Political Theology and Early Modernity

Graham Hammill, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Graham Hammill, Julia Reinhard Lupton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226314990
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. In this book, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton assemble established and emerging scholars in early modern studies to examine the role played by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought in modern conceptions of political theology.   Political Theology and Early Modernity explores texts by Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Milton, and others that have served as points of departure for such thinkers as Schmitt, Strauss, Benjamin, and Arendt. Written from a spectrum of positions ranging from renewed defenses of secularism to attempts to reconceive the religious character of collective life and literary experience, these essays probe moments of productive conflict, disavowal, and entanglement in politics and religion as they pass between early modern and modern scenes of thought. This stimulating collection is the first to answer not only how Renaissance and baroque literature help explain the persistence of political theology in modernity and postmodernity, but also how the reemergence of political theology as an intellectual and political problem deepens our understanding of the early modern period.

PART ONE

Modern Destinations

1

Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza, and Arendt

VICTORIA KAHN

Indeed, I barely comprehend how one can be a poet without admiring Spinoza, loving him, and becoming entirely his.

FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL

Words are a part of the imagination.

SPINOZA, The Emendation of the Intellect

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the problem of political theology, understood as the theological legitimation or religious dimension of political authority. Political events and social movements, from the Iranian revolution, to 9/11, to the resurgence of the Taliban, to born-again Christianity in the United States, have prompted Western scholars to revisit the relationship between religion and the state, in the process frequently castigating liberalism for cordoning off religion within the sphere of private experience. And increasingly, modern scholars are returning to one of the formative moments in the discourse of political theology—that of Weimar Germany—to conceptualize the problems posed by political theology or to rethink the relationship between divine law and positive law. It is this turn that explains the current widespread interest in the work of Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Ernst Kantorowicz, and other theorists of political theology.

In this essay, I want to complicate the current discussion of political theology by turning to one of the neglected terms of this earlier discussion, that of culture. In particular, I want to understand what the term meant and why it was anathema to both defenders (e.g., Schmitt) and critics (e.g., Strauss) of political theology in early twentieth-century Germany. What work was the idea of culture doing in the early twentieth-century debate about political theology? I will suggest that culture for these writers was conceived of as a product of early modern hermeneutics and the Enlightenment critique of religion. I’ll argue that, while its critics saw culture as a symptom of historicism and relativism, its defenders made culture a bulwark against political theology. Against the political decisionism of conservative figures such as Carl Schmitt or the religious decisionism of radical Protestant theologians such as Karl Barth, defenders of culture advanced what we might call a literary decision, a decision in favor of literature, that is modeled neither on law nor on the idea of the exception. This decision, I’ll suggest, is worth recovering as we think about the work of the humanities today.

This essay is in four parts. In the first, I briefly discuss the stakes of the idea of culture (Bildung or Kultur) in early twentieth-century debates about history and political theology. In the second section, I offer an account of the early work of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss on political theology and its relation to modern culture (the focus here is Strauss’s work on Spinoza). In the third section, I read Spinoza as elaborating a defense of culture in response to Strauss. And, in the fourth and final section, I look briefly at a modern defense of the idea of culture (that of Hannah Arendt) and a modern defense of the relevance of Spinoza for thinking about literature (Althusser and Macherey), both of which help us to understand what it might mean to think of literary culture as a bulwark against political theology and a model of political judgment.

1. Culture and Historicism

Let me begin by situating the turn to political theology on the part of thinkers such as Schmitt and the early Strauss as a response to the early twentieth-century “crisis of historicism.” Historicism (German Historismus) was a loose intellectual movement, and sometimes a method of interpretation, that argued that meaning was immanent in history and that historical events and texts needed to be interpreted in light of their immediate historical context. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historicist thinking emerged as a reaction against Enlightenment ideas of universal norms of rationality.¹ In his pamphlet “Yet Another Philosophy of History for the Cultivation of Mankind” (Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit) of 1774, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized the idea of universal principles of rationality and the view that history manifested itself in the gradual cultivation (Bildung) of humanity. Instead, Herder asserted the diversity of cultures of different historical epochs. Friedrich Schleiermacher advanced a similar argument in his essays “On Religion” (Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern). Schleiermacher’s target was those Enlightenment thinkers who equated enlightenment with the overcoming of religious superstition. Against these “cultured despisers” of religion, Schleiermacher defended what Jeffrey Andrew Barash has called “the principle of the historicity of truth as a plea for comprehension of historical divergence of religious beliefs” (5–6). Schleiermacher also advanced the hermeneutical principle that it was the goal of the interpreter to understand texts of an earlier period better than the author understood them himself.² (Strauss will later repeatedly attack this claim.) In the late nineteenth century Wilhelm Dilthey elevated this principle of “historicity”—“the historical constitution” of culture and its truths—into a method of historical analysis.³

