Sovereignty and the Sacred

Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion

Robert A. Yelle

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226585628
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating "states of exception"—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism.Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.

1

The Antinomian Sacred as a Political Category: Toward a Theory of Religion as Sovereignty

The affinities between sacredness and state of exception are of more than historical interest, insofar as they provide a further proof of the intimate connections between the realms of religion and politics, a connection in which, as we shall see, the agency of the ruler plays a crucial role. . . . Ultimately, then, what accounts for the appearance of metaphors involving sovereign decisions is the attempt to explore the nature of human agency, an exploration which requires positing agency at its most naked—gods and rulers being the personifications of this extreme form of agency.

GUSTAVO BENAVIDES, “Holiness, State of Exception, Agency” (2004), 64, 66

A number of earlier scholars have pointed out the convergence between the central categories of religion and politics: respectively, the sacred and sovereignty. The jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, who during the chaos of Weimar Germany argued for a strong leader and later served Hitler’s Third Reich, identified an analogy between the sovereign “decision,” which is necessary both to declare and to suspend the law, and the miracle, which interrupts natural law.1 Both constitute moments of revelation or fiat. The model for sovereignty is an all-powerful God, who created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo).2 The evidence for the existence of sovereignty parallels the traditional mode of evidencing the existence of the deity. Both the exception and the miracle interrupt the continuity of routine and, by doing so, simultaneously demonstrate their supervening, transcendent actuality. Sovereignty is manifested through a violation or suspension of the rule or norm, and appears as antinomian—lawless or against the law—even when displayed in the creating and commanding of new norms. Schmitt focused attention on moments of rupture or breakdown in the legal order, such as those which attend a state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand, literally “state of exception”), which in his view only highlighted the dependence of even the routine legal order on a sovereign decision that was comparable to the Fiat lux! (Let there be light!) of Genesis. As the theologians who framed the doctrine of creation ex nihilo had understood, if it were allowed that anything had coexisted with (much less preexisted) the deity, then God’s eternity and sole responsibility for creation would be called into question.3 Temporal priority and ontological singularity were attributes of sovereign authority.

Emphasizing the “irrational” aspects of religion, the German theologian Rudolf Otto, who was one of the leading scholars of comparative religion in the last century and a near contemporary of Schmitt’s, argued that “the numinous” (das Numinose)—a term he coined to distinguish “‘the holy’ minus its moral factor”)4 —is a terrifying and attractive mystery (mysterium tremendum et fascinans) that is experienced as something “wholly other” (ganz Anderes) than the ordinary or routine.5 To justify this thesis, Otto cited episodes from the Hebrew Bible in which God appears to act outside the bounds of any humanly conceivable set of ethical norms—such as when he commands the slaughter of innocents, as in the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), or attacks his chosen servant Moses without apparent provocation (Exod. 4: 24).6 Otto reminded us of God’s “wrath,” which is “incalculable” and “arbitrary.”7 He connected the numinous directly with Martin Luther’s insistence on a sovereign, omnipotent deity, the God of predestination whose cause was championed by Duns Scotus and other nominalists before being taken up in Luther’s The Bondage of the Will then supposedly “expunged” from later Lutheranism.8 Otto acknowledged the ethically problematic nature of such a deity:

Theology gives expression to its perplexed endeavour to find a name for the elements of the non-rational and the mysterious in the repulsive doctrine that God is exlex [recte: ex lege] (outside the law), that good is good because God wills it, instead of that God wills it because it is good, a doctrine that results in attributing to God an absolutely fortuitous will, which would in fact turn Him into a “capricious despot.”9

Together with miracles, morally problematic commands, such as that in Genesis 22, constituted the traditional evidence for God’s omnipotence. They prompted the “divine command theory” of morality—“that good is good because God wills it.”10 Despite Otto’s disavowal of this theory as “repulsive,” his own representation of the numinous highlighted the diremption between holiness and ethics. The numinous precedes even the basic moral distinction between good and evil and in its most primitive or pure form cannot be distinguished from the demonic.11 This raised again the great question of the ambivalent nature of the sacred as, potentially, simultaneously holy and accursed, or pure and polluted, a thesis that has inspired debate at least since William Robertson Smith in the late nineteenth century, as described in chapter 3 below.

