The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton

By Graham Hammill

It is a common belief that scripture has no place in modern, secular politics. Graham Hammill challenges this notion in The Mosaic Constitution, arguing that Moses’s constitution of Israel, which created people bound by the rule of law, was central to early modern writings about government and state.

Hammill shows how political writers from Machiavelli to Spinoza drew on Mosaic narrative to imagine constitutional forms of government. At the same time, literary writers like Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, and John Milton turned to Hebrew scripture to probe such fundamental divisions as those between populace and multitude, citizenship and race, and obedience and individual choice. As these writers used biblical narrative to fuse politics with the creative resources of language, Mosaic narrative also gave them a means for exploring divine authority as a product of literary imagination. The first book to place Hebrew scripture at the cutting edge of seventeenth-century literary and political innovation, The Mosaic Constitution offers a fresh perspective on political theology and the relations between literary representation and the founding of political communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780226315430

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

This book analyzes the uses and implications of a scriptural figure that becomes central in early modern political thinking and writing about government and the state: Moses’s constitution of Israel as a people bound by the rule of law. Until the sixteenth century, the preferred scriptural model for representing political authority among Christian writers in the West tended to be Solomon, the philosopher-king noted for his wisdom who, perhaps most significantly for medieval writers, inherited his kingdom from his father.¹ But by the middle of the seventeenth century, Moses had become a perennial figure for exploring the politics of the early modern state. In The Prince, Machiavelli uses Moses to measure Savonarola’s successes and failures, in the process showing how a new prince needs the fiction of religion to maintain obedience through the manipulation of belief. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, in Leviathan, Hobbes acknowledges that any theory of the modern state has to account for revelation as well as reason. He then goes on to interpret the Mosaic covenant in such a way that locates the authority to determine the truth of revelation in the state instead of in the Catholic Church or the priesthood of all believers. Writing in the wake of Machiavelli and Hobbes, in Oceana and The Art of Lawgiving James Harrington presents the Mosaic constitution as a scene of communication in order to legitimate popular sovereignty, and in the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza refashions the Mosaic constitution through the twinned paradigms of natural philosophy and humanist philology in order to authorize the liberty of the citizenry against the prince’s tendencies toward mystification, which Spinoza calls the mystery of despotism (TTP 389).

When read from the perspective of a purely secular politics, these uses of Hebrew scripture might seem old-fashioned, leftovers from an age in need of theological or religious legitimation. Or, at best, they might seem like rhetorical ploys to persuade those who would otherwise be recalcitrant to an emerging sense of the political to join secular public life.² However, it will be my argument that the Mosaic constitution had an integral role to play in the emergence of early modern concepts of the state. Like the story of Oedipus or Antigone, the Mosaic constitution was one of the founding fictions of early modern political life.³ Beginning with Machiavelli’s analysis of the new prince and continuing up through seventeenth-century theories of voluntary submission and the social contract, the Mosaic constitution served as a laboratory for cultural experimentation that preceded, precipitated, and responded to political invention. Through the revision and expansion of Moses’s constitution of Israel as a people unified by law and collected under the rule of a single sovereign, early modern literary and political writers attempted to grasp and probe key problems, dynamics, and relationships that defined the early modern state, including toleration and the conflictual character of politics; the fraught relations among revelation, political authority, and literary authorship; and the role of fiction in defining and delimiting obedience, liberty, and the right to resist coercive authority.⁴

I intend the phrase the Mosaic constitution to be taken in two related ways. In the first case, the phrase denotes the use of Mosaic narrative to theorize political community. Without a doubt, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers across a range of religious and political commitments recognized in Mosaic law a model for good government.⁵ Even as Luther argued against Jacob Strauss, Wolfgang Stein, and the radical Reformers that Mosaic law was no more or less righteous than other legal systems, he acknowledged that there were certain laws instituted by Moses that the Saxon princes would be wise to adopt. Religiously speaking, Christians are no more obligated to Mosaic law than they are to Roman law, Luther argued. But he also proposed that the comparative study of Mosaic and Saxon law could lead to the development of better and more just secular government, especially concerning taxation and the treatment of the poor.⁶ Luther was not alone in thinking of Mosaic law as a good model for secular government. He was joined by writers such as Milton, Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, among many others, all of whom turned to the Mosaic constitution to elaborate on the emerging early modern state.

