Today’s topic on political philosophy and political theology pairs well with my latest podcast conversation with Bill Kristol. We spoke about Leo Strauss, Alexander Kojève, nostalgia, Talmud, pluralism, the American founding, and much else. If you like the show and want to support it, you can do so by rating and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, and becoming a paying subscriber of this Substack.
I.
Political philosophy is the study of the relationship between politics and philosophy. Political theology is the study of the relationship between politics and theology. But what is the relationship between political philosophy and political theology, that is, between, philosophy and theology?
Are these two distinct, autonomous, incommensurate realms, as Leo Strauss argues? Is one superior to and inclusive of the other? For example, Hobbes and Spinoza might say that theology is subordinate to philosophy, while Augustine might say that only faith can keep philosophy in check.
The presumption that one could do philosophy without appealing to “Revelation” at all is already a vote in favor of the superiority of philosophy to theology. By contrast, the assumption that philosophy simply corroborates or justifies the findings of theology turns philosophy into a mere ornament.
Even amongst those who seek to reconcile the two, the question is which is doing the heavy lifting? Companies with two CEOs don’t work. Someone is the sovereign. Is philosophy the boss of theology or vice versa?
II.
According to Heidegger, philosophy and theology became one and the same in the middle ages; for medieval theologians, God is to be thought of as both the highest, most supreme being and the cause of all other beings. The study of Being (metaphysics) and the study of God (theology) became synonymous. Heidegger calls this conflation “Onto-theology”— the reduction of God to Being and Being to God. This is bad, Heidegger thinks, because the meaning of Being needs to be thought outside of a theological and metaphysical frame. Heidegger grew up Catholic, yet seems to make constant argument that philosophy (ontology) is independent of, and more fundamental than, theology. At the same time, Heidegger’s argument that our sense of things is inherited from tradition means that we can never quite free ourselves from the theological shadow that hangs over modernity.
III.
The term “political theology” comes to us from Carl Schmitt. In Schmitt’s view, every political movement and every political argument has a theological counterpart. There is no secularism. Secularism is just a specific breed of religiosity. Historically, Schmitt (a Catholic) is right. The secular age did not come to us from people who rejected religion, but from people who sought to reform religion. Consider Schmitt’s claim this way: “Atheism is itself a theological position. What it says is not that God doesn’t exist, but that God is politically irrelevant, that this life, this world has no need to know or serve God.” For Schmitt’s Jewish interlocutor, Jacob Taubes, secularism needs to be understood mystically and Kabbalistically, as tzimzum, the retreat of the divine from the world. Atheism is just a theology that emphasizes tzimzum.
IV.
Why should we care about the agon between (political) philosophy and (political) theology?
If the relationship between the two is unsettled, then the status of secularism is unsettled. If secularism is unsettled, then liberalism (predicated on the separation of Church and State and the reduction of theology to the private sphere) is insecure.
If the claims of religion and theology can’t be dismissed, and, moreover, if everything is theological, even the positions of those who seem allergic to theology, then the causes of modern conflict need to be rethought. All war is religious war. The West’s fight against various enemies is not a rationalist fight against superstition, but a Crusade, a jihad. All war is “holy war.”
One of the fundamental questions for theology is the status of the messiah and the End Times. If religion and theology are here to stay, then a relationship to the messianic is unavoidable. Besides inter-religious conflict, we should expect great conflict between messianist revolutionaries—those who welcome salvation any minute through radical emergency measures—and the “orthodox” (those who have learned to bide their time and accept the status quo). The conflict between the radicals and the normies is religious in nature, turning fundamentally on whether the Messiah is nigh. Philosophy cannot settle this question, nor can science. The messianic is not an empirical category, yet it may be the most politically decisive.
Abstracted of their content, all revolutionary movements need to be thought of as “chiliasms.” Conservatism, which is suspicious of revolution, likewise, needs to be understood as a theological position: “Any messiah who would come today must be false.”
V.
Pragmatists can dismiss the above as so much fancy. The important thing is not what we believe, but what we do. But the political theologian responds, “The reduction of truth to its ‘cash value’ is itself a religious position, perhaps a function of the Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It rests on a foundation of Revelation—that of the “Holy Spirit”—just as much as Anselm relied on prayer to discover his proof for the existence of God.
If Schmitt, Taubes, Benjamin, and Scholem—all of whom I consider to be political theologians—are right that religion is more fundamental than philosophy, or else, just as fundamental, the task of religious analysis gains in status and importance.
All kinds of contemporary phenomena, from Effective Altruism to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, from Occupy WallStreet to the insurrection on “January 6th,” from lockdown protests to corporate responses to the murder of George Floyd, need to be thought through a theological lens. Some are doing this work, yet most consider the topics of the day mostly through the shallow lens of winners and losers, rather than as a clash of Revelations, or perhaps most significantly, as a clash between those for whom “now is the time to act for God” and those for whom the Second Coming cannot be marked on the calendar, and in any case, should not take precedent over the demands of daily life.