As Pally notes in her essay, this isn’t the first time evangelicals have hoisted the banner of social reform. Recalling the activism of nineteenth-century American Protestants, she sees the “new evangelicals” as their contemporary successors.

You don’t have to go back to the nineteenth century to find evangelical progressives. Like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, many got their start in the 1970s, building institutions that are still around today (Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, Bread for the World).

The grandson of a Moral Majority supporter, I wasn’t exposed to this part of evangelicalism.  Like grandma, I assumed that most evangelicals “prayed Republican.”

This began to change during my young adult years. Blessed with a well-stocked church library, my congregation owned a copy of The Cross and the Flag (1972). Edited by a trio of Christian historians, it featured a who’s who of reformist evangelicals, including Paul Henry, Ozzie Edwards, and Nancy Hardesty. Reading its indictment of Christian nationalism, I felt connected to a new kind of evangelicalism. Chapters on poverty, ecology, racism, and militarism outlined a different agenda from the one found in my grandmother’s Moral Majority Report.

As David Swartz documents in Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, the autobiographies of other evangelicals reveal similar stories of inter-generational influence. More than any other book, Carl F.H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) inspired the evangelical activists of the 1960s and 1970s. While David Allen Hubbard kept a copy under his pillow at Westmont College, Samuel Escobar read about it as a student in Peru.

It is easy to see why. Calling for greater social engagement, Henry ridiculed evangelicals for debating the morality of the card game Rook “while the nations of the world are playing with fire.”

Henry’s generation called themselves the “new evangelicals.” By using the same label to describe today’s evangelicalism, Pally hints at this religious lineage. While grateful for her research, I wish she had done more to explore these connections.

Many journalists and scholars believe that the evangelical left was a reaction to the religious right. So do many evangelicals.

Like other religious communities, evangelicalism has experienced a break in its “chain of memory.” Suffering from historical amnesia, millions of evangelicals have forgotten about their tradition’s social witness.

By telling the stories of “evangelicals who have left the right,” Pally’s book may help them to remember.

is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known.

“Man,” on this picture, is not only a new idea, a new creation, but also a fleeting one: his time is past. He’s quickly grown old and is already fading away, like the grass. “Strangely enough,” Foucault mused, “man—the study of whom is supposed by the naïve to be the oldest investigation since Socrates—is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things.” He is “only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge” who “will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”

Foucault’s flippant requiem for “man” reflects a midcentury antihumanism in European thought, which, in the wake of two World Wars in the heart of Europe, had become suspicious of the “anthropotheism” of humanism wherein “Man” replaced the God who had died. And it is this story that is told so brilliantly by Stefanos Geroulanos in An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. For these antihumanists, humanistic atheism had never really gotten over its theological tendencies; so the result of the death of God was the divinization of Man. But having witnessed the atrocities committed in the name of such anthropocentrism, midcentury theorists sought to displace humanism. Antihumanism, in a strange sense, was out to protect humanity. (See, for example, Geroulanos’s discussion of Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 194-205.) But the effect was to downplay or even diminish the role and agency of “the subject,” emphasizing the impersonal systems, forces, and structures that conditioned human behavior. Thus, structuralism can be seen as “the single most influential inheritor of this early antihumanism,” later influencing a more naturalistic understanding of the human species and pressing a certain “biologization” of human action as understood in the social sciences.

I have greatly profited from Geroulanos’s careful account, though my work focuses on the later developments in French thought broached in his conclusion (can we hope for a sequel?). I can now see behind Foucault and Derrida a background milieu that I had previously failed to appreciate. Indeed, it’s striking how differently Geroulanos’s frame illuminates French thought into the ’60s and ’70s—like casting black light over a previously familiar room, disclosing all sorts of hitherto invisible features. While Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” is an essential part of the canon in twentieth-century continental philosophy, Geroulanos’s historical work makes me think we’ve underestimated how central these concerns are for understanding later twentieth-century debates.

But as a philosophical theologian with a deep interest in philosophical anthropology, I found myself struck by another theme: what might seem a surprising camaraderie between this atheism and a stream of Christian theology. Indeed, one could argue that both this atheism and a strain of twentieth-century theology share the same antihumanism. Such an antihumanism, of sorts, can already be heard in Barth’s fulminations against liberal Protestantism in his early commentary on Romans. In this respect, there might be room for a little more nuance in Geroulanos’s discussion of “Catholic humanism.” While it’s certainly true, for instance, that Henri de Lubac (in an odd echo of Sartre) claimed that “Christianity is a humanism,” I do wonder whether Geroulanos too quickly elides de Lubac to the project of Jacques Maritain—whose Catholic humanism did tend toward a conception of the human that generated an emphasis on human rights. But in this respect, one should note that Maritain accorded much greater weight and autonomy to “the natural”—and hence to “the human”—than de Lubac. In other words, I think the mid-century debates in Catholic theology about the relation and distinction between the so-called “natural” and “supernatural” are directly relevant to the status of “the human” in humanism. And given that there were important differences between de Lubac and Maritain on these matters, we should be careful not to assume that there is one “Catholic humanism.”

Here again, I think there is a trajectory of a kind of antihumanist theism—or better, Christian theology—which runs from Barth, through Hans Urs von Balthasar, up to the Catholic thinker Jean-Luc Marion, and which shares many concerns with the atheism that Geroulanos documents. Appropriating the critique of ontotheology for theological reasons, Marion’s Idol and Distance (published in French in 1977) celebrated the Nietzschean death of god as an idol well lost. This sensibility was further developed in God Without Being (1982), which articulated a theological critique of theism, drawing explicitly on the later Heidegger, including the important “Letter on Humanism,” which plays such a crucial role in Geroulanos’ account. But I think one can also find a correlate critique of what we might call (rather clunkily) “ontoanthropology” in Marion’s work on “the subject,” particularly in his essay “The Final Appeal of the Subject” (though one can find similar themes developed in Being Given). In a way not unlike the “negative anthropology” discussed by Geroulanos, Marion is critical of the “autarchy” of the subject and sketches a philosophical anthropology, in the spirit of Levinas, that decenters the human—as one who is claimed rather than makes claims. The human is marked by a dispossession that cannot be reified.

So, one could identify a theological strain that, precisely for theological reasons, is antihumanist while also embracing the critique of ontotheology. In other words, this is not just a reversion to a pre-humanistic theism, a retreat from Man back to God. This is a strain of theological thought marked by both a negative theology and a negative anthropology. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that such a theological sensibility is also critical of “rights talk” in just the way the French antihumanist atheists were. (We’ve had some discussion about this at the Immanent Frame before.) Thus, it should be no surprise, also, that both this antihumanist atheism and the theological sensibility I’ve noted share a critique of liberalism.

I don’t pretend to have made a case here; nor do I mean to oversimplify and ignore the obvious differences between an antihumanist atheism and an antihumanist theology.  These are just notes toward a more proper argument and analysis—sparks sent up while reading Geroulanos’s comprehensive, careful, and provocative history, which got me thinking about an atheism that even a (certain kind of) theologian could love.

But of course, like all scholarly analysis, Geroulanos’s has its limits. It does indeed embed atheist antihumanism into its social and historical setting—but rather as a backdrop than as a shaping force. Which is to say that Geroulanos’s analysis is incompletely sociological. In the end, it belongs to a mode of intellectual history that recoils from imputed, provisional, typologically grounded theses upon which the classical sociology of knowledge depends. This is especially worth noting since Heidegger’s nonhumanist existentialism needs to be read, not just against neo-Kantianism, but against Marx and Weber and their heritage, including precisely that sociology of knowledge developed by Karl Mannheim, in dialogue with Lukàcs, from about 1917 on, one of whose polemical purposes was to reveal positive “intellectual history” as reductive. The young Mannheim (to stay with him for a minute) insisted that the modern era was primarily politically regulated, and it’s a sign of the particular limits of Geroulanos’s method that his interest in the politics of antihumanism is never allowed full extension, even if he offers an illuminating account of interwar left-wing humanism, for instance.

So we don’t really find an answer to the obvious question: what were atheist anti- humanism’s politics? Geroulanos does note that after 1945 these politics tended to switch from right to left, but that seems a more mysterious and important phenomenon than is here quite allowed for. One specific problem in this context is that Geroulanos’s sense of the prewar French ultra-right is too indebted to Zeev Sternhell’s partisan analysis, which means that he uses the term ‘fascism’ too vaguely and readily.

Likewise, while Geroulanos shows that atheist antihumanism developed in dialogue with French Catholic antihumanisms, he shows little interest in the politics and institutional bases of irreligion in the period. Presumably, for instance, it was partly the extraordinary difficulties involved in institutionalizing atheist antihumanism that kept alive what we might call the nonhumanist irreligious inhabitation of religion (i.e., either irreligion that affirms ecclesiastical structures or doctrinal truths, or irreligion under the guise of a religious persona or mask), and which we sometimes find encouraged by Leo Strauss or, in France, by Charles Maurras and his followers.

