The Revolution in the West and The Theologico-Political Question – Discourses on Minerva
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development…but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.” So wrote Carl Schmitt in his treatise on the nature of politics in Political Theology. While Schmitt’s comments on political theology have served as the foundational basis for the academic discipline known as political theology, which is the study of how theological concepts serve as the basis for political notions, there is something deeper that should be drawn out from Schmitt’s famous tome. If politics is rooted in theology, it follows that political manifestations are incarnate instantiations of the theological imagination.
Norman Cohn wrote how late medieval millenarianism gave way to the revolutionary impetus of politics in The Pursuit of the Millennium. In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch took the theology of hope from Christianity and Judaism and tried to synthesize it with the hopeful utopian aspirations of Marxism. While Bloch’s Christianity is non-dogmatic and rooted in a Muntzerian reformist Protestantism, the connectivity between the theology of hope and reform and political utopianism is undeniably linked even if Marxism draws from a heretical understanding of theology. Leszek Kołakowski also provided background context to the mystical millenarianism of medieval mystics like Meister Eckhart and John Scotus Eriugena, and how their imminent theologies and platonic deification outlooks established the foundation for the dialectic of conflict and imminence to emerge; Kołakowski, then, exemplifies the Schmittian definition of intellectual political theology in the first volume of Main Currents of Marxism just as much as Bloch does. Countless other academic studies have linked the politics of the revolutionary left, Marxism especially, as being rooted in the theology of millenarianism too numerous to blanket cite here. Following from Schmitt’s definition, this academic enterprise of drawing the connections between theology and politics is incredibly useful for academia but still fails to reach at a more fundamental reality about the relationship of theology, politics, and society—the theologico-political question.
It follows from the reality of the theologico-political question that civilization is rooted in theology, a theology, some sort of theology, whether nominally atheistic or explicitly clerico-fascist. Moreover, civilizations rise and fall since all civilizations are living organisms. This was the great insight of Oswald Spengler. Furthermore, civilizational cycles, rise and fall, and this life-cycle is foundational to the sociology and philosophy of history offered by Ibn Khaldun. I bring this up to lay the foundational for what will be elaborated on in the forthcoming pages of this work.
We hear the word “Western civilization” utilized a lot, as if Western civilization is this monolithic and near eternal organism that has never exhausted itself until the present crisis which the West finds itself in. I wish to challenge this presuppose on several ways. While I will be guilty of using the term Western civilization for various reasons, it is clear to me that Western civilization is more of the umbrella term to discuss the rise, fall, and permutated inheritance of the civilizations that occupy the continent of Europe and European diaspora, principally in North America but also in Oceania. More eminent scholars like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee have addressed this question of civilization in far greater depth than I will here, but it goes without saying that I take much from them in this reflection on the ongoing disintegration of the West.
Western civilization, then, is not a monolithic or eternal organic civilization but that term used to describe the various civilizations which, despite their deaths, passed on a germ of inheritance to the new civilization that replaced it. I follow the genealogical model of Toynbee more than Spengler’s metaphysical understanding of civilization at least in this regard: Western civilization is that unique civilizational organism that had emerged from the permutable life, death, and inheritance of Hellenic, Roman, Christian-Gothic (or as Spengler calls it, Faustian), and Westphalian civilizations which constitute the germs of Western civilization. These preceding civilizations were, indeed, biological and organic; they experienced their rise and fall in accordance with the cycle of civilizational life but, unlike the current predicament we are facing today, also passed on aspects of their genes to the civilization that arose to replace it. Thus, we see from the rise and fall of Hellenic civilization the passing on into Roman civilization the germ of Greek philosophy and literature, to the Roman civilization which arose in its place. That permutation sank into the organism of Roman civilization that, despite the politics and legal codes of Rome being unique compared to that of the Greeks, Roman high culture had the germ of Greek inheritance to it. When Roman civilization fell it passed on the legal germ and the Greco-Roman philosophic and literary tradition (not to mention Ptolemaic science) germ to the civilization that arose in its place: Christian-Gothic civilization which fused, according to Spengler, the metaphysical-theological impulse of Christianity (infinitude) and warrior-heroism of the Gothic tribes which constituted, in wholeness, what many called Christendom and Christian civilization. This civilization, like the others before it, also fell. Christian-Gothic civilization, sometimes and historically referred to as Christendom, fell following the decadence of the Renaissance and schismatic tearing of the cathedral body of Christendom through the fires of the Reformation, but this long seed of permutation kept the preceding inheritances in the birth of Westphalian or cameralist civilization defined by the civilizational organism of state nationalism. Now, however, the organism that is Westphalian civilization is on its last legs and experiencing its terminal decline phase.
The present crisis of the West is not that the current civilization is in the throes of dying. As any student of history or civilization knows, especially from the pens of Spengler and Toynbee, all civilizations fall. Indeed, Christian Scripture contains as much when the Apostle John and St. Matthew the Evangelist write that the kingdoms of the world pass away. This phenomenon of civilizational rise and fall should not be surprising though the depreciated consciousness of mere politics and homo economicus (the economic individual) often obscure this factual reality to us.
The present crisis of the West is that, for the first time in the chain of civilizational permutation, the inheritance of the germs of the preceding civilizations is at risk of being severed altogether. The dream of a mechanical, rather than organic, of a socially engineered, rather than inherited, civilization is on the cusp of actualization—or so the prophets and priests of progressivism fancy to think. Combine other crises like external colonization and the eradication of the family through the castration of fatherhood which subsequently cuts off the possibility of motherhood, and this permutated civilization which we call Western civilization is on the verge of dying as it becomes a new civilization but this new civilization, unlike the new civilizations that preceded it, will be altogether foreign and deracinated from any inheritance of the past. The new civilization being born is being born in a wasteland, a cultural and intellectual wasteland, that represents the return of barbarism and the attempt to build civilization from a barbarism that culture and civilization, many millennia ago, had already successfully banished. The conceit of the modern is in thinking that by returning to barbarism and building anew out of that barbarism a better and more equitable society can be constructed without the supposed injustices, inequalities, and baggage of past civilizational inheritances.
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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