Can imperial power be reduced to a catechontic dimension without forfeiting its epoch-making will? Is it possible to relativize and contain imperial power within the ambit of ‘render unto Caesar’ (we shall soon come to understand the importance of this saying) without exhausting its energy? And, finally, should these questions be answered affirmatively, will it be possible to establish a substantial link between the political and eschatological dimensions? Already these questions assume we are armed with the patience of waiting, for if we were to know that the Day of the Lord is now, it would make no sense to obey any worldly power. At the same time, no ‘mortal God’,1 no power concealing the fact that this is the end of time can be tolerated. In this time the exercise of political power is necessary and its authority therefore is providential, but providential only insofar as it is for its own death. Power must be effective – it cannot reduce itself to functions of administration or ‘policing’ – and in order to be effective it cannot but will to be ‘epoch-making’. However, the epoch it marks is just as much the epoch of its own death. Only this self-consciousness allows power to assume an eschatological character. Let us try to understand how we can undo these seemingly inextricably knotted lines of enquiry.
The universalistic vocation of imperial power understood as ‘iconic’ sovereignty demands that time be understood in the light of values, contents and forms of life that endure. Were the unity of the epoch to break down, the spatial integrity of empire would also be torn apart. The crisis of the times is accompanied by the splitting and opposing of places. Different temporalities belong to different spaces and vice versa. This occurred in the dissolution of the respublica christiana, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the irreconciliability of the ‘times’ of communal freedom, of new state formations and old feudal orders with the continued reign of the idea of Empire (Sacro Romano Imperium). The empire’s capacity for ‘epoch-making’ was not recognized by any of these diverse powers. They were only prepared to recognize its weak catechontic authority as, in the last instance, a source of security and guarantor of autonomously agreed pacts (an idea that completely opposes that of the twelfth-century Hohenstaufen Chancellery and its pronouncements on the Sacrum Imperium). The idea of sacredness (of the King as ‘God’s Anointed’ on a par with the Priest) continued to hold sway but only to the extent it could delay the collapse of the empire.2 The new powers would never have accepted that there was no salvation (nulla salus) outside the unity of the empire.3 From this point of view, modern thought – heir and ‘accessory’ to those powers – has battled against the very idea of empire, considering it to be nothing more than an abstract system devoid of the force that constitutes the essence of a State. A victorious battle – at least up to now.4
Must not those who understand political power in the light of Pauline eschatology hold a similar position? They can recognize the legitimacy of the epoch-making requirement of political power, but only if it may be recollected in the light of the Age. Every worldly power and its laws wants and needs to endure and in some way suspend the flux of life’s forms. Paradoxically this enduring has to be reduced to an instant. And all instants are subsumed in the Now of the last Age, the end-time forever marked by the apocalypse of the Logos. Age is Aion, eternity, eternal Life, revelation of eternity in time – as well as the place where such revelation re-presents itself as necessarily superior to all the places where one tirelessly strives to contain the chaotic energies of becoming. Here the difference of principle collapses: while the authority representing the ultimate meaning of the Age re-presents it in itself (or rather, it is analogous to that meaning which ‘makes itself present’ in it)5 in the cult that it regulates above all and whose monopoly it enjoys, the worldly exousia6 sets about constructing for itself the idea of epoch and representing it. Epoch is a representation of exousia and is in a certain sense its first and essential production, its Weltanschauung.
According to the ‘measure’ of the Age, however, the epoch can be no other than its image always on the verge of turning into a mere eidolon (idol) to which no self-sufficiency can be attributed. Our destiny, our destination is only legible prophetically and eschatologically in the signs of the Age. In other words, the epoch expresses nothing but values, that is evaluations, points of view, ideologies while the eternal reveals itself in the Age. Every epoch is in this way ‘pre-judged’ in the Age that encompasses and ‘surpasses’ it. By analogy the same relation should subsist among the powers that embody the two concepts of time. The epoch-making power should never claim to represent the Age because de facto it is not so, as one can see in the rise and fall of empires already prophesied in the Book of Daniel,7 but also because de jure the Age reveals itself and cannot be represented by any means other than itself. While it is proper that empire closely approximates the true image of the Age, it must also convince itself of the superiority of the meta-political auctoritas of the hora novissima8 (neither anti- nor a-political), which sets itself to work as memory and care through all the epochs and their empires that will conclude the sorrowful odyssey.
Between epoch and Age there is both connection and conflict, polemos. Whoever represents the epoch must ‘pass’ it off as the Age, pretend that it is the Age while those who firmly believe themselves to be its authentic manifestation on earth always tend either to deny any truth to the values of the epoch or to subject them to their own authority and order them accordingly. The most widely diverging ways of compromise just as much as the most brutal conflicts are possible in this polemos while synthesis can only be apparent or coincide with the collapse of all significance attached to the Age; when the experience of time contracts to that of the epoch and its ‘world views’ then all enquiry into the eschaton ceases to preoccupy us. The end of the conflict will be none other than the decline of those who in this conflict stood as a sign of contradiction and whose very existence claimed an eschatological reserve with respect to all the powers of the epoch.
