Introduction: From Golden Calves to Gold Bling

Moses was not a particularly good speaker. He stuttered; indeed, he needed his brother Aaron to speak for him. Moses did not always obey the law. He murdered an Egyptian taskmaster. He was not always ready to assume responsibility for, and face the consequences of, his deeds. He fled to Midian when the murder became known. Moses refused God’s calling at his first encounter with the burning bush, and he continued to doubt God’s calling throughout his life as Israel’s leader. He directly disobeyed God in more than one instance, and his disobedience resulted in his death; he never entered the Promised Land. In short, Moses does not seem extraordinary. Yet an entire people followed him. They followed him out of Egypt in such a hurry that they did not have enough time to pack their belongings or prepare proper food; they agreed to walk through a sea, and then they spent forty years wandering in the desert. Following Moses made the Israelites into a nation. They complained, they disobeyed, and they even threatened to kill him. Nevertheless, they followed him.

Moses is the paradigm of charisma, according to Max Weber. But how could a disobedient stutterer and sheepish murderer be considered the paradigm of charisma? People followed him because they believed he had a gift from God. Because of this gift, he became a political authority, a lawgiver. Charisma is not incarnation: Moses was not divine. He was essentially weak, and he died because of his failures to obey. Moses represents the paradox of charisma: that the extraordinary appears in the ordinary, the mark of the divine in the all too human. Weber finds in Moses an alternative to both the authority of tradition and legal-rational authority; charismatic authority disrupts tradition and legal regimes, acting as a subversive, potentially constitutive force. Yet charismatic authority quickly gives way to new traditional and legal-rational regimes. Moses literally gives the law to the Israelites, transferring his own authority to the regime he instituted.

But there is a curious aspect of the Moses story on which Weber does not comment. In the Septuagint and New Testament, Moses is described as “beautiful” (in the Hebrew, Moses is described as tov, “good”). For Moses’s charisma to be conceivable to the Greek world, he must be beautiful—his charisma must be aestheticized. In our age, when presence is suspect, when endless semblances abound, must we also say that charisma is always already aestheticized? Is it impossible for charisma to be ordinary, or ugly? The ugly Socrates may have followed his daimon, but he did not lead a people. Even if we read Moses in the Jewish tradition, as good rather than beautiful, does not the biblical text make Moses good and beautiful, wrapping him in narrative elegance, and then wrapping that narrative in the warm glow of tradition?

Moses may be the paradigm of charisma, but charisma is now attributed to a wide range of individuals and offices. Martin Luther King Jr. has charisma, as does Brad Pitt. Both Adolf Hitler and Saint Francis, Clarence Darrow and the Dalai Lama, and many a high school teacher have charisma. Charisma marks, or masks, power. Charisma legitimates, but charisma also attracts suspicion. Astride the secular-sacred divide, charisma enchants (its etymology suggests divine gifts). Sociologists associate charisma with the premodern: an irrational, unstable source of authority, superseded by the rational, bureaucratic authority of modernity. Yet charisma remains in the modern world—perhaps it is reinvigorated in the postmodern. Celebrities, lawyers, politicians, and new age gurus all seem aptly labeled charismatic. With stories of secularization increasingly under scrutiny, might the concept of charisma also require reexamination, perhaps rejuvenation?

In the context of the burgeoning interest in political theology across the humanities, charisma would seem to offer an alternative narrative, one that no longer takes sovereignty as paradigmatic. Political theology has typically investigated concepts of the state (as Carl Schmitt puts it) that are secularized theological concepts. Charisma is used as a political concept, and it is a secularized theological concept, yet it does...