In the second case, the Mosaic constitution extends beyond the use of Hebrew scripture to provide an exemplary model of political community and includes the use of Moses to flag a conceptual problem. Here, the Mosaic constitution refers to the troublesome intersection of religious belief and the secular state. Early modern writers turned to Mosaic law for more than comparative legal studies. As we shall see in the pages that follow, they turned to Hebrew scripture to posit and explore the complex relations between politics and belief that inform the early modern state. Put most broadly, this book’s central thesis is that the Mosaic constitution figures a productive intersection—or what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls a point of cross-pressure⁷—between religious belief and paradigms of human creation that is unique to an early modern sense of political theology. Political theology is more than just a synthesis of religion and the state. From the perspective of the Mosaic constitution, it concerns an ongoing entanglement and antagonism between two discrete discourses and styles of thinking—politics and theology—that should by all rights have little to do with one another. This second understanding is particularly relevant for the literary writers who explored the Mosaic constitution in its various dimensions. Because Hebrew scripture is so attentive to political conflict and its own status as a written text, Mosaic narrative gave early modern writers a vocabulary, a model, and an imaginative ground for exploring, critiquing, anatomizing, and reformulating divine authority as a product of political and literary imagination. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers whom I consider here developed relations between religious belief and human creation in a variety of ways. They consulted Hebrew scripture to expound upon and debate the multiple roles of sovereignty, obligation, and imagination in the constitution of political community.

POLITICAL THEOLOGY, METAPHOR, IMAGINATION

The primary reason that Moses became such a significant figure in early modern Europe is that Mosaic narrative foregrounds the problem of constituting power. Jewish writers, Christian writers who were neither particularly philo-Semitic nor anti-Semitic, and even writers who were purportedly atheists all turned their attention to Moses in order to understand, develop, and authorize the human capacity for political making. In addition to being a lawgiver, Moses was also a writer, and part of the attraction of the Mosaic constitution is that it let a host of early modern writers raise questions about constituting power in relation to political and religious representation.⁸ Although none of these writers directly questioned Hebrew scripture as a sacred text, all of them were engaged in questioning what the sacred nature of Hebrew scripture might entail. For Spinoza and Milton, scripture is sacred because it is a common text, a text that has the capacity to posit and preserve community through polemical debate over interpretive differences, whereas for Hobbes scripture is sacred because it is a public text, a text that constitutes a public sphere through and in relation to a sovereign and authoritative interpreter. Hobbes’s position is antithetical to Spinoza’s and Milton’s in that, where they argue for and legitimate community through dissension, he validates the personal authority of the sovereign. But all three share the assumption that constituting power involves the formation of political community through the faculty of imagination.

The phrase constituting power was invented by the eighteenth-century French writer Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in order to acknowledge and legitimate the role of the third estate in the French Revolution. Sieyès distinguished between constituting power, the power to make a new political order, and constituted power, the power that preserves the already established order. He then argued that the real locus of constituting power is the sovereign nation, which precedes any legal bonds and, therefore, has the absolute authority to remake the existing political order.⁹ But the concept of constituting power precedes Sieyès’s elaboration of it. In the late sixteenth century, English Jesuits explored alternative models of constituting power as a way to curb what they perceived to be the illegitimate expansion of monarchical authority under Elizabeth. As early as the 1572 Treatise of Treasons, English Catholics argued that Elizabeth received her legitimacy from the people, who had the right to deliver her from her own tyrannical rule should she not do so herself.¹⁰ Even though recusant writers wanted a better monarch and not a new form of government, they also began to experiment with the idea that monarchy is based on election (as sanctified by the Church) and not heredity per se. Writing on the eve of the Restoration, the English writer George Lawson developed a version of constituting power in his discussion of monarchy and sovereignty by arguing that majesty is both real and personal. Reall, he writes, is in the community, and is greater than Personall, which is the power of a Common-wealth already constituted.¹¹ The implication of Lawson’s argument is that the community is not just obligated to follow laws issued by parliament or monarch but also has the right to suspend and remake the constituted order in response to tyranny, when personal majesty gets too personal, as it were. In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke sharpened Lawson’s argument by proposing that while there can be but one supreme power, which is the legislative, nevertheless since legislative power is fiduciary, there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them.¹² As Andreas Kalyvas puts it, these writers oppose a paradigm in which sovereignty is taken to be the ultimate coercive power with one in which sovereignty is understood as the power to found, to posit, to constitute, that is, as constituent power.¹³