Even were this a place to pursue such historicist enquiries, I would be incapable of taking them far. But let me open a way by making a couple of observations. The atheist antihumanism that Geroulanos describes is both philosophical and programmatic: it is consciously and strategically antihumanist. As such, it emerges from a looser, larger constellation that we might call irreligious non-humanism. By that I mean all those forms of art and thought that were neither religious (in the Judeo-Christian sense) nor humanist, that is, which, while rejecting theism, neither conceived of the human as a value nor thought of history as the gradual and progressive realization of human potential. Such irreligious non-humanism reaches back into classical antiquity—from this point of view, classicism is not a humanism—but takes a recognizably modern form after about 1830 in figures (who otherwise may share little) like Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Henry Adams, Samuel Butler, Wittgenstein, George Sorel, etc. Although Geroulanos would appear to think otherwise, I’d contend that it first becomes programmatically antihumanist in Nietzsche (who declared himself insufficiently Saint-Simonian to “love humanity”) and in Proudhon, although he uses the concept of “human dignity” against bourgeois liberal and statist humanisms, and so can be described as a humanist antihumanist. At any rate, irreligious non-humanism is structurally connected to anti-enlightenment conservativism simply because it implies the rejection of progress, and by the same stroke, and no less determinedly, the rejection of democracy. This is true even if many irreligious non-humanists did not identify themselves as conservative at all.

Observation number two: One important moment in the mutation of irreligious non-humanism into atheist antihumanism occurred in 1911, when T.E. Hulme had a meeting with Pierre Lasserre in Paris. T.E. Hulme was then an obscure English critic, attached to Orage’s avant-garde little magazine New Age. He was becoming Henri Bergson’s leading proselytizer in Britain, and he was soon to translate Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. He had published the poems that would help to define imagism. He was also a polemicist for a new kind of Toryism: one removed from Disraeli’s Burkean appeal to King, Church, and people, and aligned instead to anti-romanticism and to what would later be called “modernism.”

For his part, Lasserre was then Action Française’s leading literary intellectual, Action Française being a powerful ultra-rightist movement, at the time still loosely allied to the Catholic church but led by the irreligious Maurras, and which simultaneously affirmed royalism and popular nationalism against republicanism, socialism, and democracy. It did so under the banners of order, hierarchy, and classical French civilization. In effect, it too detached conservatism from romanticism, as well as from a de Maistrean political theology that interpreted the struggle between revolution and reaction primarily as one between Satan and God. But it never solved the problem of how conservative irreligious non-humanism might make of itself a political, as well as an intellectual, force. Although it could mobilize violence on the streets, it never attracted meaningful electoral support.

Lasserre was then most famous for his book on French romanticism, which was to popularize the notion that romanticism began with Rousseau and that it energized progressive revolutionary action. As Hulme himself was to put it, in his proto-Orwellian journalese, romanticism fomented the mindset in which “you don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a God. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth,” and which, therefore, “falsif[ied] and blur[red] the clear outlines of human experience.” Within this strand of conservative thought, then, human experience could be posed against doctrinal humanism. And for it, characteristically, human experience was most lucidly and finely delineated in the seventeenth-century literature of the passions, most particularly, for the French, in Racine. Lasserre’s argument had a transnational impact: the young T.S. Eliot drew upon it in his wartime extension lectures, for instance.

Indeed, after the meeting with Lasserre, Hulme was gradually to turn away from Bergsonian philosophy of life to embrace a more antihumanist political Toryism, now not just a modernist classicism, but what he thought of as the new objectivisim that was being worked out in thinkers like Husserl, George Moore (of the Principia Ethica), and Maurras himself. This move would prefigure, and probably influence, his friend T.S. Eliot’s gradual conversion to an English rendition of Maurras’s politics (and his turn to English seventeenth-century poetry).

Hulme, Maurras, and Eliot’s antihumanism is important because it takes us to the border where atheist antihumanism, in its search for an institutional base, meets orthodox and reactionary Catholic antihumanism. Little illuminates the difficulties of occupying this border more than Action Française’s highly charged relation to Catholicism, which, despite the breadth of the movement’s support among French Catholics, would culminate in its formal prohibition by Pius XI in 1926 (the same year, interestingly, that Carl Schmitt broke with the Church). And I think it likely that the antihumanism that develops in and out of Heidegger and Kojève, and which Geroulanos illuminates so well, is also, at certain moments, shaped at this border.

One remembers, in particular, Maurice Blanchot. As a young man, he had been a radical, sometimes terror-embracing ultra-rightist in Action Française’s slipstream. But, as Geroulanos shows, he receded into post-Kojèvean antihumanism from about 1942 (in a world where the institutional barriers to secular nonhumanisms were breaking down). But, while a “negation of God,” Blanchot’s thought is famously hard to call irreligious. Let’s say that it is as if Blanchot chooses the other side of Pascal’s wager: he makes a bet against God, a bet that the world is not just immanent and Godless but “catastrophic.” That’s a wager that can’t pay out—it’s staked in a kind of madness—except insofar as it rescues you, if not exactly from atheism, then from mundaneity. At this point, maybe “atheist antihumanism” can be conceived of as positioned against ordinary social being, and belongs in that sense to the right, even where (as was the case for Blanchot in the 1960s) its sponsors join the radical left. At the very least, it is where the world is judged catastrophic in terms that Maurras and Racine and Pascal, those conservative nonhumanists, share.

_

I want to thank Martin Kavka, Sam Moyn, Judith Surkis, and Gil Anidjar for taking the time to read and address my book with the very encouraging care that each of them has taken. In what follows, I want to take into account a number of issues that they have raised, not so much to respond as to elaborate, in relation to their stances, some of the positions I have adopted in the book and in my introduction to this discussion. I thus frame this post as an attempt to tend first and foremost to methodological questions and critiques that have been raised directly or indirectly.

Part of the reasoning involved in the argument that follows emerges from the posts offered so far, and the way that they have handled both the usefulness, however limited, and the fragility of the tripartite definition that I have sought to offer for “antihumanism.” For purposes of clarity, let me quickly recall that definition: “antihumanism” is best thought of as a rather fluid weave of three parallel and intertwined discourses, namely, the critiques of humanism, which predate and postdate the period I discuss (1925-1955, for the most part); the emergence of a philosophical anthropology that sees man as a question and refuses a number of classic and positive answers to it; and a shift in the understanding of atheism, whereby the latter would be detached from secular humanism.

To continue working from this perspective, I would prefer to now weave together a number of the different issues that have been raised. Anidjar begins his text with a commentary on naming things, and the dangers we run in doing so; while I doubt that defining and redefining terms that are in wide use qualifies as a form of nominalistic engagement, the question that Anidjar subsequently raises is worth taking into account. He asks: “Judging the book by its cover, that name clearly is atheism. But why?  Why atheism, before and after all? […] Why not follow the approvingly described completion, radicalization, and codification of antihumanism by proposing a similar indifference, not only to man and to antihumanism, but also to God and to religion?” I do not think I am putting atheism forward as a name for antihumanism, but I certainly see it as a crucial element of antihumanism’s history. So I would rephrase the question as follows: what is the value of atheism as a philosophical concept and system of ideas, particularly in the historical frame I work in? Anidjar seems to me to decline this question already in his opening declaration of atheism as “poor,” and more insistently in his final paragraph. So (concesso non dato) I need to address the sufficiency of atheism as a rubric and, more importantly, as an object of study. Moyn indirectly asks a similar question of the limits of antihumanism: “in the end, the same charge that brought humanism low applies to antihumanism itself. It is either diversionary, or unnecessary.” Moyn furthers this point by suggesting that the “antihumanists” I study often end up in quagmires not dissimilar to those of humanism. While I agree that this early generation of antihumanist thinkers does end up with the many of the same problems as those whom they doggedly critiqued, there are additional shifts that are worth attending to here.

Moyn asks about a linked issue, which deserves to be foregrounded separately. What does a negative anthropology “leave resplendently on the throne,” insofar as the “widespread ‘negative’ campaign […] against blasphemous humanisms […] is unsatisfactory if its outcome remains negative alone.” The question of this “negative” is one that matters to my argument where atheism and negative anthropology are concerned, and it seems to matter to other contributors as well: Anidjar applauds the neither/nor effect of mid-century antihumanism, while Kavka negotiates the critiques of humanism as denials of both a religious resolution and a secular one. As Surkis notes, moreover, the negative answers often came to reappear as positive, whether explicitly or despite themselves:

Precisely because these philosophies do not always have the same target at the same moment, Man’s imminent effacement is invoked repeatedly, rather than once and for all. What might be understood as a negative anthropology in one context—for example, Kojève’s 1930s account of man’s negation with the end of history—is radically revised and reinterpreted as a Marxist anthropology in the postwar era.

I am foregrounding, then, two major problems: the adequacy of antihumanism and atheism as objects, and the frame and limits of a historical shift internal to them. As Surkis notes, in a question that articulates my main interest and that I would rather keep as a question, and will only address in part: “how can one write the history of something so mercurial?”

