The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  show that the relation between the theological and the political is not univocal,

  but always runs in both directions. Jan Assmann, an Egyptologist who, after hav-

  ing worked on Egyptian doxologies, investigated—on Jacob Taubes’s suggestion—

  political theology in Egypt and in Judaism, reformulated the Schmittian theorem

  according to which all “significant concepts of the modern theory of the state

  are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt 2005, p. 36), by turning it into the

  axiom “the significant concepts of theology are theologized political concepts”

  (Assmann, p. 20). Every inversion of a thesis remains, however, in some sense

  implicitly in agreement with the original. More interesting than taking sides with

  one thesis or the other is, however, to try to understand the functional relationship

  that links the two principles. Glory is precisely the place at which this bilateral (or

  bi-univocal) character of the relation between theology and politics clearly emerges

  into the light. Louis Bréhier, one of the first scholars to become interested in the

  interrelations between imperial cult and ecclesiastical liturgy, observed, not with-

  out irony, that “when the pope goes to Constantinople, in the course of the sixth

  and seventh centuries, the emperor adores him, but at the same time he adores

  the emperor. In the same way, in the tenth century, the emperor and the patriarch

  adore one another when they meet at Saint Sophia” (Bréhier and Batiffol, p. 59).

  More original—or better, more decisive—than the opposition between the-

  ology and politics, spiritual power and profane power, is the glory within which

  they coincide. What, from the perspective of Schmitt’s political theology (or

  of its reversal in Assmann), appeared as a clear distinction between two princi-

  ples that find their point of contact in secularization (or sacralization), from the

  perspective of glory—and of the economic theology of which it forms a part—

  crosses a threshold of indetermination where it is not always easy to distinguish

  between the two elements. The theology of glory constitutes, in this sense, the

  secret point of contact through which theology and politics continuously com-

  municate and exchange parts with one another.

  In a passage from Joseph and His Brothers, a novel that caused such labor

  among scholars of myth, Thomas Mann observes that—in a phrase that is Ass-

  mann’s starting point—religion and politics are not two fundamentally distinct

  things but that, on the contrary, they “exchange clothes.” It is possible, however,

  that this exchange can take place only because underneath the garments there

  are no body and no substance. Theology and politics are, in this sense, what

  results from the exchange and from the movement of something like an absolute

  garment that, as such, has decisive juridical-political implications. Like many of

  the concepts we have encountered in our investigation, this garment of glory is

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  a signature [ segnatura] that marks bodies and substances politically and theolog-

  ically, and orientates and displaces them according to an economy that we are

  only now beginning to glimpse.

  א In two exemplary studies, Albrecht Dieterich ( Eine Mithrasliturgie, 1903) and Eduard Norden ( Agnostos theos, 1913) developed a doctrine of the forms of doxology and prayer (see Norden, p. 261). Norden’s work shows how literary elements and forms deriving from

  diverse traditions, profane as well as religious (Stoic, Judaic, mystico-hermetic, etc.), converge in Christian doxological formulations. This is formally consistent with the concrete examples detailed in Alföldi, Schramm, and Kantorowicz’s investigations. The doxologies,

  both profane and religious, have the same morphological structure; but this still does

  not say anything about the strategies they pursue or the function they have to perform.

  Threshold

  THE scholars who have been concerned with the ceremonial aspects of

  power—and Kantorowicz is certainly the most lucid among them—seem

  to hesitate before the question, which is difficult to sidestep: What is the rela-

  tion that so intimately links power to glory? If power is essentially force and

  efficacious action, why does it need to receive ritual acclamations and hymns of

  praise, to wear cumbersome crowns and tiaras, to submit itself to an inaccessible

  ceremony and an immutable protocol—in a word, why does something that is

  essentially operativity and oikonomia need to become solemnly immobilized in

  glory? Ammianus Marcellinus was astonished to observe the fixity of Emperor

  Constantius II during his solemn adventus to Rome, and he compared him not

  to a living creature nor to a god, but to a figmentum, a sort of statue “with a rigid neck, who held his eyes fixed before him, without looking left or right, like a

  figment in human form” (Alföldi, p. 274). The simple instrumental explanation

  that states that this is a stratagem of the powerful to justify their ambition or a

  mise-en-scène to produce reverential fear and obedience in the subjects, while it

  can occasionally get somewhere near the truth, is certainly not able to account

  for the deep and original connection that involves not only the political sphere

  but also the religious one. If one bears in mind the complicated choreography,

  the economic expense, and the imposing symbolic apparatus that were mobi-

  lized as much in Byzantium in the ninth century as in Berlin in the twentieth,

  the mere exhibition of arms would certainly have been more appropriate for the

  task. And ceremonial glory is frequently experienced by someone who receives

  it as a painful obligation that even the sovereign, who is above the law, must

  submit to as one does to a veritable lex ceremoniarum. According to the words of

  the pontiff to Charles V at the moment he offers his feet to be kissed: “I suffer

  against my will the kissing of my feet, but I am forced by the law of the cere-

  monial” (“invitus passus sum osculari pedes meos, sed lex ceremoniarum ita cogit”:

  Kantorowicz 1946, p. 180, note 3).

