Theopolitical questions abound

The future of politics and the rôle of the Church in a world where liberalism appears to be increasingly exhausted is again a hot topic. Chase Padusniak at Patheos Catholic has given a good run-down of a recent debate in the Roman Catholic Church Life Journal on the topic of post-liberal political theologies. To wit: is the future of Christian political theology intégriste, anarchist, or something else entirely?

To be honest, I do feel like I have drifted away somewhat from the flow of this debate in the blogosphere – my interests on this blog having largely delved into historical topics rather than current affairs. But, as chance would have it, they are not unrelated – and I do on occasion pop up for a breath of air. I won’t say it’s exactly ‘fresh’ air in the current instance; the Church Life Journal debate is essentially a reprise, in a slightly different key, of a blogosphere argument sparked by an article in La Civiltà Cattolica a year and a half ago, on Americanism and the œcumenism of fear. But that does not mean by any stretch that the CLJ debate is without importance! We are, after all, trapped in a post-liberal moment whether we like it or not. It is only good sense that we should begin to examine the grand narratives and comprehensive doctrines that will naturally fill the void. It is also good sense to interrogate them hard. We need to question where we go from here, and also to begin asking what, if anything, can be salvaged from the ordo of liberalism as it steers itself towards shipwreck.

The problem, as it is posed by both Troutner and Waldstein, is clear. Liberal social orders pretend to be neutral arbiters and level playing fields between various incommensurate comprehensive doctrines about what constitutes the Good. The liberal ‘creation story’ is one in which a neutral state is able to stave off – either with actual violence or with the mere threat of it – the various forces of religious bigotry and fanaticism behind which lurk the disintegrative forces of chaos. We are now beginning to see and understand that this pose of neutrality and levelness is, indeed, just a pose – that liberalism itself is a comprehensive doctrine, but one which does not actually constitute its own substantive ‘good’ and instead provides only various formal and procedural simulacra of the Good (debate, discourse, proceeding, election, trial, rules-based order). So far, so good, so to speak. Where Troutner and Waldstein begin to disagree is in their diagnoses of the liberal worldview – and this leads them toward diametrically-opposed conclusions about the correct uses of political power and the correct relationship between the Church and the state.

For Troutner, the nature of liberalism is fundamentally parasitic on the legacy of Christendom’s improvements on prior pagan systems of political ethics. Liberalism appeals to various expectations which grew out of the apostolic and patristic witness at the beginning of the Christian age – things like human dignity and equality before the law – and, to slightly contort his analogy, metastasises those expectations into bedrock principles of a new order which must be preserved at any cost even from the religious worldviews that brought them into being. Troutner believes that liberalism can be defeated only by providing counter-narratives which demonstrate this sophistic sleight-of-hand. Waldstein, on the other hand, understands the rejection of hierarchy and obedience as ethical categories to be present in the fall of Lucifer and, consequently, in the first fall of man. Satan, in this account, is the first liberal. Waldstein’s account of the distinctions between liberalism and the Christian worldview become, in this perspective, far more Manichæan in character. It is therefore not surprising in the slightest that Troutner ends up espousing a form of Christian anarchism and Waldstein, a form of theocracy.

As a brief aside: I do wish Troutner had gone a bit further in his critique of intégrisme, and gone into its – so to speak – moral genealogy. In its original form, the intégrisme of Charles Maurras and Action française was not particularly Catholic: Maurras was an agnostic, and the creative force behind Action française came from the anti-Dreyfusards. French intégrisme was rooted not in Catholic thought but in atheism and positivism: the thought of Auguste Comte and Ernest Renan in particular. It does not take a great leap of the imagination to substantiate from this Troutner’s point that intégrisme is often little more than an imitative inversion of liberalism. The ‘moral genealogy’ of intégrisme matters, because the one true point about the liberal compromise on matters of religion is that it does stave off, temporarily, the more substantive question of what takes its place. That question does indeed seem an ominous one, in no small part because those of us who have been steeped in liberalism’s self-written mythology are the ones who must bring forth what replaces it. For those of us who are critics of liberalism, that should scare us.

