An und für sich

Sacred Foundations and the mechanism of political theology

A few days ago, when I was about halfway through the book, I wondered aloud on Twitter whether Anna M. Grzymała-Busse’s Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State might need to join the mini-canon of Schmitt-style genealogical political theology. Having finished it, I now think it provides a key point of reference for a lot of projects in that strange field, though it is very much not in the “style” of the most influential works (of the kinds of works that I have advocated adding to the mini-canon, like Caliban and the Witch).

It is a sober empirical analysis, at times even a little boring, but it supplies something crucial: an actual concrete mechanism for the kind of “secularization of theological concepts” that are our stock in trade. In a way, Grzymała-Busse’s lack of conceptual or theological ambition is necessary for her to uncover what has been hiding in plain sight: state institutions in medieval Europe quite literally copied practices and procedures from papal models. The reasons for this are both grandiose and mundane — on the one hand, the papacy obvious carried with it a unique kind of spiritual authority, but on the other hand, the church was the only institution that looked like it knew what it was doing. For things like literacy, documentation, regular procedures, disputes based on precedent and evidence, etc., etc., the church was for many centuries the only game in town.

The motivation to adopt church models for governance grew out of the papacy’s temporal ambitions, which produced a rivalry with secular states. In Grzymała-Busse’s telling, it also arguably led to a secularization of the church itself, as the papacy’s growing administrative efficiency and ability to project power went hand in hand with growing corruption and declining interest in spiritual and theological matters in favor of law. States that were lucky were able to adopt church templates and create their own parallel structures, allowing them to administer justice, collect taxes, and do all the other things at which the church excelled. States that were unlucky — such as the Holy Roman Empire or the divided Italian peninsula — found themselves intentionally impeding from developing the kinds of centralized power structures that would allow such ecclesiastical borrowings.

Grzymała-Busse’s main goal is to argue against purely secular accounts of state formation, the most popular of which attribute state centralization either to the demands of warfare, the need to develop some form of consensus to collect taxes, or both combined. As she shows — fairly conclusively in my view — those theories simply cannot be right. And in her concluding pages, she suggests that the idiosyncratic process of state formation in Europe, which was the only part of the world that had a powerful autonomous trans-national religious institution at the crucial period, should lead political theorists to make less sweeping claims about the universality or necessity of European state structures, much less the processes that led to them.

To me, the most interesting part of her argument from the perspective of “my” preferred brand of political theology is the view that the notion of territorial sovereignty actually grows out of the papacy’s contingent political strategies during the high middle ages. Grzymała-Busse argues that the notion that all kings are peers and no secular ruler has power over a king in his own territory was actually meant to head off the rise of a powerful emperor figure to displace the pope — but the more the pope grew to function as precisely that type of figure, the more the notion of territorial sovereignty became a weapon against papal interference as well. In short, the Westphalian/United Nations model — in which the world is parcelled out among sovereign territorial units that are all to be treated as peers, with interference in their internal affairs being prohibited except in extreme cases based on international agreement — that has hamstrung any attempt at global regulation of capital or any binding climate action, effectively dooming humanity to live on a permanently less hospitable climate… turns out to stem from an over-clever political strategy on the part of some 13th-century pope. It sounds almost absurd when you put it that way.

Grzymała-Busse’s book abounds in such ironies. Every innovation that the papacy introduced to shore up its power in the short run wound up empowering temporal rulers in the long run. The very religious authority that provided the popes the opportunity to fill Europe’s power vaccuum — and in the case of Germany and Italy, fatally exacerbate it with such skill and precision that it would persist for centuries after the conflict between church and state was decisively won by the latter — prevented the papacy from assuming the imperial prerogatives it worked so hard to prevent anyone else from having. Perhaps we can see now why Carl Schmitt was so enamored with the ius publicum Europaeum — it is quite literally a secularization of the papacy’s attempt at the indirect governance of Europe. (Meanwhile, I am at a loss for what this book could offer to the “politically-engaged theology” construal of political theology, because so much of what was formative for the “positive” aspects of secular modernity came from the “bad” period of papal history.)

There is more to say about this book, though perhaps my suggestion on Twitter that this book could serve as fodder for a book event was premature. It is a little too specialized and conceptually dry to spur the kind of discussion we normally aim to have. But I hope my political theology colleagues will read it, and if any of them have thoughts about it that go beyond what I say in this post, I would be happy to host them here.

An und für sich

Who is my neighbor?

