Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion 9780226585628

Citation preview

Sovereignty and the Sacred

Sovereignty and the Sacred Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion r ob e r t a . y e l l e

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-58545-1 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-58559-8 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-58562-8 (e-book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226585628.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yelle, Robert A., author. Title: Sovereignty and the sacred : secularism and the political economy of religion / Robert A. Yelle. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018014785 | isbn 9780226585451 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226585598 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226585628 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Religion and politics—History. | Holy, The. | Secularism. Classification: lcc bl65.p7 y45 2018 | ddc 201/.72 — dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014785 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48 – 1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1 1 The Antinomian Sacred as a Political Category: Toward a Theory of Religion as Sovereignty 9 2 The Disenchantment of Charisma: The Theological Origins of Secular Polity 37 3 The Ambivalence of the Sovereign Ban: The Homo Sacer and the Biblical Herem 74 ˙ 4 Sacrifice, or the Religious Mode of Production 98 5 States of Nature: The Jubilee and the Social Contract 126 6 No Deposit, No Return: Religious Rejections of Exchange 156 Conclusion: Exit Signs 184 Notes 189 Bibliography 243 Index 265

Acknowledgments

At least for me, writing any book is a years-long endeavor. This particular book began in 2008, when handwritten and numbered journals titled “Political Theology” started appearing on my shelf. (These stopped about five years ago, with volume 5.) It may have begun even earlier, around 2005 – 6, during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which I spent researching another book that was eventually published as The Language of Disenchantment. That was when I first heard mention of Carl Schmitt. It was also when I met Bruce Rosenstock, who was an early informant and interlocutor on these topics. Important periods of research were the summer of 2010, when I borrowed Ananya Vajpeyi’s apartment in Cambridge to be closer to the Harvard University libraries; and a semester’s sabbatical from the University of Memphis in the second half of 2012, which was spent commuting between Harvard and Andover, Massachusetts, my hometown. During that time I read widely in the economics of religion and rounded out my research on political theology. This time stands out in my mind because it turned out to be the final occasion when I and my wife, Lynda Sagrestano, and our daughter, Maya Yelle, would enjoy an extended time with my parents, Louis and Judith Yelle. My father has since passed away, while my mother has moved out of her house. The really crucial opportunity, however, came in 2013 – 14, during a Joint Tikvah and Senior Emile Noël Fellowship at the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization and the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice at New York University Law School. I am grateful to the two co-directors of the Tikvah Center that year, Moshe Halbertal and Joseph Weiler, for giving me the chance to focus exclusively on the

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book for ten months. Not all was idyllic: my family remained in Memphis, Tennessee, which was a hardship for all, but especially for my wife, who had to manage a household alone. During that time, however, I was able to finish the research and write the first draft of the book. I was sustained not only by my work but also by the friendship of colleagues at Tikvah and other NYU Law programs at the brick townhouse at 22 Washington Square North. I would like to express my thanks to all of the Fellows, but especially to Ronnie Goldstein, Haim Shapira, Cana Werman, Shira Wolosky, and Jonathan Yovel. At NYU Law, I also had the chance to discuss the political and economic theories in the Hebrew Bible with Geoffrey Miller. Joe Blankholm and Patton Burchett were a ready source of companionship and conversation during this time. In August 2014 I moved across the Atlantic Ocean with my family to take up a professorship in the Theory and Method of Religious Studies in the Faculty for Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, and the Study of Religion at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. This was another extraordinary opportunity, one that came with a steep learning curve as we adjusted to life in a new country. It was a whole year before I could write the final chapter of the book—first it was necessary to decide what it should be about!— and almost another year before I could undertake extensive and necessary revisions on the manuscript. Different parts of the book were presented to audiences at Wake Forest University, Uppsala University, Stockholm University, Tel Aviv University, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, the American Academy of Religion, the North American Association for the Study of Religion, the International Association for the History of Religions, the European Association for the Study of Religion, the Deutsche Vereinigung für Religionswissenschaft, and the Siemens Stiftung at Schloss Nymphenburg (as the 2015 annual lecture for the LMU Philosophy Faculty); as well as to various LMU programs: the Distant Worlds Graduate School for Ancient Studies, the Center for Advanced Studies, and the faculty research seminars in religious studies that took place during my first two summers in Munich. I want to express my appreciation to the many participants at these colloquia for their contributions to improving the arguments that appear in this book, especially Peter Adamson, Schirin Amir-Moazami, Gustavo Benavides, Rajeev Bhargava, Julie Cooper, Susanne Gödde, Naomi Goldenberg, Peter Jackson, Jonathan Judaken, Anne Koch, Shai Lavi, Martin Lehnert, Massimo Leone, Jenny Ponzo, Lorenz Trein, and Ananya Vajpeyi. Various colleagues read and commented on draft chapters: Brian Black, Ward Blanton, Neilesh Bose, Spencer Dew, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Hein-

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rich Meier, Bruce Rosenstock, Yvonne Sherwood, Michael Stausberg, Winnifred Sullivan, Ann Taves, Cana Werman, and Helmut Zander. Gustavo Benavides and Richard Sherwin read the entire manuscript. A section of chapter 3 was reviewed by two anonymous readers as part of a proposal for a special issue of Religion. Jenny Ponzo first told me about the Roman Jubilees, which became the focus of the first section of the final chapter. My heartfelt thanks go to everyone for their criticisms and suggestions. The end result is, of course, my own responsibility. A few short passages are reproduced from several of my earlier publications. I would like to acknowledge this reuse and thank the respective publishers: Ashgate for “Spiritual Economies beyond the Sacred/ Secular Paradigm: Or, What Did Religious Freedom Mean in Ancient India?,” in Varieties of Religious Establishment, ed. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Lori G. Beaman (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 15 – 32, at 27– 31; Brill for “The Trouble with Transcendence: Carl Schmitt’s ‘Exception’ as a Challenge for Religious Studies,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 189 – 206; and Bloomsbury for Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 143, 153 – 54. I want to convey my appreciation to Alan Thomas of the University of Chicago Press for his interest in the book, as well as for selecting the two extremely generous reviewers for the press who recommended publication. Kyle  Adam Wagner and various members of the press’s staff have helped usher the book through the publication process. My student Wenzel Braunfels compiled the bibliography, and Derek Gottlieb prepared the index. Last but not least, I would like to express my love and gratitude to my wife for her support as a partner in all things, and to my daughter, whom I moved thousands of miles from her home for the sake of my academic career. Some debts it may not be possible to repay in this life. This is especially true when someone has passed on. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Louis E. Yelle, who died on July 27, 2016. Munich, Germany

Introduction

This book explores the connection between sovereignty and the sacred as a way of reimagining the foundations of both polity and religion.1 Contemporary debates in political theory often ignore the evidence from history and anthropology that suggests that sovereignty, like the sacred as figured in many premodern religious traditions, can be disorderly or ambivalent. Sovereignty is commonly expressed in acts of founding violence, such as sacrifice; during festivals such as Carnival, when there occurs a temporary inversion of the social order; or in declarations of pardon such as the biblical Jubilee. Although such moments have arguably declined in a rule-obsessed modernity, they appear necessary for the legitimacy and justice of polity. This reinforces the urgency of a reenvisioning of sovereignty. In the past few decades, the meaning, origins, and indeed viability of secularism as a political paradigm have been subjected to increasing interrogation. There is an emerging consensus that the earlier theory of secularization, according to which religion would gradually disappear or at least become irrelevant to social order, has been proved false by the reemergence of religion, especially in the public square, as both a ground of political value and a source of contestation over fundamental rights. The scholarly debate remains focused largely on questions of freedom of religion, the accommodation of religious minorities within secularized political orders, and the governmental regulation of religion more generally. We have scarcely begun to investigate the relationship between sovereignty and the sacred, and the transformation of this relationship under secularism. Questions of sovereignty concern the foundations of polity. The sovereign, even under modern constitutions, is no mere executor of the law. She or he has the power to declare hostilities, to grant pardons, and to suspend

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introduction

the law in certain instances, such as a state of emergency. In the Middle Ages, God’s absolute power (potentia dei absoluta) was evidenced by miracles, understood as events that violated the natural order. The traditional analogy between divine and royal authority, or the “divine right of kings,” reinforced the earthly sovereign’s power to suspend the law. Monotheism and monarchy both insisted on the singularity and supremacy of the ruler. Even today, such attributes of sovereignty have not vanished entirely, although their connection with earlier theological debates has been forgotten. Most provocatively, the German political theorist Carl Schmitt contended that the sovereign’s power to declare a “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand, state of emergency or martial law) is ineradicable but has been repressed by the robust regime of norms associated with the modern legal state (Rechtsstaat). Schmitt traced the attack on absolute power to deist polemics against the miracle and associated the curtailment of sovereignty with the ongoing process of disenchantment that began during the Reformation. The study of such theological discourses and their continuity into an ostensibly secular modernity represents an important task, not only for a genealogy of sovereignty, but also for what it reveals concerning the perennial tension between sovereignty and legality, or between the constituting (lawmaking) and constituted (law-applying) powers. This tension was formerly expressed through the scholastic idea of God’s “two powers”— the aforementioned “absolute” and the “ordained” or orderly (ordinata)— as well as in festivals of inversion, such as Carnival or the medieval Feast of Fools, which enacted a periodic return to chaos or the state of nature, reprising the moment when society was founded. “Rituals of rebellion,” as Max Gluckman termed such events, often involve the humiliation of the king (or the aristocracy, or the patriarchy), sometimes through the installation of a temporary ruler from the lower classes.2 Such festivals have been identified by anthropologists and historians as one of the primary means of reinforcing, as well as of contesting and even potentially remaking, the polity. As Roger Caillois and Giorgio Agamben have shown, outbursts of antinomian behavior may be associated also with the death of a ruler and mark an interregnum, or real state of emergency, with respect to the foundations of polity.3 To what should we attribute such antinomian behaviors? Do these represent merely the unruliness of the crowd or generalized violence of the state of nature? Or do they suggest the inherent lawlessness of sovereignty itself ? The answer depends on which model of polity one applies. Many religious traditions describe the polity as originating in sacrifice or divine violence. This is as true of the Hindu Purusa Sūkta (Rig Veda 10.90) as it is of the Hebrew ˙ Bible, where most of the covenants (berith) between God and the Israelites

introduction

3

were accompanied by sacrifices. The interpretation of such troubling episodes as the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, emphasized the power of divine commands to transgress ordinary morality. Sacrifice, from this perspective, refers ambiguously both to the anarchic violence that obtains in the state of nature (Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all”)4 and to the ending of such anarchy by granting a monopoly on violence to a commanding sovereign, whose power extends to the taking of human life. The sovereign straddles the boundary between chaos and order and embodies a threat that may be only temporarily or provisionally contained. Such an image of sovereignty is also found in many older accounts of sacrifice, in which figured centrally a commanding deity who, like ancient Kronos, might kill his own children. These monsters have been banished to the nightmare regions from which they came, and the basis of polity has been reimagined, in more democratic fashion, as the outcome of a voluntary agreement. Now polities are legitimated neither by sacrifice nor by divine right, but by popular consent and the social contract. From this perspective, violence is merely an unfortunate contingency, not a structural necessity in a polity. The question is whether such views are realistic or not. Is it reasonable to envision an end to violence through the inauguration of an order that does not depend on aggression and bloodshed? Or is this merely utopianism and naive wish fulfillment? Does it accord with human nature to suppose that a state that makes no reference to sacrifice is capable of commanding authority? Or does our nature support the contrary idea that violence is necessary and inevitable, and must therefore be contained? Paul Kahn has argued that the legitimacy of our contemporary order continues to depend on its ability to invoke the sacrificial domain, particularly in the context of war.5 Sacrifice helps to preserve a sense of affective commitment to the state or polity that cannot be maintained by bureaucratic norms and reason alone. The idea of sacrifice is required to sustain the kind of exceptional commitment that prepares one to kill or die, for who would willingly perish for a multinational corporation or distant oligarchy with which he felt no solidarity? The tension between sovereignty and legality is evident not only in the violence or chaos that is associated with mythic and ritual representations of the origins of polity, but also in the exercise of the pardon power, which in theological terms corresponds to the operation of divine grace. Pardons are also sometimes associated with an interregnum, because they occur most often at the beginning or end of a sovereign’s rule. In legal terms, such acts may be justified through considerations of mercy, justice, or equity, a formulation that refers to the old English common law distinction between courts of law

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introduction

and courts of equity. The latter had the ability to grant relief not available in accordance with the strict operation of legal maxims. One of the most relevant contemporary forms of the pardon concerns the cancellation of debts, particularly of sovereign debts, such as those owed by Greece to other European Union nations and institutions. Classically, the ruler had authority to coin money and levy taxes, as well as to suspend debts. The biblical Jubilee, which (in theory) every fifty years released debts and slaves and returned people to their ancestral lands, represented an attempt to regularize the older Mesopotamian debt cancellations that were called periodically at the will of the ruler. The Jubilee also aimed to restore a more egalitarian basis for polity, imagined as a return to an earlier stage of society when the land was held in common. Such visions of redemption through a return of popular sovereignty have been challenged in the modern era by new corporate forms. Given the importance of capital in our international order, it is striking how older forms of sovereignty associated with either sacrifice or the Jubilee marked a suspension of utilitarian or transactional economies. Have such older modes of sovereignty simply become obsolete? Or do they have something to tell us regarding what makes a social order just, equitable, legitimate, and binding? Without proposing to give a final answer to any of these difficult questions, this book suggests that many contemporary theories of polity have based their answers on naked reason and the rejection of tradition, foreclosing alternative answers that might be reached through a study of history and anthropology. The American philosopher of liberalism John Rawls proposed that justice requires that we frame the rules of polity as if we were behind a “veil of ignorance,” without respect to actual knowledge of our personal attributes and outcomes under these rules. Assuming that one could act in such a disinterested fashion, this veil, which masks only our own individual present and future, does not require us also to ignore all empirical evidence of human nature that might be derived from a careful study of the past, and of other cultures. This book addresses the lacunae in our understanding of sovereignty by developing the analogy between sovereignty and the sacred as states of exception. Chapter 1 begins with the analogy between Rudolf Otto’s muchmaligned account of the holy as “wholly other,” and Carl Schmitt’s idea that the sovereign is similarly sui generis, as demonstrated by the power to suspend the legal order, a power formerly attributed to God. It then proceeds to trace the myth of founding violence that draws power from the antinomian nature of the holy while simultaneously quarantining this dangerous power into some remote past age, or to circumscribed moments in the festival calendar at which there occurs something like a return to primal chaos or un-

introduction

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constrained sovereignty. It appears that we must have our (sovereign) cake and eat it too. While such fables provoke us, from our safe distance, to smile, they may be less comical than some contemporary efforts to repress the antinomian impulse and apply the same flat, rationalizing level to everything. Yet such denials are in vain. Not only are they arguably ineffective from a practical standpoint, but they fail to recognize our own dependence on precisely such myths. Chapter 2 traces the theological genealogy of what is arguably the modern master-myth of the displacement of founding violence: Max Weber’s famous theory of “charisma” as an antinomian force that declines through routinization into other, especially legal forms of authority (Herrschaft). Schmitt pointed to the manner in which Weber’s idea of charismatic authority constituted a “secularized Protestant theology . . . the most striking example of a new political theology.”6 It has long been recognized that Weber’s thesis of a stark separation between charismatic and legal authority depended on earlier Christian theological categories, such as Paul’s diremption between grace (charis) and law (nomos) as interpreted by Rudolph Sohm. Almost a century after Weber, however, it still has rarely been noted that his theory of the routinization of charisma closely resembles an earlier theological claim that miracles and other signs of grace (charismata) ceased in apostolic times. A supersessionist narrative that identified the Gospel as the final miracle and revelation was dominant in English Protestantism as early as 1600, although the debate over miracles lingered on into at least the mid-eighteenth century. The narrative of a cessation of miracles and prophecy was connected with the idea of a decline from absolute sovereignty to an orderly, rule-governed sovereignty, as reflected in the deist concept of a “watchmaker God” who, having presided over the miracle of creation, withdraws from intervening further. Weber’s ostensibly scientific account of disenchantment reflected his embrace of a particular position in a theological debate concerning how to reconcile God’s absolute and orderly powers. The theological genealogy of Weber’s theory confirms Schmitt’s famous contention, in Political Theology (1922), that under deism the sovereign decision was proscribed together with the miracle. Against this repression of the idea of an antinomian, absolute sovereignty, subsequent chapters aim to recuperate this idea as a theoretical object, through a succession of case studies of moments in the history of religions in which a state of exception has been declared from either the legal or the economic order. Chapter 3 engages with Giorgio Agamben’s argument that sovereignty is disclosed most directly through the ban, which places someone outside or beyond the law. His chief example is the ancient Latin figure of the homo sacer (literally, the “sacred man”), a condemned criminal who, having

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lost all rights, may be killed with impunity. Whereas earlier theorists regarded the homo sacer as an example of the ambivalence of the sacred— of the convergence of the pure and the polluted in a single category— Agamben argues that this figure should be interpreted not as a sacrifice, but as proof that the sovereign power to place someone under the ban is more primordial than the sacred. Juxtaposing another case of the ban, the biblical herem by which ˙ individual victims and entire cities were consecrated to destruction, I contest Agamben’s interpretation of the ban, and his rejection of the idea of the ambivalence of the sacred, while developing his insights to interpret the Exodus and the Conquest of Canaan as moments of sovereign appropriation, where the “outside” and “inside” of the polity— the law-breaking and law-making functions— become indistinguishable. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 accumulate evidence of the inability of so-called rational-choice theories, which maintain that individuals pursue individual economic interest, to account for such non-utilitarian behaviors as sacrifice. Chapter 4 begins the consideration of such behaviors as exceptions to the mundane economic order. Drawing on, among other theories, Georges Bataille’s use of sacrifice as an expression of sovereignty (souveraineté), it is argued that such deviations from utility, which may take the alternative forms of either excessive consumption (festivals, potlatches, and the like) or abstention from the same, often signify the independence from need and labor that links the king to the ascetic. The hierarchy and division of labor in which both the ruler and the mendicant find their place is connected with the rise of storage economies, in which surplus goods allow both wastage as a display of symbolic capital or “conspicuous consumption,” and the support of nonproducing members of the community. Expressions of sovereign independence from the mundane economy tacitly acknowledge this economy as a precondition. Chapter 5 considers the institutions of the Sabbath, Sabbatical, and Jubilee years as radical interruptions of both agricultural labor and the money economy. Against attempts to reduce these institutions to social justice measures, it is argued that they depict something like a return to the state of nature and play a role in the imagination of polity analogous to that played by similar depictions of the state of nature in early modern social-contract theories. The connection of the Sabbatical and Jubilee with sovereignty is reinforced by the ancient precedent for these institutions: the Mesopotamian andurarum or misharum, periodic debt cancellations that were declared by the king, often at the beginning of his reign. These older debt releases were a form of the pardon power, a positive version of the sovereign decision analogous to divine grace. Comparing and contrasting the Jubilee with John Locke’s (supposedly,

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biblically based) utilitarian account of the origins of property, it is suggested that the Jubilee expressed a quite different, antiutilitarian economic ethic. The Jubilee represented the utopian dream of a return to the condition of equality thought to obtain among the Israelites upon the Conquest of Canaan and the division of the land. In opposition to the inequities of the mundane economy, the Jubilee posited a future redemption that was also a return to the status quo ante, and to the foundations of polity. As such, rather than returning us to sacred violence or the absolute power of the king, the Jubilee aimed to restore power to the people themselves. Chapter 6 begins with the Roman or papal Jubilees that commenced in 1300 CE. The Roman Jubilee grew out of the penitential economy of the medieval Catholic Church and depended on innovations in the doctrines of Purgatory and indulgences, or releases from punishment for sin, especially through monetary payments. During the Jubilee, the pope offered plenary indulgence to those pilgrims who visited Rome and performed certain ritual acts. As the economy of indulgences, together with the Roman Jubilees, expanded, it grew increasingly complex and developed a differential price scheme that carefully quantified salvation. It was this rise in indulgences, which attempted to guarantee salvation, to which Martin Luther objected in his Ninety-five Theses. This rereading of the Reformation as a rejection of the idea that salvation can be purchased is then generalized to a second case study, that of ancient India during the Śramana period (ca. 500 BCE). As ˙ many scholars have noted, this period witnessed the rise of wandering renunciants and both Buddhism and Upanisadic Hinduism, which either rejected ˙ or marginalized the performance of sacrifice that had been central to earlier Vedic tradition. What was thereby rejected or marginalized? The idea of sacrifice as a reciprocal gift made salvation a matter of purchase. Marcel Mauss’s thesis that gift exchange is the antidote to the impersonality of the market is not entirely accurate. Sacrifice, rather than exemplifying a rejection of the mundane economic order, can represent a reinforcement of the principle of exchange that underwrites that order. There is even evidence that money may have arisen in the context of temple sacrifice, in Greece and elsewhere. This coincides with the metaphor of sacrifice as the repayment of debt in Vedic texts. When, therefore, the Upanisads articulated the idea of a state of libera˙ tion beyond the principle of exchange and quid pro quo (karma), they were rejecting the reduction of salvation to the mundane economy, in a manner analogous to Luther’s Reformation. A brief Conclusion summarizes the argument of the book. It brings us full circle, from Schmitt’s dictator and Agamben’s homo sacer to more hopeful models of polity, such as the Jubilee, that suggest a return of power to the

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introduction

people; and finally to the alternative of complete exit from society that is represented by the individual ascetic. Declarations of a state of exception contribute to ethical life by offering release from the legal or economic system. What we call “religion” or the “sacred” encompasses the dynamic interplay between a normative order and the drive to go beyond this order, either to escape or to legitimate it.

1

The Antinomian Sacred as a Political Category: Toward a Theory of Religion as Sovereignty The affinities between sacredness and state of exception are of more than historical interest, insofar as they provide a further proof of the intimate connections between the realms of religion and politics, a connection in which, as we shall see, the agency of the ruler plays a crucial role. . . . Ultimately, then, what accounts for the appearance of metaphors involving sovereign decisions is the attempt to explore the nature of human agency, an exploration which requires positing agency at its most naked— gods and rulers being the personifications of this extreme form of agency. g u s t a v o b e n a v i d e s , “Holiness, State of Exception, Agency” (2004), 64, 66

A number of earlier scholars have pointed out the convergence between the central categories of religion and politics: respectively, the sacred and sovereignty. The jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, who during the chaos of Weimar Germany argued for a strong leader and later served Hitler’s Third Reich, identified an analogy between the sovereign “decision,” which is necessary both to declare and to suspend the law, and the miracle, which interrupts natural law.1 Both constitute moments of revelation or fiat. The model for sovereignty is an all-powerful God, who created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo).2 The evidence for the existence of sovereignty parallels the traditional mode of evidencing the existence of the deity. Both the exception and the miracle interrupt the continuity of routine and, by doing so, simultaneously demonstrate their supervening, transcendent actuality. Sovereignty is manifested through a violation or suspension of the rule or norm, and appears as antinomian— lawless or against the law— even when displayed in the creating and commanding of new norms. Schmitt focused attention on moments of rupture or breakdown in the legal order, such as those which attend a state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand, literally “state of exception”), which in his view only highlighted the dependence of even the routine legal order on a sovereign decision that was comparable to the Fiat lux! (Let there be light!) of Genesis. As the theologians who framed the doctrine of creation ex nihilo had understood, if it were allowed that anything had coexisted with (much less preexisted) the deity, then God’s eternity and sole responsibility for creation would be called into question.3 Temporal priority and ontological singularity were attributes of sovereign authority.

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chapter 1

Emphasizing the “irrational” aspects of religion, the German theologian Rudolf Otto, who was one of the leading scholars of comparative religion in the last century and a near contemporary of Schmitt’s, argued that “the numinous” (das Numinose)— a term he coined to distinguish “‘the holy’ minus its moral factor”)4— is a terrifying and attractive mystery (mysterium tremendum et fascinans) that is experienced as something “wholly other” (ganz Anderes) than the ordinary or routine.5 To justify this thesis, Otto cited episodes from the Hebrew Bible in which God appears to act outside the bounds of any humanly conceivable set of ethical norms— such as when he commands the slaughter of innocents, as in the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), or attacks his chosen servant Moses without apparent provocation (Exod. 4: 24).6 Otto reminded us of God’s “wrath,” which is “incalculable” and “arbitrary.”7 He connected the numinous directly with Martin Luther’s insistence on a sovereign, omnipotent deity, the God of predestination whose cause was championed by Duns Scotus and other nominalists before being taken up in Luther’s The Bondage of the Will then supposedly “expunged” from later Lutheranism.8 Otto acknowledged the ethically problematic nature of such a deity: Theology gives expression to its perplexed endeavour to find a name for the elements of the non-rational and the mysterious in the repulsive doctrine that God is exlex [recte: ex lege] (outside the law), that good is good because God wills it, instead of that God wills it because it is good, a doctrine that results in attributing to God an absolutely fortuitous will, which would in fact turn Him into a “capricious despot.”9

Together with miracles, morally problematic commands, such as that in Genesis 22, constituted the traditional evidence for God’s omnipotence. They prompted the “divine command theory” of morality—“that good is good because God wills it.”10 Despite Otto’s disavowal of this theory as “repulsive,” his own representation of the numinous highlighted the diremption between holiness and ethics. The numinous precedes even the basic moral distinction between good and evil and in its most primitive or pure form cannot be distinguished from the demonic.11 This raised again the great question of the ambivalent nature of the sacred as, potentially, simultaneously holy and accursed, or pure and polluted, a thesis that has inspired debate at least since William Robertson Smith in the late nineteenth century, as described in chapter 3 below. According to Heinrich Meier, Schmitt embraced divine command theory: “Tertullian’s guiding principle We are obliged to something not because it is good but because God commands it accompanies Schmitt through all the turns and vicissitudes of his long life.”12 Whereas the miracle illustrated God’s

the antinomian sacred as a political category

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ability to suspend natural law, divine command illustrated his ability to suspend the moral law. Accordingly, Schmitt identified the original political decision as beyond both good and evil, locating it instead in the designation of the “enemy,”13 a designation that cannot be constrained by legal norms. The political domain is prior to all ethical relationships that would flow from the presence or absence of hostility, which can be determined only by the sovereign. In segregating the foundational categories of their respective disciplines, politics and religion, each thinker was partly following the practice of German scholarship of the time, which insisted on a rigorous demarcation of the field or object of study. In Otto’s case, at least, this effort was influenced by Immanuel Kant’s attempt to isolate the categories of experience, an attempt continued by such neo-Kantian philosophers as Jakob Friedrich Fries.14 Otto regarded religious experience as fundamentally different from other types of experience. He labeled the holy an “a priori category.”15 The motive for both Otto and Schmitt was to defend a definition of the subject in question— either of religion or of politics— in terms that were not reducible to another category, such as the True (the goal of logic), the Good (the goal of ethics), or the Beautiful (the goal of aesthetics); for if this were not achieved, then perhaps it could be said that the holy was just the good, or that the end of politics was to achieve the good, and then the study of religion or of politics would become indistinguishable from that of ethics. Arriving at a similar conclusion, although in much more libertine fashion, the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897– 1962) located the sacred— a quality he later termed “sovereignty” (souveraineté)— in moments of violence, eroticism, or excretion, in behaviors marked by excess, exuberance, consumption, or waste, when the body may be penetrated or, conversely, exude outside its boundaries and either perpetrate or experience a transgression that is simultaneously moral and physical. After reciting a long list of tabooed phenomena, he declared that each was “treated as a foreign body (das ganz Anderes),” thus deliberately drawing the parallel to Otto’s holy.16 Such displays of the sacred frequently violate the utilitarian economic order and signal, through this violation, an independence from material need. For Bataille, sacrifice, which often involves the destruction of an object and therefore of its use value, was the clearest example of such sovereignty.17 Steven Wasserstrom noted the resemblance between Schmitt’s “exception,” Otto’s “numinous,” Bataille’s “sovereignty,” and Mircea Eliade’s “sacred,” each of which entailed the rupture of ordinary, profane life.18 Wasserstrom argued for an elective affinity between such ideas, on the one hand, and reactionary and fascist political tendencies, on the other.19 He labeled

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such concepts as “antinomian” and “Gnostic,”20 using the latter term metaphorically to denote the belief that the sacred is lawless, and that legal norms, including those of Judaism (a traditional target of Gnosticism), should be rejected. Gustavo Benavides has contended similarly that there are “affinities between sacredness and state of exception,” in particular between Otto and Schmitt, that signal their common heritage in Romanticism.21 In a review of Wasserstrom’s book, Benavides argued that “the context of Eliade’s hierophanies is to be sought” in “the Decisionism of [Ernst] Jünger, Schmitt, and [Martin] Heidegger,”22 each of whom participated in the ideological reinforcement of the fascist regime, through the glorification of irrationality or violence.23 Benavides argued that the category of the sacred as understood by Otto and Eliade could serve the same politically unpalatable goal. The parallels between Schmitt and Bataille have been noted separately by others, including Martin Jay, who identified convergences between these two thinkers as members of the counter-Enlightenment who drew on Romantic and older religious ideas in their reactions against liberal legalism and bourgeois capitalism.24 As this brief review suggests, the general tendency in the scholarly literature has been to account for such philosophical affinities in terms of the immediate historical circumstances of Weimar Germany or, more broadly, interwar Europe. In support of this approach, some scholars have advanced evidence, where such exists, for the participation of particular figures, such as Eliade, in reactionary groups or activities.25 In other cases, personal connections—guilt by association, or what we might call “Six Degrees of Separation from Carl Schmitt” (or even the reductio ad Hitleram)— have been used to establish a chain of circumstantial evidence that allows for the explanation of these views in political or ideological terms. However, this does not help us much to understand Otto, as there is little evidence of any personal or public commitments on his part that might with any justice be characterized as “fascist.”26 Without disputing the contribution made by such biographical approaches to our understanding of the ideas of the thinkers in question, it appears that such critiques have failed both to take into account the longue durée history to which Schmitt’s and Otto’s ideas of an absolutely sovereign deity sought to respond, and to argue for a coherent position on the thesis of whether or not, anthropologically speaking, there is evidence for a convergence between sovereignty and the sacred precisely in their exceptionality. To this extent, these critiques are incomplete or even misleading. No claim of Otto’s has been more misunderstood, perhaps even to some extent by its author, than the claim that the “numinous” is sui generis, namely, is in a category by itself and therefore not reducible to something

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else. It is true that, in making this claim, Otto was trying to preserve subjective religious experiences, and the discipline of theology, from outside criticism. However, it is not the case that only Otto has represented the holy as sui generis, nor that only Schmitt has regarded sovereignty as exceptional: many traditions, including some reflected in the Hebrew Bible, have done so as well. Reexamining this convergence around the idea of singularity may provide a point of entry to a sociological definition of the sacred. Precisely in the claim to sui generis status, the sacred becomes comprehensible as a mode of sovereignty. My interest is in exploring the analogy between these two categories, and not in maintaining Otto’s designation of the holy as something inherently incomparable. Such earlier emphases on the irrational, and exceptional, aspects of religion have been eclipsed within the study of religion itself, especially since the publication of Mary Douglas’s groundbreaking work, Purity and Danger, more than half a century ago now.27 Douglas made the sacred primarily a question of order, of putting everything in its proper place. Yet, as I argue in chapter 3, there are reasons to think that the older idea of the ambivalence of the sacred might be due for reconsideration.28 And the challenge to our understanding posed by the history of religions remains. What we call “religion” includes not only those institutions that are part of and that reinforce the social order, but also individual and collective acts that protest, dissent from, attack, or dissolve and remake that order. Indeed, the history of religions could be written in terms of such acts of transgression: the starving Buddha, crucified Christ, paralyzed Socrates (possessed by his daimon); Tantric libertines, orgiastic rites, Bacchantes, the self-mutilated devotees of Cybele; various movements of iconoclasm (Egyptian (Akhenaton), Jewish, Islamic, Byzantine, Protestant); Carnival and other moments of social license when the hierarchy is temporarily inverted or abolished; and a host of millennial and apocalyptic movements. Many of these individual phenomena—particularly, in the wake of September 11, 2001, instances of religious violence— have received a great deal of attention, and some incisive critique. Yet, with some notable exceptions, they have rarely been the focus of a general theory of religion. These phenomena are scarcely marginal to religion. The future Buddha Siddhartha Gautama’s departure from his father’s palace and exit from family life was already a form of leaving, a sign of exit that foreshadowed the further departures of nirvāna and parinirvāna (final release at death). No deeper ˙ ˙ rejection of society, its conventions and ritual rules, even the most basic institution of the family itself, can be imagined. The very title of the Buddha as “Tathāgata”— the “thus departed one”29— emphasizes, with a spatial

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metaphor, the centrality of transcendence to the Buddhist dharma. Similarly, Christ’s sojourn in the desert and final act of self-sacrifice, which was interpreted by some Christians as a moment of abrogation of the Jewish ceremonial law— an event simultaneously creative and destructive— invoked several modes of departure. That each of these paths required, finally, the abandonment of embodiment shows the potential incompatibility of transcendence with any living system whatsoever. This reinforces the fact that religion— as transcendence— can scarcely be about “existence” or “thinghood.” It would be truer to call it an act of pure negation. No theory that purports to explain religion, yet leaves out of account such phenomena, is worth very much. It ignores what cannot easily be explained, out of convenience or perhaps fear. The view, now commonly held by many scholars, that religion doesn’t exist— that there is “no thing” described by this category— is at once technically correct, and premised on a category error.30 Religion— or, rather, those aspects of religion with which I am concerned in the present study— is not a thing, of the sort that may exist or not exist. It is, instead, a function, namely the function of transcendence within a total social order.31 Transcendence assumes reality only in relation to some system, structure, or institution, which is the object of transcendence. Transcendence is only nominally a noun— it is a verbal noun— a verb made into a noun, and must carry an object which is that-which-is-to-be-transcended. This is why transcendence may be approached only in terms of a systems theory, as part of a holistic or integrative approach that bears some resemblance to structuralism and other modes of semiotic analysis. Indeed, transcendence is figurative: always virtual, never actual. If this definition is thought to exclude those systems called “religions” that are without a notion of transcendence— if such could be shown to exist— then so be it. I will stipulate that I am not concerned with such systems. Viewed from this perspective, what we have been calling “religion”— a term for which, as described below, I would prefer to substitute the phrase “spiritual economy”— often constitutes a series of exit signs from a condition that is regarded as limited, alienating, unjust, illegitimate, intolerable, or simply boring. Transcendence resists theorizing. This is, in part, because it is difficult to define something so unstable, amorphous, or protean. However, there are other, deeper reasons for the modern neglect of transcendence, even by scholars of religion. Properly understood, modernity is obsessed with transcendence—with managing it, controlling it, affirming it in certain forms, and utterly excluding it in others. This is because, when it is a question of transcendence, vital questions are at stake: questions of sovereignty and individual autonomy. The widely accepted idea of Max Weber’s that charisma

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now has been replaced mainly by legal and bureaucratic regulation concerns precisely the management of transcendence. Similarly, the belief that the Enlightenment overcame superstition, and that secularism replaced religion, are European stories of self-transcendence, stories that (as described in chapter 2 below) have clear antecedents in Christian supersessionism, or the idea that the Gospel replaced the Mosaic law. Such narratives are also about sovereignty: not only because “charisma” is a synonym for this quality, nor only because the Enlightenment represented (according to Immanuel Kant) the triumph of individual autonomy over heteronomous authority, but also because, as Kathleen Davis has argued recently, such tales of new beginnings, like the biblical creation ex nihilo, are assertions of sovereign independence.32 There are some encouraging signs that the contemporary study of religion is beginning again to think of religion in such terms. One such sign is Thomas Tweed’s definition of religions as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.”33 There are, admittedly, several problems with this definition. Its very comprehensiveness— specifically, its effort to acknowledge the contradictory elements that may combine under the category of religion by collating such alternatives as “joy/suffering”— empties it of specificity. Yet the notion that religion is about “crossing” as well as “dwelling”— as Tweed emphasizes in the title of his book— is an important step forward. Religious agents not only create a stable habitation, or what we call a cosmos, but they also may pass beyond established boundaries. These two, complementary moves are found already in the Hebrew Bible, in the stories of the Exodus (crossing) and the Conquest of Canaan (dwelling). Indeed, to the extent that we recognize that both of these moments are necessary, we have already grasped that religion must be approached in terms of a systems theory. Mark C. Taylor has argued for this much more explicitly. He traced the current crisis in the study of religion directly to nominalism, which recognizes “only different religions” and “no such thing as religion as such.”34 To correct this error, Taylor offered the following definition: Religion is an emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths, and rituals that, on the one hand, figure schemata of feeling, thinking, and acting in ways that lend life meaning and purpose and, on the other, disrupt, dislocate, and disfigure every stabilizing structure. It is important to emphasize at the outset that this definition of religion identifies two interrelated moments: one that structures and stabilizes and one that destructures and destabilizes. These two moments are inseparable and alternate in a kind of quasi-dialectical rhythm.35

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Taylor developed the analogy between this concept of religion and Hegelian dialectics, biological symbiosis, and other complex systems. Although these remain analogies, it is clear that, for Taylor, what I am calling a systemstheoretical approach is necessary to overcome the twinned sins of essentialism and nominalism, and to capture a more valid and comprehensive concept of religion.36 Despite their other merits, two recent attempts to offer a sociological theory of religion both fall short due to their failure to accommodate the transcendent, disruptive, or irrational aspects of religion. Martin Riesebrodt’s argument that religion is designed primarily to achieve certain goods, up to and including the final beatitude of salvation, is persuasive on the whole. He qualified his own view that “Religions are less about ‘the holy’ than about blessings, salvation, and protection from misfortune” by acknowledging that “All virtuosos seek to approach the ‘holy’ or even to merge with it, the ‘holy’ being characterized as something eternal, uncreated, immutable, undifferentiated, unified, or atemporal.”37 In other words, religious virtuosi seek not merely various practical goods and comfort, but the transcendent. Riesebrodt had the integrity and rigor to grapple with what is arguably the greatest difficulty for his theory: How may we reconcile the idea that religion is about the pursuit of goods, or even “the Good,” with the vast range of cases in which religious virtuosi especially appear to pursue the opposite, or “to court misfortune”: “They seek poverty and dirt, pain and privation, homelessness and loneliness, humiliation and social contempt, sexual abstinence and sleep deprivation, malnourishment and self-denial. This would seem to contradict my thesis.”38 Yet after reading his careful catalogue of such examples, we are left in doubt as to how this contradiction might be resolved, at least on Riesebrodt’s terms. It is true by definition that whatever human beings pursue must be a “good” in some sense, even if this good is subjective or mistaken. However, the invocation of a tautology does not constitute an explanation. There are problems also with Riesebrodt’s history of religion. Assuming that such unusual behaviors may be accounted for in anthropological or psychological terms, why is it that they have arguably declined under modernization? Despite Riesebrodt’s confidence that we may simply take up and apply Weber’s sociology more rigorously in order to produce an adequate theory of religion,39 this is highly problematic because, as detailed in chapter 2 below, many of Weber’s leading ideas, including those of disenchantment and the routinization of charisma, reflected the influence of Christian and especially Protestant theology. These are not theories that explain transcendence, but stories about transcendence (and its foreclosure) that themselves require an accounting.

