sense of this difficult articulation becomes fully comprehensible. According to
the Monotheletists, whose manifesto is Heraclius’s Ekthesis (638) and who are
represented in the dialogue by Pyrrhus, there are two natures in Christ, but
only one will ( thelēsis) and one activity ( energeia), “which performs both divine and human works” (Simonetti, p. 516). Dyophysitism, brought to the extreme,
may end up introducing a division even in the economy—that is, in the divine
praxis—identifying in Christ “two wills that oppose one another, almost as if
God’s logos intends to realize the salvific passion while what is human in him
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obstructs and contrasts with his will” (ibid., p. 518). Monotheletists wish to
avoid this division. Responding to Maximus, who affirms that two wills and two
different operations must necessarily correspond to the two natures of Christ,
Pyrrhus thus claims that “that has been said by the Fathers with regard to theol-
ogy, and not economy. It is not worthy of a thought that loves truth to transfer
to economy that which has been affirmed with regard to theology, putting to-
gether such an absurdity” ( PG, 91, 348).
Maximus’s answer is categorical and shows that the articulation of the two
discourses coincides with a problem that is decisive in all senses. He writes that if
what the Fathers say about theology were not also valid for the economy, “then,
after the incarnation, the Son is not theologized together [ syntheologeitai] with
the Father. And if he is not, then he cannot be enumerated together with him
in the invocation of baptism, and faith and predication will be vain” (ibid.). In
another work, emphasizing the inseparability of theology and economy, Maxi-
mus can thus write: “The incarnated logos of God [that is, the representative of
economy] teaches theology” ( PG, 90, 876).
It is not surprising that a radical “economism”—which, distinguishing two
wills in the Son, threatens the very identity of the Christological subject—needs
to affirm the unity of theology and economy, while a “theologism”—which at-
tempts to protect at all costs that unity—does not hesitate to strongly oppose
the two discourses. The difference between the two rationalities continuously
intersects with the level of theological disputes and, just as Trinitarian and Chris-
tological dogmatics were formed together and cannot be divided in any way, so
theology and economy cannot be separated. Just as the two natures coexist in
Christ, following a stereotypical formulation, “without division or confusion”
( adiairetos kai asynchytos), so the two discourses must coincide without confus-
ing themselves, and differentiate themselves without dividing. What is at stake
in their relation is not only the caesura between the humanity and the divinity
of the Son, but, more generally, that between being and praxis. Economic and
theological rationality must operate, as it were, “in divergent agreement,” so that
the economy of the son is not negated and a substantial division is not intro-
duced in God.
However, the economic rationality, by means of which Christology came
to know its first, uncertain formulation, will not cease to cast its shadow on
theology. When the vocabulary of the homoousia and of the homoiousia, of the hypostasis and of nature, have almost completely covered over the first formulation of the Trinity, the economic rationality—with its pragmatic-managerial,
and not ontologic-epistemic, paradigm—will continue to operate underground
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as a force that tends to undermine and break the unity of ontology and praxis,
divinity and humanity.
א The fracture between being and praxis, and the anarchic character of the divine
oikonomia constitute the logical place in which the fundamental nexus that, in our culture, unites government and anarchy becomes comprehensible. Not only is something
like a providential government of the world possible just because praxis does not have any foundation in being, but also this government—which, as we shall see, has its paradigm
in the Son and his oikonomia—is itself intimately anarchic. Anarchy is what government must presuppose and assume as the origin from which it derives and, at the same time,
as the destination toward which it is traveling. (Benjamin was in this sense right when
he wrote that there is nothing as anarchic as the bourgeois order. Similarly, the remark
of one of the Fascist dignitaries in Pasolini’s film Salò according to which “the only real anarchy is that of power” is perfectly serious.)
From this follows the insufficiency of Reiner Schürmann’s attempt—in his nonethe-
less wonderful book on the Principe d’anarchie—to think an “anarchic economy”—that is, an unfounded economy—from the perspective of the overcoming of metaphysics and
the history of being. Among post-Heideggerian philosophers, Schürmann is the only one
to have understood the nexus that links the theological notion of oikonomia (which he, however, leaves unquestioned) to the problem of ontology and, in particular, to Heidegger’s reading of the ontological difference and of the “epochal” structure of the history of being. It is in this perspective that Schürmann tries to think praxis and history without
any foundation in being (that is, in a completely an-archic way). But ontotheology always
already thinks the divine praxis as lacking a foundation in being, and, as a matter of fact, intends to find an articulation between that which it has always already divided. In other words, the oikonomia is always already anarchic, without foundation, and a rethinking of the problem of anarchy in our political tradition becomes possible only if we begin with
an awareness of the secret theological nexus that links it to government and providence.
