9

God, the State, and Revolution

Rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON

Wherever revelation does not awake faith, it must awaken rebellion.

—CARL SCHMITT

Everyone is familliar with Mao Tse-Tung’s famous dictum, first formulated during the Long March in the 1930s, that “all power flows from the barrel of a gun.” The saying often has gushily romantic overtones for even the most weapons-abhorring political progressive while setting off paroxysms of indignation perhaps among American conservatives solely because of the source, even though it is the latter who, in their fanatical defense of the Second Amendment, probably have more in common with Mao than they care to admit. But few would be inclined to view the precept as a fundamental formulation of modern political theology, let alone take it as a cipher for decoding somehow the current debate and growing political nastiness in the United States over gun control. Furthermore, few would dare to ponder the “gun” itself as the master signifier for political thought in the context of globalization as a whole today—not the benign, neoliberal “world is flat” version of globalization, but the darker sort of implosive, “decolonial,” post-Eurocentric vision we find, whether implicitly or explicitly, in such writers as Mignolo, Žižek, or Badiou.

It is Badiou’s analysis in particular on which I want to zero in eventually. But first we need to offer a few warnings and disclaimers in these concluding remarks. First, what we are about to say will probably shock and enrage many conventional readers, conditioned as we all are to viewing guns and weaponry, particularly when mobilized for “military” purposes, as instrumentalities of political reaction or unrestrained violence. Second, the automatic assumption within most contemporary politico-theological discourse of a certain summum bonum that might be best described as a “Christian liberal state pacificism” needs to be assertively challenged—not because it is false as a normative teleology of human societies, or that it must be zealously sought, but because it fatefully misreads history and human nature. The ongoing controversy over the Second Amendment is often misplaced, because it usually comes down to rather trivial questions of whether individual citizens should be armed, whether and to what degree there are constitutionally sanctioned limits on the type and quantity of weapons individuals can possess, and so forth. Moreover, regardless of what the Second Amendment actually means, or was “intended” to mean, the polemics nowadays tend to be framed—at least from the side of gun control advocates—in terms congenial to the advocates of “soft” (in Foucault’s terms we should say “softly repressive”) power—the “prevention” of violence, which conjecturally flows from the profusion of deadly weapons throughout society.

As a fallback, partisans in both camps have their own competing preferred, albeit dogmatic, theories about the explanation for armed mayhem. Whether indeed it is truly “guns” or “people” that cause violence, the acrimony turns out to be rather superfluous, because the obvious answer is both. Empirical comparisons between societies, or demographic groups, or historical eras to prove particular points are trotted out endlessly, all of which miss the essential point, namely, that the issue is really the role of the state and whether the state should—normatively speaking—play a critical role in the shaping the life of homo politicus.

The Second Amendment, which is unique in many ways for modern constitutional republics, was of course inserted at the instigation mainly of Jefferson into the Bill of Rights to complement the First Amendment. Both amendments can be understood not merely in light of Jefferson’s concern and determination in preserving for the future of the new democracy “the spirit of 1776” that recognized both the right and the obligation of the colonists to revolt against state tyranny. Revolution without arms is like a motorcyle without wheels, and it is the “revolutionary” principle—which implies the utter contingency and frail legitimacy of state power—that Jefferson feared would disappear once the Constitution was established as the sacred font of future legislation and the people became comfortable, if not complacent, with the blessings of their New World experiment in democracy. Jefferson’s antistatist sympathies—sometimes bordering on what today we would regard as “anarchical”—are well-documented. Jefferson’s principle of “permanent revolution” is in truth not that much different from Trotsky’s, although the Marxist/materialist matrix of the latter’s theorizing departs substantively from the Jeffersonian Enlightenment-based (almost Rousseauean) belief in the moral “virtues” of the people.

Jefferson was convinced in principle that the more powerful and far-reaching the state, the better armed should be the people. Call it the “ammunitional” rendering of Montesquieu’s separation of powers. “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” Jefferson wrote in his letter to James Madison on December 20, 1787. The current political context, where it is impossible to look at the issue apart from reflexive political prejudices that blind us to the context in which Second Amendment rights were originally formulated, needs to be set aside, and what we need to consider seriously is the way in which guns as a signifier of political power compel us to examine the fundamental question behind all modern political economy, the very question the age of revolution starting in the seventeenth century first brought to the fore.

