1. The Concept of Political Theology: A Brief History

With respect to Carl Schmitt, the meanings attributed to “political theology” are diverse. Sometimes it is understood in a substantively nontheological sense, to refer to, e.g., “ideology” (K. Mannheim, J. Manemann), “mythology” (R. Faber, R. Groh), pure “metaphor” (H. Blumenberg), “atheistic,” cultural Catholicism (R. Gross), and parochial, political foundationalism (J. Derrida, C. Lefort).Footnote ¹³ Of these five, substantively nontheological understandings of political theology, the Derridean-Lefortian conception is more common among political theorists, though its usage frequently admits of deep confusion and inconsistencies. In effect, this conception is political existentialist in form: human social order ultimately rests upon a pre- or extrarational choice. This view, a secularized, Kierkegaardian fideism, has found many sponsors in the twentieth century (e.g., M. Weber, J.-P. Sartre, I. Berlin, B. Honig), and in these other contexts is rarely described as a “political theology.”Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, quite apart from the fact that this is not the sense in which Schmitt used the term, if we nevertheless persist in using this Derridean-Lefortian understanding of political theology to describe Schmitt's political thought, we ultimately end up saying precious little that is actually distinctive.

“Theology” is a Platonic-Aristotelian neologism.Footnote ¹⁵ It is quite literally a reasoned account of (the) God(s). Any theological vision that has no truly explicit or substantive place for a theos or for theoi can only be a theology by analogy. Contributing in no small part to the present day confusion, Schmitt would sometimes avail himself of this analogical usage or deploy the terms “metaphysics” and “theology” in the same breath.Footnote ¹⁶ We should be clear, however, that God and being, theology and metaphysics, are not the same things—a judgment with which Schmitt agrees in other writings.Footnote ¹⁷ Followers of Heidegger's postwar philosophy take for granted the conceptual interchangeability of “metaphysics” and “theology.”Footnote ¹⁸ In Schmitt's own judgment, however, Heideggerian ontology was “profoundly atheistic”—neither Christian nor theological.Footnote ¹⁹

For these reasons, this essay is concerned only with political theology in the strong sense, that is, one which makes substantive reference to God. It is only this conception that aspires to explain what is “theological” about “political theology,” and how it might provide Schmitt's work actual, substantive motivation that rises above a descriptive, yet nevertheless normatively significant, intellectual-historical exercise (i.e., the “sociology of juristic concepts,” which is the theme of chapter three of Political Theology).

The language of “political theology” is first attested in the early fifth century in Augustine's critical discussion of Varro's pagan civil religion. Thereafter, Jews, Christians, and atheists have used the concept either in the Augustinian sense, as a term of abuse, and/or as a characterization of the relationship between the biblical Hebrews and their God.Footnote ²⁰

In his 1922 work of the same name, Schmitt appropriated the language of “political theology,” thus (re-)introducing it to the academic world. The term itself appears no more than three times, only in the third chapter, and its meaning is only systematically expounded on the first page of that chapter—as we will see in section 3, below.Footnote ²¹ Hints of it can be detected in earlier writings, and after its formal introduction in Political Theology, the concept reappears in scattered remarks in his Weimar- and in the NSDAP-era writings.Footnote ²² Nowhere does Schmitt state that he had departed from the meaning he had given it in 1922. However, five years after the war, Schmitt bowed to Erik Peterson's infamous critique. “Now,” writes Schmitt, “I have been taught that a political theology has become impossible because of the Christian dogma of the Trinity. That I believe without further ado.”Footnote ²³ Accordingly, the term “political theology” appears nowhere in the entire text of Schmitt's great postwar work, Nomos of the Earth.

In truth, the strong, substantive meaning of political theology arose in print outside of Schmitt's own work and was developed only in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the Roman Catholic theologian, Johann Baptist Metz, began to outline a Marxian-inflected “new political theology,” which aimed “to stress the essentially public and socially critical character of the central content of [Christian] faith” as a “critical corrective” to the “tendencies towards privatization” of “bourgeois theology.” Self-consciously, Metz's new political theology distanced itself from the “specific historical connotations” of Schmitt's “traditional” or “‘classical’ political theology.” Notwithstanding the borrowed terminology, Metz maintained that the “political theology of Carl Schmitt… is neither theology nor can it be, but is rather a theory of the state.”Footnote ²⁴ Before the close of the decade, Metz's new political theology had spread like wildfire, providing formative influence to Latin American liberation theology.Footnote ²⁵

Within this context, the language of political theology reappeared in one of Schmitt's review essays in 1965, after fifteen years of silence on the topic.Footnote ²⁶ Then, five years later, in his Political Theology II, Schmitt took up the topic more thematically. This work was not, however, Schmitt's last testament to the world, declaring that he was a political theologian. Most prominently, the work's central thesis was that “the pretension of an absolute purity of the theological” is ultimately “empty.”Footnote ²⁷ This, however, is little more than a direct consequence of one of the core theses of Concept of the Political. At a yet deeper level, Political Theology II is an attempt at autobiographical self-exoneration. Though Schmitt (unpersuasively) denies that this is his intention, the work effectively culminates in a defense of the “unfortunate Bishop Eusebius” of Caesarea against the “defamation” he has suffered in posterity, attacked “ad personam” through “moral-political” categories, such as “ideologist” and “propagand[ist]” of “caesaropapi[sm].” As Schmitt repeatedly emphasizes, Eusebius was simply a “love[r] of peace and order” who thought he saw in the Imperium Romanum some possible salvation from “political pluralism” and “disastrous civil war.”Footnote ²⁸ This is thinly veiled allegory. Eusebius is Schmitt; the Council of Nicea, the Weimar Republic.