The governmental paradigm, of which we are here reconstructing the genealogy, is actually
always already “anarchic-governmental.”
This does not mean that, beyond government and anarchy, it is not possible to think
an Ungovernable [ un Ingovernabile], that is, something that could never assume the form of an oikonomia.
Threshold
AT the end of classical civilization, when the unity of the ancient cosmos is
broken, and being and acting, ontology and praxis, seem to part ways irre-
versibly, we see a complex doctrine developing in Christian theology, one in which
Judaic and pagan elements merge. Such a doc trine attempts to interpret—and,
at the same, recompose—this fracture through a managerial and non- epistemic
paradigm: the oikonomia. According to this paradigm, the divine praxis, from
creation to redemption, does not have a foundation in God’s being, and differs
from it to the extent that it realizes itself in a separate person, the Logos, or
Son. However, this anarchic and unfounded praxis must be reconciled with the
unity of the substance. Through the idea of a free and voluntary action—which
associates creation with redemption—this paradigm had to overcome both the
Gnostic antithesis between a God foreign to the world and a demiurge who is
creator and Lord of the world, and the pagan identity of being and acting, which
made the very idea of creation unconvincing. The challenge that Christian the-
ology thus presents to Gnosis is to succeed in reconciling God’s transcendence
with the creation of the world, as well as his noninvolvement in it with the Stoic
and Judaic idea of a God who takes care of the world and governs it providen-
tially. In the face of this aporetic task, the oikonomia—given its managerial and
administrative root—offered a ductile tool, which presented itself, at the same
time, as a logos, a rationality removed from any external constraint, and a praxis unanchored to any ontological necessity or preestablished norm. Being both
a discourse and a reality, a non-epistemic knowledge and an anarchic praxis,
the oikonomia allowed theologians to define the novelty of Christian faith for
centuries and, at the same time, make the outcome of late classical, Stoic, and
neo-Pythagorean thought that had already oriented itself in an “economic” sense
merge with it. It is in the context of this paradigm that the original kernels of
the Trinitarian dogmatics and of Christology were formed: they have never fully
dissociated themselves from this genesis, remaining tributary to both its aporias
and successes.
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We can then understand in what sense it is possible to say that Christian
theology is, from its beginning, economic-managerial, and not politico-statal
[ politicostatuale]—this was our original thesis contra Schmitt. The fact that
Christian theology entails an economy and not just a politics does not mean,
however, that it is irrelevant for the history of Western political ideas and prac-
tices. On the contrary, the theological-economic paradigm obliges us to think
this history once more and from a new perspective, keeping track of the deci-
sive junctures between political tradition in the strict sense and the “economic-
governmental” tradition— which, what is more, will acquire a precise form, as
we shall see, in the medieval treatises de gubernatione mundi. The two paradigms
live together and intersect with one another to the point of constituting a bi-
polar system, whose understanding preliminarily conditions any interpretation
of the political history of the West.
In his great monograph on Tertullian, Moingt rightly suggests at a certain point
that the most correct translation of the phrase unicus deus cum sua oikonomia—the only one able to hold together the various meanings of the term “economy”—
would probably be “a single God with his government, in the sense in which ‘gov-
ernment’ designates the king’s ministers, whose power is an emanation of the royal
power and is not counted along with it, but is necessary to its exercise”; under-
stood in this way, “the economy means the mode of administration by means of a
plurality of the divine power” (Moingt, p. 923). In this genuinely “governmental”
meaning, the impolitical paradigm of the economy also shows its political implica-
tions. The fracture between theology and oikonomia, being and action, insofar as it makes the praxis free and “anarchic,” opens in fact, at the same time, the possibility
and necessity of its government.
In a historical moment that witnesses a radical crisis of classical concep-
tuality, both ontological and political, the harmony between the transcendent
and eternal principle and the immanent order of the cosmos is broken, and the
problem of the “government” of the world and of its legitimization becomes
the political problem that is in every sense decisive.