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The second such effort was that of Robert Bellah, who presented a sweeping panorama of the history of religions extending from before the dawn of recorded history through the rise of several urban civilizations and major religious traditions. The most original, and most speculative, portion of the book was not Bellah’s summaries of these later civilizations, but his theory of the emergence of religion in prehistory.40 He focused on ritual as the key to religion,41 and suggested both that ritual is a mode of play, and that this play has an adaptive or evolutionary function. Bellah referred to the phenomenon of neoteny, or the retention in some animals, including humans, of juvenile physical characteristics into adulthood. He proposed an analogy between such physiological phenomena and play, a behavior that is often dismissed as childish, but that bears resemblance to quite serious adult behaviors, notably religious ritual, which arguably continues the function of play. The fact that biological neoteny in some cases appears to provide an adaptational advantage may also carry over to what we might call the “cultural neoteny” of ritual-as-play. Bellah noted further that play is key to social coordination among animals, and may serve the goal of promoting solidarity, which is clearly adaptive.42 Broadly speaking, then, his approach was neo-Durkheimian. So much is, I hope, a fair summary of this portion of Bellah’s argument, an argument that depended on a fair amount of speculation and an analogy between the biological and cultural domains. It is evident already that Bellah’s approach is open to the same challenge as Riesebrodt’s: the challenge of how to account for the apparently maladaptive cases, which include not merely play but also wastage, idleness, and violent exertions, none of which can be described adequately as children’s games.43 Bellah’s choice of “play” as the rubric under which to place religious ritual avoids this challenge, rather than confronting it. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the present book advance an alternative explanation for the irrational and uneconomical aspects of religion, as expressions of sovereignty. This alternative contradicts both Riesebrodt’s view that such phenomena can be reduced to a quest for goods, and Bellah’s view that they may be interpreted as adaptive, both of which views, as we have seen, lead to the same impasse. Neither have the evolutionary theorists and the rational-choice theorists who have attempted to account for the apparently maladaptive or economically irrational behaviors more commonly found in religion than in other domains of culture provided a satisfactory resolution of this problem. That these behaviors appear irrational does not make them inexplicable. However, an adequate explanation requires a different anthropology, one that includes a concept of agency, will, or mastery as a good that may be pursued for its own sake.

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This book theorizes such ideas and behaviors as expressions of sovereignty. It draws an analogy between sovereignty and the sacred, the central categories of politics and religion respectively, based on their shared qualities of rupture, singularity, and antinomianism. Some earlier historians of religion, such as Otto, attributed these qualities to the sacred. The innovation of this book is to connect these older traditions with newer currents in the field of political theology, which have highlighted the same qualities as distinctive of the sovereign. The same dynamic tension between structure and anti-structure that, according to scholars such as Victor Turner and Mark C. Taylor, is distinctive of religion, is also distinctive of the relationship between legality and sovereignty. Perhaps two things that are both so different from everything else--namely, sovereignty and the sacred--could turn out to be the same as each other? According to many older Christian theories, the king was simultaneously beneath and above the law. In his latter capacity, the king was a lex loquens, a living (literally, speaking) law unto himself, who could at any time annul or replace the existing order through an act of will. The contemporary form of this idea has achieved notoriety through Schmitt’s concept of the state of exception, in which the sovereign assumes direct authority by suspending ordinary laws, including civil rights. Schmitt interpreted the decision to declare a state of exception as revealing the true nature of sovereignty, the manner in which it exceeds any legal order. Such a decision is never reducible to purely legal considerations, in which case it would become simply another part of the normative order and could be prescribed in advance; rather it demonstrates that sovereignty itself transcends law and can institute a break, a true novum. The antinomianism that is associated with the sovereign is ambivalent, not merely because it can lead to either the founding or the overthrow of polity— to constitution or revolution (or both)— but also because of what such antinomianism suggests about the nature of sovereignty. The chaos and violence that attend such states of exception are not merely, as positivists would have it, the natural result of either anarchy or an unregulated dictatorship. They are instead expressions of the singularity of the sovereign, of the manner in which she or he transcends and potentially transgresses any regular order. Paradoxical formulations of the nature of sovereignty— for example, the medieval idea that the king has “two bodies,” an immortal and incorruptible one in addition to the natural one44— now appear to formulate a general and possibly ineradicable tension in the relationship between sovereignty and law. Whether expressed through such paired opposites as potentia dei abso-

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luta versus potentia ordinata, auctoritas versus potestas, constituting versus constituted power, legitimacy versus legality, justice versus law, etc., this tension has a long pedigree and an obvious contemporary application. If legality represents a static, existing order, then sovereignty is the force that founds and supports this order, remaining in reserve until again deployed to break and remake that order. Understood in this way, sovereignty is an ambivalent power, one that is as liable to destroy as to create. The many myths of founding violence involving the sovereign allude to this ambivalence and to the connection of the sovereign with sacrifice. From a sociological perspective, an approach to religion as sovereignty focuses on the great questions of how to maintain a stable social order, or how to overthrow an unjust order. It is in connection with such questions that the effort to analyze systematically the political dynamics of religion has been carried out.45 The ritual outbursts of Carnival have been interpreted as breaches in the polity that call for a return to primal sovereignty, either of the dictator or of the demos.46 The various antinomian gestures characteristic of much of what we call “religion” reflect a similar ambivalence with respect to the social order. Even ascetic behaviors can be interpreted as assertions of independence, indeed of sovereignty. Both Christ and the Buddha, while standing outside their respective societies, were identified as special kinds of kings. The analogy between sovereignty and the sacred depends, paradoxically, on their shared sui generis status, the manner in which each is defined in negative terms— as excessive, disruptive, antinomian, transgressive, or ex lege— or as ambivalent, because straddling the boundary of order and disorder, in the manner of Hobbes’s famous image of the Leviathan. This convergence may be merely the logical result of the endeavor to depict extreme forms of agency, of the kind possessed by gods, kings, and holy men. As Gustavo Benavides observes: “Religions must be understood as being generated by the intersection of constraints of various kinds— ecological, evolutionary, cognitive— and, in the context of a theory based on the interplay of extremes, as attempts to master or to leave behind those constraints.”47 Benavides suggests that the purpose of representations of religion as a state of exception is to reflect on, and to reinforce, a sovereignty or agency that is necessarily all too human.48 He has extended these observations to the economic domain, where asceticism, sacrifice, and other ritual modes of consumption may signify status within the economy, or pose the claim of transcendence of labor and material need.49 Various costly displays become so many signs of willpower or, in Nietzsche’s words, of a “will to power.” In this context, it is worth noting that the Polynesian word mana, which was earlier appropriated by scholars to describe

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the (impersonal) sacred, was originally translated as “command, authority, power.”50 In keeping with such an orientation, this book attempts to demonstrate, through a series of case studies, that there is a convergence between the sacred and sovereignty as states of exception. Much of what we call the “sacred” is characterized by either a deviation from or rupture in the legal order or a violation of the principles of utility and exchange that govern the mundane economy, which in either case is designed to manifest a sovereign independence or authority. Such institutions in the Hebrew Bible as miracles, sacrifices, the herem (the ban, or the devotion to destruction of individuals or entire cities ˙ such as Jericho), and the Sabbatical and Jubilee years will be used, together with examples drawn from other traditions, to illustrate this definition. This is not, therefore, primarily a work of exegesis, but an attempt to apply the concept of the state of exception and related ideas to redescribe the history of religions as a series of expressions of sovereignty. Framed in this way, this explanatory project lies at the intersection of the humanities with sociology, anthropology, and psychology; it has nothing to do with defending the prerogatives of any orthodoxy, theological or otherwise. Only the presuppositions of a narrow, mechanistic, and reductionist anthropology must be abandoned before entering into such an inquiry. Indeed, far from preserving the definition of religion as sui generis, my intention is to reinterpret representations of the singular nature of the sacred as evidence of the convergence of this category with sovereignty. It is left to the reader to decide whether, ultimately, this convergence extends to an identity between religion and politics. Certainly there would be precedent for such a conclusion.51 Apart from the fact that, in the Hebrew Bible, titles for God and gods are often derived from those for royalty— Adonai, Baal, Molech— terms of sovereignty have long been extended metaphorically to religious authorities. Such was the case when Pope Gelasius I in 494 CE borrowed the Roman republican idea of a separation between auctoritas (the indirect authority of the senate) and potestas (the direct power of the magistrate) to describe the relationship between pope and emperor. Explicitly rejecting such ideas more than a millennium later, Thomas Hobbes argued that both civil and ecclesiastical powers should be incorporated in the single body of the sovereign: “‘Temporal’ and ‘spiritual’ government are but two words brought into the world to make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign.”52 A modern Hobbesian may conclude that what we call “religion” is just politics under another name. However, he or she would then have to explain why we so often, being discontented with ordinary politics, seek a higher vantage point from which to criticize society.

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Containing the Violent Origins of Polity The exceptional or antinomian nature of sovereignty is often reflected in acts of violence, especially those that take place at the founding of a new order. Whether in the form of sacrifice, the overcoming of a hostile force, or the ban or proscription, which suspends the law by placing an individual outside of the sheltering embrace of the social order and its norms, sovereignty, in many of its most familiar forms, is founded on blood and terror. Robert Filmer, in one of the last robust defenses of divine right in the seventeenth century, held that the king inherited absolute power from Adam as first patriarch. Filmer assimilated Adam to the Roman paterfamilias, who supposedly possessed plenary sovereignty over his household, as exemplified by his power of life and death over his own children, which he exercised like gods such as Kronos or Saturn.53 Schmitt, on the other hand, insisted that the primary political decision is the identification of one’s “enemy” (hostis).54 Giorgio Agamben’s focus on the ancient Latin figure of the homo sacer (literally, the “sacred man”), a criminal who was subjected to a form of the ban as punishment, likely borrowed from Schmitt’s reference to “the hostis declaration in Roman public law,” which could lead to “ostracism, expulsion, proscription, or outlawry.”55 One of Schmitt’s inspirations, the French counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre, authored a still-useful short treatise on the origins and significance of sacrifice in which, among other things, he noted the use of the enemy (hostis) as sacrificial victim in many early cultures.56 Elsewhere in the St.  Petersburg Dialogues, his brief account of the importance of the executioner in maintaining social order reinforced the dependence of authority on violence, in a manner that anticipated Schmitt’s exception. De Maistre called the executioner “an extraordinary being, and for him to be brought into existence as a member of the human family a particular decree was required, a FIAT of creative power. He is created as a law on to [sic] himself.”57 In his later work, Schmitt focused on a different form of the state of exception, the extralegal act of appropriation that founds a nomos or legal order. He used the example of the biblical Conquest of Canaan, which involved the extermination of the native inhabitants of the Promised Land.58 The Conquest represented one application of the herem, a form of the ban that carried sacrificial ˙ connotations.59 Such institutions as sacrifice imply a close connection between the political and the religious domains. Sacrifice may be not only, as Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss argued, the point of intersection between the human and the divine, but also the site for the constitution of the durable bonds that underlie the social order.60 Sacrifice, from this perspective, refers ambiguously both

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to the generalized violence that obtains in the state of nature, and to the ending of such anarchy by granting a monopoly on violence to a commanding sovereign, whose power extends to the taking of human life. The sovereign both enforces and straddles the boundary between chaos and order and embodies a threat that may be only temporarily or provisionally contained. The power of life and death was a traditional prerogative of the king, justified by his divine right or analogy to God, as can be observed in the following speech by James I to the English Parliament in 1609: “Kings are justly called Gods, for they exercise a manner or resemblance of Divine power upon earth: For if you will consider the Attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a King. God hath power to create, or destroy, make, or unmake at his pleasure, to give life, to send death, to judge all, and to be judged not accomptable to none.”61 Later in the same speech, James tempered the idea of sovereign violence by invoking God’s promise to Noah that the Flood would not be repeated, as an illustration of the sovereign’s power to bind himself through a covenant.62 Once, there were such terrible events; now, due to an agreement between humans and God, the violence has ceased, and remains only as a distant memory— and perhaps also as a warning. In the Noah story, the original source of this violence is not God’s wrath; rather, Genesis 6 represents this as a reaction to the condition of lawlessness that prevailed upon the earth at that time: “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt. . . . And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them” (Gen. 6:11– 13).63 The answer to human violence is divine violence, which is nearly all-consuming. The rain lasts for forty days and nights, a number that— as in the case of the Israelites’ forty years of wandering before reaching the Promised Land, or of Moses’s forty days on Mount Sinai, where the law was revealed accompanied by miracles—represents a kind of interregnum and what we should, following Victor Turner, recognize as a liminal period.64 Only after the water has receded does God, in consideration of an agreement with Noah, promise never again to send a flood to destroy all life (Gen. 9:11, 15): “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). James quoted this promise in an effort to reconcile God’s dependability with his absolute sovereignty, the latter being represented both by the Flood itself and by the fact that God had, of his own volition, agreed to behave himself in the future. There was further consideration for God’s promise. Noah made burnt offerings of a portion of all of the clean (sacrificeable) animals (Gen. 8:20),65

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which sacrifice, combined with the anarchic violence that prevailed before the Flood and the deluge itself, represented a third moment of violence in this account of one of several covenants (berith) between God and human beings. In contradistinction to the previous two moments of violence, however, Noah’s sacrifice, like others in the Hebrew Bible, was orderly and rulegoverned— a metonym for the containment of violence itself by means of the now-binding agreement. This is scarcely the only narrative of violent origins in biblical traditions, of course. The Binding of Isaac (akedah) in Genesis 22 is another such. This perennially troubling case that has inspired so much commentary, including a number of books just in the past twenty years or so,66 served as an inspiration for Søren Kierkegaard’s meditations on the necessity for a leap of faith, even when this takes us beyond morality,67 which served in turn as a precedent for Schmitt’s insistence on the sovereign decision.68 That God could issue such a terrifying command, obedience to which was not merely obligatory but also exemplary for later Abrahamic traditions, provided a key proof of divine command theories in medieval Scholasticism, which insisted that God’s sovereignty exceeded all normal, human conceptions of morality. In the seventeenth century John Wilson cited this episode, together with that of Judah’s command that Tamar be made a burnt offering (Gen. 38:24) and Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter (Judg. 11), as evidence for the patriarch’s power of life and death.69 Max Weber later identified the Israelite “judges” (shofetim), or temporary war chieftains like Jephthah, as examples of charismatic figures.70 In the Binding of Isaac, the last-minute substitution of a ram for the original intended victim reinforced the implication that God was bloodthirsty, while also permitting the inference that human sacrifice itself had been replaced or domesticated. Sacrificial violence continued but was circumscribed and channeled in an ethical direction. The ambivalence of this supposed refusal of violence is underscored by the tradition of Jewish interpretation that claims Isaac was either wounded or actually sacrificed,71 which, as Yvonne Sherwood has noted, extends “the biblical paradox whereby sacrifice is both suspended and rewarded.”72 The memory of this episode, as with that of the Flood, expresses a certain ambiguity in the character of the deity, an ambiguity that, as we see from repeated cases, appears necessary in order to preserve the notion of the deity’s sovereignty. Following this episode, Genesis 22:15 – 18 presents God’s promise of prosperity to Abraham and his descendants, reinforcing an earlier promise in Genesis 15 that, like this one, is made in consideration of a sacrifice. Some other traditions also trace their origins to such a moment.73 For

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Hinduism, there is Rig Veda 10.90, the Hymn to Primal Man (Purusa Sūkta), ˙ which describes the creation of the cosmos through the sacrifice and dismemberment of a divinity known only as “Man.” Only sacrifice, it seems, is capable of conjuring something out of nothing.74 Apart from its connections with a broader Indo-European myth,75 this episode is of further interest for our theme inasmuch as it describes the creation of the different castes or levels of the social order, which emanate directly from different limbs of the cosmic giant, the Brahmins or priests emerging from the head or mouth of this being. The Hymn to Primal Man underscores the attractiveness of the theme of the creation of order from (controlled) violence in a cultural context quite different from that of the Hebrew Bible. Although in this Hindu myth there is no question of a covenant per se, it does contain an account of how the existing division of society, being founded on sacrifice, is divine and eternal. One wonders what to make of all these representations of human sacrifices.76 In a series of publications, including most famously Violence and the Sacred, René Girard argued that many stories of a founding sacrifice recorded real occurrences, which served in an earlier age to contain what would otherwise have become a pandemic of reciprocal violence by focusing such aggression on a chosen scapegoat.77 While acknowledging that some depictions of sacrifice may indeed have reflected actual practice, my argument is concerned instead with the role that narrative representations of violence, which include but are not limited to sacrifice, much less to the particular type of the scapegoat, often play in the constitution of order, or in the imagination of polity. Arguably, at least according to the charter myth of sovereignty, the cornerstones of the city must be soaked in blood when they are laid— as was the case with ancient Rome, where Romulus killed his twin, Remus, for overstepping the foundations of the new city.78 In opposition to such stories of the necessity of a primal act of violence that founds the normative order, modern liberal political philosophies have usually represented the system of laws as self-grounding, or dependent only on popular consent. Social-contract theories, such as Hobbes’s, that begin with an often violent state of nature do generally embrace the notion that a strong sovereign is necessary. Max Weber’s well-known definition of the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” is nowadays commonly interpreted to imply only that this exclusive power is required to prevent a return to the condition of general or anarchic violence.79 The constitution itself, supposedly, requires no reference to sacrifice. In the view of the American political philosopher John Rawls, justice requires that we frame the rules of polity without respect to knowledge of our personal attributes and

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outcomes under these rules, as if from behind a “veil of ignorance.” (This extends the metaphorical image of a blindfolded woman who holds the scales of justice.) The individual behind the veil is not a potentially wrathful deity, but the reasonable person of Enlightenment legal and economic theory. As detailed in the next chapter, part of the modern constitutional order was founded precisely on the exclusion of the different, arguably more authoritatively biblical idea of a God whose sovereignty was inextricably linked to sacrifice. Even while opposing such a deity, deists such as Thomas Morgan recognized the close connection between sovereignty and sacrifice: To bring any Act of Obedience under the proper Notion of Sacrifice, something must be resign’d and given up at the Command of God that was dear and valuable to the Owner, Possessor, or Enjoyer of it, and which he would not have parted with, but in Obedience to the Will of God, as an Acknowledgment of his supream Authority, and absolute Right of Commanding.80

While acknowledging that such episodes as the Flood or the Binding of Isaac expressed an absolute sovereignty, and for the very reason that they did so, many deists insisted on replacing a wrathful God with one who never deviated from natural and moral law. Morgan assembled all of the evidence from the Hebrew Bible— including the Binding of Isaac, the dedication of the first-born males to Yahweh, and the case of Jephthah’s daughter— that supported the notion that the ancient Israelites practiced human sacrifice in condemning the idea “that God may command the most unfit or unrighteous Things in the World by mere arbitrary Will and Pleasure.”81 According to the common deist reading, not only were sacrifices no longer required (as orthodox Christianity had maintained ever since the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews), but they were never effective to begin with. Even Christ’s death on the Cross was, Matthew Tindal said, merely exemplary of his adherence to the moral law, and not a sacrifice, nor in itself the cause of our salvation.82 Similarly, the Gospel was only a “republication” of the religion of nature, and neither an exceptional nor a miraculous event. This contract did not have to be written in blood. Echoing earlier deist polemics against the arbitrary, sovereign God of the Hebrew Bible, Immanuel Kant dismissed the idea that the command to sacrifice Isaac was an authentic revelation.83 Abraham should have known better. Now we are to follow the light of our own reason. The modern demotion of sacrifice may have begun with Martin Luther’s insistence that the Mass was not itself a sacrifice, and that the Eucharist began when congregants shared food and drink in church.84 It is no coincidence that the leading Protestant theorists of sacrifice in the later nineteenth century, Julius Wellhausen and William Robertson Smith, both reinterpreted

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sacrifice as originating in a spontaneous, communal celebration, centering on a feast.85 The shift of emphasis from the command that issues in an act of violence to the communal dimensions of sacrificial exchange represented a further domestication of sacrifice. We might call this a movement from sovereignty to solidarity— one that paralleled, to a certain extent, Henry Maine’s account of the evolution from status to contract.86 Maine illustrated “status” by the figure of the Roman paterfamilias, the patriarch who possessed plenary sovereignty over his household, as exemplified by his power of life and death over his own children. Such violent and arbitrary authority had now been replaced by voluntary agreements. The parallel can be reinforced: one of the theorists in this Protestant tradition of interpreting sacrifice, Arthur Sykes, in the mid-eighteenth century argued that such events were “federal rites,” meals that accompanied and consummated contracts or treaties.87 Robertson Smith’s later version of the idea that sacrificial meals promote solidarity influenced Émile Durkheim’s theory of the function of religion as a force for social cohesion. Divine command gave way to democracy, at least in theory. Recently, Geoffrey Miller has argued that the Hebrew Bible encodes and expresses a theory of the ideal political and economic order.88 He identifies a series of analogies between the covenant (berith) traditions in the Hebrew Bible and those in modern social-contract theory.89 The state of nature after the Flood is one in which all hierarchies, along with all cities and almost the entire population of the earth, have been erased: “The conditions on Mount Ararat thus satisfy the ‘veil of ignorance’ criterion, famously set forth in the work of the American political philosopher John Rawls, which holds that fair principles of justice are those that would be adopted by decision makers who act with general knowledge of the world but without knowledge of their personal endowments.”90 Similarly, because during the Exodus the Israelites do not yet know what allotments of land they will receive after the Conquest of Canaan, “the setup of the Sinai narrative thus guarantees the fairness of the decision being made and does so in a way that is astonishingly similar to Rawls’s formulation of the veil-of-ignorance idea more than two thousand years later.”91 The novelty of Miller’s approach depends on its application of concepts drawn from contemporary economics, political science, and even game theory. Miller’s reading of the Bible is wide-ranging and illuminating in many places. He demonstrates convincingly that “legal-economic analysis may have something valuable to add to the existing corpus of biblical interpretation.”92 While agreeing with many of his particular interpretations, my main disagreement with his overall approach is that he often overestimates the resemblance of ancient Israelites, or rather the authors of the Torah, to modern

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capitalists or the “reasonable persons” of rational-choice theory, the contemporary school that regards all human endeavors as, in principle, attempts to maximize profit (see chapter 4). While Miller generally acknowledges the distinction between the modern idea of a social contract as based on popular consent and the rather more authoritarian and conservative polity depicted in the Hebrew Bible,93 he glosses over some fundamental differences in outlook that challenge his analogy between biblical and contemporary liberal visions of political order. Principal among these differences is the centrality of sacrifice in the ancient Israelite as opposed to the modern constitution. The covenants in the Hebrew Bible frequently either mandate sacrifice as a condition of the covenant relation, or are accompanied by sacrifice— as in the cases of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and even Joshua, because the Shechem covenant at which the Land was distributed followed the exercise of the herem against Canaan, which was arguably a ˙ sacrifice (see chapter 3). Such antiutilitarian institutions as sacrifice— which involves the destruction of valuable items— or the abstentions from labor mandated in the biblical institutions of the Sabbath holiday and the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, during which there was a prohibition against farming and organized harvesting, similarly have no counterpart in Miller’s system, according to which human beings are supposed to be rational utility maximizers, as well as game-theory strategists. Another example is his interpretation of the Cain and Abel story. Miller argues that God’s stated preference for Abel’s offering of meat over Cain’s offering of grain stems from the fact that “meat is more of a delicacy than grain, which is cheaper; if penitents could costlessly substitute grain for meat, the incidence of meat offerings would be expected to drop off dramatically.”94 On its face, the statement sounds reasonable. However, as soon as we attempt to extend such explanations to other cases, such as the whole burnt offering (’olah) or the ban or devotion to destruction (herem), that cannot be ˙ accounted for in such cost-benefit terms, the assumption that homo religiosus and homo economicus belong to the same species is called into question.95 In sum, while agreeing wholeheartedly with Miller’s proposal that the Hebrew Bible contains a political and economic theory, I am not convinced that this theory agrees with either Rawls’s veil of ignorance or with rational choice theories as closely as Miller believes.96 Chapters 4 and 5 develop an alternative reading of such biblical institutions. Such efforts to read violence, including sacrifice, out of the liberal constitution are understandable, as they reflect a desire to control or contain the darker side of human nature. Earlier myths that preserved a reference to founding violence also presented this as largely a thing of the past. The Bind-

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ing of Isaac was arguably an attempt to “halve one’s cake and eat it in two”: to insist on a sovereignty that supersedes the moral order while also framing this sovereignty as part of a history of the prohibition against human sacrifice, a practice that the Hebrew Bible condemned among the Canaanites. Yet such compromises are inherently unstable, in part because they appear to involve a logical contradiction. It is easy to understand, then, why many would wish to reject entirely the myth of founding violence, particularly when this violence is represented as sacred, necessary, or justified. The problem is that such philosophies require us to ignore or to rationalize and interpret away too much of the historical and anthropological data. A fair reading of the evidence points toward a widespread tendency to incorporate references to sovereignty and to the foundations of polity as inherently violent, or at least antinomian. Such expressions, whether ritual, mythic, or otherwise, presumably index something important regarding the manner in which human beings legitimate the social order. It is not a question of setting aside our normative commitments against violence and sovereign absolutism, but one of not allowing these commitments to blind us to the attraction that such representations may hold, to the nimbus or shiny halo that crowns them and that draws us in, like moths to a flame. Indeed, the more we fear a return of such moments, the more imperative becomes the effort to decipher their appeal. The same blend of attraction and revulsion appears to have been shared by the authors of these myths of founding violence, who quarantined the blood flowing from such events in several ways: into the distant past; into the “as if ” of narrative; and (sometimes) through the fiction of a happy ending. The Festival as State of Nature and Interregnum The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process in which what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, . . . in the inside (as state of exception), and the sovereign power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. g i o r g i o a g a m b e n , Homo Sacer (1998), 37

Among contemporary philosophers, Giorgio Agamben has made the most important contributions to our understanding of the function that such representations of the state of exception perform in expressing and constructing ideas of sovereignty. Unlike most political theorists, he has engaged deeply with questions of the relationship between sovereignty and the sacred, particularly in Homo Sacer and its sequels.97 Despite this, and in contradistinction

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to the now-vast outpouring of commentary on his oeuvre by philosophers and political theorists,98 Agamben’s work has received comparatively little attention from historians of religion.99 This is a lacuna that urgently needs remedying, for, as we shall see in chapter 3, he has posed one of the most profound challenges to the idea that the political order has sacred origins, being founded on sacrifice. Agamben appears now, however, for a different purpose: so that we may explore his thesis that any literal interpretation of the state of nature, and its replacement by a social contract that inaugurates political society, mistakes myth for historical reality: “The state of nature is not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the City but a principle internal to the City, which appears at the moment the City is considered . . . ‘as if it were dissolved.’”100 The state of nature is itself a fiction, and the antinomianism ascribed to this state is, properly understood, an expression of the fundamental attribute of sovereignty: “Before assuming its modern form as a decision on the emergency, the relation between sovereignty and state of exception appears in the form of an identity between the sovereign and anomie. Because he is a living law, the sovereign is intimately anomos.”101 Rather than being merely incidental, violence or rupture is an essential attribute of the sovereign, precisely because she or he must remain at least partly “outside” of the city (Greek polis, the original form of European polity) in order to serve as a ground for the city and its system of legal norms.102 This attribute reemerges during the state of exception, of which the so-called state of nature is one manifestation, the ban another. The homo sacer, the wargus (wolfman) banished under medieval German law,103 and (controversially) the concentration camps of the twentieth century all figure such a “dissolved” or rather primal sovereignty, as do rituals of inversion such as Carnival, in which the laws are suspended not in some distant past, but rather in a liminal moment in the calendar of the city: “The “legal anarchy” of the anomic feasts does not refer back to ancient agrarian rites, which in themselves explain nothing; rather, it brings to light in a parodic form the anomie within the law, the state of emergency as the anomic drive contained in the very heart of the nomos.”104 The return to chaos or the reversal of social roles that has been so consistently remarked upon as a distinctive feature of Carnival and similar festivals represents, from this perspective, an effort to reprise and redeploy sovereignty in its pure or potential state, as a means of reinforcing the foundations of social order. The difference we see here between the topsy-turvy and the normal world would then be analogous to that between sovereignty and legality, or the constituting and constituted powers, or God’s absolute and ordained powers in medieval Scholastic theory. In this analogy, the festival of

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inversion symbolizes the constituting power, which appears at moments of discontinuity in or interruption of the constitutional order, and expresses the violence or abandon to which sovereignty reverts during such moments. Such occasions resemble something like the return to the state of nature or the condition of general violence that is projected as the opposite of ordinary, and orderly, life, and that is, as Agamben pointed out, equivalent to the state of exception that marks sovereignty. Rituals of inversion return us to the rule of the crowd, or to anarchy, and may lead either to a reinforcement of the existing order or, conversely, to a complete overthrow of that order: a revolution. They have therefore frequently been interpreted as moments of return to primal sovereignty where, potentially, anything can happen. Agamben draws on Hendrik Versnel’s account of the extreme and violent mourning that attended the death of the first-century Roman imperial heir Germanicus in terms of the broader category of liminal moments or rituals of inversion.105 Versnel identifies such moments, which often occur as the result of a social crisis and may involve “self-mutilation, destruction of clothes, and, in the extreme . . . suicide,” as a type of “interregnum” in which “for a short time there is no king, no law, no political and social life, and no constructive religious activity.”106 Defined by the absence of regulating institutions and social norms, such moments are, as Versnel defined them, ones of “anomy”:107 “Whoever characterizes the[se] critical periods as . . . a temporary substitution of order by disorder, of culture by nature, of kosmos by chaos, of nomos by physis, of eunomia by anomia, has implicitly characterized the period of mourning and its manifestations.”108 Like Agamben, Versnel applies the term “anomic” also to more positive but equally liminal festivals, such as the ancient Greek Kronia and Latin Saturnalia, to which he has devoted extensive and important studies.109 If such rituals are not “anomic” in the specific Durkheimian sense110, they are at least antinomian in the general sense of being lawless, or against the law. In Latin, events of mourning occasioned by the death of a sovereign were termed iustitium. Agamben argues that this term originally referred not to mourning rituals per se, but rather to the state of exception that followed a threat to the polity and was accompanied by an outbreak described as tumultus, the root of the English “tumult.” What is essential to such a situation is not the fact of mourning, but rather the state of exception, an expression of sovereignty of which various antinomian behaviors, including mourning, were merely signs: “The correspondence between anomie and mourning becomes comprehensible only in the light of the correspondence between the death of the sovereign and the state of exception.”111 Agamben and Versnel are not the first scholars to have associated festi-