After Schmitt's death, however, the broad outlines of Metz's new political theology were applied retroactively to Schmitt's body of work in toto, principally by Meier, whose now classic view is a forceful rearticulation of a minority interpretive tradition, which passes most notably through Hugo Ball, Jacques Maritain, and Taubes.Footnote ²⁹ “One cannot grasp Schmitt's teaching of the political,” writes Meier, “if one does not grasp it as a piece of his political theology.” Schmitt's principal “fixation” was the “danger” and the “apocalyptic horror of the Antichrist.” In this “eschatological confrontation between Christ and the Antichrist,” Schmitt battles against those who have “closed their hearts to the call of the Lord of history,” the “God who demands obedience.” Schmitt's concept of the “political” was articulated “for the sake of religion.” “Political theology,” writes Meier, “denies the possibility of a rational justification of one's own way of life. [It] knows that it is grounded in faith, and wants to be so grounded because it believes in the truth of faith.”Footnote ³⁰

After Meier's path-breaking work had done the heavy lifting of forging a new research program, the general assessment of Schmitt by the scholarly public palpably shifted along with it. In the 1980s, Habermas understood Schmitt's political theology to describe only a sociology of juristic concepts. Today, citing Meier, Habermas now describes Schmitt as a “clericofascist” “theologian” whose fundamental aim was to “ontologically re-embed [the] modern world in the ‘reality of God.’”Footnote ³¹ Similarly, Schmitt's most recent Anglo-American critics now gloss “political theology” as a loose synonym for “theocracy.”Footnote ³² How did this profound interpretive shift occur?

2. The Postwar Material: Notebooks, Correspondence, and Private Recollections

Beginning in 1991, reams of unpublished material from Schmitt's estate began to become available to the scholarly public in posthumous, edited volumes. To the proponents of the political-theological thesis, it appeared that Schmitt had finally “reveal[ed] himself undisguisedly” in this postwar material and “confirmed” the thesis.Footnote ³³ This claim is understandable, because it is in this (mostly) posthumously published material (his letters, notebooks, and published recollections from friends) that the strong political-theological thesis appears to be on the soundest footing. However, certain problems emerge if one digs deeply. Although there are apocalyptic-theological metaphors and even what appear to be quasi-confessional statements in this postwar material, ultimately this material offers no dispositive support for the strong political-theological thesis.

Christian Epimetheus. In the postwar notebooks, Schmitt began to call himself a “Christian Epimetheus” (Konrad Weiss's term).Footnote ³⁴ As in the Greek myth, Schmitt, like Epimetheus (“after-thought”), realized the error of his ways only after the fact (vis-à-vis Party membership), unlike his brother, Prometheus (“fore-thought”). The possible significance of the adjective, “Christian,” I will address below.

The Katechon. In addition, Schmitt also began to invoke the notion of a katechon, Paul's term for that entity that “holds back” the arrival of the Anti-Christ before the eschaton. With only two exceptions in 1942, this notion appears exclusively in postwar material. As Schmitt deploys the term, it appears to be shorthand for conservative, reactionary political thought—despite his occasional protestations to the contrary.Footnote ³⁵

Theologian of Jurisprudence. On one occasion in the notebooks, Schmitt even calls himself a “theologian of jurisprudence.” However, this should be balanced against no fewer than four other important statements, wherein he describes himself as a “nontheologian.”Footnote ³⁶ A theologian of jurisprudence is simply he who seeks to preserve law and order against the dissolving force of anarcho-socialism, for, in the eyes of “every revolutionary movement,” the “jurists” are thought to be the “theologians of the existing order.”Footnote ³⁷

Correspondence. The posthumously published notebooks also contain snippets from Schmitt's correspondence. The strongest of Schmitt's quasi-confessional statements are copied from these postwar letters to various recipients, some of whom were either Roman Catholic converts or belonged to that circle. In a 1948 letter to Helmut Rumpf discussing Rumpf's own recent conversion to Catholicism, Schmitt calls himself a Catholic by “descent,” “denomination,” and by “race.” Also, in a 1948 letter to the publisher, Herbert Nette, Schmitt repeats Weiss's phrase used to characterize another convert, Theodor Haecker, stating that his own work is committed to a “real, Catholic intensification.”Footnote ³⁸

Finally, in material from a 1949 letter to Pierre Linn—who belonged to the Roman Catholic intellectual circle surrounding Maritain—Schmitt makes the most revealing statement of all concerning the nature of his own possible faith. He simultaneously calls himself a free thinker whose thought knows “no bounds” and yet also identifies the center of his thought as the historical incarnation of Christ. But in a passage he reprinted in a 1950 essay, he also states that Christianity is, “for [him]” and “in the first place,” neither a “doctrine,” nor a “morality,” nor even a “religion,” thus raising further questions about the more basic nature of Schmitt's quasi-confessional statements.Footnote ³⁹ Ultimately, as we shall see in the next section, Schmitt's relationship to Roman Catholicism is complicated enough that we simply cannot take these quasi-confessional statements at face value, as though they described Schmitt's religiosity at all points during his intellectual career.

