God is Sovereign, But His Bishops Are Not

Over at Catholic World Report, revisiting some thoughts about sovereignty, including the influence of Joseph de Maistre who was first discussed in this interview, I look at how the notion is being used and abused today in the Catholic Church.

A good deal has been written about the concept. Perhaps the best place, for those wanting a theologically informed treatment that nonetheless ranges widely over relevant political and philosophical history, is Sovereignty: God, State, and Self by Jean Bethke Elshtain.

See also the more recent collection, Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept.

For books on Maistre, follow the link above to the interview I did with two of the leading Maistre scholars today.

Cyril Hovorun on the Church's Consciousness

I am eagerly looking forward to teaching my ecclesiology class again next year so that I can make use of Cyril Hovorun's splendid new book, Meta-Ecclesiology: Chronicles on Church Awareness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 242pp. It is an excellent survey of ecclesiology from the New Testament through the Fathers and into the modern period, treating the Syriac, Byzantine, Latin, and Protestant traditions. A vast amount of material covering an enormous terrain is handled skillfully and lightly, making this an excellent introductory text for students.

I first met the author at the 2012 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago, where I was on a panel about the question of married priests in the Catholic Church. That evening I met up with the incomparable Peter Galadza who introduced me to Fr. Cyril and several of us had a fascinating conversation over drinks and then dinner that night about what Putin was up to in Russia and Ukraine, about relations between Orthodox in Ukraine, and Orthodox-Catholic relations--among other things. Fr. Cyril is a first-rate scholar with a fascinating history, and I asked him about that in the context of an interview about his latest book, which I warmly recommend. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your background. 

CH: I am an Orthodox priest from Ukraine. I am happy to having had many opportunities to study and work in different contexts, and to encounter many other religious traditions. I began my studies in nuclear physics and then shifted to theology. I did my undergraduate theological studies in Kyiv and Athens, then wrote my PhD thesis at Durham University under the supervision of Andrew Louth.

While studying at Durham, I began working at the Department of external church relations of the Moscow Patriarchate. From 2007 to 2009 I chaired a similar department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. After that, I moved back to Moscow, where my responsibility was to reform the system of theological education of the Russian Orthodox Church. At the same time, I never abandoned teaching and research. My initial field was patristics, and recently I moved to ecclesiology and public theology. I spent several years at Yale working on my ecclesiological project, which led to publishing this book. Now I teach at Sankt Ignatios Theological Academy in Sweden. I am often invited to lecture and present at other Universities in the US, Canada, and Europe. I do regular teaching tours to China. I have been heavily involved in various dialogues, including the one between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

AD:What led to this book Meta-Ecclesiology: Chronicles on Church Awareness, particularly its focus on the Church's self-awareness?

For over 10 years I have been a part of the church bureaucratic machinery, and had plenty of opportunities to observe how the church functions on the level of its administrative apparatus and hierarchy, how its different structures and strata interrelate with each other, and how this affects the way in which the church becomes perceived on its different levels. I realized that the church is often understood in the way it is governed. In other words, church bureaucracy defines what the church is. This is certainly wrong, because the right way should be the other way around: the church should define what is its bureaucracy. 

To sort out and critically assess my experiences in the church administration, I undertook an ecclesiological inquiry. An opportunity to do this was provided by Yale University, which invited me to its fellowship program. Through the systematic study of the ecclesiological doctrines, I realized that ecclesiology, as the self-awareness of the church, was never a constant. It changed all the time, under the influence of various circumstances, including political and social ones. In other words, the circumstances and structures of the church, including administrative ones, always defined what the church is. And the church, as the body of Christ and the vessel of the Holy Spirit, always resisted the reductionisms implied or incurred by its structures. It is a permanent dialectical struggle, and my personal experience of the church administration reflected this struggle at a tiny spot on the ecclesial timeline.

AD:You review(p. 10) a number of metaphors used to describe the Church and then note that the list is not closed.Which metaphors today seem especially popular or apt?

The metaphors of the body and of the ship are still most popular, I believe. They are good, but they continue serving the church divisions. Even the metaphor of the body, which is most often employed by eucharistic ecclesiology, is reductionist, as eucharistic ecclesiology is, even though they certainly try to broaden our perception of the church. I think the metaphor of the Kingdom of God is less reductionist than others, and this is the one which was favored most by the early Church.

AD: Your discussion of Photius (p.17) notes that since his time the East has been unable to agree on a definition of primacy--except that it doesn't want primacy as Rome exercises it. Are we not closer today to a consensus on this question? Has the international Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, from the Ravenna statement onwards, not helped the East come closer to consensus on primacy?  

CH: To be honest, I do not see that now we are closer to the Orthodox consensus on primacy than in the times of Photios. The Orthodox-Catholic dialogue and the process of preparation to the Pan-Orthodox council made more obvious our disagreements and helped us to realize better their nature, but they did not bring us much closer to the solution of the issue of primacy. Nevertheless, even the fact that we are now more aware and better understand our disagreements, is positive. This awareness makes us less mislead and better equipped in solving the quest of primacy from the Orthodox perspective.

AD:You note the possibility of looking at ecclesiology from the perspectives of phenomenology and analytic philosophy. What do you see as the promises and prospects of such perspectives? Why would they be important to consider?