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vals of inversion with an interregnum or other state of exception. As early as 1939, Roger Caillois adapted Émile Durkheim’s account of collective “effervescence,” including that associated with piacular rites, in such a way as to highlight the relation between rituals of transgression and interruptions in sovereignty. Caillois described how in Hawaii, at the death of a king, “the populace . . . commits every act ordinarily regarded as criminal. It burns, pillages, and kills, and the women are required to prostitute themselves publicly. On the Guinea Coast . . . as soon as the people learn of the king’s death, ‘each robs his neighbor, who in turn robs another,’ and these robberies continue until a successor is proclaimed.”112 He noted that in some societies the period of license lasts until the corpse of the king has completely decomposed. Caillois interpreted such periods of license therefore as an “interregnum,” a time of “disorder and excess generating an effervescence out of which is born a new and reinvigorated order.”113 Although, as we shall see, Agamben criticizes both Bataille and Caillois for embracing the mystifying idea of the “ambivalence of the sacred,”114 it is clear that both of these followers of Durkheim anticipated Agamben’s interpretation of ritual antinomianism as an expression of the state of exception associated with sovereignty (or its absence). Versnel identified this ambivalence in the case of the Saturnalia and Kronia, rites of inversion that reprised the idea of a Golden Age in which the first god-king, Saturn or Kronos, presided over either limitless abundance, unrestrained violence, or both at once.115 The attribution of human sacrifices to this chthonic deity reinforces the theme.116 Long before Versnel, Caillois described the ambivalence associated with the suspension of law and order in Tonkin, China, where the courts were closed and “power is entrusted to a monarch charged with violating all taboos, and indulging in every excess. He personifies the mythical sovereign of the golden age of chaos.”117 Fortunately, such liminal states are temporary. Bataille quoted Caillois regarding such occurrences and noted that, after all, such outbursts cannot last: “The excess consecrates and completes an order of things based on rules; it goes against that order only temporarily.”118 The same conclusion has been reached by other students of such rituals as Carnival, the Feast of Fools, or the charivari, which often involve inversions of the social order such as a reversal of patriarchy or the appointment of a temporary, symbolic ruler from the lower classes. Max Gluckman, examining the Swazi Ncwala, a ritual wherein the king was humiliated, famously argued that “rituals of rebellion” are by definition not real revolutions: they end by buttressing the existing order, which is never seriously endangered by such symbolic contestations.119 Gluckman’s student, Victor Turner, who also began his account of liminality

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by considering cases of the ritual humiliation of African kings, contended that “the liminality of status reversal may be compared to comedy, for both involve mockery and inversion, but not destruction, of structural rules and overzealous adherents to them.”120 However, Turner also allowed that “some [liminal moments] . . . may have sufficient power and plausibility to replace eventually the force-backed political and jural models that control the centers of a society’s ongoing life.”121 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie gave an account of an (unsuccessful) uprising during Carnival at the town of Romans in France in 1580.122 Natalie Zemon Davis contended that in certain historical cases, carnavalesque rituals have led to actual rebellions.123 Bruce Lincoln considered several cases of rituals of inversion or breakdowns in social order, including the Swazi Ncwala studied by Gluckman and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572.124 Lincoln’s general conclusion was that such moments have at least the potential to spin out of control. How should we understand the role that myths and rites of inversion play in relation to sovereignty? Are these representations of the anarchy that obtains in the state of nature; merely symbolic acts of resistance that ultimately work to reinforce the underlying order; a temporary release of pressure that risks, in the short term, while reducing, in the longer term, the chance of a real revolution; or expressions of the inherently anomic nature of sovereignty, as Agamben maintains? Whichever explanatory model one prefers, the connection of such events with a symbolic or even, in some instances, a real crisis of authority appears clear. Even when this crisis was staged or, as Gluckman put it, a “ritual,” it referred to a state of exception. According to Agamben, the representations of anomie that occur at such moments depict the return to the “original, pleromatic state” that is characteristic of sovereignty; but “the idea of an originary indistinction and fullness of power must be considered a legal mythologeme analogous to the idea of a state of nature.”125 Versnel emphasizes this state as a condition of scarcity: “A catastrophe from culture into nature, from society into chaos in the most literal terms: no fire, no meat, no bread, no work, no communal hearth, no intercourse between man and woman.”126 We think here of the Latin prohibition against sharing fire and water with an exile, a form of the ban that, like the declaration of someone as sacred (sacer esto), exemplified the power of the sovereign to suspend community and commensality.127 Yet there are many more cheerful depictions of the state of nature, as we have seen. Victor Turner in particular emphasized the positive role that such liminal moments may play in the production of “communitas.” Perhaps the original theorist of the sacred as a moment of “anti-structure,” Turner keenly perceived the political dimensions of such moments, which we now term

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“states of exception.” He recognized their revolutionary potential, as well as their tendency to devolve into despotism or bureaucracy.128 To illustrate the ambivalence of these depictions of the state of nature, Turner quoted Gonzalo’s speech from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, itself a play about regime change that follows a state of exception that takes place on a remote island. The shipwrecked Gonzalo, perhaps naively, highlights the free sharing of goods and absence of labor that he would supervise as ruler of the island: Gonzalo: I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty And use of service, none; contracts, succession Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty; Sebastian: Yet he would be king on’t. Antonio: The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. Gonzalo: All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. Sebastian: No marrying ’mong his subjects? Antonio: None, man; all idle: whores and knaves. Gonzalo: I would with such perfection govern, sir, To excel the golden age.129

The sojourners on Prospero’s island inhabit a liminal space in which sovereignty appears to be completely up for grabs. Depending on one’s per-

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spective, the island looks like either a paradise or a reversion to barbarism. Shakespeare allows the scheming Antonio and Sebastian to mock the nobler Gonzalo’s utopian depiction of the state of nature. Turner highlighted the manner in which this utopia suspends private property and the exploitation of forced labor (tell that to Caliban!). As with many festivals, including the Sabbath and Jubilee, the state of exception is as much a holiday from economy as from polity, as much from having to work as from being ruled. Just as in the competing representations of the state of nature in modern social contract theory— the two antipodes of which are illustrated by Hobbes’s “war of all against all” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage”—such a return to a primordial sovereignty is profoundly ambivalent. This ambivalence signals something more than just the fundamental optimism or pessimism concerning democracy or crowd behavior of the person who describes it. It appears to express a tension inherent in sovereignty itself. As the source of law, the sovereign cannot be subject to legal norms, or the law would have no stable foundation. The sovereign is, as Agamben states, “intimately anomos.” The antinomian nature of sovereignty is not always negative. It is evident as much in God’s grace as in his punishment, as much in the earthly sovereign’s power to pardon offenses— as Prospero requests to be pardoned at the end of The Tempest— as in his power to execute judgment or command violence. What is interesting is that, in many of these depictions of mass behavior, during the interregnum sovereignty does not repose in the king’s effigy, as Agamben (following Ernst Kantorowicz) would have it,130 but instead returns to the people. So the crowd or demos appears as the anomic sovereign, with all of the ambivalence that attaches to this figure. This is manifestly not the situation that Schmitt envisioned, with his insistence on the importance of investing the power of decision in one person. While insisting on the indivisibility of sovereignty, Hobbes acknowledged this tension explicitly by depicting the Leviathan as a composite figure, formed by the concatenation of the masses of individual bodies from which the sovereign derives his power, indeed his very substance. This image drew upon the older idea of the king’s incorruptible body as composite and corporate, and upon Hobbes’s identification of the polity as a congregation, facing the Leviathan— their mortal God— in prayerful reverence and obedience.131 Popular rituals of transgression, which intersect with revolutionary moments, may suggest an alternative political theology, in which the constituting power returns to the people themselves. As described in chapter 5 below, this was Pierre Proudhon’s reading of the Sabbath and the Jubilee. To describe such systems, in which there exists a dynamic tension be-

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tween law and sovereignty, legal and charismatic authority, or the normal and the topsy-turvy world, I will appropriate the term “spiritual economy.” This is not only to signal that such systems share the traditional concerns of the academic discipline of political economy with questions of sovereignty and legitimacy, also in relation to economics. It is also intended to invoke the older, theological usage of “economy” (as in “Mosaic economy”) to describe a particular order that depends on a concept of the nature and agency of the divinity in relation to human beings. I prefer the term “spiritual economy” to “political theology,” which has a different history,132 one marked indelibly by Schmitt’s usage of the term. “Economy” denotes a complete, self-contained system, defined in significant measure by the mode of relation between sovereignty and legality. Much more than a simple argument about the inevitably political dimensions of religious ideas and practices, this book challenges us to see our own system of governance as one possible alternative among others, some of which have been remarkably different in orientation, but each of which constitutes a response to a shared underlying problematic of sovereignty, the nature of which is revealed by extreme cases, or by states of exception, just as Schmitt contended.133 It is understandable that many have attempted to answer such important questions of polity and ethics through a priori arguments, without regard for historical and anthropological data. The fiction of the reasonableness of humanity is possible only on this basis. As soon as one begins to learn a little history— as de Maistre pointed out in his polemic against the French Revolution, which had forced him into exile, and the philosophes who were its ideological vanguard— one encounters sacrifice and sovereign violence (as the guillotine itself proved). The progressive whitewashing of history— the attempt either to make it appear less bloody than it was, or to deny the important function that such violence (even when merely imaginary) has served in the constitution of polity, or to create the impression of a distance between ourselves and this violence so as to absolve ourselves of its stain: this is the characteristic gesture of modern, so-called rational thinking, a gesture that itself can be understood as staking a claim to sovereignty and autonomy, the mythical expression of which is the idea of a “new beginning” or inaugural age of wisdom transcending past superstitions. Countering such an approach, the aim of the history of religions is to recuperate, for our understanding of the human, the dross and membra disjecta of the past. While the various positivistic sciences— as practiced in many academic departments of law, economics, and politics, among other disciplines— have moved in the opposite direction, to establish their independence and hegemony by denying their connection with tradition, the

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history of religions is invested most heavily in the Romantic critique of Enlightenment reason, if only because it is what we call “religion” (miracle, divine command, sacrifice) that has been most deeply repressed under the new, ostensibly secular dispensation. Ignorance of this history has prevented us from understanding the meaning of our own moment as a disenchantment of sovereignty. The antidote to this ignorance is a genealogy that overcomes the false dichotomy between “secular” modernity and its theological past.

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The Disenchantment of Charisma: The Theological Origins of Secular Polity

The Exclusion of the Sovereign Exception The principle of hierarchy in all its manifestations presupposes a sovereign who stands “beyond” the order, who remains “transcendent” to the system of law, who as a prima causa guarantees the system of order. . . . But the concept of autonomy leads to the atheistic denial of any transcendent law beyond and above man. The fulfillment of man’s autonomy is at the expense of the death of God as a creator of heaven and earth and of all visible and invisible order, who gives the law to man. This development from heteronomian theism to the autonomian atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contains the inner history of theologico-political thought in the modern age. j a c o b t a u b e s , From Cult to Culture (2010), 225, 227

The reasons for the neglect or disparagement of the antinomian aspects of religion represent more than merely a failure of theory. The theories have themselves inherited certain biases, and constitute, to use Schmitt’s term, “political theologies.” The proper historical context for an evaluation of such later efforts as Otto’s to recuperate the notion of an antinomian holy is not the immediate circumstances of interwar Europe, as Wasserstrom and company have suggested, but rather a much older series of debates and transformations within Christian theological traditions. The present chapter outlines this longue durée history so as to trace its implications for our understanding of sovereignty and the sacred, as well as for the fate of these categories under secularization and modernization. This history converges with Max Weber’s famous ideas of disenchantment and the routinization of charisma. Schmitt, as we have seen, referred to this as a “secularized Protestant theology.”1 Following Weber’s use of the term “disenchantment”—Entzauberung, from Zauberei (magic), might more literally be translated as “de-magicalization”— much of the scholarly commentary on this category has focused on the question of whether and, if so,

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when magic declined.2 There was, however, another side to this process, one that connected directly to the displacement of the antinomian sovereignty outlined in the previous chapter. This side was expressed more exactly by another idea of Weber’s— the routinization of charisma— which he closely linked to disenchantment.3 Schmitt focused his critique on this aspect of Weber’s theory of modernity. Beginning from this critique, the present chapter moves backward to the Middle Ages and the Reformation before ending with a reevaluation of Weber’s famous thesis. In Political Theology, Schmitt contended that it was deism that had banished the exception together with the miracle and the understanding of sovereignty that these implied:4 The idea of the modern constitutional state triumphed together with deism, a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world. This theology and metaphysics rejected not only the transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about by divine intervention, as is found in the idea of a miracle, but also the sovereign’s direct intervention in a valid legal order. The rationalism of the Enlightenment rejected the exception in every form. . . . In the theory of state of the seventeenth century, the monarch is identified with God and has in the state a position exactly analogous to that attributed to God in the Cartesian system of the world. . . . Since then the consistency of exclusively scientific thinking has also permeated political ideas. . . . The general validity of a legal prescription has become identified with the lawfulness of nature, which applies without exception. The sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs itself.5

Just as the idea of the miracle offended the rationalist adherence to natural law, the idea of an arbitrary authority that exceeds the legal order, which it founds and supports, offended principles of liberal governance. Both the miracle and the sovereignty it implied coalesced, first and foremost, in the God of the Bible, whose continued existence arguably was itself anathema to the new secular, liberal constitution. As Jacob Taubes summarized the outcome of this struggle in the epigraph to this chapter, “The fulfillment of man’s autonomy is at the expense of the death of God as a creator of heaven and earth and of all visible and invisible order, who gives the law to man.” I have argued previously that we ought to take Schmitt’s historical contention quite seriously; it rescues his argument regarding the absoluteness of sovereignty from being the mere “tautology” that Benavides labeled it and shows that Schmitt was responding to a state of affairs whose foundations long predated the immediate circumstances of the Weimar political crisis.6

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The struggle with the challenge to human autonomy posed by the idea of a radically sovereign deity marked not only certain Protestant theologies, but also earlier periods of Christianity, as is particularly evident in scholastic debates over God’s two powers: the “absolute power” (potentia or potestas dei absoluta) and the “ordered (or orderly) power” (potentia ordinata). According to the former power, God could, at least potentially, alter the laws of nature, or perhaps even undo past events, such as restore a fallen virgin to chastity. According to the latter, he chose instead to abide, at least most of the time, by the laws that he himself had established. The corollary of God’s omnipotence was his ability to intervene at any time in the course of natural law, through the exercise of his miraculous power. The most radical version of this thesis stated that God creates everything directly (occasionalism)7 or over and over again at each instant (creatio continua, or continuous creation), a thesis defended earlier by certain Islamic theologians.8 The twin pillars of the argument for God’s omnipotence were miracles and divine commands (see chapter 1), which violated the rules of morality just as miracles violated the order of nature. These theological debates continued into the early modern period, when English deists attacked both pillars, ushering in the relative triumph of a robust concept of natural law, and of a deity whose role in this creation consisted merely of setting it in orderly motion before withdrawing from view: the watchmaker God, whom Schmitt referred to as the “engineer of the great machine.” Schmitt was attempting to intervene in these older theological debates. Despite this, very little scholarship has engaged seriously with the theological context for his claims.9 Indeed, as Schmitt contended, it was in deism, which in England had its heyday from the 1690s to roughly 1750, that we find the most vigorous polemic against everything that is exceptional in the Bible. Citing many of the same episodes that Otto later used to illustrate “the holy,” deists such as Matthew Tindal, Peter Annet, and Thomas Morgan condemned the dispensation of the Hebrew Bible— especially its miracles, revelations, and sacrifices— as the opposite of the natural religion that they identified as the essence of Christianity. Bloody sacrifices and the herem, which commanded ˙ the wholesale slaughter of entire tribes, were, in the deist argument for natural law, key evidence against the Jewish God.10 Thomas Morgan rejected the idea that God would have commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac: “For, upon this Principle, . . . God may command the most unfit or unrighteous Things in the World by mere arbitrary Will and Pleasure. A Supposition which must unhinge the whole Frame of Nature, and leave no human Creature any Rule of Action at all.”11 What many deists objected to was the apparent capriciousness of the God of the Old Testament, who prescribed

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rules without meaning, disturbed the order of nature through miracles, and threatened the natural law that guaranteed human reason and morality. Calling the Mosaic law a collection of “merely positive and arbitrary precepts,” Tindal argued: “If God cou’d command at one time for commanding-sake in any one point, he might do so in all points and times; and consequently, . . . an arbitrary Will, which might change every moment, wou’d govern all things.”12 Whereas, according to deists, natural law was universal and could be known through the exercise of human reason in the absence of revelation, the Hebrew Bible insisted on the historical boundedness of the law as having been given to a particular people at particular moments. Judaism or the Mosaic law therefore became for many deists the negative image of the natural law that alone, as they argued, was eternal, rational, and constant. As John Toland stated, quoting James 1:17, “Religion is always the same, like God its Author, with whom there is no Variableness, nor Shadow of changing.”13 In these respects, deism represented what, following Charles Taylor, we might call a “mutation” of orthodox Christianity:14 an exacerbation of traditional Christian polemics against Judaism, combined with an abandonment of revelation or the historical basis of biblical traditions. Although the issue is controversial, there appears to be support within some branches of the Jewish tradition for the deists’ assertion that certain of the Mosaic laws were arbitrary.15 Jiří Moskala refers to this as the “Arbitrary Command Explanation”: “The Mosaic dietary laws were classified as irrational laws [on this view], because no reason can be found for their existence. They were given as a demonstration of God’s authority. Jewish scholarship has traditionally assigned these laws to a special type designated by the term hukkim because ‘their explanation is known only to God.’”16 Isaac Heine˙ mann reviewed the positions of various Jewish thinkers over the centuries concerning whether the commands (mitzvoth) are irrational or rational, arbitrary or not— a distinction he framed in terms of Kant’s distinction between heteronomy, or laws given by an outside authority, and autonomy, or laws given by and to oneself.17 Heinemann argued that, upon a fair reading, and as acknowledged to varying degrees by most major Jewish thinkers, certain of the commands, especially the ritual rules referred to as “statutes” (hukkim), ˙ are indeed either without reason, or without one accessible to human understanding, and are in any case to be obeyed whether or not one comprehends their reason.18 Indeed, a number of major Jewish thinkers expressed the opinion that it was more virtuous to obey a command for which one can perceive no ground, out of simple obedience to God19— a direct contradiction of the Kantian understanding of moral duty. Heinemann described a traditional practice in which “the sages of the Land of Israel did not publicize

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the reasons for their decrees until after twelve months had passed, in case someone might not agree with the reason and thus disparage the decree.”20 In this case, the rule was literally given prior to, and was therefore independent of, the reason: the rule appeared to emerge ex nihilo. Although the search for a meaning of these prohibitions began already two millennia ago with Philo Judaeus’s symbolic interpretation and continued with rationalizing accounts such as those of Moses Maimonides in the twelfth century and John Spencer in the seventeenth, the increasing prevalence of rationalistic interpretations of halakhah among many liberal Jewish thinkers in the contemporary era has occurred in the context of a general modern bias against the “rule” considered as an arbitrary command and may not reflect accurately the range of traditional Jewish opinions as a whole.21 God arguably gave no explanation— only a warning or threat— to Adam and Eve when he commanded them not to eat of the fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden.22 Yet the most famous example in the Hebrew Bible of the importance of obedience to divine command is the Akedah or Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), which provides no reason for the deity’s abominable command to Abraham to sacrifice his son. Marcel Poorthuis concludes that “in spite of the ink spilled over the interpretation of the story of Abraham having to sacrifice his son Isaac, the unfathomable and contradictory nature of the divine decree is apparent to any unbiased reader.”23 Søren Kierkegaard singled out this episode as an illustration of the fear and trembling precipitated by the awe-fulness of the holy.24 He constructed his own series of meditations in order to fill in the missing details and especially the human, emotional dimensions of the story. Ironically, this very project served to highlight the difference between his own Protestant “inwardness” and the emphasis of the biblical story on command and obedience.25 Thus, despite the fact that the Danish philosopher provided one source for Schmitt’s concept of the “decision,”26 Kierkegaard’s Abraham appears, in contrast with the biblical Abraham, rather indecisive. Thomas Morgan, as we have seen, used the Binding of Isaac to illustrate his attack on the capricious God of the Hebrew Bible. He condemned Jews for following arbitrary commands: “Their Obedience was only the Submission of Slaves, their Virtue nothing but a Restraint upon outward Actions, and their Repentance like that of a Thief or Murderer at the Gallows.”27 The modern understanding of these issues has been deeply impressed by Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Kant attempted to exclude arbitrariness, or heteronomy, by subjecting the individual will to a universal maxim, the categorical imperative, that one can legislate for oneself in a mode of autonomy. His famous definition of modernity in “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784) as

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“the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority” under the “direction from another,” emphasized that individual autonomy is the basis of the modern ethos.28 When Taubes, in the epigraph above, stated that the “development from heteronomian theism to the autonomian atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contains the inner history of theologicalpolitical thought in the modern age,” he was invoking Kantian categories.29 Like some deists before him, Kant held the ceremonial provisions of the Jewish law in contempt, as a form of heteronomy; he even declared that Judaism was not a religion, because it referred merely to external precepts: Judaism is really not a religion at all but merely a union of a number of people who . . . formed themselves into a commonwealth under purely political laws. . . . The proof that Judaism has not allowed its organization to become religious is clear. First, all its commands are of the kind which a political organization can insist upon and lay down as coercive laws, since they relate merely to external acts. . . . [Even the Ten Commandments] are directed to absolutely nothing but outer observance.30

Such polemics against the legitimacy of ritual commands influenced the development of what we call “secular” law, as I have argued previously.31 The redefinition of “true” religion as not ritual but spiritual— a form of belief or sentiment— coordinated with its privatization to the sphere of the home or individual conscience. Meanwhile, the excision of “superstitious” ritual commands rendered the law ostensibly rational and secular. Of course, this was only a secularized form of Christian anti-Judaism. Yet it was arguably the insistence that law have a rational basis that constituted the heart of the deist critique of traditional religion. Deists rejected the idea of a God who acted arbitrarily. To the natural law that could be known through the exercise of reason, revelation and divine positive law added nothing of importance. Even the Gospel was, as Tindal said, but a “republication of the religion of nature.”32 He rejected any exceptions to natural law that would violate its regularity and point to its incompleteness: “There must be some Rule, or Rules, which bind without Exception, because every Exception to a Rule is built on some Rule or other; and as there can’t be Rules, so there can’t be Exceptions ad infinitum: . . . [The rules of natural law] would be to little Purpose, cou’d not Reason tell Men how to apply them in all Conditions and Circumstances of Life.”33 Tindal argued that God maintained a regular order in both the moral and physical domains. This was the very guarantee of his lawfulness. Tindal drew the conclusion that any act by a human judge that exceeds the laws already established would usurp a divine prerogative, a power of creation that God himself held in abeyance.34 Natural law coupled

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with reason would henceforth provide the rule of decision. Morgan contended similarly that “God governs both the natural and moral World by stated general Laws, and . . . does not alter, set aside, or suspend these Laws upon particular Incidents, or occasional Emergencies.”35 The deist effort to reconcile God’s sovereignty with natural law limited divine intervention in the world to the original Fiat lux! and subsequent acts that established an orderly creation, and to the upholding, maintenance, and republication of natural law. This is the stereotyped image of the “watchmaker God.” The analogy within the mundane legal order would be the exercise of full sovereignty that establishes the laws or the constitution, but then withdraws and allows these to operate without intervening further. As applied to the legal order, this view depends on the fiction that the application of the laws is not itself a creative act. The majority of deists condemned Judaism, or the religion of the Hebrew Bible, as exceptional, the opposite of what natural law and religion was and should be. This polemic was found, sometimes side by side, with the standard Christian polemic against Judaism as a form of “legalism.” The original source for this stereotype was Paul’s opposition in Romans between the law (nomos) of Moses and the grace (charis) of the Gospel, which transcends and replaces that law. Orthodox Christians, who were committed to preserving the Old Testament as a valid (for its time) revelation, deployed various distinctions— such as that between prophets and law, or between ancient Israelite religion and rabbinic Judaism— to separate the charismatic from the legalistic dimensions of Judaism, while denigrating the latter. No less an authority than Max Weber reflected some of these theological biases.36 Crucially, however, for the deists it was the Jewish law itself— inasmuch as it consisted of “merely positive” ritual prescriptions that were a matter of fiat rather than of natural law— that signified an arbitrary sovereignty and had therefore to be proscribed. Whereas, in ancient Israelite religion, there is no obvious contradiction between the legal norm and sovereign authority— most law being presented as the product of divine revelation— Christian theologians building on Paul had introduced a diremption between charisma and law that, through many transformations, culminated in the deist disenchantment of a sovereign deity. It was this same diremption that, according to Schmitt, was the ultimate basis of Weber’s idea of the routinization of charisma. It is one of the ironies of history that Schmitt, who was an active participant in the Nazi regime until his departure from official duties in 1936, and who, as Raphael Gross has capably demonstrated, remained an anti-Semite,37 nevertheless in his career as a jurisprude argued the case on behalf of the exceptional sovereign God of the Hebrew Bible as against deism. To all appearances, Schmitt

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did so unwittingly. He participated in the standard polemic against Jewish “legalism” and also implicated Jewish thought in the excessive normativity of the modern legal state.38 The Theological Origins of Weber’s Theory of Charisma The Anglican theologian and proponent of “radical orthodoxy” John Milbank has argued strenuously against the privilege accorded to social-scientific approaches to religion, a privilege that is based in large part on a claimed divide between the social sciences and theology. Against this view, Milbank contends that all the most important governing assumptions of [secular, social theory] are bound up with the modification or the rejection of orthodox Christian positions. . . . Secular discourse does not just “borrow” inherently inappropriate modes of expression as the only discourse to hand [as Hans Blumenberg contends] . . . but is actually constituted in its secularity by “heresy” in relation to orthodox Christianity.39

The label “heresy” would surely be regarded as problematic by many, even among those who share the view that the social sciences, having emerged largely against the background of European, Christian culture, could reasonably be expected to retain some biases or presuppositions from their history of formation. Perhaps that is why Milbank places the word itself in scare quotes. As we have seen, to describe the relation between secular modernity and its Christian past, Charles Taylor has used a different word— “mutation”— which is also problematic unless one adds the caveat, borrowed from a rudimentary knowledge of biology, that all evolution is also the result of mutation, combined with natural selection. Such a caveat takes away the connotation of disapproval that might otherwise attach to the label. Reinforcing Milbank’s contention, the present chapter provides a theological genealogy for Max Weber’s categories of disenchantment and charisma. Weber’s idea of the routinization of charisma, in particular, echoed earlier theological debates concerning the nature of divine sovereignty: the medieval distinction between God’s two powers—“absolute power” and “ordered/orderly power”— and the ancient Christian idea that miracles and other charismata had ceased at the end of the apostolic age or shortly thereafter, as deployed by English Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Weber’s sociology reflected a number of Protestant polemics, including the deist attack on an arbitrary deity described in the preceding section of this chapter. Although Weber’s categories are commonly deployed by

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social scientists without reference to their history of construction, knowledge of this history should give us pause regarding such an unreflective deployment, as well as regarding where to draw the line between secular science and theology. First, a brief outline of Weber’s theory. He contrasted “charismatic” with “traditional” and “legal” (or “bureaucratic”) modes of authority (Herrschaft).40 He described charisma as an inherently personal, spontaneous, and lawless force, which can inhere just as easily in berserkers or murderers as in religious figures such as Jesus or the Buddha.41 Charisma specifically excludes both economic and legal rationalization:42 “Genuine charismatic domination knows no abstract laws and regulations and no formal adjudication. . . . In a revolutionary and sovereign manner, charismatic domination transforms all values and breaks all traditional and rational norms: ‘It has been written . . . but I say unto you. . . .’”43 Weber’s concept of charisma, in other words, is defined negatively, as a state of exception to legal and economic order, coinciding precisely with the quality that I have referred to as “sovereignty.” Owing to its dependence on the recognition of personal qualities, which is limited to the lifetime or career of the charismatic figure, charisma is unstable and temporary, and it gives way to more enduring structures of authority through a process of routinization. Weber allowed the transmission of a kind of charisma through inheritance, office (Amtscharisma),44 or education. However, these were all substitutes, fundamentally opposed to the purely personal type of charisma. Hence Weber argued that “fully developed office charisma,” as exemplified by the Catholic priesthood, “inevitably becomes the most uncompromising foe of all genuinely personal charisma, which propagates and preaches its own way to God and is prophetic, mystical, and ecstatic.”45 The primary manner in which charisma has been rationalized in modernity is through its institutionalization in bureaucratic and legal forms. The forces of legal and economic rationalization have contributed to the institution of a predictable set of technical procedures, which have repressed or even foreclosed charisma in these and other domains. Weber imputed to the Catholic Church an important role in the development of legal rationality through the systematic incorporation of Roman law into canon law.46 This reinforced the association of the Catholic Church with the routinization of charisma. These associations display a conceptual ambiguity. Weber presents charisma both as a structural alternative— as one of a number of types of authority available at any moment— and, in historical terms, as a force that has waned under processes of modernization. Weber identified charisma with the sacred,47 and in his lecture “Science as a Vocation” (1917), which repre-

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sented one of the earliest statements of his idea of disenchantment, he clearly identified this process with the routinization of charisma.48 He noted the importance of inspiration and individual talents in scientific work— of “gifts” and “gifts of grace” (Gnadengaben)— only to subordinate such vagaries of personality to systematic labor and calculation. His target here appears to be the Romantic notion of “genius.” Following this is the key passage: The increasing intellectualization and rationalization [of modern life]  .  .  . means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable [unberechenbaren] forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation [Berechnen]. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations [Berechnung] perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means. . . . This process of disenchantment . . . has continued to exist in Occidental culture for millennia.49

Further on, he stated that “science . . . does not know of the ‘miracle’ and the ‘revelation.’” Later still: “Science today is . . . not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations.” And: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’” Weber depicted rationalization as necessary to modern intellectual work, but also as a precious achievement, one open to threat from a new irrationalism, also because the self-imposed rigors of modernity are so emotionally unsatisfying for many individuals. Schmitt’s argument in Political Theology (1922) was partly a critical commentary on Weber’s accounts of disenchantment and the routinization of charisma.50 The first three parts of this essay were republished in 1923 in a posthumous memorial volume (Erinnerungsgabe) for Weber, who had died in 1920. Together with Schmitt’s essay Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), Political Theology represented a critique, partly indirect and generally respectful, of the late scholar’s theories.51 While rejecting the strict opposition between charisma and law posited by Weber, Schmitt’s contention that deism had banished the sovereign decision along with the miracle closely resembled Weber’s account of the disenchantment of the world under Protestantism. Crucially, however, Schmitt did not regard this process as inevitable. His argument in favor of the sovereign decision that creates the state of exception can be viewed as an effort to reverse this process. Although the modern constitutional state had attempted to eliminate the necessity for the sovereign decision through the institution of a supposedly comprehensive system of laws that can be self-ruling, Schmitt argued that this attempt can never be finally successful, as there will always be a need for an ultimate authority to

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interpret the laws, as well to declare the state of emergency in which the laws must be suspended. Schmitt indicated further that the origin of Weber’s theories was theological rather than scientific. Political Theology does not connect Weber directly to the attack on miracles. Schmitt’s essay Roman Catholicism targets instead the Protestant theologian Rudolph Sohm— one of Weber’s sources for the idea of a split between charismatic and legal authority52— for instituting a typically “Protestant rupture of nature and grace.”53 Around forty years later, Schmitt explicitly identified Weber’s theory of charisma as “the most striking example of a new political theology” disguised as a sociological theory: “Max Weber’s sociology of ‘charismatic legitimation’ . . . is just an offspring of secularized Protestant theology (by Rudolph Sohm) as a deformation of an originally theological notion. For the charismatic legitimation of the Apostle Paul in the New Testament remains the theological source for all that Max Weber has said sociologically about charisma.”54 The identification of pure religion as grace that deteriorates into legalism was a Protestant trope that had been deployed against both Catholic law and Jewish halakhah. Key figures here were, respectively, Sohm and Julius Wellhausen.55 Whereas Sohm had described the decline from the charismatic organization of the primitive Christian community into the legal and institutional organization of the Roman Catholic Church, Wellhausen had described the fall in ancient Israelite religion from the prophets to the priests, and into legalistic ritualism. Both of these narratives reinforced the superiority of Protestantism as a restoration of the charisma of the primitive Christian Church. However, the roots of such narratives were much older than the Reformation, reflecting not only Paul’s original bifurcation between grace (charis) and law (nomos) in Romans, but also the early Christian idea that miracles and other charismata had ceased already in apostolic times. In the Reformation, this contention was redeployed in a manner that connected it with the fundamental problem of how to reconcile sovereignty with legality, as expressed in a centuries-long debate in medieval Scholasticism over the relationship between God’s two powers. Schmitt’s critique of Weber already pointed to these associations. From one perspective, Schmitt’s goal was to restore a more traditional Catholic concept of order, one in which the potentia absoluta is acknowledged. He conceded on at least one occasion that the Puritan doctrine of predestination had recognized God’s power of “decision” concerning salvation.56 Schmitt’s greatest struggle was with the deist model of the deity as a watchmaker or “engineer of the great machine,” which, by embracing calculability to the exclusion of all else, had destabilized the traditional balance between the deity’s two powers.

