*

Paul W. Kahn’s Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is a compelling book, though compelling in a sense not unlike an intellectual bruise one is drawn to press on again and again. Ostensibly a re-purposing of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology, Kahn’s book possesses a more ambitious armature than his title and the format of following Schmitt’s chapter scheme might suggest. Kahn is a legal scholar by training, and interested here in the problem of sovereignty, which takes him deep into questions of law, jurisprudence, constitutional reasoning, and forms of political organization. It is no less notable, however, that Kahn’s project weighs in on four classic philosophical and political problems: a) the problem of whether and how freedom is possible; b) the question of how a social body is constituted, reconstituted, and reformed; c) the question of whether there is anything human beyond reason (i.e., the question of whether reason comes to an end); and d) the question of when modernity begins, and thus of what its signature concepts and practices are. Subsidiary matters in Kahn’s disquisition on sovereignty include the nature of artistic creation; the motif of creation as such, in relation to religion, politics, and art; and the question of what the origin of a social body has to do with its subsequent operations. This last issue is the one that connects Kahn to Schmitt, since it is Schmitt’s famous contention that the primal act (decision) of collective origin is recapitulated in the ordinary operations of statecraft, a fact it behooves us to remember, but—and this is Schmitt’s raison d’être—also a fact that we subjects of modern liberal democracies, with our proper procedures and our endless debates, largely repress (consistent perhaps with Freud’s famous contention that this repression was itself the primal act of collective origin). We should not be surprised, says Schmitt, that undemocratic phenomena erupt in the midst of democratic structures, for such eruptions tell us something ineradicable about the political as such, and thus about ourselves.

This claim, if true, might be seen as yet another dark myth for our dark times. However, for Kahn, and presumably for other thinkers similarly drawn to Schmitt, it is most definitely not a depressing claim. It is not simply about wiretaps and orange alerts and foreign ambushes. And this makes sense. Why write a book renewing our interest in a sometime Nazi thinker who merely says that, at their heart, democracies are also undemocratic? Don’t we have plenty of our own tyrants and failures to keep us foul company in the long and laborious struggle toward a more democratic and free universe?  On the contrary, Kahn seeks the counsel of Schmitt because he thinks Schmitt’s observations about the political—specifically his observation that politics is about deciding, not about reasoning—are liberating, indeed, are a theory of liberation. In contrast with “a theory of politics as reasonable discourse,” alongside which Kahn places discourses driven by questions of rights, justice, procedural equality, and so on, a political theology of the kind Schmitt offers captures “the character of our political experience as authentically free.” Free, he tells us, like Picasso was free. Free, he writes, somewhat more disturbingly, like Abraham was free.

And here is the bruise. Kahn is not simply offering us Schmitt to banish the illusion that we can do without decision in political life—and thus without force, violence, or sacrifice. He is offering us a Schmitt whose meditations on decision bring us solutions to the four classic problems noted above: of freedom, of origin and practice, of reason, and of modernity. Kahn wears many colorful hats in this book, and takes many risks, assuming in one moment the mien of sober expert on institutions of law and justice, and in another the theorist or perhaps even the practitioner of art, while in yet another he writes as a philosopher returning us to the most elemental problems of the human condition. In this cornucopia, Kahn reminds me of Terence Malick trying to produce a film written by Jerry Bruckheimer. We will heed Schmitt’s voice along the way, adequately updated and made progressive for a renewed liberal polity. We will also enjoy the spectacle of the decision, clenched fist hammering on raucous, conversational table. But there is a grimness that besets Kahn as he wends through this story that belies the loftier intellectual realms in which he seems to want to take his place. There is no doubt that Kahn usefully recalls us to a consideration of the structures of political life. But Schmitt proves a wayward interlocutor on the more foundational topics those structures bespeak, and seems to support Kahn in his least convincing mode, arguing for the salience of will over reason in the problem of freedom.

Kahn has advanced this argument elsewhere, that the will, and not reason, forms the center of “Judeo-Christian metaphysics,” most notably in Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil. It is, I find, a significantly distracting claim. Does he not know, I mutter to myself, pulling Pascal and Kant and Kierkegaard off the shelf, that Schmitt’s petty algorithm of decision is woefully incapable of taking us through even problema 1 of the relationship of the universal and the particular in the problem of freedom? Kahn brings up Abraham in order to imagine for us a politics that “begins with an act of willing self-destruction that rests on faith, not reason.” But what does Kahn make of the fact that, in Kierkegaard’s telling, it is the hero Agamemnon, not Abraham, who, by the logic of Kahn’s political theology, places faith in the divine higher than his human obligation, who, as Kahn approves, leaves off “the finite in the presence of the infinite”? (And is this not the very constitution of terrorism?) For Kierkegaard, Abraham, by contrast, refuses this calculus, this “faith,” and thus, in asserting his love for Isaac as equal to his love for God, shows that these two loves, both faithful and rational, both universal and particular, do not—ultimately cannot—conflict. Faith would then be the commitment to this novum. One can certainly argue this notorious biblical episode, with or without the likes of Kierkegaard, well into the next millennium. But—Kahn knows—at some point there is (can be, should be) a decision on what it means. His is chilling, opting for decision itself as outside the framework of human understanding. Kahn is careful to overrule the arbitrary, arguing that decision (will) hews a path between the irrational or mad and the ordinary rule of rational norms and procedures. But it is startling to find on this middle ground a defense—from the finite to the infinite—that would not be out of place on a recruitment poster for martyrdom.

This conflation of Abraham and Agamemnon is repeated in diverse ways throughout Kahn’s analysis. In thinking through the origins of community—the origins of the state—Kahn writes:

The originating act rests on the faith that through death is life, the central idea of every sacrifice. There can be no nation of Israel as a community sustaining itself through history until families are willing to sacrifice their children for the sake of the existence of the state. They do so not because of a promise of their own well-being, as in Hobbes’s idea of the social contract, but because they have faith that the state holds forth an ultimate meaning. Sacrifice is the appearance of the sacred as a historical phenomenon. Its domain is silent faith, not reasoned discourse. We can talk forever and never reach a position of faith. This is the faith that connects the transcendent experience of revolution to the jurispathic moment of judicial decision, and both to the state of exception in defense of the nation.

Here, again, there is the supposed opposition between faith and reason, between reasoning as the position of deferral and naiveté, and faith and sacrifice as the signs of true politics (marked by the appearance of the sacred). But surely he knows, I mutter, pulling Spinoza and Hobbes off the shelf, that there is a whole literature that makes central the complex relationship between reason and commitment (faith) in the enactment of political being. A thinker like Spinoza, rationalist to the core, is fascinated with the question of how sovereignty is made collective—how a mass, in other words, is constituted as rational when rationality is only possible in a mass. Spinoza’s notion of reason as collective (and thus connected to power and sovereignty) is unlike Kahn’s model, which would have us debating ad nauseum in the desert until someone, call him the king, has the cojones to bring the reasoning to an end. As Kahn puts it, “sovereignty is constituted in the imagining of the sacrificial act: the willingness to kill and be killed establishes the temporal and geographic boundaries of the state. The pledge speaks the same language beyond reason that Abraham spoke to God: ‘Here am I.’” And yet, amazingly, almost as an aside, Kahn also writes that “the condition of free thought is not isolation from others. Rather, if freedom is realized in discursive engagement, then its condition is mutual recognition. Freedom is a practice we do together.”

