Political Theologies: Past, Present, and Future (Keynote featuring Mark Lilla & John Milbank)

to begin this evening i am pleased to introduce professor chesser chester gillis a member of the department of theology where he holds the amateur chair in catholic studies he is the founding director of the program on the church and inter-religious dialogue within the berkeley center professor gillis has served on the faculty of georgetown since 1988 was chair of the department of theology until 2006 and is currently interim dean of georgetown college gillis's research interests include comparative religion and contemporary roman catholicism he is the author of a number of books in these areas including the co-editor of the columbia university series religion and politics he is currently working on a new edition of his roman catholicism in america and a book on inter-religious marriage tentatively titled two shall become as one interreligious marriage in america he is frequently consulted by the media about contemporary issues in religion especially about roman catholicism ladies and gentlemen please welcome professor chester gillis [Applause] thank you very much michael if you're waiting for those books to come out keep waiting i'm waiting as well for the ones i'm working on to our distinguished panel of participants let me add my welcome to georgetown university to audience members from the georgetown community and the greater washington dc area thank you for joining us for what we believe will be a unique conversation about the state of political theologies and their influence historically now and going forward i have two roles which permit me to offer these introductory remarks i am the interim dean of georgetown college and i am a senior fellow at the berkeley center however i am here mostly because i'm a theologian with deep personal and professional interests in this conversation when i began studying theology political theology was associated with the catholic theologian johann baptist metz who sought to interrupt the comfortable lives of first world privileged christians with a sober reminder that their comfort comes the expense of the poor and the disenfranchised and by recalling dangerous memories of atrocity in order to prevent more of them in the future and by the reformed theologian jurgen multmann who in his theology of hope focused on an eschatological understanding of christian religion both of course were european since that time political theology has expanded geographically and across religions as witnessed by works such as the blackwell companion to political theology published in 2006 that includes muslim and jewish views on the topic though the book is devoted mostly to christian theology a continuing bias in the west while weber and habermas have argued that religion belongs in the private domain those who espouse political theologies generally favor religions engagement with public and civic life however the contemporary task of political theology is complicated by the fact that some believers do not want to participate in a public life that includes believers from other religions and non-believers and that some secularists do not want religion of any type to have a voice in public life however i think that even if we surrender to either of these constituencies it does not mean that there will be no public narrative at all most do not pine for a christian america to use the title of robert handy's work of some 40 years ago which is hegemonic over other religious identifications and non-religious world views since this may be neither wise nor possible in pluralistic america it is also naive to think that life is morally neutral since values are implicit in laws and public policies the disestablishment of religion required by the constitution should not mean the establishment of secularism as a replacement for religion political life like religious life is directed to a comprehensive purpose both political and religious views then should be subject to evaluation in a democracy founded on the separation of church and state political activity can be evaluated by religious criteria and religious activity can be evaluated by political criteria religious persons participate in and contribute to public activity and values and they must recognize that others who hold different views also participate in these activities and construct values in his democracy and tradition using the method of pragmatism jeffrey stout has argued that adherence to religions do not encounter incommensurability when discussing an ethics that will be inclusive and public but others disagree somewhat and argue instead that the christian story stands in opposition to culture and or that there is a fundamental incommensurability between the christian message and the way that contemporary culture functions morally the tension between political and narrative theology is discussed and even heatedly argued in the pages of arcane journals of theology the so-called radical orthodoxy proposed by stanley harwass and john milbank favors a narrative theology to in which the christian story stands in opposition to culture among christian theologians some such as mary doke see an opposition between political and narrative theology that must be overcome and a public christian theology created which informs and even shapes social cultural political and religious discourse in america she further insists that international concerns while important as stressed by mets do not negate the need to attend to national politics as a way to address global issues whatever shape the narrative of contemporary political theology takes some such as cornell west argue that it cannot simply be the story of the powerful christian white male elite but ideally includes the economically deprived the socially marginalized ethnic minorities women and representatives of all religions as well as the voices of those who are not religiously identified on the one hand this makes the conversation more complicated on the other hand it makes it more inclusive and certainly more interesting christianity comforts its followers but it must also challenge them and society at large something in west view it has largely failed to do racism homophobia and patriarchy have coexisted all too conveniently with christianity and american culture west calls for a radical democracy that enfranchises all citizens and in particular cases cares for those on the margins of society american society is not only privatized he argues it is also balkanized especially along racial lines thus political theologies must confront social issues head on this conference brings together experts in christianity judaism and islam indicating that political theology is not the sole provenance of one religion the conversation must be within religious traditions and between religious traditions political theology is not confined to christian discourse as it was when i began studying theology georgetown's berkeley center for religion peace and world affairs is ensuring that the conversation is international and into religious in this conference some of the best scholars will explore how globalization secularization and pluralism affect political theologies jurgon multman has argued that truth is to be found in unhindered dialogue rather than in theological systems and assertive dogmatics we are here to engage in that dialogue thank you and welcome [Applause] i would like to make one note about a very important set of events happening next week the berkeley center annually has a berkeley center lecture series where we bring in a prominent scholar for a an extended period of time on tuesday wednesday and thursday charles taylor will be delivering a series of lectures in this auditorium and it starts at 4 30 p.m on tuesday and the time changes on wednesday but there is a poster out front so if you're interested you should um grab the poster and you can see the times the the lecture series is titled narratives of secularity and the individual lectures are called master narratives of modernity disenchantment and secularity and a more adequate narrative of western secularity so i encourage you to attend as well uh tomorrow as um as dean gillis mentioned there's a number of very smart people out in the audience who will be sharing their views about the