” . . . the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable
as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints . . .”
Leo Strauss, On Tyranny
RALPH C. HANCOCK is Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, the author of Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics, and of a number of articles bearing on the question of religion in relation to the politics of modern rationalism. He is working on a book concerning the problem of moral-politicals foundations in Tocqueville, Heidegger, and Leo Strauss.
Rémi Brague undertakes no less than
to sort out the relationship between
the notion of “divinity” and that of “law.”
He pursues this question, not mainly by
a sustained philosophical analysis or the
close analysis of pertinent texts (though
his inquiry of course involves philosophical
thinking and textual exegesis), but by
a broad-gauged comparative examination
of the configuration of the divine with respect
to the legal in Judaism, Islam, and
Christianity. And he alerts us at the outset
that he aims to displace, not only the conventional
“grand narrative” of “secularization”
(the idea of a sort of natural drift
towards the emancipation of the political
from the religious), but at a deeper level,
the formulation of the question in terms
of a “political-theological problem.” This
term comes directly from Spinoza, and
evokes the thought of writers from Varro to
Carl Schmitt, as Brague notes. He chooses
not to note, however, that the term has recently
been made famous, or infamous, by
Leo Strauss, and thus that Strauss (whose
work Brague knows intimately) is a key
interlocutor in his project.
Brague argues that the term “political
theology” preemptively narrows the question
of the relation of the divine to the legal
in at least three ways.1 First, the “logos” in
theo-logy takes it for granted that the divine
is “to pass through the prism of discourse.”
Second, “theo” indicates, not the general
notion of the divine, but a personal God
or gods. Finally, “political” privileges just
one domain of the practical (the government
of the city) over the other two: ethics
(self-government) and economics (the
government of the household). In order to
overcome or think beyond this threefold
preemptive narrowing, Brague proposes
the neologism “theio-practical.” Brague’s
history of the theio-practical problem is
magisterial in its command of materials
from various traditions and languages,
and the reader is asked to follow a bewildering
number of twists and turns through
considerations of the writings of authors
major and minor. Still, the book has a
central argument, and it finally intends no
less than to illuminate the basic character
of the modern world, the world defined by
a “rupture with the premodern relationship
with the law,” a world in which law
is supposed to have no relation with the
divine but is “quite simply the rule that the
human community gives itself.”
Some vague notion of divinity,
Brague shows, appears to be coeval with
humanity. Such a notion is generally, but
not always, associated with the notion of
power, though the extension of this divine
power to political and legal realms is far
from straightforward or automatic. Such
an association between divinity and legal
authority, when it happens, can take one
of two main forms, or appear as a mixture
of these: law can be associated with the
divine as its origin, and/or as its intrinsic
characteristic. The first alternative will
become dominant among the Greeks, and
be taken up by Greek philosophy, whereas
the latter will be articulated by the three
great revealed religions. The Christian
appropriation of Greek philosophy involves
some combination of the two forms, as we
shall see.
The Greek gods did not make laws;
divinity thus entered into law only
through an indirect, regulatory function.
The philosophers sought to appropriate
this regulatory function by identifying
divinity with the intellect. Plato, in his
Laws, exceptionally proposed a theology
as the state’s foundation, but he did not
imagine that such a theology could be
revealed in a book by a God.
The religions of the book are also the
religions of divine law in the strongest
sense: man’s life is to be governed by
rules revealed by God and available in a
text. The Jews had only a brief experience
under their own kings, after which they
found themselves most often under alien
sovereigns, and their political sensibility
was characterized mainly by nostalgia for
an earlier nomadic liberty. Without the
power to live politically under their own
laws, Jewish political thought was not practical
and concrete but was projected upon a
messianic future. Thus, Jewish history has
not encouraged the development of properly
Jewish political thinking: the category
of the political is “laminated” between a
pre-political and quasi-anarchic liberty
and the meta-political longing for a messianic
king. The practical life of Judaism is
that of “a law without a state.”
The political situation of Islam is in
a way opposite to that of Judaism: Islam
entered history in a political guise, and
the political dimension is central to Islam’s
identity. Brague minces no words here:
Islam is about conquest from the outset.
