The Glorious Empty Throne An Exposition of Agamben's "The Kingdom and the Glory"

 The modern West has become - in Guy Debord's term - a "society of the spectacle", where the unreality of media begins to assume the place of politics within the constitutional nation-state. Another term that this essay will use - mass democracy - refers to rapid domination of undifferentiated masses and their votes to determine questions of government. Agamben's project is to interrogate two interwoven and crucial aspects to this new order: economy and glory. In the case of the former, economy (and government as we will see) has completely swallowed up politics. There are no longer questions of substances to address, only crises that afflict the biological subsistence of citizenry (increasing a formless concept, replaced with "human rights"). In the case of the latter, the praise heaped on the system becomes the very task of politics. It does not matter who wins, only that "the system works" and popular politics results in praise for this system, which media conducts in an endless routine. But where do these concepts emerge from that have so defined the West? And how do we escape the increasing destruction of bio-politics and unlimited police powers of the state?

To begin, one must turn to theology. Carl Schmitt has insightfully recognized that all political concepts were secularized theological concepts. What remains between the original use and the novel, between the religious and secular, is a "signature". A signature marks out a point of reference to investigate what continued and what changed between this transmutation from one category of thought to another. Therefore, the question of "economy" must be approached through the theological notion of oikonomia.

To be clear: Agamben's archaeology, his study of the signature, is not to claim a causal relation. It was not inevitable that Aristotelian metaphysics or Medieval theology led down this path. In fact, in many ways, the modern is distinctly a betrayal or reversal of many points of contact. Nevertheless, Agamben's purpose in this study is excavate the syntactic links. It is to explain the transition of meaning in a growing array of homonyms. The logical problems do not necessitate any particular course, in fact the change of historical circumstances (whether from long term structural changes or rapid events occasioned by the actions of individuals) may precipitate the semantic shift. However, the point is that these conceptual problems would explain why - through the series of treatises and exposition that respond to each other down time - these terms appear, disappear, and reappear in varied guise. To understand how economy was used is to gain some conceptual ground as to how it has taken the role it possesses now today.

Within the ancient world, per standard Aristotelian dichotomies, the city (polis) was distinct from the life of the home (oikos). Whereas the city had a deeply-rooted customary and constituting law (nomos), the home had a master (despotes) who governed his family and his servants/slaves through a series of pragmatic actions to preserve its order (taxis). The home-life is compared, in Xenophon, to a dance, where a series of rhymic orders preserve the certain character of the house. Things are taken out, things are put away, bodies move here and there to carry out their tasks and perform their pattern of life. Thus, an oikonomia requires administration to preserve the basic, unwritten, order of things. For the master of house, his role is to provide, where the verb (oikonomein) means to give sustenance and nourishment to those under his care. The series of gestures to preserve this order requires no necessary law or principle to fulfill, no telos or end. Instead, the economy requires a series of actions that may seem to conflict with the good ends, but are pragmatic necessity amidst efforts to maintain the order of the home. In the Aristotelian sense (not so much Plato, who is far more vague about differences), the opposition between city and home must be preserved in order to carve out the distinct categories of politics and home-governance. But it's precisely these oppositions, this dichotomy, that has created a problem of interrelation. When do enough homes constitute a city? When does a city melt down into a series of separated home-economies? How does this transition come about? At what moment? This fracture becomes the inspiration of later political theory, as well as theological questions about the relation of God to his creation.

Within the New Testament, St. Paul as fierce preacher of the gospel, offers an entirely exoteric definition of the Gospel. In a crucial syntagma, the Apostle announces that

"To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the oikonomia of the mystery hidden for ages in God" (Ephesians 3:9 per Agamben's translation, 23)

What was important for Paul, as well as other Apostolic authors, was the revelatory nature of the Cross of Christ. The ministry that the evangelists bore was to announce what was revealed. Christ crucified - putting away sin and reconciling Humanity - thus unveils God's purposes from the very beginning. Mystery (mysterion) referred to the dramatic and poetic presentation of the truth of the world. Often the mysteries were preformed in an esoteric and cult-like setting, such as the Eleusian mysteries. However, in the Apostolic setting, the oikonomia (dispensing, administration) of the mystery is performed in the preaching of the Gospel. Redemption is now manifest before all. Within this early Christian theology, the conception of the Church is not a political community, but a household. The Church is the oikos theou, which is constantly built up through the ritual of the Word (e.g. Ephesians 4:16; Romans 14:19; 1 Corinthians 14:3, 2 Corinthians 12:19). In these cases, the oikonomia are a series of administrative acts to reveal this mystery before the world. What was hidden in the Old Testament would now be manifest in the preaching of the New.

Early Christian theology tended to continue this definition of Church and oikonomia, seeing a series of discrete acts that manifest the will of God. However, the Gnostic movement offered a radical challenge that saw the Church adopt certain aspects of their paradigmatic rescripting of the "economy of mystery". While divergent, most Gnostics accepted a fairly complex cosmogony that revealed the processes by which the world was made, fell, and redeemed. The divine one began to fragment in his emanations, until the point where one such emanated beings - the demiurge - created the prison-world of matter. In this dark abyss, many other emanations that constitute living souls were cast. The gospel of redemption was now to reveal this cataclysmic fracture within God and see its healing through this saving knowledge (gnosis), which would allow the enlightened to escape this dark world. In the hands of the Valentinians or the Marcionites, the emanations introduced a mythological element,  a demonstration of the "mystery of the pleroma", which explained why the world was degraded. Gnostics had drawn upon the cosmic warfare imagery that is all over Second Temple Judaism, the Gospels, and the Pauline letters. In this war against flesh, sin, and the devil, the Gnostics gave a metaphysical account of how this came about. 