The contemporary Italian political theorist Antonio Negri argues, persuasively to my mind, that constituting power becomes a significant conceptual problem once Machiavelli argues for the project of establishing a new state.¹⁴ Negri’s purpose in making this claim is to locate a line of radical political thinkers from Machiavelli to Lenin who work to elaborate a purely secular vision of political making—shorn of its links to discourses of transcendence. However, the problem with constituting power is that it endlessly falls into theological modes of thinking and representation. This is because constituting power constitutes more than collective life. To succeed as an act of political making, constituting power must also constitute the overarching conceptions of justice, the conditions of social recognition and nonrecognition, that transcend political community and through which political community is achieved. I do not mean to suggest that political communities are determined by God or Platonic ideals but rather that political making assumes supplemental discourses—myths and founding fictions—that play the role of the transcendent for particular political communities.¹⁵

The twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt exploits this need for a supplemental discourse in his account of political theology. Schmitt introduces the concept of political theology as a response to Sieyès’s definition of constituting power, arguing that the capacity for political making cannot lie in the organic unity of the people because the people cannot actualize their own will without some representative figure, some transcendental figure who rules over the group and expresses its collective will.¹⁶ Schmitt’s general point strikes me as correct. There can be no group without some representative that is not itself included within the group. Nevertheless, he also identifies in very specific terms the figure that transcends and represents the unity of the people. Reviving late sixteenth-century proto-absolutist political theory against Sieyès’s legitimation of the French Revolution, Schmitt locates political making in the personal authority, or what he calls the decisionist character, of the sovereign, who is analogous to God. All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, he asserts, not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic nature.¹⁷ Just as theology needs a God who can intervene in and suspend the natural order, so too does the state need a sovereign who can stand above the law, suspend it, and decide exceptional emergency situations—that is, decide where there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it."¹⁸

We need not follow Schmitt’s arguments for the personal authority of the sovereign to understand the links between constituting power and political theology that he discusses. Even a political philosopher like Hannah Arendt, who is deeply opposed to Schmitt’s revival of absolutism, sees something significant in his argument. Responding to Schmitt, Arendt proposes that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political writers took up ready-to-hand theological concepts in an attempt to theorize new arrangements of authority and power. As she notes in On Revolution, the separation of politics from religion that for her characterizes modern politics placed a special burden on religion to authorize political making.

The numerous difficulties and perplexities, theoretical and practical, that have beset the public, political realm ever since the rise of the secular, the very fact that secularization was accompanied by the rise of absolutism and the downfall of absolutism followed by revolutions whose chief perplexity was where to find an absolute from which to derive authority for law and power, could well be taken to demonstrate that politics and the state needed the sanction of religion even more urgently than religion and the churches had ever needed the support of princes.¹⁹

Arendt makes this assertion as part of a broader argument to show how the American Revolution escaped the burden of European political theology. For her, the link between constituting power and political theology is fundamentally historical and, therefore, can be left in the past. But one implication of Arendt’s claim is that the relation between religion and political making is itself fundamentally inventive and creative. From one perspective, we might say that the state needed religion and, indeed, reinvented it for its own purposes. But as we shall see, religion was not just an instrument in the service of the early modern state. From another perspective, we can say that political and literary writers adopted theological concepts to do more than just to buttress juridical authority. They used theological concepts and religious discourses to respond to perplexities, to approximate understandings of political phenomenon that would otherwise remain unvoiced, if not invisible.