_

As intellectual-historical problems and objects go, both atheism and antihumanism are elusive, tricky. To declare them to be such objects, and not merely topics, requires at least:

(a)   a sense of internal consistency, a logic that is largely immanent to them, rather than merely passing (and hence reducible); and

(b)   a sense that something is “under way” in this relatively consistent conception—that some transformation is occurring that demonstrates both the course and limits of the object, as well as the self-sufficiency thanks to which it merits being named an object.

I would avoid generalizing about “atheism”; their differences apart, the writers I address do seem to understand atheism in a particular way, to grant it a broad conceptual structure and an immanent logic. This is what renders atheism an object for intellectual-historical study and allows us both to address the huge differences between these writers and the sense of a conceptual and cultural transformation of “atheism itself.” In other words: To call this “all together, now and again” is misleading, for, whatever atheism may mean, what is rather clear is that in the 1930s and 1940s, for these and other writers, it came to mean something rather precise and significantly different from what it had meant before. Rather than denote a secularism that simply declared religion dead, atheism engaged with religion, and Christian anthropology in particular, much more explicitly and much less negatively than secularist atheisms had, acknowledging a continuing and substantive debt, rather than a mere surpassing. And, furthermore, it thoroughly rejected the claim, which seems paramount to today’s cheerleaders of atheism, among whom somewhat surprisingly Anidjar places “my” thinkers and at times myself as well, that atheism offers a solution, a voie royale, a superior form of redemption or society. Quite to the contrary, non-humanist atheism entailed a kind of skepticism toward political projects and solutions, as well as toward epistemological and moral certainty based on a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought (Kantianism and positivism most significantly); I have named this last practice antifoundational realism.

These three points—that atheism was fundamentally theological, that it denied itself a secular redemptive project, and that it involved itself in a deep epistemological and frequently existential skepticism—are decisive for expressions of atheism during the period. These points appear in different guises in Kojève, Levinas, Bataille, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others during the 1930s and late 1940s, despite their rival projects, arguments, and preferred solutions. Some of them (notably Kojève, Bataille, and Sartre) time and again pointed out that their projects mattered in a world after the “death of God.” Others, like Hyppolite and Levinas, understood classical humanism as specifically secular, i.e., as specifically tied to an immanence that refuses “vertical” transcendence. In other words, these three points are suggested by and help explain the dismantling of transcendence in the 1930s and the admission of a post-Christian anthropology deprived of Christian theology that Kojève argues for, and the obsession with the inescapable metaphysical grounding of western modernity (a diagnosis that both Koyré and the young Heidegger aided), and the neither/nor attitude toward religion and atheism, as in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” as well as Hyppolite’s late-1940s essays and his Logic and Existence. It is because atheism came to be identified with them, and through them with existentialism, and later with structuralism, that it deserves central billing in the story of humanism’s demise.

These same three points grounding atheism’s internal logic are, finally, very much at stake in the contemporary critiques of various humanisms, insofar as these involve rejections of vastly different projects with well-defined, if often utopian, goals. Anidjar suggests that the rejection of humanism should instead be seen to take priority, with Catholic critiques of humanism adding to the non-Catholic ones. I think this account is a bit teleological and follows the perspective established from the 1960s on, a perspective toward which I point, but which I avoid in my argument. Moreover, it seems to me that Catholic critiques led the way insofar as secular humanism itself was at stake, and that they are not quite equivalent to critiques not committed to religious resolutions and affirmations, which, as Moyn argues, end up in a far worse-defined space. (In this context, I very much appreciate Kavka’s effort to see antihumanism as a refusal of a strict religion/secularism/atheism divide.) The idea, which atheist thinkers proposed, that one should avoid both God and Man as solutions seems to be much more decidedly new than Catholic criticisms of humanism, which dated at least to de Maistre and came with Counter-Enlightenment baggage that non-Catholics as well as some Catholics wanted to steer clear of. In any case, Catholic critiques of humanism gave an opening for something that was taken up by others who refused the positive resolutions of community and personalism—and even, as Simon During notes in a comment to my first post, Maurrassianism. To those who refused these solutions belongs what I have tried to see as an atheism in the process of changing. The emergence and course of antihumanism is, to me, impossible to conceive outside of this broader shift.

_

In addition to suggesting that philosophical atheism had a kind of internal logic to it (as did the other two main lines of my argument), I have also suggested that these changes are revealed by and thanks to the transformation that atheism underwent in this particular historical moment. In other words, definitive is not only the internal logic but specifically the internal logic in the process of its assertion and transformation. Though atheism obviously means and has meant other things as well, what marks its force in the 1930s and the postwar decade is precisely the loss of conviction, by many thinkers who attached themselves to it, in the secular projects it had been—and, to a degree, often continued to be—most closely attached to.

This is what seems to me to be one angle of Surkis’s point on history as critique: the immanent logic of a concept or a constellation of concepts is also a historical one; it is immanent because it is historical. If, in other words, the history of atheism is mercurial, if its value as an object of study is to be found in its opacity and elusiveness, then only thanks to the development of particular affiliations and arguments amidst this elusiveness did it come to provide the stakes for antihumanism’s conceptual history. Hence the overall weave of the three discourses, or angles, of my study that I have offered: by addressing what is at stake in the critiques of humanism, or in the theorizations of man, it becomes possible to ask whether something is also happening for those thinkers who proclaim the end of transcendence or the death of God. And vice versa. These are objects in relation to one another; their histories emerge in their parallel constitution as objects of study. Other angles would be possible: to emphasize the question of the “normal” man (from Halbwachs and Bataille on), or the postwar epistemological angle (in Lacan and Canguilhem most significantly, and then Foucault), or the devastating question that Surkis poses in her last sentence—the question of woman, a question I have avoided, both through respect for it and through argumentative failure. But, mutatis mutandis, it seems to me that those angles “receive” much more from the emergence of antihumanism than they “contribute” to it.

_

That atheism, critiques of humanism, and negative anthropology may suffice as objects, particularly in their interlocking, does not mean that they moved in the same direction. In the book, I am perhaps too brief on this: the critiques of humanisms per se continue well into the 1970s, when they seem to be displaced, at least in part, by a new trust in human rights “after” Solzhenitsyn. Atheism, central to the developments I discuss, recedes from view (though not in substance) in the 1960s, and in some cases is affected by adjusted understandings of the divine (Levinas seems to me the major case for this) and perhaps by the “indifference” Anidjar speaks of. Whereas negative anthropology is decidedly taken up, institutionalized, and radicalized by thinkers usually placed under the rubric of “structuralism,” I would insist that from the mid-1960s onward, its assumption becomes a foundation for a number of “schools” of French philosophy and even beyond it. While the tripartite definition I have offered for antihumanism would have to be adjusted for the post-1963 period, its fundamental force, particularly its negative force, is largely in place and complete by then. If I insist on ending my account before the anti-subjectivism of the 1960s comes front and center, this is precisely because the shifts that did the most damage to an entire worldview had been established by the mid-1950s.

Thus, Moyn is right to emphasize that what sits on the throne at the endpoint of my story is unclear. If language, being, structures, the other, human rights, etc. could occupy or dismantle that throne, one reason for this may well be that the answers offered by the end of the 1950s are hardly definitive or sufficient, and perhaps the critical reactions building on their impulse in the 1950s and 1960s are directed precisely at this lack of a new figure.

This is to say that if no figure is definitively enthroned, this is also because antihumanism seems to become more of an exigency and less of a single philosophical movement. The “hatred of humanism” becomes a denial that does not deny all possibilities of humanism, nor all possible anthropologies. If, as Moyn argues, the same problems reemerge, this is because the ground shifts, and not because humanism is de-legitimized in toto. If “humanism” needed to be laid low, this also allowed new mini-humanisms to emerge—humanisms that would not suffer the critique of old European male, colonial, etc. anthropocentrism. In my account, what facilitates this is the emergence of negative anthropology. In keeping with Derrida’s “The Ends of Man,” I have argued that antihumanism remains “on the same shore,” that it allows for, and perhaps even engenders, new and much more minimal humanisms. When Levinas argued for an humanisme de l’autre homme, when human rights were declared essential, regardless of their possible insufficiencies (and I look forward to reading Moyn’s forthcoming The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which will probably force me to add subtlety if not adjust this point)—are these not positions to which antihumanism contributed, precisely through its anti-anthropocentric drive, and its re-theorization of the conceptual place of “the human?” Could not much the same be argued of positions that saw this developing antihumanism as nowhere near sufficient? The throne that is usurped, but by no one in particular, and the refusal of affirmative solutions and anthropologies are, to my understanding, indices of the force of the suspicion and rejection of a humanist narrative routinely seen as dominant in the rise of the modern West.