emerging trends in political theologies starting at 10 15 and there will be three panels those will be held in copley formal lounge which is in the building on the other side of red square when you walk into this building i am now pleased to welcome my mentor and friend professor mark lilla back to georgetown he joined us last spring for a conversation with jose casanova mark joins us from columbia university where he is professor of the humanities and in the department of religion professor lilla was trained at the university of michigan and harvard university from where he received his phd in 1990. he has held positions at new york university oxford university and most recently and where i met him in the committee on social thought at the university of chicago his work ranges widely in the history of ideas though his central concerns lately have been the relation between religion and politics and the legacy of the modern western enlightenment his books include gb vico the making of anti-modern 1993 the reckless mind intellectuals and politics 2001 and most recently the stillborn god religion politics and the modern west 2007. his current research focuses on the religious concepts of conversion and innocence joining mark this evening is professor john milbank professor in religion politics and ethics at the university of nottingham he is the author of several books of which the most well-known is perhaps theology and social theory and his most recent is being reconciled ontology and pardon he is one of the editors of the radical orthodoxy collection of essays which occasioned much debate around the globe in theological circles and elsewhere in general he has endeavored in his work to resist the idea that secular norms of understanding should set the agenda for theology and has tried to promote the sense that christianity offers a rich and viable account of the whole of reality a quick note about format for about the next 45 minutes i will moderate a discussion between professors lilla and milbank about their work and thoughts on emerging trends in political theologies in the spirit of the evening we will be adjourning by eight and of course when i ask questions they have every flexibility of ignoring my questions and talking about what they would like we will then have ample time for discussion with audience members thank you for your patience and now please join me in welcoming professor zalila in milbank [Applause] well thank you for joining us today thank you for joining us this evening i'd like to begin by letting you give us some sense of where you both think that the developments in political theologies are headed both within the traditions that you study and also around the globe it's a term that has re-emerged as a as a descriptor to capture a whole complex set of phenomena it's not clear what the term means one of the drivers for this conference was to help gain some clarity uh by engaging in a conversation among a number of scholars um who are working in this field in some way so i'll first ask uh that question of john and then mark can follow up um yes i think that's a difficult question i think it's important to stress that political theology is not a traditional term at all and i think that's significant you know there are theological treatments of the area of politics um the term political theology in its kind of second incarnation though tended to suggest theologies whose entire horizon is political if we're thinking of people like mets and this is an approach i would uh strongly reject not leastly because i think it lands you up with a less rather than a more radical and critical approach to to politics if you decide that the entire horizon is political um i think i'm i'm far more interested than the first incarnation of the term when cole schmitz the criticism of schmidt by eric peterson and the conversations they were both having with ernst cantorovitz uh i think that body of work is a far greater significance um but in a way this was not theology so much as an attempt to talk about the way in which our discourse in the west about politics is far more theological than we imagine and i think this probably is of relevance to the kind of things that mark and i might talk about so that schmidt you know kicked off by suggesting that the entire theory of sovereignty is somehow irreducibly theological and peterson replied by saying yes but it's heterodox and it relates to voluntaristic deviations and it's incompatible actually with um trinitarian theology and then cantor if it's joined in uh by talking about the ways in which the models of rule in the west were not just theological but also christological um in in his book uh the king's two bodies and i think this work carries on um a couple of few weeks ago um a gambon was uh at uh i'm also the director of the center of theology and philosophy at nottingham i my deputy would be furious if i didn't advertise that and giorgio gammon was at our conference in rome and he was talking very interestingly about the idea with a lot of people have put forward recently that the entire obsession with the economic in the west is in the end somehow christian although also distortion of the christian that the idea of economia of of of adaptation um you know the the economic trinity and so on has got more to do with the the discourse of economics than we might imagine i think this is sort of continuing um this tradition um which tends to sort of undermine the idea that we're living in pure secularity i mean in relation to um mark's extremely interesting book i've i think you know one of the questions i've raised to him would be aren't you lieding the fact that actually hobbes is a political theologian and and in some ways you know you're saying oh he ends political theology but on the contrary you could say he starts begins to invent it because he reads the bible entirely within a political horizon you know that's that's part of the point of leviathan that he's saying actually the message of the bible is political um uh it's not a spiritual message at all and this is part of the moves he's making so that you know it's not quite as yet an outright secularism i'm i'm just mentioning that because it's it's one example i think of the argument that we're we're sort of not as secular as we appear because we're using kind of bric-a-brac um from the theological past and so it's a lot of my endeavors have been arguing that the secular isn't as secular as it appears um it's extremely difficult to have the purely secular um and in fact i would turn this round to the paradox that only if you have the church and acknowledge the role of the church do you have the secular because somehow it's the idea of the church that relativized the political and made it secular and once you don't have the church then what you tend to have is a re-sacrilization of the political order rather than simply secularity and i i think this is the strongest part of mark's book i think the argument from russo onwards was very very powerful and i i really agreed with most of that but i think i want to generalize that more i'm not sure it's just german protestants for whom this is true um for example i mean france is that the whole role of civil religion in in in republican france is far more important than than certainly germans think they tend to think the french are all sexy atheists but this is a german delusion the french are much more religious i think than they are today far more religious than the the germans and and i think that um so so therefore this this question of somehow you get rid of the church and and actually the whole structure of the the the relative division between the secular sacred starts to become problematic that that either you get the re the re-sacrisation of the secular or or else you get a totally kind of banalized secular that that is sort of formal and empty and then the trouble is then that it's purely about power and in a way i felt kind of that's what you're recommending mark because in a way you're saying hobbs is wrong about religion but we've got to pretend that's the ignoble lie has to be let's pretend hobbes is right about religion because um the russo russo is right about religion but that's far too dangerous because russo realizes that religion is the prime force that drives us to to drive sociality