The orthodox critics - ranging from Irenaeus to Tertullian - challenged these gnostics on the point of what, precisely, this economy was. They countered with historicization, where in time, God's actions happened amidst men according to the purposes of his will. This primarily took place in the series of actions among God's persons - the Father sending the Son in the Spirit - which mark out the biblical drama. This account prevented the infinite fracture of the divine, where in any Gnostic cosmology, there was no reason to explain why God would not divide beyond eight, twelve, or thirty into an infinite number of beings. But in reframing the Apostolic theology in these terms, the order these economic-administrative acts demonstrated became more mysterious. If the Gnostic cosmology was historicized, it had also now taken on an inexplicable character:

"While in Paul, the economy was an activity carried out to reveal or accomplish the mystery of God's will or word (Colossians 1:24-25; Ephesians 3:9), now it is this very activity, personified in the figure of the son-word, that becomes a mystery. [...] the sense of 'plan hidden in God,' which was a possible though imprecise paraphrase of the term mysterion, tends now to be transferred onto the very term oikonomia, give it a new significance. There is no economy of mystery, that is, an activity aimed at a fulfilling and revealing the divine mystery; it is the very 'pragmateia,' the very divine praxis, that is mysterious" (38-39)

The Pauline syntagma - economy of mystery - had now been reversed: the mystery of the economy.

This reversal, for Agamben, reflected a change in metaphysical priorities. For a theologian like Tertullian - the first Latin theologian to serially reflect and analyze God as Trinity (trinitas) - this framed knowledge of God primarily around knowledge of God's economy. God as Trinity is not primarily a question of divine being - as it had been with much of ancient pagan theology - but divine action. The question of the Trinity is not so much a question of understanding how God is in himself, but how God interacts with his creation. And primarily, the interaction is a question of how God-in-three-persons acts to both judge and redeem the world. Tertullian, drawing on the ancient biblical imagery of God as king, translates this royal imagery into economic governance. God as Trinity is primarily a question of how God acts to manage, administer, and govern his world, which he does through the Son and Spirit as well as a host of angels. It is in history that man can discern theology, scrying the meaning of history in the series of God's actions. Against pagan theology, which had utilized myth and legend to explain the being of the gods, God was to be understood through his actions in time. Against accounts of fate or nature's necessity, the divine economy emerged from the will of God. But this will was active and providential, not inextricably flowing from the determinations of Nature. Instead, the free will of God enters into save man, which includes the series of divine miracles in Scripture. These exceptional acts - which define "economy" in canon law - then reaffirm the order. Economy becomes the absolute basis of theology.

However, this "economization" of theology, of discerning God through the series of actions in history, introduces a gap. How do then Christians know or understand God as he truly is? How do the series of actions relate to God's very being (or Being)? This fracture becomes the serious problem of understanding, precisely, where God's government of the world emerges from. It is worth quoting Agamben at length:

"The economy through which God governs the world is, as a matter of fact, entirely different from his being, and cannot be inferred from it. It is possible to analyze the notion of God on the ontological level, listing his attributes or negating, one by one - as in apophatic theology - all his predicates to reach the idea of a pure being whose essence coincides with existence. But this will not rigorously say anything about his relation to the world or the way in which he has decided to govern the course of human history. As Pascal will lucidly realize with regard to profane government many centuries later, the economy has no foundation in ontology and the only way to found it is to hide its origin [Pascal, Pensees, 1962, p.51]. For  this, God's free decision to govern the world is now as mysterious as his nature, if not more; the real mystery, which 'has been hidden for centuries in God' [Colossians 1:26] and which has been revealed to men in Christ, is not that of his being but that of his salvific praxis: precisely the 'mystery of the oikonomia,' following the decisive strategic reversal of the Pauline syntagma. The mystery that, from this moment on, will not cease to startle theologians and philosophers, and to arouse their attention, is not of an ontological, but of a practical nature." (54)

In other words, the original revelation in the Apostolic preaching is now what God is, but how God acts. And why does God act? It is according to his will. While ancient theology will hold together God's being and act through the will, the inscrutable will continues to loom as a hanging aporia. How does God will what is natural to him into act? And why? This adumbrates the mysterious nature of it. Why did God create the world? And what was he doing before it? To this question, Augustine would offer the snarky answer that God was preparing hell for those who asked these silly questions. This gesture is more of an avoidance of what cannot be thought, rather than a serious or satisfying answer. The free will of God, which Christians will claim in opposition to pagan theologies of fate and necessity, will never satisfactorily explain how God's being and act remain together. It is only in modern theology that this problem will radically transform into the all-consuming will, where being and action start to blur together, and the only reason is because. This "an-archic" (literally without arche, without a principled foundation) basis of God's willing (since God's being, either as Father or Son, is an-arche) means that the entire administration flows from mystified nothing. Anarchy is power: the order is as it is because it is willed such. This becomes the basis for all government.

