"For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in." (Romans 11:25)
A core concept in the current world is "office". Unlike a law, an office cannot be broken or destroyed. An office has an immortal authority to carry out certain actions that are efficacious. A man may be removed from office, be unworthy of office, or abuse his office, but the office itself remains. For Agamben, office becomes a central threshold concept between potency and act, between act and effect, to determine the core of Western metaphysics. Office is the means between two unbridgeable terms, to take an otherwise ineffective act and give it power. And most importantly, the office itself acts through its officiant. The office works ex opere operato - the work working its own work - which is indifferent to the subject who holds it. Again, one may misuse or abuse an office, even stain an office (a wholly external turn of phrase), but the office remains nevertheless. And as the above suggests, office has its roots within Christian ecclesiology. If there's a way out from the current crisis of an unlimited economized security apparatus, a way to approach the problem is through the development of this concept.
The office of the Christian priesthood emerged out the matrix of biblical cult and Hellenic political life. The term leitourgia literally referred to a "work of the people", a ceremonial office of public beneficence (whether holding games, plays, constructing a public work). However, in the Greek translation of Scripture, leitourgia was the term applied to the cultic service of God. The sacrificial service of the Temple, in the Christ, came to an end in the "once and for all" sacrifice of Jesus. Thus the sense of "liturgy" to describe sacrifice, for Christians, became somewhat awkward. For the author of the Letter to the Hebrews (whether Paul or otherwise), Christ inhabited the eternal high priesthood of Melchizedek. The King of Salem - a mysterious figure who offered bread and wine - received obeisance from Abraham (and through Abraham, his children - Moses and Aaron). Christ now ministered before an eternal altar, and the eucharistic rite (which participates in this "once for all") recapitulated it in some way. But how could an unrepeatable act be repeated?
The precise origins of the Eucharist not withstanding (with the likelihood that it was a form of the Passover rite), it rapidly became linked to conceptions of the Hellenic polis. Key to Agamben is the reversal of a Pauline syntagma. Whereas the Apostle to the Gentiles will speak of the "economy of the mystery" (oikonomia tou mysteriou Eph. 3:9; though translated, in the KJV, as "fellowship of mystery"), the Apologists and AnteNicaean theologians will discuss the "mystery of the economy". While this inversion of terms does not - ipso dixit - mean a reversal of meaning, it opens the possibility of change. What for Paul was the unveiling of the divine plan, which Christian ministers made known in the ritual word, now became a mysterization of the entire divine plan of salvation. God's government of the world was now a moment of ritual silence, the logic becoming the unsayable. The liturgy was now a threshold for revealing, rather than using, this mystery. The secret of time parallels the secret of God (since oikonomia also was an important term to define the actions and persons of the Trinity). The liturgy becomes thus summons the need for an office, an effective ritual performance of the mystery.
Ex Opere Operato thus becomes a very useful technical term to recognize this new reality. For Thomas, a major difference between the sacraments of the Old Testament and the New was efficacy. While the sacrifices of Israel required faith to be efficacious (since they were pedagogical shadows), the sacrifice of the eucharist was efficacious in the work itself. Grace had been embedded among men in the sacrament, worked through the priesthood. And the priesthood - against Donatism and later critics of invalid sacraments from wicked ministers - was an officium that bestowed efficacy on the act. A priest may be a vile sinner, but his office made his performance of the mass efficacious. And the office itself has power because it participates in the divine economy. The priest is an "animate instrument" in the hands of God who carries out the act. Thus an ontological contradiction emerges: God only acts in the eucharist through the ministry, but the priest does not act himself but only acts as an instrument in God's hands. Thus the Opus Dei depends on human hands, but is not a product of human action. The priest is wholly removed from the process, yet integral to its carrying out. Agamben notes the odd origin of this instrumentality in Medieval commentary on the devil as carrying out God's act, even as God condemned the action. Thus, the priest carries out God's ministry, and this itself is meritorious even as the priest is not the source of the act. Agamben summarizes this ontological paralysis, which will continue to appear in Western metaphysics:
"In this sense the ethical connection between the subject and his action is broken: what is determinative is no longer the right intention of the agent but only the function that his action carries out as opus Dei. Just as the demon's action as opus operatum is carried out in the service of God even if it remains evil as opus operantis, so the liturgical action of the priest is effective as opus Dei even if the unworthy priest is committing a sin. The liturgy thus defines a peculiar sphere of action, in which the mystery paradigm of the Letter to the Hebrews (Christ the high priest's opus operatum) and the ministerial paradigm of the letter of Clement (the opus operantis Ecclesiae) coincide and are at the same time distinguished. This can happen, however, only at the price of dividing and emptying of its personal content the action of the priest, who, as the 'animate instrument' of a mystery that transcends him, exercises an action that is still in some sense his own." (25)