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Divine Right, or Potentia Dei Absoluta God’s “absolute power” (potentia dei absoluta) and “orderly/ordered power” (potentia ordinata) were, respectively, his power viewed purely and simply, or in his capacity to do whatever he wishes; and his power as he had chosen to exercise it, by constructing a lawful and orderly cosmos, or the existing state of affairs.57 The connections between this medieval distinction and Weber’s theory of charisma and its routinization may not be immediately apparent. Weber himself, to my knowledge, nowhere invokes such a connection. Schmitt came close to doing so in his notebooks, where he attributed the charisma-versus-law distinction to Weber but especially to Sohm, and also linked this opposition to a “fatal, antithetical chain of concepts” that included the distinctions between sovereignty and legality, decision and institution, and the constituting versus constituted powers.58 Certainly Schmitt’s concept of the sovereign decision that remains always capable of declaring a state of exception to the existing legal order represents a strong parallel to the understanding of the potentia absoluta as that concept had developed in the Middle Ages and had come to be applied, by analogy, to the powers of human sovereigns: emperors, kings, and popes.59 In the formulation by Duns Scotus: In every agent acting intelligently and voluntarily that can act in conformity with an upright or just law but does not have to do so of necessity, one can distinguish between its ordained power and its absolute power. The reason is that it either can act in conformity with some right and just law, and then it is acting according to its ordained power, . . . or else it can act beyond or against such a law, and in this case its absolute power exceeds its ordained power. And therefore it is not only in God, but in every free agent that can either act in accord with the dictates of a just law or go beyond or against that law, that one distinguishes between absolute and ordained power; therefore, the jurists say that someone can act de facto, that is, according to his absolute power, or de jure, that is[,] according to his ordained legal power.60

God’s omnipotence was reinforced by his power to perform miracles, a power that kings also were commonly believed to possess, such as the ability to heal scrofula by touch.61 Miracles were a major focus of medieval discussions of the potentia absoluta. Some traditional examples included the possibility, first raised by Jerome, of God’s restoring a fallen virgin to chastity, and the biblical episode of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego’s salvation from perishing in the flames of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace (Dan. 3:16 – 18).62 These discussions continued into the Enlightenment and were echoed in debates between deists and their opponents.63 As Jeffrey Wigelsworth put it,

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in their emphasis on natural law to the exclusion of the miracle, “Deists may be described as emphasizing the potentia dei ordinata rather than potentia dei absoluta.”64 Schmitt’s reference to the manner in which deism had excluded the miracle together with the sovereign exception adverted to such early modern debates and therefore, at least indirectly, to their medieval predecessors. Accordingly, some interpreters, including Mika Ojakangas and John Milbank, linked Schmitt’s theory of the exception to the medieval distinction between the two powers.65 Milbank states: As Schmitt concluded, the doctrine of modern sovereignty is a secularization of (one should add late medieval voluntarist) theological authorizing of absolute rule. For Schmitt, the grounding of secular sovereign power in the right to assume exceptional authority in the case of exceptional circumstances involves an appropriation (and later a problematic secularization) also of the divine right to overrule his own commands, rooted in his potentia absoluta.66

In addition to miracles, divine commands were another proof of God’s omnipotence.67 The so-called divine-command theory of morality, as we have seen, held that there is nothing good or evil in itself, and that the determination of what is good or evil depends upon an antecedent command from God. Schmitt embraced this theory, which Otto invoked also as an illustration of the numinous, despite calling it “repulsive.”68 In the seventeenth century, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth argued against the divinecommand theory, an idea “advanced by such as think nothing so essential to the Deity, as Uncontroulable Power and Arbitrary Will.”69 He blamed Ockham as one of the first proponents of this erroneous theory and Descartes as a more recent one.70 In the most radical versions of the potentia absoluta, God could change the laws at a whim and impose punishments or distribute rewards as he saw fit. Such ideas contributed directly to the decline of the Catholic sacramental economy by demoting its power of salvation, and to the rise of the idea of predestination.71 These developments were complex. Predestination could be understood either as the result of a prior determination regarding an individual’s salvation or damnation, to which God had bound himself; or as God’s foreknowledge of an individual’s actions as meriting such judgments.72 Rather than a last-minute whim on God’s part, predestination was generally taken as a guarantee of the solidity of his will, albeit a guarantee that came at the price of making this will inscrutable. Yet in the most extreme formulations of his absolute power, God might choose to save even Judas retroactively, reversing time and his own prior judgments. Such an image of the deity, as advanced with increasing insistence by certain nominalists from the thirteenth century onward, supposedly disturbed

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the traditional compromise in Scholasticism according to which, although God’s power was infinite in theory, in practice he exercised this power in a regular and predictable fashion. Michael Gillespie depicted the grounds of the ensuing crisis: While no one denied God’s potentia absoluta (absolute power), these scholastics generally thought that he had bound himself to a potentia ordinata (ordered power) through his own decision. The possibility that God was not bound in this way but was perfectly free and omnipotent was a terrifying possibility that nearly all medieval thinkers were unwilling to accept.73

Jean Bethke Elshtain presented the crisis in similar terms: “Once the structure of medieval Thomism starts to crack, God’s omnipotence leaves human beings stewing in a kind of permanent impotence as their agency is swamped by God’s arbitrary power or, alternatively, human free willing and capacity to ‘do’ shrinks the realm of divine agency.”74 The two horns of the dilemma thus having been sharpened by the logic of the nominalists, the room for compromise between the countervailing goods of God’s absolute power and human beings’ freedom and security disappeared. Francis Oakley, a historian who has contributed greatly to our knowledge of the medieval distinction between God’s absolute and orderly powers, broadly shared the view that nominalism contributed to a crisis in Scholasticism,75 and that modernity resolved this crisis by proscribing the sovereign deity of the nominalists: “The story of the relationship between science and religion in the seventeenth century was, in its most fundamental aspect, the story of the progressive exile of the sovereign God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to the remote and inaccessible post of First Cause— the First Cause to which eighteenth-century deists were to accord a thin and sanitized respect.”76 Another leading historian, William J. Courtenay, called certain aspects of these accounts into question.77 He argued that, originally, the potentia absoluta was understood as the sum of possibilities that God might have brought about hypothetically, and not as an active power that might be exercised at this moment against the existing order.78 Even miracles were understood to be part of the potentia ordinata. The reinterpretation of the absolute power as a special, disruptive mode of action occurred later, with the theologians’ adoption of the newer view of the canonists, who had come to interpret this power as analogous to the pope’s ability to suspend the legal order.79 This adoption began or accelerated with Duns Scotus, and continued with Ockham and other nominalists.80 Relying heavily on Courtenay, Mika Ojakangas has attempted to reverse Schmitt’s formulation: “Given its origin in juridical discourse, the constitution-making power, rather than being a secularized

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theological notion, is a theologized juristic notion. . . . The Schmittian theory of constitution has nothing to do with theological ideas and has no roots in medieval doctrines of God’s absolute power. His theory of constitution is a late modern innovation.”81 However, the matter is not so simple. First, neither Courtenay’s nor, consequently, Ojakangas’s version of why the nominalists came to assert their version of the potentia absoluta as an active power appears convincing. By presenting this development as a later and mistaken transposition of the ideas of the canonists into the domain of theological speculations concerning divine sovereignty, Courtenay leaves us at a loss to understand why the analogy between God’s absolute power and the power of human rulers to suspend the legal order appeared persuasive to the theologians who framed it. The answer given by other scholars, such as Oakley, that this analogy was itself the result of a desire to assert the prerogatives of the sovereign God of the Bible is more convincing: Scotus, Ockham, the latter’s nominalist followers, and so many other latemedieval thinkers were responding in their use of the distinction [between the absolute and ordained powers] to promptings essentially conservative in nature and biblical in provenance. . . . The invocation of the absolute power had consistently been motivated by the wish to vindicate the Old Testament vision of Yahweh as a personal God of power and might against the threat of philosophic determinism.82

It is not as if Oakley and Courtenay do not agree on many of the particulars.83 Both identify a similar timeline for the increase in emphasis on the absolute power, beginning with Scotus and continuing through Ockham and his followers; although Oakley argues that the roots of this emphasis can be traced even earlier.84 Courtenay also expresses a version of the “crisis” thesis by arguing that this increase posed a danger: “The potential arbitrariness in the exercise of any form of human sovereignty, an arbitrariness deplored but widely recognized in medieval society, contained serious dangers for the understanding of God and for the distinction of absolute and ordained power if applied to the concept of divine power.”85 The main difference between the two scholars concerns the underlying reasons and especially the theological motivations for this crisis. Oakley, rightly in my view, sees this as the result not of an accident, but rather of a fundamental fissure in Christian thought, of “tensions between the biblically-inspired notion of an omnipotent and transcendent creator-God and the persistent tendency of the Greek philosophers to identify the divine instead with the immanent and necessary order of an external, self-subsistent cosmos.”86 The Scholastic distinction between

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the absolute and ordained powers represented an attempt to reconcile these two very different visions, which represent “the half-forgotten line of troubled intersection between separate tectonic plates of rival Greek and biblical origin.”87 Rather than a thirteenth-century mistake, it is the ancient tension between Jerusalem and Athens that is expressed here. And within this dialectical tension, what the nominalist emphasis on the absolute power represented was a reassertion of the transcendent sovereignty of the God of Israel, as manifested in creation ex nihilo, miracles, and revelation. The Cessation of the Charismata They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. l a f e u , in William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, act 2, scene 3

The medieval idea of God’s two powers, which aimed to reconcile the tension between antinomian and legalistic modes of divine authority, was only one of the theological concepts that influenced Weber’s idea of charisma. As we saw earlier, Weber’s account of modernity connected the disappearance of charisma with rationalization and disenchantment. The notion that charisma is always receding into the past, to be replaced by more legalistic modes of authority, finds some precedent in the deist notion of a watchmaker God who, after pronouncing the Fiat lux! and laboring for several more days, then goes on a permanent vacation. Yet there are far more specific theological precedents for Weber’s idea. I have argued previously that the idea of disenchantment can be traced back to three ancient Christian tropes that were redeployed by Protestants during the Reformation. The first was the claim that, with either Christ’s Incarnation or Passion, the pagan demons were driven from the world and the oracles through which they spoke were silenced. The ancient source for this was Eusebius’s reinterpretation in Christian terms of Plutarch’s account of the decline of the oracles, and of the death of Pan, which after the Reformation became a trope of literary Romanticism.88 In his typology of authority, Weber identified the oracle and the ordeal— quasimagical ruptures in the natural order— as the forms of legal decision specific to charismatic authority, which was opposed to all rules.89 The second trope was the claim that the Gospel had abrogated or nullified the Mosaic law, or at least the ceremonial portion thereof, which was no

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longer binding nor capable of effecting salvation.90 According to Christian typological interpretations of the Bible, the Gospel had superseded the Mosaic law, removing its mysteries and ending its rituals. The deist John Toland argued that this meant that there are no longer any mysteries, at least when it comes to the true and natural religion.91 This event of demystification was signaled by the rending of the veil of the Temple at Jerusalem upon Christ’s death. Such ideas directly informed the Protestant attack on Catholic sacramentalism, an event that Weber closely identified with disenchantment.92 Weber further attributed rationalization to the Puritan emphasis on the moral aspects of the Mosaic law at the expense of its ceremonial aspects.93 The third ancient theological trope redeployed by Protestants was the claim that the charismata— the signs of grace, or of possession by the Holy Spirit, including miracles, speaking in tongues, and so on, had ceased with the end of the apostolic age.94 There was even biblical precedent for this idea, in Paul’s statement that “as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away” (1 Cor. 13: 8 – 10). The idea that miracles were no longer possible was handy in dismissing the Roman Catholic Church’s authority to perform or to certify miracles; the Church’s magisterium had long depended on these prerogatives. That miracles had ceased became orthodox doctrine in certain Protestant denominations, although others, such as Pentecostals, have dissented. Whereas Paul’s original opposition of grace (charis) to law (nomos) provided a precedent for Weber’s bifurcation between charismatic and legal authority, the idea that miracles had ceased anticipated his thesis of the routinization of charisma.95 Weber refers explicitly to the cessation of prophecy in several places.96 (This was the same idea, miracles being events that accompanied prophecies and certified their truth.) Weber may have known about this idea from either Sohm or Adolf Harnack, whose account of the cessation of miracles in the early Church coordinated with Sohm’s ideas concerning a decline from charismatic to legal authority in that institution.97 At least one older source connected the cessation of the charismata directly with debates over God’s two powers. Oakley has drawn attention to a speech given by James I before Parliament in 1609 (see chapter 1) as evidence of the continuity of the medieval discourse concerning these powers. As we have seen, James began by asserting his own divine right, including the traditional prerogative of the sovereign over life and death.98 Attempting to reserve his absolute sovereignty in a manner that Parliament would find acceptable, James described how the constituting power may be limited by the constitution that it has itself established.99 Oakley pointed to James’s

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invocation of the biblical idea of the covenant (berith) between Yahweh and the people of Israel: So as every just King in a setled kingdome is bound to observe that paction made to his people by his Lawes, in framing his government agreeable thereunto, according to that paction which God made with Noe after the deluge, Hereafter Seede time, and Harvest, Cold and Heate, Sommer and Winter, and Day and Night shall not cease, so long as the earth remaines.

Voluntarism— the idea that the sovereign will is paramount— need not entail arbitrariness when the sovereign is restrained by his or her own prior consent. The case of Noah (“Noe”) surely served as a graphic precedent for this idea, for this was a case in which God’s fury had destroyed nearly all life on earth. Following the Flood, God struck a covenant with Noah in which he promised never again to exercise his death-dealing power in this way and agreed to uphold in the future the regular order of nature. James compared the sovereign’s authority with the divinity’s power to suspend natural law. Reinforcing his argument for a self-regulating royal sovereignty was an implicit threat of violence held in abeyance. James further tempered his claims as sovereign by relegating antinomianism to an earlier phase of polity:100 For although God have power as well of destruction, as of creation or maintenance, yet will it not agree with the wisedome of God, to exercise his power in the destruction of nature, & overturning the whole frame of things, since his creatures were made, that his glorie might thereby be better expressed. . . . But now in these our times wee are to distinguish between the state of Kings in their first originall, and between the state of setled Kings and Monarches, that doe at this time governe in civill Kingdomes. For even as God, during the time of the olde Testament, spake by Oracles, and wrought by Miracles; yet how soone it pleased him to settle a Church which was bought, and redeemed by the blood of his onely Sonne Christ, then was there a cessation of both; He ever after governing his people and Church within the limits of his reveiled will. So in the first originall of Kings, whereof some had their beginning by Conquest, and some by election of the people, their willes at that time served for Law; Yet how soone Kingdomes began to be setled in civilitie and policie, then did Kings set downe their mindes by Lawes, which are properly made by the King onely; but at the rogation of the people, the Kings graunt being obteined thereunto. And so the King became to be Lex loquens [a speaking (i.e., living) law], after a sort, binding himselfe by a double othe to the observation of the fundamentall Lawes of his Kingdome: . . . And therefore a King governing in a setled Kingdome, leaves to be a King, and degenerates into a Tyrant, as soone as hee leaves off to rule according to his Lawes.101

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Not noted in Oakley’s several exegeses of this remarkable passage is that James invoked the cessation of oracles and of miracles, ideas that stemmed from the early centuries of Christianity and that, at the time of the king’s speech, had already been redeployed by Protestants.102 James adverted in other places to the idea that Christ’s coming banished such wondrous signs, in terms that anticipated the idea of the replacement of miraculous power by institutional authority: All we that are Christians ought assuredly to know that since the coming of Christ in the flesh, and establishing of his Church by the Apostles, all miracles, visions, prophecies, & appearances of Angels or good spirites are ceased. Which served onely for the first sowing of faith, & planting of the Church. Where now the Church being established, .  .  .  the Lawe and Prophets are thought sufficient to serve us.103

In associating the idea of the cessation of the charismata with such a transition in the Christian Church, James was not alone, as the remainder of this section will show. What is striking is the connection that he makes between such ideas and a transformation in royal authority, defined in terms of the two powers. The notion of an absolute, antinomian sovereignty that declines into a lawful, regular order as the result of a cessation of miracles, and of oracles: Does this, perhaps, sound like something we have heard before? In fact, in James’s speech we already have almost all of the ingredients of Weber’s famous ideas of disenchantment and the routinization of charisma. The idea that the charismata ceased at the beginning or in the early centuries of the Christian era had already been raised by certain fathers of the Church, such as Origen and Augustine.104 It figured in attempts to counter assertions of authority made on the basis of continuing revelations, such as those claimed by the Montanists. Jon Ruthven argues for an earlier origin of this idea in pre-Christian Jewish notions of the end of prophecy.105 Martin Luther affirmed that miracles had ceased, as these were needed only to expel heathen superstition and to spread and confirm the Gospel.106 During the Reformation, many Protestants invoked this idea to dismiss the Roman Catholic Church’s claim to be able to perform and certify miracles. It was not necessarily a general prejudice against the miraculous, but rather a specific conflict with Roman Catholicism “about who was teaching the truth and where authority resided” that led some Protestant reformers to preach the cessation of miracles.107 This doctrine was used in turn against those wonder-workers who would threaten the authority of the established Church of England. Thomas Hobbes, who recognized the political dangers of prophecy, embraced the conclusion that this had ceased.108 By the beginning of the

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seventeenth century, the idea that miracles had ceased had already become fixed doctrine for many English Protestants.109 In 1609, around the time of James’s speech, Thomas Morton considered and rejected all of the reasons given by Catholics in favor of the continuation of miracles: We use to water yong plants (saith S. Gregorie) when they be new set, which watering then ceaseth, after that they have taken roote: so were miracles necessarie for the first seed-plot of the Church, to the sound rooting of multitudes in the faith.  .  .  . We intreate not now of the wonderfull manner of protection, which God often useth for the preservation of his servants, which often exceedeth all expectation or reason of man: but of the Charisma and gift of working Miracles, which exceedeth all possibilitie of nature: and hereof argue diversly. . . . If S. Chrysostome and S. Augustine, who had so neare affinitie with the primitive and Apostolicall age, said, that some principall Miracles were then altogether ceased: can we thinke that now after the continuall withering of a thousand yeares, the Church like Sarahs barren wombe, should revive and bring forth in this twelfth and thirteenth generation most wonderful Miracles, as they [the Catholics] do pretend?110

In another work, Morton used philology to debunk the Catholic idea of transubstantiation. He labeled Cardinal Robert Bellarmine’s reference to consecrated oil as “chrism” “another Jesuiticall Fraud,” like that which had led to the idea that the Eucharist was transformed from mere bread into the literal Body of Christ.111 Morton pointed out that Cyril had actually referred to the consecrated oil as a “charisma,” meaning a gift of grace, and simultaneously as “still Oyle.” In other words, just as the oil had been consecrated by the grace of God yet not changed in substance, so too the bread after consecration remained simple bread. Such a theology evinced an interpretation of “charisma” as meaning something other than a miraculous transformation. Protestants disagreed among themselves as to precisely when miracles had ceased. Among those later generally identified as deists, some took a firmer line and argued that God had rarely if ever performed miracles.112 Thomas Morgan, for example, stated: God has given Men sufficient, natural, and moral Means of Happiness, where they will use them. In the rational Use of these Means there can be no Need of Miracles, and without such a Use of Means all the Miracles in the World can signify nothing. Neglecting the rational, human Means, which God has ordain’d and established in the Course of Providence, and depending on Miracle, immediate Interposition, and uninstrumental, divine Agency, is the most dangerous and fatal Presumption . . . This . . . was the very Life and Soul of Judaism.113

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Without necessarily denying that miracles might happen on occasion, deists effectively undercut the rationale for miracles by denying them any evidentiary value. Each link in the epistemic chain was subjected to critique: How may we know when a miracle occurs? Perhaps we had simply misunderstood nature. If a supernatural event were to take place, how could we guarantee that it emanated from the deity, rather than from an evil spirit? Propositions of natural religion should be certifiable by appeal to plain reason. If a proposition accords with reason, then a miracle is not needed to vouch for its validity. If, on the other hand, a proposition does not accord with reason, then no number of miracles can validate it. Conyers Middleton, whose Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers (1749) precipitated a robust debate toward the end of the deist period, pared miracles back to the apostolic age and was generally skeptical of accounts of miracles and parsimonious in allowing their authenticity even in the earliest times.114 Middleton did not deny that God could continue to perform miracles, if he wished, although he refrained from expressing any opinion on whether or not he had done so recently.115 Others suspected Middleton of unbelief, but he characterized his own position simply as affirming “that, after the days of the Apostles, no standing power of working miracles was continued to the Church, to which they might perpetually appeal for the conviction of unbelievers.”116 This way of putting things obviously undercut the claim of any Church hierarchy, or episcopal succession, to miraculous power. The goal was largely to diminish the legitimacy of the Church; but the means applied severed charisma from institution in a manner that anticipated Weber’s structural division of these types of authority. One review of the controversy summed up this difference of opinion: “Dr. Middleton and some few confine them to Christ and his Apostles days, and admit none but what are recorded in Scripture. Those Protestants, who have appeared against him, vindicate the miracles of two or three centuries” after Christ.117 In large part, this distinction turned on the question of what one considered the function of such miracles to have been. Some argued that their purpose had been to evidence the true inspiration of scripture. By this standard, once the canon of scripture had been closed with the promulgation of the Gospels or New Testament, there was no longer any need for such signs.118 Others argued that miracles enjoyed a longer duration, as they served not only to reinforce the initial Gospel message, but also to support the nascent institution of the Church during the early centuries of its persecution and minority status.119 With the transformation of Christianity into an established tradition, this function was obsolete. The terminus ad quem for the cessation of miracles would therefore, in theory, have been either Constantine’s

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Edict of Milan in 313 CE, which legalized Christianity, or the acceptance of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 CE. This left plenty of room for debate over the validity of particular miracles. Middleton’s declared purpose was to combat the intrigues of Jesuits and “the late growth of Popery in this Kingdom” of England.120 He rejected the Roman Catholic Church’s claim to possess, as an inheritance from the early Church, “a divine and extraordinary power of working miracles,” which constituted “the most powerful of all their arguments” for authority.121 The word “charisma” itself denoted not supernatural abilities, but ordinary ones: And in truth, all the other expressions of these [Church] Fathers, which are commonly understood to signify the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost, may be interpreted more rationally . . . to denote not onely the ordinary graces of the Gospel . . . nay in some places, they seem even to disclame all gifts of a more extraordinary kind. . . . Thus when St. Clemens tells the Corinthians, that they had all been blessed with a large effusion of the Holy Spirit, yet this effusion, as it appears from the context, was not of a kind which conferred any extraordinary powers . . . He means nothing more by that gift, or charisma, as he calls it, than the different talents, abilities, and advantages, whether natural or acquired, of strength, wisdom, riches, continence, &c. by which Providence thinks fit to distinguish the different characters of men.122

False claims of supernatural powers, supported by a host of monkish inventions including relics, prayers to saints, the worship of images, and so on,123 had not been challenged successfully until the rise of Protestantism: The light of the Reformation dispelled the charm: and what Cicero says of the Pythian Oracle, may be as truly said of the Popish miracles; when men began to be less credulous, their power vanished. For that spirit of inquiry, with which Christendom was then animated, detected the cheat, and exposed to public view, the hidden springs and machinery of those lying wonders, by which the world had been seduced and enslaved to the tyranny of Rome.124

Middleton referred to the belief that the oracles were frauds that operated either by mechanical means— automatons— or by ventriloquism, the clever concealment of tubes by which distant voices could be made to appear as if they came from inside statues.125 Invoking the Ciceronian version of the decline of the oracles, Middleton here, like many Protestants before him, associated Christianity with the rise of skeptical reason, linking Reformation with Enlightenment. Middleton stated that, after Christ’s ascension, the apostles were given miraculous powers in order to withstand persecution and persuade the recalcitrant Jews and Gentiles:

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But in process of time, when they had laid a foundation  .  .  . and planted Churches in all the chief Cities of the Roman Empire, and settled a regular ministry to succeed them . . . the benefit of miraculous powers began to be less and less wanted . . . and as soon as Christianity had gained an establishment in every quarter of the known world, . . . [these powers] were finally withdrawn.126

In other words, to put the same in Weberian terms, once the “bureaucratic authority” of the Church was sufficiently solid, such “charisma” was no longer needed and was accordingly taken back. A major difference from Weber is that Middleton presumed an intention and teleology, the guiding hand of the deity behind the replacement of charisma by bureaucracy. Weber instead described charisma as an inherently unstable social phenomenon that is constantly giving way to routinization. This avoided any need to invoke divine agency to account for changes in modes of authority. Like Middleton, Weber explained charisma as a largely personal quality, opposed to the “charisma of office” (Amtscharisma). The idea that miracles had ceased was embraced by the seventeenthcentury Cambridge theologian John Spencer, who is best known for his account of Mosaic ritual law, De legibus hebraeorum ritualibus (1685).127 Spencer’s attempt to explain some of the curious features of the ritual laws of the ancient Israelites in their cultural context, as a prophylaxis against idolatry, anticipated later efforts to account for these traditions in historical and anthropological terms. His ideas on sacrifice were cited approvingly two centuries later by both Julius Wellhausen and William Robertson Smith.128 In broad terms, Spencer was a proto-deist, who tried to rationalize biblical institutions.129 This is evident also in his works from 1665 on prophecies and prodigies, extraordinary occurrences considered as miraculous signs. Spencer expressed his general view that such departures from the regular order of nature were not to be expected: And the faithfulness of Nature to its Original laws of motion, the continuance of all things as they were from the beginning of the Creation, awaken a considerate mind into a quick and lively sense of the depth thereof. Nulla litura est in libro naturae. [There is no blot/correction in the book of nature.] God never saw it necessary (as upon mature thoughts) to correct and amend any thing in this great Volume of the Creation, since the first edition thereof. . . . This general constancy and harmony of Nature in its operations, is not so much removed as commended by (those petty discords) prodigious occurrences. . . . These are but the Anomalies of Nature, some temporary exceptions from her more common rules of motion. . . . For Righteousness is the Image of God, a transcript of the nature of him with whom there is no variableness, nor shadow of turning.130

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Spencer at the end of this passage quoted James 1:17, like Toland after him, in defense of the idea of a watchmaker God who sets everything in motion at the beginning and then refrains from intervening. Such a robust concept of natural law leaves little if any room for the miraculous. Decades before Tindal and Morgan, Spencer rejected the possibility of an arbitrary God as a prospect that would provoke anxiety: What sober Reason can warrant us to conclude any necessary and natural occurrences the prophetick signs of Events (to us) purely arbitrary and contingent? [If ] all such irregular accidents shal be allow’d presages of future judgments, . . . our lives shall alway hang in doubt before us, we shall fear night and day, and have no assurance (at least, no comfort) of our lives.131

Fortunately for us, this is not the case. Rather, under the present “Oeconomy” (meaning the Gospel dispensation, as opposed to the “Jewish Oeconomy”), we are not to “expect[] . . . any Signs from heaven.”132 Although God used, “suitable to the non-age [i.e., childhood] of the Church, to address himself very much to the lower faculties of the Soul” with all sorts of vehemence and mysteries, such as those delivered on Mount Sinai, now such “mighty signs and wonders . . . vanish[ed] as the light of divine Revelation, prevail’d, as Stars do [vanish] upon the approaches of day-light.”133 Henceforth, those who look for such miracles “mistake the temper and condition of that Oeconomy which the appearance of our Savior hath put us under; wherein all things are to be managed in a more sedate, cool, and silent maner.” Nearly the last miracles of this sort were those that attended the Passion of the Christ: Indeed the Vail of the Temple was rent, the Sun dreadfully eclipsed, the Earth terribly shaken at his death; but these astonishing Wonders were made use of as his last reserve to conquer the prejudices of an obdurate people . . . and perhaps these prodigious changes in Nature were intended as prophetick emblems of the great change shortly to ensue in Heaven [the way of Worship and Religion] and Earth [the Powers and Kingdoms of the World] by the Power and Doctrine of that Person who then died upon the Cross.134

Here Spencer associated the cessation of the charismata with another of the great tropes that informed the Protestant idea of disenchantment: the notion that the Passion was a sort of miracle to end all miracles, which signaled the transformation of one spiritual economy into another, the supersession of the Gospel over the Mosaic law: as “the Jewish Oeconomy commenced in fearful sights at Mount Sinai, . . . now fit it was its conclusion should somewhat resemble the solemnity of its beginning.”135 Special signs were also given

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of the destruction of Jerusalem. Religion evolved into something more rational, as befits a maturer age. Spencer refers to the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, where the apostles performed such miracles as speaking in tongues, as a “mighty rushing Wind,” which is a literal translation and possibly a demythologization of the term for “spirit” (Greek pneuma; Hebrew ruah.). Such phenomena he relegates to the past: “In the more sedate and gentle Dispensation of the Gospel . . . God expects now that we should be judiciously religious.”136 Miracles were suited only for those ages of humanity’s childhood, which Spencer associated with pagans but above all with Jews.137 This anticipated his later use, in De legibus hebraeorum, of the “accommodation theory,” the idea that the Mosaic law was a necessary concession to the spiritual immaturity of the ancient Israelites. In his treatise on prophecies, reprinted together with his work on prodigies, Spencer maintained his thesis that God hath by no Promise encouraged our Expectation of any such prophetick inspiration in these latter Ages of the World.  .  .  . God gave Prophecy to the Church of the Old Testament, and to the Times wherein our Savior was first manifested and preached to the world (stiled the last daies, being the expiring times of the Jewish Oeconomie).  .  .  . All other extraordinary gifts which anciently attended the Prophetick Spirit, are now ceased. The gifts of healing, of working miracles, of discerning of Spirits, of divers tongues, of interpretation of Scripture, have all expired with their occasion; and why should we imagine that Prophecy (numbred with them) survives them all?138

In addition to the cessation of the charismata and the unveiling of Jewish mysteries, Spencer also took up the third of the ancient theological mythemes that had been reworked by Protestants into a general idea of the disenchantment of the world: the silence of the oracles. He noted both of Plutarch’s treatises on the decline of the oracles and echoed the Christian reinterpretation of this event as due to Jesus: “This imposture [of oracles] the Devil abused the world withal, till the light of the Gospel and Philosophy made the fallacy notorious.”139 Spencer used the word “Oeconomy” to describe our modern, disenchanted order. This order coordinates with a particular conception of divinity, and of sovereignty. Modernity is also a libidinal economy, an economy of affect, in which, as Spencer says, “all things are to be managed in a more sedate, cool, and silent maner.” Under our disenchanted dispensation, the sovereign God must be placed in the background, receding into the distance, in order to establish the Gospel as the last revelation, to prohibit enthusiasm, and above all, to alleviate the anxiety that would attend the idea of an arbitrary, interventionist deity.

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What Is Disenchantment? It is well known that, in the 1920 edition of The Protestant Ethic, Weber attributed “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) to the ancient Israelite idea that there is only one God, who is radically separate from the world.140 This had the effect of excluding all intermediate spirits and producing a “dis-godded” (entgötterte) world.141 In consequence of the remoteness (or independence) of the one true God, and of the absence, either of being or of power, of any intermediary spirits to whom one might make an appeal by ritual, the manipulation of the world by means of magic and oracles also faded. In Weber’s view, it was the renewed emphasis on such ideas by Protestants that ended the Catholic ritual economy of salvation, which had amounted to an effort to control the world by magic, as exemplified by the doctrine of ex opere operato, or the idea that by virtue of the ritual work having been performed, the intended result— namely, salvation or grace— would follow automatically. There are several difficulties with Weber’s characterizations of the nature and history of disenchantment. The first, as has just been demonstrated once again, is that the idea of disenchantment, although partly derived from ancient Israelite sources, is more closely related to a set of ancient Christian tropes that was taken up and reworked during the Protestant Reformation.142 The idea of disenchantment is supersessionist, meaning that it posits the replacement of one historical era and dispensation by another. Indeed, disenchantment is a variant of traditional Christian supersessionism, as indicated by its entanglement with a series of anti-Jewish tropes. Kathleen Davis has argued that ideas about historical periodization, new ages and beginnings ex nihilo are fundamentally assertions of sovereignty.143 With Weber, a form of Christian triumphalism was transformed into a scholarly theory concerning how one form of sovereignty or authority (Herrschaft) replaced another. This narrative had another side, however. The idea that charisma had declined was interpreted as a fall from grace (charis) by such Protestant theologians as Sohm, who influenced Weber. Christianity supposedly restored the prophetic tradition that had been occluded by Jewish priestly legalism, only to fall in its turn into another kind of legalism: that instituted by the Roman Catholic Church. Weber’s ambivalence regarding these developments was signaled by his diagnosis of modernity as an “iron cage.” Ironically, the disenchantment of charisma wrought by earlier Protestant thinkers such as Spencer, Tindal, and Morgan appears to have created the precondition for this diagnosis. From his own particular Catholic perspective, Schmitt blamed these developments on the bifurcation between law and grace; the problem was that Protestants such as Sohm were either too hot or too cold.

