Writing in opposition to American entry into the First World War, Randolph Bourne reminded his fellow dissenters of the impending vituperation. “In an age of faith,” he mused, “skepticism is the most intolerable of insults.” As we witness, in the invasion of Iraq, an extension of the American Empire that is unprecedented in its arrogance and hypocrisy, we should recall that skepticism can also be the most indispensable of virtues. With our own terms of skepticism, and with a harsh and dreadful love, Christians must openly disparage the martial and pecuniary faith which animates history’s richest, most well-armed, and appallingly parochial superpower.
But we can’t shout with any force or effect until we take the measure of the Empire we inhabit. Two years ago, Ari Fleischer, the Bush Administration’s bland and haughty press secretary, anointed the culture of American capitalism “our blessed way of life.” Combined with the President’s frequent references to the providential character of American power, Fleischer’s assertion now appears as much more than the eloquence of an apparatchik. It’s time to realize that the American Empire is a sacral order, a newer, bolder, more beguiling and more frightful incarnation of the earthly city described by Augustine in the City of God.
I mention Augustine with some hesitation, for it’s been depressing to watch the bishop of Hippo yet again conscripted into the intellectual battalions of Empire. He’s been drafted by a group of Christian intellectuals who are as “embedded” in imperial culture as the “journalists” accompanying the invaders. A few weeks ago, on ABC’s Nightline, Michael Novak—always a reliable shill for corporate and imperial ambition—had a ten-second spot as the “Catholic voice” on the “just war” tradition. After Novak came Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller professor at the University of Chicago, who has apparently applied for the position once held by an earlier embedded intellectual, Reinhold Niebuhr: Unofficial Conscience of the State. Both Novak and Elshtain interpreted Augustine in a manner siren-sweet to the ears of the Pentagon. Neither one questioned American motives; neither one displayed the slightest concern with the sordid history of U.S.-Iraqi relations; neither one presented “just war” thinking as anything other than an easily-filled checklist of conditions. Speaking with that wizened gravitas symptomatic of imaginative paralysis, they confirmed what my friend and colleague Michael Hanby has long contended: that “just war” rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of Augustine’s purpose. While certainly culpable in the Constantinian conversion of the Church, Augustine’s thinking on “just war” was not, Mike maintains, a “theory” or even a set of criteria. Rather, Augustine’s remarks on war constitute a reflection on the nature of war in general, as well as a meditation on the sort of character required so as to fight “justly.” In short, here’s what you have to be like to fight a just war—now try waging one.
With all due deference to theologians—the question begged being, of course, how much deference is due—I write as a historian convinced that just war thinking has been far too elastic and accommodating to make any Christian difference in deliberation about conflict. Exactly which wars have been avoided thanks to its counsel? Exactly how has violence been restrained because of its power? Which theologians did the Bush regime consult on the niceties of ad bello and in bello? (Stalin may have had a more pertinent point than we acknowledge when he asked how many divisions the Pope had. Certainly the current Holy Father has no control over American troops such as George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, embedded intellectuals who otherwise make flamboyant displays of their devotion to the pontiff.) My answers to these questions would not be reassuring, and I suspect that the just war tradition’s primary historical significance has been to provide rulers with theological camouflage, and prelates with tickets to prayer breakfasts.
So rather than frame the issue of this war in terms of “justice,” I would shift attention to Augustine’s account of “earthly felicity” in Book II, chapter 20 of the City of God. There, the earthly city—epitomized in imperial Rome—encompasses the entire range of human gifts and achievements, “the blessings bestowed by God,” all perverted by libido dominandi, the love of domination which corrupts everything we are and create. “So long as it enjoys material prosperity and the glory of victorious war,” the citizens of the eathly city are happy. “We should get richer all the time, to have enough for extravagant spending every day.” The earthly city is a boundless marketplace mastered by “providers of material satisfactions” who cultivate not the honor and morality but rather the “docility of their subjects.” This managerial paradise rests on a culture of individualism whose first and only commandment is that “anyone should be free to do as he likes about his own, or with his own, or with others, if they consent.”
Written as a scathing survey of Roman imperial culture, Augustine’s account of earthly felicity now reads like a premonition of late capitalism in the American Empire. Surely, many Christians will object, isn’t this comparison old and moldy? I’ve expressed tedium with this analogy myself, and I would reiterate caution against facile parallels between Rome and the United States. (Such parallels are, recall, staples in the rhetorical arsenal of reaction.) But I must now perform the penitential—but also, I hope, illuminating—exercise of affirming this oft-belabored analogy. What else is the fuel of “democratic capitalism” but the urge to “get richer all the time”? How else do we judge our rulers than by their provision of commodities? What other word but “docility” describes a populace which, indifferent to the corporate franchising of democracy, supports the invasion of Iraq while admitting to incomprehension about its rationale? And why else does this “free people” accept this corporate coup d’etat, if not because it allows us the latitude of “choice” in our “private lives”—in the realm, that is, of commodified leisure, enjoyed when not tethered to the office or cubicle? And what—to allude to Augustine’s demolition of the gods of the Roman civil religion—is the American Empire but another “nation with the soul of a church” as G. K. Chesterton once wrote with bemusement and horror? Augustine is indeed the most relevant theologian for our time, but not in the hackneyed fashion of our embedded Christian intellectuals.
