E Pluribus Unum?

As I have been slowly making my way through the second volume of Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, I have been giving thought to not only the singular type of evil embodied by Hitler and his Reich, I have also been fascinated with how National Socialist ideology comes in contact with the political questions that have formed history. In other words, Nazism, while perhaps being a singular evil in history (let’s leave Stalin out of this for the moment), does emerge from some of the most common political questions and aspirations. What struck me is that Hitler represents a response to the fundamental political, and indeed philosophical, question of the correlation between the one and the many.

Although I am not a political philosopher or “scientist”, I would like to suggest that this relationship between the one and the many underlies much of the turmoil endemic in communities and nations. Human societies tend toward instability as they contain the unruly appetites and passions of many individuals, the pursuit of which militates against the common good, and increases conflict and competition between members of the society. Left to their own devices, societies will plunge themselves into anarchy and civil war.

Something, or better someone, must “order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men.” This can be done by the sheer force of the police state. But the maintenance of such a state based primarily in terror is itself unstable, as the possibility of rebellion is never too distant. Far better is the emergence of the Leader (not, of course, without, recourse to coercion) who embodies the common good, as sort of hypostasis of the Nation or the body politic, which unifies the aspirations of the people. For instance we might think of Louis XIV saying “L’Etat, c’est moi” in this regard. Think also of the rise of the Caesars in imperial Rome. Similarly, the Tsar was Russia. Stability is found in the Leader’s embodiment of the nation and the subjects desire to live into a political hypostatic union with this personalized polity. He is the apotheosis of e pluribus unum.

The rise of Nazism from the chaos of Weimar republicanism is a case in point. The chaos and instability of Weimar constitutionalism which also was seen as finding its genesis in the humiliation of 1918 activated a strong cultural memory of the great Germanic Leader represented in both legend and history by the likes of Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick the Great. Indeed, the Führer-prinzip was a German political ideal which the National Socialists were able to exploit and expand. Through his rhetorical gifts demonically employed Hitler fashioned himself as the messianic Leader. As one motto stated, the people are to “work toward the Führer.” Thus he ruled though the love of the people, albeit it not without the machinery of state terror to keep enemies at bay. In fact, even after his death and the destruction of Germany, the some of the men in the dock at Nuremberg, having already admitted their complicity in the inhumanity of the Reich, were moved to tears when film of Hitler was presented to them.

Of course, there are types of instability that can affect the polity embodied in such a Leader. We can see this when the Leader looses contact with the people, such as Louis XVI, who on the day the Bastille fell only thought to record in his journal “nothing,” noting the lack of game caught that day by the King. And certainly the most historically prevalent form of this polity, the monarchy, is subject to the problem of dynasty, when the heirs to the throne are not able to embody the nation’s polity adequately that the unruly wills of the people might be ordered.

Such reflections, provided that they are actually descriptive of the foundational issues of politics, evoke a number of reflections for me as a Christian and an American. And among these issues is the role of democracy in this dynamic between the Leader on the one side and anarchy on the other. Does liberal democracy resolve the problem of the one and the many? And if so, how is this accomplished? In brief, we might suggest that democracy attempts to transcend this dialectic through replacing the leader with an abstract ideal, such as freedom or equality. Parliamentary procedure and laws keep the pursuit of individual interests from verging on the anarchic. In essence, the apotheosis of politics here is a non-personal idealism.

But the more significant question as a Christian must be how the embodiment of the Kingdom of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus relates to the issues I have outlined above. And here we should notice that Jesus does not deny the need for the Leader who embodies the political existence of the people. He is not a proto-democrat offering some ideals to be the principle of social coherence. He redeems the age long struggle between the one and the many by becoming the One, the hypostasis of the polity which is the Kingdom of God. The New Testament language of dwelling “in Christ” and the church being the body of which he is head is political language in the sense that I have outlined above.

But what differentiates, then, Jesus from Caesar or even Hitler? It is the way that he lives out his identity as the Leader. We must look to the kenosis of the cross for our political bearings for this new polity of the Kingdom.

I am still working through all this in my mind. I offer it to anyone out there who might be reading this for your thoughts and reflections as I continue to consider the ramifications.

More on Episcopal Ecclesiology

I have been giving more thought to my suggestion that the Episcopal Church is now espousing, perhaps quite unintentionally, a modernistic ecclesiology where the two concrete forms of ecclesial existence are the national church and the individual. The parish and diocese are within this framework mediating legal fictions functioning as aggregates of individual spiritualities on the one hand, and trustees of the property belonging to the national church. This new ecclesiology I have called “Neo-Erastianism.”

Some of the ideas behind this I have expressed in an earlier post, where I suggest the ecclesiological nationalism is a product of modernism. Among my comments were these:

What strikes me today is that Protestantism emerged along with the development
of the nation/state, and was indeed underwritten by this modern political
project. We often forget just how important the emerging western nations
were to the success of the Reformation…. Historic Protestantism exists as the
spiritual arm of a political trend that is in fact now under the immense stress
of both globalism on the one hand and tribalism on the other. Nationalism posits
a mediating unit, the Nation/State, as the ultimate political unit. Such a
unit has been unstable as it is too large for the tribe and requires bureaucracy
and a police or military force to maintain. With Protestantism no longer
underwritten by the culture, either formally as in a state church, or tacitly,
as in the case of the United States, and with ecclesial bureaucracy not able to
adapt to rapid social and technological change, churches such as the Episcopal
Church are destined to become moribund.

The Neo-Erastian airs from the Presiding Bishop and other bishops were inevitable.

Anglican ecclesiology (at least in its North American manifestations) is actually a matter of preferences and the exercise of power. The individual is free to choose from a variety of ecclesiological options, and then is able to embody these choices to the extent that I have the power to do so. “Preference” refers most specifically to the ecclesial existence of the individual as a religious subject. Higher levels of ecclesial life, such as the parish or the diocese, are simply aggregates of individual preferences. This dynamic has been intensified by the loss of the geographically defined parish church and the rise of sodalities of type or party, such as the Anglo-catholic or charismatic, for example. The parish thus serves the preferences of the individual by gathering individuals of like preference together as a more efficient means of providing resources.

The interaction of these preferences, especially to the extent they come into conflict with one another, is governed by the operation of power. This power resides most concretely in the national church, with subsidiary application of this power through dioceses and congregations.

But note that none of the above is strictly theological in structure. One can hold to the episcopate as the esse of the church, or that the church is an event created by the faithful preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments. These merely constitute the aforementioned preferences. Ecclesiology as it pertains to the national church is a matter of polity enforced through canon and, as is increasingly the case, civil law.