Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion

By Robert A. Yelle

Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism.

Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226585628

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Sovereignty and the Sacred

Sovereignty and the Sacred

Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion

ROBERT A. YELLE

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58545-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58559-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58562-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226585628.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Yelle, Robert A., author.

Title: Sovereignty and the sacred : secularism and the political economy of religion / Robert A. Yelle.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018014785 | ISBN 9780226585451 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226585598 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226585628 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Religion and politics—History. | Holy, The. | Secularism.

Classification: LCC BL65.P7 Y45 2018 | DDC 201/.72—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014785

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1  The Antinomian Sacred as a Political Category: Toward a Theory of Religion as Sovereignty

2  The Disenchantment of Charisma: The Theological Origins of Secular Polity

3  The Ambivalence of the Sovereign Ban: The Homo Sacer and the Biblical Ḥerem

4  Sacrifice, or the Religious Mode of Production

5  States of Nature: The Jubilee and the Social Contract

6  No Deposit, No Return: Religious Rejections of Exchange

Conclusion: Exit Signs

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

At least for me, writing any book is a years-long endeavor. This particular book began in 2008, when handwritten and numbered journals titled Political Theology started appearing on my shelf. (These stopped about five years ago, with volume 5.) It may have begun even earlier, around 2005–6, during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which I spent researching another book that was eventually published as The Language of Disenchantment. That was when I first heard mention of Carl Schmitt. It was also when I met Bruce Rosenstock, who was an early informant and interlocutor on these topics.

Important periods of research were the summer of 2010, when I borrowed Ananya Vajpeyi’s apartment in Cambridge to be closer to the Harvard University libraries; and a semester’s sabbatical from the University of Memphis in the second half of 2012, which was spent commuting between Harvard and Andover, Massachusetts, my hometown. During that time I read widely in the economics of religion and rounded out my research on political theology. This time stands out in my mind because it turned out to be the final occasion when I and my wife, Lynda Sagrestano, and our daughter, Maya Yelle, would enjoy an extended time with my parents, Louis and Judith Yelle. My father has since passed away, while my mother has moved out of her house.

The really crucial opportunity, however, came in 2013–14, during a Joint Tikvah and Senior Emile Noël Fellowship at the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization and the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice at New York University Law School. I am grateful to the two co-directors of the Tikvah Center that year, Moshe Halbertal and Joseph Weiler, for giving me the chance to focus exclusively on the book for ten months. Not all was idyllic: my family remained in Memphis, Tennessee, which was a hardship for all, but especially for my wife, who had to manage a household alone. During that time, however, I was able to finish the research and write the first draft of the book. I was sustained not only by my work but also by the friendship of colleagues at Tikvah and other NYU Law programs at the brick townhouse at 22 Washington Square North. I would like to express my thanks to all of the Fellows, but especially to Ronnie Goldstein, Haim Shapira, Cana Werman, Shira Wolosky, and Jonathan Yovel. At NYU Law, I also had the chance to discuss the political and economic theories in the Hebrew Bible with Geoffrey Miller. Joe Blankholm and Patton Burchett were a ready source of companionship and conversation during this time.

In August 2014 I moved across the Atlantic Ocean with my family to take up a professorship in the Theory and Method of Religious Studies in the Faculty for Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, and the Study of Religion at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. This was another extraordinary opportunity, one that came with a steep learning curve as we adjusted to life in a new country. It was a whole year before I could write the final chapter of the book—first it was necessary to decide what it should be about!—and almost another year before I could undertake extensive and necessary revisions on the manuscript.

