III
On the Counter-Revolutionary Marcionism of Carl Schmitt and Others
One doesn’t fight for something, but against something: Hatred is the dominant note of war, not love.
—Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, in a letter dated November 8, 1942
The subtitle of my third part is also indebted to Jacob Taubes’s explicit enquiry of Gershom Scholem: “Walter Benjamin—a Modern Marcionite?”166 Yet in terms of subject matter, the decisive “reference person” for the title and subtitle is Carl Schmitt (who was for Taubes, after Benjamin and Scholem, almost equally important167):
• Political demonology disfigures Schmitt’s talk about “political Christology”168 back into recognition;
• the following quote (from Political Theology II) substantiates my claim that he apperceives a modern Marcionism, although the names of Benjamin and Marcion do not explicitly come up:169
The structural core problem of the Gnostic dualism between the god of creation and the god of redemption governs . . . not only every religion of salvation and redemption. It is immanently given in every world in need of change and renewal, inescapably and ineradicably. . . . The lord of a world in need of change, i.e., a misconceived world—a lord to whom the need for change is ascribed, since he refuses to submit to it but instead resists it—and the liberator, the creator of a transformed, new world cannot be good friends. They are, so to speak, enemies by definition.170
Whether they are necessarily “Manichaean” enemies171 is a question for expert historians of ancient gnosis;172 but one should be able to, or even must, speak about a “demonization” of the enemy in question (as Schmitt does in the previous quote). But certainly it is a “total”173 or rather “absolute” enmity: an understanding of the enemy as a “criminal,” and even a “beast that has to be not just repelled, but definitely destroyed.”174 It is true (before 1933 as well as after 1945) that Schmitt repeatedly emphasizes that the differentiation between enemy and criminal was achieved with the—for him “classical”—“Jus Publicum Europaeum,” spearheaded by Thomas Hobbes.175 But still he always has to admit and equally emphasize
1. that the non-criminalizing, not even “discriminating” concept of the enemy (in the form of “cabinet wars”)176 was applied only to European peoples (or rather states);177
2. that as a result of World War I the age of sovereign nations or rather “states” has drawn to a close, and so the Jus Publicum Europaeum with its principle of restricted enmity and warfare has also come to an end.
As early as 1937 Schmitt establishes “total enemy, total war, total state” as one connection, and in the essay of the same name he expounds: “The sort and form of the state’s totality defines itself from total war . . . But total war only has meaning by virtue of the total enemy.”178 It is this enmity that is now at stake, first and finally. The introductory sentence of The Concept of the Political, the treatise with which Schmitt founded his doctrine of the enemy in 1929, had read: “The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.”179 The other important book here, the 1970 Political Theology II, is still in line with this: “Today one can no longer define the political by beginning from the state. On the contrary, whatever one may still take to be the state must be defined and grasped by beginning from the political. Yet the criterion for the political . . . today is the degree of the intensity of association or dissociation, meaning: the distinction between friend and enemy.”180
Especially with a view to the subject “Political Theology” (which was at first a doctrine of the state, or rather a doctrine of “sovereignty”181) it says ten pages earlier and quite consistently: “The thematic development of my treatise ‘Political Theology’ dated 1922 (2nd edition 1934, R.F.) has a general direction which . . . can be discerned everywhere today: from political theology to political Christology.”182 Political Christology, however, for Schmitt183 means a “stasiology”184 (which he thinks must be fought), that is, a doctrine of insurrection, even civil war; hence Christology is in essence polemical. Nevertheless, it remains “Theology,” as the synonym “Christology” already suggests. Yet Schmitt explicitly also uses the term “New political theology,” making the point that in essence it is a “Political theology of the New.”185 We recall:
The structural core problem of the Gnostic dualism between the god of creation and the god of redemption governs . . . not only every religion of salvation and redemption. It is immanently given in every world in need of change and renewal, inescapably and ineradicably . . . The lord of a world to be changed, i.e., a misconceived world . . . and the creator of a transformed, new world cannot be good friends. They are, so to speak, enemies by definition.186
Where the “counter-god” still carries the name “Antichrist”—both Schmitt and Benjamin use it187—he must be “overcome,”188 and so he is an “absolute” enemy. Schmitt (though not Benjamin!) speaks in the central passage we just quoted a second time as a Gnostic, indeed as a Marcionite; the explanations immediately preceding our quotation leave no doubt about it: “Gnostic dualism juxtaposes the God of love, a God alien to this world, viewed as God of salvation, with the just God, the Lord and creator of this evil world. The two gods are in a state of open war, or at least in a relationship of unbridgeable alienation similar to a kind of dangerous Cold War, in which the enmity can be more intense than any enmity found in the naivety of a fight on traditional battlefields.”189
For the moment I will leave aside how Schmitt brings God’s enmity—indeed even the gods’ enmity—up to date in contemporary history; suffice to say that it politicizes the Yahweh-Christ opposition in principle; it even metaphysically, or rather theologically, indeed christologically grounds political antagonisms, not only with regard to the Cold War. Expressed in terms of the sociology of religion: at least since the “arch-heretic” Marcion, within Christianity there inheres—christologically, and hence theologically immanent—a readiness for insurrection ranging from the latent to the potential, as well as a dominant tendency for order and subjugation (at any cost). John Milton, for example, enhanced the obviously revolutionary struggle of Satan with his own revolutionary experience, making the vanquished revolutionary a Puritan, and the reactionary God a Stuart.190 Milton drew the final possible consequence from a “political Christology” in Schmitt’s sense191: to oppose Satan-Christ and God-Father. Pierre Joseph Proudhon will do the same, and Donoso Cortés for his part will demonize the Utopian Socialist. Whether negative or positive, Political Theology, like Political Christology, implies political demonology, even if Schmitt—an open partisan and successor of Cortés—would like to obscure that (with a hostile eye toward Karl Marx,192 Ernst Bloch, and the contemporary theologians indebted to Bloch: Johann Baptist Metz and Jürgen Moltmann193).
Let’s first look at Schmitt’s pivotal teacher—before Hobbes—and his illustrative dispute with Proudhon. Schmitt leaves no doubt as to his significance (especially after 1945): “With every intensification of world-historical development, from 1848 and 1918 up to the global World Civil War of the present, his [Cortés’] importance has grown along with it, and it has done so in the same way that the rescuer grows along with the danger. To fully bring this into recognition is the aim of our publication. It aims to help make sure that now, for the third time, Donoso’s name is no longer left unheard and that his words unfold their power.”194
For this purpose Schmitt sets all his hopes in Cortés’ speech sans phrase—the famous, infamous one in favor of dictatorship, which this actively political lay-theologian regarded “as a fact of the divine order.” For Cortés, God himself now and again “acts” “dictatorially,” by “breaking through . . . the laws” that “he himself has given to himself.”195 The point of this is of course that Cortés understands this worldly-political dictatorship mainly to be as illegal as it is illegitimate: “If legality suffices to save society, then legality—if not, then dictatorship! This horrendous word . . . , though by no means as horrendous as the word revolution, the most horrendous of all words.”196 And neither constitutional nor legitimist legality can possibly prevent the revolution. The revolutions of 1830 (1834) and 1848 have proven this; hence Cortés brings “his decisionism to a conclusion,”197 as Schmitt approvingly comments.
