Pecknold

[PT 11.1 (2010) 77-101] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317Xdoi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.77 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.

Migrations of the host:fugitive DeMocracy anD the Corpus MystiCuM

C. C. PecknoldThe Catholic University of America

School of Theology and Religious StudiesWashington, DC 20064

[email protected]

AbstrAct

The essay argues that Sheldon Wolin’s case for decoupling democracy and liberalism, which he makes in both editions of Politics and Vision (1960 and 2004), significantly depends on the historical argument Henri Cardinal de Lubac made in his book Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Eglise au moyen âge (1944 and 1949). Such a claim for the importance of this dependence deepens our understanding of the significance of both Wolin and Lubac for contemporary debates about religion and democracy. To this end, the essay has two proximate goals: (1) by displaying Wolin’s use of Lubac’s argu-ments concerning the shifting use of the term corpus mysticum, we will have a better theological understanding of Wolin’s complex criticisms of liberal democracy; and (2) in the midst of claims to uncertainty about the political implications of Cardinal de Lubac’s thought, we will see some of the con-clusions that one political theorist came to after considering a theological argument. Finally, this particular instance of a mutually critical dialogue of faith and political reason raises crucial questions for thinking about the ends of democracy.

Keywords: church, corpus mysticum, democracy, eschatology, Eucharist, lib-eralism, Henri de Lubac, teleology, Sheldon Wolin.

Sheldon Wolin’s magisterial study of the western political imagination, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, has recently become of interest to theologians.1 First released in 1960, the

1. Sheldon Wolin has long been one of the premier political thinkers in America, and needs no introduction amongst political philosophers. An acceleration of interest in his work has also been driven by the publication of his expanded edition (which nearly doubled its size and import) of Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought,

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book became a staple of course curricula in political science departments for decades as it instructed students in the ebbs and flows of political history from the Athenian city to the Roman Empire to the American nation-state. Wolin himself had been a political activist as a professor of politics at Berkeley, and his work was understood to provide a historically sound interpretation of political development in the West that sought to encourage democratic activism, especially at the local level, where ordinary citizens could learn to speak truth to power. In 2004, Wolin published an expanded edition of this volume, nearly doubling its size. His vast, ambi-tious argument concerns the need to decouple democracy from liberalism. So why would theologians find it of any interest? Largely, I will argue, because his political arguments concerning the democratic flight from lib-eralism are contingent upon reading the world theologically. The central aim of this essay is to show that Wolin’s critique of liberal democracy, and his constructive argument for “fugitive democracy,” substantially depend on an argument that Henri de Lubac, sj (1896–1991) makes concerning the “mystical body” of Christ. In making such a case, the essay suggests that the gravest contemporary political problems in our time are, in fact, theo-political problems. Furthermore, it is Wolin who acutely presents us with a diagnosis of this problematic in the guise of a negative political theology. Stanley Hauerwas recently employed Wolin to good effect in his debates with Jeffrey Stout.2 He is particularly attracted to Wolin’s comment that “the significance of Christian thought for the western political tradition lies not so much in what it had to say about the political order, but primarily in what it had to say about the religious order. The attempt of Christians to understand their own group life provided a new and sorely needed source of ideas for Western thought.”3 For Wolin, Christianity “revified” a waning western political imagination, not by trying to control the empire, but by introducing a powerful new conception of space and time, largely through an understanding of its own communal life, built around participation in the body of Christ, and through its eschatological view of time. Wolin

expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), as well as a series of popular articles on “inverted totalitarianism,” which he has dealt with at greater length in his most recent book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 2. Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) provoked a number of responses from Stanley Hauerwas. See, e.g., Stanley Hauer-was, “Democratic Time: Lessons Learned from Yoder and Wolin,” Cross Currents (Winter 2006) and his postscript to Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Pacifism (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004). 3. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 87. Cited in Hauerwas, “Democratic Time.”

Pecknold Migrations of the Host 79


understands that Christianity invents the whole notion of the saeculum, as well as the idea of a community that is redemptive for all humanity. From this it is easy to see why Hauerwas is attracted to Wolin.4 He seems, on one level, to validate the claim that the Church presents no political models to the world. 5 It was what Christians had to say about themselves, rather than what they had to say about politics that made a difference in the world. Wolin argued that it was the early Christian attempt “to understand their own group life” that had unwittingly renewed the western political imagination. But the story that Wolin tells is even more compelling and more useful to contemporary debates about religion and politics than even Hauerwas is aware of, and for different reasons. Wolin’s narrative in Politics and Vision is powerful and enduring in part because it identifies the “mystical element” that Christianity had inserted into western political history. He narrates political history in a way that takes theology seriously as theol-ogy. He explains how the political imagination developed in conversation with Christianity, captured mass allegiances, and took over mystical and transcendent powers that once belonged to the sacramental actions of the Church. Wolin’s post-World War II context made him understandably anxious about fascism, which he saw as a species of nationalism, a type of political mysticism.6 His genius was in seeing nationalism (and fascism) as a mere symptom of a broader degenerative disease in the western political imagination. The problem was what he called “the mystical element” in liberal conceptions of state and market. Though apparently no one has recognized this debt, except for Wolin himself, the political argument concerning the decoupling of democracy and liberalism that he makes in both editions of Politics and Vision (1960 and 2004) significantly depend on the historical argument de Lubac made in his 1944 book Corpus Mysticum: Eucharist and the Church in the Middle

4. For Hauerwas’s most developed view of radical democracy to date, see Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian (Theopolitical Visions) (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008). Hauerwas seems to agree with Coles that democracy is an autonomously generated politics, which is uncritical at best. 5. Pope John Paul II wrote that “The Church has no [political] models to pres-ent…” Centesimus Annus, 43. The encyclical considered the place of the State in protecting human dignity, and strongly stated the Church’s support for a more “authentic democracy” is guided by truth as the foundation of freedom, for “the Church’s method is always that of respect for freedom.” Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 5, “Truth preserves and expresses charity’s power to liberate in the ever-changing events of history.” 6. See Carlton J. H. Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960) for a similar view published at the same time.