It is here that a confusion (in the literal sense of con-fusion, a falling in together as indistinguishable) emerges. It is precisely this medieval aporia which will mark out Rome's transformation in Vatican II into the harbor of Social/Christian-Democracy. Erik Peterson was not simply a modernist European, seeking to find in the Roman Church a backstop for European democracy against capitalism, fascism or communism. Instead, the Church's liturgy marked out the primordial political activity. Corporate prayer, with the priest faced towards the Congregation, was a kind of self-creation that blurred all boundaries in doxology. God worked through the priest-in-congregation, yet the work of the congregation was God himself. While certainly dependent on the mainly Protestant ecumenical movement, the ecumenical Protestant movement sought to find a modus vivendi with Rome. It was not antithetical to Roman Catholicism, except in its exclusivity (an opposition posed equally against Fundamentalists and Confessionalists). It is perhaps for this reason ecumenical mainline Protestantism adopted the lowest-common-denominator vestments for their pseudo-ritualism. Therefore, it's not correct to consider Vatican II as strictly an external influence. It is a development of certain ideas within Rome's own history, though stretched to the same crisis that marks out of mixed-market Social Democracy. The endless liturgical dance of God and Man results in a pure economization. Amilennialism reaches its most zenith, where the eschaton seem to collapse into the modern era. This marks out why the contemporary moment is simultaneously one of upwards progress and apocalyptic struggle. The end is always here, yet history must continue. There is no sovereign act, such has completely collapsed into its derivative government. As Richard Tuck spoke better than he knew, The People - the Sleeping Sovereign - is permanently comatose. Yet The People continue to act precisely through their representatives, which continue to expand and intensify the bureaucratic management of the palace.
To be clear: a genealogical analysis is not cause-effect. The argument is not ex opere operato caused modern bureaucratic management. Rather, the argument is that this concept was an attempt to deal with similar questions of ontology, ethics, politics, and theology. And in the last case, theology has secularized in the Modern era to define the economization of all things. There are no more questions to answer, no more ideas to ponder. Rather, the ideological totem of Human Rights stands silent over the parade of managerial efforts to optimize the biological substratum of Human life. The grubby materialism of Bill Gates spreading medicine and food to save the third-world flows with idealistic fawning over The Science curing all maladies. The consultation of The People through the poll, the vote, the survey, or indirectly through social media data harvesting, becomes the endless ritual of divine governance. Ex Opere Operato, Democracy is its own end, it is its own self-constitution towards itself. The People acts through the representatives, who do not themselves act, yet no government is possible without these men and women who serve the public. Every election, every media tabulation, every data-mine and statistical compilation is a liturgical self-generation. The ontology of Democracy is a complete destruction and crisis of Western metaphysics.
It's for this reason that social (or mass) democracy has emerged simultaneously with the liturgical renewal movement. In an effort to renew Church practice after an age of industrialization, the old adage (which has become a saccharine platitudinous cliche) that lex orandi, lex credendi became a mark to restructure. Rather than throw in entirely with the forces of reaction (which lost successive battles, culminated in nationalist Italy's conquest of Rome from the popes), some Roman Catholics believed liturgical renewal could sanctify the new political movements, the new praxis determining dogma (or its lack thereof). Thus modern theologians poured over liturgical texts and prayers, ignoring straightforward analysis of Scripture. Pope Pius XII offered one of the last official denunciations of this program, putting forward the more venerable "doctrine determines liturgy" syntagma. But this shift towards practice, and its effect, flowed naturally from the twentieth century obsession of movements. All party politics was about mass-mobilization, whether on the Left or the revolutionary Right. The salvation on offer was not towards any particular end, but in an almost utopian eschaton that seemed on the cusp of success. Whether it was the Sorelian myth of the universal strike, the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, or the caesarism of rightwing renewal, all had a participatory metaphysic of the crowd. Join the movement, mobilize, collapse into the sea of humanity which will now constitute a superior mode of being. In an almost Hegelian way, where the complete revolution of the absolute subject produces the state, so too did the movement recreate a universal actor (though one that was increasingly divorced from the state as subject, rather than an instrument). Whether it's the Nation or the People, both saw an agency that worked through the various revolutionary agitators, who gained efficacy precisely in the name of their sovereign. In a similar way, the Church existed for the liturgy, which made Christian through its mysterious reenactment. The ritual performance of mass politics became a lex orandi which would form the lex credendi of party dogmatism. The Movement was a never ending liturgy. It is own its effect.