Mohammed is both prophet and king,
and the moral and social are understood as
one block. But this is not at all to say that
Islam has been successful in giving effect
to this political essence; on the contrary,
political power and religious authority in
fact parted ways early in Islamic history,
leading to a tendency to “nomocracy,”
the rule of disincarnated religious laws, in
some respects parallel to Judaism. But the
separation of religion and politics is merely
circumstantial in Islam and has never been
able to find a doctrinal foundation.
Whereas Islam triumphed by warfare
during the lifetime of its founder, Christianity’s
first identity was that of a persecuted
minority. When it became dominant
in the Roman world, this, Brague argues,
was through a Christian civil society’s
conquest of the state, the reverse of Islam.
While the temptation to identify imperial
power with God’s kingdom was certainly
present (as in Eusebius), the separation
between temporal and spiritual realms was
effectively at work in Christendom from
the outset, in Byzantium as well as in the
West. The idea of an original unity of the
spiritual and the temporal from which a
separation emerged only in modern times
is, Brague is able substantially to demonstrate,
a modern myth. This is not to say
that this separation ever found a clear and
definitive articulation, either theologically
or institutionally (but then we are
still looking for a definitive articulation
of the “liberal” separation we now mostly
take for granted). But the resistance of religious
ideas and institutions to fusion with
political power was always at work, and
the articulation of the two spheres was the
fecund task that drove the development of
Christian political thought.
Under Christianity, the realms of religion
and politics are distinct; would that
they were separate—that is, would that
they could be simply and finally separated.
This is the drama, the agony perhaps,
of Christian political thought and of its
institutional development, as described
in chapter 9, Brague’s historically richest,
“Christianity: a Conflict of Laws.” Countering
the prevalent myth of an original
fusion, Brague deftly traces the historical
effects of Christianity’s inherent resistance
to absorption into the political realm. This
resistance created throughout the medieval
period a situation in which both religious
and political authorities (eventually
the Papacy and the Empire) recognized
the legitimacy of the sphere occupied
by the other within a divine economy
but attempted to protect and expand its
prerogatives at its rival’s expense. That is to
say, each granted a real if subordinate status
to the other within a world governed by
God. The end of this rivalry based upon
a certain implicit mutual respect is the
end of the Middle Ages and the birth of
the modern world. This end, in Brague’s
telling, is precipitated by the “Papal Revolution.”
In the context of the investiture
controversy, the Papacy was driven to claim
a kind of absolute sovereignty grounded in
its exclusive authority for the care of souls.
The modern, “secular” idea of state sovereignty,
first articulated as “the divine right
of kings,” was a response to and a mirror
image of these Papal claims. The modern
fable of a natural or simply rational “secularization”
ignores the necessity of a prior
claim (rivaling that of the papacy) to
sacrality. Even the word “state” (“status“)
in the modern sense appears first of all in
ecclesiastical arguments. Brague’s argument
thus seems to be that the “secular”
(let us say, the effectively absolute authority
of the human) could not have appeared
“natural” to us if it had not first appeared
as the counter-assertion of the sacred.
A spokesman for secular naturalism
might, however, respond to Brague’s
argument by proposing that the contest of
absolutisms in the late Middle Ages, while
no doubt of historical interest, cannot be
considered definitive of the essential character
of modernity. Like Leo Strauss (not
exactly, to be sure, a spokesman for secular
naturalism), such a critic might argue that
the “break” defining modernity is to be
sought “on the plane of purely philosophic
or rational or secular thought.” (Natural
Right and History, ch. 2 f.n. 22) The rational
essence of modernity, on this view, must
be distilled through an interpretive process
that purifies it of the more or less accidental
historical context of its genesis.
Chapter 14, “The Modern Age: The
Destruction of the Idea of Divine Law,” is
Brague’s response to the effort to liberate
modernity from its history in the reaction
against Papal absolutism. This chapter,
philosophically Brague’s richest, might
be entitled, “The Tyranny of Autonomy.”
Here he argues that what passes in the
modern age for “autonomy” is not autono
mous, since “the modern age did little but
draw the consequences of decisions that
had been taken long before.” He develops
a compact and powerful critique of this
specious and tyrannical “autonomy”
upon the basis of an elegant and luminous
discussion of the traditional or pre-modern
relationship between “Law and Counsel,”
that is, between “what an authorized will
imposes and what wisdom recommends.”
