Pawel Figurski (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences), “Between the Sacred and the Secular Kingdom: Liturgical Struggles over the Proper Place of Politics in Medieval Christianity”
Robert Markus, in his retractatio published a few years before his death, argued that “Christian tradition has a legitimate place for the autonomy of the secular” (2006, p. 9). A thesis, derived from his reading of Augustine was an apology for the Christian concept of the secular conceived as the sphere “equivalent to what can be shared with non-Christians” (2006, p. 6). Nevertheless, these Augustinian ideas, according to Markus, were soon-after obscured in the Christian tradition by a de-secularizing tendency. This paved the way for the medieval ecclesiastical triumphalism and the so-called Constantinian Church, which appropriated the imperial Roman ideology once severely criticized by the bishop of Hippo.
Markus’ reading of Augustine was challenged by many; most harshly by John Milbank, claiming that the secular does not have the proper place in the Christian tradition for it “is quite simply a realm of sin” (2006, p. 406). For Milbank and the followers of the radical orthodoxy movement, the City of God exists in full perfection in heaven, but it is also a social reality here on earth. Therefore, political means of establishing and maintaining norms must also be embedded within the Church in order to build the true society. There the political power is only an inner-ecclesial one (Bruno 2014, p. 143–144).
With these two opposing conclusions derived from the Augustine thought I would like to venture out into the period formative for the emergence of the Christian stand on political power, namely, the European Middle Ages between ca. 800 and ca. 1200. In the course of these four centuries, there were many debates about the proper place of political forms of organization in the Christian tradition. The proposed solutions for the disputes over the nature of the kingdom, sacralized or de-sacralized, sometimes follow Markus’, other times follow Milbank’s readings of Augustine.
This paper will examine these competing theologies of the political that were not only exemplified in Christian worship but also influenced by political liturgies, in particular, prayers concerning war, peace, and kingship. Liturgical texts influenced other types of sources that strove to find the proper place of politics in medieval Christianity. Moreover, practiced ecclesiastical rituals offered new tools for conceiving political order that were more refined than both Markus’ and Milbank’s propositions.
Michael J.S. Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought (Baltimore, 2014).
Robert A. Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, 2006).
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford, 2006).
Sophia Mösch (Univ. Oxford), “Secularity and Sacrality in Carolingian Political Advice: Cicero, Virgil, and Augustine”
This paper will draw on my forthcoming monograph “Augustine and the Art of Ruling in the Carolingian Imperial Period” and on my postdoctoral project, comparing Western and Eastern portrayals of rulership under the Carolingian and Macedonian dynasties.
In my research examining the impact of Augustine of Hippo’s thought on Carolingian ideas of rulership and ethics, I was struck by the many entanglements of secularity and sacrality both in Augustine’s De civitate Dei and in the political advice to Carolingian rulers.
When I considered Augustine’s place in time and his occupation as a Christian writer, the problem of identifying the influences on the De Civitate Dei arose. While this is an impossible task to achieve, my questions concerning advice to rulers on secular and religious matters led me to foreground Cicero in the De civitate Dei. I explored H.-X. Arquillière’s argument that Augustine recognised natural vs. divine virtues and R. Dodaro’s thesis that Augustine conceived a transformation of the four virtutes civiles under Christian rulership, beyond the level of virtue attained by pagan rulers, who lack vera pietas. Cicero’s skeptical stance, his manner of considering supporting and opposing views, was evidently reflected in Augustine’s discourse on divine and worldly rule. By enhancing Polybius’ argument that the elements in Rome’s rise to supreme power were the “wisdom” and moral superiority of its individual citizens, Cicero set the basis for Roman political thinking. Augustine, by providing an alternative definition of ‘state’ based on divine law alongside that suggested by Cicero based on natural law, laid the foundation for a versatile application of his brand of thought in the Middle Ages. In a similar way, Augustine adapted Virgil for his argument: in Book II of the De civitate Dei Augustine adapts two verses of Virgil’s Aeneid and adds a spiritual dimension to “empire”, which according to the classical Roman tradition has a purely political and military meaning. While Virgil’s verses are part of Jupiter’s speech who says to Venus “For these [Romans] I set neither limits of government nor time limits; I have given an empire without end”,1 Augustine urges the Romans to abandon the cult of the gods and strive after the one and true God who “[…] sets neither limits of government nor time limits, He will give an Empire without end”.2
By means of Alcuin of York’s Epistolae and Hincmar of Rheims’s De regis persona et regio ministerio, I will show how two preeminent Carolingian political advisers reuse classical, Christianised topoi such as “wisdom” (sapientia) and “empire” (imperium), and, more interestingly, how they pick up the art of remodelling and transforming them in order to speak to a fundamentally different political and religious situation.
