Conclusion

This chapter discusses the role played by Gnosticism in the discourse of Christian political theology in the 20th century. It does so in the context of the late debate between Schmitt and Blumenberg on the legitimacy of Modernity, the political meaning of Trinitarianism, and the connection between Gnosticism and revolutionary movements. This debate focussed on the Gnostic motif of a struggle between true and false gods as it reappears in Goethe and the German Enlightenment. The chapter gives a novel interpretation of Blumenberg’s hypothesis that Goethe adopted the Gnostic motif as a reaction to the appearance of Napoleon’s imperial designs. In so doing it draws upon Foucault’s ideas on the philosopher’s duty of parrhesia or frank speech towards the tyrant. The chapter concludes by offering a republican, anti-imperial interpretation of the motif of resistance to omnipotent gods and men.

Jürgen Habermas and Public Reason

This chapter explores Jürgen Habermas’s conception of a post-metaphysical idea of public reason as basis of democratic legitimacy in postsecular societies. It discusses Habermas’s interpretation of Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies of religion in terms of their efforts to ‘translate’ theological substance into ethico-political form, thus giving a secular meaning to the idea of God’s Kingdom. The chapter shows the roots of Habermas’s adoption of ‘methodological atheism’ in the writings of Karl Jaspers and Ernst Bloch on the relation between philosophy and faith in revelation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the similarities between Habermas’s and Jacques Derrida’s defences of an essential messianic component in contemporary democratic theory.

Eric Voegelin and Representation

This chapter discusses the political theory of Eric Voegelin as the earliest example of anti-Schmittian political theology based on the rejection of sovereignty. The chapter shows how Voegelin adopts Schmitt’s suggestion that political theology turns on the idea of a non-electoral representation of political unity but rejects Schmitt’s identification of this representative with the sovereign. Voegelin instead argues that ‘democratic’ societies are characterized by a dual system of representation, where philosophical and theological representatives of the transcendent God stand above sovereign representatives. Conversely, ‘totalitarian’ societies are societies that ‘close’ themselves to divine transcendence because they see salvation as a function of enacting immanent social laws. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relation between Voegelin’s idea of non-sovereign representation and contemporary accounts of populism, especially that of Ernesto Laclau.

Jacques Maritain and Human Rights

This chapter discusses the connection between Christian political theology and human rights in the thought of Jacques Maritain. It argues that Maritain understood universal human rights as part and parcel of a new ‘democratic’ Christian political theology centred on the struggle between multitude and empire and on the rejection of state sovereignty. The chapter shows that Maritain’s philosophical foundation of the universality of human rights is not based on a ‘metaphysics’ of the human person as much as it offers a biopolitical account of rights and adopts ideas of governmentality that parallel emerging neoliberal critiques of sovereignty. It ends with a discussion of Maritain’s turn to human rights in the context of his own struggle with anti-Semitism and establishes a comparison with Alain Badiou’s adoption of Paul’s political theology as the foundational discourse of egalitarian universalism.

Carl Schmitt and Sovereignty

This chapter reconstructs the origins of political theology in Carl Schmitt’s polemical engagement with the jurisprudence of Hans Kelsen and with the critique of sovereignty in English pluralist political theory. Kelsen sought to dismiss the idea of the state as a legal personality standing above the legal system as the product of an unscientific approach to jurisprudence because reliant on theological analogies with God’s transcendence over nature. This chapter shows that what Schmitt calls ‘political theology’ is a defence of these politico-theological analogies based on the claim that the political unity of a people requires a non-electoral form of representation of divine transcendence. The chapter then discusses Schmitt’s interpretation of Hobbes as recovering for modernity this Christian idea of political representation and compares it with the critique of Hobbes found in English pluralist theory. The chapter ends with a discussion of the debate between Schmitt and the German theologian Erik Peterson on Trinitarianism as ‘Christian’ political theology.

Introduction

This chapter identifies the question of the legitimacy of democratic government as the key site in which the discourse of political theology intervenes. It explains why ‘legitimacy’ is necessarily a politico-theological concept that raises the problem of the representation of a People. It then contextualizes the emergence of political theology in the 20th century as a reaction against the theorems of secularization developed by Karl Marx and Max Weber that point towards the eventual abolition of religion in modern society. The chapter concludes with some methodological considerations derived from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg on political theology.

Ernst Kantorowicz and Government

This chapter offers a novel interpretation of Ernst Kantorowicz’s monumental work on political theology, The King’s Two Bodies. It argues that Kantorowicz’s innovation with respect to Schmitt consists in offering a genealogy of liberal government in opposition to state sovereignty. The chapter shows how this modern idea of government finds its remote origins in the development of a ‘religion of law’ by jurists working for medieval emperors and monarchs in their struggle against the theocratic claims of the Catholic Church. The chapter contextualizes Kantorowicz’s work in the 20th-century Anglo-American debate on the medieval origins of medieval constitutionalism in Bracton. It also discusses the continuing relevance of Kantorowicz’s genealogy of government in the current debate between defenders of national sovereignty and advocates for global constitutionalism.