_

As I have suggested, this does not mean that this empty throne is not also the mark of a failure or limitation—and Moyn has a very real point when he writes that “there is no denying how hard it must have been to undermine humanism—which, of course, is alive and well, some days almost as if the developments Geroulanos […] chronicles had never occurred.” And even if I may disagree with Anidjar that what he calls the “poverty of atheism” deprives it of historical value or internal consistency, I understand his suggestion that atheism contributes to a disregard for others, with its implication that non-humanist atheism may go a step further in that direction. Anidjar seems to suggest further that non-humanist atheism is a sort of ruse of Western Christendom, which, having already absolved itself of explicitly religious imperialisms, can now abscond from their secular variants as well. I prefer to think of antihumanism as an expression of European thought’s self-consciousness of its own finitude. The skepticism involved in non-humanist atheism and negative anthropology was perhaps a matter of hatred, as Moyn writes, but perhaps more a matter of fear—no doubt mixed with contempt—that humanism was too ideologically successful and self-congratulatory to be able, after two world wars, to understand that it was also harmful in ways conceptual as well as everyday. Of course, one may and should negotiate and debate this. However insufficient it may be, ultimately, this skepticism and its signatures during this phase are too significant to be left to dissipate.

_

In the beginning of this essay, I asked how one may go about weaving and articulating for atheism and antihumanism an adequate intellectual-historical approach that may facilitate our understanding of specific texts, concepts, and systems of thought. Obviously an essay as short as the present one cannot answer this question in full. Yet I do hope that in the process of explaining myself before the generous essays and critiques of Surkis, Anidjar, Kavka, and Moyn, I have offered a sense of how I approach these methodological, historical, and philosophical questions in the book, and in doing so I have perhaps given reason to either resolve or open to further debate a couple of their worries.

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.

One of the things that intellectual historians show us, although often only implicitly, is the fluidity of the terms of debates that we take to be self-evident.  In An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, Stefanos Geroulanos shows us this fluidity by focusing on the French history of objections to (and reformulations of) humanist discourse from 1929 to 1952, a history that suggests that the rigidity of the categories of “religion” and “humanism” in Anglophone discourse is exceptional and unnecessary.  In Geroulanos’s history, the first chinks in post-Feuerbachean humanism in France appeared in the 1930s as a result of advances in quantum physics, particularly Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  These made it impossible to see the mind as truly mirroring the world, and thereby made it impossible to construct a metaphysics of man that could open up a path of progress toward a telos of history in which truth would be made universally manifest.  One wonders how our culture wars would play out today if the philosophers who intervene in them were as trained in physics as they are in evolutionary biology.  Indeed, as Geroulanos notes in his concluding pages, the long shadow that the philosophy of physics has cast over Francophone philosophy of science means that contemporary French philosophers of biology such as Henri Atlan can affirm a non-theological and non-dogmatic, yet antihumanist, stance that is absent from the popular press in the UK and America.  (Geroulanos is co-editor of Henri Atlan: Selected Writings, to be published late this summer by Fordham University Press.)

This antihumanist turn can be a turn away from religion.  Indeed, in the customary story of philosophical antihumanism—I think of the compact and powerful narrative of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger’s antihumanism near the opening of Reiner Schürmann’s Heidegger on Being and Acting—antihumanism is part and parcel of a broader attack on foundational discourses, including theology.  The potential of a phrase such as “antihumanist atheist,” then, is that it could serve as a category that could offer arguments against the foundationalist narratives of religious authorities as well as of those who describe human animals in essentially computational terms.  Its articulation of what Geroulanos calls an “antifoundational realism” would cast a pox on the houses of both the buffered and the porous.

Nevertheless, such a phrase—if it were to be useful as an expression of skeptical voices in our contemporary discourses—would have to defend its own stance.  More specifically, it would have to show that atheism proceeds apace from antihumanism, that the attack on one foundational discourse (the metaphysics of man) entails an attack on all possible foundational discourses.

In this regard, the story that Geroulanos tells is less helpful, although no less fascinating a story for it.  His title comes from a description by Emmanuel Levinas (in an essay on Maurice Blanchot) of the Heideggerean and Sartrean intellectual scene: “contemporary thought holds the surprise for us of an atheism that is not humanist.”  This makes it seem as if antihumanism and atheism emerge in French thought together, but antihumanism emerges earlier, and more clearly, than atheism does.  The broad array of pre-WWII antihumanists whom Geroulanos treats in the first two-thirds of his book includes both secular and religious thinkers.  In addition to an account of Kojève’s atheist anthropotheism, Geroulanos also offers treatments of Catholic attacks on liberal humanism, such as those offered by Jacques Maritain and Henri de Lubac; of Alexandre Koyré (described by Henri Corbin as “a great mystical theosopher”); and of Emmanuel Levinas, whose criticism of essentialist accounts of humanity in the mid-1930s was paired with the claim that only Judaism, and specifically the temporality underlying its account of repentance, could redeem history from hyper-Hobbesian brutality.  It is in the last third of the book, where Geroulanos offers sketches of postwar thinkers, that atheism begins to emerge as the telos of Geroulanos’s story of French antihumanist claims.  Thus, in a 1946 essay by Maurice Blanchot on de Lubac and Nietzsche, “the negation of God” becomes a key element of an account of the human as the site of freedom.  What accounts for this atheist lag?

Part of the answer surely has to do with the complexities of the antihumanist project at this point in French intellectual history, but part of it may also have to do with a lack of clarity about the nature of atheism.  Let me elaborate, with apologies for brevity.  (My reflections here are inspired by Levinas’s 1968 essay “Humanism and An-archy.”)

What binds all of these antihumanisms together is the denial that self-consciousness can serve as a ground of meaning.  Nevertheless, the claim that self-consciousness is finite (determinate, negative) can be the basis of two apparently opposed claims.  On the one hand, it can lead to a claim that humans cannot definitively access any meaning that would allow them to plan the course of future history for the better; this would cover Jean Hyppolite’s articulation of the “unstable equilibrium” between the human subject and history that Geroulanos treats in his final chapter.  On the other hand, it can lead to the positing of meaning outside the boundaries of a philosophical system; this would cover Levinas’s phenomenology of sensibility and its groping toward a transcendence that can never be conceptualized (it belongs to the “prehistory” of the ego) as the ground of alterity.  Both of these moves are atheist insofar as they deny a place to the concept “God” in systematic thought.  Yet the latter is certainly religious, and somewhat more sanguine about the possibilities of skepticism to achieve short-term liberationist goals.

If the antihumanist atheist can be either “secular” or “religious,” then a fuller account of this position could perhaps lead to the formation of common ground between various persons in their opposition both to those who claim to speak on behalf of God and to those who think that one cannot refuse theology without also refusing religion.  (For this latter claim, see Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.)  But those who would find themselves on that common ground should be careful.  An antihumanist atheist might conclude of the Yeshiva University conversation that there is no good reason to say that divine commands have the determinate content that Orthodox religious authorities say they do.  Yet even if that statement is correct, such an expression of antifoundationalism will be rejected by others as expressing merely another dogmatism that polices culturally strange temperaments.  The ability of the skeptic to be undone by his or her opponents’ own skepticism serves as a reminder of the truth of antihumanism: humans can capture nothing beyond self-consciousness.  Selves are not just porous—they are leaky.

Let’s consider this from another angle. At least in the modern world, resistance takes both a passive or ethical form—renunciation, and an active or political form—revolution. Renunciation and revolution are conceptually twinned since neither affirms the current actual social order or seeks to reform it. Indeed, as most other non-political, non-contemplative modes of social disengagement disappear into modernization’s integrative machinery, these become the most easily imaginable modes of resistance.

But sometime after 1917 (1923? 1956? 1968? 1989?) it became clear that no major modernized, capitalist society would, in all probability, undergo a secular revolution. Perhaps rather surprisingly, the French post-1968 Maoists were those who first absorbed the implications of this for the history of religious renunciation. They did so originally in Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau’s L’ange (1975) and then, more famously, in Alain Badiou’s ongoing work.

By and large the post-Maoists have not been well received in the Anglophone world, and it is not hard to see why. Nonetheless, their’s is not just the most inventive left-wing theo-politics of our time, it’s one of the few bodies of thought that has remained loyal to thorough-going resistance.  (I say this mindful of Leo Strauss’s not wholly dissimilar right-wing irreligious theo-politics, which in the end, however, aloofly concedes to liberal capitalism.)

To simplify greatly, one post-Maoist move is to emphasize the distance between critique and resistance.  The logic runs like this: revolution has become impossible but there are good rational grounds maximally to disengage from, indeed to resist, the democratic state capitalist order. However resistance cannot be grounded just in reason since it requires a leap into another order, into the unknown. So to commit to resistance involves a Pascalian wager. We stake ourselves on a faith that the current situation is temporary and a new order can suddenly and unexpectedly appear.  Resistance demands patience, hope against hope, fidelity: indeed it will be unending since even overturned social existence will gradually become routinized, institutionalized, hierarchized.

What kind of intellectual work can help prepare for the irruption of a new order, an “event” in Badiou’s patois? Mainly not critique in the conventional sense as evidential and situated judgment on what lies to hand: Badiou rejects the “proximity of critique and violence” that Justin Neuman ascribes to Walter Benjamin. Rather, philosophy thought in Platonic (and indeed Straussian) terms as the care for truth and for universals can most help prepare us for the irruption of a future event and help preserve the shards of a past event. For Badiou (and this is a clearly a Maoist move) to live in the true is to live in resistance, while to critique is to tally with and in the system and its untruths. Thus Badiou’s recent polemic, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, which is indeed addressed to the situation at hand, is not critique in any conventional sense but rather a denunciatory naming of the various forms and instances of untruthfulness and anti-universalism (nation, family) that have been made use of by Sarkozy (for Badiou, a Petainist rat-man stoking the politics of fear). This is combined with encouragement to a particular renunciatory ethical stance in relation to the current democratic market-state, and axioms, some philosophical, that are put forward for debate (“Love ought to be reinvented but also simply to be defended”).