THE DANGER OF THE STATE

That question amounts, as we have seen, to the authority and legitimacy of the state overall. The familiar nineteenth-century insistence on “limited government” was not originally a defense of laissez-faire economics, but a cautionary tale against the expansion of despotic prerogatives with the resulting arbitrary exercise of state power that had been historically witnessed by absolute monarchies since the seventeenth century. It was the co-optation of the limited-government principle by the infamous “robber barons,” especially in America, in the second half of the nineteenth century to create a de facto political aristocracy based on predatory accumulation of wealth that changed the equation. The creation of corporate empires as ministates, operating as corrupt political hegemons, within the legitimate but feckless democratic res publica of that day and age that transformed the general social valuation of the state apparatus in general from oppressor to savior.

But this valuation has been gradually eroding since the end of World War II, largely because of what is perceived as the increasingly ineffective role of the state in mobilizing the productive interests of the general population against predatory economic power. Instead the state is seen as allied with that predatory power, as may be seen in the populist disgust with the alliance between Wall Street and Washington following the worldwide financial collapse of 2008. In the developing world, it has taken the form of indigenous socialist and grassroots collectivist movements that have won democratic elections, such as we see in South America, which resist ideologically the neoliberal fantasy of an economically integrated global superstate pursuing broader secular goals (e.g., the charter of the International Monetary Fund). The Arab Spring, with its antiauthoritarian passions and insurrections, has been the manifestation within the Islamic world of the same tendencies. The gun, therefore, has become the token of both resistance and insurgency against the neoliberal state in all its cultural and regional guises. The familiar adage about firearms as the “great equalizer” reflects the original Jeffersonian insight that democracy to be sustainable must somehow be permanently weaponized.

But let us get to Badiou, who has “axiomatized” as a political thought operation (Badiou’s own phrasing is “truth procedure”) the intuitions of a Jefferson. In his Metapolitics, first published in French in 1998 and translated into English less than a decade later, Badiou builds out the theoretical—and by extension the nascently theological—latticework for the assertion of the quintessentially political in opposition to the claims of the state.¹ Every state—even a putatively “democratic” one—is inimical to the political. The political, which Badiou identifies with the concept of “democracy,” arises from a “fidelity” to an “evental singularity” made known epochally in the resistance to state power. But it is only in this resistance that the state discloses itself for what it is, i.e, antihuman and antipolitical. The notion of a benevolent state is just as hypocritical and contradictory as the oxymoron of “enlightened despotism.”

“Whenever there is a genuinely political event, the State reveals itself. It reveals its excess of power, its repressive dimension.” Consequently, we have, according to Badiou, in the “political prescription the postevental establishment of a fixed measure for the power of the state.”² Although Badiou does not say it outright, the fixing of the “measure” is of course the equilibration of the previously unequal power between the state and the people through the “barrel of a gun.” As an unrepentant Maoist, Badiou clearly has something like this analysis in mind. Without the “equalizer” of weaponry, the state’s power is unlimited, crushing the political virtues of its citizenry that Jefferson so prized. “It is not the simple power of the state of the situation that prohibits egalitarian politics. It is the obscurity and measureless in which this power is enveloped.”³

The division of armaments apportions this erstwhile “measureless” in such a way that what Nietzsche’s Zarathustra termed the “pale monster,” namely, the state, is slain, butchered, divided up, and consumed as the nutrient power of the politically awakened demos. As we have already suggested, therefore, the gun becomes the projective symbol of the empowered demos rather than of an antidemocratic lawlessness or of some sort of vicious reactionary, nativist, anticosmopolitan cabal. The debate over gun rights, which has taken on its own strange, idiosyncratic overtones in the current American context, needs to be further contextualized in terms of its meaning for the democratic revolutions that continue to percolate everywhere on the planet. It is not insignificant that when Secretary of State John Kerry met with the leaders of the Syrian rebels in Italy in early 2013, offering them humanitarian aid, he was angrily rebuked. Kerry was told, in effect, by the leadership that all gestures of assistance were meaningless without proffering the weapons material for democratic empowerment that would allow the rebels to level the playing field against the ruthless Assad regime, which initially triggered the uprising by mowing down unarmed demonstrators with tanks and machine guns.