Ages.7 Such a claim for the importance of this dependence is intended to deepen our understanding of the significance of both Wolin and de Lubac for contemporary debates about religion and democracy. To this end, this essay has two proximate goals: (1) by displaying Wolin’s use of de Lubac’s arguments concerning the shifting use of the term corpus mysticum, we will have a richer theological understanding of his complex criticisms of liberal democracy; and (2) in the midst of claims to uncertainty about the political implications of de Lubac’s thought, we will have before us some of the conclusions that one political theorist came to after considering de Lubac’s argument in Corpus Mysticum. The essay will first state Henri de Lubac’s argument in Corpus Mysticum in order to examine Wolin’s use of the mystical theme in the political narrative he tells, and to help us better assess forms of political mysticism. Second, this essay will consider the theological implications of Wolin’s political argument concerning his most recent work on the “fugitive” nature of democracy by comparing it with de Lubac’s understanding of the Eucharist and the Church on pilgrimage to the City of God. In conclusion, the relationship between Wolin’s work on fugitive democracy and de Lubac’s on the corpus mysticum will stress the importance of Wolin’s negative claims, and the positive need for de Lubac’s view of time and community.

Making the Political Fit the Sacred

The corpus mysticum, the idea of Christ having a “mystical body” that is really present to the Church in a sacrament (a sacred sign) even though

7. Wolin used the second French edition. See Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 2nd

ed. (Paris: Aubrie, 1949). Wolin also relied on similar kinds of arguments put forward by his Berkeley colleague Ernst Kantorowicz, whose famous book The King’s Two Bodies (Princ-eton: Princeton University Press, 1957) had been published just prior to Politics and Vision. But Kantorowicz is just as dependent on de Lubac as Wolin is for his historiographical treat-ment of the corpus mysticum (see King’s Two Bodies, ch. 5). Wolin’s 1950 Harvard doctorate on eighteenth-century English Constitutionalism and Conservativism looked back to the theme of the mystical body of the Church in relation to politics especially with reference to Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Laws, in whose work he saw not the origins of English lib-eralism, as was commonly thought, but a kind of proto-Burkean constitutional conserva-tive who sought an organic religious and political unity along more medieval than modern lines. The underlying unity could be found not only in legal principles, authority and con-sent, but in the mystical unity of the society itself. See his “Richard Hooker and Eng-lish Conservatism,” The Western Political Quarterly 6.1 (March 1953). Two of his subsequent essays pursued these themes in the 1950s as well: “Politics and Religion: Luther’s Simplistic Imperative,” The American Political Science Review 50.1 (March 1956): 24–42; and “Calvin and the Reformation: The Political Education of Protestantism,” The American Political Science Review 51.2 (June 1957): 428–53.



his historical body has ascended to heaven, dominates the story that Wolin tells about the western political imagination. The power of his argument largely derives from his attentiveness to the migrations of the term corpus mysticum that de Lubac had traced from the fourth to the ninth centuries and then through to the thirteenth century. De Lubac had initiated his study out of puzzlement over nineteenth-century ecclesial documents that consistently referred to the Church as “one mystical body,” which he could trace back to Unam Sanctam (1302), and even as far back as the ninth century, but no further. This is because his genealogical study of the term revealed that a kind of inversion had taken place by incremental degrees, “slowly, imperceptibly a disassociation began to occur.”8 If the meaning of the term could be seen in its use, then what de Lubac saw was that the meaning of corpus mysticum had significantly changed in the medieval period. In de Lubac’s narrative, the meaning of corpus mysticum changed from its particular liturgical use in the early church, where it referred to the sacrament of the Eucharist, to the general socio-political usage that had settled by the mid-twelfth century, where it referred to the Church-society as a mystical body. These medieval shifts in terminological usage ushered in a new modern formulation, which remained in use until the twentieth century, and explained the nineteenth-century expressions he had originally questioned. The early Church had taught that the Eucharist was the corpus mysticum, the mysterious sacramental communion with God in Christ, into whose body Christians were being formed. This liturgical usage concerned par-ticipation in Christ’s sacrifice, and thus his redemption of humanity. Sac-ramental communion generated the ecclesial communion that gathered human beings into one mystical but nonetheless real body, united in com-munion with God and with one another. Thus the invisible but real and mysterious presence of Christ as a “hidden power” and an “inner reality” in the bread and wine of the sacrament of the Eucharist was understood as that which constitutes the ecclesial body. As de Lubac so famously puts it, “the Eucharist makes the Church.”9

The view of community here is profoundly participatory and relational, a dynamic in which horizontal relations are all analogically referred, through the Eucharist, to their proper vertical or transcendent relation to God in Christ. As de Lubac writes of the early Church view, “being in communion with someone means to receive the body of the Lord with them. Being united with the saints in the Church and participating in the Eucharist, being part of the common Kingdom, and sharing in the

8. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 96. 9. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 88.



Holy mysteries go together in tandem and it can be said that they are one and the same thing.”10 The power generating Christian communion was understood as the mysterious and sacramental presence of Christ.

For the body of Christ that is the Church is in no way other than the body and blood of the mystery… Through the Eucharist each person is truly placed with the one body. It unites all the members of it among themselves, as it unites them to their one head… In this way, little by little, the ‘whole Christ’ comes into being, who is always in our minds as the ultimate end of the mystery.11

What can be seen in the early view of corpus mysticum is a tripartite view of that mysterious communion between (1) the historical body of Christ witnessed to in Scripture, now under (2) the veil of the sacrament of his mystical and real presence, where Christ generates (3) the one true Church in communion with God that is destined for heaven. Christians of antiquity would not have thought of the Church as the corpus mysticum; they would have thought of the Eucharist as that sacrament of commu-nion with Christ’s body, now ascended to heaven, but really and mysti-cally present to the one true Church. The Church receives its institutional life, its reality, as a gift precisely because it receives Christ’s mystical pres-ence in the Eucharist. That is to say, corpus mysticum would not have been thought to refer to “the body of believers” as a separate, sociological thing. The Church was causally related to the Eucharist as the corpus mysticum. Christians of the first millennium could, however, make distinctions between Christ’s historical body, his sacramental or mystical body, and his true, ecclesial body.12 And it is in the making of these distinctions that the term gains some “freedom of movement” that will later distort the meaning. De Lubac certainly wanted to show with his study that the Eucharist and the Church were inextricably, and causally linked, for, as he notes, “the Eucharist corresponds to the Church as cause to effect, as means to end, as sign to reality.”13 But the burden was upon him to show how this meaning had slowly changed. His historical investigations led him to be critical of early medieval thinkers who transitioned “from the sacrament to the power of the sacrament or from visible form to the reality itself so swiftly” and placed “the accent so strongly on the Church,” that distortions arose.14 He saw the shifts beginning as early as the ninth century, and by the late

10. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 21. 11. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 23. 12. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 26. 13. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 13. 14. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 13; original emphasis.



