In The Kingdom and the Garden, Agamben frames this question of form-of-life around the fracture of eschatological time. Though unfair to Augustine's thought (though not his legacy), it is this separation between past golden age (Paradise) and future hope (Kingdom) which bleeds out the Present of any potential hope. Defined by suspension, pulled apart by two poles which seek fulfillment without overlap, the result is regime which erases hope while it proclaims itself fulfilled. It is the paradox of perfect imperfection, that nothing more could be done and There Is No Alternative, which absorbs all efforts to bring an end to the apparatus. It's not for nothing that traditionalist "retvrn" movements (oriented to restoring Paradise) and progressive utopia movements (oriented towards the Kingdom) end up in a similar place. Not a few trads will simply baptize a current flavor of regime as much as Marxist agitators will do the same. It does nothing to end the colonization of the mind, where the technique of discourse is not used, but uses, as the future of the Revolution or the past of Golden Age rapidly dissipate.
The problem is Humanity. Broken either by a fall from glory or innate weakness, both haunt the political theology of Christianity as well as its secular successors. The result is dire:
"The expulsion from paradise acquires from this perspective its true meaning: man is the living being that can corrupt his nature, but not heal it, thus consigning himself to a history and to an economy of salvation, in which the divine grace dispensed by the Church through its sacraments becomes essential" (31)
And thus Agamben is able to earlier claim that "not paradise, but its loss constitutes the original mythologize of Western culture, a sort of originally traumatize that has profoundly marked Christian and modern culture, condemning to failure every search for happiness on earth" (15). Of course this seems to exclude secular utopians, but Marxism (drawing from its Hegelian roots) requires its own redemptive narrative. Man may not have had a dramatic fall, but Genesis is appropriated for that state of primitive communism which must pass away so as to reconstitute itself in the glory of human works. Man must individuated through successive regimes of private property, hitting its zenith in industrial capitalism (or perhaps late-financial capitalism), until the Dictatorship of the Proletariat can bring about true Communism. Yet that future seems as fleeting as the past. The result is often a form of Progressivism, where things are as best as they are and will continue to move towards the inevitable conflict. In all cases, a false-present (strung out between past and future) becomes the absolute. The Status Quo justifies itself out of its own failures.
But what's the problem? How did this fall come about? Is it something wrong with human nature? And if not, how did sin enter the equation? How did the fallenness become present prior to its existence? Agamben offers several different theological approaches, but sets his eyes on Augustine. For the bishop of Hippo, in supposing in-built lack through the missing donum superadditum, put the question in a bind. For how could, as Augustine writes in De Natura et Gratia, "that which belongs properly to God [that is, human nature - cal] put itself forward as deprived of the grace of God?" The crisis is clear:
"Augustine most have recourse to the doubling of human nature worked out by sin: the possibility that was available to man in the paradisiac condition was lost when his nature was corrupted and estranged itself from grace, which he needs, like a sick body, as a remedy" (33)
Thus there's two forms of human nature: the human nature as God made (perfect and immaculate as a form) and human nature as it is stained. But how can the former have any purchase if the latter is lived experience? Anselm attempted to resolve the Augustinian fracture in human nature, but only brought it into further crisis. As he wrote in de conceptu virginali et de originali peccato: "That sin which is assumed in the origin itself is called 'original' and can also be called 'natural', not because it belongs to the essence of his nature, but because it is assumed together with it because of its corruption" (36). Yet this sin was entirely personal (an act of Adam properly). So how can this action cause an ontological change in Human nature? It was treated as original because of its natural effects, but how could this be? How did it have the power to effect a change the world in the blink of an eye?
As a detour: much of Agamben's analysis (reflecting his use of his sources) reveals the importance of covenantal theology. While not nearly important in much medieval theology, the covenantal relationship could elucidate terms and conditions that don't reflect questions of natures as much as relations. Thus, in Scripture, the question of God's presence is not a metaphysical one. It's not what it means to be, or not be, in the presence of God. But as is evident from the text, it's a relational question (as much as one says that "she is distant" when your spouse acts cold or disinterested; these are not metaphor, but perhaps the primary use of spatial language). However, this emphasis on covenant (to this extent) would require much revision to medieval metaphysical questions. Yet one may still receive the fruit of their efforts. For just as a rich sacramentology emerges out of the covenantal fidelity in the Reformed tradition (apart from the opus operatum of most transubstantion), so too does the relation (the form-of-life through Law & its perfection) offer an equally rich appreciation of original sin and nature. But I leave this off for now.
