by Andrew Kuiper
This is the third installment of Kuiper’s review: part 1 and part 2.
For somewhat understandable reasons, the French Revolution has acquired a reputation for inaugurating an era of aggressive, and aggressively secular, revolutionary politics. Many religious conservatives, particularly Roman Catholics fond of Donoso Cortes, Joseph de Maistre, and the counter-revolutionary tradition of political theology, see this point in history as a Satanic upheaval which forever sundered Church and State and finally ended the possibility of a post-Reformation reunion of Christendom. On the other side of the political spectrum, however, the story has a very similar structure though with an opposite evaluation. Intellectual historian Jonathan Israel sees in the French Revolution an almost completely novel instantiation of Spinozist political philosophy. Under Israel’s reading, this means that radically immanent materialism is allowed, for the first time, to be the basis of a political system. He sees this event is nothing less than a cleansing fire which prepared the world for modernity by consuming the brambles of tyranny and superstition produced by clerics and theologians of all stripes. Is it true, one wonders, that the political ideals and rights-discourse of the French Revolution were always perceived as an absolute dethronement of more traditional political theologies?
Certainly in the case of Reformed Protestants and other non-Catholics, the sudden introduction of religious freedom (and retroactive amnesty from exile for religious reasons) was seen as an obvious good stemming from the Revolution. Edelstein spends some time outlining the Huguenot contributions to natural right discourse in France which suggests (as Dale Van Kley argues) that the Protestant contributions to revolutionary French political thought were not ornamental. In the nineteenth century, Benjamin Constant would reverse the throne-and-altar fulminations of Louis XIV’s courtly preacher, bishop Bossuet, and read both Protestantism and the French Revolution positively. As Bryan Banks puts it: “For Constant, the reformed religion was at once a faith coeval with modern times and a regeneration of a purer form of Christianity, undiluted by years of needless dogma and ritual.”[1] Banks also points out that even Constant’s Roman Catholic contemporary, Alexis de Tocqueville, found something regenerative and divine in the French Revolution.
Other modern Catholic figures, including G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and contributor to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Jacques Maritain, also made the case for a moderate but definitive embrace of the revolutionary ideals of 1789. The appropriate Catholic response to the early modern trans-Atlantic discourse of natural right (whether in French or American form) and the following revolutionary events has always been seen as a more difficult task for those of the Roman persuasion. The case of Lamennais, his condemnation by Pope Gregory XVI and subsequent departure from the Catholic Church, was weaponized against many attempted receptions of modern democratic and/or revolutionary politics, even as late as Jacques Maritain.[2] Because of the particularly contentious nature of Roman Catholic engagement with revolutionary thought, Edelstein’s contribution on this point is invaluable. He takes us to the initial response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the highest levels of the Vatican which allows some surprising details to emerge.
April 1791, the date when Pope Pius VI issued the encyclical Adeo nota, is often pinpointed as the date when the papacy condemned human rights (jura hominis) and specifically the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (DRMC) as “contrary to religion and society.” Edelstein disagrees, pointing out that the disturbances in the papal states of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin are the immediate concern of this encyclical, not the work of the French National Assembly which had taken place almost a year and a half earlier. The Avignonesi and their fellow agitators were attempting to cede their territories to French sovereignty and impose the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The sole (negative) reference to the Declaration in Adeo nota is immediately concerned with the Assembly in Carpentras who voted to adopt the Declaration in June 1790 as part of their plan to place themselves under French sovereignty. Why does parsing this document matter? For Edelstein, the context of Adeo nota and later, Quod aliquantum (March 10, 1791), indicate that Pius VI did not object to the idea of human or natural rights in toto or even oppose wholesale the DRMC. His negative comments and criticisms should be understood at least in part as a polemic which shares certain key assumptions: that natural law has a relationship to natural rights, and that even nations have rights according to the jus gentium. The specific objections which Pius VI raises are to the nature and extent of rights as understood by the DRMC. Unsurprisingly, articles 10 and 11, treating freedom of speech and religious liberty, provoked his contempt. In the mind of the pope, it was “insane (inanius)” for these blanket liberties to be proclaimed. As Edelstein comments of Pius VI: “To determine human rights, [Pius VI] concluded, one cannot start from the principle of total liberty, but rather from the Stoic-Thomist rule to live life in accordance with reason.”[3] There was here no hint of reapplying earlier models of religious liberty or at least tolerance as found at times in Las Casas, Nicholas of Cusa, Raymond of Llull, Irenaeus, and Lactantius.
