The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

of the Old Testament (at first most likely weekly) to which was added, at least

  starting from the end of the second century, the lectio of New Testament texts.

  Even if we do not know the origin and basis of the readings, the Ambrosian,

  Mozarabic, and earliest French liturgies preserve a succession of three lectiones, one from the Old Testament and two from the New. The dominant principle

  at the beginning was that of lectio continua, but it is probable that in the course of the first three centuries, the bishop was responsible for indicating each time

  to the deacon and the lector the passages to be read. From the end of the fifth

  century, instead of lectio continua, one sees the selection and fixing of a series of pericopes in relationship with the constitution of the liturgical year. This system results in the production of books (called lectionarii, comites, or epistolaria), which assemble the pericopes to be read on each day. One of the oldest lectionaries, the Mozarabic Liber comicus de toto circuli anni, thus presents the pericopes ordered according to the feasts of the liturgical calendar, in the form: legendum

  in 1o dominico de adventu Domini ad missam, followed by the texts to be read

  (in this case, two passages from Isaiah and one from the letter to the Romans).

  The canticle and the psalmody were integral parts of the lectio, in the form of

  the lectio solemnis.

  3.2. If the liturgical year is, as we have seen, a sort of memorial of the works

  of God scanned according to the calendar, the reading of the Holy Scriptures is

  the most noteworthy way that every day and, at the limit, every hour is put in an

  anamnestic relationship with an event of sacred history. Moreover, according to

  the deepest intention that defines the Christian liturgy, the reading is not limited

  to recalling or commemorating past events, but in some way renders present the

  “word of the Lord,” as if it were newly pronounced in that moment by the living

  divine voice. Cum sacrae scripturae in Ecclesia leguntur, reads the Roman Missal,

  Deus ipse ad populum suum loquitur et Christus, praesens in verbo suo, Evangelium

  annuntiat (“When the Scriptures are read in the Church, God himself is speak-

  ing to his people, and Christ, present in his own word, is proclaiming the Gos-

  954

  HOMO SACER IV, 1

  pel”). Anamnesis is contained in a lectio that is “represented” in the etymological sense, that is, it renders performatively present the reality of that which is read.

  This performative character of the liturgical reading is expressed clearly by

  Nicholas Cabasilas in his Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. In the words read

  or sung, he reads, “we see [ horōmen] Christ and the deeds he accomplished and

  the sufferings he endured for our sakes. Indeed, it is the whole economy of re-

  demption which is signified in the psalms and readings, as in all the actions of

  the priest throughout the liturgy” (Cabasilas, pp. 60/26). And if “the whole cel-

  ebration is like an icon of a single body, which is the life of the savior,” the songs

  and the readings signify and “place before our eyes [ hyp’opsin agousa]” the various moments of the economy of Christ (ibid., pp. 62/27). The special efficacy of the

  lectio coincides with its twofold action: the readings at once “sanctify [ hagiazein]

  the faithful and symbolize the economy of salvation. . . . Since they are extracts

  from the Holy Scriptures and other inspired writings, the chants and lessons sanc-

  tify those who read and sing them; and because of the selection which has been

  made and the order in which the passages are arranged they have another power

  [ dynamin]: they actualize the signification [ sēmasian] of the presence [ parousias]

  and life of Christ” (pp. 130/53).

  Cabasilas clarifies beyond any doubt that the term sēmasia here designates

  much more than a simple linguistic “signification,” specifying that the readings

  “reveal the manifestation of the Lord [ tēn phanerōsin tou Kyriou dēlousin]” (pp.

  156/62). According to the messianic intention implied in Jesus’ words in the epi-

  sode of the reading in the synagogue of Nazareth, Scripture is fulfilled in the one

  who listens to its reading (“Today this scripture has been fulfilled [ peplērōtai] in your hearing”). And it is on the basis of this peculiar performative efficacy of the

  words of the lectio that, as had already happened in the synagogue, they could

  acquire a sacramental status and be presented in the canons of the mass as oblatio

  rationabilis and logikē thysia, a sacrifice of words.

  3.3. If we turn now to the problem of the nature of monastic rules, it is pos-

  sible then to advance the hypothesis that the Rule of the Master, by making the

  rule the object of a lectio continua, in reality decisively affirms its liturgical status. The text of the rule is thus not only a text in which the distinction between

  writing and reading tends to become blurred, but also one in which writing

  and life, being and living become properly indiscernible in the form of a total

  liturgicization of life and a vivification of liturgy that is just as entire. For this

  reason it does not make sense to isolate in the corpus of a rule, as Vogüé does,

  a “liturgical section,” emphasizing its thoroughness and meticulousness, which

  THE HIGHEST POVERTY

  955

  is “unsurpassed . . . by any liturgical document of antiquity prior to the first

  Ordines Romani” (Vogüé 2, 1, pp. 65/34). In the rule, there cannot be a liturgical section, because as we have seen, the whole life of the monk has been transformed into an Office and the very harshness of the prescriptions concerning

  prayer and reading articulate just as meticulously every other aspect of life in

  cenoby. As meditatio renders lectio potentially continuous, so every gesture of the monk, all the most humble manual activities become a spiritual work and

  acquire the liturgical status of an opus Dei. And precisely this continuous liturgy is the challenge and novelty of monasticism, which the Church was not slow to

  pick up on, seeking to introduce, albeit within certain limits, the totalitarian

  demand proper to the monastic cult into cathedral worship as well.