If one is against arming the democratic citizenry under any circumstances, one must have the justifiable conviction that the state that preserves the imbalance of firepower cannot be presumed to run the risk of ever becoming “tyrannical.” History itself continually gives the lie to that presumption. Yet we must ask ourselves: if guns are the cipher for revolutionary resistance to the state, or at least the power of the authentic politeia in opposition to the inevitable encroachments of power on the part of the state, on what is that resistance founded? And is it not only the Jeffersonian resistance to an imbalance of power, deeply feared by the Enlightenment theorists of civic virtue, that constitutes the “force of God,” countervailing the “force of law” expressed through both the founding and regulating violence Benjamin identifies as the very metaphysical substance of the state itself? Jefferson himself certainly thought so. The vast majority of revolutionary thinkers from the English revolutionaries in the seventeenth century forward certainly grasped these dynamics.

But Jefferson was not a revolutionary like Mao in the modern sense. Jeffersonian democracy was the ultimate praxis of the Lockean argument, outlined extensively in Locke’ss Two Treatises on Civil Government, that the state has limited rights when it comes to the creative power of the individual, especially expressed through the transformation of nature by the force of labor. As is well understood in political theory, it was Locke, not Marx, who invented the labor theory of value. Marx only “socialized” the theory of value and radically construed it anew as a historical phenomenon, as part of the dialectical redirection of the transformative process through class consciousness and ultimately via class conflict. We discern, therefore, in the genealogical link between Locke and Marx the key to the difference between the Enlightenment and the modern view of the “force” that sets itself against the power of the state. It is inconceivable to think of modern revolution without some variant on the Maoist dictum about the provenance of power. The dictum rests, explicit in most of Marx’s writings, on the tacit view that the repressive state is the inexorable outcome of a culture of “possessive individualism.”

Whether this repression is through the highly “enlightened,” nuanced, discursive, and putatively benign therapeutic apparatuses Foucault documents, or whether it comes from the paranoid reactivity of monopoly capital and its political extensions, which was the revolutionary experience in Europe from the early nineteenth century up through the late 1960s, are in a large sense irrelevant. The issue of state repression is as ancient as Greek democracy itself. Political theory begins as a response to tyranny. The state and the polis—therefore, the state and “politics” per se—signifies the rudimentary antinomies of political theology overall. The dilemma of whether to render to God or Caesar is eminently one of deciding between, in Tönnies’s phraseology, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The repressive mechanisms of the former come into play only when one who has, either by birth or voluntary association, assented to its strictures opts to reject them for whatever reason. In the former instance repression follows from a challenge to the “artificial” legitimacy of the state—an idea introduced by Hobbes that has become unshakable in the modern venue—that frequently arises as the command of “conscience” or, as is more often than not the case, from God.

THE REVOLUTION OF THE SAINTS

In short, the state exists, as Hobbes himself well understood, in order to preserve individuals from the intrinsic consequences of their fallen condition, from their unsociability in the state of nature. But, as Michael Walzer in his famous study of the origins of revolutionary thought notes tellingly, this uniquely Hobbesian insight, which in many respects may be considered the primum mobile of all modern political thought, has profound implications that necessitate the very revolutionary theory that challenges the state itself. The concept of a so-called state of nature reflects in actuality the complete breakdown of a sense of prevailing “natural orders” and its attendant anxiety that characterized the transition from the medieval to the modern worlds. It is in the midst of this breakdown that the notion of revolution, according to Walzer, is born from the experience of a divine calling among a select company of “saints” to combat the chaos. The first revolutionary “saints,” of course, were Calvinists—specifically, the Puritans of the seventeenth century. “These men,” Walzer writes in his classic from the 1960s, “are marked off from their fellows by an extraordinary self-assurance and daring. The saints not only repudiate the routine procedures and customary beliefs of the old order, but they also cut themselves off from the various kinds of ‘freedom’ … experienced amidst the decay of tradition. The band of the chosen seeks and wins certainty and self-confidence by rigidly disciplining its members and teaching them to discipline themselves. The saints interpret their ability to endure this discipline as a sign of their virtue and their virtue as a sign of God’s grace.”⁴

Revolutionary politics arises as a reaction against the “fall,” against the chaos, in the name of an imminent—and immanent—republic of godly community and mobilized virtue. The “grace” need not be heavenly; it can also be historical, as Marxist materialism recognizes. The discipline is the same. The saints fight against tyranny—and they always fight with arms—in the name of a God-ordained community with God-anointed leaders that will replace the mere restraining mechanisms of the state per se as the harsh, but unavoidable remedy to the disorder of the state of nature.