It’s worth considering, for our embarrassment and our instruction, that secular political intellectuals have perceived the sacral character of Empire more keenly than Christian thinkers still blinded by the smoke of Constantine’s incense. In his unfinished 1918 essay “The State,” Bourne recognized the modern state as a surrogate for the salvation once offered by the Church. Struck by the verbal and visual pageantry of war propaganda in world War I, Bourne concluded that the state was primarily “a mystical conception.” In a portrait of modern state fetishism which recalls Augustine, Bourne wrote that the state was the “invisible grace” of which the government was “the visible sign, the word made flesh.” Likening the State to an ecclesia, Bourne summarized what in theological terms would be its soteriology: “As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of men,” he wrote, “so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation.” Or damnation, he might have added, for the cultural and military strength of the modern nation-state enable it to dissolve or destroy all rival devotions. “The State is a jealous God, and will brook no rivals.” (Recall Hobbes—the commonwealth is “a mortal god.”) The State’s jealousy extended to the taking and sacrifice of war. By offering the individual a sense of existential completion through sacrifice on the battlefield, war “achieved almost his apotheosis” and preserved its own facsimile of eternal life.
Thus, war is not a “failure” of the state system; rather, it is the agonistic liturgy of the state’s soteriology. (Similarly, there was no “bungled” or “failed” diplomatic effort by the Bush regime. Imperial unilateralism was the only course ever considered.) Justified by President Bush as the culmination of a providential evil (the Romans, Augustine pointed out, needed the iniquity of their enemies to underscore their virtue), the invasion of Iraq is also a perverse imperial Eucharist, a sacrificial slaughter of human beings to the everlasting life of a deity. As Bourne put it in a maxim often quoted by Dorothy Day—and never cited, I might add, in all our grave and ponderous just war commentary—“war is the health of the state.” Among Christian theologians, William Cavanaugh has put it best. The modern state, he writes, is “a simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ” which offers “an alternative soteriology to that of the church.” “Extra republicam nulla salus,” as he wittily encapsulates this perverted theology.
What is to be done? First, we must demolish unrelentingly the illusions promulgated by Novak, Elshtain, Weigel, Neuhaus, and other embedded Christian intellectuals. Whether ignorant or heedless of American hubris, they sanitize their accounts of the imperial order; pervert the critical intelligence of Christian faith; and bivouac in the discursive parameters drawn by the corporate regime. Stale and obscurantist, their rendering unto Official Sources merits rebuke and inattention. It’s time for regime change among Christian intellectuals.
Second, we must recover the theological idiom of our Christian criticism; bring to a new fruition the critical potential of its political and cultural intelligence; and suggest, without prescribing, conceptions of the good life unbeholden to Caesar and Mammon. We have to be, in other words, disembedded intellectuals, freer in our thoughts than those who ride with the legions of Empire. While we must always insist on the theological integrity of our opposition to the Empire—remembering, with John Milbank, that modern theology’s greatest sin was its false modesty before secularity—we shouldn’t be chary about joining hands with the disembedded of other traditions. It should come as an inspiring scandal when, for instance, Marxists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude Empire with affirmative gestures, not only toward Augustine’s “two cities,” but toward the unlikely revolutionary figure of St. Francis. Discovering in poverty “the ontological power of a new society,” Francis, they write, “refused every instrumental discipline” and “posed a joyous life” against the skinflint and accumulative ways of power. In doing so, they remind us, Francis did not speak and act as a vox populi, a “representative” of people too mired in misery and resignation to know the truth of their oppression. Rather, Francis’ ministry was “not representational but constituent activity”—that is, it aimed to shape and not simply reflect the consciousness of his audience.
Francis is not a bad model with which to begin the recovery of our mission as intellectuals. I’ll confess that I have little or no idea what “sharing the condition of the poor” could mean for most of us who inhabit, however uneasily, the precincts of the middle class, other than some vague and ineffectual sentimentality about “simplicity” or “downshifting”. But we can discover a transformative “ontological power” in prayer, liturgy, and other practices of penance and charity, rightly understood as self-expenditure for the sake of the Gospel. If we’re academics, we can “refuse instrumental discipline” by disrespecting the protocols of professionalism—writing reflective essays rather than polished articles, for a start. And, at least in our writing, we can imagine a world free from the imperatives of incessant production and purchase. Indeed, the reconstruction of the Christian moral imagination—it’s redemption, that is, from the imperial, pecuniary prison into which it’s been thrown by Novak, Neuhaus, and the embedded scribblers at First Things—is indeed a necessary and joyous labor. Moreover, Francis and Augustine are models for Christian intellectuals who speak, not as “representatives” of a Church now in disarray, but from a wealth of intellectual, moral, and spiritual tradition which challenges all humankind—including if not especially “the faithful.”
But I’m afraid we have to remember Bourne’s reminder that any skepticism of imperial convention—even one leavened by Christian faith—will always appear as an insult. It should be an insult, and I see no reason why disembedded Christians should pull any punches for the sake of “civility.” Much of what passes among Americans, Christian or non-Christian, for argument, historical wisdom, and moral sense is sheer stupidity and avarice. However insistent they are on a “moral clarity” that disguises a will to obfuscation and forgetting, embedded Christians merely add to the corruption of moral imagination by supporting this immoral war, and they do so with the lamest standards of evidence and argument. Thus, our criticism needs, not only wide and impeccable erudition, but flair, wit, and a withering sarcasm in the face of venality and chauvinism. (Augustine displayed no pious decorousness when dissecting venerables like Cicero and Varro.)
In these times, when death is so readily offered as the solution to inconvenience, loss, injustice, or death, the affirmation of life is our most urgent and emancipating duty. From poverty, unemployment, and alienation, to abortion, capital punishment, and war, the Empire thrives, not only on death, but on our bogus ways of evading or sacralizing it. A freedom purchased with death is really a servitude; a homeland so secured is really a prison; a security so leveraged is really a terror. Worshippers of death in the midst of plenty, the imperial populace marches to the crack of the Devil’s riding crop. It’s time to emerge from the catacombs, shake the foundations, make a spectacle unto the world.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 1.1.