This is the point at which I have to admit my own limits—to say that, if Kahn’s argument about freedom and decision can be held together, then perhaps it is just my own dimness that cannot make it out. It seems right to say at the very least that the problem the so-called contract theorists address seems fundamentally the same as Kahn’s. How do we conceive of the moment of origin? What kind of an act is it? How do you move (if indeed you do move) from nature to freedom? Like Kahn, Spinoza has recourse to the image of the ancient Hebrews as a mass constituted before God. But they interpret this image very differently. For Spinoza, the case of the Hebrews displays both the democratic quality of the divine-human relationship, as the covenant with God “left them all completely equal,” with equal “right to consult God, to receive and interpret his laws,” and to share “in the government of the state,” and the dangers of having God as the head of state—the need, in short, to transfer this position to a human, and ideally democratic sovereign, as the Hebrews did for a time. It demonstrates the coordination of commitment and reason, for God, as the sign of democratic sovereignty, is the very embodiment of reason, while also being, in human hands, a site of conflict. Another way of putting this is that reason, for Spinoza,  is no less about decision than it is about principle, so to mark the haunting of a state by its origins is not threatening to democratic unfolding (i.e., not the sign that there is something undemocratic afoot). There is no moment, no decision, that is not subject to “talk,” no transcendent that transcends the mind making it comprehensible. For Kahn, by contrast, the presence of revelation and faith in the case of the Hebrews demonstrates the centrality of sacrifice and exception:

A politics of the exception is one that relies on revelation and faith rather than argument and reason. It is, as Schmitt writes, a politics of the miraculous, but – and this is the most important point—it is also an experience of freedom. This is the moment that liberal theory rejects as a failure of reason. Despite the failure of theoretical comprehension, the history of the nation has been the narrative of these moments of decision, just as the history of the Jews is a narrative of God’s revelation.

It is not that people cannot disagree about such things: reason, faith, origin, the political, or more narrowly, the history of the Jews, the history of the nation, America. It is that Schmitt, on these topics, is a mallet. In encountering again and again Kahn’s insistence that “political theology” is a form of authenticity and an expression of freedom insofar as it “rests on an experience beyond discourse . . . on faith, not argument, and on sacrifice, not contract,” I was moved to look again at some of the more searching accounts in the philosophical tradition (of the West) of the limits of what we can know. One does not have to look far.

There is Pascal, for one, who writes so movingly of “the supreme difficulty” that our “very being” presents to us, but who writes, nevertheless, that there is a “relationship between man and all he knows,” and who knows, thus, that, if reason’s very power is constituted through the “recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it,” this beyond is no more a receptacle for faith than it is for further scrutiny of the “greatest prodigy in nature . . . man himself.” Who better than Pascal to agree with Schmitt that faith is a wager unplumbed by reason? But how impoverished Schmitt seems next to the French early modern, who takes us with great subtlety to the frontiers of each. Commit, says Pascal, for you—your being as both rational and faithful—are already committed. Now account for both in the life you piece together in their wake.

There is Kant, for another, whose position on reason and freedom Kahn typifies as the subordination of “the self to a universal rule.” Kahn’s argument with Kant (and Rawls) launches him into an extended discussion of artistic creation, as if Kant simply failed to recognize that real freedom involves more than applying a rule. In the course of this dispute, Kahn makes some powerful connections between creation, interpretation, and imagination. But hovering over the proceedings is the Schmittian mallet: Artists “do not know how it is that they do what they do. They do not know because the imagination is not an expression of reason but of free will.” One appreciates what Kahn is saying when he says that “the artist does not apply the universal.” It is just that this maxim masks the thing that Kahn shares with Kant and his heirs, not just Rawls and Habermas, Kahn’s bêtes noir, but a wilder, more creative thinker like Alain Badiou. Of course freedom is not the application of a rule. Of course it is an “event” with no precedent and no premise. Of course, Kant would say, we have no examples of it, for it is not given in the nature of the world as we ordinarily (Badiou would say), or phenomenally (Kant would say), receive it. In this, Kant and Kierkegaard stand together. Reason and faith can each hollow out the quotidian pieties with which we ordinarily move through the world.

But Kahn’s (Schmitt’s) striking conclusion, that freedom can only be preserved outside the range of reason, seems too costly a conclusion in terms of what it blinds him to: It makes any notion of free will literally blind, for, in the idiom of the artist, the actor “does not know how it is that they do what they do,” a truly disarming and contradictory notion. And it makes Kahn blind to the, again, more subtle structures of freedom and reason present in someone like Kant. For Kant acknowledges that freedom is awesome, incredible, wondrous. We would not believe it possible were it not for the consciousness we have of the moral law, to which all of our vague, fumbling projects of self-interest (abandoning the finite for the infinite, for example, whether that infinite is God or Oprah) nevertheless—or, indeed, therefore—point, and which requires the postulate of freedom. When Kahn transposes the moral law into the language of rule-obeying contra the freedom of muses and creative daimons, he is surely confused, for the idea that, loosely translated, I can take the other’s standpoint as my own is doubtless as radically unprecedented as any human action there is, and is no less present in Guernica than in the Declaration of Independence. Or he is crazy. For the idea that there is something more free (higher, better) than finding common cause with the other is, like Agamemnon, part of a world I, with Picasso and Abraham, would disavow. Kant’s reason, like Spinoza’s, is constituted in the collective, outside of which there is only fate, self-deception, and the banality of taking oneself as the measure of all things. This does not mean it is sheerly comprehensible. But, Schmitt might grudgingly approve, it is comprehensible “in its incomprehensibility,” and this, Kant notes, with Pascal, “is all that can fairly be required of a philosophy that strives in its principles to the very boundary of human reason.”

These (Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard, Badiou) were not the only thinkers I pulled off my shelves in reading Kahn’s treatise. Bestrewn on the floor are Aristotle (on the nature of knowledge deferred), St. Anselm (on reason and borders), Maimonides (on the fall and its disavowal), Plato (on the divided line and on killing and being killed), Sartre (on authenticity), Levinas (on Sinai and freedom) . . . the list goes on. Freud, as I note above, is actually a vital case for Kahn’s work, for Freud can look now like Schmitt, with his primal killings, and now more like Spinoza or Derrida, who conceive origins as already, i.e., primarily, repressed, which is another way, oddly enough, of saying that they are “originally” rational insofar as consciousness and unconsciousness are thereby understood to come into existence together. There is Strauss, too, a companion in arms for many readers of Schmitt, a writer who similarly loaded his ambivalence about reason into the arrows he flung at enemies theological and political. But the thought was by that point too fatiguing. The book clearly got my goat, and perhaps that is a mark of its strength. I wanted, in revisiting these thinkers, to expose Kahn’s (Schmitt’s) anemic notion of reason as the standard Trojan horse that it is, smuggling in an empty genealogy of the West and of modernity, while tapping into something importantly true and often bungled: that, as Pascal notes, it is reason that knows it is not enough, reason that is always drawing and redrawing its borders and its unknowns. And thus it is reason that is enough. It needs—god knows it needs—no mallets.