Both analytic philosophy and phenomenology are the most advanced modern lines of thought that analyze how we perceive the world and ourselves. I believe that they are relevant to ecclesiology, which is also an epistemological discipline that deals with the ways of perception and self-perception of the Church. If we take classical theology, it has been articulated in the language borrowed from philosophy. In the same vein, when we speak today about new theological reflections on the Church, then modern epistemologies are very appropriate places where to go and borrow their ideas for new ecclesiological syntheses. Such syntheses are not just desirable, they are needed for the renewal of our perception of the Church, to make the church better understood by the people familiar with the modern intellectual culture, and finally to demonstrate that the Church is not an archeological artifact, but an alive reality capable of engaging with, and changing the modern world.

AD: Several times throughout the book you draw on Syriac sources and note that they differ from Latin and Byzantine sources. What, in your view, does the Syriac tradition give us that the Latin and  Byzantine might not?

The Syriac tradition is among the greatest in the Church of the first millennium. It was dynamic and open, and reached as far as India and China because of its extraordinary flexibility. Therefore, it would be an unforgivable omission to ignore it when describing ecclesiological doctrines of the past. Its characteristic feature was the language in which it expressed itself. It was the language of poetry and images. The Syrians were particularly fond of the metaphors, and not much fancy about sophisticated and abstract concepts. They could use Greek language, but still their theological language was Syriac, inasmuch as it employed images and metaphors.

AD: Your treatment of Photius notes his complaints about "ritual" questions--how Latin rituals differed from those of the East. Are these still important or valid complaints today? Or have most Christians generally decided that liturgical diversity is not a seriously Church-dividing issue? 

I argue that diversity of the Church practices, including liturgical ones, was a norm in the early Christianity. Photios witnessed a shift in the attitude to the diversity, when unity of the Church became understood as uniformity. Photios himself was a man of his time, and emphasized ritual differentiations as a Church dividing issue. I tried to demonstrate in the book that this was a weak point shared not just by Photios, but by many in his time, including his western counterparts. It does not fit the perennial idea of the Church and today, Photios's judgements regarding the role of rite in the Church should be taken with a grain of criticism.

AD: Your treatment of Vatican I (p.90) notes that nothing in its prior history--not Islam, nor the Reformation, nor the collapse of the Roman Empire--called forth such a radical ecclesial reaction in the Latin West as Vatican I did in confronting modernity. Tell us a bit more about this, for it seems to me a crucial point for "re-interpreting" the council--as Walter Kasper and others have argued. 

The western Church waged several ecclesiological wars in the past. I call these wars ecclesiological, because they were about redefining what the Church is. In what we now call "culture war", which is a polemic between conservatives and liberals, Vatican I clearly identified the Church with only one side and thus reduced what the Church really is. Instead of engaging with modernity, Vatican I led to building an alternative to it. This alternative, "a perfect Christian society", failed and was to a great extent deconstructed by Vatican II. With much regret I observe similar processes in some Orthodox Churches. They choose to be partisan in the culture wars of our time and instead of engaging in the meaningful dialogue with modernity try to reconstruct primordial models of relations with the society and the state. These models are destined to fail. The Church, however, will suffer and already suffers from their failure.
 

AD: This summer I published an article* on Joseph de Maistre's influence on ecclesiology. So I looked for him in your treatment of the First Vatican Council, especially the years leading up to it, but did not find a lot of engagement here with ultramontanist thought, including Joseph de Maistre.Why not? 

Certainly, Joseph de Maistre was an important figure in the ultramontanist movement, which I explore a bit when I talk about the evolution of ecclesiology during the nineteenth century. He had close connections with the Russian court in the beginning of that century. However, his influence on theology per se was not as noticeable as the one of Johann Adam Möller, for instance. For this reason I pay more attention to Möller and his influence on the father of the Russian ecclesiology, Alexey Khomiakov, even though Khomiakov did not recognize such influence. I give more credit to de Maistre in my second book, where I demonstrate how his political ideas about sovereignty echoed in the renewed concept of Orthodox autocephaly in the same period.  

AD: Your appendix on the St. Irenaeus Working Group was fascinating. I suspect few people know much about them. Tell us a bit more about the group and your involvement with it. What are their hopes, and projects? 

We call it an unofficial Orthodox-Catholic dialogue. The group began its work in 2000, when the official dialogue was suspended after the unfortunate meeting in Baltimore. It consists of the theologians from both sides of the dialogue. However, unlike in the official dialogue, they are not appointed by Churches, but invited by their colleagues on the basis of their academic merits. The group therefore is meritocratic. I think this is a productive format, which allows to openly tackle difficult issues. In the official dialogue, such issues are discussed with the official positions of the Churches in mind, which often leads the discussions to deadlock. The group enjoys its academic freedom, which facilitates our search for the solution to the burning issues from the agenda of the official dialogue.

AD: Having finished Meta-Ecclesiology: Chronicles on Church Awareness, what are you at work on now? What other projects are in the works? 

