I thank Charles Lesch for his exceedingly generous reading of my book and for his incisive questions. As I see it, we both start from a “methodological” approach to the discourse of political theology, whereby the analogies between theological and political concepts are the crucial factor. We are both interested in applying this approach to understand some of the dilemmas faced by liberal democracy. The difference between us is that for Lesch, as he passionately argues in his book, the “theological” is crucial for liberal democracy because it harbors a fundamental moral or ethical concern for the otherness of the Other (be this God or another human person). I tried to understand the use of this analogy more in line with what I believe was Schmitt’s intention behind coining the term of political theology, namely, as a genealogical account of jurisprudence in the West as it developed from canon law onward. As proposed by Harold Berman, canon law was the instrument that the Christian Church adopted to proclaim its “liberty” from the dependence and dominance of the Holy Roman Emperor. From this point of view, Christian political theology is a discourse intended to legitimize the rule of law (embodied by the church) against the rule of persons (represented by the empire). I identify this impetus at work in thinkers like Voegelin and Maritain, for whom the new empires were the fascist and totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.
The system of government through rational, self-referential rules, first developed for the sake of the universal Christian Church, was subsequently adopted and adapted by various early modern European national monarchies in their effort to build states of their own that would also be independent from imperial dominance, as argued by Ernst Kantorowicz. The notions of sovereignty and of the state of exception as Schmitt understands them are juridical notions that belong to these efforts to “rationalize” the state, to generate a legal “reason” of state, not its “unreason,” in part by using analogies to the structure of divine power and government. I see this logic still at work in Habermas’s reconstruction of the idea of public reason as the ultimate ground of liberal democratic legitimacy. My gamble is that one can avoid the risk of political theology “coming to refer to almost any relation between politics and religion” if one sticks to its juridical meaning.
Lesch’s second question is whether concepts like human rights and human dignity are still “dependent” on their theological sources for their normative force. Here I would distinguish between what I believe and what I think someone like Maritain believed. For Maritain the answer is certainly affirmative, and I tried to explain not only his reasons for believing this, but also why the implementation of human rights discourse in the neoliberal world order is, paradoxically, reliant on this theological reconstruction of human rights. This does not mean I share this view. From my perspective, the question is better posed this way: What does a genealogical approach to political and legal concepts entail about their normative validity? I think this question is far from being answered today, and the discourse of political theology should be at the heart of this ongoing debate.
Lastly, I am grateful to Lesch for pointing out that I am not advocating a Christian political theology as much as studying it, and that my preferred alternative to such a political theology is actually the modern republican conception of civil religion, which attempts a complex reconciliation between a pagan and philosophical approach to politics and the approach offered by revealed monotheisms. I see this civil religion at play in Rousseau and Kant, whereas Lesch, in his innovative and careful readings of these authors, roots their political thought in Christian political theology. I hope we shall have further occasion to debate this difference in interpretation because of its importance for the self-understanding of liberal democracy.