Many have found similarly suggestive lines in the postwar correspondence between Schmitt and Taubes. This correspondence began in 1952 with a very dense letter Taubes had sent to his friend Armin Mohler, who passed it along to Schmitt. Asking whether the “new nomos of the earth can measure up to the nomos of Christ,” Taubes asserts that Schmitt “must” take a stand on “what law is,” and he intimates that the answer is somehow tied up with “theology.” Paradoxically, however, Taubes imagines here a “theology” of the sort that is possible, as he says, in an age whose “fate is atheism,” and thus in an age that is “in a decisive sense after Christ,” and not just in a chronological sense. Four months later, in a letter to Mohler, Schmitt declared that “Taubes is right. Today, everything is theology, with the exception of what the theologians themselves are saying.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Then, almost three decades later, in a direct response, Schmitt adds that, “for [him],” political theology concerns a “specifically juristic capability,” namely, the ability to recognize the “fundamental, constitutive differentiation” between concrete “Nomos” and abstract “Norm,” which “contemporary juristic positivism” fails to understand.Footnote ⁴¹

The qualifications from Taubes's original letter remain pertinent, however. What precisely is “theology” in an age whose “fate is atheism” and which is “in a decisive sense after Christ”? Conspicuously, God and revelation make no appearance in these discussions. Thus, this theology could only be one in an analogical sense.

Even more importantly, the fundamental meaning of Schmitt's body of work cannot be resolved by adverting to private correspondence or to recollected conversations, treating them as unguarded moments of candor or privileging them above Schmitt's own written texts, as so many scholars do. Schmitt appears to have given different impressions to different people based on his knowledge of their own personal predilections or for other reasons impossible to ascertain after the fact. After the war, Schmitt apparently told several people that he was a devout Roman Catholic. For instance, Taubes and E.-W. Böckenförde have alluded to such private postwar conversations.Footnote ⁴² However, Schmitt appears to have given an altogether different impression to other close colleagues, students, friends, and correspondents. For example, as early as 1921, his friend and publisher, Franz Blei, was confident enough about Schmitt's faith to write to him: “I am … a godless clerical. Like you too, dear friend.”Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, before his falling out with Schmitt in 1927, Waldemar Gurian, in a letter, openly insinuated that Schmitt was a “pagan” who only “pretend[ed]” to be “Cath[olic].”Footnote ⁴⁴ Similarly, in a 1938 letter to Schmitt, Peterson implied his suspicion that Schmitt had “renounced being a Christian.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In a 1953 letter to a colleague concerning the “remarkable shifts” visible in Schmitt's work, Voegelin describes Schmitt as an “agnostic” who only “started as a Catholic.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1988, citing both letters and conversations with Schmitt, Mohler similarly concluded that Schmitt's thought could be described as “Christianity without Christ.”Footnote ⁴⁷

In light of the contradictory evidence, the status of the strong political-theological thesis can hardly be resolved simply by citing letters or essays that include recollections from persons close to him or who engaged in correspondence with him. This is, in fact, already conceded by the most self-aware proponents of the thesis.Footnote ⁴⁸ Moreover, the more recently published Weimar- and Wilhelmine-era notebooks offer no unambiguous support for the thesis.Footnote ⁴⁹

3. Carl Schmitt and the Church

Schmitt's relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, and thus to the Christianity of his upbringing, is complicated at best. A narrative of genuine and unbroken Catholic intellectual continuity across his entire career squares poorly both with his biography and with his documentable abandonment of Catholic patterns of thought. Rather than signaling underlying continuity, the quasi-confessional statements from the postwar notebooks must be interpreted either as the sincere recovery of something abandoned or as tactical apologetics. It should not be projected retrospectively upon the Weimar-era material as an interpretive lens.

Schmitt began his life as a relatively devout Roman Catholic. Moreover, as late as 1923, in an important transitional work, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, he gushed with praise for the Roman Catholic Church and the potential contributions of its legal-theoretical resources to the modern theory of the state. Biographically and intellectually, however, the 1920s were a time of great change for Schmitt, as he slowly drifted away from the Church. As late as 1924, Schmitt still attempted to observe Roman Catholic rites, seeking an annulment of his first marriage in order to remarry. However, having been informed in advance that no annulment would be granted, he proceeded with the second marriage and was subsequently excommunicated in February 1926.Footnote ⁵⁰ So momentous a decision is not made overnight; this break with the Church was long in the making. If for no other reason than this, the thesis of genuine Roman Catholic continuity across his intellectual career cannot be sustained.Footnote ⁵¹ Similarly problematic is the conflation of Schmitt with the loose school of Catholic “Reich theologians”—a group to which he did not belong.Footnote ⁵²

Following his excommunication, his work Roman Catholicism was quickly disavowed, and therewith any aspiration to play a role in the European-wide Renouveau Catholique movement. Most prominently, in a 1926 response to criticism from Richard Thoma, Schmitt had explicitly disclaimed any interest in aligning the state with the workings of the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ⁵³ Looking back later in 1970, Schmitt dubbed his 1923 text a “eulogy to the Roman [Catholic] Church,” which was “anything but an official Church statement.” Though written almost contemporaneously, Political Theology and Roman Catholicism are hardly sister works, as Schmitt confirms later, calling them “wholly different” from one another.Footnote ⁵⁴

The development of his writings over the Weimar period coincides with this biography. Three prominent axes stand out especially: (a) his conception of representation, (b) his relationship to Christian universalism, and (c) his anthropology. Major shifts with regard to these themes amount to the effective abandonment of distinctively Catholic motifs and signal a broader reorientation of Schmitt's thought in the Weimar period.

