Political Theology II

The Myth of the Closure of any Political Theology

Carl Schmitt, Michael Hoelzl, Graham Ward, Michael Hoelzl, Graham Ward

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745642543, 9780745642536
• eBook ISBN: 9780745697109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political Theology II is Carl Schmitt's last book. Part polemic, part self-vindication for his involvement in the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), this is Schmitt's most theological reflection on Christianity and its concept of sovereignty following the Second Vatican Council. At a time of increasing visibility of religion in public debates and a realization that Schmitt is the major and most controversial political theorist of the twentieth century, this last book sets a new agenda for political theology today. The crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century led to an increased interest in the study of crises in an age of extremes - an age upon which Carl Schmitt left his indelible watermark. In Political Theology II, first published in 1970, a long journey comes to an end which began in 1923 with Political Theology. This translation makes available for the first time to the English-speaking world Schmitt's understanding of Political Theology and what it implies theologically and politically.

1

The Myth of the Ultimate Theological Closure

1 The Content of the Myth

Peterson’s conclusion (with its final comment attached) is still cited today as if a res iudicata has been ultimately created, with legal force. It is sufficient to refer to it to make any further discussion superfluous and to make unnecessary not only the study of my book Political Theology from 1922, but also a more detailed examination of Peterson’s treatise from 1935. Such generalising dismissals are frequent and hard to avoid in discussions within the fragmented scientific community, with its divisions of labour. They ease and lighten academic research in a way that is difficult to resist. With such a multifaceted, complex and over-talked-about topic as political theology, such dismissals are almost inescapable.

Nevertheless, a critical re-examination is needed from time to time for the sake of academic accuracy. For the global and negative conclusion that political theology is impossible, contemporary theologians and anti-theologians, Christians and anti-Christians can be quoted. With respect to the possibility of such a negative consensus, it is time to confront the formation of such myths. Scholarly works, too, can become legends quickly, whenever they haul out and solemnly declare a commonly accepted conclusion as the result of their erudite research. Erudite treatises, which are transmuted into academic legends in this way, are only used and – contrary to the etymological meaning of the word Legende – not read any more, only cited. That is the case here.

Our investigation concerns questions in the history of ideas. If, in the year 1935, a treatise about the formula ‘one God – one monarch’ was published in Germany, then it automatically entered the sphere of being dangerously relevant to the current situation, more so when the monarch is occasionally (p. 52) also called Führer. This was seen then as contemporary criticism and protest; as a well-disguised and intelligently masked allusion to the cult of the Führer, the one-party system and totalitarianism. The book’s motto contributed to that; it was a sentence by St Augustine – ‘Pride too has a certain desire for unity and omnipotence, but in the realm of temporal things, where all things are transient like a shadow’¹ – who warns against the false striving for unity which originates in the worldly lust for power.

This explains the vivid reception and acceptance of the treatise when it was first published. The Catholic journal Gral praised it as ‘a small, friendly book which provides, in barely a hundred pages, new insights into the greatest questions that determined human society and nations’. The book, the Gral continues, ‘delivers the death-blow to political theology without any polemic’. In the Schweizer Annalen it was noticed that ‘here the end of all political theology is accomplished. The buried meaning of this analysis is exposed here in a surprising way.’²

There is, as far as I know, no historical or biographical monograph on Erik Peterson’s life and work, although this would be an informative subject, especially with respect to political theology and theological politics. During the years of his public career, 1925–60, his conversion to Catholicism marked an absolute turning point, which cannot simply be pinpointed to a calendar date in 1930. Peterson began as an academic theologian in the tradition of the Göttinger Schule during the First World War, 1914–18, and was caught up in the intense crisis which occurred in German Protestant theology following the outcome of the First World War. The voluminous literature on this crisis between 1918 and 1933 has been well researched and painstakingly analysed in a dissertation by Robert Hepp from the University of Erlangen in 1967. He raised the right research question: Politische Theologie und Theologische Politik [Political Theology and Theological Politics].³

Throughout the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the co-operation and mutual recognition between the two kingdoms and domains found in Augustine’s teachings safeguarded the division between civitas Dei and civitas terrena – religion and politics, this world and the hereafter – thereby making it concrete for German Protestantism in 1918, these institutional safeguards vanished, initiating crisis; whereas the Catholic church remained, it appeared, absolutely unaffected by this crisis during the entire Weimar period (1919–33). It held on unperturbed to its traditional teachings concerning the two societates perfectae – the church and the state. The old Lutheran as well as the modern liberal separation between the spiritual and the temporal, religion and politics, was abrogated through the shattering of the two decisive domains, church and state – because the separation between state and church is an issue concerning the responsibility of legally institutionalised subjects and not an issue concerning an objectively verifiable distinction between domains. In fact, as Robert Hepp says (p. 148), there was no state any more which was ‘purely political’ and no theology which was ‘purely theological’. The domain of society and the social impacted on both and dissolved their distinction. In this way a situation arose for German Protestantism in which Protestant theologians realised the crises of religion, church, culture and state, and, finally, saw that critique is the essence of Protestantism. This was an insight of Bruno Bauer which, since 1848, had been overshadowed by Marxism. In a ‘political manifesto’ from 1932 entitled Krisis, the constitutional theorist, Rudolf Smend, spoke as a matter of course of the connection between the political and the religious crisis. Robert Hepp writes (pp. 161 and 162):