But what if the problem is not so much a historical one, but a theoretical one. Agamben cites several church fathers, from Origen to Eriugena, that mark out the question of Paradise as a symbolic one. There was no literal wooded fatherland from which our ancestors departed in exile. Rather, it's a state of existence, it is human nature itself. Here Agamben quotes Eriugena's Periphyseon:
"With the word 'paradise', divine scripture has expressed in a figurative way the human nature made in the image of God. The true plantation of God is this nature that he created in Eden in the image and likeness of himself [...]. The fertile land of this plantation was a potentially immortal body [...] And the water of this land capable of all forms was the sensitive faculty of an incorruptible body" (66)
In other words, Paradise is not a question of Past and the current state of human relations. Truly, if Paradise was restored, it was mankind's immortality in body and soul. And thus the glorious return is neither to be found in the past, or even the future, but in the present. It may a vision of what could be but never was. The telos toward which man strives is thus not supernatural at all, but nature itself!
"if the Garden is only human nature, then man has never entered into his nature or has always already exited from it. That man has not yet even entered into paradise, that what scripture narrates about sin and the fall should be understood as having happened outside paradise, this means that sin happened outside human nature, that human nature was never contaminated by it" (66-67)
This, for Agamben, represents a total rejection of the Augustinian tradition within Western metaphysics. Eruigena embraced Pelagius, not Augustine, in the valorization of nature and not its corruption through an internal split between the ideal nature in God's mind and the corrupted nature of lived historical experience. Therefore, Eruigena was not far from the later Spinoza. Sin was not in nature, but in deviation from nature in man's potential to not realize his nature. Nature is not stained or punished, but the human will which chooses to stay outside, or be exiled, from Eden. Thus Agamben juxtaposed two rival paradigms running through Western thought, from which I quote at length:
"In the Augustinian tradition, which wound up prevailing in the Latin Church, nature and sin are indissolubly linked and human nature is irrevocably split into an originally nature, now lost, and a natura lapsa. Paradise is, consequently, a real historical place, where man was placed by God, but from which he exited forever when sin contaminated his nature. [...]The only possibility of restoring in some measure the original nature, which is incurably corrupted, is consigned to a history and an economy of salvation - in which the Church works through the sacraments - and to another paradise, the heavenly one, which does not coincide with the first and is reserved only - in the future and never in the present - to the elect. The natura lapsa continues and will continue to exist in hell, where it eternally suffers its penalty.
In the second model, which is that of Eriugena, paradise - that is, human nature - is completely alien to sin and the history of the fall narrated by Genesis must be understood to have happened outside of it. There is not properly a history of salvation, because human nature is always already saved." (72-73)
Here, one can take exception with Agamben's way of framing things. Certainly, he is not wrong to assess a larger trajectory, especially as the concept of "grace" became an increasingly abstract (and somewhat spooky) metaphysical substance. I have limited experience with Medieval theology, and Agamben himself is not offering a recrudescent Renaissance sneer against the Scholastics. As clear in this work and others, Agamben draws quite a bit from Scotus and Scotist metaphysics. It would be better to frame this problem around what, in fact, is human nature. If human nature, as detailed in Scripture, is the Image of God, then this nature itself is departed when it ceases to do so. Thus, the Augustinian frame is not the problem, so much as what could become of it. The argument between Pelagius and Augustine was not nature vs grace, but the definition of these terms. If Augustine understood grace as union with Christ (which I think a stronger argument can be made, sans some slippage in his texts), than there's no problem. The return to Nature is the image of God. And this image is none other than Christ, revealed in the pages of the Gospels.
Nevertheless, there is an Augustinian reification which takes place, where the eschatological urgency of Christian living formed the basis of a world-order. Christendom may have been a betrayal of this openness, the flattening of time between an ever-fleeting Past (whether of Paradise or the Apostles) and Future End (seemingly deferred indefinitely). The Augustinian Sixth Age did not have any particular parameters, and thus the Age of the Church mirrored, in someways, the End of History bleated throughout the Twentieth Century. But the Middle Ages (and the Spirit of God working through them) revolted from this confinement. Just as much as Islamisms, the truculent remains of the Communist Second World, and Christian Fundamentalists defied the 1990s as simply the End, so too did movements like the Spiritual Franciscans arise to stir up the mind. Whatever their errors or exaggerations, they reflected a revolt against this top-down, supranational, flattening. There Is No Alternative may be a secularized Sixth Age, but it's less a description than a proscription. It's an ideological spear thrust at the regime's enemies, not a recognition of what has come about:
"With the Augustinian neutralization of the thousand-year Kingdom, historiography eliminated from itself a deeply heterogenous element, which would have introduced into chronology an irreducible rupture" (146)
And Agamben draws upon no better Medieval critic of this mechanism of separation, flattening, and capture than Dante. As a White Ghibilline, a partisan against the Emperor but equally opposed to papal worldly gain, Dante saw in Human nature and in Human civilization the potential for that original, paradisiac, justice which was simultaneously most human and divine. Dante exalts human civilization, even the goodness of a pagan like Virgil. Yet he also recognizes the original corruption of the Fall, the breakaway from human nature. There is no contradiction, for it is precisely in God becoming a man to make satisfaction for man's sins that God exercised his authority to pardon. But in this, the final deed is done: human nature is open:
"the incarnation of Christ is perfectly sufficient for the cancellation of sin and his position with respect to the sacraments - which he never mentions in the Comedy, except with reference to the corruption of the Church - is instead comparable to that of those - whom Aquinas takes care to contradict - who affirm that 'there was no need for any sacraments after Christ came" (94)
Thus, for Dante (and the alternative Western tradition of sin and nature), the Incarnation unleashed a whole new mode of life. Paradise is possible in this world, as much as it is Human nature and that has been totally rectified through the Word taking flesh. His form-of-life is available, manifest through the Gospels, echoed through his disciples (canonically formed in the life/teaching of Ss. Paul, Peter, James, John, Jude, et al., but less authoritative in the lives of the saints).
