spinoza followed when neglecting the traditional religious meaning of the law in Ch. 4 of the TPT, when analyzing the traditional belief in the election of the Hebrews, Rousseau does not talk about the intentions of a personal God. Instead of this, he emphasizes the influences that the internal and external contingent events exerted on the development of the people. This is an analysis tantamount to the reduction of the belief in the election of the Hebrew people in the strict and traditional sense, to purely natural phenomena. Another sign of the similarity of orientation in Spinoza and Rousseau is their shared opposition to Hobbes. In Hobbes, the formation of society takes place within the frame of the triad of fear of death, contract based on the principles of reason, and the Christian idea of salvation. In Spinoza, by contrast, we find an evolution based on indignation, while the salvation can but be reached by the “emendation of the intellect”.” All these finds attest to our thesis that albeit Spinoza rarely appears in Strauss’ text, he has an important role in the realization of his intentions, which is no less than demonstrating the paradigm of genealogical philosophy, within which Rousseau must be given a distinguished place. In this

A political theology “of Doubtful Solidity”  193 light, it is especially important to pose the question why Spinoza was so neglected in Natural Right and History. My tentative answer relies on the significance Strauss attributes in his hermeneutical method counter-intuitively to what rarely comes to the fore in the text. In case of a contradiction, he warns us, the opinion must be taken to be the author’s sincere view that comes to the fore much less than the opinion that corresponds to the general view on the matter. Now, in Natural Right and History Spinoza comes to the fore rarely, and my thesis is that this was intended. In the spirit of his hermeneutical maxim, we can affirm that Strauss wished to conceal his real opinion and he emphasized Hobbes to draw our attention off Spinoza as an in reality much more important factor in the development of the theories of natural right retraced in the book, as it appears after reading it superficially. Strauss was reluctant to present Spinoza in the negative light he would have had to do if he had talked about the developments of Entzauberung, disenchantment of natural right unreservedly. But why was he so anxious about Spinoza’s role in this history? His book was not written in a period of political persecution in the sense that he uses the expression in his other books. So, he must have had a private censure. What Strauss wanted to let the attentive reader understand without spelling this out overtly is that Spinoza prefigured Rousseau much more than Hobbes as a philosopher of the inauguration and the crisis of the modern theory of natural right.

7. The private censure and advice to politicians Strauss had a radically ambiguous relationship to three decisive factors influencing his assessment of Spinoza and the role he played in history. The first factor was Judaism as far as the choice between assimilation and orthodoxy was concerned. The second was Spinoza as the master thinker of the secularization of the Jewish people. The third was Hermann Cohen’s denouncement of Spinoza as banned from the community of the Jews. This denouncement Strauss must have felt legitimate from the point of view of Jewish orthodoxy, whereas he must equally have been convinced that Spinoza’s option, the assimilation to a more and more disenchanted, value-neutral environment was the only way that could assure the survival of the Jews. In the years after the Shoa and the condemnation of Spinoza by Carl Schmitt in his book on Hobbes as the main representative of the typically Jewish liberal intellectual, i.e., for precisely the same reason as Cohen condemned him,7 he must have had forceful constraints to avoid saddling on Spinoza the responsibility for a development he denounced and held to be unavoidable at the same time. Thus overtly, he saddled on Hobbes – the positive hero for Schmitt – the responsibility for the general development whereas he gave enough hints to the attentive reader to let him or her reflect seriously on Spinoza’s role in the whole process.8

194  Gábor Boros It is time now to come down to the question I promised to pose and answer at the beginning. What kind of advice does Strauss, following Rousseau, offer to politicians? In this respect, the decisive thesis for Strauss can be found in the preface to the second discourse, the one about the inequality: “All we can very clearly see about this Law is not only that for it to be law the will of him whom it obligates must be able to submit to it knowingly. But also that for it to be natural it must speak immediately with the voice of Nature” (Rousseau 1997, p. 127). This thesis proves to be fatal in a certain sense. What it requires, is the dominance of two human faculties, the will and the sense – sense being the representative of the voice of nature. These are two faculties that were dominated traditionally by reason as considered the real nature of man. However, the idea of a reason given by Nature or God and commanding the will by nature disappears now. As we saw in Pufendorf, in the earlier construction, the will was not the absolute faculty of freedom, because it was naturally subordinated to reason. Thus, it was a faculty of freedom limited and informed by the natural reason. After the disappearance of this commanding natural reason, what remained was no more and no less than the absolute will without any bounds. “Without any bounds”: this means basically two things. On the one hand, the will no longer acknowledges any pre-given law (exlex, says Pufendorf); on the other hand, the will cannot be related to the most general community that is constituted by all humankind and defined by the possession of the naturally given reason. Thus, the universality of the will had to be re-established in the philosophy of politics, no more on the “material” universality of the supposedly given sui generis universal reason but on a type of “formal” construction. This implies a new understanding of reason, a reason that is produced, brought forth in an accelerating pace during history and is embodied in the form of exemplary cleverness of foxy politicians. This is the acquired and embodied reason that will serve the “material” element of the community, which is no more the community of all humankind but always that of a particular group of individuals. Instead of the universal, this particular community is identified by its own history, its own language, its own literature, its own morals – i.e., by all the contingent factors one can enumerate, all the factors that can be translated into the language of sentiments that was advanced to the rank of the voice of nature – attested by Rousseau’s definition of natural law quoted previously. Thus, freedom’s original negativity disappears again. However, its positivity, its being bound does no more originate in the universality included in the rational natural law but in a positivity established by the particular histories of always particular nations. Consequently, the ideal goal is no more the perfection of universal humanity as such.9 And in general: the capability of attaining the state of perfection is no more the most important distinguishing characteristic of the human beings. The

A political theology “of Doubtful Solidity”  195 theory of the general will is “realist” (Strauss) in the sense of its departing from the real universality of reason embodied in the natural law for all humankind. The general will is realist in the sense of its being always only the general will of one of the particular states, one of the only real things (res in Latin). This general will is, as Strauss puts it, The ‘realistic’ substitute for the traditional natural law. According to that teaching [Rousseau’s teaching], the limitation of human desires is affected, not by the intellectual requirements of man’s perfection, but by the recognition in all others of the same right which one claims for one’s self; all others necessarily take an effective interest in the recognition of their rights, whereas no one, or but a few, take an effective interest in human perfection of other men. This being the case, my desire transforms itself into a rational desire by being ‘generalized,’ i.e., by being conceived as the content of a law which binds all members of society equally; a desire which survives the test of ‘generalization’ is, by this very fact, proved to be rational and hence just. (NRH 276–7) The howsoever general will is bound to a particular society to a measure that the will’s intended goal is far from being the progress towards the morally perfect universal mankind. This goal is much more the preservation of the morals of the given particular nation avoiding, as far as possible, all kinds of being influenced by other morals, other peoples determined by other contingent histories. “The general will takes the place of the natural law” – says Strauss before quoting Rousseau: “By the very fact that he is, the sovereign is always what he ought to be” (NRH 286). This is an emblematic sentence. Its meaning in our context is that what is important is not some quality – universalistic moral righteousness, for example – of the sovereign but its mere existence. Beyond the theoretical aspects of the generalization of the will that we have treated as yet it can be instructive to address the question of the content of the practical pieces of advice that Strauss offers the politicians. They deserve our attention not only because they summarize and complement the chapter on Rousseau but also because they have some non-negligible actual consequences. The starting point is the presupposition we have analyzed: the lack of universal reason both in the particular members of the people and in the people as a whole. Thus, the most urgent task is to enlighten the people, who cannot see for themselves. The most appropriate man for achieving this task is the legislator, the father of the nation, “a man of superior intelligence.” He has a double duty: First, to enlighten the people concerning the appropriate general will, second, to render visible every individual member of the people in the sense of transforming them from bourgeois selves interested merely in themselves into real members of the community (citoyens),

196  Gábor Boros who will prefer without doubts the highest good of the community as it is presented by the legislator to the particular interests. The solution of this twofold problem is supplied by the legislator, or the father of a nation, i.e., by a man of superior intelligence, who, by ascribing divine origin to a code which he has devised or by honoring the gods with his own wisdom, both convinces the people of the goodness of the laws . . . and transforms the individual from a natural being into a citizen. (NRH 287) The arguments supporting the divine origin of the laws are, according to these recommendations of Strauss-Rousseau, necessarily “of doubtful solidity.” Therefore, serious efforts must be made to sustain the belief in the divine origin of the laws – precisely because this origin is obscure enough. The direction of the efforts is bifurcated. On the one hand, the transformation of people into citoyens must be continued incessantly. On the other hand, the philosophy and the philosophers must be attacked if they are reluctant to become of national character in an appropriate way. That is to say, society must do everything possible to render the citizens oblivious of the very facts that political philosophy brings to the center of their attention as the foundations of society. Free society stands or falls by a specific obfuscation against which philosophy necessarily revolts. The problem posed by political philosophy must be forgotten if the solution to which political philosophy leads is to work. (NRH 288) Already the mere existence of political philosophy poses the problem that the philosophy intending to set up a commonwealth by way of universal natural laws of reason is of necessity cosmopolitan. In the light of this argumentation, it is in no way a haphazard fact that Rousseau – interpreted by Strauss – will by all means avoid the solutions offered by the natural law-based political philosophy. Yet, I do not want to suggest that Rousseau himself propagated tout court a totalitarian-tyrannical regime, nor that Strauss wished to interpret him unambiguously in this direction. It is at any rate worthwhile to keep in mind that for Strauss it was plausible if not obligatory to warn his readers of the totalitarian danger of the political regime built on the unambiguously particular general will. In Strauss’ book on Natural Right, this warning is much less in the foreground than in his article What is Political Philosophy? written not much later (cf. Strauss 1959).

Conclusions The chapter on Rousseau in the book ends with distinguishing three Rousseauean conclusions, answers to the question of existence that Strauss

A political theology “of Doubtful Solidity”  197 orders hierarchically. The first answer is the figure of the legislator, the foxy politician who feigns divine origin to his laws, fights against the not (or not enough) national philosophy and covers all this by the obscurity of a fable. Strauss places above this first answer the civic religion that he believes to be a more efficient means to transform the sentiment of the people than the mere authority of the lawgiver. The civic religion is strongly linked to the habits prevailing in the country, which were formed by the contingent historical events from the earliest period of the nation or tribe, and precisely this is the reason for its superiority over the mere laws of the lawgiver. The third answer that Strauss mentions is the feeling of existence. Albeit enumerated as the highest, it has a not negligible disadvantage. It is accessible only for a small number of individuals. This is the elementary well-feeling, easiness dating back to the period before the striving for self-preservation and the passion of pity having, at the same time, a sophisticated form that makes it accessible in the developed social state only for the thinker leading a marginal existence. The tension between the two opposite ideals of the state of nature and the Roman state that Strauss identifies in the beginning does not so much dissolve by the end as rather becomes sublimated into the paradoxical phenomenon of the unsocial and unthoughtful feeling of existence.

Notes 1 “They . . . conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion” (Spinoza 1985, p. 491). 2 From our contemporary perspective, it would be challenging to elongate the paradigmatic line of the genealogic philosophy beyond Nietzsche through Max Weber to the contemporary phenomenology that also makes considerable efforts to retrace the genesis of meaning. 3 Ethics, Bk 3 praef, Spinoza 1985, p. 491. 4 Cf. Rousseau himself: “[The Moderns] restrict the province of natural Law to the only animal endowed with reason, that is to say to man;” (Rousseau 1997, p. 126). 5 “By the Term of Right he does not express any Law directive of an Action, but only the Power of acting and what may be done without Injury, and that therefore ‘tis by no Means a fair Conclusion, that one ought necessarily to do all those things, which one has a Right of doing. Farther, as it is an improper Acceptation of the Term of natural Law, to make it denote that according to which every thing acts by a certain and determinate Manner, so is it likewise improper to apply the Name of Right to that Power and manner of acting which appears in irrational Beings: For he alone can be truly said to have a Right of acting, who acts on previous Reason and Deliberation” (Pufendorf 1729, pp. 106–107). 6 Bk. II, Chapter 1; Pufendorf 1729, p. 101. 7 It is not to obliterate the huge difference between Cohen’s aiming at the preservation of the Jewish people as a people and Schmitt’s expressing a prevailing sentiment in Nazi Germany that led to the Endlösung. 8 At the end of Ch. 2 on “Natural right and the distinction between facts and values,” he talks about the necessity of rediscovering a natural, “prescientific” world by way of the recognition of the eternal values. He maintains that “[t]he information that classical philosophy supplies about its origins suffices, especially if that

198  Gábor Boros information is supplemented by consideration of the most elementary premises of the Bible, for reconstructing the essential character of ‘the natural world.’ ” 9 This negation would have rendered challenging the inclusion of Pufendorf’s, Kant’s and Hegel’s respective natural law theories in the treatment of it by Strauss. Pufendorf clearly serves as a model for Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals in many respects, for example when he treats subjects such as “Of the Duties and Performances of Man towards himself; as well in Regard to the Improvement of his Mind, as to the Care of his Body and of his Life” as the title of Ch. 4 of Bk 2 states.

Bibliography Curley, E. M. 1996. ‘Calvin and Hobbes, or, Hobbes as an Orthodox Christian’. Journal of the History of Philosophy 34, 2: 257–271. https://doi.org/10.1353/ hph.1996.0030. Matheron, Alexander. 1990. ‘Le problème de l’évolution de Spinoza du Traité théologico-politique au Traité politique’. In: Spinoza: Issues and Directions: The Proceedings of the Chicago Spinoza Conference. Edited by E. M. Curley and P. F. Moreau. Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill: 258–270. Pufendorf, Samuel. 1729. Of the Law of Nature and Nations. Translated by B. Kennett, introduction and notes of Barbeyrac. London. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1985. The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2016. The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Strauss, Leo. 1953. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. ———. 1965. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1988. What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (originally 1959). ———. 2008. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 1, Die Religionskritik Spinozas und zugehörige Schriften. Stuttgart: Metzler.

12 Religious moral languages, secularity and hermeneutical injustice* Gorazd Andrejč

Jeffrey Stout’s “modest pragmatism” (Stout 1990, p. 249–265, 2004, p. 251–259), as a philosophical approach to public moral discourse in a religiously plural society, has received a mixed response from the opposite sides of the secularism debate. On the one hand, influential theologians and communitarian thinkers have claimed that Stout concedes too much to the secularists. For example, Stanley Hauerwas1 argues that Stout’s affirmation of radical democracy lacks a credible – and, for Hauerwas, crucial – rootedness in theology, claiming that Stout “wants to repeat what I [sic!] am saying without taking on the theological issues which he, himself, would not want to own as part of his own convictions” (Springs et al. 2010, p. 16). On the other hand, secularists have found Stout’s inclusive approach towards religious reasonings in public discourse all too theological. Among others, Stout’s fellow pragmatist Richard Rorty has argued against Stout’s claims that “there is no inherent tension between democratic institutions and religious belief,” maintaining that “non-theists make better citizens of democratic societies than theists” (ibid., p. 8). This essay is based on the conviction that Stout’s attempt of mediation between the political theology of Christian communitarians and the liberal visions of public discourse – say, versions by Rorty, Habermas and Rawls, respectively2 – deserves a re-examination and further analysis in the light of recent work in epistemology of democracy and pragmatist philosophy of language. By way of offering such re-examination, I will present what, following Stout, I call a “modest pragmatist” vision of public moral discourse. I will engage with Stout’s descriptive account of how such discourse has worked in Western societies, but more importantly, I will also take inspiration from some of the central features of Stout’s approach in the normative sense. I will suggest, however, that such a vision is persuasive only if certain principles which Stout either affirms or presupposes – a strong principle of religious freedom, a democratic principle of inclusion and a principle to settle disputes discursively and not violently – are placed in its center and developed somewhat further than they have been in Stout’s own work. I will do this by using recent theoretical work in the epistemology of democracy, especially Elisabeth Anderson (2006) and José Medina (2013), and

200  Gorazd Andrejč a Wittgensteinian-pragmatist philosophy of religious language. However, I will apply the previously-mentioned theory – Medina’s theory of hermeneutical (in)justice in particular – to the question which it does not address, namely: how can and should different religious languages be included in public moral deliberation? The result is, I will argue, a new and stronger variant of the modest pragmatist vision of public moral discourse and a renewed argument for a qualified secularity of such discourse.

1. Stout on the secularity of public moral discourse There are various factors that shape the grammar of any particular moral language and the negotiations of the common-enough values in a society in which different moral languages are used by respective communities. Following Stout, by “moral language” I mean a system of concepts and logical relations, which has a capability to express moral attitudes, relevant experiences, views, beliefs, dilemmas and arguments. A moral language always lives embedded in practices and relationships and can be anything from an idiosyncratic discourse of highly particular meanings used by a minority with an insulated subculture, to a loosely defined and much broader discourse used more or less across the polity. In the latter case, the meanings of the central words of such a language will tend to be underdetermined and constantly negotiated between different interpretations, through the process of public deliberation, or more simply, through different expressions and narrations of moral attitudes, stories and the like. Every moral language, however modern or new, incorporates and builds on existent concepts and distinctions it inherits to a large extent. Through time, the meanings of the key terms are rearranged, their boundaries renegotiated, some terms are abandoned, others renewed, and, rarely, new ones are invented and “catch on.” This is why Stout characterizes a typical modern moral language of Western societies as a bricolage (Stout 1990, p. 74–77). He uses the Wittgensteinian metaphor of an “ancient city,” according to which language is like “a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses and of houses with additions from various periods; . . . surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses” (Wittgenstein 1968, §18). Just like a typical city, a moral language has many contingent features and only a few that have been “planned” in any meaningful sense when having the city as a whole in mind. A typical European moral language includes traces of Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, the Bible, of medieval Christianity and the Reformation, Kant, Romanticism, sometimes Nietzsche, often traces of both capitalism and socialism, modern psychology and some other scientific discourses, and often also some postBiblical Jewish, pagan (Norse, Slavic or other) and Muslim (Turkish, Arab, Persian and so on) traces. Today, the overall public moral discourse in societies such as British, Canadian, German, or Belgian, tends to be secular. This means that its main