I conclude, in lieu of this longer project, with a gesture toward a better genealogy (and thus a better account) of modern reason, which would begin, Kahn might well recognize, in Genesis, on which, one could say, his treatise is a partial commentary. For, even though Kahn, like so many before him, makes Reformation and Enlightenment (in Schmittian parlance, decision and its rationalization) the twin sources of modernity (without accounting for their sources), his treatment of reason as a nattering cipher silenced by the muscular arm of the sovereign owes more than a little to that familiar story of God and the serpent and Eve and Adam. In the midrashic imagination I have in mind, however, the God character is a little different from Schmitt’s fearless, sovereign actor. Confronted with his act of creation, God tries to keep knowledge out of the relationship, himself repressing (in confusion? in vainglory?) what he has established in creating in the first place: self and other, reason and faith. There is no mystery in Genesis, no ignorance of how what is done is done. There is simply, in the serpent, mystification, as knowledge is passed off as inconsequential. There is simply, in Adam and Eve, double-mindedness, as they confront, out of Eden, the laborious commitment that da’at, knowledge, will require of them. And there is simply, in God, the combination of bluster, self-regard, and self-consciousness that artists like Malick use to great effect to bring faith and reason into ever new deliciously undecidable relation. Is it not a beautiful joke that his new film, Tree of Life, full of gauzy pieties to God in the voice-overs, is prefaced, not with a verse extolling God’s trembling mystery, but instead with God’s blunt and angrily rhetorical question to Job as God appears, finally, after a long silence: “Where were you [while I was here making the land of good and evil]?” It is a measure of the film’s depth, its own da’at, that it simultaneously acknowledges the force of this question and responds, with painstaking attention to detail, bypassing rhetoric for reason: “Here.” “Here,” the Jobs of Malick’s film say. “We were here, as you were, citizens and sovereigns of the land the knowledge of good and evil made.”

Taylor’s book and its commentaries situate themselves in a contemporary debate loosely staged under the term secularism and which includes a range of voices from diverse disciplines, geographic regions, and social and political perspectives. The term is by no means limited to work in the study of religion, although it has a special frisson there, as scholars of religion have come to see that the secular is just as much their conceptual quarry as its seemingly more identifiable partner. It is as if the increasing sophistication of thinking about religion has tended to displace religion itself, not only because, as some theorists would have it, religion has merely heuristic existence, but also because discourses of religion so clearly have to be separated out from a teeming background of other conceptual generics (e.g., politics, economics, power, gender, rite, law), and it is valuable to try to identify some of these along the way. The term secular might be deployed as a name for this background, enabling scholars to retain the right of refusal—there is no religion separate from the discursive marks it chews into a cacophonous, plural space—while also investigating the contexts and effects of religion’s enunciation. But, as the essays in Varieties make clear, this use of secularity as a blanket descriptor is inadequate both to the specific formation the secular engenders and to its role in rendering all specificity invisible. Books as diverse as Marcel Gauchet’s Désenchantment du monde (1985), Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1987), Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular (2003), and Tracy Fessenden’s Culture and Redemption (2007) have probed the literary, philosophical, and political texture of the secular while raising questions about its identity and its boundaries. These works show that if religion is resistant to the effort to conceive its non-religious conditions, the secular is resistant to the effort to conceive its religious or religio-cultural specificity, a state of affairs ripe for investigative hermeneutics.

Taylor’s book thus enters debates well underway, and in which he has long been a participant. The fruit of a life’s work on modernity and the modern self, A Secular Age nevertheless reads as a little impervious to the state of current thinking. This is evident in the decision to set the story in Latin Christendom, a move that might have seemed a strategic admission of the inevitability of location and the division of labor, but which has given rise to predictable criticisms of myopia and cultural irrelevance. The moniker Latin Christendom has the flavor of an attempt to be responsibly specific—thus engendering specific quibbles—while also denoting a landscape very large and vague. Something even vaguer, like “the West,” might have served as a better location, precisely because it is hard to say what the West is, and this seems as it should be as we (Latin Christians, seculars, and others) ponder not only how we got here but what and where and why is here. This roomier choice might have empowered Taylor to head off two of the critiques in Varieties: that he carves out his historical Christianity blind to its porous, often violent actualities (Saba Mahmood, Nilüfer Göle), and, by the same logic, that his Christianity is only mock-historic (Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan). (It would be gorgeous to connect these two critiques, but, alas, readers will not find this connection in Varieties.) But, like his use of the word secular, he seems at once to solicit these critiques and to sidestep them, late to a conversation he is not quite having. Taylor’s story—from Latin to license—is first and foremost about God and belief, and this puts it at some degrees of remove from the debates into which it is somewhat awkwardly interjected. He shares with Asad a critique of, in Taylor’s words, “subtraction stories,” which make the secular a neutral baseline rather than a specific formation of its own. But the ensuing debates have tended to foreground, as Taylor does not, the flaming ideological stakes involved in histories of God in the West, and the impossibility of considering their hold, or lack thereof, without the mediation of a cultural critique borne precisely in normative contestation with the Christendom Taylor takes as descriptive. Many of the contributors to Varieties—and certainly the editors—treat Taylor as a player with a horse in this race, but the ones who settle into the most attentive readings of him sideline the secular for the sake of the book’s real obsessions: God, history, the age.

The first of three such readings is by the theologian John Milbank. It says something about Taylor’s place in contemporary debates about the secular that his most intimate interlocutor here is Milbank—a brilliant, often embattled critic of secularity, and co-founder of the theological revival known as Radical Orthodoxy. One senses (or perhaps one hopes) that at this stage Radical Orthodoxy is only slightly more pleasing a descriptor to Milbank than deconstruction was to mid-career Derrida, being by now more a short-hand for hostile, or at least ignorant, outsiders to caricature what is in practice a complex multi-headed project. Still, Milbank throws his hat cheerfully into the ring, embracing the delicious ambiguity of his presence at this table with his usual combination of intellectual brio and studied cluelessness. On the one hand, who else could better comment on Taylor’s contention that it is a spirit of reform buried deep in the shadows of the Christian ethos that gives rise to the overturning of a pan-Christian norm? Who else could better relate to the relish with which Taylor depicts an enchanted Christianity and its haunting semblance in the wake of its reformation? Gauchet, whom Taylor might seem to resemble, felt he was doing a fair job of depicting the metaphysics and historicity of the Christian worldview in arguing that it contains its secular at its origins. But for Milbank and Taylor alike, this “whiggish” notion is to be firmly set aside, as we conceive a Christianity that might have been, and might still be, otherwise (though Milbank, rewriting Gauchet, wants to record, too, “the history of the failure to live up to the radicalism of ‘incarnation’ from the very outset”). Milbank and Taylor disagree on the details of this otherwise. But of all the contributors in Varieties, Milbank is by far the most able and willing to enter into the project of historical and theological reconstruction that Taylor attempts, and his solidarity with Taylor’s work provides a tighter angle on the Christian question (whither, wherefore) that they share.

