The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West - Couverture rigide

Chapter One: The Crisis

The kingdom of God is among you.
—LUKE 17:21

My kingdom is not of this world.
—JOHN 18:36
The revolt against political theology in the West was directed against a Christian tradition of thought. It began, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a local dispute involving a particular faith and a few kingdoms in a small corner of the globe. Yet its implications proved far-reaching, for the West and for any nation that has tried to absorb Western political ideas in the modern era. Something unprecedented happened in the polemical battle between Christian political theology and its modern adversary; an authentically new way of treating political questions, free from disputes over divine revelation, was born. What was it about the Christian tradition that provoked such a profound intellectual challenge to the way societies had always conceived of political life? That is the first question we must address. However progressive our modern political ideas may appear, they were forged in a backward looking struggle against an archaic tradition of political thought stretching back to the dawn of civilization. Christian political theology was just one expression of that tradition, and a uniquely unstable one.
God, Man, World

Why is there political theology? The question echoes quietly throughout the history of Western thought, beginning in Greek and Roman antiquity and continuing down to our day. But generally it has been interpreted in terms of another question, which is why human beings believe in gods.

Western theories about the genesis and nature of religious belief are numerous, and we will have occasion to examine some of them in detail. Yet we need to recognize that they address the question of political theology only obliquely. Religious faith is a necessary but insufficient condition for the development of political theology. It is possible for an individual or entire civilization to hold beliefs about God without those beliefs being translated into political ideas. Just as there are religions without theologies, so there are religions without political theologies. So we must ask ourselves: Why do certain religious beliefs get translated into doctrines about political life? What reasons do people give for appealing to God in their political thought?

Understanding reasons is the key to understanding political theology. Most theories of religion, ancient and modern, have adopted a third-person perspective on belief: religion is something that happens to human beings, arising out of ignorance and fear or as a mythical expression of a society's collective consciousness. But political theology is a way of thinking; it is an activity, not a psychological state. Subjectively viewed, religion is a choice, perhaps even a rational choice, for individuals and societies. We all face the implicit alternative between living in light of what we take to be divine revelation, or living in some other way. Infinite choice is not actually available in every historical circumstance, this we know. But we also know that since time immemorial human beings have speculated and argued about the divine; that they have changed their beliefs and their societies on the basis of those arguments; and that at certain junctures they have confronted intellectual alternatives to theological argument. We do not live in an iron cage whose bars are inherited ideas, rituals, and representations of the divine; nor are we being swept away by some historical process that began in a world with religion and is now ending in a world without it. From a subjective standpoint, we sense ourselves to be thinking, critical creatures considering the alternatives before us. And therefore we are.

If we permit ourselves to take such an internal, rather than external, view of ourselves, we begin to see that the question of God can present itself to any reflective mind, at any time. And once that question is posed, many others flow from it, including all the traditional questions of political theology. Political theology may not be a feature of every human society, but it is a permanent alternative to reflective minds, to which other alternatives can be opposed.
Let us consider how some traditional theological-political questions might arise, for anyone. Once a human being becomes aware of himself, he discovers that he is in a world not of his own making, a whole of which he is a part. He notices that he is subject to the same physical laws affecting inanimate objects in this world; like the plants, he requires nutrition and reproduces; and like the animals, he lives with others, builds shelters, struggles, and feels. Such a person can remark his differences from all these natural objects and creatures, but he will also recognize what he shares with them. He does not observe the world from without, as an external object of contemplation; he views it from within and sees he is dependent on it. The thought can then occur that if he is ever to understand himself, he will need to understand the whole of which he is a part. If man is imbedded in the cosmos, knowledge of man will require knowledge of the cosmos.

It is when we find ourselves posing questions about the cosmos that we can then find ourselves considering answers having to do with God. This, too, makes sense. The cosmos in which we find ourselves has unknown origins and appears to behave in a regular fashion. Why is that? we wonder. We know that the things we fashion ourselves behave in a predictable manner because we conceive and construct them with some end in mind. We stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for us, when considering the cosmic order, to imagine that it was constructed for a purpose reflecting its maker's will. By following this analogy, we begin to have ideas about that maker, about his intentions, and therefore about his personality.