Languages, secularity and injustice  201 normative categories, like “public good,” “anti-social behaviour,” “callous,” “praiseworthy,” “human right” and “hate-speech,” are not “framed by a theological perspective” taken for granted by all those who participate (Stout 2004, p. 93). While Stout’s account of why the Western public moral discourse became secularized should not be taken as a complete or even balanced historical explanation, it nevertheless captures a crucial dynamic which I want to focus on here, which relates to what is taken for granted in a conversation and what is not, and how shared background beliefs or presuppositions shape the conversation. Stout writes that, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the public moral discourse in parts of Western Europe and North America moved notably towards secularization, not because people became less religious or nonreligious en masse, but because of a combination of moral and pragmatic-political reasons. After the denominational pluralization of Christianity in the Protestant countries, which went through various Protestant-Catholic and intra-Protestant conflicts, neither the “plain sense of the Bible” – according to which the Bible is supposed to be sufficiently clear to interpret itself – nor the ecclesiastical authority could still effectively function as the arbiter to settle moral and political disputes. Stout follows Christopher Hill’s account of 17th century England: the then newlyemerged, if still limited, space for different interpretations of the Bible in England, which was still very much Christian, meant that, by the latter part of the century, appealing to the Bible in public disputes ceased to work as an effective arbiter of such disputes. Because of this, a somewhat different and broadly accepted way of settling such disputes had to be found, a way that did not rely on God’s will or on an agreed method to determine God’s will (Stout 1990, p. 79–81, 2004, p. 94). This situation, Stout argues, facilitated a crucial move towards secularization of the public discourse in England, which influenced also the developments in North America (and probably vice versa) and later, indirectly, much beyond.3 It is important to appreciate that “secular” and “secularized” here, as elsewhere in Stout’s writings, have particular and quite narrow meanings: What makes a form of discourse secularized, according to [Stout’s] account, is not the tendency of the people participating in it to relinquish their religious beliefs or to refrain from employing them as reasons. The mark of secularization, as I use the term, is rather the fact that participants in a given discursive practice are not in a position to take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are. This is the sense in which public discourse in modern democracies tends to be secularized. (Stout 2004, p. 97; italics added) This meaning of the “secular” resembles the “third sense” of the “secular” of which Charles Taylor writes in A Secular Age, according to which the “shift to secularity . . . consists . . . of a move from a society where belief

202  Gorazd Andrejč in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others” (Taylor 2007, p. 3). For Taylor, the salient consequence of that is that “you can engage fully in politics without ever encountering God” (ibid., p. 1). Though this similarity is notable, Stout’s sense of the secular is narrower than Taylor’s ‘third’ sense and does not venture into phenomenological analysis. More importantly, secularization, according to Stout’s use of this term, “is not a reflection of commitment to secularism” (Stout 2004, p. 93). It does not refer to a lessening of religious convictions among the population, nor to the anti-religious ideological influence of “secular elites,” nor to disestablishment of the “State Church.” All these things might have become more likely, or perhaps possible in the first place, once secularization of the public moral discourse in the Stoutian sense has largely happened. But none of those developments should be seen as either equal to, or a necessary consequence of – let alone a definite cause of – secularization of the public moral discourse. The crucial feature of Stout’s minimalist notion of the “secular” is what, following David Lewis, he calls the “kinematics of presupposition” (Stout 1990, p. 79): the fact that the presuppositions of moral discourse, which all conversation partners normally take for granted, can change. When a particular kind of traditional-Christian set of religious commitments could not be taken for granted by the large majority of those who took part in important ethical-political discussions and negotiations in a particular context, a process of secularization of public moral discourse in that context began.4 We should note, however, that the main focus in Stout’s secularization theory is not historical, but falls within a cross-section between philosophy of language, ethics, political philosophy and epistemology. In the next section, we move on from the historical-descriptive sketch outlined in this section to a normative perspective which I derive from Stout’s work. I will be guided by the question: why is it a good idea that public moral discourse should be secular in Stout’s sense? This question is relevant in new ways today – including, of course, for Europe and the US, given the increasing diversity of religious and/or metaphysical commitments by their inhabitants in comparison with the 17th-century situation.

2. Three principles of the “Modest Pragmatist Vision” Modest pragmatist approach to the secularity of the public moral discourse rests on three crucial principles. A strong principle of freedom of religion This principle is not an intrinsic part of the commitment to any kind of secularity of the public moral discourse. Think of the influential philosophical positions and the actual political arrangements where upholding

Languages, secularity and injustice  203 the secularity of public moral discourse does (or did) not accommodate freedom of religion. Communist governments, such as those of the former Soviet Union or China, have maintained a distinctly secular public moral discourse while not accommodating a genuine freedom of religion of their respective citizens. Stout claims more than that, however, arguing that even a political philosophy like Rawlsian liberalism, which has been influential in Western democracies, does not affirm a strong – or, strong enough – principle of freedom. According to Rawls’ conception of “public reason,” no public justification of moral and political convictions between citizens should be based on “comprehensive doctrine,” either religious or secular. It is not hard to realize, however, that Rawlsian public reason has to be secular in an important sense, even if Rawls does not call it that (Rawls 2005, p. 447). It regards believers who would justify their convictions on religious premises in public moral discourse as “not reasonable” (c.f. Stout 2004, p. 67). Stout’s “modest pragmatism” (1990, p. 243–265), on the other hand, is based on a commitment to a different and stronger principle of freedom of religion than those of either Rawlsian or Habermasian liberalism. According to Stout, all citizens should not only be free to believe and worship as they see fit privately, but they should also be free and even encouraged to explicate publicly their different religious reasons, if they have them, for their moral convictions about the matters of public interest. Explaining one’s religious or nonreligious reasons to those who do not share them, as well as considering various kinds of religious or nonreligious reasons of one’s fellow citizens seriously, demand attentiveness and considerable effort. So, does trying to persuade people, who believe differently from me, with reasons which are relevant for them and which they might be inclined to accept. Such “immanent criticism” is seen by Stout (but not by Rawls) as an important and legitimate practice in a respectful and public reason-giving discussion (Stout 2004, p. 72–73). The difficulty here is the need to comprehend, at least minimally, the notably varied grammars of each other’s diverse religious languages, and hence to be prepared to live not only with strong propositional disagreements about moral matters but also with at least some deeper, “grammatical disagreements” (cf. Andrejč 2016). In a religiously free society, we should accept the situation in which some of us operate with somewhat different meanings of shared moral words – such as “dignity,” “freedom,” “goodness,” or “flourishing” – than others, as normal. Being ready to live with such difference follows directly from the liberal commitment to respect difference and individuality, which includes taking “seriously the distinctive point of view each other occupies” (Stout 2004, p. 73). Why should, then, secularity of the public moral discourse be affirmed in the modest pragmatist vision at all, given that it encourages partakers in the public conversation to speak in, and carefully listen to, multiple religious and nonreligious languages and reasonings? I will return to this question in

204  Gorazd Andrejč the concluding section of the essay. The question can be answered, however, only if we take on board further two principles: The democratic principle of inclusion of all citizens in deliberation over issues of public interest Since the rules and policies of the polity affect all citizens, it is right and important to include all citizens in the negotiation and determination of those rules and policies. Stoutian, modest pragmatism is committed to a “conception of ourselves as citizens who . . . ought to enjoy equal standing in political discourse” (Stout 2004, p. 83). Somewhat problematically, Stout claims that such a conception is “[implicit] in our way of treating one another” (Stout 2004, p. 83), which is probably an overly optimistic idea. More importantly, Stout’s inclusive conception of citizenship is consistent with Elisabeth Anderson’s view that “exclusion casts doubt on the claim that problems and solutions as defined by those allowed to participate are truly in the public interest – responsive in a fair way to everyone’s concerns” (Anderson 2006, p. 14). It is a sustained commitment to democratic inclusion of all citizens which supports, and gives a particular character to, the first principle mentioned previously, the principle of freedom of religion. The previously-mentioned ethical reason for democratic inclusion in both Anderson’s and Stout’s philosophy is intertwined with a Deweyan pragmatist epistemology. José Medina explains the reasoning behind it: [It] is because we want to exploit the benefits of productive dissent that we need to recognize and take advantage of the heterogeneous situated knowledge of diverse agents; that we want all agents and groups to be in communication and to interact epistemically, so that they can interrogate each other and cooperate; and that we want diverse experiences and reactions to be used for critically revisiting and perfecting decisions and policies. (Medina 2013, p. 6) Finally, let us mention the third and related principle: A Commitment to Settle Disputes Discursively and not through Violence (silencing, intimidation, imprisonment, forced exile, killing) The modest pragmatist approach can only work if most citizens are, at least in principle, committed to trying “to resolve differences by exchanging reasons” rather than through using threats or force against those with whom they disagree or whose lifestyle they do not like (Stout 2004, p. 96). Fairer and better solutions to problems can be found if we “keep the conversation going” (ibid., p. 86) in the face of our differences – provided that all parties

Languages, secularity and injustice  205 abide at least by basic standards of discourse ethics such as a commitment to minimal notion of truthfulness – rather than giving up on the conversation completely or closing it down. The latter course, of course, leaves the matters of public interest to be decided by unilateral decrees of those in power, or perhaps negotiations between different groups who have some power, without exchanging reasons, without ethical considerations. The three principles mentioned previously are nothing new. Here, we wanted only to explicate them fully for the purpose of the discussion that follows. Also, there is much more to be said about them; some of the issues that can be raised about them are addressed next, others we cannot address in this article.

3. Hermeneutical injustice and the diversity of religious languages In order to see more clearly how the three principles described in the previous section – the strong principle of religious freedom, the principle of democratic inclusion and the principle to solve disputes discursively – work together in the modest pragmatist vision of public moral discourse, and how they provide a rationale for its secularity, we have to engage some more the ideas of recent Deweyan epistemology of democracy. Building on Dewey’s experimental approach to democracy (which also influences Stout’s version of pragmatism), both Elisabeth Anderson and José Medina emphasize the importance of citizens’ “situated knowledge” for democratic decisionmaking, because “citizens from different walks of life have different experiences of problems and policies of public interest” (Anderson 2006, p. 14). To what amounts taking citizens’ situated knowledge seriously in public deliberation? The experience of different communities and individuals in society (different according to ethnicity and/or race, economic status, religion or ideology, gender) often results in somewhat different moral and epistemic sensibilities being held by those communities and individuals. Imbalances of power are present in every society, including the societies which aspire towards democratic inclusion – indeed, such imbalances are exceptionally huge today in the country which, at least until recently, has seen itself as a beacon of democracy, namely the US. These imbalances are manifested in unequal distribution, not only of the material goods but also of the immaterial goods and institutional provisions that are crucial for the realization of the principle of democratic inclusion. This refers to such goods, inter alia, as access to knowledge, the status of “being a knower” and “being a reliable testifier,” having one’s experience regarded as morally and politically relevant, and having one’s language or discourse accepted as sensible and reasonable. In other words, societies are marked – or plagued – not only by economic but also systemic “epistemic,” “testimonial,” and “hermeneutical” injustices, as Miranda Fricker argues in her influential book Epistemic Justice (2007).

206  Gorazd Andrejč This does not mean that privileged groups necessarily possess superior knowledge and understanding, as is especially salient in case of the moral and morally relevant knowledge and understanding that are most relevant for democratic decision-making. Groups that are economically and socially underprivileged, and that tend to be silenced or ignored, often possess unique insights into social and political issues due to their particular circumstances. Following the seminal work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Medina (2013, p. 101–109) takes the experience and the situated knowledge of the AfroAmerican community in the United States as a case study. An important lesson Du Bois teaches us about the problem of white ignorance regarding the systemic racial injustices that still plague American society, is that, “while white Americans exhibited a special kind of blindness and deafness in the obscure world they created, black Americans developed a ‘double vision’ and a ‘double consciousness’ that was attentive to dual meanings and had special insights into the two worlds” (Medina 2013, 104). For our purpose, the most relevant ethical concepts in Medina’s analysis (building on Fricker’s) are hermeneutical injustice, insensitivity, marginalization and responsibility (Medina 2013, p. 90–130). Hermeneutical injustice can consist of, on the one hand, being unfairly disadvantaged in the capacity “to make sense of an experience,” either one’s own or that of others, and on the other hand, of “enjoying unequal participation in communicative practices in which meanings are generated and expressed” (ibid., p. 90, 97). Hermeneutically marginalized speakers can struggle to express their experience, concerns and views, at least fully, in the vocabulary of the dominant moral discourse in society. This is because groups in power have a disproportionate influence on meaning-generation in the dominant discourse, and because not trying to understand what the marginalized feel and want to say is often part of the mechanism that keeps those in power in their privileged position. Hence, the hermeneutically privileged often remain blind to facets of meanings of moral concepts as used by the disprivileged speakers. “Hermeneutical insensitivities involve the inability to respond to attempts (however inarticulate) to express certain aspects of our experience or [the] experience of others.” (ibid., p. 97) Medina argues that we are hermeneutically responsible to attend to and help, if we can, the interpretive and communicative attempts of hermeneutically marginalized speakers: “Communities share a collective responsibility to do everything they can to facilitate everyone’s ability to participate in meaning-making and meaning-expressing practices” (ibid., p. 109). The foci of Medina’s analysis are, for the most part, gender and racially-based injustices and the corresponding responsibilities. There is no doubt that these injustices remain endemic, even in societies with long traditions of battling such injustices. What Medina does not pay enough attention to, however, is the fact that the moral languages of hermeneutically marginalized groups (as well as those in power) are sometimes religious. They sometimes draw on the symbolic resources and meanings of confessional or religious traditions

Languages, secularity and injustice  207 which help them express their morally and politically salient experiences, often in unique ways. Such religious linguistic resources can be shared between the marginalized and the privileged. This has evidently been the case with AfricanAmerican communities in the US, who have normally shared central Christian symbolic resources with white and most other Americans. African Americans have, however, developed somewhat different interpretations of the common Biblical themes – such as the exodus and the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, or the theme of salvation in Christ itself. Building on the relevant African-American experiences, cases in point are the black-liberation interpretations of biblical themes by Martin Luther King Jr. and, more recently, Cornell West. African Americans have used these themes in ways that give expression to their particular experience, especially of the injustices they have been suffering and continue to suffer, in response to which they have developed special kind of political sensibilities. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that a religiously and hermeneutically marginalized group draws, at least in part, on the resources of a different religious culture than that of the majority of their co-citizens, typically combining those with the shared hermeneutical resources. This is the case with some communities of native Americans in the US: for example, the Lakota who follow their traditional religion and values (cf. Pickering 2000, p. 6–7, 27–30, 68, 108; Scheid 2016, p. 163–179). Note that the marginalization itself can, but need not, be religion-related – that is, it can be but is not necessarily bound up with the fact that the hermeneutically marginalized group is of a different religion, denomination or belief than the more privileged groups of citizens. But in all such cases, hermeneutic marginalization consists in the privileged group(s) not attending to the communicative attempts, reasonings, as well as the unfamiliar or “unusual” meanings used by the speakers from the marginalized group.5 We should not, of course, suppose that all moral languages, either religious or secular and either dominant or marginalized, will have only good conceptual and interpretive resources to offer to the deliberation of the whole polity. The moral languages of marginalized communities can include categories, interpretations and values which are in conflict with those of the majority of citizens. Moreover, some values of the marginalized group can be in conflict with the principles of religious freedom, democratic inclusion and discursive solution-seeking to disputes, the principles which are central for an inclusive, religiously free society to function. The point, however, is that a genuine openness, fairness and attentiveness to all voices and experiences as much as possible is needed before criticism, debate or rejection. The democratic principle of inclusion, Anderson writes, makes maximal use of . . . situated knowledge [that] is critical for solving the kinds of complex problems modern democracies face. Collective,

208  Gorazd Andrejč democratic discussion and deliberation is a means of pooling this asymmetrically distributed information for decision-making. (Anderson 2006, p. 14) So, being hermeneutically open does not mean giving a blank check to all languages of morals, whether this be in the sense of proclaiming their “goodness” or of accepting their equal expressive power. But it does mean “being alert and sensitive to eccentric voices and styles as well as to nonstandard meanings and interpretive perspectives” (Medina 2013, p. 114). Openness, in other words, is a matter of “making our communicative contexts and dynamics more hospitable to plural and diverse experiential standpoints” (ibid.). The inclusion of different moral and religious forms of reasoning into the public moral conversation across communities necessarily involves effort and adaptation by all sides: by those who are hermeneutically privileged and by those who are not. The more such moral languages are grammatically distant from one another,6 the more likely the approximation of meanings and consequently a good mutual understanding across such moral languages can become a challenge. Languages are, of course, not static or unchangeable. Hermeneutical innovation, however slow or imperceptible, happens all the time. Such innovation is sometimes required for ethical reasons, namely, in order to enable meaningful communication between diverse communities. Stout finds it significant that cultures and languages “are not, simply by virtue of conceptual diversity, hermeneutically sealed. Nothing in the nature of conceptual diversity itself prevents one culture from developing the means for expressing an alien culture’s moral [and religious] propositions or grasping their truth” (Stout 1990, p. 64). Furthermore, when direct translation of important moral words is not possible and the overlaps of meaning are too thin to establish a sensible conversation through hermeneutical innovation, a comparative “grammatical investigation” of the imaginaries of both cultures can constructively challenge, transform and enrich both discourses, and open up new ways of communication (Burrell 2011, p. 165–175; see also Medina 2013, p. 114n13). Such a need can be readily observed in the context of interreligious communication in which two or more thick religious languages – Western Christian and Japanese Buddhist, for example – which originally come from notably different cultural contexts, meet (Andrejč 2016, p. 107–115, 154–165). But the challenges of interreligious and intercultural communication, either across distinct polities or within a polity, should not be exaggerated. I follow a Wittgensteinian perspective here, according to which the concept of “language” itself can be properly understood only if the instinctive and gestural roots of all communication are fully in view. “Our language is an extension of the more primitive behavior (for our language-game is a piece of behavior)” (Wittgenstein 1980, §151). This is epitomized by the

Languages, secularity and injustice  209 importance of “exaggerated gestures and facial expressions” in teaching a language, where “the word is taught as a substitute for a facial expression or a gesture” (Wittgenstein 1970, p. 2). It is because the “origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction,” as Wittgenstein (1998, p. 36) puts it, that languages which are culturally very distant can nevertheless achieve an impressive degree of mutual intelligibility and communicability (with enough contextualized interpretation, “participatory learning,” etc.). Wittgenstein even talks about “the common behavior of mankind” which provides a sort of a “system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (Wittgenstein 1968, §206). From this perspective, the grammatical gap between different religious or secular languages, and even the gap between “alien” cultures, however noticeable and deep it may be, can never be radical (Plant 2005, p. 105–108). Finally, the danger of hermeneutical marginalization means, on the one hand, that the marginalized speakers/communities and those who realize the responsibility to help them need, at least in some contexts, to engage in hermeneutical resistance, which can mean sticking to their own, idiosyncratic phrases and meanings (Medina 2013, p. 100; Fricker 2007, p. 166–168). On the other hand, they may need to linguistically approximate with the hermeneutically privileged speakers/communities in order to allow for hermeneutical innovation for the sake of communicability. In other words, in order to be understood, the hermeneutically marginalized will, most often, have to express themselves in public conversation by using mostly the established vocabularies on which the privileged speakers – sometimes coming from a different religious or confessional tradition than the marginalized – have a disproportionate influence. For this reason, the hermeneutically-resistant speakers often have to be creative and “resignify those meanings” with their own, somewhat different usage of them (Medina 2013, p. 113; see also Butler 1997). Now, how to seek a balance between hermeneutic resistance and hermeneutic innovation by incorporation of elements of a dominant moral language into the marginalized, is of course a million-dollar question. Moreover, conscious attempts at either hermeneutic innovation or preservation of meanings are very often futile because of the sheer power of the dynamics of language evolution, which is, for the most part, beyond the control of any one individual or even group. The fact that religious moral languages normally have an inbuilt tendency towards preserving the tradition (c.f. Assmann 2008; c.f. also Andrejč 2016, p. 119–127) makes conscious attempts in hermeneutical innovation in religious languages even trickier. Nevertheless, I trust that a sufficient ethical case for such innovation has been made.