Already in the first decades of the twentieth century there was a reaction against historicism and cultural analysis as forms of relativism. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West in particular was seen as an attack on “the prewar liberal confidence in German and Western culture” and as bringing “into sharp question the forms of liberal historical scholarship through which cultural development” had been interpreted. In 1919, the Protestant theologian Friedrich Gogarten wrote a manifesto entitled Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times), in which he declared, “We are jubilant over the Spengler book. It proves, whether one agrees with its details or not, that the hour has struck when this fine, clever culture [Kultur] discovers, out of its own cleverness, the worm that is eating it; when trust in the development of culture receives the deathblow. And the Spengler book is not the only sign.”⁴ Gogarten had in his sights liberal theologians such as Ernst Troeltsch and Adoph von Harnack who had studied religion as a historical and cultural phenomenon, as an instance of cultural “values,” rather than as an experience of “radical otherness.” Gogarten was not alone is seeing relativism as “the inevitable outcome” of the historicist methods of “liberal theology.”⁵ The German theologian Rudolph Bultmann, Martin Heidegger, and the Swiss Protestant Karl Barth were also struggling to recover a more authentic and personal approach to religious experience. Like Gogarten, Bultmann criticized the cultural approach to religion, emphasizing instead the need for a decision (Entscheidung) in favor of faith. This language of “decision” was also used by Heidegger in his lectures on the phenomenology of religion in 1920–21. For Gogarten, Bultmann, and Heidegger, “‘decision’ involved a return to the individual self, which chose its existence in resolute opposition to the inhibiting factors of the natural or historical objectivity surrounding it.”⁶ Karl Barth’s 1919 commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans also stressed the need for a decision in favor of faith and against existing historical conditions. He did so in part as a reaction against “the nationalism of the German theologians, who did not hesitate to see a Divine purpose behind German involvement” in World War I. In charged language that anticipates the later complicity of theologians with the Nazi cause, Barth wrote:

Can religion be of such absorbing interest that it may be welcomed as an enrichment of life, a valuable addition to civilization, or even as a substitute for it? When men are already sufficiently burdened by the inner uncertainty which attaches both to civilization and to barbarism, is it credible that religion should be brought triumphantly into connection with science, art, ethics, socialism, the State, Youth Movements and Race, as though we had not had abundant experience of the waste land of ‘Religion and . . . ’? . . . The watchman at the gate of humanity has only to take care lest, at the eleventh hour, he too may be compelled to conclude a short armistice with the adversary of whom he is so terrified. Religion, though it come disguised as the most intimate friend of men, be they Greeks or barbarians, is nevertheless the adversary. Religion is the KRISIS of culture and barbarism.⁷

Against the political theology of German nationalists as well as the cultural relativism of liberal theology, Barth asserted the radical otherness of God, his “utter transcendence vis-à-vis the things of this world.”⁸ This is the intellectual and political context in which both Schmitt and Strauss took up the question of political theology. Both saw historicism as synonymous with cultural relativism, and both were trying to rethink the relationship between politics and religion, positive law and divine law, in ways that responded to political crisis of World War I and the intellectual failures of historicism.

2. Strauss and Schmitt

I think it’s fair to say that the most important text in recent discussions of political theology (at least those that try to provide a genealogy of the term) is Carl Schmitt’s treatise by that title of 1922. Schmitt used the term political theology historically to refer to the secularization or appropriation of theological concepts for political purposes. More important, he used the term structurally to describe the homology between the theological or metaphysical assumptions of a given age and its dominant political form. And, most important of all, he used the term existentially: a political theologian is one who understands the theological or ultimate stakes of politics. The current widespread interest in Schmitt can be attributed not only to his stringent critique of liberalism but also to his insistence on the theological dimension of political conflict (though what this means is, of course, the subject of considerable debate among readers of Schmitt).