but hobbes pretends that like richard dawkins that religion is just a silly mistake but you're saying in a way you're saying um and this might be a functionalist argument for why we've got dawkins and hiddens and my god that's all they deserve you know i'm usually against functionalist analyses but in this case i'm going to turn functionalist i mean maybe maybe it's because you need to reduce religion to the trivial that's the only way that you can kind of guarantee the secular you know if you say religion is all based on fear and and and and all the rest of it but it's it's you know it's very unlikely to succeed because you know i think another problem um and you know i'm guilty here as much as you is that you know really reality isn't based on books a lot of the time you know really american britain aren't based on hobbs and lock um up to 1945 england was based on anglicanism um to a far greater extent than people realize it wasn't based on hobbs and log um and and you know it's only kind of retrospectively that we say oh this is the great tradition and these people came along and everybody stopped doing what they were doing before and you know it's it it's a retrospective argument as you know a lot of historians have uh have now shown so i for me um i'm rambling on far too much for me political theology is partly this objective critical thing showing that we're not as secular as we imagine and then obviously also i want to have a theology of the political and um for me this would be a kind of development of augustine city of god but mark okay um i guess i'll talk about my my book in a second um uh just to maybe correct some understanding at least about the intentions um of the book but in terms of your original question um i was interested just to see in in reading um theology and social theory the past week to see how much common ground we have no definitely it was much more than i thought um you know i use the metaphor of being you know the other door brings people together i think there's a recognition on both our sides that um there's a break at least in thought and that there are two shores and we're sort of looking at each other from the opposite shores um uh with an uh a disdain for those who think that they can somehow negotiate the middle by developing a liberal theology or as you point out correctly in your book just to kind of paste on top of some theological systems some sociology borrowed from the latest theological center and that the only theology worthy of the name is a theology that as you said in your introductory remarks tries to account for the whole and politics is part of the whole yeah and so i think we agree entirely on that picture and uh i don't know where political theology is today what i feel i know something about is is the forgetfulness of the alternative of political theology and despite the fact that we're living uh or even you know i prefer the term theology the political um you know we're living in a world where there's one that's well developed now that we all have to think about um and where we keep uh floundering about and thinking about our own political experience um in trying to figure out what to do with religion it's because we have not um we've forgotten that there was once a great struggle over um how to think about what for me is the essential issue and here i'll get to how i use the term political theology and that is um the legitimation of public authority um i i'm not interested in political i'm not talking about what schmidt is talking about nor am i talking about what metz and mortman are talking about i'm talking i've tried in my book to do a couple of things that are in contrast to what john does and charles taylor as well and that is to focus on one narrow intellectual problem and that is how you legitimate legitimize the exercise of public and to see to examine how that the difference between legitimating on the basis of a divine revelation is is different from trying to legitimate it without that appeal i'm not interested in secularization i have nothing to say about that i'm not interested in the secular society unlike john and charles taylor um i uh as your friend haman once said about um about theories like kant's someone looks upon them uh a wise man looks upon them the way a wise girl looks upon a love letter i.e skeptically you know and i look at all they're sort of genealogy junkies uh the books begin saying we've got a contemporary problem but to explain that let me go back to the 11th century and then you have to spin out a whole story that then is to replace someone else's story and it's as if you can't write about or think about these things without telling a new story these are just so stories they're fairy tales that we use to try to orient ourselves in the present um so i have nothing to say about how society got secularized whether the term is appropriate or not i'm interested in one thing only and that is how we've come to legitimate the public authority that we exercise today nor have i tried to explain how that sort of fled how that trickled down from books into action the book the reckless mind is about the logic of an argument what happens when you make another assumption about how authority can be legitimated and what other possible chess moves open up on the basis of that other people can worry about how or whether those ideas trickle down the presence of of of religion simultaneously with a new uh legitimation of public authority so i think it's crucial to at least decide for the purposes of the conference whether you want to talk about i guess we mentioned three things now one is um a distinction between political theology and political philosophy that focuses just on the question of authority a larger view of everything being politically theological or theologically political allah schmidt down through agamben and the rest or if you want to talk about a theology that understands politics as part of its vision of the whole and now that last question i don't know if you want to continue asking questions i i have lots to ask uh john but maybe michael you want to well i want to i want to start by asking i want to continue by asking john a question that i think will help tease out some understandings of radical orthodoxy which is the movement that you're most well known for and something that i think it might help some people in the audience who may be unfamiliar with your work um and i'm going to start in a weird way we were both we both wrote essays for a fresh rift for jean-luc marion's work and in you mentioned not necessarily in that in that piece but in another piece that marion has a bleakly pascalian view of love which requires handing the physical world political society and positive and humane science over to an inevitable lovelessness and again in christ the exception a small essay he wrote we are to imitate christ and to love ecstatically through exchange losing our lives in order to gain them but if only christ reconciles us to each other nation to nation race to race sex to sex ruler to subordinate person to person then this can only mean that the specific shape of christ's body in his reconciled life and its continued renewal in the church provides for us the true aesthetic example for our reshaping of our social existence so i'm interested in what you view as the contribution of and the critique of the theologies of the political uh the radical orthodoxy i mean i think what you've just said shows that it's not quite right to say that i'm kind of against culture i'm not a barten at all uh in fact i think bart's a kind of inverted liberal and actually i really agree with mark that it's it it's kind of um insane apocalyptic and he never quite gets rid of it and you're actually right most theologians are going to disagree with you but i actually agree with you um and because and because there's no mediation at all in a strange kind of way he lets everything stand you know it's sort of any politics is like bad and i'm not saying that at all i'm you know there's a line in the introduction to the ro volume that says compared to bart we're more mediating but less accommodating and and that's the point that we believe in a in a in a kind of specific refraction of culture um and another way that i'd like to relate um what what i've done to what mark says is is