The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton [NOOK Book]

THE MOSAIC CONSTITUTION

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chapter One

This book analyzes the uses and implications of a scriptural figure that becomes central in early modern political thinking and writing about government and the state: Moses's constitution of Israel as a people bound by the rule of law. Until the sixteenth century, the preferred scriptural model for representing political authority among Christian writers in the West tended to be Solomon, the philosopher-king noted for his wisdom who, perhaps most significantly for medieval writers, inherited his kingdom from his father. But by the middle of the seventeenth century, Moses had become a perennial figure for exploring the politics of the early modern state. In The Prince, Machiavelli uses Moses to measure Savonarola's successes and failures, in the process showing how a new prince needs the fiction of religion to maintain obedience through the manipulation of belief. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, in Leviathan, Hobbes acknowledges that any theory of the modern state has to account for revelation as well as reason. He then goes on to interpret the Mosaic covenant in such a way that locates the authority to determine the truth of revelation in the state instead of in the Catholic Church or the priesthood of all believers. Writing in the wake of Machiavelli and Hobbes, in Oceana and The Art of Lawgiving James Harrington presents the Mosaic constitution as a scene of communication in order to legitimate popular sovereignty, and in the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza refashions the Mosaic constitution through the twinned paradigms of natural philosophy and humanist philology in order to authorize the liberty of the citizenry against the prince's tendencies toward mystification, which Spinoza calls the "mystery of despotism" (TTP 389).

When read from the perspective of a purely secular politics, these uses of Hebrew scripture might seem old-fashioned, leftovers from an age in need of theological or religious legitimation. Or, at best, they might seem like rhetorical ploys to persuade those who would otherwise be recalcitrant to an emerging sense of the political to join secular public life. However, it will be my argument that the Mosaic constitution had an integral role to play in the emergence of early modern concepts of the state. Like the story of Oedipus or Antigone, the Mosaic constitution was one of the founding fictions of early modern political life. Beginning with Machiavelli's analysis of the new prince and continuing up through seventeenth-century theories of voluntary submission and the social contract, the Mosaic constitution served as a laboratory for cultural experimentation that preceded, precipitated, and responded to political invention. Through the revision and expansion of Moses's constitution of Israel as a people unified by law and collected under the rule of a single sovereign, early modern literary and political writers attempted to grasp and probe key problems, dynamics, and relationships that defined the early modern state, including toleration and the conflictual character of politics; the fraught relations among revelation, political authority, and literary authorship; and the role of fiction in defining and delimiting obedience, liberty, and the right to resist coercive authority.

I intend the phrase "the Mosaic constitution" to be taken in two related ways. In the first case, the phrase denotes the use of Mosaic narrative to theorize political community. Without a doubt, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers across a range of religious and political commitments recognized in Mosaic law a model for good government. Even as Luther argued against Jacob Strauss, Wolfgang Stein, and the radical Reformers that Mosaic law was no more or less righteous than other legal systems, he acknowledged that there were certain laws instituted by Moses that the Saxon princes would be wise to adopt. Religiously speaking, Christians are no more obligated to Mosaic law than they are to Roman law, Luther argued. But he also proposed that the comparative study of Mosaic and Saxon law could lead to the development of better and more just secular government, especially concerning taxation and the treatment of the poor. Luther was not alone in thinking of Mosaic law as a good model for secular government. He was joined by writers such as Milton, Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, among many others, all of whom turned to the Mosaic constitution to elaborate on the emerging early modern state.

In the second case, "the Mosaic constitution" extends beyond the use of Hebrew scripture to provide an exemplary model of political community and includes the use of Moses to flag a conceptual problem. Here, the Mosaic constitution refers to the troublesome intersection of religious belief and the secular state. Early modern writers turned to Mosaic law for more than comparative legal studies. As we shall see in the pages that follow, they turned to Hebrew scripture to posit and explore the complex relations between politics and belief that inform the early modern state. Put most broadly, this book's central thesis is that the Mosaic constitution figures a productive intersection—or what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls a point of cross-pressure—between religious belief and paradigms of human creation that is unique to an early modern sense of political theology. Political theology is more than just a synthesis of religion and the state. From the perspective of the Mosaic constitution, it concerns an ongoing entanglement and antagonism between two discrete discourses and styles of thinking—politics and theology—that should by all rights have little to do with one another. This second understanding is particularly relevant for the literary writers who explored the Mosaic constitution in its various dimensions. Because Hebrew scripture is so attentive to political conflict and its own status as a written text, Mosaic narrative gave early modern writers a vocabulary, a model, and an imaginative ground for exploring, critiquing, anatomizing, and reformulating divine authority as a product of political and literary imagination. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers whom I consider here developed relations between religious belief and human creation in a variety of ways. They consulted Hebrew scripture to expound upon and debate the multiple roles of sovereignty, obligation, and imagination in the constitution of political community.