It may well be that political thinking about constituting power in early modern Europe has its roots in the theological distinction that William of Ockham and his followers drew in the fourteenth century between God’s potentia absoluta and his potentia ordinata, that is, between God’s absolute power to do whatever he wills and the restricted order to which he has committed himself. The political problem of constituting power may already be a theological problem. Ockham defends God’s omnipotence by emphasizing his radical ability to create outside the bounds of any already established order and then argues that God confines himself to an ordained system so that his will can become knowable to human reason.²⁰ Like the nominalists’ God, the Machiavellian founder expresses a seemingly absolute power in the act of creating a new legal order. Romulus established the common good when he murdered his brother Remus and instituted the Roman senate, and Numa reinforced the common good when he feigned revelation in order to compel Roman citizens to obey the rule of law. In both instances, the constitution of the common good is predicated upon an act that could only be deemed bad by the system of rules that has been constituted. Moreover, in his account of the history of the Roman republic, Machiavelli argues that civic virtue can be reestablished only by acts of extreme violence, like Junius Brutus murdering his sons, that hearken back to the founding act. In the Discourses, the theologico-political question becomes, how does the myth of founding commit the ruler to a legal order while at the same time preserving the creative capacity of the political?

Hebrew scripture differs from nominalist and Roman models in that scripture links constituting power more explicitly to creaturely life. Indeed, the book of Exodus can be read as a key text on political invention as biopolitics. From its very beginning, Exodus pits Israel’s creaturely fecundity against the tyranny of Egyptian rule. The Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased very greatly, so that the land was filled with them [paru vayeesh’r’tzu vayeer’bu vaya’atz’mu] (JPS Exod. 1:7). Both thematically in its use of multiply and increase and rhetorically in its piling on of verbs—multiplied, increased, filled—this passage harkens back to Genesis, recalling both the injunction to increase and multiply and God’s promise that humans will have dominion over the creeping and swarming reptilian things. This connection is not lost on medieval rabbis, who compared the Israelite’s fecundity with the supposed capacity of reptiles to give birth to seventy offspring at once.²¹ By the beginning of Exodus, however, the relation between creaturely life and dominion has become a critical problem. In Genesis humanity is to have dominion over all the living things that creep on earth [ha’rehmes ha’romeys al-ha’aretz] (Gen. 1:28), but by Exodus Israel has become that creeping thing, an extremely fertile group of resident aliens in Egypt ruled over by a foreign power that enslaves the Hebrews and claims the right of dominion over them. Initially, Pharaoh submits the Israelites to forced labor in hopes of curtailing their creaturely expansion, and when this fails, he issues the order to have the midwives murder all the firstborn sons of Israel. When both efforts fail, Pharaoh issues a more extreme command, ordering all his people, Israelites and Egyptians both, to drown their newly born sons (Exod. 1:22). Exodus represents the Mosaic constitution as both a doubling of and a distancing from Pharaonic rule. As the founder of a new political order, Moses faces the problem of translating a creeping multitude, affiliated by tribal bonds and kinship structures, into people bound by law and obligated through a covenant to a supreme God. At the same time, that translation is never complete. Israel is constantly murmuring, resistant to the imposition of authority, and attached to its own collective capacities for creation and fabrication, be it the forging of the golden calf before the reception of the law or the construction of the Ark of the Covenant before the wandering in the wilderness.

Eric Santner has argued that because Moses inaugurates a politics and a theology of creation, what I am calling the Mosaic constitution becomes a touchstone for twentieth-century thinkers like Freud and Franz Rosenzweig who want to assess the biopolitical dimensions of the modern state. If the lesson of the Mosaic constitution is that life is the ‘stuff’ of sovereignty, then the challenge for these thinkers is to refashion Jewish monotheism so that it distances itself from the enigmatic seductions of sovereign power and authority.²² The early modern emphasis on Hebrew scripture as a received text adds an extra twist. In binding the secular state to interpretations of Hebrew scripture, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers also bind a political theology of creation to literary creation and imagination. While the Mosaic constitution raises the problem of a constituting power that exists outside the bounds of normative law, Hebrew scripture locates that power more specifically in the persuasive capacities of metaphor and narrative to shape life through belief. Jonathan Sheehan has recently detailed the transformation of the Bible from a book authorizing religious truths to a complex of literature, teaching, scholarship, and history that turned it into the key text in what gets called the cultural heritage of the West.²³ With remarkable erudition, Sheehan shows how in the movement from the Lutheran Bible to the eighteenth century, the Bible became the basis for a notion of culture that could counter the forces of Enlightenment skepticism. Writers like Machiavelli, Marlowe, Harrington, Marvell, Milton, and Spinoza were acutely aware that the Bible is a human artifact and that its various stories get used as political fictions in the service of mystification, ideological misdirection, and the self-interest of de facto authority. In this interpretive tradition, both scripture and its uses become objects of skeptical reading and political critique. At the same time, these writers also attempted to use the persuasive capacities of scripture to shape collective, creaturely life. The insight that scripture is a human artifact changes the truth-claims that one might make about a supposedly divinely authored text but it also increases the burden for political exegesis—for analyzing, explaining, and reimagining the political uses of the divine text.