  Hence the singular resemblance between the deep structure of the rules and

  that of liturgical texts in the strict sense: corresponding to the monastic atten-

  tion to the forms and meanings of the habit there are the ample sections in

  liturgical texts de indumentis sacerdotum (“on the clothing of the priests”); to the prescriptions on the cenobitic profession, the chapters de ministris (“on ministry”) and on priestly ordination; to the obsessive and punctilious descriptions of

  the monks’ daily and nightly Offices, the grandiose articulation of the liturgical

  year. But hence also the differences and the tensions that remain present in some

  way in the whole history of the Church. Yet if the Church had extracted a liturgy

  from life, this had nonetheless been constituted into a separate sphere, whose

  proprietor was the priest, personifying the priesthood of Christ. The monks

  do away with the separation and, by making their form of life a liturgy and the

  liturgy a form of life, institute between the two a threshold of indiscernibility

  charged with tensions. Hence the predominance of the Office of prayer, reading,

  and psalmody in the rules over that which is sacramental in the proper sense.

  The Rule of the Master, so meticulous in its description of the former, hardly
/>
  mentions the mass in connection with the psalmody of feast days (Vogüé 2, 1,

  p. 208) and, curiously, discusses communion in the section dedicated to the

  weekly service of the monks in the kitchen (p. 104). Hence also the firm distinc-

  tion between the monk and the priest, who can be hosted in the convent under

  the title of a pilgrim ( peregrinorum loco), but cannot live there permanently or

  pretend to any form of power within it ( nihil praesumant aut eis liceat vel aliquid

  ordinationis aut dominationis aut dispensationis Dei vindicent; p. 343).

  If the liturgy is totally transformed into life, then the fundamental princi-

  ple of the opus operatum—which already, beginning with Augustine, sanctioned

  the indifference of the priest’s moral qualities with regard to the efficacy of his

  office—cannot hold. While the unworthy priest remains in any case a priest, and

  956

  HOMO SACER IV, 1

  the sacramental acts he carries out do not lose their validity, an unworthy monk

  is simply not a monk.

  Despite the progressive extension of the Church’s control over the monas-

  teries, which as we have seen were put under the supervision of the bishop from

  at least the Carolingian era, the tension between the “two liturgies” will never

  disappear completely, and precisely when the Church seems to have integrated

  cenoby into its order, the tension returns with Franciscanism and the religious

  movements between the twelfth and thirteenth century, becoming reactivated to

  the point of open conflict.

  א From this perspective, the Protestant Reformation can be seen legitimately as the

  implacable claim, promoted by Luther (an Augustinian monk), of the monastic liturgy

  against the Church liturgy. And it is not an accident if from the strictly liturgical point of view, it is defined by the preeminence of prayer, reading, and psalmody (forms proper to

  the monastic liturgy) and the minimalization of the eucharistic and sacramental Office.

  א The Greek term leitourgia derives from laos (“people”) and ergon (“work”) and means “public tribute, service for the people.” The term belongs originally to the political lexicon and designates the services that well-to-do citizens owe to the polis (organizing public games, arming a trireme, staging a chorus for the city’s festivals). Aristotle, in the Politics (1309a17), thus cautions against the custom in democracies of “costly but useless liturgies like equipping choruses and torch-races and all other similar services.”

  It is significant that the Alexandrian rabbis who were to carry out the translation of

  the Bible into Greek known as the Septuagint would choose precisely the verb leitourgeō

  (often combined with leitourgia) to translate the Hebrew sheret every time this term, which means generically “to serve,” is used in a cultic sense. Just as significant is the fact that in the Letter to the Hebrews, Christ himself is defined as “leitourgos of the holy things” (8:2), and it is said of him that he “has obtained a better leitourgia” (8:6). In both cases, the originary political meaning of the term (service done for the people) is still

  present. As Peterson was to recall in his Book on Angels, “the Church’s earthly liturgy has an original relationship to the political world” (Peterson, pp. 202/112).

  Threshold

  MONASTICISM has clearly been perhaps the most extreme and rigorous

  attempt to achieve the Christian’s forma vitae and define the figure of the

  practice in which it is worked out. Just as certain, however, is the fact that this

  attempt proceeds progressively, even if not exclusively, through assuming the

  form of a liturgy, if indeed in a sense that does not coincide perfectly with that

  according to which the Church worked to elaborate the canon of its Divine

  Office. For this reason, the validity and identity of monasticism depend on the

  extent to which it succeeds in maintaining its own specificity with respect to

  Church liturgy, which for its part was being systematized on the model of sacra-

  mental effectiveness and of an articulation as well as a disjunction between the

  subjectivity of the priest and the efficacy ex opere operato of his practice.

