Church, Gospel, and Empire

How the Politics of Sovereignty Impregnated the West

Mitchell

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781630879150
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book addresses the apparent dislocation of the church and theology from the socio-cultural mainstream and attempts to recover its counterpolitical voice. It argues that early in ecclesiastical history, the tradition's founding and constituent principles were betrayed by a complicity with the prevailing politics of sovereignty that has continued to this day. Following the contours of contemporary theologians who explain the dislocation in terms of a fall in early modernity, an initial subsumption of transcendence by sovereignty is proposed. The genealogy of this fall is then explored in four historical studies focusing on the theopolitical transformations of law, violence, and appeasement from their beginnings in the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea to their culmination in the commodification of life itself. The trajectory is traced through seminal soteriological developments such as the crusade theology of Pope Innocent III, the inversion of the corpus verum and the corpus mysticum, and the conjunction of sovereignty and capital in the mysterious currency of the Bank of England. The narrative culminates in the seemingly paradoxical concurrence of the politics of biopower and the so-called century of the Holy Spirit. Drawing on a radical substratum intimated in the case studies, the final section develops an innovative christological configuration of kenosis or what is termed 'kenarchy.' This provides a re-imagining of the divine distinct from its implication with imperial sovereignty, which could allow theology to make a more effective contemporary political intervention.

Part I

Theological Dislocation

1

New Bearings

The Origins of Modernity and Their Ongoing Impact, Critical Themes

The intention of this initial chapter is threefold. Firstly, it places the thesis in the context of contemporary theology. It does this by affirming a general sense among many theologians that there has been a serious dislocation of theology from contemporary life. It identifies a common methodology among theologians who are investigating the cause of this dislocation, which is to posit and search out some kind of fall in the history of the Christian faith. The thesis is then introduced within these same methodological contours. The way in which theologians commonly locate this lapsis in a shift in the apprehension of the divine at the onset of modernity is noted, and the attempt is made to show that the much earlier dislocation posited here contributes to the field of enquiry by qualifying, expanding, or questioning the arguments propounded by the theologians concerned. Secondly, the chapter aims to highlight a problematic tendency for modern and postmodern thinkers to predicate their analyses on immanence and positions the thesis as a possible explanation and antidote for this trend. Thirdly, the chapter aims to prepare the ground for the ensuing exposure of the genealogy of church and empire by introducing key themes central to its ongoing development in the conduits that follow.

In line with this intention, this chapter is in three parts. Firstly, it provides a brief overview of contemporary theologians who recognize the theological dislocation and posit a fall in the genesis of modernity to explain it. Particular reference is made to the proposals of John Milbank, Michael Allen Gillespie, William Cavanaugh, and Paul Fletcher. The work of Michel de Certeau, building on the ideas of Henri de Lubac, is seen to indicate that all these perspectives can be read in terms of the loss of a body. The implications of proposing an earlier lapsis are then contemplated. Secondly, Paul Fletcher’s recognition of the tendency of responses to modernity to predication on immanence and the relevance of this to the dislocation of theology from the Western intellectual and political arena is examined. The possible rooting of this tendency in the identification of divine and imperial power consequent on the proposed fourth-century fall is then considered. Thirdly, themes crucial to the proposal of a fourth-century subsumption of the church by sovereignty and its subsequent genealogy are indicated and explored, in preparation for the ensuing conduits of Christendom where the supposed lapsis and its subsequent genealogy are investigated in detail.

It is anticipated that the initial presentation of the thesis in relation to contemporary responses to modernity and questions about the nature of sovereign power and its status in the medieval world will undergird the overall argument and shed light on the challenges faced by contemporary theologians in hope of a renewed theopolitical vision. For if imperial sovereignty is necessarily subversive of originary gospel and ecclesia and has been embraced by the church, then the primary theological formulations and ecclesial institutions that make up the Christian tradition may well have been misconstrued and deformed in consequence. And if the era of medievality known as Christendom was the outworking of a secular intrusion into an initial Christian orientation, then it will be important to reconsider and revise theories of modernity that have been predicated on what was already an era of covert secularization. This is particularly to be welcomed, given that the current understanding of modernity as the response to a representative Christian mindset tends to render permanent the marginalization of the church and its contribution to contemporary society. As will be indicated, theological responses to this predicament are themselves often predicated, at least in part, on a diminished view of transcendence vouchsafed by modernity with the result that they fall short of providing a sustainable practical theopolitical alternative. If however, as the coming conduits will suggest, the conflictual sovereignty of church and empire that modernity was in part a reaction to is evidence of an earlier dislocation of originary Christianity, then an alternative theopolitical mindset might yet be reconfigured.