Representation. The political theological thesis maintains that one of the integral features of Schmitt's political theology is his theory of representation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Though some support for this view can be found in Wilhelmine-era writings with echoes in one of his early transitional works, the Catholic character of this idea conspicuously drops out in the Weimar period.

In the first century, Paul declared that on this earth “there is no authority except from God.” Of course, Schmitt knew this important passage and would sometimes even quote it in Latin or German translation when discussing the views of others.Footnote ⁵⁶ As late as 1917, Schmitt would echo this Pauline statement approvingly. “If a Christian obeys authority, he obeys God and not authority, because [authority] … is from God.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In his early Weimar, transitional work, Schmitt's depiction of Roman Catholicism as a legal institution tracks this conception. “Roman Catholicism,” he writes, “rests upon the rigorous realization of the principle of representation. … The political power of Catholicism rests upon … the pathos of authority. … The Church … represents Christ himself.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Over the course of the Weimar period, however, his theory of representation undergoes a dramatic shift. Though formally similar, his new account of representation is substantively different. The Weimar era constitutional and legal writings very clearly reject the Pauline notion of theologically grounded political authority, familiar from his earlier, Wilhelmine-era writings. This side of Schmitt simply drops out. The fact that it was once present in his writings makes its later absence all the more significant. On Schmitt's view at this later point, the state is held to be a “determinate status of a people.” This body requires political representation, but the thing represented is neither the authority of God, nor that of Christ, but simply “the political unity of the people.” The fundamentally changed character of his theory of representation is nowhere more clear than in his sympathetic discussion of Rudolph Smend's theory of integration, wherein Schmitt avers explicitly that the “political unity” of a given state rests upon a “human decision.” As such, the political unity of a given state is not, he writes, “present by nature.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Self-consciously, Schmitt distinguishes himself here from the sixteenth-century teaching on constituent power, in which “the people itself is constituted by God.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The significance of Schmitt's formulations is revealed even more concretely against the backdrop of a discussion one decade later in his book on Hobbes. There, Schmitt contrasts the basic outline of the modern theory of the state against medieval conceptions. State sovereignty on the modern, Hobbesian model is a product of “human work,” and thus it represents the “achievement of human understanding and human creativity.” The state so understood is not of “divine origin,” as it had been in the “medieval conception,” which viewed the state as an “existing community” based upon a “preexisting natural order” that had been “created by God.”Footnote ⁶¹

Universalism/Pluralism. The maturation of Schmitt's thought over the 1920s consisted also of his abandonment of Christian universalism, leading to the development of the radical, right-wing pluralist vision, for which he is so (in)famous. In the first century, Paul wrote that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor freeman, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” and thereby introduced to the Christian imaginary the notion of universal humanity, which has animated the gospel to this day.Footnote ⁶² The catholicity of the Catholic Church is fundamentally premised upon this idea. Thus, at early points in his career, Schmitt could easily agree with the basic sentiment. For instance, in one of his Weimar-era transitional works, Schmitt would write of the “civitas humana,” which the Church, as an institution, is able to represent.Footnote ⁶³

In stark contrast, Concept of the Political rejects this universalist message with a singularly clear and unambiguous voice. By the second half of the Weimar period, Schmitt would famously proclaim that “whoever says ‘humanity’ wishes to deceive.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The “political” as a distinctively Schmittian concept is completely unintelligible without this intellectual transition.

Anthropology. This fundamental shift in Schmitt's thought during the Weimar period affected even his philosophical anthropology. In 1917, it was still possible for Schmitt to say that, human sin notwithstanding, the cosmos and man within it were fundamentally good. Following a centuries-old tradition in Christian theological anthropology, he gave divine incarnation as evidence for his claim.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, by 1927/1932, he would write that “one could examine and arrange all theories” as to “whether they presupposed man to be ‘by nature evil’ or ‘by nature good.’” Signaling a profound shift in his thought, Schmitt stated in no uncertain terms that “all genuine political theories presuppose man to be ‘evil.’”Footnote ⁶⁶

Many recent commentators have assumed this statement to be an expression of a hyper-Augustinian theological anthropology of “original sin,” which appears deceptively attractive in light of the fact that Schmitt had written that “optimistic and pessimistic suppositions… ultimately all amount to an anthropological profession of faith.”Footnote ⁶⁷ However, this phrase meant nothing more than “only supposed or believed in, not genuinely known”—as one of Schmitt's most perceptive early readers understood.Footnote ⁶⁸ Moreover, in light of the opinions he held in 1917, in one of his most explicitly theological writings, it stands to reason that the change has to be explained nontheologically. In case there were any doubt, Schmitt clarified, in the notes added to the text's 1963 reissue, that the “use of a formula, like ‘from nature’ good or evil, does not mean a particular profession of faith in … the Christian-theological concept of nature.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In section 5 below, treating Schmitt's relationship to Donoso Cortés, I will return to this anthropological theme.

Postwar Recovery? Both biography and documentable drift in his thought suggest that Schmitt's Weimar-era maturation coincided with his effective abandonment of the Church. But how to make sense, then, of the theological imagery and quasi-confessional statements found in the postwar notebooks? Two explanations present themselves.

