Angel Jaramillo Torres
The Enlightenment was an impressive propaganda exercise in favor of the cause of political philosophy in its battle against political theology. But it failed to realize that, as long as humanity exists, there will be those who seek solace in a life oriented toward obedience to divine design.
Athens and Jerusalem
Aristotle begins his book on Metaphysics (actually named by Andronicus of Rhodes) with words that Voltaire would have endorsed in his enlightened garden: all men have an appetite for knowledge. This is the promise that philosophy makes to man: our destiny is to ascend from Plato’s cave of ignorance to knowledge.
The philosophical myth of the cave is contrasted with the biblical myth of the human condition in the Garden of Eden: the prohibition is to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent drives the primordial human couple to curiosity about the world. Once Adam and Eve are tempted to disobey, there is no longer any place for them in a place where obedience to divine design is the only commandment. From that moment on, man enters the natural order. It is not for nothing that there is no word in the Bible equivalent to what we understand as nature. In fact, physis is a word invented by philosophy, already present in Homer, a poet-philosopher.
Thus, the two fundamental attitudes toward the world are outlined: life dedicated to the free scrutiny of reality based solely on human reason, and life devoted to obedience to an inscrutable God. Tertium non datur.
Each of these two attitudes faces the problem of human life in society. Thus, political philosophy and political theology are born. This polarity is primordial and precedes any political regime. The history of civilizations can be understood as a systole and a diastole in which theologians and philosophers clash for world domination.
This also occurs in modernity. The Machiavellian revolution promised man dominion over nature, and Francis Bacon promised the use of modern natural science to achieve paradise on earth. In political terms, this meant the emancipation of man from ecclesiastical tutelage and also the establishment of the secular state, where religion is relegated to the private sphere. That is why Machiavelli and Bacon must be considered the fathers of liberalism. In fact, liberalism can be regarded as the most significant contribution of political philosophy to the modern predicament. Although political theology also considered the separation of church and state (“render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”), it did so to relegate what Hobbes called the Leviathan (the voluntary union of all men) to a secondary role.
The Enlightenment of the 18th century was the most impressive propaganda exercise in favor of the cause of political philosophy in its battle against political theology. But it made the mistake of deluding itself about the absolute compatibility of human beings with their desire for knowledge. It failed to realize that political theology is a permanent temptation and that, as long as humanity exists, there will be those who seek the consolations of a life oriented toward obedience to divine design.
Our predicament in the 21st century
On September 12, 2001, millions of human beings searched their encyclopedias for a strange word that only scholars of Islam in the West seemed to know: jihad. The day before, Mohammed Atta and his companions had stunned the world by hijacking four commercial airliners, two of which crashed into the Twin Towers in New York. At the same time, another dared to destroy part of the Pentagon, the temple of the so-called American “military-industrial complex.” The fourth plane was piloted by heroes whose last word, according to Martin Amis, was “love.”
Along with the towers in Manhattan, the West’s illusions of a rational world free from the influence of revealed religions came crashing down. Le retour de Dieu took everyone by surprise. In the narrow corridors of the think tanks on K Street in Washington, D.C., the mandarins of international politics pondered Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history and Samuel Huntington’s idea of the clash of civilizations. But neither of them understood the fundamental dichotomy of human passions: the life dedicated to reason and the life devoted to obedience.
Almost two years before the jihad appeared on Wall Street and the Potomac, a red-haired former KGB agent took the reins of the Russian government after the unexpected resignation of Boris Yeltsin, the vodka-loving bear. The dream of a liberal Russia was over, as if the despotism of the steppe were the destiny of the Slavic world east of the Urals. Few knew that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin felt nostalgia for the Russia of the tsars. The next step was backward: the third Rome of the Orthodox Church was returning from the sleep to which Lenin and his intrepid Bolsheviks had confined it. Putin looked far into the past but also into the future. With him returned the imperial impulse of political theology.
No one noticed the global significance of Putin as the theologian of geopolitics and the imposing Rasputin-like beard: Aleksandr Dugin. The tellurocracy of the Russian continental mass could bend the liberal and democratic thalassocracy of the United States to its will. Russian intervention in the election that brought Trump to power cannot be viewed separately from the theological-political designs of Putin and his ideologues straight out of Dostoyevsky’s novels.
It is only due to a lack of philosophical rigor and historical sense that we label the type of regime that seeks to promote the Russian empire as populist. What lies behind it is much more fundamental: a way of life based on complete submission to an inscrutable God. One could speak, in any case, of a political theology of populism. The religious variable is irrelevant here: Putin does not have the extravagant idea of taking the Orthodox Church to the ends of the earth, but instead seeks to generate a disposition toward authority, so that it is not critically discussed but obeyed without objection. In this, Huntington was wrong: the variety of civilizations hides the primordial unity of political theology. It would, of course, be an exaggeration to say that Putin is the sole promoter of political theology. Its triumph is occurring independently in various parts of the world: it is a sign of the times. Karl Popper is correct in suggesting that the alternatives are tyranny or an open society. But Popper did not have the ears to consider that the foundation of liberal democracy, its raison d’être, is to present itself as the alternative to theocracy.
AMLO and Evangelical Liberation Theology
In the 13th century, Doctor Angelicus achieved the unlikely feat of merging two antithetical traditions of thought: Greek philosophy and the New Testament. We refer to this marvel of theological will as scholasticism. Many centuries later, in the favelas and other Latin American hellholes, intellectuals in cassocks took pity on the destitute who toiled in Latin American cities and towns. From this variety of compassion, another unlikely fusion was born, just as improbable as that of Thomas Aquinas: Christian Marxism.
Thus, the man from Trier, disciple of Hegel and scholar of modern economics, could be read in the key of the parables of the Sermon on the Mount. Although most of the clergy who follow this teaching are Catholic, there is also an evangelical variety, which had a certain boom, among other places, in Tabasco, at the time when Andrés Manuel López Obrador was growing up.
Evangelical Liberation Theology is AMLO’s religious affiliation. This is where his discourse in favor of the poor and his sense of justice come from. But if we look closely, what underlies this is the preaching of the most essential tenet of political theology: obedience to the designs of a mysterious God. Hence, AMLO’s repeated need to replace rational public policies with acts of faith. Political theology also prescribes, in modern circumstances, the re-enchantment of the world, to use an expression dear to Max Weber. That is, the continuous deinstitutionalization of the bureaucratic-rational state and its conversion into the arbitrary decisions of the leader. Just as Jesus Christ demanded total love for God from human beings, political theology proposes a relationship of love between the people and their leader.
The return of Eros to the public square is one of the effects of political theology in Mexico and the world. This love is manifested by the will of the leader and can dispense with elections supervised by independent electoral bodies. Needless to say, Marxist theory’s contempt for “formal democracy” strengthens political theology’s thesis against universal suffrage. Finally, political theology is defined in opposition to scientific development, as it considers it a reflection of human vanity. For AMLO, governing is not a science because, ultimately, everything depends on the will of God, which is enigmatic. Politics thus becomes voluntaristic prayer. In the concept of “liberation theology,” the primary element is not liberation but theology. Seen in this light, the fundamental fact of AMLO’s rise to power is the transition from secular governments to one based on political theology. In light of the above, nothing seems more crucial to understanding our predicament. The conflict between Athens and Jerusalem, between political philosophy and political theology, is a significant issue of our time. There is no Twilight of the Gods.
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