4. A minimalist discourse ethics We have seen that combining a serious engagement with the situated knowledge of diverse groups and citizens with the strong principle of religious freedom has far-reaching implications. The third principle of the modest

210  Gorazd Andrejč pragmatist vision of public moral discourse – the commitment to settle disputes discursively and not through violence – could appear like a basic condition for any kind of public deliberation to happen at all rather than an ideal with far-reaching consequences like the first two principles. But the commitment to settle disputes discursively can contain either or both: (1) basic conditions for language to work as a means of negotiation at all or/ and (2) a demanding ideal with far-reaching implications insofar as it is developed further and applied critically to various aspects of human interactions. In this essay, I focus more on its former, and more problematic, aspect rather than the latter. Arguably, one of the main factors which contribute to the descent into conflict is a breakdown of trust in the use of language as means of settling conflicts of interests and disagreements. The Herzegovinian philosopher Dražen Pehar called a process which leads to such a breakdown a “dediscoursification”: “The agent dediscoursifies another agent” when he or she violates the “moral matrix of discourse” continuously and in a particularly severe way. The dediscoursifier pushes the interlocutor towards “los[ing] trust in the use of language, silences him or her as ens loquens” (Pehar 2016). Such violations include frequent and blatant lying, making contradictory statements and/or promises on crucial issues, breaking promises and making statements without trying to make sure that those statements are at least probably true. This is to say that for any kind of negotiation between speaking subjects and communities – let alone the more complex kinds of moral deliberation conducted through reason-giving discussion – a commitment to some basic discourse-ethical standards is necessary. Of course, there are other kinds of unethical language use, many of which are subtler in nature than the aforementioned blatant violations. Some of the subtler kinds have been discussed in the section on hermeneutical injustices and marginalizations previously, which can often be hard to notice. This makes it difficult to assume that we could reasonably expect most citizens not to commit them in order to even qualify for partaking in public discourse. According to the second principle of the modest pragmatist vision, the democratic principle of inclusion, we must try to make deliberation about matters of public interest as inclusive as possible. If the basic ethical standards for language use are set too high, there is a risk of disqualifying far too many members of society from public moral deliberation. Stout is right that a crucial mistake of Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (1985) was to introduce a set of overly high standards for inclusion in public deliberation (Stout 1990, p. 166). I am not convinced by Stout’s further claim, however, that we should give up on the quest for any kind of “criteria for public discourse as such” (ibid.). The danger of dediscoursification is real. Hence, it is important to reflect on the conditions which ground the commitment to discursive (as opposed to violent) ways to resolve conflicts. We cannot accept any kind of attitude towards the language

Languages, secularity and injustice  211 with which we try to settle disagreements, because blatant violations of the moral matrix of language devalue language as such. It is granted, however, that the content of the basic discourse-ethical criteria has to be simple and applicable cross-culturally. A suggestion that I find persuasive is that such criteria should be based on the primitive concept of truthfulness. According to Bernard Williams, the virtue of truthfulness – on which trust in the use language as such depends – is constituted by two other virtues, “Accuracy and Sincerity: you do the best you can to acquire true beliefs, and what you say reveals what you believe” (Williams 2002, p. 11). Now, for minimal discourse-ethical standards, which is what we are after here, we need not follow Williams’ ambitious interpretation of these two virtues all the way. Accuracy, in its basic form, encompasses adherence to some broadly accepted and tested rules for fact-checking and evidence-giving – not necessarily narrowed down to “scientific evidence” but taken in a broader, “common-sense sense” – and relating one’s assertions to what one has evidence for. Sincerity encompasses refraining from lying, deliberate deception, manipulation and misrepresentation of one’s own feelings and beliefs or those of others. Of course, violations of accuracy and sincerity, understood even in this basic way, are frequent in most cultures. Often enough, even speakers who try to uphold these virtues fail to do so. But it is when these two basic virtues are violated severely and continuously, and there is little or no evidence suggesting that this is likely to change, trust in the use of language as such tends to be fatally eroded. I have not been convinced by arguments that the meanings of basic concepts such as “truth,” “truthfulness,” “accuracy” and “sincerity” are radically different across cultures. Nor do I think that we need an agreed religious or nonreligious metaphysical account of these concepts in order to use them in meaningful communication. In other words, I work under the assumption that these concepts, or such that are similar enough to them, can work in basic discourse-ethical criteria for acceptable language use across most cultures and religions that we know of – which is not to say that there is an automatic agreement on any exact content of such criteria. That is always in need to be negotiated between the relevant parties in the discourse. In any practical context, further contextually specific questions about the conditions for moral discourse will arise which are not addressed here. What to do when one or more parties engaged in public moral discourse repeatedly violate the previously-mentioned basic criteria? What kind of pressure or even coercion, if any, can or should be used in critical situations in order to achieve minimally ethical conditions of conversation? And, how can the violated party determine the point at which it is rational and right for her to abandon attempts to negotiate discursively? These difficult and important questions are related to, but somewhat separate from, the central ones I am addressing in this paper. But a political theory that would include the modest pragmatist vision of public moral discourse I am outlining here

212  Gorazd Andrejč would need to broach and address them – I have limited myself here to developing only some, less-explored implications of this approach.

5. Conclusion: so, why secularity? We are now able to revisit our earlier question: why should the secularity of public moral discourse be affirmed according to the modest pragmatist vision of public moral discourse presented here – given that it encourages the use of multiple religious reasonings in the public sphere? Let us remember what “secularity” means here and reframe the question somewhat. Secularity means “the fact that participants in a given discursive practice are not in a position to take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are” (Stout 2004, p. 97). If we accept such a situation and are committed to try as good and just ways to live together as possible, as individuals and as groups and despite the persistence of differences, we will try our utmost to find ways to talk, argue, persuade and negotiate with one another across these differences. A part of the solution is in continuously negotiating a somewhat underdetermined (meanings-wise) but still common-enough moral discourse across the communities, while trying to listen and understand as much as possible to the expressions in different moral languages used in society, religious or secular. The normative claim here is that, beyond the fact that we cannot expect that fellow participants in the public moral discourse will share our religious assumptions, we should not expect that, and we should nevertheless continue the conversation. Some argue against this normative claim in the following way. Since “certain substantive choices and views have necessarily to prevail” in order to ground the moral and political categories and values of a society (Milbank 2012, p. 18), it is claimed that the particular religious tradition that is dominant or professed by the majority should be the one that provides the meanings of those categories for the whole society. In much of the Christian and perhaps some of the post-Christian world, this would mean that the overall moral discourse of society should be broadly Christian and should be recognized as theologically grounded. According to such an arrangement, those in power should nevertheless take into account the fact that a fair number of citizens do not share the religious-metaphysical grounding of those categories and should make public deliberation hospitable to them wherever and whenever it is possible. In other words, the theological-communitarian politics need not have the expectation that all participants in public discourse would share the dominant religious beliefs, strictly speaking. It is just that the discourse should remain of that particular religious kind – in most of Europe, Christian – and as such used by all parties in discussion, whether they believe its metaphysical interpretations or not. Such an arrangement, then, would respect Stoutian “secularity” to some degree, but far from fully. It rejects the conviction that a cross-communal, underdetermined language

Languages, secularity and injustice  213 of moral deliberation should be found, such that would not be theologically or anti-theologically “substantive.”7 It follows from the argument of the current essay that such an alternative arrangement is neither just nor good. Instead, the public moral discourse should normally be (qualifiedly) secular even if the majority of citizens are Christian, because such secularity is the most democratic way to proceed and enables the fairest kind of respect for religious freedom. A fair and democratic secularity, which does not slide into an anti-religious bias or atheistic presumption, is of course difficult to achieve. It can only be maintained if the hard work on overcoming hermeneutical and other group injustices continues, if the society strives to achieve mutual understanding and negotiation of common-enough values, rules, policies and laws. But the difficulty of this task is not a good enough reason to give up on it. It should be recognized, however, that this argument will be convincing mostly to those who share and prioritize the basic democratic sensibilities which undergird it. Democratic, inclusive and fair society with freedom of religion and belief is first and foremost a moral ideal, based on an “ethic of reciprocity” (Kloppenberg 2016, p. 589), not – primarily – a dispassionate system of government. This is to say that the reformed Stoutian picture of public moral discourse as secular which I defend is a part of a broader moral vision of a fair and inclusive society – which is important, if we think that a “moral theory is needed to justify the coercive rules that are the only hope of keeping a multireligious society from falling apart at the seams” (Foster 2005, p. 5). The modest pragmatist approach taken here takes a central feature of the Enlightenment, the idea of a “fully equal citizenship for members of all religions” (ibid.), and develops it – with the help of a careful epistemology of democracy, better philosophy of language, other critical tools and lessons learned from modern societies – in a more democratic direction than that in which Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke or Hume were able or willing to do. As a vision, it is best promoted through a combination of reasoned argument and preaching, i.e., speech acts which try to inspire fellow citizens to accept and pursue it.

Notes * The research that went into writing this article has been funded by Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) through two projects: Interreligious Dialogue – a Basis for Coexisting Diversity in the Light of Migration and the Refugee Crisis (ARRS Project J6-9393), and Radicalisation and Violent Extremism: Philosophical, Sociological and Educational Perspective (ARRS Project J7-9419). 1 The other two Christian communitarians Stout engages in some detail in Democracy and Tradition are Alasdair MacIntyre and John Milbank. See Stout (2004, p. 92–139). 2 See Stout (1990, p. 266–292, 2004, p. 63–91). 3 In his recent monograph Protestants: The Radicals that Made the Modern World, Alec Ryrie (2017, pp. 120–131) shows how English Civil War and the hopeless attempts to create a religiously unified country in the 17th Century England

214  Gorazd Andrejč brought about the opposite: the beginnings of a reluctant but irreversible acceptance of pluralization of British Christianity and, through this, a dawning of the necessity for finding political community and language that were not premissed on religious uniformity. See also Legaspi (2010, p. 3–5) for a broader but related thesis that the pluralization of interpretations of the Bible in European Christianity has contributed to a decline of political authority of the Bible in many parts of Europe, not just in England. James Kloppenberg (2016, p. 179), on the other hand, argues that some characteristic features of particular Reformation-Christian communities such as Quakers importantly influenced some early experiements in democratic political culture in the US which quite consciously did not exclude people from public deliberation on the basis of religious beliefs or identity. Notably, the “founding documents of Pennsylvania illustrate the extent to which [William] Penn’s convictions as a Quaker aligned with the principles of popular sovereignty, autonomy, equality, and mutuality” (ibid.). 4 In my reading (I do not have the space to argue it here), this depiction of the secularization of Western public moral discourse is largely compatible with those accounts of secularization which emphasize the Christian origins of the basic conceptual categories involved, such as Charles Taylor’s genealogy of the “secular” in his The Secular Age (2007) or even Larry Siedentop’s account of the emergence of Western Liberalism in his Inventing the Individual (2015). It is not, however, compatible with the radically negative, anti-Enlightenment interpretations of the same history, such as that of John Milbank (2006). Furthermore, I do not see a contradiction between the normative aspect of the modest pragmatist vision of public moral discourse outlined in this article and the historical claim that Christianity has had a decisive (but not exclusive) influence on the grammar of most important European and “Western” moral concepts, including the concept “secular” itself. 5 For a related but somewhat distinct (broader) topic, see Kidd (2017). 6 The differences between moral or religious languages can sometimes be only a matter of “surface grammar” while there remain significant similarities in terms of “depth grammars” (Wittgenstein 1968, §664) – that is, social practices and attitudes which can sometimes find very diverse expressions in respective languages. The reverse can also be the case, of course: languages which might seem very similar can, under investigation, exhibit a notable grammatical disparity in their meanings. 7 It is impossible to defend Stout’s approach to secular-but-religion-friendly democracy against John Milbank and other anti-Enlightenment thinkers on the one hand, or the Rawlsians, Habermasians and Rortyians on the other, more fully in this essay. In my view, Stout has already done a persuasive job arguing for his approach against these critiques in his (1990) in (2004).

Bibliography Anderson, Elisabeth. 2006. ‘Epistemology of Democracy’. Episteme 3, 1–2: 8–22. Andrejč, Gorazd. 2016. Wittgenstein and Interreligious Disagreement: A Philosophical and Theological Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Assmann, Jan. 2008. ‘Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)translatability’. In Religion: Beyond a Concept. Edited by Hent de Vries. New York: Fordham University Press: 139–149. Burrell, David. 2011. Towards Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology. Chichester: Wiley.

Languages, secularity and injustice  215 Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of The Performative. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacque. 1998. ‘Faith and Knowledge’. In: Religion. Edited by J. Derrida and G. Vattimo. Cambridge: Polity Press: 1–78. Foster, Greg. 2005. John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1985. Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Kidd, Ian James. 2017. ‘Epistemic Injustice and Religion’. In: The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Edited by I. J. Kidd, J. Medina and G. Pohlhaus Jr. London: Routledge: 386–396. Kloppenberg, James. 2016. Toward Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Legaspi, Michael. 2010. The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press. Milbank, John. 2006. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2012. ‘What Lacks Is Feeling: Hume Versus Kant and Habermas’. Avello Publishing Journal 2, 1. https://avellopublishing.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/ john-milbank-what-lacks-is-feeling-hume-versues-habermas-and-kant-avello-1-2. doc (accessed 14.10.2019). Pehar, Dražen. 2016. ‘Dediscoursification – How Discursive Attitudes Cause Wars’. Transconflict, 29 January. www.transconflict.com/2016/01/dediscoursificationhow-discursive-attitudes-cause-wars-291/ (accessed 14.10.2019). Pickering, Kathleen Ann. 2000. Lakota Culture, World Economy. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Plant, Robert. 2005. Wittgenstein and Levinas: Ethical and Religious Thought. London: Routledge. Rawls, John. 2005. Political Liberalism. Expanded Edition. New York: Columbia University Press. Ryrie, Alec. 2017. Protestants: The Radicals That Made the Modern World. London: William Collins. Scheid, Philip. 2016. The Cosmic Common Good: Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Siedentop, Larry. 2015. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. London: Penguin. Springs, Jason, Cornell West, Richard Rorty, Stanley Hauerwas and Jeffrey Stout. 2010. ‘Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion: JAAR 78, 2: 1–36. Stout, Jeffrey. 1990. Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

216  Gorazd Andrejč ———. 2011. ‘Western Secularity’. In: Rethinking Secularism. Edited by C. Calhoun, M. Juergensmeyer and J. VanAntwerpen. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 31–53. Williams, Bernard. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Edited and translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1970. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Vol. I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1998. Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von Wright. Revised Edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

13 “State-persecution” in the works of Raffaele Pettazzoni A religious history Valerio Severino

“One of the first pages of the history of religion in Italy is written in blood.” (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 203)

In this paper, I am going to address the issue of persecution as understood by Raffaele Pettazzoni, whom, as a first step, I intend to introduce briefly (§ 1). After that, I seek to present what he meant by persecution and in what contexts he elaborated on the notion or phenomenon – on the basis of his spurious references to the religious history of Italy, in his works written between 1937 and 1952 (§ 2) and the “Roman religion”studies specifically in the Thirties (§ 3). As a next step, I present the theory that he used also in examining the problem of persecution, namely that of the two types of religions, that is: “religion of the state” (Religione dello Stato) and “religion of the individual” (Religione dell’Uomo)1 and their conflict (§ 4); as well as I touch upon the possible solutions and their consequences as seen by Pettazzoni, and specifically the achievement of a religious unity in a Christian state (§ 5). At the end, I am going to arrive at the relevance of the appeal to fear in his investigation (§6).

1. Under the impact of Risorgimento2 No understanding of the work of Raffaele Pettazzoni is possible without examining his Italian political background. Though he was an international figure, having a European humanistic education – participating in the international debate on the origin of the concept of God for instance with Wilhelm Schmidt, and his “Primitive monotheism” theory, related to the question of the All-knowing God (Pettazzoni 1922, 1956); contributing to the formulation of the relationship between Phenomenology and Historicism, and in this, discussing with Mircea Eliade (Spineto 1994); and being the second president of the International Association for the Studies of History of Religions, after Gerardus Van der Leeuw – I share the conclusion reached by Enrico Montanari that Pettazzoni was a “man of the Risorgimento” (Montanari 2010), that is, the Italian Unification. It is to

218  Valerio Severino be considered that Pettazzoni was born just 20 years after the official proclamation of the Italian state, almost ten years after the death of one of the Republican fathers of the Italian nation, Giuseppe Mazzini. He witnessed the rise of Fascism in Italy – adhering to the circle of Giovanni Gentile and establishing with him at the University of Rome the first Italian chair of “History of Religions”-studies – and the fall of Fascism, the abrogation of the Italian Monarchy, the birth of the Italian Republic and the new political scenario dominated by the Christian Democratic Party.3 Although Pettazzoni’s works constituted a model of increasing intellectual complexity, his religious studies always contain some underlying logic of the 19th century’s ideologies which is typical of the Risorgimento, especially of the Republican movement. Using rhetoric themes like “redemption,” “resurgence,” “sacrifice,” “martyrdom,” “holy Fatherland,” widely diffused in the era of the rise of European nationalisms, Pettazzoni took part in the process of the so-called “invention” of a national tradition, according to the influential concept provided by E.J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). His approaches reflect the paradigm of the salvation of the state which emerged in a history of religions in Italy that Pettazzoni had sought to write. The main motive of the “religion of the state,” and the religious history of the nation, too often overlooked by scholars of Pettazzoni’s Religious Studies, especially by Marxist scholars who follow his method and teachings (e.g., Ernesto de Martino, Vittorio Lanternari, etc.) should be emphasized as relevant not only in his general approach, but also in the specific question of persecution.