Different parts of the book were presented to audiences at Wake Forest University, Uppsala University, Stockholm University, Tel Aviv University, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, the American Academy of Religion, the North American Association for the Study of Religion, the International Association for the History of Religions, the European Association for the Study of Religion, the Deutsche Vereinigung für Religionswissenschaft, and the Siemens Stiftung at Schloss Nymphenburg (as the 2015 annual lecture for the LMU Philosophy Faculty); as well as to various LMU programs: the Distant Worlds Graduate School for Ancient Studies, the Center for Advanced Studies, and the faculty research seminars in religious studies that took place during my first two summers in Munich. I want to express my appreciation to the many participants at these colloquia for their contributions to improving the arguments that appear in this book, especially Peter Adamson, Schirin Amir-Moazami, Gustavo Benavides, Rajeev Bhargava, Julie Cooper, Susanne Gödde, Naomi Goldenberg, Peter Jackson, Jonathan Judaken, Anne Koch, Shai Lavi, Martin Lehnert, Massimo Leone, Jenny Ponzo, Lorenz Trein, and Ananya Vajpeyi.

Various colleagues read and commented on draft chapters: Brian Black, Ward Blanton, Neilesh Bose, Spencer Dew, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Heinrich Meier, Bruce Rosenstock, Yvonne Sherwood, Michael Stausberg, Winnifred Sullivan, Ann Taves, Cana Werman, and Helmut Zander. Gustavo Benavides and Richard Sherwin read the entire manuscript. A section of chapter 3 was reviewed by two anonymous readers as part of a proposal for a special issue of Religion. Jenny Ponzo first told me about the Roman Jubilees, which became the focus of the first section of the final chapter. My heartfelt thanks go to everyone for their criticisms and suggestions. The end result is, of course, my own responsibility.

A few short passages are reproduced from several of my earlier publications. I would like to acknowledge this reuse and thank the respective publishers: Ashgate for Spiritual Economies beyond the Sacred/Secular Paradigm: Or, What Did Religious Freedom Mean in Ancient India?, in Varieties of Religious Establishment, ed. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Lori G. Beaman (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 15–32, at 27–31; Brill for The Trouble with Transcendence: Carl Schmitt’s ‘Exception’ as a Challenge for Religious Studies, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 189–206; and Bloomsbury for Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 143, 153–54.

I want to convey my appreciation to Alan Thomas of the University of Chicago Press for his interest in the book, as well as for selecting the two extremely generous reviewers for the press who recommended publication. Kyle Adam Wagner and various members of the press’s staff have helped usher the book through the publication process. My student Wenzel Braunfels compiled the bibliography, and Derek Gottlieb prepared the index.

Last but not least, I would like to express my love and gratitude to my wife for her support as a partner in all things, and to my daughter, whom I moved thousands of miles from her home for the sake of my academic career. Some debts it may not be possible to repay in this life. This is especially true when someone has passed on. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Louis E. Yelle, who died on July 27, 2016.

Munich, Germany

Introduction

This book explores the connection between sovereignty and the sacred as a way of reimagining the foundations of both polity and religion.¹ Contemporary debates in political theory often ignore the evidence from history and anthropology that suggests that sovereignty, like the sacred as figured in many premodern religious traditions, can be disorderly or ambivalent. Sovereignty is commonly expressed in acts of founding violence, such as sacrifice; during festivals such as Carnival, when there occurs a temporary inversion of the social order; or in declarations of pardon such as the biblical Jubilee. Although such moments have arguably declined in a rule-obsessed modernity, they appear necessary for the legitimacy and justice of polity. This reinforces the urgency of a reenvisioning of sovereignty.

In the past few decades, the meaning, origins, and indeed viability of secularism as a political paradigm have been subjected to increasing interrogation. There is an emerging consensus that the earlier theory of secularization, according to which religion would gradually disappear or at least become irrelevant to social order, has been proved false by the reemergence of religion, especially in the public square, as both a ground of political value and a source of contestation over fundamental rights. The scholarly debate remains focused largely on questions of freedom of religion, the accommodation of religious minorities within secularized political orders, and the governmental regulation of religion more generally. We have scarcely begun to investigate the relationship between sovereignty and the sacred, and the transformation of this relationship under secularism.

