No True Scotsoman (Part Three): The Scotus Story in Sociology

III. The Scotus Story: Its Presence and Character Beyond Radical Orthodoxy

            III.a. Scotus and Sociology

Before we start tracing the origin of the story backward, it will help as well to see that this story is not necessarily unique to Radical Orthodoxy.  In fact, both John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock are at pains to emphasize that this “Scotus Story” is not really a unique feature of Radical Orthodoxy.  It will help to quote at length an excerpt from Milbank’s preface to the second-edition of Theology and Social Theory:

In general the idea that there is ‘a controversial RO reading of Scotus’ is a chimera.  The new insistence that Scotus is perhaps the central figure (amongst many others including Avicenna, Gilbert Porreta, Abelard, Roger Bacon, Henry of Ghent, etc.) in the crucial shift within Western thought within which Kant is still located is not original to RO, but has been elaborated on by L. Honnesfelder, J.-F. Courtine, O. Boulnois, J.-L. Marion and J. Schmutz, amongst many others, ultimately in the wake of Etienne Gilson, whose views they have nonetheless heavily qualified.[1]

Milbank continues by noting that he believes “the real controversy concerns the assessment of this shift,” and that “regrettably” this point has been obscured.[2]

Milbank does seem to be largely correct in this estimation.  More and more the strong periodization that emphasized the novelty of modernity over and against even the late Middle Ages is being called into question in a variety of ways.[3]  And with this, too, comes a variety of determinations on the exact significance of what the blurring of the Medieval and the Modern ”eras” means exactly—including univocity, nominalism, and voluntarism.

In fact, such blurring will help us explain and account for what to many will undoubtedly seem the entirely odd strategy of attempting to understand the modern world through its relationship to (what are to many) obscure medieval theologians and theological shifts.  Whatever one thinks of Radical Orthodoxy, they are not alone—and are not the first—to start this conversation. 

Quite famously, Hans Blumenberg asked about the “legitimacy of the modern age” in his magnum opus by the same title.  In it he was challenging the “secularization thesis”—but not in a way we might associate with Radical Orthodoxy.  Rather than question the thesis in the name of religion, Blumenberg wants to question what he calls the “expropriation model.”[4]  By this he means a transference of “goods” (in this case, ideas) from the church to the world.  Here in his famous spat with Karl Löwith, Blumenberg is specifically contesting Löweth’s thesis that in essence modernity was merely Christianity in secularized form.  Specifically, Löwith demonstrates how “providence” became “progress.”[5]  Thus Blumenberg notes that secularization is “the final theologoumenon … which seeks to impose upon the heirs of theology a guilty conscience …” for forsaking or having forgotten “its true presuppositions” in theology.[6]

Over-against secularization as merely a “guilty theological conscience,” Blumenberg wants to argue precisely for the “legitimacy” of modernity, by noting that, as one of Löwith’s students, the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, puts it “modern thought had to face the challenge by filling the gaps left by the theological answers that had become impossible to accept.”[7]  Whence the gap and ruin caused by theology, to which modernity had to rush in?  While Blumenberg typically likes to speak in terms of “Gnosticism” what he means is the “absolutism of grace” found in voluntarism.  As Blumenberg notes,

The denial of universal directly excludes that God would limits the possibility that God’s restriction of himself to his potentia ordinata [ordained power] in nature too could become comprehensible for the benefit of man and his reason.  Divine spirit and human spirit, creative and cognitive principles, operate as though without taking each other into account.[8]

In other words, “theological absolutism had its own indispensible atheism and anthropotheism” that arose out of it in response.[9]  Modernity is legitimate precisely because it arose out of the ruins caused by nominalism and voluntarism in order to construct a new edifice.  It may appear to have similarities, but these are merely superficial and its essential character is new.  As a particular irony, Pannenberg is quite critical of Blumenberg’s thesis—but quite contrary to Radical Orthodoxy uses Scotus (!) as an example of the persisting theme of God’s eternal love and movement toward man in theology as a counter to Blumenberg’s notion of a theological “absolutism of grace.”[10]

If nothing else, this reveals the fact that variations on the “Scotus Story” (and here we will notice they slide easily into conflating Scotus with the legacy of nominalism) have immense political and social import.  Above we saw Milbank’s argument that “God’s will” immanentized, so to speak, and became a secular concept driving political and social programs.  While we do not want to take away from Milbank’s originality—whatever one thinks of his argument as a whole—here he is arguing something that has quite a bit of precedent in the broader literature.