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What is crucial now is to appreciate three basic points: First, the idea of a general disenchantment of the world was an ancient Christian mytheme, a trope or rhetorical device that had been used to beat and bludgeon other traditions, and that was then taken up again for polemical purposes mainly by Protestants during the Reformation, long before it was used by Weber to describe a supposedly real historical event. The second point is a direct implication of the first: Weber’s accounts of disenchantment and the routinization of charisma uncannily resembled a theological position that had been deployed in Protestant polemics, rather than the scientific, “value-neutral” account that he represented it to be, lending support to Schmitt’s contention that Weber’s theory constituted a “political theology.” Thirdly, disenchantment was hardly the legacy of Judaism, as Weber claimed, but was in fact, in some of its key variants, directed against either the Mosaic law or those manifestations of the holy, such as miracles and revelation, that are highlighted in the Hebrew Bible. Disenchantment was and remains in many ways a Christian problem, albeit one that has been visited upon other peoples and cultures. Weber’s contention that the notion of an all-powerful God, who is utterly separate from the world, had played a role in disenchantment is certainly true as far as it goes. This idea, which was first articulated in ancient Israelite religion and subsequently passed down to all of the Abrahamic religions, was used by Protestants against the “magical” dimensions of Catholic sacramentalism. If God is truly sovereign, then he cannot be coerced by rituals; and if he is not like mortal men, then he cannot be swayed by our prayers. This logic informed, for example, the Puritan critique of “vain repetitions” in prayer as a form of rhetoric, magic, and idolatry, designed to persuade or even coerce God to do our bidding, and therefore premised on an erroneous conception of the deity as anthropomorphic.144 Luther insisted that salvation was “by faith and by grace alone” (sola fide, sola gratia), and could not come by means of ritual works, for this would represent a limitation on God’s sovereignty. The resulting disenchantment of the economy of Catholic sacramentalism contributed to the interiorization of religion, and at the same time it opened the way for a realignment of worldly activity in terms of a different, less spiritual ethic. Weber’s account of the role played by these theological developments in modernization was utterly brilliant. However, it is necessary to add several crucial qualifications or refinements to his account. The first concerns an equivocation in the meaning of “disenchantment.” As we have seen, in Science as a Vocation, Weber defined disenchantment in terms of “calculability” (Berechenbarkeit):145 rationalization “means that there are no mysterious, incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is

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disenchanted.”146 It is the drive to eliminate chance through systematically organized procedures that has enabled the rationalization of the modern capitalist economy, as well as of science, law, and the like. The definition of secularization as the rise of calculability is immensely productive.147 However, to frame the process of disenchantment in this way is immediately to suggest a problem. This is because the various magical operations that were, according to Weber, thus disenchanted were in fact nothing other than efforts to construct a system for predictively securing certain results.148 Only the means deployed to do so, as well as the cosmologies on which these techniques were based, were different from those of modern science. Weber tended to conflate magical procedures with the operation of charisma, which, according to his theory, is truly unpredictable and cannot be produced by means of any technique. Yet the two are quite different, even though they converge at points. This can be illustrated by the Catholic doctrine of the ex opere operato efficacy of the sacraments, which was, according to the Church, independent of the personal qualities of the priest who performed these ritual operations. Obviously, this doctrine produces certainty (or calculability) of the efficacy of such sacraments even if the priest lacks personal charisma or moral probity. Accordingly, Weber classifies the priest’s authority as a “charisma of office” (Amtscharisma), which is to say, no true charisma at all.149 But the same is true of magic in general, which generally tries to reduce performance to a settled procedure.150 Luther criticized the doctrine of ex opere operato on these grounds already in 1520.151 Weber’s conflation of charisma with magic is therefore unsustainable. Charisma may indeed be incalculable, but this is hardly the case for magic. Calculability is precisely what the Catholic sacramental economy already represented , as reflected in its minute quantification of so many indulgences to produce so much remission from sins, or so many fewer years in Purgatory.152 What the Reformation introduced instead was the idea of predestination, which in its most extreme formulations affirmed the power of God to save or damn us irrespective of the moral quality of our actions: God’s will is unknown to us, rendering our fate uncertain. As has often been noted, Luther drew upon nominalist ideas of divine sovereignty.153 Weber emphasized how predestination provoked a radical anxiety that gave way, in turn, to the acceptance of substitute signs of salvation. No one can live for long in such a condition of existential doubt. It was this turn that produced the idea that worldly success could substitute as a sign of individual grace, or of God’s providence— an idea that contributed to capitalism. Yet this is one or two steps removed from the terrifying God that Luther invoked in attacking the Catholic sacramental economy, and it is already close to the God of the deists, who abandoned the idea of predestination in favor of the belief that human

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beings are able through the exercise of their own reason to know and perform whatever is necessary for salvation.154 Spencer’s Gospel “Oeconomy,” which is “sedate, cool, and silent,” is what Weber called “calculability.” Far from introducing calculability, then, the Reformation, at least at the beginning, introduced its opposite.155 Otto attributed to Luther the notion of predestination as an authentic manifestation of the holy, a notion that he argued was opposed to the hegemony of “natural law” and was repressed by subsequent movements in Lutheranism.156 Similarly, Schmitt cited both earlier Christian divine command theories and the Puritan doctrine of predestination as clear examples of “decisionism,” the legal philosophy that champions the importance of the sovereign decision over that of the norm: In the Calvinist teaching of the dogma of “supralapsarian Predestination,” according to which God had already decided conclusively before the Fall of Man about salvation and damnation, . . . one could find a decisionist stance against every regulatory restriction, measurement, and calculation of the Divine decision. At the same time, however, this teaching reestablishes a genuine law and order concept, namely that of pure grace or lack of grace, which had been debased by juristic or moral normativization. It returns this concept of grace, which statute thinking continually attempts to normativize and relativize, back to its rightful place of deserved incalculability and immeasurability.157

Like Weber, Schmitt used the terms “calculability” and “calculation” to describe the effect of normativity or legalism in prohibiting the sovereign exception.158 Calculability is the very opposite of the unpredictable behavior of the charismatic, which in this regard closely resembles that of Otto’s capricious deity and Schmitt’s absolute sovereign. We must confront the fact that, if disenchantment means the rise of calculability— as Weber, Schmitt, and Otto all appear to agree— then the Reformation in its origins represented a movement for reenchantment. The relative disenchantment of ritual magic was only a corollary of the thesis of a sovereign deity unconstrained by law, arguably just as in the Hebrew Bible, in which magic (but not the miracle) is prohibited in favor of an all-powerful God, as Weber suggested. It was with the later retreat under deism from this robust sovereignty to a countervailing emphasis on natural law that we reached calculability, or disenchantment properly speaking.159 As Schmitt suggested, rather than a unidirectional trajectory of rationalization that must be accepted with resignation, there appears instead to be a dialectic in which sovereign charisma emerges in response to a prior condition of excessive normativity, just as Luther’s attack on the Church followed the increasing quantification of salvation through a fixed economy of pen-

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ances and indulgences (see chapter 6). Rather than Weber’s “routinization,” this sequence resembles Schmitt’s “decision,” which breaks through the frozen crust of normative strictures. The ascendance of the idea of an excessive normativity itself gives way to an effort to achieve release from this condition, to escape what Weber called the “iron cage” (stahlhartes Gehäuse).160 The thesis that modernity took shape as a reaction against the idea of a radically sovereign deity, and that, at least to this extent, what we call the “secular” represented a response to, and in some respects a continuation of, an originally theological problematic, has been debated previously by both Hans Blumenberg and Michael Allen Gillespie.161 Both have directed attention to the manner in which, in the early modern period, philosophers attempted to carve out a space for human intellectual endeavor, to lay the foundations of a positive project for science and rational thought, in opposition to (while remaining in certain respects dependent on) the notion of an arbitrary, sovereign God, which notion had otherwise appeared to render such efforts as futile. Both thinkers identify modernity as the response to a crisis precipitated by the medieval nominalists, who insisted on God’s omnipotence and accordingly provoked the collapse of the Platonic and Aristotelian cosmologies. When God can change the rules of the game at any moment, when he can suspend the laws of nature or morality, what is the point of using reason to inquire systematically into physics or ethics? As Gillespie puts it, “Nominalism emphasized the supremacy of divine will. Modernity in a variety of ways sought to construct a bulwark against the chaos that this will entailed.”162 Through various, subtle transformations, however, the position of radical doubt created by the nominalists opened a path for human reason to follow. The characterization of modernity as the assertion of an autonomous humanity against a heteronomous, external authority is at least as old as Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as the exit from “self-incurred minority,” a period of immaturity in which humans had not assumed responsibility for making their own decisions, but had instead relied upon traditional modes of authority, especially divine revelation.163 What Blumenberg’s and Gillespie’s accounts allow us to see is the extent to which modernity was formed over many centuries in response to precisely the challenge posed by the model of an absolutely sovereign God that Christian theologians had distilled from biblical tradition.164 The resurgence of the idea of divine omnipotence during the later Middle Ages and early Reformation not only called the stability of the cosmos into question, but also resulted in a renewed insistence on predestination, which left a vanishingly small space for human beings’ freedom and contribution to our own salvation. This led, in turn, to the sequence of events that Weber attempted to describe in The Protestant Ethic : Somehow

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the idea of predestination, which implied a radical devaluation of all human action, gave way to the countervailing idea that worldly activity, including business, could be taken as a sign of grace and/or be viewed positively as a “calling.” This in turn allowed the rationalization of the domain of production and commercial exchange, a domain that had previously been given over in part to the Catholic ritual economy. Yet the inconclusive nature of this process of the rise of human selfassertion, which led simultaneously to a disenchanted technicity and to attempts to escape the same through sentimentalism, irrationalism, or violence, suggests the weakness of Blumenberg’s claim that modernity represented a “final overcoming” rather than a continuation of these theological debates. As we have seen already, the deist attack on the sovereign God represented a direct extension of these earlier debates, as well as of traditional Christian supersessionism and anti-Judaism. Not only did deists such as Tindal and Morgan find it necessary to continue to wage war against the God of revelation and predestination, but the deist settlement in turn has proved unstable, as both Weber’s critique of the “iron cage” and Schmitt’s renewed defense of the exception illustrated.165 It is this instability that modernity has inherited, a modernity that has been depicted alternatively by Blumenberg as a final triumph of human self-assertion; by Weber as disenchantment, routinization, and the rise of “calculability”; by Schmitt as a failed attempt to deny the perennial necessity of an absolute, plenary sovereignty; and by Gillespie as an entrée into nihilism.166 The possibility presented by this historical sketch is that such dichotomies may be particularly Christian. In ancient Israelite religion, where law itself was viewed as the primary example of divine revelation, such a tension between law and charisma (or the miracle) may not have existed. A heightening of the tension between law and charisma can be traced, on the one hand, back to Paul, and on the other, arguably, to (as Oakley put it) the “unstable” amalgam of Jerusalem with Athens. Are these tensions, then, merely a historical legacy of the formation of Christian tradition— a legacy that it might be possible, through further historical transformations, to overcome? Or do they describe a version of a problem that may be more broadly distributed across cultures, even if differently expressed there? Weber’s extrapolation of such ideas into a general opposition between charismatic and legal authority suggested that these tensions are not confined to Christianity but represent instead a perennial tension between two aspects of sovereignty. The dependence of his theory on a series of theological tropes renders it of dubious value for scientific purposes.167 However, as we saw earlier, the tension between sovereignty and legality is reflected in other cultures and historical

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periods. Leaving behind the specific theological biases of Weber’s ideas of disenchantment and rationalization, in particular the normative commitment to the progressive exclusion of charisma, later chapters of the present book explore this tension, while developing the analogy between sovereignty and the sacred as antinomian categories. Given that there exist longue durée or even perennial tensions between sovereignty and legality, we might pose the question why the deist moment of disenchantment happened when it did. Yvonne Sherwood has traced the shift from the “Absolute Monarchical /Patriarchal Bible” to the “Whig/Liberal Bible” at the end of the seventeenth century in England.168 The Monarchical Bible emphasized the “sovereign dispensing power,” or potentia absoluta; the Liberal Bible largely replaced this with a norm-governed republicanism. A nodal moment in these debates was the 1686 case of Godden v. Hales, which upheld James II’s ability to declare a suspension of the laws. A few years later the Glorious Revolution happened, bringing with it (supposedly) the rise of toleration and moderation. John Locke’s argument against Robert Filmer’s defense of absolute monarchy introduced readings of the Bible that contradicted the older assertions of the divine right of kings. Sherwood connects these developments with Schmitt’s historical account of the prohibition of the sovereign exception and argues that the judgment in Godden v. Hales, which illustrates the monarchical exception by citing God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, “highlights the theological roots of the prerogative and the close relation between the exception and the holy, in the sense of the qadosh, the set apart.”169 Sherwood identifies these debates over sovereignty with a particular moment in the history of English politics. Despite the longer-term nature of the debates over God’s two powers and over the cessation of miracles, there is indeed a case to be made that the second half of the seventeenth century marked a crucial shift, with the rise of deism, the relative triumph of natural law, and the attack on sovereign absolutism. Important in this regard, at least in the English context, was the Civil War (1640 – 60).170 Not only did it witness the beheading of James I’s son, Charles I, in 1649, an event that showed the vulnerability of divine right in the most graphic possible way.171 The revolutionary moment also illustrated the potential of prophecy, coupled with religious enthusiasm, as a source of disturbance of public order. This problem was certainly on Hobbes’s mind when he affirmed, in the middle of that war, that prophecy had ceased, and it likely was on Spencer’s mind as well when he published his treatises on prophecy and prodigies just five years after the end of the Civil War. Hobbes’s solution was to affirm the absoluteness and singularity of sovereign power; this was also the thrust of Filmer’s work, which,

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although written earlier, was published after the end of the war. Spencer’s solution, and that of many deists after him, was to insist on the regularity of divine— and, by extension, royal— authority, its compatibility with reason. Both approaches indicate that prophecy was a political problem— a matter of sovereignty. Where I am in complete accord with Sherwood is in her move to scrutinize the theological genealogy of contemporary notions of sovereignty, particularly by reviving the Christian idea of the “dispensation” as describing a “system of management (law and order) and the exception,” a “paradoxical relationship between the law and spirit/ charisma/ grace” that lingers on into modernity as “charisma, with its origins in grace/charis.”172 Sherwood cites Giorgio Agamben’s use of the related term dispositio, a Latin term that, as she notes, was used to translate the Greek oikonomia (economy).173 The English term “dispensation” also connects this with the notion of covenant or testament— as in the Old and New Testaments, or “the old dispensation of law and the new dispensation of mercy.” Here I would point back to Spencer’s use of the term “Oeconomy”— a usage employed by other early modern theologians174— to describe both the Mosaic law and our brave new disenchanted age, which he presents as having begun at the moment of the Crucifixion. One answer to the question of how modernity may be said to constitute a spiritual economy or “political theology,” then, is to show how the dynamic tension between law and the exception has been conserved and managed into contemporary times, through such ideas as Weber’s “charismatic versus legal authority.” This completes a project of genealogical excavation that began in an earlier book, in which I endeavored to show that disenchantment was a discourse rooted in ancient Christian categories that was resuscitated on the threshold of modernity by Protestants.175 While thus following in Weber’s footsteps, I pointed to the problems involved in taking his theory of disenchantment as a supposedly objective, scientific sociological category. Paradoxically, the very idea that modernity represented a break with an enchanted past is itself the strongest proof of the continuity between Christianity and modernity; for it was Protestant theologians who, in the midst of arguing for a reform that was also ostensibly a restoration of the original Gospel, redeployed against those elements of the tradition that they regarded as impure a series of supersessionist polemics that had first been advanced at the dawn of the Christian era against pagans and Jews. The same can now be said of Weber’s related ideas of charisma and its routinization, ideas that in fact echoed and depended on a set of older theological discourses. What Weber presented as a scientific, “value-free” description of sociological processes now appears to have been

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something closer to what Schmitt identified it as: a “secularized Protestant theology.” John Potts, in his recent history of the idea of charisma, rightly notes both that “Weber’s . . . refiguring of the Christian concept of ‘charisma’ was his enduring exercise in the secularization— and transformation— of religious thought,” and that “later social theorists  .  .  . possessed only a weak grasp of the term’s original religious significance.”176 Potts, who provides a useful survey of the idea of the cessation of the charismata in the early Christian era (while remaining oddly silent on Reformation developments), asks: Did the church actively suppress charisma as defined and celebrated by Paul? Or did charisma simply subside, made redundant by developments within the church that were not expressly antagonistic to the charismata themselves? .  .  .  By the early second century, the church had staked its future not on wandering prophets and charismatic individuals but on the office of bishop presiding over a hierarchical structure and a uniform set of rituals. . . . This process is indeed the master example of the routinisation of charisma, as delineated by Weber in the early twentieth century.177

Potts here echoes Sohm’s Protestant history of the transformation of authority in the early Church. What Potts ignores is that the narrative of a “cessation of the charismata” was not a reality, but rather the taking of a position in a debate over competing claims to authority. Of course, disenchantment is a discourse that becomes real only to the extent that it has been disseminated and widely adhered to. Derogations are still possible. As Jane Shaw has noted, claims of miracles remained common in Enlightenment England, even among members of the nascent scientific community.178 Ann Taves has written insightfully about religious experience and enthusiasm in historical periods after the deist moment.179 Pentecostalism and other charismatic movements reacted against the disenchantment of Christianity by reintroducing prophetic and enthusiastic forms. Jon Ruthven’s account of the development of the cessationist doctrine in the early Christian era was itself undertaken out of sympathy for modern-day charismatic Christianity, as against orthodox Presbyterianism. Recognizing a parallel between the doctrine of the cessation of miracles and Weber’s idea of disenchantment, Alexandra Walsham argued that the continuation of reports of miraculous events in seventeenth-century England “may serve to unsettle some still prevalent assumptions about the critical role which the Reformation played in facilitating what the German sociologist Max Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’ and to reinforce Bob Scribner’s well-known critique of this desacralization thesis.”180 The problem with framing the cri-

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tique of Weber in this way is that it still takes his account of disenchantment as a historical thesis about the “fact” of disenchantment, a thesis that may be either proved or disproved through the adducing of historical evidence, such as the continuation of reports of miracles despite the prevalence of the doctrine of their cessation. It was indeed the case that, as Walsham points out, “the argument that miracles had ceased was intimately linked with Protestantism’s attempt to align itself with the forces of enlightenment and knowledge.”181 This very claim illustrates how the secular Enlightenment followed earlier forms of Christianity in perpetuating and transforming a triumphalist narrative of the progressive disenchantment of the world. We must be exceedingly cautious to distinguish between that narrative and any historical reality. There is not and never has been any “fact” of disenchantment, except in the sense in which cultural attitudes become crystallized and taken for realities by virtue of being widely disseminated and believed in by substantial majorities or influential minorities. To attempt to prove or disprove Weber’s secularization thesis on such terms is to mistake this thesis for something other than what it is, which is a restatement of a Protestant theological position. Both Walsham and Potts should have been attuned to this through their excavation of the different versions of the cessationist idea, which clearly anticipated Weber. Such genealogical excavation reinforces the challenge to modern secularism posed by Schmitt’s provocative phrase “political theology.” If even Weber, the master of secularism, succumbed to latent theological biases, how can we be sure that we ourselves are free of similar biases? Generations of sociologists have deployed Weber’s categories, apparently without awareness of their provenance, and lacking even his knowledge of the theological texts. This is partly another effect of overspecialization. Even intellectual historians have neglected the theological origins of the complex of ideas we refer to collectively as “disenchantment.” An example is Jonathan Israel’s magisterial account of the rise of the radical (or skeptical and nonreligious) Enlightenment, which begins the history of attacks on miracles with Spinoza, and that of the attacks on oracles with Bernard Fontenelle, thus a century or more after the theological versions of these polemics.182 This obscures the continuities between the Reformation and Enlightenment modes of disenchantment. Jonathan Sheehan argues that the idea of disenchantment is a Christian apologetic narrative, rather than an historical event.183 Although this is true, it brings up the question of the specific sources and transformations of this narrative. A number of other scholars have identified the origins of this narrative in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism; examples are Talal Asad, Manuel Borutta, and Michael Saler.184 Jason Josephson-Storm’s

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own account of the “myth” of disenchantment hardly begins before the Romantic era, although he does cite some classical and Reformation precedents for this myth.185 As we can now see clearly, it is mistaken to locate the beginning of such discourses of disenchantment in Romanticism, or even the Enlightenment, and therefore as separate from earlier theological discourses that began back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in which the roots of the concept were already established. To identify disenchantment as primarily the Romantic nostalgia that emerged in reaction to the Enlightenment project of demystification would be accurate only for the later period. In its origins, disenchantment had nothing to do with disaffection, mourning, or melancholia. It was originally an expression of Christian triumphalism, of the victory of the Gospels and the Crucified One over Jews and pagans. This meaning lingers on in Spencer and other deists, combined now with another affect: anxiety over the possibility of a radically arbitrary deity. Such a disturbing possibility led to the countervailing insistence that now, unlike before, “all things are to be managed in a more sedate, cool, and silent maner.” It was only after this that the sedated patient partly awakened and expressed a longing for a less orderly world. None of this diagnosis constitutes a prescription, of course. But the first step in any treatment is to get the diagnosis right. I cannot help thinking that one of the reasons why historians of ideas have not recognized the explicitly theological genesis of disenchantment is because of the divide that is thought to separate “secular” from “theological” histories, as expressed in a systematic neglect of Christian sources that rises to the status of a methodological principle in certain contemporary academic disciplines. Yet if to accept this divide as prescriptive and normative is precisely what it means to be “secular,” then what such academic, antitheological histories have provided us is not, in fact, a diagnosis of secularism, but rather another index of its chief symptom. Surely this is not the conversation that Weber intended to inaugurate when he turned to theological sources in order to achieve a historical perspective on the forces that have shaped us. Disenchantment, although it is a narrative indebted to earlier theological polemics, cannot be dismissed as a “mere narrative,” nor as the by-product of temporary political upheavals. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the disenchantment of a sovereign deity was one of the key moments in the political constitution of modernity, as well as in the developments that we label collectively as “secularization.” Given the importance of these developments to the central categories of the history of religions, one can only be dismayed by the neglect that they have received in most contemporary scholarship in the field. If the study of religion is to have any rel-

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evance, it must be by providing a more accurate diagnosis of what “modernity” represents with respect to such ideas of sacrality and sovereignty. If this is not done, then we are left with either an antiquarianism that refrains from drawing the comparison between religion and secular modernity, and so remains perpetually a mode of alienation; or a hopelessly presentist approach that, by never challenging itself with the real difference represented by other modes of being in the world, is trapped in solipsism. The remainder of this work therefore attempts to recuperate, through a series of case studies, the convergence between sovereignty and the sacred as an object for theory. In the course of these studies, we will also go beyond history to anthropology, and beyond Christianity or “the West” to examine other traditions. The idea of an antinomian sacred has been narrated as well as enacted in other cultures and historical eras, and not merely in Weber’s oeuvre. Attending to these other narratives and enactments constitutes a first step outside the limitations of the Christian problematic of disenchantment. We begin the next chapter with Giorgio Agamben’s account of the ancient Roman figure of the homo sacer.

3

The Ambivalence of the Sovereign Ban: The Homo Sacer and the Biblical Herem ˙ Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the “Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,” whom Homer denounces— the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts. a r i s t o t l e , Politics 1253a, 1– 6

The Homo Sacer and Sacrifice Giorgio Agamben argues that our political tradition, meaning the classical Greek and Roman and later Christian European traditions that constitute his primary archive, has conceived sovereignty in a manner that ineluctably leads to violence. The primary demonstration of sovereignty is not the creation of the law per se, but rather the capacity to place subjects under the ban, and thus outside of the operation of the law and its protections. The ban is therefore the purest form of the state of exception, in which the law is suspended. His chief example is the ancient Latin figure of the homo sacer, a term that literally translates as the “sacred man,” who was placed under a proscription as a result of having committed a serious offense.1 (Agamben does not dwell on which offenses qualified for this punishment, a point discussed further below.) According to one authority, Festus, the homo sacer could not be sacrificed (more precisely, immolated [Latin immolare]) yet could be killed with impunity by anyone. This was a strange sort of banishment, one that left a person without the security afforded by the law, yet apparently without making his punishment follow either instantaneously or necessarily upon his having been condemned. What might this mean? Agamben places great importance on the detail that the homo sacer may not be sacrificed. This places the condemned beyond the reach of divine, as well as of human law and rights. It is this condition of being utterly abandoned by the law that explains why such an obscure Latin figure, known only from textual fragments whose meaning is still disputed, plays such a central role in Agamben’s narrative of the political history of the West. The homo sacer supposedly foreshadows more recent instances of the sovereign ban,

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such as the deprivations of human rights that took place at Auschwitz and Guantanamo Bay, hence the choice to name the book, and the series of which this book constitutes the first entry, after this figure. Agamben contends that sovereignty in the West has been marked both consistently and increasingly by the interpenetration of the law with its abandonment or suspension. Our recognition of the logic of sovereignty that was revealed in the homo sacer has merely been repressed by liberal theories but has now returned in force. Despite the rise of democracy, human rights, and the liberal legal order, what was formerly the ban of an individual— the sacred man— became, in the middle of the last century, the mass ban of the Nazi death camps, Soviet gulags, and other atrocities of totalitarianism. This is because liberalism has not succeeded in overcoming but has instead replicated a distinction between what ancient Greeks referred to as biological life (zoe) and political life (bios). Even while attempting to inscribe the former within the latter and to dignify all life with human rights, modern democracies stand atop a fault line that is inherently unstable. If political life guarantees certain legal rights, “bare life”— life that has been abandoned by the law— is its shadow and double. The only solution is to think ourselves out of the ontology of sovereignty that we have inherited. Meanwhile, we are confronted with, for instance, Auschwitz as the legal and territorial “state of exception” that is the implicit mirror image and, increasingly, the default condition of modern biopolitics. One can, even on the basis of such a brief sketch, make various challenges to Agamben’s argument. Why does he place so much weight on the homo sacer while ignoring a great variety of other figures (including sacrificial ones) from the classical past that might have been chosen as exemplary? Why, if the homo sacer already revealed the truth about sovereignty, was it necessary for us to wait another two millennia or more for this truth to emerge fully into the light, or to become the norm, as revealed in the extermination camp (Vernichtungslager)? Whereas other scholars have noted a tendency toward ahistoricism in Agamben’s account— a tendency endemic to arguments that privilege classical etymology as our first source of knowledge as to the truth of any matter— it should also be clear that his account in no way acknowledges, much less explains, the history detailed in the preceding chapter, namely that of the proscription of the state of exception under the modern liberal constitution that was exemplified by the deist rejection of miracles and of the idea of a radically sovereign deity. In this respect, at least, Agamben’s genealogy of sovereignty appears radically incomplete. My concern in this chapter is with a part of Agamben’s argument that affects directly the history of religions: the manner in which he attempts to separate sovereignty from sacrifice, and from a particular understanding of the

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sacred. For Agamben, who follows Carl Schmitt in this regard, sovereignty is defined by the power to suspend laws by declaring a state of exception. Agamben emphasizes the homo sacer because this figure illustrates the condition of being beyond all laws, including religious ones, better perhaps than some other figures in ancient Roman law who were either executed after sentencing (and thus within the reach of human law) or sacrificed (and thus subject to religious law). Certainly there were figures who were sacrificed for various offenses,2 along with persons who were placed under bans of various sorts, such as the interdiction against sharing water or fire with them, which made their remaining within the territory practically impossible.3 Yet only this one figure served to illustrate Agamben’s thesis so neatly: “once brought back to his proper place beyond both penal law and sacrifice, homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted.”4 Agamben has other motivations for focusing on the homo sacer. He wishes to decouple sovereignty from sacrifice, and thus from the sacred, a concept he regards as having mystified and obscured the true nature of sovereignty.5 “To sacrifice” means only “to make sacred” (sacrum facere); the meaning of sacrifice is dependent on the meaning of sacredness, which is primary, and which supposedly can exist without sacrifice, as the case of the homo sacer shows. Bypassing both sacrifice and the sacred, Agamben announces his goal to “uncover an originary political structure that is located in a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical.”6 Because he is excluded from both of these spheres, the homo sacer represents what is more fundamental than the sacred itself. “Sacredness is . . . the originary form of the inclusion of bare life in the juridical order”: To have exchanged a juridico-political phenomenon (homo sacer’s capacity to be killed but not sacrificed) for a genuinely religious phenomenon is the root of the equivocations that have marked studies both of the sacred and of sovereignty in our time. Sacer esto [the declaration of a person as a homo sacer] is not the formula of a religious curse sanctioning the unheimlich, or the simultaneously august and vile character of a thing: it is instead the originary political formulation of the imposition of the sovereign bond.7

For Agamben, the sacred is an epiphenomenon of sovereignty, a side effect or by-product of an ontologically or temporally prior determination within the juridico-political order. The homo sacer reveals that the sacred is an empty category and exemplifies a deeper truth that sovereignty constitutes abandonment. As Roger Friedland neatly puts it, “Giorgio Agamben refuses sovereignty’s religious genealogy.”8

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In an earlier work, Language and Death, Agamben identified sacrifice as an effort to create a ground for human action that otherwise lacks such a ground: “The foundation of violence is the violence of the foundation.”9 While sacrifice appears capable of performing this function— of creating something out of nothing, as it were—this appearance is really part of an illusion, of the “sacrificial mythologeme.” This illusion must be eliminated, at least for the sake of honesty, and perhaps as a first step beyond sacred violence. The book Homo Sacer represents an attempt to implement this project. A key part of the sacrificial mythologeme, according to Agamben, is the notion that the sacred is ambivalent, “simultaneously august and vile.” He referred to this idea earlier in Language and Death: “The sacred is necessarily an ambiguous and circular concept. (In Latin sacer means vile, ignominious, and also august, reserved for the gods; both the law and he who violates it are sacred: qui legem violavit, sacer esto).” This idea is not an invention of Agamben’s. Some older theorists, such as Robertson Smith, had identified the sacred or holy as having a dual character: sometimes this quality is ascribed to things that are blessed or auspicious; and sometimes, to things that are malign or inauspicious. In either case, the things that are designated sacred are subject to taboos, meaning that contact with them is restricted or interdicted. This led some scholars to conclude that the sacred is ambivalent in nature: alternatively pure or polluted, holy or accursed, or possibly both at the same time. The homo sacer, who is a condemned criminal yet also in literal terms “sacred,” was seen by other scholars as an example of such ambivalence. Although Agamben himself had earlier appeared to accept this interpretation, at least as a statement of the sacrificial mythologeme, in Homo Sacer he rejects this interpretation as a scholarly “equivocation” and highlights the distinction of the homo sacer from sacrifice, rather than its connection with that category. In the interest of achieving some clarity, not merely on Agamben’s position (which already appears somewhat contradictory) but even more on the substance of his claims, I want first to examine what we know about the homo sacer, to see if that figure really can be separated from sacrifice. Then I will consider the evidence from the history of religions that bears upon the question of whether the sacred is ambivalent, and if so, in what sense. This will afford the opportunity also to scrutinize another case of the sovereign ban, namely that of the herem in the Hebrew Bible. Afterward we should be in a better position ˙ to evaluate what remains of this aspect of Agamben’s argument and to apply his insights to the convergence between sovereignty and the sacred. As a number of scholars have pointed out, there do indeed appear to be sacrificial overtones to certain presentations of the homo sacer figure: for example, in certain cases he was dedicated to various chthonian gods.10

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Moreover, this figure ought not to be considered in isolation from a range of other figures, some of whom clearly suffered a form of sacrificial or at least ritualized death.11 Some recent scholarship, responding to Agamben’s interpretation, has rejected the notion that civil and religious law, and capital punishment and sacrifice, could be clearly distinguished in ancient Rome.12 Agamben seizes on Festus’s statement that the homo sacer may not be “immolated.” Given, however, that we are considering the concept of sacrifice in general, meaning a consecration unto death, rather than only a specific form of Roman ritual, namely immolation, why should we conclude that the homo sacer was not sacrificed?13 Agamben converts Festus’s statement that the homo sacer “may be killed with impunity, yet not sacrificed” into a metaphysical truth concerning the nature of sovereignty. However, it has been pointed out that by the time Festus was writing, human sacrifice had been banned in Rome, providing a motive for his distinction between this practice and the declaration of someone as “sacred.”14 What, then, do we do with the fact that, as appears clearly from the texts, the homo sacer could indeed be killed with impunity? Why, if he was guilty, was he not immediately put to death, if not by means of sacrifice, then by judicial execution? It is possible that, as Agamben (together with a number of other scholars) contemplates, the homo sacer was not within the reach of the law at the moment when he was condemned, having fled the scene of the crime; and that, with his declaration as “sacred,” the law envisioned that the punishment would be enforced against the fugitive whenever and wherever such enforcement became possible. The most reasonable explanation of the Sitz im Leben of this provision, however, appears to be the one given by Rudolph Jhering as early as the nineteenth century: the provision granting impunity for one killing the homo sacer was made in order to allow punishment for certain heinous offenses to be exacted even before a judicial authority was able formally to authorize such punishment. Evidence that the (now dead) perpetrator had indeed met the standard for a declaration as “sacred” could be presented later in court as a defense that the execution had been legally justified.15 Rather than condemning a person to a shadowy, fugitive existence beyond the margins of society, therefore, the declaration of someone as sacer permitted the swiftest and most severe punishment in exceptional cases. It was a form of extrajudicial self-help or legally sanctioned vigilantism.16 Although Agamben does not discuss the types of offenses that would lead someone to being declared sacred, these appear significant. They included parricide, defrauding a client, and moving boundary stones.17 The homo sacer often was someone who had violated intimate relations of trust, either the personal or the physical boundaries on which the social order was based.18

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A person could also be declared a homo sacer for transgressing certain sacred places, such as groves dedicated to the gods. Leon ter Beek recently proposed an interpretation of a partially legible inscription found over a century ago in Rome and identified by some with the legendary Lapis Niger (Black Stone) that supposedly contained the tomb of Romulus.19 The inscription seems to impose the penalty of sacer esto against anyone who defiles the place. Ter Beek regards the punishment as clearly religious in nature. We know of other cases where the violation of boundaries brought penalty of death. In the legend of Rome’s founding, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus argue over where to build the city.20 Remus jumps over the trench or wall that his brother has laid and is killed for this infraction. Did this legend record an echo of a human sacrifice made to consecrate the foundations of the city (Bauopfer), a practice known from other contexts?21 Or did it merely reinforce the importance of boundaries? Jhering cited this story in connection with an explanation of the homo sacer.22 Agamben’s interpretation of the homo sacer is tied to, and may even have been predetermined by, his conclusion that the Holocaust— which he views as a modern manifestation of the sovereign ban— is misnamed, because it did not, in any sense, constitute a sacrifice. This conclusion is reiterated in a later work, Remnants of Auschwitz.23 Agamben does not want to allow this tragedy to be justified in any way by dignifying it as a sacrifice. He may be responding partly to fascist assertions that war and killing constituted a form of sacrifice as a means of ennobling violence. On the other hand, Nazis also analogized the killings at the camps to exterminating vermin— in other words, as the opposite of valuable and sanctifying death.24 One can argue that only the victims have the moral authority to characterize this event. Rather than a Greek word, namely Holocaust, that was used in the Septuagint to translate the ancient Israelite ’olah, or whole burnt offering, the modern Hebrew name for this event—Shoah (the Disaster/Catastrophe)— avoids sacrificial connotations. Sacrifice is in the eye of the beholder. From the orthodox Christian perspective, beginning with the Letter to the Hebrews, Jesus’s Crucifixion has been interpreted as a sacrifice. From the Roman standpoint, it was merely a judicial execution. In this case, to demystify the event of killing by refusing to label it a sacrifice would deprive the death of much of its significance. If we choose to follow Agamben’s approach, we should have to accept the Romans’ perspective as determinative. It would be better to recognize that the same event may be characterized in different ways as it becomes incorporated into various moral narratives. Agamben’s reasons are understandable— he wants to avoid another event such as the Holocaust and believes that this will be possible only if we characterize it properly, which in his view requires demys-

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tifying it by rejecting all talk of sacrifice and the sacred— yet he is arguably foreclosing other valid readings. The Ambivalence of the Sacred and the Biblical Herem ˙ What about Agamben’s argument that the ambivalence of the sacred is a myth? He states that “sacer esto is not the formula of a religious curse sanctioning the unheimlich, or the simultaneously august and vile character of a thing.” The notion that a thing could be both holy and accursed— a notion linked to Freud’s concept of “the uncanny” (unheimlich)25— Agamben treats as a mystification both in itself and as applied to the homo sacer. He devotes a chapter to disproving this idea, which he labels a “mythologeme” inherited from “late Victorian anthropology.”26 This mythologeme, he says, was invented by William Robertson Smith, who applied to the Bible the anthropological concept of taboo.27 Mary Douglas, whom Agamben does not cite, had earlier traced the idea of the ambivalence of the sacred to the same source.28 Taboos, or prohibitions of varying degrees of strictness, especially against physical contact, had been applied to objects for different and seemingly diametrically opposed reasons. Things that are polluted as well as things that are pure may be regarded as dangerous and therefore off-limits. The danger of contagion supposedly is expressed in the horror sacer, the fear of the sacred that appears to coincide with Otto’s notion of the mysterium tremendum.29 This led some scholars, such as Mircea Eliade, to conclude that the sacred itself possesses a curiously ambivalent nature, inasmuch as it converges with the accursed.30 Agamben, therefore, in the service of clarifying the nature of sovereignty, weighs in on a debate of long standing in the history of religions and places himself on the side of those scholars, including Douglas and Franz Steiner, who have criticized the idea of the ambivalence of the sacred. On the other side are not only Robertson Smith but also the tradition of French sociology that includes Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, as well as Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Eliade.31 In what remains the best study of the history of the anthropological category of taboo in its intersection with the concepts of the sacred or holy, Steiner argued that the idea that the sacred is simultaneously pure and polluted, at least from the confused perspective of the “primitive mind,” resulted largely from a fraudulent linguistic deduction. The Polynesian category of taboo (tabu or tapu) was seen by European observers to apply to objects that were either “pure” or “defiled,” at least from their perspective.32 These observers concluded that taboo oddly confused or combined two diametrically opposed ideas. Robertson Smith argued that “in most savage societies no

