(Schmittian) Political Theology today, the case of Pierre Manent.

Because Carl Schmitt was, for a while, an echt Nazi, and a virulent Antisemite, few serious scholars are inclined to call themselves ‘Schmittian’ or to cite him approvingly. It’s more usual to see the thought of Schmitt mined for arguments by Left-critics of liberalism (sometimes with a deliberate attempt at evoking frisson). Of course, Schmitt’s views on a range of topics (the political, the state of emergency, political theology, the friend-enemy distinction, the dictator, Weimar jurisprudence, etc.) has attracted a lot of scholarship.

But in reading Pierre Manent’s (2016) Beyond Radical Secularism: How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge, translated by Ralph C. Hancock, it occurred to me it would be useful to offer a schematic characterization of defining features of a Schmittian project of political theology. Before I get to that, let me say a word about Manent’s little book, which has not lost its timeliness. The book is written with sparkling prose and every brief chapter has an arresting thought (about which perhaps some other time more), and what follows does no justice to what can be learned from it.

Manent diagnoses the practical failure of Laïcité—the peculiarly French republican version of secularism that is gaining traction in Europe due to concern over political Islam. Interestingly enough Manent both thinks that political Islam is at war with France and, more defensively, that this war cannot be won without a major change in French political self-organization. (In what follows, I ignore Manent’s fierce criticism of cosmopolitanism and the European project.)

In particular, he proposes a grand bargain: the Muslim community is asked to forego financing from abroad, to eliminate the Burqa, and to publicly choose for participation in French nationhood on more or less equal terms as Christianity and destiny (I return to that below), and in return France abolishes the fiction that, in public, citizens only have a secular identity. So, presumably the policing against religious public self-identification would come to an end, and he is quite clear that local subsidies to Mosques (and presumably churches) would be possible in return. The explicit aim is civic friendship within a nation that understands its Christian heritage but with a Muslim co-partnership. (In some ways, this imports Benelux practices into France.)

Crucially, Manent’s project would also allow for the revitalization of the providential, national Christian project that had been paused after the defeat of June 1940. In the contemporary political landscape Manent’s version of (religious) nationalism — he explicitly calls for the revival of the covenant — is while thoroughly illiberal, moderate because it’s neither racial (and untinged by great replacement theory) nor flirting with forced expulsion of minorities. So much for set-up. (If you want a summary of the book, Timothy Haglund’s review does a nice job.)

Well, one aside. He treats the liberal project of cosmopolitan European integration as, in principle, delegitimizing all nation-states and so also Zionism, which is understood as a national covenant. I quote because you wouldn’t believe me otherwise: “Now that the Jewish people have taken the form of a nation in Israel, the nations of Christian Europe cannot break with the national form without fatally wounding the legitimacy of Israel.” (p. 115, closing page of the book.) One wonders who the audience for that sentence is.

Even so, in reading the little book I could not help but think that the ghost of Schmitt qua political theologian had come alive. Schmitt is never mentioned, but elsewhere Manent has shown a keen interest in Schmitt (especially when he reflects on liberalism). Let me explain.

Now, crucially, you have to forget (only for the sake of what follows) that Schmitt was a Nazi, and allow that Schmitt’s Nazism was instrumental in character by which I don’t mean careerist (although surely was that too). [But rather that it was instrumental analogous to the way Stateside many educated, Christian evangelicals are Trumpists.] So what does a Schmittian political project amount to, or what are its characteristics? (Here I am drawing on the very instructive The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, Expanded Edition, by Heinrich Meier.) 

1. Providentialism. There is a clear commitment to God’s general and particular providence. In particular, our actions unfold in a larger history that is actualizing God's plan (that’s the general providence). In addition, God may well have goals for us as individuals. Some of us have a special role to play in advancing this general plan, and (since we act in conditions of radical uncertainty) will be called to make existential decisions.

2. Sincere Faith. I didn’t mention miracles in the previous entry, but these may well be part of God’s agency. The crucial point is that philosophy or reason cannot conquer faith (for reasons familiar from Bayle, Hume, or Kant), and so it is foundational.

3. The authority of Revelation. In particular, that Jesus is the Christ, and that the coming of the antichrist is a necessary step toward the second coming of Christ.

4. Political theology in a twofold sense: first, that many political concepts and practices are secularized Christian concepts and practices (and so a way in which the antichrist gains strength). Second, the ultimate authority of theology in politics. It is, of course, tempting to treat the first sense as descriptive and the second as normative, but that misses the eschatological role of the first by which one may well advance the second.

5. Catholic, but with an uneasy relationship to papal authority (and Augustine’s rejection of political theology).

6. The friend-enemy distinction is foundational. There is no turning the cheek to the providential enemy. This also means political life is risky. (In fact, the Antichrist promises 'peace and security.’) The enemy is the other, the Stranger.

7. Original sin. Crucially this means man is incapable of anarchism, and so must be ruled.

Of course, in practice, these interact in complex ways. So, for example, within political theology epicureanism and Spinozism are the explicit enemy.

I would be very curious to learn whether mainstream, learned Catholic theologians have written on Schmittianism and how they view it. Notice, for example, that Schmittianism is not integralism because there is no claim that catholic religion should be the basis of public law and public policy.

Now, I should stop, but let me briefly explain why I thought of Schmitt in reading Beyond Radical Secularism. This thought occurred to me not with the invocation of the state of war in the first sentence of chapter 1, or the invocation of civic sincerity in the introduction. Not when I realized that the point of the book was the turn enmity into civic friendship. Nor even when he treats the (Gallic) catholic church as the greatest political fixed point, the mediator between centrifugal forces of our age.

But rather, when I noticed that the book is explicitly organized around the contrast between “divine providence” denied by the “religion of the philosophers” (that is “epicureanism”) and the “artificial providence” of liberal cosmopolitanism (see p. 71). And, in fact, the book is a resounding apologia for the greatest spiritual force, “the catholic church” (p. 105).

And once I realized this is a book of political theology, I also understood something that puzzled me at first. Against contemporary jurisprudence and international law, which carefully separates war from terror, Manent (echoing Schmitt) systematically treats terrorist as warriors. (In Schmitt, terrorism is the most intensive form of enmity and war.) In fact, in the closing paragraph of the book Manet rejects the religion of humanity — human rights — as insufficient to end the state of war.