1 His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono;
Imperium sine fine dedi. Aen. 1.278f. Another significant passage on imperium in the Aeneid is Aen. 8.714–8.731.
2 […] nec metas rerum nec tempora ponit,
Imperium sine fine dabit. Civ. II 29, p. 96, ll. 7–8.
Conrad Leyser (Univ. Oxford), “Two Concepts of the Secular”
Is ‘the secular’ an idea—or is it a thing? Much discussion presumes the latter. There are, accordingly, histories of secularization, usually in conjunction with some notion of modernity; or of the reverse process, ‘de-secularization’, which Robert Markus in The End of Ancient Christianity (1990) saw as taking place in the period from Augustine to Gregory the Great. In his earlier study, Saeculum (1970), however, Markus had treated ‘the secular’ in a different way, as a category within Augustine’s theology of history and the social order. The ‘secular’ in this sense is not descriptive: it is a political intervention, a way of designating a neutral zone, in which all parties must suspend claims to absolute certainty and make what peace they can. This lecture is an attempt to untangle these two notions of the secular, by looking at the reception of Augustine in early medieval and in modern contexts.
Sean Hannan (MacEwan Univ.), “Messianic Politics and the Present Time: Augustine’s Distentio against Agamben’s Kairos”
Taking his lead from Walter Benjamin’s messianic present and Martin Heidegger’s primordial temporality, Giorgio Agamben has expressed discomfort with received notions of ‘ordinary time.’ Striving to break free of this view of time as empty and homogeneous, he has sought out ways to rethink time as more meaningful and fulfilled, ultimately taking Pauline messianism as his model. In the Apostle Paul’s transformative use of the phrase ὁ νῦν καιρὸς (or: “the now-time”), Agamben sees a crucial first step towards the overcoming of empty chronos (time simpliciter). Agamben’s project, as glimpsed through the early work Infancy and History and the later exegesis of Paul in The Time That Remains, can thus be seen as an attempt to bring time back to life by way of kairos, the messianic present of Paul.
This paper aims to reappraise the feasibility of Agamben’s project by contrasting it with an account of time offered by another foundational figure of Christianity: Augustine of Hippo. In the eleventh book of his Confessions, Augustine confronts the challenge posed by temporality, especially the paradox of the present. As it turns out, the present, which seems to be the foundational point of temporal existence, also tends to disappear into fleeting nothingness whenever we begin to reflect upon it. This absence of the present leads Augustine to conceive of temporality as distentio or “stretching-apart.” By this, he means that time is a kind of tensile force which stretches temporal beings apart, destabilizing them from within.
By contrasting Augustinian distentio with Agamben’s retrieval of the Pauline kairos, we can get a better idea of whether or not ancient Christian thought still harbours potential for humankind’s ongoing attempt to make sense of temporality. More pressingly, this contrast will allow us to determine what kinds of political futures are left open by the Augustinian and Pauline approaches to time. For Agamben, certainly, the question of time is always a political one; his interest in Pauline messianism is ultimately rooted in a commitment to revolutionary politics in the Benjaminian tradition.
Augustine, meanwhile, was less amenable to political messianism, which does not mean that his philosophy of time is necessarily without political consequences. The question that remains is: what kind of politics is made possible by an approach to the present time that refuses to name it as a messianic moment of wholesale transformation? To suggest a tentative thesis: perhaps the possibility for social change does not limit itself to auspicious instants or key kairoi. Perhaps, instead, a rejection of imminent messianism and an embrace of homogeneous time can open up all of temporality—all of history—to the possibility of change.