More: Orthodox Christians cannot afford to remain neutral on this question, and in fact we already are struggling with it in ways that heighten our awareness of the underlying problems in ways which are not necessarily as immediate for our Western brothers and sisters. This is one of the Big Questions, to which the Russians in particular were keenly sensitive when they were grappling with the notions of nihilism, anarchism and autocracy in their own country, before the Revolution. One need only peruse one of the novels of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy to understand immediately that the most sensitive minds of the Russian intelligentsia found the liberal compromise to be not only untenable, but in some sense contemptible: the characters in the great Russian novels who espouse the ideals of contemporary European liberalism, progress and Whig history almost always turn out to be hypocrites. The sensitivity of the Russian men-of-letters to the stakes of the Big Question of political theology, however, did not save them – the Revolution hit them all the same. The attempts at articulating the Kingdom on earth failed miserably even as their final triumph was proclaimed from the Kremlin in 1917.

This failure is still with us. The current political problems currently dividing the Orthodox Church can be traced back to an imperial ecclesiology which neither the Russian nor the Constantinopolitan Church has fully managed to shed. Still more problematically, this imperial ecclesiology undergirds on a practical level what may be the most useful and worthwhile concept the Orthodox historical witness has to offer on the Big Question of political theology—symphony.

Once one begins to acknowledge that Church and state are two distinct things – a realisation that struck Christian thinkers very early in their interactions with the Roman Empire – various forms of theopolitical engagement begin to emerge. The first and oldest form of theopolitical engagement there is, is simply the state cultus: cæsaropapism. Cæsar is the pontifex; or, still more crudely, Cæsar is god – and the state is (above) the church. Obviously, this form of theopolitical engagement was unacceptable to the early Christians living under pagan Roman rule, but it would become much more palatable when Rome’s emperors became Christian themselves. In more subtle forms, every kind of civic religion and every kind of personality cultus that forms around a sæcular leader partakes in this form of theopolitical engagement.

The second form of theopolitical engagement is the inverse of this: theocracy, or papocæsarism, wherein the church is (above) the state. The divine laws as interpreted by the priesthood with direct reference to the æternal ends of man become the laws by which all human beings must be made to live. For Christians and heretics both, from Savoranola and Chauvin to Joseph Smith, this has always been an attractive option – and intégrisme does not entirely avoid the temptation of it. It has also been, for most of Muslim history, the preferred form of theopolitical engagement: the primary political organ being entirely contiguous with the religious community, the ummat al-Islâm, it made sense for there to be no distinction either between religious law and civil law.

The final form of theopolitical engagement to emerge is laïcité: the idea that there is a bright and impenetrable line between the affairs of the state and the affairs of the Church, and never the twain shall meet. This is the dominant form of theopolitical engagement encouraged under the liberal order. There can be friendly forms of laïcité characterised by pluralism and tolerance – this is the model encouraged in the United States. There can also be less-friendly forms, like those adopted in France and Turkey. And there can be forms that are downright hostile, where the state actively oppresses and attempts to destroy the Church – as under the ideocracies of the twentieth century.

Orthodox Christians recognise a third form of theopolitics that emerged under Emperor Saint Constantine and was theorised under Emperor Saint Justinian of Eastern Rome and, in Russia, under Tsar Ivan IV Grozniy: the theopolitics of church-state symphony. It shares with theocracy an acknowledgement that politics has an æternal dimension. But it also shares with laïcité the acknowledgement of separate spheres of Churchly and stately concern; however, it does not draw the bright impenetrable line between the two. Church and state are partners, or brothers, and assist one another in various ways. In Orthodox theology, the model for this relationship is that of Moses and Aaron. Aaron, the elder brother, is kohen (כוהן, priest); Moses, the younger brother, is məḥoqeq (מחקק, lawgiver). Moses stands above, and goes up the mountain; Aaron stays below among the people. Moses commands, compels, prods, rebukes; Aaron persuades, pricks consciences, reconciles, makes peace.