On the other hand—and here Milbank’s imagined cluelessness is transferred elsewhere—on what principle of bland inclusivity did the editors imagine a conversation in which Milbank has something meaningful to say to, e.g., Wendy Brown or Jonathan Sheehan or Jon Butler or Saba Mahmood or José Casanova? This is not to scapegoat Milbank. Indeed, his essay is among the liveliest in the volume. Nor is it to suggest that the others mentioned here are in unproblematic conversation with each other, or with William Connolly, Nilüfer Göle, Akeel Bilgrami, Robert Bellah, Simon During, or Colin Jager. It is simply that, if the editors imagined some meaty encounter between those deeply invested in the Christian story in and of modernity and those invested in quite other projects, many in significant opposition to the Christian one, they should have staged this debate, or said something telling or pointing or otherwise helpful about it. Instead, we get in the introduction a long excursus on the importance of Taylor’s book, which, as one gets into the substance of Varieties, comes to seem increasingly absurd. If Taylor is not quite at the forefront of debates on the secular, neither is he front and center, as Milbank is, on debates concerning the Christian. Perhaps this is the curse of liberal theology. It wants its redemption from too many sources in too many ways; it genuinely desires and/or is reconciled to modernity and the secular, and can then only gesture weakly towards real desire for real Gods, while stronger voices make the point more robustly. A Secular Age does reveal Taylor as the theological contestant he has perhaps always been, but his unedited habits of speech and his wide-angle lens undermine the force and persuasiveness—not to mention the clarity and cogency—of his vision. A cruel reading would have Gauchet and Milbank debate entirely over Taylor’s head, the one arguing that Christianity is secular, the other arguing that they are in contingent, temporary struggle. This, at least, is the debate on God and history that Taylor enters, and it is not at all clear that the editors have accurately assessed his centrality to it. Which could make Varieties a kind of obscene joke, I suppose, or, as it seemed to me at moments, an act of celebrity self-congratulation and (what is the same) self-delusion.

Milbank is not oblivious to all of this, but he has the good sense to ignore it, though he does spend rather more time on Gauchet, whom the editors dismiss in a single line. For Milbank, Taylor’s is “nothing less than a new diagnosis of both Western triumphs and a Western malaise,” and this encomium seems genuine in his case because, again, he shares with Taylor, over against Gauchet, a commitment to the claim that “secularization is not whiggishly on the agenda of history, but is fundamentally the result of a self-distortion of Christianity.” This is a fight Milbank has had, is having, and will continue to have, and there is consequently a kind of believable freshness to his respect for Taylor as an ally and kindred spirit. After all, to argue, as Milbank does, that “a festive Christianity […] could still in the future stake its claim to be the true enlightenment and the true romance” is either crazy or simply crazily impassioned, calling all allies to the ready. Milbank is no fundamentalist. His is an encounter with both the beauties (mystical, embodied, sexual, moral, convivial) and the ugliness (puritanical, lawful, morbid) of his tradition. In Milbank’s Christianity, for example, the shame is not in the erotic or ecstatic nature of existence, but in a cramped overemphasis on sin as sexual rather than spiritual or relational. Compared to Taylor, who concludes his paean to enchantment with a donnish reminder that “we have to understand religious/spiritual life today in all its different thrusts, resistances, and reactions,” and compared to a religious thinker like William Connolly, who strangely urges that “deep pluralism cannot gain a secure foothold in predominantly Christian states until confession of Jesus by Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and immanent naturalists are allowed to compete legitimately with Christian confessions of him as a divine savior,” Milbank’s forward-looking Christian messianism is energizing in its clarity and courage. Connolly worries at one point that his (meandering) reflections on Jesus, SUVs, capitalism, Fox News, Bergson, globalism, and DNA is “risky.” But, in light of the varieties of secularism in the intellectual worlds of the thinkers in this volume, I can think of nothing more risky than continuing to find new ways to claim that Christianity is simply and categorically—if wildly and astonishingly—right. The only person in this volume still talking to Milbank at that moment is Taylor, and even he took over 800 pages to say much less than that.

Taylor’s location between Milbank and some of the other contributors might seem one of the great virtues of his work—a bilingual manifesto for the seculars and the critics alike. Taylor certainly seems to desire it this way. He will not, pace Milbank, simply be pulled into the position of Christian supremacy. He will not simply be satisfied with secular pluralism. What most of the contributors reveal, however, is that this desire is unfulfilled. The most provocative in this regard are the essays of Sheehan and Jager, each of whom encounters a vivid core of A Secular Age at the same time as they anatomize its failure. But failure is indeed the flavor of the day in Varieties, even if its writers are diplomatic to a fault. Here is Wendy Brown providing a tutorial on Feuerbach and Marx as relief from Taylorian treacle on a straw materialism, followed by Simon During wondering whether it is all not rather much ado, giving us Alan Hollinghurst and his darkly exquisite mundane instead of the clunky philosophical history of the secular. There is Jon Butler counseling Taylor that his preference for philosophical paradigms and his neglect of ordinary people does not fit “the historical problem,” either of countervailing cases of belief and unbelief or, even more, of the indifference that is, for Butler, a significant feature of the modern American landscape. Here are Nilüfer Göle and José Casanova cautioning a historicization of the sources of the secular, the first urging the introduction of Islam into the picture of European secularity, the second making globalization the frame for decentering this secularity altogether. There is Saba Mahmood wondering whether Taylor has not misidentified his “very object,” and concluding that, “by delineating an account of Christian secularism that remains blind to the normative assumptions and power of Western Christianity, Taylor’s invitation to interreligious dialogue sidesteps the greatest challenge of our time.”

With the possible exceptions of Mahmood and Butler, the authors in Varieties would not judge their commentaries expositions of the failure of Charles Taylor. Bilgrami and Bellah, fundamentally sympathetic, make minor adjustments to Taylor’s program; Connolly embraces the challenge to propound one of his own. I stress the angle of failure because to read through the essays in Varieties is to perceive in them—or perhaps simply to experience—a kind of fatigue with the terms Taylor lays out, and an appetite to get beyond them. One cannot deliver a review of Varieties without marking the oddity of this fact, the strain of the enterprise, the mismatch of the voices, even without the outlier Milbank holding up the fortress of Christian conviviality. This mood of fatigue is why Milbank can seem both so impressive and so clueless in this bunch. He is so manifestly not fatigued, so ready to engage, so prepared, so present. The same cannot be said for many of the contributors to Varieties insofar as they are commenting on Taylor, and, indeed, the same cannot be said for Taylor himself, who uses his afterword to restate his argument, touching only barely on questions that put any pressure on the project. If the contributors to Varieties are too polite to say so, and its editors too concerned to defend Taylor from the jabs of some his earliest reviewers, it should nevertheless be said in this Immanent Frame that Varieties has the feel of aristocratic poverty, gamely putting on a good show of something that is withering at its center.

But enough such observations. Let me turn finally to the essays by Jager and Sheehan. With Milbank and a few others, both do Taylor the honor of seriously entertaining his position, providing through close readings alternative accounts of Taylor’s issues and constituting thus a kind of shadow secular age. Jager and Sheehan are both committed to working out the problem of history in Taylor. Unlike Sheehan, however, who uses the concept of history to liberate Taylor from its more prosaic strictures, Jager follows Taylor into his historical labyrinth to explore what can be seen if we don’t struggle so hard to get out. He begins by granting Taylor’s investment in historical detail, giving us, without judgment, the Taylor who writes: “It is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predicament that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition. [...] In other words, our sense of where we are is crucially defined in part by a story of how we got there.” This avowal of the historical forms the crux of a significant swath of criticism of Taylor, but Jager breezes by this temptation to focus on what he hears with especial force in this statement—predicament, understanding of ourselves, and above all, story. For Jager, Taylor’s commitment to story—“thick and messy rather than thin and sterile”—suggests his roots in a Romantic quest to understand experience (one’s own or another’s) from the inside. Along with Bilgrami, Jager thus fastens on Taylor’s interest in the double aspect of reflexivity in modernity: not only that I can “adopt a third-person perspective” on my commitments, but that “my own experience [can] become my object.” If the first signals modernity as irony, along with a concomitant sense of threat to any deeply encompassing worldview, the second marks a quite different standpoint: the will to penetrate experience as such, to undergo experience, as it were, while being self-conscious of doing so. Taylor calls this “radical reflexivity” as opposed to the reflexivity of the third person. But it is not clear that it is aptly named. For the issue, as Jager shows, is the heightened sense of presence that stories empower in us. While radical reflexivity suggests a distancing afflicted by acute self-consciousness, what Taylor is identifying is a mode of closing the gap between self and self or between self and world. Simply put, he is identifying a feature of, or access to, the modern self that is just as all-encompassing, just as absorbing and world-enchanting as religion.