Middle Ages, de Lubac argued that this language had been transformed and obscured through a new focus that inverted the terms “mystical” and “true,” making the Church a mystical power, and speaking of the Eucha-rist in a way that had the potential to separate its reality from its mystery. By the twelfth century, terminology once used solely for the conse-crated host had begun to be used for the Church so that it was far more common to call the Church the mystical body, while the Eucharist had now come to be called the corpus verum. The inextricable, causal relation-ship between the Eucharist and the Church now seemed to be reversed. At the same time, against spiritualizing trends that had been mounting for several centuries—trends that effectively denied Christ’s real presence in the consecrated host—the Eucharist ceased to be called the corpus mysticum and began being called, in hyper-realistic terms, the corpus Christi. The reversal could be said to be completed by 1302 when Pope Boniface VIII wrote and signed the papal bull, Unam sanctam, which demonstrates that some kind of reversal had taken place, and that the shift gave to the Church those mystical powers of communion that were once ascribed to Christ’s mystical body in the Eucharist, and thus authorized the Church in its political claims. As the Church comes to terms with a new historical situ-ation, the earlier emphasis upon the Eucharist constituting the Church as Christ’s Body gives way to a new political emphasis on the Church making the Eucharist. While the bull ostensibly attempts to staunch or discipline the growing schism between Latin and Greek-speaking churches through the universal primacy of St. Peter’s successor, it also represents the caesura between the sacramental origins of the term corpus mysticum and the new exclusively ecclesial and institutional/political meaning. It introduced the possibility of detaching the Church from the Eucharist. At the dawning of the fourteenth century, in de Lubac’s account, the mystical body language had finally ceased to be used of the Eucharist at all, and its meaning had migrated in such a way that it was now used exclu-sively of the Church. As the bull states, “she [the Church] represents one sole mystical body (corpus mysticum) whose Head is Christ and the head of Christ is God.” The entire papal document reflects the full sacralization of the Church’s cohesive powers in the society (“We venerate this Church as one”). While Augustine could speak of “two cities” in the fifth century, now it was clear that there was only one city, with two swords, both of which had been given to the Church. “[I]n this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal.” This transfer of mystery from the sacrament of the consecrated host to the Church also meant a transfer of power: from a liturgically centered form of political and social life to the heavy concentration of institutional power. The power of the sacrament of communion had shifted from its transformative role in



forming the character of Christian community to an objective view of the institutional Church as that mystical power. A new fusion of horizons (to borrow a metaphor from Gadamer) had become the occasion for the corpus mysticum to migrate from mysterious sacrament to mysterious socio-political power. As the papal bull states, “Both, therefore, are in the power of the Church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the former is to be administered for the Church but the latter by the Church; the former in the hands of the priest; the latter by the hands of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.” Pope Boniface VIII concludes, “temporal authority [has been] subjected to spiritual power.” In these migrations of the term corpus mysticum, it becomes the divine right of the “spiritual power” to “establish the terrestrial power.”15 Since Unam Sanctam is precisely where de Lubac locates the decisive shift having taken place, it is reasonable to conclude that he is aware of how profoundly political his argument is. As we shall see, the political implications were obvious to Wolin. In the wake of the protracted investiture controversies that preceded Unam Sanctam, the bull seems like so much water under the bridge. But exactly the same process was occurring on the political side of the ledger. Monarchs also intensified their claims to holiness and divine right. For example, a royal touch was believed to cure illnesses, and would often be accompanied by the sign of the cross.16 As Ernst Kantorowicz put it, the pope wore a royal crown, and the king wore papal shoes. The exchanges worked both ways over centuries “until finally the sacerdotium had an imperial appearance and the regnum a clerical touch.”17 It exemplifies a process that had been underway for hundreds of years—at least since Pope Gregory VII affirmed the jurisdictional authority of the papacy in Dictatus Papae in 1075, and more arguably still since Pope Gelasius I at the end of the fifth century—a patient process that had finally made the sacred fit for political use, and equally important, made the political fit for sacred use. The patient process, whose gradual, imperceptible shifts in the meaning of words de Lubac argued had unintended consequences. And this was what Sheldon Wolin recognized as preeminent in the history of western

15. Cf. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. R. Balinksi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3–9. 16. See e.g. Guibert of Nogent, De pigneribus sanctorum, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, in Corpus Christionorum Continuatio Medievalis 127 (Brepols, 1993), 90. 17. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 193. “Mutual borrowings and exchanges of insignia, political symbols, prerogatives, and rights of honor had been carried on perpetu-ally between the spiritual and secular leaders of Christian society. The pope adorned his tiara with a golden crown…the emperor…donned the pontifical shoes and other clerical raiments.”



political thought, even if de Lubac himself hesitated to draw political con-clusions from it. In what follows, the article develops the political conclu-sions that Wolin drew from de Lubac’s early work.

Wolin’s Use of Henri de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum

In his first chapter, “Political Philosophy and Philosophy,” Wolin sets out the terms of his study. He states, in a manner reminiscent of Alasdair MacIntyre, that his interest is in “the problem of perspective or angle of vision, and the manner in which a tradition operates.”18 He states his interest in the complex and varied tradition of political philosophy “since Plato” and the Ciceronian res publica, government as the “property of all people.” And he states his interest in the medieval Church as “the only institution that ever rivaled the authority of the political order.”19 Wolin is interested in the way political institutions “define ‘political time’,” and in the way “political arrangements provide a setting wherein the activities of individuals and groups are connected spatially and temporally.”20 From the outset of his project, Wolin gives thematic precedence to “time” and “space,” and does so explicitly in relation to Christianity as both inspiration and rival to political arrangements in the West. After having established that political thought had been in decline due to the failure of philosophy to “face the implications of concentrated power,” Wolin argued that it fell “to Christianity to revivify political thought.”21

Wolin, supported especially by Oscar Cullmann’s Christ and Time, argues that Christianity infuses a new understanding of time into political thought.22 In contrast to the classical “cyclical” view of time, the Christian eschatological view—that time has a beginning and will come to an end—meant that political history was now charged with a new meaning and destiny. Not only was this a new linear view of time, as has sometimes been said; it was also a vertical view of time, in which there are genuine

18. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 3. A fruitful comparison between MacIntyre and Wolin might begin with their common Aristotelianism and their rejection of Nietzsche. Cf. Alas-dair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 256–63. Wolin is, however, decidedly non-Marxist. 19. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 4. 20. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 8. 21. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 86. 22. Stanley Hauerwas has rightly focused on the use of Oscar Cullmann’s study of Christian time in Wolin’s work, yet he neglects Wolin’s greater dependence on de Lubac, whose work on the corpus mysticum stresses the nature of Christian community in light of this eschatology. Wolin’s dependence on these two theologians, one Protestant and the other Catholic, is itself indicative of his attentiveness to political time and space in the Christian West.



points of contact between the above and the end and the below and the present. “History was thus transformed into a drama of deliverance…,” Wolin writes, “the future had become a dimension of hope.”23 Likewise, the Christian view of community called human beings to live a new life of “meaningful participation,” as well as “ideals of solidarity and member-ship that were to leave a lasting imprint, and not always for the good, on the Western tradition of political thought.”24 Wolin’s reference to the ill-effects of the Christian view of community refers directly to develop-ments that came in the medieval period, in which, as he puts it, the political community became “a pneumatic being.” In following de Lubac’s argument concerning a sacramental society, Wolin comes to this surprising political conclusion: “Christianity helped father the idea of a community as a non-rational, non-utilitarian body bound by a meta-rational faith, infused by a mysterious spirit taken into the members; a spirit that not only linked each participant with the center of Christ, but radiated holy ties knitting each member to his fellows.”25 These were the developments that Henri de Lubac’s work on the Eucharist in the Middle Ages had carefully traced. And while de Lubac would have objected to the “non-rational” descrip-tion that Wolin provides for the late medieval view of the corpus mysticum, this gives us an important clue to how Wolin understands the mystical element in liberalism, counter-intuitively as non-rational, even irrational. Thus the story that de Lubac told in Corpus Mysticum fits the politi-cal history well, and Wolin utilizes it with subtle skill, stating clearly that when it comes to these developments in the Christian view of commu-nity, “the basic work here is H. de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum.”26 The depth of his understanding of de Lubac reveals itself in the succinctness of his summary, and the verifiable political implications he sees. Wolin writes that:

the term itself, corpus mysticum, is uniquely Christian and without biblical background. It did not come into usage until the ninth century and at that time its meaning was strictly sacramental, referring to the Eucharist and not to the Church or to any notion of a society of Christians. By administra-tion of the sacrament the host was consecrated and incorporated into the mystic body of Christ. As a result of the doctrinal disputes raised by Beren-gar, the mystical element receded, and the doctrine of the real presence of the human Christ replaced it. The corpus mysticum was now called the corpus Christi (or corpus verum or corpus naturale). This, however, was preliminary to the socializing and politicizing of the concept of the corpus mysticum, for after

23. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 112. 24. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 87. 25. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 119. 26. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 629.



the middle of the twelfth century, the corpus mysticum, which had previously been employed in sacramental usage to describe the consecrated host, was now transferred to the Church. The mystical force and passion surrounding the old notion was brought to sustain the whole society of Christians and its power structure.27

However, what is most curious is the fact that Wolin takes de Lubac’s conclusions, which go as far back as the thirteenth century, much further even up to the late modern innovations that such development made pos-sible. But his use of de Lubac’s work is surprising, for it reveals that while Wolin sees early Christianity as generative of political knowledge, he sees the later theological developments in which the Church is identified as corpus mysticum, as politically degenerative. The shifts gave rise to a “split” between structures of governance and an invisible, mystical bond that generated a new political mysticism. In Wolin’s view, this inversion of the meaning of the corpus mysticum within Christianity is the political cause for the effects of nationalism in temporal societies, as is clearly indicated in a second lengthy quotation that also reflects on de Lubac’s work:

we can find at various times throughout the Middle Ages an undercur-rent of unease fed by the Church’s attempt to maintain a double identity: on the one side, the Church as the governing organ of Christendom; on the other, a society of believers who, in their mystical unity, were members of a living body following a common life inspired by the love of Christ. These two conceptions did not easily coexist, and out of their commingling emerged a somewhat confusing image of an imperial power organization which professed also to be a community. The significance of this dual nature is that it expresses the quandary of most modern societies. Moreover, this similarity between the Church and modern political societies is not fortuitous. In both instances the force fusing the members into a solidary whole has been a mystical, non-rational one. In temporal societies it has been the force of nationalism; in the church-society it has been the sacrament of symbolic communion which joins the members of the mystical body of Christ. The religious element in national sentiment can be exposed more clearly by indicating briefly the changes that the corpus mysti-cum idea underwent and how these were reflected into political thought.28

Wolin notes that classical political thought had never understood itself as “a mystic body cohering around a godhead,” and certainly early Christianity had strictly speaking resisted thinking of politics in this way

27. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 119. 28. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 119; emphasis added. It is clear that Wolin is reading de Lubac in light of his concerns about political mysticism; for de Lubac, the Catholic could have never admitted that the mystical was non-rational, nor even that it was before or after the inversion of the meaning of the term corpus mysticum. Indeed, the Apostle Paul sug-gests that sacramental worship renews, perfects and elevates reason (alla metamorphousthe te anakainosei tou nous) in Romans 12:1–2.



for fear of its idolatrous implications.29 But the migrations of the term corpus mysticum now seemed to authorize the view of political society as itself mystical. What had been a legitimate, if sometimes distorted, claim within the Church continued to migrate further away from the Church and became manifest in a politics that would have been unrecognizable to antiquity.

Modern Migrations of the Host

Extending de Lubac’s thesis to the sixteenth century, Wolin provides a rather unsympathetic view of Luther whom he reads as serving “the cause of national particularism.”30 He considers Luther’s “depoliticized religion” merely the unwitting, cooperative flipside of Machiavelli’s de-theologized politics. In Luther’s attempt to return to some primitive purity, in his attempt to step outside of history, and out of the socially embedded nature of institutions, Wolin sees a schizophrenic thinker who was at once repelled by, and obsessed with, politics.31 Far from “a politics of indifference,” Luther displays an anti-institutional attitude towards the Catholic Church, and an institutional dependence on the rising significance of newly forming nation-states (“national particularism”). The “split’ nature of Luther’s political attitude meant that he “oscillated between a disdainful and a frenetic interest in politics and sometimes combined both.”32 Since political power was to be taken away from the Church, Luther understood that it had to go somewhere: it must go to the secular authority of the princes. Surprisingly, Wolin barely con-tains his contempt for Luther. But Wolin’s disdain for Luther does not arise from some theological concern about the subjectivity of faith (as is common with critics of Luther) but arises because Luther weakens the

29. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 119. 30. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 128. 31. In the common coupling of Luther and Machiavelli, Wolin reservedly follows J. N. Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 55–61. Wolin argues, however, that Figgis understands the importance of the Luther/Machiavelli relation, but he misses the “fundamental weak-ness in Luther’s thinking,” namely Luther’s failure to see the role of religious institutions as a countervailing authority that could restrain politics (Wolin, Politics and Vision, 145). Cf. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Age of the Reforma-tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 142–3. Skinner also sees Luther and Machiavelli converging as the founding fathers of the “impious modern State,” but mainly in their rejection of natural law as a basis for political life. The assumption is not only that Machiavelli represents, as Suarez thought, a “totally false” conception of political life, but that Luther’s theology makes such an erroneous politics possible. 32. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 130.