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  Instrumental explanations—like the sociological theory that understands

  ceremonies as a sort of symbolic mise-en-scène of a whole society (Schenk, pp.

  506–507)—do not take us much further than the late Baroque antiquarians

  who saw in it the consequence of original sin, which had produced inequality

  between men and the creation of a sort of theatrum ceremoniale in which the

  power ful enacted the signs of their wickedness (Lünig, pp. 1–70).

  In the following pages we shall try to grasp the connection between power

  and glory in the exemplary case of acclamations and liturgical doxologies. We

  shall try to make strategic use of Luther’s warning, that glory blinds those who

  try to penetrate majesty, by not asking the questions: What is glory? What is

  power? Instead, we shall pursue what is a more humble aim only in appearance:

  to investigate the forms of their relations and their operations. We shall, in other

  words, interrogate not glory but glorification, not doxa but the doxazein and the doxazestai.

  8

  The Archaeology of Glory

  8.1. The studies on glory in the field of theology we
re knocked off course

  for a long time by the apparently commanding work of Hans Urs

  von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Aesthetik. Despite the clear ety-

  mological connection between the German term Herrlichkeit and the sphere

  of domination and power ( Herrschaft, herrschen), Balthasar chose to orientate

  his study of glory in terms of aesthetics. “We here attempt,” he writes in the

  foreword to the first volume, “to develop a Christian theology in the light of

  the third transcendental, that is to say: to complement the vision of the true

  and the good with that of the beautiful ( pulchrum)” (Balthasar 1982, p. 9). In

  contrast to Protestantism, which had deaestheticized theology, he proposed to

  restore it to the aesthetic rank that belongs to it. He of course recognized that

  the kabhod, glory in its original biblical sense, presupposed the idea of “lord-

  ship” and “sovereignty”; however, for him, it was a case of transferring these

  concepts into the sphere of beauty—or, rather, of an aesthetics characterized

  heavily by Kantian references:

  It is a case of envisioning the revelation of God, and God can only be truly rec-

  ognized in his lordship and sovereignty, in what Israel calls kabhod and the New

  Testament calls glory, despite all the question marks concerning human nature

  and the cross. This means: God comes to us primarily not as teacher (“the true”),

  nor as “redeemer” with many ends for us (“the good”), but to show and radiate

  himself, the glory of his eternal trinitarian love, in the “disinterestedness” that

  true love has in common with beauty. (Balthasar 1965, p. 27)

  Balthasar is aware of the risk inherent in such a project, that of “aestheticizing

  theology”; but he thinks he can sufficiently guard against it by shifting the em-

  phasis from the adjective to the substantive and distinguishing in this sense a

  “theological aesthetics” from an “aesthetic theology,” in which “the attribute will inevitably be understood in the worldly, limited, and, therefore, pejorative sense”

  (Balthasar 1982, p. 79).

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  One may doubt, of course, whether the effectiveness of such a purely verbal

  precaution is sufficient. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin, recognizing in fascism the

  project of an “aestheticizing of politics,” placed in opposition to it a “politiciza-

  tion of art” (not of aesthetics). In contrast to Balthasar’s attempt to “aestheticize

  glory” and to transfer a genuinely “political” concept (from Peterson’s perspective

  it in fact defined the specifically “public” character of liturgy) into the sphere of

  beauty, our reading of glory will never forget the context to which it belongs

  from the start. In the Bible, neither kabhod nor doxa is ever understood in an aesthetic sense: they are concerned with the terrifying appearance of YHVH,

  with the Kingdom, Judgment, and the throne—all things that can be defined

  “beautiful” only from a perspective that it is hard not to call aestheticizing.

  8.2. The syntagma “glory of God” ( kabhod YHVH ) is a fundamental concept

  of Judaism. Immediately after the treatment of the names of God in the Guide

  of the Perplexed, Maimonides defines its meaning and, at the same time, its con-

  textual problematic, through a tripartite structure:

  Similarly kabhod is sometimes intended to signify the created light that God

  causes to descend in a place in order to confer honor upon it in a miraculous way:

  And the glory of Y.H.V.H. abode upon mount Sinai, and [the cloud] covered it, and

  so on [Exodus 24:16]; And the glory of Y.H.V.H. filled the tabernacle [Exodus 40:34].

