summarizes the reasons for the proximity between the two authors as well as the
reasons for their disagreement. The reduction of Christian faith to monotheism
is presented as the result of the Enlightenment, against which Peterson recalls
that “for Christians there is political action only on the presupposition of faith
in a triune God,” who should be located beyond both Judaism and Paganism,
monotheism and polytheism. At this point, the preface announces in a more
subdued tone the final thesis of the book on the “theological impossibility” of a
Christian political theology: “We shall show here with an historical example the
internal problematicity of a political theology that orientates itself on monothe-
ism” (Peterson 1994, p. 24).
More than the critique of the Schmittian paradigm, what is decisive here is
the enunciation of the thesis according to which the Trinitarian doctrine is the
only possible foundation of a Christian politics. Both authors want to found
a politics on Christian faith; but while, for Schmitt, political theology founds
politics in a secular sense, the “political action” that is at stake for Peterson is, as
we shall see, liturgy (returned to its etymological meaning of “public practice”).
The thesis according to which the real Christian politics is liturgy and the
Trinitarian doctrine founds politics as participation in the glorious worship of
the angels and saints may appear surprising. The fact remains that this is precisely
where the watershed that separates Schmitt’s “political theology” from Peterson’s
Christian “political action” lies. For Schmitt, political theology founds a politics
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in the proper sense as well as the secular power [ potenza] of the Christian empire that acts as katechon. On the other hand, for Peterson, politics as liturgical action rules out any identification with the earthly city (the invocation of the name of
Augustine, “who makes himself visible at every spiritual and political turn of the
West,” confirms this fact): politics as liturgical action is nothing else than the cul-
tual anticipation of eschatological glory. In this sense, the action of secular powers
is, for the theologian, eschatologically irrelevant: what acts as katechon is not a political power [ potere], but only the Jews’ refusal to convert. This means that,
for Peterson (but his position coincides here with that of a prominent part of the
Church), the historical events he witnessed—from the World Wars to totalitari-
anism, from the technological revolution to the atomic bomb—are theologically
insignificant. All but one: the extermination of the Jews.
If the eschatological advent of the Kingdom will become concrete and real
only after the Jews have converted, then the destruction of the Jews cannot be
unrelated to the destiny of the Church. Peterson was probably in Rome when,
on October 16, 1943, the deportation of a thousand Roman Jews to the extermi-
nation camps took place with the conniving silence of Pius XII. It is legitimate
to ask ourselves whether, at that moment, Peterson became aware of the terrible
ambiguity of a theological thesis that tied both the existence and the fulfillment
of the Church to the survival or the disappearance of the Jews. This ambiguity
will possibly be overcome only if the katechon—the power [ potere] that, postponing the end of history, opens the space of secular politics—is returned to its
original relation with the divine oikonomia and its Glory.
2
The Mystery of the Economy
2.1. Oikonomia means “administration of the house.” In the Aristotelian
(or pseudo-Aristotelian) treatise on economy, we can thus read that
the technē oikonomikē differs from politics just as the house ( oikia) differs from the city ( polis). This distinction is restated in the Politics, in which the politician and the king—who belong to the sphere of the polis—are qualitatively opposed
to the oikonomos and the despotēs—who are referred to the sphere of the house and the family. Even in Xenophon (in whose works the opposition between
house and city is certainly less pronounced than in Aristotle’s), the ergon of the economy is said to be the “good administration of the household [ eu oikein ton
( . . . ) oikon]” (Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 1, 2). However, it is important not to forget that the oikos is not the modern single-family house or simply the extended family, but a complex organism composed of heterogeneous relations,
entwined with each other, which Aristotle ( Politics, 1253b) divides into three
groups: “despotic” relations between masters and slaves (which usually include
the management of a farming business of substantial dimensions); “paternal”
relations between parent and children; “gamic” relations between husband and
wife. These “economic” relations (Aristotle emphasizes their diversity: ibid.,
1259a–b) are linked by a paradigm that we could define as “administrative”
[“ gestionale”], and not epistemic: in other words, it is a matter of an activity that is not bound to a system of rules, and does not constitute a science in the proper
sense (Aristotle writes that “the term ‘head of the family’ [ despotēs] does not refer to a science [ epistēmēn] but to a certain way of being”: ibid., 1255b). This activity rather implies decisions and orders that cope with problems that are each time
specific and concern the functional order ( taxis) of the different parts of the
oikos. A passage from Xenophon clearly defines this “administrative” nature of
oikonomia: the latter not only has to do with the need and use of objects, but,
first and foremost, with their ordered arrangement ( peri [ . . . ] taxeōs skeuōn: Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 8, 23; the term skeuos means “tackle, tool relative to a 387
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certain activity”). In this perspective, the house is first compared with an army
and then with a ship:
Once I had an opportunity of looking over a great Phoenician ship [ . . . ] and
I thought I had never seen tackle so excellently and accurately managed. For I
never saw so many bits of stuff packed away separately in so small a receptacle
[ . . . ] And I noticed that each kind of thing was so neatly stowed away that there
was no confusion, no work for a searcher, nothing out of place, no troublesome
untying to cause a delay when anything was wanted for immediate use. I found
that the steersman’s servant [ diakonon] [ . . . ] knows each particular section so exactly, that he can tell even when away where everything is kept and how much
there is of it [ . . . ] I saw this man in his spare time inspecting all the stores that
are wanted, as a matter of course, in the ship. (Ibid., 8, 11–15)
Xenophon defines this activity or ordered administration as “control” ( episkepsis, from which derives episkopos, “superintendent,” and, later, “bishop”):
I was surprised to see him looking over them, and asked what he was doing. “Sir,”
he answered, “I am checking [ episcopō] to see how the ship’s tackle is stored.”