I am about to finish a second book, which continues the "Meta-ecclesiology." While the first book from my ecclesiological series deals with the epistemological aspect of the Church, in the second book, whose working title is "The Scaffolds of the Church", I take a structuralist approach. I analyze the evolution of the structures of the Church and argue that they don't belong to its nature. They are rather scaffolding that facilitate building and maintaining the edifice of the church. Like in my first book, I continue applying to the Church the traditional language of the Aristotelian/Porphyrian dialectics, and experiment with new philosophical languages, in this case the language of structuralism/post-structuralism.

_________________
* "Sovereignty, Politics, and the Church: Joseph de Maistre's Legacy for Catholic and Orthodox Ecclesiology," Pro Ecclesia 24 (Summer 2015): 366-389. 

Joseph de Maistre Then and Now

I have been spending many happy weeks this spring immersed in the fascinating thought of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) (as well as some of his contemporaries, especially Louis de Bonald and Felicité de Lamenais). I came across Maistre in the early part of the last decade thanks to Richard Lebrun, whose grandson, Brian Butcher, was in the doctoral program with me at the Sheptytsky Institute at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. Lebrun, the doyen of anglophone scholars of Maistre, hearing of my work on the papacy, sent me a number of essays on Maistre. I did not have time to dive into him then with any seriousness, so I set him aside knowing that he was a substantial and influential figure to whom I would return at some point.

What makes Maistre so fascinating is not only how misunderstood he has been, not only how "outrageous" some of his ideas may appear to some people today (which always attaches a frisson to someone), but how often he is cited as a major influence on the First Vatican Council and the development of modern conceptions and practices of the papacy in its exercise of universal jurisdiction and infallibility. Maistre's notion of "sovereignty" is said to be hugely influential here. One figure who has been arguing for the centrality of Maistre in the modern papacy is the German Jesuit historian Hermann Pottmeyer in such books as Towards a Papacy in Communion: Perspectives from Vatican Councils I & II. Others have made similar arguments on the Orthodox side: the Russian Orthodox Nicholas Lossky has suggested that the aftermath of the French Revolution shapes modern Orthodox nation-states and their churches' desire for "autocephaly." And the Greek political scientist Paschalis Kitromilides has also argued for the influence of post-revolutionary French thought on modern Orthodox ecclesiology in Greece and southeastern Europe. 

What makes all of these lines of influence even more fascinating is that Maistre spent fourteen years in Russia at the imperial court in St. Petersburg where he was ambassador of the King of Piedmont-Sardinia (whose subject Maistre was: he was never a French citizen though he wrote in beautiful, elegant French and was a noted stylist). Maistre was also, for a time, close to and influential upon Tsar Alexander I and the tsar's minister of education and "national enlightenment" Sergei Uvarov, and Maistre one of the most celebrated figures in the stylish salons of St. Petersburg, then one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe and in some ways a place of refuge for many fleeing revolutions in France and elsewhere. 

It seems clear now, thanks to modern scholarship, that many of the ideas and perceptions of Maistre are demonstrably false, and that he was a much richer, and perhaps ironically more modern, thinker than some have thought--himself a revolutionary in some ways though he despised the French Revolution and all its pomps and works. One of the newest works to continue the project of examining Maistre in depth and context comes in an edited collection by Richard Lebrun and Carolina Armenteros, Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers (Brill, 2011, 308pp.). I asked the editors for an interview about this book, and their other works on Maistre, and here are their thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your backgrounds

Richard: born 1 October 1931, on a farm near Milton, ND, grew up on another farm near Langdon, ND. Early education was mostly in the parochial school in Langdon with the Presentation Sisters. I received a B.A. in 1953 from St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN. The second semester of my third year was spent in Vienna as a participant in the Institute of European Studies – this also involved extensive travel in Italy, North Africa, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, and England. It was this experience that ignited my interest in European history. Following graduation from St. John’s, there followed three years of active duty in the U.S. Navy (an alternative to two years in the infantry during the Korean War). While in the Navy, I married in 1954. We subsequently had six children, and now have a multitude of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Following the Navy, thanks to the G.I. Bill and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, I entered graduate school at the University of Minnesota in September 1956, earned an M.A. by the spring of 1957, and then a Ph.D. (in history) in 1963. 

I was very interested on French history, but by the time I came to undertake a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Minnesota, we had small children, so the prospects of doing archival research in France were small; in these circumstances, my faculty advisor suggested a topic in intellectual history where I could rely on printed sources, and also suggested that very little had been done in English on Joseph de Maistre, someone he felt was of considerable importance. 

In September 1960, I accepted a teaching position at the University of Ottawa, where I taught until 1966, when I was invited to accept at teaching position at the University of Manitoba, where I taught until my retirement in 1998.

Carolina: Of Spanish, French, and Dominican parents, I was born on 13 October 1974 in Geneva, Switzerland. I grew up in Spain until I was twelve, when my family emigrated to the United States, the Mojave Desert of Southern California to be exact. I did my undergraduate work at Stanford, where I double-majored in history and biology and where I completed a Master’s in modern history before moving to Cambridge to do a second Master’s in ancient history.

