Liturgical Power , livre ebook

217

pages

English

Ebooks

2017

Écrit par
Nicholas Heron

Publié par
Fordham University Press

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217

pages

English

Ebooks

2017

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Fordham University Press

Date de parution

28 novembre 2017

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780823278718

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

Is Christianity exclusively a religious phenomenon, which must separate itself from all things political, or do its concepts actually underpin secular politics? To this question, which animated the twentieth-century debate on political theology, Liturgical Power advances a third alternative. Christian anti-politics, Heron contends, entails its own distinct conception of politics. Yet this politics, he argues, assumes the form of what today we call "administration," but which the ancients termed "economics." The book's principal aim is thus genealogical: it seeks to understand our current conception of government in light of an important but rarely acknowledged transformation in the idea of politics brought about by Christianity.This transformation in the idea of politics precipitates in turn a concurrent shift in the organization of power; an organization whose determining principle, Heron contends, is liturgy-understood in the broad sense as "public service." Whereas until now only liturgy's acclamatory dimension has made the concept available for political theory, Heron positions it more broadly as a technique of governance. What Christianity has bequeathed to political thought and forms, he argues, is thus a paradoxical technology of power that is grounded uniquely in service.

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Publié par

Fordham University Press

Date de parution

28 novembre 2017

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780823278718

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

L I T U R G I C A LP O W E R

   

 Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

  

L I T U R G I C A L P O W E R Between Economic and Political Theology

  

thisbookismadepossiblebyacollaborativegrantfromtheandreww.mellonfoundation.

All rigHts reserved. No part of tHis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mecHanical, pHotocopy, recording, or any otHer—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, witHout tHe prior permission of tHe publisHer.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at Http://catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in tHe United States of America

20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

Introduction

1The Economic God

2Liturgical Power

3The Practice of Hierarchy

4Instrumental Cause

5Anthropology of Ofﬁce

Conclusion

Acknowledgments Notes BibliograpHy Index

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

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   

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In societate angelorum omnia possidentur communiter;sed tamen quaedam excellentius habentur a quibasdam quam ab aliis.

[In the society of angels all things are shared in common, but someshare in them in a more excellent way than others.] — . ST THOM AS AQUINAS

Every heightening of direct power also thickens and condensesthe vaporous circle of indirect inﬂuences. —CARLSCHMITT

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INTRODUCTION

Today, the question of political theology unexpectedly stands near the cen 1 ter of theoretical discussion in the humanities and social sciences. And yet, ever since Carl Schmitt ﬁrst pronounced his celebrated thesis accord ing to which “all signiﬁcant concepts of the modern theory of the state are 2 secularized theological concepts” it has almost exclusively been assumed that the vector charted by the theologicalpolitical travels in one direction and in one direction only. Whether the relation between the two terms has been understood according to the stronger model of genetic derivation 3 or whether according to the weaker model of structural homology, the orientation has remained always the same: from the heavens to the earth, from the religious to the secular, from the theological to the political. The present study, by contrast, offers a different account and a different trajec tory. It examines a sequence of ostensibly theological concepts and ﬁgures, which assume their surprising political signiﬁcance only if situated in a perspective articulated according to the inverse orientation. And not only on account of the fact, in itself insigniﬁcant, that these concepts and ﬁg ures can be shown to have their provenance in the civic sphere (or at least in a context where the positing of a clear distinction between the “civic” and the “religious” would be meaningless); but also, and indeed above all, because they acquire their speciﬁc force—and hence, their particular her meneutic value—only in the course of their Christianization as the more or less worldly instruments of a polis that has been deﬁnitively shifted out of this world. A guiding premise of the following investigation is that the prevailing discourse around political theology has for the most part all too casually and uncritically accepted the pertinence and even selfevidence of the two structuring hypotheses that marked its twentiethcentury point of

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