By taking these few short steps, the human mind finds itself confronted with a picture. It is a theological image in which God, man, and world form an indissoluble divine nexus. The picture also tells a story, about a God who created or shaped the cosmos of which we are an unusual part, sharing some characteristics with his other creatures and having others unique to ourselves (or perhaps shared with him). Such a picture can appear before any mind that begins reflecting on its surroundings. How this or that particular theological picture actually develops is a historical question. Yet even an arbitrary picture inherited from the tradition or society in which one lives can be given rational structure and rational justification. The believer has reasons for believing that he lives in this divine nexus, just as he has reasons for thinking that it offers authoritative guidance for political life.
How that guidance is to be understood, and why believers think it is authoritative, will depend crucially on how they imagine God to be. If God is thought to be passive, a silent force like the sky, nothing authoritative may follow. We know there is something divine out there, and knowledge of it might help us understand our environment, but there is no reason why it should necessarily dictate our ends. Such a God may be considered part of the structure of being, or beyond being, but in neither case does he determine how we should live. He is a hypothesis we can do without. But if we take seriously the thought that God is a person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God are not mute facts, they express an active will. They are authoritative. And that is where politics comes in.

Political life revolves around disputes over authority: who may legitimately exercise power over others, to what ends, and under what conditions. In such disputes it might be enough to appeal to something in human nature that legitimizes the exercise of authority, and leave the matter there. But as we just saw, any reflection about human experience has a way of traveling up the chain of causes, first to the cosmos, then to God. If we conceive of God as the shaper of our cosmos, which displays his purposes, then the legitimate exercise of political authority might very well depend on understanding those purposes. God's intentions themselves need no justification, since he is the last court of appeal. If we could justify him, we would not need him; we would need only the arguments validating his actions. In this line of reasoning, God, by creating, has revealed something man cannot fully know on his own. This revelation then becomes the source of his authority, over nature and over us.

Not all civilizations have entered into this logic. In ancient China, for example, the emperor himself was thought to be divine and the gods were there to comfort the populace in the face of his power. In ancient Greece, some imagined a first cause or "unmoved mover" without personality who embodied divine law, which philosophers could contemplate to understand the cosmic order and man's place within it. Other Greeks entertained thoughts about a panoply of deities with conflicting personalities but whose natures were still intelligible to human reason. Such gods were never thought by the Greeks to exercise revealed political authority because they created man and the cosmos--and perhaps that is why political philosophy was first able to develop in ancient Greece. In any case, the ancient Greeks seemed to believe that only men exercise political authority over men, though wise ones will reflect on the eternal, unchanging divine law and keep a wary eye on Olympus.

Yet in countless other civilizations, revealed political theologies developed to explain and justify the exercise of political authority. The number of gods they imagined were many, as were the political arrangements they justified. But there is an underlying structure to this vast array, and a place within that structure reserv...

Advance praise for Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God
“Mark Lilla is a master of the history of ideas. The Stillborn God . . . is a study of ‘political theology,’ the central question in the relation of religion to politics, as to which has the highest authority in moral discourse. The Enlightenment and the thinkers that followed had posited a ‘great separation,’ between the two, but that liberal view has collapsed, and we face the question anew as to the idea of God in the world today. Lilla follows this question from Kant to Hegel, to Karl Barth in Christianity and Franz Rosenzweig in Judaism. It is a tale told with lucidity and spareness, and challenges all serious thought in the modern world. The Stillborn God will be a landmark in political philosophy.”
—Daniel Bell,
Henry Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard University

“Mark Lilla’s elegant and erudite book is a masterwork of modern secularism. Like all the greatest secularists, Lilla is mesmerized by religion, and cannot live with it or without it. The Stillborn God is a history of ideas haunted by the consequences of ideas, a cautionary tale about philosophy in the world. And in our God-addled age, this rich and lucid study of theology and politics is even a public service.”
—Leon Wieseltier

"Thomas Hobbes, Mark Lilla demonstrates in the most insightful discussion of that seminal philosopher's ideas I have ever read, separated political authority from religious commandment and in so doing made modern liberal society possible.  But can we be so sure that we know how best to live in a world in which we rule ourselves? The Stillborn God is a profound meditation on our contemporary condition, offering hope guided by wisdom."
—Alan Wolfe,
Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, Boston College