POLITICAL THEOLOGY, METAPHOR, IMAGINATION

The primary reason that Moses became such a significant figure in early modern Europe is that Mosaic narrative foregrounds the problem of constituting power. Jewish writers, Christian writers who were neither particularly philo-Semitic nor anti-Semitic, and even writers who were purportedly atheists all turned their attention to Moses in order to understand, develop, and authorize the human capacity for political making. In addition to being a lawgiver, Moses was also a writer, and part of the attraction of the Mosaic constitution is that it let a host of early modern writers raise questions about constituting power in relation to political and religious representation. Although none of these writers directly questioned Hebrew scripture as a sacred text, all of them were engaged in questioning what the sacred nature of Hebrew scripture might entail. For Spinoza and Milton, scripture is sacred because it is a common text, a text that has the capacity to posit and preserve community through polemical debate over interpretive differences, whereas for Hobbes scripture is sacred because it is a public text, a text that constitutes a public sphere through and in relation to a sovereign and authoritative interpreter. Hobbes's position is antithetical to Spinoza's and Milton's in that, where they argue for and legitimate community through dissension, he validates the personal authority of the sovereign. But all three share the assumption that constituting power involves the formation of political community through the faculty of imagination.

The phrase "constituting power" was invented by the eighteenth-century French writer Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in order to acknowledge and legitimate the role of the third estate in the French Revolution. Sieyès distinguished between constituting power, the power to make a new political order, and constituted power, the power that preserves the already established order. He then argued that the real locus of constituting power is the sovereign nation, which precedes any legal bonds and, therefore, has the absolute authority to remake the existing political order. But the concept of constituting power precedes Sieyès's elaboration of it. In the late sixteenth century, English Jesuits explored alternative models of constituting power as a way to curb what they perceived to be the illegitimate expansion of monarchical authority under Elizabeth. As early as the 1572 Treatise of Treasons, English Catholics argued that Elizabeth received her legitimacy from the people, who had the right to "deliver" her from her own tyrannical rule should she not do so herself. Even though recusant writers wanted a better monarch and not a new form of government, they also began to experiment with the idea that monarchy is based on election (as sanctified by the Church) and not heredity per se. Writing on the eve of the Restoration, the English writer George Lawson developed a version of constituting power in his discussion of monarchy and sovereignty by arguing that majesty is both real and personal. "Reall," he writes, "is in the community, and is greater than Personall, which is the power of a Common-wealth already constituted." The implication of Lawson's argument is that the community is not just obligated to follow laws issued by parliament or monarch but also has the right to suspend and remake the constituted order in response to tyranny, when personal majesty gets too personal, as it were. In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke sharpened Lawson's argument by proposing that while "there can be but one supreme power, which is the legislative," nevertheless since legislative power is "fiduciary," "there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them." As Andreas Kalyvas puts it, these writers oppose a paradigm in which sovereignty is taken to be "the ultimate coercive power" with one in which sovereignty is understood "as the power to found, to posit, to constitute, that is, as constituent power."

The contemporary Italian political theorist Antonio Negri argues, persuasively to my mind, that constituting power becomes a significant conceptual problem once Machiavelli argues for the project of establishing a new state. Negri's purpose in making this claim is to locate a line of radical political thinkers from Machiavelli to Lenin who work to elaborate a purely secular vision of political making—shorn of its links to discourses of transcendence. However, the problem with constituting power is that it endlessly falls into theological modes of thinking and representation. This is because constituting power constitutes more than collective life. To succeed as an act of political making, constituting power must also constitute the overarching conceptions of justice, the conditions of social recognition and nonrecognition, that transcend political community and through which political community is achieved. I do not mean to suggest that political communities are determined by God or Platonic ideals but rather that political making assumes supplemental discourses—myths and founding fictions—that play the role of the transcendent for particular political communities.

The twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt exploits this need for a supplemental discourse in his account of political theology. Schmitt introduces the concept of political theology as a response to Sieyès's definition of constituting power, arguing that the capacity for political making cannot lie in the "organic unity" of the people because the people cannot actualize their own will without some representative figure, some transcendental figure who rules over the group and expresses its collective will. Schmitt's general point strikes me as correct. There can be no group without some representative that is not itself included within the group. Nevertheless, he also identifies in very specific terms the figure that transcends and represents the unity of the people. Reviving late sixteenth-century proto-absolutist political theory against Sieyès's legitimation of the French Revolution, Schmitt locates political making in the personal authority, or what he calls the decisionist character, of the sovereign, who is analogous to God. "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts," he asserts, "not only because of their historical development ... but also because of their systematic nature." Just as theology needs a God who can intervene in and suspend the natural order, so too does the state need a sovereign who can stand above the law, suspend it, and decide exceptional emergency situations—that is, decide where there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it."

We need not follow Schmitt's arguments for the personal authority of the sovereign to understand the links between constituting power and political theology that he discusses. Even a political philosopher like Hannah Arendt, who is deeply opposed to Schmitt's revival of absolutism, sees something significant in his argument. Responding to Schmitt, Arendt proposes that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political writers took up ready-to-hand theological concepts in an attempt to theorize new arrangements of authority and power. As she notes in On Revolution, the separation of politics from religion that for her characterizes modern politics placed a special burden on religion to authorize political making.

The numerous difficulties and perplexities, theoretical and practical, that have beset the public, political realm ever since the rise of the secular, the very fact that secularization was accompanied by the rise of absolutism and the downfall of absolutism followed by revolutions whose chief perplexity was where to find an absolute from which to derive authority for law and power, could well be taken to demonstrate that politics and the state needed the sanction of religion even more urgently than religion and the churches had ever needed the support of princes.

Arendt makes this assertion as part of a broader argument to show how the American Revolution escaped the burden of European political theology. For her, the link between constituting power and political theology is fundamentally historical and, therefore, can be left in the past. But one implication of Arendt's claim is that the relation between religion and political making is itself fundamentally inventive and creative. From one perspective, we might say that the state needed religion and, indeed, reinvented it for its own purposes. But as we shall see, religion was not just an instrument in the service of the early modern state. From another perspective, we can say that political and literary writers adopted theological concepts to do more than just to buttress juridical authority. They used theological concepts and religious discourses to respond to "perplexities," to approximate understandings of political phenomenon that would otherwise remain unvoiced, if not invisible.

It may well be that political thinking about constituting power in early modern Europe has its roots in the theological distinction that William of Ockham and his followers drew in the fourteenth century between God's potentia absoluta and his potentia ordinata, that is, between God's absolute power to do whatever he wills and the restricted order to which he has committed himself. The political problem of constituting power may already be a theological problem. Ockham defends God's omnipotence by emphasizing his radical ability to create outside the bounds of any already established order and then argues that God confines himself to an ordained system so that his will can become knowable to human reason. Like the nominalists' God, the Machiavellian founder expresses a seemingly absolute power in the act of creating a new legal order. Romulus established the common good when he murdered his brother Remus and instituted the Roman senate, and Numa reinforced the common good when he feigned revelation in order to compel Roman citizens to obey the rule of law. In both instances, the constitution of the common good is predicated upon an act that could only be deemed bad by the system of rules that has been constituted. Moreover, in his account of the history of the Roman republic, Machiavelli argues that civic virtue can be reestablished only by acts of extreme violence, like Junius Brutus murdering his sons, that hearken back to the founding act. In the Discourses, the theologico-political question becomes, how does the myth of founding commit the ruler to a legal order while at the same time preserving the creative capacity of the political?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE MOSAIC CONSTITUTION by GRAHAM HAMMILL Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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