Secularized Theological Concepts Research Articles

Secularism as Theopolitics: Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar and the Theological Underpinnings of the State in South Asia

Abstract Carl Schmitt’s well-known declaration that “all significant” modern political concepts are “secularized theological concepts” has sometimes been treated as hyperbole: a metaphorical axe aimed at the frozen sea of legal positivism, a provocation rather than a thesis. In this article, I demonstrate the fecundity of this thesis by applying it to secularism, a concept undeniably central to the Liberal state; crucially, however, I do so in the context of early modern South Asian history and ongoing debates over the secularism of premodern Mughal polity. As I argue, Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar (1542–1605 CE) – a monarch of the Mughal dynasty often cast by South Asian secularists as a precocious emblem of the neutral state – was, in fact, an ideal type of Schmittian sovereign, who nonetheless stands equidistant from both Schmitt and his Liberal opponents in his stance toward religious pluralism. The theological correlate to Akbar’s “secularism” was an Islamicate theology of religions, which provided a contentful religious justification for religious pluralism, very different from contemporary “post-metaphysical” arguments. The final section of the article takes a critical turn, as I examine Akbar’s legendary reputation in the present, my intervention into his “secular” mythos, and the special difficulties involved in applying Schmittian concepts to an early modern, non-Western sacred king.

Sanctifying Security: Jewish Approaches to Religious Education in Jerusalem

While Schmitt’s Political Theology paints modern theories of the state as secularized theological concepts, prominent threads of Jewish religious education in 20th century Jerusalem have moved in a different direction, that is, toward the re-sacralization of such secularized theological concepts. Orthodox Jewish schools in Jerusalem, or yeshivot, take an orthopractic approach to religious education as informing all aspects of life, rather than a delimited set of doctrines or beliefs. As such, questions of security fall within the purview Jewish religious education. To look more closely at the relationship between orthodox Jewish religious education, sanctity and security, I spent seven months enrolled as a student-observer in three Jerusalem yeshivot taking daily field notes, conducting interviews, attending classes, and studying related sacred texts. By examining both Jewish sacred texts and ethnographic data from contemporary Jerusalem yeshivot, this article highlights how geo-political ideals of security in modern Jerusalem are being re-sacralized by contemporizing ancient sacred texts and approaching religious education itself as a means of eliciting divine aid in the securitization process for Jewish Jerusalem.

Stirner and the Critique of Political Theology

In his Politische Theologie (1922), Carl Schmitt declared that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”; “not only,” he goes on to add, “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.”1 The key example Schmitt gives is that of the exception in jurisprudence, which he says bears the same structure as the miracle in theology.

Accumulation as eternal recurrence: theology of the bad infinity

The paper re-evaluates Schmitt’s (Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty, trans. George Schwab. Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2005: 36, 48, 65) claim that although all “significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”; the theological was replaced in the nineteenth century by “exclusively scientific thinking”; leading in the twentieth, to “the onslaught against the political,” in which it “vanishes into the economic or technical-organizational”. Some modern political concepts, especially sovereignty, have theological origins; and economics claims to be pure positive science. Nonetheless, the political is necessarily worldly, whereas economics is theological in its origins and remains so. The political is worldly in accepting the principle of plurality as “the law of the earth,” taking worldly freedom as its aim (Arendt 1968: 146–50, Arendt in The life of the mind. Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, 1978: 19). Economics is theological first, because, like the one god, it is essentially singular and postulates an order beyond human knowledge and agency. Three stages of economic theology are sketched: the primitive theology of Adam Smith; the pseudo-theology of neoclassical economics; and the true theology of Marx’s account of capitalist accumulation. The paper uses Eliade’s (The myth of the eternal return or, cosmos and history, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series XLVI. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1965) account of the “archaic ontology” of pre-modern societies in which order is beyond human knowledge and agency; realizes itself through the eternal recurrence of archetypal agents and acts; and abolishes history. It also uses Agamben’s (The kingdom and the glory: for a theological genealogy of economy and government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2011) description of the development of the word oikonomia. It argues that the line of modern political thought based on sovereignty and regarded as central by Schmitt, is a politics that has been colonized by economics, and must be a form of domination. Liberation from economic theology can only come from a revival of a true politics that aims at freedom. It is true that such a politics has never yet succeeded in separating itself from domination (Clastres in Society against the state, trans. Robert Hurley. Urizen Books, New York, 1977); but that is the subject of another discussion.