Church’s ability to check temporal monopolies on power.33 As long as the Church had political power, however it imagined itself to have it, kings and princes were limited. For Wolin, Luther unwittingly opened the way to the monopolizing power of early and emerging nation-states.34 Furthermore, Luther merely shifted the corpus mysticum further from reality, making the Church into an invisible mystical body whose visible structures depend on the state, thus generating a confusion of politics and mysticism. In an ironic turn, Luther actually illustrates the effects of the shift in the meaning of the term by radicalizing it, and revealing its inner logic. Luther etherealizes the Church as mystical in an anti-institutional sense, ceding all reality, power, juridical and institutional authority to the state. Wolin’s disdain for Luther can only be explained by what he had learned from de Lubac: Luther’s unwitting split between the mystical and the real in turn authorized an autonomous secular state unchecked by any other countervailing authority. Luther’s attack on the medieval political theology of the Catholic Church was at the same time a turn to the subject, individualizing the Christian view of community that had previously been understood in terms of an organic whole. Luther’s faith had become “an inward disposi-tion of the individual inclining him towards God. The reward of faith was membership in the invisible communion of Christians, the corpus mysticum ruled by Christ” but without location, offices or institutions.35 Luther’s “assembly of hearts in one faith” provided a vague social unity that could be easily extended to wherever associations of individuals of faith were found. The Reformer’s failure to appreciate the importance of institutions, as well as his quietism, did not entail a separation of religion and politics as is often assumed. In Wolin’s account, this was the most devastating shift of all, for Luther’s reforms entailed “the political irrel-evancy of the Christian ethic” and a new moral autonomy for the state.36

Christian ethics, indeed religion itself, could now be thought of as personal, private, intimate matters of the heart and soul precisely because the corpus mysticum had become radically interiorized, invisible, mystical but not powerful in any real way. Real power would be limited to the

33. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 145. 34. Cf. Hugo Rahner’s pointed claim that “all the churches who wish to withdraw from the unity of the Church dogmatically first of all seek refuge with the state but soon are absorbed by the state and fall with it,” Church and State in Early Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), xvi. 35. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 137. For a contrary view from a Catholic perspective, see Jared Wicks, sj, “Roman Reactions to Luther: The First Year (1518),” The Catholic Historical Review 69.4 (October 1983). 36. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 147.



secular authority. Luther had successfully shown not only the irrelevance of the Christian ethic for the logic of a secular politics, but he had pro-vided a theological rationale for dismantling “the medieval conception of a political society…[as] a corporate whole knit together in a common involvement.”37 It was a theological rationale that the ruling elites badly needed.38 The “split” in Luther’s soul had already been formed by a politi-cal culture that had begun to shift well before he ever had the language for, let alone his experience of, his sola triplex. But he played a crucial role in pushing the corpus mysticum further away from its sacramental origins, and further away still from its ecclesial extensions. No longer was there an actual politics appropriate to a Christian people. Politics had been reduced to a single coercive form, the kind that Machiavelli could recommend to Italian princes at the same time as German ones.39 Thus Wolin further extends de Lubac’s thesis that the corpus mysticum, both as a term and an idea, had slowly been detached from its concrete sacramental, scriptural and local institutional meaning. The medieval migrations which enabled the corpus mysticum to migrate to Church-society as a whole (de Lubac’s conclusion) find their end with Luther. Ironically, however, this enabled the power of the corpus mysticum to be transferred in complex ways to new symbols and new institutions. From Luther’s bifurcating “simplistic imperative” Wolin sees the begin-ning of a process of political cell-division that will replicate itself at high speed, all in service of the cause of national particularism. John Calvin, however, seems to be viewed as having put the brakes on this cell-division. Calvin aids the migrations of the mystical body in a way that partly follows Luther’s reforms, but also tries to restore the organic complexity of the medieval order. Wolin sees in Calvin a thinker who understands that the corpus mysticum is a union between Christians and Christ that generates love that can be shared with one’s neighbors. In contrast to his disdain for Luther, Wolin admires what he takes to be

37. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 146. 38. For a recent, persuasive account of how ruling elites needed theological ratio-nale in order to secure collective sentiment for newly emerging nations, see Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 39. Luther and Machiavelli were nearly exact contemporaries, and did most of their work in exile: Machiavelli exiled from Florence, and Luther excommunicated from the Catholic Church. It is interesting to consider the way exclusion, exile and excommunication helped to generate new narratives of inclusion that would in fact turn the tables on their erstwhile foes. Anthony Marx argues (see note 38 above) that the early nation-states wove a narrative of inclusion out of the fabric of systematic exclusions around which national unity could be forged, and state power centralized.



Calvin’s attempt to partially restore the medieval commitment to the common good, one which would not be preserved by “a pope who acted as a trustee for the corpus christianum” of course, but a “cohesive force [which] came from a mystical spirit working through the members who had joined with Him to form a corpus mysticum.”40 In Calvin’s case this was an explicitly Eucharistic understanding of how members were formed in a common good which could in turn be shared with others (albeit a “virtualist” understanding of the real presence of Christ). Wolin writes that for Calvin,

The sacramental rite signified a common good, which the participants shared with, and through, Christ. And the common love of Christ became the accentuating principle compelling the participants to share this good with their fellows; they could not love Christ without loving each other; and they could not injure each other without injuring Christ.41

In addition to this sacramental unity, Calvin also looked to doctrinal and scriptural bonds. Preaching was central. Yet Word and sacrament were not sufficient on their own. In order to promote cohesion and unity, and to regulate life together through “proper instrumentalities of power,” an ecclesiastical government was needed.42 Thus Calvin was “rediscovering what the Roman Church had always practiced and the early Reformers had nearly always forgotten: that a religious society, like any society, must find support in institutions; and that institutions, in turn, were aggregates of power.”43 Far from Luther’s private vision of the corpus mysticum, Calvin’s communal vision was founded on a commit-ment to public truth, which is why “preaching” was always an “office” with all of the political connotations that word implies. While Calvin attempted to repair Luther’s individualizing reforms with a communal understanding of power structures, Wolin admits that it was not in fact a return to the medieval model at all, and seems to worry about its totali-tarian implications.

