On “The Politics of God,” Part 2

In this next section on the essay adapted from “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” by Professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University, we examine the impulses that separated man from God, and secular politics from religion.

Section II: The Great Separation.

For those who study the evolution of human consciousness, this could as easily been termed “The Great Differentiation.” To explain this, consider that human development generally occurs in three stages.

1. Fusion
2. Differentiation
3. Integration

For millennia religion and politics were fused — they were the same thing. Caesar was the head of his church as well as the head of state, and to do your duty as a good Roman citizen was to sacrifice at Caesar’s altar. Though you were free to call upon other gods in your private life if you wished, in public you venerated “Caesar, Filius Dei” or suffered the political consequences.

In Lilla’s essay, he begins by asking “Why is there political theology?” and follows that by breezing the reader through a very (very!) abbreviated history of human consciousness up to and through the Middle Ages into the Renaissance itself, where “The Great Separation” began with thinkers like Thomas Hobbes. Humankind began differentiating between the City of Man and the City of God.

“…if we take seriously the thought that God is a person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God reveal something man cannot fully know on his own. This revelation then becomes the source of his authority, over nature and over us… “

What Lilla is describing here is the movement into the “red” spectrum of consciousness, according the the graph inserted above. With the evolution of a Personal God, mankind created a way of reducing the infinitude of God to a level where it could be understood, related to, and thus, controlled. It set the stage for political theology because it set the stage for those who believed they could predict and interpret all the things that happened that seemed beyond the control of mortal ken.

In other words, by those who truly believed they had the ear of God (or who could convince others that they did).

The original impulse may well have been benign enough: Forward thinking persons a bit more evolved than their peers wanted a method of governance that reflected what was best about humanity rather than what was worst. They saw religion, in its ideal form, as a way to bring into being a recreation of divine paradise, completely missing that (symbolically speaking, of course) mankind had left Eden behind a long, long time ago and, generally speaking, was not yet evolved enough to live in another.

Back to Lilla. In a breathtaking synopsis of human evolution the professor sweeps us through the religious insanity of the Middle Ages right up through the Renaissance, all in one paragraph. Thus does he set the stage for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Traditionally, political theology had interpreted a set of revealed divine commands and applied them to social life. In his great treatise “Leviathan” (1651), Hobbes simply ignored the substance of those commands and talked instead about how and why human beings believed God revealed them. He did the most revolutionary thing a thinker can ever do — he changed the subject, from God and his commands to man and his beliefs…

In even a brief reading of Hobbes one begins to see the first signs of serious “differentiation” between God and State. Hobbes, speaking to an audience beleaguered by hundreds of years of religious chaos, showed how man’s experience of God was defined by “fear” — and, more seminally, how each person’s experience of God did not, could not define the totality of “God.” This, in Hobbes’ clear-sighted view, most especially included the clergy of every religion.

The new political thinking would no longer concern itself with God’s politics; it would concentrate on men as believers in God and try to keep them from harming one another.

A much humbler goal, but one much more accessible to populations too long victimized by inter-(and intra-)religious savagery.

“In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.

In the last paragraph of his section, Lilla takes us from Hobbes to Locke, from a mind who conceived all power of governance in the hands of one man to a mind that gave birth to the ideas of governmental power shared by many. This idea of liberal democracy is where we in the West find ourselves today — in two hundred years we’ve finally managed to free the slaves and give women the right to vote and own property in their own name. As long as the old ideas of political theology stay out of the picture, we tend toward governments which secure more liberties, create more opportunities, include more diversity in their embrace.

It is only when we resurrect those old ideas of obedience to a personal God that we, as a people, become confused. We simply accept the assumption that the State has the right to interfere in private affairs. We begin to question if all persons have the State-granted “right” to marriage, thinking perhaps only some do. We begin to question each person’s right to control over their own life and health, thinking perhaps some classes of persons (notably women) shouldn’t be permitted that freedom. We grow confused and angry over how others conduct their lives, or even think their thoughts — all this out of some primitive and mistaken notion of a personal God with the same neuroses and psychoses of its creators.

And yet, it’s clear that without some connection to something greater than ourselves, the laws and policies our government creates are not always going to reflect what’s best and brightest about us. Secure in our fortress of safety and comfort, it’s easy to overlook the millions (billions!) living in squalor; once noticed, it’s too easy to dismiss them as “lazy” or somehow “inferior.” We try to give them secular democracy without any other context; with their newfound freedom they vote religious fundamentalists into power, creating theocracies often worse than the dictatorships they replaced.

This “Great Separation” is hardly a fait accompli even in the West, as Lilla goes on to explain in the next section of his essay. Because individual persons are creatures of the cultures from whence they came and because those cultures are still riddled with primitive religious impulse, we are still prone to the kinds of barbarity that plagued our forebears. And yet, without the more enlightened lessons religions teach (love, charity, forgiveness — radical notions that got Christ crucified) we are doomed to repeat the failures of the last hundred years over and over again.

The answer is not, can never be simple regression. The “old time religion” (i.e. religious fundamentalism of any flavor) is now officially a cure worse than the disease (as Islamic and other extremists are doing their best to demonstrate). The only way out, now, is through. Finding a way forward is a job for our best modern thinkers and visionaries — if they can find a way for their signal to be heard above the noise.