For Cortés, who now has the Revolution before his eyes, only the naked sword can be at hand. He is convinced that the moment of the final battle has come; “[yet] in the face of radical evil there is only dictatorship, and in such a moment the legitimist idea of hereditary succession becomes nothing but empty dogmatism.”198 “Radical evil” here is socialism, because “the revolutionary radicalism of the 1848 proletarian revolution” has been “infinitely more thorough and more consequential than the third estate’s revolution of 1789.”199 And Cortés believes he needs to match this: “When the forces of attack are concentrating in political associations, then the forces of resistance necessarily also unite in one hand, without anybody being able to prevent it, or even allowed to prevent it. This is the clear, plausible, and incontestable theory of dictatorship.”200
It rests on the promise that “the choice is not between freedom and dictatorship,” but rather that it is about
choosing between a dictatorship of insurrection and a dictatorship of the Government. Faced with this question, I choose dictatorship of the Government because it is less oppressive and less disgraceful. One has to choose between either a dictatorship from above or a dictatorship from below. I choose the one from above, because it comes from a purer and more light-filled sphere. And finally, it is the choice between a dictatorship of the dagger and the dictatorship of the sword. I choose the dictatorship of the sword, because it is more honorable.201
In this way Cortés openly returns to something like the Roman barracks emperors in the form of a military dictatorship, but he still does so as an indeed Constantinian Catholic. He has an explicitly Catholic dictatorship in mind: the “shamelessly simple rule of the sword and the monk’s cowl,” to quote Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.202 For Cortés the army and the church are the last two piers left standing in the revolutionary torrent. He frankly declares: “Today the standing armies are the only pillars that prevent civilization from falling back into barbarism.”203 And: the “most radical measure against revolution and socialism” is “Catholicism, and Catholicism alone.” It is “the only doctrine that stands in absolute opposition to them.”204 Why? It is the religion that “instils charity in the rich and patience in the poor; that teaches the poor to content themselves and the rich to be merciful.”205 When looking at how he wants to solve the Social Question, one can see how Cortés has failed to understand it. The following words leave even less room for doubts about his sentiments: “The root of the evil is not the government, but the governed. For the evil is that the governed are less and less willing to let themselves be governed.”206
Nonetheless, it would be a great mistake to simply cast Cortés aside (to the right) as an “extreme . . . reactionary.” More than that, as “the most radical counter-revolutionary”207 of the nineteenth century, he was the first to discern in his theory of dictatorship an epochal reality, and of course this was even easier since he himself desired it. However, as Schmitt emphasizes, the “authentic energy” of the concept of dictatorship lies in the “sphere of a revolutionary democratism” opposed to Cortés. It reduces any “system of conservative ideas and sentiments” to sheer absurdity, though it does so by logical necessity.208
The concept of dictatorship only truly comes full circle—as Schmitt is right to believe—in plebiscitary Caesarism, although this is not a democratic or even proletarian matter. It was in fact August Comte—the anti-socialist and transformer of liberal theory into an authoritarian, that is “positivist” theory—who greeted Louis Napoleon’s plebiscitary Caesarism as the solution to the 1848 revolutionary crisis. The abolition of the régime parliamentaire and the founding of the république dictatorial appeared to him like the double préambule de toute vraie régénération. For him Napoleon I was a tyrant for the sole reason that he had allied himself with a backward theology in support of his usurpation of power.209
Those coming after Napoleon will have no more need of this theology—not least because of Comte and his school. Or at least they will know how to clearly subdue it in such an alliance. Schmitt summarizes ex eventu: “Caesarism . . . is a typically non-Christian form of power even when it signs concordats.”210 What will remain—and significantly so—is the dictatorial state, although not a socialist one. Cortés has underestimated liberalism (i.e., he has taken its will to freedom too seriously). The Spanish Civil War, which he had predicted correctly—in addition to the dictatorship that arose with it—by no means crushed the (formerly) liberal citizens between its fronts. Almost all of them decided against socialism. Of course, at that moment, liberalism and its “chattering class” is dead (as a chattering class!). Cortés has painted its downfall in apocalyptic colors: “On that terror-filled day of struggle, when the decisive battle will be fought, when on the vast battlefield the immeasurable rows of Catholic troops and the hordes of socialists will be crashing back and forth, it will be asked in vain, and no one will be able to say what happened to liberalism.”211
Cortés is driven by the “martial idea of a bloody, definitive, annihilating, decisive battle.”212 As he is cornered by his position into the defense, it is the courage of despair (like dictatorship itself) that dictates his position to him. It is quite different with Proudhon, whom Cortés knows he stands eye-to-eye with, as enemies on a par with one another. But Proudhon, the representative of (anarcho-syndicalist) socialism (and one of George Sorel’s most crucial teachers), is in the midst of a promising “destructive” attack: “In the eyes of Donoso . . . [Proudhon is] an evil demon, a devil.”213
No doubt—and the sympathy of Carl Schmitt cited here only underlines this—with such an extreme juxtaposition Cortés has a “unique significance” for the future enemies of socialism: that of the anti-apocalypticist. Again in the words of Carl Schmitt, whom Taubes called the “apocalypticist of the counter-revolution”:214 “in the era of the relativizing dissolution of political concepts and oppositions, Donoso has” understood “the central concept of all great politics,” and has held on to it “through all deceptive and fraudulent concealments,” and has sought “to identify, beyond the distinctions of daily business of politics, the great historical and essential distinction between friend and enemy.”215
It is a typical example of Schmitt’s fake neutrality to simply talk about “friend and enemy.” Otto Brunner pointed out a more than formal continuity when he registers Schmitt’s “concept of the political,” constructed from the friend-enemy opposition, “as merely . . . the endpoint in the development of a doctrine of raison d’état.”216 This last had always been repressive, both inwards and outwards. Once one knows the enemy Schmitt shares with Cortés, his formality unmistakably reveals what “devils” have to reckon with217: “The political enemy . . . is . . . the other, the alien, and it suffices for his essence that he is essentially something different and alien in a particularly intensive sense, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible, which can neither be decided by a general advance standardization, nor by the judgment of a third party that is ‘uninvolved’ and hence ‘impartial.’”218
Even earlier, de Bonald, the key teacher of Cortés and also Schmitt, noted: “Je me trouve constamment entre deux abimes, je marche toujours entre l’être et le néant.”219 So for him the “extreme case” had already become a permanent situation, that is, decisionism had become permanent: “Wherever Catholic philosophy of the 19th century appears in contemporary intellectual form, it expresses in one way or another the thought that a great alternative arises, allowing for no mediation. No medium, says [Cardinal] Newman, between catholicity and atheism. All of them define a great Either-Or, the rigour of which . . . rings of dictatorship.”220
Schmitt, who has been paraphrased and cited here throughout, completes this thought and does away with it.221 As we have heard, in 1949–50 he wanted more than ever to help ensure “that now, for the third time, Donoso’s name is no more left unheard, and that his speech unfolds its power.”
With words to a similar effect, the Regensburg Bishop Michael Buchberger, editor of the first Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, had already in 1932–33 greeted the German translation of Cortés’s Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism: “With the sharp visionary eye of the deeply faithful scholar, Donoso Cortés was one of the first to understand the meaning and admonition lying in the socialist movement and the social revolution. Because of this, his work remains timely and valuable even today and especially today.”222
When it comes to the period after 1945, one can hardly over-emphasize that the Schmitt essay cited above was first printed in 1949 in the journal Die neue Ordnung [The New Order], edited at the then-influential Dominican monastery in Walberberg. In that same year, there also appeared a contribution by Schmitt’s Catholic student Günther Krauss, “The Totalitarian Idea of the State,” which openly spells out why Cortés is still, or rather more than ever, “timely”: “Donoso Cortés already predicted our situation a hundred years ago: the dictatorship of the proletariat as the connection between socialism and Slavdom. What was his antidote to this dictatorship? Dictatorship.” And Krauss poses the further rhetorical question: “Do we even have a choice between totalitarianism and non-totalitarianism?” His apodictic answer is: “on the field of worldviews he who fights at half speed and with empty hands has no chance, and on top of that he is busy with other things, such as denazification. What counts here is faith against faith, spearhead against spearhead, as it says in the Song of Hildebrand, myth against myth, as one [still today] has to say”223 (in agreement with Alfred Rosenberg, down to the spelling of Mythus).
Krauss’ continuity with the “epoch of fascism” (Ernst Nolte) is more than evident; it is explicit, although (in our present context) I am not very keen on the concept of fascism. The self-definition as “conservative revolutionaries” common amongst all (pre- and pro-)fascists suffices, certainly enough to quote and agree with Jean F. Neurohr:
Since 1789, since de Maistre [and de Bonald], since the Legitimists and the Romantic Conservatives, . . . there had always been something Satanic, something Luciferian about the word “revolution”; it had meant a rebellion against the eternal order of God. However, after 1918 there was heroic ring to the word, it became something great, something permitted, indeed . . . necessary, ordained by God, when the aim was . . . to establish through revolution . . . the conditions under which life could be dignified and worth living again.224
It is precisely the “Conservative Revolution” which, “according to a felicitous. . . definition by Edgar Jung, smashes temporal institutions into pieces in order to preserve eternal orders.”225
This last quoted Leopold Ziegler, a popular philosopher quite influential via his sometime favorite student Edgar Julius Jung (private secretary to Franz von Papen), who did Catholicize to an extent, but (like Jung) he remained a (wayward) Protestant throughout his life. It should be pointed out emphatically that Neurohr spoke not only with a view to Catholic Conservative Revolutionaries, despite mentioning de Maistre and the “Romantic Conservatives” by name. Indeed, these last were not, in general, Catholics by denomination. And a lot of the “modern” or indeed “revolutionary” Conservatives have completely ceased to be Christians; they may well even be Antichristians. And the fact that they are so partly in a Catholicizing sense is not a contradiction at all, as nobody proves more compellingly than Charles Maurras, who also heavily influenced Carl Schmitt.226
Indeed Maurras’ doctrine is a “doctrine of the fear-instilling, hateful enemy”227—including the special characteristic in common with Schmitt’s friend/enemy theory, which is to trace this enemy down to his earliest forms of historical appearance. Maurras talks extensively about the “difficulty” posed by “neutralising the infinite and absolute principle . . . Perhaps the solution is to establish worldly authorities aimed at channelling and tempering this horrible meddling of the divine. This is what Catholicism does.”228
This is what it has always done; it is its essence, and the French essence was also of this kind—up until the Revolution; up until the Reformation it was the occidental essence. The (bourgeois) Revolution, and today socialism ,are the ever radicalising waves of the flood of Judeo-Christian anarchism which in the end, after 1200 years, destroys the Catholic “channelling” of the divine: what was once the “Christian-Catholic substance of Europe” has broken apart into its constituent pieces, and the “Catholic” part, in which the once-integral paganism continues to exist, has been pushed into the defensive corner. Though just in this way it is the only force that a new—political—paganism can rely on: “Je suis athée, mais je suis catholique.”
