Chapter 1: Destitution of Sovereignty
1
Destitution of Sovereignty
The Political Theology of Søren Kierkegaard
And at midnight there was a cry made.
—Matthew 25:6
The Event
In his 1922 Political Theology, Carl Schmitt famously says:
A Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in theological reflection in the nineteenth century stated: “the exception explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the general. If they cannot be explained, then the general also cannot be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not thought with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion.1
The citation is from a text entitled Repetition. At stake here is the question of “the event”: Schmitt is here thinking, with the help of the Protestant thinker called Søren Kierkegaard (who is the thinker of the event par excellence), the event of “the political” which in its verbal resonance rests on the exceptionality of “a decision and not on a norm.”2 What Schmitt here thinks as “the political” is the advent, apocalyptic in its resonance, which is inaccessible to and unattainable in the purely constituted order of the normative. It is as though, for the event to be possible, the constituted-normative order must be suspended: the event, then, cannot be said to belong to the positive order of the norm, for the intensity of the event is each time exceptional to what is given and normatively valid. The exceptional decision, taken at the limit of all situations (it is verbal, since “all law is ‘situational law’”), the event is, for Schmitt, each time irreducible to “the everyday frame of life”:3 this is so because the “homogenous medium,” like this “everyday frame of mind,” “must exist” in order for the norm to be applicable at all. This normative state of affairs (the idea that there is no space, within the concrete order of the state, which is not occupied by the law) does not explain the event of the political itself (that is, the possibility of decision and the possibility of the norm itself); it does not explain the agonal topos where the decision between enmity and friendship may erupt, the intensity of which alone accounts the very possibility of the political. The passion for the exception and the intensity of decision that break through the immanent-normative order (which is “the general”): it is this passion and intensity that is, according to Schmitt’s own claims, supposed to bring the apocalyptic Kierkegaard in proximity to his own “political theology.” By citing Kierkegaard here, Schmitt claims that even for the “Protestant” thinker (why Schmitt mentions Kierkegaard as “Protestant” is revealing as well as concealing), as much as for himself, this “passion” or “intensity” would essentially be the theological (Kierkegaard would rather say “religious”) passion (thus passion par excellence): it interrupts and tears apart the fabric of the normative constitution of existence, opening the constituted order to certain transcendence (to the absolutely heterogeneous, that which is radically asymmetrical to the “homogeneous medium” of the “everyday frame of life”). The event is the opening up of the abyss of a dissymmetry that cannot be understood on the basis of the positivistic totality of the already existing norm. The “theological” here for Schmitt has an institutional history: it has a history of institutions (that Schmitt would then go on to display), for what—at the last moment—interests Schmitt is none other than the “institutional” possibility of nomos through exception and by exception.
It is true that what Kierkegaard would call “faith” is indeed this exposing of ourselves to the event breaking through the immanent regime of the law: the event suspends the closure of immanence by tearing it from normative validity and opening it to the incalculability of decision with “utmost passion.” But, precisely for that matter—and this is important—the event refuses to be embodied in “history” (of institutions): the absolute event of Christ dying on the cross, which alone opens up the eschaton to come, is a wholly otherwise event; it cannot be understood as the historical event in the name of which “the nomos of the earth” can seek legitimacy. To understand this, it will be necessary for us to understand Kierkegaard’s decisive eschatological critique of historical Reason.