this word um reconciliation i thought another very good book bit in your book was we saying you're insisting that this idea in christianity that we're reconciling is very very important and that's the point where it's not simply kind of overworldly and and suggests something that goes um a bit beyond the political but i suppose at that point that's where i think for us ecclesiology is much more important than in in most political theologies certainly than in the case of um liberation theology the idea that the church itself is as the anticipation of the kingdom is kind of the project of the real society and this goes beyond political purposes um for two reasons um first of all because it posits what i call an ontology of peace so that i agree with pierre manong who hovers i think in the background of your book at certain points when he says that liberalism actually um assumes the priority of evil i think this is very very important that it's reactive it assumes that the worst is dominant and so it's linked to agonistic ontologies and this you know remains the case with with hegel and and with with ideas that you must assume that evil is primary this is true for leaveness too or that you must kind of pass through evil to get to the good and and so on whereas i think that christianity is committed to a counter-ontology of um sort of original harmony and peaceableness which is ruptured by the fall but but the thing about the fall is that it doesn't ontologize even it makes it can it makes it all pervasive but it doesn't have a theory about it it's it's contingent can i ask you a question just on that point and then you can go on i i don't know what makes you say that um liberal liberalism ontologizes evil the account i would give is that it's actually close to something i suppose neighbor would say which is that um politics is one thing that we do that copes with our interaction on the assumption of the worst and that this is a type of thinking about politics that puts evil first because it puts first though there are other ways of thinking about politics preventing the worst things we can do to each other now you can say that's a thin way to think about ourselves but liberalism isn't committed to an ontology it says for the purposes of this part of human interaction let us choose to focus on this okay and let us think about the family not like that and let us think about right and then uh but it's like you're yearning for liberalism and and you're positing to liberalism a kind of view of the whole that it was invented to reject that for the purposes of politics we don't need to do that and i think that's a very american pragmatist take on on european liberalism which you know take hobbs it clearly is linked to an ontology to to anatomistic on ontology um and um you know in general it's it's linked to some kind of theory of human nature which tends to bring begin with the individual and then that's linked into metaphysical nominalism and the lines from malcolm onwards here are are very very very very clear i think and and i mean i agree you could you could um you could read it that way um what do you do about what do you do about montessori no ontology there i mean hobbs yes you can make the argument but you know those are the figures that really matter in the development of liberalism i mean french liberalism from montesquieu to groces i mean you know it it's easy to be selective and then develop that kind of picture well i think there are ontological assumptions in the background but you know let's for the sake of argument say that this is uh you know completely pragmatic um there's there's still something here being said about um um about well about human nature i think because you're you're talking about um what should be dominant collectively you know what what are the priorities collectively and uh and basically you land up saying that um when it comes to the collective dimension um you know we have to we have to focus on on on negative things um and this relates always i think to some kind of individualism but you know that's the primary thing the primary things are that people are struggling against each other or the primary things that are people are sort of pursuing economic self-interest so you land up with this suspension between the individual and the absolute sovereign state on the other hand because all these doctrines tend to be linked to arguments for why you must have an absolute kind of monopoly of power at the center so this is you know these approaches are definitely ruling out you know higher purposes for politics of shall we say the the classical kind um and there are all kinds of problems about those that they you know they sacralized city-states they excluded most people and so on but this is where i think that the the christian invention of ecclesia which is i think something like i i don't go with all these two simplistic christian left things i think i think the christian project is something like the paradoxical democratizing of the noble that you know whereas antique democracy could only think in terms of a kind of lowest common denominator and this is the problem for the left even today that it tends to say let's just have the worst i think the whole point about ecclesia is you know paul writes to everybody says have i not said you're all kings that it's somehow saying that nobility the virtues are you know because it's sort of redefining virtues around love can be democratic but at the same time there's still a hierarchy because some people are more virtuous than others and this is why increasingly i insist that christian politics cuts across all our secular categories including our our left right categories you know which which in a way are just you know post-revolutionary stuff i think people are critical of capitalism now and i believe we have to go beyond capitalism also have to go beyond the left that because um the left the whole idea of the left is just not critical enough we have to face up the fact that left has not managed to sustain a critique of capitalism because it's not deep enough i have no problem uh and and this is why and this is why i think christianity is moving back into the center of of of political um and thinking and this is why i think ecclesia if you like it reinvents this idea of the politics virtue but it says it's more than the political it's a it's a community of reconciliation so that everything to do with sort of coercion um like you know war punishment policing all these sort of things by augustine are regarded with semi suspicion um that you know because we've got to go beyond that towards reconciliation you know um not just live and let live but actual reconciliation and this has to be something this is why i talk about the aesthetic that it has to be something like um [Music] it's the kind of thing jean-luc nancy talks about that it's the the something about community that's ineffable you know it's it's it's it's a tradition and somehow um the catholic tradition is a tradition of how you bind lots of different concrete cultures without surrendering their concreteness nonetheless into something universal and this is why the catholic project is the only project that does this it seems it seems to me yeah yeah and and and and that's precisely the thing yeah sorry can i just say this now because is isn't it doesn't that idea in a way resolve your russo versus hobbs prior aporia i mean if you can allow that i mean you see i read your book as an argument for catholicism no seriously seriously well it sort of because that's the alternative doesn't work yeah well that's the alternative i actually i take seriously but i want to press you on that because in reading your book um i was trying to um it's long too long yeah yeah i don't have your elegance concision you never met a digression you didn't like um but no about william but trying to work work out the argument and i keep losing this yeah are you okay okay um i was trying to figure out just what you meant by ecclesiology and tell me if i had the steps of the argument right to begin with you say the christian christian theology must be ecclesiology second you reject the church state distinction as somehow being in your terms ontological or fundamentally there yeah and then you make the argument i think for the withering away of the state