However the effect must be efficacious, the work must itself produce. Ancient distinctions between being and act - which Aristotle defined most decisively as the potential to not act - are overcome through an ex opere operato coincidence between potentiality and actuality. Pelagius represented older distinctions when he defended that man could still, in theory, not sin as a potentiality of human nature. However, Augustine's refutation collapsed Pelagius' argument. The fact that man did not not sin was proof that, through a corruption of realized nature, man could not not sin. This indistinction was further developed among western Augustinians into the instrumental cause. It's only as an instrument that a hammer could be said to be the cause of a house. In the hands of the builder, it was a tool to accomplish work worked of the building. However, this same logic could apply to the animate tool of the slave which the master used to complete his task. It's in this sense that the above animate instrument of the priest could be said to be God working. And because God is actus purus - a full realization of God's potential in his act (meaning, there's nothing held back) - God's actions completely cohere in the effect. The mere act of the eucharistic rite is pure effect. Medieval distinctions between God-in-himself and God-towards-creation (the immanent and economic trinity) collapsed in modern theology into Rahner's Rule: the immanent is the economic. This means a total identification between the actions of the Church and the actions of God. God's own self-expression in Three Persons is the total realization of God's existence. This reality cannot be understood, only manifested as the all-in-all. The eucharistic rite for liturgical renewal thus became not a particular mediation of a meritorious sacrifice or a particular promise, but was the self-expression of the mystery. The Lord's Supper was not the forgiveness of sins so much as the zenith of God's governance. The modernist liturgy is a manifestation of the "mystery of the economy", which the patristics had not intended or understood. It's in this sense the ecumenical cliche "we are God's hands and feet" represents this total collapse. The Kingdom of God is fully realized in the ritual of the global Church. Secularized, The People is fully realized in the democratic liturgy of voting and polling in the globalist cage.
It's in this way that Agamben modifies Heidegger's critique of technology. The instrumental cause is not focused on production, but productivity; as much as the liturgy is productivity, not some given reified product. Now the work-worked is completely confused with the working, with the products as mere residue of the producing. Rather than a creationist paradigm, which Heidegger blamed for the objectification of nature, it was the liturgist that mirrored the society of technique:
"one cannot understand the metaphysics of technology if one understands it only in the form of production. It is just as much and above all governance and oikonomia, which in the last analysis can even provisionally put causal production between parentheses in the name of a more refined and diffuse form of management of human beings and of things." (61)
Political economy today has nothing to do with industrial production, which the West sloughed off fairly rapidly in the late twentieth century. Rather the "economy" which all western democracies manage is an economy of productivity. GDP masks the empty currency exchanges, stock swaps, and infinite fluidity of virtual capital that define production. It is less important to have produced things, often an embarrassing residue of inefficiency (the way a DVD is seen as archaic refuse of the more efficient and efficacious virtual stream). The cult of productivity had only ever used the cult of production as a cocoon to outgrow. Economics thus exhibits the same pathology of liturgical renewal, the study of greater efficiency and purity for the blurred conversion of individual people into the Global Church and the Global Market, through whom all governance derives its legitimacy.