Now government must be distinguished, as it has been in most ancient and medieval political theory, from sovereignty. Both flow from a theological paradigm, where God as King both reigns and rules. However, in Agamben's telling, theories of medieval kingship picked up on the "wound" between kingdom and government, between reigning and ruling. The Fisher King - the wounded king of Arthurian mythos - cannot move. He enjoys himself by fishing, but the governing of his realm takes place when his ministers roam the forests to maintain order. However, these archers and falconers that rule require the king's name for legitimacy. The authority of the king provides the legitimation for the exercise of power that the king's ministers possess. But the king himself does nothing and - in truth- may be nothing. This mythologeme will provide the basis of an idea, that intensified in European history, of a sovereign that reigns, but cannot himself govern. Authorized power depends upon authorizing power in order to order, to govern.

But what is this order by which government regulates? As stated above, order is nothing but the relation to how things are (or should be). It's the dance-like rhythm of the household, servants and children moving here and there, things taken out and things put away. The immanent-concrete order of things always refers to a transcedental-true order of things. God as supreme governor seeks to order the world according to his divine order. Order is the empty concept that relates between how things should be and how things are through the power of the master over his home, the general over his army, the captain over his ship, and the shepherd over his sheep. 

What Gnosticism had threatened was to introduce a radical split, rather than coincidence, between the transcendental power of nature and the immanent order of the governor. Ontologically, there are now two gods (the Good and the evil Demiurge), which may contest one another, unveiling the anarchy between ordering and ordered power. It would be as if the shepherd ruled his sheep in a war to defy all principles of agriculture and zoology. Yet these categories themselves attempt to impose a vision of what ought to be with regards to the realities of sheep on the ground. The good shepherd governs his sheep in coincident with how nature governs the lives of the sheep so they flourish as such (healthy weight, energetic, bleating, eating grass, and so on). However these factors are themselves immanent and thus refer upwards to a transcendental order that is only recognized in the concrete realities of life. Thus a paradox emerges: the transcendental order is a reflection of an immanent order, and the immanent order is produced in response to the transcendental order. It is a circle, and the question may be posed whether the chicken or the egg first appeared, but nevertheless it poses a question of preeminence. But what if there's no resolution? What if an immanent order, which claims transcendental authority, turns upon a kind of nihilism. This, again, is the anarchy of power.

The problem is compounded through the ordering order of the transcendental reign. Why does not the king simply step in? Why does the Fisher King's wound never heal? According to some forms of the legend, the Fisher King's thigh was pierced with the Holy Lance (the spear which pierced Christ's side). This mythologeme could suggest that it is precisely the transcendental sovereignty, in the possession of a man's body, which fundamentally renders his authorizing power inexercisable. Instead, the power of the sovereign expresses itself through the plethora of ministers who rule in his name. Rather than diminish his power, the vast number of agents express his power. In very simple terms, it is precisely the king's many servants within his palace that makes his reign appear glorious (a term we will return to). Sovereignty cannot be divided, but it can emanate and spread. Thus the glory of God appears in his ability to govern, not directly, but through a whole host of angels and saints. The power of sovereignty is only fully expressed in the power of government. The more that is governed the greater the sovereign. 

Within the Medieval world of Christianity, this distinction primarily appears in the division between spiritual-authorizing power and temporal-authorized power. While Christ had given the Kingdom of God to the Apostles (and their successors, the bishops, most importantly the Pope of Rome), they were not to govern the earthly world of men. In the classic articulation, pope Gelasius exegeted the "two swords" the Apostles found (Luke 22:38) as two exercises of an undivided power. The priesthood wielded the spiritual sword and the civil ruler wielded the temporal sword: one punished through penance and excommunication; the other through fines, jailing, and execution. Again, why not simply grant the pope (or king) both swords? Why must the power to authorize and legitimate be separated from the power to carry out the execution of government? Similarly, in medieval theology, God's omnipotence came across the potential expression of absurdities (e.g. Christ incarnated as a donkey instead of a man, the Father took flesh, Judas was saved and Peter damned). God's omnipotence met a similar split, between an authorizing total power (potentia absoluta) and the power limited to the order of things (potentia ordinata). But again, what separates these two? It is the will - which as we have seen is anarchic - that demarcates these distinctions. The being and act of God are pulled apart, as much as during the medieval period the authorization of power in the sacerdotal pope tore at the authorized governing power in the temporal emperor. What was it that linked emperor and pope together? It was this ordered world (God's division of the two swords) that flowed from the mystery of the economy, the inscrutable will of God.