let me read you something the good ruler must reduce the scope of the political precisely insofar as he is a good ruler and you call the state the anti-church now that seems to leave me with the conclusion that you're thinking about a new post-political community with a mission of salvation and i'll quote something else the church enacts the vision of paradisal community or else it promotes a hellish society beyond all tenors known to antiquity corruptio optima pessima what can go wrong we'll go wrong um do i have you right well in in in summary you have me right um i i guess that um when what i'm talking about in terms of things going wrong is something like the kind of things that ivan ilitch and now charles taylor talk about as well that and that foucault picks up that sort of when the project of reconciliation becomes a kind of institutionalized over-institutionalized um disciplinary um project um it it does lead to something sinister and i and i think taylor is right as well this is a big factor in secularization that it's it it seems to suggest that the heart of things as the ethical and that the kind of religious bits can slip away but but yes you're right in the sense that what i'm arguing for is um again something augustinian rather than something medieval after galaxias in that i think that the state is sort of both outside and in the church in the sense that i think it needs to be outside because it's it's going for compromises it has to use dubious solutions um um [Music] and and so forth um but at the same time um it it somehow should be serving this project of reconciliation and this is the bit where i say the things that you know people are going to scream about you know um because this is where i i argue that we do need to carry on in the west recognizing the primacy of the christian church and i i think that tockfield's reading of america is actually a very catholic reading he reads america almost um as if it's kind of well he says so that it's favorable to catholicism because he reads it as saying that the reason america works is that there's something sustaining intermediate institutions between the individual and the state and this is this church space and the that there is this although there are all these sex and that's a problem because i think it makes america too deistic somehow nonetheless america is weirdly gothic and medieval and this is what maritime thought as well but that because there is this recognition of kind of the church level and again my argument is if you don't have that you don't have the secular either and people's minds are changing incredibly fast there was an article in the new statesman of all things i read it on the plane this is you know the british left-wing organ arguing that the pope is actually right to protest that nothing is said about christianity in the european constitution you know it's as if because the european constitution sounds as if you go from antiquity to the enlightenment to nothing in between and he was saying well but in that in a way don't you get rid of this radical thing um about reconciliation you get rid of canosa when you're a pope an emperor in the snow who has all the armies has to bow down before the pope in a sense that you see that not um you know what happens after the wars of religion if you like is is the key moment of secularization and that you know if you lose all christian it's very dialectical if you lose all christian reference you actually lose the secular you see and i i felt your book was quite close to saying that when you were talking about all this russo stuff you were close to saying that well i think that what's becoming clear to me as we're talking is that from my point of view there is a kind of illusion for you between the ambition of theology to think the whole and the ambition of the ecclesia to be the whole now for me the task of philosophy is to understand the whole but now it's task i mean for me as someone who's committed to liberalism is to understand from the point of view the whole why liberalism works now it's possible for you to want reconciliation and thought and not want reconciliation in life you want both i don't because i've come to be suspicious not of reconciling things in thought but in trying to bring it about in history and that's why i'd be interested to hear you talk um i guess less about you know the references going back in the tradition and think more about the present and future what would politics look like on this vision i i actually don't know i mean one of the essays in your collection there's a talk of eucharistic anarchism i have no idea what that means yes sure i mean but just addressing your concerns for a moment it seems to me that you when you're talking about russo you're strongly recognizing um you know this question about what actually what actually psychologically motivates people um and the way in which you know um people bind together societies under shared visions and so on and this is something if you like that's not completely liberal so that russo is a bizarre mixture in the sense you know the isolated individual has this kind of primacy but then when we get into uh when you meet other people um um he he's sort of um he's he's starting to recognize you know the primacy of of of relationality and the way that's the source of both you know both evil and and good but then they you know most of the 19th century french liberals were including talkville were recognizing that you you have to qualify liberalism in in terms of um this question of you know why why do people really act and you know even the scots tradition about sympathy and so on is is in a way um qualifying liberalism because it's uh it's this this question of that you know what binds people together and um this is is somehow more than liberalism and it seems to me that you're sort of saying you sort of recognize that this is realistically true um but then you're saying well you don't like it because you know it leads to something nasty and i think that's true but isn't the problem that that we have a kind of er sats version of this that you know when religion in the 19th century gets associated strongly with nationalism and that you know part of the problem all the time is the absolutely sovereign state and then the nation state which let's be honest is a racist state you know um and and and in a way um if you had real religion if you if you talked about the real you know the real sort of church community um um you would um this this this might be actually kind of less dangerous because you've got this idea here of the of the actual transcendence of of the political so you've got the idea of something that's continuously self-critical but i mean as ron williams has said very well that you know the west continues this negative critique that christianity started but but it it's it's now kind of nihilistic it's it's not in in it's not in favor of anything else so that it becomes like a negative theology that's become nihilistic because you're not hope holding open this kind of church space of something we haven't quite got yet but are trying to get towards but i i think what i'm saying actually um is is is is is is perfectly concrete in the sense that um [Music] yes i'm in i'm in favor of a kind of distributor socialism in other words i i want to um i want us to um return somehow engineer you know a far greater distribution of of property and and power and i want us to end this artificial separation between um the economic and the political on which liberalism is built so i'm with chesterton and bellock here that i think we need to um we need to uh return to other potentialities within the middle ages so i reject all this stuff about we live in modernity i'm you know like lator we we've never been modern we just live in one medieval project this is part of what radical orthodox is trying to say we live in a scotis alchemist space so we're still we still live in the middle ages but we need to live in a different middle ages and and and uh so and you know the as bella said you know the middle ages had taken so far this getting rid of slavery um the the you know the idea of the free independent peasants the idea of independent artisans in guilds uh um it had some principles of a market economy that wasn't yet a capitalist economy it hadn't yet quite