(Ibid., 8, 15)
Thus Xenophon compares a well-“economized” house to a dance:
All the utensils seem to give rise to a choir, and the space between them is beau-
tiful to see, for each thing stands aside, just as a choir that dances in a circle is
a beautiful spectacle i
n itself, and even the free space looks beautiful and unen-
cumbered. (Ibid., 8, 21)
Oikonomia is presented here as a functional organization, an administrative ac-
tivity that is bound only to the rules of the ordered functioning of the house (or
of the company in question).
This “administrative” paradigm defines the semantic sphere of the term
oikonomia (as well as that of the verb oikonomein and the noun oikonomos) and determines its gradual analogical extension outside its original limits. It is thus
already in the Corpus Hippocraticum ( Of the Epidemics, 6, 2, 24) that hē peri ton noseonta oikonomiē designates the set of practices and apparatuses that the doctor needs to implement with the patient. In the philosophical field, the Stoics use an
“economic” metaphor when they intend to express the idea of a force that regulates
and governs the whole from the inside ( tēs tōn holōn oikonomias: Chrysippus, frag-
ment 937, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, II, 269; hē physis epi tōn phytōn kai epi tōn zōōn ( . . . ) oikonomei: Chrysippus, fragment 178, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, III, 43). In this broad sense of “governing, looking after something,” the verb oikono
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mein acquires the meaning of “providing for the needs of life, nourishing” (thus, the Acts of Thomas paraphrase the expression from the parable in Matthew 6:26
“your heavenly Father feeds them” about the birds of the sky as ho theos oikonomei
auta, in which the verb has the same meaning as the Italian “governare le bestie”*).
It is in a passage from Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations are contemporary
with the first Christian Apologists, that the administrative meaning of the term
appears with more clarity. Reflecting on the inappropriateness of hastily judging
someone else’s behavior, he writes:
It is sometimes a hard matter to be certain whether men do wrong, for their ac-
tions are often done with a reference to {an economy} [ kat’ oikonomian ginetai];
and one must be thoroughly informed of a great many things before he can be
rightly qualified to give judgment in the case. ( The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 11, 18, 5, pp. 188–189)
Here, following a semantic inflection that will remain inseparable from the term,
oikonomia designates a practice and a non-epistemic knowledge that should be
assessed only in the context of the aims that they pursue, even if, in themselves,
they may appear to be inconsistent with the good.
The technical use of the term oikonomia in a rhetorical context is partic-
ularly interesting: it designates the ordered arrangement of the material of an
oration or a treatise (“Hermagoras iudicium partitionem ordinem quaeque sunt
elocutionis subicit oeconomiae, quae Graece appellata ex cura rerum domesti-
carum et hic per abusionem posita nomine Latino caret”: Quintilian, Institutio
oratoria, 3, 3, 9. Cicero translates the term with dispositio, that is, “rerum inven-tarum in ordinem distributio”: De inventione, 1, 9). Economy is, however, more
than a mere arrangement [ disposizione], since it implies, above and beyond the
ordering of the themes ( taxis), a choice ( diairesis) and an analysis ( exergasia) of the topics. In this sense, the term appears in the pseudo-Longinus precisely in
opposition to the concept of the “sublime”:
We see skill in invention, and due order and the oikonomia of matter, emerging
as the hard-won result not of one thing or two, but of the whole texture of the
composition, whereas the sublime flashing forth at the right moment scatters
everything before it like a thunderbolt. ( Longinus on the Sublime, 1, 4)
But, as clearly becomes apparent in Quintilian’s remark (“oeconomiae, quae
Graece appellata ex cura rerum domesticarum et hic per abusionem posita”), in
this gradual analogical extension of the semantic sphere of the term, the awareness
* Governare le bestie could be rendered in English as “to attend to the animals,” or, more literally, “to govern animals.” —Trans.