Josh Timmermann (UBC), “Tempora periculosa, dies mali: Tyconius, Augustine, and Their Carolingian Readers’ Responses to Pauline Eschatology”
In the New Testament letters traditionally attributed to Paul, there are numerous warnings about the “dangerous times” and “evil days” fast approaching, divine portents for the End of time. While some recent historical scholarship insists that Paul fully expected the End to arrive within his lifetime or soon after, other modern commentators—including, notably, the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben—hold that Paul was anticipating not the ultimate times of the Apocalypse, but the penultimate times. The implications of this difference are highly significant, yet both approaches emphasize the deep sense of eschatological, or messianic, tension shot through the Pauline epistolary corpus. It is the fateful draining-out of this tension from later Catholic doctrine with which Agamben takes issue in his polemical essay The Church and the Kingdom. Yet, in that short essay, building from his earlier The Time That Remains, Agamben is only able to give a cursory summary of the long and complex trajectory by which the messianic temporality of Paul became relatively muted, interpreted in ways that allowed for the Church to develop and flourish as a singular (temporal) ecclesio-political entity.
My paper will focus on two moments within that longer trajectory: First, on the strategies for interpreting difficult, eschatological scriptural passages that took root in late Roman Africa, particularly in the writings of the Donatist theologian Tyconius, who developed a “spiritual” approach to scriptural hermeneutics, and of Augustine, who was significantly influenced by Tyconius’s ideas despite his schismatic affiliation. Second, on the readings and discursive uses of eschatological passages in the Pauline letters during the Carolingian era, a period marked by its major writers’ constant emphases on correction, reform, and the importance of learning from the teachings of the Church’s great, orthodox authorities—including, of course, Augustine, but also to some extent Tyconius, upon whom Augustine had, in the words of one modern historian, “bestowed the benediction of patristic authority.”
Tyconius and Augustine bequeathed to the early Middle Ages an eschatology that was predominantly ecclesiological in its orientation, which Carolingian readers subtly adapted to address concerns specific to their own circumstances. Although it was almost universally agreed that they were living in the Sixth, and final, Age of the World, the “radical agnosticism” of Augustine and Tyconius regarding the precise date of the End, the ability for humans to confidently predict it, and the durations of the world’s temporal Ages meant that preparation of the Christian community was urgently necessary as the world could end at any time, but also that planning for a longer-term future of ecclesia and imperium was possible, and indeed prudent, because the Sixth Age could stretch on for many more generations. The central role of the institutional Church—Tyconius’s corpus bipartitum, made corpus permixtum in Augustine’s Catholicizing adaptation—in this eschatological equation coincided, in the Carolingian context, with the indispensable role of the Frankish sovereign as “guarantor” of orthodoxy throughout the imperium Christianum. A new and particular sort of Christian politics, structured by a distinctive “political theology” (in something close to the Schmittian sense of this term), took shape from this politicized ecclesiology. Examining the uses and interpretations of key eschatological passages in the Pauline letters is one possible, particularly revealing window onto these critical developments in the history of Christian thought and discourse, and onto the shaping of earlier figures and their (novel) ideas as suitably “patristic” and thus functionally authoritative.
Catherine Conybeare (Bryn Mawr College), “‘Ubi cubes in meridie?’ Augustine, Africa, and the Song of Songs”
Augustine of Hippo is today celebrated in Algeria as a great pre-Islamic thinker and native son. To African American Catholics, he is an unofficial saint of refuge. But to many in his own time and place, Augustine was not African enough. In this paper, building on my essay “Africitas Augustini Hipponensis” (JMLat2015), I shall focus on the African Christians whom Augustine dubbed schismatic and “Donatists,” and specifically on their reading of the Song of Songs. This reading survives to us only in Augustine’s derisive commentary upon it in his sermons (notably sermons 46, 138, and 162A); but from these sermons we learn that the Song of Songs provides part of the justification to the Donatists for situating the true church in Africa.