4
The Kingdom and the Government
4.1. One of the most memorable figures of the prose cycle of the Grail
Legend is that of the roi mehaignié, the wounded or mutilated
king (the word mehaignié corresponds to the Italian magagnato [in poor shape; shabby]) who reigns over a terre gaste, a devastated land, “where crops do not
grow and trees do not bear fruits.” According to Chrétien de Troyes, the king
was wounded in battle between his thighs and mutilated in such a way that he
cannot stand or ride. For this reason, when he wants to enjoy himself, he asks to
be put in a boat and goes fishing (the nickname “Fisher King” originated here),
while his falconers, archers, and hunters scour his forests. This must be, however,
a rather strange kind of fishing, given that Chrétien specifies shortly after that
it has been fifteen years since the king last left his room, where he is kept alive
with communion bread that is served to him in the holy Grail. According to an-
other and less authoritative source—which recalls Kafka’s story about the hunter
Gracchus—the king lost his hounds and his hunters while hunting in the forest.
Once he reached the seashore, he found a glimmering sword on a boat, and
when he attempted to pull the sword from its sheath, he was magically wounded
between the thighs by a spear.
In any case, the mutilated king will be healed only when, at the end of his
quête, Galahad will smear his wound with the blood left on the tip of the spear
that inflicted the wound on Christ’s side.
This figure of a mutilated and impotent king has been given the most various
interpretations. In a book that has exercised a considerable influence not only
on Arthurian studies but also on twentieth-century poetry, Jesse Weston has
juxtaposed the figure of the Fisher King with the “divine principle of life and
fertility,” that “Spirit of Vegetation” that, following the studies of Frazer and the
Anglo-Saxon folklorists, the author recovers—with a good dose of eclecticism—
in rituals and mythological figures that belong to the most divergent cultures,
from the Babylonian Tammuz to the Greek-Phoenician Adonis.
These interpretations overlook the fact that the legend undoubtedly also
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contains a genuinely political mythologem, which can be read, without forcing
things, as the paradigm of a divided and impotent sovereignty. Even if he does
not lose any of his legitimacy and sacredness, the king has in fact for some reason
been separated from his powers and activities, and reduced to impotence. Not
only can he not hunt and ride (here these activities seem to symbolize secular
power), but he must also stay in his room while his ministers (the falconers,
archers, and hunters) govern in his name and place. In this sense, the splitting
of sovereignty dramatized in the figure of the Fisher King seems to evoke the
duality that Benveniste identifies in Indo-European regality between a mostly
magic-religious and a more properly political function. But, in the Grail legends,
the emphasis is rather put on the inoperative and separated character of the mu-
tilated king, who will be excluded from any concrete activity of government at
least until he is healed by the touch of the magic spear. The roi mehaignié thus
contains a kind of anticipation of the modern sovereign who “reigns but does
not govern”; in this sense, the legend could have a meaning that concerns us
more closely.
4.2. At the beginning of his book on Monotheism as a Political Problem,
just before tackling the problem of divine monarchy, Peterson briefly analyzes
the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On the World, which represents for him some-
thing like a bridge between Aristotelian p
olitics and the Judaic idea of divine
monarchy. While, in Aristotle, God is the transcendent principle of every move-
ment, who leads the world like a strategist leads his army, in On the World—
Peterson observes—God is compared with a puppeteer who, remaining invisible,
moves the threads of his puppet, or with the Great King of the Persians who lives
hidden in his palace and governs the world by means of the innumerable crowd
of ministers and officials.
Here, the crucial question for the image of divine monarchy is not whether there
is one or more powers [ Gewalten], but whether God participates in the powers
[ Mächten] that act in the cosmos. The author wants to say: God is the precondi-
tion for powers to act in the cosmos (he uses the term dynamis, adopting a Stoic
terminology, but he means rather the Aristotelian kynesis), yet, precisely for this reason, he himself is not power: le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas. (Peterson
1994, p. 27)
According to Peterson, in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, metaphysico- theological
and political paradigms are strictly entwined. The ultimate formulation of a
meta physical image of the world—Peterson writes, repeating almost literally
a Schmittian thesis—is always determined by a political decision. In this sense,
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“the difference between Macht ( potestas, dynamis) and Gewalt ( archē), which the author of the treatise posits with regard to God, is a metaphysico-political problem,” which can assume different forms and meanings and can be developed in
the direction of the distinction between auctoritas and potestas as much as in that of the Gnostic opposition between god and the demiurge.
Before analyzing the strategic reasons for this peculiar excursus on the theo-
logical meaning of the opposition between kingdom and government, it is a
good idea to examine more closely the text from which it takes its marks in
order to check if it is well founded. The unknown author—who according to the
majority of scholars could belong to the same circle of Hellenistic Stoic Judaism
from which Philo and Aristobulus came—does not really distinguish between
archē and dynamis in God, but rather, with a gesture that brings him close to the Fathers who elaborate the Christian paradigm of the oikonomia, between essence
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