Once, “law bathed in counsel as in a nourishing
environment.” The Right and The
Good, one might say (though Brague does
not use these terms), were inseparable,
even equiprimordial, each informing and
elevating the other. The autonomy or
“internal rule” of a being was understood,
Brague explains, “not as submission to
the rule that a subject gives himself,” but
as “coincidence with the rule that constitutes
all things as they are.” This formula
of Brague’s might, however, seem to give
final priority to the Good, in the manner
of classical political rationalism: law would
ultimately serve counsel, and so the best
counselor would embody or represent the
highest law. But if “the rule that constitutes
all things as they are” does not fall within
the compass of human intelligence and/or
human responsibility, then the ascendance
of the Good over the Right, of Counsel
over Law, would never be complete: a
revealed command would always be necessary
to lift Counsel above its incomplete
grasp of the Good—though the command
of Law would, for its part, always remain
“bathed in counsel.” This is the delicate
balance that Brague wishes to recover or
to articulate: if “a man [ultimately] loves
himself only for the sake of God” (cf.
Bernard of Clairvaux), this divine charity
is somehow continuous with the love that
man as a natural being has for his own
good.
This delicate dialectic between Law and
Counsel is betrayed, Brague thinks, in the
modern idea of autonomy: the poles separate,
and each flies off to an extreme. In
repudiating Law, Counsel also forgets the
Good, and is reduced to sheer “interest,”
eventually understood in terms of “laws
of nature” originally derived from and
then wrested from a lawless God, laws that
are thus as alien to humanity as they are
to divinity. Law, for its part, contemns
mere counsel and declares its utterly
formal autonomy, as in Kant, for whom
natural desires and tastes are “pathological.”
Either Law or Counsel, emancipated
from the other, becomes inhuman. When
man attempts to take full possession of
himself, he must understand himself either
as pure Counsel (interest) or as pure Law
(autonomy); but each of these necessarily
falls back for its meaning on the now desiccated
version of its abandoned partner. Pure
interest becomes an inhuman “natural” or
“rational” law, and pure autonomy is left
with no content but interest.
This hollow modern dialectic between
deontology and utilitarianism seems finally
to derive, according to Brague, from an
earlier, properly theological severing of
Law and Counsel, that is, the late medieval
and nominalist “long-term shift to the
primacy of the will.” But this observation
confronts us directly with the question
whether the wholesome dialectic of law
and counsel was not always necessarily at
risk in the context of a Biblical theology of
an omnipotent Creator. Brague thinks not;
it was not necessary that the “Almighty
Father” be reduced simply, inhumanly, to
the “Almighty.” In fact, twice at least, as it
were in passing, he suggests a non-Christian
responsibility for this catastrophic
disruption: the radicalization of the idea
of omnipotence “echoed motifs that recall
and were perhaps indirectly derived from
the Muslim Kalam” (237; Cf. 144, where
we learn that the Unam Sanctum of 1304,
the “most extreme expression of the claims
of the Holy See” may have been inspired
by “the theory of the caliph developed by
Avicenna”). Brague’s very discreet thesis
would thus be that the absolutization of
divine Sovereignty in Christian theology
and papal politics, and thereby the resulting
reaction in the modern sacralization of the
“secular,” stem ultimately from the influence
of Islam.
If there is an alternative to this rivalry
of absolutisms, and thus to its eventually
“secular” outcome, then, for Brague,
this must be found in some authentically
Christian understanding of “The End of
the Law.” Chapter 13, with its culminating
discussion of the thought of St. Thomas
Aquinas, is thus the true core and foundation
of Brague’s argument. This is the most
beautiful discussion in The Law of God, and
we cannot do it justice here. Brague’s praise
of Thomas’s work, “the most profound
reflection that medieval scholasticism has
passed on to us regarding the notion of law
in general and divine law in particular,”
may be said to come down to this: Thomas
holds law and counsel together. He resists
the Islamic-leaning emancipation of law
from counsel, or will from reason, as well
as the reduction of the Good to pure,
impersonal intelligence (as in Maimonides
and his “Islamic” teachers). God’s goodness
cannot be contained in any fixed
rational serenity but overflows creatively
as a gift to his creatures. His human creatures
are not simply more or less rational
animals but “irreplaceable persons” with
the capacity to act freely (in a way irreducible
to impersonal reason) and thus to
be co-agents with God of history, of an
“irreversible historical time.” The aim of
the “New Law of Grace” as offered in the
Person of His Son or of His Word is best
understood as “to liberate liberty itself.”