Characterizing Donatism as an African protest movement goes back at least to Frend 1952. Tilley 1997 and Merdinger 1997 provide the theological angle. What I wish to do in this paper is something rather different: to attempt to reconstruct the affective dynamics inherent in the Donatists’ reading of the Song of Songs; and to trace the violence that Augustine’s opposition to it performs on his own African identity. I shall use two more or less contemporary texts to illuminate these dynamics. The first is the best-known novel of the great Algerian Berber writer Kateb Yacine, Nedjma (1956), which may be read as an allegory of the search for origins and for a political situatedness, focused through the beloved but elusive female figure of Nedjma herself. The second is the new non-fiction work by Wael B. Hallaq, Restating Orientalism (2018), which argues that “secular humanism … is not only anthropocentric, structurally intertwined with violence, and incapable of sympathy with the nonsecular Other, but it is also anchored, per force, in a structure of thought wholly defined by modes of sovereign domination.” Ultimately I shall argue that in this instance Augustine was “incapable of sympathy with the nonsecular Other,” and that the urgent hostility of his response to the Donatists betrays the inescapable interpenetration of politics and theology, complicated by personal loyalties suppressed and disavowed.
Matthew Gillis (UT Knoxville), “They Devour My People Like Bread: Suffering and the Sacred”
In this paper I examine the theme of the sacred and the sacrilegious in Abbo of Saint-Germain’s Sermo 14 De fundamento et incremento Christianitatis (On the Foundation and Growth of Christianity). Beginning with a discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality as an anti-theological tract that uses the tools of the theologian to dismantle moral theology, the paper then considers how the genealogical method is theological in origin. I use Abbo’s early tenth-century sermon to argue that theological genealogy’s goal was to reveal the truth of earthly and spiritual power by assembling their meaning from scripture, which was both powerfully historical and moral, while always remaining more than historical in its spiritual, unearthly potential. My central focus is Abbo’s monsters—the raptores—sacrilegious, flesh-eating horrors that plagued the contemporary church. I approach these monsters as a mode of theological expression, which enabled Abbo to cast the clerical and monastic orders as the sacred city of God. Abbo depicted the city of God and its enemies in terms that were both historical and beyond time in order to fashion “true Christians” as the raptores’ victims. In this sense, my paper turns the tables on Nietzsche’s historical and “untimely” genealogical methods, by revealing how he simply inverted Christianity’s traditional monsters and victims in his anti-theological tract in order to envision a post-moral world.
Mo Pareles (UBC), “Wulfstan’s Captive Woman”
The war captive of Deuteronomy 21:10-14, stripped of pagan raiments and converted to wifehood, is a well-known figure of translation and interpretation from Origen and Jerome to the moderns. The steps of stripping, re-adorning, and transforming the woman enact the sovereignty of her husband/captor over her body and, by analogy, that of the masculine translator over his text. This figure reappears in a new guise in the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (Sermon of the Wolf to the English, C-revision of 1014), as Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York, rebukes the English for sins that have left them open to conquest, including (he claims) the routine purchase and resale of women for sexual assault, first by their own people and then by the conquerors. Here, translatio imperii is portrayed as the transfer of an abused woman without any of the glamour with which this trope usually appears in the rhetoric of linguistic (literary and Biblical) translation. This passage has been read as an allusion to real violence against women and as a (still) shocking rhetorical flourish, but it is rarely recognized as a Biblical translation—in fact, a condensed sequence of Bible translations consistent with Wulfstan’s audacious habit of rewriting the Old Testament as a source of English legal authority. This paper reads Wulfstan’s captive woman at the intersection of political and sexual sovereignty, as the abrogation of a woman’s sovereignty over her own body (or, more precisely, the abrogation of God’s sovereignty over the woman’s body) becomes central to Anglo-Saxon land claims in a time of conquest.
Noah Blan (Univ. Michigan), “Theorizing a Carolingian Ecological Sovereignty”
This paper examines how making better Christians (correctio) intertwined with controlling nature in the eighth- and ninth-century pan-European Carolingian empire. It proposes a complex of ideas about righteous control of environments that helped to justify Carolingian domination that I call “Carolingian ecological sovereignty.” This concept helps explain how the rhetoric and exercise of power over nature legitimated Carolingian claims of hegemony over bodies and spaces in Europe.
