Telos 188 (Fall 2019): Theology and World Order is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
It would be naive to consider the question of global political order without engaging in debates about theology. Not only has it become clear that religious conflicts drive political ones, the very attempt to move “beyond” religion must be understood in terms of its theological meaning. The postsecular turn has not meant a return to religion so much as a realization that secularization was never a turn away from religion in the first place but rather itself a specific theological alternative among many. Accordingly, if our deepest political conflicts arise as consequences of theological disputes, we must address theology directly in order to get to the roots of major conflicts. Not only clear cases, such as conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians or between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, but also those between the United States and China revolve around theological issues that shape political and military conflict. Yet, our current approaches rely on political scientific and military calculations that have not yet been able to evaluate theology as a key and deciding factor in such conflicts. As the U.S. military and intelligence agencies debate the threat that Islamic State poses in Afghanistan,[1] for instance, a key consideration should be the character and prospects of Islamic State’s theology, as well as the broader question of the role of theology in deciding political conflict. This issue of Telos engages in this discussion by considering how conceptions of world order arise from specific theologies.
We begin with four essays that examine the role of Islam in shaping political and economic order. Willem Styfhals discusses historical examples of religious nihilism in Christian Gnosticism, Jewish Sabbatianism, and Jewish Frankism in order to then show that Islamic State’s theology upsets the opposition between a religious pre-modernity and a modern secularist nihilism. The rejection of transcendence by secular nihilism coincides in fact with a form of religious nihilism that assumes that God’s transcendence is so total that there is no link between transcendence and immanence, the divine and the earthly. The consequence in both the secular and religious variants of nihilism is a denial of traditional moral values and existing structures and practices, to the point that violence and sin are affirmed as ways of resisting the total fallenness of the world. By showing how these religious forms of nihilism are similar to secular nihilism, Styfhals indicates that the particular kind of extremism that we find in Islamic State is grounded in a consistent theological perspective that forms part of the Islamic tradition yet is opposed to almost all other current representatives of this tradition, including al-Qaeda. Such a nihilist theology seems to be a recurring possibility in all the monotheistic religions, as well as in secularism.
Saladdin Ahmed pursues a related critique of Islamic State theology by providing a bracing account of how the banning of women from public spaces by Islamists (i.e., those who advocate Sharia law) has led to extreme forms of oppression of women in the Muslim world. The exclusion of women from public spaces not only denies them participation in public life and severely restricts their autonomy, but it also creates a self-perpetuating dynamic of sexual repression in men, leading to even more degrading effects on women. Using close readings to demonstrate the ideological uses of sacred texts, Ahmed shows how Sharia law limits men’s interaction with women to those, such as mothers and sisters, who are prohibited as sexual partners. The result is, on the one hand, an increasing sexual repression in men, leading them to treat their eventual wives as sexual objects. On the other hand, the vanishing traces of women in public spaces have the effect of creating, in a Freudian dynamic, an ever more expansive sense of what counts as sexualized, to the point where even the shadow of a woman must be considered transgressive, and as a result women become subject to even greater restrictions. Ahmed contends that because Islamic sacred texts have an ideological import and pathological effect, they must be criticized directly, as a rigid defense of the cultural particularity embodied in these texts would only contribute to the way that they enforce ongoing breaches of universal human rights.
Rumy Hasan investigates the controversial but little-researched thesis that Islamic doctrine and practice act as a brake on economic development, arguing that Islam’s strict laws against blasphemy and apostasy have discouraged the kinds of innovative thinking and risk-taking that are necessary for economic growth and that practices such as five-times-daily prayer and Ramadan fasting function to automatically inhibit economic development. Looking at both the history of Islam and a variety of contemporary examples, Hasan concludes that the period of learning and growth in the Islamic world was confined to the era of military conquests, whose end brought intellectual and economic stagnation beginning in the late Middle Ages and lasting until today.