In this project, maybe surprisingly, religion becomes an intellectual resource since (as Bellah reminds us too) it maintains memories of styles of comportment through which it is possible to live in resistance. Religious revelations (i.e., prophetic narrativizations of supernatural agents’ interactions with the world) are not true, but this does not detract from religion’s ethical and political commitment to resistance. Thus in Badiou’s remarkable book on St Paul, Paul is converted blindly to Christianity and, in the face of murderous state persecution bravely dedicates himself to building collectives open to anyone at all outside the legitimating forces that uphold the Roman Empire. Paul’s is an inspiring example of militant practice and virtue committed to waiting for a miraculous event, all the more so because, in truth, his trust in Christ is hypothetical or “fictional.” For that reason, his conversion and commitment are motivated by a faith (not quite a conviction) that reminds us of the distance between thought and resistance.

Where does this leave us in relation to Saba Mahmood’s and Stathis Gourgouris’s instructive disagreement?  My sense is that (leaving aside their implicit dispute about the political status of contemporary Islamic theocracies) their debate can be stripped down to an argument about whether religious or secular institutions are the more mystified in regard to their own historicity and situatedness.

From the position of the post-Maoist theo-politics, this is not a debate worth having since beyond history and critique lie domains that are neither religious nor secular (i.e., do not belong to the order of enlightened rational progress). These include what is axiomatically true (like mathematics) as well as whatever is open to total rupture and innovation—what can break with incremental or mundane temporality (e.g., falling in love, or creating a wholly new kind of artwork, or being converted to a faith).

Let me be clear: I do not write this as a committed post-Maoist myself, far from it. But I do think this body of work makes an important contribution to contemporary theory, partly because, in fidelity to the spirit of resistance and in its dismissal of the (divisive and integrative) politics of difference and identity, it asks us to approach religion subtracted from its institutionality and truth-claims and hence from the schema in which the religion versus secular debate is carried out. In doing so it asks us squarely to examine how critique helps us deal with what remains a (maybe the) crucial question of our time: should we refuse capitalism? And it does so without succumbing to the manifold lures of revelation, revolutionary expectations, transcendence, historical progress, eternal life, tradition, philosophy-as-conversation, communicative rationality, social-capital building…

History of ideas. Taylor sees two books lurking in The Stillborn God: a compelling narrative about modern German thinking on religion and politics, and “a much broader narrative of modernity” that he finds borders on the “fantastic.” David Hollinger, on the other hand, takes my purposes “to be rather more modest than those attributed to [me] by many of the postings” and thinks that I’m only trying to “put before us the core intellectual resources of the modern North Atlantic West.” Hollinger has my aims exactly right. He also takes seriously my skepticism about all narratives of modernity. As I say in the book:

We are still like children when it comes to thinking about modern political life, whose experimental nature we prefer not to contemplate. Instead, we tell ourselves stories about how our big world came to be and why it is destined to persist. These are legends about the course of history, full of grand terms to describe the process supposedly at work-modernization, secularization, democratization, the “disenchantment of the world,” “history as the story of liberty,” and countless others. These are the fairy tales of our time…they make the world legible, they reassure us of its irrevocability, and they relieve us of responsibility for maintaining it.

Taylor, though, voices a common criticism, one that José Casanova also made in his previous post. So clearly I have to say more about the kind of story I am telling. To do that, let me first review what I did say in the book, then expand on it.

In the introduction to The Stillborn God I write that:

[The book] reenacts an argument about religion and politics that stretched over four hundred years in the West…. It is not a comprehensive study of all the major contributions to debates over religion and politics in this period, which would fill many volumes. Instead, it takes the reader through the steps of a particular argument, one in which the confrontation between political theology and its modern philosophical adversary was particularly intense, the disputes vivid, and the stakes clear. This is an analytic but highly episodic history of ideas.

These terms – “analytic” and “episodic” – express my approach to the history of ideas, but clearly need to be unpacked. I take the history of ideas to be a different discipline from that of “intellectual history” as the term is employed today. Recent intellectual history, ranging from Skinner to Foucault, is deflationary. It tries to bring ideas down to earth by returning them to their supposed historical contexts, or looking behind their backs to discover the hidden forces of power that generated, then used, them as ideological tools. While I learn from this literature, I have no desire to contribute to it.

What attracts me is an exercise that forces inquiry in the opposite direction: beginning with ideas as they emerge in different contexts, and are advanced for different reasons, to see what their logic is and how they shape and constrain those who try to use them. What strikes me time and again in studying the thought of the past is not how pliable ideas are to human purposes, but how they resist and even shape those purposes. We think ideas, but ideas also think us. As admirers of Hegel, Taylor and I presumably agree on this. Perhaps then we also agree that the philosophical task of thinking through, and then mastering, the ideas that “think us” requires an exploration of their hidden potential and limitations. We can do that by examining concepts abstractly; we can also do it indirectly by analyzing how they play out on the broader canvas of history. That is what I try to do, both in The Stillborn God and, in a different way, in The Reckless Mind. A cumbersome way of doing philosophy, but there it is.

I am well aware of the mountain of methodological objections to what I have just said, and the many attempts to cope with them, from Lovejoy and his “unit-ideas” to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe project of the Bielefeld school. I cannot address them here. My point is simply to explain the assumptions behind The Stillborn God.

The rules of the games. To explain why the book it has the shape it does, let me try another approach (with due apologies to Heinrich Böll).

In studying the history of political theology over the past decade and a half, I came to feel that I was watching something like the three-dimensional chess game Mr. Spock used to play on Star Trek. Think of political theology as the game on one board. The game has set pieces, which move in certain ways and are not allowed to move in others. The players know this, but they are free to develop an infinite number of strategies within the rules, so there are always surprises. That is how the game is played. The outside observer (me in this case) does not know the rules, but by watching enough games he begins to see how different pieces move and which strategies are successful. Eventually he begins to infer what the rules must be.

Now imagine that a second board is added, and call this modern political philosophy. Many of the pieces are the same but some are new, and certain powerful pieces from the first board are missing. New strategies are developed, so there is variety here as well, but again there are constraints on the game, so not everything is possible. A strategy that works on the first board may not work on the second, and alien pieces won’t work at all. Again, the observer has to watch a number of games to learn how the new pieces work, which strategies are successful, and what the new underlying rules are. He can now begin to compare the two games and see where they seem similar and where they differ. He can also watch the players and see how, at the psychological level, the structure of each game affects the way it is played.

The Stillborn God begins as a book about these two chess games. Part of the book explains, in all too cursory fashion, how the second chessboard came to be built after a stalemated game on the first board (Christian political theology) descended into violence among the players. But the real drama is in the analysis of strategies on the new board, as David Hollinger has seen. There were of course many such strategies, each having its own background, and one could write a history of how each and every one of them developed, who used them in which historical contexts, and the like. I have not done that. Rather, I have focused episodically and analytically on a few grandmasters whose strategies stand out as having advanced the game and revealed its inner possibilities: Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel. Their strategies developed in a certain order because later masters were aware of the earlier ones, but there was nothing teleological about this development and contemporary players can draw on any of their moves, which are now freeware. The game continues to develop, but also repeats itself.

Indeed, games continue at both levels, even in the West, though the question “which board are you on?” seems less pressing today than it did in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. The building of the second board did not abolish the first one, or necessarily lessen its allure. Which is why, in the wake of the French Revolution, certain players began to raise the following plausible question: can’t the two games be combined? Despite the differences in certain pieces and moves, this was a natural suggestion to make, since the strategies on the two boards shared a family resemblance. (As Charles Taylor correctly suggests, not every piece on the old board had a “revealed” valence.)

So in the early-nineteenth century a combined game (liberal theology) was developed, and for a while it seemed playable. Some, like David Hollinger, still think it is. But it turns out to have two fatal weaknesses, mainly psychological. Those players really interested in the second game tend to think the old pieces just muddy play, and conclude that nothing is lost in removing them from the board. Others feel that combined play betrays the grandeur and seriousness of the old game, to which they long to return. That is why, when stressful circumstances present themselves at a certain juncture (e.g., the Weimar years), there is a return to messianic political theology. But not being trained in the old rules and strategies, the new messiahs are prone to making foolish, dramatic moves that put them in indefensible positions. Their experience with the mixed game makes them the worst players, not the best, on the old board. (The same is true of today’s political Islamists, I’d add.)