At its deepest level, the church cohered as a corpus mysticum, but on top of this mystic foundation Calvin erected a set of institutions to articulate and enforce a distinctive way of life. The tight corporate quality of the whole recalled the ancient polis, yet the underlying element of mystery was a reminder of that transcendent strain utterly alien to the classical community.44

40. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 151. Interestingly, De Lubac is also quite conciliatory in tone towards Calvin. Cf. Corpus Mysticum, 118. 41. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 152. 42. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 152. 43. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 153. 44. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 157.



While the political community could draw support and even pedagogi-cal guidance from the “mystic solidarity of Christians,” Calvin was, no less than Luther, ultimately opposed to the unity and cohesion of the political order understood as the corpus mysticum. Yet Calvin gave theologi-cal permission for the “transcendent strain” (which was, Wolin reminds us, utterly alien to Athenian democracy) to migrate into the social founda-tions of new political institutions. The Christian society in Calvin’s view, if it can be put this way, “donated” the mystical unity and cohesion of the Church as the social basis for the political order which would other-wise be quite independent from the Church (Calvin’s Geneva theocracy notwithstanding).45

Wolin observed a common pattern emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Theological and political arguments of the period seemed to work in apparently opposite directions for the same ends. If Luther has his alter-ego in Machiavelli’s principe, so Calvin has his in Thomas Hobbes’s “matter, form, and power of a commonwealth eccle-siastical and civil.” The mystical elements that had already shifted from the sacraments to the Church, to the wider society, also migrate to a new understanding of the person, community and history in liberalism. But what can be said of democracy itself? He hopes that critics will learn “to disentangle” what he calls “democratic radicalism” from “liberalism,” a philosophical tradition that was “born in fear, nourished by disenchant-ment, and prone to believe that the human condition was and was likely to remain one of pain and anxiety.”46 Despite the view that liberalism is shaped by eighteenth-century rationalism, Wolin argues that its deepest influence comes from classical economics which had a firm grasp on “the limits of reason and the pervasiveness of irrational factors in man and society.”47 The Protestant Reformers, no less than Thomas Hobbes, bequeathed to the liberal progeny “the problem of subjectivism implicit in both the Protestant belief in the primacy of individual judgment and the Hobbe-sian insistence that human judgments were inevitably tainted by personal

45. Wolin’s account might challenge the Calvinist defenders of modern democ-racies. For example, Jeffrey Stout’s preference for Reformed theologians like Nicholas Wolterstorff might be understood in light of this need for democratic solidarity, partly owing at least to the gift that Christian citizens are imagined to provide. But does Cal-vin’s “virtualist” understanding of the Eucharist not commit him to the same kind of split between the mystical and the real as Luther? See J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 46. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 263. 47. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 263.



bias or by interest.”48 Wolin sees the political implications clearly: “liberal-ism transformed the older notion of the common good from an object posited by reason to one rooted in desire.”49 So it is hardly surprising that economic theory, according to Adam Smith, posited an “invisible hand” for the economic well-being of a society in which individuals will always attempt to satisfy their own selfish desires.50 Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is no sign of liberal rationalism regulating the market in perfect harmony, but reveals what might be seen as the last mutation of the corpus mysticum, a shadowy force that orders the social but is not itself the social. The political implications were ultimately economic. Wolin observes that from the early Christian sense of community to the medieval, a coherent view of the common good had emerged. At some point in the migratory process, between the first caesura (between the sacramental and ecclesial uses of corpus mysticum) and a second caesura (between the ecclesial and socio-political uses) de Lubac saw an individu-alizing tendency with regard to Eucharistic piety emerge. But Wolin saw the individualistic tendency in terms of moral judgments, and a confusing tendency with regard to inner-outer distinctions. Luther’s sacrifice of “the political relevancy of the Christian ethic” naturally meant that the moral judgments of the community would have to be carried not by the com-munity, but by the individual conscience (and inevitably, desire). Wolin sees in Calvin, and in Locke, an attempt to restore that “lost” community, and thus an attempt to articulate a “collective conscience.” But they never were able to overcome the fundamentally subjectivized sense of conscience that had emerged. The only way to “exteriorize” the conscience, and thus make it genuinely collective, was to look for political arrangements that could protect what “a growingly secular society most treasured; namely, wealth and status, or more briefly, ‘interests.’”51 Wolin discerns, then, a shift from the medieval common good, to Luther’s individual conscience, to Calvin’s collective conscience, and finally Locke’s social conscience, which is so easily transcribed to economic terms, from “personal inter-est” to what is in the “public interest.” The loss of the medieval sense of community had led to a largely materialist, physicalist and reductive view of the human person. “Having reduced man to mere externality and stripped him of conscience, it was easy for the liberal economists to treat him as a material object,” and thus property becomes the sine quo non for

48. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 297. 49. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 298. 50. Samuel Fleischacker’s Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) gives a much more nuanced understanding of Smith’s “invisible hand.” 51. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 303.



participation in the society.52 Wolin’s use of de Lubac’s argument in Corpus Mysticum culminates in his conclusion about liberalism at the end of the first edition of Politics and Vision. Wolin concludes:

In retrospect the long journey from private judgment to social conformity appears as the desperate effort of liberals to fashion a substitute for the sense of community that had been lost.53

