Liturgical Power

Nicholas Heron

Description

Is Christianity exclusively a religious phenomenon, which must separate itself from all things political, or do its concepts actually underpin secular politics? To this question, which animated the twentieth-century debate on political theology, Liturgical Power advances a third alternative. Christian anti-politics, Heron contends, entails its own distinct conception of politics. Yet this politics, he argues, assumes the form of what today we call "administration," but which the ancients termed "economics." The book's principal aim is thus genealogical: it seeks to understand our current conception of government in light of an important but rarely acknowledged transformation in the idea of politics brought about by Christianity.This transformation in the idea of politics precipitates in turn a concurrent shift in the organization of power; an organization whose determining principle, Heron contends, is liturgy-understood in the broad sense as "public service." Whereas until now only liturgy's acclamatory dimension has made the concept available for political theory, Heron positions it more broadly as a technique of governance. What Christianity has bequeathed to political thought and forms, he argues, is thus a paradoxical technology of power that is grounded uniquely in service.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• History of Christianity
• History of religions
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823278718
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

L I T U R G I C A LP O W E R

   

 Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

  

L I T U R G I C A L P O W E R Between Economic and Political Theology

  

thisbookismadepossiblebyacollaborativegrant fromtheandreww.mellonfoundation.

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Printed in tHe United States of America

20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

Introduction

 1The Economic God

 2Liturgical Power

 3The Practice of Hierarchy

 4Instrumental Cause

 5Anthropology of Office

Conclusion

Acknowledgments  Notes  BibliograpHy  Index

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   

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In societate angelorum omnia possidentur communiter; sed tamen quaedam excellentius habentur a quibasdam quam ab aliis.

[In the society of angels all things are shared in common, but some share in them in a more excellent way than others.] — . ST THOM AS AQUINAS

Every heightening of direct power also thickens and condenses the vaporous circle of indirect influences. — CARLSCHMITT

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INTRODUCTION

Today, the question of political theology unexpectedly stands near the cen 1 ter of theoretical discussion in the humanities and social sciences. And yet, ever since Carl Schmitt first pronounced his celebrated thesis accord ing to which “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are 2 secularized theological concepts” it has almost exclusively been assumed that the vector charted by the theologicalpolitical travels in one direction and in one direction only. Whether the relation between the two terms has been understood according to the stronger model of genetic derivation 3 or whether according to the weaker model of structural homology, the orientation has remained always the same: from the heavens to the earth, from the religious to the secular, from the theological to the political. The present study, by contrast, offers a different account and a different trajec tory. It examines a sequence of ostensibly theological concepts and figures, which assume their surprising political significance only if situated in a perspective articulated according to the inverse orientation. And not only on account of the fact, in itself insignificant, that these concepts and fig ures can be shown to have their provenance in the civic sphere (or at least in a context where the positing of a clear distinction between the “civic” and the “religious” would be meaningless); but also, and indeed above all, because they acquire their specific force—and hence, their particular her meneutic value—only in the course of their Christianization as the more or less worldly instruments of a polis that has been definitively shifted out of this world. A guiding premise of the following investigation is that the prevailing discourse around political theology has for the most part all too casually and uncritically accepted the pertinence and even selfevidence of the two structuring hypotheses that marked its twentiethcentury point of