So in the end, The Stillborn God is about three games and the logic and psychology of playing them: the old game (political theology), the new game (modern political philosophy), and the failed mixed game (liberal theology). Though these developed in a certain historical order, the book does not aim to provide a “narrative of modernity” or anything of the sort. Its aim is rather, to quote David Hollinger again, to expose and assess “the core intellectual resources of the modern North Atlantic West,” which are drawn from all three games.

The Great Separation. I have no idea whether this playful metaphor of the chess game will help clarify things for my critics. Charles Taylor seems bothered by the different metaphors of separation – rivers, chasms, and bridges – that I used in the book, and he may think I’ve just compounded the problem. But in reading him I sense he is looking for something I had no intention of providing. Had I tried to write a “narrative of modernity” he would be quite right to object that “what I cannot see is a moment of Great Separation” and to ask “is the great separation consummated when we’ve all been converted to mechanistic materialism?” But if one focuses on the development of the game, I do think there was a moment of separation, and that was the publication of Leviathan. On the old board, the aim of the game was to legitimate the exercise of political authority on the basis of a revealed nexus of God, man, and world. On Hobbes’s new board, the aim was to legitimate authority without appeal to such a revealed nexus – indeed, by explicitly ruling out that chess piece. (Which is what made Hobbes’s move more decisive than Grotius’s sly etiamsi daremus non esse deum, which left it in play but without real power.)

Now, though Hobbes built the new board and was the first to play on it, those who followed him developed quite different strategies of play (as I indeed say in Chapter 2 and elsewhere). Some, appealing to neo-stoicism, Grotius, and Pufendorf, assumed a more optimistic anthropology, which led them to different political conclusions. Others, like Locke, played a double game, following Hobbes’s materialistic anthropology in some works and various Protestant dissenters and natural theologians in others. Taylor is right: the history is messy, as were the arguments, both before Hobbes among Christian theologians, and after. But even in retelling ourselves this history we need to distinguish which board different writers were playing on, and when. It is no accident that Locke’s Two Treatises are, in fact, two treatises: one directed at Filmer and other political theologians playing on the old board, the other directed to those already playing on the new one.

(I should add that I don’t quite follow Taylor when he says that I use “political theology” in three different senses. I am pretty consistent – in fact, repetitive, according to one reviewer – in saying that I take political theology to be “a doctrine that legitimates the exercise of political authority on the basis of a revealed nexus of God, man, and world.” I do not really take up natural – i.e., non-revealed – theology, which perhaps I should have. This is a large topic, but my short answer is that in practice natural theology usually depends on revelation at some point. Though St. Thomas distinguishes divine, eternal, natural, and human law, those very distinctions appear to be revealed, not arrived at on the basis of reason alone. Finally, when Taylor says I employ the term political theology in a third sense — “the enframing of our thought about politics and human affairs in some doctrines about God and the world” – I simply don’t recognize myself, or understand what he means by “enframing.”)

Our path. Clearly the largest confusion to which The Stillborn God lends itself concerns the connection between political history and the history of these games. I seem to have opened myself to misunderstanding by not speaking more explicitly about the relationship between the Great Separation in Western political thought and the Sonderweg that our societies currently seem on. This has led many critics (some of whom appear to have relied solely on a synopsis of the book published in the New York Times Magazine) to attribute views to me that aren’t my own.

My silence on this score was intentional. The intellectual Great Separation was the necessary condition of our current understanding and exercise of political legitimacy, but it was not a sufficient condition. Nor is liberal constitutionalism the only political doctrine that the Great Separation has spawned – far from it. A Whiggish history of the modern political thought and practice written, say, in the aftermath of the two world wars might have reached much darker conclusions about the impact of the Great Separation and perhaps brighter ones about the wisdom of returning to political theology. (One book that did was Henri de Lubac’s The Drama of Atheist Humanism, written during the war.)

It was my hope to avoid both Whiggism and triumphalism by leaving open and contingent the connection between the intellectual Great Separation and the way different Western institutions in different countries developed at different times, down to our day. We know where we are now, but recounting how we got there is an enormous task (as Charles Taylor knows better than anyone), and the temptation of historical necessity is ever present. I wanted to stress the experimental nature of what we are attempting, and the strangeness of it, seen in the vast sweep of history. There are historians who can fill in the blanks and I hope they do. I also hope that The Stillborn God will be useful to them, by uncovering the deeper logic of two distinct intellectual programs, or games. Once the distinction is appreciated, I think it will be easier to see how different players at different times developed different strategies of play in different matches.

Even stated this way, though, the aims of The Stillborn God are open to the objection that I have forced the distinction between political theology and modern political philosophy. Some critics have asked: what about the United States? Doesn’t its history show that liberal political theology and liberal constitutionalism can work hand in hand, that there is no aut-aut? David Hollinger and Daniel Philpott offer versions of this argument, which has also appeared in previous posts and in published reviews. Let me take them up briefly here before signing off.

I do not disagree with Philpott when he writes that “the formation and incubation of liberal democracy” in the United States drew from Christian tradition of dissent, which opened up theological space for thinking about the autonomy of politics. That is how things happened on the ground; but once it did, Americans found themselves playing by the rules of the new chess game, and today do not generally make reference to a divine nexus of God, man, and world when explaining to themselves what makes their constitution legitimate. We have kicked that ladder away (Pastor Huckabee notwithstanding). Given the presence of real, and really aggressive, political theology in the world today, we need to keep a sense of proportion about this.

Nor do I deny that Christianity “has continued to sustain and, at vital junctures, to contribute to the expansion of liberal democracy, both in thought and substance.” How could it not? After all, the whole point of liberal democracy is that we are no longer in the business of looking into people’s souls and questioning the grounds on which people have certain political views. There are many American Christians, and their Christianity no doubt inspires their views on a range of issues (for better or worse, let’s admit that, too). But the legitimacy of the constitution does not depend on our accepting or even recognizing the legitimacy of their deepest convictions, only that they can express them, and by and large they accept that. Which means they are playing on the new board, not the old one.

David Hollinger thinks I misunderstand the American case because I focus on Germany, suggesting that the god of liberal theology is still alive and kicking here. Institutionally, this clearly isn’t so: the liberal Protestant churches have been severely depopulated over the past forty years, losing young people either to religious indifference or more ecstatic forms of faith, and liberal Catholicism isn’t doing any better. But Hollinger is referring to something else, I think, which is the prophetic strain in American religion which has done so much to inspire the political liberalism of our time. But this is not “liberal theology” in any recognizable sense, which is an intellectual tradition rooted in the nineteenth-century hope of accommodating faith to the demands of the present. The prophetic tradition wants to bring God’s judgment down on the present, denouncing racism, war, environmental degradation, inequality, and the rest. Reinhold Niebuhr was a political liberal but not a theological one; he admired Karl Barth, and his early work in the churches of Detroit during the depression was inspired by a ferocious Augustinianism, not liberal accommodation. Similarly with Dr. King. We should not conflate the prophetic “social gospel” with liberal theology, which inspires very few today. American politics still makes room for prophets, as it should – so long as they retire to their churches once the ballots are cast. And they generally do.

This is a fascinating story, and well worth the telling, particularly as Lilla weaves together both a Christian and a Jewish variant, which grew symbiotically in Germany. Of course, one might cavil at some of the interpretations; I feel that Lilla pulls his major figures perhaps a bit too far in the anthropocentric direction. In particular I feel that his Hegel interpretation is a bit too human-centred, but there is much room for disagreement here and no writer can please everyone. This is a fascinating account, from which one can’t but learn, whether in agreement or not.

But then this monograph is woven into a much broader narrative of modernity, about the coming, and then later the threatened undoing of what he calls the Great Separation. Otherwise expressed, this involved a determined sidelining of “political theology.” This meant that people were ready to understand political society in purely human terms. This, for Lilla is something achieved in the early modern West, and now perhaps under threat even here. It is foreign, even unthinkable, in other cultures. The motive for the Great Separation was the religiously inspired violence of the confessional wars of the early modern period. Its great architect for Lilla was Hobbes. The threatened return of political theology today may also weaken our defenses against the eruption of violence, hence the importance of our understanding what is at stake.

So the form of the narration is, first an important gain, and then later a threatened back-sliding. This latter threatens as a result of the tradition of liberal theology and the self-declared return to revelation that its discrediting provoked. This is a narrative rather like the secularization one, which often ends in today’s variants with a threatened “return of religion” – except that Lilla sets his face against an idea of secularization as an inevitable historical force.

Now this narrative seems to me wide of the mark. The strong metaphors, like Great Separation, and the image of our having crossed a river, distort and exaggerate the differences. On one bank, political theology supposedly reigns supreme; on the other, it has vanished.

What is political theology? Perhaps that in answering basic political-normative questions (justice, legitimate authority, war and peace, rights and obligations) one appeals to divine authority. Or perhaps that one appeals to revelation. But this is not a category for many religions, so Lilla adds “cosmological speculation.” In any case, for the modern West, “We no longer recognize revelation as politically authoritative.”

