(6:24 PM) | Dave Belcher:

Christianity and Politics?

The Christian respects and cherishes the distinction between the things that are
Caesar's and those that are God's even when, acting on his own and without
committing the Church, he gives himself most wholeheartedly to his temporal
mission, and when the Church herself does everything in her power, while
remaining within her own sphere (which is that of the spiritual) to help the
world overcome the difficulties it faces in its own order. (The Peasant of the
Garonne, 82)

I think that Maritain understands Hegel's Philosophy of Right and democracy quite well. I just think that this is wrong when it comes to the gospel. This was my point in my post on Jim Wallis. If Wallis wants democracy--one that takes religion seriously and gives it a proper place--then he needs to be reading Maritain; if he wants Christianity, then he should be talking about something altogether different. He can't have it both ways, in my opinion. Ok. So, what am I saying? What do I mean, for instance, when I use the word "politics"?

I mean politics in two ways: one quite basic, and one "Hardto-Negrian." First of all, politics is the way in which a group of people collect and order themselves together, how they negotiate boundaries, and what they decide is common to their lives. So, this definition of politics is prior to any notion of society (societas). The second definition is quite obviously a response to the emergence of "society"--in Hardt and Negri's case, the society of control. Biopower spreads its regime over every region of life (bios), making it impossible to imagine any sort of outside to Empire's reign and rule. In this second sense, Christians are "political" merely by virtue of their location within the biosphere of Empire--and it should be noted here that that location can be anywhere, since Empire is a literal utopia, a no-place. Christians are political in exactly these two senses.

So, as Discard says in one of his comments below, I am indeed using the phrases "contemporary monasticism" and "mysticism of dispossession" with such an understanding or "(re)conceptualization" of Christian politics in mind. Christians are not to retreat into their isolated sphere--as the villagers in Night's film--while holding out hope and offering suggestions to "the world" for possible improvements in "their" sphere, which would be the worst sort of escapism (though I think this kind of effacement--without the "suggestions to 'the world'" part--is kind of what Thom Yorke is talking about in almost every song he writes..."I'm not here..." There is something undeniably compelling about it, which is to say, there are times when I just want to fucking disappear). Rather, Christians are bound up with the political, embedded in the very fabric of Empire (which has no center), much like St. Augustine's civitas dei is bound up with the civitas terrena; the heavenly city is on a pilgrimage with the earthly, moving through this world toward the end that it simultaneously waits for ("O, Maranatha!"). Now. Sounds a bit like Milbank right? There is a big difference. Milbank--and even Cavanaugh, who has probably written the best book in contemporary theology over the past 5 or 6 years--is saying that Christian politics is better than the worldly politics which poorly emulates the theological. The theological is a counter-politics to the politics of nihilism. I'm not saying this. This reneges on the whole "pilgrimage" metaphor that Milbank supposedly likes (and on the use of Certeau/de Lubac, for Cavanaugh). If I may quote myself from a comment below,

I mean this [kind of politics] at the communal level, and in a profound engagement with "the world." I mean by this a community that is so shaped by the practices of a
humbling liturgical life that it becomes reality for them outside the walls of
the church--which means the church becomes a moving body that is actually made
up by the "work of the people" (liturgy). So, Christian communities are, then,
simultaneously linked to a tradition and a heritage while yet moving ever out
from it in a transitivity that moves toward those who "are not" in this world.

Christian politics and Marxism thus have elements of affinity. Breton, again: "There is a certain correspondence between the mystical--neoplatonic critique of the Divine attributes--as an attempt to possess God in terms of ontological properties which would reduce His transcendence to the immanence of Being--and the Marxist critique of private property. Christianity and authentic Marxism share a common call to dispossession and a critical detachment from the prevailing order" (The Word and the Cross, 136). Breton goes on to say, however, that though there is an emphasis on the liberation of the poor from economic oppression in the Christian gospel, it is not limited to this. Furthermore, while both Christianity and Marxism share a "principle of hope," as Ernst Bloch says, Christianity cannot be reduced to historical materialism because of its "prophetic eschatology" (ibid., 137). Christian service towards those who "are not"--towards the Cross--is a passage, a soft breeze, a whisper. Far from the carnivalesque spectacle of the politics of the Religious Left or the Religious Right, or from the immanent materialism that reduces the mystery of the Infinite to "transcendence," the Cross as the Sign of Contradiction leaves a mark of distinction on the world which can only be perceived as "foolishness" and a "stumbling block." As Breton says, "The Logos of the Cross is doubtlessly more radical than a certain radicalism believes" (ibid., 30).

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