According to Heinrich Meier, Schmitt embraced divine command theory: “Tertullian’s guiding principle We are obliged to something not because it is good but because God commands it accompanies Schmitt through all the turns and vicissitudes of his long life.”12 Whereas the miracle illustrated God’s ability to suspend natural law, divine command illustrated his ability to suspend the moral law. Accordingly, Schmitt identified the original political decision as beyond both good and evil, locating it instead in the designation of the “enemy,”13 a designation that cannot be constrained by legal norms. The political domain is prior to all ethical relationships that would flow from the presence or absence of hostility, which can be determined only by the sovereign.

In segregating the foundational categories of their respective disciplines, politics and religion, each thinker was partly following the practice of German scholarship of the time, which insisted on a rigorous demarcation of the field or object of study. In Otto’s case, at least, this effort was influenced by Immanuel Kant’s attempt to isolate the categories of experience, an attempt continued by such neo-Kantian philosophers as Jakob Friedrich Fries.14 Otto regarded religious experience as fundamentally different from other types of experience. He labeled the holy an “a priori category.”15 The motive for both Otto and Schmitt was to defend a definition of the subject in question—either of religion or of politics—in terms that were not reducible to another category, such as the True (the goal of logic), the Good (the goal of ethics), or the Beautiful (the goal of aesthetics); for if this were not achieved, then perhaps it could be said that the holy was just the good, or that the end of politics was to achieve the good, and then the study of religion or of politics would become indistinguishable from that of ethics.

Arriving at a similar conclusion, although in much more libertine fashion, the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897–1962) located the sacred—a quality he later termed “sovereignty” (souveraineté)—in moments of violence, eroticism, or excretion, in behaviors marked by excess, exuberance, consumption, or waste, when the body may be penetrated or, conversely, exude outside its boundaries and either perpetrate or experience a transgression that is simultaneously moral and physical. After reciting a long list of tabooed phenomena, he declared that each was “treated as a foreign body (das ganz Anderes),” thus deliberately drawing the parallel to Otto’s holy.16 Such displays of the sacred frequently violate the utilitarian economic order and signal, through this violation, an independence from material need. For Bataille, sacrifice, which often involves the destruction of an object and therefore of its use value, was the clearest example of such sovereignty.17

Steven Wasserstrom noted the resemblance between Schmitt’s “exception,” Otto’s “numinous,” Bataille’s “sovereignty,” and Mircea Eliade’s “sacred,” each of which entailed the rupture of ordinary, profane life.18 Wasserstrom argued for an elective affinity between such ideas, on the one hand, and reactionary and fascist political tendencies, on the other.19 He labeled such concepts as “antinomian” and “Gnostic,”20 using the latter term metaphorically to denote the belief that the sacred is lawless, and that legal norms, including those of Judaism (a traditional target of Gnosticism), should be rejected. Gustavo Benavides has contended similarly that there are “affinities between sacredness and state of exception,” in particular between Otto and Schmitt, that signal their common heritage in Romanticism.21 In a review of Wasserstrom’s book, Benavides argued that “the context of Eliade’s hierophanies is to be sought” in “the Decisionism of [Ernst] Jünger, Schmitt, and [Martin] Heidegger,”22 each of whom participated in the ideological reinforcement of the fascist regime, through the glorification of irrationality or violence.23 Benavides argued that the category of the sacred as understood by Otto and Eliade could serve the same politically unpalatable goal. The parallels between Schmitt and Bataille have been noted separately by others, including Martin Jay, who identified convergences between these two thinkers as members of the counter-Enlightenment who drew on Romantic and older religious ideas in their reactions against liberal legalism and bourgeois capitalism.24

As this brief review suggests, the general tendency in the scholarly literature has been to account for such philosophical affinities in terms of the immediate historical circumstances of Weimar Germany or, more broadly, interwar Europe. In support of this approach, some scholars have advanced evidence, where such exists, for the participation of particular figures, such as Eliade, in reactionary groups or activities.25 In other cases, personal connections—guilt by association, or what we might call “Six Degrees of Separation from Carl Schmitt” (or even the reductio ad Hitleram)—have been used to establish a chain of circumstantial evidence that allows for the explanation of these views in political or ideological terms. However, this does not help us much to understand Otto, as there is little evidence of any personal or public commitments on his part that might with any justice be characterized as “fascist.”26 Without disputing the contribution made by such biographical approaches to our understanding of the ideas of the thinkers in question, it appears that such critiques have failed both to take into account the longue durée history to which Schmitt’s and Otto’s ideas of an absolutely sovereign deity sought to respond, and to argue for a coherent position on the thesis of whether or not, anthropologically speaking, there is evidence for a convergence between sovereignty and the sacred precisely in their exceptionality. To this extent, these critiques are incomplete or even misleading.