My sense of ecological sovereignty rests on a critical reading of what Giorgio Agamben calls the “anthropological machine,” meaning the mechanism by which people articulated human ontology by identifying and excluding what is non-human as the basis for political power. Agamben claims that its modern incarnation functions by “animalizing the human,” while premodern variants tended to humanize the animal. In either era the “anthropological machine” depended on the exceptional existence of a person whose truly human characteristics could never be fully realized but only refined and rearticulated in opposition to what was less human. This paper challenges Agamben’s epochal bifurcation of sovereignty by examining Carolingian sources that both animalized humans and humanized animals. At the center of the Carolingian “anthropological machine” was the unattainable “new Adam”—Christ in final perfection, but imperfectly embodied by his human designate, Charlemagne, whose human failings tied into both personal and collective salvation.
The paper asks not where we may locate Agamben’s machine in the eighth and ninth centuries, but rather how sovereignty predicated on the domination, supervision, and “redemption” of nature shaped Carolingian discourses of power. As Courtney Booker and Abigail Firey have shown, Carolingian politics were constrained, stretched, and impelled by religious and cultural discourses shared among Carolingian elites, who shaped and were reshaped by these interpretive frameworks over the course of the eighth and ninth century. This paper exposes a discourse of “happy kingdoms,” which emerged in the 780s and 790s, that proved a key constitutive element both in Charlemagne’s kingship and in that of Carolingian rulers who came after him. It represented the Carolingian empire as a garden-paradise, showing how Carolingian thinkers saw in prevailing environmental conditions the measure of the ruler’s success or failure.
The discourse reflected neither an explicit “caesaropapism” on Charlemagne’s part, nor a deceptively “political Augustinism”—the untoward expansion of ecclesiastical-political power within and over the state. While the discourse of “happy kingdoms” derived from an amalgam of ancient, biblical, and patristic sources, Augustine’s texts were only several of many such Carolingian repurposings. And, following Mayke de Jong’s work, the entangling of Frankish church and Carolingian state reflected not ecclesiastical overreach, but rather the working out of Carolingian theology and politics according to the goals of correctio. Carolingian ecological sovereignty was inflected by correctio, and therefore in the “redemption” and proper management of bodies and spaces. Theorizing a Carolingian ecological sovereignty shows the era to be a vital “missing link” in the long and circuitous history of sovereignty in western political history—one that connects Augustine (via his early medieval interlocutors) to Agamben.
Abigail Firey (Univ. Kentucky), “‘The split and shaken throne’: Pivots in Political Theology in Tenth-Century Western Francia”
Theories of sacral kingship may operate well when royal or imperial power is relatively stable, or when the memory of consolidated royal or imperial power is fresh enough to substitute for stability. What, however, happens to political theology when royal power changes hands frequently, and competes with other, ascendant forms of power, such as that exercised by counts and bishops? Because the end of the Carolingian dynasty is often treated historiographically as a “transfer of empire” to the Ottonians, surprisingly little attention has been given to the political theology set forth by bishops in western Francia in the tenth century, where the throne alternated between Carolingian and Capetian scions, before passing definitively into Capetian control. During this period of royal instability and rising comital power, two councils, held at Fismes (881) and Trosly (909), offered descriptions of governmental powers. Their records show substantial shifts from a sacralised royal identity to a division of royal and ecclesiastical powers.
The Council of Trosly is reckoned as one of the most extraordinary expositions of political theory composed before the later middle ages. It details the honor of the church and the conduct of kings. Trosly’s description of government writ large is a performative appeal to past authorities, to imply a seemingly timeless foundation for governmental powers. Despite that performance, Trosly suggests that some of the foundations of the political edifice erected by the Carolingians were cracking. In pressing the question of relations between secular and ecclesiastical powers, Trosly began to pivot toward distinction between those powers. While still citing Scripture, patristics, and Carolingian capitularies as authorities, Trosly extended political theory by integrating excerpts from the Liber Scintillarum of Defensor of Ligugé, and the anonymous De duodecim abusivis saeculi. Whereas conciliar texts previously eschewed citation of contemporary or recent works, Trosly drew on the legacy of Hincmar of Reims, especially his De ecclesiis et capellis, and on the Council of Fismes (881), the record of which was drafted by the aged Hincmar, as one of his last acts.
