Last update - 00:00 05/03/2008
Down to earth
By Yehudah Mirsky
"The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West," by Mark Lilla Alfred A. Knopf, 334 pages, $26
Once upon a time, the story went, there was religion. A powerful phenomenon in its time, it had become tamed in the cool light of reason, an intermittently helpful and most often harmless handmaiden to the great projects of secularism and modernity, barreling inevitably along the train tracks of history. There were, to be sure, some who tried to hop off the Progress Express, indeed at times turn it around; they were called "Fundamentalists" and were to be pitied, really, and, when needed, put in their place.
This narrative is in retrospect so unconnected from reality that one can hardly believe how commonplace it was - and occasionally still is - in many Western elite circles not that long ago Think of Francis Fukuyama's celebrated assertion in the early 1990s that with the collapse of the U.S.S.R., history had come to a close and naught was left was to dot the I's and cross the T's of liberal democracy; or, closer to home, of the dangerously short-sighted condescension with which the historic Mapai establishment viewed the National Religious Party and Israel's ultra-Orthodox. These delusions about the passing of religion were as wishful as they were ultimately cruel.
In this volume, originally a set of lectures at Oxford, synthesized into an elegant book-length essay, Mark Lilla, distinguished intellectual historian at Columbia University and an increasingly significant public intellectual, sets out to tell the story of political theology's rise, fall, attempted rise and second failure in the higher reaches of Western philosophy.
The volume is not as all-inclusive as the subtitle suggests; indeed, "religion, politics and the modern West" is a colossal subject, and it is unclear if any one volume could do it justice. What Lilla is after is not a comprehensive history of the fantastically rich and complicated interactions of religion and politics in the West in all their sociological, cultural, political, economic and ideological permutations, but rather a focused history of one set of ideas. He is, nonetheless, after big game, tracing the thread of political theology from the mythic-poetic revelations of the Bible through the marriage of Scripture to philosophy in late antiquity and through the Middle Ages, to modern philosophy's loss of faith and the attempts of modern European thinkers, at times heroic, at times misguided and sometimes both at once, to find a way to live the quotidian life of politics somehow in the presence of God.
The focus of the inquiry narrows as the book proceeds, and the loss of comprehensiveness is regularly made up for by an exquisitely thought-out and well-formulated presentation. Lilla writes not only learnedly, but beautifully; indeed, whatever the opposite of "well-turned sentence" may be, this book doesn't have any.
The "stillborn God" of Lilla's title refers to liberal theology as it arose in late-19th- and early-20th-century Germany, the attempt, chiefly by Protestant theologians but also some significant Jewish thinkers, such as Hermann Cohen, to, as Lilla puts it, "find a third way in the modern world, preserving what is best in the biblical moral tradition and placing it at the center of modern moral consciousness." This was but one more chapter in the long history of the current he refers to as "political theology." He is using "political theology" in a distinctive sense, that is, the view that politics can, and indeed ought to be seen as an arena in which the divine manifests itself in this world, through the workings of human affairs, through the choices, including political choices, that people make.
Another, in some ways, better known, use of the term is that of the German jurist, philosopher - and Nazi - Carl Schmitt, who used the term "political theology" to denote his contempt for modern liberalism, which he saw as a thinly secularized theology, a weak-kneed sentimentality that deeply falsifies the true meaning of politics, which is managing survival in a world of enemies. Lilla does not discuss Schmitt, indeed one senses that he is deliberately seeking to reframe the term "political theology" to denote not, per Schmitt and others, the religious underpinnings of modern ideas as such, but to denote its opposite, a vision of political life as the attempted enactment of religious ideas.
One may discern in the history of religions, Lilla writes, three broad approaches to how God is depicted and thought of: Immanence - God and divinity deeply intertwined in the fabric of the world we know; Remoteness - God absent from and largely inaccessible to our world, except to a select few; and Transcendence, which he identifies with the God of the Hebrew Bible. This God "is alone in heaven, perched above the world but close enough to be reached." This latter picture of God yields an image of humanity as "a creature made in God's image (who) has received the divine breath of life. Though he is not a god and cannot become one, neither is he a beast or a serf. Living in that middle distance is the hardest lesson he has to learn." The story of political theology, then, is the story of attempts to live in that middle distance.
Netherworld of power
For Christianity, the miraculous and paradoxical Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus yielded several different and at times contradictory understandings of transcendence: of the world as basically good, demonstrated by "(t)he willingness of God to condescend and become flesh, sharing our sufferings and our joys;" and the thoroughgoing depravity of this world and of humanity, redeemable only through the self-sacrifice of God Himself on the Cross.
The triumph of Christianity throughout the Roman world via the conversion of the emperor Constantine and the Church's emergence from the catacombs to the seat of empire brought these tensions to the fore. The Church, in moral terms, moved into a netherworld of power and responsibility. What happened to the sublime ethics of the Sermon on the Mount once they descended the mountainside? Armed, Lilla notes, with neither the Jewish halakhah nor the Muslim sharia, the Church was left to its own devices. Monasticism was one response to this problem; another was an acceptance of political life as one element of God's creation and one capable of living with the spiritual life, albeit in regular, hopefully creative, tension; and apocalypticism was a third.
In the Middle Ages it was the second that largely prevailed in practice, though rarely if ever did ecclesiastical authority truly wield full political power. In the 16th and 17th centuries the welter of events that we clumsily but still usefully call the Renaissance and Reformation - and the beginnings of Enlightenment, spurred on by, among others, Spinoza - radically undermined the prevailing order of things, earthly and metaphysical alike. Above all, the rise of Protestantism loosed the individual conscience from the moorings of sacrament, unleashed against the Church the pent-up fury accrued over centuries of institutionalization and compromises with power, and created in its place a phantom Church anew in the modern nation-state. Exhausted by agonies of religious violence, bereft of the certainties of the pre-Copernican universe, thinkers sought a new basis for politics.