The will of God (a mystery that can only be contemplated, not understood) is what holds these distinctions between authorizing power and authorized power, between the spiritual and temporal, between transcendental order and immanent order. The former, whether as the pope governing the empire or God exercising potentia absoluta, cannot come about without threatening the entire order of things. Thus the wounded king allows the expression of his many ministers. Such is a secular expression of a more fundamental problem:

"God's impotence functions to make possible a righteous government of the world" (106)

Yet it is also the fact that since this transcendental ordering power exists, it must (theoretically) always exceed the ordered power of governance. Thus, a pope may call for an interdict, which suspends the exercise of spiritual power and delegitimates a temporal ruler (altering the civil order). Again, the means this disjuncture is crossed is through the free exercise of the will. In strictly theological terms, God's government of the world splits into two distinct orders: general providence and special providence. General Providence manifests in the normative-natural order of things, through which God sustains his creation. Not a Deist Watchmaker, God must constantly sustain the universe. Thus the rain that waters the field, the rising sun that enlightens the earth, the rotation of the seasons, these are all God's active efforts to preserve creation. Special providence, on the other hand, are the excesses of divine power that intervene, from time to time, to preserve. The miracle, the wonder, the sign, all of these represent God's involvement beyond the normed order of the universe. The distinction between general and special providence becomes necessary precisely to preserve any rational sense to things. If there was no special providence, then general providence could be mistaken for something like pagan fate: impersonal and inviolable. If there was no general providence, then special providence would become chaos as the will of God erratically (and violently) reordered things. It is this problem that the will covers over: general providence reflects a broad approach to macro-systems of universal governance, while special providence deals with individualities. In more modern terms, general providence has become the rational law of nature, whereas special providence appears as coincidence and the vague New Age support from "the universe" in the particular life of a man.

However, as stated above, it would be unbecoming of God, as sovereign, to actively govern the world. Instead, a plethora of ministers maintain the world. The medieval doctrine of primary and secondary causes allows a whole host of agencies to involve themselves in the carrying out of divine providence. While God may will a general providence to the ordering of the world (primary cause), created agents (whether beasts, spirits, or men) carry out these actions (willingly or not). Thus God may will the Earth to be watered, but he does so through the atmospheric water cycle or human gardeners. This interrelation between God's causative will and creature's causative wills allows one to preserve the coincidence of divine and human freedoms. And the dispersal of the grace to carry out these actions - from the High Middle Ages through early modern theology - will mark out disputes between various groups. As Pascal would mock in his Provincial Letters, the Dominicans and Jesuits end up parsing terms to slam the simplicity of truth that the Augustinian Jansenists defend. If the Jansenists were right, the power of God's rule would become entirely mysterious and absolute - like the baroque divine right monarchies of the seventeenth century - and the entire providential system would become a harsh aristocracy of the elect. The distinctions between sufficient and efficient grace allowed a providential system that could administer the world without diminishing the agency of creatures. When this paradigm became secularized, in the works of Rousseau and Adam Smith, this referred to the pseudo-divine invisible hand of the world economy. But of course, this requires an increasingly diffusive system, where the governing hand (God/Market) must give way to justify the order as it stands in the activities of creatures. This has birthed our modern system:

"theology can resolve itself into atheism, and providentialism into democracy because God has made the world just as if it were without God and governs it as though it governed itself" (286)

As has happened among libertarians and self-professed liberalism, laissez-faire has become a means to justify actions simply as they are. It is not a question of man interfering in the market (how can he?), but that every economic action of man thus justifies the proper government of affairs. Governments have claimed the mantle of free-trade to offer special dispensations (invasion, trust-busting, threat of debt collection) when interference is necessary, when aberrant market forces prevent the functioning of the economy. Thus government receives its mandate to continue in order to enforce this global market order. And this order must continue to express itself as long as the natural order of economics continues to exist. The drive of this system is to free up the agency of more and more market actors, a secularized version of the democratic drive of secondary causation. It is the Market's operations, but secondarily through all the market actors. The liberal drive towards greater involvement - whether Feminist drives to include house-work within the paid economy or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society's efforts to include black men and women within the welfare state - requires greater government involvement. Thus the irony, which can puzzle the uninitiated, that an increasing "free-trade" government flowed together with expanded powers of government. Leftist criticism of Reagan "neoliberalism" and Clinton's New Democrat economic "conservatism" parallels the paleocon's fear that socialism had won out in the United States. The global market - the secularized providence - has become atheistic (there is no general providence) and democratic (the individual market actor is definitive). The steady order of Medieval theology has completely collapsed into confusion.

As stated above, the suspension of the sovereign and the continued exercise of government depends upon the king's ministers. The Fisher King may wounded and unable to govern, but his presence is known throughout the land through his able servants. In the divine economy of the world, this process is primarily carried out through angels. The celestial hierarchy pursued two different, but interrelated, tasks: contemplation of God and administration of creation. Per the biblical imagery of Jacob's Ladder, these two tasks met and were continually exchanged as angels ascended and descended constantly. All angels saw the divine essence (contemplation) and all angels were involved in governing the world. In Pseudo-Denys,  the anonymous and mysterious fifth/sixth century author involved in a marriage of Christian orthodoxy and Proclean Neoplatonism, the angels mirror the clergy. There was "hierarchy" in both heaven and on earth. Among the angels, the thrones, dominions, and powers descended down into archangels and angels. Among the ministers of the Church, the primate bishops would descend down into priests, deacons, readers, and so on. Denys, whoever he was or why ever he assumed the mantle of St. Paul's Athenian convert, was a key figure that made the Church's ministry into a mystery. The priest was no longer the bearer of an exoteric message, an economy of the mystery, but a constituent part within the mystery of the economy. God, at the summit of this divine hierarchy, ascribed the order (taxis) to the various offices and actions of the ministry. In secular terms, divine sovereignty is defined through the right to form a government. The primary expression of this governing ministry is glory. While the administration of creation will one day pass away, the angels will all return to their primary task of contemplating the divine. The contemplation of God is expressed in the never-ending songs, the choreographed celebration, that defines liturgy. Thus, the ultimate expression of divine power is nothing else than worship. It is the production of glory.