The Beauty of Charisma Introduction: From Golden Calves to Gold Bling

The Beauty of Charisma Introduction: From Golden Calves to Gold Bling

REOCCUPYING SECULARIZATION: SCHMITT AND KOSELLECK ON BLUMENBERG'S CHALLENGE

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the compound of the categories of secularization and reoccupation in its variations from Hans Blumenberg's philosophy to Carl Schmitt's political theory and, ultimately, to Reinhart Koselleck's conceptual history. By revisiting the debate between Blumenberg and Schmitt on secularization and political theology with regard to the political‐theoretical aspects of secularization and the methodological aspects of reoccupation, I will provide conceptual tools that illuminate the partly tension‐ridden elements at play in Koselleck's theorizing of modernity, history, and concepts. For Schmitt, secularization is inherently related to the question of political conflict, and, correspondingly, he attempts to discredit Blumenberg's criticism of secularization as an indirectly aggressive, and thereby hypocritical, attempt to escape the political. To this end, I argue, Schmitt appropriates Blumenberg's concept of “reoccupation” and uses it alternately in the three distinct senses of “absorption,”“reappropriation,” and “revaluation.” Schmitt's famous thesis of political concepts as secularized theological concepts contains an unmistakable methodological element and a research program. The analysis therefore shows the relevance of the Blumenberg/Schmitt debate for the mostly tacit dialogue between Blumenberg and Koselleck. I scrutinize Koselleck's understanding of secularization from his early Schmittian and Löwithian theory of modernity to his later essays on temporalization of history and concepts. Despite Blumenberg's criticism, Koselleck holds onto the category of secularization throughout, but gradually relativizes it into a research hypothesis among others. Simultaneously, Koselleck formalizes, alongside other elements, the Schmittian account of reoccupation into his method of conceptual analysis and uses the term in the same three senses—thus making “reoccupation” conceptually compatible with “secularization,” despite the former notion's initial critical function in Blumenberg's theory. The examination highlights a Schmittian residue that accounts for Koselleck's reserved attitude toward Blumenberg's metaphorology, regardless of a significant methodological overlap.

Potentia absoluta et potentia ordinata Dei: on the theological origins of Carl Schmitt’s theory of constitution

In line with his theory of secularization according to which all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, Carl Schmitt argues in Constitutional Theory that people’s (Volk) constitution-making power in modern democracy is analogical to God’s potestas constituens in medieval theology. It is also undoubtedly possible to find a resemblance between Schmitt’s constitution-making power and God’s power as it is described in medieval theology. In the same sense as the constitution-making power is absolutely free from all normative ties, God’s potestas constituens, or rather, God’s potentia absoluta is free from such ties. Yet, unlike the Schmittian constitution-making power, God’s potentia absoluta was not, in medieval theology, originally intended as a description of some form of divine action: the absolute power of God referred to the total possibilities initially open to God. However, when the canonists started to employ the term potentia absoluta in their speculations concerning the papal plenitude of power (plenitude potestatis) by the end of the thirteenth century, they used it in a different sense than the theologians previously. According to certain canonists, the pope, by his potentia absoluta, could grant de facto dispensations from divine and ecclesiastical laws. Later on, this notion became a theological notion as well, but given its origin in juridical discourse, the constitution-making power, rather than being a secularized theological notion, is a theologized juristic notion.

Theology and organization

This Introduction argues for the importance of theology for the study of organization. It also draws the contours of a possible ‘theology of organization’. Theology of organization, as we use it here, does not refer to a study of organization that is rooted in faith, nor does it refer to a study of religious practices in organizations. Instead, theology of organization recognizes that the way we think about and act in organizations is profoundly structured by theological concepts. In this editorial to the special issue we have three aims: to outline what theology of organization is, to show how it builds upon Carl Schmitt’s ‘political theology’ and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘economic theology’ and finally to propose three different forms that theology of organization can take. These forms of theology of organization respectively (1) analyse organizational concepts as secularized theological concepts, (2) show how theological concepts have survived unaltered in organizational contexts and (3) show how theological concepts have been corrupted or lost their original meaning when deployed in organizational contexts. In the final section of this editorial, we introduce the five contributions to this issue and indicate how they connect to the three forms of theology of organization that we have proposed.