Indeed Milbank’s statement of God’s will becoming the human’s (political, social) will is argued by Ernst Kantorowicz in his magisterial and path-setting work, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology.  Kantorowicz argues that certain “vertical” theological terms become “horizontal” or political ones; in particular the corpus mysticum [mystical body of Christ] of the Church “acquired a corporational character signifying a ‘fictitious’ or ‘juristic’ person.”[11]  In this he is following the earlier study of the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac who, we shall see, himself is part of the “Scotus Story.”  For Kantorowicz, in other words, what was originally the unity and distinction of Eucharist as Christ’s body, and the multiplicity church as Christ’s body, becomes transposed into Crown/King and Kingdom. 

Kantorowicz views the authority of the crown in explicitly secular terms as a “fictional power,” but one that nonetheless operationalizes the same logic that the Eucharist as the Body of Christ did: it aggregates otherwise unrelated individuals into a myth of sovereignty.[12]  As Jennifer Rust comments: “As theological tropes become sociological in The King’s Two Bodies, they tend also to be tamed into pliable fictional material for representing specific political, very human interests, evacuated of all but the barest hint of transcendent content.”[13]

More specifically, as William Cavanaugh notes, “despite Kantorowicz explicit disavowal of contemporary political relevance for his historical study as anything more than an ‘afterthought’ recent commentators have seen his work as a subtle attempt to undermine Carl Schmidt.”[14] 

Schmidt had argued in a similar manner that:

           

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.[15]

In this particular case it is, much as Milbank will later argue, the concept of the voluntarist, sovereign God that interests Schmidt for its political upshot:

It is a sociology of the concept of sovereignty when the historical-political status of the monarchy is shown to correspond to the general state of consciousness that was characteristic of Western Europeans at that time, and when the juristic construction of a historical-political reality can find a concept whose structure is in accord with the structure of metaphysical concepts.  Monarchy thus becomes as self-evident in the consciousness of that period as democracy does in a later epoch … The metaphysical image that a definitive epoch forges of the world has the same form as its political organization.[16]

What is important here is Schmidt’s concept of the “state of exception.”  Law, of course, sets the precedent for procedure and verdict. Yet within the sealed circle of this jurisdiction, there will inevitably be examples that the law itself, by its very nature, cannot account for.  In these instances, whatever they are, it is required (says Schmidt) that the sovereign be able to act outside the precedent of law to decide the “state of exception.”  This is precisely the translation of voluntarist sovereignty into the political arena.  The “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”[17]  As Michael Hollerich puts it, “it would be false if we were to describe the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth century as the really real and the Cartesian concept of God was merely a reflection.”[18] 

In this vein, in his monumental book Minding the Modern, Thomas Pfau traces at length how Ockham “disaggregated will and reason.”[19]  He asks, “in passing” whether “nominalism’s fragmentation” of cosmos and its reconstitution as a nature of wholly disaggregated entities can ever be recuperated: “Can narrative still aspire to exemplarity, let alone universality?  Can it still be ‘representative’ of anything beyond its own, singular occurrence?  And can there be anything like a meaningful ‘plot’ in a world composed of strictly singular and thus ostensibly a-rational entities and subjects?”[20]  This question is precisely one that strikes an even more ominous cord in the light of Schmidt’s notion of sovereign exception: if there are no narratives to which sovereigns are a part, what ultimate sense to politics can there be other than will?

Of course the notion of the “will” in this sense has ambiguous results, and can be taken in different directions (as we have already seen). As Richard Halpern puts it, both Kantorowicz and Schmidt utilize the theological notion of will, yet Kantorowicz “offers a kind of anti-Schmittian parable in which the sovereign’s power to decide states of emergency cedes to bureaucratic regularity and continuity long before the modern era.”[21]  In addition, the study of Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau similarly argues for a transition into a political or social notion of God’s “general will.”  Indeed his argument, he says, solves a mystery that typically stumps historians who look for precedents for Rousseau’s concept of a general political will: “the mystery is solved when one realizes that the terms volunté général was well established in the seventeenth century, though not primarily as a political idea.  In fact, the notion of ‘general will’ was originally a theological one, referring to the kind of will God had (supposedly) in deciding who would be granted grace sufficient for salvation, and who would be consigned to hell.”[22]  What this is (in a reductionistic summary) provides later a “secularized” logic of the internal relationship between the will toward the general good and its relationship to willing toward the relative good of any individual.[23]