escaped from feudalism but we need to return and and go forward um you know all this stuff about you know do you want to go back to the middle ages are you pre-modern none of this is complex enough to capture what has really happened and and people again and again are inclined to think that there's something inevitable you know i come from peter house where we invented attacking the weak theory of history and this is what you have to go back to again again and again modernity is just an accident it's just one way things happen to have gone it's only because the english peasants lost their property it's only because an english king dissolved the monasteries that's why we have modernity this is the way you need to think it's only because napoleon marched across europe that christianity has declined sorry is that your view that is not your view no that is the way i think that it's absolutely contingent none of this is inevitable but but you tell the story that it's all been you know i don't say it can hold both of these things together that if you say that to really unlock the key to what's happened you don't have to say well stuff happens uh but rather that this is the working out of the logic of a theological debate in the 11th century and you know it reminds me of uh i forget what poet it was who said that you know poetry has been going downhill since the whole marriage isn't inevitable like that i'm just trying to i'm trying to dig out what are the hidden presuppositions because you know i'm a historicist in in that sense and i don't think that i've got a greater genealogical disease than you have mark i just think your your genealogy is truncated because you're you're saying oh um secularity has come about you know because the world wars of religion and because of religious fanaticism and i think this it's not as simple as that and that it comes about because of all kinds of stuff going on in the middle ages and that you know hobbes could only have done what he'd done because all the intellectual tools were already prepared for him by people like um like william william of vocam nor do i think that religion is sort of as such fanatical i think protestantism is fanatical i think iconoclasm is fanatical i think that people who don't have doctrines like muslims tend to be fanatical well w.h horden had this right if you don't have doctrines then any old trivial stuff becomes important head scars become important for god's sake you know um on or whether you're for them or or against them you know you can't distinguish what matters any longer so it's it's a particular kind of religion that is is fanatical and especially it's to do with smashing images and people who think god can't be mediated if you smash images you also smash people's faces and and um and you think you have a direct line to god which we don't because you've forgotten the idea of analogy so i just reject this idea that that the problem is the breakdown of catholic christendom it's not religion in general right but what the problem is the heretics but but what but one of the consequences of that um is that what and i i guess it's the closest i come to uh i don't think a can i get some help with this um i don't think of it as a genealogy i think it more more as an account of a miracle that out of all of this an idea was born that people legitimately govern themselves and that all the other questions that haunted us where that fit in we don't have to ask for the purposes of politics now i understand that out of that many ideas were born and we can discuss which ones we consider to be true liberalism deviations from liberalism and all the rest but that seems to me to be a real break and that in the way that you know bloomin bag talks about the same break you do but from a different angle after that break it reshuffles the cards this is a genuinely new idea about politics now if you don't accept that idea about politics which you don't it seems to me you're obliged to say more than you have about what politics will look like because it seems to me that on this question too in your book there's some sliding around because even the way you described it when it comes to the exercise of authority the fundamental political question from the point of view of liberalism you talk about the exercise of authority as a tragic reality and in fact at this point when you were talking about augustine and having to deal with the state it has to be in and out it seems to me there you know you're going towards a kind of dualism there of separating out politics and you won't follow the laws of your thought follow the logic of your thought which is to say no they're one we think them as one and the state is part of this one the one being the ecclesia okay and that um there's not tragic realities in non-tragic realities there's reality and politics is part of it and this is the whole that we think now that seems to me as you say a catholic alternative that's the real alternative to what i'm talking about it's more respectable one from my point of view because it it provides an alternative to it highlights what's different about liberalism that liberalism brackets and it's the bracketing not the anthropology because we can you know we can talk about anthropologically uh what's missing i mean in hobbs vision i mean yeah as i do but the task for us it seems to me after this has happened is to somehow as the french say make two things into one on the one hand hobbs got politics right while getting the anthropology wrong rousseau got the anthropology right while getting the politics wrong solve so what well yeah no and i i absolutely agree i felt i'm interested you're saying that because reading your book it was as if you were siding with hobbs and yet the whole book was building up to this is the aporia and and this is why i'm suggesting actually that the solution to the supporia is clearly a catholic solution because to repeat you know if we can make the anthropology um directed towards a trans-political community in other words a community um that is going beyond the purposes of politics which are sort of kind of like some sort of peace or or you know punishing the wicked or managing things if if we're going towards total reconciliation but at the same time you this is a critical enterprise because you know we're not quite getting there yet so there's this eschatological dimension but this is that's precisely the way you resolve your apoory no no because you haven't solved my problem because part of my problem was how do you hold on to what we've achieved with liberal politics and that is something and that's where you're not for my point of view not saying enough to understand well and that is how do you hold on to the politics that hobbs based on a crazy anthropology with a wider richer anthropology that rousseau's gets without all these well i think at that point at that point you say well who are you when you when you have to go liberal this is always like a kind of disappointment in the sense because it's always to do with the libido dominante in augustinian sense you know that i'm i'm not committed to a kind of naturalizing of our sort of individualism and selfishness i'm more with rousseau but it's it's a kind of choice um although at the same time you know i think we are more corrupted than he he's saying but but i um but what i am saying is that um you know by by not by by not by not naturalizing that um you know one one is holding open um something else even even if you like in the political realm or even something that the political can um aspire to and if if you like what we're seeing in you know in the in the present crisis is that where you allow the libido dominante to run right it doesn't even make sense you know that when individuals are sort of you know it's been said just make your own calculations eventually they start to do insane things like treating debt as if it's an asset um and making apparent money out of debt and it turns out that actually there's no invisible hand saving this process at all and at that point you have to start thinking again at least to some degree about you know why do we have finance we in what way does the economy serve society and the political you know when it when the crunch comes you know in in the real political sense here it turns out that you know nations