Sacred State? Explorations of Civil Theology in Eric Voegelin and Joseph Ratzinger
This lecture I delivered on August 17th, 2024 as part of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Symposium on Religion in Public Life hosted at LSU, sponsored by the Eric Voegelin Institute. Other lecturers were Ascension Parish District Attorney Jean Paul Robert and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute in the Department of Political Science at LSU, Dr James Stoner.
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Introduction
Man, in
his spiritual nature, is capable of symbolic meaning; that is to say, he
expresses his relationship with a transcendent reality. This is evidenced by
the many cave drawings and rituals in human societies since the dawn of time. The
word “meaningful” is inherently symbolic because in calling some event
“meaningful” we are saying it’s more than just a sign, like a traffic signal,
but rather that it points to a higher order, and presupposes a person who
“means.” Telling a friend his or her gift “meant a lot” is saying it’s more
than just a convenient artifact, but that it somehow also affirms my place in
the universe. The gesture is thus experienced as symbolic.
Voegelin and Truth Representations
Voegelin very much wanted to find out what relation a society’s symbols have to its rise and fall. This was an urgent topic for the young university of Vienna grad who saw his German fatherland descending into the chaos of the Third Reich, which had a whole cadre of meaningful symbols, but, why did they seem to disintegrate the fabric of the nation? Here we may introduce the concept of truth, simply defined as the correspondence between mind and reality. Voegelin understood that a society’s symbols had to be experienced as “true” if they were to hold it together; I nuance the word “true” not because I hold cultural symbols up against the measuring stick of revelation, but rather because said symbolizations—the myths and rituals but also the political structures that follow from them—were experienced as coherent with the transcendent reality, and therefore remained catalysts for the order of that society. This is what Voegelin means when he says a society is the representative of a transcendent truth.[1]
He noticed that the structuring to represent transcendent truth had discernible com-monalities not just among a few ancient civilizations, but among all of them:
The empire is a cosmic analogue, a little world reflecting the order of
the great, comprehensive world… the great ceremonies of the empire represent
the rhythm of the cosmos; festivals and sacrifices are a cosmic liturgy, a
symbolic participation of the cosmion in the cosmos; and the ruler himself
represents the society, because on earth he represents the transcendent power which
maintains cosmic order.[2]
Voegelin called this the “cosmological symbolization”: heaven and earth formed a cosmic unit. In such an arrangement, the ruler and the priest were often the same. The measure of order was the myth. To state the obvious, the notion of church and state separation did not and could not exist in the ancient world.[3] History is not problematic from this standpoint; it’s not even really a thing, because we see time as linear, while the ancients saw it as cyclical: the myths followed the pattern of the seasons.
The crack that would shatter this worldview came with Israel, and Voegelin had the courage to claim that history only begins with Israel (not with Egypt, India, or China, which are all much older).[4] Why? Because starting with Abraham, the revelation of transcendent God breaking into this world had the structure not of static information, but of promise-response-fulfilment: meaningful time was no longer cyclical, but now it’s a vector pointing to the unknown future. This is why Voegelin says that for the Hebrews history becomes a form of existence as opposed to every other civilization, and because of this “differentiation of consciousness” (his preferred description of revelation: he was an agnostic after all), time would become irreversibly linear.
Leaving the phenomenon of Israel aside for the moment, there developed, in Greece, yet another rival to the cosmological symbolism. It hinged upon the discovery that the point of contact with the transcendent was the ψυχή, the soul—not the king—and its right ordering would come by loving the sophon—wisdom: hence philo-sophia. Now, since it is the rightly ordered human soul that is the measure of social order, Voegelin calls it the anthropological symbolization of truth.[5] It got traction among the Greeks, who then wrote cathartic tragedies to foster virtue (or at least that was the idea) and produced such a rare breed as Hereclitus, Plato and Aristotle. But this kind of truth representation was too delicate to catch anywhere outside of Athens: idols die hard.[6]
A final evolution in truth representation appeared with the Christians settling down in Rome, and Voegelin calls it soteriological (read: salvific). That city was the first to be the battleground for all three symbolizations—cosmological, anthropological and soteriological—trying to gain the upper hand. The novelty the Christians brought was that with the Incarnation, the hitherto invisible measure became visible in Christ, whose Kingdom was “not of this world”; man’s transcendent destiny could no longer be repre-sented by an entity of political power, but only by spiritual power, embodied in the Church. The emperor must only serve God, not represent him. From this moment on, temporal society has nothing to offer man with respect to salvation—there is no civil theology, since it had been radically de-divinized.[7] It is beyond the scope of this lecture to consider what happens when the temporal ruler of a people no longer holds their religious and ultimate loyalty, since that is claimed by Christ, who is not of this world. It is the story of the tumultous relationshiop between Church and state in Europe and comprises the most interesting second half of Voegelin’s New Science of Politics where he says: “The specifically modern problems of representation are connected with the re-divinization of society.”[8]
Meanwhile, it takes little imagination to envision what kind of pushback must have come from pagan Rome when things start going badly: you Christians refuse to sacrifice, so now the empire is imploding! We can imagine how the catastrophic fall of Rome to Alaric in 401ad would seem to point the finger of blame at the subversive Christians who angered the gods; this was the event that sent the bishop of Hippo into damage control by trying to rescue the narrative from the pagans through his twenty-two-volume work: De Civitate Dei—The City of God. But out of this scenario emerges the first theoretical discussion of “civil theology,” and we do well to examine why Christianity has traditionally viewed it with unmitigated hostility.