The result was a more oppositional relationship between ecclesiastical and secular lords, rather than the collaborative arrangement that had proven so effective in governing the Carolingian empire. In this respect, these councils foreshadow the rhetoric of Gelasian political theology that would escalate in the Ottonian empire and papal principalities in the next century. In western Francia, however, the pressure on ecclesiastical privileges was not from growing imperial power, but from the fragmentation of royal authority and either delegation or usurpation of that authority to counts. The collaboration between secular and ecclesiastical elite crumbled without the theocratic ideology that had been its adhesive. Lacking the mimesis of divine kingship, and the imagery and rituals asserting the role of king or emperor as vicarious representative of divine authority, comital power was blatantly mundane. What political theology could impose a theoretical order in this situation? That is the question this paper seeks to address.
Geoffrey Koziol (UC Berkeley), “Necessity, Exception, and Post-Carolingian Justification of Rebellion”
This paper examines three at least partially successful political rebellions of the late- and post-Carolingian world: those of Boso of Vienne (879), Robert of Neustria (922), and the Saxons (1073). All three share a striking commonality: they justify rebellion in terms of “necessity.” This appears to have been a borrowing from the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, in particular, a pseudo-decretal of Felix IV which had introduced the maxim “Necessitas non legem habet.” The allusion to the maxim hints at a degree of hitherto unsuspected learning and self-reflection on the part of the rebellions’ leaders, as well as suggesting that later rebellions learned from earlier ones, so that “necessity” came close to an accepted doctrine of rebellion. The questions are why necessity came to play this role, and whether reliance on a doctrine of necessity had anything to do with the success of these rebellions.
Michael Moore (Univ. Iowa), “Political Augustinism: Modern Political Theology and the Carolingians”
The thesis of political Augustinism, put forward in 1937 by H.-X. Arquillière, in his book l’Augustinisme politique, has been exceptionally influential. The book has served as a touchstone for scholars of medieval political thought, especially for students of the Carolingian period. This paper will re-examine Arquillière’s thesis in light of Carolingian evidence, and suggest that Augustine did not dominate political thought quite as Arquillière argued.
Secondly, Arquillière’s contribution to the history of medieval political thought was made in the context of French-language discussions of political theology. The debate on politische Theologie first emerged among German thinkers (C. Schmitt and E. Peterson) and was then taken up with a very different tonality by French thinkers, who explored in turn a somewhat different concept of théologie politique (J. Maritain, H.-X. Arquillière). French thinkers (E. Gilson included) were concerned to revive the importance of theology for the modern world, while rejecting the neo-Catholic nationalist politics of Maurras and the Action français. In the framework of these debates one can point to certain developments in medieval historiography, in the cases of Alois Dempf and Ernst Kantorowicz, which had their own connections to the German tradition of political theology.
Mark Vessey (UBC), “Political Augustinianism in the Canadian West: C. N. Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (1940)”
This paper will go behind the historiographical horizon sketched 20 years ago in my introduction to the proceedings of the 27th annual Medieval Workshop at UBC, published as ‘History, Apocalypse and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God’ in Augustinian Studies 30.2 (1999). That horizon was marked by a lecture given in Montreal in 1950 by H.-I. Marrou, entitled L’Ambivalence du temps de l’histoire chez saint Augustin, origin for a research trajectory that would reach its highpoint with R. A. Markus’s Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (1970) and extend through the same author’s later work down to Christianity and the Secular (2006), as well as (e.g.) into Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom (2ndedn. 2003). For the 45th Workshop, I look back a decade further, not in this instance to Marrou’s Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (1938), now almost universally acknowledged as the founding experiment for what would belatedly appear as Anglo-American ‘late antiquity,’ but to a work signed off by its author from ‘Oxford, July 1939,’ so 80 years ago next spring, with words of gratitude for help received ‘from Professor R. G. Collingwood and Mr. R. Syme.’ Innocent of both Schmitt’s ‘Politische Thelogie’ and Arquillère’s L’Augustinisme politique, Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture probably has a better claim than either to be seen as the repressed theological-political ‘other’ of mainstream, post-1960s Anglophone historical scholarship having Augustine as its subject. It is now a very strange book, not only because of the way it was written off the scene by Marrou-Markus-Brown. Part of its strangeness was original to Cochrane (1889–1945), an Ontario-born classicist and ancient historian who taught at the University of Toronto, published books on the Canadian explorer David Thompson (1924) and on Thucydides (1929), and died before he could produce the book of a set of lectures on the City of God that he had just given at Yale University. Another factor, more significant than any influence of Ronald Syme’s beyond the work’s initial focus on an Augustan ‘revolution,’ was the idealist philosophy of history developed in the 1920s and ‘30s by R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), a writer whose extraordinarily rich and challenging intellectual legacy has been seized upon afresh over the last few decades but not yet, so far as I am aware, had much exposure in contemporary genealogies and projects of late Romanism, early medievalism or historically minded para-Augustinianism. By going back to a pre-WW2 moment in intellectual history that is also a nearly prehistoric moment for our present disciplinarity, and teasing out the special character of Cochrane’s somewhat (how?) Collingwoodian contribution to thinking ‘western’ politics, histories and theologies over the longue durée, I hope to give another posthumous twist to a career that has already been convincingly credited with helping to inspire such later Canadian adventures in large-scale cultural and cognitive history as those associated with the names of Harold Innis, Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan.