There is, however, at least one more twist to this story. The priest and professor, Fr. Nicola Spedalieri, while working in or around the papal court, published a highly contentious work in 1791: The Rights of Man (De’ diritti dell’uomo). In Edelstein’s estimation, this was no coincidence. “Both the timing of the work and Spedalieri’s position make it likely to have been the Vatican’s semi-official response to the DRMC.”[4] Like Pius VI, he excoriated article 10 as being utterly foolish (insensate), yet, not only did he defend a general use of human rights discourse, he also articulated particulars. These included the right of self-preservation, right to self-perfection, right to property, right to self-defense and, most radically, the right of anyone under certain circumstances to commit tyrannicide. Edelstein reports: “‘It is lawful for anyone to kill a Prince’ (E’ lecito a chiunque di uccidere un Principe), Spedalieri affirmed, drawing on the authority of none other than the infamous Jesuit Juan de Mariana (who had justified the assassination of Henry III as lawful tyrannicide).”[5] Despite suspicion and criticism of Spadelieri from many ecclesiastics, he at least had the support of some high-ranking officials: the pope himself appears to have approved of the work.[6] This indicates, at the very least, that the discourse of natural rights was never seen as inherently problematic, even during the firestorm of political pressure that the French Revolution caused for papal interests. It was always a question of which rights and the manner of their philosophical and theological grounding. In fact one might say that a broad continuity of Thomistic rights discourse rooted in natural law and traditional metaphysics (Bellarmine, Suarez, de Mariana, Vittoria, Las Casas) was the norm for early modern Catholic thought.
Let us pause the historical excavation for a moment and ask a different kind of question. In what ways does retelling this narrative of rights help us now? Edelstein’s work, of course, does not limit itself to bare reconstruction, but also comments on the relationship between Pius VI and the later proliferation of rights-discourse in papal documents and later relationships between Catholic thought and human rights in the modern world. Edelstein is also careful to point out that not only the Jansenist contribution to natural right, but the entire panoply of Physiocrat discourse set the stage for radically laissez-faire forms of capitalism. The rapidly changing forms-of-life unleashed by the twinned forces of economy and technology make our political realities and concerns radically different from premodern or even early modern reflections; though, through good historical genealogies we can sometimes glimpse something of the origins of our present.
Speaking of rights in a contemporary setting conjures up a new host of problems. Rather than debating preservation or transfer regimes of rights, the more salient discussions revolve around the functional independence of rights apart from a religious or metaphysical vision. More broadly, a continuing concern is the inadequacy of rights-discourse, by itself, to establish a political community which substantively delivers on questions of justice which are not directly and explicitly addressed by rights. Much of modern (and postmodern) political theory is concerned with how foundational social realities sustain and fund the employment of rights-discourse: from communitarians like Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, to left-liberals like Samuel Moyn, agonist Arendtians like Chantal Mouffe, postliberal theologians like John Milbank, as well as critiques of right which have a more explicitly Marxist provenance. Practitioners of political theory and political theology must delve more deeply and answer fundamental questions that our predecessors may have taken for granted. It may even be that, until all discussants come to some kind of similar grammar concerning those more primordial questions of the nature of society (or the nature of nature) that the classical, medieval, and modern loci of political theory (rights, freedom, church and state, reasonable discourse, free speech, law, justice, consent) risk becoming tokens or signifiers devoid of substance or even a shared meaning. Or, to put it differently, our political problems are more appropriately understood as questions of interpretive sociology: especially those currents of sociology that are concerned with the status and function of the sacred in society.