But, if you look at what shaped the West “for over a millennium,” you get a much more complex picture. These issues of justice, war and peace, and so on: these were not settled by revelation according to what was long a dominant view. Take Aquinas. The sources here were natural law theory, Aristotle, sometimes Plato (admittedly, Plato comes close to leaning on “cosmological speculation,” if you think of his Idea of the Good). When it comes to legitimate rule, one important source was traditional law. Who was the legitimate successor to the previous King lately deceased?

True, there were demands on the political system made by revealed religion. The King should defend the true faith for example; this was a key notion of post-Constantinian Christendom. And there was indeed a crisis generated by different interpretations of this demand in the early modern period: the Wars of Religion, which we modern Westerners are dimly aware of as the crucible out of which certain features of modern liberal society emerged painfully and over time, most notably the principles of toleration, separation of church and state, and eventually pluralism. This was a tough and sometimes long transition. But we didn’t make it by shifting utterly our modes of political thinking, from one based on divine revelation to one based on purely human considerations.

Take the French Wars of Religion. The normative background in which these were fought out included French Law, including the Salic law of succession; the generally accepted considerations of Natural Law, and the above-mentioned demand that rulers should defend the true church against heresy. In fact the vicissitudes of the 16th Century were partly determined by the ways in which different kings weighted the different demands on them. And the crucial drama turned on the way within each side, and particularly the Catholic side, these demands were differently weighted. In the end the crucial struggle was between the Ligue under the duc de Guise, on one side, Catholic extremists who were willing to over-ride all other considerations in order to defend the Catholic faith, going even to the lengths of assassination of Kings they considered not sufficiently hostile to heresy (but to be fair, the royal party also resorted to assassination, of which Guise was a victim); and on the other side, les Politiques, the party that weighed peace, order, and legality over doctrinal purity. They won, and the compromise was the accession of Henri IV, legal according to Salic rules, along with his conversion and an Edict of toleration (l’Édit de Nantes). Paris vaut bien une messe.

Europe emerged from its wars of religion by moves of this kind. The analogues of the Politiques cobbled together various kinds of deals in which the demands for doctrinal purity were tempered by legality and the requirement of peace and order. The Holy Roman Empire became a patchwork quilt of confessional states in which each local ruler enforced his orthodoxy, while co-existing with neighbours who embraced different confessions. In other states, “heretical” faiths were tolerated within limits.

The great political philosophy which emerges out of this transition is that of modern Natural Law, whose major figures in the 17th Century were Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf. This was the school which invented modern human rights; that is, they made central individual “subjective” rights, rights as the property of individual agents. And they all developed powerful reasons why legitimate order should trump any theological claims about the evils of heresy (that is, not render these null and void, but trump them whenever they conflicted with the demands of order).

Where in all this do we find something like a “crossing” to another shore? This seems altogether too dramatic an image. The more so, in that many of these thinkers continued to invoke the will of God as the basis of Natural Law. This is clearly the case with Pufendorf and Locke. For Locke, the kernel of Natural Law is the right to life. And the basic justification of this right is as follows: “For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one anothers Pleasure.” True, this is arguably not derived from Revelation, but the product of Natural theology. Nevertheless, God remains very much part of the picture. It would not be possible to describe Locke as “thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms.”

So what is political theology, and when did we abandon it? One answer is to define this mode of thinking as one deriving basic premises from Revelation, and then note that it was first neutralized, subordinated to the other kinds of consideration which were always in the field, and then later, dropped altogether, in the sense that most political thinkers today do not feel the necessity of evoking revelation. Which of these steps corresponds to “crossing the river”? Hardly the first, because the notion of Nature and particularly human nature as providentially designed persists for a long time. Indeed, it is not even fully clear when the second move occurred, because since the reigning notion of the Age of Enlightenment was that a Supreme and Benevolent Being had designed the world, appeals to God and appeals to Nature were in this domain extensionally equivalent. It wasn’t really until the post-Darwin era that the notion of a normative design in nature, whether based on a theistic account or not, comes under challenge.

Later the discussion in the book seems to introduce a third conception of political theology. In the above discussion we gleaned two senses: (1) political theology exists where our normative political theory depends directly on premises from Revelation, (2) this theory depends on premises which are theological, even though not drawn (only) from Revelation (e.g. Locke and Pufendorf). To these, the discussion of Chapter 2 seems to add a third. Our whole thought about politics can be enframed by a view of God and his purposes, and their relation to human action in history, even though our normative thought doesn’t derive directly from any theological premises, revealed or rationally arrived at. Otherwise put, if we reconstruct political deliberations in the form of practical syllogisms, we are not forced to articulate any specifically theological premises.

Lilla elaborates three such enframings in pre-modern Christianity: one a hyper-Augustinian view which saw the political scene as dominated by what were in effect super-robbers, who can at least quell the petty criminals and keep them in order; a second which did try to draw some conclusions for political order in Church and State from God’s ambiguous relation to human history; and a third, that of millennial rebels, which called on people to reject all established orders in favour of the new eschatological age. “Withdrawal into monasticism, ruling the earthly city with the two swords of church and state, building the messianic New Jerusalem – which is the true model of Christian politics?” He wants to claim that the tension between these three frames helped to bring an end to political theology in Christendom.

This third sense of “political theology,” the enframing of our thought about politics and human affairs in some doctrines about God and the world, Lilla speaks of as maintaining a “divine nexus”. This sense (3) is clearly different from (1) and (2), since it is possible to practice political theory in this sense without engaging in (1) or (2). In our age, Reinhold Niebuhr provided an example. Plainly his Augustinian faith combined with his observations helped him develop a philosophical anthropology of humans as fallen creatures, which made him very skeptical of claims that human life could be radically improved by political engineering, whether communist or liberal.

So what would it mean to end political theology? Perhaps to drop it in all three forms, and to think out the great questions in entirely intra-worldly terms. This seems to be what Lilla is suggesting in Chapter 2, the “great separation.” And this impression is strengthened by his choice of Hobbes as the paradigm figure. He reads Hobbes’ “Epicureanism” i.e., mechanistic atomism, as leveling “nothing less than the Christian conception of man.” Of course, this is highly controversial, if one means that Hobbes meant to level the Christian conception. This would render the whole second half of Leviathan with its elaborate interpretation a tongue in cheek exercise meant to fool his contemporaries. Another interpretation is not ruled out. There were Christian Epicureans in the 17th Century (Gassendi, for instance).

But we can by-pass this and simply say that we consider mechanistic materialism incompatible with Christian faith and that therefore Hobbes was in fact refuting it, even if he didn’t grasp this. But this reading of the Great Separation raises questions for the issue when it was supposed to occur. Hobbes was much less influential in his time than he is in ours, and this was largely because of his reductive theory. Lots of contemporaries judged of him what Lilla seems to have judged, that he was a covert atheist. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. So is the great separation consummated when we’ve all been converted to mechanistic materialism? In which case, it would have to be a moment of liberation yet to come. Or is it just when we stop talking altogether about God? But that doesn’t seem to have happened either, except in some reaches of the academy, and even there you wonder how many crypto-Niebuhrs are hiding.

So how are we to conceive the Great Separation, the abandonment of political theology? In senses (1) and (2), it was never the only game in town, except perhaps for millenarist sectarians. But it was part of the range of essential considerations for most people. There were those who in virtue of their theology in sense (3) wanted to retreat from the political world, like Anabaptists. Whatever theology they had in sense (1) could be called “negative”; have nothing to do with the powers of this world. Obey the Prince when he doesn’t demand something directly contrary to the Gospel (like joining the army), and even when he does issue such commands your disobedience should be utterly passive. Somehow we’ve got to an age in the West where there is very little direct intrusion of normative premises from theology into our political lives; but this can arise for many believers because their enframing sense of the relation to God is much more complex, and doesn’t admit of such direct transfers, or because lots of people are now atheists or agnostics, or more realistically for both reasons: because we are split about the issue of potential theological enframings, the only way we can discuss together about political issues is in terms which remain common.

I think Lilla exaggerates the importance of Hobbes, but he is right to see him as one thinker in the chain of those who developed what I have called the modern moral conception of social order. A more apt founding figure for this outlook is Grotius. It sees human beings as both each pursuing their own goals, of life and prosperity, in potential conflict with others, while at the same time they are sociable, meant to live with others. Our social morality can be derived from this predicament. Those social rules are correct which can enable humans to live together; which can in other terms harmonize their projects, so that they become mutually strengthening, instead of causes of conflict and hence destruction. This is if you like a derivation of social rules from purely human considerations, and Grotius even makes the (in)famous claim that these rules would be valid, even if God didn’t exist. But in the way these ideas were worked out, in say, Locke, or Pufendorf, or the framers of the American Declaration of Independence, they were not disconnected from theology. The assumption was that God had made human beings so that they could achieve harmony by these rules, whether this was established by reason, often in a Deistic mode, or shown by Revelation (and for many people, of course, the fact that these truths were doubly guaranteed made them all the more credible). “We hold these truths to be self-evident….”