  In this problematic context, cenoby appears as a field of forces run through

  by two opposing tendencies—at once to resolve life into a liturgy and, pulling in

  the other direction, to transform liturgy into life. On the one hand, everything

  is made rule and Office to the point that life seems to disappear. On the other,

  everything is made life, “legal precepts” are transformed into “vital precepts,”

  in such a way that the law and even the liturgy itself seem to be abolished. A

  law that is indeterminated into life has as its counterpart, with a symmetrically

  inverted gesture, a life that is totally transformed into law.

  What is at stake, when we look closely, is two aspects of one same process,

  in which what is in question is the unheard-of and aporetic figure that human

  existence assumes upon the fading of the classical world and the beginning of

  the Christian era, when the categories of ontology and ethics enter into a lasting

  crisis and trinitary economy and liturgical effectiveness define the new paradigm

  for both divine and human action. What is in question in both cases, that is

  to say, is a progressive and symmetrical cancellation of the difference between

  being and acting and between law (writing) and life, as if the indetermination

  of being into acting and of life into writing that the Church liturgy operatively

  957

  958

  HOMO SACER IV, 1

  achieves functions in the monastic liturgy in an inverted sense, moving from

  writing (from the law) toward life and from being toward acting.

  Naturally, as must happen in these cases, the novelty of the phenomenon

  cohabits perfectly well with subterranean continuities and abrupt convergences,

  so that in unforeseen ways Christianity is seen to unite with Stoic ethics and late

  Platonism, Jewish traditions with pagan cults. Moreover, the monk does not live

  and act, like the Stoic philosopher, to observe a moral law that is also a cosmic

  order; nor, like the Roman patricians, to scrupulously follow a juridical prescrip-

  tion and a ritual formalism. He does not fulfill, like the Hebrew, his mitzwot by

  virtue of the fiduciary pact that binds him to his God; and neither does he, like

  an Athenian citizen, exercise his liberty because he wants to “seek beauty [ philokalein] without extravagance and wisdom [ philosophein] without effeminacy”

  (Thucydides 2.40.1).

  It is in this field of historical tension that, close to the liturgy and almost

  in competition with it, something like a new level of consistency of the human

  experience slowly begins to clear a path for itself. It is as if the form-of-life into

  which liturgy has been transformed sought progressively to emancipate itself

  from liturgy and—while unceasingly collapsing back into it and just as obsti-

  nately liberating itself from it—allows us to glimpse another, uncertain dimen-

  sion of acting and being.

  Form-of-life is, in this sense, what must unceasingly be torn away from the

  separation in which liturgy keeps it. The novelty of monasticism was not only

  the coincidence of life and norm in a liturgy, but even and above all in its great-

  est success, the investigation and identification of something that the syntagmas
<
br />   vita vel regula, regula et vita, forma vivendi, forma vitae attempt laboriously to name and that we must now attempt to define.

  PART THREE

  Form-of-Life

  This page intentionally left blank

  1

  The Discovery of Life

  1.1. Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries complex phenomena

  arose and spread in Europe—in France and Italy and later in Flan-

  ders and Germany—that historians, who have not succeeded in classifying

  them otherwise, have classified as “religious movements.” From the point of

  view of Church history, they gave rise to the foundation of monastic orders or

  to heretical sects, which were persecuted harshly by the Church hierarchy. In

  1935 Herbert Grundmann dedicated a now classic monograph to this phenom-

  enon, under the title Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter ( Religious Movements in the Middle Ages). Grundmann proposed, against the tendency of confessional

  historiography to consider only the monastic orders and the heretical sects that

  had resulted from them, to restore to them precisely their nature as “move-

  ments.” On the other hand, against the opposite tendency of some historians to

  privilege only the socioeconomic aspects of the phenomena in question, what

  was at stake for Grundmann was to consider their “original peculiarity” and

  “religious goals,” above all by posing the problem of which profound events,

  pressures, and crises had “determined the development of religious movements

  into the various orders and sects” (Grundmann, pp. 9/3).

  If one examines, moreover, the ample material Grundmann takes into con-

  sideration, one notices immediately that the sources, both direct and indirect,

  situate the claims of the movements on a level which is clearly religious. How-

  ever, these claims put forward innovations that are not indifferent with respect

  to the way in which the Church tradition and monasticism had defined and de-

  limited the sphere and the practice of religion. It is possible, nonetheless, to try

  to consider them in themselves, before or beyond the religious or socioeconomic

  meaning that undoubtedly belongs to them. Whether one considers Robert of