2. The “Religious history of Italy”: 1937–1954 What kind of persecution does Pettazzoni mean? And what kind of approach does he seek in the “History of Religions”-studies? The examination of persecution is developed in the framework of a research project launched in the middle of the Thirties on pre-national, national and supra-national religions concerning the pre- and post-Christianity Roman state (Pettazzoni 1936–1937),4 and resumed in the Forties within a new and closely related project on the study of the religious history of Italy, pursued until the middle Fifties.5 Pettazzoni based his study on the history of the appearance and spread of the so-called Bacchanalia religion in the Italian peninsula, and then, its repression in 186 BC, or using his word, its “persecution” by the Roman state. In this respect, he directed attention to two sources: on Livy’s Ab urbe condita (l.39) who informed about the mass arrests, executions, confiscations of goods, destruction of places of worship; and on a decree, namely the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus. The latter prohibited the Bacchanalia, giving instructions to the local magisters (magistri) how to put the senatorial decree into force (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 202–206).6

“State-persecution” in Pettazzoni  219 By Bacchanalia Pettazzoni does not mean the cult of Bacchus which had been assimilated to Liber and as such, had became part of the Roman public religion already three centuries before the eventual repression of the later esoteric and mystery cult, here referred to by the term Bacchanalia, that is – according to Livy – a religious community to join by initiation, segregation, in exclusive and hidden worship places, performing secret rites by night and the raptos a diis homines as a form of transport of individuals out of this world (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 204–205).7 I would like to point out the project of Pettazzoni to understand the persecution of the Bacchanalia as the point of origin of the persecution of Christians, intended as its “prolongation” (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 207). For this purpose, he tried to detect the different stages of this prolongation and therefore to uncover the missing links of this diversified process. He describes a chain of persecutions in chronological order to demonstrate a continuity, or development between the persecution of mystery religions and that of Christianity later; that is: first a persecution of mysteries mixed with Jewish elements (the expulsion of the Jews from Rome in 139 BC because of their worship of Juppiter Sabazius similar to Dionysos and assimilated by the Jews of the Diaspora to Yahweh Sabaoth), then a second wave of persecution of a mystery religion extended also to the Jews (the Egyptian mystery cult banished repeatedly in the last decades of the Roman Republic, by extending the persecution to the Jews under the rule of Tiberius) (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 207),8 then, a third one, implemented by Nero’s father Claudius, against the followers of Chrestus, i.e., those Jews who were allegedly linked to Christianity (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 207).9 The “common oppression” of Mysteries and Christianity by the Roman state is not only due to their mixing, but being both “religion[s] of a different type, that is, diverging from the Roman one” as the Roman one is of “an ancient and national type.”10 It is relevant to outline that, in Pettazzoni’s view, Mysteries and Christianity both diverge from the Roman religious type, but each one is moving in a different direction. On the one hand, the mysteries attest to the survival of a previous, “pre-antiquity” – “pre-national” type of religion, i.e., a tribal, ethnic one, of which they formulate a variation. In this, Pettazzoni carries out a comparative study of ethnological and classical subjects and understands the similarities between tribal rites of initiation and mystery cults as evidence on the developments of the same religious pattern at a morphological level. In Pettazzoni’s view, this pattern took form at first in a pre-national environment and, despite of its worldwide diffusion, established and maintained a closed community with a tribal character, in the national society too. On the other hand, Christianity developed a type of religion which, despite of its initiation rite, established an open community which is not national but universal. It constitutes a super-national type of religion with a proclamation to all, a “post-antiquity” and “modern” type of religion (Pettazzoni 1946, p. 169).

220  Valerio Severino

3. The Roman question Apart from summarizing Pettazzoni’s treatment of the issue of persecution, I would like to draw attention to the framework of its study. First, to the nationalist framework: as already mentioned, he took a part in the process of the so-called “invention” of a national tradition, and, in this context, he explained persecutions by elaborating on the concept of pre-national/ super-national. Second, more specifically, I would like to direct attention to the Italian religious history of the time. The Lateran Accord of 1929 (the conciliation between State and Church) established Roman Catholicism as the state religion. Soon afterwards, in the middle of the Thirties, the Fascist government mobilized the Italian academic intelligentsia in a common effort to recall the romanità in the humanities, in order to establish continuity between ancient Rome and 20th century Italy.11 Pettazzoni began to take an interest in “Roman Religion”studies in the years of the Fascist Italy (Santi 2009). During the celebrations of the birth of Emperor Augustus, decreed by the Italian government to be held in 1937–1938, he attended the event and was entrusted with the task of writing an essay on the religious issue (Pettazzoni 1938).12 In this political context yet in 1935, he started to examine the question of the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus and the issue of religious repression (Gandini 2001, p. 180–181), in order to prepare a course at the University of Padova dedicated to Roman religious politics, i.e., a subject on mystery religions in the academic year 1936–1937. The handwritten draft of the lesson is a first version of several pages of the essay on the religious history of Italy previously examined, among them the part dedicated to the repression in 186 BC of the religion of Bacchanalia, and the chain of oppressions which lead to the “persecution” of Christianity and eventually its “recognition” by the Roman state.13 In the following academic year, he resumed the same issue within the academic course at the University of Rome dedicated to the religion of Augustus, by focusing the Jewish history and Egyptian religion, the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus and on the religious persecutions of the first emperors (Gandini 2003, p. 130). Though on the surface contributing to the national effort of Fascism’s identification with the ancient Roman tradition, marked in 1938 by the official commemoration of the bimillennium of Augustus’ birth (Scriba 1995; Kallis 2011), Pettazzoni, however, implicitly accentuates surprising contradictions. Ancient Rome, for the sake of the religion of the state, repressed Christianity together with mysteries, and if modern Italy claims to be an heir of the Roman legacy, then the implications are startling. His choice of a topic that does not contribute to the myth of Roman Christianity and, as such, is inappropriate to fit the expected framework, seems deliberate. The topic of Roman state persecution of Christians is understated, in as much as Pettazzoni moved it in the background of the topic of the persecution of the Bacchanalia, but it is a disturbing topic at the aftermath of the settling of the

“State-persecution” in Pettazzoni  221 so called “Roman question.” This line of interpretation deserves to be followed, although further examinations would be needed in order to confirm this assumption. If confirmed, it would improve the result of my previous studies, and my thesis that, in the Thirties, Pettazzoni hid in the subtext his point of view on the contradictions of Fascism during his investigation on the religions of the state (Severino 2016).

4. The theory of the religion of the state and the individual/ man: an overview The persecution of Bacchanalia and Christianity is an aspect of the overall theory of Pettazzoni concerning the two types of religion, namely that of the state and that of the individual. As an academic historian mobilized in the dispute on nation and religion in Italy, Pettazzoni supplied a comparative history in which the conflict with the state is not limited to a specific moment in time, for example the persecution of Bacchanalia and Christianity, but is structural, overarching periods and nations. He extends the conflict in the history of religions and makes an effort to demonstrate that the opposition is not of concern for religions but for types of religions, and coins the expression “fundamental religious diversity.”14 The following paragraph aims to provide an overview of this typological diversity, based on the earlier works (Pettazzoni 1921, 1920, 1936–37, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1952, 1954) dedicated by Pettazzoni to a comparative history of the religions of the state, i.e., the nationalization of monotheisms, the Greek polis as civic religion and the religions of mystery, etc. I will focus on five aspects briefly. The first point is whether a religion is public or esoteric, and in this respect, Pettazzoni argues that the fundamental difference is that in case of the latter, religion does not include the whole society, but only a restricted community of the initiated as a church or a sect, thus forming a group within the larger group of the society; while the former, the religion of the state, on the contrary, includes all the nation. A second point, which is closely connected to the first, is proselytism or supra-nationalism. The community of the initiated, apart from forming a group within a society, can also surpass national borders and be a supranational community, while the religion of the state is strictly limited to the nation. The third point regards the origin of the religion; so while Christianity can be traced back to Christ, or Zoroastrianism to Zoroaster, etc., and such religions are revolutionary in character; the religion of the state has no founder, but is seen to be rooted in the tradition of the nation, that is, is born together with the nation. The fourth point is mysticism, i.e., whether man is considered as sacred and in a sacred communion with God. If so, man is then not just a human among other humans in a society, but, is elevated or carried off in a union

222  Valerio Severino with God (raptus ad diis); while in case of the religion of the state, the sacred is not inside man, but between/among men, as a social element and no-one can appropriate it, because the sacred is public: neither individual, nor human. The last point is soteriology and salvation, in the case of which the religion of the state requires the sacrifice of the individual for the worldly benefit or salvation of the community, while the esoteric requires the sacrifice of this world for the sake of the salvation of the individual in the hereafter. Persecution is an argument of the theory of the fundamental diversity which allows illustrating a conflict between the two types of religions which were either esoteric/supranational or national, revolutionary or traditional, mystic or social, eschatological or worldly and so on.

5. Christian state and totalitarianism Since this paper intends to treat this theory of the “fundamental religious diversity,” in the debate on the religious persecutions, as a final point, I would like to focus on just one of the tentative solutions of the conflict considered by Pettazzoni, that is the achievement of a religious unity in a Christian state – which is the most relevant for the issue of persecution. Pettazzoni referred to the adoption of Christianity as a state religion by the Roman Empire starting from the 1st century and enduring between Constantine and Theodosius. The so-called stateizzazione that would strictly be “state-ization” (or, paraphrased and more distant from the original word form: nation-alization [Pettazzoni 1920, p. 142]) of monotheisms is a key motive in the studies of Pettazzoni, examined by him by applying a comparative method, that is, with regard to the Sasanian Empire and the adoption of Zoroastrianism, too, which he considered as a type of monotheism – as “religion of one national state” (Pettazzoni 1920, p. 1). His examination focuses on the passage from the “dualism” (in which the “people’s religion [polytheistic, traditional] and the reformed religion,” Zoroastrianism, coexisted peacefully and tolerantly)15 to a phase of degeneration of this “twofold” syncretistic system, due to the “fusion of church and state,” when the sovereigns of the Sassanid dynasty declared themselves Mazdeans for political reasons (Pettazzoni 1920, p. 92, 196). A relevant issue for Pettazzoni is how the form of the persecution starts to evolve at the aftermath of the rise of the Christian state in the Roman Empire. According to his interpretation, the state gave up its religious strategy of syncretism and switched the syncretism of polytheism, characteristic of the Roman state, for the conversion of monotheism with reference to Christianity and religious unification. By adopting, along with Christianity, its strategy of “conversion,” as a consequence, the state adopts the exclusivism of monotheism as well. This “originally purely religious” exclusivism, by being acquired by the state, “became political” by persecuting the Roman state religion and calling it “paganism” in the beginning.16

“State-persecution” in Pettazzoni  223 The vocabulary employed by Pettazzoni in this field of research should be noticed. In order to designate this “exclusivism,” he used the word of ‘totalitarianism’ and spoke about a “Christian totalitarianism” and then a “totalitarian state” after its conversion (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 212). On several occasions, he linked totalitarianism to a religious system characterized by conversion and supra-nationalism, and referred to the “triumph of the totalitarian Christianity” and the defeat of syncretism (Pettazzoni 2013, p. 184).17 This reference to the Christian root of totalitarianism stimulates a reflection on the Fascist regime and the Fascist persecutions as the degeneration of a long and branched process – set in motion by the adoption of Christianity as state religion which, at this point, in Italy, lead to the collapse of both the state and the religion of the individual. Pettazzoni reiterated the same statement in the Fifties, i.e., in the post-Fascist era, and largely increased its emphasis: “Catholicism . . . is a totalitarian religion” (Pettazzoni 1957, p. 38).18 The claim that a religious totalitarianism, i.e., the monotheism, and specifically Christianity which, because of its “function” based on exclusivism and conversion, turned to be political as soon as the state endorses Christianity as state religion, is rather reductive. This issue of the Christian roots of the totalitarianism of the state, supported by Pettazzoni in the light of the experience of Fascist Italy, cannot be settled here, and, as such, having such a degree of flexibility, probably cannot be solved ever. Pettazzoni’s thesis, which makes a controversial statement, is undeveloped19. I should like to make clear my specific objection in suggesting what I regard as a main weakness in this thesis that is that it does not reflect the Christian experience in politics and democracy.20 Leaving aside this huge question, I would mention here only one item to be considered more, which is related to the period when Pettazzoni started to study the issue of “persecution” as an argument of his theory of the fundamental diversity between religion of the state and religion of the individual. Close in time, in 1935, Erik Peterson published his essay on monotheism as a political problem, and intended to contribute to a discussion on Political Theology with regard to the position of Carl Schmitt.21 Peterson looked at the same question raised by Pettazzoni – if Political Theology was degenerative – from another point of view, and reached an opposite conclusion by considering not the exclusivism-conversion function, but the dogma of the Trinity as essential to Christianity-Catholicism. I do not intend to summarize the thesis of Peterson, but only to recall his argument that the concept of monarchy of the emperor would be contradicted by the notion of the Trinity which avoids to link monarchy to monotheistic patterns (Peterson 1935). A large number of studies at different levels have investigated the background of the objection of Peterson to the Political-Theology proposal, and pointed out his hidden opposition to the rise to power of National Socialism in Germany at the time and the linking of theology with nationalism in the totalitarian experiment.22 Pettazzoni did challenge neither Peterson’s

224  Valerio Severino critics on Political Theology, nor Schmitt’s thesis, and avoided to enter the scholarly debate. A further step forward in our investigation of the thesis on the Christian roots of state-totalitarianism would be to evaluate the impact of Risorgimento, i.e., the extra-scholarly aspect of Pettazzoni’s scholarship, and the connections between freemasonry, socialism and republican patriotism which were also a characteristic outcome of the anti-clericalism produced by the age he lived in (Montanari 2010, p. 41; Mola 2006, p. 833–842). One cannot understand any given history of persecution without understanding the history of the chronicler who has written this history.

Concluding remarks: an appeal to fear By placing Pettazzoni’s reflections on persecution in a wider theoretical and political context, the outcome of my essay offers some more general concluding remarks. First, the issue of “persecution” represented for Pettazzoni an argument to implement his theory on the opposition between religion of the state and religion of the individual. Second, this theory is connected to the question of the clash between Church and State in Italy. In this respect, the Italian history of religious persecutions seems to provide an argument on their incompatibility, and attempt to create support by increasing fear on the one hand caused by the Roman roots of Fascism and the awareness of the history of the Roman persecution of Christians; on the other hand, fear of Christianity because of its connections with the roots of totalitarianism. The appeal to emotion is obvious – despite it has never been noticed by scholars and critics, mentioning mostly Pettazzoni’s positivist heritage – and develops a persuasive language to which my essay is addressed: “One of the first pages of the history of religion in Italy is written in blood” (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 203).

Notes 1 I adopt here the translation of the Italian original expression “Religione dell’Uomo” (word for word “Religion of the Man”) provided in the Fifties by Herbert Jennings Rose (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 202–214), the official translator of Pettazzoni. Rose suggested switching “man” for “individual” since he considered the literal rendering rather inadequate in English, and the word “individual” more apt to express the general theory of an opposition to the state. This choice to not leave the word “man” unaltered, in order to make a neater and more conventional two-side expression (individual-state), was accepted by the author, who used to discuss the translations of Rose line by line with him (see their long correspondence and friendship 1927–1958, edited by Accorinti 2014). Despite Pettazzoni’s consent, and the fact that the English simplification made the expression readily intelligible, while the Italian binominal expression “manstate” sounds eccentric, I do not fully agree with the translation decision taken by Rose at lexical level, because it loses the original meaning to some extent, that is the idea of a sacralisation of man in communion with the deity, opposed to

“State-persecution” in Pettazzoni  225 the sacralisation of the state as a sphere outside of and entirely alien to man, and then subject to no appropriation neither by an individual nor by any group, and therefore public (see Severino 2009). Nevertheless, Rose’s translation as “religion of the individual” is not only easier to understand, but also correct in the framework of the theory of Pettazzoni we shall consider in this essay, and for this reason, I keep it. But I reject the other item of the Pettazzoni’s expression translated by Rose “State Religion,” which can cause misunderstanding of the main issue of the thesis of a religiousness of the state, to which Pettazzoni opposed the religion which is not innate and appropriate to the state, but of another kind, and despite this diversity endorsed by the state and adopted as state religion (see next, in this essay, for more details). 2 The chapter title refers to the book edited by Horst Junginger The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism, which included two revelant chapters on R. Pettazzoni (Ciurtin 2008; Stausberg 2008). This essay aims to resume this debate and explore this neglected aspect of the political attitude of Pettazzoni related to the issue of the Italian Unification. 3 I do not intend to review the extensive amount of literature dedicated to the intellectual history of Pettazzoni. An adequate examination on the subject would run far beyond the limits of this paper. Here, I would only like to stress the importance of the biographical work provided by Mario Gandini, largely based on pieces of evidence from the “Pettazzoni archive” (Library G.C. Croce, San Giovanni in Persiceto, Italy) and published between 1989 and 2009 in the journal Strada Maestra. This monumental work titled “Materiali per una biografia [materials for a biography]” served and still serves as a fundamental reference for historians of the “History of Religions”-studies and would deserve an English translation. 4 The text is in English, and only later was published in Italian, namely in 1946, with a different title Religioni nazionali, supernazionali e misteriche [National, Supra-national and Mystery Religions] included in a collection of essays which was recently reprinted twice by Giovanni Casadio, the first time a few years ago, as a first step in the ambitious project of a new edition of the works of Pettazzoni, which, unfortunately, is experiencing a slowdown (Pettazzoni 2013, 2018, p. 163–176). 5 The essay was published twice, although with two different titles Idea di una storia religiosa d'Italia [Idea for a religious history of Italy] and Per la storia religiosa d'Italia [For the religious history of Italy] (Pettazzoni 1947, 1948). A modified version of the text, namely Religione dello Stato e religione dell'Uomo [Religion of the State and Religion of the Individual/Man], was finally included in a collection of essays Italia religiosa [Religious Italy] (Pettazzoni 1952, p. 7–28). This series of articles and chapters all deals with the issue of the persecution and religion, by considering the same sources and case studies. The author keeps several passages of the first version of the text (Pettazzoni 1936–37) unchanged. 6 For the sake of simplicity, I will always refer to the English version of the text edited in 1954. 7 With reference to Livy 39. 8 According to the Antiquitates Judaicae of Flavius Josephus. 9 Relating to Suetonius’ works. 10 I refer here to some passages of the text published in the Thirties (Pettazzoni 1936–37) which are closely related to the issue of the other version of the essay (Pettazzoni 1954) but which were not included there. I quote from the Italian edition (Pettazzoni 1946, p. 172). 11 It is impossible in this place and time to provide an overview on the extensive bibliography on the topic of the myth of romanità in Fascist Italy, which is not

226  Valerio Severino the focus of this essay. I limit myself to refer to a review of the studies just as a first step to be aware of the complexity of this issue and the debate (Nelis 2007). 12 Pettazzoni was one of the scholars who were required to prepare a volume on Augustus. Pettazzoni’s chapter elaborated on his cult. 13 According to the handwritten notes of Pettazzoni found during the examination of his private papers by Mario Gandini (Gandini 2002, pp. 175–176). 14 “And so we meet once again that fundamental religious diversity which forms the subject of our essay” (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 214). 15 “. . . neither fusing with nor rejecting the other” (Pettazzoni 1920, p. 130). 16 “. . . Christian totalitarianism was originally purely religious, not political; ‘my kingdom is not of this world,’ and it became political when Christianity became the religion of the State and persecuted paganism as once the pagan State had persecuted it” (Pettazzoni 1954, p. 212). 17 Referred to the essay La religione nazionale del Giappone e la politica religiosa dello Stato Giapponese [The National Religion of Japan and the Religious Policy of the Japanese State] edited first in 1931. The opposition between conversion and syncretism is a main topic of Pettazzoni (Pettazzoni 2013, p. 153–161, i.e., the chapter Sincretismo e Conversione). 18 The paper dedicated to the topic “The Church and the religious life in Italy” was presented in a conference on “The Church and the State.” 19 More developed and balanced studies in this field of research have been conducted. I shall limit myself to one crucial reference, i.e., the investigations of Paolo Prodi on the influence of the Catholic Church on the development of the modern state which focused the issue of the “papal prince-monarchy” in the early modern Europe (Prodi 1987). 20 The Catholic priest Luigi Sturzo, leader of the Italian Christian-democratic party (Partito Popolare Italiano) even before his exile in 1924, contrasted Fascism by accusing it of being a “totalitarian state” (Gentile 2010, p. 147–148, 413 with reference to the essay published in 1936 The totalitarian State). 21 “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt 1985, p. 36). 22 Without claiming to be exhaustive, I mention here only Hollerich 2007; Geréby 2008; Siniscalco 2014. I refer to Mezei 2010, p. 79, regarding the issue of the possibility of a new Political Theology at the aftermath of World War II and the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Bibliography Accorinti, Domenico (ed.). 2014. Raffaele Pettazzoni and Herbert Jennings Rose, Correspondence 1927–1958: The Long Friendship Between the Author and the Translator of the All-Knowing God. Leiden: Brill. Ciurtin, Eugen. 2008. ‘Raffaele Pettazzoni et Mircea Eliade: Historiens des religions généralistes devant les fascismes (1933–1945)’. In: The Study of Religion Under the Impact of Fascism. Edited by Horst Junginger. Leiden: Brill: 333–363. Gandini, Mario. 2001. ‘Raffaele Pettazzoni dal Gennaio 1934 all’estate 1935. Materiali per una biografia’. Strada maestra. Quaderni della Biblioteca comunale “G. C. Croce” di San Giovanni in Persiceto 51, 2: 82–212. ———. 2002. ‘Raffaele Pettazzoni negli anni 1937–1938. Materiali per una biografia’. Strada maestra. Quaderni della Biblioteca comunale “G. C. Croce” di San Giovanni in Persiceto 52, 1: 54–232. ———. 2003. ‘Raffaele Pettazzoni intorno al 1935. Materiali per una biografia’. Strada maestra. Quaderni della Biblioteca comunale “G. C. Croce” di San Giovanni in Persiceto 54, 1: 100–268.