Nevertheless, the tie that binds epoch and Age seems to rule out the survival of only one of the duellists. This fact is reflected in the realism of the Pauline conception of worldly power. If empire does not aim to make itself something more than epoch then it will also cease to function effectively as defensor pacis, defender of the peace – if spiritual power now believes itself free from all worldly authority then it commits the sin of impatience by claiming to bring forward the Last Judgement. The end of the conflict through the collapse of one of the parties only proves the impotence of the victor – one of the most profound and least understood themes of Hegel’s philosophy of history. Thus in the destiny of Europe the decline of the ‘guardian’ of the Age was accompanied by that of an epoch-making (epoche-machende) imperial power. The collapse of the idea of Age took with it the idea of a form of power genuinely capable of enduring. ‘Where are the princes of the heathen? … They vanished and are gone down to the grave’ (Baruch 3:16–19).
The Church never challenged the Empire from the point of view of the new state-powers, mainly because the love which inspired and drove them would not submit itself to the Age. The episkopos9 (overseer) ‘of those who stand outside’ had to limit himself to the role of sovereign, but in the narrow sense of ‘disciplining and punishing’ and attending to necessitates saeculi, to worldly needs. Paradoxically, for the empire to arrange itself in like manner would have required it to intervene in dogmatic controversies (as was the case with Constantine) to the point of openly competing with the authority of the Church. If the empire took its bearings from the sun of the Age it would not have tolerated a merely catechontic self-representation. However, in seeking to be ‘sacred’ it sustained an unbreakable bond of friendship/enmity with the Church. Catastrophe struck with the appearance of a power that not only defined itself as in principle autonomous from every spiritual power but also as one that could not even tolerate any such above itself, even more: one that was incapable of understanding or heeding spiritual claims. Paradoxically the Church always sought a catechontic power invested with spiritual authority like steel wood or a heroic centaur.10 With the collapse of this idea nothing remains but the mortal and de-sacralized form of the State. The epoch of empire declines into a techne politiké (political technique) of endurance that pours the eschatological question out into the infinite void of becoming. A State can only fake epoch-making, just as a nationalistic Reich faked being an empire. But empire can only be conceived in its difference (opposed to in-difference!) with the eschatological order for which spiritual authority is a living memory. The latter becomes mere preaching when confronted with indifferent catechontic powers that are no longer empires and that fight among themselves in their ever more desperate quest to bestow the sign of the Age on their own particular epoch.
1 The thinly veiled debate with Hobbes’ Leviathan is pursued through these early chapters; Cacciari has in mind the frontispiece to Leviathan with its sovereign body politic made up of the bodies of the individual citizens.
2 See Herfried Münkler (2007).
3 Cacciari here applies the maxim extra ecclesiam nulla salus – there is no salvation outside of the church – to the claim of empire to be the only power capable of providing security, a claim contested by the new powers (tr. note).
4 On liberal thought’s criticism of the idea of empire (following the development of Hegelian political philosophy from the young Hegel’s The German Constitution up to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History) see P. Catalano (1986 and 2000).
5 On the theological and political problem of ‘representation’ see Hasso Hofmann (2007); Giuseppe Duso (2003) follows Hofmann.
6 exousia: authorized, delegated power or authority; rule. In Pauline theology (esp. in 1 Corinthians), exousia comes to mean power to decide (for oneself), and hence free will, freedom or liberty (tr. note).
7 On the significance of the succession of empires in Daniel’s prophesy, see A. Momigliano (1987); in the same volume, see also Il cristianesimo e il declino dell’impero. The latter has made an immense contribution to the present work.
8 novissima literally means ‘the newest’. It paradoxically translates the Greek ‘eschaton’, meaning ‘the very last’. In Christian theology ‘the very last’ is simultaneously ‘the very first’, thus Hora novissima is usually rendered as ‘the Last Hour’ that is also the very First Hour (tr. note).
9 episkopos, ἐπίσκοπος, literally means ‘overseer’, he who is charged with the task of ‘keeping an eye on Christ’s flock’. In the NT also designates one of the positions of leadership in the Church (tr. note).
10 ‘un legno d’acciaio’, lit. ‘steel wood’, refers to the Church’s impossible synthesis of eschatology and political praxis; they can neither be reconciled nor separated. ‘Heroic centaur’ suggests Machiavelli and perhaps refers to the same impossible synthesis viewed from the standpoint of Empire or Prince (tr. note).