Introduction: The Long Shadow Of Political Theology

Strictly speaking, the phrase "political theology in the Middle Ages" is anachronistic—even anachronistic on different levels. But to identify such tensions between a historical environment and a complex meaning can become a way of unfolding the latter's intellectual potential. In our specific case, it may enable us to see more distinctly that long shadow by which a certain layer of medieval thought has reached the present.

Above all, the phrase "political theology" would have looked tautological in medieval eyes because politics without divine orientation, as an independent public use of power, was not supposed to be a practical or a cosmological possibility. Likewise, the concept of theology stood in a certain tension with the pre-modern understanding that any kind of knowledge that humans could dispose of was disclosed either by divine revelation, or by an interpretation of the world as God's creation. In other words, to speak of "political theologies" assumes two differentiations that were not given in the medieval world. One is the differentiation between religion and politics, as it was finally (and not even then with lasting success) established in reaction to the religious wars through the Westphalian Peace of 1648. The other, less functional, more ideological and therefore also more aggressive differentiation was the central dogma of eighteenth-century Enlightenment: it ruled that all acceptable knowledge had to be exclusively based on human experience and human intelligence. Divine revelation was tolerable only as long as it could claim full compatibility with the laws of the human mind. Seen from a chronological position "behind" these two thresholds, the notion of a political theology does not only look tautological. It appears to be part of a general vision of the Middle Ages as a proverbially "dark" period. In the most critical version of Enlightenment ideology, the sheer existence of "political theology" would have been subsumed under the so-called "treason of the priests," under the obsessive imagination about a conspiracy of the clergy designed to abuse those who were not in possession of knowledge and power.

All of this, that is the vision of the Middle Ages as a dark and repressive period and, as a consequence, the identification of political theology as a problematic concept, has long been part of our cultural baggage. The truly interesting question is, therefore, why that period and some of its key concepts have developed a new fascination in the intellectual situation of the past decades. The notion of political theology for once seems to lie at the intersection between different currents of contemporary culture, both intellectual and political, that come together to produce an astonishing effect. The one author that we associate with political theology today is, more than anybody else, Carl Schmitt, whose reputation, like that of Martin Heidegger, will forever be tainted by his effort and ambition to provide (in Schmitt's case, from the position of legal studies) a sound intellectual foundation for the early stages of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist movement—vis-à-vis which effort, despite negative reactions from the Party, neither Schmitt nor Heidegger ever took definitive distance. After a good hundred years during which (following the bourgeois revolutions and reforms), political legitimacy had been regarded as absolutely incompatible with any religious position or value, Schmitt, in a number of publications from the early 1920s, not only highlighted the fact that much of the conceptual structure of modern statehood could be considered as the outcome of a secularization of previous religious institutions and their theological meanings; he also argued, more provocatively, that theological values could serve perfectly in the present to lend legitimacy to declarations of the state of emergency (which action Schmitt defined as the essence of political power).

Paradoxically somehow, while his writings, up until the present day, have been received with considerable reservation among conservative (and even right-wing) political circles, Schmitt's work, in different modalities, has found its strongest resonance among the intellectual Left. It has either been understood (such is the case of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben) as a conceptual construction that, perhaps against its own intentions, makes evident the perversions...