Again, one can take exception with Agamben from a wider view of Christian tradition. Within the Reformed tradition especially, the sacraments are not so much "the medicine of immortality" or a need to trans-temporally revisit and reappropriate the meritorious sacrifice of Christ. Instead, it is a ritual incorporation of the life. To eat the Supper is not so much a return to the Cross, but a return to the Last Supper. It is a public memorial of the Christ (or, in Agamben's argument, restored/opened Human nature), and in partaking one is seated with Christ. Such is not a mere intellectual act, as if one must engage in a series of mental acts to gain the benefits of such. Rather, the potency of the symbol is in the logic of a ritual. By eating and drinking, you choose to live as God did, knowing the joy of divine friendship and mercy. The potency of this signification is in covenant, a constitutive speech act of promise, reward, and blessing. What makes the New Covenant eternally new is not that it is an appendage, upgrade, or sequel to the "Old Covenant", but that is makes the entirety of Israel inoperative. The fulfillment is on both sides, it is something that one simply appears into, as in media res, not something one begins. It is like a marriage which no longer stands under the threat of sanction, of divorce or separation. Rather, it's as if one simply appears amidst the Marriage of the Lamb. One may step out (or be thrown out), but the wedding vows are already said and done. And like a marriage, reflecting ritual and not substance-chemical logic, it is not a thing, but a relation. The ceremony is not something that has material properties or a temporal quality (e.g. a battery being charged, and examinable as having 73% capacity). Thus, Dante may be said (tongue-in-cheek) to be a Protestant avant la lettre, or at least offering an alternative vision that some (not all!) Reformers embraced.
However, the point is not to make Agamben (or even Dante, really) a proto-Protestant. For many of the Reformers reinstantiated the problem, which Agamben clarified once again:
"The earthly paradise - as we have seen - is the place where theologians pose the problem of human nature. And this happens by capturing human nature in apparatus that condemns every attempt to define it to a split. This split is that between nature and grace. We are not dealing with a simple opposition: the two terms in reality form a system, within which they presuppose one another and constantly refer to each other in a relationship of inseparable division" (107)
It is precisely in that Human cannot return to Paradise, yet awaits it transfigured reappearance in the future Kingdom, that allows this ideological machine to function. Grace is necessary for a restored Human nature, but does that then mean Human nature is grace itself? Certainly not, but the idealized Human nature then is held apart from the historical and experienced Human nature, fallen nature, which man labors under. And how can this nature be restored? Through grace, confected through the offices and rites of the Church. It's almost as if life itself was theorized in relation to the undead, that Humanity came about as a categorical distinction in relation to a primordial quasi-other (not unlike the schematic paradigm of control in Attack on Titan). Agamben's example is more pedestrian (though more biblical):
"Nature is now defined by the non-nature that it has lost, just as the body that has been made nude is defined by the clothes of which it has been stripped. Nature and grace, nudity and clothes together constitute a singular apparatus, whose elements seem autonomous and separable and yet, at least insofar as it concerns nature, do not remain unchanged after their separation. This means that nature - exactly like simple nudity - is, in reality, inaccessible: there is only its being made nude, only corrupt nature exists" (114-115)
And it's precisely this corrupted nature which is captured in the apparatus, distinguished out as the primary focus of ecclesiastical life. Pure Nature may not exist (in Thomas it almost operates as a theoretical supposition, grace-like, to frame discussions of nature), but it is necessary in order to extract out corrupt nature which must be dealt with. This then justifies a regime which draws its raison d'être from the problem it poses. Agamben is not so much interested in some state of rebellion from Mother Church, as many Leftist mental insects could hear in this account. Rather, it's in the secularization of this paradigm, where defections in Human nature (competition, violence, jealousy, conservative disposition to place and people, etc) need exposition and uprooting. The State (in its martial Paternal or its nutritive Maternal visage) replaces the Church as arbiter and manager of this apparatus, where man is corralled to participate of its goods and services in order to begin the process of correction for Human nature. But this perfection is temporally dislocated and non-existent. Thus, the regime of distilling grace into commodity form is not so much the production of salvation, but damnation:
"The distinctions between 'animal body' and 'spiritual body' and between naturalia and gratuita do nothing by codify this insufficiency, just as that between natura integra and natura corrupta attests is irremediable permanence in human nature. The natura integra is something from which it suffices to subtract its clothing of grace for it to exhibit its faulty nudity, and sin is nothing but the operator of a defectiveness that was inscribed in it from the beginning. The earthly paradise, from which man, for this reason, could only be expelled, is not a cipher of human nature's perfection, so much as, instead, its constitutive lack" (125)