It is this feature of Taylor’s project that Jager foregrounds, rooting it in a diversely romantic sensibility and genealogy that makes literary expression not only a substitute for religion in the modern age but also a key dimension of the way Taylor’s writing is framed, structured, and narrated. In this way, Jager allows the clumsier historical scheme of A Secular Age to drop out, giving us a Taylor in metaphysical kinship to Wordsworth, Herder, and the Hegel who has been a touchstone of his career. “When Taylor says he has a story to tell,” Jager writes, “he means that his account must be undergone, not simply paraphrased or glossed,” a fitting commentary on a thinker intimate to the core with The Phenomenology of Spirit.

This appraisal of Taylor in a romantic register is not all Jager is doing. In fact, he uses romantic imagery, sources, and genealogies to explore what he thinks of as the key ambivalences of the book. “Simply by virtue of living in the secular age,” Taylor holds, “we find ourselves feeling our way deeply into peoples and places that are not our own.” A Secular Age, then, itself reflects this nova, becoming a “working-through at the methodological level of the secular reflexivity whose historical genesis the book narrates.” At the same time, this secular reflexivity, in its first-person call to undergo experience, is not so obviously secular. Indeed, Taylor seems to “tilt” the “playing field in favor of Christianity,” making the only phenomenology he is truly interested in the one of the Christian, “who must live with the knowledge that his or her faith is an option.” Jager roots the primacy of the Christian to the first-person in Taylor’s allegiance to romantic sources, which would seem to justify his right to tell the story as his story. Even more, it has always been clear that Taylor’s reading of the romantic is an unabashedly religious one. The paradox is that, if the effort to get inside experience is the sign of modernity, Christianity is “the best response to the secular age,” an “unresolved tension,” says Jager, in a book more interested in expressing this tension than resolving it.

Jager ferrets out further intriguing paradoxes in the project, but they are all rooted in his argument that “the romantic method of A Secular Age both narrates the arrival of a modern ‘formation of the secular’ and, read properly, provides the tools for its genealogical critique.” Enlarging and refining the conception of story throughout, Jager allows Taylor the right to a history written with the desire not only to tell it but also to change it, while reminding him of principles which Taylor himself seems not quite to believe. In Jager’s conception of Taylor’s principles, ”telling the proper story, here, doesn’t mean telling a more accurate story; it means finding the essential thing that got lost or sidetracked the first time and highlighting that, and thereby telling a different story, with a different ending.” In this project, Taylor desperately needs readers like Jager, readers and critics who will save him from his sentimentalism, from his cruder historicism, and from his own faltering in the face of conviction. “Secretly,” writes Jager, “Taylor is looking for readers willing to undergo modernity with him, looking for readers who will experience the book as a form of poetic thinking, a story that needs to be retold properly.” Then we might “catch a glimpse of a different world […] in which things had somehow turned out otherwise.” He is looking, in short, for readers like Jager and Milbank, who have the fleet-footedness to see him at least that far.

Sheehan’s essay forms a brilliant counterpoint to Jager’s. If Jager enlarges the power of Taylor’s histories, Sheehan disciplines them, confronting not simply failures of stamina, execution, sources, or editing, but—like Jager and Milbank—the measure of the entire colossus on its own terms. On the one hand, Sheehan depicts himself as a kind of mild-mannered historical everyman, too plain thinking for the rich philosophical stew Taylor sometimes serves up, and punctilious in upholding the principles and guidelines of his “guild.” On the other hand, Sheehan launches the one truly devastating question to Taylor in the entire volume: “When was disenchantment?” To be sure, there are other hard-hitting moments in Varieties. Mahmood, who has become of late something of the go-to scholar for post-secular, post-colonial critique, digs into Taylor’s blindness and omissions with gusto. During compares Taylor to Edmund Burke with his revaluing of tradition, and goes on to wonder why Taylor fails to notice that most of the claims of Christianity are, under “modern truth regimes,” “false, unverifiable, or unproven.” Butler drives by the over-refinement of Taylor’s categories—seculars 1, 2, and 3—to ask why Taylor insists on ignoring the number of bums in the pews. And Casanova serenely witnesses to Taylor’s obsolescence.

Yet none of these criticisms do what Sheehan’s question does: illuminate a query of central importance to Taylor while raising the specter of the incoherence of his reply. If Jager gives Taylor an assist over some of the awkward moments in his argument, Sheehan lunges toward the abyss. It begins benignly enough: what kind of a thing is A Secular Age, this secular age? Is it a history? A philosophy? A theology? An anthropology? Sheehan has no stomach for Jager’s suspension of the historical question. But he is prepared, as Butler, for example, is not, to grant that Taylor has written some other kind of thing, some other—dare we entertain it—kind of history. So let us ask, says Sheehan, what kind?

To some degree, all of the essays in Varieties are asking a version of this question—the question of genre, of beast, of fish or fowl. Of the candidates proffered (existential history, phenomenological history, literature), both During and Sheehan come up with the old category of “conjectural history.” In During’s account, this term is interchangeable with philosophical history more generally, and is rooted in works like Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), John Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy (1830), and, of course, the ur-text of philosophical history, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). As During writes, with humorous understatement, “philosophic history is rarely written these days, in part because it can’t well account for [and is not interested in] historical causality.” Sheehan puts it more bluntly, quoting Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) as a way of comprehending the negative ambition of conjectural history: “Let us therefore begin by setting aside all facts.” It is Sheehan, however, not During, who pursues the notion of conjectural history as a real response to the problem of genre, beginning with a re-reading of this Rousseauian sound bite. It is not, Sheehan instructs, that Rousseau “really did set aside all facts […] But these facts do philosophical rather than historical work.”

What is it, then, to write a conjectural history of fact in a philosophical vein? Sheehan strives mightily to work out the conditions of this possibility. If the article begins in kinship with Butler, pointing out what kinds of argument and evidence real historians work with, and what kinds they must, of necessity, put aside, it goes on to the further task of delineating what Taylor is doing instead. Sheehan likes the notion of conjectural history because, like Jager, he wants to take Taylor at his word that he is actually writing a history of how we got here, and, also like Jager, he seems intrigued by the challenge to locate Taylor’s work somewhere other than the obsolescence to which many of his other readers seem implicitly to relegate it (“philosophic history is rarely written these days…”). Unlike Jager, Sheehan wants to hold Taylor’s feet to the historical fire while also excusing him from what Sheehan characterizes as the less glamorous work of building historical cases. What follows is a colorful excursus into Herodotus, Genesis, Kant, Catholics, and Vico, with short stops on milking cows, eating lunch, the pervasiveness of theology, and the simple life in which yearnings for “fullness” are gustatory, not spiritual. Sheehan comes up with the idea of “apologetics” as that project at once to understand the past and to show its inevitable claim over the present. Taylor cannot have done with history, Sheehan argues, because he wants what the past has to offer. But he also cannot do history proper, because he wants to reserve the right to tell things differently, to imagine the story and the present otherwise. This is similar to Jager’s notion of changing the outcome as I relate the events. But in Sheehan, the work of apologetics is significantly more equivocal than Jager portrays story-telling. Sheehan’s ostensible solution to the emplacement of Taylor’s work comes in his section on Vico, whom he lauds precisely for avoiding apologetics, for attempting the first modern, secular history of the ages unimpeded by visions of redemption and the methodological uniformity that undergirds them.