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sharp line seems to be drawn between the two kinds of taboo [against pure and impure things] just indicated, and even in more advanced nations the notions of holiness and uncleanness often touch,” although he added that “the Semites— or at least the northern Semites— distinguish between the holy and the unclean, [which] marks a real advance above savagery.”33 After Robertson Smith and before Otto, Nathan Söderblom wrote: “In primitive religion one cannot tell whether tabu is holy or unclean. . . . The Latin sacer (French sacré) means ‘holy’ as well as ‘cursed.’”34 As Steiner pointed out, from the Polynesian perspective, there was no such confusion. Taboo meant simply prohibition or interdiction, words that serve well enough as a rough translation, although, as he showed, the cognate terms for taboo in different Polynesian societies exhibit further differences in meaning. Similarly, the Latin sacer and Hebrew qadosh (n. qodesh), both of which may be translated as “sacred,” refer to things that are set apart or restricted, not to things that possess some inherent degree of goodness. Laboring under the mistaken notion that such terms refer to some irreducible positive value or “degree of beatitude,” scholars such as Robertson Smith and Sigmund Freud (1) “pretend[ed] that there is [such a thing as] sacredness apart from interdiction,” (2) drew an analogy between sacredness, so conceived, and taboo, and (3) concluded that this analogy depended ultimately on a conflation between the pure and the polluted in primitive mentality.35 While Steiner’s argument is on the whole persuasive, it is important to understand what he did and did not do. He did not deny that taboos, or similar prohibitions in non-Polynesian cultures, including biblical ones, were indeed applied to objects that might well be described as holy or accursed, depending on the case. He allowed that the Latin term sacer and the Hebrew qodesh in fact do this.36 Douglas also noted with respect to sacer that “it may apply to desecration as well as to consecration.”37 What joins certain items that are otherwise opposed into a single category is that both are dangerous, although this is sometimes secondary to the fact of their having been consecrated to the gods. Indeed, as Wolf Wilhelm Grafen Baudissin already demonstrated in the late nineteenth century, the primary meaning of qodesh is separation, and not moral rectitude or purity.38 This separation in many cases stems from God’s ownership or sovereignty over items that are designated qodesh: once such items become part of the domain of the divinity, they are removed from ordinary human use. The opposite of holy is not impure, but rather profane or common (Hebrew hol). In this sense, the category of qodesh, like that of ˙ sacer (with which Baudissin compares it), may indeed be said to be morally or qualitatively ambivalent; although it is an exaggeration to say, as Caillois did, that there is an “original identity of the pure and the impure.”39 As Douglas

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more circumspectly concluded, “To talk about a confused blending of the Sacred and the Unclean is outright nonsense. But it still remains true that religions often sacralise the very unclean things which have been rejected with abhorrence.”40 Indeed, in some cases, such as Hindu Tantra, objects or practices that have been prohibited by the surrounding culture for ritual, moral, or hygienic reasons may be taken up and positively enjoined. Transgression is drafted into the service of liberation out of the belief that tabooed things or actions possess a special potency. One does not need to turn to Bataille for an endorsement of this idea, as Jonathan Z. Smith, who was no credulous subscriber to the Eliadean notion of the sacred, has also affirmed it.41 Although Agamben asserts that the idea of the ambivalence of the sacred originated in a misapplication of the concept of taboo in and from nineteenth-century anthropology, de Maistre noted a version of this idea in his “Elucidation on Sacrifices” (1810), without any mention of the concept of taboo and with specific reference to the homo sacer: It is very likely that the first human victims were criminals condemned by the laws. . . . The ancients believed that every capital crime committed in the state bound the nation, and that the criminal was sacred and bound to the gods until, by the shedding of his blood, he was un-bound, both himself and the nation. We see here why the word sacred (SACER was taken in the Latin language in both a good and a bad sense), why this same word in the Greek language (HOSIOS) meant both what is holy and what is profane [recte: accursed]; why the word anathema means at the same time what is offered to God as a gift, and what is delivered to his vengeance. . . . When the Laws of the Twelve Tables pronounced the death penalty they said: SACER ESTO (that he be sacred)! . . . On the one side there is crime, on the other side innocence, but both are sacred.42

De Maistre also identified an ambivalence in the Latin word hostis, which he connected with the Old French hoste, a word meaning “host” or “guest” that is related to the English “guest.”43 The stranger may always turn out to be an enemy. Agamben states that the homo sacer was first connected with the idea of the ambivalence of the sacred in 1911 by W. Warde Fowler, who drew upon Robertson Smith’s concept of taboo in making this connection.44 More recently, the eminent Indo-European linguist Émile Benveniste affirmed the dual meaning of sacer (and the homo sacer).45 Agamben finds fault with Benveniste for uncritically adopting these meanings.46 However, as we have already seen, Robertson Smith was not the first to express the idea that the sacred is ambivalent, nor was Fowler the first to apply this idea to the homo sacer. This idea was clearly articulated by de Maistre, and has been based on

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multiple data points, rather than relying solely on Robertson Smith’s problematic notion of taboo. Numerous data from other cultures exhibit patterns similar to the homo sacer. The pharmakos is a well-attested form of the scapegoat ritual practiced in ancient Greece, whereby a victim usually chosen from the lower classes or by reason of possessing physical defects was subjected to various indignities and then either driven away or executed.47 In some scapegoat rituals, the victim was feted and treated like royalty for a period of time before suffering his fate, suggesting a convergence between the sovereign and the accursed. James George Frazer associated such rituals with Carnival and other periods of social license, during which a temporary king was sometimes elected from the lower orders.48 Frazer attempted to force too many cases into a single pattern of the dying (and reborn) God. What is interesting for our present purposes is that Agamben also has pointed to such rituals of inversion as key manifestations of the state of exception,49 although without connecting them to the sacrifice or banishment of a victim. As Girard has argued, the case of the pharmakos, like that of Oedipus (who, though tainted and driven away from Thebes for his crimes, upon his death became a source of blessing for Colonus), illustrates a certain ambivalence in a case that appears analogous in some respects to that of the homo sacer.50 If the pharmakos affords no support for Agamben’s contention that the ban is unconnected with sacrifice, neither does the figure who arguably comes closest to the homo sacer within the Hebrew Bible. Cain murders his brother Abel out of jealousy because God prefers the latter’s offering of sheep to the former’s offering of grain (Gen. 4). God condemns Cain to wander as a fugitive but places a mark upon him as a sign that vengeance will be taken sevenfold upon anyone who kills him. In this sense, Cain is quite different from the homo sacer. Although the story does not call him holy, he is clearly placed under a sort of taboo. Cain is the first son of Adam and Eve, and the murder of Abel is the first killing of one human being by another to appear in the biblical narrative. While underscoring the human propensity to violence, the story also suggests God’s preference for blood sacrifice and depicts the first instances of both animal and cereal offerings in the Bible. As a figure both accursed and sacrosanct, closely connected with the institution of sacrifice, Cain illustrates the limitations of Agamben’s definition of the homo sacer as “one who may be killed, yet not sacrificed.”51 Clearly this does not apply to all cases of the ban. Cain, however, is a solitary figure in the Bible and has no particular connection with sovereignty. A more important parallel in the Bible to the homo sacer is the institution of the herem, a term that is usually translated as “ban, proscription, or ˙

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devotion to destruction.” Although Agamben notes in passing that the herem ˙ informed Robertson Smith’s idea of the sacred, he otherwise ignores this institution.52 We should attempt to remedy this omission.53 That which was subject to the herem was condemned to utter destruction, including all the ˙ human inhabitants and often the livestock and even, in some cases, the material wealth of a conquered city.54 Such a severe punishment was applied for religious violations, often in the context of holy war,55 although individual victims could also be devoted by vow. Despite this context, the herem also ˙ represented a kind of consecration or devotion whereby those placed under the ban became the inviolable property of God. Those who took banned goods for themselves suffered terrible punishments. Achan’s theft from Jericho led to the defeat of the Israelites at Ai; he was discovered and his family slain (Josh. 7). Saul failed to kill Agag of Amalek and left some choice sheep alive; Samuel delivered God’s curse on Saul and hacked Agag to pieces (1 Sam. 15). Failure to execute the herem, then, leads to severe punishment, ˙ and that which is placed under the ban appears to have the power to spread the curse.56 Representations of herem in the Bible occasionally depict this ˙ practice as a sacrifice, a depiction that has proved ethically problematic for contemporary scholarship, as it raises once again the possibility that human sacrifice and/or homicide was approved as a religious practice in ancient Israelite monotheism.57 If, as a number of scholars have argued, the concepts of the sacred and of sacrifice are centrally concerned with God’s (or a god’s) ownership, then the herem represents these qualities explicitly. In the context ˙ of a discussion of which gifts to God may be redeemed, Leviticus 27:28 states that nothing that is haram (i.e., placed under the herem) may be redeemed; ˙ ˙ such items are irrevocable donations and the inalienable property of God.58 They are the “most holy things” (qodesh qadashim).59 Human beings under the ban may not be ransomed, but must be put to death (Lev. 28:29). On a scale of holiness, what is haram is apparently more holy than what is merely ˙ qodesh, as it belongs more absolutely to God. Such ownership is an important aspect of God’s sovereignty. The fact that, in the case of the herem, sovereignty ˙ and sacrifice appear to converge raises a difficulty for Agamben’s attempt, in exclusive reliance on the homo sacer, to decouple these two categories. The effort by some scholars to distinguish the herem from other types of ˙ sacrifice depends upon a prior normative definition of sacrifice— such as, for example, an animal offering on an altar— that excludes the herem from ˙ the core associations of the category. However, when we are talking about sacrifice in a broader, less technical sense, this normative definition appears just as arbitrary as Agamben’s insistence that the homo sacer was not sacrificed

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because he was not “immolated.” I can do no better than to quote Susan Niditch’s conclusion: The ban is not a clear matter of promise and deal [as in the do ut des model of sacrifice] . . . , but the point needs to be made that deep in the mythological framework of Israelite thought, war, death, sacrifice, the ban, and divine satiation are integrally associated. . . . To disassociate the Israelite ban from the realm of the sacred and from the concept of sacrifice is to ignore the obvious and yet this is precisely what many scholars have done.60

While agreeing with Niditch’s general point, I would suggest that in some instances the herem can be understood precisely in terms of the logic of sac˙ rificial exchange. This only serves to reinforce its connection with other types of sacrifice. The circumstances of the Conquest support this interpretation: the inhabitants of the Canaanite cities and their possessions are forfeit to God. Joshua commands this forfeiture just prior to the sacking of Jericho (Josh. 6:18 – 19), suggesting a quid pro quo, an exchange of valuables for the Israelites’ imminent victory. When Achan fails to observe the command, God declares that his covenant has been violated (Josh. 7:11– 12). This is why the Israelites cannot withstand their enemies. The power of victory has been taken back, because the contractual counterpayment has not been honored. Jephthah’s vow (neder) to make a burnt offering in exchange for victory over the Ammonites is clearly a quid pro quo (Judg. 11:30). Although not called a herem, ˙ this vow combines aspects of the war-herem with an individual dedication.61 ˙ The confusion over whether or not to regard the herem as a sacrifice lies ˙ partly in a certain misplacement of emphasis when it comes to what a sacrifice is or does. The homo sacer, like that which is herem, is devoted to destruc˙ tion. This is what makes it sacred: first the devotion or consecration, then the subsequent act of delivering over to destruction. Focusing on the manner of delivery ignores what is central: the devotion, which is the declaration that establishes what amounts to a property interest. What is sacred is owned by God (or the gods). This is how Hobbes elucidates the meaning: Out of this literal interpretation of the Kingdom of God ariseth also the true interpretation of the word Holy. For it is a word which in God’s kingdom answereth to that which men in their kingdoms use to call public, or the king’s. . . . For by holy is always understood, either God himself or that which is God’s in propriety, as by public is always meant either the person of the commonwealth itself or something that is so the commonwealth’s as no private person can claim any propriety therein. . . . And wheresoever the word Holy is taken properly, there is still something signified of propriety, gotten by consent.62

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It is the fact that a property interest has been established in each case that makes both the homo sacer and the herem sacred. Each has been, as de ˙ Maistre put it, “bound to the gods,” dedicated as their property and therefore not available for free and common use, so that, as Hobbes states, “no private person can claim any property therein.” Even the life and liberty of the person(s) in question have been forfeit for the sake of this property interest. What makes this interest “public” is not that the property has been returned to the commons— on the contrary, that would make it profane rather than sacred— but rather that it has been alienated from any other, special interests. It is exactly parallel to the idea that, in the case of a crime, the state is bound to vindicate the public interest by prosecuting, whether or not there exists any private interest that would provoke civil litigation. Indeed, although it may be anachronistic to put things this way, both the homo sacer and the herem might ˙ be thought of as instances of very serious crimes that require the full measure of violence in punishment or expiation. As the perpetrator has injured the commonwealth or polity as a whole, his destruction cannot be waived by any individual. An analysis of the homo sacer in terms of public interest and criminal law seems more adequate than Agamben’s category “bare life.”63 The herem has an equal claim with the homo sacer to establish the na˙ ture of the sacred. Unfortunately for Agamben’s argument, the herem points ˙ again to the duality of this category.64 H-r-m is used, sometimes in place of ˙ and sometimes in combination with q-d-sh in various Semitic languages, to designate that which is holy, or rather prohibited.65 In Arabic, in place of q-d-sh, h-r-m became the general word for what is placed off-limits: thus, ˙ prohibited foods are haram, but so is Mecca itself; and the same root appears ˙ in the English word “harem,” where the king’s women are segregated for his own enjoyment. Haram in Arabic therefore can have, as Philip Stern states, ˙ an “unambiguously positive connotation.”66 Stern concludes that “the herem ˙ partakes of a dual nature; so that it may manifest itself at one pole as the ‘most holy’ . . . and at the other pole as an ‘abomination.’”67 The application of the same word in Arabic to describe things either pure or impure has been noted by Joseph Chelhod, who, however, rejects the idea that this dual application represents any confusion between these two categories.68 Steiner pointed, quite rightly, to the fact that in many languages there is no such dual meaning: True, the Semitic languages have a comparable peculiarity and, to some extent, the Latin sacer as well. But such a correlation is not a general feature of human life and speech. In Galla, for example, where the word for prohibition and interdiction is hirmi, the word for holy, sacred, soul, is ayana, and there is no inherent association of the holy and the prohibited in the language.69

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This statement is true as far as it goes, but the example chosen to illustrate it does not obviously support Steiner’s argument, inasmuch as hirmi shows every indication of being a loan word from Arabic borrowed by Oromo, an Afro-Asiatic language formerly often called “Galla,” as Steiner calls it here. Possibly the oldest dictionary of this language glosses hirmi as “forbidden, interdicted; . . . especially of foods,” and under the entry for boye or swine states that “the flesh of this may not be eaten among the Galla, it is hirmi.”70 This suggests strongly that Arabic haram has been carried over, together with ˙ its primary application to designate certain substances that are inedible because they are unclean. This does not mean that hirmi has a “dual meaning” in Oromo, but it does suggest that this example is not exactly “non-Semitic” and, by the same token, connects the word with a history of dual meanings and inversions of meaning in the root h-r-m. ˙ From this review of the evidence over the ambivalence of the sacred, let us return to Agamben’s dismissal of this notion: What is at work here is the psychologization of religious experience (the “disgust” and “horror” by which the cultured European bourgeoisie betrays its own unease before the religious fact), which will find its final form in Rudolph Otto’s work on the sacred. Here, in a concept of the sacred that completely coincides with the concept of the obscure and impenetrable, a theology that had lost all experience of the revealed word celebrated its union with a philosophy that had abandoned all sobriety in the face of feeling. That the religious belongs entirely to the sphere of psychological emotion, that it essentially has to do with shivers and goose bumps— this is the triviality that the neologism “numinous” had to dress up as science.71

This is a damning, and largely unjustified, indictment of Otto, whose own idea of the ambivalence of the sacred was quite different in many respects from that of Robertson Smith and, unlike the latter’s, owed little or nothing to the anthropological category of taboo. Indeed, it becomes apparent that a number of different versions of the ambivalence thesis have been conflated in scholarly discussions. The first is that the sacred, like the taboo, combines the pure and the polluted, or the sacred and the accursed. This is the version that Steiner critiques. As we have seen, his critique is valid, but only up to a point: there is no “primitive thought” that confuses these two categories, but there does appear to be a certain ambivalence in the extension of the category of the sacred itself. A different idea is that the sacred produces conflicting emotions in the worshipper or witness, either revulsion or attraction: this is Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans (terrifying and attractive mystery). The so-called horror sacer would be an example of the former emotion. It is understandable that Caillois, among others, has associated Otto’s idea with the thesis that the

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sacred connects the pure with the polluted.72 However, these are not the same: the former describes an ambivalent emotional reaction to a sacred object, whereas the second describes an ambiguity in the sacred object. Significantly, Otto’s thesis depended not only on a psychology or phenomenology of experience of the numinous, but also on evidence drawn from biblical and other traditions that pointed to the ex lege status of the deity. This evidence suggested that the status of the deity itself is ambiguous, as God may be observed to commit actions that are, at least from the perspective of human reason, immoral.73 This is also the reading that a number of deists made of the institutions of the Hebrew Bible, a reading that prompted their rejection of that text. Thomas Morgan cited the provisions of Leviticus 27 regarding the irrevocable donation of human beings as sacrifices, and Matthew Tindal cited the Conquest of Canaan and the exercise of the ban there.74 When it comes to a practice that neither Agamben nor Douglas considered— namely that of the biblical herem, ˙ where, if anywhere, the idea of the holy is at stake75— we are faced again with the problem of the ambivalence or rather the irrationality, violence, and disorderliness of that category. This is not only because those things labeled haram ˙ are, in a sense, both sacred (off-limits) and accursed, but also because the herem in the context of holy war raises most acutely the problem of the mor˙ ally ambiguous status of the deity. Of course, the herem makes an absolute ˙ distinction between God’s chosen people, who are holy, and their existential enemies. The latter are condemned because they constitute a threat to Israel’s very existence, worship the wrong gods, and/or threaten to seduce Israel away from the service of Yahweh. Focusing only on this aspect, one might agree with Douglas that the holy is primarily about imposing order through separation. Yet this order is touched undeniably with a component of chaos— of absolute violence, divine intervention, transgression, and liminality— in a manner that suggests the incompleteness of her account. Douglas rightly emphasized the manner in which the biblical idea of the holy echoed the creation and cosmic order,76 but she neglected the evidence that pointed to a connection between the holy and the antinomianism or violence that accompanies the founding of such an order. This aspect of the holy was better captured by Otto’s account of the tremendum, to illustrate which he cited God’s promise to exterminate the enemy tribes: “I will send my fear before them, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come” (Exod.  23:27).77 Yehezkel Kaufmann endorses the biblical basis of this understanding: The Bible ascribes to God actions that, to our way of thinking, lack moral grounds, or even run counter to our moral sense. Indeed, at times they seem to reflect a ruthless, capricious, demonic being. . . . Nor can we reconcile the

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dangers of contact with God and his holy appurtenances with a belief in a supreme moral will. . . . One can discern, therefore, a primary non-moral or supramoral element in monotheistic faiths: the will and command of God is absolutely good. The doctrine of predestination held by some Christian denominations is the most striking form of this idea. God has foreordained who will be saved and who will be damned. At this point the absolute will of God becomes in essence immoral . . . Exaltation of the One made it possible for cruelty to develop on a religious basis. . . . Israel devoted the enemies of YHWH to destruction; Christianity destroyed idolaters and heretics for the glory of God; Islam fought holy wars. . . . Hence there is no ground for viewing the laws of the ban and the dangers of contact with the holy as notions of an earlier age. They are not demonistic conceptions but express in their own way boundless adoration and reverence of the One.78

Kaufmann avoids rationalizing away the disturbing aspects of God in the Bible and subsequent monotheistic traditions. The ambivalence of the holy is neither a relic of primitive thought nor an idea foreign to the Bible and merely imported there from anthropology, as Agamben contended. The Camp, the Wilderness, and the Conquest: The Sovereign Ban Reconsidered Sovereignty . . . presents itself as an incorporation of the state of nature in society, or, if one prefers, as a state of indistinction between nature and culture, between violence and law. a g a m b e n , Homo Sacer, 35

Agamben may not have succeeded in persuading us of certain details of his argument. In particular, his claims that the homo sacer is not a sacrifice, and that the sacred is not ambivalent, appear difficult to sustain. However, let us recall the primary purpose of his argument, which was to focus our attention on the ban as “a juridico-political phenomenon,” as an expression of sovereignty. Here he is on firmer ground. Indeed, both the biblical herem and ˙ Otto’s focus on the ex lege status of the holy reinforce Agamben’s conclusion that “before assuming its modern form as a decision on the emergency, the relation between sovereignty and state of exception appears in the form of an identity between the sovereign and anomie.”79 The herem is a graphic exam˙ ple of the interpenetration of sovereignty with antinomianism. Sovereignty cannot be expressed adequately in purely legal terms, for it must incorporate a reference to the condition in which the law is suspended, a reference to the state of nature or to violence. In certain exceptional moments, law-breaking and law-making converge. Otherwise sovereignty, which alone is capable of

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constituting the legal order, might appear to coincide too closely with that order, leaving the law itself without any secure, because independent, foundation. As we have seen, this moment of lawlessness is often placed at the origins of the polity, in a past that is more or less distant, sometimes with the implication that this moment could be revisited if it became necessary to the reestablishment of order. Narratives of violent origins constitute one means of separating, at least rhetorically, the lawless and lawful aspects of sovereignty; this may help to soothe the contradiction between these two opposed qualities. Another means of separation, as we have seen, is the circumscription of antinomianism to a moment in the festival calendar of the polity. A third means of separation is geographic or spatial: this is the idea of the “camp,” which Agamben emphasizes in Homo Sacer. From Auschwitz to Guantanamo Bay, the camp represents a territorial displacement in which humans may more easily be deprived of the rights that, classically, were guaranteed to citizens, or qualified residents of the city. As a fugitive driven from the city, the homo sacer foreshadowed such a condition of banishment, with its accompanying reduction to “bare life.” Infamously, Agamben identifies the Nazi concentration and death camps as the logical end point, or perhaps the reductio ad absurdum, of a millennia-long history of sovereign violence in the West. One problem is that, by tracing a monolithic and apparently ineluctable logic of sovereignty all the way to the door of this camp, Agamben makes it difficult to imagine other, more hopeful modes of polity. If even ostensibly liberal democratic states depend on the same logic as that which eventuated in the Nazi genocide, what realistic alternatives are there to the threat that this atrocity might repeat itself ? As noted previously, Agamben expresses the hope for an alternative foundation for polity. Yet his account of what such an alternative might look like remains inchoate. The idea that sovereignty represents a zone of indistinction between inside and outside, culture and nature, and law and exception has applications beyond the cases that Agamben considers. Even if we confine ourselves to the idea of the “camp,” we find alternatives to Auschwitz and Guantanamo Bay in the camp (mahaneh) that the Israelites established during the Exodus, ˙ their forty-year wandering in the wilderness prior to arriving in the Promised Land. This episode represents a liminal moment in the constitution of Israel as a people and resembles the transition from the state of nature to the social contract, which may be said to occur in stages: when the Sinai covenant is established and, later, when the Israelites possess Canaan. The significance of the number forty in signaling such a liminal moment has already been noted: the same number was foreshadowed by the number of days of rain during the Flood, and echoed later by Jesus’s forty-day self-exile in the desert. It appears

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that the people placed themselves under the ban at the instigation of God and Moses. The demand presented to Pharaoh was that he allow the Israelites to go into the desert to make a sacrifice. He does so only under extreme duress— the Ten Plagues. If there is any sovereign here, it is not Pharaoh. Indeed, during the period of wandering, it is God himself who leads the people directly, in the form of the pillars of cloud and fire, which alight whenever and wherever they will (Num. 9:15 – 23; Exod. 13:21– 22). Moses serves as God’s regent. Challenges to him are rebuffed miraculously, as when Korah and his band are swallowed up by the earth (Num. 16). All along the way, the people’s radical dependence on God is emphasized. No single image encapsulates this better than the manna that appears on the ground each morning so that the people may gather it for sustenance.80 Every day brings exactly as much as each one requires. Hoarding is forbidden, and the leftovers spoil overnight. The one exception is the Sabbath, when the people are prohibited from laboring and are sustained by manna gathered the day before. This is a true creatio continua, where events are dependent from moment to moment on the whim of God. Of course, this is also the period during which the law is given, accompanied by further miracles.81 Outside of any city, sleeping in a movable encampment that includes the Tent of Meeting, led hither and thither by signs and wonders, subject to the vagaries of the favor and displeasure of their leader: it is in these circumstances of exposure to a radical sovereignty that the law appears, underlining its close connection, indeed absolute dependence, on what lies beyond it. With the crossing of the Jordan and the entry into Canaan, the gift of manna ceases (Josh. 5:12). It is important to observe how the Conquest of Canaan is presented, for the moment of appropriation (and expropriation) of the land is also a moment where the law and the exception converge.82 As Agamben states (though not in reference to Canaan): The “ordering of space” that is, according to Schmitt, constitutive of the sovereign nomos is therefore not only a “taking of land” (Landesnahme) . . . but above all a “taking of the outside,” an exception (Ausnahme). Since “there is no rule that is applicable to chaos,” chaos must first be included in the juridical order through the creation of a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, chaos and the normal situation.83

The moment of territorial acquisition is not one that can ever be justified in strictly legal terms. The subsequent recognition of valid title based upon conquest merely codifies theft as law. Prior to any legal transfer of property, there is only the moment of taking. This is perhaps why, in various cultures, this moment has been accompanied by various rituals, as well as legal fictions

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and subterfuges, to make it appear to be something other than a naked theft.84 During the Spanish conquest of America, for example, the ceremony of the Requerimiento involved making an announcement before a hostile invasion that the land had been claimed for the Spanish monarchy and offering clemency to those who submitted and converted to Christianity— even though, of course, the natives could scarcely be expected to understand Spanish.85 In his later work, The Nomos of the Earth , Schmitt shifted emphasis from the “decision” that both creates and suspends the law to the moment of appropriation of the land that first establishes a normative regime for a given territory: Nomos is a nomen actionis of nemein [to appropriate]. By common consent, nemein means both teilen [to divide] and verteilen [to distribute]. Oddly enough, it also means weiden [to pasture]. . . . In other words, this weiden does not mean feeding or drinking, but rather producing, which expresses a preliminary distribution. It proceeds in an allocation of mine and thine, which is recognized as law, i.e., an allocation that can result only from division and distribution. . . . It is the original constitution, the concrete primal norm, the beginning of law and property. No legal attribution or allocation is possible without the divisio primaeva. . . . However, just as division precedes production, so appropriation precedes division; it opens the way to apportionment. It is not division– not the divisio primaeva— but appropriation that comes first. Initially, there was no basic norm, but a basic appropriation. No man can give, divide, and distribute without taking. Only a god, who created the world from nothing, can give and distribute without taking.86

Schmitt cited Deuteronomy 4:4, Numbers 34:13, and Joshua 11:23 as examples.87 Arguably, this is as close as he came to acknowledging the sacrificial foundations of polity, for the latter division was made by Joshua followed the exercise of the herem against various Canaanite cities. (In an interesting ˙ coincidence, Bernhard Laum connected nemein with the distribution of meat [Verteilung des Fleisches] that occurs during sacrifice.)88 This is the classic case of “holy war” in the Bible, where, on the whole, victory is attributed to divine intervention rather than to the efforts of the Israelites themselves.89 God presents the Conquest as a pure gift: “I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you dwell therein; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards which you did not plant” (Josh. 24:13).90 The biblical example remains shrouded in myth. However, with his shift of perspective to the moment of territorial conquest, Schmitt placed his argument for the exceptionality of sovereignty on a solidly historical footing, especially given the recent experience of European colonialism. Schmitt referred to “the formative, even festive processes of many land-

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appropriations that are able to make Nahme a sacred act.”91 The festival or ritual aspects of the application of the herem to Jericho are depicted in ˙ Joshua 6:2 – 5: See, I have given into your hand Jericho. . . . You shall march . . . around the city once. . . . Thus shall you do for six days. And seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark; and the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, the priests blowing the trumpets. And when they make a loud blast with the ram’s horn, . . . then all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat.92

This event is followed by the slaughter of all of the inhabitants of the city, with the exception of the informer Rahab’s household. The repetition of the number seven appears to be a symbolic allusion to the Sabbath. Bemidbar (Numbers) Rabbah 14:1 points out that the Sabbath must have happened on one of the seven days during which Jericho was encircled, and then proceeds to assert that the Sabbath actually coincided with the seventh and final day: as this day was holy to the Lord, so too the city was made holy or devoted (haram).93 This conclusion is echoed by a number of other sources, as Hein˙ rich Guggenheimer notes in his commentary on Seder Olam 11: “This is the opinion of all Yerushalmi [Jerusalem Talmud] sources, that Jericho was stormed on [the] Sabbath.”94 The taking of Jericho, like the Sabbath itself, by repeating the number seven, symbolically reprises the creation, on which God rested after six days of labor.95 Both ritual institutions combine the ordering power of the creation with the condition of indeterminacy or state of nature that obtained at that time. Stern suggests that the herem belongs to the ˙ mythological tradition of the victory of cosmos over chaos: the forces that threaten order must be extirpated for order to be reestablished.96 The Conquest of Canaan represents a liminal period in which the law is suspended or inverted. Under normal conditions, the rule is “Thou shalt not kill.” In this context, however, the exceptional commandment is to slaughter without mercy and spare none. It is important also that this event occurs at the point of transition from nomadism to settled, agricultural life, and that it encodes an opposition between the tent-dwelling Israelites and the citydwelling Canaanites, who are presented as corrupt.97 As Schmitt said with regard to nomos: “The most important period was the transition from the nomadic age to the fixed household: the oikos. This transition presupposed a land-appropriation which, by its finality, distinguished itself from the perennially provisional appropriations and divisions of the nomads.”98 The fact that the gift of manna ceases may be taken to signal proleptically that, with the transition to agriculture, such food is no longer needed. Norman Gottwald

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has made an impressive effort to prove that ancient Israelite monotheism was formed, in sociological terms, through the rising up of certain displaced classes against their wealthier urban countrymen.99 Whatever the historical truth of such contentions, my interest lies squarely with the manner in which the biblical narrative depicts this opposition, and how such an opposition appears to coincide with Agamben’s idea that the point of meeting of the “outside” and “inside” of the city, or in this case the boundary of the land, represents an important moment in the constitution of sovereignty. As both Schmitt and Agamben have noted, such moments of territorial appropriation found a new normative order or polity. The Conquest is followed shortly by the Shechem covenant (Josh. 24), at which the original distribution of the land among the tribes of Israel takes place. This ends one liminal moment in the history of Israel. This moment remains central to future ideas of polity, as the Jubilee Year (Lev. 25) describes a restoration of the land to this original distribution and, like the herem against Jericho, involves the blowing of the ˙ shofar and symbolic references to the creation through the number seven, or in this case, seven times seven. (See chapter 5.) Supplementing Agamben’s homo sacer with an analysis of the connections between territory and sovereignty, Steven DeCaroli states that sovereignty requires a boundary. The boundary structures political relationships both for that within the sovereign field and for that which lies beyond it.  .  .  . When the legitimacy of this boundary is challenged, when the edges of the sovereign field are made to appear arbitrary, sovereignty responds with banishment. It should not surprise us, then, to find that within ancient sources the displacement of boundary markers is included among the few original infractions that warrant exile.  .  .  . The moving of boundaries represents a very literal disruption of the relation between authority and territory.100

Eliade argued that the story of Romulus and Remus reflected not only a “primordial cosmogonic sacrifice” but also “the ritual of founding a city by means of a furrow.”101 Both represented the creation of the world in illo tempore. Remus’s infraction, then, was to challenge the cosmic order. Yet the converse of such rituals could also occur: “an enemy city was ritually destroyed when its walls were demolished and a furrow was drawn around their ruins.” In some analogous cases of ancient warfare, even the ground was salted to prevent farming and resettlement.102 This is similar to what happened at Jericho. Both forms of the ban had cosmic import. Since all foundations are arbitrary, even the successful expropriation of territory raises, for the victors, the problem of how to justify such a Landnahme, for example as a divine

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grant or the spoils of (holy) war. In place of an individual devotion, there is a different and more extreme form of the ban: a complete annihilation of the conquered peoples that is portrayed as the limit case of sacrifice in an orgy of bloody slaughter. That historical analysis suggests the implausibility of such an event’s actually having occurred in Canaan only prompts the question of what the motivation of such a depiction is. One possible answer to this question is that, at the changeover from one polity to another— just as at the moment of an interregnum or transition from one sovereign to another within an existing polity— there may occur, as Agamben notes, a temporary period of anomie, or “suspension and alteration of all social relations.”103 By means of either narrative representations or ritual enactments of such a condition, the ultimate foundation of sovereignty in violence and chaos is acknowledged, but also circumscribed and contained in a manner that defends the existing order. In the context of a critique of Weber’s theory of an antinomian charisma that declines through routinization, John Milbank pointed to the manner in which this depicts an initially visible violence— the appropriation of land, conquest in war, monarchic suppression of feudal authority. After the initial act of violence, power operates merely with formal regularity, and Weber makes no attempt to see how the “fictions” of power are constantly reconstituted and upheld. In this respect, it is significant that there is a strong parallel in Weber between the operation of sheer physical violence “at the outset,” and the commencement of religion with “charisma.” In either case, a neat division is effected between a quite arbitrary foundation, and an area of self-contained rationality which it henceforth permits. . . . In the charismatic exhortation of the primitive warrior band, religion and founding violence are originally inseparable.104

Milbank is right to identify the parallel between Weber’s theory of charisma and the myth of founding violence connected with the sacred. One can find the same myth in the Hebrew Bible. The herem fits the description of ˙ an “initial violence” (the slaughter of the native inhabitants of Canaan) conducted by a “primitive warrior band” (the “sons of Israel” [bnei yisrael]) that effects a “neat division” (and distribution of land) between a “quite arbitrary foundation” (the claim of such land as a divine grant) and “an area of selfcontained rationality which it henceforth permits” (the land now renamed eretz yisrael, which is to be governed according to the revealed laws, including both “Thou shalt not kill” and the regulated violence of nonhuman sacrifices, with occasional exceptions made for those who are beyond the law). And all of this is included under the rubric of the herem, which represents the clear˙

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est possible assertion of the interpenetration of the sacred with violence, and with sovereign appropriation. In a discussion of the decisive break made by biblical ethics with any other normative system, and the utter dependence of this new ethics on revelation rather than on some ostensibly universal natural law, the Protestant theologian Karl Barth compared this break to the Conquest of Canaan: We have to realize how far-reaching is this change in the conceptions of ethics. . . . It means an annexation of the kind that took place on the entry of the children of Israel into Palestine. Other peoples had for a long time maintained that they had a very old, if not the oldest, right of domicile in this country. But . . . on no account had the Israelites to adopt or take part in their cultus and culture. . . . Ethics in the sense of that general conception is something entirely different from what alone the Christian doctrine of God can be as a doctrine of God’s command. Christian ethics . . . is the final word of the original chairman . . . which puts an end to the discussion and involves necessarily a choice and separation. . . . In its annexation of the realm of general ethical problems theological ethics behaves as the Israelites did or should have done on their entry into Canaan. . . . Theological ethics has to accept the fact that it must not believe in the possibility and reality of a general moral enquiry and reply which are originally and ultimately independent of the grace and command of God. . . . Annexation remains annexation, however legal it may be, and there must be no armistice with the peoples of Canaan and their culture and their cultus.105