Questions of sovereignty concern the foundations of polity. The sovereign, even under modern constitutions, is no mere executor of the law. She or he has the power to declare hostilities, to grant pardons, and to suspend the law in certain instances, such as a state of emergency. In the Middle Ages, God’s absolute power (potentia dei absoluta) was evidenced by miracles, understood as events that violated the natural order. The traditional analogy between divine and royal authority, or the divine right of kings, reinforced the earthly sovereign’s power to suspend the law. Monotheism and monarchy both insisted on the singularity and supremacy of the ruler. Even today, such attributes of sovereignty have not vanished entirely, although their connection with earlier theological debates has been forgotten. Most provocatively, the German political theorist Carl Schmitt contended that the sovereign’s power to declare a state of exception (Ausnahmezustand, state of emergency or martial law) is ineradicable but has been repressed by the robust regime of norms associated with the modern legal state (Rechtsstaat). Schmitt traced the attack on absolute power to deist polemics against the miracle and associated the curtailment of sovereignty with the ongoing process of disenchantment that began during the Reformation.

The study of such theological discourses and their continuity into an ostensibly secular modernity represents an important task, not only for a genealogy of sovereignty, but also for what it reveals concerning the perennial tension between sovereignty and legality, or between the constituting (law-making) and constituted (law-applying) powers. This tension was formerly expressed through the scholastic idea of God’s two powers—the aforementioned absolute and the ordained or orderly (ordinata)—as well as in festivals of inversion, such as Carnival or the medieval Feast of Fools, which enacted a periodic return to chaos or the state of nature, reprising the moment when society was founded. Rituals of rebellion, as Max Gluckman termed such events, often involve the humiliation of the king (or the aristocracy, or the patriarchy), sometimes through the installation of a temporary ruler from the lower classes.² Such festivals have been identified by anthropologists and historians as one of the primary means of reinforcing, as well as of contesting and even potentially remaking, the polity. As Roger Caillois and Giorgio Agamben have shown, outbursts of antinomian behavior may be associated also with the death of a ruler and mark an interregnum, or real state of emergency, with respect to the foundations of polity.³

To what should we attribute such antinomian behaviors? Do these represent merely the unruliness of the crowd or generalized violence of the state of nature? Or do they suggest the inherent lawlessness of sovereignty itself? The answer depends on which model of polity one applies. Many religious traditions describe the polity as originating in sacrifice or divine violence. This is as true of the Hindu Puruṣa Sūkta (Rig Veda 10.90) as it is of the Hebrew Bible, where most of the covenants (berith) between God and the Israelites were accompanied by sacrifices. The interpretation of such troubling episodes as the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, emphasized the power of divine commands to transgress ordinary morality. Sacrifice, from this perspective, refers ambiguously both to the anarchic violence that obtains in the state of nature (Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all)⁴ and to the ending of such anarchy by granting a monopoly on violence to a commanding sovereign, whose power extends to the taking of human life. The sovereign straddles the boundary between chaos and order and embodies a threat that may be only temporarily or provisionally contained. Such an image of sovereignty is also found in many older accounts of sacrifice, in which figured centrally a commanding deity who, like ancient Kronos, might kill his own children.

These monsters have been banished to the nightmare regions from which they came, and the basis of polity has been reimagined, in more democratic fashion, as the outcome of a voluntary agreement. Now polities are legitimated neither by sacrifice nor by divine right, but by popular consent and the social contract. From this perspective, violence is merely an unfortunate contingency, not a structural necessity in a polity. The question is whether such views are realistic or not. Is it reasonable to envision an end to violence through the inauguration of an order that does not depend on aggression and bloodshed? Or is this merely utopianism and naive wish fulfillment? Does it accord with human nature to suppose that a state that makes no reference to sacrifice is capable of commanding authority? Or does our nature support the contrary idea that violence is necessary and inevitable, and must therefore be contained? Paul Kahn has argued that the legitimacy of our contemporary order continues to depend on its ability to invoke the sacrificial domain, particularly in the context of war.⁵ Sacrifice helps to preserve a sense of affective commitment to the state or polity that cannot be maintained by bureaucratic norms and reason alone. The idea of sacrifice is required to sustain the kind of exceptional commitment that prepares one to kill or die, for who would willingly perish for a multinational corporation or distant oligarchy with which he felt no solidarity?