So, when was disenchantment? Sheehan seems to want us to think that he thinks Taylor can answer this question. As long as we realize that Taylor is dealing with hinges and not chronologies, with before and after, then and now, not when and which, we can go some distance into Taylor’s genealogy of the secular age. But Sheehan cannot ultimately pull this off. At the most trivial level, Sheehan cannot hide his own basic conviction that the facts cannot ever really be set aside. If conjectural history is indeed, as During depicts it, that history which, unconcerned with fact, proceeds to tell stories irrespective of causality, then a historian like Sheehan—a historian as Sheehan depicts himself—cannot admit its legitimacy as anything other than fiction. The move to apologetics and the valorization of Vico are not the only things that give Sheehan away. It is also more simply that Sheehan does not give any good reasons why facts would ever be displaceable, other than those pressed by a history he himself does not, and would never, practice.

But even if one believes that Sheehan believes that his question is not fatal to Taylor, his question is fatal to Taylor, for reasons Sheehan gestures at but does not plumb. Although Sheehan probes the meanings of conjectural history in more detail than does During, he does not isolate its most important dimension. At one point, Sheehan’s attempt to save Taylor leads him to withdraw his question. If there is “no reliable way to apprehend the reality of the prior state [enchantment, the traditional past...] the facticity of ‘enchantment’ takes on philosophical rather than historical import. In that case, though, our opening question—when was reform?—does not matter.” In other words, Taylor is telling the kind of history in which it does not matter when, or even whether, there was disenchantment. Like Rousseau’s “spirit of Society” that “changes and corrupts all our natural inclinations,” Taylor’s categories “float free of historical empiricities and instead become a generalized logic embedded in the very structure of modern human existence.” Where is Milbank to bail Taylor out of this whiggery? Where is Taylor to protest that, in giving him permission to float free of the empirical, Sheehan’s putative defense leaves him considerably worse off than the most hostile criticism? Where is Gauchet to observe with irony that the historian’s historian Jonathan Sheehan ends up sounding a lot like metaphysical him? Shouldn’t Sheehan be the first voice to reason that no one gets to float free from the empirical?

If he did so reason, he would find himself in the company of Immanuel Kant, whose “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” Sheehan might profitably have reviewed for his piece. In Kant’s account, conjectural history is not deployed to solve problems history could also solve. It is not another name for “philosophical history,” conceived as a parallel kind of history with its own ends. In Kant’s paradigm, there is no such thing as philosophical history. There is history, and there is its concept (conjecture). The project of history involves us in philosophy only in that history is a concept. Simply put, we are limited to the thing (history) but we require its conditions (concept).

It is not hard to imagine how this all gets out of control—how the very language of conjecture could be used to authorize interpretive license. But as Sheehan’s reading of Rousseau intimates, the liberation from fact is constrained and conditional. For Kant, while a historical account might have gaps in the record, which conjecture could temporarily fill, “to base a historical account solely on conjectures would seem little better than drawing up a plan for a novel.” Jager’s argument is thus implicitly imagined by Kant, although while Jager finds real value in this endeavor, Kant worries that it will lead to confusion. There is only one case, says Kant, in which what “may be presumptuous to introduce in the course of a history of human action may well be permissible.” The case is what he calls the first beginning of history, or a history of “the first development of freedom.” Sheehan alludes to such a case at the beginning of his essay in evoking the notion of a golden age—that age, in other words, which comes before our own but has no actual historical validity. One could call it transcendental, perhaps, or structural—fictive in the way the state of nature was fictive for Rousseau and Hobbes, but telling nevertheless with respect to the conditions of knowledge and existence in the present. Conjectural. But whereas Kant rigidly maintains the extreme narrowness of this exception, Sheehan goes on to try the term on Taylor, who is not dealing with the first development of freedom at all, but rather with what Kant calls “the history of its subsequent course,” a history which Kant, if not Sheehan, insists “must be based exclusively on historical records.” Taylor may be dealing with beginnings of a kind—the beginning of modernity, the beginning of the secular, the beginning of disenchantment. But Sheehan’s initial question got it right: without an account of when, without a true fidelity to historical record, not only in Butler’s sense of considering the actual doings of ordinary people, but also in Kant’s sense of ensuring that all our ideas are properly historical—even the idea of history itself, which must needs ground in conjecture the very thing it also expresses in record—we are not doing anything but fiction. It is not clear that even Jager can save Taylor from the weight of this responsibility. At the least, Taylor would need a Kantian reader to find his real exit, his real redemption. It is not clear such a reader could succeed. Still, Sheehan and Taylor, along with the others, leave me hoping that such things could be taken on—that we philosophers and we historians could again (since Kant) meet to talk real business together over a book or two.

“Youth Without Youth” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence, sexual congress, female nudity, metaphysics.

So warns the caption to Manohla Dargis’s review in the New York Times. Now may be the perfect moment, then, to admit that the thought of semi-legions watching a professor of the history of religions act out a professor of the history of religions’ speculations on reincarnation, cognition, Nazis, and preternatural teeth fills you with a pleasure more electric than the disdain that is its inevitable accompaniment. Yes indeed, I would hasten a guess that for many of us, there is a not-too-buried fantasy of being wrenched (no, no, yes, yes) into the public forum, footnotes flapping, epigraphs primping, microphone shoved in face, hair hastily mussed, audience primed (The rose, what of the third rose?), and… you’re on camera 2! “Well of course Eliade, ahem, Eliade is, you know, a bit of a duffer, a popularizer, well sure that is the point, yes, I suppose the film does convey something of what he thought, the novels along with… I mean his ideas were always a bit… and you know he had a dark past of his own… What? Yes comparative myth, religion, the origin of language, but it is all a little, shall we say, jejune, and probably a little distasteful, too, just the sort of thing one might expect (and it’s too bad, really) to make it to… But even then Coppola doesn’t quite get… well thank you for having me on.”

It all goes poorly, this multiplex metaphysicizing. And what can one expect? Coppola means to bring no academics out of hiding. In Youth Without Youth, he has produced a work of sovereign obfuscation on his very own, daring the intellectually well-heeled to compete with this reverent take on the dreamy, sweaty, and thoroughly incoherent world of our perennial Romanian bête noir of the South Side. Admirers (including most prominently Coppola himself) will call it a meditation on time, love, consciousness, Orientalist banditry; critics a murky mess of monstrous myopia. My own view? Bloated, presumptuous, frequently brain-freezing but also colorful, amusing, and intermittently — as if in a dream, I am fated to admit — thought-provoking, Coppola’s film at the very least clearly causes an acute case of adjectivitis, from which I will now attempt to cure myself, as the protagonist Dominic Matei does his despair and suicidal temptation through the miracle of electromagnetic revelation: “soon it will be learned that someone, a man of unknown origin, was struck by lightening and after ten weeks appeared perfectly healthy and young again. Let’s hope the rest will not be found out.”