  The expression is sometimes intended to signify his true essence and true reality

  [ . . . ] as when he says, Show me, I pray Thee, Thy glory [Exodus 33:18], and was answered: For man shall not see Me and live [Exodus 33:20]. This answer indicates

  that the glory that is spoken of here is His essence [ . . . ] Kabhod is sometimes intended to signify the glorification of Him [ . . . ] by all men. In fact all that is

  other than God [ . . . ] glorifies Him. For the true way of glorifying Him consists,

  in apprehending His greatness. Thus everybody who apprehends His greatness

  and His perfection, honors Him according to the extent of his apprehension

  [ . . . ] It is in view of this notion being named glory that it is said, The whole earth is full of His glory [Isaiah 6:3], this being equivalent to the dictum, And the earth is full of His praise [Habakkuk 3:3], for praise is called glory. Thus it is said: Give glory to the Lord your God [ Jeremiah 13:16]; and it is said: And in His temple all say: Glory [Psalm 29:9] [ . . . ] Understand then the equivocality with reference

  to glory and interpret the latter in every passage in accordance with the context.

  (Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Book 1, Chapter 64, pp. 156–157)

  Of the three points at which Maimonides articulates the meaning of kabhod, the

  first refers to the episode in Exodus 40:34, in which “the glory of Y.H.V.H. ” ap-

  pears to the Jews as consuming fire, surrounded by a cloud that only Moses can

  penetrate. The second, in which the term would designate the essence of God, is

  THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY

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  actually derived from the same context. While speaking to Moses, YHVH covers

  him with his hand so as to prevent him from seeing his blinding kabhod, but the

  skin and face of Moses nevertheless receive such splendor that the Jews are unable

  to look at him, and he must place a veil over his face. With a characteristic ges-

  ture, Maimonides derives the second meaning of the term—which the biblical

  passage in no way suggests—from the fact that the kabhod, in its first sense as

  “created light,” does not simply reveal YHVH but hides him to the same degree.

  This impossibility of seeing forms the basis of the second meaning, that of kabhod

  as God’s “true reality” hidden behind the kabhod understood as “created light.”

  The third meaning—that of praise by creatures—insofar as it designates

  a certain human praxis (even though Maimonides extends glorification to in-

  clude inanimate creatures who “bespeak” the kabhod of God in their own way),

  is the only concrete meaning. But this time as well Maimonides uses it to derive

  the second meaning inasmuch as praise presupposes the greatness and perfec-

  tion of the divine being. In some way then, the glorification stems from the glory that, in truth, it founds.

  It is interesting to note how Maimonides’ strategy can be found repeated

  without significant variations in modern studies of this question, both Jewish

  and Christian. Works of lexicography and monographs both end up distinguish-

  ing the same three meanings, more or less, as Maimonides, at times specifying

  more precisely the second meaning in terms of “power” [ potenza], “greatness,”

  “weight” (this last being the etymological meaning of the Semitic root kbd ). The

  relation, established by Maimonides, between the kabhod as “created light” and

  kabhod as the being of God, is developed by modern theologians, Christian and

  Jewish, in the sense of binding glory to the “manifestation” of God, to the divine

  essence insofar as it is made visible and perceptible.

  This meaning of kabhod, which in the final instance
is identified with

  YHVH himself, is then opposed to the “objective” meaning of “glorification”:

  “There is also a kabhod that creatures offer to God. It can be described as the

  ‘objective’ kabhod of YHWH” (Stein, p. 318—the medieval theologians, more

  correctly named this glory “subjective”). This kabhod, which is expressed in ac-

  clamations and hymns of praise, is at times presented as the natural and joyous

  reply of men to the manifest glory of God. At other times it resembles the honor

  that is bestowed upon the profane powers and cannot easily be related to the

  kabhod­ being of God, as it was for Maimonides. In this case, modern scholars

  aim precisely at leaving out this objective meaning (ibid., p. 323).

  However, for the ancients as well as for the moderns, the problem is precisely

  to justify—or at times to conceal—the double meaning, the homonymy and

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  ambiguity of kabhod: at once glory and glorification, objective and subjective

  kabhod, divine reality and human praxis.

  א In the rabbinical tradition, the kabhod YHVH is related to the Shekinah (literally,

  “habitation,” “residence”) that expresses the presence of God among men. Hence, where

  the biblical passage states: “The Lord is in this place” (Genesis 28:16), the Targum translates this as “Truly the Glory of the Shekinah dwells in this place.” And in the Alphabet of Rabbi Akiba one can read: “{At that hour God looked and saw his throne and his Kabhod and his Shekinah}” (quoted in Scholem 1997). Even Maimonides relates glory to the verb shakan (to reside) and with Shekinah, which for him does not mean manifestation, but only “[God’s]

  abode in a place” (Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Book 1, Chapter 25, p. 55).

  In the same way, Sa’adiah Ga’on—and along with him Yehudah Halewi and the

  other medieval philosophers—identify Shekinah with kabhod: “{The bright apparition that proves to the prophet the authenticity of the revelation God made to him is a light

  that was created: it is called kabhod in the Bible and Shekinah in the rabbinic tradition}”

  (quoted in Scholem 1990). The Shekinah is not identical with God but, as with the kabhod in its first meaning of the term according to Maimonides, it is one of his free creations, which precedes the creation of the world.