But what if the state itself no longer functions as the means of “restraining” sin? In Walzer’s analysis the eighteenth century rejection of the Calvinist conscience in favor of the liberal laissez-faire—what we would now term libertarian—view of the minimalist state as the protector of property and industry was only possible because the Calvinist revolution had succeeded by and large in its objectives. Locke, the architect of modern liberalism, was a second-generation Puritan. Calvinism had employed the tools of civil repression and community discipline in pursuit of a godly commonwealth. “Liberalism also required such voluntary subjection and self-control, but in sharp contrast to Puritanism, its politics was shaped by an extraordinary confidence in the possibility of both, a firm sense of human reasonableness and of the relative ease with which order might be attained. Liberal confidence made repression and the endless struggle against sin unnecessary…. The Lockean state was not a disciplinary institution as was the Calvinist holy commonwealth, but rather rested on the assumed political virtue of its citizens.”⁵

Liberalism’s assumption of such virtue ironically created the conditions for its eventual demise. If there is one point on which Calvin and Marx agree, it is that an affirmation of private virtue without the discipline of the community, or, regarded in the classic context, without the oversight of the politeia, readily degenerates into acquisitive excess. Acquisitive excess has, in fact, been the destiny of liberal democracy, even if this excess has been fostered by the credit of the state, as we have witnessed since the advent of Keynesian economics, with its mission of “rescuing” capitalism. The mounting critique of ideology throughout the nineteenth century unmasked liberal virtue as a smokescreen for this very excess. “Law, morality, religion are … so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests,” Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology.⁶

It is no coincidence that liberalism in the past century, or at least since it became synonymous with progressive, continues to retain the same kind of hypocrisy, in the etymological sense of a lack of penetrating critical judgment that Marx first brought to our attention. The hypocrisy now extends to the pretense that it is advancing the interests of the downtrodden, when in fact it is simply keeping the downtrodden marginally secure—a strategy first adopted during the rise of the second German Reich under the “Iron Chancellor” Bismarck—while building a vast, bureaucratic army of civil servants and better-paid administrative professionals. Max Weber himself foresaw this development in the nineteenth century with his observation that social idealism, an inalienable property of progressivism in all its historical countenances, inevitably generates an “iron cage” (stahlhartes Gehäuses) of rigidified, impersonal, and collectivist bureaucratic behavior because of the need to concretize—or as we should say “enforce”—our moralistic sentiments.⁷ The crisis of this new bohemian bourgeois “socially responsible” state corporatism, with its feigned “collective conscience,” consists in the current global debt disaster, just as in Marx’s time the crisis amounted to one of overaccumulation and the immiseration of the productive classes. The working classes of today have been abandoned by the new capitalists just as they were in the early nineteenth century.

Jefferson envisioned a virtuous citizenry as a sort of Archimedean balancing point against which the hegemony of the state must be held in abeyance and the metrics of power judiciously weighed. But he did not anticipate modern social bureaucracy, designed to administer the intricacies of the new, rationalized, “capitalist” order, in the way that Weber, as a German state employee, did for the first time. Marx, who competed indirectly with Weber to be the most “scientific” observer of the social trend lines of his day, did not anticipate it either. He understood the private “captains of industry,” but not the faceless functionaries of what nowadays we refer to euphemistically on a global scale as the benevolent toiling angels of “civil society.” Neither, of course, anticipated the rise to virtually unmastered power of the bureaucratic, bohemian bourgeoisie. The bohemian bourgeoisie is horrified at an armed citizenry, let alone a revolutionary armed citizenry, and seeks to disarm it by whatever measures it can muster and justify. It is also horrified at religious enthusiasms of all sorts of deeply feared “fundamentalists” who might somehow upset the equipoise of its brave new world of well-ordered, pluralistic, infinitely subtle and all-permeating Foucauldian networks of virtualized “disciplinary power.” Foucault’s revision of the Baconian formula to make power absolutely identical with and indistinguishable from “knowledge” (i.e, in the form of “power/knowledge”) adumbrates the crisis of representation, therefore, in modern liberal democracy because no longer is there a “balance of power” between the principle of sovereignty and any kind of “material” interests. All interests are now immaterial; they are coded as the rarefied “social good” for which the engineers of the new virtue, like Plato’s guardians in his utopian scenario, assume rigorous and unrelenting oversight.