However, this blur of action and potency into efficiency, the worked work working out of its own work, is limited through the borders and boundaries of law. Not anyone can simply represent Christ in the sacrifice, anymore than anyone can represent The People, The Nation, or The Global Market. Certain actors receive a means to translate from undifferentiated human actor into the animate instrument. What makes the liturgy effective is the office. Derived from the Roman concept of duty, an office imposes a certain kind of character upon the actor to express the legitimacy of the act. Thus Cicero, in his discussion on office/duty (de Officis), exposits what is proper and customary to an office-holder. It's not a question of what is lawful for the officeholder, but what is appropriate for the holder. However the idea of duty/office expands beyond any awarded position. Every human action involves office, whether it is father, brother, son, or patrician, plebeian, or slave. The question is not so much what must be done, but what should be done. This makes officium a strange threshold between law and nature:
"Officium is neither a juridical or moral obligation nor a pure and simple natural necessity: it is the behavior that is expected among persons who are bound by a relation that is socially codified, but the compulsory nature of which is sufficiently vague and indeterminate that it can be connected - even if in a derisory way - even to behavior that common sense considered self-evidently offensive to decency" (72)
Thus all should act in a way that comports with their "duty", including prostitutes and bums. A prostitute should act the role, as much as a bishop should act the role of a bishop. Therefore, from Cicero's ranging discussion, it is quite clear that office is to make life governable. Duty demarcates expectations for the various categories of human living and activity. But where do these duties come from? The effects of a given life. The prostitute is defined from the worked work of the profession. It is not some pseudo-Platonic form that descends down in the world of matter. Rather it is the given of activity that is given a form. The form then becomes a constraint on a certain pattern of actions. To continue the scandalous juxtaposition: the whoring of the prostitute defines the prostitute, and thus the prostitute should exhibit the "virtues" of a prostitute (whoring well). The bishop too is defined by performing the liturgy of the Church, and thus a bishop should exhibit the character of his office. A certain form of living became a defined category that then defined the spontaneous human actions in ritu. In watered-down sociological terms, the prostitute's solicitation is as much a ritual as the mayor's press conference. There are expectations on behavior, even if this behavior is unethical and reprehensible. And it's this reification of duty that transitions into the obligation of law. Duty expresses the particularity of certain forms of life, but command then demands that office-holder (the bearer of a duty) must be. Duty is confused and blended into law, where all existence must now be legislated (or, if not, ceasing to exist).
Additionally, this duty blends together with the concept of virtue. For Aristotle, the threshold concept, the apparatus, to connect act and potential was hexis - habit. Thus it was the habit of architecture that allowed a man to work his potency into the act of building. In ancient philosophy, the actualization of a potency was realized outside of himself (a builder's work was manifest in the house he built). However, potency threatened to entirely dissolve when action ceased. The work worked might demonstrate what was, but not any current ontology. Habit linked together act and potential, and its existence was most manifest in the impotency of the agent. It was the builder not building - though he could build - was a sign of his potency as much as the built building was. The habit held potential and act together in relation without collapse. However, the habit could produce a state of indistinction when its operativity required constant action. If the habit is the matrix through which God and man interact -as it was for Thomistic medieval theology - then this habit must continue to work to prove the perfecting and perfection of the work. This defines virtue (etymologically from vir, man; thus to be virtuous is to fully actualize as man) as the realization of the potency towards perfection. In this sense, the habit increasingly defines an internal reality that has infinite development. The work should never cease, since the purpose is in the working, not in a resultant work. However, virtue still referred to a natural given, even if pock-marked with ambiguity. A static for of Human demarcated the working of virtue to reach this perfection (even if it will only complete in Paradise).
In modern ethics, virtue becomes completely swallowed up in act itself. In patristic texts, the free-will (autexousia, authority over one's being) defined the nature of virtue. Medieval theology continued this metaphysic forward, even adumbrating its ambiguities. Thus Thomas could argue that a slave willingly obeying his master was a virtue. The free-will to choose can run parallel with the necessity to act in a command. Religion (likely from religare, to bind again) thus becomes a supreme virtue in this conflation, being meritorious for willingly obeying yet itself a necessity of obligation. It becomes increasingly unclear what precisely is a virtue (done out of the will realizing potency in act) and what is an obligation (being made an animate instrument). If carrying out an obligation becomes the peak of virtue, then it's unclear how the working of virtue could ever cease. Man becomes obligated to virtue, and it is virtuous to maintain obligation (with the highest, in religion, to God). However, this reaches a zenith of confusion with Kantian ethics. Duty in itself (without any object of obedience besides the command) becomes the supreme virtue:
"if the aberrant idea of an action carried ut only for the sake of duty (that is, in obedience to a command, and not for the sake of a natural inclination) was able to penetrate into ethics and impose itself there, this is only because the Church, by means of a centuries-long praxis and theorization, had elaborated duty or office as a model of the highest human activity, embodied in the office of the priest and, even before that, in the priesthood of Christ. The 'duty of virtue' is not, in this sense anything but the definition of the devout life that Kant had assimilated by means of his pietistic education." (112)