In sum, Wolin follows de Lubac’s argument from the fourth to the thir-teenth century in seeing an increasingly widespread use of the term corpus mysticum to describe the whole society in a way that had moved far beyond its original sacramental or ecclesial sense. But the import of Wolin’s treat-ment of de Lubac is not in his dependence on de Lubac in his footnotes on medieval political theology. The import of his use of de Lubac can be seen most fully in how he carries the argument further, and articulates an interpretation of the political implications of Corpus Mysticum that has been missing from literature on de Lubac ever since he himself declared the work to be “naïve.”54 De Lubac habitually and famously identifies a trajectory without coming to conclusions. But Wolin employs the theme so thoroughly in Politics and Vision that he can simply note in passing that Sir John Fortescue readily used corpus mysticum to refer to either the people or the state, or that much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s understanding of community was thoroughly shaped by the idea of a “common spirit” of “communion and dependency.”55 Wolin reveals his dependency on de Lubac’s argument in Corpus Mysticum only at the beginning of the work, in relationship to early and medieval Christianity. But it is clear that it exerts a profound and often unnoticed influence on the entire argument he makes in Politics and Vision (in the original and expanded editions). Rousseau’s dictum, “as soon as he is alone, man is nothing,” could now be seen as merely the romantic version of the corpus mysticum having migrated further from its source, now generating a new theological anthropology (“Man is born free, but is everywhere in bondage”), and a new vision of the redemptive community (the social contract that will save us from bondage).56 Such migrations, in Wolin’s view, would

52. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 306. 53. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 314. 54. Henri de Lubac, At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circum-stances that Occasioned his Writings (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 30. 55. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 120. 56. Cf. William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Politi-cal Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 9. Cavanaugh’s recent and influential argument is apparently made independently of Wolin’s earlier work but the similarities are striking. Cavanaugh notes that “it is essential to see fundamental agreement



increasingly and necessarily take on nationalistic dimensions, culminating in the nineteenth-century concentrations of coercive power, namely in the newly minted nation-state.57 The mystical element now authorized strong notions of “a single government” in which individuals would need to make sacrifices for the distinctive identity of the political whole. Wolin does not cite de Lubac’s later work The Drama of Atheist Humanism, but doing so would only have shown how distortions of Christianity gave rise to the “transvaluation of values” in a new world of secularism, atheism and nationalism.58 Wolin, a secular Jew, and a thoroughgoing critic of Nietzsche, was less interested in secularism and atheism in themselves because these were simply new cultural forms that masked the deeper problems of political mysticism that he believed were the greatest threat to genuine democratic freedom. What is clear is that Wolin went further than de Lubac, both historically and philosophically, in his judgments. Would de Lubac have moved in quite this direction? We will never know. But consider de Lubac’s sugges-tive conclusion to his argument concerning one strand of his argument in Corpus Mysticum:

In the sixteenth century, Scholastics, Humanists and Protestants spoke repeatedly of the mystical body. As an exception to this Calvin preferred to replace it with any of several analogous turns of phrase… But Erasmus and Luther in contrast both contributed to the success of the modern formula-tion. Since then, it has remained the common property of both Catholic and Protestant theologians… From theology it would even make some inroads into the world of philosophy: Suarez would say that people grouped into society formed: “a mystical body that morally can be called one in itself”, and, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant would address his readers on the mystical body of reasonable beings formed by the free submission of each one to the rule of moral laws.59

It is not unreasonable to think that Wolin represents one possible politi-cal development of the trajectories that Cardinal de Lubac’s early work more than suggests. Moreover, while one can imagine that de Lubac would

between Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke on the need to domesticate the Body of Christ in order to produce unity” (39) and “the rise of the state is predicated on the creation of the individual…liberated from the confines of the traditional group and now relating to other individuals on the basis of contract” (73–4). 57. Wolin’s argument has been replicated, augmented and supplemented by a wide range of contemporary theorists; however, many who follow this line most often, and inex-plicably, neglect the theology that Wolin saw as so important to his analysis in the 1950s. E.g. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1996). 58. See Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995). 59. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 118; original emphasis.



have done this work much differently, he would have found much to agree with in Wolin’s development of thesis with regard to political mysticism beyond the Church. But how might de Lubac have criticized Wolin? In this next and final section, we will conclude with some compara-tive reflections on time and community, and consider what theological criticisms of Wolin’s “fugitive democracy” might be raised in light of de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum.

Theo-political Reflections on Fugitive Democracy and the Corpus Mysticum

Jeffrey Stout concludes: “Sheldon Wolin’s work on the evisceration of democracy, though admirably accurate in its treatment of the dangers posed by empire and capital, abandons the project of democratic account-ability too quickly in favor of the romance of the fugitive.”60 Wolin’s fugi-tive democracy certainly can be taken as the dark “small town democratic” vision of a hopeless Romantic. But this would betray the reading of Wolin that has been offered in these pages, especially given his strong critique of the “mystical element” in politics. Wolin seems more realistic than romantic when we understand his insistence that democracy is fugitive by nature, that it is “fleeting,” and always on the run from being “managed.” It is not the “flight from author-ity” that interests Wolin, it is the flight from the political mysticism and irrationalism of liberal political and economic forms. If he has hope, it is hope that we may be vigilant for wherever such democracy might emerge or irrupt. Just as he wants to remove, as de Lubac seemed to suggest was required from a theological point of view, the errant understanding of the corpus mysticum from the western political imagination, and return it to its proper sacramental home, so he seems to want to retain a sense of the loss of Christian time, and Christian community, always careful not to search for political substitutes for Christianity in the West. What may we critically observe about Wolin’s “fugitive democracy”? In terms of political time, we can say that he captures a sense of the radically incomplete nature of democracy as a temporal activity. Wolin’s Aristote-lianism seems to allow democracy no transcendent telos, and thus refuses the grand mysticism that he associates with the enormous scale of modern political thought. His argument to decouple democracy and liberalism, then, is really an argument about political time, refusing mystical ends for democracy. Should we be surprised that calls for “radical democracy” are often viewed as futile?

