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{"id":17988,"date":"2016-03-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2806"},"modified":"2016-03-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T00:00:00","slug":"ascension-and-absence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/03\/ascension-and-absence\/","title":{"rendered":"Ascension and Absence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Robert Farneti (Mimetic Politics<\/a>) observes that Rene Girard refused to describe his project as theology. Farneti thinks Girard was right: He wasn\u2019t writing theology but \u201ca theory of man.\u201d He writes, \u201cGirard\u2019s mimetic theory culminates in a radical rejection of theology, in particular of its claims to articulate a final and comprehensive discourse on the apocalyptic institution of the Kingdom of Christ\u201d (104). By rejecting theology, Girard aims to \u201cdefend a more straightforward access to the Gospel\u201d (104).<\/p>\n

Farneti thinks this is a mistake. In order to formulate a political theory for a desacralized (= de-sacrificial) age, and to resist re-sacralization, one needs theology, a political theology in the Schmittian sense. This is not the same as \u201cdivine politics,\u201d which refers to the \u201cauthority of God\u2019s word in this world, and therefore is related with \u2018divine command theories.\u2019\u201d Political theology \u201cis concerned with the kind of politics that takes place in the absence of direct and intelligible indications from a transcendent God\u201d (100). Political theology is for a politics after the wrenching early-modern separation of heaven and earth. But that separation doesn\u2019t simply remove God from politics. Political theology \u201cis politics after God left.\u201d But, unlike Girard, it is a politics that recognizes that \u201cGod remains as a problem,\u201d a political<\/em> problem (100). <\/p>\n

What Farneti thinks Girard needs is a theological justification for desacralization, a \u201cpolitical theology of the empty tomb\u201d or, as he prefers, a political theology of the ascension. Hobbes helps him out here: \u201cAscension lived a quite minor existence within earlier Christian theology,\u201d he claims, \u201cand it was Hobbes who turned it into a crucial theological as well as political<\/em> tenet. For Hobbes, the ascension marked the beginning of the \u201cregeneration,\u201d \u201cthe time of hope and anticipation when human beings were left alone with their projects of building, in absentia<\/em>, a polity emptied of every aspiration whatsoever of easily<\/em> instituting the Kingdom of Christ\u201d (114-115). Ascension thus provides a basis for a political theology of God\u2019s absence, but one that founds that absence in a theological affirmation.<\/p>\n

From this angle, Book 3 of Leviathan<\/em> is an effort to placate England\u2019s warring factions \u201cby neutralizing, in Carl Schmitt\u2019s words, \u2018Christ\u2019s effectiveness\u2019 (Wirkung Christi<\/em>), namely the actual and efficient presence of Christ in the interim of \u2018regeneration.\u2019 Hobbes\u2019s theological enemies, for whom the kingdom of Christ had already begun and \u2018was a political entity liable to trigger a civil war,\u2019 strongly supported the idea of a mystical and \u2018eucharistic\u2019 presence of Christ \u2018even in this world.\u2019 They failed to acknowledge that in the time in which they lived \u2013 the time after Christ\u2019s ascension \u2013 human beings had to take their bearings within a world emptied of the indications and constraints of a substantially present deity\u201d (117-118).<\/p>\n

Farneti\u2019s critique of Girard strikes home, but his treatment of ascension is wrong historically and theologically. Historically: For a church that minimized ascension, there are an awful lot of Christ Pantocrators on the ceilings of churches east and west. More particularly, as Hobbes surely knew even if Farneti doesn\u2019t, Hobbes\u2019s theological and political opponents \u2013 Puritans in particular \u2013 placed enormous stress on the ascension but to the opposite effect. In this, they simply followed Paul, for whom the elevation of Jesus didn\u2019t neutralize Him but was a sign of judgment (Act 17). And here is the theological issue with Farneti: Ascension means a kind of absence, but it\u2019s the absence of a king to whom all owe allegiance. It\u2019s Psalm 2: Having installed the king on Zion, the Lord calls on kings and judges to tremble in repentance. Psalm 2 is no brief for political theology or desacralization. <\/p>\n

As Hobbes recognized, the politics of the ascension is entangled with Christ\u2019s eucharistic presence and therefore with the presence \u201ceven in this world\u201d of a polity that anticipates the Kingdom of Christ. That polity is the ultimate target of Hobbes\u2019s, and Farneti\u2019s, political theology.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"