After my second Master’s, I decided to stay at Cambridge for a Ph.D. in political thought and intellectual history, a subject for which Cambridge is world-renowned. During the first few months of my doctoral research, I discovered Maistre’s Considerations on France (1797) in the library. I thought then that they would be useful as no more than a passing reference for my Ph.D. project, which at the time was on a subject completely unrelated to Maistre. Within ten minutes of opening the Considerations, though, I knew that I would change my dissertation subject, and that I would henceforth work on either Maistre’s philosophy of history, or – if that had been done – some other aspect of Maistre’s thought. That was twelve years ago, and I have been reading and writing on Maistre ever since.

AD: What led you both to work on this book?

Richard: Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers is the third of three volumes of essays first presented at Reappraisals/Reconsidérations, the Fifth International Colloquium on Joseph de Maistre, held at Jesus College, Cambridge on 4 and 5 December 2008. This colloquium was organized by Carolina Armenteros, who subsequently asked me to work with her on editing and publishing the proceedings of this colloquium. I had first met Carolina at the fourth international colloquium on Maistre, which met in Chambéry in 2001; I was later invited to serve as the external examiner on her Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation in history in June 2004. From the time we first met, we explored our mutual interest in Maistre together through email; I also wrote many letters of reference for her for various fellowships and teaching positions.

Carolina: At Richard’s suggestion, I made the theme of the conference – Reappraisals – broad enough to accommodate a wide variety of interests. When the sessions were over, it became clear that Maistre’s posterity had been one of the major topics. It therefore made sense to gather the relevant papers into a themed volume, which we rounded off by commissioning some extra chapters.

Reappraisals yielded two additional collections of essays, which Richard and I also co-edited: Joseph De Maistre and the Legacy of Enlightenment (Oxford, 2011) and The New enfant du siècle: Joseph de Maistre as a Writer (St Andrews, 2010).

AD: Your book, Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers, published in 2011, focuses on a man who died nearly 200 years ago. How is he still relevant today?

Richard: There are many figures in intellectual history, from Aristotle on, who, because of the brilliance of their thought and their influence on European culture and civilization, remain of perennial interest. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, from the generation before Joseph de Maistre, continues to be the subject of new and important studies, despite the huge bibliography on him. Evidence of Maistre’s continuing relevance may be found in the fact that new editions of his works and new studies of his thought and influence continue to appear in French and other languages. The subjects that he explored, including the nature of politics, the nature of language, the role of religion in society and politics, theodicy, and similar topics, continue to be of importance in our contemporary world. Fundamentally, his thought still provokes serious reflections on problems and issues that are still with us. Our 2011 volume focuses on Maistre’s European readers, but omits Spain and Portugal; there remains to be explored his influence in the Hispanic worlds of both Europe and Latin America, as well as his influence in the Muslim world and in Asia. We know that our website on Maistre has attracted interest from scholars in both Japan and China.

Carolina: As a Catholic political thinker who witnessed the de-Christianization campaigns of the French Revolution, Maistre was particularly interested in the relationship between religion and politics, and between tradition and modernity. I think these are subjects that make him especially relevant today, when traditional immigrant populations are growing in Europe and North America and when Judaeo-Christian traditions are reasserting themselves as legitimate sources of public reason. The repercussions of these trends abound in modern democracies: they range from Obamacare’s implications for religious freedom of conscience, to Switzerland’s ban on minarets, to France and Belgium’s controversial policies on the wearing of the burqa and niqab, to the dialogue between Christian churches and various Western governments over abortion, euthanasia, and world poverty. Our inheritance from the radical Enlightenment has led us to view these issues as confrontations between backwardness and progress, and it has encouraged us to see religion and tradition as mentalities to be discarded. Yet Maistre offers us alternative and much more stimulating ways of approaching the problem.

AD: Maistre has often been portrayed as perhaps the arch-reactionary, the figure resisting the revolutionary tide of 18th- and 19th-century Europe. What does this portrait (caricature?) miss of him and his thinking?

Richard: The caricature of Joseph de Maistre as the arch-reactionary is largely the product of politics in nineteenth-century France, and the long struggle in that country (a struggle that spread elsewhere in Europe and to England and the U.S. as well) between those who saw themselves as loyal to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and those who came to see the Revolution as a tragedy for France and for Christianity. In the circumstances of that period, Maistre became a symbol of the fundamental cleavage between those who admired the Revolution and those who approved it. (See my Throne and Altar: the Political and Religious Thought of Joseph de Maistre, pp. 1-3.) It is only in the past few decades that it has become possible to read Maistre anew with fresh eyes and from a broader perspective.

Carolina: The idea that Maistre was an arch-reactionary suggests that he was committed to the past. There is some truth in this: he thought, overall, that the French people had been better off under the Old Regime than they were during the French Revolution. This opinion, however, should not obscure the fact that Maistre was open to social and political changes that he saw as initiated by Providence, executed by human wisdom, and tending irresistibly toward the good. Even revolutionary calamities were productive within his scheme, because they contributed to purging society of the evils that prevented it from perfecting itself. Not only that, but despite providential intervention, humans were in charge of their own destiny, and as time went on they took increasing responsibility for producing their own social and political environments. This way of thinking is incompatible with reaction. But it dovetails very well with what I believe Maistre to have really been – a revolutionary conservative.

AD: Maistre spent fourteen years in Russia. Is there evidence of Russian culture generally--and Russian Orthodoxy in particular--shaping his thought, particularly his religious or theological thought?