For Søren Kierkegaard, the Hegelian pantheistic immanent metaphysics of history—which is the most consummate form of “theodicy” in Occidental metaphysics—cannot address the question of faith whose distance or heterogeneity (dissymmetry or disjunction) is essentially nourished by that absolutely singular, exceptional and decisive event of Christ’s humiliation on the cross. Kierkegaard’s eschatological passion, then, lies in this self-given task that seeks to release the singularity of decision and of the exceptional event of opening to “the wholly other” (which is essentially tied up with “religion,” namely, “Christianity”) that Hegel attempts to subsume under the “general” or “the universal” (totality) by a dialectical “cunning of reason” through “mediation.”4 One can, thus, say that Hegel’s theodicy of history is none other than “the nomothetic operation”5 at the service of worldly sovereignties. Kierkegaard names the worldly kingdom (saeculum), whose legitimacy rests in eliciting from us “normative obligations”6 from a theological foundation (which nevertheless it liquidifies), as “Christendom”: when Christianity is seduced by history, it becomes “Christendom.” It thereby forgets completely (there is no more “Christian” left in Christianity) the true Christian passion, that is, to be contemporaneous to that absolute event of divine foolishness, to that absolute event of kenosis. What, then, becomes obscure to Christendom is this paradox: how kenosis is inseparable from the event of the Lord’s glory: God dying the most ignoble death on the cross, the event in relation to which the eighteen hundred years of “Christendom” appears as a history of tragic betrayal. By forcibly separating these two moments (Christ’s humiliation [kenosis] and his exaltation [glory])—this is the metaphysical violence of Christendom—and by merely taking up the moment of glory as the only Christian example, Christendom has obfuscated the decisive event of Christianity on the stage of history, the decisive event being that of bringing about (or at least bringing about an anticipation of) a conflagration (of what the Origenist eschatology calls Apokatastasis) that is paradoxical to the utmost degree, for it consists of bearing the unbearable experience of suffering unto death and thereby the opening of that chasm or the abyss, of that radical heterogeneity in respect to any worldly sovereignty in the profane order. Christendom has not only violently substituted—by a force or power alien to its original eschatological spirit—the event Kenosis with glory, but what is even worse, it has further substituted glory of the Lord with worldly pomp and splendor, repressing thereby the abyss that the event invokes: “abyssus abyssum invocat” (Ps 42:7).
This is, then, what “the event” is for Kierkegaard: “abyssus abyssum invocat,” exemplified only in one individual, who himself is paradoxical to the utmost, who has appeared only once on the stage of history to undo “the truth of the world” (“I am the truth”: John 14:6)7 and un-figures the figura8 of the world: the event of truth (this is the truth of the event: that is, dying on the cross) invokes the abyss, for it undoes the truth of the world (“scandal for the Jews and foolishness for the Gentiles”: 1 Cor 1:23) and un-figures the sovereign figures who rule, not by pistis but by nomos. But the truth, the event of truth that alone is pneumatic, the glorious truth of exception, is the absolute paradox, for it is inaccessible and invisible to the glories of the world, for the truth of this glory is at the same time none other than the eternal passing away of all worldly glories.
Such event, then, eschatologically burns the existence of the Christian in his inwardness and it still burns, after eighteen hundred years, in Kierkegaard’s very existence (“whose very existence interests him infinitely”): for here is involved an existential faith, since faith by definition has to be existential. Faith is, then, worklessness: it is the impossible, impossible because of its absolute distance from all possibility or capacity; impossible because its inwardness is more radically exterior than any exteriority; impossible because of its absolute heterogeneity in relation to any potentia that emanates from a sovereign auctoritus. Here existence must be understood, if one goes with Kierkegaard, as an infinite ex-sistence, that is, existence being set apart (for faith means “setting apart” or being “set apart” from “the foundation of the world”) from the worldly being, even though that mode of being may be aesthetically pleasing or ethically ennobling: “Beware of those who go about in long robes” (Luke 20:46). Kierkegaard, being neither a preacher nor an apostle, is without authority: he is this ex-sistence as an open wound, torn open by faith to the transcendence without potentia. Existence, then, can never be thought on the basis of the force of the law or by the sovereign power of the worldly nomos. Only existentially may Kierkegaard still hope (for hope is without auctoritus), by virtue of having to bear, in the inwardness of passion, a messianic abyss, to be contemporaneous with the one whose manifestation on the stage of history means, paradoxically, to be incognito to all those who are on this earth. Almost in one-sided manner, Kierkegaard intensifies the moment of the absolute abandonment (“My God, My God, why hast thou abandoned me?”: Matt 27:46), of absolute poverty over against the splendor of the worldly glory in order to reintroduce the spirit of that absolute event which has been done away by the eighteen-centuries-old Christendom: “the measuring rod of the unconditional” is the paradox, for it is the immeasurable itself, that is, an unconditional sacrifice.”9 Here the religious passion is so radically heterogeneous10 to all worldly potentia that it can only be a scandal, a “danger” or an “offence” that sets the world on fire: “Christianity is incendiarism, Christ himself say, ‘I am come to set fire on the earth’ and it is already burning, yea, and it is doubtless becoming a consuming conflagration, best likened to a forest fire, for it is ‘Christendom’ that is set on fire.”11 The faith anticipates the arrival of the holy conflagration (the conflagration of the holy), that is—as Taubes describes it:
separation (Aussonderung) and setting apart (Absonderung); being holy means being apart. The holy is the terror that shakes the foundations of the world. The shock caused by the holy bursts asunder the foundations of the world for salvation [das Heil]. It is the holy that passes judgment in the court of history. History exists only when truth is separated from error, when truth is illuminated from mystery. History is elucidated from the mystery of error to the revelation of truth.12
Is the event that Schmitt is concerned with the same as this arrival of the holy, the latter being that event (as it is for Kierkegaard) which delegitimates (“sets fire on the earth”) any political theology that justifies the rule of sovereign power by constitutional (a mere human book of the law, which is to be distinguished from the divine commandment) means (while worldly nomos is a “means and end” relation, commandment is that where this is annulled), even though it implies suspending the normative order guaranteed by the constitution? Is the (Schmittean) “paradox” here (suspending the constitutional order of worldly nomos in order to reinstitute the sovereign figure precisely by constitutional means [Article 48 of Weimer Republic]) the same as the Kierkegaardian paradox of faith that affirms the unthinkable and incalculable event of the “monstrous copulation”13 (as the tragic Hölderlin affirms in his own way), this joining together of the divine and mortal (in Christ) that sets apart the true exception (that never becomes rule in turn) from worldly hegemonies anchored on the nomothetic figure of the sovereign? Here is an impossible affirmation, affirmed eschatologically (that is, as the judgment upon history and not merely a historical judgment), affirmation of an unthinkable and incalculable distance (that “yawning abyss,” that vertigo of thought) that uncouples in advance (“always already”) any possible “analogia entis” between the eschatological event (which is a secret, a monstration, radically invisible in the light of world-historical politics) of conflagration (“I am come to set fire on the earth”) and world-hegemonies on the immanent plane of profane history. It is as though Kierkegaardian eschatological faith must, in advance and monstrously (a “scandal,” a “danger,” a “thorn in the flesh”), undo any political-theological justification of a political situation: for what is earthly is the order of utter transiency which, as such, must pass away in the blazing landscape of apocalypse; for the divine affirms the world only by throwing an immense question mark, an absolute No to the world; for it is an affirmation from which the eschatological judgment is immediately tied up, for it is not a mere dialectical, that means, a “mediated” affirmation (an affirmation is not affirmation if it has to be “mediated”: therefore Hegel’s philosophy is only negative philosophy, a conceptual maneuvering); for the divine refuses “at any price [to] be a kingdom of this world; on the contrary, it would be that the Christian might venture life and blood to prevent it from becoming a kingdom of this world.”14
Therefore, the state, and for that matter, the visible church, cannot be the “figure of the absolute,” unlike what Hegel saw in the dialectical mirror of the concept: the true measure of the unconditional, which is the immeasurable, is such that it does not figure itself into the kingdom of the worldly, for Christianity is essentially a “polemical concept.”15 Christianity is stasis or “militant” or an infinite “opposition” against powers of the world. This is the Kierkegaardian either/or: “only either/or is the embrace which grasps the unconditional.”16 But here the either/or, where what is to be opposed (the enemy) is not dialectically mediated, is not a political concept. It is inaccessible to the Schmittean friend/enemy “either/or” of the worldly hegemonic regimes which are founded upon the power of earthly nomos. Rather as the purely Christian event, it has only a religious meaning, which is the meaning of covenant held fast in the language of love: “the terrible language of the Law is so terrifying because it seems as if it were left to man to hold fast to Christ by his own power, whereas in the language of love it is Christ that holds him fast.”17 Who can miss here the Pauline messianic paradox of faith? As soon as this opposition is taken away18 and the thorn in the flesh is taken out, only then do we all become “Christians” in “Christendom” and the absolute becomes dialectically embodied in the figure of the state. The intensification of the political passion with which sovereign powers of worldly hegemonies may decide on the “friend-enemy” either/or is not the Kierkegaardian existential passion of either/or: “All religion has to do with passion, with having passion. It will be true therefore of every religion, especially in ages of rationalism or common sense, that it has only very few adherents.”19 This demands a radical separation, pursued with the most intense passion, which the seriousness of the event of religion itself demands from us:
It is necessary to practice separation, discrimination, between the infinite and the finite, between a striving for the infinite and for the finite, between living for something and living by something, which our age—most indecently!—has put together in the closet, got them to curdle together or coalesce into one, which Christianity on the contrary, with the passion of eternity, with the most dreadful either/or, holds apart from one another, separating them by a yawning abyss.20
It is this passionate exception without sovereignty, this immeasurable measure which is vertigo of thought (because it is the paradox) which demands from us the decision with an absolute either/or: it is this non-sovereign exception (which as love and as gift is so excessive and outpouring that it arrives to us only by our unconditional sacrifice of worldly glories) which, for Kierkegaard, “thinks the general with the utmost passion.”