Where I agree with Lilla is that this new ethic of order could be detached from a theistic anchoring. It could be seen as inscribed in Nature (Jacobins), and then later as what our instincts and intuitions as they have developed in civilization suggest to us. What I cannot see is a moment of Great Separation, as it were, a crossing of a stream. Even today, our sense of this liberal order of equality, rights and democracy is sustained by what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus,” in which people support the same principles for a host of different reasons, Kantian, utilitarian, but also theological. Now in fact, it is hard to think across these gaps; for a believer to understand an atheist, and vice versa. So people always fall into imagining that their grounds for upholding the consensus are the only valid ones. Certain people on the US right think that Christianity is the only possible basis; certain members of the liberal academy think that if you aren’t some kind of Kantian you have no good reason to believe in Liberalism. These beliefs help to generate the kind of Kulturkampf from which the US suffers. But the fact is that our civilization is anchored in widely incompatible “comprehensive views,” to use Rawls’ term. Only if you forget this can you believe that “we” have crossed a deep divide, and that we are now threatened with regression. It seems to me that the reality is more mixed and less dramatic than that.

So on “our” (modern liberal) side of the river, “political theology” has never been wholly absent, and has often been very prominent. Unless we choose to forget abolitionists in Britain and America, the Civil Right movement, all the Second World War rhetoric about “defending Christian civilization,” etc. It is more or less prominent at different times and in different milieu, but it is always there.

And symmetrically, the kinds of philosophical considerations which we rely on today were very present on the “other” shore. One has the impression at times that Lilla sees the pre-modern age as dominated by the Guises and the Münzers. There were far too many then, but then we’ve seen quite a few in our day, not just those with a “theological” outlook, but also Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Lilla never undertakes to describe the “other shore”, but the odd hints he does offer make me wonder. He speaks of contemporary recurrences to political theology as being unlike those of earlier days; they don’t “appeal to miracles, or biblical inerrancy, or divine providence, or sacred tradition.” Later he mentions “fanciful cosmologies.” But Biblical inerrancy is an invention of modern evangelical Protestantism; miracles were not standardly appealed to in political theory, even with a “divine nexus” (it’s true that they became very important in apologetics in the 18th Century, hence the punch in Hume’s deflationary arguments on this score); providence played a big role for thinkers of “British and American Liberalism,” of which Lilla says that for two centuries they “stayed well within the philosophical orbit that Hobbes had circumscribed.” This would certainly have surprised many of them.

One is led to wonder whether for Lilla pre-modern normative thinking was simply dictated out of Revelation. Speaking of our present enlightened age, Lilla says: “No one in modern Britain or the United States argued for a bicameral legislature on the basis of divine revelation.” But did the Norman Kings of England when they summoned the first Parliaments which provided the template for today’s British and American institutions consult the Bible or the doctrine of the Catholic Church?

Of course, one finds the tendency to derive goals directly from Revelation among sectarians and millenarists. These groups are often violent, which is one reason why many secular moderns link religion and violence. The last century has shown that this kind of murderous sectarianism is not confined to religious believers. It’s not clear to me what Lilla’s views are on this question.

In sum, the monograph on German thought is immensely stimulating and suggestive, but the broader narrative is hard to grasp, and seems to verge at times on the fantastic.

My take on The Stillborn God is more positive than most of the postings on this blog. Lilla’s account of the salient intellectual history of early modern Europe strikes me as dazzling in its “lucidity,” the ideal Lilla urges us to pursue. I wish that some of my praise for Lilla’s incisive analyses of Rousseau, et al., had made it past the austere editorial instincts of LRB. I understand Lilla’s purposes to be rather more modest than those attributed to him by many of the postings. What this book does the most commandingly is to put before us the core intellectual resources of the modern North Atlantic West for keeping supernatural warrants for political action from playing too great a role in polities that include many citizens who disagree about just what the divine asks of us and some other citizens who doubt that there is any divinity to be obeyed at all.

My frustration with the book begins with Lilla’s assumption that these core resources are sufficiently available in the writings of the great philosophers of Europe from Hobbes to Hegel. He alludes to Tocqueville, but offers no exposition of Tocqueville’s ideas to match what he offers about Kant and Rousseau. Indeed, after Rousseau, every thinker Lilla addresses was German. One might think that British, American, and French theorists have a claim on Lilla’s attention, especially since in all three of those countries stronger steps were made toward The Great Separation than were made in Germany. By saying virtually nothing about Anglo-American and French intellectuals of the last 200 years, Lilla leaves the impression that he believes all of them were just recycling ideas of the Old Greats. But the narrowly German scope of Lilla’s treatment of the history of ideas about religion and politics since the late 18th century would not be so objectionable were it not for Lilla’s argument about the function of liberal Protestantism in the North Atlantic West during that exact period. The God of liberal Protestantism was “stillborn,” Lilla argues, because it proved unable to do more than sanctify the state.

Lilla’s carefully worked-out, extensively documented, German-centered defense of this claim is not directly discussed (to my enormous surprise and puzzlement) by any of The Immanent Frame’s bloggers so far. Yet, Lilla’s argument about liberal Protestantism is anything but marginal to his book. It is this argument that 1) gives The Stillborn God its title, 2) takes Lilla from Hegel to the Third Reich and the Bolshevik Revolution and beyond, and 3) most distinguishes Lilla from other writers who have addressed the history of ideas about religion and politics in the modern West. Hence much of my LRB review is a critique of Lilla’s interpretation of liberal Protestantism. Let me here summarize my main points about Lilla’s argument, and elaborate in ways that space limitations prevented me from doing in my review.

Lilla attributes to liberal Protestantism a much tighter logic than its actual history displays. Lilla is right to call attention to Ernst Troeltsch’s association of the Kaiser’s 1914 call to arms with “the living breath of God,” and to other connections between liberal Protestantism and state power in Germany, but all of his evidence about the sanctification of the state comes from a society with an overbearing tradition of political absolutism and a monolithic sense of the Volk. If Lilla had devoted more attention to the case of the United States, a nation where liberal Protestantism has been uniquely influential and where The Great Separation was largely enacted through a constitutional separation of church and state, he would be obliged to admit that liberal Protestantism has given itself to a variety of outlooks on state power quite different from those he finds in Germany. The great “higher critic” Theodore Parker was a member of the “Secret Six” who financed John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. “Social Gospel” theologian Walter Rauschenbusch was deeply embedded in the German theological culture on which Lilla concentrates, but Rauschenbusch’s embrace of modernity was defined largely against the decisions made by state, rather than for those decisions. Rauschenbusch’s successor as the most politically important liberal Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, is so significant that his ideas about religion and politics are vigorously and even vociferously debated to this day (The Atlantic published an extensive overview of this discussion in November 2007), but Lilla says nothing about Niebuhr, or Rauschenbusch, or Parker. Harvey Cox’s The Secular City drew explicit inspiration from both Ernst Bloch and Friederich Gogarten, the two German totalitarians with whom Lilla climaxes his narrative of German acquiescence in state power, but Lilla does not deal at all with Cox and Cox’s support of a variety of 1960s radical movements. Martin Luther King, Jr., is perhaps the most widely respected American liberal Protestant of the 20th century, but King and his protests against established political authority escape Lilla’s attention altogether.

Lilla alludes to the fact that “in the Anglo-American orbit, a liberal theological outlook could grow up alongside a liberal politics whose principles derived from Hobbes’s materialism,” but this crucial part of his story he covers only with the cryptic observation that it was made possible by “a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks.” At issue is more than a historically accurate understanding of liberal Protestantism. At issue, too, is the role that liberal Protestantism can play in today’s struggles over religion-and-politics. Lilla is too quick to dismiss (he counts among liberal Protestantism’s triumphs a disposition to prescribe “the length of a gentleman’s beard”) liberal Protestantism as a setting in which he might find allies in the campaign to employ lucidity in the defense of a political sphere separated from divinity. Hence the big problem with The Stillborn God, as I insist in my LRB review, is not that Lilla has failed to give us a comprehensive history of the relationship between religion and politics in Western thought. That was never his intention, and he should not be held responsible for it, or for comparative body counts of religious and secular fanatics. The problem is that Lilla’s selection of episodes since 1830 cannot vindicate the claim that entitles his book. Moreover, this misstep drastically narrows the constituency that might potentially avail themselves of the intellectual resources he identifies in the writings of the canonical philosophers of early modern Europe.

If anyone doubts that liberal Protestants can advance Lilla’s cause, they need look no further than the campaign speeches of the liberal Protestant Barack Obama. “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values,” Obama declared in a widely quoted speech. Democratic commitment obliges religious believers to advance policy goals on the basis of principles “accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.” This sounds pretty good to me, and it is a long way from Governor Huckabee’s comment the other day to the effect that we ought to amend the Constitution so that it better reflects God’s views on same-sex relationships and abortion. There are sharp differences of opinion among religious believers in the United States, and non-believers as well as believers have a stake in the disagreements between people like Huckabee and Obama. Obama’s theoretical position tracks a tradition of American political theory exemplified by John Rawls that is congruent with what Lilla means by The Great Separation. Lilla’s aloofness from this rich American discourse renders The Stillborn God disappointing even to someone as massively sympathetic as I am with Lilla’s basic outlook. If liberal Protestants can help our cause, why not welcome them?