Richard: It’s clear that Maistre was fascinated by his observations of Russian politics, culture, and religion. However, it must be recalled that he never learned the language, and lived only in the rarefied “French language” milieu of the court and diplomatic circles in the Russian capital. My impression is that his interactions with Russian culture only deepened and intensified his fundamental beliefs, strengthening his adherence to positions that he had reached long before his sojourn in Russia.

Carolina: I agree with Richard that the core of Maistre’s thought was already formed before he arrived in Russia. In fact, living in Saint Petersburg seems to have strengthened his identity as a Latin Catholic. I would add only that intellectual debates at the Russian court were the major stimuli that drove him to compose his mature works. Thus the Platonic illuminism that was in vogue among the Saint Petersburg aristocracy in 1809 inspired Maistre to read Origen and to write his esoteric works, the St Petersburg Dialogues and the 

Clarification Regarding Sacrifices (the first treatise on the sociology of violence), which were published in 1821. Mikhail Speransky’s initiatives to establish a national system of education also led Maistre to write his Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon (published 1836), along with various pedagogical memoirs for the Russian government. As for Du Pape (1819), his magnum opus and the text that founded political ultramontanism, it was shaped by his participation in Russian religious debates and in particular by his desire to save the Orthodox Church from subservience to the state.

AD: In turn, is there evidence of his having shaped Russian culture and Russian Orthodoxy?

Richard: On Maistre’s influence in Russia, the essay by Vera Miltchyna, published first in French as “Oeuvres de Joseph de Maistre en Russie: Aperçu de la réception,” in the Revue des études maistriennes, No. 13 (2001), and in English translation as “Joseph de Maistre’s Works in Russia: A Look at their Reception,” in the volume I edited entitled Joseph De Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence: Selected Studies (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), remains a good starting place. But Carolina’s essay “Preparing the Russian Revolution: Maistre and Uvarov on the History of Knowledge,” in our 2011 Brill volume, goes far beyond the influence of Maistre’s published works to explore his direct influence on Sergei Uvarov, a figure who was very important in nineteenth-century Russian state policy.

Carolina: Maistre may have influenced Russian Orthodoxy by antithesis: I have always thought that Aleksandr Sturdza’s Considerations on the Doctrine and Spirit of the Orthodox Church (1816) were a response to Maistre’s ecclesiology. I discuss this in Chapter 3 of my book, The French Idea of History: Joseph De Maistre and His Heirs, 1794-1854 (Cornell, 2011). Yet Maistre exercised an influence on Russian educational policy that was far more important. He helped Razumovsky, Alexander I’s minister of education, to elaborate a curriculum for the imperial lycée at Tsarskoye Selo – a curriculum that was later adopted throughout the country. He also exercised a formative influence on Uvarov that, thanks to Uvarov’s long career as an educational policy maker, had an impact on Russian education until the end of the reign of Nicholas II. In our Brill volume I argue that, although they were designed to prevent Revolution, the educational policies that Uvarov implemented and derived from Maistre actually helped, quite ironically, to prepare the Russian Revolution.

AD: Isaiah Berlin perhaps infamously held Maistre to be a precursor of fascism, which seems rather de trop to me. What would you say in answer to Berlin? 

Richard: It seems to me that Cyprian Blamires’ essay, “Berlin, Maistre, and Fascism” in our 2011 Brill volume provides a devastating and convincing response to Berlin’s misguided efforts to portray Maistre as a precursor to fascism.

Carolina: Certainly. Blamires wrote his doctoral thesis on Maistre under Berlin’s supervision and understands both thinkers deeply. I would add too that the rest of our volume in itself constitutes further proof of Blamires’ thesis, since most of the Maistrian interpreters it discusses were thinkers on the left. This tendency to engage the left is a general facet of Maistre’s posterity: among his hundreds of interpreters across the centuries, I can think of only two who had strong fascist sympathies: Carl Schmitt and Charles Maurras.

AD: Maistre was extensively involved with Freemasonry, and at one point seems to have thought that the Freemasons would be instrumental in uniting a divided Christianity. And yet many Catholics today regard Freemasonry with horror, seeing membership in it as totally incompatible with membership in the Catholic Church. How did Maistre negotiate these difficult waters?

Richard: On Maistre’s relationship to Freemasonry, see my Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant, where my treatment of this issue is based on the excellent studies by Jean Rebotton and Jean-Louis Darcel. Fundamentally, eighteenth-century Freemasonry, and in particular the strand of Masonry with which Maistre was involved, was not particularly anti-Christian or anti-Catholic. In France, many priests and bishops were involved. It was only in the clerical versus anti-clerical wars in nineteenth-century France that Freemasonry became resolutely anti-clerical. For more detailed studies of Maistre and Masonry, see the Revue des études maistriennes, No. 5-6 (1980) which includes a number of important studies on “Illuminisme et Franc-Maçonnerie,” which were presented at a colloquium held in Chambéry in May 1979.