In contrast to the first three essays concerning Muslim-majority countries, Ankita Dutta looks at the situation of Islam as a minority religion in an account of the difficulties that have accompanied Italy’s transformation from a relatively homogeneous country to an increasingly diverse one shaped by immigration. By the end of the twentieth century, Italy had abandoned the designation of the Catholic Church as the state church and provided official state recognition to other denominations. However, the system today still heavily favors the Catholic Church, for instance, by allowing the crucifix (but no other religious symbols) in school classrooms, by providing state funding for compulsory Catholic religion classes in primary and secondary schools, and by guaranteeing a portion of income tax revenues to the Catholic Church. As Italy becomes a country with more migration inflows than outflows, it has been slow to adjust the relationship between state and religion to account for the growing Muslim population, and Muslim groups must struggle to achieve basic recognition of their religious freedom. Due to community resistance, Muslims do not yet have the kind of bilateral agreement with the government that other religions have obtained in order to achieve state recognition as a religious denomination. This lack of recognition hampers their ability to construct schools and mosques, with only three officially recognized mosques in all of Italy.
The postsecular turn has brought with it a new understanding of how our conceptions of history are theologically grounded, and the next two essays provide alternative models of history that are based in different theological conceptions. Maxwell Kennel compares Augustine’s Confessions with Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in terms of the conceptions of time that these texts lay out. While they both focus on the present moment as the intersection of past and future, the key difference lies in Augustine’s insistence on the intentionality of the present moment as that which structures the relationship to past and future. By focusing on each moment as a passing one whose character depends on the tension of consciousness (distentio animi), Augustine distinguishes memory of the past, attention to the present, and expectation of the future as three modes of intentionality that relate to time. Each mode makes use of intentionality to create a selection from out of the past, present, and future in order to create a structure for being. The movement from one moment to the next thus acquires a teleology based on intention and linked in the text to a personal history. With Nietzsche, however, intentionality does not seem to play a role in structuring the relation to time, according to Kennel. Instead, the gateway that is the present moment is an intersection of an eternity stretching from the past with an eternity leading out into the future. There is no particular content to this gateway, and the lack of intentionality leads Nietzsche toward a cyclical notion of time with an emphasis on the eternal return of the same. With the falling away of intentionality, there is no more basis for a trajectory and there is only repetition. If Styfhals was able to show how a putatively secular development in nihilism in fact has religious versions, Kennel’s linking of Augustine to Nietzsche demonstrates that secular conceptions must be considered as including a theological import that can be revealed in a comparison with religious texts.
Beginning with the idea of the eternal return, Gilad Sharvit provides another conception of history, understood as ambiguity, through an interpretation of Freud’s work on religion. While Totem and Taboo emphasizes the eternal return of the guilt of the sons over their primal murder of the father in primitive religion, Moses and Monotheism treats the movement from primitive religion to Judaism as an increasing abstraction from concrete father to abstract law, coupled with an increasing guilt in relation to the father and the law. But rather than expressing eternal fixed truths or a continual progress of history toward reason, the structure of religion that Freud lays out has an erratic history, repeatedly shifting between the poles of reason, embodied in Judaism and its emphasis on law and guilt, and sensuality, manifested in Christianity’s mitigation of law with passion. Christianity is in this case not a sign of progress but a regression with respect to the increasing abstraction of the law and the increase of guilt. Since there is neither a law of progress nor a simple repetition of what came before, every manifestation of history establishes a new way of mediating the conflict between reason, expressed as guilt, and sensuality, expressed as rebelliousness. Similarly, Sharvit reads the Oedipus myth along with Jean-Pierre Vernant as a description of the ambiguity of the human, who has no defined essence and must oscillate between God and subhuman. Ambiguity rather than truth becomes the key category of history, with eternal reversal replacing the idea of eternal return.