Delegitimation
The idea of “political theology” prophetically announces the decisive crisis of the self-legitimizing project of modernity which, as we know from Karl Löwith is none other than the secularization of the Judeo-Christian “‘eschatological pattern’ of history.”21 In contrast to the Greek conception of history, whose fundamental principle is “verification of prognostications concerning historiconatural event,”22 the philosophy of history opens up “the temporal horizon for a final goal,” “an eschatological future” which “exists for us only by expectation and hope.”23 In Hegel’s philosophy of history, the secularization of the “eschatological pattern” assumes the form and movement of pantheistic metaphysics. Here again the eruption of Christ on the stage of history is the paradigm, but it is now invested with speculative meaning:24 through Christ’s death, there takes places the “reconciliation” or “mediation” (the dialectical “synthesis”: this dialectical concept of mediation is precisely the target of Kierkegaard’s eschatological critique) of the infinite (God) and the finite (the world) in a movement of the self-cancellation of negativity (Aufhebung), in a purely immanent manner, needing no outside as “foundation” and “ground.” In the Hegelian “philosophy of history” (Löwith reminds us that this term is derived from Voltaire) follows the eschatological pattern of biblical thought, but attempts to realize the kingdom of God on the immanent plane of “universal world history,” the self-legitimizing task of modernity (which is the meaning of saeculum) needs no “outside,” for the order of saeculum bears within itself the prerogative of the eschatological judgment, now grasped as the telos of a triumphal march of the universal world-historical politics.25
Paradoxically, the self-legitimizing task of modernity, precisely in its mere taking up of the eschatological pattern, neutralizes or liquidifies the apocalyptic thorn, the poisonous sting of eschatological judgment that, in biblical discourses, judges the course of the worldly regimes and puts earthly sovereignties into question. It is not for nothing that Kierkegaard in his Concept of Dread speaks of the speculative-dialectical idea of mediation as intolerable and at best as “equivocal.”26 This purely conceptual category (which nevertheless pretends to grasp “reality,” “actuality,” “event” or “existence”) liquidifies or neutralizes the apocalyptic intensity of decision. There is, as Kierkegaard would say, no longer any radical distance or heterogeneity between the foolishness of Christ and the wisdom of the world; there is, as Schmitt will say, no longer any radical distance between the exception and the norm. Kierkegaard sees in Hegelian dialectical “cunning of Reason”—where the principle (arché) of Reason serves as the “hegemonic fantasm” or as the “sovereign referent” of this epochal condition of modernity27—an apotheosis of the worldly order of sovereignty:
That the established order has become something divine or is regarded as divine constitutes a falsehood which is made possible only by ignoring its origin. When a bourgeois has become a nobleman he is eager to make every effort to have his vita ante acta forgotten. So it is with the established order. It began with the God-relationship of the individual; but now this must be forgotten, the bridge hewn down, the established order deified.28
The Hegelian concepts are like money:29 the economic logic that governs the equivalences of values is the same logic which converts Real to Reason and vice versa, which has led to his (Hegel’s) announcement that the Prussian state of Hegel’s own time is the objective expression of the Absolute (we know Marx’s critique of Hegel begins precisely here).30 In the epochal condition of modernity which gives itself the self-legitimizing and immanent task of secularizing of the eschatological (and yet neutralizing the eschatological sting of judgment), political theology—if it is possible—must think, with the apocalyptic intensity of passion, the possibility of transcendence anew as the event of breaking through the nomos of the profane order. That means for Kierkegaard the task of introducing the radical disjunction between the eschatologically oriented secrets of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) and the profane order of the world-historical politics (Weltgeschichte): Christendom “reduces sacred history to profane history.”31 Justice is the reason for the birth and the death of Christ—who, being this paradox, cannot be understood historically as a “historical” figure but must be understood eschatologically—this justice puts into question, and judges by “an immeasurable rod,” the immense march of eighteen-century-old Christendom: this intimate relation between judgment and justice, as much as the two instances of Christ’s humiliation and glory, cannot be grasped by the empty form of dialectical (Hegelian) time (which is the vulgar temporality of Christendom). This demands the time of faith which is the Now-time of being contemporaneous with that absolute event of Kenosis, which occurred some eighteen hundred years before; this demands an eternity in the midst of time as Now-time, the Now-time as “an atom of eternity,”32 the Now-time that, by virtue of the eschatological faith, de-formalizes the empty form of successive, qualitatively undifferentiated instances and thereby bringing into proximity what lies in the remote, some hundred years back:
For in relation to the absolute there is only one tense: the present. For him who is not contemporary with the absolute—for him it has no existence. And as Christ is the absolute, it is easy to see that with respect to Him there is only one situation: that of contemporaneousness. The five, the seven, the fifteen, the eighteen hundred years are neither here nor there; they do not change Him, neither do they in any wise reveal who He was, for who He is, is revealed only to faith.33
Here is an eschatological critique of the historical Reason of modernity: the historical Reason of modernity, in the name of secularism, deifies worldly hegemonies and replaces the possibility of the justice, which in the profane order can only be stern judgment, with a totalitarian celebration: “the religion of suffering has become the religion of mirth, but it retains the name unchanged.”34
The deification of the established order is the secularization of everything. The established order may be quite right in affirming that, so far as worldly things are concerned, one must attach oneself to the established order, be content with the relativity, etc. But in the end one secularizes also the God relationship, insists that this shall be congruous with a certain relativity, not essentially different from one’s station in life, etc.—instead of which it must be for every individual man the absolute, and it is precisely this God-relationship of the individual which must put every established order in suspense, so that God, at any instance He will, by pressure upon the individual has immediately this God-relationship a witness, a reporter, a spy, or whatever you prefer to call it, one who in unconditional obedience, or by unconditional obedience, by persecution, suffering and death, puts the established order in suspense.35
This suspension has nothing much to do with Schmittean suspension of the normative order of constitution by constitutional means (Article 48 of Weimer Republic): the former is the kenosis of the worldly sovereignties; the latter is focused on the Katechon figure of the worldly sovereign who restrains from chaos rising from below and thereby legitimates itself as the sovereign power.
Political Theologies
Schmitt’s political theology traces back all the evils of the contemporary society (the technology of politics in today’s secular-liberal world of mass consumption, the neutralization of politics in the name of “objective,” “value free” truth, the totalization of administrative rationality) to the secularizing project of modernity whose most consummate expression is to be found in Hegelian pantheistic metaphysics of history:
Conceptions of transcendence will no longer be credible to most educated people, who will settle for either a more or less clear immanence-pantheism or a positivist indifference toward any metaphysics. Insofar as it retains the concept of God, the immanence philosophy, which found its greatest systematic architect in Hegel, draws God into the world and permits law and the state to emanate from the immanence of the object.36
Schmitt goes on:
If viewed from this perspective of the history of ideas, the development of the nineteenth-century theory of the state displays two characteristic moments: the elimination of all theistic and transcendental conceptions and the formation of a new concept of legitimacy. The traditional principle of legitimacy obviously lost all validity. Neither the version of the Restoration based on private law and patrimony nor the one founded on a sentimental and reverent attachment was able to resist this development. Since 1848 the theory of public law has become “positive,” and behind this word is usually hidden its dilemma; or the theory has propounded in different paraphrases the idea that all power resides in the pouvoir constituant of the people, which means that the democratic notion of legitimacy has replaced the monarchical.37
At stake here is the question of legitimacy: with the loss of authority (as a result of the liquidification of the established order of religion in modernity), legitimation of the sovereign power is in crisis which Schmitt laments. Against such state of affairs, Schmitt constructs a political theology of apocalypticism that has nothing to do with suspension of the worldly hegemonies but everything to do with securing a place for the sovereign power who, being Katechon, restrains chaos rising from below. Against such political theology of legitimation of the (earthly) sovereign power, Jacob Taubes evokes a “negative political theology,” political theology “from below.”38 Against the apocalyptic counterrevolutionary political theology39 of Schmitt, which is inspired by counterrevolutionary philosophers of the state such as de Maistre, Bonald and Donoso Cortes, Taubes invokes the political theology of exception without sovereignty, taking seriously into account the Pauline paradoxical messianic logic of Verbund (“covenant”) which is free not only from ethnic ties. But also from the earthly nomos of the Roman empire.40