Maurras confesses atheism, disregarding tactical considerations in favor of strategy i.e., logical necessity. In Chemin de Paradis he poses the rhetorical question “whether the idea of God, the only one and the one present to consciousness, is always a beneficent and political idea . . . if one allows this naturally anarchic consciousness to develop the sense that it could make a direct connection with the absolute and infinite being, then the idea of this invisible and remote Lord will quickly obliterate the respect it owes to its visible and close lord: rather than men, it will prefer to obey God.”229
This Apostolic maxim (Acts 5:29) which Maurras directly attacks here is the inheritance of Jewish prophetism, as is early Christianity as a whole. Prophetism, the “inventor” of monotheism, remains the root of all evils. At first it is active in the Reformation’s reception of Christianity, since for Maurras Protestantism is nothing but the re-awakening of an original and anarchical Christianity, “which only in the imposed form of Roman-imperatorial paganism could become the protagonist of authority.”230
Maurras’ argument may be summarized in the words of Ernst Nolte as follows:
If the Reformation means nothing but “the unleashed tumult of the inner life,” if it is nothing but an anarchist attack on the civilization of Rome, then it has to have its roots outside Rome, in a barbaric-anarchist, anti-Roman phenomenon. As Maurras adopts Protestantism’s self-understanding, putting a contrary accent on it, he finds this phenomenon in early Christianity. It is nothing but a form of Jewish prophetism, whose anti-civilizational and primitivist character [Ernest] Renan had described. Hostility to civilization connects the “Hebrew desert” with the “Germanic primeval forest”: the cry of the prophet awakens in the German the unfettered rage of his instincts, biblicism and Germanism become one in the barbarity of modernity. And with this, the well-known thesis that freedom and democracy had their origins in Old Germania gains a new and strange emphasis. Democracy, which had developed in the forests of Germania, was right to accept nourishment and approval from that Christianity of Jesus the Jew, who [again according to Renan, but also Nietzsche] had been an anarchic enthusiast: “The fathers of the Revolution are in Geneva, in Wittenberg, and at earlier times in Jerusalem; they are drawing on the Jewish spirit and the varieties of an independent Christianity, which were raging in the oriental deserts and the primeval forests of Germania, at different focal points of barbarity.” Yet this Judaism is not only a distant historical root; it may be found freshly alive and unchanged in the modern world: “The Jew, monotheist and nourished by the prophets, has become an agent of the Revolution.” Rome had found ways to neutralise the “poison of the Magnificat,” as medieval society had known how to confine and to make use of the Jews, but Protestantism and the Revolution have torn down the barriers, and the rebellious barbarian threateningly stands within the walls of a society deeply shaken.231
For Maurras the idea of progress, the historical-philosophical motif of all enlightenment, of all idealism, positivism, and socialism, means “a barely secularized messianism.” Mediated by Protestantism, Enlightenment philosophy was altogether a fruit from the Jewish tree. German Idealism was also nothing but the most sublime formation of Jewish-Christian monotheism, analogous to science [Wissenschaft], at least where it did not submit itself to serve higher interests. Its system consisted in replacing the God of the Jews with curiosity, which was unfittingly called “Science,” which sat on an altar as the centre of the world, and which was paid the same honors as Yahweh.
Yet the development inaugurated by this modern spirit is coming to a bad end only today in socialism, the most radical form of “slave rebellion,” as Maurras—conforming with Nietzsche—reinterprets the emancipatory history of modern times. And because socialism was the eschatological intensification of a principle that had been in power in France since 1789, it was insufficient to fight it alone; one could destroy socialism only if one destroyed its allied predecessors together with it, the complete “Left.” According to Maurras the Left is not only a group of revolutionaries and the masses that follow them. Even the future Volksfront far from covers this “Left” he has in mind. All republicans, all liberals are “Reds,” pioneers of the “egalitarian barbarity” against whom a barricade must be erected.232
As if there could be no question about it, Maurras thinks the army are those who have to stand on this side of the barricade: “In France one can posit the axiom ‘No army, no public order.’ The Mr. Radicals, Mr. Socialists, and Mr. Communists would then be the masters of all.” Yet this consequence must be thwarted. To an extent Maurras propagates and organizes the civil war from the right. “However deep his aversion even against terrorism may be, still he is not afraid . . . to talk . . . about conservative revolution. Radical reaction is a revolution against the revolution.” Emphatically, in Maurras’ own words: “Au nom de la raison et de la nature, conformément aux vieilles lois de l’univers, pour le salut de l’ordre, pour la durée et les progres d’une civilisation menace, toutes les espérances flottent sur le navire d’une Contre-Revolution.”233
The “names” in which the (counter-)revolution is to be waged once again signal the fundamentals of Maurras’ fight: “cis-cendence” against transcendence, and, with a view to history, archaism. Maurras wants to apprehend where “counter-nature” had its beginnings, in Judeo-Christianity, and he wants to do so with the help of the institution that domesticated it first (albeit not for good): the Catholic Church and its societal system. Its “shells” would be its “armor” against the assaults of modernity, led by Judeo-Christianity.234
Only as a pagan Catholic, critically formed by the Laicist Catholicism of Comte (i.e., only as a biologist), can Maurras preserve ancient, Catholic heritage: the latter as the former, and the former only in so far as it serves him as evidence of the “beautiful inequalities,” which “make what is beautiful beautiful, the state strong, and the people healthy.” For Maurras human nature only exists in a synchronic plural, as differences: higher and lower natures.235
According to its very concept, order is command and submission: “hierarchy.” It would be easier to grasp, easier to defend, if every being, according to its greater or lesser capabilities, were to serve order from its place and there were to find its own proper fulfillment. This is roughly the idea of the orthodox-Catholic doctrine of order. However, it presupposes a different, more idealistic idea of the world than does Maurras, a reader of Lucretius. For him, it is not a logical consequence of each one’s nature that some human atoms are forever locked into interior darkness, whilst others are “happily” enjoying the light. Rather, the fate of each atom is mere chance, and it is only from this chance that the unique lucky strike of beauty and perfection arises—which for Lucretius is the world, but for Maurras the well-ordered society: the whole world, he writes, would be less good “if it had contained fewer mysterious sacrifices made for the sake of its perfection.” Maurras identifies the atoms locked into the dark as human sacrifices necessary for the perfection of society. But like Lucretius he presupposes that the respective position on the social ladder has aleatory grounds. Only this mechanistic presupposition then gives the Maurrasian doctrine of order its unique—if you will, positivist—accent. And “positivist” in the case of Maurras, going beyond Comte, has to be understood as “related to blood.” His mechanics are a bio-logic: it is blood, the “substance of substances,” that allocates the various positions and so guarantees to each family—befitting their social rank—the continuity of their position: “As long as men are created through blood and the blood is shed in battle, the actual political order will be administered through blood.”236
Beyond Comte, Maurras is a neo-feudalist and, on the grounds of his naturalism, a racist. Only when neo-paganism is “perfected” in social-biologism does fascism sans phrase appear: some form of an “SS-state.” Its anti-intellectuals, such as (indirectly) the later Maurras, who rose to become chief ideologue of Vichy France, represent the extreme counter-position to human(itarian)ists of all stripes. One may regard Thomas Mann’s Naphta as his ideal prologue in every respect, the great nemesis of “civilization’s man of letters” Settembrini, and even more than that, Naphta’s crucial prototype Ludwig Derleth.237 I shall remind the reader here that Schmitt’s Jesuit friend Erich Przywara (in 1936) interpreted Derleth as the “black-Nietzschean” endpoint of a line beginning with Donoso Cortés—like Derleth, a Jesuit manqué—but going back even further.238 Still in 1956 Przywara calls this line “Ignatian,”239 not least because of its dualistic theology of history. In just the same way Thomas Mann’s Naphta (adapted from Derleth) “carries” it “before himself” when he speaks “of the ‘dos banderas,’” of “the ‘two flags,’ around which the armies gather for the great campaign: the hellish and the spiritual one; one in the region of Jerusalem, where Christ, the ‘capitan general’ of the good, is commander—the other in the plains of Babylon, where Lucifer poses as ‘caudillo’ or chieftain.”240
Whoever has seen “the two flags flying,” whoever “has seen Christ in the field and Satan on his throne,” for him—so the Ignatian inference by Przywara’s friend Reinhold Schneider—“no choice remains; there is only one command that he can follow. The power and the will of the servant become one. The will of the leader [Führer] is pointing in one direction.”241—“As the first king-leader of the military ever . . . [Christ Imperator Maximus] has ordered man to lead a heroic life,” as Derleth(-Naphta) will still declare in “The Death of Thanatos” in 1945.242 In terms of (religious) politics this was done in the service of the counter-Reformation (and counter-revolutionary) Rome; already the Jesuit order “as the irreconcilable enemy of the new”243 had fought under its signs, and indeed it had done so “in a draconian, almost military centralization of values.”244 Schneider summarizes: “To the (Protestant-)Nordic rejoicing over the fall of the barriers, the (Catholic) south responds with a hammer-blow onto the foundation stone of an even stricter building.”245
Maurras was also a resolute anti-Protestant, yet—as we have also already heard—in such a radical manner that his anti-Reformation disposition included an anti-Christian and anti-Jewish, that is an anti-monotheistic disposition. So at least in this regard, does Maurras not stand in contradiction to his (perhaps only partial) student Schmitt? He was also an uncompromising anti-Protestant (despite, or because of his Hobbesianism),246 but what about Schmitt’s monotheism, which is central for us? Did he not simply, even emphatically, fight against what is effectively a doctrine of two gods? Yes, but with the obvious premise that not even the doctrine of the Trinity, regarded as a panacea by his opponent Erik Peterson, necessarily prevented an inner-divine “stasis.”247 For Schmitt, the turn from Political (Mono-)Theology into Political(-dualist) Christology (i.e., “stasiology”) is possible at all times: “The structural core problem of the Gnostic dualism between a god of creation and a god of redemption governs . . . every religion of salvation and redemption” from the very beginning and permanently so: because it “structurally” inheres in it (not to mention that “in every world in need of change and renewal” this problem “is immanently given”). But then, does one not have to become an atheist like Maurras (or at least a polytheist in the way of Max Weber, Hans Blumenberg, and Odo Marquard248)?