The crisis of representation in modern liberal democracy thus emerges from a historical process whereby the “substance” previously signified in modern political economies, be it real property, labor, or capital equipment, relentlessly and systematically deliquesces into purely “symbolic economies.” The underlying values of these economies are no longer genuinely exchangeable other than as promissory notes. In addition, material goods now are transmuted into “social goods,” meaning that the promise no longer turns on the eventual exchange of one tangible item (or even a useful service) for another, as in the theoretical redemption of banknotes for gold or silver, but instead on the alleviation of certain abstract wrongs and the acquisition of indefinite symbolic credits toward ill-defined “extramundane” rewards. But the fiduciary compulsion of these virtualized tokens is only as good as the vanishing material economy that undergirds them. In his prophecy of an inevitable crisis of capitalism Marx did not foresee the political substitution of these symbolic tokens engineered by the ingenious social marketing mechanisms we now regard as democratic politics. The crisis Marx predicted finally appeared full-blown in the 1930s, but it was Keynes who, in a curious way, launched the process, which he believed would “save” capitalism, whereas, in fact, he only postponed it.

THE TASK OF POLITICAL THEOLOGY

But our job is one of geneaological discernment, not alarm mongering and doomsaying. As the crisis of liberal democracy approaches—and it is indeed very near—it does not avail itself of any straightforward political and economic solutions. The solution, if we are to employ the term appropriately in this setting, is ultimately not one of politics but of political theology. What are we really setting forth by such a contention?

In order to arrive at some sense of how to navigate our way through such thinking about what we can imagine as a political theology of the future, a future darkened and thoroughly rent by constant economic crisis and attendant political confusion, we need to turn back, as many Christian philosophers do at such junctures, to Augustine’s Civitas Dei. However, we are not seriously concerned, as many political theologians in the past have been, with the possibility of either a Christian state, as the Roman Empire was nominally in Augustine’s era, or the destiny of the “church” in an age of social and political collapse. All theologies of the “two kingdoms,” first crafted by Augustine, have exhausted their implications.

The last twitchings of the expiring corpse of an intellectual heritage we might term Christian Augustinian Romanism, which yokes the salvation of the world to a beneficient—or at least a theologically authorized—state form can be found, of course, in the radical orthodoxy movement of today: John Milbank’s call at the end of Theology and Social Theory, the book that launched the movement in the early 1990s, where he characterizes Christian life and praxis as a “counterethic” and “counter-ontology,” securing in terms of chronos as well as kairos an activist and ethically integral community that struggles against secularity because it discloses itself as “different from all other cultural systems, which it exposes as threatened by incipient nihilism.”⁸ Theology must become “ecclesiology,” according to Milbank, because politics itself must become a theologically suffused “social theory,” or at minimum a strategy of installing virtue within the polis, of preserving the “commonwealth” against the constant encroachments of the nihil. All species of modern “cultural conservatism” conform to this model in some fashion. And, even though it is possible to read Theology and Social Theory as a curious sort of mongrelized, Reformed-Anglican manifesto calling for the church to take a less passive and perhaps even a strengthened “militant” role in resisting the moral and political deterioration of society nowadays, familiarity with Milbank’s style and rhetoric persuades us that he is outlining a typically British Romantico-Gothic (ironically, one dubbed postmodern by the radical orthodox movement) vision of a neo-Constantinian world order.