“State-persecution” in Pettazzoni  227 Gentile, Emilio. 2010. Contro Cesare: cristianesimo e totalitarismo nell’epoca dei fascismi. Milano: Feltrinelli. Geréby, György. 2008. ‘Political Theology Versus Theological Politics: Erik Peterson and Carl Schmitt’. New German Critique 105: 7–33. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds.). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollerich, Michael. 2007. ‘The Anti-secular Front Revisited: Reflections on Catholics and Politics in Hitler’s Germany’. Pro Ecclesia. A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 16, 2: 141–164. Kallis, Aristotle. 2011. ‘ “Framing” Romanità: The Celebrations for the Bimillenario Augusteo and the Augusteo-Ara Pacis Project’. Journal of Contemporary History 46, 4: 809–831. Mezei, Balázs. 2010. ‘Erik Peterson antischmittiánus argumentuma’. Világosság 9, 11: 73–80. Mola, Aldo A. 2006. Storia della massoneria italiana dalle origini ai giorni nostri. Milano: Bompiani. Montanari, Enrico. 2010. ‘Il concetto di ‘fede laica’ in Raffaele Pettazzoni’. Historia Religionum: An International Journal 2: 39–59. Nelis, Jan. 2007. ‘La Romanité (‘Romanità’) Fasciste. Bilan des Recherches et Propositions pour le Futur’. Latomus 66, 4: 987–1006. Peterson, Erik. 1935. Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Theologie im Imperium Romanum. Leipzig: Hegner. Pettazzoni, Raffaele. 1920. La religione di Zarathustra nella storia religiosa dell’Iran. Bologna: Zanichelli. ———. 1921. La religione nella Grecia antica fino ad Alessandro. Bologna: Zanichelli. ———. 1922. Dio. Formazione e sviluppo del monoteismo nella storia delle religioni. Vol. I: L’essere celeste nelle credenze dei popoli primitivi. Roma: Società Editrice Athenaeum. ———. 1936–37. ‘A Functional View of Religions’. The Review of Religion 1: 225–237. ———. 1938. ‘La religione’. In: Augustus. Studi in occasione del bimillenario augusteo. Edited by Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Rome: Tipografia della R. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: 217–249. ———. 1947. ‘Idea di una storia religiosa d’Italia’. La Rassegna d’Italia [Milano] 2, 68: 69–76. ———. 1948. ‘Per la storia religiosa d’Italia’. Rivista di studi storico-religiosi 19: 29–41. ———. 1952. Italia religiosa. Bari: Laterza. ———. 1954. Essays on the History of Religions. Authorised translation by Herbert J. Rose. Leiden: Brill. ———. 1955. L’onniscienza di Dio. Torino: Edizioni Scientifiche Einaudi. ———. 1956. The All-Knowing God: Researches into Early Religion and Culture. Translated by H. J. Rose. London: Methuen & Co. LTD. ———. 1957. ‘La Chiesa e la vita religiosa in Italia’. In: Stato e Chiesa. Edited by V. Gorresio. Bari: Laterza: 35–49. ———. 2013. Saggi di storia delle religioni e di mitologia. Edited by Giovanni Casadio. Napoli: Loffredo Editore University Press, 2018. Reprinted. Milano: Mimesis [First Edition 1946: Roma: Edizioni Italiane].

228  Valerio Severino Prodi, Paolo. 1987. The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Europe. Translated by Susan Haskins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1st Italian edition 1982). Santi, Claudia. 2009. ‘La religione romana negli studi di Raffaele Pettazzoni’. Storia, Antropologia e Scienze del Linguaggio 25, 3: 173–188. Schmitt, Carl. 1985, 1922. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by G. D. Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Scriba, Friedmann. 1995. ‘Il mito di Roma. L’estetica e gli intellettuali negli anni del consenso: La Mostra Augustea della Romanità 1937–38’. Quaderni di storia 41: 67–84. Severino, Valerio. 2009. La Religione di questo mondo in Raffaele Pettazzoni. Roma: Bulzoni. ———. 2016. ‘The Irreligiousness of Fascism: The Concept of a “Religion of the State” in Raffaele Pettazzoni’s Studies – Analysis of the Subtext’. Numen 63, 5–6: 525–547. Siniscalco, Paolo. 2014. ‘Erik Peterson: Il Monotesimo come problema politico. Una teologia della storia?’ Sophia 6, 1: 69–86. Spineto, Natale (ed.). 1994. Mircea Eliade – Raffaele Pettazzoni, L’histoire des religions a-t-elle un sens? Correspondance 1926–1959. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf. Stausberg, Michael. 2008. ‘Raffaele Pettazzoni and the History of Religions in Fascist Italy (1928–1938)’. In: The Study of Religion Under the Impact of Fascism. Edited by Horst Junginger. Leiden: Brill: 365–395.

14 Christ versus the Llama sacrifice Rodolfo Kusch’s theological criticism of the colonization of Latin America Péter Szakács Rodolfo Kusch, one of the most interesting personalities of Latin American thought, was a philosopher, a playwright and a university professor in Argentina and Bolivia. Born in Buenos Aires in 1922, he died in Maimara, a secluded village in Northern Argentina, where he had been exiled after Perón’s death as a persona non grata in 1979. His philosophy, immersed in the context of Latin America, unfolds in the “era of overcoming positivism” (1940’s-1950’s), is mostly defined by Heidegger. His main objective, however, was to create an authentic Latin American philosophy that reflected on the culture and specific challenges that faced the continent. Hence, he anticipated the great schools of thought of the next decades, the philosophy of liberation and decolonialism. Although he was not an ethnographer, he is famous for visiting Andean villages to acquaint himself with the local culture. He interpreted the meaning of existence from the perspective of the indigenous people, while also reflecting on the particularities of Western civilization. Many of his works1 are characterized by a strong essayist style. He approached existence and civilization through unusual topics like football, tango, eating habits, everyday life in Buenos Aires, expressions of lunfardo (the Buenos Aires slang, out of which he developed a unique philosophical language), Andean celebrations, religious/magical rites and so on.

1. Kusch in context A central feature of modernity is that it oppresses, and presents as superseded, the patterns of thought that deviate from the Western definition of rationality. This applies to Andean (quechua, aymara) popular thinking as well. The main goal of the philosophy of liberation, anti- and decolonialism is to emancipate these patterns of thought and to create an intercultural dialogue in which they may participate as equals of Western thought. Kusch was a prominent precursor of the aforementioned movements, who argued that Andean thought is not inferior to its Western counterpart, and that, in fact, we can grasp something universal about existence by studying it, something that a Western perspective generally overlooks.

230  Péter Szakács For the purposes of this essay, I will present Kusch’s thought in the context of decolonialism, with special attention to his philosophy of religion, which places Andean religion as neither morally nor psychologically inferior to Christianity. In fact, he sees that the goal of both is to find some kind of salvation against the irrational or tragic nature of existence. Central to human experience is the irrational nature of existence, meaning that there are such threatening and anxiety-inducing aspects of life – like death – to which man cannot find any practical solution. Consequently, they pose a threat to our psychological integrity. To preserve this integrity, humans have to internally confront these threats and neutralize them. In other words, they have to order the opposing forces of the cosmos, both humanistic and antihumanistic. In religions, this goal is achieved through sacrifice. For example, during the andean huilancha, the blood of a beheaded llama is sprinkled in the four cardinal directions to transform the barren, threatening world into a more homely place. According to Kusch’s philosophy of religion, the sacrifice of Christ originally played a similar role: to neutralize death and evil through the spilled blood, which the believer can relive in some manner. However, this spiritual experience became conceptualized and rationalized during the first centuries of Christianity, which is related to the fact that Christianity took the form of a political ideology, and then, an ideology of authority (Gorsfoguel 2013). Polytheistic religions, in turn, grasp reality by virtue of contradictory but equally powerful principles. Christianity, however, attempts to subordinate everything to one humanistic principle, to the human-faced god, which ultimately means that the homo rationalis denies anything that stands in the way of human will, even the tragic aspect of life (Ferreira da Silva 2002, p. 293– 316). This is why, according to Kusch, Christians could not tolerate the dualism of gnosticism after the conquest of America. In fact, they sought to eliminate Pre-Columbian religions, which similarly operate with complementary opposites and remind them of what they had tried to deny in every possible way. Unfortunately for human beings, this denial leads to self-alienation and an inauthentic life—this was not the case in early Christianity and the Andean religion. Kusch concludes that the introduction of Christianity did not bring anything new to America – the need for salvation is not of a divine nature; it is, instead, an universal human experience that can be grasped in the huilancha just as in the concept of Christ’s sacrifice. Hence, Andean Natives do not need a catechism (Kusch 2007d, p. 138–139).

2. Kusch’s criticism of Western cultural superiority Kusch’s believed that during the development of Latin American cities the Natives ostensibly adopted the dominant Western culture while under the surface or in their souls, the contrary happened. In fact, the conquistadores, European settlers and colonists adopted Indigenous ways of thinking as American popular thought, through its myths and rituals, understands

Christ versus the Llama sacrifice  231 existence in a more profound way than European thought (Kusch 2007b, p. 179–215). Kusch says that if we look at philosophy as the self-interpretation of a given culture, then Latin American philosophy is inauthentic as it imports its terms, problems and approaches from Europe, and European trends and paradigm shifts move it from the outside. This means that it cannot reflect on real Latin American problems because they are different than those of Europe (Kusch 2007b, p. 179–215).2 Our author therefore attempts to outline an authentic Latin American philosophy departing from Native American culture, in particular, from Andean culture. His approach is defined primarily by Heidegger; or, more precisely, it is defined by a particular reading of Heidegger. According to this reading, the surrounding world is understood through an original non-conceptual understanding of existence, through myths and rites and the poetic nature of language. Conceptual and theoretical thinking develop later. While the original understanding of existence has in its kernel a reflection on the finite and non-objectified nature of the human being, for theoretical thinking – which views the world primarily as a series of objects and tools serving defined functions – death and finitude can be forgotten, which makes human existence object-like, inauthentic (Heidegger 2014, 2018). Kusch believes that this original non-conceptual understanding of existence can be found in a very pure form in Andean popular culture. This, however, cannot be called primitive thinking, because, for example, it is preserved to this day in the depths of people’s consciousness, even in big cities in both Latin America and Europe. But all this does not mean that Native culture would be pre-logical or irrational. It has a specific logic and rationality, though it is significantly different from the Western as it grasps reality through contradictory principles – every mythical being has its own counterpart without which it cannot exist, as opposed to Western thinking, where opposing principles dissolve in a third, as in a higher synthesis. Analyzing the Coatlicue statue in the Templo Mayor in Mexico City which displays Nahua cosmology, Justino Fernández writes that the thought and art of Aztec and Nahua culture is so complex that it must have some kind of logic behind it and is not merely pre-logical. (Léon Portilla 2006, p. 118–119; Fernández 1954, p. 215). The great pre-Columbian civilizations did not stay on the level of mythological thought, but had their own philosophers – amautas in Incan culture, tamatlinis in Nahua – who turned skeptical towards myths and religious teachings – like Socrates – and whose main task was to educate the people morally. Nahua tamatlinis – “those who know” – were sharply distinct from priestly authorities. Their task was healing, chronicle-writing, keeping track of time etc., but most importantly to hold a mirror to others – according to the principle of gnōthi seauton, to somehow get people to “put on a face” (or character) – and “to humanize their love” (Léon Portilla 2006, p. 63–74).3 During the height of the great pre-Columbian civilizations, mythological and more complex philosophical and conceptual thought existed in parallel,

232  Péter Szakács but by today only the former has survived (Kusch 2007d, p. 172). Kusch tries to conceptualize existence through popular thinking, assuming, somewhat similarly to Bartolomé de las Casas, that this holds the seed of spiritual truth in itself. Kusch describes this “seed” with the concept of pensamiento seminal. Because of this, he adopted field research among his methods, though not as an ethnographer or anthropologist since his goal was not to give a detailed anthropological description of Andean culture and especially not to list household objects and pieces of folk art. In order to shed light on how Andean Natives – and in a wider sense, aboriginal people – see existence and urban civilization, he incorporated field research among his methods. However, he published only a handful of interviews and relevant observations from this work. He did not view popular culture in an objective way but led a conversation with it, understood deeply its inner motivations, “understood the language of the folk.” Therefore, as Mario Casalla writes, despite his blonde hair and blue eyes – gringo looks – he was welcome amongst the reserved, chiefly Bolivian Natives (Kusch 2007a, p. 140–142). Kusch’s views can be summed up as follows: existence has two aspects, one is practical and rational, preoccupied with the external world and with all that can be changed; the other is emotional and linked to the irrational nature of life, with everything that we cannot change, including death. Western civilization separates these two and concentrates on the practical-rational aspects. Therefore, the manipulation of the external world, the betterment of life or solving all solvable problems. Through all of this, Western civilization hides – though does not eliminate – the irrational aspect. This results in a sick conscience and – using Kusch’s own expression, neurotic – society. In contrast, folk culture and religion (and the American pre-Columbian civilizations) do not separate these two aspects; therefore, their activities do not primarily serve for the solution of problems of the external world but solutions that make it possible to live with the irrational aspect of life. These kinds of solutions surpass the causal order of things and the isolation of the individual. They make it possible for Aboriginals to feel ecstatically part of a greater whole and liberated from the finitude of existence.

3.  Ser and estar Kusch further distinguishes between two concepts of existence for his interpretation of culture, which he names ser and estar. Spanish speakers use ser to designate permanent properties and estar to refer to temporary states or geographical positions. Ser is – similarly as Plato’s Being – stable, predictable, lasting existence while estar is Heraclitus’s river, a becoming, constant change. In ser everything is subordinated to a universal, eternal principle whilst estar grasps existence by dint of contradictory principles. Therefore, ser has to do with a Christian interpretation of existence while estar seems closer to polytheistic or dualistic religions. Ser results in an active,

Christ versus the Llama sacrifice  233 animalistic, masculine attitude towards the environment; estar results in a passive, plantlike, feminine attitude. For Kusch, the stable ser is a false, illusoric existence, estar holds a much greater reality and lives more strongly in the psyche of a person. These two forms of being correspond to two different particular behaviors: ser alguien (to be somebody) and to dejarse estar (to just be, to be anybody). Kusch writes that the two are mainly distinguished by relating differently to the Anger of God – meaning various natural disasters that can destroy the human being at any time – and the irrational, tragic nature of life: death, uncertainty and all that is connected to human existence and is unchangeable (Kusch 2007b, p. 421–438). As Kusch sees it, the somebody of ser alguien has separated themselves from their environment and is striving to emerge from the crowd with the creation of something permanent, for which they use every minute of their life in the most efficient way. But those who “just are” cannot separate themselves from their environment and live at its mercy. In the essays Charlas para Vivir en America, Kusch describes the businessperson who focuses her or his empire on optimum profitability and enjoys the comforts of “civilized” existence as somebody. The Native, who sits for hours in silence with a glass of chicha or waits half a year starving for the time of sowing or harvesting to come, at least from a capitalist perspective, is nobody or, with a Heideggerian term, anybody. This, however, does not mean being morally inferior to the businessperson (Kusch 2007a, p. 579–585). The interpretation of the history of the ser alguien is linear – an image of continuous upward motion, development is related to it, during which “somebody” subordinates the world under her or his power; while the dejarse estar-interpretation of history is cyclical. The aspiration to be somebody gives birth to the concept of the objective world as a mere object of the work of a subject with emotional and sacral properties eliminated from this perspective. The space of the objective world is defined by abstract (physical, mathematical, economical) principles. If a human being is born into such a world, they will feel alien, which urges them to make the environment more friendly. By contrast, the anyone who “just is” does not know the concept of an objective world. For them, nature and praxis are inseparable from emotions, and space is, in a sense, a projection of their psyche. Arguably, Kusch thinks that while ser and estar can be found in both cultures, Western civilization is ser-focused and denies the estar while Asian and pre-Columbian civilizations (and folk culture generally) are estar-focused and prevent the individualistic view from taking over. The image of the sacral space being kept alive by rites and myths – where every point of space has its own olic meaning – the cyclical interpretation of history and the imitation of archetypes represented by gods and heroes make it possible for humans, no matter what happens to them, to feel at home and to be able to confront the irrational or tragic nature of life.

234  Péter Szakács In response to this, Kusch compared the Aymara copula utcatha with the Heideggerian Dasein and the Spanish estar (Kusch 2007b, p. 163–273). Utcatha is derived from the word uta (house) and means to be or sit in the house; hence it would seem that it refers to a spatial, neutral being cast somewhere, similarly as Dasein or the Spanish estar. But if we study its different meanings more carefully, we will find meanings like “being in the womb” or “sitting on the square and selling merchandise” – where square is an archetype that means the center of the cosmos.