after all have to reassert themselves they can't just let the economy dominate you know it's not going to it becomes untrue but you can do all of that and think about all of that while still assuming that human beings legitimately rule themselves because what you talk about in your book is not a richer anthropology to cool you talk about supernaturalizing the natural yeah well i i that that that's right um and that's because um i i think that in inevitably if you're if you're talking about you know what's authoritative what's the good or something like that you're invoking all the common goods you are invoking something like um a mythical um transcendent dimension um you know at the heart of what makes all the signifiers work if you like is as levistral said an x that doesn't have any immediate reference and um this is if you like the space of the the mythical and the transcendence and i think this idea um that you can have um pure self-government is untrue i think for one thing it's a kind of formalism that suggests that nothing is ruling and that we're sort of just you know the miracle you're talking about and it's true people had never had this thought before they're they're they're saying somehow out of the mere formal rules we can distill um a kind of order and and i think the problem about that is that um the formalism is is backing arbitrary power it's it's uh it's the people then who um if you like cream off the bureaucratic surplus value of those rules or it's the people who are creaming off the surplus valley of economy who are ruling it to put this in marxist terms um but but at the same time i think something beyond that and this is the sort of schmidtian point i would add is is that actually um something mythical will always fill the heart of this empty empty formalism yeah i guess i guess my view is that all of those are withdrawal symptoms you'll get over it um and and that's what uh that whole line of thinking is is that you can't see it you can't smell it you can't touch it but trust me political theology is there if we send the canary into the mind it'll die it's it's it's uh it's this secret thing holding it together instead of just admitting the obvious that nothing holds it together anymore and we get by and what do you do about the biopolitical problematic you know is this is this self-ruling thing is it natural or or is it or is it um cultural and constructed and uh you know and it turns out to be yeah you know aperitically both at once and and we want to you know we want to as la tour says we want to divide off the natural and and the cultural as if we where whereas in fact they're you know they're always already blended which means that um we you know well for the reason aristotle gave man is the creature that by nature departs from his nature yeah but that that exactly aristotle did not have modern but he says we're a political animal which means that he he the liberal is biopolitical in the sense he's trying to deal with a pre-cultural nature um you know about which we can't really say anything because really we have to decided already in cultural terms you know we decide him as a fearful you know that man is naturally fearful or economical or um or something like this and and it also means that kind of outside um outside the political realm um it turns out that you know if you don't subscribe to that you lose you lose everything natural after all paradoxically this is why people can uh this is why people can land up in guantanamo bay but but aristotle is saying quite different something quite different he's saying of our very animal nature we are political we are teleologically intended to live in in cities this isn't what liberals say no but you can have a view of man as a political animal and one of the things he can do as a political animal is say for the purposes of the exercising of political authority this is what we're going to do we're going to limit ourselves to these things to protecting ourselves against the worst harms and will either leave people in their other social relations or individually to cope with uh the remainder but but i agree with you that what is lacking in the little story i tell is someone who can solve the problem and say okay give us a new account of man as a political creature that makes sense of the fact and from my point of view of the success of liberal government but well i i think that it tends to turn into a kind of relentlessly disciplinary project to this that foucault is right about this because once you said oh the worst harms um the these turn out sort of not to be finite and and you you you get endlessly worried about um you know um what is inhibiting somebody else's freedom or you you start to see all interference by somebody with somebody else as as a kind of violence because you know after all you know even to interact with anybody is is to sort of impose stuff on them and and then you get this kind of endless policing endless disciplining so that it it turns out not to be merely this formal contractualist thing but it has this disciplinary process um at it at its very very very heart and you know like political correctness is always on the horizon if you like well that was before foucault went to california and discovered that it's not all discipline it's also fun he got a whole lot less gloomy after that i have no idea what i'm talking about we have about he went to california anyway we have about 15 minutes left and i'd like to bring this into um a different realm uh with a final question before we um open the floor to the audience um you invoked uh archbishop of canterbury uh williams um previously and he of course recently said that um the that the uk may need to find a place for muslim law sharia within um the way within its larger legal order and he said in the way that we have already accommodated other religious law i'm i'm curious um given the now we're on the other shore we're on the um state of uh with plural religions i i'm curious what your response to that is um as a thinker coming from uh from your tradition yep um well i think the problem with uh rowan's speech which you know all his advisers told him don't give um was that he he appeared to be saying that sharia law could actually be in conflict with british law say in relation to marriage law and you could sort of choose which one to to go for and um people immediately said including a lot of muslim women well you know we wouldn't have a free choice we'd be under huge internal pressure to go for sharia law even though we didn't really like it and soon after that rowan retracted and said no he was only talking about instances where um things like marriage negotiations or islamic ways of conducting mortgages are not incompatible with british law the procedures are a little different but they're compatible and they could actually be useful and this already goes on in relation to judaism it's been going on for 100 years in under british law you know that that certain things are dealt with internally um but but but there's no sense but ron appeared to be talking about a kind of choice of jurisdictions um and i think at that point a kind of multiculturalist legalism had entered into his thinking um which he he seemed quite quickly uh for swear and quite rightly in in in my view um there's a sense in which the only kind of pluralism that can work here is a much more organised pluralism you know if if we can recognize that there are certain in our own terms that there are certain goods pursued by um islamic communities certain for example certain kind of tacit modes of self-control you know that that's that's great but but but in a way then you're you're seeing how this contributes to the overall good of say britain as we're talking about about um britain here so that yeah for sure um sharia approaches could have a role in in in certain in certain areas but unfortunately we're talking about a situation where you know ready people are demanding legalized polygamy and um and other things that you know do challenge the principles of our western way of way of life and here no i mean i mean i think it's very clear to me living in the uk far clearer than when i lived in america actually that you know islam is a problem unless it cut reinvents itself in a more sort of de-politicized kind of form because it just is a