In early modern English literary studies, political theology has most often been associated with sacred kingship and Christian incarnation, due in no small measure to the massive influence of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies in English literary studies. Subtitled A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Kantorowicz’s work tracks the legal theory that the dignity of the sovereign is located in the mystical office of the monarch, which is embodied by but also transcends the king’s real, physical, and historical presence. Beginning in the twelfth century and moving up through the seventeenth century, Kantorowicz shows how English common lawyers defined the office of the king through the theological figures of the body of Christ and the body of the Church in such a way that split that office between absolutism and constitutionalism.²⁴ In Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England, Debora Kuller Shuger shows how the regulation of private morality through public authority assumes a sacred element located in the monarch’s sacerdotal function.²⁵ And in Alterations of State, Richard C. McCoy argues that the monarch retains a sacramental presence throughout the various transformations of English statehood from Henry VIII to the Glorious Revolution.²⁶ Both Shuger and McCoy focus on sacred kingship as a corrective to recent works on republicanism and constitutionalism that exclude religion; as Shuger puts it, sacred kingship shows that religious ideals . . . unfold at the dead center of early modern thinking on government and its properties.²⁷ Julia Reinhard Lupton offers a more nuanced view by arguing for a literature of citizenship that emerges dialectically through the need to reconstruct political community after the death of the tyrant. Instead of focusing on sacred kingship, Lupton locates political theology in the exception, the moment of crisis that threatens to dissolve prior forms of community and promises the invention of new ones. Emphasizing the constitutional promise installed within the drama of sacred kingship, Lupton elaborates a political theology associated with the emergence of early modern liberalism on the desecrated grounds of divine kingship. In her Pauline account of early modern political theology, Christian and Jewish models of incarnation persist on the Shakespearean stage in the hybrid figure of the citizen-saint, but these models of incarnation also contains the seeds of their own undoing. The citizen-saint embodies the promise of citizenship through the potential associated with the saint or martyr who sacrifices herself on the altar of the tyrant.²⁸

The Mosaic constitution develops through a more explicitly republican tradition that includes figures like Marvell, Milton, Harrington, and Spinoza, and its emphasis is less on sacred kingship or personal authority than it is on textual authority as the constituent agent of communal life. From the perspective of the Mosaic constitution, political theology is best understood as metaphorical theology. This is the phrase that Hans Blumenberg uses in his critique of Schmitt, whose monograph Political Theology has been both definitive and a source of irritation for subsequent generations of political thinkers.²⁹ Blumenberg means to call attention to the ways in which Schmitt takes metaphors from theology and literalizes them in the service of his own political agenda. So, for instance, when Schmitt argues for an analogous relation between the God of Christian theology and the sovereign of the modern state, he does so to grant a set of real emergency powers to the sovereign, who can then suspend the law in order to protect it.³⁰ Blumenberg’s point is to show that Schmitt justifies a political argument through a metaphor that he treats as if it were real. Schmitt needs the metaphor of the person, which he takes from theology and justifies with his concept of political theology. At the same time, Schmitt’s crisis-driven rhetoric also literalizes that metaphor in the very real person who oversees the executive branch of government in such a way that the literalization of a theological metaphor justifies the expansion of executive authority. Blumenberg sees his insight about metaphor as a point of critique. He is deeply, and rightly, critical of any theory of secularization that sees the modern age as an empty form drained of its religious substance, as an era whose central concepts take shape through the transfer and emptying of theological substance. Such an understanding inevitably constructs an illegitimate modernity against its more authentically religious past. It loads the dice against modernity in favor of an ideal and imaginary understanding of religion. I see Blumenberg’s insight about metaphor not only as a point of critique but also as a site of possibility for developing a different and more comprehensive account of political theology. In literalizing the metaphor of the person, Schmitt inadvertently calls attention to the persistence of theocratic authority in secular politics, while in giving priority to metaphor Blumenberg uncovers the condition for elaborating new concepts of political personhood and community through the resources of fiction and imagination. The very fact that theological argumentation happens in and through a metaphoric language means that it can be accommodated to an unpredictable range of ends. The metaphorical nature of scripture and of theological concepts is what makes political theology an ongoing source of invention and imagination. One of the main goals of this book is to recover that sense of invention and imagination among a group of writers for whom the fashioning of secular government was a most urgent problem.