In the wake of the killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, a new meme has emerged on the right: the killer, Daniel Penny, was acting as a “Good Samaritan.” A more craven and blasphemous distortion of Jesus’s parable is hardly imaginable. In fact, I almost hesitate to dignify it with a response. Neely himself is so obviously the victimized party here, and if anything, his murder shows what happens when a “Good Samaritan” doesn’t show up. Moreover, the fact that the story a story that is so obviously about moral decency that crosses lines of ethnic enmity and distrust — the Jewish victim’s co-religionists pass him by, while a member of a hated, supposedly half-breed sect provides generous help — can be deployed to apply to a member of a privileged in-group using lethal violence against a multiply marginalized person displays the kind of willful, spiteful ignorance that only committed racists can pull off.

This isn’t the first time the story has been misunderstood. There are numerous accounts of preachers crafting a contemporary version of the parable where a priest and a deacon pass the victim by, while an atheist (or an illegal immigrant, or a trans person, or whoever else) generously helps. The punchline is always that the parishoners — who have presumably known this story all their lives — inevitably find this retelling offensive and insulting.

This misunderstanding is all the more puzzling given that Jesus clearly intends for the listener to identify with the victim. The interlocutor asks Jesus “who is my neighbor,” presumably to get out of the exhorbitant demands of Jesus’s teaching by applying them only to a limited in-group. Jesus tells the story and then asks essentially, “Okay, who was that guy’s neighbor?” The pride and presumption of the interlocutor, who wants to be able to pick and choose his neighbors, is undercut by a scenario in which he is radically vulnerable and is no position to turn away any neighborly assistance.

Except! Yes, that’s right, there is a catch, and it’s the fateful last exchange: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’” Go and do likewise — suddenly the interlocutor is no longer identified with the victim, but with the hero. What’s more, this isn’t just any guy off the street, but a teacher of the law. There is nothing a teacher of the law knows better than how to get out of things, so we can imagine the gears turning: “Go and do likewise — but in what respect? Was it not the case that the Samaritan was helping my fellow Jew, filling in for the neglectful priest and Levite? Perhaps I, like the Samaritan, should help Jews in need so that they aren’t put in the embarrassing position of relying on the help of a Samaritan, who surely has his own Samaritan problems to attend to. And if I’m supposed to take away the message that Samaritans are worthy of respect, surely the best kind of respect is not to impose on them, right?” And so it goes.

There are other trap doors as well. Could we not see the scenario as precisely a failure of policing? Again, we wouldn’t have needed to bother the poor Samaritan if our Roman men in uniform had done their jobs! Better, perhaps, than cleaning up after someone is victimized would be to intervene before it gets to that point, right? In this interpretation — presupposing, of course, the racist premise that Neely was somehow primed for violence, which no empirical evidence supports — Penny was a true neighbor to everyone on that train, a kind of super-Samaritan! And the fact that he is being persecuted for his actions by the usual rogue’s gallery of liberals and reporters and various social jusice warriors shows that he must have done the right thing. Maybe he’s even a little bit like Jesus! In fact, I wonder if we can detect some Christ-like imagery in these dramatic photos portraying Penny between two subordinate figures, like Christ crucified between two thieves:

All these various plot holes and “outs” may be an indication that entrusting the moral formation of one’s society on a half-remembered story that may have been told by an apocalyptic preacher in first-century Palestine is a questionable move. This is not, I hasten to add, because those stories are garbled or incoherent. No, the reason this is a risky procedure is that they are designed as traps. At one point, the disciples ask Jesus why he preaches in parables. His answer is not that they are more memorable or easier to understand or anything we might expect on a common-sense level. Instead, he offers a more paradoxical answer:

He answered, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:
“You will indeed listen, but never understand,
and you will indeed look, but never perceive.
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn—
and I would heal them.”

As my theology professor Craig Keen loved to paraphrase this passage, Jesus is saying, “I tell them parables rather than preaching straightforwardly because otherwise they might turn and be saved.”

A parable, in other words, is not a memorable tale or a moral lesson. It is a judgment — or better, it is a way to get people to pass judgment on themselves. We can try all we want to point out to these people identifying a cold-blooded murderer as a Good Samaritan how much they have misunderstood the text, but the text is doing what it is meant to do — it is giving them the opportunity to demonstrate that they are well and truly lost. What we do with that information is unclear, given that we do not expect the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God, but the information itself is unequivocal. Anyone who could bring themselves to utter such a blasphemous thing is beyond help, beyond hope. They are damned, and to live as they do is surely a living hell.