Emile Durkheim described how students at the Sorbonne defecting from philosophy to his newly formed program of sociology had become disinterested in the standard presentations of politics:
In this sense, a veritable revolution has occurred within the minds of our students. The political question which used to enthuse them, now leaves them cold and indifferent. The more or less greater freedom of the press, the relations between Church and State, those relating to executive and legislative power, etc. no longer interest them. To the contrary, everything relating to the internal organization of society, its moral structure, everything that touches the nature of the family, property, the relations between diverse social organisms, awakens in them, and especially among the brightest, a veritable passion.[7]
But by “internal organization of society” Durkheim did not mean drab reductionist questions of scarcity or statistically modeled group behavior. Instead, he emphasized the fundamental and endlessly disseminated presence of religion, particularly evinced in feasts, festivals, ritual, ceremonies, and liturgy. Through the influence of Durkheim and later the ethnologist, Marcel Mauss, at the Sorbonne, an entire generation of French thinkers were trained to consider religion, society, and politics under the auspices of the sacred and the dynamics of gift-exchange, overcoming the prejudice that these are outmoded categories useful only for investigating primitive societies. Not only does the question of the sacred perdure in the modern world, the models of archaic society may play a positive role in reimagining and transforming our condition. As Bruno Karsenti argues, “[t]he archaic is not what has been superseded by modernity–with its alleged rationality based upon calculations–but what modernity has had to ‘forget’ or repress in order to sustain its identity.”[8] Durkheim believed that when we refuse to recognize the depth of the nature of our social crisis, the attendant anxiety is channeled and recirculated. It then emerges under the mask of a supposed crisis of politics and morals: this is a severely harmful misdiagnosis.
Another crucial insight Durkheim bequeathed to the next generation of French thought was the role of social effervescence. This is intimately related to the question of the sacred and denotes a collective experience of societal disruption and creativity. This was no merely academic notation for Durkheim, as he keenly felt that his own age desperately needed regeneration through just such an eruption of the sacred:
If today we have some difficulty imagining what the feasts and ceremonies of the future will be, it is because we are going through a period of transition and moral mediocrity. The great things of the past that excited our fathers no longer arouse the same zeal among us, either because they have passed so completely into common custom that we lose awareness of them or because they no longer suit our aspirations. Meanwhile, no replacement for them has yet been created.[9]
Subsequent readers of Durkheim and Mauss in the interwar period did attempt to create new sacred forms. At that time, Paris became home to the informal and para-academic College de Sociologie whose stated aim was not simply simply to describe society, but to regenerate it. Their meetings, whose inner members were mostly composed of dissident surrealists and academics (Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Callois), were attempts to form an institutional collective effervescence. Interestingly, they understood themselves simultaneously as an elective community, a secret society, and something akin to a religious or monastic order. The work of these smaller, tightly-knit societies within the larger society were meant to insulate members from the hypnotism of mass politics and propaganda while giving those within it the much needed fellowship of poetic and intellectual genius. This mixture of political vanguardism, artistic production, and ritual drama did not accomplish what it set out to do. Handicapped by internal disagreements as well as the overwhelming events of World War 2, the members drifted apart belatedly continuing the search for the sacred on their own.[10]
The imposition of some ostensibly sacred structure (whether confessional state or Nietzschean conventicle) is neither possible nor desirable for our world. It is impossible because our shared social realities are thoroughly stifled by a (non)myth of secularism that assumes materialistic atheism at the start. It is, moreover, repugnant to an age that has been reared in the wake of revolutions, instinctively protective of individual rights and the individual freedoms they imply. But if we could allow the human hunger for the sacred to guide us forward, we could perhaps avoid both the unreflective attempt to copy Christendom and the assumption that the rights we hold as precious float free of the divine. Our late modern societies are both exhausted and indelibly marked by Christianity and its intellectual, institutional, and dogmatic forms. An acknowledgement that society needs the sacred and a socially shared liturgy is not to give up the field to a pre-made religious conservatism. Most of the figures mentioned in the second half of this essay are either post-Christian or virulently anti-Christian. There is no neutral category of religion or the sacred, but it is important to remember that fearful wonder for gods and daimones both precedes and exceeds the historical emergence of Christianity.