4. Causal thinking versus pensamiento seminal The “popular knowledge” described previously is something that is, apparently, completely foreign to the theory-oriented Western attitude. Western thinking strives, since Plato or perhaps even Parmenides, to change opinion (doxa) to truth (alētheia). There can be a wide variety of opinions on a given thing but only one truth. This relates to individualism, says Kusch, and ser alguien-behaviour: If there is no truth that is considered valid, contrary to invalid judgements, then the Western type of praxis is not viable. What happens in this case is that infinite aspects of a particular object are denied and only one aspect will be stated as truth. From the perspective of the Western civilization opinion is “dirty” and unsettling while truth is “clean”; the former is of the mob and the latter is of the cultivated individual. According to Plato and Socrates, opinion is “shameful, blind and crooked” whilst true knowledge is “clear and beautiful” (Plato, Republic, VI, 506d). To illustrate this, Kusch tells the story of a Bolivian field trip where he spoke to an old Aymara Native who was complaining about drought and the lack of harvest. The philosopher suggested getting water pumps with the help of state subsidies with which the farmer could irrigate his potato fields. The indigenous man laughed and did not understand why he should do so when he could also turn to his rain bringing rites. Seems, writes Kusch, that on this account, the man did not have a concept of a reality separable into components. But this, he argues, does not automatically signal a disability; it simply means the indigenous person, instead of turning to some external instance (the state, industrial technology, etc.) that would transform their activity and their worldview, chooses a “psychologically internalized” solution (Kusch 2007b, p. 273–306). Though the practical solutions offered by causal thinking are invaluable, they have their limitations. The great invention of popular culture, the pensamiento seminal denies the causal thinking of ser alguien, its individualistic attitude and the concept of objective and causal world born from it. At the same time, pensamiento seminal constructs a particular popular spirituality, in which the boundaries between individuals and between man and nature are blurred (Kusch 2007a, p. 15–37, 473–492; Miranda-Butavand 2018). Here it seems beneficial to draw a parallel between Kusch and his Portuguese contemporary, Eudoro de Sousa (1911–1987) who insists that

Christ versus the Llama sacrifice  235 myths and culture come from an original rite in which participants map the movements of the cosmos with their dance, and move to the rhythm of the universe (eurythmia). For Eudoro de Sousa, this harmony later broke up for some reason, and the endeavor to bring it back created mankind’s greatest cultural achievements (poetry, instrumental music, mystery cults, philosophy, etc.) (De Souza 2000, p. 38–105). In this context, ser seems just a particular aspect of estar, while the short linear history is just part of an overarching cyclical history (Kusch 2007a, p. 25–38). In contrast to causal thinking, popular culture and “The Native does not argue” – says the Puquina4 philosopher Javier Lajo (2005). To describe the non-conceptual nature of popular thinking in a late work, La negación en el pensamiento popular (Kusch 2007b, p. 567–698), Kusch uses Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor (Ricoeur 1974). Ricoeur writes that in a given context – in fact within the whole culture – the meanings of individual symbols are not fixed but change constantly. This is a complex dynamic system, which despite changes, always conveys meaning. Kusch adds that in the case of the pensamiento seminal this is linked up with a particular moral conduct. In short, for Kusch, the concept of an objective reality derives from individualistic attitudes and from causal thinking by virtue of which Western man can dispose himself of a world full of functional objects, where the Native is a pauper. While it is true that the Aboriginal does not possess objects in the Western manner, their pensamiento seminal, myths and rites, born on the border of the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the irrational, make them lords over our world of nightmares. This kind of domination is inaccessible to the Western man: he is reduced to ask the Native for alms (Kusch 2007b, p. 228–234).

5. The construction of a linear history One of the first defining moments of the development of Western Civilization is the creation of a particular type of city (Kusch 2007b, p. 228–234). Man, to escape the anger of God and the uncertainty surrounding the tribal form of life, organizes the satisfaction of needs in a more reliable system, subject to abstract principles, in which humans can access food in any time independently from seasons and the weather – and later, the shelves of supermarkets – and where the walls of buildings provide the same comfortable temperatures. But urban cohabitation requires discipline where everyone has to fit into the machinery of society and fulfill the functions assigned to them. However, man, as he or she belongs originally to estar, has elements in him or her that resist all and yet are controlled by authority with weaponry, law enforcement, etc. (in short, with the Anger of man), which is at least as threatening as the Anger of God. This endeavor of the ser alguien to eliminate the Anger of God is a Sisyphean task, which recreates the terror that it was called to destroy (Kusch 2007b, p. 125–178). Kusch argues that ancient Roman

236  Péter Szakács citizens liable to military service belonged, in some sense, to the world of estar as they had to leave their cities to protect the empire from the attacks of the barbarians. Contrarily, the Christians of ser, who were mainly slaves, craftsmen and traders, could strengthen their powers within the protective walls of the city. No wonder that it was so important for them to eliminate gnosticism, which, by reason of its duality, belonged to the sphere of estar. But estar cannot just be eliminated, argues Kusch. The development of the polis, the spread of Christianity as a moral religion, and later, capitalist production made people more disciplined but that process did not remove the elements that contradicted the mechanical order of the city; it only exiled them to the periphery – like the mob of the suburbs, exiled into the ­subconscious – like feelings and impulses incompatible with societal ­living or exiled to prisons – like convicts. The more disciplined and sophisticated a society is, the more elements that belong to estar and are uncontrollable to the Western spirituality are trapped outside, and the stronger their threat to ser is. Consequently, the more civilized a society gets, the more vulnerable ser becomes, and the closer it gets to collapse and dissolution in estar. As this civilizing process does not eliminate the Anger of God but recreates it as the Anger of man, the individual feels uncomfortable in culture. According to Kusch’s concept of history presented in the work América profunda, the resulting tension must somehow be relieved. To do this, there is a European, refined and more philosophical way: in Europe, the realization of ser is taken very seriously, writes Kusch. This process culminates in psychoanalysis, Marxism and literary works such as Kafka’s The Trial, given that civilization can be subverted primarily by sexuality, starvation (and deprivation) and irrational fear. Psychoanalysis makes it possible to live with the neurosis of urban life, therefore neutralizing the threats originating from the irrational aspect of the soul. Marxism and other revolutionary ideologies are able to eradicate unjust political systems to the benefit of the oppressed, but almost instantly a similarly unjust system will take their place. Kafka and like-minded writers depict aversion towards authority in a Romantic light, taking away its threatening characteristics. Latin America is different. While Western Culture is the result of a few thousand years of civilisatory process, which created a society that is quite unified, all this was “planted” ready-made to Latin America, as a foreign element. Therefore, in the reading of Kusch, the construction of ser from a Latin American perspective is even more illusory and less believable than from a European point of view, and estar—with the ritual and mythological thinking—dominates the consciousness of people (Kusch 2007a, p. 17–134).

6. The cyclical conception of history While a linear history is mapped by chronology, cyclical history is mapped by myths and rites. The life of the Native maps this circle as exemplified

Christ versus the Llama sacrifice  237 by the fact that Andes has two seasons: the first is abundant in harvest, the other is dry and forces man to passivity and destitution; the first is of ser alguien, the second is of dejarse estar. Andean man follows the changes of nature in their everyday activities. Different rites make it possible to internally experience these changes so as to not alienate them from themselves. For the Andean man work is no suffering or obstacle (traba, labor) but an inalienable, internally experienced part of life. This is due to their specific way of thinking that does not subsume existence to abstract concepts, does not suppose linear development but recreates the set order of community through rites, celebrations and games year by year, due to their pensamiento seminal. If the world is viewed through abstract categories and existence is subjected to linear material development, as happens in Western Civilization, then the time of work becomes a commodity and is seen as a sacrifice for something that is outside of it – leisure time. Kusch argues that in this way, life’s ultimate goal will always be in the future and the present then serves merely for the future. The human being is never present in the present as they lost the rites that could keep them there, as well as the sacral space with its defined center. Instead, they gained a space without center, defined by abstract mathematical qualities, where they themselves become defined by abstract categories and are subjected to praxis. Western man always wants to become somebody while sacrificing everything for a state that the Native already has, to be able to just be later on (Kusch 2007a, p. 375–403).

7. Andean religion Kusch, in his lecture entitled Interpretación de las religiones nativas (Kusch 2007d, p. 149–176) compares the Andean and the Christian religion, and sheds light on the common origin of both in the human psyche. In Polo de Ondegardo’s (1500–1575) description of the Inca Empire’s holy sights and roads (1561), it is helpful to take note of two great Andean deities: Pachayachachic (the teacher of nature who is in fact a trinity constituted by Viracocha, the Thunder and the Sun) and Guanacauri (a deity bringing misfortune, connected to sin, witchcraft and the dead). The former is a benefactor similar to the Christian God, an “affirmative” character, while the latter is a demonic entity, whose essence is “denial”,” negation. Since Pachayachachic is a God distant from the material world, Inca religion may be called not God-centred but more demon-centred, focused on estar and the negative aspect of existence, contrarily to Christianity. (Kusch 2007d, p. 149–155). In the Andean syncretic religion, which was born out of the contact between Christianity and the pre-Columbian cults, we find the same dualistic structure in terms of divine beings. There is Gloria (a divine pantheon including 14 Christian saints symbolized by the Calvary, representing the Christ and affirmation in general) and Achancu, the more important demon

238  Péter Szakács who represents negation. There are two principles opposing each other: the human will and something that is above it as its negation, the uncontrollable. The former is represented by the humanistic Gloria, the latter by the demon. Several rites serve to appease the two, that is, to conspire with the demonic power that threatens man and therefore to eliminate the various dangers. In these rites, the experience of the believer is of essence, while emphasis is laid on how the anxieties haunting the subconcious can be treated. The task of religion and the pastor is the handling of the irrational side of life (Kusch 2007d, p. 162–166). Kusch, following Jung, claims that the Trinity itself can be traced back to a quaternity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are faced with a chthonic entity, Satan (or in another perspective, the Virgin Mary) but this fourth element is denied, separated from the deity. In Cristianity, the Christ’s crucifixion offered originally the same kind of salvation as the Andean blood sacrifice: the neutralization of the powers threatening humans, by virtue of the spilling of blood, or better, the internal experience of the sacrifice. Both are an answer to the same psychic need with the difference that while the llama sacrifice, the huilancha offers a particular and temporary salvation, which has to be repeated, the Christian sacrifice is universal. But as Christianity became institutionalized and conceptualized, it became the dogmatic moral religion of the Western elite building the ser, and all this became forgotten. For Christian pastors, the goal is not to assure cohabitation with the irrational side of life but to eliminate the irrational, to deny it, if needed, with tools of authority, that is, with the Anger of man. This is connected to the concept of linear development and the fact that the Church became the supporter of colonialism and imperialism. Consequently, the Natives do not understand the Christian moral religion and the Christian pastor does not understand the rites of the Natives (Kusch 2007d, p. 153–170).

Conclusion According to Kusch, culture serves to offer a shelter against the Anger of God and the various threats lurking against man. In this context, the original function of religion is to make it possible for the human being to preserve psychic integrity in the face of the irrational aspect of life. In popular religiosity, as we can see from the previous examples, the first condition for this is that we have to interpret the world as a battlefield of opposing and separate forces; some of these represent man itself, others the negation of individual will and all that threatens man (humanistic and zoomorphic dynasties of deities, God and Satan, etc.) The cosmos interpreted in this manner is not an objective space but a projection of the human psyche. Furthermore, humans have to admit that the humanistic principle collides with its opposite and in some way they are reconciled or conspire with it. That religion offers a solution to the internal need to deal with the irrationality of life is not exclusively characteristic of Andean rites but charaterized

Christ versus the Llama sacrifice  239 the original form of Christianity as well. However, Christianity—as Kusch argues in his work entitled Interpretación de las religiones nativas (Kusch 2007b, p. 149–183) and in dialogues with two monks – over time became institutionalized, dogmatized and became a supporter of the endeavors of the conquering Western civilization and its ser alguien behavior. It denies that existence is defined by equal contrarian principles and subordinates everything to one humanistic principle: man. It brings about God’s kingdom through a linear historical process and makes the world more rational and human. The psychic integrity of man, with Christendom and Western civilization, is sustained by hiding away the irrationality of life. This hiding away lies with the notion of continuous development and our constant activity. But this, according to Kusch, is a neurotic frame of mind. Therefore, if we define religion as salvation against the irrational nature of life, then this can be found in the Andean religion at least as much as in Christianity so spreading the Catechism in the Andes is unnecessary. In fact, preachers should learn from Natives as the latter represent something of a higher order than the neurotic frame of mind of Western Christendom. And in this context, the transition from polytheism or dualist religions to monotheism does not mean development or an evolution that would be desirable.

Notes 1 Indios, Porteños y Dioses (1966); De la mala vida porteña (1966); Charlas para vivir en América (1962). 2 Kusch’s claim that Latin American philosophy is inauthentic is nuanced substantially by Augustin Salazar Bondy’s work entitled ¿Si existe una filosofía de nuestra América? (2006) and the encyclopedia compiled by Dussel listing the 4000 most important specifically Latin American authors (2010). All these considered, Kusch is right in saying that Latin American universities generally teach and cultivate philosophy in a Eurocentric way. But if a given culture’s philosophy is inauthentic, it prejudicates the self-validation of the people who have developed it. 3 Léon Portilla (2006) analizes some words with respect to tamatlinis: “Las . . . dos palabras te-ix-cuitiani: »a los otros una cara hace tomar« y te-ix-tomani: »a los otros una cara hace desarollar« son aún más interesantes, pues en ellas se descubre que el tamatlini, o el sabio, tenía verdaderas funciones de pedagogo y psicológico . . . podrá constatarse claramente que existe un asombroso paralelismo entre la palabra ixtli: rostro, cuyo radical ix- hemos encontrado en estos . . . compuestos, y la voz griega prosópon (cara), tanto en su sginificado primitivo de carácter anatómico, como en su aplicación metafórica de personalidad. . . . Itech netlaneco [significa] »gracias a él, la gente humaniza su querer«. . . . Éste aspecto de tamatlini . . . apunta a una cierta idea de lo humano como calidad moral” (Léon Portilla 2006, p. 68–71). 4 Puquina is an ethnic group living around Lake Titicaca.

Bibliography Bondy, Augustin Salazar. 2006. Si existe una filosofia de nuestra América? Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores. Dussel, Enrique. 2010. ‘El Primer Debate filosofico de la modernidad’. In El pensamiento filosofico latinoamericano del Caribe y latino [1300–2000]. Edited by

240  Péter Szakács Enrique Dussel, Carmen Mendieta and Carmen Bohorquez. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Editores: p.55–66. ———. 2014. 16 Tesis de Economía politica. Mexico City: Siglo 21 Editores. Fernández, Justino. 1954. Coatlicue. Estética del arte indígena antiguo. MexicoCity: Centro de Estudios filosóficos. Ferreira da Silva, Vicente. 2002. Dialéctica das Consciências e Outros Ensaios. Lisbon: Casa da Moeda. Ginés de Sepúlveda, Juan. 1951. Demócrates segundo o de las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios. Madrid: Instituto Vitoria. ———. 1967. Tratado sobre las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios. Mexico City: FCE. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2013. ‘The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemocides of the Long 16th Century’. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11, 1: 72–90. Heidegger, Martin. 2014. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 2018. Sein und Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Hobbson, John. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kusch, Rodolfo. 2007. Obras Completas. Vol. I–IV. Rosario: Editura Fundación Ross. Quoted works (Kusch 2007a, b, c, d correspond to vol. 1, 2, 3, 4 of the Obras Completas): ———. La seducción de la barbarie. Tomo I: 3–124. ———. Indios, porteños, dioses. Tomo I: 135–322. ———. De la mala vida porteña. Tomo I: 323–466. ———. Charlas para vivir en América. Tomo I: 467–604. ———. América profunda. Tomo II: 1–254. ———. El pensamiento indígena y popular en América. Tomo II: 255–546. ———. La negación en el pensamiento popular. Tomo II: 567–698. ———. Las religiones nativas. Tomo IV: 129–176. ———. Mario Casalla: Una implacable pasión americana (Introducción.). Tomo I: 135–144. Lajo, Javier. 2005. Qhapaq Ñan. La ruta inka de Sabiduría. Lima: CENES. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 1992. Historia de las Indias. Tomo 1–3. Mexico City: FCE. Léon Portilla, Miguel. 2006. La filosofía náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes. MexicoCity: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Marx, Carl. 1867. Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Oekonomie. Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner. Mendieta, Jerónimo de. 1993. Historia eclesiástica indiana. Mexico City: Porrúa. Miranda, Gabriel Carlos and Butavand Carlos. 2018. La rehabilitación del saber seminal como un camino hacia una mistica popular (manuscript). Ondegardo, Polo de. 1561. La relación de los adoratorios de los indios en los cuatro ceques. Cusco. Plato. 2003. Republic. Translated by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin Classics. Quijano, Hannibal. 2004. ‘Colonialidad del Poder: Eurocentrismo Y América Latina’. In: Cuestiones y horizontes: De la dependencia historica estructural a

Christ versus the Llama sacrifice  241 la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder. Edited by Hanibal Quijano. BuenosAires: 2014 CLACSO. Ricoeur, Paul. 1974. La métaphore vive. Paris: Seuil. Seibold, Jorge. ‘La mística popular en la ciudad’. Revista Medellín XXXIX (2013), 154: 89–101. Souza, Eudoro de. 2000. Origem da poesia e da mitologia e outros ensaios dispersos. Lisbon: Casa da Moeda.

15 Religious atheism Assessing political religion through Critchley’s Faith of the Faithless Dennis Vanden Auweele The “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens does not feel as “new” anymore. Many philosophers who identify as without religious affiliation put some distance between themselves and those who argue that “religion poisons everything.”1 In his 2006 review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Terry Eagleton – though not an atheist – complained that “to read Richard Dawkins on theology” is alike to listening to someone “holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds” (2006, p. 32). Atheism has to be better than this to compete with the nuance and profundity of theology, and Eagleton’s charge has ushered in a wave of more philosophically and theologically refined atheism. James Wood noted, for one, that we need a “theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief. Such atheism, only a semitone from faith, would be like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity” (2009, p. 79). Many of the thinkers who took up this task hold a more charitable disposition towards (some aspects of) religion and often argue that (some elements of) religious faith is (are) indispensable for human flourishing. Some of these include James Wood, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Julia Kristeva and Gianni Vattimo. In this contribution, we will attend specifically to the potentially beneficial function of religion for liberal democracy. The argument seems to be made that liberal democracy is served by an authorizing faith to ward off both the erosion of liberal values and the slide into political demotivation. We will unpack this mostly from the work of the British philosopher Simon Critchley and his Faith of the Faithless. One general critique of this secular appropriation of religion, often from more conservatively-minded theologians, is that this approach considers religion merely for its instrumental purposes, and so will ultimately be denied these boons. The point seems to be that one does hold a religious faith because it is useful, but religious faith is useful because one holds it; put differently, religion is not held as true because it provides hope and comfort, religion provides hope and comfort because of being held as true. Rather than a gratuitous or prudentially considered choice, religious faith essentially involves deep and often involuntary commitment. If such commitment

Religious atheism  243 builds merely from prudential considerations, then it will ultimately not be authentic. A slightly coarse example of an instrumentalist approach to religion can be found in the (popularizing) work of Alain de Botton, who especially in his Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion makes an argument for the usefulness of certain aspects of religious life, such as community life, kindness, caretaking, pessimism and so on (de Botton 2012). Terry Eagleton called de Botton’s book an attempt “hijack other people’s beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure” (Eagleton 2012). Even atheists are unhappy with de Botton’s argument. Simon Critchley, for one, a denominational atheist who once quipped that his only religious commitment is to Liverpool Football Club, claims to arrive at the absolute necessity of religion for political liberalism through a different route. Through confronting nihilism, which to him is the loss of religious and political hope, Western society risks political demotivation because it is without an authorizing faith. Since we seem to be beyond a metaphysically-sanctioned faith, we need a “faithless faith” as a sort of literary supreme fiction. We will evaluate whether such a supreme fiction can achieve the sort of religious connection to liberal principles that seems required for the proper functioning of liberal democracy.