Carolina: Maistre’s youthful social life seems to have revolved mainly around Freemasonry. He was very enthusiastic about it. In the eighteenth century, as Richard notes, Freemasonry, although formally forbidden by the Church, was not as feared and despised in Catholic circles as it would be in the nineteenth century. The message of Pope Clement XII’s In Iminenti (1738) hadn’t sunk in so to speak. The young Maistre even believed Freemasonry and Catholicism to be compatible, to the point that he proposed, in his Memoir to the Duke of Brunswick (1782), that Catholics and Protestants should use Freemasonic institutions as forums of ecumenical reconciliation.

The French Revolution changed all that. When it came, Freemasons acquired a European-wide reputation for subversion as conspiracy theories flourished speculating on the role they had supposedly played during the Revolution. It was at this point that Maistre began to be accused of having developed revolutionary sympathies among the Freemasons. He defended himself against the charge, and abandoned his Masonic activities with regret. Years later, when he was in Russia, he would console himself for this loss by befriending Freemasons (the Swedish Baron de Stedingk) and cultivating esotericism.

AD: Maistre's Du Pape seems to have had, at least initially, a rather cool reception in Catholic circles--especially in Rome itself. And yet contemporary scholars of our time (e.g., the Jesuit Hermann Pottmeyer) have said he is the figure influencing Catholic ecclesiology from Vatican I onward. How would you assess his influence on Catholic theology? How (if at all) has that influence changed in different ages from his own to ours?

Richard: Actually, the influence of Maistre’s Du Pape precedes Vatican I. Numerous editions of Maistre’s works, including Du Pape, were published in France during the Second Empire. Beginning with Lamennais in the 1820s, and then with Louis Veuillot in the 1850s and the 1860s, Maistre’s Ultramontane ideas were widely publicized in France well before 1870. He was probably important in weaning much of the French episcopacy from Gallicanism and converting them to Ultramontanism. In addition to the influence of his ecclesiological ideas, his aggressive defense of Catholicism generally seems to have heartened many nineteenth-century conservative Catholics, not only in France, but elsewhere. It’s significant, for example, that his little essay defending the Spanish Inquisition was translated into English three times in the nineteenth-century (1838, 1843, and 1851). See my “Joseph de Maistre et l’apologie de l’Inquisition espagnole,” in Joseph de Maistre (ed. by Phillippe Barthelet; Les Dossiers H; L’Âge d’Homme, 2005).

Carolina: I would add to that the influence that Maistre had on the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870. Since the 1790s, Maistre had followed Jean Bodin in ascribing absoluteness to temporal sovereignty. By the 1810s, in Book 1 of Du Pape, he observed that because temporal sovereignty is by nature absolute, and because the Church possessed both temporal and spiritual sovereignty, papal sovereignty was doubly absolute and could be termed infallible. I believe this statement to be at the origin of the dogma of papal infallibility. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Maistre does not seem to have been as great an inspiration to Catholic theology as he was in the nineteenth.

AD: Maistre seems clearly to have been an enemy of Gallicanism at least insofar as that was a movement for the "independence" of the French church from papal control. On a related matter, did he have much to say about Eastern Orthodox notions of "autocephaly" whereby each national church is held to be free from any external authority outside the nation-state?

Richard: Book Four of Du Pape, which is entirely devoted to “The Pope in his relations with the Chuches called schismatical,” argues strongly that both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Anglican Church, have been and are fatally weakened by the way they have been subjected to the state. And, of course, much of the argument against Gallicanism as developed in De l’Église gallicane, blames the weaknesses of the pre-revolutionary French Church on the Gallicanism of the French crown and the parlements.

Carolina: Yes, I’m afraid Maistre was no fan of the autocephalous churches. Any and all ideas of ecclesiastical independence from Rome were anathema to him!

AD: Your book's title speaks of Maistre's "European readers." Do you know of any evidence that Maistre's theories about sovereignty influenced not just Western European readers but also those in the emerging independent nation-states such as Greece, Romania, or Bulgaria?

Carolina: This is an exciting question, which beckons to new research. Unfortunately, I am not at all aware of Maistre’s reception in any of these countries. But I can say that although he wrote on Maistre in French, and lived most of his life in France, one of Maistre’s most famous interpreters, Emil Cioran, was Romanian.

AD: The German Catholic Carl Schmitt famously said in the 1920s and 1930s, "Sovereign is he who decides the exception." What would Maistre have said in response to such a statement? Tell us, in other words, a bit about his theory of sovereignty, and whether you think his theory has influenced Catholic ideas about the "sovereign Pontiff."

Richard: As for a dialogue between Maistre and Schmitt, see the essay by Graeme Garrard, “Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt” in my Joseph De Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence: Selected Studies mentioned above. In Du Pape, of course, Maistre based a good part of his argument for papal authority over the Church on his theory of sovereignty. See especially, Book Two of this work, which deals with “The Pope in his relations with temporal sovereignties.”

Carolina: I’ve answered a bit of this question above. Here I would say as well that Maistre would have agreed with Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty by exception (which is not surprising, since Maistre influenced Schmitt). Maistre had a very pessimistic idea of sovereignty. In On the Sovereignty of the People (1794-6), he defined it as “an absolute power that can do evil with impunity.” Like Schmitt, he believed that it always originated in an act of violence. However this was only his view of temporal sovereignty. In The French Idea of History, I have argued that for him ecclesiastical sovereignty distinguishes itself from temporal varieties precisely by its peaceful birth and rational capacity to govern non-violently. All temporal governments in his view follow over time the trajectory of a parabola: they rise with violence, and they decline when what he calls human ‘force’ is spent. But the Church is unique among all other governments in that it was born inconspicuously, and that rather than rise and fall, it has never ceased to grow steadily and in a straight line.