Of course Barth had to choose the most ethically problematic episode in the entire Hebrew Bible— the wholesale slaughter of indigenous populations in order to take possession of their land— because this episode, like the Binding of Isaac, exposes most acutely the inadequacy of any theory of morality based on natural law to justify this action, and by the same token requires the supposition of a purely positive law or revelation— a divine command— as its basis. At the same time, Barth’s account highlights the nature of the herem ˙ as a decision for “annexation,” “separation,” and possession, which fuses sovereignty and the sacred into a single moment. One approach to understanding the herem is to regard this as the proto˙ type for later notions of “holy war” in monotheistic traditions. Jan Assmann in particular has presented the thesis that a “Mosaic distinction” exists that separates the Abrahamic traditions from all others, based upon the claim to a radical exclusivity of worship that extends also to a refusal of social interaction.106 The herem as a form of total warfare bears some comparison with the ˙ contemporary notion of genocide. As we have seen, Agamben presents the Vernichtungslager as the endpoint of a European, or perhaps Greco-Roman,

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ontology of sovereignty. The herem locates analogous practices in ancient Is˙ raelite monotheism, as well as in surrounding polities, such as Moab, that worshipped different deities.107 Although calling into question Agamben’s statement that “supreme power . . . [is] always founded on a life that may be killed but not sacrificed,” the Conquest of Canaan provides a key illustration of his claim that the state of nature, which gives way (at Shechem) to a social contract, is a myth. What such myths express is the idea that the sovereign is “intimately anomos,” outside of any system of legal norms. In this sense, at least, the sovereign— like those things that, by being devoted to it, are marked as sacred— is ambivalent, a declaration of a state of exception from ordinary (and peaceful) life. The same is true of the sacred in its economic dimensions, which are characterized by the separation of certain things from the laws of economic exchange that govern the mundane economy, or by the temporary suspension of those laws. Beginning with an analysis of the nonutilitarian aspects of the biblical herem, we now turn to these economically exceptional moments. ˙

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Sacrifice, or the Religious Mode of Production To solve the mystery of giving and receiving, of sacrifice and asceticism, of work, leisure, and agency, would be to solve the mystery of religion. g u s t a v o b e n a v i d e s , “Economy” (2005), 86

Rational Choices for Irrational Actors? The biblical herem represented a derogation from the norm, a declaration ˙ of exception not only from ordinary law and morality but also, like some more conventional forms of sacrifice in ancient Israelite religion and other traditions, from the mundane economy. By placing a human being or other object totally beyond the possibility of exchange or redemption (Lev. 28), the herem removes this object from the marketplace irrevocably. Considered ˙ from this standpoint, the herem might be thought to manifest the idea of a ˙ “true gift”—that is, one made not in contemplation of some further benefit that would be received in exchange. Yet there are several caveats or qualifications that prevent this simple conclusion. The first is that not all instances of its application are the same: as noted above, in some cases all life, including animal, is extinguished; in others, animals (but not humans) are spared; in the most extreme cases, no wealth may be taken.1 Normally, however, the gold went into the treasury of God— in other words, to the priests. We cannot say that the herem constituted, for all interested parties, the refusal of a benefit (in ˙ this case, of war booty).2 It is also true that, in the case of both the war-herem ˙ and the dedication of individual sacrifices as haram, such vows may have ˙ been made in expectation of a benefit (Num. 21:1– 3).3 Joshua declared the herem against Jericho immediately prior to the sacking of the city (Josh. 6: ˙ 16 – 18). In such cases, valuable items (and people) devoted to God may be promised in exchange for a victory not yet consummated. The story of Jephthah presents a parallel, although his vow was not called a herem (Judg. 11). ˙ He promised, in return for success in battle, to sacrifice the first living being he would see upon returning home. Tragically, this was his daughter. We know of similar examples from other cultures; for example, Agamemnon’s

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sacrifice of Iphigenia to allow the departure of the Achaean fleets for Troy, or the fourth-century BCE Roman consul Publius Decius Mus’s dedication of himself as a sacrifice in exchange for success in battle.4 The herem, in some in˙ stances at least, appears similarly to be part of a quid pro quo exchange. This only reinforces its connection with sacrifice which, as a number of theorists have told us, often depends on the principle of reciprocity indicated by the Latin phrase do ut des: I give to you (or to God) so that you (or God) will give to me in return.5 Despite according with the logic of gift exchange in some instances, the herem involved so much destruction and waste that attempts to explain it in ˙ economically rational terms appear rather forced. In a basic sense, the herem ˙ of course can be seen as the outcome of a competition over a scarce resource, namely land, in which there must be winners and losers. Yet this does not explain the slaughter. Human beings are ordinarily regarded as very valuable. The inhabitants of a conquered city— excepting perhaps some who posed an immediate danger, such as elements of the hierarchy that could be expected to offer continued resistance— would more naturally be candidates for economic exploitation, as slave labor or for childbearing and concubinage. What is least in doubt, however, in the case of the herem— to the extent that it was ˙ actually applied— is that the defeated tribes were put to death. How may we account for such behavior? Norman Gottwald attempted to account for the herem in terms of his the˙ ory that the Conquest of Canaan represented not an invasion from outside, but a revolt of peasant pastoralists and farmers against their urban overlords: “Behind the herem lie selective expulsion and annihilation of kings and up˙ per classes and the selective expropriation of resources such as metals— all with the aim of buttressing the egalitarian mechanisms of Israelite society and providing a solid renewable support base for the peasant economy.”6 This supposedly explained why Canaanite cities in particular were targeted, as housing the elites who were the principal opponents of the peasant insurrection; and why in some instances the horses, which could not be readily exploited for farming, were destroyed while the oxen were preserved.7 Gottwald argued further that the wholesale slaughter of populations was actually more common in large states than in tribal societies such as that of ancient Israel, and that the herem was only a “Deuteronomic . . . dogma,”8 both of which ˙ assertions are ways of minimizing the problem that the herem poses for a ˙ theory of the economic rationality of ancient Israelite practices. Of course, the possibility that the herem was mainly a retrospective fiction must be taken ˙ very seriously,9 yet Gottwald appears to want it both ways: to take certain

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declarations in the biblical text as historically accurate, and others as theology or myth, without defining, in the case of the herem, how this distinction ˙ could be consistently applied. Weakening this argument further is Stern’s suggestion that the slaughter of entire peoples was necessitated by the ancient Israelite tribal confederation’s lack of organization, which precluded the effective economic exploitation of conquered peoples and suggested as a fate for them slaughter rather than slavery: “the ‘economics’ of the herem were not simply those of sacrifice to no ˙ purpose . . . a social group had to be at a sufficiently high level of economic organization to absorb the vanquished soldiers [and presumably the women and children as well] en masse as slaves.”10 Unlike the Israelites, “the Egyptians were in a good position . . . to utilize captive slave labor” and generally took prisoners.11 In other words, pace Gottwald, it is not large states but loose tribal confederations that could be expected to engage in mass slaughter.12 The fact that the herem has been declared ultimately “rational” in economic ˙ terms by scholars invoking diametrically opposed arguments only demonstrates the malleability and inconclusiveness of much economic theorizing, as well as a fundamental ambiguity in the definition of economics itself as the study of the rational pursuit of self-interest under conditions of scarcity,13 for the range of possibilities encompassed by the terms “interest” and “goods”— and even what is meant by “rational”— is indefinitely broad and vague. At a more basic level, the theology of the herem—which, as opposed to how it was ˙ (if ever) actually put into practice, is all we really know— expresses a clear rejection of the values of the marketplace, according to which everything is exchangeable, and nothing is ultimately beyond (monetary) redemption. The herem violates market logic in another sense as well: the peoples that were ˙ placed under the ban were those with whom it was impossible for the ancient Israelites to contemplate an exchange, whether of women, or of goods, or of religious practices (Deut. 7). This in itself should not be terribly surprising, for, as a large number of cases suggest, what is “sacred” (and, as we have seen, this term applies with special force to the herem) means nothing more nor ˙ less than what is devoted to God’s (or a god’s) ownership and possession. “Sacredness” refers to a power of disposition over certain goods, a power that, in its prerogatives, is indistinguishable from sovereignty. As a limit case of this power, the herem appears incompatible with some fundamental tenets ˙ of market economics. The definition of the discipline of economics itself as the study of rational action with respect to scarcity is hardly capacious enough to extend to certain behaviors that themselves produce or promote scarcity. Even though the herem, by virtue of reducing the demand for land by slaughtering po˙

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tential competitors for a limited supply of this good, does not constitute an unambiguous case of the deliberate production of scarcity, we may turn to any number of sacrifices in which valuable objects are destroyed in order to establish the basic point. There is a divide between the mode of valuation of goods by market economies and that adopted by economies that I shall refer to, provisionally and for the sake of contrast, as “sacred.”14 Market economies depend on, among other things, the principles of free exchange; a common, quantifiable standard of valuation; and ownership as the right of disposition and alienation of goods. Sacred economies seem to depend rather upon a refusal of a number of these fundamental principles. First, not all objects are valued according to a common, usually numerical, scale, nor are they all exchangeable. Instead, certain objects are declared to be qualitatively different in value than other, especially profane items. In a number of cases, sacred objects are declared absolutely inalienable: literally priceless. As if to guarantee this, these objects may even be destroyed, which of course also destroys their use or exchange value. That these actions may be undertaken in obedience to (divine) command further demonstrates that what is in question here is not rational self-interest.15 Chapters 5 and 6 describe several further cases of religious rejections of exchange. In cases where exchange or the market is itself rejected, it seems nonsensical to speak of “rational choice” in market terms. What is striking is precisely the contrast that such sacred economies describe through their departure from market principles. Jacob Neusner has described the economics of the Mishnah— the first systematization of the Torah that occurred in the early centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple— as a “distributive” as opposed to a “market” economics.16 This does not mean that there was no market economy in ancient Palestine. Rather, “the framers of the Mishnah  .  .  . imagined a distributive economy while legislating for a market one.” In fact, Neusner defines this distributive economy in terms of derogations from the market: The Priestly Code [interpreted in the Mishnah] assigned portions of the crop to the priesthood and the Levites as well as to the caste comprising the poor; it intervened in the market processes affecting real estate by insisting that land could not be permanently alienated but reverted to its “original” ownership every fifty years; it treated some produce as unmarketable even though it was entirely fit; it exacted for the Temple a share of the crop; it imposed regulations on the labor force that were not shaped by market considerations but by religious taboos, e.g., days on which work might not be performed, or might be performed only in a diminished capacity. . . . The Temple taboos imposed upon the productive economy considerations of a nonmarket, nonproductive character, in consequence of which the maximization of productivity forms

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only one among several competing considerations, and not the most important one, in the planning of production.17

The “distributive economy” can be defined only negatively, through its deviation from or opposition to the market: “The Mishnah’s economics knows the market, but it is not a market economics. Distributive economics . . . is the distribution of scarce goods and services not through the market mechanism.”18 This does not represent a failure on Neusner’s part to grasp the underlying principles on which such a nonmarket economy is based. It is a reflection of the fact that the distributive economy defined itself precisely through such opposition, as in the case of the Jubilee’s redistribution of the land, which reverses what the market has brought about (see chapter 5). As Neusner states, “The theology of the Mishnah utilizes the principles of distributive economics in order to make a statement of not economics but theology.”19 When the law prohibits usury, for example, it is commenting negatively on such market practices.20 In the past few decades, the economically irrational– seeming behaviors on display in the history of religion have come under the lens of rational choice and evolutionary theorists.21 The reason is obvious. It is not those mundane behaviors in which individuals comfortably inhabit the roles of reasonable economic agents that have been assigned for them under capitalism, and in which they express the subjective yet ultimately quantifiable and calculable preferences that are the main mode of being for consumers in the marketplace, that pose a challenge for such theoretical perspectives. It is, instead, those rarer occasions on which humans appear to defy or reject these roles by engaging in waste, spoilage, excessive consumption, or wanton destruction— or sometimes merely by refraining from production or consumption altogether— that challenge the thesis that human beings are ultimately rational economic agents who either maximize their individual interests or, by some indirect means, contribute to the evolutionary advantage of a larger social group. In a well-known article entitled “Sacrifice and Stigma” that was published over twenty-five years ago and has become a classic of the genre, Laurence Iannaccone highlighted such behaviors as the explanandum of his rationalchoice theory of religion. Iannaccone lucidly stated: The personal sacrifices that lie at the heart of most religions are especially problematic. Although some of these sacrifices generate obvious benefits, many others seem aimed at destroying valuable resources. . . . These practices demand explanation, not merely because they deviate from “normal” behavior, but because they appear completely counterproductive. . . . The problem

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is epitomized by the burnt offering, a religious rite designed specifically to destroy valuable resources.22

Iannaccone proceeded to describe how, despite apparently acting against their own self-interest, individuals may engage rationally in such behaviors. The gist of his theory is that sacrifices and the observance of prohibitions may be the price of entry into a group that offers, by way of compensation for such costs, the reward of greater social solidarity, a solidarity that is guaranteed by the elimination of “free riders” or hangers-on who lack the commitment to undergo such sacrifices.23 My goal here is not to lay out all of the arguments that Iannaccone presents in favor of his theory, nor to provide a counter-critique of each such argument. For the moment I will note only a few major hurdles that any such theory would have to clear before it could be advanced as a comprehensive explanation for religious phenomena, such as: Why, if barriers to entry are adaptive, did Max Weber claim conversely that it was the abolition of most of the ritual requirements of ancient Judaism that contributed to the success of Christianity as a universal religion?24 Why, similarly, did the relatively simple (as compared with Judaism) set of ritual demands placed upon Muslim converts in the early centuries of that tradition nevertheless coincide with tremendous growth in membership? Are exclusion and inclusion equally valid as adaptive strategies, and is everything therefore adaptive? Why do some individual ascetics pursue sacrifice even to the point of destroying either themselves or, at least, as celibates do, their hope of progeny? The challenge of accounting for any benefit to the individual in such cases is highlighted by the efforts of some other theorists to account for the same behaviors in terms of how they might benefit a larger social group over the longer term.25 Finally, we must point out that none of the explanations that Iannaccone provides for the performance of these special behaviors can be limited to religious groups, as he himself notes.26 Why is it, then, that they are not equally distributed among all types of groups; and why have we arguably observed in many instances not quite the disappearance, but the marginalization of such economically irrational behaviors as sacrifice, both within traditional religion and within the wider marketplace, with the advance of capitalism and utilitarian philosophies? Such historical questions are beyond the scope of Iannaccone’s theory, which sets out to explain the counterintuitive success of certain demanding contemporary religious sects. For a general theory of religion, however, such questions are of great importance. The marginalization of asceticism and of similar economically unproductive behaviors has been a notable phenomenon in the development of mod-

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ern attitudes toward religion, especially in earlier Protestant and deist polemics against Catholic ritual. Samuel Musson’s dismissal of such behaviors as irrational is utterly typical for the eighteenth century: No rational exception, I say, can be made from these systems, in respect of the persons, or singularities of such, concerned in working those miracles; on account of their strange, and apparently odd austerities and works of penance; their abode in desarts; their fasts even of forty days and nights from all kind of nourishment; of a Moses, Elias, the Messiah; religious abstinence from certain meats and drink; their vows; the sin of breaking them, even that of chastity ; their penitential garb; all which, and much more of the same nature.27

In religious studies as well, such a marginalization also occurred earlier in the history of interpretation of the ancient Israelite ’olah or whole burnt offering that Iannaccone referred to in his essay. In his groundbreaking work on the development of the Pentateuch, the nineteenth-century German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen argued that the prominence of the whole burnt offering in Leviticus and other parts of the Pentateuch was a later development that coordinated with the rise to dominance of the priestly class, the centralization of worship at Jerusalem, and the proliferation of offerings made directly to priests.28 Leaving aside these other aspects of his theory, Wellhausen’s treatment of the whole burnt offering— the ’olah as opposed to the zebah (which usually involved the consumption of an animal) and other ˙ sacrifices— was determined not only by his philological analysis of the Pentateuch itself, but also by his assumptions regarding the origins and social significance of sacrifice: In the early days, worship arose out of the midst of ordinary life, and was in most intimate and manifold connection with it. A sacrifice was a meal, a fact showing how remote was the idea of antithesis between spiritual earnestness and secular joyousness. . . . Religious worship was a natural thing in Hebrew antiquity; it was the blossom of life, the heights and depths of which it was its business to transfigure and glorify.29

According to Wellhausen, it was the priests who cast us out of this Eden, by replacing such celebrations with the burnt offering and other modes of sacrifice that were “deprived of their natural spontaneity, and degraded into mere ‘exercises of religion.’”30 Wellhausen’s interpretation of Jewish ritual was biased by Protestant attitudes. The ancient thesis that the Gospel had superseded Mosaic law found support in his idea that, after all, this law was, at least in its objectionable parts, not original, but a fabrication made after the return from the Babylonian Exile. Even his specific contentions regarding the origins of sacrifice echoed older Protestant interpretations of the Eucharist,

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going back to Luther, as a meal rather than a sacrifice.31 Wellhausen’s thesis concerning the development of sacrifice was taken over by William Robertson Smith, who endorsed the idea that ancient Israelite religion was focused on sacrifice as an act of commensality.32 Émile Durkheim borrowed from Robertson Smith in defining the social function of religion in producing group solidarity, particularly in ecstatic communal rituals.33 Sacrifices that eventuated in feasting obviously fit such theoretical models much better than did the burnt offering. Wellhausen’s historical reconstruction was challenged almost immediately by William Lang Baxter, who rejected as dubious the contention that the ’olah was a late development.34 Genesis depicts Noah’s burnt offering after the Flood (Gen. 8:20) and prescribes that Isaac be sacrificed in the same way (Gen. 22). More recently, M. Bourdillon contradicted Robertson Smith on this point: “Clearly the meal is not essential to sacrifice. . . . [In some] ancient Hebrew sacrifices . . . the offering was entirely burnt; in others the flesh of their victims was consumed only by priests.”35 In economic terms, however, Wellhausen’s and Robertson Smith’s accounts of sacrifice appeared to accord with common sense. Wellhausen identified the proliferation of burnt offerings and of sacrificial offerings to priests with the centralization of worship at Jerusalem that occurred with the Deuteronomic legislation. Previously, when sacrifices had been performed in smaller settings, there was a natural tendency for them to become occasions for group celebrations, and vice versa. Moreover, because the killing of an animal meant the production of a relatively large amount of meat that could not be consumed by only an individual or a small family before it spoiled, the surplus would have to be shared with others.36 The consequence was that “whenever one slaughtered, then one also sacrificed; every occasion of slaughter was a holy act”37— or, rather, an action that was hallowed by virtue precisely of its becoming an occasion for commensality. The fact that, in the case of human sacrifices in ancient Israel, the burnt offering was almost always applied would, from this perspective, constitute an exception that reinforces the rule: such victims were not eaten, and by burning them the danger of cannibalism was removed.38 Yet the question remains: even assuming (a big assumption) that it could be proved that most or even all sacrifices in ancient Israelite religion had originated in the kinds of circumstances that Wellhausen and Robertson Smith described, why should we then conclude that the earlier pattern of sacrifice was more legitimate, rather than that this pattern had evolved over time into a more perfect form? Behind this assumption lay a Protestant bias toward privileging the supposedly original or earlier form of an institution, as opposed

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to the innovations of priests, as well as a bias against the very idea of sacrifice, which reached its apex in the deist denial that even Christ’s death ought to be interpreted in such terms. At one time, however, all such practices were innovations. Moreover, even were we to accept this theory of the origins of sacrifice, how should we account for the great number of other cases in which it appears, to the contrary, that religion is not communal, utilitarian, and economically rational— in a word, not natural but exceptional? It is telling that Wellhausen’s interpretation of Judaism echoed one of the central themes of the deist critique and of Spencer’s rationalization of sacrifice, namely, the attack on divine command theory: “The old meaning of the festivals and of the sacrifices had long faded away, and after the interruption of the exile . . . they had become simply statutes, unexplained commands of an absolute will.”39 I have gone into some detail on this example of the burnt offering in order to illustrate that such efforts as Iannaccone’s to explain, or better still to explain away, the economically irrational aspects of religion are nothing new in the study of religion.40 Note also that while Iannaccone does not attempt, as Wellhausen did, to minimize the importance of the burnt offering, he manages to arrive at a similar conclusion: that the rationale for sacrifice ultimately has (or had) something to do with the manner in which it increases social solidarity. Durkheim’s bias toward the idea that religion serves primarily to construct social solidarity by means of group rituals is an enduring legacy that has been inherited by contemporary efforts to marginalize the exceptional or irrational in religion. Religion, like some other areas of culture, involves apparently uneconomical activities, as measured by their unproductiveness or even wastefulness in terms of time, energy, money, and other resources. This is the source of the analogy between religion and “play” that has been made by such scholars as Johann Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and, more recently, Robert Bellah.41 Huizinga argued that religious ritual, like play, was circumscribed and rule governed.42 He applied the rubric of play to the potlatch, a form of competitive gift giving that involved one-upmanship, and to other agonistic or dangerous forms of ritual behavior.43 Caillois’ Man, Play and Games was an ambitious attempt more rigorously to classify different types of play and their intersection; a discussion of this work would carry us too far from the present theme.44 More pertinent is the focus on festivals in Caillois’ earlier work, a focus that he shared with Georges Bataille as a fellow member of the Collège de Sociologie. To a certain extent, “play” is an appropriate analogy for some of the uneconomical aspects of religious behavior. Like ritual, play is undertaken at moments separated from mundane labor and lacks an obvious material goal. Doing something “for sport” means not for money,

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nor out of necessity. True, even vast sums of money may be wagered on the outcome of sporting contests, yet this is a zero-sum game, in which no new value is produced (and is in this respect like the activities of some financiers or speculators). Caillois rightly included gambling or games of chance (alea) in his analysis of play. However, there are significant limitations on the usefulness of “play” as a descriptive label for the uneconomical aspects of religion. These aspects appear to be motivated in many cases by something other than the sense of enjoyment that we characteristically associate with play, understood as an activity voluntarily undertaken (as many religious commands are not). (I leave aside here the obvious enjoyment associated with many festivals, religious or otherwise.) Josef Pieper’s rubric of “leisure” may be better for certain examples, such as the Sabbath, which he labeled not merely “a Sunday afternoon idyll.”45 The abstention from labor mandated on the Jewish Sabbath, and the prohibition against planting and organized harvesting during the biblical Sabbatical and Jubilee years, appear to have a more complex meaning (see chapter 5). Moreover, ritual includes bloody sacrifices and ascetic mortifications, neither of which would be characterized by a neutral observer as either “play” or “leisure.” Neither term works for the biblical herem, which, ˙ as it occurred during combat, was scarcely leisurely. It is true that, by extending the definition of “play” to include agonistic behaviors, theorists such as Huizinga aimed to capture, in part, such very unchildlike activities as war, which represents perhaps the most uneconomical endeavor possible, at least in terms of the sheer waste of life and wanton destruction that it produces. Yet Huizinga’s contention that “war and everything to do with it remains fast in the daemonic and magical bonds of play” was not terribly convincing.46 The use of “play” to designate such activities remains profoundly counterintuitive. Within the Durkheimian tradition of sociological analysis, the most significant efforts to define an economics alternative to that of the marketplace have been those of Marcel Mauss, in The Gift, and Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share.47 Mauss’s essay was a brilliant attempt to demonstrate Durkheim’s principles on the ground through the analysis of concrete social relations. Where Durkheim had argued in fairly general terms that group ritual contributes to social solidarity, Mauss showed how, in premarket societies, gift exchange operates as a powerful mechanism for creating bonds of obligation. He distinguished between the reciprocity encouraged by gift exchange, which envisions long-term relations of mutual dependence, and the anonymous transactions of market economies, where buyer and seller look to short-term interest and treat each other accordingly. Although Mauss, himself a socialist, sought the antidote for the cold,

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utilitarian calculations of the marketplace in such traditional forms of exchange, arguably the gift as he described it offered no such liberation. That is because, as his analysis showed, the “gift” was not entirely voluntary, no free expression of generosity, but rather carried with it in some way the requirement that the grantee should reciprocate. Indeed, if this were not the case, then the gift could not function as the basis for a network of social relations, in which individuals are bound by ties of obligation that ensure the availability of even the most basic goods, namely marriage partners and food. The very fact that the maintenance of such relationships requires disguising, in some fashion, the similarity between the obligation to reciprocate a gift and the analogous requirement, in the context of a market economy, to pay cash money for goods received, intimates the tenuousness and precariousness of the gift economy. In general terms, one must not return a gift with another that is exactly the same; and often there must also be a delay, even a substantial one, between the receipt of a gift and its reciprocation. A defining feature of the capitalist economy is the “arm’s length,” that is, temporary, transactional, and frequently also anonymous nature, of the exchanges that are basic to a free market. The relations created by such exchanges— barring long-term contractual arrangements or “brand loyalty”— are the opposite of what is aimed at in the gift economy, in which the specific nature of an exchange is governed not by immediate self-interest, but rather with the goal of reinforcing existing and possible future relationships. To the extent that an exchange comes to resemble nothing more than a one-off trade, this larger goal may be jeopardized. Taboos against transactionalism were by no means limited to so-called primitive economies. The very same principles arguably applied also to the idea of salvation in the sacramental economy of the Catholic Church. So, with the increasing quantification of indulgences that occurred on the eve of the Reformation, salvation came to look less like a gift and more like a purchase. According to the countervailing idea of predestination, salvation may not be bought even by the performance of virtuous actions. (See chapter 6.) Bataille argued that such religious displays as sacrifices and festivals, as well as wars, which involve wasteful consumption (dépense), demonstrate the quality of “sovereignty” (souveraineté), of being free from the mundane economy and from the servility that is imposed by scarcity and by the accompanying necessity of labor.48 He defined sovereignty as a state of exception to transactionalism: What distinguishes sovereignty is the consumption of wealth, as against labor and servitude, which produce wealth without consuming it. . . . We may call

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sovereign the enjoyment of possibilities that utility doesn’t justify  .  .  . Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty.  .  .  . Beyond need, the object of desire is, humanly, the miracle ; it is sovereign life, beyond the necessary that suffering defines.49

Bataille provided a definition of sovereignty that, although expressed in economic terms, converged with Schmitt’s definition of the same quality in terms of law and politics. This convergence extended to Bataille’s mention of the miracle as an analogy for human behaviors that lie beyond utility: just as the miracle, as traditionally understood, represents a sovereign violation of natural law, the economic miracle signaled by an interruption of the utilitarian order signifies a supervening will. Bataille argued that sacrifice expressed the most radical derogation from any utilitarian economics: Sacrifice restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane. . . . Destruction is the best means of negating a utilitarian relation between man and the animal or plant [that is offered as a sacrifice]. But it rarely goes to the point of holocaust. It is enough that the consumption of the offerings, or the communion, has a meaning that is not reducible to the shared ingestion of food. . . . Religion is this long effort and this anguished quest: It is always a matter of detaching from the real order, from the poverty of things, and of restoring the divine order. . . . The meaning of this profound freedom is given in destruction, whose essence is to consume profitlessly whatever might remain in the progression of useful works. Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates. It does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order. This principle opens the way to passionate release; it liberates violence while marking off the domain in which violence reigns absolutely.50

As examples of this phenomenon, Bataille focused on Aztec human sacrifice and the potlatch, a form of competitive gift giving in which successive entrants up the ante by either giving away or, in some cases, gratuitously destroying more wealth than their competitors, in an apparent bid for status and prestige.51 The potlatch has received extensive attention from anthropologists and other scholars since even before Mauss described it in The Gift. Whereas Mauss regarded reciprocal gift exchange in premarket economies as a basis for the constitution of social relations, Bataille chose to highlight instead the aberrant or extreme form of gift giving represented by the potlatch. This shift of emphasis enabled him to argue that, in certain cases at least, wasteful consumption is not, or not exclusively, about the establishment of

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social order, but rather about “sovereignty,” a quality that is demonstrated precisely by its derogation from the kinds of mundane exchanges that, in premarket economies, create the ties that bind. Bataille defined such derogations in opposition to the “calculation” that is expressed in “servile” economic relations, of the type that have become dominant in modern capitalist economies.52 Accordingly, he described the massive consumption and display of luxury devoted to the glorification of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages as typically religious and nonutilitarian.53 Bataille inverted the traditional definition of economics as rational action under conditions of scarcity: “It is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury[,]’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems”;54 and “On the whole a society always produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal. It is precisely the use it makes of this surplus that determines it.”55 As argued further in chapter 5, the rise of those nonutilitarian behaviors that we call “religious” appears to have been associated with the development of storage economies that effectively produced and harnessed surplus wealth and, by so doing, enabled the development of social hierarchies. As Bataille noted, not only engaging in unproductive activity but also abstaining from productive activity is wasteful: “Idleness, [building a] pyramid or alcohol [use] have the advantage of consuming without a return— without a profit— the resources that they use: They simply satisfy us; they correspond to the unnecessary choice that we make of them.”56 Just as common in the history of religions as instances of excessive consumption are abstentions from productive activity or from labor: the sloth or idleness in which many holy persons, resembling in some respects the wealthy elite in certain cultures, have indulged. This is one reason for the frequent analogy between religion and play, or leisure. It may be true that, in some sense of the term, orare est laborare (to pray is to work).57 However, as Weber already pointed out, the Puritans singled out such endeavors as unproductive.58 As Pieper noted, some Protestants even turned the formula on its head, in order to encourage an economy of “total work”: “To work means to pray, [Thomas] Carlyle wrote.”59 It is, of course, not only holy persons who engage in idleness, as there are certain days or seasons, set aside for this purpose in the calendar of almost every tradition, when such (in)action is enjoined for everyone. Here we encounter the problem of how to account for the Sabbath— and as well the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, discussed in chapter 5 — as periods of enforced inactivity. These holidays share certain characteristics with such exuberant festivals as Carnival. However, whereas the latter involve a release from restrictions normally placed upon conduct, the Sabbath involves the placement of additional, albeit temporary, restrictions. Weber noted the

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challenge of interpreting the Sabbath in sociological terms,60 owing in part to the apparent difficulty of reconciling it with the capitalist doctrine of ceaseless labor without enjoyment. In The Protestant Ethic, he managed to reconcile a theology of salvation with the capitalist notion of deferred gratification; yet the challenge represented by the Sabbath is arguably greater. Like those festivals with which it has sometimes been compared, the Sabbath cannot be dismissed as a marginal case, precisely because it represents that which is sacred or rather set apart, in this case from activity or productive use. Not only certain times may be declared sacred in this way, but also certain persons or things, and places or plots of land. Thus Pieper noted that divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. “Temple” means . . . that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or for habitation. And this plot of land is transferred to the estate of the Gods, it is neither lived on, nor cultivated. And similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days, a limited time, specially marked off— and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends. Every seventh day is a period of time of that kind: that is what a feast is, and such is its only origin and justification.61

The fact that, during the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, the designation of certain land as sacred, or beyond utility, coincides with the declaration of certain times as sacred only reinforces the truth of this observation. Whatever is removed from use in this way can be said to be subject to a taboo, just as the cities placed under the herem were destroyed utterly and then shunned. ˙ Everyone takes a holiday; there is nothing unusual, perhaps, in the idea of rest from labor (although, as argued below, more than this was at stake in the Sabbath). The behaviors most clearly opposed to economic rationality are those we group under the heading of asceticism. Ascetic practices involve not only idleness, but also the taking on of pains: intentional deprivations, such as refraining from food, sleep, or sex; voluntarily embraced tortures, such as wearing a hair shirt, sleeping on the bare ground, self-flagellation, remaining on top of a pillar (St. Simeon Stylites), being immured, or being submerged up to one’s neck in a pond for years on end.62 Within Latin Christendom, such practices were closely identified with the Catholic ritual economy that was targeted by Protestants during the Reformation. English deists followed suit in declaring such behaviors to be no part of natural religion. Always a clear thinker, Jeremy Bentham argued that the principle of “utility,” which directs us to maximize good or pleasure, is strictly antithetical to the principle of “asceticism,” which, at least to outward appearances, does exactly

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the opposite, by courting pain and discomfort.63 Of course, the declaration of such behaviors as “irrational” depended upon the rejection of the premise that they might be undertaken in order to secure some return benefit, such as salvation or saintliness. To this extent, Bentham’s conclusion depended on the prior disruption of the Catholic ritual economy, which occurred when the Protestant idea of predestination severed any connection between ritual conduct and salvation. One of the difficult questions regarding such religious practices concerns whether they can properly be labeled derogations from the economic order. It would probably be better to say that they often represent a parallel economy, the goal of which is salvation, that exists side by side with a more mundane economy in which people pursue self-interest— or rather, ordinary, material interest, given that the pursuit of salvation can also be regarded as selfish or egotistical. The case of asceticism in general is, in this regard, strictly parallel to that of sacrifice, where the object that is given over for destruction may be paid as the price for some benefit that is expected in return (do ut des).64 This was Hume’s explanation of the burnt offering: “A sacrifice is conceived as a present; and any present is delivered to the deity by destroying it and rendering it useless to men; by burning whatever is solid, pouring out the liquid, and killing the animate. For want of a better way of doing him [God] service, we do ourselves injury.”65 Despite what Bataille claimed, destruction or removal from use is not sufficient to establish a complete lack of economic interest. Only when sacrifice also renounces the expectation of a return does it conform to the pattern of a “true gift,” one made without calculation.66 Given what we already learned from Mauss about gifts, it is possible to dismiss the appearance of disinterest as merely a pretext that disguises the insistence on a return. The sacrifice, like the gift, enables the possibility of various and even divergent interpretations, so that the same action may be viewed strategically as either productive or destructive, as involved in exchange or as refusing such involvement. Attacking the idea that sacrifice is disinterested, because the proceeds of the sacrifice are enjoyed rather than destroyed, is quite an old trope. John Toland wrote: “Natural religion was easy first and plain, / Tales made it Mystery, offrings made it Gain; / Sacrifices and Shows were at length prepar’d, / The priests ate Roast-meat, and the People star’d.”67 In the nineteenth century, as we have seen, similar critiques informed the conclusion of such Protestant biblical scholars as Julius Wellhausen, William Robertson Smith, and Abraham Kuenen that sacrifice in ancient Israelite religion had followed a trajectory of decline, from a communal meal to the proliferation of sacrifices in which the priests received an increasing share of the meat and other