György Geréby (Central European Univ., Budapest), “‘There is no church without an emperor’: On the Political Theology of the Christian Roman Empire”
The term “Byzantium” is a legacy of post-reformation Western scholarship. In order to understand the strategies of legitimacy in the Eastern Roman Empire one ought to add “Christian,” since the Christian aspect, as it is well known, became a foundational aspect of the surviving Eastern Empire. While originally the Christian attitude towards the Empire was ambiguous, a new imperial legitimacy developed following the Gospel of Luke, as interpreted originally by Melito, Origen and Eusebius, but then developed further by e.g. Romanos. The normative idea of the Empire became attached to the Christian polity as a means of achieving the universal mission. (Not without certain caveats, like the ones raised by Gregory Nazianzen.) Again, since the role of the Empire was thought of as a temporal institution (as reflected in the legends of the “Last Emperor”), the roles of the emperor and the church (the oecumenical patriarch) were separate, while at the same time mutually interdependent. The two realms were to be unified at the eschaton (reflected in the iconography of the “hetoimasia”). Runciman justly called this arrangement as “theocracy” but as Dagron has shown it, there was no “caesaropapism.” The paper will look at the specifics of the foundations of the claims of legitimacy by analysing the well-known epistle of patriarch Antony IV to the Great Prince of Moscow (1396), and the De caermoniis of Konstantine Porphyrogennetos. Comparing the letter of Pope Gelasius to Emperor Anastasius to the Novella VI of Justinian and the epistle of Theodore the Studite to emperor Nikephoros provides interesting differences in political theology.
Ana M. Montero (Saint Louis Univ.), “Royal Theological Virtues and Political Propaganda: Alfonso and Isabel of Castile”
In the years 1344–1351, Franciscan Juan García de Castrojeriz composed a commentary of the De regimine principum written by the General Prior of the Augustinian order and Aristotelian thinker, Giles of Rome (c. 1243–1316). This political vernacular treatise, known as Glosa castellana al Regimiento de Príncipes, arguably became the most influential synthesis of politics and theology in Castile (maybe only surpassed by the Alfonsine second Partida). In this paper we investigate the influence of Glosa castellana at the delicate juncture taking place during last years of Enrique IV’s contested reign. More precisely, we aim to compare two works composed under the influence of the Glosa castellana for the education of those future princes that could inherit the throne after failed king Enrique IV. One is the Exortación o información de buena e sana doctrina, penned by Pedro de Chinchilla circa 1467 and addressed to prince Alfonso, who briefly reigned as Alfonso XII. The second work is Jardín de nobles doncellas by fray Martín de Córdoba, a treatise written after Alfonso´s death in 1468, as a way to build up political support among the nobility for Isabel, Enrique´s half-sister and future queen of Castile. In these two works, as it could be expected, both candidates to the Castilian throne are said to stand in for God vicariously, a tour de force that was more difficult to achieve in the case of Isabel for obvious gender issues within a society with a prevalent misogynistic worldview. Therefore, both Alfonso and Isabel were taught different virtues and embodied a slightly different conception of justice that still pointed to the supremacy of Christian justice they should embody—thus, whereas faith is the first virtue for Alfonso, mercy is highlighted in the case of Isabel who is arguably the first Iberian princess to be equated to Virgin Mary. For this act of bold Christian propaganda, fray Martín de Córdoba combined Castrojeriz´s ideas with images taken from Seneca´s On clemency. Briefly, the Glosa castellana al Regimiento de Príncipes and Sobre la clemencia (which had been translated into Castilian by Alonso de Cartagena in the 1430s) fed the propaganda machinery that would strengthen the alliance between theology and politics while paving the way for the development of absolutism. This movement would be contested through literary works such as Cárcel de amor and Celestina by means of the portrayal of female cruel characters.