This glory, in political terms, was the acclamation of the people. Though lacking any particular juristic function (acclaim was not necessary for legitimate succession), the roar of the crowds glorified the newly crowned sovereign. This dovetailed identically with liturgical celebrations of divine power. Thus in the Byzantine Empire, the liturgical shouts of "Alleluia!" to God paralleled the political acclamation "Axios!" (something like "he is worthy!"), which celebrated the appearance of the sovereign. However this appearance itself produced something almost lifeless. Often a Roman Emperor appeared before the jubilant crowds like a statue. Arrayed in purple and military garb (both of which were prohibited for non-rulers), the radiant appearance matched the celebration of the people. The glory and the power coincided, for it was in the ornate apparel that authority appeared as authorized (thus pretenders must be punished with sumptuary laws). This conjunction of authorized power with the appearance of glory suggests something like a speech-act, something said that creates what it describes (e.g. the pastor/judge's "I pronounce you married" in a ceremony). However this glorified apparel is a signature of a much more primal symbolization of authorized power: the fasces. The Roman Consuls (the elected executives of the Republic) were followed by the Lictors, who bore the fasces. A symbol of unity (a bundle of reeds) and power (combined with an axe), the fasces was the instrument of punishment. The reeds would be used to beat offenders and the axe would be used to execute criminals. However the imperial purple and acclaims of "Axios!" took the place of this direct symbolism. And what is symbolized? As suggested above, the acclamation of the sovereign prince paralleled the liturgy of God. The acclamation seemed to unite the purposes of the Heavenly Creator and the Earthly monarch, a twinning between spiritual and temporal authority. However, this moment of conjunction left the bearer of this sovereign power frozen. How could a mere man, the bearer of the divine kingdom, act? Like God, his glory increases as his ministerial government expands, thus leaving the sovereign able only to reign, not rule. The wounded Fisher King can only observe his government, never intervene.

Let us bring all of this above analysis down into concrete historical terms: Agamben frames the primary scope of the book around a debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson. Both Continental Catholic thinkers, they violently disagreed with one another. For Schmitt, the political remains the key solution to the problem of economic dissolution which liberalism signaled. The constitution-state, which had dissolved politics into a government which no longer legislated but executed the law, was doomed to degeneracy. Instead, Schmitt's juridical work on the concept of "dictator" offered the hope that sovereignty, though buried under procedural parliamentary politics, could re-exert itself against the growing tide of socialist mass movements. Thus Schmitt, belonging to the Roman Catholic Center Party, argued President Hindenburg must use his constitutional dictatorial powers to suspend the law in order to save it. A dictatorship could reverse the tide of Bolshevism (as well as the revolutionary right), arresting and removing his enemies. The introduction of a "state of exception" would preserve the normative force of the law, as much as a miracle reaffirms God's good providence over creation.

However, Schmitt would eventually find himself in his "exceptional period" as a jurist for National Socialism. During these years, Schmitt focused on the legitimating feature of primal democracy (as opposed to liberal representation democracy) which acclaimed the sovereign (we will return to this point later). However, most importantly, Schmitt developed his thoughts on the concept of Fuhrung (leadership). Schmitt gained late admiration for Hitler when, as Chancellor, he was able to press for a suspension of the Weimar Constitution (though it remained the formal law until 1945, when Germany was dissolved) and ban his political enemies. The brutal violence in the Night of Long Knives demonstrated the political will to preserve Germany from subversives. However (and this is what provides a hidden and embarrassing link to Peterson), Hitler acted not from the position of sovereign. Hitler was only ever elected to the office of Chancellor, head of government. It was through an analysis of Fuhrung that Schmitt theorized Hitler's effective position of indistinction. Like the providential shepherd, the Fuhrer offered a transcendental order to his sheep even as he pragmatically moved them here and there. Sovereignty and government, political and economic, transcendental and immanent, general and specific providence all blur together. Politics becomes defined as administration of the Fuhrer's will (an administration which becomes increasingly democratized, as any may act to carry out the will of the nation), and, more importantly, defined through the mass rally. The screaming throngs of "Hail Hitler!" becomes a form of worship and celebration. This then saw a blur of indistinction between what is political and what is economic, between the authorizing power of the sovereign and authorized executive power of the government. All ordering becomes reduced to what is ordered, thus giving an unlimited premium of government. The continued shadow of the Constitution opened the possibility that any act, whatsoever, could become ipso dixit licit or illicit through the show of force. It was at this moment the anarchy of power was on full display.