The tension between sovereignty and legality is evident not only in the violence or chaos that is associated with mythic and ritual representations of the origins of polity, but also in the exercise of the pardon power, which in theological terms corresponds to the operation of divine grace. Pardons are also sometimes associated with an interregnum, because they occur most often at the beginning or end of a sovereign’s rule. In legal terms, such acts may be justified through considerations of mercy, justice, or equity, a formulation that refers to the old English common law distinction between courts of law and courts of equity. The latter had the ability to grant relief not available in accordance with the strict operation of legal maxims. One of the most relevant contemporary forms of the pardon concerns the cancellation of debts, particularly of sovereign debts, such as those owed by Greece to other European Union nations and institutions. Classically, the ruler had authority to coin money and levy taxes, as well as to suspend debts. The biblical Jubilee, which (in theory) every fifty years released debts and slaves and returned people to their ancestral lands, represented an attempt to regularize the older Mesopotamian debt cancellations that were called periodically at the will of the ruler. The Jubilee also aimed to restore a more egalitarian basis for polity, imagined as a return to an earlier stage of society when the land was held in common. Such visions of redemption through a return of popular sovereignty have been challenged in the modern era by new corporate forms. Given the importance of capital in our international order, it is striking how older forms of sovereignty associated with either sacrifice or the Jubilee marked a suspension of utilitarian or transactional economies. Have such older modes of sovereignty simply become obsolete? Or do they have something to tell us regarding what makes a social order just, equitable, legitimate, and binding?

Without proposing to give a final answer to any of these difficult questions, this book suggests that many contemporary theories of polity have based their answers on naked reason and the rejection of tradition, foreclosing alternative answers that might be reached through a study of history and anthropology. The American philosopher of liberalism John Rawls proposed that justice requires that we frame the rules of polity as if we were behind a veil of ignorance, without respect to actual knowledge of our personal attributes and outcomes under these rules. Assuming that one could act in such a disinterested fashion, this veil, which masks only our own individual present and future, does not require us also to ignore all empirical evidence of human nature that might be derived from a careful study of the past, and of other cultures.

This book addresses the lacunae in our understanding of sovereignty by developing the analogy between sovereignty and the sacred as states of exception. Chapter 1 begins with the analogy between Rudolf Otto’s much-maligned account of the holy as wholly other, and Carl Schmitt’s idea that the sovereign is similarly sui generis, as demonstrated by the power to suspend the legal order, a power formerly attributed to God. It then proceeds to trace the myth of founding violence that draws power from the antinomian nature of the holy while simultaneously quarantining this dangerous power into some remote past age, or to circumscribed moments in the festival calendar at which there occurs something like a return to primal chaos or unconstrained sovereignty. It appears that we must have our (sovereign) cake and eat it too. While such fables provoke us, from our safe distance, to smile, they may be less comical than some contemporary efforts to repress the antinomian impulse and apply the same flat, rationalizing level to everything.