political religion in a way that's just not compatible with our western and people in religious studies they i mean they all talk most of them talk nonsense about all those in my view i know we agree about that yeah um and but i was glad to hear you say that while we've been doing this for a hundred years uh with the jewish community which is right in the sense that you know the apocalyptic picture you have sometimes of you know you know a worse tyranny than since uh ancient man in fact you know the state limits itself and it can the liberal state can limit itself and it can say that the law extends this far the written law it can be silent about other things and as long as things aren't incompatible we don't care about that stuff the only thing that matters and this is where it was on clearing williams's statement i didn't follow the second one because it wasn't clear uh whether he thought that sharia should then have standing as we stay here in the legal system and that's the line from the point of view liberalism that you can't cross but you know i mean let's take a lesson from this we can do this kind of stuff and it's and we can do it without having to think about how does this contribute you know to the human good in a in a comprehensive way in the community we actually can lower the bar a little bit and let it go on i think it's sort of pragmatic but it means there's some kind of shared nation and it's like the way the british public education system i mean the state system uh has religious schools within it which would it's unfinished and pays for them and they don't hear in american terms and yet in reality it works it's not in reality a problem and and i think that what was really firing rowan here was much more the issue of the rights of collective bodies he was back to this kind of old maitland figgis acton question you know do corporate bodies have rights and particularly for example you see catholic adoption agencies in britain have had to shut down because they they're not accepting gay adoption and you know they argued for exemptions and pluralism and so on and and i think ron was partly addressing that situation because on the horizon there are people who are saying you should outlaw people who say you can't have women priests and i'm in favor of women priests but i'm not in favor of the state saying that churches have to do that but there are definitely people arguing this kind of thing now so and so the issue is you know what's the rights of corporate bodies as against you know this is can be quite a tricky issue for liberalism because i think that you know the ultimate logic of liberalism always tends to see you know favor the priority of the individual that you know the idea of rights to corporate bodies tends to involve more notion of well what we what role are they playing in the public good like we can let the baptist church be self-governing because we kind of see it it's it's more a good thing than a bad thing you know it that's the kind of thinking i think that's going on here yeah well thank you i would like to take questions from the audience for chuck there's a microphone in the middle so if you could come forward you'll be recorded hi um my name is chuck matthews uh i'm one of the other participants tomorrow uh professor lilly you had mentioned that foucault eventually went to california and changed his mind i'd encourage both of you actually to take a little trip with me to california oh that's too dangerous well we've been there together what i mean though is um for both of you there seems to be a surprising lacuna in your thought in the stillborn god and in much of what you've written john about the fact of the one liberal society that seems remarkably godly and yet not really to have many of the problems that seem to be pressing in these complicated ways on the liberal imagination or the theopolitical imagination john and that is of course the u.s uh at the beginning professor lilla you said that um you and professor milbank share a disdain for the middle um from your different shores and i think i could speak for myself and most of the people in this room who are the scholars of or perhaps participants in that middle in some way or other and for several hundred years that middle has been middling along um if there's a model of success in liberal society it seems to me to be one that involves some kind of weird consociation of religiosity and liberal intuitions i think in some ways they've reinforced each other and a long line of what i think of as properly liberal thinkers from madison through tocqueville through up to people like reinhold niebuhr and people today actually suggest that this is a reinforcing although complexly reinforcing especially someone like tocqueville complexly reinforcing inter into relationship so it's just surprising to me that um i feel like in listening to you i'm hearing the same conversation i would refer to that tweet between nietzsche and overback 100 years ago and it seems like it's the same thing no neither of you ever actually look across the pond so i just want to have you think about what's going on in the united states thank you i've been across the pond that nowhere is the biopolitical more problematic than in the us because this is why it's got so much crime because you know liberalism doesn't explain why you shouldn't keep going back to nature in inverted commas um nor does it explain why you know at the heart of um you know the the the the the civil kind of legal thing um you shouldn't be sort of bending it so absolutely towards you know self-interest that you know whether you're whether you're the president or the head of a board that again it's going to veer off in in in a kind of criminal direction and that this you know this is why criminality just plays such a huge role in in um i mean it's it's also why you have to keep things bland most of the time of course you know because the danger is just round the corner you know so so that you have to qualify this with endless kind of civility but i wasn't really quite sure what you were asking i mean why is america why is it saying something different well let's see if mark has it yeah yeah well um i guess i just have to repeat what i said earlier to make clear that the argument of the book has nothing to do with secularization nothing and so it's about the principle of the legitimation of authority in the united states we have a system that is liberal in that sense and people can be as religious as they like now that may help it may cause problems so i felt i was talking on every page about the american situation without saying i'm talking about america as well here but america is you know this is why i said in one line of the book that um it was no accident the best analyst of modern democracy i.e especially american democracy was a frenchman who's a student of rousseau that struck that and multiscuf that's right that's took feed but you know my line on the united states is that what's recognized here is that human beings legitimately rule themselves damon linker i think is probably going to argue tomorrow that uh well it's not so clear that all americans agree about that so you know you you can have a debate about that but but i think we agree no no the stillborn god is is the god of a liberal theology that thought he could find a that it could somehow fudge the issue of who legitimately exercises authority do human beings do it autonomously or don't they and the 19th century tradition tried to somehow avoid that question well for fear of being labeled a tyrant uh we do need to draw this to an end and uh eight o'clock is the hour that we agreed upon for ending so we can say that we did rule this uh through self-rule um please join me in uh thanking uh professor john milbank and professor mark lilla for this uh wonderful conversation and i encourage you to attend the panel discussions tomorrow as well as i mentioned before please pick up the the note about the poster about the charles taylor lecture next week which will be equally engaging thank you again thank you

Channel: Berkley Center

Views: 10,902

Keywords: Political Theology, John Milbank, Mark Lilla, Religion, Politics, Modernity, Secularization, Globalization

Id: oz4-s6Oxnus

Length: 80min 53sec (4853 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 30 2013