To give some context: if Augustine was going to score an intellectual win against the pagans, he had to tackle one of their champions. As there weren’t too many stellar representatives at that time, he looked for someone to argue with from Roman history, and found Marcus Terentius Varro: a renowned scholar of the republic; that he had died four hundred years earlier didn’t bother Augustine one bit—what mattered was that Varro wrote a justification for the polytheistic configuration of the state. Remembering the cosmological truth model we mentioned earlier, Varro was 80% of that mindset, adding the following sophistication. There were, he wrote, three kinds of theology (or ways of understanding the divine): theologia mythica, or the myths sung by the poets, the theologia naturalis, i.e. the study by the philosophers into what’s real and what’s not; and the theologia civilis: the official state cult or religion of the masses, whom the authorities guided away from the philosophers and toward the poets.[9]
This is why Augustine lumps the mythical and civil theologies together under the category of fabulosa (pertaining to fables).[10] Worship and truth were entirely separate categories. Now, Ratzinger differs with Voegelin’s account on only one point; while the latter thinks the two categories of Roman religion once again become three since Christianity is the “supernatural” theology in addition to the original “natural” and “civil,” Ratzinger believes Christianity belongs squarely under the “natural” category, since this philosophical truth-seeking possessed the ability to dismantle the myths.[11] This is understandable, as he intended to underscore Christianity’s ultimate demythologizing effect—that Christians were accused of atheism is readily overlooked by secular academics today.
Ratzinger vs. Kamlah
Voegelin rightly points to “The City of God” as representing the end of an epoch. But does its ancient reasoning still make sound contributions to church-state relations today? The eventual Pope Benedict XVI was convinced that it does, and the present shift of analysis from Christianity as a social phenomenon to the Church in particular intends to show how. But perhaps we will find answers in an unexpected place.
I would like to draw attention to a long forgotten lecture given by then Father Joseph Ratzinger in a Paris symposium on Augustine in 1954.[12] Outside of his dissertation, it is the only recorded instance where he gives substantial attention to Augustine’s De Civitate Dei – The City of God. This attention was attracted at the time by the ambitious proposal of Wilhelm Kamlah in his Christianity and Historicity,[13] seeking to unlock the meaning of Augustine’s multi-volume work. The barely 27-year-old Fr Ratzinger, who just happened to have published his dissertation on the Augustinian concept of the Church, found in Kamlah a worthy intellectual grappling partner, and this section will look closely at Ratzinger’s lecture responding to Kamlah’s book.
The focal point of every speculation on this subject is: what exactly is the City of God: the precise frontiers of Christendom or the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse? Ratzinger identified two popular strands of interpretation of the term “city of God,” each dominating its respective time period. The Medieval era understandably favored the political implications for a Christian state; this became known as the “theocratic” option. By contrast, the 19th and 20th centuries favored an “idealist” interpretation in which neither the city of God nor the city of man were regarded as historical entities. Part of the reason Wilhelm Kamlah’s book caught Ratzinger’s eye was because it did not settle for either of these interpretations but proposed a third called eschatological. What does this mean? If eschatology is the study of the end of the world, then such an outlook will ignore the historical element, because if the meaning of something is all about the next life, then it’s not very concerned with this life!
Before settling upon any particular characterization of the Church, Ratzinger knew that historical context, more than anything, anchors you to reality—it’s the context that he would become known for. He noticed that the term “city of God”—πόλις τοῦ θεοῦ—in both Eastern and Western traditions prior to Augustine, was always a Christian allegory of the Old Testament to Jerusalem in contrast to Babylon. If the book title Civitate Dei contains these biblical connotations, he thought, then what did the single word civitas mean for Augustine? Only one thing: Rome. It was the only remaining polis of the ancient world, characterized by an unbroken unity of the political and the religious. The citizen of the polis sees himself as radically bound to its gods: as the cult went, so the city’s fortune follows.