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HOMO SACER II, 4
of the original domestic meaning was never lost. In this sense, there is an instruc-
tive passage from Diodorus Siculus in which the same semantic nucleus exhibits,
at the same time, both the domestic and the rhetorical acceptation of the term:
It should be the special care of historians, when they compose their works, to give
attention to everything which may be of utility, and especially to the arrangement
according to the parts [ tēs kata meros oikonomias]. This eye to arrangement, for instance, is not only of great help to persons in the disposition of their private affairs
[ en tois idiōtikois biois] if they would preserve and increase their property, but also, when men come to writing history. (Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, V, 1, 1) It is on this basis that, in the Christian age, the term oikonomia is transposed into a theological field, in which, according to a widespread belief, it would acquire
the meaning of a “divine plan of salvation” (with particular reference to Christ’s
incarnation). Given that—as we have seen—a serious lexical investigation is yet
to be carried out, the hypothesis of such a theological meaning of the term
oikonomia, which is usually taken for granted, should first of all be verified.
א In order to understand the semantic history of the term oikonomia, we need to
remember that, from the linguistic point of view, what we are dealing with is not really a transformation of the sense ( Sinn) of the word, but rather a gradual analogical extension of its denotation ( Bedeutung). Although dictionaries do usually, in such instances, distinguish and list one after the other the various senses of a term, linguists know perfectly well that, in point of fact, the semantic nucleus (the Sinn) remains within certain limits and up to a certain point unchanged, and that it is precisely this permanence that allows the extension to new and different denotations. What happened to the term oikonomia is somehow similar to what has more recently happened to the term “enterprise” [“impresa”], which, with the more or less conscious assent of the people concerned, has been extending itself so far as to cover fields, such as the university, which traditionally did not have anything to do with it.
When, referring to the theological use of the term, scholars (such as Moingt with
regard to Hippolytus: Moingt, p. 903; or Markus: Markus 1958, p. 99) speak of an alleged
“traditional sense” of oikonomia in the language of Christianity (which is, precisely that of “divine design”), they end up projecting onto the level of sense what is simply an extension of denotation to the theological field. Even Richter, who in any case denies the
existence of a single theological meaning of the term that could be recovered in different contexts (Richter, p. 2), does not seem to distinguish correctly between sense and denotation. In truth, there is no theological “sense” of the term, but first of all a displacement of its denotation onto the theological field, which is progressively misunderstood and
perceived as a new meaning.
In the following pages, we shall abide by the principle according to which the hy-
pothesis of a theological meaning of the term oikonomia cannot be presupposed, but must be promptly verified each time.
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א It is well known that, in Plato, the difference between oikos and polis is not presented, as it is in Aristotle, in terms of an opposition. In this sense, Aristotle is able to criticize the Platonic notion of the polis and reproach his master for pushing the unitary nature o
f the city too far, thus running the risk of transforming it into a household:
Is it not obvious that a city may at length attain such a degree of unity as to be
no longer a city?—since the nature of a city is to be a plurality, and in tending
to greater unity, from being a city, it becomes a household [ oikia]. (Aristotle,
Politics, 1261a)
2.2. It is a widespread belief (Gass, p. 469; Moingt, p. 903) that Paul was the
first to give a theological meaning to the term oikonomia. Yet, a careful analysis of the passages in question does not confirm this hypothesis. Let us take 1 Corinthians 9:16–17:
If I preach the Gospel [ euangelizōmai], I have nothing to glory of; for necessity
is laid upon me; for woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel. For if I do this
of mine own will, I have a reward: but if not of mine own will, I have an oikonomia entrusted to me [ oikonomian pepisteumai, literally: “I have been invested fiduciarily of an oikonomia”].
The sense of oikonomia is here perspicuous, and the construction with pisteuō does not leave any doubt: oikonomia is the task (as in Septuagint, Isaiah 22:21) that God has assigned to Paul, who therefore does not act freely, as he would in a negotiorum
gestio, but according to a bond of trust ( pistis) as apostolos (“envoy”) and oikonomos (“nominated administrator”). Oikonomia is here something that is assigned; it is, therefore, an activity and a task, not a “plan of salvation” that concerns the divine
mind or will. One should understand the passage from 1 Timothy 1:3–4 in the
same way:
I urged you to stay on at Ephesus. You were to command certain persons to
give up teaching erroneous doctrines and studying those interminable myths
and genealogies, which issue in mere speculation and cannot make known the
oikonomia of God, which works through faith [ oikonomian theou tēn en pistei, the good activity of administration that God entrusted to me].
But the meaning remains the same even in those passages in which the combina-
tion of oikonomia with the term mystērion has induced interpreters to assume a theological sense that is not necessitated by the text. See, for instance, Colossians
1:24–25:
Now I rejoice in my suffering for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what
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