Yet such denials are in vain. Not only are they arguably ineffective from a practical standpoint, but they fail to recognize our own dependence on precisely such myths. Chapter 2 traces the theological genealogy of what is arguably the modern master-myth of the displacement of founding violence: Max Weber’s famous theory of charisma as an antinomian force that declines through routinization into other, especially legal forms of authority (Herrschaft). Schmitt pointed to the manner in which Weber’s idea of charismatic authority constituted a secularized Protestant theology . . . the most striking example of a new political theology.⁶ It has long been recognized that Weber’s thesis of a stark separation between charismatic and legal authority depended on earlier Christian theological categories, such as Paul’s diremption between grace (charis) and law (nomos) as interpreted by Rudolph Sohm. Almost a century after Weber, however, it still has rarely been noted that his theory of the routinization of charisma closely resembles an earlier theological claim that miracles and other signs of grace (charismata) ceased in apostolic times. A supersessionist narrative that identified the Gospel as the final miracle and revelation was dominant in English Protestantism as early as 1600, although the debate over miracles lingered on into at least the mid-eighteenth century. The narrative of a cessation of miracles and prophecy was connected with the idea of a decline from absolute sovereignty to an orderly, rule-governed sovereignty, as reflected in the deist concept of a watchmaker God who, having presided over the miracle of creation, withdraws from intervening further. Weber’s ostensibly scientific account of disenchantment reflected his embrace of a particular position in a theological debate concerning how to reconcile God’s absolute and orderly powers. The theological genealogy of Weber’s theory confirms Schmitt’s famous contention, in Political Theology (1922), that under deism the sovereign decision was proscribed together with the miracle.

Against this repression of the idea of an antinomian, absolute sovereignty, subsequent chapters aim to recuperate this idea as a theoretical object, through a succession of case studies of moments in the history of religions in which a state of exception has been declared from either the legal or the economic order. Chapter 3 engages with Giorgio Agamben’s argument that sovereignty is disclosed most directly through the ban, which places someone outside or beyond the law. His chief example is the ancient Latin figure of the homo sacer (literally, the sacred man), a condemned criminal who, having lost all rights, may be killed with impunity. Whereas earlier theorists regarded the homo sacer as an example of the ambivalence of the sacred—of the convergence of the pure and the polluted in a single category—Agamben argues that this figure should be interpreted not as a sacrifice, but as proof that the sovereign power to place someone under the ban is more primordial than the sacred. Juxtaposing another case of the ban, the biblical ḥerem by which individual victims and entire cities were consecrated to destruction, I contest Agamben’s interpretation of the ban, and his rejection of the idea of the ambivalence of the sacred, while developing his insights to interpret the Exodus and the Conquest of Canaan as moments of sovereign appropriation, where the outside and inside of the polity—the law-breaking and law-making functions—become indistinguishable.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 accumulate evidence of the inability of so-called rational-choice theories, which maintain that individuals pursue individual economic interest, to account for such non-utilitarian behaviors as sacrifice. Chapter 4 begins the consideration of such behaviors as exceptions to the mundane economic order. Drawing on, among other theories, Georges Bataille’s use of sacrifice as an expression of sovereignty (souveraineté), it is argued that such deviations from utility, which may take the alternative forms of either excessive consumption (festivals, potlatches, and the like) or abstention from the same, often signify the independence from need and labor that links the king to the ascetic. The hierarchy and division of labor in which both the ruler and the mendicant find their place is connected with the rise of storage economies, in which surplus goods allow both wastage as a display of symbolic capital or conspicuous consumption, and the support of non-producing members of the community. Expressions of sovereign independence from the mundane economy tacitly acknowledge this economy as a precondition.

Chapter 5 considers the institutions of the Sabbath, Sabbatical, and Jubilee years as radical interruptions of both agricultural labor and the money economy. Against attempts to reduce these institutions to social justice measures, it is argued that they depict something like a return to the state of nature and play a role in the imagination of polity analogous to that played by similar depictions of the state of nature in early modern social-contract theories. The connection of the Sabbatical and Jubilee with sovereignty is reinforced by the ancient precedent for these institutions: the Mesopotamian andurarum or misharum, periodic debt cancellations that were declared by the king, often at the beginning of his reign. These older debt releases were a form of the pardon power, a positive version of the sovereign decision analogous to divine grace. Comparing and contrasting the Jubilee with John Locke’s (supposedly, biblically based) utilitarian account of the origins of property, it is suggested that the Jubilee expressed a quite different, antiutilitarian economic ethic. The Jubilee represented the utopian dream of a return to the condition of equality thought to obtain among the Israelites upon the Conquest of Canaan and the division of the land. In opposition to the inequities of the mundane economy, the Jubilee posited a future redemption that was also a return to the status quo ante, and to the foundations of polity. As such, rather than returning us to sacred violence or the absolute power of the king, the Jubilee aimed to restore power to the people themselves.

