Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Foundations of Authority

Living Law ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 133-190
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
Divine Sovereignty ◽  
Mystical Tradition ◽  
The Law

This chapter is dedicated to reconstructing Gershom Scholem’s analysis of Jewish messianism in light of political theology. Scholem’s political thought is often associated with a critique of any attempt to endow Zionism with messianic traits. This chapter, instead focuses on Scholem’s conception of legal authority, arguing that his historiographical work on the mystical tradition of Judaism shows that the authority of the law is a function of the abdication of divine sovereignty and of a mystical idea of God’s Nothingness. Scholem articulates Jewish political theology around motifs found in Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and nihilism. His is a political theology of the law after the “death of God.”

The Theory of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century: The Contribution of the Canonists

Traditio ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 179-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Watt
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society

The work of the medieval canonists has always formed a significant chapter in the histories of medieval political thought. The law of the Church and its attendant juristic science forms the proper source material for the examination of the system of ideas which lay behind the functioning of papal government. Ecclesiastical jurisprudence was the practical branch of sapientia Christiana. It was concerned with a constitution and the exercise of power within its terms; with an organization and the methods by which it was to be run. It had of necessity to be articulate about the nature of the papacy, the constitutional and organizational linchpin. In consequence the canonists were the acknowledged theorists of papal primacy. To them rather than to the theologians belonged that segment of ecclesiology which treated of the nature of the Church as a visible corporate society under a single ruler. In that period of nearly a century which lay between the accession of Alexander III and the death of Innocent IV, canonists were required to register the increasingly numerous and more diverse applications of papal rulership to the problems of Christian society. The concept of papal monarchy came to be reexamined in academic literature because of the accelerating tempo of papal action. Under the stimulus of an active papacy, the canonists were led to examine many of the assumptions on which the popes based their actions and claims. The world of affairs conditioned the evolution of a political-theory, which in turn helped to shape the course of events.

The Beatific Life

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saitya Brata Das
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Creative Expression ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Law

This chapter presents a reading of the much-neglected novella Clara. It presents Schelling as offering an imaginative-creative expression of what may be called the ‘beatific life’, a life that is moved not by the power of the law but is released from the cages of the law. Beatitude, then, is the fundamental attunement that, by releasing life from the foundation of the worldly nomos, attunes it to the eschatological advent of the holy: the result is a political theology that destitutes sovereignties in the worldly order. Our exposure to the gift of our very existence, the gift that wounds us in the outpouring of an unconditional beatitude, is not mere life at the disposal of the law but the being which exists just ‘like a rose, without a why’.

Humans, Jews, and the Other Others

Other Others ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sergey Dolgopolski
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Dynamic Key

The “Introduction” formulates the question of the political, and in particular of the emergence and erasure of the political from the horizon of currently predominant political thought in political theology and political ontology. The “Introduction” further attunes the readers to the dynamic key of “effacement” as both emergence and erasure, thereby defining the main register in which the book is proceeding -- as distinct from the keys of chronological periodisation, linear history, paradigm shifts, or other stabilizing approaches. The “Introduction” further draws a distinction between politics and the political, and advances the question of the political in relation to the Talmud as both a text and a discipline of thinking able to shed a new, contrasting, light on the paradox driven modern political notions of a singularizing and even singling out notion of a “Jew,” and a universalizing notion of the “human being.” The “Introduction” concludes by gesturing towards a much closer connection between the question of the political in the Talmud, the notions of the Jews and of the human beings in modernity, and the question of earth and territory as a part of political equation these concepts spell out.

Introduction

Living Law ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Charismatic Leadership ◽  
Alternative Conception ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Divine Sovereignty ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Higher Law

This chapter situates Jewish political theology as a discourse developed in the 20th century, mainly by German Jewish thinkers. It sets out the basic differences between this analysis and the discourse on political theology developed by Carl Schmitt, centered on the need for absolute sovereignty to “restrain” disorder and revolutionary upheavals. The chapter argues that Jewish political theology offers an alternative conception of divine sovereignty and its implications for democracy and revolution. Jewish political theology is both republican and anarchic, attached to the idea of a higher law above human sovereignty and to the egalitarian ideal of a politics beyond domination. This chapter presents the two analytical-conceptual guiding-threads of the investigation. The first is concerned with Max Weber’s category of charismatic leadership and the problem of its functioning within a constitutional idea of democratic legitimacy. The second guiding-thread is concerned with the process of secularization. This chapter argues that Jewish political theology reconceives divine providence in order to criticize the assumption of human progress in and through history.

Political Theology of the Death of God:

2021 ◽  
pp. 188-206
Author(s):  
AGATA BIELIK-ROBSON
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Death Of God

Epilogue

2015 ◽  
pp. 334-344
Author(s):  
Yaron Harel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Government Official ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Religious Leadership ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Administrative Functions ◽  
The Law ◽  
Official Recognition

This epilogue studies how the Young Turk Revolution further weakened both Jewish autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and, along with growing secularization, the official recognition and legal authority hitherto accorded to the law of the Torah and to the religious leadership. In the controversies that broke out after the Young Turk Revolution, the call to remove the chief rabbis in a number of Jewish communities drew on revolutionary, reformist, and Enlightenment arguments, including the idea of free expression. Struggles over power in the community began to assume the character of a confrontation between those who were defined as enlightened liberals and their opponents, who were seen as benighted conservatives. Ultimately, the ‘secularization of the rabbinate’ — that is, the involvement of the ḥakham bashi in political matters and his role as a government official fulfilling explicitly administrative functions — led to a ‘cheapening of the rabbinate’. Modernization, and especially the expansion of education, disseminated ideas of secularism and individualism, and facilitated the emergence of new kinds of leader. During the first decade of the twentieth century, patterns of leadership that had been accepted in the Ottoman Empire for generations, including the placing of a religious figure at the head of the community, were increasingly perceived as outdated.

The Development of Legal Reasoning

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom R. Tyler ◽  
Rick Trinkner
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Developmental Model ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Legal Socialization ◽  
The Law ◽  
Legal Judgments ◽  
The Relationship

The cognitive developmental model of legal socialization is discussed in chapter 5. This approach emphasizes the development of legal reasoning and focuses on how such thinking shapes legal judgments about the purpose of laws, how legal authority should be used, and whether people should feel obligated to obey legal institutions. Basically, legal reasoning provides a framework to understand the nature of society and the requirements of social order, leading to judgments about the legitimacy of the law. Building on Kohlberg’s work in moral development, the legal reasoning perspective argues that people develop increasingly abstract and sophisticated models of the relationship between society and the law with respect to the position and duties of the law and the responsibilities and obligations of citizens. This provides a basis for understanding when to follow appropriate laws and when to violate laws viewed as unjust or unprincipled.

Roman Civil Religion and the Question of Jewish Politics in Arendt

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 573-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Civil Religion

This article discusses the question of how Arendt’s mature “neo-Roman” republican political theory relates to her early . It argues that her early reflections on the problem of Jewish politics in modernity already adopt one of the main pillars of her later republican political theory, i.e., the substitution of federalism for sovereignty. The article puts forth the hypothesis that Arendt’s republicanism takes up the idea that Romans and Jews, during their republican periods, both held a “civil” conception of religion. Arendt’s conception of civil religion is analyzed in light of her readings of Virgil. The article concludes that Arendt’s mature political thought is neither “non-religious” nor contains a “political theology” but that it does put forward a civil-religious interpretation of natality and plurality.

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