It was this latter problem that had marked out Schmitt's opposition to Peterson. While the former believed in the necessity of a Christian politics, the latter saw it dissolved as a contradiction in terms. Schmitt - whom Peterson dubbed "Eusebian" - believed that the earthly sovereign had the task to restrain the forces of evil that threatened to bring about the end of time. The German Emperor -as a katechon, restrainer - could intervene to prevent a collapse into chaos. But for Peterson, Augustine in City of God had demonstrated how Christianity put an end to all politics. In contrast to Eusebian Schmitt, the revelation of the Trinity ended monarchy and instead put into an effect a new regime of worship. In a blurring of terms, Peterson argued that liturgy was the supremely political act. In reversing the clearly household terminology of the New Testament, Heaven would become an unending city-state, whose supreme political expression was no longer in deputized administration, but unending praise. However, at the same time, a shadow of government must be preserved in the administration of the damned. Government would remain excluded from the primary task of politics, which was nothing other than praise of the system of government itself. Yet at the same time government would continue at full-steam. Here the shadow is cast, for the government of the damned coincided with contemplation and worship of God. In facing this problem head-on, Thomas admitted that for paradise to truly be paradise, the sufferings of the damned must contribute to the full beatitude of the saints. It is not pity or remorse, but enjoyment, that Heavenly citizens feel, a satisfaction in the order of divine judgement. Thus is complete the relation between never-ending infernal government with the economized politics of liturgy.

It's in this moment that Agamben signifies Schmitt's embarrassment with his own work. His opposition to Peterson revealed, at the same time, a proximity. While Schmitt may have morphed his monarchic sovereignism into praise for Chancellor Hitler's revolutionary government, the truth was that this slip was simply to recapitulate the logic of Peterson. The exceptional punishment of the damned in the Camps (whether Jew, Slav, Gypsy, political criminal, etc.) coincided with the cheerful praises of the Nation, encapsulated with its Leader. This form of democracy was not nude, but guided and guard through the functionaries that performed and scripted the liturgy of power. The banners, the choreographed marches, the singing, the call-and-response between representative and crowd, all of these required the determined skillful hands of bureaucrats. Like angels leading the procession of worship, so too did government officials write, promote, and solicit spontaneous odes of celebration. The supreme manifestation of government would be a litany of unending praise for the leader and the exterminating penalty afflicted upon the enemy. And while Schmitt had made a temporary peace with this regime, was this any different than Peterson's economized politics of liturgy? What if the full expression of supreme never-ending, ever-expanding, governance was not in National Socialism, but its successor: Social Democracy? 

But again, we must pause. Social Democracy is an expression of the zone of indistinction: collapse of sovereignty into government,  the economization of politics (leading government to only concern administration for continued biological existence), and the increasing suspension of law to carry out its penalties. This blurring is what took place within National Socialism and the revolutionary mass politics of the mid twentieth century. But why do these phenomena require "glory"? Why are millions, if not billions, spent on media spectacles? Why must the will of the people require choreographed song, celebration, and participation? Why do representative democracies spend an inordinate amount to broadcast activism, gestures of power, and so on, despite that formal power is exercised through the mundane processes of parliamentary procedure and party politics? Why do these rites, which conjoin the heavenly and earthly, continue? Here we must turn to an archaeology of Glory.

Glory means an opinion or expression of evaluation (doxa). Within the Hebrew world, the Biblical term for glory (kavhod) implied a heaviness or weightiness, the reputation of one established. God's glory was his objective reputation, the appearance of his majesty with fear and trembling among men. However, glory took on aesthetic dimensions as well. Glory was beautification, to exclaim how wonderful the divine is. And within Christian theology, glory was what was exchanged between the persons of the Godhead (the Father glorified the Son, the Son glorified the Father), as well as between God and his people (the Church glorified God, God glorified the Church). Here the term begins to develop a double-significance in homonymy. Glory could be divine reality (the weight of God's presence) or human opinion acclaimed. These blurred together in the mutual glorification of the liturgy: God was celebrated precisely in that his presence was unknowable. The blinding light of the glory of God was beautiful, but it also hid a beauty far beyond created eyes. What man may know, and celebrate, is the divine accomplishment of salvation, even as at the same moment God remains beyond this light. 

Where medieval theology suggested the radical disjuncture between God-in-himself and God-to-us (the fearful Deus absconditus that predestined in his inscrutable will), modern theology has tried to radically identify the immanent Trinity (God-in-himself) and the economic Trinity (God-as-revealed). Rahner's Rule - named after twentieth century Jesuit priest and theologian Karl Rahner - claimed that the immanent and economic trinity were identical. It's thus no surprise that this modern emphasis coincided with the Liturgical Movement, with a renewal of liturgical studies to form doctrine. The emphasis on lex orandi, lex credendi (in other words, "the way you pray is the way you believe") focused study on liturgical reform to revive the Church. The immanent trinity and economic trinity found complete overlap in the worship of salvation, celebrating God's mighty acts to redeem his creation in an endless cycle of praise. God is what he does, and his actions reveal (if not define) his being. Glory is the luminous cycle which bring the two together. God as sovereign creator and God as omnipotent governor of providence coincided in celebration. But what this signifies is that the center of the circle is empty:

"Of course, the operation of glory - or at least its pretension - is to express the pleromatic figure of the trinity, in which economic trinity and immanent trinity are once and for all securely articulated together. But it can only fulfill this task by continuously dividing what it must conjoin and each time reconjoining what must remain separated. For this reason, just as in the profane sphere glory was an attribute, not of Government but of the Kingdom, not of the ministers but of the sovereign, so the doxology refers ultimately to the being of God, not to his economy. And yet, if one removes Government, and the Government that which remains if the Kingdom removes itself, in such a way that the governmental machine always consists in the articulation of these two polarities, equally, one could say that the theo-doxological machine results from the correlation between immanent trinity and economic trinity, in which each of these two aspects glorifies the other and steams from the other. Government glorifies the Kingdom, and the Kingdom glorifies Government. But the center of the machine is empty, and glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine." (211)

 In other terms, the praise of God emerges from his series of acts to save the Human race. These actions reveal the internal being of God: that the Father out of his deep love sent the Son with the Holy Spirit to redeem Adam's children. However, this means that the being of God is only visible in his actions, which in turn constitute his being. Medieval theology - whether Latin nominalists like Occam or the Greek essence-energies distinction of Gregory Palamas - had maintained that there was still something beyond, a sovereignty beyond the economy of salvation. Modern theology, however, had tried to reconcile the possible problems this encouraged (an agnostic apophatic excess of divinity) with complete identification. The economy is God's being, God is constituted through his act of will to save humanity. But if God's being is in his act, what was God prior to this act? Modern theology refers to a transcendental series of internal actions that refer to this economy (Father sending Son in Spirit, Spirit bringing Son to Father). If this is true then God's being is none other than glory (Father glorifies Son through Spirit, Son glorifies Father in Spirit). But the cycle of activity (for this constitutes God's being) is an-arche (since, in Augustinian theology, the Trinity as the series of God's relations, is an-arche). Therefore, at the center of the government and providence, is nothing. The origin of action is a void. There can be no reason that God wills to act as such, or to constitute his being as such, besides naked arbitrary choice. Once again, at the heart of modern theology, the anarchy of power appears. The aestheticization of glory exists to bedeck this void. The glorious golden and bejeweled throne, receiving endless praise and worship, is empty.

Mankind's task in this process is expansion. According to the Jesuit motto - which seems absurd on its face - man's task is ad maioram Dei gloriam (to the greater glory of God). If glory is defined according to God's presence, this task makes no sense (how can finite man add to the perfect God). However, if glory is this intensification of worship, this celebration of the empty seat, then the liturgics must become more intense, more expressive, more involved. Perhaps it is no surprise that the Liturgical Renewal movement within Rome reached a certain climax in the Novus Ordo Mass. An effort to restore ancient purity, the worship of God, which had been a hieratic affair, was democratized to include the people. Prayer towards the altar (an established practice) was changed to prayer towards the people. An unintended gesture, the mysterious sovereign God beyond was now transmuted into the void between priest and people, as all now belong to the ministry of God. The greater the ministry, the greater the government, the greater the glory. The politics of the Church, in this guise, takes on increasingly totalitarian dimensions, as the government must be of all and belong to all. This logic explains the Vatican II's Jesuit Pope working hand-in-hand with David Rockefeller to establish "ethical capitalism". Like the twentieth century transformation of liberalism, this form of capitalism is similar to the World Economic Forum's praise for "share-holders capitalism" and its democratizing effects. In secularized terms, the Global Market's being is manifest through the flurry of market actions of its constituents. Mass Democracy, in a politics that is primarily about access to resources and administration of goods for biological survival, requires unending praise of its own rites. Thus it's quite common to hear the empty platitude "the system works" when a democratic election is carried out. What does it mean that it "works"? The metric is simply continuity as a basis of stability, not whether citizens languish in poverty, incarceration, suppression, immorality, fear for life or the despair these cause.

But why is glory necessary for this process? What does it contribute if it adds nothing but greater involvement? What does that accomplish? And why does the democratic process - saturated with social media and advertisement - require this constant cycle of self-validation? Why are polls constantly conducted about the popularity of the government? And in Europe, why have referendums (of dubious legal validity) and motions of no confidence become more frequent? From a theological point, once again, the idea of worshiping God as necessary seems peculiar. Why does God need man's glory?

Agamben turns to anthropological research of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss in ancient societies, where the discrete categories of modern thought (religion apart from politics, law apart from magic) blur. In the Vedic tradition, a startling claim is made: the gods are themselves constituted through the sacrifices of men. Thus, prayer and praise, sacrifice and service, constitute the very birth of the divine itself:

"Perhaps glorification is not only that which best fits the glory of God but is itself, as effective rite, what produces glory; and if glory is the very substance of God and. the true sense of his economy, then it depends upon glorification in an essential manner and, therefore, has good reason to demand it through reproaches and injunctions." (226)

This then gestures at the secret link between glory and power which determine the continued exercise of government in the name of the sovereign. The power of the authorized power in government depends upon its own summons into existence. The translation from fasces (an effective ritual symbol) into the imperial purple and heavy crown was not an emptying out of signification (a mere shadow of authority), but a distinction that further disguises the power of glory. For the Emperor would not exist without the crown or purple, his government would immediately dissolve, thus the ritual must be performed. Within the chaos of mass democracy, in the society of the spectacle,  whatever balance or possibility simply evaporates. Totalization takes place precisely through the dispersion of this power and this blur together of kingdom and government through the unending procession of glory. The void of the will to power is dispersed through these separations, but modern politics has unleashed its potential violence. Only glory may sustain this system to continue its whirlwind of never-ending government over all things, which can't stop without collapse:

"Glory, both in theology and in politics, is precisely what takes the place of that unthinkable emptiness that amounts to the inoperativity of power. And yet, precisely this unsayable vacuity is what nourishes and feeds power (or, rather, what the machine of power transforms into nourishment). That means that the center of governmental apparatus, the threshold at which Kingdom and Government ceaselessly communicate and ceaselessly distinguish themselves from one another is, in reality, empty" (242)

In contemporary terms, this glorification of the political sovereign is through public opinion. The People - what Richard Tuck has called the "sleeping sovereign" - must continually be exalted. The Will of The People is what authorizes and legitimates the government that acts in its name. Yet, this public opinion itself must be constituted through the media apparatus of opinion polls, surveys, and votes. There is no The People without these efforts to diagnose what The People think on the variety of pre-packaged issues. This fact has been recognized from early on in the twentieth century from theorists like Walter Lipmman (Propaganda) and Edward Bernays (Propaganda). The chaos of individual thought was not capable of constituting itself into any sort of political sovereign. Instead, without these clerical mediations of supplication and exaltation, The People were merely the masses, chaotic and confused. The fear that a demagogue would take control, which animated these new and hawkish liberals, would not come true, despite the anti-fascist mythology of the twentieth century. What took place among National Socialism was not a demagogic despotism, where the strongman refounds the political community around his family and his law. Rather, its elaborate liturgies of primal acclamation are an exhausted form of the public opinion polling that has now dominated the West. It is this communicative society, the discursive politics that Jurgen Habermas and the anticommunist left has so celebrated, which expresses unlimited government:

"Consensual democracy, which Debord called 'the society of the spectacle' and which is so dear to the theorists of communicative action, is a glorious democracy, in which the oikonomia is fully resolved into glory and the doxological function, freeing itself of liturgy and ceremonials, absolutizes itself to an unheard of extent and penetrates every area of social life" (259)

It is out of this paradigm that all of life falls under government, every aspect of human existence must be upheld. The benign goals of welfare may result in temporary uplift, but find their final goal in the dance of democracy. While it is quite common, and fairly widespread, that true democracy sees government increasingly devolve to every individual citizen, this only intensifies the power of government. Power exercised by all over all leads to the chaotic state of exception that has become common to the west. Whether it is vaccine mandates, lockdowns, quarantines, all these exhibit The People governing to the best of their ability, increasingly deputizing all citizens to fulfill the government as if they acted as The People. It's not uncommon to find ideologues in media to speak as if they are The People, calling for the punishment of those who have excepted themselves from the process. It is in the glorious democracy that this expression of power will happen simultaneously with rituals of popular consultation. Just as ancient acclamations were often not spontaneous, but elicited or choreographed, so too does media technique and advertisement (made more efficient through data collection) attempt to shape The People which justifies the government that regulates and administers the state's control of resources. The endless cycle of praise for Democracy, celebrations about "the system works", will dovetail with oversight of the infernal penal colony of the damned. The punishment of regime dissidents only elicits more praise. Social Democracy's telos leads to endless self-valorization, total government, and a carceral state for those who have made themselves outside the blessed community.

The anarchy of power can only continue to operate as long as the political liturgy of mass democracy continues. The modern west has become what Ivan Illich has called the most explicitly Christian era, a time of never-ending apocalypse. The only solution must come from within an alternative political theology, and it is the one that St. Paul had declared. Christ Crucified was not a step in a history of salvation which constitutes the redemption of humanity. Rather, Christ Crucified is an eternal revelation of God. The angelic and Human ministers, who had only expanded the government of Torah in order to carry it out through human traditions, must be stopped. The Wounded King will not justify his endless proliferation of glorious government, but put it to a stand-still:

"[Pauline messianism] acts as a corrective to the demonic hypertrophy of angelic and human powers. The Messiah deactivates and renders inoperative the law as well as the angels and, in this way, reconciles them with God (katargeo is the technical term that Paul uses to express the relation between the Messiah and the power of angels and men; I translate argos as "inoperative" and not simply as 'I destroy'). (One reads in Colossians 1:15-20 that all things, 'whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers,' have been created through the Messiah and through him they will be reconciled with God.) The theme of the law no longer applied, but studied, that in Kafka's novels goes hand in hand with that of the constantly inoperative angel-functionaries, here reveals its messianic pertinence. The ultimate and glorious telos of the law and of the angelic powers, as well as of the profane powers, is to be deactivated and made inoperative." (166)

The cycle between the sovereign and the government grounds to a halt. The exchange of power manifest in the acclamatory public opinion ceases. The individual freed from discursive and communicative politics. The machine which generates and flows from public opinion evaporates. The being of God is none other than the gift the shatters the cycle. The Christ offers an opening of a life beyond government. Beyond discourse and identity, a new politics begins to appear.