THE MOSAIC CONSTITUTION

Let me illustrate what I mean by the constitutive role of imagination by briefly discussing two mid-seventeenth-century Dutch paintings: Ferdinand Bol’s Moses with the Tablets of the Law, which was commissioned for the Schepenzaal or Magistrates’ Court of Amsterdam’s newly constructed Town Hall, and Rembrandt’s painting of the same title, which the older artist created as a response to Bol, who was also his student.³¹ Both of these paintings are concerned with the use of public religion to secure obedience to the secular state. Bol’s Moses (fig. 1.1) was commissioned by the anti-Orangist, pro-statist Staatsgezinde party, which oversaw the building of Amsterdam’s Town Hall and insisted that the building stood as an expression of a secular and resolutely antimonarchical state.³² To that end, Bol casts the Mosaic constitution through a republican understanding of obedience, representing the constitution of the Hebrew state through the people’s desire to submit to the law, which, it appears from the reverential and ecstatic facial expressions on the figures at the base of Mount Sinai, Moses cannot bring down quickly enough. In his poem on Bol’s painting, the Dutch poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel gets at this dynamic quite precisely. As Moses brings down the law, Vondel writes, the people dat hem eerbeidigh, en wolkomt met verlandgen [greeted him with reverence and welcomed him with longing].³³ Vondel’s poem suggests that the state is based not just on the law but more importantly on a longing for the law. But Bol adds an extra dimension. The strong division between the top and bottom halves of Bol’s painting suggests that voluntary submission endows not just the law but the lawgiver with a transcendental quality that in turn sanctifies the act of obedience to the secular state. Bol’s painting suggests that longing for the law generates a mystical quality that becomes the imaginary source of sovereign authority.

Fig. 1.1. Ferdinand Bol, Moses Descends from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments (1662). Photograph: © Royal Palace Foundation, Amsterdam.

Rembrandt’s Moses (fig. 1.2) draws out the play of imagination at work in Bol’s painting. Instead of sanctifying obedience, Rembrandt theatricalizes the giving of the law. His painting combines the act of obedience with the aesthetic act of viewing the painting. As viewers of Bol’s painting, we see the Mosaic constitution being staged before us, but as viewers of Rembrandt’s painting, we are more explicitly brought into the space of the Mosaic constitution as if we were actors in the scene itself. The difference between the two paintings is subtle but significant. Bol’s painting portrays a narrative scene in order to reinforce a lesson about virtuous republican citizenship; Rembrandt stages a narrative moment in order to highlight the mediated aspects of public space and its constitution. As Harry Berger comments in his discussion of Rembrandt’s handling of spectatorship, the image is not something for observers to see, know, and genuflect before but something for them to make and unmake, something perpetually incomplete that extends its desire for completion into theirs.³⁴ On one level, Rembrandt highlights the political identification at work in Bol’s painting as an aesthetic act. His theatricalization of spectatorship foregrounds the mimetic aspects of communal life, in that identification with the Hebrews is the minimal condition we must accept in order to be members of the community that the painting creates. On another level, Rembrandt emphasizes the historical specificity of the Hebrew past as a point of identification that the painting’s viewers are required to navigate. Rather than portraying a longing for the law, as Bol’s painting does, Rembrandt’s Moses situates its viewers at a point of metacritical ambiguity. Do we see ourselves as Hebrews longing for the law? Or do we see ourselves seeing ourselves as Hebrews longing for the law? That is, do we unproblematically identify with the historical example? Or do we reflect on our distance from it when we are asked to identify with it? Rembrandt’s theatricalization of public space leads to a more general reflection on the Mosaic constitution as a historically distant moment—or better, as a contemporary representation of a historically distant moment—through which political subjects are interpellated into the scene of the modern state.