Much of this postwar material should be understood within the broader context of the postwar revival of religiosity in Germany and the search for an often theologically accented “firm ground” or “new beginning” after the total social and political collapse wrought by the war.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thus, their presence in his writing might indicate a later shift in Schmitt's postwar thought.

Alternatively, less charitable interpreters argue that Schmitt underwent a postwar “flight into religion” as a general strategy for self-exculpation. Here we do well to recollect the specific nature of the evidence found in the postwar notebooks. Nothing within Schmitt's Glossarium is fully candid, for he intended it to be read posthumously. Not only did he provide redaction instructions for posthumous publication, but he self-consciously wrote them not in his usual, almost impenetrable, Gabelsberger, stenographic style, which few today can read, but rather in a more readily legible hand. Bearing some of this in mind, some scholars argue that the documents must be read with “caution,” because they often reveal a “self-justifying intent.”Footnote ⁷¹ Between 1934 and 1936, Schmitt had been denounced for his ostensibly anti-NSDAP behavior prior to 1933, both by a Roman Catholic émigré journal in Switzerland and by an SS publication. Drawing attention to his earlier ties with the Roman Catholic Center Party, they claimed, among other things, that he remained a Roman Catholic and by extension an insincere Party member. It was these attacks in particular that led to Schmitt's fall from grace within the NSDAP, and these allegations even appear in Schmitt's SD-file.Footnote ⁷² Fearful that charges might be brought against him at Nuremberg in 1947, Schmitt was quick, on numerous occasions, to remind his interrogators of the SS's attack on him. Though this can be no more than a speculative hypothesis, one cannot help but wonder if Schmitt thought that echoing some of these charges after the war might alleviate some of the appearance of intellectual complicity with the NSDAP. The chronology, at least, supports this claim. As far as the documentary evidence goes, it would appear that Schmitt first began to reidentify openly as a Roman Catholic only at some point during his internment by the Americans, while awaiting possible sentencing for war crimes. It was only at some point after 1950, following the death of his second wife, that Schmitt actually reconciled with the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ⁷³ Whichever interpretation we may prefer, the important conclusion remains: we should not read this (mostly) postwar material back onto the Weimar-era corpus.

4. The Methodological Atheism of the Theory of Political Theology and the Political

A careful review of core features of the plain-sense reading of Schmitt's Weimar-era works cuts deeply against the strong political-theological thesis. Here, I focus on two of his most frequently discussed ideas: his theory of political theology and his concept of the “political.”

The Theory of Political Theology. The strong political-theological thesis argues not just that political theology is somehow central to Schmitt's intellectual project, but also that it is, as one author puts it, “the only adequate description of Schmitt's teaching.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Problematically, however, Schmitt nowhere identifies himself with, nor does he ever define, “political theology” along the lines of the strong political-theological thesis. Instead, the sense he gives it is altogether different. The claim that Schmitt “never speaks of … [political theology's] meaning” is not correct.Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, the attempt to extract multiple layers of meaning of “political theology” finds, at best, only ambiguous textual warrant in Schmitt's Weimar writings.Footnote ⁷⁶ Also inconclusive are the efforts to treat Political Theology as two separate texts on historical-developmental grounds.Footnote ⁷⁷

As he makes very clear in his 1934 foreword to Political Theology, that text must be read against the background of his understanding of secularization and a famous lecture he gave in 1929.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the Weimar writings, Schmitt's conception of secularization is articulated nowhere more clearly than in the 1925 foreword to the second edition of his Political Romanticism. There, he maintained that although the sweeping currents of secular modernity may have been successful in displacing God as a central point of reference, an empty space nevertheless remained behind. This space is then subsequently filled by some other, generally “metaphysical,” placeholder (e.g., humanity, the nation, the individual, life as an end in itself), functioning thereby as that epoch's authoritative center of gravity.

This narrative of secularization coheres perfectly with Schmitt's Weimar-era philosophy of history. In his important 1929 lecture “Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” Schmitt declares that the “central domain” of human thought had dramatically shifted from one stage to another over the course of the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Over this span of time, the era of theological thinking had been decisively eclipsed. As theological transcendence had grown less and less credible, especially for the “leading elites,” “the hitherto central domain, theology, [was] abandoned.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The precise import of this historical transformation for European jurisprudence was, to Schmitt's mind, pithily expressed by Alberico Gentili, when he wrote silete theologi in munere alieno (be silent, theologians, in a task that does not belong to you).Footnote ⁸¹ The fundamentally “profane” and “atheological” tenor of Schmitt's historical narrative was immediately apparent to Karl Löwith—one of Schmitt's early, theologically sensitive readers, whose work Schmitt held in generally high regard.Footnote ⁸²