Enter Thomas Hobbes, whose "Leviathan" (1651) Lilla argues, became the seminal modern Western text for its "Great Separation" of religion from politics. Hobbes suggested that religious and political conflict are in the end but two manifestations of an underlying problem, the sheer misery and uncertainty of human existence, in his famous phrase "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The state, for Hobbes, provides not an entry into transcendence but a minimal form of security against the unrelenting threats that make up life; this minimum is the best we can hope for, and thus no small thing. Locke, Hume and the modern liberal tradition may offer a somewhat sunnier view of the human prospect than Hobbes, but all are following in his footsteps.
The great counterweight to Hobbes' detachment of religion from politics was, in Lilla's view, Rousseau, who, like Hobbes, "wanted to rid the world of religious conflict," but believed that "religion is simply too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from the things touching on morality." For Rousseau, there is no politics without morality, no morality without conscience and no conscience without God. But this God's worship is not confined to one Church or other but is the property of all humanity.
Kant took these ideas one step further and argued that religion and rational morality were one and the same, "translating Christian concepts of sin and eschatology into modern terms of moral inclination and historical progress." And Hegel took this one step further still - by identifying the modern state with moral progress as such, indeed by collapsing the moral teaching of religion into the state after first rethinking it as Spirit, i.e. humanity's own self-consciousness. In other words, for Hegel, "to be a modern human being is thus to be a de facto Protestant."
This then laid the groundwork for liberal theology. Late 19th-early 20th century thinkers like Adolph Harnack, Ernst Troeltsch and Hermann Cohen could in all sincerity argue that as Germany was the bearer of the highest ideals of Western culture, of universalism, tolerance, progressivism and patriotism, their German identity was a religious identity of unimpeachable morality. (Though Harnack and other liberal theologians did not, to put it mildly, share Cohen's views of the compatibility of Judaism with goodness.) Even before World War I, sensitive observers had begun to see that these seemingly appealing views had leached the passion and commitment out of religious life and dangerously sanctified the status quo. Liberal theology may have thought it was moralizing political power, but in the end, most damningly in Germany, it simply became its handmaiden, complacently sanctifying the status quo. The war left it in ruins.
Restoring God to heaven
Two great theological reactions, Lilla writes, came in the form of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig, both of whom distanced the transcendent God from self-satisfied moralities and restored Him to His heaven, whence He mocked all human attempts to cast Him in friendly bourgeois categories. For Barth, revelation was not the polite uplift of progressive morality but an artillery shell exploding into the world, leaving the crater known as the Church. For Rosenzweig, Judaism and Christianity are, in essence, Being and Becoming; Judaism is a timeless realm, Christianity is the divine engagement with history, and both stances are necessary to redeem the world. In terms of the possible meanings of transcendence outlined above, these thinkers offered a kind of apocalypticism, a life lived under the sign of a divine presence endlessly "remote-and-near," in Rosenzweig's words - and it must be said, scarcely realizable as politics. Indeed, the death of German liberal theology was one of the many elements that paved the way for Hitler.
The dynamic Lilla has described, of liberal theology giving way under the press of events and of the deeper reaches of human experience to a more poetic, expressive and messianic politics, is, one recognizes, a dynamic that has played out elsewhere, in, for instance, the history of religious Zionism after 1967, and in a good deal of Islamic politics today.
Lilla ends his story with the death of liberal theology and its final burial in Weimar. He tells a schematic tale and leaves out a very great deal of Western religious history, even as regards liberal theology itself. For instance, he scarcely discusses the rise of nationalism, in which Rousseau played such a crucial role, nor does he probe the persistence of liberal theology to the present day in many Christian and Jewish circles. Because of his resolutely European focus, Lilla also doesn't much discuss American thinkers such as Reinhold Niebuhr, who synthesized Barth's crisis theology with a passionate commitment to liberal democracy and on Barthian grounds, seeing democracy as the system that most deeply acknowledges human depravity and thus trusts nobody with power. He similarly ignores modern Catholic theology, which produced, among others, the works of Jacques Maritain, who argued that humanism is unintelligible in the absence of religious belief, and John Courtney Murray, who argued for the principled religious acceptance of liberal democracy as a teaching of peace. (Lilla is himself deeply knowledgeable on Niebuhr, Maritain and a host of other figures who do not make it into this book.)
Even so, the tight focus of his argument yields its own ample rewards. He does indeed demonstrate that essential tensions of our political life, between order and passion, obedience and rebellion, pessimism and hope, are deeply connected to, and in some ways derived from, the animating tensions of our most basic Western religious ideas. God who dwells in heaven and earth, who commands both love and justice, who demands obedience from creatures He has endowed us with free will, whose moral teachings speak in universal tones and whose revelations are spoken in the languages of tribes, has set the terms of a human world in which there are no easy answers, if indeed there are answers at all.
Yet in the end, we - liberals included - must believe in something or die. Commenting on liberal theology's celebration of the values of universalism, tolerance and other abstractions, Lilla writes: "Values are not divine commands; nor, in the end, do they provide divine hope and solace." Rediscovering divine commands that positively ground morality and offer real hope but still leave room for a politics filled with others is perhaps the greatest challenge of our age.
Dr. Yehudah Mirsky, a former U.S. State Department official, is a fellow of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute and of the Van Leer
Jerusalem Institute.