But of course we find out plenty (and remain, like Matei, only temporarily cured of extravagant descriptives). We find out, for example, that Eliade’s protagonist has a prodigious ambition: not only to master Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese before the end of his twenties, not only to attain the superpowers of DC Comics’ infamous reincarnating Hawkgirl (“I am a strange superman of the future”), not only to impersonate Angels, head off Archangels, fight for God, surmount time, attain the “inarticulate moment of the beginning,” the “proto-language,” the real, and, not incidentally, stop-or fail to stop-the Nazis before Romania is lost (Dominic the freedom fighter manqué, stuck on the delectable curlicue of that familiar insignia adorning the buxom Nazette’s garter), not to mention-stay with me here-the bomb, celebrity culture, and the death of seriousness; no. Our knight is not satisfied with his Archimedean day job but wants to go further. It turns out-yes, a dream-it can all be done after hours (“I continued to study in my sleep, mastering Chinese and other languages…”). Which, speaking personally, is something of a relief. If for Eliade there is no convincing way of securing the world from unreality, at least we’ll have enough time to meet our deadlines, if not even squeeze in the odd mission to Gotham City.

And oh what a glorious unreality it is-by which I refer not to the film, with its silicone platitudes, but to the question of whose film it is. Whose artistic brow is this bauble meant to furrow, and in what time, what register, with what darts? Coppola’s lovechild comes at an auspicious moment in Eliade reception. On the one hand, Eliade has probably never been as unfashionable as he is now, his oeuvre in the comparative history of everything running full-on against every delicate historical sensibility modestly veiled before the archive of truths. Professor Matei, with his Chinese and his Babylonian, his saints, magi, and bodhisattvas, is a cartoon, if for some a little too close to home to be all that funny. To be sure, Matei has his real-life defenders, those, like J.Z. Smith, who are prepared to admire the sweat on Eliade’s brow, who cede, as Smith gingerly does, “the descriptive endeavor,” if not the alien theology that is its inexorable accompaniment; or those, like Jeffrey Kripal (in his own post on this movie), for whom Eliade speaks for evolutionary mutants and occult intellectuals everywhere. Usually, however, there is more fractiousness involved (no search committees or journal editors named). On the other hand, might not Youth Without Youth be just the effortless Smithian reading that is, for Smith himself, such a strain? Does not this noisy celebration of the fragmentary, this dismemberment, even, of Matei’s desire for that “old passion,” the final “regression” by which one’s “life work will be complete,” show us an Eliade in total control of the descriptive precisely as a conduit to the righteous dogma (for his age and ours) that nothing is as it seems? Would not Eliade’s theology of unreality, then, his labor in the mines of the dreamtime, not finally, like Hamlet’s seeming, provide a standpoint for the viewer to say no to him, and thus a standpoint for him to smile back at us and say, with no little justification, “my life’s work is complete”?

So, at least, it seems to me. In this sense Coppola has done us a service. For if Matei exhibits all the Casaubon bathos of which mid-twentieth century history of religions was capable, his twenty-first century cinematic avatar provides a reminder that this atavism is Eliade’s own metaphysical double. It is Eliade who spans both the squirm-inducing, unreadable past (“time, Dominic, we are running out of time”) and the garish but inescapable present (“the recovery is amazing”). It is he who is both deceived about the key to all mythologies and who deceives us in turn, whose lightening bolt in the rain to us is precisely that he is young beyond his years. Age: 70, but “with the sexual organs of a man of 40. Fully functional. Technically youthful.” In Coppola’s hands, he might be Casaubon and Eliot both, and thus never more fully our contemporary muse. “Can I believe in the objective reality of the person to whom I am conversing?” asks Matei, of the person to whom he is conversing. Well, yes. But again, this is not to dispel the fear that the real and the unreal, the one and the double, cannot be distinguished. It is simply to notice that this fear is internal to the structure of the double authorship here (the author as himself); it is internal, namely, to the claim Matei makes on us that he cannot wake up from Eliade’s dream except to show the dream itself, and the historian of religions whom he is impersonating in it, to be objectively, and depressingly, banal.

Does Coppola appreciate this sly logic of protagonist and progenitor? Undoubtedly not. His foray into metaphysics at the movies is too predictably oriented towards the dizzying joy of abandoning sense, as if the barefoot stomping alone is what makes the wine. Still, amidst the Jungian babbling and overwrought editing, the heated “so” and despairing “not-so,” Eliade is strangely rejuvenated. One of the film’s most memorable conceits has the newly and miraculously youthful Matei’s teeth being pushed out by new ones, as if, in angelic regard for what history abandons, he reverses Walter Benjamin’s dyspeptic prognosis and finds therein the renewal of life in the wreckage of the suicidal old master. “We have to know more about you, who you are, what is your real age,” his doctors demand, our questions, I think, for Eliade-technically youthful, fully functional. But libraries are limited, complains Matei, the teeth are coming in too fast, and we cannot escape the Nazis, it would seem, no matter what our age, or his.

So Dominic Matei, I say: “tell the professor what he wants to know: that you need a new identity”; that you need (is the camera still rolling?) the third rose, this our Eliadean rose.

The question, at least, of the times and what they positively require is raised by Lilla with dramatic flourish. As he ventures in the book’s closing lines, “we have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely on our own lucidity.” A rousing declaration to be sure, if not also a bit conventional in our post-post-Enlightenment. But then Lilla is not aiming for diagnostic creativity in these pages. There is the fortress called “the Modern West” to defend and a story to tell about its internecine struggles that makes this defense more urgent and more vexing than ever. In the dense, Tim Burton-style fog of late, late 2007 on this bloody planet earth (2008 by the time you read this), who could doubt that, well, something needs urgent defense, that, indeed, it may very well be that “our lucidity” has been souring in its own carnivorous juices for so long that the masses will no longer stomach our pies.

Yet it is harder than it might seem to get to the bottom of Lilla’s concluding claims about politics, reason, and biblical theology, hard, simply, to discern who or what is the agent in these sentences: What are these forces? Which Bible—which books, sections, verses, versions? By what method is the Bible’s promise discerned? On what grounds might we distinguish the productive light (lucidity) from the destructive light (revelation)? These questions betray precisely the disingenuous sensibility Lilla wants to pulverize. His analysis trades on a single distinction: between political theology and political philosophy, between, in short, a politics informed by “larger, impersonal forces” and one chastened enough to exile such forces, to make one’s way alone—to let God be. But the villain in Lilla’s nightmares is not “the religious mind in all its chiaroscuro intensity, pulsing with conscience and curiosity, hope and despair.” It is the thieving, academic fop, the purveyor of the quixotic “third way” between these poles, the liberal theologian, that is, with his well-anointed and even better appointed liberal deity scavenged from the early modern dump. Empowered by Kant and emboldened by Rousseau, the “post-Christian” theologian (does it not matter that he is, as Gil Anidjar notices in his fiery response to Lilla, “the Jew, the Arab”?) doubles “the Christian lion” and the “Christian lamb” in brotherly love, like Jesus and the Devil in Mike Huckabee’s rendering of Mormonism. Shall we not abhor such wanton mixing? Shall we not refrain from asking how we are to distinguish the tangled limbs in the bedclothes when their progeny is already short-sheeting our bed?