Humanity becomes constituted through this "ontology of command", where the efforts to solve the split between act and potency degenerate into their complete confusion. A man's ability to will to obey becomes constitutive for man's well-being. As Kant declaimed in his Groundwork, the virtue of duty reaches its apogee in the syntagma: "We must be able to will that a maxim of our action become a universal law" (115). The will becomes the apparatus, replacing habit, to constantly conjugate potential to act. The resultant reward is the sum-zero of "respect", when one finds mere satisfaction in having done one's duty for no other reason. It is pure subjection to law. And thus humiliation becomes the sum-total of happiness derived from the virtue of duty. Joy consists in obedience, in following every dictate no matter how obscene. As Lacan noted, this form of Kantian ethics parallels the masochistic, who finds pleasure in complete subjection to the sadist. While the law becomes the sadistic Other, who issues the commands, the virtue of duty exceeds the law. Obedience to a law, which marked out much positivist jurisprudence, was only a manifestation of a far more substantial ontological change. The law that describes depends upon its normative effect. The command - the imperative - becomes the core. You must not only obey, but will to obey. It's this that marks out the modern transformation of ancient philosophy into something radically new:
"The 'Copernican revolution' worked out by Kant did not consist in having put the subject at the center in place of the object, so much as rather - but the two services, are in truth, inseparable - in having substituted an ontology of command for an ontology of substance. And one does not understand the history of post-Kantian philosophy if one does not know how to make out in it the succession of crossings, conflicts, and compromises between the two ontologies, which with phenomenology and Being and Time reach their provision rendering of accounts, in which esto and esti, 'be!' and 'is' seem for an instant to be indeterminated." (122)
This "ontology of command" defines the modern demand to act, which hides beneath being itself. It's no mistake that the passive-aggressive pseudo-imperatives of "social distance" often blur with "get vaccinated". Where do these commands come from? The government and its array of NGO affiliates, yes, but are the legal? Where is the law? Silent. The force of the command, which lends its potency to the Law, has unshackled. It's in this sense that the "state of exception" reflects this confusion between parasite and host, where the latter assumes control of the former through the inactivity. It's the anarchy of power, where legality ceases to matter. Does it matter whether an executive order has the force of law? No, it has simply is force, and the need for the will to want to obey defines this massive form of compliance. Justice, which has always existed apart from the law, has become eradicated through mere force of will. There's no way to be except as it is commanded. It's in this way Social Democracy finds common cause with the spirit of National Socialism. The widespread destruction of the war in the east was not due to explicit personal commands from Hitler or any legal body. Rather, the will to obey became an expression of the virtue of duty. Unlike Fascism or Marxist-Leninism, which had deferred the eschaton, this ontology of command collapses everything into the present. It's not a question of fulfilling one's nature, arriving at a paradisal end, but reaching perfect nullity in the respect-humiliation of subjection. The liturgical display of humiliation in losing votes, subjected to the "will of The People" even as it's not your own, becomes a virtue of the "working" system. Democracy becomes a form of sado-masochism, in a meaningless dance of empty actions that become their own end. The progressivist vision forms an ouroboros, a self-cannibalizing of both parents and children.
It's for this reason that "Human Rights" is sinister, despite its innocent and innocuous nomenclature. Human Rights constitutions, charters, and provisions have a fairly vague legal subsistence. It is more precise to see in the efforts to manage the diversity of human life through the command that Human beings must be. It is the conceptual transformation of right: from kingly prerogative to act or not (reflecting older metaphysics) to the demand for what can be to be. And it is necessary for what can be to want to be what it can be. Thus Agamben ties together this otherwise disparate study between liturgy, duty, and command:
"The ontology of command and the ontology of operativity are therefore closely bound: as a putting-to-work, the command also presupposes a will. [...] Will is the form that being takes in the ontology of command and operativity. If being does not exist, but must actualize itself, then in its very essence it is will and command; and vice versa, if being is will, then it does not simply exist but has to be." (129)
As contemporary events sprawl out from one crisis to another, the demand of the will, the necessity to obey, will only intensify. Whether it's the increasingly vague obligation to let all (even children) decide their gender, the protection of all life despite the circumstances (including incarceration), or the complete virtualization of the economy into productivity without products, all are driven by the need to want to conform. The majority-of-minorities mass politics has not uplifted idiosyncrasy or eccentricity (which are, by definition, outside description). Rather it's the cancerous rapid mutation of categories of conformity. It is not merely queerness (literally being weird or strange), it is the ballooning of sexuality categories in an alphabet soup. And the pressure of government is not so much to be a certain which way, but that you must be a way, you must be governable. Perhaps this explains the strange explosion of military transgenders and the belligerence of leftist for a war in Ukraine.
If there's a future hope, it's present not in the mystified demand for the secular liturgy of democracy, the dance of death towards apocalyptic immolation. Instead the Pauline "economy of mystery" must return. If the killing force of the law has been unleashed, than it will take a politics of the crucified Christ - a politics of potent passivity - to end this dark night.
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