1. Experiencing nihilism: disappointment The paradox at the heart of the atheist turn to religion is that this turn can occur only because of the attempt for the most radical implementation of atheism. A radical implementation of atheism does not only reject religious metaphysics, but also all religiously-inspired concepts that are in some way dependent upon that metaphysics. One important such concept is hope, which ultimately sustains religious commitment to certain values. Religious hope is based upon a religious metaphysics. For instance, the Christian commitment to Christian values (neighborly love, humility, forgiveness) is based upon the hope that the Kingdom of God is nigh – in this world or the next. While one might recognize the value of these Christian values, our commitment to them will wane if and when Christian metaphysics is taken out of the picture insofar as these values are not given a substitute secular foundation. This is what Nietzsche called the “shadows of God” that will be visible for many years after the death of God.2 A radical atheism would overcome even these shadows of God. If commitment to certain values can no longer be based on religious hope, then what sustains our commitment to these values? Some years after Nietzsche, Karl Löwith made a powerful argument that the very idea of progress – whether social, moral or political – is a Christian artifact.3 Outside of Christianity, there is no real justification for progress. For this reason, Löwith called many modern philosophical systems, such as those of Hegel,

244  Dennis Vanden Auweele Comte and Marx, ultimately illegitimate: their idea of progress is a secularized form of religious hope that loses all justification outside of Christian metaphysics. Many of those writing in the 20th century pointed to the dangers of such utopian thinking and how it legitimizes the “slaughter bench of history” for the sake of a final solution.4 The first epochal recognition of the nullity of hope – either religious or political – arrived already in the 19th century under the idea of nihilism. Its first usage is usually traced back to the work of F.H. Jacobi, who employed it to warn against the consequences of a philosophy exclusively concerned with the understanding (Verstand). According to him, this would lead to a failure to access truths in excess of the understanding, such as freedom and God. For Jacobi then, reason itself leads to nihilism if it insists on being disconnected from revelation. Though certainly related, Nietzsche’s famous usage of the term nihilism likely stems from Russian nihilist revolutionaries, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who thought of nihilism as a task to be completed, namely by opposing and undoing social life from its traditional values. It is in the wake of this movement that the first feminist authors arose in Russia – such as Appollinaria Suslova, the mistress of Dostoevsky – who saw traditional marriage as a form of female slavery. Nihilism was an occasion here to start anew, to recreate society in accordance with more reasonable and social building blocks. This dual sense of nihilism – as a threat and a task – explains the duality in Nietzsche’s philosophy about this concept: on the one hand, Nietzsche appears often generally afraid of the coming of a sense of meaninglessness (see especially the soothsayer’s prophecy in Thus spoke Zarathustra); on the other hand, Nietzsche stills thinks that we have some ways to go to accomplish fully nihilism (the “shadows” of God). Nietzsche’s own analysis of the causes of nihilism is complex and multifaceted, including reflection on the rise of the natural sciences, the historical (rather than mythological) approach of Christian religion, the modern casuistry against moral good and evil (trying to give a rational foundation of morality) and the lack of national leadership and communitarian unity. While Nietzsche recognizes that the modern age is a nihilistic one, he recognizes that there are still some “shadows of God” that have to be overcome. Nietzsche does not attempt such to wholeheartedly embrace nihilism, but to undo all erroneous conceptions of reality so as to make way for a more truthful one.5 We need here not focus on the variety of causes of nihilism. Instead, we can point to a general disappointment with religion and politics. It is from that perspective that Simon Critchley in his critically acclaimed Very ­Little . . . Almost Nothing starts to look for a way to ward off the excesses of radical nihilism, such as political disconnection, demotivation and general hopelessness (2000). Nihilism requires of us that we find a more modest way to ward off the all-pervasiveness of meaninglessness. In dialogue with Jena Romanticism and roughly in line with Maurice Blanchot, Critchley

Religious atheism  245 makes the claim that literature is the region wherein nihilism can be paused momentarily. Critchley’s point in Very Little . . . Almost Nothing is that religion has become incapable for many to serve its primary function. In his view, that function is a “metaphysical comfort” or “existential balm” through the attempt to show that “the answer to the question of the meaning of life lies outside of life and outside of humanity” (2000, p. xvii). In my view, this is a somewhat simplified and almost banal, description of the function of religion that unduly privileged a certain sense of Christianity. I do not mean to deny that religions generally do offer an “existential balm” for the hardships of human existence; though, I would point out that the existential balm is an effect of the metaphysics of that religion. The causality is thus turned topsy-turvy. Disregarding that point for now, Critchley and many like-minded thinkers, point out that religion no longer seems to offer the succor that it has traditionally provided: “Much as I would very often like to have faith and am sometimes deeply envious of people who have it, I simply am not soothed by this balm. In fact, it irritates my skin, bringing me out in a nasty rash” (ibid.). Although this phrasing might make one suspect that Critchley is a rabid atheist, his ultimate concern is not to discard matters of a religious nature but rather to give a non-faithbased solution to these concerns. In most of his works, his concern is both religious and political and, in both areas, he admits to a strong sense of disappointment: “Religious disappointment provokes the problem of meaning, namely, what is the meaning of life in the absence of religious belief? . . . Political disappointment provokes the question of justice, namely, ‘what is justice’ and how might justice become effective in a violently unjust world?” (ibid., p. 2) This is what Critchley roughly identifies with the experience of nihilism, namely the meaninglessness of ordinary life and the lack of societal and personal justice. The challenge of nihilism was tackled differently by the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Both answers are thought of as problematic by Critchley. The Enlightenment sought to ward off nihilism by taking recourse to weighty metaphysical constructs of reason and progress. Yet, these fail to provide recourse in everyday life: “How to confront the problem of nihilism after one has seen how the values of Enlightenment not only fail to get a grip on everyday life, but lead instead to its progressive dissolution?” (ibid., p. 12) Romanticism, by which Critchley means the Jena Romanticism of the final years of the 18th century, sought a re-enchantment of the world through art. This project fails equally because the overt attempt to reenchant the world will always appear artificial and forced. This means, for Critchley, that nihilism cannot be avoided, but can at best be banned from certain highly specific locations. Critchley is thinking here, following Maurice Blanchot, of the potential of literature to create a space where nihilism appears untrue or at least put to the side momentarily. Literature does not re-enchant the world but creates a space for a weak sense of meaning to

246  Dennis Vanden Auweele emerge. This meaning may not refer to something transcending the world of finite things but must re-inscribe that world of finite things with value. This is ultimately called the task of thinking: “The task of thinking is to keep open the slightest difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be” (ibid., p. 29). Blanchot emphasized that literature has an impossible task, namely to create meaning through the process of writing (1955, 1980). Literature is the attempt to create a space outside of nihilism, but this is a task that cannot ultimately be achieved. However, through the simple attempt of writing, nihilism is given pause; through the doomed attempt to create a space of meaning, something meaningful happens. The world created in literature takes over the function of Nietzsche calls childish self-creation: an eternally self-repeating game of creation and destruction. Romanticism expected too much from human imagination, but literature gives us very little, almost nothing – which might, hopefully, be sufficient to pause nihilism. It requires little argument to show that powerful literature has the potential to inspire human beings and provide a sense a meaning knowing all too well that such meaning is based on nothing.

2. Faith of the faithless How does the literary attempt to create a space outside of nihilism reflect upon religion and atheism? This question is addressed in Critchley’s Faith of the Faithless (2012). The general point is that one must come to believe in religion as in literature, meaning that religion ought to create a space of meaning outside of nihilism. In other words, religion and literature are both forms of aesthetic creation that give a weak sense of meaning that creates a space of commitment and association: religion is a “supreme fiction” that we recognize as a fiction, but believe in nonetheless. The questions raised in Faith of the Faithless are directly concerned with the issue of what Critchley calls the dangers that political life might “slide into demotivated cynicism” (ibid., p. 4). The very structure of political liberalism risks a disconnection between individual and political life, making it so that the individual feels himself to be no longer a member of a larger political unit. In fact, due to its emphasis on individuality and free self-expression, this is a problem that inheres in the very concept of liberal democracy. The foundational principles of liberal democracy can even in extreme forms turn against liberal democracy, which is why many speak today of the “crisis” of liberal democracy. Although one could argue at length whether this problem is inherent in liberal democracy or whether is results from some specific implementation of liberal democracy,6 the pressing problem of the decline of support for the project of liberal democracy requires an urgent solution. For this solution, Critchley arrives at – with no cheer – the conclusion that politics needs a “motivating and authorizing faith which, while not reducible

Religious atheism  247 to a specific context, might be capable of forming solidarity in a locality, a site, a region” (2012, p. 4). The question at hand is here similar as in Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: while recognizing the ultimate meaninglessness of politics (there is no absolute sanction for political authority), there has to be a space where a sense of commitment can emerge that nevertheless sanctions liberal politics. That sanction is subjected to the same restrictions as literature: no “strong” authority (based upon Reason, Progress or Revelation), yet one that is strong enough to create a sense of community. The paradox is clear: while liberalism is supposed to have no other sanction than a people’s sovereign decision, there ought to be some form of intricate, even religious, connection to the fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Only religion can serve as an authorizing faith that can arrest and resist a slide in cynicism and populist self-concern. Yet, as the experience of nihilism makes painfully obvious, religion is for the Western world incapable of achieving this end. To put things provocatively: Since the Western world is faithless and yet desperately needs a motivating faith, it requires something of a faith of and for the faithless. Critchley borrows this term from an essay by Oscar Wilde (De profundis), which he wrote when a prisoner in Reading Gaol. The beautiful line from Wilde goes as follows: When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. (1954, p. 154) What exactly is a faith of the faithless? Critchley remains throughout very sketchy on the exact content of such a faith. The reason for this is that this faith is to emerge from an act of creation – its contents cannot lie in something given such as history, revelation, tradition, race, nation, etc. This act of creation cannot be merely individual or personal since it is supposed to bind together a community into a bond of confraternity. Critchley writes, a “faith of the faithless must be a work of collective self-creation where I am the smithy of my own soul and where we must all become soul-smiths,” (2012, p. 4) even suggesting that Christianity had its source in an aesthetic process of self-creation: “Christ makes himself into a work of art through the transfiguration of his suffering in his life and passion” (ibid., p. 5). There is continuity between Faith of the Faithless and Very Little . . .  Almost Nothing: an aesthetic process is to carve out a space for meaning to emerge through an act of creativity. In the transition from an authoritarian politics towards a politics of sovereignty, the authorizing faith must be emergent from within the general will of the people. It is no coincidence that Critchley engages extensively with Rousseau in Faith of the Faithless,

248  Dennis Vanden Auweele since Rousseau already recognized the potential fatal flaws of sovereignty as the particular will of the people. The people must be able to recognize their will as the general will (the social contract). In other words, there has to be a way for human beings to identify their private concerns with the general concern, even if their immediate private concerns clash with the general concern (for instance in the case of political leadership belonging to a different political orientation). This is what Critchley calls, following the poet Wallace Stevens and Alain Badiou, as a “supreme fiction,” which is “a fiction that we know to be a fiction . . . but in which we nevertheless believe” (ibid., p. 91). Rousseau was very well aware that there is no such thing as the general will of the people, especially not in a democratic state, but that fiction is necessary so as to bind that people together nevertheless. We lack such a thing today: “What is lacking is a theory and practice of the general will understood as the supreme fiction of final belief that would take place in the act by which people becomes a people or by which a free association is formed” (ibid., p. 92). There is an obvious and potentially fatal tension that does not just arise in Critchley’s argument, but which inheres in the very idea of liberal democracy. Let me illustrate. Some years ago as a graduate student, I attended an event organized by the Faculty of Political Science at KU Leuven. The topic was the perception of the European Union by political theorists and journalists from the Asian subcontinent. At the time not quite capable of responding poignantly, I felt a profound irritation when especially the Chinese and Indian journalists derisively mocked the lack of wholeness in European politics. There was then, and still is today, nothing of the sort of a European identity – certainly nothing on a par with Indian, Chinese or even American identity. At the time, I responded to the journalists by suggesting that the wholeness that was found in Chinese and Indian politics could only have arisen through indoctrination and political suppression. Being a child of Europe, it was unfathomable to me that nations of respectively 1.4 and 1.3 billion people would find anything they could agree on, or that they would be comfortable in subscribing to a general will. My experience in Europe, and Belgium particularly, had let me to believe that a lack of wholeness was the necessary consequence of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy does not lead to consensus but dissensus. And yet, for a nation to function and thrive, there ought to be something of a joint political consensus, a fundamental belief if you will, that binds people together. The sort of politics that has been practiced throughout Europe has not been capable of producing such a general consensus.

3. Producing the supreme fiction Critchley’s argument then seems to make sense given the foregoing: If the practice of liberal democracy creates and sustains dissensus, there ought to be a countering force that cultivates a unity throughout this diversity. That

Religious atheism  249 unity would be something that allies individuals powerfully and authentically to liberal principles without thereby mitigating their individuality. If we grant Critchley’s point that traditional religion will likely not be capable of sustaining such unity, a new “faithless faith” is to emerge as a literary creation. In the remainder of this paper, I would like to engage with three issues that emerge in Critchley’s suggestion to take up a faithless faith as a supreme fiction that counters a feeling of detachment from political life. These are the issues of creativity (who and how is the supreme fiction produced?), authenticity (who and how believes the supreme fiction?) and longevity (how does the supreme fiction endure?). In order to test better Critchley’s suggestion, it will be helpful to take up an example of a “supreme fiction.” I think some new religious movements could be apt to serve as an example. In 2001, there was a census survey in a number of English speaking countries where a number of people declared to be adherent of a religion called Jediism.7 This phenomenon was confined mostly to the English speaking world, and the more impressive quantities were in Australia (around 70,000 people) and New Zealand (around 53,000 people). The main church of this religion is officially called Temple of The Jedi Order (located in Beaumont, Texas). While many adherents stress that the church is not uniquely based upon the mythology of the popular movie series Star Wars, it is undeniable that this piece of fiction place an important role in the religion. The religion has strong resemblances to certain trends of mindfulness and self-empowerment. The religion’s website declares the following: We are a Jedi church and international ministry of the religion Jediism and the Jedi way of life. Jedi at this site are not the same as those portrayed within the Star Wars franchise. Star Wars Jedi are fictional characters that exist within a literary and cinematic universe. We are a recognized International Ministry and Public Charity; a tax exempt (donations are US income tax deductible) 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded in 2005.8 Though the immediate turn to the temple’s charity status and tax exemption might raise suspicions, we will here work under the assumption that this movement honestly is meant to count as a religion (not a tax shelter). Let us take Jediism as an example of a literary supreme fiction that turns into a faithless religion. Let us also assume that most adherents of this religion do not literally believe in the science fictional mythology of Jediism, but instead adopt this religion for a sort of profound truth in its most basic teachings. This is evidenced from the central topics of their creed, where little to no reference is made to a metaphysics, but rather to certain foundational values. This creed references “the inherent worth of all life within [the force]”; “the sanctity of the human person”; “a society governed by laws grounded in reason and compassion”; “a society that does not discriminate

250  Dennis Vanden Auweele on the basis of sexual orientation or circumstances of birth”; “the ethic of reciprocity”; “the positive influence of spiritual growth and awareness on society”; “the importance of freedom of conscience”; “the separation of religion and government and the freedoms of speech, association, and expression.”9 These are a few tenets of the religion of Jediism. Note that none of these refer to metaphysical notions (with the potential exception of the first principle). In fact, one might easily recognize that these ideas are the general principles of classical liberalism. There are other examples of religions that attempt to accomplish similar things, such as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Dudeism or the Church of the SubGenius. Often parodying in nature, these religions offer up a system of values roughly in agreement with the principle of classical liberalism. Can these then work as the supreme fiction that Critchley described previously? Let us start with the issue of what I call creativity. The emergence of mythology and religion is subject to a complex debate. Many religions have founders and great moments of foundation, but a religion that has the appearance of being the isolated invention of any individual, however gifted and exalted that individual might appear, is easily discounted as disingenuous. For instance, that the Church of Scientology is largely though not uniquely based on L. Ron Hubbard 1950’s book Dianetics (1950) seems sufficient for many to discard that religion as the delusion or deception of that individual. One is then tempted to speak of a cult (which often revolves around an individual, alive or dead) rather than a genuine religion. More generally speaking, religions do not seem to be individual creations, but as Critchley calls them, “communal act of soul-smithing.” There was a vocal debate in the 19th century on the matter of how religions come into existence. In his view of religion in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (1793/94), Kant seemed to suggest – and Hegel followed him in this for the most part – that it was reason itself that produced religion. According to Kant, one could understand the whole of religious faith in terms of two concentric circles: the inner circle is the pure religion of reason or the kernel of religious faith; the external circle is the wider sphere of historical faith that provides historical clothing to the rational essence of religion.10 This means that the basic structure of religion, its naked body so to speak, is generated by reason which is then subsequently given form by means of relatively contingent historical factors. Such historical content might lead religion astray from its bare reasonable message, and it is therefore the duty of the philosophical researcher of religion to return religion to its fundamental message. Nevertheless, any authentic religion is generated through reason. Kant’s general point was highly contested by theologians and philosophers alike. I want to focus on one type of reaction that emerged. This reaction came (among others) from one of Kant’s greatest admirers, Arthur Schopenhauer. Though known mostly as an atheist, Schopenhauer did come to a fairly nuanced understanding of the genesis of religion.

Religious atheism  251 Schopenhauer follows Kant in limiting the reach of discursive rationality to representational reality. When then philosophy attempts to attain a view of the whole and purpose of things (traditionally called metaphysics), they cannot build from discursive reason but, instead, it should start from a profound intuitive insight. This insight necessarily exceeds reason. Since Schopenhauer calls philosophy and religion both forms of metaphysics, it would stand to reason that religion is constructed in a way similar to philosophy. This means that a religion is not founded by a discursive and intentional act, but it first emerges through a profound insight that someone (“genius”) aims to communicate to others. Philosophy communicates through argumentation, religion through symbols, parables and allegories. Any attempt to frame religion in merely discursive language is already at a distance from the true well-spring of religion, namely that profound insight into reality. The creativity that erects a religion cannot be based upon rational considerations. Any overt attempt at creating a religion will at best create a poor and shallow substitute of religious faith. There has to be reason and unreason cooperating in the establishment of religion. The inaugural moment might be related to an individual, it is the communal act of furthering that inaugural moment that sustains a religion. In that sense, Christianity is based upon the life of Jesus Christ; Islam is based on the life of Mohammed; Judaism is based on the life of Abraham (and other prophets). Those religions are not, however, reducible to the life of these individuals – they grow up to lead a life of its own, sustained by a “living body.” What is peculiar about the three examples I raised previously – Jesus Christ, Mohammed and Abraham – is that in the way their stories survive in the tradition, nowhere is it mentioned that they deliberately sought to found a religion or gather a following. They most often did not claim to be the Messiah, with some exceptions, but were rather recognized as the Messiah by others. The true Messiah – as the Monty Python line goes – would deny to be the Messiah. It seems then that the foundation of a religion is the unintentional consequence of the life of the founders. This is what makes them authentic guides: they refused a personal stake or acclaim through their act. In that sense, many would feel that the overly intentional creativity in founding a new religion, such as Jediism, easily renders this false creativity. There was no inspiration beyond reason and unreason; instead, there is a merely rational calculus involved in founding that religion. This is a first problematic. This brings us to the second issue at stake in producing a supreme fiction, namely authentic belief. One does not have to be a Kierkegaardian to recognize that religious faith does not emerge authentically if and when one subscribes to it on the basis of prudential considerations. This is a worry signaled by many about Blaise Pascal’s famous wager-argument: this argument can show at best that Christian faith is beneficial, and it will by itself not allow one to belief in Christianity authentically. What exactly does allow

252  Dennis Vanden Auweele one to believe a religious faith authentically is a matter difficult to settle, but for our current purposes it suffices to point out that authentic faith generally does not emerge through prudential considerations. If we turn to our example of Jediism, it is very hard to tell whether the followers of this religion are true believers. A series of litigation in the Netherlands has repeatedly confirmed that Pastafarianism (or, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) does not count as a real religion because courts have ruled that its followers are not authentic believers. These court cases usually revolved around the right of individuals to wear colanders on their head (a sign of Pastafarian faith) for official function (e.g., picture on a driver’s license, public defense of a doctoral dissertation). In the Netherlands, religious symbols are allowed to be worn on these occasions, but the colander is not recognized as such. Disregarding the problem that theologically and philosophically untrained judges are making rulings on the authenticity of religious faith, the very nature of these new religions invites the question of authenticity. Authentic faith usually comes from either a life lived in a certain religion or a great moment of conversion. Jediism and other religions are too new for one to be raised in it, and the matter of conversion is difficult to settle. Suffice to say that most people are naturally skeptical whether one can believe authentically in a religion based on science fiction or parody – no matter the uplifting nature of its message. This brings us to our final point, on which I can be brief, which is the matter of the longevity of a supreme fiction. If one looks at religions that have endured throughout history, this achievement tends to be related to strong institutions (and often political backing). Many religions have faded into history. While it is certainly too early to judge whether Jediism and cognates will persevere, this seems unlikely if these religions fail to have a robust institutional backing.

