Ascension and Absence

Robert Farneti (Mimetic Politics) observes that Rene Girard refused to describe his project as theology. Farneti thinks Girard was right: He wasn’t writing theology but “a theory of man.” He writes, “Girard’s mimetic theory culminates in a radical rejection of theology, in particular of its claims to articulate a final and comprehensive discourse on the apocalyptic institution of the Kingdom of Christ” (104). By rejecting theology, Girard aims to “defend a more straightforward access to the Gospel” (104).

Farneti thinks this is a mistake. In order to formulate a political theory for a desacralized (= de-sacrificial) age, and to resist re-sacralization, one needs theology, a political theology in the Schmittian sense. This is not the same as “divine politics,” which refers to the “authority of God’s word in this world, and therefore is related with ‘divine command theories.’” Political theology “is concerned with the kind of politics that takes place in the absence of direct and intelligible indications from a transcendent God” (100). Political theology is for a politics after the wrenching early-modern separation of heaven and earth. But that separation doesn’t simply remove God from politics. Political theology “is politics after God left.” But, unlike Girard, it is a politics that recognizes that “God remains as a problem,” a political problem (100).

What Farneti thinks Girard needs is a theological justification for desacralization, a “political theology of the empty tomb” or, as he prefers, a political theology of the ascension. Hobbes helps him out here: “Ascension lived a quite minor existence within earlier Christian theology,” he claims, “and it was Hobbes who turned it into a crucial theological as well as political tenet. For Hobbes, the ascension marked the beginning of the “regeneration,” “the time of hope and anticipation when human beings were left alone with their projects of building, in absentia, a polity emptied of every aspiration whatsoever of easily instituting the Kingdom of Christ” (114-115). Ascension thus provides a basis for a political theology of God’s absence, but one that founds that absence in a theological affirmation.

From this angle, Book 3 of Leviathan is an effort to placate England’s warring factions “by neutralizing, in Carl Schmitt’s words, ‘Christ’s effectiveness’ (Wirkung Christi), namely the actual and efficient presence of Christ in the interim of ‘regeneration.’ Hobbes’s theological enemies, for whom the kingdom of Christ had already begun and ‘was a political entity liable to trigger a civil war,’ strongly supported the idea of a mystical and ‘eucharistic’ presence of Christ ‘even in this world.’ They failed to acknowledge that in the time in which they lived – the time after Christ’s ascension – human beings had to take their bearings within a world emptied of the indications and constraints of a substantially present deity” (117-118).

Farneti’s critique of Girard strikes home, but his treatment of ascension is wrong historically and theologically. Historically: For a church that minimized ascension, there are an awful lot of Christ Pantocrators on the ceilings of churches east and west. More particularly, as Hobbes surely knew even if Farneti doesn’t, Hobbes’s theological and political opponents – Puritans in particular – placed enormous stress on the ascension but to the opposite effect. In this, they simply followed Paul, for whom the elevation of Jesus didn’t neutralize Him but was a sign of judgment (Act 17). And here is the theological issue with Farneti: Ascension means a kind of absence, but it’s the absence of a king to whom all owe allegiance. It’s Psalm 2: Having installed the king on Zion, the Lord calls on kings and judges to tremble in repentance. Psalm 2 is no brief for political theology or desacralization.

As Hobbes recognized, the politics of the ascension is entangled with Christ’s eucharistic presence and therefore with the presence “even in this world” of a polity that anticipates the Kingdom of Christ. That polity is the ultimate target of Hobbes’s, and Farneti’s, political theology.