Lester Field, Jr. (Univ. Mississippi), “From Πολιτικὴ θεολογία to ‘Political Theology’: From Hellenic Religion to Modern Ideology and Historiographical Commonplace”
Avoiding current typologies, which, at best, describe the past in present terms rather than explain it in its own, a careful examination of historical usage seems in order. Ironically, given modern recourse to his work, Eusebius of Caesarea coined πολιτικὴ θεολογία in terms of Ελληνικὴ θεολογία—not Christianity—and contextually, his usage hardly seems unique or novel. Porphyry, for example, had used ἀνοικεοτάτη θεολογία in much the same way. By Hellenic and Hellenistic understandings, after all, εὐσέβεια entailed definition ranging from “religion” to “loyalty,” that is, to the state. The polis itself seemed sacral as well as “natural.” As Aristotle put it, “Only gods and beasts live apart.” As Augustine’s critique of Varro’s theologia civilis attested, such understandings proved regionally or linguistically diffuse as well as archeologically deep.
By the same token, the ancient “church” described itself as the ἐκκλησία, which, in pre-Christian Greek had indicated the representative assembly of the polis. The term, which passed into Christian Latin as ecclesia, had presupposed its self-understanding as political assembly of the City or Kingdom of God. It re-presented the City of God; so its δόγμα seemed “law.”
Eventually “liturgical” constitutions in Byzantium and Europe made the emperor the temporal head of the Church on earth. Conversely, with the re-emergence of Roman law, “law-centered kingship” increasingly replaced liturgical rule with an institutionally distinct, if not yet separate, “church” and “state.” Even before the Enlightenment, in 1670, Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus attempted to define the foundation of this “new” order. Since it remained problematic even after the American and French Revolutions, Auguste Comte did likewise in 1822. Presupposing the “progress of civilization,” Comte argued that “theological politics,” which had given way to “metaphysical politics,” now had to give way to “positive politics.”
In 1922, the jurisprudent, Carl Schmitt, coined “political theology.” Addressing God politically, acclamations to “one God,” explored by Erik Peterson fascinated Schmitt, all the more since they pertained to the ἐκκλησία as the institutional extension of Christ’s historical body. Since “political theology” seemed not “part of theology but of political thought,” imperial theology seemed secularization. Eusebius, for example, reverted to the cosmic monarchy, in which Logos and emperor participated.
Nicaea rejected it. Of “anarchy, polyarchy, and monarchy,” Gregory Nazianzen explained, monarchy could neither impose unity on others of the same nature nor divide itself and so lost “its political-theological character” to ineffable Trinitarian community, which “fundamentally fulfilled the break with any “political theology.” Peterson pitied Schmitt, who had become a Nazi in 1933 and only cited him once, in the last footnote of Monotheism as Political Problem. Eschatological polity precluded further politicization; Trinity belied monarchy.
Acknowledging Peterson’s “brilliant discussion,” Kantorowicz nonetheless posited “Christian political theology”: to the epicletic union of Christ’s historical and “mystical body,” Western jurisprudence responded with the “state’s mystical body” or king’s two bodies. Thanks to Kantorowicz and Peterson, then, a category of secular jurisprudence became historiographically invaluable, even commonplace.
Jon Beasley-Murray (UBC), “Friends, Enemies, and Others: Political Theology and the Art of the Encounter”
Kevin Attell (Cornell Univ.), “The Empty Throne: Agamben and Political Theology”
Ever since the publication in 1995 of his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben’s work has drawn upon and been associated with debates concerning political theology. Homo Sacer also marks a significant move in Agamben’s thought toward the overtly political philosophy that he has been pursuing for the last two decades and for which he is best known. This paper will examine the juncture in Homo Sacer where Carl Schmitt’s account of sovereignty is incorporated into Agamben’s work and will trace some of the theoretical and methodological developments arising from that moment.