Political-theological analysis concerns itself with the “secularization of concepts” and the “after-effects of Christian-theological conceptions” in later historical contexts.Footnote ⁸³ It does not, however, seek to uncover what Schmitt later called a “superficial secularization” of historical theological notions. He does not insist that something exactly like the omnipotent God of the Abrahamic religions must be found in its concrete particularity somewhere in the political entity.Footnote ⁸⁴ In Political Theology, Schmitt presents his political theological analysis very clearly as a “sociology of juristic concepts.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Even in the very last monograph he wrote, Schmitt insisted that Political Theology was a “purely juristic” work, which sought only to examine a “scientific-theoretical and conceptual-historical problem,” namely the “structural identity of theological and juridical concepts, arguments, and insights.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Schmitt clarifies the meaning of his political-theological “sociology of juristic concepts” in the opening of the chapter entitled “Political Theology” of Political Theology. Famously, Schmitt claims there that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized, theological concepts; not only according to their historical development—because they were transferred out of theology into the theory of the state…—but also in their systematic structure, knowledge of which is necessary for a sociological examination of these concepts.” Here, he aims to demonstrate the existence of “systematic analog[ies]” or structural isomorphisms of concepts. Touching on the core themes of the argument of Political Theology, Schmitt contends that the “state of exception” in the theory of the state is “analogous” to the “miracle” in theology. As an analog to the miracle, the state of exception stands outside of the normal, ordinary workings of the legal order, just as the miracle stands outside of the normal, ordinary workings of the natural order. Similarly, Schmitt argues, the “omnipotent legislator” resembles the “omnipotent God,” both analogically and in terms of the concept's inner logic.Footnote ⁸⁷ Six years later, Schmitt describes another case of a structural-conceptual “analogy,” adding that this “belongs to the theory of political theology.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Schmitt's principal argument in Political Theology is a direct response to clear provocations in Hans Kelsen's writings and its advocacy of a “pure theory of law,” uncontaminated by the contingencies of sociology, psychology, ideology, biology, ethics, and politics. Between 1920 and 1922, Kelsen's critique turned to theology, first drawing attention to the analogy between divine and political sovereignty. On his view, a true legal science can succeed only on analogy with natural science, whose success, he argues, is premised upon mankind's liberation from the thought patterns of Christian theology. This liberation entails the rejection of “extralegal acts of state” that “take refuge in a metalegal system,” which are analogous to an omnipotent God's suspension of the regularity of the natural order (i.e., a “miracle”). Seen from the perspective of a pure theory of law, this analogically atavistic appeal to metalegality sanctions legal arbitrariness, or, what is worse, the free play of “political interests.” Thus, he calls for the “overcoming of the theological method” in the name of a true science of law.Footnote ⁸⁹

When seen in its proper context, Schmitt's “political theology” later that same year is not at all his covert way of suggesting that all legal order is founded upon divine order. Instead, his fundamental claim in Political Theology is that liberal constitutional thinking deceives itself in its belief that it has absolutely nothing within its system analogous to an omnipotent God (i.e., an authoritative figure) or that the miracle can be altogether banished from the regular workings of nature (i.e., that all basic political-ethical problems can be subsumed under, and resolved by, the regularity and inner consistency of a standing body of law, which makes no reference beyond itself). Thus, in attempting to show the continuing structural and substantive relevance of something like God and something like the miracle for legal and state theory, Schmitt's points of emphases are sovereignty and those rare decisions that such a sovereign must issue in a state of exception, and that thereby frustrate the regular working of a standing body of law.

The Political. At its most basic level, the strong political-theological thesis claims that Schmitt's concept of the political is grounded in theology. Reconciling the bellicose cri de coeur of Concept of the Political—clearly Schmitt's least Christian writing—with Christian teachings had proven a stumbling block for most of Schmitt's readers until rather recently. This is understandable, given that the strong political-theological thesis is fundamentally irreconcilable with the central, analytical meaning of Concept of the Political. One of the basic, underlying theses of that text is that anything that proves sufficient to group human beings with the “level of intensity” necessary to support a friend-enemy distinction becomes political thereby.Footnote ⁹⁰ Ultimately, whatever that content may be, it matters not. Thus, although the theological can certainly contribute to the development of the intensity characteristic of the political, the political as such has conceptual and logical priority over the theological. Precisely for this reason, Schmitt dismisses as “nonsensical” the idea of a “purely” theologically motivated war. “This easy recognition,” writes Schmitt, “is mostly confused by [the fact] that religious… antitheses can escalate into political antitheses.” Thus, while there does indeed exist a “clear” “methodological relationship” between the “thought-presuppositions of theology and of politics,” nevertheless, “theological support [of politics] frequently confuses political concepts” in that it tends to “obfuscate the recognition of existential antagonisms,” which are themselves the subject matter of a relatively autonomous, qua architectonic, political sphere.Footnote ⁹¹ Following this line of thought, Schmitt would write two years later that “the decision whether something is unpolitical always represents a political decision.”Footnote ⁹² He does not write that the decision about what is political rests upon a prepolitical theology.

On Schmitt's final analysis, all conceptions of pure theocracy are basically “nonpolitical” in character. For instance, the “theocratic” conception of monarchy, which is “religiously grounded” by virtue of its presumed relationship with a “personal God,” has theological concepts (e.g., God) as its primary points of reference rather than distinctly political concepts (e.g., monarch, people, state). “None of these [theological] ideas,” writes Schmitt, “belong essentially to the political sphere.” Similarly, in his discussion of the “theory of democracy,” Schmitt would assert that “state power… does not emanate from God.” For this reason, Schmitt treats the theory of the divine right of kings and the democratic principle of vox populi vox dei as political claims which operate on the same conceptual-tactical plane. They each “have only a polemical and negative sense,” which consists in excluding all other claims to political supremacy. Although monarchy can, and often does, formally claim to “be religiously grounded,” and the Jeffersonian democrat might similarly claim providential dispensation from the “God of [his] particular people”—the ultimate political meaning of this appeal to God is its solemn rejection of everything else that might have limited the monarch's or the dēmos's claim to sovereignty.Footnote ⁹³

As we have seen, everything Schmitt had to say about “political theology” in the Weimar period, when he composed his most important works, is fully consistent with what sociologists of religion today call “methodological atheism”—enquiry whose explanatory power presupposes no particular type of spiritual conviction, but which is, of course, not the same thing as atheism simpliciter. In addition, we have seen that while the concept of the political does not, as such, deny that politics can draw upon religious elements (this is the general force of the “level of intensity” criterion), it does disclaim the idea that the political as such is founded upon or derived from theology. The political is a more primordial concept.