At the same time, this history-producing
freedom is not arbitrary or merely subjective,
since man’s agency dwells within his
love of God, the ultimate reality: “the
object of faith is identified with truth.”
I, for my part, am prepared to confess
that a conception so beautiful cannot be
without a certain truth. But to consider,
in all sobriety, the practical or political
implications of Brague’s faithful liberation
of liberty is to wonder whether his reaction
against Islamic heteronomy has not
left him closer to modern autonomy than
he might want to be. In fact he goes so
far as to say that, in Thomas’s Christianity,
the dimension of law “as external to the
person” is finally abolished. This seems
to me directly to threaten the delicate
dialectic of Law and Counsel described
above. Thus, Brague insists in his conclusion
that Christianity departs from both
the Greek and the Jewish conception of
man as “being under” law; Christianity is
not a law or halakhah or sharia, but a way,
a viaticum, and its central sacrament, the
Eucharist, a meal, a nourishment that does
not repress the creature from the outside
but enables his freedom.
Brague is thus left to conclude that the
most decisive break in the understanding
of the relationship between divinity and
what is binding is not modernity’s break
with the authority of religion, but the early
medieval Christian emancipation of religion
from law. But then he seems to be
left, to our great surprise, in an ambivalent
position regarding modernity. The
modern separation of the normative from
the divine is already nascent in Christianity,
and it is Christianity’s separation of
the whole genus of the practical (ethics,
economics, politics) from the divine that
made possible each of the three species’
(modern) declaration of independence
from each other.
The upshot, then, of what I take to be
Brague’s anti-legalistic (that is, distinctly
non-Jewish and non-Islamic) Thomism
is a celebration of autonomy that appears
to be practically, politically vulnerable to
a modern cooptation. Brague is so careful
to protect the Law of Grace from contamination
by any merely practical law that
he may expose it to a decidedly modern
enthusiasm for the liberation of human
meaning from any heteronomous authority.
He appears to deplore the modern dissociation
of the history of freedom from the
history of salvation, but how can salvation
restrain, or, in the end, inform freedom if
the divine is separated rigorously from the
normative or binding—if, as Brague says
elsewhere, “God asks nothing of us”?
To sustain a distinction between Christianity
and modernity might require more
openness to a kinship between Christianity
and religions of the Law, or at least
one of them. Leo Strauss, to be sure, seems
not to have been optimistic about such a
strategy. He chose to absolutize the difference
between reason and revelation, and
thus to reduce revelation to a “brute fact”
on an Islamic model, as Brague has elsewhere
noticed. Brague seems finally to
risk downplaying the role of obedience
to a power beyond reason, or perhaps
confining this role to a sacramental realm
somehow divorced altogether from the
interpretations and judgments of practical
life. But to recognize reason’s part
of responsibility for sustaining the delicate
dialectic of Law and Counsel would
seem to imply recognizing the primacy
of the political within the practical. And
if the Biblical and modern insight into, or
at least the question regarding, the Eternal
significance of personality in history is in
fact unavoidable for us, then we are back
to the theological-political predicament, if not
necessarily to Leo Strauss’s version of it.
1. One statement of Strauss’s narrower formulation of
the question of the relation between the divine and the
binding is this, from Natural Right and History:
The fundamental question . . . is whether men
can acquire that knowledge of the good without
which they cannot guide
their lives individually or collectively by the
unaided efforts of their natural powers, or
whether they are dependent for that knowledge
on Divine Revelation. No alternative is more
fundamental than this: human guidance or divine
guidance. (74)
Note that this formulation involves a definite and demanding
concept of “knowledge,” which is no doubt
posterior to the primordial articulation of the divine
and the legal, and likely dependent on Greek philosophy
as intensified by its rivalry with the knowledge-
claims of Biblical revelation. Note also that the
specification “individually or collectively” implies the
whole problem of the status of this most urgent kind of
knowledge in relation to the conditions of our collective
existence, which Strauss, as is well known, understands
to be an insuperably political condition. It may
be then, that Strauss carelessly frames the question of
the divine and the authoritative in terms narrowed by
a Western political-theological tradition; or, it may be
that he judges advisedly that this tradition has not so
much narrowed as sharpened questions that the most
thoughtful heirs of Athens or of Jerusalem will find to
be essential or even unsurpassable.