4. Conclusion Liberal democracy requires some strong foundation in order that citizens will ally themselves to the principle of liberal democracy, even if those principles do not cohere with their private will. This argument is not supposed to quiet down dissent against illiberal governments; to the contrary, it seeks only to quell the potential slide into illiberal politics (e.g., populism). Illiberal politics are a worry on either side of the political spectrum. In dialogue with Critchley, we have recognized that only something of the sort of a religion has sufficient persuasive force to connect citizens intimately to liberalism. However, many forms of new religions will likely fail in bringing about such persuasion on a large scale because they are not recognized as authentic faiths. They are too artificial. What “faithless faith” might emerge to counter these problematics, remains to be seen.

Religious atheism  253

Notes 1 This line comes from Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007). Other influential books include Dawkins (1976, 1986, 2006); Harris (2004, 2006); Dennett (2007). 2 See for instance: “When will all these shadows of God no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-deified nature? When may we begin to naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?” (Nietzsche 2001, p. 110 [109]). 3 See Löwith 1953, where he argues that modern philosophy claims to be secularized, while it really is a continuation of Christianity without Christian metaphysics. Hans Blumenberg responded to Löwith by emphasizing the legitimacy of the modern project (1966). 4 On the dangers of the utopian mindset, see Kolnai 1995. For a more moderate appraisal of utopian hope, see Eagleton 2015. 5 I cannot explore Nietzsche’s dealings with nihilism here in detail. For a reading roughly in line with my own: Niemeyer 2019, p. 68–100. 6 Many scholars argue that the crisis of liberal democracy is mainly due to the to “depoliticisation” of liberal democracy, that is, the process wherein policy choices and decisions are moved from the public to the private sphere (for example, the privatization of health services, public transportation, etc.). See especially the work of Laclau (2014) and Mouffe (2013). For a contemporary review of the situation, see Toplišek (2019). Although I cannot develop it here, I think the problem runs deeper than a merely problematic implementation of liberal democracy. I would argue that the lack of a strong sense of community or association is a real consequence of any implementation of liberal democracy. In most Western countries, there is a serious decline of support for liberal principles, in favor of either leftist or right-wing politics. For discussion, see Wike and Fetterolf (2018, p. 136–150). 7 Some allege that this religion was founded primarily for the purposes of tax evasion. In 2016, the Charity Commission of the UK officially denied the Temple of The Jedi Order the status of charitable incorporation. They did not think of this religion as a serious one. For full discussion of the court case, see Cheung 2019, p. 350–377. 8 www.templeofthejediorder.org/ (accessed December 20, 2019). 9 Ibid. 10 For this imagery, see Kant’s second preface to Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason. Edited and Translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 64–65 [Ak 6:12–14].

Bibliography Blanchot, Maurice. 1955. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1980. L’écriture du désastre. Paris: Gallimard. Blumenberg, Hans. 1966. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Cheung, Tommy. 2019. ‘Jediism: Religion at Law?’ Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 8: 350–377. Critchley, Simon. 2000. Very Little . . . Almost Nothing. Revised Edition. New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. London and New York: Verso.

254  Dennis Vanden Auweele Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton and Company. ———. 2006. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. De Botton, Alain. 2012. Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. London: Hamish Hamilton. Dennett, Daniel. 2007. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. London: Penguin Books. Eagleton, Terry. 2006. ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching’. The London Review of Books 28: 32–34. ———. 2012. ‘Review of Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton’. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/12/religion-for-atheists-de-botton-review (accessed 02.10.2019). ———. 2015. Hope Without Optimism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Harris, Sam. 2004. The End of Faith. New York: Norton and Company. ———. 2006. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York: Knopf. Hitchens, Christopher. 2007. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Warner Books. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Religion and Rational Theology. Edited and translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kolnai, Aurel. 1995. The Utopian Mind and Other Papers. London: Athlone Press. Laclau, Ernesto. 2014. The Rhetorical Foundations of Society. London: Verso. Löwith, Karl. 1953. Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen. Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtsphilosophie. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso. Niemeyer, Christian. 2019. ‘Auf die Schiffe, ihr Philosophen!’ Friedrich Nietzsche und die Abgründe des Denkens. Freiburg and München: Verlag Karl Alber. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. The Gay Science. Edited and translated by Bernard Williams and Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toplišek, Alen. 2019. Liberal Democracy in Crisis: Rethinking Resistance Under Neoliberal Governmentality. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Wike, Richard and Janell Fetterolf. 2018. ‘Liberal Democracy’s Crisis of Confidence’. Journal of Democracy 29: 136–150. Wilde, Oscar. 1954. De Profundis and Other Writings. London: Penguin. Wood, James. 2009. ‘God in the Quad’. New Yorker 31: 79.

Index

Aboriginal 8, 232, 235 Abraham 104 – 106, 109n14, 251 absolutism 60, 62, 66, 154, 171 accountability 2 agapeic 15, 84 – 85, 89 – 92 apology 113, 14 apperception 52 Aquinas, Thomas 78, 146 – 147, 150 Arendt, H. 7, 130, 176 – 183 Aristotle 150, 177, 200 atheism 117, 121, 123n6, 123n16, 242 – 243, 246 Augustine 5, 6 – 7, 60 – 64, 73n26, 76, 77, 80, 86, 115, 123n13, 141 – 146, 147 – 148, 150 – 151, 151n15, 151n21 Auschwitz 79 authenticity 9, 77, 180, 249, 252 Bacchanalia 8, 218 – 221 Badiou, A. 112, 242, 248 Bible 6, 01, 94, 97, 198n8, 200, 201, 213n3 Blanchot, M. 244 – 246

213n3, 214n4, 218 – 224, 230, 236, 237 – 238, 239, 243, 245, 247, 251, 253n3 Christian theology 15, 63 Christology 5, 60, 63, 73n20 Cicero 180 – 181, 183, 185, 190 city of God 59 – 60, 64, 71, 80, 143 – 144, 148 civil theology 61 – 62, 64 colonialism 8, 139n8, 229 – 230, 238 commitment 42, 84, 86, 112 – 113, 123n11, 134, 202 – 205, 210, 242 – 243, 246 – 247 Communism 3, 6, 92, 127 – 131, 133, 142, 145 – 147, 150 community: political 7, 8, 35, 72n3, 131, 213n3; religious 21, 83, 208, 219 compatibilism 41 – 42, 76, 224 Concordia 15 – 16, 18 Copernicus, N. 11 Council of Trent 12, 17 – 18, 24, 32n48, 32n51, 159 – 160, 165 Critchley, S. 9, 111 – 112, 242 – 252

Calvinism 4, 11, 14, 16, 21, 23, 27n11, 27n14, 30n33 Camus, A. 117 Canaanite woman 6, 93 – 107 capitalism 92, 131, 200 cartography 40 – 47 Catholicism 12, 23, 26n1, 84, 220, 223 Christ (also Jesus) 16, 18, 21, 94 – 107, 108n5, 109n12, 251 Christendom 15, 85, 239 Christianity 6, 7, 8, 60, 63, 82, 84, 86, 89, 112, 113 – 115, 119, 121, 122n6, 132 – 135, 176, 178, 180, 200 – 201,

Darwinism 131 deception 99, 115, 121, 211, 250 decline 7, 129, 176 – 177, 179, 181 – 182, 183n5, 214n3, 246, 253n6 Deleuze, G. 55n7, 156 – 157, 162 depoliticisation 2, 9n1, 253n6 Descartes, R. 2, 20, 36, 38 – 39, 47, 53, 87, 123n10 discipline 1 – 2, 4, 7, 9, 14, 20, 138, 147, 161 – 163, 165, 190, 235 – 236 discourse 7, 37, 90, 106, 149, 154 – 156, 158, 172, 173n2, 186, 190, 194, 199 – 206, 208, 209 – 213, 214n4

256 Index dispositive 7, 154 – 175 dogmatism 137 Dostoevsky, F. 6, 111 – 122, 244 Eliade, M. 217 Enlightenment 7, 60, 79, 82, 87, 89 – 90, 123n7, 147, 161, 162 – 165, 168, 171 – 172, 213, 214n4, 214n7, 245 Entzauberung 186, 193 episteme 155 – 156, 165, 193 eschatology 5, 60, 63, 91 esotericism 219, 221 – 222 Eucharist 4, 11, 15, 21, 29n26, 33n60 European Union 248, 126 – 127, 130 – 135, 137 evil 5, 76 – 83, 85 – 88, 90, 92nn3, 92n7, 92n11, 144, 171, 230, 244 Fascism 8, 92, 92n11, 218, 221, 224, 226n20 Foucault, M. 7, 149, 154 – 160, 162 – 165 Francis, Pope 86, 134 – 136 freedom of religion 8, 9, 13, 202 – 204, 213 genealogy 188, 189 – 191, 214n4 Girard, R. 89 gnosticism 230, 236 God 2, 4 – 6, 13, 16, 19 – 21, 37, 43 – 46, 49, 55n11, 58 – 72, 76 – 92, 97 – 98, 104 – 105, 108n6, 111 – 112, 114 – 116, 118 – 120, 123n11, 135, 142 – 148, 151n15, 169 – 170, 181, 190, 192, 194, 196, 201 – 202, 217, 221 – 222, 230, 233, 235 – 239, 243 – 244 Gospel 18 – 19, 94, 99 grace 61, 64, 81 – 84, 92n9, 112, 116 – 117, 145 Great Seal 167 – 171 Habermans, J. 2, 199, 203, 210, 214n7 Hegel, G.W.F. 5, 7, 76 – 77, 80, 82 – 85, 87, 92n6, 186, 198n9, 243, 250 Heidegger, M. 8, 86, 136, 156, 180, 229, 231, 233 – 234 heresy 12, 17 hermeneutics 7, 95, 99, 102, 108n8, 165, 170, 185, 193, 199 – 200, 205 – 210, 213

history 2, 5, 7 – 8, 59, 63, 71, 73n13, 77, 80, 82 – 83, 85, 119, 128, 131 – 132, 136, 142, 155, 159, 170, 177, 183n5, 185 – 186, 188 – 191, 193 – 194, 214n4, 217 – 218, 220 – 221, 224, 225n3, 225n5, 233, 235 – 236, 244, 247, 252 Hobbes, T. 5, 47, 49, 51 – 54, 56n16, 71, 72n5, 78, 183n10, 185 – 188, 190 – 193 Husserl, E. 130, 136 – 138 identity 2, 41, 102, 128, 214n3, 248 image 38, 44, 48, 51, 58, 61, 67, 87, 90, 115, 145, 166 – 167, 169, 188, 233 imperative 65 – 68, 70 – 71, 181 institutionalization 7, 154, 158, 161 – 162, 172, 238 – 239 James, W. 112 Jansenism 113 – 114 Jediism 249 – 252, 263n7 Jesuitism 11 John Paul II 128, 134, 137 Joseph II 154 – 155, 160 – 165, 168 – 169, 171 – 172 Judaism 193, 251 Kafka, F. 100, 103, 236 Kant, I. 5, 58, 60, 65 – 71, 72n3, 73n20, 73n22, 76 – 77, 80 – 84, 87, 123n7, 146 – 148, 149, 163, 186, 198n9, 200, 250 – 251, 253n10 Kepler, J. 4, 9, 11 – 23, 26n1, 27n6, 27n12, 27n14, 28n19, 30n34, 31n39, 33n57 Kierkegaard, S. 5 – 6, 85 – 87, 92n7, 92n9, 94, 99, 104 – 108, 109n10, 109n15, 251 Kusch, R. 8, 229 – 240 language 8, 17, 41, 45, 87, 106, 107, 137, 143, 190, 194, 199, 200, 202 – 203, 205 – 211, 213, 229, 231 – 232, 251 law 3, 36, 41, 43, 51, 60, 63, 65 – 66, 68 – 69, 71, 80 – 81, 100, 120 – 121, 144 – 145, 147 – 148, 150, 187, 190 – 192, 194 – 197, 249 lawgiver 65 – 66, 68 – 69, 197 legitimation 2 – 3, 59

Index  257 Leibniz, G.W. 35 – 54, 77 leisure 170, 237 Lévinas, E. 136 liberal democracy 2 – 3, 6, 9, 242 – 243, 246 – 248, 252 liberalism 112, 131 – 132, 203, 243, 246 – 247, 250, 252 literature 194, 245 – 247 logos 14, 16 – 17, 58 – 60, 63 – 64, 70 – 71 Lutheranism 12, 84 Machiavelli, N. 181 MacIntyre, A. 142, 146, 148 – 151 marginalization 206 – 207, 209 Marx, K. 84 – 85, 131 – 132, 134, 218, 236 Mary, Virgin 104 – 105, 238 memory 51 – 52, 127, 188 metaphysics 36 – 37, 41, 62, 64 – 69, 77, 87 – 88, 148, 187, 191, 243 – 245, 249, 251 monads 35 – 46, 48, 50, 53 – 54, 121 mysteries 219 – 220 myth 60 – 61, 91, 170, 220, 230 – 231, 233, 235 – 236, 244, 249 – 250 natural theology 61 Newton, I. 21, 51 Nietzsche, F.W. 85, 88 – 91, 186, 188, 190, 200, 243 – 244, 246 nihilism 243 – 247 omnipresence 11, 15 – 18 orthodoxy 12, 113 – 114, 193 pagan 58, 60, 63, 88, 94 – 97, 103, 200, 222 Pascal, B. 39, 45, 111 – 118, 121 – 122, 251 Pastafarianism 252 Paul, St. 21, 81, 144 pensamiento seminal 232, 234 – 235, 237 persecution 11, 14, 170, 185, 193, 217 – 224 Pettazzoni, R. 217 – 224 phenomenology 47, 136 – 138, 217 philosophy of religion 70, 76, 82, 137, 230 piety 111, 162 pity 88, 192, 197

Plato 87, 89, 160, 176 – 177, 180, 200, 232, 234 political theology 1 – 4, 11, 18, 20, 58 – 60, 63 – 64, 70 – 71, 76, 78, 80 – 85, 88 – 92, 94, 111 – 112, 122, 142, 146, 151, 154 – 155, 160, 171 – 172, 185, 223 – 224 politician 59, 67, 70 – 71, 190, 193 – 195, 197 polyphony 118 pope 128, 134 – 136, 159 – 160 populism 131, 252 power: political/pastoral 1 – 4, 80 – 81, 89, 91, 154, 160 – 163, 171 – 172 practice 18, 21, 58 – 59, 81, 114, 117, 119, 142, 148 – 150, 156 – 160, 162 – 165, 177, 201, 206, 212, 248 pragmatism 135, 199, 203 – 205 preestablished harmony 4 pride 144 – 145 prince 12 – 13, 18 – 20, 81, 88 private sphere 180 privation 76, 83, 191 privilege 206 – 209 proselytism 221 public sphere 1, 176, 178, 180, 212 Pufendorf, S. von 186, 191, 194 pyramid 166 – 171 Rautenstrauch, F.S. 161 – 163, 165 – 171 reciprocity 213, 250 representation 2, 37 – 40, 42, 44, 46 – 51, 53 – 54, 58, 62, 67, 70, 83 Republican 68, 81, 171, 176, 181, 218, 224 revelation 5, 60, 62 – 64, 112, 136 – 138, 244, 247 Ricoeur, P. 235 Risorgimento 217 – 218, 224 ritual 114, 116 – 118, 120 – 122, 230, 236, 247 Romanticism 200, 244 – 246 Rousseau, J-J. 112, 185 – 190, 192 – 196 sacrament 13, 15 sacrifice 229 Sartre, J.-P. 108, 110 Satan 79, 238 Schiller, F. von 84 Schopenhauer, A. 86 – 88, 250 – 251 Schmitt, C. 2 – 4, 59, 78, 193, 223 – 224 scientism 123

258 Index secularization 128 – 130, 132 – 134, 138, 186, 193, 201 – 202 Seneca, L.A. 61 – 62 Shoa 193 socialism 114, 117, 224 sola Scriptura 17 solidarity 112, 133 – 135, 143 – 144, 247 soteriology 60, 63, 222 soul 36 – 38, 45 – 46, 48 – 49, 64, 77, 82 – 83, 89 – 90, 112, 114, 117 – 118, 145, 160, 172, 188, 236, 247, 250 sovereignty 2 – 3, 84 – 85, 90 – 91, 247 – 248 Soviet 126 – 128, 203 Spinoza, B. 48 – 49, 146 – 147, 185 – 193 Stout, J. 199 – 205, 208, 210, 212 – 213 Strauss, L. 4, 185 – 197 Taylor, C. 129, 201 – 202 testimony 95, 103 – 105, 107 theodicy 76 – 80, 82 – 83, 88 – 89, 91, 117

tradition 20, 77 – 80, 82, 86, 114, 126 – 127, 129 – 134, 136 – 138, 155, 176 – 177, 180 – 182, 186 – 188, 195, 206 – 207, 209, 212, 218, 220 – 221, 244, 247, 249, 251 transcendence 3, 79, 83 – 84, 86, 91 truth 15, 17, 20, 53, 58, 61 – 64, 67, 69, 112, 115 – 116, 118, 122, 136 – 138, 143 – 144, 147, 149, 211, 232, 234, 249 Tübingen Stift 14 Varro, M.T. 60 – 64 virtue 21, 60, 63, 80, 85, 90, 117, 121, 129, 142 – 143, 147, 148 – 150, 211 wager 112, 116, 251 witness 94, 101, 103, 105 – 107 Wittgenstein, L. von 156, 200, 208 – 209 Žižek, S. 242