I cannot see that Schmitt theoretically (or explicitly) ever took this step. Instead he more or less always confessed to be a “Eusebius redivivus”:249 an almost “monarchic” Catholic, completely assimilating Christ to the Father, decisively Roman in almost having the latter absorb the former, indeed Constantinian, that is, a caesaro-papist Catholic. The epitome of such a Catholicism, and equally every hierocratic and hence total(itarian) Catholicism, is the Christus Imperator, Rex et Victor, whom Schmitt explicitly invokes (just as the Roman imperial coronation liturgy of the Middle Ages did). Here I will cite, of course, Reinhold Schneider’s 1931 characterization of the “Christ-Führer”; Schneider, who had then not yet reverted to faith, accomplished it with a view to the Byzantine Christ Pantocrator of Cefalu:
“Ruler and judge, no longer with the serenity of suffering, but with the serenity of power. He is at once Creator and Redeemer, Father and Son—Redeemer perhaps only because He created. In the movement of his hand, in his gaze, there is a merciless demand that love cannot fulfill, that is perhaps even indifferent to it. He came in order to coerce allegiance. By opening the Scriptures and pointing, his robe only slightly unfolded: merely by revealing himself he brings about the decision no one can escape.”250
Schneider sees the very Christ that for Schmitt is also represented by the Roman Catholic Church, its papacy above all: the “reigning, ruling, triumphant Christ.”251 He is that Christ-Father who for Schmitt does not arise against the God-Father and so—inner-divinely—will not start the revolution.252 It is the God of Pope Gregory the Great, whom Schmitt then cites approvingly: “God is highest power and highest being. All power is from him, and is, and remains divine and good in its essence. Should the devil have power, this power is, as far as it is above all divine power, divine and good. Only the will of the devil is evil. Yet despite this eternal evil, satanic will, the power itself remains divine and good.”253
The Christ Pantocrator of Cefalu, for example, is and remains above all the “Byzantine” one, before the occidental “Fall,” the “schism of the world . . . into the historical dualism of holy and profane, of church and empire, of priesthood and aristocracy”; this schism already carries within itself “the seed of the future desanctification of state and politics”254 and so founds the general disappearance of authority. Derleth radically faces it, i.e., he strives for an integral resacralization (by way of the papal church), and in his “Christus Imperator Maximus” (dated 1905 and 1919) he invokes precisely the “Christ of Cefalu.” His soldiers declare: “We unconditionally surrender to the leader [Führer] with the baton of command, who with inextinguishable fires destroys once and for all the groundwork of the makeshift in-between kingdom, because he walks in advance of the heir of the Fisherman’s Ring, who builds his church upon this rock and is expected as the king and the redeemer of the world and the savior of time.”255
Christ is “leader,” “commander,” “pope,” “king and world redeemer”: all the monarchist titles relevant in the past, present, and future are heaped upon this one who—particularly as the “complexio oppositorum”—anticipates that “Führer,” “the cry” for whom “is trembling through people conscious of their nation,” as Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy writes in his and Josef Wittig’s “The Age of the Church” in 1928.256 Schmitt would have been the last to ignore the caesarist mood at the time; he promoted it by “rationalizing” it and saw his prophecy of the “new order” fulfilled in the “New Kingdom [Reich]” of the “Augustus” Hitler, the kingdom—in the Maistrian/Schmittian sense—of the political “pope,” as the “charismatic leader”—in the Weberian sense.
We will leave aside here Schmitt’s fascism, or rather national socialism, and concentrate on the fact that Derleth, highly respected by theologians such as Przywara and Hans Urs von Balthasar, was a hierocrat and hence played a role which could be taken up by Schmitt at times, and indeed was taken up by him. “To set the evocation of a religious-moral world dictatorship of the church against the utopia of a communist-socialist future state,”257 as the German integralist Otfried Eberz had desired in 1922, “was more than aesthetically attractive”—to go back to the editorial note by Hochland’s editor Karl Muth on Eberz’s essay “Catholic Imperialism.” But because Schmitt’s friend Eberz hierocratically emphasized the medieval “world-idea of the Christian empire,” his anti-utopia was also a bad utopia (i.e., a sheer impossibility). By the same token it was once again openly articulated what the “systemic” telos of Catholicism actually was and is: the Catholic Church is “a theocracy . . . and its politics” towards “states” was “never anything else but theocratic imperialism.”258
“The Church”—to let Schmitt himself speak here—“like every other imperialism spanning the world, will, when it has reached its aim, bring peace to the world, but a fear hostile to all form discerns in this peace the victory of the devil.”259 And not only did men of letters such as Schmitt and Eberz “medievally” regard the opposite to be correct: “with Pius XI’s first encyclical ‘Ubi arcano’ and its pontifical theme, the Pax Christi in Regno Christi, dated 23 December 1922,”260 “the political form” of Roman Catholicism had also officially “reached a peak,” as Hans Barion, the canonist of the Schmitt School, writes in 1968. Besides the Lateran Accords of 1929 Barion calls the peak’s “most significant manifestation” the 1925 introduction of the Feast of Christ the King.261
This introduction is not merely to be judged from an intra-ecclesial point of view, if that is ever even possible, but for the time being it marks—to papalistically emphasize this—the intra-ecclesial final peak of the pope’s “Christificatio” as the “vicarius Christi.”262 No doubt it is under the influence of Pius XI’s pontificate that the English convert Theophilus Stephan Gregory writes in 1938: “The Vicarius Christi is the most powerful symbol of man’s submission to Christ.”263 This is exactly what Boniface VIII means when—in Schneider’s “Great Renunciation”—he calls out with fanatical incitement: “This is Anagni, the City in which the Vicar of Christ was slapped in the face—and so was Christ through him.”264 Eberz affirms in 1922: Philip the Fair “smashed to pieces . . . in Anagni the theocratic world empire of the lawgiver of Nazareth.”265
We will dwell on Eberz’s words on the ecclesial “theocracy,” which in 1926 for example were shared by Nuntius Eugenio Pacelli (later Pius XII) when he calls the church of Christ a “supernatural and spiritual theocracy.”266 Schmitt, unlike almost everyone else, insisted on its juridical character; again in Roman Catholicism and Political Form he says: “The pope is not the prophet, but the vicar of Christ. All fanatic wildness of unfettered prophecy is kept at bay through such a formulation. In this way, as the office is made independent from charisma, the priest gains a dignity that seems to fully abstract from a concrete person.” This latter point may be true, yet nonetheless the office itself is a charisma. It is given with the office, but without the reversal of this relationship having become impossible. As Schmitt himself has to write, priesthood and papacy both go back “in an unbroken chain to the personal mission and the person of Christ,”267 no doubt an extremely charismatic one. The charismatic component cannot be fully excluded from any Christianity, which includes the Catholic one, even though its tendency certainly is anticharismatic and juridical, defusing charisma not by merely negating it, but by binding it to an administration [Be-amtentum].
Schmitt had already written in 1914’s The Value of the State that “the infallible pope, the . . . most Absolute that may be conceived on earth, is nothing by virtue of his person, but is only a vicar of Christ on earth.”268 As regards the pure instrumentality of the papal office holder (which that section also mentions), who took up the old title of “servus servorum Dei,” one should recall what Hugo Ball wrote in a 1924 review, endorsed by Schmitt as late as 1970: Schmitt’s “tendency towards the Absolute in its final consequence does not lead to an originary abstraction, be it called God, form, authority, or whatever, but rather to the pope as the absolute person.”269
De Maistre before him had hypothetically relied on the fact that papalism is nothing but politics, which shows precisely how Schmitt is “the last of the political theologians,”270 especially in view of de Maistre, de Bonald, and Donoso Cortés. In a letter to the Archbishop of Ragusa, de Maistre wrote: “Si j’étais athée et souverain, . . . je déclarerais le pape infallible par edit public, pour l’établissement et la sûreté dans mes états. En effet, il peut y avoir quelques raisons de se battre, de s’égorger même pour les fables, il n’y aurait pas de plus grande duperie.”271
It may be a mere fiction, but it is revealing. Hans Barth is right to comment on this passage as follows: “The absolutization of the idea of social order and the idea of unity of religious doctrine, which is at the basis of order, gives rise to the danger that the inner justification of the doctrine within the idea of truth is given hardly any attention and is no more felt to be an immediate need.”272
As Schmitt formulated juridically in his 1922 Political Theology: the authority “to make law does not have to be in the right.”273 And no doubt papal infallibility is in particular also a question of (ecclesiastical) law. De Maistre circles around the idea that unity prevails only where there is a single organ that somehow continuously creates and preserves, administers, and interprets it. This authority in the figure of the pope is “le chef naturel, le promoteur le plus puissant, le grand Démiurg de la civilisation universelle.”274
To cite de Maistre’s general thesis here: “Il ne peut y avoir de societé humaine sans gouvernement, ni de gouvernement sans souverainté, ni de souverainté sans infallibilité; et ce dernier privilège est meme dans les souveraintés temporelles (où n’est pas) sous peine de voir l’association se dissoudre.”275 “[So] ‘the worldly as well as the spiritual order’ needs a ‘power that judges but is itself not judged,’ a power that decides all possible conflicts, be they of a spiritual or political origin and kind, and does so in the last instance, ‘sans appel,’ and hence finally and bindingly.”276
Barth’s comment here again puts the finger on the essential decisionism of de Maistre’s papalism, and not only de Maistre’s. In effect, the papalist analogy only serves to manipulate “infallibility” as “the essence of the unappealable decision.” That the two words “infallibility” and “sovereignty” are “parfaitement synonymes” (Du Pape, ch. 1) means: “In practice” there is no difference “between not being in error . . . [and] being exempt from being tried for error; what matters is that no higher authority can repeal the decision”277—as it says in, again, Schmitt’s Political Theology (I).
But in a (Catholic) church-specific sense, does this not mean that, to use Maurras’ words one last time, “Catholicism eliminates the Father as much as the Son” and declares itself to be the “guardian of man?”278 Schmitt personally was repeatedly compared to Dostoyevski’s “Grand Inquisitor,”279 and for his part he defended him.280 Yet we are never merely concerned with the ecclesial-Catholic, but rather, for example in the following section with the monarchist emphasis on unity in general (not only Schmitt’s), even if no less an authority than Jacob Burckhard has attributed281 it to the Catholic Church above all other institutions. On the other hand, even the Catholic Church, or indeed precisely the Catholic Church, has never been safe from schism and heresy. And with the emperor, or rather the state, the papacy engages in a (slightly war-like) perpetual fight. In other words: caesaro-papism and hierocracy are bad utopias, because (in the long run) they are sheer impossibilities.