Without the walls of the dogma the spiritual could no longer be clearly separated from the temporal … The same theologians who already demanded the separation of the state and the church at the time of the monarchy, although being priests [Abbés] engaged with the world, provided the service of a hairdresser for the Emperor’s theological periwig – exactly as Eusebius of Caesarea once did for Constantine the Great; these same theologians had become theologians of the royal court of democracy.

It is the theologian of Constantine’s royal court, the Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who has been illustriously placed at the pinnacle of false political theology. In what follows we will encounter him frequently. The moral or theological portrayal of him as a ‘hairdresser for the Emperor’s theological periwig’ was formulated in 1919 by the theologian Overbeck from Basel. It was intended to be an excoriation of the famous Berlin professor Adolf Harnack, accusing him of being a theologian of the royal court of Wilhelminian Prussia. Of course, this should have been a ‘purely’ moral and ‘purely’ theological criticism, not commingled with anything political, since such commingling would have been ‘impure’ eo ipso. Peterson published his exchange of letters with Harnack from the year 1928 with an epilogue (Hochland, November 1932 [= E. Peterson, Theologische Traktate (München: Kösel-Verlag, 1951)], pp. 295–321). In 1932 he writes, in note 19 of this publication: ‘From this perspective one can say that only to a certain extent did the confessional controversy in Germany have any real impact in the field of political theology.’ In his treatise of 1935, Peterson was silent about this ‘impact to a certain extent’, although it had been an urgent issue for all Christian confessions because of Hitler.

In his years at Bonn, between 1924 and 1930, in the ripening of his determination to convert, Peterson also wrote a paper important for the present context, Was ist Theologie? [What is Theology?’] (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1925). In it Peterson proclaimed – at that time he was still an Ordinarius in the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Bonn – that theology is only possible as a theology of absolute dogma. Theology is the continuation of the incarnate logos and is only possible between the time of the Ascension and the return of Christ; everything else is literature, fiction and theological journalism:

Only because of dogma is theology separated from its association with that most dubious of all academic disciplines, the so-called Humanities. It is liberated from the contexts of the history of civilisations, the history of literature, art history, philosophy of life, or whatever they might be called.

The Christian theologian has a particular ecclesiastical status; he is neither prophet nor novelist. ‘Neither the Jews nor the pagans have a theology; theology exists only in Christendom and only on the precondition that the incarnated word spoke of God. The Jews may do exegesis and the pagans mythology and metaphysics; but theology, in its proper sense, only began when the incarnate one spoke of God.’ Not even the Apostles and martyrs are theologians. For Apostles proclaim the word and martyrs testify to it. In contradistinction to that, theology is the continuation of the revealed logos in the form of concrete discussion. There is only theology in the time between Christ’s first and second coming.

From such a viewpoint, any idea of a Christian ‘political theology’ seems to become meaningless, if not blasphemous. My own book Political Theology, from 1922, was known to Peterson through many conversations.⁴ The book does not deal with theological dogma, but with problems in epistemology and in the history of ideas: the structural identity of theological and juridical concepts, modes of argumentation and insights. We will refer to this in Chapter 3. However, with his theses about the nature of Christian theology, Peterson appeared to have bypassed the uncertainties related to the crisis of German Protestantism at that time; he made himself secure through a dogmatic theology. But, given the changing friend–enemy constellations throughout history, theology can become a political tool of the revolution as well as of the counter-revolution. This is a natural part of the ongoing change within political–polemical tensions and of the formation of battle-lines; it is just a question of intensity. Erik Peterson himself knew this best. He went so far as to respond like this to a complaint about the contemporary loss of interest in theological controversies:

One must have the courage to live once more in the sphere in which dogma is an issue, and then one can be assured that people will be interested in theology again. They will be interested in the same way women hawkers in the market at Constantinople were interested in the controversy over homoiousios and homoousios.

This sounds more like revolution and is definitely not a depoliticisation of theology, although Peterson seems not to have noticed that these political–theological demonstrations were in fact revolutions of the monks. A bishop of the Christian church like Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who loved peace and order, was sympathetic neither to these demonstrators nor to the protesting ‘women hawkers’ of Constantinople and other oriental cities, who lacked specific theological charisma.

