The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton by Graham Hammill (review)

Graham Hammill has written an impressive study of political theology in early modern England. His book is distinguished by its ambition and range, and by its scholarly and intellectual depth. At its core lie three brilliant chapters that offer an original and persuasive understanding of political theology in Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Harrington. Hammill goes on to explore the impact of his distinctive account of political theology on Marlowe, Drayton, Marvell, and Milton.

The common thread that runs through Hammill’s wide-ranging book is his interest in what the story of Moses giving laws to the Israelites meant to political and imaginative writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This story seems to foreground the complex nexus between theology and an emerging notion of a secular political sphere. On the one hand, the story of Moses seems to be about instituting a political form of government that breaks with the political theology of the Egyptians in which pharaoh is both a king and a god. On the other hand, though, the basis for Moses’s lawgiving is his claim to being the recipient of divine revelation, and his political authority is supposedly backed by divine will. For Hammill, in its very doubleness, the Moses story shows how secular political orders seem to require what he usefully terms a “theological supplement,” an explicit or implicit claim that the political community is called into existence by God. This theological supplement to political structures can provide the binding authority that compels obedience; equally importantly, the theological supplement can redefine political opponents as theological enemies and empower the state to use spectacular violence to protect itself. Hammill explores the way explicitly theological claims haunt early modern ideas about the nature and structure of political life. But Hammill also claims that the Mosaic moment opens the door to the notion that self-consciously literary texts can also generate myths or fictions that can function as the “supplement” that these political orders need. Thus Hammill writes, “in binding the secular state to interpretations of Hebrew scripture, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers also bind a political theology of creation to literary creation and imagination. While the Mosaic constitution raises the problem of a constituting power that exists outside the bounds of normative law, Hebrew scripture locates that power more specifically in the persuasive capacities of metaphor and narrative to shape life through belief” (8). Exploring the ways self-consciously literary texts can themselves “shape life through belief” is the focus of the second half of the book.

Hammill begins his book with a chapter on Machiavelli that is striking for its force and clarity. From the Moses story Machiavelli draws the lesson that rulers should make “instrumental” use of religious claims to legitimate their power and forestall opposition. Implicitly, at least, Machiavelli understood scripture as nothing more than an unusually powerful and effective rhetorical reservoir that a new prince can mobilize to serve his interests. Machiavelli advises the prince to use religion to buttress his political power and demonize his enemies and therefore to authorize spectacular violence to silence dissent. But, fascinatingly, Hammill argues that Machiavelli’s instrumental use of religion foregrounds the importance of belief (and therefore imagination) in political life, thus opening the door for an examination of the ways nonreligious texts can also manipulate imagination and compel belief in politically effective ways. That idea will turn out to play an important role in the chapters devoted to literary texts. But in the first half of the book, Hammill suggests that Machiavelli’s understanding of religion as nothing but an imaginative and rhetorical reservoir also opens the door to a more utopian understanding of the role of specifically religious discourse in political life.

According to Hammill, this utopian potential is most fully developed by Spinoza, about whose complex religious and political thought Hammill offers an excellent, detailed chapter. For Hammill, Spinoza understands religion as nothing...