Whereas there are certain similarities between the Christian militancy of a Calvin, the “saints” in radical orthodoxy are never revolutionaries. The latter model assumes the persistence of an identifiable and, in certain respects, “sovereign” entity that becomes the torchbearer for an enduring “cultural system,” especially one that is eternally “alternative” to the prevailing saeculum. There is neither a need nor a compulsion toward revolution, because it is the state—and the state alone—that can provide the historical apparatus for the shaping of the Christian “citizen” of the “city of God.” It is no accident that Milbank, coyly in this context, cites Hegel as the touchstone for what an ecclesiology qua theology qua social theory would actually look like. The new theology “refuses to treat reason and morality as ahistorical universals, but instead asks, like Hegel, how has Christianity affected human reason and human practice? Veering back to the “Church Fathers,” and mainly Augustine, such a social theory turns for its paradigm of the politeia to the very sacramental mythos of community found in “the incarnation and Pentecost.” It “seeks to define a Christian Sittlichkeit, a moral practice embedded in the historical emergence of a new, and unique community.” The complex Hegelian “task,” therefore, is “situated in the re-narration of Christian emergence, a story which only constitutes itself as a story by re-narrating previous stories, both of past and history, and of the relation of creation to Godhead.”⁹ To be sure, as Hegel himself made clear, this task is nothing else but the job of the state. “The march of God in the world, that is what the state is.”¹⁰

In radical orthodoxy we have intimations once again of a spectral Christian statism, which, like its liberal counterpart today, understands its distinctive moral and spiritual role in combating the “barbarism” that, for the former, consists in the retreat of the religious from public life. In the latter instance, even without the pretension to any kind of religious morality, we have the perceived horror on the part of new and entrenched secular, educated elites of an increasingly armed but atomized social constituency, a horror arising from their purely rationalistic and “casuistic” type of ethical conscience dedicated to the expansion of ever new frontiers of “social justice” enforced by the enlightened despotism of their own knowledge aristocracy. But both models are not only statist; they are decidedly Roman. Augustine in his own odd way—in a way airbrushed to its extremities by radical orthodoxy—was the last true apostle of triumphal Romanitas.

The consecration of the state form goes all the way back to book 19 of the Civitas Dei. Ironically, it is here we find the implicit assertion of the divine legitimacy of the Christian state. Contrary to all the attempts over the generations to make Augustine into a “political theorist,” the label cannot be properly attributed to him, if only because he was not concerned with arriving at a cogent construct of the politeia per se, only at trying to understand how the Roman ideal of the res publica, or commonwealth, had fatefully and most brutally degenerated into empire, which, as he wrote, was on its last legs. Rome pretended to be a polis when it was not one at all. Even the Stoic dream of an aristocratic, self-controlled “cosmopolitan” polis, or a cosmopolis, had long lost its traction as well as its attraction. Thus, in response to rampant accusations among the populace that the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 was a kind of divine judgment on the empire’s somewhat recent rejection of the pagan gods in favor of the new monotheistic Christos pantokrator, at one time Constantine’s “conquering sun,” Augustine sought not so much to offer an “apology” for the new Christian imperium as to demonstrate why all previous forms of the polis were not what they appeared to be.

Modern readers are usually baffled, and largely bored, by the seemingly overweening attention Augustine gives, up until the very last sections, to what might be termed a thoroughgoing narrative deconstruction of the Roman gods and the historic pillars of what were once considered “republican” piety. The entire Civitas Dei is a sustained critique, therefore, of the idols—the politico-moral representational syntactics—of what today we know as liberal democracy. The “liberal” or republican state, as Schmitt profoundly and prophetically realized, is not really a state at all, because it is a product of a play of natural and self-seeking interests, interests linked to forces that the Enlightenment was convinced, as an act of faith, were instruments of the providential hand of God. The moral quality of these forces was merely assumed to be beneficient. But over time these forces are exposed for what they really are—expressions of what Augustine termed cupiditas, or “avarice,” the basis of all “base” desires that lead to moral depravity, greed, ruthless ambition, exploitation, and unceasing social violence. Radix malorum est cupiditas. For Schmitt, as well as for contemporary historical thinkers like Lilla, it was the separation of the theological from the moral within the computative scheme of the political that undermines the current crisis. Schmitt’s solution, of course, was even more draconian than Augustine’s. For Schmitt, it would require the force of exception in the agency of the sovereign, who literally performs the divine but political act of creatio ex nihilo. Thus the political can only be resuscitated in the present “dark age” of social and moral breakdown by the embodied theological. In a sense, the body of the king returns. The king is dead. Long live the king.