Global Language or Universal Language?: From Babel to the Illustrious Vernacular

Globalization is a “hot topic.” While language figures prominently in debates, its complexity defies descriptions of globalization adequate for other subjects. Increasingly diverse ethnicity in nation states alters the status of once dominant vernaculars—what Dante called the parlar materno —as factors of cultural and social cohesion. Language and religion, rather than nation, now serve as elective markers of identity. Inevitably, however, to assert global status for a language conveys overtones of linguistic, and thus cultural, hegemony. From this perspective, Carl Schmitt’s dictum that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” resonates in the sphere of language. For when Schmitt refers to modern concepts of state as theological in origin, his thought speaks directly to the concept of global language. For “global” is only a slightly attenuated variant of “universal,” whose totalizing connotation we find somewhat embarrassing today. And yet, historically, the myth of a lost universal language has played an important role in traditional cultures that value creation accounts. The latter evoke a mythic moment, in illo tempore , when all humans spoke a common language for the simple reason that the origin of the one implicated the emergence of the other. Perhaps no one thought so profoundly about the question of global or universal language in this sense as Dante Alighieri in his philosophical treatise on the illustrious vernacular, the De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1304 CE, DVE ). Unlike proponents of global language today who seek to extrapolate a (pre)dominant language from among hundreds of dialects, Dante recognized multilingualism as an historical contingency, a product of the linguistic fall at Babel. At that point, universal language—the speech co-created by God and the first man in Genesis—disappeared, fractured into linguistic shards representing the diversity of human culture. Dante’s anthropology of language thus imitates the division of the first human into an infinite series, each unit different from others, but all containing an originary “DNA,” identified in Genesis 1:26–27 as divine similitude. Likewise, Dante proposes that all human language possess a common “deep structure,” a set of principles for a universal grammar that act as the formal cause of language. Dante calls this capacity for language the forma locutionis , the innate capacity for speech, which defines humans. For Dante, only the vernacular or mother tongue can embody this essence. Jointly created by God and the first man, it has the potential to incarnate the highest aspiration of human speech, the volgare illustre or illustrious vernacular. Although Dante lays out his anthropology of the vernacular in De vulgare eloquentia —arguing that one must look to the most refined vernacular poetry for examples—he defers demonstrating the concept fully until Purgatorio and Paradiso . There he deploys text networks invoking Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and diverse vernacular poets and philosophers to showcase the volgare illustre as a universal vernacular—a forma locutionis in which the meaning, aura, and affect of speaking take precedence over language of origin.

The changing role of the state: The state as a mirror of the individual?

If the topic of the workshop is the continuity and discontinuity of the state and law, it is possible to tackle the subject of the changing role and nature of the state itself. This change can be perceived from many perspectives and some of them are already almost traditional from a lawyer’s or political scientist’s point of view like the state and globalization, the transformation of the state (typically, post-communist transformation), the state and (European) integration, the shift from state governance to (non-?)state governance, the changing role of the public sector (vis-a-vis privatization, public-private partnership) and so on.1 Some perspectives are “hot topics” waiting to be elaborated deeply in the near future, e.g. the role of the state in the current fi nancial crisis, the possibility of establishing a “world government” (given that currently states are too weak to solve the problems of “too big to fail” companies); others can be seen as topical in the future–or maybe not.2 But here I do not want to write about these complicated issues, instead, I’ll focus on two abstract speculations I have on my mind. The fi rst speculation has been infl uenced by the famous statement of Carl Schmitt, namely, that all concepts of modern state theory are secularized theological concepts.3 From Schmitt’s perspective, thinking about the state was infl uenced by thinking about God (e.g. Hobbes’ “Leviathan” was an attempt to create an earthly or

Reconciling the Irreconcilable? Rejoinder to Kennedy

Abstract Among Carl Schmitt's most notable and controversial contributions to political theory was his claim that “all the significant concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological concepts.” First formulated in 1922 in his Political Theology, this contention remained constant throughout his long career, as evidenced by its return in his Political Theology II, published in 1970. Here Schmitt's Cadtholic background was clearly apparent, for in so arguing, he was recapitulating the familiar topos of biblical prefiguration in which the New Testament was understood as realizing the latent meaning of the Old. Viewing modern politics as merely the secularized version of a prior theology allowed Schmitt to develop his strong notion of the sovereign as a profane divinity with virtually all of the omnipotent attributes of its alleged sacred predecessor.