The stillborn is in this light an equivocal image for Lilla. For the atmosphere he conjures is hardly the hushed sorrow cloaking the inert fetus: named, blessed, buried, remembered (would that it were so). It is rather the chaotic atmosphere of carnival, in which the fangs of the real God are impossible to distinguish from the benign liberal effigy until the very moment of the unholy kiss between theology and politics. Something live has emerged from the early modern birth canal, and this is precisely why we must wager at all, separating both the real and the simulacrum lest any seed be spilled. No doubt the “the liberal deity” was “unable to inspire genuine conviction among those seeking ultimate truth.” It is stillborn in only this sense, then: that its face and figure simply do not pass in the world. But for Lilla, there really is no liberal God that is not also (how could we have missed this, he wonders?) a fiercely partisan and demanding lover: “for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God” we are reminded, in the epigraph from Exodus. There is no third way. What is stillborn for Lilla, then, is not God—his (Lilla’s, God’s) gallop through the Modern West suggests just the opposite. What is stillborn is the promise God makes, which the dragon slayer Hobbes might very well have been too hasty in assuming he had procured—the promise God makes to keep his eros to himself.

So it is and shall be. “We have trouble letting God be… because [for believers in biblical religions] God does not let us be.” But if this is so, whither Lilla’s walls? If the wager is for a sobered political philosophy schooled in the lessons of the “Great Separation,” what will separate the separation from its opposite—from mixing, tangling: from the very passions on this (Modern, Western, Hobbesian) “shore” of the divide? Lilla seems both to trust in the strength of the Hobbesian imaginary and to assume its impermanence. Hence the book’s fundamental ambiguity, its insistence both that we are on another shore (however narrow the river), which makes it difficult to understand both the religious frenzy on the international pages of the daily papers and our (the “West’s”) own tormented struggle to domesticate this frenzy, and that in fact there is no shore, no respite, no haven from the “craving for a robust faith” which seems a constitutive threat, a “temptation,” to political life as we know it. “Thomas Hobbes was wise” not because he successfully put an end to political theology (the thesis of the book is that he did not) but because he saw the necessity of doing so—he saw that this necessity is part of the task of a proper political philosophy. But then, one assumes such a task would not be accomplished through lucidity alone, as if simply seeing the danger of political theology would convince us to abandon it. Indeed, it seems strange to suggest, as Lilla does, both that political philosophy is constituted through “self-awareness” and restraint and also that only “with great effort and a great deal of argument can people be trained to separate basic questions of politics from questions of theology and cosmology.” Argument, on Lilla’s grounds, seems to have little to do with it (for all the danger of their positions, “reading Rousseau and Hegel on religion is an infinitely richer experience than reading Hobbes or Hume…”). Effort, yes, and here it would be consistent with Lilla’s drift to recall Nietzsche’s observation that our values (of restraint above all) are writ in blood. It takes work to separate: education, but also discipline and protocols and police and maybe a little, too, of Sweeney Todd’s grief and self-mortification. Lilla may be sincere when he casts his book as identifying “no dragons to be slain.” But this bit of fantasy wears thin by the end, thanks to Lilla’s own gallant horse. That he slays none is not for lack of trying: the wisdom of Hobbes, I take it, above all.

It is at this point, though, that the disorientation sets in. Lilla notes that since the time of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, “the liberal democratic tradition” has really failed to confront “just what religion is.” But just what, or who, or where is religion for Lilla himself? Is the problem really the Bible—that, in addition to being modern, “we are heirs to the biblical tradition”? This seems so profoundly to beg the question. For what makes the Bible the Bible, if not the passion (“the forces unleashed”) that would so obviously survive its exile? What makes revelation (the divine light) different from lucidity (the natural light) if not the thing they precisely share: the appetite that drives human beings towards at once hedgehog-like commitments to the whole and fox-like commitments to the piecemeal and the plural. Reason and revelation are names for human desires, but from neither of these desires, then, can there be any separation. As above, we can get God to promise to stay out of politics (we can, with effort, divide our passions from their aim); we cannot make this promise ourselves (we cannot divide our aims from the passions).

To some degree this is Lilla’s point—that we are to be ever vigilant (lucid, self-aware). But he wedges this fact into a pseudo-history about “the West” and its vicissitudes, making it seem as though there is some historical lesson to be learned here, from the Bible to Hobbes to Kant to Cohen to Bhutto. Lilla’s real problem is not history, though (or particular books, for that matter, whether Amos or King Lear). It is ontology—not the ontology of religion, e.g., the “messianic longings embedded in biblical faith,” but the ontology of division, of separation. One might say Hobbes’s “Great Separation” expresses Lilla’s own messianic longing for the purity of a political philosophy that keeps its sights down and its garters tight. To be sure, there is (against many intellectual fashions) an admirable focus in Lilla’s observation that his book wagers “between two grand traditions of thought, two ways of envisaging the human condition”—in his boiling down the innumerable complexities, perspectives, and traditions here to two. What threatens the argument, however, is Lilla’s squeamishness about mixing. Like Strauss on Athens and Jerusalem, Lilla invests everything in a separation between reason and religion for which he has no real way of accounting. Their opposition is presupposed, a presupposition which has the ironic effect of requiring the very third between them that is anathema to Lilla. In his own analysis in the book, the third is but a mask for one side, a failed attempt to stand in both reason and religion, an emissary reabsorbed by the fires of the side that sends it forth. Yet, like Lilla’s imputation of dangerous tendencies to the Bible rather than its readers, this opposition—and the structure of opposition as such—is not given an intellectual outline. It is as if the words reason and revelation have frozen referents to which we need only point. This pointing cannot take place on rational grounds, for there are no reasons given for it; equally it cannot take place on revealed grounds, for revelation, on Lilla’s reading, is unable to pick out the human apart from its connection with the divine. The standpoint of revelation can see only itself; the standpoint of reason can see everything but itself. Neither can hold onto the tension, much less the opposition, between themselves (the opposition itself is a fantasy of each), and so one can only imagine Lilla their narrator preaching from the ice floe of the very third which his own argument rules out. This time, one regrets to say, it is Lilla himself who vanishes.

It would be hard to be “self-aware” under these circumstances. In Lilla’s endgame, any admixture of revelation in reason spoils the batch. But, holding onto the clarity of his “two grand traditions of thought,” one might productively take a cue from Burton, who is in other ways a quite delicious muse of the proceedings. Lilla’s work tries, to its credit, not to be about good and evil, at least as Gnostic complementaries. This is food, glorious food: appetite, passion, eros, revenge. In Burton’s Sondheim, we are saved from none of these, and here Lilla puritanically demurs. But for Burton this anti-salvation is declared as much in a cheerfully spinozistic mode as a gothic one: human appetite is ruinous, and yes, with the fierce consciousness of this appetite, that is all there is. Does this mean we will eat our own, live and stillborn both? Undoubtedly. Man the barricades. And yet, and yet those barricades are erected in the playing fields of what they protect us from, by that same material, with the same dangers. Shall we slit our own throats as a result? Not at all. For consciousness can be read on the tongue and in the stomach—it can function to limit and to restrain and to choose from there. If this, finally, is what Lilla can mean by lucidity (even if it is not what he does mean), let it reign unimpeded, in this tradition and that.