In this section I want to suggest that the work of Leo Strauss—Schmitt’s younger contemporary—is equally important for understanding the early twentieth-century debate about political theology, though for complex reasons it has been marginalized within the American academy. Specifically, I propose to use Strauss in order to complicate recent discussions of political theology. By the term political theology Strauss meant a political regime founded on revelation; but by the problem of political theology, Strauss meant the question of the relationship between political theology and political philosophy, or between revelation and reason. For Strauss, this was a “permanent problem” for Western political thought, deriving from its twin heritage of Greek philosophy and the Bible, Athens and Jerusalem. The great political philosophers of the seventeenth century—Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke—had tried to “solve” the problem of political theology by subordinating religion to the state or by arguing, in proto-liberal fashion, for the separation of state and church, public and private, politics and culture. But, in Strauss’s view, they had not so much solved the problem of political theology as repressed it. This does not mean, however, that Strauss was a defender of political theology.⁹ Rather, it means he was a critic of liberalism.

In his early work on Hobbes and Spinoza, whom he saw as proto-liberal thinkers, Strauss registered his dissatisfaction with liberal political theory but had not yet found an alternative. In his later work, he became a defender of what he considered the classical notion of philosophy. Thus, while Strauss declared that his whole career had been motivated by a concern with the “theological-political problem,” he had a very different understanding of this problem than did Schmitt—and not only because Strauss was Jewish and Schmitt Catholic. Although Strauss entertained the idea of religious orthodoxy as a young man, the mature Strauss was a rationalist who wanted to defend the claims of reason against political theology and the tyranny of revelation, on the one hand, and against liberalism on the other.

In this section, I trace Strauss’s critique of political theology, a critique that went hand in hand with an attack on a liberal or Enlightenment idea of culture, which Strauss associated with Spinoza. In the next section, I turn to Spinoza to see what a critique of political theology looks like that defends a liberal idea of culture as a sphere of human activity that makes room for religion while also disabling its claims to theocracy. This comparison of Strauss and Spinoza is designed to bring culture and the imagination to the fore as neglected terms in modern discussions of political theology—not only as sources of the power of political theology but also as vehicles of its critique.

Let me begin my account of Strauss’s shifting views of the problem of political theology by turning to the autobiographical preface to his first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. (The book was published in 1930, the preface in 1962.) In the preface, Strauss describes himself at the time of its writing as “a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament” (1). Here the theological-political problem refers to the problem of the relationship between religion and politics, and specifically to the Jewish question, which is the form this problem takes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Strauss equates the theological-political predicament with the failure of liberalism to solve the Jewish question in Weimar Germany. Liberalism had claimed to solve the Jewish question by making religion a personal matter and treating Jews as equals under the law. But such formal equality, Strauss argued, could not address the ongoing problem of discrimination in the private sphere. Political Zionism was a response to this failure of liberalism to deal with anti-Semitism, but political Zionism was in turn vulnerable to criticism by cultural Zionists for evacuating Judaism of its cultural heritage. Yet even cultural Zionism, Strauss argued, was a diluted form of Judaism, a religion which claims, after all, to be founded on divine revelation. Jewish faith “must regard as blasphemous the notion of a human solution to the Jewish problem” (6), Strauss wrote. And he continued, “One could not have taken this step [of cultural Zionism] unless one had previously interpreted the Jewish heritage itself as a culture, i.e. as a product of the national mind, of the national genius. Yet the foundation, the authoritative layer, of the Jewish heritage presents itself, not as a product of the human mind, but as a divine gift, a divine revelation. Did not one completely distort the meaning of the heritage to which one claimed to be loyal by interpreting it as a culture like any other high culture,” he asked.¹⁰ In this analysis, Strauss does not object to liberalism simply because the public/private distinction cannot guarantee freedom from anti-Semitism. Rather, his objection to liberalism is even more fundamental: in his view, Judaism is a political theology and is thus incompatible with the liberal, Enlightenment idea of culture, that is, with a celebration of “product[s] of the human mind” or a belief in “human solutions” to human problems.

Such an objection might suggest that Strauss was sympatheti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE: Modern Destinations
• PART TWO: Scenes of Early Modernity
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index