No claim of Otto’s has been more misunderstood, perhaps even to some extent by its author, than the claim that the “numinous” is sui generis, namely, is in a category by itself and therefore not reducible to something else. It is true that, in making this claim, Otto was trying to preserve subjective religious experiences, and the discipline of theology, from outside criticism. However, it is not the case that only Otto has represented the holy as sui generis, nor that only Schmitt has regarded sovereignty as exceptional: many traditions, including some reflected in the Hebrew Bible, have done so as well. Reexamining this convergence around the idea of singularity may provide a point of entry to a sociological definition of the sacred. Precisely in the claim to sui generis status, the sacred becomes comprehensible as a mode of sovereignty. My interest is in exploring the analogy between these two categories, and not in maintaining Otto’s designation of the holy as something inherently incomparable.

Such earlier emphases on the irrational, and exceptional, aspects of religion have been eclipsed within the study of religion itself, especially since the publication of Mary Douglas’s groundbreaking work, Purity and Danger, more than half a century ago now.27 Douglas made the sacred primarily a question of order, of putting everything in its proper place. Yet, as I argue in chapter 3, there are reasons to think that the older idea of the ambivalence of the sacred might be due for reconsideration.28 And the challenge to our understanding posed by the history of religions remains. What we call “religion” includes not only those institutions that are part of and that reinforce the social order, but also individual and collective acts that protest, dissent from, attack, or dissolve and remake that order. Indeed, the history of religions could be written in terms of such acts of transgression: the starving Buddha, crucified Christ, paralyzed Socrates (possessed by his daimon); Tantric libertines, orgiastic rites, Bacchantes, the self-mutilated devotees of Cybele; various movements of iconoclasm (Egyptian (Akhenaton), Jewish, Islamic, Byzantine, Protestant); Carnival and other moments of social license when the hierarchy is temporarily inverted or abolished; and a host of millennial and apocalyptic movements. Many of these individual phenomena—particularly, in the wake of September 11, 2001, instances of religious violence—have received a great deal of attention, and some incisive critique. Yet, with some notable exceptions, they have rarely been the focus of a general theory of religion.

These phenomena are scarcely marginal to religion. The future Buddha Siddhartha Gautama’s departure from his father’s palace and exit from family life was already a form of leaving, a sign of exit that foreshadowed the further departures of nirvāṇa and parinirvāṇa (final release at death). No deeper rejection of society, its conventions and ritual rules, even the most basic institution of the family itself, can be imagined. The very title of the Buddha as “Tathāgata”—the “thus departed one”29—emphasizes, with a spatial metaphor, the centrality of transcendence to the Buddhist dharma. Similarly, Christ’s sojourn in the desert and final act of self-sacrifice, which was interpreted by some Christians as a moment of abrogation of the Jewish ceremonial law—an event simultaneously creative and destructive—invoked several modes of departure. That each of these paths required, finally, the abandonment of embodiment shows the potential incompatibility of transcendence with any living system whatsoever. This reinforces the fact that religion—as transcendence—can scarcely be about “existence” or “thinghood.” It would be truer to call it an act of pure negation. No theory that purports to explain religion, yet leaves out of account such phenomena, is worth very much. It ignores what cannot easily be explained, out of convenience or perhaps fear.

The view, now commonly held by many scholars, that religion doesn’t exist—that there is “no thing” described by this category—is at once technically co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1  The Antinomian Sacred as a Political Category: Toward a Theory of Religion as Sovereignty
• 2  The Disenchantment of Charisma: The Theological Origins of Secular Polity
• 3  The Ambivalence of the Sovereign Ban: The Homo Sacer and the Biblical Ḥerem
• 4  Sacrifice, or the Religious Mode of Production
• 5  States of Nature: The Jubilee and the Social Contract
• 6  No Deposit, No Return: Religious Rejections of Exchange
• Conclusion: Exit Signs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index