60. Jeffrey Stout, “The Spirit of Democracy and the Rhetoric of Excess,” Journal of Religious Ethics 35.1 (2007): 3–21.



In his humanism, Wolin is perfectly Aristotelian. Wolin resists political forms, which would restrict human beings freedom as political animals. To be human is to be political. Thus any political form that collects consent, but rejects participation is dehumanizing. His project is an invitation to human beings to be political agents, and to attend to their own local ways of knowing and naming the political. Wolin identifies the human need for political knowledge, and this works in ways which bear striking similarities to theological knowledge, and perhaps his work can be seen analogically as a par-ticular kind of negative political theology. In medieval terms, negative the-ology was part of a complex triplex via that safeguarded human knowledge of God, and human naming of God, from idolatry. They were interested in saying, as part of their theological grammar, what God was not. This attentiveness to the via negativa in theological language was no less true when the Church considered the city of God. After all, Saint Augustine’s City of God has far more to say about the city of man than it does about the city of God (and thus Augustine also might be understood in terms of a negative political theology, for he, no less than the Church, presents no political models to the world—despite accounts to the contrary). In this negative sense, Wolin is more confident in saying that democ-racy is fugitive, that it is on the run from settled, secure, fixed political forms. Surprisingly, though he refuses liberalism, he does not, however, refuse political forms or the institutions that embody them. Wolin’s work can thus be seen as an attempt to purify our naming, not of God, but of “the political,” which for him is always the common good of ordinary human beings who, as he once put it, are just trying to eke out “a decent existence” at the most local level.61 Thus it might be most accurate to view Wolin as offering a negative political theology that is really in the service, not of God, but humanity—though hopefully he might admit that these ends are not mutually exclusive. For such a radically local and democratic thinker, he heightens rather than lessens the importance of thinking about “the common good” in theological, political and economic terms. Where does this leave American democratic visions of e pluribus unum? Wolin is devastatingly critical of this liberal drive to unity, which he sees as the mystical impulse inherited from the migrations of the corpus mysti-cum. De Lubac would agree that unity is the fundamental impulse of the corpus mysticum. But for the Jesuit theologian, unity was the work of God

61. While no Catholic, Wolin’s humanism seems in line with the minimal way in which Catholic Social Teaching defines the “common good” in terms of the conditions nec-essary for human flourishing. He is not so much concerned to deny the Church its claims to comprehensive superiority in faith and morals, or its call to communion for all human-ity; he is only concerned to deny liberalism, the nation-state or the market an unchecked power that would be a simulacrum of the same.



who made all of humanity in his image for communion with Himself. The problem of corpus mysticum was not its impulse for unity, but in the complex distinctions that arose from seeing the source and summit of that unity as sacramental and ecclesial. For de Lubac, the Church is unfinished, but constantly nourished by every consecrated moment of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist that makes the Church. The future has become a dimension of hope in the ekklesia which provides a kind of political knowledge because it is teleological and eschatological knowledge of “the end of the political,” which is the city of God. And it is surely at this point, if not at others, where Wolin and de Lubac would most surely agree that the Church claims knowledge about “the end of the political,” and it is at this point that they would also part ways. For while they most likely could agree to a reasonable extent on the nature of the human person and even community, political time and space could never become wholly immanent for de Lubac not only for fear of the totalitarian implications of this view of time, but because Christian revelation bears witness to a different view of history. Yet Wolin’s fugitive democracy is perpetually restless by nature, not unlike Augustine’s restless heart. Wolin cannot answer, as Aristotle could not, questions about the telos of human souls, or even the telos of the spirit of the human community. Aquinas himself faulted Aristotle for not being able to name the telos of the soul. If democracy is fugitive, what is it running towards? Why is it fugitive? What generates this restlessness? Is not the very fugitivity of democracy itself a sign that it has lost something that would make it whole? Wolin is helpful in laying bare the restlessness of our nature as political animals, and he is right in denying that liber-alism is that political form which could elevate and perfect democracy. In this, he might be seen as offering nothing contradictory to Catholic (negative) political theology. Without intending as much, Wolin can be seen as a political theorist who clears a space for the political philosopher and theologian alike to think about the political knowledge the ecclesial person has access to through the sacramental time of the Church. And yet it must be noted that Wolin, like so many, is more often right in what he denies than what he affirms. For his critique of political mysticism is as profound as his political immanentism is weak. Wolin reads democracy’s nature rightly when he views it as fugitive; but when he fails to name from whence that restlessness comes, and to what end it is directed, he invites us to take theology seriously as theology once again when thinking “the political.” Partly because it develops so brilliantly the argument of Corpus Mysticum, Wolin’s work highlights how much the western political imagination needs the Church. In particular, the Church is necessary to make sense of the political restlessness (the



political nature) he so ably names. For democracy to embody its fugitive character it will also need something beyond it to which it can flee so that it doesn’t become a totalizing, immanent space. Stout, like Hauerwas, has famously preferred Karl Barth’s totaliter aliter, where the total otherness of God also means that religion cannot really challenge the autonomy of the political, which is what the Catholic Church does in a carefully circum-scribed sense. But likewise, in Wolin’s commitment to detach democracy and liberalism, it is not clear that “fugitive democracy” can get us out of an autonomously constituted, autonomous politics and the local space it needs, even though he helps us to identify it. While Wolin teaches us that liberal state and market are not mystical bodies, it is not clear that democ-racy alone, detached from all of this political mysticism, is sufficient on its own. The upshot is, from de Lubac’s point of view, that only a concrete, visible Church can save us. In conclusion, theologians and political philosophers’ attempts to reconcile religion and liberal democracy might look different were they to examine Henri de Lubac and Sheldon Wolin together. In Wolin, we have a theorist who wants to free democratic imaginations from the disciplines of detachment imposed by both state and market, and from the political mysticism that gives both state and market their power to collect consent and allegiance at the same time it forces human beings to cease to be political animals. In de Lubac, we have a theologian who set out to free the ecclesial imagination from disciplines of detachment that separated the historical body of Christ, his sacramental mystical body in the Eucharist, and his true body the Church. Henri de Lubac imagined a “mystical body politics” that was more inclusive, more humanizing and ultimately more social than the isolating politics of the modern, liberal state.62 While Wolin cannot imagine, as de Lubac could, a “common destiny” for the world in Catholicism, he did learn from de Lubac a crucial political insight: from his reading of de Lubac he learned that the nationalist mystique (to use Péguy’s terms)63 is a distorted reflection of the corpus mysticum. De Lubac could have applauded Wolin’s critique of nationalism and the version of liberalism that amounts to the same. But is it possible to think that de Lubac could follow Wolin’s vision of democracy as fugitive? Quite possibly, but he might have noticed, as a thoroughgoing Augustinian, that

62. See F. C. Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), where the term has a certain affin-ity to Michel de Certeau, another thinker who has tried to work out the political implica-tions of Cardinal de Lubac. 63. See Charles Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, trans. Alexander Dru (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001).



Wolin’s work is charged with a divine yearning (an eros) for that which he cannot name.64 Wolin’s resistance to settled political forms, and his insistence on preserving the fugitive nature of democratic action, is no less a cry for human freedom than liberalism itself. It also resists political rest through its distinctively theological and historical argument for political agonism.65 As a negative political theology, Wolin’s fugitive democracy rejects every distorted reflection of the true corpus mysticum. But does it not then also yearn for the real thing?

C. C. Pecknold is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His most recent book is Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History.

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