Sub specie “Political Christology,” or rather demonology, it also means that there is a pope-emperor dualism, or rather: church-state dualism—always theologically articulated, if not generated. In the words of Schmitt from his Political Theology II:
The . . . doctrine of the two kingdoms separate until Judgment Day will again and again face that colon of the always open question: Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabitur? Who decides in concreto for man, creaturely acting in his own right, on the question of what is spiritual and what is worldly and how it stands with the res mixtae, which are in the interim, as it were, between the Coming and the Second Coming of the Lord, forming the existence of this spiritual-worldly, spiritual-temporal twin-being that is man?282
As he makes clear in the passage above, Schmitt always believed this “great” question (of Thomas Hobbes) could only be solved in a decisionist manner. But this means—not only in my understanding—that it can only be solved by whichever is the higher power, indeed by violent force. Certainly, not only have popes banished emperors “by means of” their key power; equally emperors have appointed and disposed of popes, claiming for themselves the role of “vicarius Dei.” Conversely, not only have emperors gone to war bearing “the Banner of Constantine”; so have popes, unambiguously, as “epigones” of the imperators.283 They too were Constantinian-gifted, Contantinian-burdened.
Schneider aptly speaks of pope and emperor as the “two powers fitted into one another”;284 it is therefore “law” for them to be each other’s “enemies”:285 enemy brothers who quarrel about their inheritance, which is doubled, and is called: Roman Christianity, or rather: “Christian Rome.” This city lives “in the name of the Cross . . . and the name of the imperators”;286 and because of that it is an impossibility: “The inheritance of Rome eternally conflicts with the inheritance of Christ.”287 But Schneider writes this only to affirm the conflict as the tragedy of the “Christian Rome”: “Behind the pope’s throne dawns the shadow of Caesar; but Caesar’s shadow followed the emperors too . . . The Christian and world-historical task of both was . . . to wrestle with this shadow until the end of time and always afresh . . . on their thrones to grab the Cross and with its help force back the shadow.”288
This shared “Christian and world-historical task” connects them by making them into enemies: “Pope and emperor are the unity of the visible head, spiritual and temporal head,” but “historically real as one [only] via the sword that pierces them, that they themselves together stab into their heart”—“crossbeam through upright beam.”289 It is cruel, but, as Przywara interprets, it is the cruelty of the cross and therefore a holy, “justified” one: “culpa,” but “felix.” Schneider generalizes: “Sword and cross have nothing in common, and yet the cross often becomes a sword, in order to then, on a field of battle, turn into the foe of the sword again. Faith sinks without power, and power sinks without faith. In the end, beyond the world, faith will be victorious, when it has wholly imbued the world and has overcome it.”290
Those for whom this is necessarily an eschatology of the “opiate,” for them—as for the anti-transcendent Schneider of 1930—power without the cross will necessarily sink only where faith is a power in the first place: because of one that has empowered it. Rome was this power, as Schneider mercilessly analyzes in his Innocent III. It subjugated the gospel to its “service,” and—as it was “doubting the validity of the invisible, inner value, itself respecting otherworldly powers only as helpers, never as commanders, binding the invisible without the condition of reality”—it set “an example,” “whose continuously generative force can never be extinguished.”291
This force governs the “Constantinian age,” even when Constantine stands opposed to Constantine, indeed it is he facing himself; “only” in Caesar’s “following” the emperor and the pope may be discerned: “the great enemies that in turns cause each other to appear, to increase, indeed only make each other possible by fighting one another.”292 The gospel is objectively only “one more weapon”293 in this fight. It is about Caesar’s fight for power, whereby—and this is what makes emperor and pope an “immortal pair of combatants”—each one wants to use the other because he has to. That is to say, he needs or requires the other. Innocent III hardly wants to destroy the empire; indeed, it is indispensable to him, because the emperor was to be “his executor,” “the strong and at once unconditional executor and defender of his commandments. But because . . . [Innocent] thinks this way, he does not understand the empire; because the crown which he thinks he may confer by his own free choice is commanded by what is more powerful than him, by what has long been ruling him: the claim of Rome. It is as if Caesar were to crown Augustus so that both can rule together.”294 And yet they cannot share their power; where they stand, both under the sign of absolute rule, there is only space for one.295 So why does the pope crown his rival, the emperor?
He wants to use him as a tool:
Yet as he names him imperator, he commands him to rebel. Because the name only allows for one meaning. The imperator has to resist the one who has anointed him; he has to be the first on earth and crush everyone who thinks himself above him. He will never be forgiven if he recognizes a lord above himself; someone will take the title away from him and give him another. The imperator is the absolute ruler and commander, the ordering one as such, whom armies follow without protest. But does not Christ look down from the star-spangled heavens? Are not the pagan words long blown in the wind? They immortally persist through the transformations, and whomever they grasp will be carried by them in all their unchanged weight. Certainly, the world of the imperators broke apart into this world and the beyond; Caesar could be pontifex maximus without relinquishing the world of imperators: he was Pontifex so that he could triumph and rule even more safely; but the pope vies for empires and sceptres in the name of renunciation.296
We shall leave aside here the ascetic legitimizations of the pope’s empire (at the time of Innocent III, a world empire). A condition of the possibility of an imperial-papal dualism was that the Caesar was no longer a pontifex maximus, that he could never be after he had become a Christian and his empire a Christian one. The resistance against the emperor as a High Priest was the last remnant of the early Christian apocalyptic rejection of the empire. Christians had recognized the emperor as a worldly lord well before the “Constantinian Turn,” having endured it themselves; hence the “independence” of the “spiritual power” had become an even greater point of contention, precisely after Christianization—at least in the Western half of the empire. And thus the dualist powers, far from forming a “hypostatic union,” became mortal enemies for life, i.e., each one as much as the other wanted again to be both: emperor and pope, the one and only pontifical imperator of a pagan-ancient Rome.
Caesaro-papism and hierocracy were challenging each other to duel, because neither wanted to tolerate a limitation of their power; both were in it for total power, and this is the way it had to be according to the law [Gesetz] valid for both of them once they had entered the competition, according to the Roman law [Recht] to which both emperor and pope appealed as a welcome “justifier of dictatorial power.”297 It confirmed for them that they needed to recognize no human law above them, no law of another human being: “As the pope does judge, but cannot be judged, so the emperor.”298 What judges between them is necessarily the sword. Schmitt’s question: “Quis iudicabit?,” when posed in the struggle between emperor and pope, means war.
Emperor and pope are the prototype for all later models of sovereignty, that of early modern absolute monarchy and the territorial and national states, however republican or democratic. That this sovereignty in foreign policy and international law has been largely lost after World War I has been our topic. In addition, we have talked extensively about the fragility of domestic sovereignty, especially with a view to Donoso Cortés’s permanent dictatorship of the emergency. In view of Schmitt this last will now have to be analyzed closer: Cortés distinguishes “between a dictatorship of the rebellion and a dictatorship of the government,” which he explicitly identifies with one “from above,” that is, existing superiority, power, and rule. He opts for a military dictatorship in order to maintain the status quo—or for (an exacerbating) re-installment of it—and regards dictatorial terror as pious, God-pleasing work. Schmitt will call it “katechontic,” and despite such katechontics (referring to Paul and Tertullian), he remained an anti-apocalyptic: an “apocalyptic of the counter-revolution,” as his patron Donoso Cortés already was.
The supposedly purely reactive nature of such apocalypticism must be doubted: the tranquil, peaceful, just character of the “order” that precedes the “destructive attack” (of left revolutionaries). Brunner’s assessment of Schmitt’s doctrine of the enemy as “the pure endpoint of a development of the doctrine of the raison d’état” leaves no doubt about Schmitt’s Machiavellism (which he himself never denied): the essential hostility of his admittedly repressive and arbitrary statism. Jean Bodin’s decisive influence on Schmitt lay in the fact “that he boils the explication of the relationships between the prince and the estates down to a simple either-or, and he does so by referring to the state of emergency,” part of which is “in principle an unlimited permission, i.e., the suspension of the complete existing order.”299
In the state of emergency, as Schmitt emphasizes, the decision “frees itself of all normative ties and becomes absolute in the actual sense. In the state of exception the state suspends the law.” Or to repeat another one of Schmitt’s maxims: The “authority . . . in order to do right, does not need to be in the right.”300 And once the state of exception has become “normal”—as in a not merely “commissionary,” but rather “sovereign dictatorship”301 à la Cortés—it never needs to be in the right again. Its crimes, as “state crimes,” are crimes no more, not even “sins”—if one follows the court poet close to Bodin and his intellectual relatives, Pierre Corneille.302
In his Cinna, Corneille lets “Livie,” wife of Augustus, cry out to heaven as follows: “Tous les crimes d’État qu’on fait pour la couronne, / Le ciel nous en absout alors qu’il nous la donne, / Et dans le sacré rang ou sa faveur l’a mis,/ Le passé devient juste et l’avenir permis. / Qui peut y parvenir ne peut être coupable; / Quoi qu’il ait fait ou fasse, il est inviolable: / Nous lui devons nos biens, nos jours sont en sa main, / Et jamais on n’a droit sur ceux du souverain.”303
The conclusion Schneider draws from these words is inescapable: “Law is tied to the state, not the state tied to law; the highest value in the end is life, though supra-personal [überpersönlich] life; and because it rests in the hands of the ruler, no duty is conceivable that is contrary to his rights.”304 The words of Schmitt’s student Ernst Forsthoff that refer directly to Bodin are fully congruent with Schneider’s comment: “Sovereignty gives to its holder . . . alone the authority to define law and crime, and to do so without sanctions in the case of abuse. [Already] Bodin realized that recognizing such sanctions had to lead to the negation of sovereignty.”305 And “so it is” “the sovereign,” to turn around one of Schmitt’s sentences, “who has absolute power.”306
For Schmitt himself it is also significant that Corneille gives the modern-absolute state an Augustan turn. Via his Eusebianism, or rather Constantinianism, he was not only indirectly but also directly an adherent of the “Augustan restoration”307: “The Imperium Romanum is peace, the victory of order over rebellion and the side-takings of the civil war: One God, one world, one empire,”308 as Schmitt sympathetically summarizes (not only) “the peace- and order-loving” Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea’s view on things. Like the late antique court theologian he reflects not for a single moment on the fact that Augustus was a party in this civil war and that he “ended” it in a way that was partisan as much as it was terrorist.309 For the Eusebius redivivus “the Roman emperor Augustus” equally and “certainly belongs to the Christian history of salvation.”310 For Schmitt (going beyond Eusebius but referring to the other church father Tertullian) he and his descendants are prototypical “katechons” (as I have already hinted).
Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 220) sought a “power” that “holds back the end and suppresses the evil one. This is the kat-echon of the mysterious passage in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians.” And Tertullian then, anticipating his descendants, of course found it in the Roman Empire. Per translationem imperii “the medieval empire of the German rulers” then understood itself “historically as the katechon.”311 And succeeding them were the sovereign states of modernity, which—as Hobbes could have formulated—“held back” the end that threateningly stood at the door in the wars of religion, by ending the bellum omnium contra omnes through a forced peace.
Hobbes at least wanted to understand it as so perfect that all eschatology would end in it: for him the utopia of the “heavenly kingdom” does not even continue to exist as a possibility of escape from organized obedience, but rather is taken to function to stimulate obedience: “The Kingdom of God is closed only for sinners, that is those who have not shown the obedience owed to the [state’s] laws.” Obedience is the condition to enter the Kingdom of God, which dissolves without residue into this condition. The chapter in the Leviathan devoted to it does not even talk about it anymore, but—as its heading says—talks “Of What Is Necessary for a Man’s Reception into the Kingdom of Heaven”:312 it is “obedience.”
The Kingdom is here; it is the “Leviathan,” the “mortal god” that—an unmissable signal—in Judaism had become the “symbol . . . of the pagan global power hostile to the Jews,” that is in particular also the Roman power. Jean Bodin, “well-versed in cabbalistic scriptures,” speaks “in his Daemonomania (1581 Latin edition, Book II, Ch. 6, and III, Ch. 1) of the Leviathan as a demon. . . . According to cabbalistic opinions” it is “a giant animal . . . that the Jewish god plays with for a few hours every day; but at the beginning of the millennium it will be slaughtered”—as already Isaiah 27:1 prophesied—“and he will scatter the blessed inhabitants and devour its meat.” Schmitt comments in a very contemporary light in his 1936–37 “The State as a Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes”: all this “could be the original mythical image of some Communist doctrines of the state and of the condition of a state- and classless society that comes about after the state’s abolition.”313
In Schmitt’s eyes the Jewish Cabbalah could have incurred no greater guilt than having contributed to preparing such a stateless and classless society. And it is only consistent that he keeps with Thomas Hobbes, who used the Leviathan with its Roman connotations as a “political-mythical image” in the struggle against the “Jewish-Christian destruction of the natural (and political) unity.”314 Schmitt, “the German Hobbes of the twentieth century,”315 also in this regard followed in the steps of the Leviathan’s author; his anti-Judaism/anti-Semitism is, as Ernst Niekisch aptly put it, “a statement issued in Rome’s secular fight against Judaea, always flaring up . . . Hatred is driving him, because the Jew is eroding the great Roman form”316—which Schmitt, both before and after national-socialism, admired also in the Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism and Political Form is the title of a famous work by this “last of the political theologians,”317 who was also a “black(-brown) Nietzsche”—despite his sentiment against Nietzsche (Maurras called him “notre condisciple” without any problems.318)
Schmitt is part of the “Conservative Revolution” not least on the grounds that he is anti-Jewish, because he is pro-Roman, or rather: pro-Roman because he is anti-Jewish. The “Conservative Revolution” altogether is subject to the scheme “Rome versus Judaea” brought into play by Friedrich Nietzsche, and projective, as it is in general, it is so by accusing first “Judaea,” or rather “Juda” of this “deadly hostile contradiction”: “The hatred of the Jew against the Roman is the parasite’s hatred against the state’s ordering power inherited by birth, the hatred of an asocial race against the powerful order embodied by the Roman state, sprung from the secure feeling that only where the state is weak can the Jew live his life to the full.”319
I have cited here a sentence from 1943 by Hans Oppermann, who was decisively influenced by Stefan George but by then had long become a National Socialist. Then a Classicist in Strasbourg, he claimed in the “Series on the Ideological Training of the NSDAP”: “The Judaification of the old world went beyond everything we can imagine from our own experience.”320 Oppermann, projecting psychologically, re-projects “historically.” And the (pre-)fascists’ fight against the Jews is largely a war on a (long) gone battleground, which does not in the least diminish its weight. As “genealogists” for whom Judaea is the source of all (modern) evils, they cannot do anything else but to a large extent lead a “historical discourse,” dressing their current ideology in historical costume. And indeed so does Schmitt.
This can be said not least about his ruminations on Christian antiquity and of course also about the ones on heretical antiquity—spearheaded by Marcion. Schmitt even attributes a revolutionary potential to Jesus’ crucifixion, and he does so by positively referring to—yet another irony—the most prominent amongst the Protestant “New political theologians” during the late 1960s/early 1970s, and so, as it were, the modern Marcionite:
The Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann in a lecture, Political Theology, . . . interpreted the fact of Christ’s crucifixion politically-theologically, and he said: “After all, Jesus was not providentially born under Augustus’ era of peace [which is where Eusebius, Dante, etc. had started from], but rather was crucified by Pontius Pilate in the name of the Pax Romana. It was a political punishment” (p. 12). And he continues: “Jesus was certainly not a Jewish freedom fighter like the two zealots crucified with him. But it cannot be denied that he brought upheaval to the political religion of Rome in a much more profound sense than they had. The Christian martyrs sent into the arenas still knew that” (p. 12). This is correct. In contrast, the idea of a “crucifixion in the name of the Pax Romana” to me seems to be an anachronistic re-projection and rejection from the modern Pax Americana into the era of Pilate. Crucifixion was a political measure against slaves and those set hors-la-loi; it was the sublicium sumptum de eo in servilem modum.321
Moltmann is right, as Schmitt draws the bottom line, “when he emphasizes the intense political meaning indestructibly contained in the adoration of a god thus crucified.”322 But this is not everything yet. Already twenty pages earlier, Schmitt has equally agreeingly cited Hegel’s general as much as emphatic thesis—it could stem from Moltmann’s main teacher then, the left Hegelian Bloch—that “nowhere else can such revolutionary words be found as in the gospels.”323 This is in the pre- and/or pro-Marcionite gospels, as I add here with Adolf von Harnack in mind, author of the book on Marcion, that is decisive for all the twentieth-century authors analyzed here. And in particular I am thinking of the following passage, which itself merges horizons:
Those with the deepest knowledge of the people’s soul, as it lives in the despisers of churchly Christianity today, are reassuring us that only the proclamation of love, a love that does not judge but helps, still has a chance to be heard. Here is where Marcion appears also at the side of Tolstoy, and there at the side of Gorky. The former is a Marcionite Christian through and through. The directly religious passages we have from Marcion could well have been written by him, and conversely Marcion would have recognized himself in Tolstoy’s “miserable and despised,” in his reading of the Sermon on the Mount . . . , and in his zeal against common Christendom. On the other hand, Gorky’s moving play The Lower Depths can be understood as a Marcionite play as well; “the Stranger” who appears here is the Marcionite Christ, and his “Lower Depths” are the world.324
In the relevant context of Erich Auerbach and Taubes I have already more extensively dealt with this key passage from Harnack’s book on Marcion. Like no other passage it proves how the archetypal historical explorer set his subject into a context that was then highly contemporary. Already Harnack apperceived what Taubes in 1986 would call “modern Marcionism.” Taubes was deeply familiar with Harnack; but as well as thinking of Benjamin—and Schmitt—he was above all thinking of Bloch.325 He understood “his work as a ‘witness to revolutionary Gnosis’—in the spirit of the arch-heretic Marcion, this most important interpreter of the Apostle Paul, whose ‘Gospel of the alien god’ destroys the common tablets of value with such a revolution that all church-Christians, be they Catholic, be they Protestant, would make the sign of the cross before Marcion’s doctrine, if only they knew of it.”326
Schmitt knew (more than) enough about Marcion and Marcionism beyond that, but he was critical, even hostile [feind–selig], towards all non-Eusebian, or rather pro-fascist Christianity. For his taste the conservative-liberal Harnack was certainly still too “cupidus rerum novarum,” since in his book, Marcion, Harnack is emphatically of the opinion that “this philosophy of history . . . , which under all circumstances justifies the past” has “not yet become the general norm.”327 Schmitt could only add “indeed” or “unfortunately so,” even though he may not have known word for word the most relevant passages from Bloch’s 1968 Atheism in Christianity. Here I cite the following exemplary passage (which is likely to have been partly inspired by Benjamin’s Thesis XV, “On the Concept of History”):
Jesus’ birth . . . took place in the year zero. Interpreted in a Marcionite way the year zero . . . is completely different from the calendar beginnings set within history and hence merely occur, such as the Roman ab urbe condita. Paradoxically one could only recall the new beginning of the Jacobins’ year zero, “likewise” intended to be total, its tearing away from the whole “Old Testament” of history as purely the fraud of dukes and clerics. But in the incomparably different, that is, religious topos Marcion also rejects, with full primeurs, any possible historical mediation before his novum.328
As I have shown again elsewhere, Schmitt remained tied to the ab urbe condita. He was a “Roman”329 in an emphatic way, coming close to the later Nietzsche:
The symbol of this battle, written in a script which has remained legible through all human history up to the present, is called “Rome Against Judea, Judea Against Rome.” To this point there has been no greater event than this war, this posing of a question, the contradiction between these deadly enemies. Rome felt that the Jews were something contrary to nature itself, something like its monstrous polar opposite. In Rome the Jew was considered “guilty of hatred again the entire human race.” And that view was correct, to the extent that we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, the Roman values.330
166. Jacob Taubes, in Antike und Moderne: Zu Walter Benjamins “Passagen,” edited by Norbert W. Bolz and Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), 138ff.