As we begin to consider secular ideas in terms of their theological meaning, it becomes more difficult to separate philosophy from theology. Consequently, when Jeffrey A. Bernstein compares Leo Strauss and Giorgio Agamben in terms of their theories of law, he begins with Strauss’s idea that philosophy must justify itself in terms of politics but that divine law constitutes politics. Bernstein compares Strauss’s and Agamben’s readings of Plato’s Laws, in which they both attempt to naturalize law by setting law against sovereignty, yet also maintaining the independent and prior existence of law. This idea of the priority of law leads them to want to affirm the priority of philosophy over theology. The task of philosophy would be to determine the natural laws by which violence can be replaced by wisdom, sovereignty by law, thereby also replacing the arbitrariness of theological conceptions with the rationality of philosophy. As a result, Strauss and Agamben both focus their attention on the gap between actual law and the true justice that should be the result of law’s rational application. Agamben is most concerned with the problem that if law is established by sovereignty, then the law will always be essentially a form of the violence that grounds sovereignty. His project is therefore to sever the connection between law and sovereignty so that law can establish itself as something that is based in justice rather than violence. Because for him sovereignty involves the violent actualization of law, Agamben’s attempt to imagine law outside of sovereignty leads him to move away from actualization and toward the prospect of a pure potentiality that would be the only form of true freedom. But if Agamben must discard actuality, this perhaps indicates that sovereignty is ultimately about real existence in the world and that, correspondingly, philosophy only gains practical significance as a form of theology, that is, as the reflection on how a particular religious conception manifests itself in the world. Strauss, in contrast to Agamben, sees law as divine law that derives its authority from a theological tradition, as opposed to justice, which Strauss describes as the result of a philosophical attempt to establish a true law that would be based not in tradition but in rational insight. While he supports the philosophical project of establishing justice in the place of tradition, he sees that an overturning of a theological tradition would threaten to bring the whole society into disorder. He thus does not argue for a replacement of religious texts by philosophical ones but rather for a continuing critical intervention by philosophy in the understanding of law in order to constantly improve the theological tradition. This criticism, as an ongoing accompaniment to a tradition, risks undermining the authority that is the foundation of law’s functioning. This risk must be minimized by maintaining the importance of the authority of the tradition in spite of the need to continually revise it to accept points of critique. Strauss seems to assume, though, that the authority of a theological tradition is the ultimate basis of law, even though the meaning of the tradition is subject to constant philosophical revision.
The recognition of the continuing importance of theology is also an affirmation of the foundational character of cultural traditions and communities in the development of moral philosophy. Afsoun Afsahi’s essay demonstrates this link between moral philosophy and community by arguing that Kant’s political theory is dispersed throughout his writings as the pervasive insistence that the use of reason can only be effective when it is exercised through the mediation of a community rather than through an isolated individual. Building on work by Hannah Arendt, Afsahi first locates this focus on an intersubjective context for reason and politics in the Critique of Judgment, in which Kant establishes the spectators of action as the bearers of the disinterested stance that is necessary for recognizing beauty. Afsahi then extends her argument to Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morality and the Critique of Practical Reason by focusing on the way in which Kant’s fundamental moral law of acting so that the principle of one’s action can be successfully universalized also depends on the imagination of community for its legitimacy. In Kant’s political writings, this community context becomes important in the way that the state depends on the public use of reason in scholarly debate in order to maintain its legitimacy and to advance toward an ever more perfect civil constitution. The publicity of laws and the freedom of the press become essential for maintaining and improving political order. Afsahi notes, however, that Kant limits the public use of reason to a learned class of scholars, thus creating a distinction between passive citizens, who are simply granted equality before the law, and active citizens, who are the only ones who may voice their opinions in the public sphere. While Afsahi criticizes this aspect of Kant’s argument, it would also be worthwhile to inquire whether such a structure might in fact be stable, in spite of its limitations. Such an inquiry would indicate something about the future prospects of, for instance, the Chinese state structure, in which only a subset of party members can act as active citizens.
Our section on the Critical Theory of the Contemporary addresses the question of twenty-first-century world order. Tim Luke analyzes the rhetoric of socialism in current U.S. politics, which includes both Democratic Party nostalgia and Republican Party red-baiting. The real harbinger of a new world order, however, is the increasing oligarchic control of state and economy in both the capitalist United States and nominally socialist China. Adrian Pabst refers to this development as the rise of the civilizational state as the newly dominant political unit to replace the nation-state. As civilizational states, the United States, China, and Russia are moving the world away from a unifying liberal order and toward conflicting civilizational spaces, each insisting on its own cultural exceptionalism. The call to civilizational values reinforces an oligarchic tendency to undermine free association and active communities of mutual aid. Similarly, in my consideration of the idea of world literature, I attempt to plot out the ways in which cultural dynamics might compel the division of the world into separate civilizational trajectories in the twenty-first century.
Notes
1. Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Julian E. Barnes, “Officials Disagree about Threat Presented by ISIS in Afghanistan,” New York Times, August 3, 2019.