Even (or perhaps especially) the French Revolution, with which we began this essay, explicitly recognized the need for civic religion. Dan Edelstein has elsewhere explored how the image of ancient Egypt as the cradle of all arts and sciences was reworked as a “mythology of nature.” This interest in Egyptian myths, rituals, and symbols became a source for Jacobin civic solidarity ranging from the personification of liberty as Egyptian goddess, to the use of a statue of Isis as a regenerating fountain in the Revolutionary festival, to the inauguration of a new Revolutionary calendar. Sacred Egypt, or at least its cultural aura, was deployed as the palpable form of reason, nature, and the rights of man[11] The creative and critical return to archaic models is not then, anti-modern, but characteristic of modern politics.
In her excellent study of ancient Athens, Civic Rites, feminist philosopher and classics professor Nancy Evans argues that Greek democracy was intimately dependent on public festivals–not only these, but also theatrical performance, panhellenic games, and especially the nocturnal and sacred rites of the mystery cults.
While admission to the Eleusinian Mysteries came at some cost, ancient sources show over and over again that women and slaves regularly attended alongside citizen men. Its breadth of participants makes the Mysteries the most inclusive and egalitarian of Athenian religious institutions.[12]
If we find democratic participation and an egalitarian ethos desirable, we would do well to consider how these first emerged within the context of Greek, Roman, and Christian ritual and theology. There is no polis or ekklesia without thysia (rites, sacrifies) and a mystagogos. How to cultivate sacred effervescence now in a world which is effectively post-Christian with no new candidates for replacement is unclear. And we must acknowledge that the attempt to either revitalize Christianity or welcome something else will involve a frightening vulnerability much like the task of the poet at the end of Czeslaw Milosz’ “Ars Poetica?” :
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
[1] Bryan Banks, 2014 dissertation, “Progressive Protestants: Representations and Remembrance in France, 1685-1815”, Florida State University Library.
[2] See the section “Vespers” in Ralph Macinerny’s The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain.
[3] Edelstein, On The Spirit of Rights, pp. 198-199
[4] Ibid., p.199
[5] Ibid.
[6] Edelstein cites Pelletier’s Rome et la Révolution française and Dale Van Kley’s “From the Catholic Enlightenment to the Risorgimento: The Exchange between Nicola Spedalieri and Pietro Tamburini, 1791-1797” as corroborating that Spedalieri enjoyed “protection in high places” and “unofficial papal sponsorship” respectively.
[7] Durkheim, “L’etat atual des études sociologiques en France” (1895) cited in Michele H. Richman Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the College de Sociologie, p.94-95
[8] Richman, Sacred Revolutions, p.133 (Richman’s summary of Karsenti’s argument in Marcel Mauss: Le fait social total)
[9] Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life (cited in Richman, Sacred Revolutions, p.56)
[10] Nietzsche’s scattered (but consistent) political and educational writings centered around a model of social regeneration almost identical to the group of interwar Parisians we have been discussing. In his work Nietzsche’s Great Politics, Hugo Drochon argues that Nietzsche, despite his reputation for solitude, was a profoundly political thinker. Reworking both Plato’s Academy and Wagner’s ideal of the poet-dictator, Nietzsche reflected seriously on how to overcome and revitalize aspects of the modern state. “It is in extrastate institutions that Nietzsche believes this mission can be accomplished and that a degree of normative authority can be reestablished within them.” This requires artists and philosophers who are able to gather in small groups and refuse to be integrated into state or market controlled reproduction of hegemony. “For those of the ‘smaller band’ who will follow this path to true culture, Nietzsche explains that the institution they require would have ‘quite a different purpose to fulfill.’” Again, we see how crucial intellectual collaboration is for Nietzsche as these “new Platos” do not “have the duties of a solitary; on the contrary, they set one in the midst of a mighty community held together, not by external forms and regulations, but by a fundamental idea. It is the fundamental idea of culture’.”
[11] For the way in which the “need to ritualise deism” characterized the French republican project, see Edelstein “The Egyptian French Revolution” in his edited volume The Super Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much. See also Lynn Hunt on how Revolutionary politicians attempted to create a “mythical present” through ritual and festivals in her Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, p. 27.
[12] Evans, Civic Rites, p. 129.