Chapter 6 begins with the Roman or papal Jubilees that commenced in 1300 CE. The Roman Jubilee grew out of the penitential economy of the medieval Catholic Church and depended on innovations in the doctrines of Purgatory and indulgences, or releases from punishment for sin, especially through monetary payments. During the Jubilee, the pope offered plenary indulgence to those pilgrims who visited Rome and performed certain ritual acts. As the economy of indulgences, together with the Roman Jubilees, expanded, it grew increasingly complex and developed a differential price scheme that carefully quantified salvation. It was this rise in indulgences, which attempted to guarantee salvation, to which Martin Luther objected in his Ninety-five Theses. This rereading of the Reformation as a rejection of the idea that salvation can be purchased is then generalized to a second case study, that of ancient India during the Śramaṇa period (ca. 500 BCE). As many scholars have noted, this period witnessed the rise of wandering renunciants and both Buddhism and Upaniṣadic Hinduism, which either rejected or marginalized the performance of sacrifice that had been central to earlier Vedic tradition. What was thereby rejected or marginalized? The idea of sacrifice as a reciprocal gift made salvation a matter of purchase. Marcel Mauss’s thesis that gift exchange is the antidote to the impersonality of the market is not entirely accurate. Sacrifice, rather than exemplifying a rejection of the mundane economic order, can represent a reinforcement of the principle of exchange that underwrites that order. There is even evidence that money may have arisen in the context of temple sacrifice, in Greece and elsewhere. This coincides with the metaphor of sacrifice as the repayment of debt in Vedic texts. When, therefore, the Upaniṣads articulated the idea of a state of liberation beyond the principle of exchange and quid pro quo (karma), they were rejecting the reduction of salvation to the mundane economy, in a manner analogous to Luther’s Reformation.

A brief Conclusion summarizes the argument of the book. It brings us full circle, from Schmitt’s dictator and Agamben’s homo sacer to more hopeful models of polity, such as the Jubilee, that suggest a return of power to the people; and finally to the alternative of complete exit from society that is represented by the individual ascetic. Declarations of a state of exception contribute to ethical life by offering release from the legal or economic system. What we call religion or the sacred encompasses the dynamic interplay between a normative order and the drive to go beyond this order, either to escape or to legitimate it.

1

The Antinomian Sacred as a Political Category: Toward a Theory of Religion as Sovereignty

The affinities between sacredness and state of exception are of more than historical interest, insofar as they provide a further proof of the intimate connections between the realms of religion and politics, a connection in which, as we shall see, the agency of the ruler plays a crucial role. . . . Ultimately, then, what accounts for the appearance of metaphors involving sovereign decisions is the attempt to explore the nature of human agency, an exploration which requires positing agency at its most naked—gods and rulers being the personifications of this extreme form of agency.

GUSTAVO BENAVIDES, Holiness, State of Exception, Agency (2004), 64, 66

A number of earlier scholars have pointed out the convergence between the central categories of religion and politics: respectively, the sacred and sovereignty. The jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, who during the chaos of Weimar Germany argued for a strong leader and later served Hitler’s Third Reich, identified an analogy between the sovereign decision, which is necessary both to declare and to suspend the law, and the miracle, which interrupts natural law.¹ Both constitute moments of revelation or fiat. The model for sovereignty is an all-powerful God, who created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo).² The evidence for the existence of sovereignty parallels the traditional mode of evidencing the existence of the deity. Both the exception and the miracle interrupt the continuity of routine and, by doing so, simultaneously demonstrate their supervening, transcendent actuality. Sovereignty is manifested through a violation or suspension of the rule or norm, and appears as antinomian—lawless or against the law—even when displayed in the creating and commanding of new norms. Schmitt focused attention on moments of rupture or breakdown in the legal order, such as those which attend a state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand, literally state of exception), which in his view only highlighted the dependence of even the routine legal order on a sovereign decision that was comparable to the Fiat lux! (Let there be light!) of Genesis. As the theologians who framed the doctrine of creation ex nihilo had understood, if it were allowed that anything had coexisted with (much less preexisted) the deity, then God’s eternity and sole responsibility for creation would be called into question.³ Temporal priority and ontological singularity were attributes of sovereign authority.