A. The Origins of Modernity and Their Ongoing Impact

1. Lapsarian Perspectives

The classic view of modernity generally regarded the modern era as a period in European history from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards. It was seen as a time when, through the adoption of rational methods of intellectual enquiry by such as Galileo Galilei in physics, René Descartes in epistemology, and Thomas Hobbes in political theory, religion played a lesser part in life than in the medieval era, people prospered economically, and conditions improved across the board.1 Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century approaches, however, in response to the exigencies of the modern world such as the persistence of poverty and the prevalence of violence and war, or the perceived marginalization of Christian faith, tend to reject previous more positive analyses. Instead they concentrate on modernity’s ambiguous affirmation of human potential alongside the oppressive sovereignty of its juridico-political constructs and rationalistic approach to knowledge. Stephen Toulmin, for example, affirms an early positive root to modernity in a literary or humanistic phase represented by the work of Montaigne, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare, and predating a more pretentious philosophical and scientific phase by a hundred years.2 Hardt and Negri propose first the emergence of a radical plane of immanence, embodied in the writings of such as Duns Scotus and Dante Alighieri, succeeded by a counter resurgence of transcendent sovereignty as depicted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.3

These approaches to the early Renaissance disclose a problem with the medieval world that early expressions of modernity were an attempt to address, while at the same time calling into question the theoretical and political direction of the later modern worldview that succeeded it. It is the endeavor to understand how these positive and negative aspects arose and their perceived tendency to depose the church and its theology from the public sphere that has provoked the lapsarian analyses of contemporary theologians. That is to say they posit some kind of specific fall after which Christian faith is estranged from the socio-political and cultural-intellectual mainstream. For John Milbank the lapsis is ironically Hardt and Negri’s perceived moment of breakthrough in the late thirteenth-century work of Duns Scotus. In Hardt and Negri’s neo-Marxist approach, Scotus’ concept of the univocity of being establishes immanence as the sphere of human freedom by making the apprehension of the transcendent a component of temporal thought. Milbank’s radical orthodoxy, on the other hand, sees this as the manifestation of a foundational metaphysic of modernity, which he describes as “ontotheological idolatry regarding God.”4 The problem with univocity from Milbank’s perspective is the way in which it posits being independently of the divine and then describes God by means of it. This might be termed an intellectual fall because of the way it renders ontology and metaphysics supra-theological by creating a theoretical human grammar, or what Catharine Pickstock calls a mathēsis,5 to which language about God is subjugated. For Milbank this is “the turning point in the destiny of the West.”6

Michael Alan Gillespie postulates a nihilistic crisis in late medieval thought brought about by the impact of the nominalists and in particular William of Ockham. Building on Blumenberg’s conception of the origins of modernity as a proto-Nietzschean self-assertion that reoccupied the scholastics’ need to show the hand of God in all events,7 Gillespie contrasts the Thomistic attempt to reaffirm the notion of the ultimate reality of universals with Ockham’s assertion that all real being is individual or particular and universals are thus fictions.8 Whereas for the scholastics creation itself was regarded as the embodiment of divine logic, and man, as the rational animal and imago dei, was seen as the pinnacle, the nominalists asserted that God could not be understood by human reason but was only accessible by biblical revelation or mystical experience. From Gillespie’s perspective this implies that creation is radically particular and thus not purposeful. Human beings have no natural or supernatural end or telos and God is presented as “frighteningly omnipotent, utterly beyond human ken, and a continual threat to human well-being.”9 This position presented an ontological shift “that shattered every aspect of the mediaeval world.”10

William Cavanaugh proposes a political fall, in which the church acquiesced to the separation of Christian faith from the public sphere on the conviction that the violence of the post-Reformation wars was the inevitable result of variant theological ideas and opposing ecclesiastical structures. He suggests that this perspective was in fact a basic creation myth of modernity, fundamental to the legitimation of the nation state as the guarantor of the modern world.11 He supplies a plethora of convincing arguments to show that no so-called religious war of the sixteenth or seventeenth century was fought solely between the exponents of conflicting doctrines or representatives of different churches. He argues that the concept of religion is itself a modern theory relegating faith to internal values without external disciplines in a way unique to the emerging Western nation state...