AD: At least as I read him--and I've not read everything--Maistre seems to have had what I would characterize as a deeply Augustinian pessimism about the human condition in general, and about the condition of sovereigns and monarchs in particular, viewing them all as (potentially) deeply corrupt. Is that a fair and accurate reading? 

Carolina: Maistre’s pessimism has been greatly emphasized, and with good reason. However I don’t think that he believed monarchs and sovereigns to be more corrupt than other people. And I also believe that Pelagianism plays a much greater role in his thought than does Augustinian pessimism. After all, this was an avowed enemy of modern Augustinians, a man with a nearly unbounded faith in the power of human beings to craft their own destiny, a Catholic who bordered on heterodoxy by maintaining that sometimes, the human will can annul God’s.

AD: Some have argued today that we live in a "globalized" world where national sovereignty has become significantly downgraded. What do you think Maistre would say in response to such ideas? 

Carolina: I think he would be very open to them. Maistre was a Europeanist, in fact a universalist, by virtue of his Christian faith. He believed that someday, the Church would extend over the whole earth, embracing and mingling with all cultures. In Europe, the political result would be a European confraternity similar to the Amphictyons of ancient Greece. Beyond Europe, a global order would model itself on the European Christian community. Maistre never addressed directly what would happen to nations in the future, but his later thought suggests that he would not have regretted their demise, at least not greatly. In the end, religious identity took undisputed precedence over political or national identity for him.

AD: Was Maistre in the end a hopeless romantic? In other words, his theory about the papacy--if I understand it correctly--was that it was supposed to function as something of a bulwark against the potential for tyranny in other sovereigns. But the "Sovereign Pontiff" is a sinful man like other leaders. Did Maistre expect too much of the popes? 

Richard: I think Maistre was fully aware that popes are as human as the rest of us. His argument was not so much about expecting the pope to be especially virtuous as about trying to identify a structural bulwark against tyranny. For various reasons he had no faith in the “Concert of Europe” that Tsar Alexander was promoting after the downfall of Napoleon, but I think he would have been sympathetic to the fundamental ideas about the League of Nations and the United Nations. We are, of course, still wrestling with the problem of what the world should do about lawless and tyrannical regimes, be they in Rwanda, Libya, or Syria.

Carolina: I agree. Maistre did not expect exceptional virtue from the popes. In fact, he defended monarchy precisely because it was the regime that required the least virtue, because even mediocre men could make it work. In this sense at least, he was no romantic, but an eighteenth-century rationalist and especially an heir of Montesquieu. 

Strange Bedfellows?

Interest in Origen of Alexandria, as I have noted repeatedly, remains high. His influence is to be found in rather unlikely places such as the work of the post-revolutionary French political thinker Joseph de Maistre. I am in the midst of reading Marc Froidefont's fascinating recent book Théologie de Joseph de Maistre (Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier, 2010).

Froidefont lays out in elaborate detail just how indebted Maistre was to Origen, including some of the latter's rather dodgier bits of eschatology. This will surely be disconcerting to certain "traditionalist" Catholics who assume, usually without having read him, that someone as reportedly revanchist as Maistre, stout defender Du Pape, must be impeccably orthodox and totally reliable. Maistre was heavily influenced by not only Origen but also illuminism and Masonry and other things that would surely give people pause today. Origen's influence especially, Froidefont says, has left a "soupçon d'hétérodoxie...sur l'oeuvre de Maistre."

The Problem of Sovereignty

It has been suggested by such scholars as the Jesuit Herman Pottmeyer, the Russian Orthodox Nicholas Lossky, the Greek political scientist Paschalis Kitromilides and others that both Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology, from the nineteenth century onward, is deformed, not to say corrupted, by theories of national sovereignty as they emerge in the aftermath of the French Revolution. This has an impact on discussions at Vatican I about the jurisdiction and infallibility of the "Sovereign Pontiff." It would also seem to have had an impact on several Orthodox Churches that achieve autocephaly in the nineteenth century when their nation-states become independent. 

Much of the discussion of sovereignty comes from such fascinating figures as Joseph de Maistre, who is often portrayed as an antediluvian revanchist desperate to roll back 1789 and reassert the unity of "throne and altar," a portrait that, so far as I can see to date, is neither completely fair nor entirely accurate from what I can tell from reading numerous studies of him, including especially a wonderful work by the Canadian scholar Richard Lebrun, Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988).

Maistre, in his famous work Du Pape, argued strongly in favor of a very centralized sovereign papacy--this much is fairly well known. What is not so well known, it seems to me, are what seem to be his reasons, two ad intra and one ad extra. The internal: he wanted a strong pope to unify the Church which he had seen as divided and weakened in two contexts: first in France, where Gallican-Ultramontane conflicts, as well as the Revolution, had done enormous damage; and second his witness of the weakness and divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church during his fourteen-year stint in Russia as ambassador of the king of Sardinia. 