Again, this parallels the modern fracture of the human body between its civilized (clothed) form and its bare (naked) exposure. Social Democracy, in its liberal exaltation of tolerance, claims no power for the State over its broad multi-cultural, socially plural, form (though the Popperian "intolerance of intolerance" allows it to banish its ideological boogeymen). Everyone is allowed to live as they deign. However, the State does claim authority over material reality, the regulation and distribution of goods and services, the protection and jurisdiction over corporeal life. Thus, sexuality and gender fluidity are outside the bounds of restriction, yet highly police measures swoop down to prevent the spread of a pandemic. This fracture is what results in the Camp, because it is the exaggeration of these defects that define life in the current state of Mass Democracy. The logic of the Nazi camp was not civilizational, but biological; it was hygiene, not immorality. It was the full unrolling of nationalist logic over The People as a single organism. The nature of people - eating, drinking, celebrating, loving - is sublimated, as bare life becomes the very justification to destroy (defective) Human nature in the name of preserving it.
However, as clear above, there's an alternative to this apparatus, and its operative powers: the Messianic. As clear in The Time that Remains (requiring its own review), Christ does not introduce a successor regime, but a truly new reality here-and-now. He does so through destroying the apparatus through its inoperativity. Such happens, primarily, through the Millennial Reign. Agamben cites Irenaeus' far more sanguine defense of Human nature's restoration in time:
"In Irenaeus' theology of the Kingdom, temporal beatitude on earth must precede eternal beatitude, because in it what is at stake is the restoration of human nature to its original integrity" (139)
To clarify: Agamben is not offering a valorization of "whatever is, is" or "let it all hangout" philosophy of the present. Such abandons the Human vocation of thought, reflection, and joy for dumb bestial apathy and comfort. Rather, Humanity flourishes, is happy (in that classical sense), when it can exercise the full potential of its Nature. And this is only done when its perfection in released in the now-time that the Christ effects. It is not a quantitative transformation (a new kind of time, one more experience, one more stage), but qualitative. We transform in the twinkle of an eye because the relation of all things transforms. The effective power of the Resurrection is not its juxtaposition, as one pole, from the parousia, for which mankind still awaits. Thus Agamben hand waives the entire "delay" problem that modern theologians and biblical scholars have fixated upon. There may indeed be an end (Agamben is uninterested, if not agnostic, about it), a final day of reckoning, but it is not the hope upon which Human nature depends. Rather, the fullness of Resurrected life, the Power of the Kingdom and the Glory, breaks into Now.
Agamben concludes with a summarization of the problem and the way out:
"the Garden and the Kingdom result from the split of one sole experience of the present and that in the present they can therefore be rejoined. The happiness of human being on earth is stretched between these polar extremes. And human nature is not a pre-existent and imperfect reality, which must be inscribed through grace into an economy of salvation, but it is what always appears here and now in the coincidence - that is, in the falling together, of paradise and Kingdom. Only the Kingdom gives access to the Garden, but only the Garden renders the Kingdom thinkable. Or rather: we grasp human nature historical only through a politics, but this latter, in its turn, has no content other than paradise - which is to say, in Dante's words, 'the beatitude of this life'." (152)
To iterate, the above has nothing to do with questions of historicity. Though Agamben may think me bone-headed, there's no reason to deny a historical Eden or a historical New Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the metaphysical point remains distinct. For it is precisely Eden and Jerusalem which must correspond to form the very basis of a lived life today. We cannot understand the full unveiling of the joys and freedom of Human nature without Christ and His Kingdom (the blessed and free life, so arranged as the coming politics). Yet simultaneously, it's only an attempt to recognize Human nature as such that opens our eyes to see its fullness in the flesh. Politics and virtue, sociality and anthropology, must go together to form the very basis of theology. Christian is the recognition of humanity, not its upgrade. It is not a new identity, or potentiality, superadded to otherwise defective Human nature. This permitted the destruction of infidels in the past, the same way the secular social-democratic homo economicus allows a justification for the eradication (far more ruthless than anything from church history) of those who are outside of this scope.
The Kingdom of God is within you.
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