Returning to the term civitas, Ratzinger noticed, as we said, that this word had a deeply Roman connotations, with all its false gods, as opposed to the “place” where the true God was worshipped. It therefore, allowed Augustine to set up a comparison: civitas Romanorum (or such) relates to civitas Dei as letter relates to spirit.[14] If you are hearing biblical overtones, you’re on target; it’s an echo from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “the letter kills but the spirit gives life.”[15] This is an insightful assertion because it opens up a whole new relationship between the two terms: all worldly cities are civitates secundum litteram—according to the letter—they’re man-made, they have to exist, but on their own they always end up the spiritual equivalent of Babylon. But there is another community, says Ratzinger, also called civitas, but secundum spiritum: the ecclesia, the Church. The letter is not evil in itself: it only “kills” if you stubbornly remain in it. The lesson for the Corinthians not to cling to Jewish laws remained a valid lesson for Augustine to the Romans: don’t cling to your idols; they may have originally given you a sense of belonging to something great, but they were meant to give way to citizenship in the Kingdom of God brought by Christ, and that is the ecclesia. Can you appreciate the intricacy of the paradigm shift that Augustine is pulling off? He’s not letting us think of the “Church” as though it were a better version of Rome, somewhere a little further east; no: it’s an altogether different order of thing, incommensurate with this world.
In the wake of this exegesis of the term civitas Dei, Ratzinger returns to examine Kamla’s hangup with the eschatology characterization. At the risk of oversimplifying, this view is one that separates itself from the concrete and objective in favor of the existential and subjective, not very far from the idealist camp. For Kamlah, a Lutheran, you have either an eschatological community called by God to holiness awaiting rapture, or a concrete institution called a “Church” that gets its hands dirty, takes its place in world history, and has its magical rituals called “sacraments.” He sees these two different kinds of Christianity are irreconcilable, and you can tell he much prefers the eschatological to the sacramental, since the former feels more Lutheran and the latter feels much too Catholic!
But Kamlah has to explain how the same Church transitioned from white to black, from eschatological to sacramental, and he achieves this by pointing to an event in 217ad called the “Callistus Turn.” Pope Callistus issued an edict declaring that he would readmit to communion those who had done penance after committing grave sins—including adultery and murder. Kamlah thought that “by this act the Church formally abandoned her venerable claim to be the community of the holy.”[16] In other words, he saw a definitive rupture between personal and sacramental holiness, from it being relational to something transactional.
The problem, says Ratzinger, is that Augustine saw this earthy, sacramental Church as the same communion of saints, personally called by God. There are a couple pieces of evidence for this: Augustine’s own understanding of civitas, which gives shape to his whole work, implies that the state cult is the beating heart of the city; allegorically, it’s the factor that separates the city of man with its polytheistic sacrifice from the one place of true sacrifice, symbolized by Jerusalem. Therefore, the one civitate Dei, the city whose animating force is its sacrificial cult to the living God, combined with Augustine’s description that it is “built by the love of God to the contempt of self,”[17] both coincide: its sacrifice is consummated by the love of God.
To summarize Ratzinger’s inquiry: he revealed that the genius of Augustine’s description of the Church as the actual civitate Dei lies in that it embodies the tension of both the eschatological and sacramental poles. First, the eschatological pole, by showing how the ecclesia—the city of God—cannot be reduced to one more society among others; rather, it relates to other “cities” as spirit to letter and so exists and operates on a different level from other societies in this world—indeed we can call it alien to this world. It’s this fact, he says, that “fundamentally excludes, both the nationalization of the church and the ecclesiastization of the state.”[18]
The Catholic worldview is loaded with instances of et…et: “both…and” similar to what we just saw: body and soul, nature and grace, God and man; not only one reality or the other, but both. We call it the language of analogy, which can feel often like walking a knife edge, but it amazingly conserves both humility before the mystery as well as our need for sanity. Augustine understood that, and our deep dive into his thinking via Ratzinger succeeded in inoculating us against erroneous thinking regarding the nature of the Church: just like her Spouse, it is fully entrenched in man’s historical situation, and simultaneously beyond it; it labors tirelessly to build a society where the peace of Christ reigns through justice and love,[19] yet is entirely autonomous of the historical instances of “Christendom.”