5. Juan Donoso Cortés and Thomas Hobbes

The interpretive prospects of the strong political-theological thesis become yet clearer through a careful examination of Schmitt's relationship to Juan Donoso Cortés and Thomas Hobbes.

Donoso Cortés. Inevitably, the strong political-theological thesis ends up assimilating Schmitt and Donoso Cortés.Footnote ⁹⁴ Much of the strong political-theological thesis's force derives from Schmitt's published discussions of Donoso Cortés prior to 1923, which made reference to the Spaniard's battle as a believer with anarchosocialism, his apocalyptic eschatology, and his fixation with Satanism.Footnote ⁹⁵ Yet, even at this point, Schmitt had been clear that Donoso Cortés's “current significance” lay in the “consistency” of his decisionistic cast of thought.Footnote ⁹⁶

Upon any of Donoso Cortés's theological reflections, Schmitt rarely if ever tarries for long, and this is increasingly the case after 1922/23. In all of the published writings, the only genuinely theological element Schmitt discussed at any length was the Spaniard's theological anthropology. Donoso Cortés took the “doctrine of original sin,” and “radicalize[d] it polemically into a teaching on the absolute sinfulness and fallenness of human nature.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Yet two qualifications are important here. At least twice in two separate essays, Schmitt had described Donoso Cortés's theological anthropology as being “close to insanity.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Secondly, as Schmitt knew quite well, the theological anthropology of the Roman Catholic Donoso Cortés conflicted sharply with post-Tridentine dogma. Thus, by drawing attention to the Spaniard's “exaggeration of natural evil” and his consequent proximity to “Lutheran dogma,” Schmitt signals to his reader the theologically heretical character of Donoso Cortés's writings.Footnote ⁹⁹

Schmitt's relationship to Donoso Cortés is more complicated than that of ventriloquist and puppet. In fact, at times, Schmitt seems to be embarrassed by the former's fits of theological histrionics. Schmitt's 1929 essay on Donoso Cortés is especially pertinent in this regard. There, Schmitt avers that it is “unfortunate” that Donoso Cortés's “main works” are those that are the most translated and widely disseminated, for his contemporary, relative obscurity owes much to his inexpert “la[y]” “theologizing” style and thus to the numerous, sophomoric theological-doctrinal blunders contained within those works. Donoso Cortés “was, in everyday politics, an exceptional, clear, and practical diplomat, and in no way an apocalyptic enthusiast or visionary.” He did indeed sometimes write as though he were an “eschatological prophet,” but in his actual, political behavior, he proved himself to have been a “purposeful, professional diplomat.” Donoso Cortés “became in his writings apocalyptic and eschatological, but in concrete reality, he conducted a [type of] politics… which is impossible to view under the grandiose aspect of the Last Judgment.” Actually, in Schmitt's estimation, it “is entirely impossible, with apocalyptic ideas, to provide an ideological foundation” for the sort of “caesaristic” dictatorship Donoso Cortés favored. Instead, the Spaniard's “political intuition” was “rooted in secular horizons.” He “deserves … to be heard, even if he loses himself in a theological style, which has become unmodern.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Hobbes. In addition, those within the tradition of the strong political-theological interpretation ordinarily view Schmitt's work on Hobbes as the “touchstone” for the thesis.Footnote ¹⁰¹ However, it is actually in Schmitt's work on Hobbes that we find the greatest warrant for the just complaint by faithful Christian intellectuals that Schmitt “instrumentaliz[es] Christianity.”Footnote ¹⁰²

During the 1920s and for most of the 1930s, Schmitt had treated Hobbes's writings as an expression of the technologizing, modern scientific project.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the wake of the spiritual-political anarchy unleashed by European protestantism, Hobbes recognized that a stable state could no longer allow itself to be subjected to spiritual potestates indirectae, or indirect powers—to use Cardinal Bellarmine's expression.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It was in this specific sense that Hobbes “completed the Reformation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

At least in the early 1920s, Schmitt left no doubt that he viewed Hobbes's moral theory as non-”Christian” and the process of “technologization” his work epitomized as “atheis[tic].”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ However this may be, beginning in 1938 and with even greater force after the war, Schmitt's discussion of Hobbes gave the appearance that he had shifted course. At that point, he began to argue that the “restoration of the original unity of life” was the “actual meaning of Hobbes's political theory”—an original unity that the “Judeo-Christian” tradition's “state-destroying separation of spiritual and worldly power” had begun to dissolve. Now, Schmitt would maintain that Hobbes had presupposed a “Christian community” for his Leviathan, and that this community would rest upon the claim “that Jesus is the Christ.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