Schmidt himself was also reacting against his friend, Erik Peterson.  Here again we see echoes in Milbank of an earlier debate for his version of the “Scotus Story.”  For Peterson (much like Milbank) argues that as Trinitarian doctrine developed it undermined the use of the concept of absolute sovereignty in politics:

Christians … recognize themselves in God’s monarchy; certainly not in the monarchy of a single person in the deity, because this brings with it the germ of internal division, but in the monarchy of the Triune God. … With this development, monotheism as a political problem is eliminated theologically.[24]

As Giorgio Agamben argues, however, the arguments of Kantorowicz, Blumenberg, Löwith, Schmidt, and Peterson are all different sides of a similar (and to Agamben, similarly deficient) story.  Rather than the Trinity being a figure that defeats Schmidt’s concept of voluntarist politics, and rather than Kantorowicz’ notion of a more “bureaucratic” display of will likewise being such a counter to Schmidt, Agamben notes the collusion of all their theses together by a question they leave unanswered: “Even historical studies of the insignia and liturgies of power, from Peterson to Kantorowicz … have failed to question this relation, precisely by leaving aside a number of questions [for example]: why does power need glory?  If it is essentially force and capacity for action … why does [power] assume the rigid, cumbersome, and ‘glorious’ form of ceremonies, acclamations, and protocols?”[25]

Instead of merely looking at how the concept of God’s “will” was “secularized” either into a notion of the sovereign state of exception, the people as the elected body of the king, or how these questions are avoided in Trinitarian theology, all cycle around a deeper level.  For Agamben, the proper area of diagnosis is to examine the break that occurs in Christian theology between God’s being and God’s will.  But Agamben specifies this break as between theologia and oikonomia or, in terms more familiar to Trinitarian theology these days: between the immanent trinity (God as He is in Himself from Eternity) and the economic trinity (God as revealed in history).  As such, the element that Milbank (for example) would attribute to Scotus or Ockham, is for Agamben at the heart of all Christian theorizing itself:

To the question ‘why did God make heaven and earth’ Augustine answers, ‘quia voluit.’ ‘because he wishes to.’ (Augustine, A Refutation of the Manichees, I, 2. 4).  Centuries later, in the heyday of Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas clearly restates contra Gentiles the impossibility of founding creation in being: ‘God acts, not per necessitatem naturae, but per arbtrium voluntatis’ (Contra Gentiles, Book 2, Chapter 23, n.I).  In other words, the will is the apparatus needed to join together [God’s] being and action, which were separated [in God’s action].  The primacy of the will, which, according to Heidegger, rules over the history of Western metaphysics and reaches its completion with Schelling and Nietzsche, has its roots in the fracture between being and acting in God …[26]

With the statement “The King reigns, he does not govern,”[27] Agamben maps this phrase and idea onto the similar split between God’s being and God’s action, or between God in himself (Immanent Trinity) and God as displayed in salvation history (economy).[28]  “Theology never truly manages to get to the bottom of the fracture between immanent trinity and economic trinity,” he says.[29] In fact they go under a sort of double negation or erasure: transcendence is defined by immanence, immanence by transcendence.  And by this mutual referral both are ultimately empty. It behooves us to quote him at length:

The aporia that marks like a thin crack the wonderful order of the medieval cosmos now begins to become more visible.  Things are ordered insofar as they have a specific relation among themselves, but this relation is nothing other than the expression of their relation to the divine end.  And vice versa, things are ordered insofar as they have a certain relation to God, but this relation expresses itself only by means of the reciprocal relation of things.  The only content of the transcendent order is the immanent order, but the meaning of the immanent order is nothing other than the relation to the transcendent end. ‘Ordo ad finem’ and ‘ordo ad invicem’ refer back to one another and found themselves on one another.  The perfect theocentric edifice of medieval ontology is based on this circle, and does not have any consistence outside of it.  The Christian God is this circle, in which the two orders continuously penetrate one another. … From this follows the contradiction, noticed by scholars, according to which Thomas at times founds the order of the world on the unity of God, and at times the unity of God in the immanent order of creatures.[30]