167. Cf. Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fügung (Berlin: Merve, 1987).
168. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder politischen Theologie (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1970), 11.
169. As regards Schmitt’s lively interest in Benjamin, see, besides his Hamlet und Hekuba dated 1956 and Politische Theologie II, 116 n. 2, also Helmut Lethen, “Über das Spiel von Infamien,” in Belles lettres/Graffiti: Soziale Phantasien und Ausdrucksformen der Achtundsechziger, edited by Ulrich Ott and Roman Luckschreiter (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2001), 53–66.
170. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 120–21.
171. Ibid., 119.
172. Cf. Guy Stroumsa, “König und Schwein: Zur Struktur des manichäischen Dualismus,” in Gnosis und Politik, edited by Jacob Taubes (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1984), 141–53.
173. Cf. above all Carl Schmitt, “Totaler Feind, totaler Krieg, totaler Staat” (1937), in Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar—Genf—Versailles 1923–1939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940), 236.
174. Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1963), 17, 37.
175. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 110–11.
176. Cf. Schmitt, Die Wendung zum diskriminierenden Kriegsbegriff, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2003).
177. Cf. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 11.
178. Schmitt, “Totaler Feind,” 236.
179. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 20; cf. also ibid., 13; and Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 25.
180. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 25.
181. Note that the subtitle of Political Theology (I), dated 1922 and 1934, is “Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.”
182. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 11.
183. “Political Christology” has a different meaning in, e.g., Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); cf. R. Faber, “Walter Benjamins Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels und Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s Die zwei Körper des Königs. Ein Vergleich,” in Geschichtskörper. Zur Aktualität von Ernst H. Kantorowicz, edited by Wolfgang Ernst and Cornelia Vismann (Munich: Fink, 1998), 171ff., esp. 179ff.
184. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 123.
185. Ibid., 35.
186. Ibid., 120–21.
187. Cf. ibid., 81.
188. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 270.
189. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 119–20; emphasis added.
190. Cf. Christopher Caudwell, Bürgerliche Illusion und Wirklichkeit. Beiträge zur materialistischen Ästhetik, trans. by Horst Bretschneider (Munich: Hanser, 1971), 82.
191. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 119.
192. Cf. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 73.
193. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 31–9 and 117–18 n.3.
194. Carl Schmitt, Donoso Cortés in gesamteuropäischer Interpretation. Vier Aufsätze. (Cologne: Greven, 1950), 21.
195. Juan Donoso Cortés, Der Abfall vom Abendland (Vienna: Herder, 1948), 32–33.
196. Ibid., 29.
197. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, 2nd ed. (Munich: 1934), 83.
198. Ibid.
199. Ibid., 72.
200. Cortés, Abfall vom Abendland, 31.
201. Cortés cited in Robert Spaemann, Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration: Studien über L.G.A. de Bonald (Munich: Kösel, 1959), 171–72.
202. Karl Marx, Der 18. Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (Frankfurt: Insel–Verlag, 1965), 13.
203. Cortés, Abfall vom Abendland, 78.
204. Ibid., 76.
205. Ibid., 63.
206. Ibid., 67.
207. Schmitt, Donoso Cortés in gesamteuropäischer Interpretation, 81.
208. Carl Schmitt, “Donoso Cortes in Berlin (1849),” in Wiederbegegnung von Kirche und Kultur in Deutschland: Eine Gabe für Karl Muth (Munich: J. Kösel and F. Pustet, 1927), 338–73, 373.
209. Cf. Hans Barth, “Auguste Comte und Joseph des Maistre,” Schweizer Beiträge zur Allgemeinen Geschichte 14 (1956), 103–38, 125–26.
210. Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1950), 32.
211. Donoso Cortés, Der Staat Gottes: Eine katholische Geschichtsphilosophie [Ensayo sobre el Catolicismo, el Liberalismo y el Socialismo, Considerados en Sus Principios Fundamentals] translated and edited by Ludwig Fischer (Karlsruhe: Badenia, 1932), 200.
212. Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe, 13.
213. Ibid., 14.
214. Jacob Taubes, “Carl Schmitt—ein Apokalyptiker der Gegenrevolution,” in Die Tgeszeitung, 20.07.1985, 10–11.
215. Schmitt, Donoso Cortés in gesamteuropäischer Interpretation, 78.
216. Cited after Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 14.
217. The Concept of the Political was written on the eve of German fascism, out of and into a situation of civil war. A 1939 essay referring back to the extended 1932 version of The Concept of the Political explicitly identifies “depoliticization,” which Cortés already opposed, with “indecision, nihilism and in the end bolshevism” (“Neutralität und Neutralisierung. Zu Christoph Steding Das Reich und die Krankheit der europäischen Kultur.” Deutsche Rechtswissenschaft IV (1939), volume 2, 97).
218. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 27.
219. “I constantly find myself between two abysses; I always tread between being and nothingness.” Cited in Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1922), 50; cf. also Joseph de Maistre, Vom Papste, 2 vols. (Munich: Allgemeine Verlagsanstalt München, 1923), 195.
220. Schmitt, Politische Theologie (1934), 69.
221. *Translators’ note: Faber uses the word aufheben, which retains the double-sided Hegelian connotation of ‘abolition’ and ‘preservation.’ Already in 1948 Alfred von Martin, who has unjustifiably been forgotten, called Schmitt “the last of the political theologians”; cf. Martin, Im Zeichen der Humanität: Soziologische Streifzüge (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1974), 130; and more recently: Richard Faber and Perdita Ladwig (eds.), Gesellschaft und Humanität: der Kultursoziologe Alfred von Martin (1882–1979) (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013).
222. Cf. J. Donoso Cortés, Der Staat Gottes, Preface.
223. Günther Krauss, “Die totalitäre Staatsidee,” Die neue Ordnung (1949), 494–508, 497–98.
224. Jean Frederic Neurohr, Der Mythos vom Dritten Reich: zur Geistesgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1957), 74.
225. Leopold Ziegler, “Der deutsche Staat,” Deutsche Rundschau 238–39 (1934), 133–43, 137.
226. Cf. Helmut Quaritsch, Positionen und Begriffe Carl Schmitts, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1991), 64.
227. Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche: die Action franςaise, der italienische Faschismus, der Nationalsozialismus, 2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 1965), 186.
228. Cited in ibid.
229. Cited in ibid.
230. Ibid., 69.
231. Ibid., 170.
232. Cf. ibid., 158.
233. Cf. ibid., 157 and 179, as well as Ernst Robert Curtius, Der Syndicalismus der Geistesarbeiter in Frankreich (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1921), 16. *Translators’ note: In the name of reason and nature, conforming to the ancient laws of the universe, all hopes are floating on the ship of a Counter-Revolution.
234. Cf. Armin Mohler, Die französische Rechte: vom Kampf um Frankreichs Ideologienpanzer (Munich: Isar Verlag, 1958), 42.
235. Cf. Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, 183–84.
236. Cf. ibid., 161 and 184.
237. Cf. Gerhard Loose, “Naphta: Über das Verhältnis von Prototyp und dichterischer Gestalt in Thomas Manns ‘Zauberberg,’” in Ideologiekritische Studien zur Literatur. Essays I, edited by Volkmar Sander (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972), 215–50, as well as Richard Faber, “Die politisch–religiösen Ideendichter Ludwig Derleth, Stefan George, und Henrik Ibsen,” in Ibsen’s “Kaiser und Galiläer”: Quellen, Interpretationen, Rezeptionen, edited by Faber and Helge Høibraaten (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), 181–209.
238. Erich Przywara, Heroisch (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1936).
239. Erich Przywara, Ignatianisch: Vier Studien zum 400. Todestag des Heiligen Ignatius von Loyola (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1956).
240. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg: Roman. 7th ed. (Berlin: Fischer, 1964), 409, as well as Faber, “Preußischer Katholizismus und katholisches Preußentum,” in Preußische Katholiken und katholische Preußen im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Faber and Uwe Puschner (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), 89–114.
241. Reinhold Schneider, Philipp der Zweite, oder Religion und Macht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 88.
242. Ludwig Derleth, Der Tod des Thanatos (Luzern: Stocker, 1945), C. 48.
243. Schneider, Philipp der Zweite, 89.
244. Hermann Broch, Der Zerfall der Werte, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7 (Zürich: Rhein-Verlag 1955), 29.
245. Schneider, Philipp der Zweite, 116.
246. Cf. Siegfried Lokatis, “Wilhelm Stapel und Carl Schmitt–Ein Briefwechsel.” In Schmittiana: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk Carl Schmitts, vol. 5, edited by Piet Tommissen (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1996).
247. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 63.
248. Cf. Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Berlin 1967 (critical towards Weber: Jacob Taubes, “Kultur und Ideologie” [1969], in Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu einer Kritik der historischen Vernunft [Munich: Fink, 1996] 283ff., and Richard Faber, “Politische Psychologie: Ovids ‘Metamorphosen’ in aktuellem Kontext,” in Foedera Naturai. Klaus Heinrich zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Hartmut Zinser et al. [Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989] 103–18); Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979); Odo Marquard, “Lob des Polytheismus,” in Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 91ff, and Marquard, “Aufgeklärter Polytheismus–auch eine politische Theologie.” In Der Fürst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, edited by Jacob Taubes, 2nd ed. (Munich: Fink, 1985), 77ff. Critical towards Blumenberg and Marquard: Richard Faber, Der Prometheus-Komplex: Zur Kritik der Politotheologie Eric Voegelins und Hans Blumenbergs (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1984); Teil (below as Excursus I); as well as Jacob Taubes, “Zur Konjunktur des Polytheismus,” (1983) in Taubes, Vom Kult zur Kultur, 340ff.
249. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 28.
250. Reinhold Schneider, Schicksal und Landschaft (Freiburg/Br.: Herder, 1960), 178.
251. Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und Politische Form, 2nd ed. (Munich: Thealiner Verlag, 1925), 65–66.
252. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 120–21.
253. Cited after Carl Schmitt, Gespräch über die Macht und den Zugang zum Machthaber (Pfullingen: Neske 1954), 21.
254. Karl Anton Prinz Rohan, “Adel im Wandel der Zeiten,” Die Besinnung 12 (1957), 166–69, 167.
255. Ludwig Derleth, Proklamationen, 2nd ed. (Munich: Musarion, 1919), 89.
256. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Josef Wittig, Das Alter der Kirche (Berlin–Dahlem: Verlag L. Schneider, 1927), 5 [emphasis added].
257. Otfried Eberz, “Katholischer Imperialismus,” Hochland XX (1922), 55.
258. Ibid.
259. Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form, 66.
260. Hans Barion, “‘Weltgeschichtliche Machtform’?,” in Epirrhosis: Festgabe für Carl Schmitt, edited by Hans Barion et al. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1968), 19.
261. Ibid.
262. Cf. Fritz Leist, Der Gefangene des Vatikans: Strukturen der päpstlichen Herrschaft (Munich: Kösel, 1971), 95.
263. Theophilus Stephan Gregory, Das unvollendete Universum: Schicksalsgestaltung der abendländischen Geschichte, trans. and introd. by Oskar Bauhofer (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1938), 275. [The Unfinished Universe; retranslated from the German]
264. Reinhold Schneider, “Der große Verzicht,” in Homo Viator: Modernes christliches Theater (Cologne: J. Hegner, 1962), 368.
265. Eberz, “Katholischer Imperialismus,” 59.
266. Cited after Pius XII, Der Papst an die Deutschen: Pius XII, als Apostolischer Nuntius und als Papst in seinen deutsch—sprachigen Reden und Sendschreiben von 1917–1956, edited by Bruno Wuestenberg (Frankfurt: Scheffler, 1956), 43.
267. Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und Politische Form, 29–30.
268. Schmitt, Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen, Tübingen 1914, 95.
269. Hugo Ball, “Carl Schmitt’s Politische Theologie,” Hochland XXI (1924), 264.
270. Cf. von Martin, Im Zeichen der Humanität.
271. “If I were atheist and sovereign, . . . I would declare the Pope infallible by public edict, for the establishment and the safety in my states. Indeed, there may be some reasons to struggle, to slaughter each other even for the fables, there would be no greater deceit.” Cited in Barth, “Auguste Comte und Joseph des Maistre,”119.
272. Ibid.
273. Schmitt, Politische Theologie (1934), 20.
274. “. . . the natural chief, the most powerful promoter, the great Demiurge of the universal civilization.” Cited after H. Barth, “Auguste Comte und Joseph des Maistre,” 121.
275. “There can be no human society without government, no government without sovereignty, no sovereignty without infallibility; and this last privilege exists even in the temporal sovereignties (where it is not) under pain of seeing the association dissolve.” Cited after ibid.
276. Ibid., 120–21.
277. Schmitt, Politische Theologie (1934), 71–72.
278. Cf. Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, 187.
279. Cf. Alfred Schindler and Frithard Scholz, “Die Theologie Carl Schmitts,” in Der Fürst dieser Welt, edited by Jacob Taubes (Munich: Fink), 153–73, 172–73.
280. Schmitt, Politische Theologie (1934), 74, and Römischer Katholizismus (Hellerau: Hegner, 1923), 66–67.
281. Cf. Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, (Munich: n.d.), 179.
282. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 107.
283. Reinhold Schneider, Innozenz der Dritte (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963), 36.
284. Reinhold Schneider, Kaiser Lothars Krone: Leben und Herrschaft Lothars von Supplinburg (Leipzig: Insel–Verlag, 1937), 140.
285. Reinhold Schneider, Innozenz und Franziskus (Wiesbaden: Insel–Verlag, 1952), 121.
286. Reinhold Schneider, Innozenz der Dritte, 11.
287. Ibid., 10.
288. Schneider, Kaiser Lothars Krone, 143.
289. Erich Przywara, Logos: Logos–Abendland–Reich–Commercium (Düsseldorf: Patmos–Verlag, 1964), 110.
290. Reinhold Schneider, Das Inselreich: Gesetz und Größe der britischen Macht (Wiesbaden: Insel–Verlag, 1956 (2nd ed.), 28–29.
291. Schneider, Innozenz der Dritte, 36.
292. Ibid., 131. In an unpublished letter dated 16.03.1931 Schneider writes to his companion Anna-Maria Baumgarten, “It [the Innocent III.] is simply about the demonic nature of the inheritance of ancient Rome, which apprehends two powers at once and so forces them into mutual destruction.”
293. Schneider, Innozenz der Dritte, 38.
294. Ibid., 60.
295. Cf. ibid., 72.
296. Ibid., 73.
297. Ibid., 76.
298. Ibid.
299. Schmitt, Politische Theologie (1934), 14 and 18.
300. Ibid., 19–20.
301. Cf. Carl Schmitt-Dorotić, Die Diktatur: Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1921), 25ff. and 40.
302. Extensively: Faber, “Jean Bodin und de Bonald bei Werner Krauss und Carl Schmitt: Ein Vergleich.” In Werner Krauss: Wege–Werke–Wirkungen, edited by O. Ette et al., (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag Spitz, 1999), 71–90.
303. Cited in Reinhold Schneider, Corneilles Ethos in der Ära Ludwigs XI: Eine Studie (Baden-Baden: H. Bühler, [1947]), 86–87.
304. Ibid., 87.
305. Ernst Forsthoff, Der Staat der Industriegesellschaft: Dargestellt am Beispiel der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich: Beck 1971), 12.
306. Schmitt-Dorotić, Die Diktatur, 27.
307. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 49–50 n. 2.
308. Ibid., 80–81.
309. A classic now as ever: Ronald Syme, Die römische Revolution [The Roman Revolution] (Stuttgart: Klett, 1957).
310. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 82.
311. Schmitt, “Drei Stufen historischer Sinngebung,” Universitas 5 (1950), 929.
312. Hans-Joachim Krüger, Theologie und Aufklärung: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Vermittlung beim jungen Hegel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966), 30.
313. Carl Schmitt, “Der Staat als Mechanismus bei Hobbes und Descartes,” Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie XXX (1936–37), 626.
314. Schmitt, Der Leviathan, 22–23.
315. Helmut Schelsky, Thomas Hobbes: Eine politische Lehre (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1981), 5.
316. Ernst Niekisch, Das Reich der niederen Dämonen (Hamburg: Rowohlt,1953), 201.
317. Cf. von Martin, Im Zeichen der Humanität, 130.
318. Cf. Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, 257.
319. Hans Oppermann, Der Jude im griechisch-römischen Altertum. Ausg. 22 von Schriftenreihe zur weltanschaulichen Schulungsarbeit der NSDAP (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1943), 14.
320. Ibid., 6. As regards Oppermann’s continuous reception of Stefan George, see Oppermann, Vergil (1938). In Wege zu Vergil: Drei Jahrzehnte Begegnungen in Dichtung und Wissenschaft, edited by Hans Oppermann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), and on Oppermann in general: Richard Faber, “Faschistische Vergil-Philologie: Zum Beispiel Hans Oppermann,” Hephaistos 10 (1991), 111–33.
321. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 117–18 n. 3.
322. Ibid.
323. Ibid., 92.
324. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), 232.
325. Cf. not least Taubes, “Einleitung: Das stählerne Gehäuse und der Exodus daraus ode rein Streit um Marcion, einst und heute,” in Gnosis und Politik, edited by Jacob Taubes (Munich: Fink, 1984), 9ff.
326. Cf. not least Taubes, “Walter Benjamin—ein moderner Marcionit?,” 139.
327. Harnack, Marcion, 217.
328. Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 241–42. In an interview six years later Bloch says, as if citing Schmitt’s 1970 Political Theology II, so in a kind of circular argument: “he who has supposedly created the existing world cannot be at once the redeemer” (Tagträume vom aufrechten Gang: Sechs Interviews mit Ernst Bloch, edited by Arno Münster [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977], 87).
329. Cf. Faber, Lateinischer Faschismus: Über Carl Schmitt den Römer und Katholiken (Berlin: Philo, 2001), especially ch. 1.
330. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 286; Cf. also Faber, “‘Rom gegen Judäa, Judäa gegen Rom:’ Eine Kritik des schwarzen Nietzscheanismus,” in Antisemitismus, Paganismus, Völkische Religion, edited by Hubert Cancik and Uwe Puschner (Munich: Saur, 2004), 105–18, and, as regards pre-Christian, Roman anti-Semitism, see Hubert Cancik and Cancik-Lindemaier, “Classical Anti-Semitism: The Excursus on the Jews in Tacitus and its Ancient and Modern Reception,” in Antisemitismus, Paganismus, Völkische Religion, 15–25, as well as Hubert Cancik, “Der antike Antisemitismus und seine Rezeption,” in “Das ‘bewegliche’ Vorurteil”: Aspekte des internationalen Antisemitismus, edited by Christina von Braun and Eva-Maria Ziege (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), 63–79.