We are concerned here, as we said, with Peterson’s 1935 treatise on ‘political monotheism’. This treatise was written in the context of the new crisis which, predictably, followed Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, and as a consequence of the totalitarian ambitions of his National Socialist regime. The new crisis impacted upon all Christian confessions, Protestants and Catholics, but in different ways, because the Catholic church had signed a Reichskonkordat with Hitler in 1933. The treatise from 1935 does not deal with the crisis explicitly and ex professo, but in a way, one might say, that is disguised in terms of a very erudite historico-theologicophilological focus on the early centuries of the Roman Empire. As far as the problem of political theology is concerned, it is decisive that Peterson maintains the Augustinian teaching of the two kingdoms, the two distinct ‘cities’ (the city of God and the earthly city). Their institutionalisation occurred during the Christian Middle Ages and Reformation. Peterson ignores the crisis of the modern problematic of church/state/society. Neither of these kingdoms is any longer distinguishable, either in matter or content. The spiritual–temporal, this world and the hereafter, transcendence–immanence, idea and interests, superstructure and substructure – can only be determined according to the struggle between the subjects. Totality is potentially attainable from every standpoint or disputed matter after the traditional ‘walls’ (that is, the historical legacy of the institutions of the [various] churches and states) have been successfully challenged by a revolutionary class.

Up to the First World War (1914–18), the restored structure of these institutionalised dichotomies, legitimated by the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), seemed to be valid. One could hold on to the fiction of a ‘purer’, ‘cleaner’ separation between religion and politics, even in the liberalism of the nineteenth century. Religion was either an issue for the church or, simply, a private concern. But politics was an issue for the state. Both remained distinguishable, despite ceaseless disputes about their responsibilities, as long as the organisations and institutions were visibly distinctive, immanent organisations and institutions and were able to appear and act effectively in the political public sphere. For, as long as this was the case, one could define religion as being related to the church and politics as being related to the state. The time of change came when the state lost its monopoly on the political and other political agents, who were literally fighting each other, claimed this monopoly for themselves. The traditional categories imploded when a revolutionary class, and particularly the industrial proletariat, became the new effective subject of the political.

I have examined this development in my book Die Diktatur: Von den Anfängen des modernen Soveränitäts gedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf [Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to the Proletarian Class Struggle] (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1921). The result was formulated in a strictly systematic form only in 1927, in my book The Concept of the Political. This treatise – originally published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik (August 1927) – begins therefore with the statement: ‘The concept of the political is the precondition for the concept of the state.’ Subsequently, the systematic enquiry of this treatise developed into a book on the theory of the constitution [Verfassungslehre] (1928), not on the theory of the state [Staatslehre]. In other words: today one can no longer define the political from the state; what we take to be the state today must, on the contrary, be defined and understood from the political. But the criterion for the political today can no longer be a new substance, or a new ‘subject matter’, or a new problematic in its own right. The only scientifically arguable criterion today is the degree of intensity of an association and dissociation; that is, the distinction between friend and enemy.

I beg the reader’s pardon. I have counted on your patience to follow such a swift overview of the transition from church and state to the political. In the light of the confusion in the current discussion, there is hardly any other possibility of communicating and gaining a degree of reflection which makes a fruitful discussion possible. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde has summarised the current status of the problem in an essay, ‘Politisches Mandat der Kirche?’ [‘A Political Mandate for the Church?’] (Stimmen der Zeit, 148, December, 1969, pp. 361–72):

The contemporary political left and the theology which sympathises with it discovered something of what Carl Schmitt already foresaw and formulated forty years ago. Namely, that the political has no discrete object. Moreover, it designates a certain degree of intensity of association or dissociation, which draws its material from all subjects, whatever the given situation and conditions of a society may be. Therefore one cannot circumvent the political by retreating to a neutral position, to some pre-political natural law or to the pure proclamation of the Christian gospel. Even those positions become politically relevant whenever they enter the matrix of the political. This is unquestionably right, empirically and analytically. And one might ask oneself why neither the common public nor the public voice of the church came to this conclusion.

Böckenförde’s essay is dedicated to ‘Professor Hans Barion on his seventieth birthday’. We have now to consider Barion’s account of the problem of political theology.

2 Hans Barion’s Critique of Political Theology

With reference to what precedes our discussion, we concentrate on examining Barion’s critique from 1968 of the over-progressive theory of the state made by the Second Vatican Council. In the fifth of his studies on the council, he analyses in particular §74 of the Pastoral Constitution, ‘On the Church in the Modern World’. The canon lawyer raises two questions: Is the council’s over-progressive theory of the state a political theology? And is it a theology at all?

Barion’s answer is:

It is a ‘political theology’ because it prescribes a certain political model in its official teaching: but therefore it cannot be theologically legitimated, and hence it cannot be a theology, because revelation does not present such models. Even the recognition of the Roman state in the first century was just a factual recognition, like every other model ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Editors’ Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Introduction
• Guideline for the Reader
• Introduction
• 1 The Myth of the Ultimate Theological Closure
• 2 The Legendary Document
• 3 The Legendary Conclusion
• Postscript: On the Current Situation of the Problem: The Legitimacy of Modernity
• Appendix: ‘Peterson’s Conclusion and Concluding Footnote’
• Notes
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names