Emphasizing the irrational aspects of religion, the German theologian Rudolf Otto, who was one of the leading scholars of comparative religion in the last century and a near contemporary of Schmitt’s, argued that the numinous (das Numinose)—a term he coined to distinguish ‘the holy’ minus its moral factor)⁴ —is a terrifying and attractive mystery (mysterium tremendum et fascinans) that is experienced as something wholly other (ganz Anderes) than the ordinary or routine.⁵ To justify this thesis, Otto cited episodes from the Hebrew Bible in which God appears to act outside the bounds of any humanly conceivable set of ethical norms—such as when he commands the slaughter of innocents, as in the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), or attacks his chosen servant Moses without apparent provocation (Exod. 4: 24).⁶ Otto reminded us of God’s wrath, which is incalculable and arbitrary.⁷ He connected the numinous directly with Martin Luther’s insistence on a sovereign, omnipotent deity, the God of predestination whose cause was championed by Duns Scotus and other nominalists before being taken up in Luther’s The Bondage of the Will then supposedly expunged from later Lutheranism.⁸ Otto acknowledged the ethically problematic nature of such a deity:

Theology gives expression to its perplexed endeavour to find a name for the elements of the non-rational and the mysterious in the repulsive doctrine that God is exlex [recte: ex lege] (outside the law), that good is good because God wills it, instead of that God wills it because it is good, a doctrine that results in attributing to God an absolutely fortuitous will, which would in fact turn Him into a capricious despot.⁹

Together with miracles, morally problematic commands, such as that in Genesis 22, constituted the traditional evidence for God’s omnipotence. They prompted the divine command theory of morality—that good is good because God wills it.¹⁰ Despite Otto’s disavowal of this theory as repulsive, his own representation of the numinous highlighted the diremption between holiness and ethics. The numinous precedes even the basic moral distinction between good and evil and in its most primitive or pure form cannot be distinguished from the demonic.¹¹ This raised again the great question of the ambivalent nature of the sacred as, potentially, simultaneously holy and accursed, or pure and polluted, a thesis that has inspired debate at least since William Robertson Smith in the late nineteenth century, as described in chapter 3 below.

According to Heinrich Meier, Schmitt embraced divine command theory: "Tertullian’s guiding principle We are obliged to something not because it is good but because God commands it accompanies Schmitt through all the turns and vicissitudes of his long life."¹² Whereas the miracle illustrated God’s ability to suspend natural law, divine command illustrated his ability to suspend the moral law. Accordingly, Schmitt identified the original political decision as beyond both good and evil, locating it instead in the designation of the enemy,¹³ a designation that cannot be constrained by legal norms. The political domain is prior to all ethical relationships that would flow from the presence or absence of hostility, which can be determined only by the sovereign.

In segregating the foundational categories of their respective disciplines, politics and religion, each thinker was partly following the practice of German scholarship of the time, which insisted on a rigorous demarcation of the field or object of study. In Otto’s case, at least, this effort was influenced by Immanuel Kant’s attempt to isolate the categories of experience, an attempt continued by such neo-Kantian philosophers as Jakob Friedrich Fries.¹⁴ Otto regarded religious experience as fundamentally different from other types of experience. He labeled the holy an a priori category.¹⁵ The motive for both Otto and Schmitt was to defend a definition of the subject in question—either of religion or of politics—in terms that were not reducible to another category, such as the True (the goal of logic), the Good (the goal of ethics), or the Beautiful (the goal of aesthetics); for if this were not achieved, then perhaps it could be said that the holy was just the good, or that the end of politics was to achieve the good, and then the study of religion or of politics would become indistinguishable from that of ethics.