Now, obviously, even from the Hebrew perspective this relationship is fraught with irony and dysfunction, as all good families are. Moses has a nasty temper and even murders an Ægyptian in a rage – which is what leads to his exile. Aaron is weak-willed and bows to the will of the crowd when they demand an idol be built with gold they’d brought out of Ægypt. God permits neither of the two brothers to enter the Promised Land with the people, because both of them are impatient and grumble at God in Miribah. Also, despite their dissimilarities of function, the two brothers and their offices are not exactly equal. Even though it is Moses who anoints Aaron, in Jewish (and in Orthodox Christian) tradition, Aaron began his work as prophet before Moses did—which is not the case, significantly, in the Islâmic tradition. When Moses dies, only the ‘sons of Israel’ weep for him; when Aaron dies, all of Israel weeps for him, including the women. Even so, it is clear that only these two could lead the Hebrew people out of Ægypt and get them within sight of the Promised Land; and it is not coincidental that this is treated in the Greek Patristic literature as both a this-worldly, political end and an æternal, spiritual one.

The good thing about looking to the Exodus as a model for the symphonic relationship between Church and state is that it seems to imply it doesn’t necessitate an Emperor. Remember, there was no melek מלך in Israel before Saul! However, the bad thing about the idea of symphony in Church-state relations is that in the Christian era, it has never been done without one. And there seems to be an unhealthy tendency among the ‘priests’ of our time to seek out a ‘lawgiver’ among the ‘nations’ who are not our brothers. The American right-wing evangelicals who in our time hold up Trump as their ‘Cyrus’ (even as Trump rages and threatens and sanctions the children of the actual, historical Cyrus) is merely the most visible and risible example.

In that case—chto delat’? When I first wrote that article on symphony, I mentioned that Fr Stanley (Harakas) held up symphony as a yet-unfulfilled ideal to be striven for, and that Vigen Guroian was the one urging caution and a less-maximalist approach to the question of political involvement by the religious. I fear I may have gotten that slightly wrong. In his book, Fr Stanley does indeed hold up symphony as the only desirable form of theopolitics, but takes a decidedly more pessimistic tack when it comes to the question of how and whether it can be achieved. Harakas and Guroian actually agree far more than they disagree on this particular question, to the point that Harakas actually advocates little more than issue-based advocacy for Orthodox laypeople and clergy, to the tune of about two core issues.

I would love to see either Guroian or Harakas (or both!) engage with both the advocates of Christian anarchism and the intégristes. Personally, I hold with neither the anarchists nor the intégristes nor the liberals, and am rather deeply distressed that in the imagination of a very significant portion of the American electorate – including portions of the American electorate I naturally tend to sympathise with – these three options seem to be the only ones on offer or seriously considered. After all, Berdyaev (and the rest of the Vekhi authors, for that matter) was none of the above. None of the above, too, was Mother Maria, who spurned the ‘egoistic vegetarianism’ of Day’s anarcho-pacifism, but also had no easy words of comfort either for the émigré Russians who dreamed of a fœderal liberal-democratic Europe, or those who dreamed of a new Tsar. By the end, none of the above was Saint Ilya Bunakov – who, rejecting liberalism and anarchism and theocracy, was prophesying a ‘new word’ of political synthesis when he was murdered by the Nazis.

Axiomodernity is going to demand, soon if not already, a politics of the Cross that falls into none of these traps. We do not get to the Cross by imitating the unrepentant water-bearers for Pilate; nor do we get there by taking up arms on the roadsides with modern-day Zealotry; nor do we get there by fleeing to the hills like the Essenes. Or, we may as well say, we can get to the Cross on any one of these roads but only through repentance, prayer, fasting and self-giving (how else?). With regard to the symphonic ideal, we need to bear in mind the example of Metropolitan Onufriy of Kiev, who is living and working under the most hostile of conditions. If such a symphony is ever to manifest itself, I do not claim to know what it will look like, but I have a hunch that it will have to be through aggressive gestures of humility and generosity.