In short, Bol’s painting puts the Mosaic constitution to political use. In response, Rembrandt’s painting represents the Mosaic constitution as a cultural text that is being put to political use. Whereas Bol’s Moses allegorizes and mystifies state power, Rembrandt’s Moses refashions the Mosaic constitution by highlighting the processes of identification, transmission, and cultural inheritance through which the state is constituted and obedience is enforced. Rembrandt’s staging of the Mosaic constitution might profitably be supplemented with Spinoza’s discussion of prophecy in the Theologico-Political Treatise. Spinoza argues that what makes prophets special is neither their ability to reason philosophically nor some capacity to experience the divine in unmediated fashion but rather their aptitude for imagination. As individuals, the prophets imagine the divine in powerful ways, and collectively prophecy shapes communal identification and behavior through the hold that it has on the modern political imaginary as a set of gripping, imaginative writings. Rembrandt’s Moses intimates a similar insight about both the imaginative force of prophecy and its social and political functions. While the angels and light that surround Bol’s Moses endow him with a divine aura, the painterly and artifactual aspects of Rembrandt’s Moses—the visible brushstrokes in the background, the heightened attention to Moses’s hands—along with the decidedly uncertain look on Moses’s face suggest a more human scene of political and aesthetic making. Rembrandt’s emphasis on imagination does not make him less interested than Bol in public religion. By having Moses cover the first tablet, which contains the laws regulating individual piety, with the second, which contains the laws regulating public morality, Rembrandt stages this scene of prophetic imagination to affirm the state’s right to compel public worship while separating that right from private belief.³⁵ But his emphasis on imagination does suggest that he is more engaged than Bol in understanding and foregrounding the role that imagination plays in constitution of community.

Fig. 1.2. Rembrandt van Rijn, Moses Destroying the Tablets of the Law (1659). Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photograph: bpk, Berlin / Joerg P. Anders / Art Resource, New York.

Despite their differences, these two paintings both respond to what this book argues is a central aporia in the theorization of the early modern state: the law assumes a public that is potentially obedient, but the law cannot compel obedience without some sort of excessive or extralegal force. One solution is to make the prince a representative of divine authority, as do early modern political thinkers writing in the tradition of Reason of State. Reason of State combines arguments for strong government with an interest in Tacitus’s account of the arcana imperii, or mystery of state, out of the contention that the prince cannot be bound by moral or legal norms if he is to govern effectively.³⁶ As Giovanni Botero explains in the opening pages of his 1589 treatise On the Reason of State, reason of state is the knowledge by which a prince maintains a stable rule over a people [un dominio fermo sopra popoli]; nevertheless, the actions required to maintain a stable rule cannot be considered by ordinary and common reason [che non si possono ridurre a ragione ordinaria e comume].³⁷ And as Bol’s painting suggests, this solution is not limited to Reason of State or absolutist political thought but cuts across a range of political traditions, including republicanism. Another solution, the kind developed by Rembrandt as well as by writers such as Harrington, Spinoza, and Milton, is explicitly to associate extralegal force with images, metaphors, and narratives taken from scripture. One function of these devices is to compel obedience. But since they work as images, metaphors, and narratives, they also ground an effort to reconceive the public through a politics of representation, poetic strategies of communication, and rhetorical models of demonstration and persuasion. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, both Harrington and Spinoza explore the rhetorical and poetic conditions that make Hebrew scripture persuasive in an effort to reformulate the legal state through models of communication while they also mobilize the persuasive force of scripture to induce