Conclusion
To
summarize our findings: we’ve allowed Voegelin to walk us through the different
truth representations that gave form to the social order of their respective
civilizations: cosmological, anthropological and soteriological, and the
radical de-divinization brought by the latter; we witnessed the clash of truth
symbolizations played out in the pages of Augustine’s City of God as it
articulated the withering effect of faith in Christ upon any civil theology. The
problematic vacuum of temporal authority, from that moment onward, would simmer
just beneath the surface of European civilization.
While Voegelin’s analysis addressed Christianity qua society, Ratzinger—through his dialogue with Wilhelm Kamlah—proceeded to address Christianity qua Church, and our foray into ecclesiology shifted the analysis to the nature of the Church in the world, concluding that it can neither substitute nor meld with it.
This, of course, opens wide the door to the questions of civil subservience, patriotism, and inculturation. The 1965 Conciliar Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae) represented a watershed moment for the Church that no longer held out expectations for a confessional state, without condemning its possibility; Voegelin’s definition of theocracy remains untested and indeed unimaginable in modern times.[20] One thing is certain, however; short of the New Jerusalem in the world to come, there is no sacred state.
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Bibliography
Augustine. The City of
God, trans. Marcus Dods. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.
First Series, Vol. 2. ed. Philip Schaff. Buffalo, NY: Christian
Literature Publishing Co., 1887.
Footnotes
[1] Cf. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: an Introduction, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1952, 75.
[2] Cf. Op. cit. 54. Cf.
also Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans.
Willard Trask, (Harper & Row: New York, 1959).
[3] “Men did
not learn to control the forces of nature, to make the earth fruitful as a
practical task of economic organization...they viewed it rather as a religious
rite by which they co-operated as priests or hierophants in the great cosmic
mystery of the fertilization and growth of nature. The mystical drama, annually
renewed, of the Mother-Goddess and her dying and reviving son and spouse, was,
at the same time, the economic cycle of ploughing and seed time and harvest by
which the people lived. And the priest was not so much the organising ruler of
a political community as the priest and religious head of his people, who
represented the god himself and stood between the goddess and her people,
interpreting to them the divine will...” (Christopher Dawson, Enquiries into
Religion and Culture, [Washington: CUA Press, 2009], 80).
[4] “Israel
alone had history as an inner form, while the other societies existed in the
form of the cosmological myth.” (Eric Voegelin, Order and History vol. I:
Israel and Revelation, ed. Maurice Hogan in: The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, [Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 2001], 165).
[5] Cf.
Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 61-75.
[6] Solon of Athens: “It is
very hard to know the unseen measure of right judgment; and yet it alone contains
the right boundaries of all things.” (Elegy and Iambus, “Loeb Classical
Library,” vol. I, Solon 16). Voegelin notes Solon’s predicament regarding the
Olympian gods that wouldn’t go away: “as a statesman he lived in the tension
between the unseen measure and the necessity of incarnating it in the eunomia
of society.” (New Science of Politics, 68).
[7] Cf.
Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 108.
[8] Idem. 106
[9] Cf. De
Civitate Dei, book VI, ch. 5.
[10] “...let them
attempt with all the subtlety they can to distinguish the civil theology from
the fabulous….They are aware that that theatrical and fabulous theology hangs
by the civil, and is reflected back upon it from the songs of the poets as from
a mirror.” (De Civitate Dei, book VI, ch. 9).
[11] Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, Truth
and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, (San Francisco:,
Ignatius, 2004) 168.
[12] Joseph
Ratzinger, “Herkunft und Sinn der Civitas-Lehre Augustins:
Begenung und Auseinanderset-zung mit Wilhelm Kalmlah.” Augustinus Magister:
Congrès International Augustinien. vol. 2: Communications, Paris:
Études Augustiniennes, 1954, 965-980 (henceforth, Herkunft).
[13] Wilhelm Kamlah, Christentum
und Geschichtlichkeit: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Christentums und zu
Augustins “Bürgerschaft Gottes” Stuttgart: W.
Kohlhammer, 1951.
[15] 2 Cor.
3:6
[16] Kamlah, Christentum, 117.
[17] Augustine, The City of God, vol. II, trans. Marcus Dods, New
York, Hafner, 1948, 47.
[18] Ratzinger,
Herkunft, 980, my translation and italics.
[19] “[Peace]
needs to be implored from God as his gift, but it also needs to be built day by
day with his help, through works of justice and love.” (John Paul II, Message
for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, 1 January 2000, 2.
[20] “theocracy
not meaning a rule by the priesthood but the recognition by the ruler of the
truth of God.” (The New Science of Politics, 85).
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