This is important for Agamben’s story in a sense unites Schmidt, Kantorowicz, and others by showing how their questions are part of a higher order, an order that is the circulation of concepts attempting to reconcile the immanent and the economic trinities, general and special providence, or kingdom and government.  Schmidt’s “state of exception” is God’s absolute “let there be” while Kantorowicz’ “bureaucratic” body of Christ that becomes transposed into the Kingdom is the “amen” of the people who then execute God’s will, which, according to Agamben, temporarily unites the fracture of immanent and economic, being and praxis, by the blinding light of “glory.”  “Government glorifies the Kingdom, and the Kingdom glorifies Government.  But the machine is empty, and glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine.”[31] 

In other words, to summarize Agamben’s initial question as to why, even in our day, “power needs glory” is because the entire political-economic and governmental framework has been based historically on the same logic utilized in Christian Trinitarian theology from the beginning.  Our government and economic theory then embodies the same fracture between being and praxis, between theory or justification, and implementation.  “Glory” is the veil that covers the fracture or “nudity” of essence,[32] but also powers the disjoined being/praxis kingdom/government split.  The break between the unity of the sovereign body, and the multiplicit body of deputized governmental executors distributed over time and place, is temporarily forgotten or superceded under the circulation of glory.  That is, until the next breathe of the total “engine” need be taken, and the process is repeated.  A lot would be at stake if this turned out to be true, at one can see here again why someone like Milbank would be eager to move this narrative from the essential heart of Christian trinitarianism, into a later epoch to be deemed “deformative.”

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[1] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, xxv note 41.

[2] Ibid.

[3] For a great recent example see Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History Into Periods? (Colombia: Colombia University Press, 2015).

[4] Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985), 21.

[5] Specifically in Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1957).

[6] Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 72-73.

[7] Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Christianity as the Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Thoughts on a book by Hans Blumenberg,” in Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Idea of God and Human Freedom (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1973), 181.

[8] Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 153-154.

[9] Ibid., 149.

[10] Pannenberg, “Christianity as the Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” 188.

[11] Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 209.

[12] Ibid., 336-383.

[13] Jennifer Rust, “Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum: Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and de Lubac,” in Graham Hammil, ed., (et. al.) Political Theology in Early Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012), 114.

[14] William Cavanaugh, “The Mystical and the Real: Putting Theology Back Into Political Theology,” in William Cavanaugh, Field Hospital: The Church’s Engagement With a Wounded World (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2016), 103.

[15] Carl Schmidt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty  (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985), 36.

[16] Ibid., 46.

[17] Ibid., 5.

[18] Michael Hollerich, “Carl Schmitt,” in the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, 111.

[19] Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Tradition, & Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), 160-185.

[20] Ibid., 172.

[21] Richard Halpern, “The King’s Two Buckets: Kantorowicz, Richard II, and Fiscal Trauerspiel,” Representations 106: 1 (Spring: 2009), 71.

[22] Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine Into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 4.

[23] Ibid., 21.

[24] Quoted in Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 11; Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 197: “It is only when the doctrine of the Trinity vanquishes the monotheistic notion of the great universal monarch in heaven, [emphasis added] and his divine patriarchs in the world, that earthly rulers, dictators and tyrants cease to find any justifying archetypes any more.”  And further: “what does this characteristically Christian answer [of the Trinity] mean in relation to those other concepts of God . . . [which is to say, God is Trinity] not as supreme substance and not as absolute subject, but as triunity, the three-in-one?” (10), cf. esp.149-150; Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 215, where he pulls no punches and states that “the God of classical theism,” is “a god of the pagans. ”  Indeed, the Father’s merely “baptized Aristotle” (Ibid., 20-22);  Cf. the very helpful essay by Randal E. Otto, “Moltmann and the Anti-Monotheism Movement,” International Journal of Systematic Theology vol.3 no.3 (2001): 293-308.

[25] Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, xii.

[26] Ibid., 56.

[27] Ibid., 69ff.

[28] Ibid., 60.

[29] Ibid., 210.

[30] Ibid., 87.

[31] Ibid., 211.

[32] Ibid., 221.