The external: Maistre, like many Catholics of his generation, seems to have been not merely haunted but deeply traumatized, almost shattered, by the Revolution. The savagery of Robespierre, the bloodletting

of the Revolution, and the capacity to enact violence in the name of virtue forever turned off those who may have been sympathetic to some of the revolutionary causes. Maistre  drew from the Revolution, and a study of wider Western history, the clear realization of the flaws in all monarchs, the problems in all political systems and their endless capacity for tyranny and evil. So he seems to have thought that a strong Sovereign Pontiff would be the one and only force capable of serving as a check on man's capacity for trying to lord it over his fellow man. A strong pope, in other words, would be the last refuge, the last court of appeal, for nations being savaged by their own leaders. 

More recently, others have picked up on the theological connotations of modern notions of sovereignty, and taken them in interesting and often controversial directions. None did this more clearly or more controversially than Carl Schmitt in his short book Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, which opens with the famous ringing declaration that "sovereign is he who decides on the exception."

Now a new book comes along to continue the discussion in a new and very interesting direction: Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Columbia University Press, 2011), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In this strikingly original work, Paul W. Kahn rethinks the meaning of political theology. In a text innovative in both form and substance, he describes an American political theology as a secular inquiry into ultimate meanings sustaining our faith in the popular sovereign. Kahn works out his view through an engagement with Carl Schmitt's 1922 classic, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. He forces an engagement with Schmitt's four chapters, offering a new version of each that is responsive to the American political imaginary. The result is a contemporary political theology. As in Schmitt's work, sovereignty remains central, yet Kahn shows how popular sovereignty creates an ethos of sacrifice in the modern state. Turning to law, Kahn demonstrates how the line between exception and judicial decision is not as sharp as Schmitt led us to believe. He reminds readers that American political life begins with the revolutionary willingness to sacrifice and that both sacrifice and law continue to ground the American political imagination. Kahn offers a political theology that has at its center the practice of freedom realized in political decisions, legal judgments, and finally in philosophical inquiry itself.

The book is not very big or very long, and I read it in an afternoon. It is an interesting attempt to analyze American polity in particular, and Western ideas of popular sovereignty in general, through a kind of neo-Schmittian lens. It is, it must be said, very thin on any theology qua theology. The author clearly knows his limits and does not want to deal with God except for a few perfunctory and passing references he does not develop. God seems largely irrelevant, though to his credit Kahn is not so simplistic or dismissive as other authors who attribute all theological references to fundamentalist troglodytes or otherwise regard them as the equivalent of phrenology. 

This book seems very much to be a "continuing the conversation" work, without expectation of solving the many problems it picks up or to which it alludes. Kahn is at pains to distance himself from Schmitt, whose ties to the Nazis of course make him rather problematic. But Kahn says that Schmitt still raises such compelling issues that one must think through him, leaving aside his odious ties to National Socialism. And the most compelling issue still needing careful thinking is "the serious claim of political theology...that the state is not the secular arrangement that it purports to be" (18). For Schmitt and others (including, as I have noted previously, William Cavanaugh) "political theology" is not some attempt to set up a state church or create some kind of theocracy. No, it is an attempt to show how the politics of the liberalism of modernity, the politics that gives us the modern nation-state, is not at all "secular" and free of religious or, better, "theological" claims, albeit in highly disguised fashion. As he puts it, "freeing the state from the church did not banish the sacred from the political. It might have, but it did not." Anyone who has attended to the history of arguably the three greatest revolutions of modernity--the French, the American, and the Russian--will immediately see the truth of this. All three purported to establish secular states but ended up smuggling in theological claims through the backdoor or else created ersatz forms of religiosity (e.g., Lenin's shrine tomb or the American flag and pledge of allegiance). As Kahn goes on, 

the French revolutionaries attacked the church, but they found it necessary to invent their own rituals of the sacred....The French tried to establish a ritual practice that sacralized reason, but they did so in the name of the sovereign people. The American Revolution practiced the same double forms of the sacred, worshiping "self-evident truths" set forth in the name of "We the People" (21).

Having distanced himself from Schmitt, Kahn wants to use him to think through the question at the heart of his book: "what do we learn if we engage Schmitt's argument from a perspective that substitutes popular sovereignty for his idea of the sovereign?" (9) From here he looks at notions of "American exceptionalism," the role of the US Supreme Court, the pardon power entrusted to the president under the US Constitution (and to various governors, inter alia), and similar issues. 

There were four hugely influential people whom I expected to see cited in this book but none merited even so much as a passing reference: the first, of course, was Maistre; but missing also, though having a very great deal to say on the issues Kahn treats, were Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor (especially his A Secular Age), and René Girard, who would have helped Kahn flesh out such underdeveloped lines as "We must take up the perspective of political theology, for political violence has been and remains a form of sacrifice" (7). Later on he says "We will never find an adequate explanation of the politics of sacrifice in liberal theory or positive political science" (17). Girard would certainly agree, and has spent his life howing just where we can find explanations of the source and origin of the sacrificial victim in Western culture.  

Still, for all that, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is an edifying and enjoyable little book that raises some enormously important questions which we very much need to consider more than we have. Political scientists, philosophers, jurists, and theologians would all profit from Kahn's engaging text.