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1/ Nicholas Heron, "Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology", 2018, contests that idea that there is a “genetic derivation” or “structural homology” between politics & theology.
2/ Instead, Heron proposes the opposite trajectory: theological concepts & figures will be accounted for by virtue of their “provenance in the public sphere” and as “instruments of a polis”.
3/ To do this, Heron traces a path between two predecessors. The first is Erik Peterson, who of course famously declared that the advent of the Church resulted in a “closure” of monarchical political theologies.
4/ But Peterson did not think a mere vacuum followed. Political life continues. But this is “a form of political action specific to Christianity itself”. For Peterson, theology is already itself political; indeed, it is the only truly political thing.
5/ Heron correctly notes that Peterson (not Schmitt) allows politics to be analysed in its own terms. For Schmitt, the political is always diagnosed or explained by the theological. For Peterson, the political is coterminous with the theological; it is not explained by it.
6/ Next, Heron points to a second predecessor: Agamben, ‘The Kingdom and the Glory’. For Heron, Agamben fills out what Peterson started: the politics that ensues after the advent of the Church is the "economic" or “governmental”.
7/ With Agamben, governmentality that refers upwards to the transcendence of God without ever revealing His being. “le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas” is a literal horror in the modern age.
8/ For Agamben, the closure of political theology brings governmentality to the fore, in a process Foucault calls “the unblocking of the art of government” ("le déblocage de l’art de gouverner").
9/ But crucially, for Agamben, governmentality has to continually refer to this closed political theology, to a God that lies behind it, but is never visible. It does this through ritual and ceremony, the apparatus of “glory”.
10/ This is where Heron comes in. Rather than “glory”, he prefers to speak of “liturgies”. Liturgy is the means by which the Peterson/ Agamben axis of “economic theology” perpetuates in the world.
11/ By “liturgy”, Heron means acts and devices that have the structure of “divinisation”, but with an absent God at the centre. These liturgies thus create a sense of endless disappointment and disenchantment amongst consumers. This is the political life Xnity has bequeathed.
12/ Heron gives a bleak picture. He shows that there is a “vicariousness” at the centre of our economic transactions that apes the real God, but which swerves away nihilistically as soon as we get close to the centre.
13/ Heron thinks this nihilism is found in Christian God. He uses Schmitt’s idea of civil war (stasiology) amongst the persons of the Trinity to prove this.
14/ For example, Heron writes: "there is no original substance of power from which its various emanations and manifestations could ultimately be sourced, but only economy, only vicariousness. In the beginning was already the economy” (p.9).
15/ For Heron, there is no point beyond which the vicariousness of economic power could ever finally be eradicated. And this is what ensures it continues to be repeated in the world. But I think Xnity can tell a better story than that ...
