Divine politics

In "The Stillborn God," a history of the separation of church and state, Mark Lilla urges the West to remember the religious fanaticism in its past -- or risk its return.

By Laura Miller

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Sept. 24, 2007 | An alternate title for "The Stillborn God," Mark Lilla's new history of the separation of church and state in the West, could be "How Soon They Forget." Take an example from our own lifetime, something titanic like Sept. 11. Remember how it seemed so inconceivable, so unprecedented, that terrorists would blow up the World Trade Center? Yet it had already happened -- in 1993, when a group affiliated with al-Qaida tried to do just that, with a car bomb, killing six people. Somehow, the fact of that bombing never seemed to stick in the public's mind; until the towers actually came down, spectacularly and on national television, and thousands died, an Islamist terrorist attack on American soil remained "unimaginable."

Small wonder, then, that we also have a hard time remembering the religious fanaticism in our own history. Westerners now talk blithely about the need for a "reformation" in Islam, apparently oblivious to how bloody and traumatic the Christian Reformation actually was. Lilla finds this situation perilous. As long as we refuse to acknowledge the madness of the religious wars and persecutions of the 16th century, he argues, we remain in danger of loosening our grip on "the Great Separation" (of church and state) that resulted from it. By not understanding how easily any politics infused with any religion can drift in the direction of fanaticism and terror, we put ourselves at risk of drifting that way ourselves.

If we think the West is way beyond lapsing into that kind of insanity, Lilla (a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books) begs to differ. "Intellectual complacency," he writes, "nursed by an implicit faith in the inevitability of secularization, has blinded us to the persistence of political theology and its manifest power to shape human life at any moment." Political theology, what Lilla defines as "discourse about political authority based on a revealed divine nexus," takes its beliefs about how society should be run and how power should be distributed from what it considers to be the word of God -- the divine truth revealed to man through scripture.

This way of thinking about politics isn't merely a holdover from our evolutionary past, destined to dwindle away like the appendix. It is "a primordial form of human thought and for millennia has provided a deep well of ideas and symbols for organizing society and inspiring action, for good and ill."

Political theology, as far as Lilla is concerned, comes with being human. Human beings have always speculated about metaphysics and the possibility of the divine. Once someone decides that they believe in a deity with purposes and intentions, it's a short step to the idea that such a god would have definite ideas about how human societies should be run. (But not an inevitable step; as Lilla observes, the Greek gods managed to create humanity and meddle perpetually in its affairs without especially caring how we govern ourselves: "Perhaps that is why political philosophy was first able to develop in ancient Greece.")

Contemporary Westerners often live under the illusion that modern political philosophy -- that is, the habit of "thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms, without appeal to divine revelation or cosmological speculation" -- is as predestined as Karl Marx believed the proletarian revolution to be. We think that, once set in motion, secularism cannot be rolled back, and once established, it cannot be overthrown. Lilla calls this a "fairy tale." He would like us to remember that our view of politics is relatively recent, an experiment of sorts that is still ongoing.

The triumph of modern political philosophy is not a done deal. As time goes by, we increasingly forget "why it was begun and the nature of the challenge it was intended to meet. Yet the challenge has never disappeared." The threat posed by our short memory is twofold. Political theology remains an appealing alternative to many, many human beings and societies, and when we stop understanding why that is we become unable to understand them. At that point, too, "it is no longer certain that we understand ourselves."

"The Stillborn God," meant to correct this deficiency, is a history of ideas, specifically the ideas of the Western philosophers who struggled with the separation of religion and politics. Lilla describes the long arc of this effort, beginning with Thomas Hobbes and concluding with some German thinkers of the 1930s and '40s. His premise is that even at what we think of as the upper echelons of Western thought, the potential for "messianic passion" lurks. This is why people who ought to have known better succumbed to the allure of the murderous messianic political movements of the mid-20th century. We must remain vigilant against the ever-present tendency to infuse political life with "spirituality" because it can, despite the best intentions, so easily turn bad.

At the same time, we have to recognize that "Political theology ... remains a live alternative for many peoples today." Our own political philosophy was devised as a remedy for a specific historical situation, and it isn't necessarily going to work for everyone else in exactly the same way. When we accept the fact that even we -- who think of ourselves as well beyond it -- remain susceptible to the allure of political theology, with its certainties and absolutes, we'll be better able to live on the same planet with people who don't share our investment in the Great Separation.

Lilla is a marvelously concise and lucid writer, and "The Stillborn God" covers this material in an impressively short 300 pages. The earliest sections are the strongest -- having endured a Catholic religious education to the point of confirmation, I've never encountered a more comprehensible explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity. Lilla traces what he regards as the inherent instability of Christian political theology to this doctrine. Because, through the Trinity, the Christian God has multiple, incompatible relationships to the world he created, it's been difficult for Christians to get a clear fix on how they should feel about that world (and its political institutions), too.

Most gods are either immanent (divine but also part of and active in the world, like the Greek gods); remote (completely removed from the material universe like God of the Gnostics) or transcendent (apart from the world, although occasionally intervening in its affairs, like the God of the Hebrew Bible). The Christian God is all three, depending on which moment in history you're talking about. In the form of the Father, he is a remote god. In the form of the Son, the incarnated Christ, he is immanent, a presence in the world for the 33 years of Jesus' life and at some point in the future when he will return. He is also transcendent/immanent in the Holy Ghost, who, after the resurrection of Christ, infused all of creation in the form of God's grace.

According to Lilla, while this theology covers all the divine bases, it results in an unclear stance on the part of God toward his creation. Some Christians believe the world is essentially good and man should glorify God by making it better, by participating in government and other activities. Others regard the material universe as inherently fallen and corrupt and advocate withdrawing from worldly concerns and relying solely on God's grace for salvation. Or, conversely, if their instincts are apocalyptic rather than ascetic, this same school might urge doing whatever is necessary to achieve a kind of divine insurgency that will precipitate the complete transformation of the fallen world into the Kingdom of God.

It was the clash of all these conflicting (yet equally valid) Christianities that inevitably led to the horrific religious wars of 16th century Europe. Exhausted and appalled by the spectacle of Christians hunting and killing each other over arcane doctrinal disputes, the early modern philosophers began to question the very premises of political theology. Thomas Hobbes, whom Lilla regards as the father of this line of thought, made the revolutionary suggestion that we stop asking what God wants from us and start asking what people want from religion.

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