What matters in this context is not at all the much-debated historical question of Hobbes's religiosity, but rather that Schmitt has not even made a concertedly persuasive effort to argue the case. Schmitt contends that Hobbes was “entirely agnostic” and that this is especially clear in his hyper-Erastian theory of miracles. For Hobbes, “the belief in miracles is always only superstition.” Yet Schmitt maintains—and here he clearly departs from Hobbes—that if “the state power commands belief, then it is a miracle, and everyone has to abide by this command.” Thus, “nothing is true here. Everything is command.” In order to save appearances, Schmitt qualifies in the closing pages of his Hobbes book by adding that Hobbes's “fundamental agnosticism” was the “abyss out of which his piety arose.” Puzzlingly for his reader, Schmitt adds that although Hobbes's “thought was no longer believing,” Hobbes nevertheless exhibited a “genuine” “piety,” and on the basis of this cynically stipulated “piety,” Schmitt declared Hobbes to be a “vir probus,” or upright man.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Whether or not Hobbes was a believing Christian is ultimately inconsequential to Schmitt. “The individual-psychological question concerning the subjective convictions of Thomas Hobbes ought not to be posed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Thus, as it does so often in Hobbes's writings as well, the Christian faith appears here far more as a condition of national-political integration than as the enactment of obedience to the divine.

6. A Tactical Retreat to Esotericism by Defenders of the Strong Political-Theological Thesis

Correspondence, notebooks, and anecdotal recollections fail to provide dispositive support for the strong political-theological thesis. Also, core features of Schmitt's most important Weimar-era works actually cut against the thesis. The same is true of his relationship to Donoso Cortés and Hobbes. Are Schmitt's explicit statements in his published writings merely window dressing intended to throw off the scent?

In fact, this is precisely what the most self-reflective interpreters of Schmitt's ostensible political theology already concede: that Schmitt kept the core animating his thought secret from his readers. In response to these and other interpretive difficulties, Meier maintains that Schmitt actually “s[ought] to conceal” the political theological core of his thought “to the best of his ability.” “In the final analysis,” writes Meier, it did not really “matter to [Schmitt]… whether he would really be understood by anybody, that is, so understood as he understood himself.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ With minor variation, this same basic move is repeated in numerous subsequent studies within this interpretive tradition.Footnote ¹¹¹ Following them, both Agamben and Assmann are forced to appeal to the purportedly “unsaid,” “implicit,” or “esoteric” dimension of Schmitt's texts.Footnote ¹¹²

To remain plausible, the political-theological interpretation of Schmitt's thought must make an appeal to esotericism. The trouble is that the conclusions of such a manner of reading are, by their very nature, totally unfalsifiable. The answer to this question ultimately requires a judgment concerning the scholarly merits of the hermeneutics of esotericism. In the final analysis, the question becomes: Is the argument of Schmitt's work intelligible without the hypothesis of esotericism? Until the 1990s, most of Schmitt's readers thought the answer was yes.

As we have seen, significant features of Schmitt's most important writings undermine the strong political-theological thesis. The postwar, quasi-confessional statements, moreover, are of a rather peculiar nature, are directed to a specific audience, and can quite plausibly be read in light of the revival of postwar Christian religiosity. Even more speculatively, they can be read as an effort to reiterate criticisms from the NSDAP era, in the hope that this might further distance him intellectually from the NSDAP regime. Moreover, correspondence and anecdotal reference to private conversations cannot resolve our difficulty, for these materials present a mixed and highly contradictory picture of Schmitt.

In his celebrated Weimar writings, Schmitt maintained that God had left the scene, but that something else would always step up to fill the conceptual space he had formerly occupied. Thus, Schmitt held that every epoch has its own “central domain,” around which the thought of that age revolves. Precisely for these reasons, he held thoroughgoing state neutrality to be a chimera.Footnote ¹¹³ In addition, Schmitt also believed that Comte's “religion of humanity” was ultimately a dangerous “pseudoreligion.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Thus, he sneeringly derided Blumenberg's account of modernity and “the burden of self-assertion” it placed on modern man. At its base, it represented for Schmitt an antimetaphysical, ahistorical, immanentistic “autism” of human “self-empowerment.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ But the rejection of universalistic, liberal humanism is in no way unique to Schmitt, having become entirely commonplace under the combined impact of Heidegger and French poststructuralism.Footnote ¹¹⁶ However, because Schmitt rejected the notion of universal human dignity grounded in human autonomy, which has proven to be so vitally important to so many aspects of liberal modernity, there is no reason to doubt that Schmitt would have agreed in basic principle with Böckenförde's famous dictum that “the liberal, secularized state lives upon presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

But none of these contentions make Schmitt a political theologian in the strong sense. Nowhere in the middle- to late-Weimar period, when he composed his most important works, does Schmitt support the contention that terra firma can be found only in (Christian) revelation. Although painting Schmitt with the broad brush-strokes of the medieval atavisms of the Roman Catholic counterrevolution may make him seem more comprehensible, this interpretive framework distorts his thought. Here, the apparently superficial answer is actually the correct one. Schmitt's Weimar career ended with his well-known reflections on the “political,” which clarify that although the political may draw upon all spheres of human life, including the sphere of Christian theology, the political is ultimately irreducible to all of them. Thus, although Schmitt is certainly no laïciste, neither is he a Christian political theologian. Whereas the formulation of the political is by definition pluralistic in character, Christian political theology is universalistic in orientation, at least so long as it wishes to remain biblical.

Concerning the core of Schmitt's thought, the only significant questions that remain are why he formulated the “political” in the way he did and whether his formulation is correct. Although neither of these two questions can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion here, I hope to have provided the point of departure and, having done so, to have relieved contemporary discussions of political theology from the perceived necessity of tackling Schmitt's sordid past and the conceptual difficulties inherent to his work.