Augustine seems to have little interest in the question of sovereignty, even as it might have been couched conceptually in his own era. His project is to redescribe the res publica through a Christian semantics, a reformulation that was only thinkable within the century after Constantine’s conversion. Constantine’s vision of the Chi-Rho at the Milvian Bridge, the cross subtly and symptomatically transmuted into an imperial signet, has had far greater consequences for Western political thinking than can be imagined; it became the linchpin for the struggle between popes and emperors throughout medieval Europe.

On the other hand, Augustine—in contrast to Eusebius, or later Hegel, for that matter—did not see the imperial regime as necessarily the march of God on earth. The coming of a “Christian” state was both a blessing and a challenge. It was a challenge because, as Christian reformers have lamented over the centuries, it made conversion and the discipline of personal as well as communal sanctification seem much too easy. It was a blessing because now what might be considered the lost “virtues” of the res publica could be freely developed and elaborated without the fear of persecution. But, for these virtues to be realized, a different sort of res publica was critical, one more akin to what Calvin later called the “holy commonwealth”—though not with his militant overtones—than even the most pastoral ideal of the ancient ekklesia with its hierarchial and professional cadres for the curing of souls had indicated. To lay the foundational argument for a true Christian res publica, Augustine had not only to dismantle the authority of Roman’s great “civil theologian” Varro, which he spends so much of the book doing, but to show how civil theology itself was always an impostor theology. Only a political theology would rescue the res publica.

THE NEW “CITY OF GOD”

In section 21 of book 19, referring to earlier meditations by Roman authors on the demise of the Roman republic, Augustine poses the metapolitical question of what a polis, or res publica, is truly seated upon. In book 2 he had cited Scipio’s critique of Cicero that the Roman res publica, or commonweal, never really existed because there was not “justice” (iustitia) in it. A “republic,” Augustine argues in book 19, is defined as the “weal,” or well-being, of the people (res populus), the populus itself understood as “a multitude ‘united in association by a common sense of right and a community of interest’” (coetum multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatum).¹¹ And thus without iustitia there can be no ius, or “right,” that binds together the polis, or res publica. For the res publica to function as a “state,” that is, to have operative power and authority, it must have both iustitia and ius. However, in the Roman republic this failure to establish justice can be blamed on the false gods themselves. These false gods, who were in reality “demons,” were exposed for what they were in the sack of Rome, “for the gods would not drive off those who assailed the walls of Rome from outside unless they themselves first drove out all morality from within the city.”¹²

Elsewhere in book 14 of Civitas Dei Augustine, as most readers are already familiar, defines the question of the “city,” the politeia, in terms not so much of its historic precedents or organizational makeup but of its general “character.” This character is a reflection of what we might term its “conative” structure (from the Latin conatus), its composite of expressive desires. “We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love (amores): the earthly city was created by self-love (amor sui) reaching the point of contempt for God (contemptum sui), the Heavenly City by the love of God (amor Dei) carried as far as contempt of self (contemptum sui).”¹³ These two loves constitute the historical destiny of each type, a type that is forged through the very nature of its own mode of devotion, its religio. Secular liberal democracy, that is, a non-Jeffersonian democracy where desire rather than virtue is all that matters, would in Augustine’s typology obviously fit into the destiny of the civitas terrena, the destiny of the damned. In this “earthy city its wise men who live by men’s standards [secundum hominem] have pursued the goods of the body or of their own mind, or both,” which lapsed into a dominion of pride (superbia) and a genuflection to the whims of the leaders of the “general public” (duces populorum). The state, therefore, as a functionary and intermediary for these desires, has no gravity or authority. Its only claim to rule is to rule by tyranny, which is not rule but violence, and in Augustine’s reimagined genealogy of Rome the history of the putative res publica is precisely that, the tyranny of collective amor sui masquerading as both Romanitas and humanitas simultaneously.