Arriving at a similar conclusion, although in much more libertine fashion, the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897–1962) located the sacred—a quality he later termed sovereignty (souveraineté)—in moments of violence, eroticism, or excretion, in behaviors marked by excess, exuberance, consumption, or waste, when the body may be penetrated or, conversely, exude outside its boundaries and either perpetrate or experience a transgression that is simultaneously moral and physical. After reciting a long list of tabooed phenomena, he declared that each was treated as a foreign body (das ganz Anderes), thus deliberately drawing the parallel to Otto’s holy.¹⁶ Such displays of the sacred frequently violate the utilitarian economic order and signal, through this violation, an independence from material need. For Bataille, sacrifice, which often involves the destruction of an object and therefore of its use value, was the clearest example of such sovereignty.¹⁷

Steven Wasserstrom noted the resemblance between Schmitt’s exception, Otto’s numinous, Bataille’s sovereignty, and Mircea Eliade’s sacred, each of which entailed the rupture of ordinary, profane life.¹⁸ Wasserstrom argued for an elective affinity between such ideas, on the one hand, and reactionary and fascist political tendencies, on the other.¹⁹ He labeled such concepts as antinomian and Gnostic,²⁰ using the latter term metaphorically to denote the belief that the sacred is lawless, and that legal norms, including those of Judaism (a traditional target of Gnosticism), should be rejected. Gustavo Benavides has contended similarly that there are affinities between sacredness and state of exception, in particular between Otto and Schmitt, that signal their common heritage in Romanticism.²¹ In a review of Wasserstrom’s book, Benavides argued that the context of Eliade’s hierophanies is to be sought in the Decisionism of [Ernst] Jünger, Schmitt, and [Martin] Heidegger,²² each of whom participated in the ideological reinforcement of the fascist regime, through the glorification of irrationality or violence.²³ Benavides argued that the category of the sacred as understood by Otto and Eliade could serve the same politically unpalatable goal. The parallels between Schmitt and Bataille have been noted separately by others, including Martin Jay, who identified convergences between these two thinkers as members of the counter-Enlightenment who drew on Romantic and older religious ideas in their reactions against liberal legalism and bourgeois capitalism.²⁴

As this brief review suggests, the general tendency in the scholarly literature has been to account for such philosophical affinities in terms of the immediate historical circumstances of Weimar Germany or, more broadly, interwar Europe. In support of this approach, some scholars have advanced evidence, where such exists, for the participation of particular figures, such as Eliade, in reactionary groups or activities.²⁵ In other cases, personal connections—guilt by association, or what we might call Six Degrees of Separation from Carl Schmitt (or even the reductio ad Hitleram)—have been used to establish a chain of circumstantial evidence that allows for the explanation of these views in political or ideological terms. However, this does not help us much to understand Otto, as there is little evidence of any personal or public commitments on his part that might with any justice be characterized as fascist.²⁶ Without disputing the contribution made by such biographical approaches to our understanding of the ideas of the thinkers in question, it appears that such critiques have failed both to take into account the longue durée history to which Schmitt’s and Otto’s ideas of an absolutely sovereign deity sought to respond, and to argue for a coherent position on the thesis of whether or not, anthropologically speaking, there is evidence for a convergence between sovereignty and the sacred precisely in their exceptionality. To this extent, these critiques are incomplete or even misleading.

No claim of Otto’s has been more misunderstood, perhaps even to some extent by its author, than the claim that the numinous is sui generis, namely, is in a category by itself and therefore not reducible to something else. It is true that, in making this claim, Otto was trying to preserve subjective religious experiences, and the discipline of theology, from outside criticism. However, it is not the case that only Otto has represented the holy as sui generis, nor that only