Coming back to Carl Schmitt, it is important to explain his citation of Kierkegaard. Despite being “Protestant” (Schmitt, as we know, is “Catholic”), Kierkegaard is, for him, the apocalyptic thinker of decision and exception who offers, at the epochal closure of modernity, the decisive critique of the secularizing project of historical Reason. Schmitt, then, finds in this Protestant critique of the secularizing liquidification and neutralization of political elements of his own political theology, based upon the notion of sovereignty. Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty (“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”)41 is based on the (Catholic) theological concept of analogia entis.42 The apocalyptic intensity of decision is the prerogative of the sovereign figure who, as the power “to suspend valid law,” is true auctoritus (“Because the authority to suspend valid law . . . is so much the actual mark of sovereignty”).43 For Schmitt, this possibility of auctoritus (“to suspend valid law”), must invoke the very power of the myth (“to great politics belongs the ‘arcanum’”).44 The apocalyptic intensity of exception and decision, in Schmitt’s counterrevolutionary political theology, turns into the figure of the sovereign who is the very locus of auctoritus, who alone can suspend the general order of legality to bring forth an entire new order of nomos: exception here, as Benjamin reminds us, turns demonic by becoming the rule45 against which Benjamin thinks of a messianic exception without sovereignty, exception that suspends the nomos of the worldly without founding a new earthly hegemonic order in turn.46 It is, thus, not surprising that, for Schmitt, the dictator has remained the paradigmatic example of the sovereign figure who, as the true Katechon, restrains the chaos rising from below that threatens to destroy the state:47 in this manner, Schmittean Katechon becomes the real raison d’état, the ultimate arché of earthly hegemonies, the principle of justification and legitimation of worldly sovereignties eliciting from us “normative obligations.”48 The task left to us today, then, is to think of a political theology of exception that weakens sovereignties and destitutes worldly hegemonies. This demands that we put forward an infinite critique of historical Reason (which assumes, in the philosophical discourse of modernity, the name of “philosophy of history”)—which is provided in such a powerful way by Søren Kierkegaard—along with a tireless deconstruction of the politico-theological principle of analogia entis. Thus Kierkegaard writes:
“Then give to the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor, and to God what is God’s.” Infinite difference! Whether the Emperor be called Herod or Shalmanezar, whether he be Roman or Japanese, is to Him the most indifferent of all things. But, on the other hand—the infinite yawning difference which He posits between God and Emperor: “Give unto God what is God’s!” For they with worldly wisdom would make it a question of religion, of duty to God, whether it was lawful to pay tribute to the Emperor. Worldliness is eager to embellish itself as Godliness, and in this case God and Emperor are blended together in the question, as if these two had obviously and directly something to do with each other, as if perhaps they were rivals one of the other and as if God were a sort of Emperor—that is to say, the question takes God in vain and secularizes Him. But Christ draws the distinction, the infinite distinction.49
I conclude here with another citation from Kierkegaard, this time with a comment from Jacob Taubes:
And so Kierkegaard has the presumption to prophesy the Antichrist: like mushrooms after rain, demonically infected figures will appear, “who will boldly make themselves apostles, on the level with the apostles, some having the task of fulfilling Christianity, and soon even becoming founders of a religion themselves, founders of a new religion, which is alleged to meet temporal and worldly demands in a different way from the asceticism of Christianity.” The most dangerous thing is when the demonic figures themselves become apostles—like thieves masquerading as policemen—the founders of religion that will find disastrous support in such a critical time because, viewed from the perspective of eternity, it is true to say about this time that religiousness is needed, true religiousness; whereas viewed from the demonic perspective, the same age says of itself that religiousness is needed, but demonic religiousness.50
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Henry, Michel. I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
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———. Poems and Fragments. Translated by Michael Hamburger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Attack upon “Christendom.” Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.
———. The Concept of Dread. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
———. Training in Christianity. Translated by Walter Lowrie. New York: Vintage, 2004.
Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Translated by David E. Green. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
———. The Meaning in History: The Theological Implication of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, 57–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos, 2006.
———. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
———. Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Greenwood, 1996.
Schürmann, Reiner. Broken Hegemonies. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Taubes, Jacob. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
———. The Political Theology of Paul. Translated by Dana Hollander. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
1. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
2. Ibid., 10.
3. Ibid., 13.
4. Kierkegaard, Concept of Dread, 9–21.
5. Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 11.
6. Ibid.
7. See Henry, I Am the Truth.
8. Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 619–27.
9. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 55.
10. Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 11: “The term ‘witness to the truth’ stands in relation to the fact that Christianity is heterogeneous to this world, by renunciation, by suffering, and this is the reason why such a mode of being is of so little capable of being something else at the same time. But to want to have all worldly goods and advantages (the witness to the truth being what he is precisely by renunciation and suffering), and then at the same time to be a witness to the truth—one might Christianly say, ‘the dance of a witness that is! Such a witness to the truth is not merely a monster but an impossibility, like a bird which is at the same time a fish, or like an iron tool which has the remarkable peculiarity of being made of wood.’”
11. Ibid., 41.
12. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 194.
13. Hölderlin, “Becoming in Dissolution,” 96–100. Elsewhere he writes: “King Oedipus has an eye many perhaps. . . . Life is death and death is a kind of life.” Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 604–5.
14. Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 132.
15. Ibid., 127.
16. Ibid., 82.
17. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 61.
18. Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 127.
19. Ibid., 185.
20. Ibid., 144.
21. Löwith, Meaning in History, 2.
22. Ibid., 9.
23. Ibid., 6. “The Christian and post-Christian outlook on history is futuristic, perverting the classical meaning of historein, which is related to present and past events. In the Greek and Roman mythologies and genealogies the past is re-presented as an everlasting foundation. In the Hebrew and Christian view of history the past is a promise to the future; consequently, the interpretation of the past becomes a prophecy in reverse, demonstrating the past as a meaningful ‘preparation’ for the future. Greek philosophers and historian were convinced that whatever is to happen will be on the same pattern and character as past and present events; they never indulged in the prospective possibilities of the future.” Löwith goes on to say further: “The Greek historians wrote pragmatic history centred around a great political event; the Church Fathers developed from Hebrew prophecy and Christian eschatology a theology of history focused on the supra-historical events of creation, incarnation, and consummation; the moderns elaborate a philosophy of history by secularizing theological principles and applying them to an ever increasing number of empirical facts. It seems as if the two great conceptions of antiquity and Christianity, cyclic motion and eschatological direction, have exhausted the basic approaches to the understanding of history.” Ibid., 19.
24. Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 17–50.
25. We know that Friedrich Nietzsche writes one of his Untimely Meditations, namely, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” where he criticizes the Hegelian theodicy (the Hegelian “justification of the ways of God” [Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 16]): “Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to talk of a ‘world process’ and to justify their own age as the necessary result of this world-process; such a point of view has set history, insofar as history is ‘the concept that realizes itself,’ ‘the dialectics of the spirit of the peoples,’ and the ‘world-tribunal,’ in place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the sole sovereign power.” Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 104.
26. Kierkegaard, Concept of Dread, 11.
27. Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 12, 21.
28. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 74.
29. Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 238.
30. Commenting on this point Löwith writes: “Hegel believes that, as a Christian philosopher, he can answer this question by secularizing the Christian doctrine of providence and converting the salvation story of Christianity into a secular theodicy, for which the divine spirit is immanent in the world, the state is an earthly god and all history is divine.” Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 216.
31. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 28.
32. Kierkegaard, Concept of Dread, 79.
33. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 58.
34. Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 142.
35. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 77–78.
36. Schmitt, Political Theology, 50.
37. Ibid., 51.
38. Taubes, To Carl Schmitt, 13: “Carl Schmitt thinks apocalyptically, but from above, from the powers that be; I think from the bottom up.”
39. Ibid., 1–18.
40. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 65–66.
41. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.
42. Schmitt writes: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.” Ibid., 36.
43. Ibid., 9.
44. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 34.
45. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255.
46. Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 312–13.
47. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 59–61.
48. Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 514.
49. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 153.
50. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 190–91. Taubes’s citation of Kierkegaard gives the following reference: Kierkegaard, Das Eine Was Nottut, 7.