The state can have no virtue, or even a “moral authority,” in the saeculum, according to Augustine, because it is the ensemble of wills that readily manifests as mundane vanity, thus effectively as tyranny. But within the state, within the saeculum as a whole, the contours of the city of God can be discerned. That is why Augustine regarded the church, the ekklesia, as a sort of predestined antidote to the vitiation of the state within the secular habitat. The church is not a polis, but its politico-theological instrumentality leavens the state, bereft of its “political” authority, which is ultimately a moral authority. It is a certain agency that has the force of God behind it.

Augustine seemed to grasp that the state was in crisis, because the republic as the fantasized, moral bulwark of the Roman imperium, supposedly restored by Constantine, had never really been present to history. He foresaw the inevitable collapse of the state form for this very reason, yet he was ever hopeful because he knew that God was “with” his true people, his half-heavenly, half-earthly civitas Dei, who would persist beyond the historical verdict on the state itself. We have our same “Romanist” fantasies today about the endurance of the democratic state, the res publica of American secular interests. We assign a “virtue,” particularly in the debate over guns, to the state that is not there and has never been there perhaps. Or we enjoy Milbank’s Romantic fantasy of a medieval church redivivus, which always requires the temporal sword to back it up; a church aligned with a Christian “state” can keep its finger in the dike against the onslaught of “nihilism.”

Augustine was always more modest than that. His aim was immediate. He wanted to dispossess us of our fantasy of the omnicompetent Roman state, which everyone had taken as a given, now emboldened by the arrival of the presumed “Christian” iteration until the sack of Rome. He wanted to scotch that fantasy because he knew that something inconceivable was in the works, something that would not happen right away, and in his own lifetime would remain unfulfilled, especially when the Vandals later sacked Carthage, and he died a martyr’s death. The state is never genuinely competent, only God. We cannot expect the “church,” contra Milbank in any political guise, to make history from the divine point of view. Only the saints, the communio sanctorum, have historical authority. And what, or who, are these saints—today?

We live at a time when the baton of political theology passes to the saints, the revolutionary saints, the Christian insurgents, the visible signs of the operative and indefensible force of God. We are not talking, despite the inevitable nattering complaints of “exclusivism” and “hegemony,” contra Milbank or any of his congeners of Christian “triumphalism” in any meaningful sense of the word. The lengthy “parenthesis,” as the dispensationalist say of Christendom, is over. The church has played well its historic supporting part. It is now the age of militancy, not of the virtuous state. The state cannot be virtuous any more than a dung beatle can be free of excrement. The virtue of the saints is the new knowledge that emerges from the event of the absolute Christ encounter—the force of God!

Strangely, Augustine himself anticipated this at the end of his Civitas Dei, a historical compendium, a Heilsgeschichte, that continues to require decoding even today. Augustine talked about “the power of knowledge” that “will be very great in the saints.”¹⁴ Furthermore, we live in an age “consecrated” by the resurrection, the ultimate sign of the force of God. This event, let alone this force, we do not yet understand. Christian theology has no advantage when it comes to such saintly “knowledge.”

Today we find ourselves truly as “militants” who cannot resist and are the historical embodiment of this force. Perhaps that is what is meant by the “church militant” (ecclesia militans), the spiritually, socially, and political engaged “community of saints” propelled by both contemporaneous and eschatologically framed insurrectionary power. The militant is the execution of what Badiou in his Metapolitics dubs the “infinite of the situation,” the “evental” manifestation of the immeasurable force that finds its measurable dimensions in the moment of insurrection.¹⁵ But this insurrection also brings to presence eventally, if we may indeed speak “theologically,” the God force driving history that Augustine remotely sensed, the force for which the material sign is resurrection.

Both insurrection and resurrection derive from the same Latin root through which we obtain the word surge. It is the power of resurrection that eventally decides the minute of insurrection. According to Badiou, the truth of all politics expands into a “destination” that “reactivates a subject in another logic of its appearing-in-truth, resurrection.” Such a resurrection “presupposes a new world, which generates the context for a new event, a new trace, a new body.”¹⁶ A genealogy of the political yields the truth of this resurrection power, by which the militant, the visible agent of the communio sanctorum, is eminently sustained. It also reveals the insurrectionary moment. That is the task of political theology today amid the enveloping crisis of liberal democracy.