Mark Lilla - The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West

Contents

To my daughter, Sophie

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,
or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above,
or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water
under the earth:
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:
for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God.

EXODUS 20:45

Introduction

T HE TWILIGHT of the idols has been postponed. For over two centuries, from the American and French revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, political life in the West revolved around eminently political questions. We argued about war and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity. Today we have progressed to the point where we are again fighting the battles of the sixteenth centuryover revelation and reason, dogmatic purity and toleration, inspiration and consent, divine duty and common decency. We are disturbed and confused. We find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruin. We assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

In most civilizations known to us, in most times and places, when human beings have reflected on political questions they have appealed to God when answering them. Their thinking has taken the form of political theology. Political theology is a primordial form of human thought and for millennia has provided a deep well of ideas and symbols for organizing society and inspiring action, for good and ill. This obvious historical fact apparently needs restating today. Intellectual complacency, nursed by implicit faith in the inevitability of secularization, has blinded us to the persistence of political theology and its manifest power to shape human life at any moment. Our complacency is partly understandable, given that Western liberal democracies have succeeded in creating an environment where public conflict over competing revelations is virtually unthinkable today. But it is also self-serving. Every civilization at peace is prone to think it has solved the fundamental problems of political life, and when that certainty is wedded to a theory of history it breeds the conviction that other civilizations are destined to follow the same path. Chauvinism, too, can have a human face.

Yet there is a deeper reason why we in the West find it difficult to understand the enduring attraction of political theology. It is that we are separated from our own long theological tradition of political thought by a revolution in Western thinking that began roughly four centuries ago. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe civilizations on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We see that they face the same challenges of political existence we face, and ask themselves many of the same questions we do, regarding justice, legitimate authority, war and peace, rights and obligations. Yet their way of answering those questions has become alien to us. The river separating us is narrow, yet deep. On one shore the basic political structures of society are imagined and criticized by referring to divine authority; on the other they are not. And this turns out to be a fundamental difference.

Historically speaking, it is we who are different, not they. Modern political philosophy is a relatively recent innovation even in the West, where Christian political theology was the only developed tradition of political thought for over a millennium. The first modern philosophers hoped to change the practices of Christian politics, but their real opponent was the intellectual tradition that had justified those practices. By attacking Christian political theology and denying its legitimacy, the new philosophy simultaneously challenged the basic principles on which authority had been justified in most societies in history. That was the decisive break. The ambition of the new philosophy was to develop habits of thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms, without appeal to divine revelation or cosmological speculation. The hope was to wean Western societies from all political theology and cross to the other shore. What began as a thought-experiment thus became an experiment in living that we inherited. Now the long tradition of Christian political theology is forgotten, and with it memory of the age-old human quest to bring the whole of human life under Gods authority. Our experiment continues, though with less awareness of why it was begun and the nature of the challenge it was intended to meet. Yet the challenge has never disappeared.

FRAGILITY is a disturbing prospect. We see this in our children, who love fairy tales where occult forces threatening their little worlds are exposed and mastered. We are still like children when it comes to thinking about modern political life, whose experimental nature we prefer not to contemplate. Instead, we tell ourselves stories about how our big world came to be and why it is destined to persist. These are legends about the course of history, full of grand terms to describe the process supposedly at workmodernization, secularization, democratization, the disenchantment of the world, history as the story of liberty, and countless others. These are the fairy tales of our time. Whether they are recounted in epic mode by those satisfied with the present, or in tragic mode by those nostalgic for Eden, they serve the same function in our intellectual culture that tales of witches and wizards do in our childrens imaginations: they make the world legible, they reassure us of its irrevocability, and they relieve us of responsibility for maintaining it.

The Stillborn God is not a fairy tale. It is a book about the fragility of our world, the world created by the intellectual rebellion against political theology in the West. This may seem an unusual, even perverse, theme, given that Western nations are currently at peace with one another and that the norms of liberal democracy, especially regarding religion, are generally accepted. The West does appear to have passed some kind of historical watershed, making it barely imaginable that theocracies could spring up among us or that armed bands of religious fanatics could set off a civil war. Even so, our world is fragilenot because of the promises our political societies fail to keep, but because of the promises our political thought refuses to make.

Human beings crave assurance. One powerful attraction of political theology, in any form, is its comprehensiveness. It both offers a way of thinking about the conduct of human affairs and connects those thoughts to loftier ones, about the being of God, the structure of the cosmos, the nature of the soul, the origin of all things, the end of time. The novelty of modern political philosophy was to have relinquished such comprehensive claims by disengaging reflection about the human political realm from theological speculations about what might lie beyond it. In a sense, this new political philosophy was more modest than the political theologies it replaced, since it renounced higher appeals to revelation as justifications of political principles. In a psychological sense, though, it was wildly ambitious. Human beings everywhere think about the basic structure of reality and the right way to live, and many are led from those questions to speculate about the divine or to believe in revelations. Psychologically speaking, it is a very short step from holding such beliefs to being convinced that they are legitimate sources of political authority. We know this from our history books and, in recent years, from world events. In the West people still think about God, man, and world todayhow could they not? But most seem to have trained themselves not to take that last step into politics. We are no longer in the habit of connecting our political discourse to theological and cosmological questions, and we no longer recognize revelation as politically authoritative. This is a testament to our self-restraint. That we must rely on self-restraint should concern us.