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offerings. Cases that suggested otherwise— in particular the ’olah or whole burnt offering (of which the priest, in the case of animal offerings, received only the skin)— were marginalized. For Bataille’s argument, the ’olah and the herem serve better, as being more clearly cases in which the use value of the ˙ sacrificed object was at least partly destroyed. Arguably, if it was his intention to describe the “true gift” or real sacrifice, Bataille should not have spent so much time on the Aztecs. There is ample evidence that Aztec sacrifice was intended to renew the cosmic cycle and promote a bountiful harvest by giving over certain human beings to the gods. Also, reports that the Aztecs practiced cannibalism on these occasions— that the remains of the sacrifice were at least partly consumed— vitiates the idea that every benefit was renounced.68 Converging in some respects with Bataille’s approach was Thorstein Veblen’s analogy between the priests and the “leisure class.”69 Veblen aimed to analyze those behaviors which, although apparently irrational from an economic standpoint, are nevertheless associated with the accumulation of wealth in many societies. As soon as there exists a surplus of luxury, there exists also the possibility for some class of individuals to exempt themselves, whether through superior abilities or chance opportunity, from the necessity of performing tedious labor. In such circumstances, refraining from work or, alternatively, engaging in what Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” or “waste” can become a sign of one’s membership in the leisure class.70 Such behaviors are the opposite of the rational reinvestment of profits, so as to defer gratification and maximize return, that Weber would, shortly after Veblen, identify as central to the “capitalist spirit.” Veblen himself noted the antithesis between the habits of the leisure class and the requirements of modern industry, which led him to suggest that such a class must nowadays appear “archaic.”71 Yet the continuing accuracy of his analysis of certain behaviors of wealthy capitalists is confirmed by any number of anecdotes, as reflected in popular culture à la The Great Gatsby (book 1925; movie versions 1974 and 2013), Wall Street (movie 1987), or The Wolf of Wall Street (movie 2013). Veblen extended his account also to other non-economical behaviors, including “warfare, religious observances, and sports.”72 He applied the term “leisure” to all such cases by defining this term to mean “not . . . indolence or quiescence,” but rather “non-productive consumption of time.”73 “Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or the ball,” demonstrate that, although “festive gatherings probably originated in motives of conviviality and religion” (and here we may think of Wellhausen and Robertson Smith), they evolved into wasteful displays that served an altogether different purpose: namely, to signify prestige in a stratified economy.74 Veblen identified parallel behaviors among the religious class:

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The most obvious economic bearing of [religious] observances is seen in the devout consumption of goods and services. The consumption of ceremonial paraphernalia required by any cult, in the way of shrines, temples, churches, vestments, sacrifices, sacraments, holiday attire, etc., serves no immediate material end. All this material apparatus may, therefore, without implying deprecation, be broadly characterized as items of conspicuous waste. [These] further the habits of thought characteristic of the regimes of status.  .  .  . In economic theory, sacred holidays [also] are obviously to be construed as a season of vicarious leisure performed for the divinity or saint in whose name the tabu is imposed and to whose good repute the abstention of useful effort on these days is conceived to inure. The characteristic feature of all such seasons of devout vicarious leisure is a more or less rigid tabu on all activity that is of human use.75

Veblen also noted the abstention from labor, or indolence, commonly practiced by members of the priestly class.76 The austerities that led some Indian sadhus or fakirs to grow their fingernails to excessive length not only resemble behaviors by Chinese mandarins but may be done out of similar motives: to demonstrate the freedom from exertion in a graphic way, because anyone who performs manual labor cannot grow their nails so long, as the nails would break. The parallel in this respect that Veblen drew between the behaviors of the wealthy and those of the religious in many societies is largely convincing. He argued further for a parallel between the deity worshipped in such societies and their hierarchical mode of economic and social organization: The cults impute to their divinity the habits of thought answering to the stage of economic differentiation at which the cults took shape. The anthropomorphic divinity is conceived to be punctilious in all questions of precedence and is prone to an assertion of mastery and an arbitrary exercise of power— and habitual resort to force as the final arbiter. In the later and mature formulations of the anthropomorphic creed this imputed habit of dominance on the part of a divinity of awful presence and inscrutable power is chastened into “the fatherhood of God.” The spiritual attitude and the aptitudes imputed to the preternatural agent are still such as belong under the regime of status, but they now assume the patriarchal cast characteristic of the quasi-peaceable stage of culture.77

Veblen goes on to quote a verse from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, underscoring his direct reference to the angry God of the Hebrew Bible, the Lord of Hosts, who rules by divine command and vents his wrath at will. In many precapitalist economies, a significant amount of wealth was indeed devoted to religious activities. The contrast between such societies and

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our modern, capitalist one was described just after the Second World War by J. H. Boeke, professor of tropical economics at the University of Leiden, in a book called Oriental Economics: [In these economies] the temple is much more important than the home; prestige counts more than riches, power more than profit. All economic activities are subject to an ethical or religious criterion. Since economic labor itself is despised, and at best may be valued as an evil necessary for the preservation of the human body, one has to respect those people who refuse to labor— the beggar, the fakir, the divine; everyone should help to make living possible for such as these. In an Indian village of less than 1,800 inhabitants, there are 244 persons, more than 13 per cent, who live on the charity of their fellow villagers. In the Punjab, the number of beggars in 1930 was about 600,000, [or] 2.5% of the population. This social class is four times as numerous as that of the provincial service; and probably the people pay more for the upkeep of tramps than for that of their administrators. . . . One other feature of the village community remains to be mentioned: its non-economic orientation. Its interest, its willingness to make sacrifices, its appreciations and value judgments are not inspired by economics but by social and religious purposes. . . . The selfimposed sacrifices— and the readiness to undertake them is remarkable— serve preferably the construction or care of temples, hostels, musical instruments, and the like, not of roads or bridges. . . . This contrast between the prevailing attitudes toward productive property and toward property for consumption is very remarkable. What ingeniousness, exertion, skill, and patience are spent on ornaments, weapons, dresses for state occasions, houses! With what care are race-bulls, hunters, fighting-cocks, and turtle-doves bred! But toward capital as a factor of production and as a substitute for labor the villager’s disposition is unfriendly.78

Boeke described village life in Asia as one great, continuing expenditure, similar to the way Bataille described wealth lavished on the Church in the High Middle Ages. Indeed, Boeke himself drew the parallel with medieval Europe, where labor was disdained: “the lords lead a seigniorial life without doing any economic labor.” Rather than recommending that an end be brought to such practices, he suggested the inappropriateness of a capitalist model for Asian villagers and proposed instead a more psychologically sensitive solution: Poverty is a feeling of want and can be combatted not only by supplying the felt need but by removing the feeling itself, that is by directing the desire to an immaterial sphere, by lifting the people out of the deficiencies of their economic existence into the amplitude of a spiritual world. It is the program professed and embodied by Gandhi who has formulated it in five words: plain living and high thinking. It also is the glad tidings of precapitalistic Christian-

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ity, as revealed in the New Testament and as, in its fullness, it can be realized only in a precapitalistic community.79

Whether such practices truly distinguish mid-twentieth-century Asian villages from twenty-first-century America, with its McMansions, NASCAR races, and the like, is a question we might answer differently. Yet what Boeke’s account makes clear at least is that religion depends absolutely on the consumption of surplus and thus on the economy that creates such a surplus. The first and most obvious illustration of this is the existence of a class of individuals (anywhere between 2.5 and 13 percent of the population, from the data Boeke cites) who, being freed from the need to labor for their sustenance, are able to devote themselves principally or entirely to religion (or to a religiously construed idleness). Jacques Gernet provided a fascinating account of ritual consumption in T’ang Chinese Buddhism. Although the percentage of the population that became monks was never higher than one percent, the amount of wealth lavished on the monasteries seriously impacted the economy by withdrawing agricultural labor, arable land, and precious metals that could otherwise have been used for coinage.80 Monks were also free from taxation and corvée labor. Although monks could not, according to the Vinaya, handle money, they were not prohibited from owning property, and in China many practiced usury as an occupation.81 Through the establishment by the monasteries in the seventh century of “Inexhaustible Treasuries,” which functioned rather like banks in accepting donations and recirculating the money in the form of loans, there was an “interpenetration of commerce and religion.”82 Gernet suggests that Buddhism may have introduced the idea of “productive capital” and even “a form of modern capitalism into China.”83 Yet the purpose of the Buddhist economy, which paralleled, competed, and intersected with the mundane economy, was not capitalist: “Pious and charitable offerings together formed a coherent system that did not aim at an accumulation of goods but at their redistribution and circulation; not at growing profits but at expenditure.”84 This was particularly evident in Buddhist festivals, at which “entire fortunes were squandered gratuitously for entertainments and as offerings and where self-mutilations and self-immolations by fire took place.”85 Such acts reveal that these festivals were not merely economic but “an act of total self-sacrifice . . . In great festivals, one spends and one spends oneself.”86 Gernet describes these as carnavalesque occasions, at which the distinctions between rich and poor were broken down. He therefore concludes that “Buddhism in China . . . [was] an antieconomic movement” that rebelled against

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the fact that “the first cause of human misery and of the succession of sins (theft and murder) is of an economic order.”87 In contradistinction to those arguments that attempt to identify a utilitarian basis for such uneconomical behaviors, Veblen, Bataille, and others pointed us toward an ideological or psychological motivation: conspicuous waste, whether by means of consumption or indolence (which consumes time and incurs numerous opportunity costs), marks the possession of status and thereby gratifies the possessor. It serves to produce what Pierre Bourdieu later referred to as “symbolic capital.”88 Veblen thereby suggested the involvement of the religious or sacred economy in the mundane economy. Even and especially when religious behaviors derogate from the economy of labor, production, farming, and the like, these behaviors remain dependent on the surplus created by this economy. Religion exists, as it were, as a shadow or negative image of the world of exertion and manufacture. Applying an analogy from biology, religion may therefore be said to be parasitic upon this world, although nothing pejorative is intended by this term. The sacrificial economy, when it is not governed directly by wealthy elites, generally requires their support and participation. Any religious caste that abstains from productive labor, such as the Buddhist san˙gha, is dependent on the existence of surplus goods, principally food. Laypeople give monks gifts (dāna) in exchange for merit. Similarly, in Vedic India the sacrificer, or the one who, filling the role of the priest, actually performs the sacrifice, complements and serves the sacrifier (French sacrifiant, a translation of Sanskrit yajamāna), the one on whose behalf, and at whose behest, the sacrifice is performed.89 The gods who command and receive the sacrifice are the images of those human rulers who command and receive the material benefits of labor and production. Whether sacrifice immediately or at some metaphorical distance is dependent upon the mundane economy, the role of sacrifice and of other, related religious institutions often appears to be to symbolize the mundane economy and, by so doing, to legitimize it, either by naturalizing it or by giving it a supernatural sanction. At the same time, the fact that, to whatever extent the sacrificial economy may be separated from the mundane economy— perhaps through an emphasis on the idea that a sacrifice represents a voluntary donation rather than a payment— it may appear to afford a release from the compulsion, the labor, the scarcity, and the absence of fellow feeling endemic to the mundane economy. The ambivalence of sacrifice, or of the festival, lies in part in the fact that, while it offers an apparent or a temporary reprieve from the mundane economy, it emerges from this same economy and also returns to it.

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It should be clear that such an account of the role that religious displays play in the constitution of social order is not at all the same as the claim that sacrifice and other rituals produce solidarity or group cohesiveness. This claim, which lies behind the various theories of religion, although these are in other respects diverse, of Wellhausen, Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Iannaccone, is actually incompatible with the account just provided. What displays of conspicuous consumption (excepting those leveling festivals of communitas) imply is not the equality and substantive identity of the various members of a social group, but rather the fundamental difference among and stratification of the various classes into which a larger group is subdivided. Such cases illustrate the convergence of the division of labor and wealth within the economic domain with the “separation” that is the root meaning of the sacred. From this standpoint, what the sacred represents, in its pure form, or distilled essence, is the principle of hierarchy — a word that, in the original Greek, expressed this combination of sovereignty and the sacred by compounding the two ideas (hieros, the sacred, and arkhein, to lead or rule) into a single word.90 Activities otherwise demarcated as religious, such as sacrifice and ritual gift giving, are implicated in more mundane modes of exchange.91 Yet various traditions present the prospect, if not the reality, of a state of exception from the norms and practices of exchange that govern the ordinary economy, as illustrated by the “true gift,” destructive sacrifices, and suspension of labor as on the Sabbath. The religious economy defines itself against the tedium of labor and accumulation as an alternative praxis, mode of escape, or utopian vision. However, the religious economy depends on the existence of luxury, leisure, and money; and ritual expenditure resembles the conspicuous consumption observed under capitalist modes of production. Bataille’s argument that cases such as sacrifice exemplify “sovereignty” also recognized the manner in which this quality expresses the desire of escape or release from the conditions of the economy: “the introduction of labor into the world replaced intimacy, the depth of desire and its free outbreaks, with rational progression, where what matters is no longer the truth of the present moment, but, rather, the subsequent results of operations.”92 Sovereignty exists as the antithesis to the thesis that is servility, meaning the consignment to labor, scarcity, and utilitarian calculation. While acknowledging the traditional association of sovereignty with kings and gods,93 Bataille wants to extend this into a capacity inherent in human beings by virtue of their humanity. In some cases, this leads him to ignore the fact that the economic stratification of society conditions any such expression of sovereignty on the part of individuals.94 This omission becomes particularly problematic when

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he foregrounds the examples of the potlatch and Aztec human sacrifice: the former, a display of wealth and prestige obviously open to only a few in any society; the latter, the murder of captive victims. Each of these cases looks more like the traditional prerogatives of sovereignty, rather than the radical reinterpretation that Bataille would like to give that concept. Surely it matters that, the fiction of their voluntary submission notwithstanding,95 the Aztec victims were put to death at the command of others. This was not, then, a “true gift,” but rather a display of the power to dispose of others as property, and an assertion of the king’s and priest’s roles in upholding the universal order. The connection between sovereignty and conspicuous consumption is reinforced by Jean Starobinksi’s analysis of largesse, meaning the ancient practice, which continued into recent centuries, of a ruler distributing gifts in a display of generosity and authority: In Latin, largitio took on a very broad meaning. The word designates the liberality of the prince and of important personages in a province or city: these might be public meals, lands, individual bonuses in cash or kind, or games . . . Those who had resolved that their authority would be respected had to manifest in various ways their faculty for augmenting and increasing the prosperity around them. True authority was the act of an auctor, the origin of our word author.96

The most common form was the distribution of valuable objects by throwing (sparsio), in imitation of the sowing of seed— a ritual that Starobinski connects with the Saturnalia and other festivals, as well as with “divine kingship.”97 This ritual was generally performed by a king upon his ascension,98 suggesting a parallel with the debt cancellations in ancient Mesopotamia declared in some cases at the beginning of a king’s reign, which served as precedent for the biblical Jubilee (see chapter 5). Such giveaways, coinciding with an interregnum, marked a state of exception in the political as well as the economic order. Gustavo Benavides has outlined the implications of such theories as Veblen’s for an economics of religion by pointing out the connection of such real or imagined derogations from mundane economic calculation with ideas of sovereign arbitrariness and Schmitt’s state of exception.99 The study of such cases may serve as the basis for a wider sociological account of religion, because, as Benavides notes, religious derogations from the social order reveal an apparently widespread cross-cultural impulse to transcend the limitations of the human condition, with its attendant biological, social, and economic constraints: not only “being subject to pain, disease, ageing, death,” and dif-

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ferences of ability, but also “having to engage in the coerced, exploitative work that emerged along with stratified societies.”100 Declarations of exception, or displays of excess, react to these constraints by attempting at least symbolically to overcome or master them.101 We are therefore locked into a series of paradoxes. While expressing the desire for release from the mundane economy, such sacrifices depend on that economy for the surplus that they extract and consume; and in the very act of offering an apparent alternative to the world of labor and inequality, such sacrifices may defer and defuse the motive of protest into the unproductive channels of ascetic quiescence or, alternatively, panem et circenses. For anyone who has read Nietzsche or Marx, these issues should be well-known. It nevertheless remains the case that it is in religion above all that we find the expression of, or even the attempt to realize, a release from the condition of general oppression that has been endemic to both social and economic order ever since humanity was cast out of Eden and cursed to toil and death, through tilling the soil and, ultimately, merging with it (Gen. 3:17– 19).102

Asceticism as Self-Mastery The Heart of Man is very oddly fram’d; was a Prince so cruel, as to command some of his Subjects to lie all their Lives among Ashes, or to stand upright, and not lean once, for the sake of procuring some Ease, till they died, such a Monarch would infallibly be look’d upon as a Tyrant, and yet we meet with some Men who inflict such Punishments upon themselves. b e r n a r d p i c a r t , Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World (1734), 3:480

One of the most common forms of aneconomic religious behavior is asceticism. By removing themselves from the economy, indeed from the household (oikos) that is the original economic unit, ascetics eschew both production and reproduction, hence the reliance of so many ascetics on begging or alms for sustenance. (Naturally I am not speaking of those groups, such as Trappists, that use productive labor as a form of discipline.) Normally individuals eat, sleep, have sex, and so on. Various ascetics violate this set of norms. While different reasons for such violation have been given in the various traditions, what is noteworthy is that many appear to operate by the same principle, namely by signaling a departure from the existing or ordinary state of affairs. In the case of fasting, celibacy, and the like, such a departure is marked on the body and in the behavior of the individual ascetic. This represents an assertion of power: the power to undertake, or to refrain from undertaking,

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certain actions, against the pressures of society or biological instinct. When all other means of asserting control are blocked, what remains is our own bodies, which then become the field over which the individual will exerts control and, by so doing, demonstrates its existence and efficacy. The will of the ascetic reveals itself as a countervailing agency by resisting the system. The explanation of human behavior in terms of “rational choice” and an indirect or disguised utility doesn’t appear to be capable of accounting for such phenomena. Although the practice of non-violence may promote an obvious advantage to the group if adopted generally, neither celibacy nor fasting unto death (e.g., Jain sallekhana) can be accommodated within any calculation of individual evolutionary benefit. What appears immediately capable of accounting for such extreme actions is the drive to assert control and sovereignty, even at the cost of all other possible goods. Such forms of asceticism demonstrate the existence of a drive, not toward any simple version of the “good,” such as has been suggested by the rational-choice theorists or evolutionists, but rather toward a quality that we may call variously sovereignty, independence, or autonomy. Nietzsche’s anticipation of this finding in the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, which dealt with the meaning of ascetic practices, coordinated with his discovery of something he called a “will to power” at the root of many human endeavors: The ascetic ideal points the way to so many bridges to independence that no philosopher can refrain from inwardly rejoicing and clapping hands on hearing the story of all those who, one fine day, decided to say “no” to any curtailment of their liberty, and go off into the desert . . . What does the ascetic ideal mean for a philosopher? My answer is— you will have guessed ages ago: on seeing an ascetic ideal, the philosopher smiles because he sees an optimum condition of the highest and boldest intellectuality,— he does not deny “existence” by doing so, but rather affirms his existence and only his existence, and possibly does this to the point where he is not far from making the outrageous wish: pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam [perish the world, long live philosophy, long live the philosopher, long live me]!103

We do not need to agree with every aspect of Nietzsche’s analysis in order to appreciate the value of this insight, which has been further corroborated by Louis Dumont’s reading of ancient Indian asceticism as an expression of individuality against the strictures of the caste system.104 By repudiating the duties of caste, even to the extent of deliberately violating the purity regulations that maintained caste boundaries, sadhus and sannya¯sis declared their freedom from social convention, and in so doing signaled the present or future attainment of a final liberation (moksa) from the round of death and rebirth. ˙

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Unlike our rational-choice and evolutionary theorists, Nietzsche did not shy away from the most disconcerting expressions of human religious behavior: When man decided he had to make a memory for himself, it never happened without blood, torments, and sacrifices: the most horrifying sacrifices and forfeits (the sacrifice of the first-born belongs here), the most disgusting mutilations (for example, castration), the cruelest rituals of all religious cults (and all religions are, at their most fundamental [level], systems of cruelty)— all this has its origin in that particular instinct which discovered that pain was the most powerful aid to mnemonics.105

This reading appears too restrictive, inasmuch as it reduces the semiotic or signaling function of such behaviors to the sole function of making an impression on the memory. We must also take note of why such behaviors are impressive in the first instance: they violate the commonly received standards of behavior, or what we would expect intuitively from our fellow human beings, namely to pursue their own self-interest always and ever, in order to maximize their own benefit or what has euphemistically been called “human flourishing.” This is one reason that all rational-choice theories will inevitably fail to plumb the depths of the motives underlying such behaviors: it is precisely the point of such behaviors to violate the “reasonable person” standard that is ubiquitous in contemporary legal and economic analyses— otherwise they would fail of their objective both to impress themselves upon the mind and to achieve their other semiotic function, which is to signal a supervening agency, the existence of which is certified precisely by defying such customary expectations. This was classically understood to be one of the functions of the miracle, which in Greek was termed sēmeion, a word that bears an etymological relationship with the contemporary term “semiotics.” Miracles, which together with portents and omens were also referred to in English as “signs,” served their semiotic function by manifesting a deviation from the expected. As I have argued elsewhere, there is an analogy between this classical understanding of the miracle as a sign and contemporary communication theory, which defines the informational value of an item as consisting in its singularity or uniqueness against a background of “white noise.”106 In the case of human behaviors, as in the case of manifestations attributed to divine intervention, what is signaled by such deviations is the actuality of an underlying will or agency. As Timothy Lubin has suggested, ascetic behaviors (or abstentions from behavior, the point being merely the fact of deviation) are, in terms of Peircean semiotics, a kind of index:

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Ascetical systems everywhere are, among other things, methods for asserting control over those aspects of bodily experience to which most people are inclined to succumb: the urge to eat, to sleep, and to have sex. These urges, of course, are essentially endemic (even if non-conforming individuals might be found). . . . In Peircean terms, if eating and sleeping are taken to indicate helplessness and mortality, fasting and vigil contrariwise indicate fortitude and independence— perhaps even immortality.107

One of the functions of the index is to evidence a causal relationship between the signifier and signified. In this case, the toleration or embrace of deprivation is the signifier, and what is signified thereby is a certain strength or independence of will, or possibly transcendence of the human condition in its entirety. Further, there is a direct correlation between the signifier and signified: the greater the deprivation, the greater the apparent freedom from need; the stronger the pains imposed, presumably the stronger the will required to impose or assume such pains. I say “presumably” because, in the case in question, there is in fact no more direct way of ascertaining the quality of the will in question. The will being, as such, an internal or mental condition, it can be known only indirectly by reading the catalog of external behaviors, including ascetic deprivations. This much appears to be straightforward, depending only an appreciation of the basics of the semiotic functioning of such behaviors. Yet there is something, or rather several things, more subterranean at work here. Both Nietzsche and Lubin use the word “independence” to describe the aim of such displays, and both indicate that that from which independence is being sought is the limitations of the human condition, including mortality or physical extinction.108 Even in the midst of saying “no” to everything that would appear necessary for not only “human flourishing” but even the mere continuance of life, both individual (by not eating) and collective (by adopting celibacy), the ascetic is really trying to win a victory over death. The fact that in some admittedly extreme cases, asceticism may itself induce physical death (as it nearly did with the fasting Buddha before his enlightenment) would then be merely a side effect of the quest for the transcendence of mortality. One may well doubt that it is only the fear of death that motivates such practices. After all, none of us has ever experienced death beforehand. Death therefore appears as an abstraction— the ultimate sign of the loss of individuality, which we may only know by analogy, or approach asymptotically. Lubin suggests that asceticism is a “method[] for asserting control”; perhaps the helplessness of the body is the most obvious place to demonstrate the actuality of the will as, even in the most degraded of circumstances, each of us has some measure of control over our own bodies: the faculties of consum-

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ing, excreting, even breathing, and so on may be restrained, up to a certain point. So it stands to reason that the first exertions of a more general will to power or control would be directed toward the body itself. Similarly, in some cases we know humans are willing to sacrifice themselves for the survival of certain ideals. Perhaps that ultimate demonstration of the independence of the will that comes with the voluntary embrace of death is counted as adequate compensation. The Jain practice of fasting unto death and the immolations performed in our own time by Tibetans to protest the Chinese regime may be taken as examples, although there are additional complexities to these phenomena that would have to be addressed in a full analysis. Such cases suggest further that what is sought is, in a sense, even more than merely a victory over physical death: the fear of death has itself been transposed into the desire that something, somewhere not be subject to the transformations and corruptions that are part of the (ordinary) human situation. When Riesebrodt acknowledges that “all virtuosos seek to approach the ‘holy’ or even to merge with it, the ‘holy’ being characterized as something eternal, uncreated, immutable, undifferentiated, unified, or atemporal,” he is pointing to this desire to accede to something that is absolutely unconditional or unconditioned. This much can be learned from a cursory appraisal of Buddhist doctrine, which states, among other things, that all existing things (dharmas) are conditioned (“marked”) by impermanence and insubstantiality or “lack of self ” (anātman). It was the preliminary recognition of this that induced the Buddha to leave a life of luxury and family obligation in the royal palace in order to pursue liberation from the round of death and rebirth by attaining the state of nirvāna, which is not only unconditioned but, as re˙ counted in Buddhist doctrine, indescribable. “Sovereignty” is just another term for the quality of not being subject to conditions; another word that Bataille used for this quality was “insubordination,” which means just what it says: the state of not being subordinate, that is, of being sovereign, at least over one’s self— as just noted in the case of the Buddha. Whereas Bataille ascribed this quality indiscriminately to Aztec kings, lone ascetics, and some criminals— an ascription that has the virtue of indicating the association among all of these different cases— we have been accustomed, when speaking of sovereignty, to limit such usage to kings and gods. As Benavides justly observes, “What accounts for the appearance of metaphors involving sovereign decisions is the attempt to explore the nature of human agency, an exploration which requires positing agency at its most naked— gods and rulers being the personifications of this extreme form of agency.” The idea of an absolutely sovereign god or king is a projection of human agency. I will take slight issue with Benavides’s formulation, though

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perhaps he would agree with this emendation: such projections are designed not merely “to explore . . . human agency,” but rather to certify or guarantee the authority that must be regarded as supporting the normative order, if that order is to have any validity. That is why the idea that the sovereign will might be subject to prior restraints or “preexisting conditions” is so objectionable to many theorists of order, whether theologians or jurists (or both). The problem of how to establish the existence of such a sovereign will, and the problem of how to establish the independence of will of the individual ascetic, are merely two different versions of the same problem. And in both cases, similar devices are deployed to address this problem: the miracle being one mode of counterfactuality or singularity that, together with the blood sacrifices that are often commanded by the sovereign or divinity, resemble in their own way the mortifications of the ascetic, which are so often thought to produce miraculous displays or magical powers. In both cases, it is control or certainty that is the goal of such devices. This is one reason “antinomian” is such a problematic term when applied to the idea of a sovereign deity. The goal is neither lawlessness nor chaos, but the firmer establishing of order, which is felt to be called into question by the possibility that the will of the sovereign might itself be subject to limitations. From such a perspective, it is necessary that the radical independence of the sovereign with respect to the system of norms be firmly established. The entire tradition of “divine right,” with its assertions that God himself promulgated the statutes in a moment of revelation, evidences this point of view.

5

States of Nature: The Jubilee and the Social Contract In the beginning, before the desire of having more than man needed had altered the intrinsic value of things, which depends only on their usefulness to the life of man; or had agreed, that a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay, should be worth a great piece of flesh, or a whole heap of corn; though men had a right to appropriate, by their labour, each one of himself, as much of the things of nature, as he could use: yet this could not be much, nor to the prejudice of others, where the same plenty was still left to those who would use the same industry. . . . In the beginning all the world was America. j o h n l o c k e , Second Treatise of Government (1988), chapter 5, §§37 and 49

The “Antiwilderness Bias” John G. Sprankling has identified an “antiwilderness bias” in modern American law. A series of court decisions in the early nineteenth century, including that of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), expressed a clear preference for land that had been cultivated or otherwise reduced to economic use, over land that had not been so developed.1 In some cases, the notion of “wilderness” or virgin territory even acquired pejorative connotations. This bias toward development became the basis for denying recognition to forms of land use and ownership common among Native Americans and for expropriating their land. Sprankling characterizes this bias as an “ideology of exploitation”: Implicit in the development model is the ideology of exploitative utilitarianism. Wild lands are valued only for the material wealth that they can provide to humanity in the short term. Accordingly, a wild land tract is considered a commodity, as fungible and mundane as an automobile, a pencil or an orange, destined for consumption.  .  .  . To allow the forest to remain is to squander its value; to advocate preservation of the forest is to preach heresy. The same spirit animated the familiar rule that property rights may be acquired by capture. Confronted with a seemingly infinite supply of wild animals, minerals, water and other fugitive resources, early American courts seeking to stimulate economic development endorsed the ancient rule that capture created title. . . . Adverse possession law as applied to wild lands may be reconceptualized as a variant of the capture rule. Privately owned, undevel-

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oped lands are analogous to a captured resource such as a caged deer. The owner who exploits her property protects her title. But the owner who retains his land in its natural condition has effectively allowed it to elude his grasp. Like an escaping deer, it can be captured by the first claimant who places it in viable economic use.2

Sprankling describes the ideology that favors exploitation by granting ownership. Where did it come from? One important source is John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689), which articulated an influential utilitarian rationale for private ownership.3 For Locke, the recently discovered American continent and its native inhabitants provided a test case for his theory that use, of which capture is the first step, makes ownership: “this law of reason makes the deer that Indian’s who hath killed it.”4 Native American society exemplified the state of nature in which property rights were first established; “thus,” according to Locke, “in the beginning all the world was America.”5 This did not mean that Locke valued the state of nature above all. For him, the rude condition of life among the Native Americans showed instead the need for cultivation: “There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life . . . land that is wholly left to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste; and we shall find the benefit of it amount[s] to little more than nothing.”6 Those who, through use, reduced the land to private ownership made it more valuable, thereby increasing the value for all. Ten acres of farmland in Devonshire were worth more than a thousand acres of “the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage, or husbandry.”7 Although “God gave the world to men in common,” he especially “gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, . . . And hence subduing or cultivating the earth, and having dominion, we see joined together. The one gave title to the other.”8 Native Americans did not all view land in the same way. A number of the more nomadic tribes regarded some lands as sacred and free from exploitation, while using others casually and sporadically, without setting boundary markers or signs of individual possession. The European bias toward development created an environment hostile to the recognition of native land claims based on such forms of use or nonuse.9 The very notion that some land is sacred— in the sense of not being subject to economic exploitation— is antithetical to the fundamental principles on which much of modern property law is based, as articulated by Locke more than three hundred years ago. In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988),10 the U.S.

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Supreme Court acknowledged that Native American rituals conducted in the Chimney Rock area of the Six Rivers National Forest in California depended on “privacy, silence, and an undisturbed natural setting” but concluded that government plans to construct a road and allow timber harvesting in the area did not constitute an illegitimate infringement on the claimants’ right to the free exercise of their religion, “even assuming that the Government’s actions here will virtually destroy the Indians’ ability to practice [that] religion.”11 In contrast, Justice Brennan’s dissent recognized the importance of such ceremonies in Native American traditions and argued that Native American faith is inextricably bound to the use of land. The sitespecific nature of Indian religious practice derives from the Native American perception that land is itself a sacred, living being. . . . Rituals are performed in prescribed locations not merely as a matter of traditional orthodoxy, but because land, like all other living things, is unique, and specific sites possess different spiritual properties and significance. Within this belief system, therefore, land is not fungible.12

Lyng concerned the right to exercise one’s religion freely, but it was adjudicated on the basis of a property claim. The U.S. government had taken possession of the land long ago and was now merely asserting its right to do whatever it wanted with its own property. The court’s failure to accommodate Native American claims illustrated not only a fundamental difference between two cultures regarding the way in which land should be used, but also the limits of the promise of freedom of religion. The demise of the notion that the land is sacred has sometimes been attributed to biblical traditions, despite the clear importance of the land of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. Brennan’s dissent in Lyng contended that “while traditional Western religions view creation as the work of a deity ‘who institutes natural laws which then govern the operation of physical nature,’ tribal religions regard creation as an ongoing process in which they are morally and religiously obligated to participate.”13 Brennan was referring to the notion of a more or less distant deity, epitomized by the watchmaker God of English deists. This God is utterly distinct from the natural order; in some Christian theologies, he abandoned that order to man. The doctrine that the world was created from nothing supposedly encouraged the view that nature not only is separate from God and from the humanity made in his image, but also may be spiritually without value. Human beings have ownership and sovereignty over the Earth, rather than the “stewardship” that Brennan argued is characteristic of Native American attitudes. Emily Cousins makes a similar argument. The European settlers of North

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America carved up the land into individual plots— a practice forced on Native Americans as a result of the 1887 Dawes Act, which undermined traditional practices of communal ownership— as a result of “the Judeo-Christian belief that human beings were meant to have dominion over nature.”14 However, “unlike Western categories which draw dichotomies between human and animal, animate and inanimate, natural and supernatural, most Native American traditions stress interrelatedness among all things.” Complaints that biblical traditions, as a result of their belief in a transcendent God, devalue the natural order have often been made, for example by the Japanese Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki.15 There is reason to attribute some aspects of the modern view of land, and of nature, to certain strands within biblical tradition. Lynn White, Jr., famously argued that Latin Christianity contributed a powerful theological impetus to the view that nature is not sacred but rather at the disposal of humanity.16 When Locke argued that private ownership should follow from capture and use, he invoked a biblical warrant. His claim that “subduing or cultivating the earth, and having dominion, . . . [are] joined together. The one gave title to the other” echoed the language of Genesis 1:28, which in the King James Version reads: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

In his First Treatise, Locke cited this verse explicitly.17 Decades before Locke, the Massachusetts colonist John Winthrop quoted Genesis 1:28 in order to argue that the Puritans had a warrant “to seeke out & replenishe & subdue other places which lye waste,” meaning those territories of America that may have been inhabited by natives.18 Winthrop elsewhere referred to these lands as a vacuum Domicilium or vacant residence from which God had driven the natives in order to make room for the European arrivals: This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property; for they enclose no ground, neither have they the cattle to maintain it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion, or as they can prevail against their neighbors. And why may not Christians have liberty to go and dwell amongst them in their waste lands and woods (leaving them such places as they have manured for their corn) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites . . . There is more than enough for them and us. God hath consumed the natives with a mysterious plague, whereby the greater part of the country is left void of inhabitants. We shall come in with good leave of the natives.19

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Are Winthrop, Locke, White, Cousins, and Brennan correct that the ideology of exploitation or the “dominion theory” of land ownership is founded on the Bible? The Bible is familiar with an economy of money and private property, including land ownership. Depending on which scholar one follows, the division of the commons into private property in its current form, however, appears to be a relatively recent development, having begun in England in either the eleventh or the fifteenth century.20 The main counterargument against Locke, however, is found in the Bible itself, which includes alternative traditions that recommend rest over ceaseless labor.21 The Sabbath and Jubilee Richard Hiers notes that Genesis 1:28 “did not license exhaustion of the earth’s resources or its degradation” and points out that “a number of [biblical] laws require explicitly that the land must be allowed to rest periodically.”22 He is referring to the institutions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years. The Sabbath— the Lord’s Day— comes from the Hebrew word shabbat meaning “to cease or rest” and, as is widely known, represents a day of abstention once in the week from labor as well as many other ordinary activities. This idea appears also in Genesis 1, according to which God created the world in six days, then rested on the seventh. The Sabbatical and Jubilee years are institutions modeled on the Sabbath day that prescribe the abstention from organized tilling, planting, and harvesting every seventh year in the case of the Sabbatical and every fortyninth or fiftieth year in the case of the Jubilee.23 Although the Sabbath is commonly referred to as a day of rest, this term may be something of an anachronism, for, as Gnana Robinson has argued, “rest” in the sense of ease or leisure does not appear to be part of the root meaning of the term or institution of the Sabbath.24 When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, more sacrifices were actually performed on the Sabbath than on other days.25 In the case of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, one must note further that the commanded abstentions constituted a very severe burden on an agricultural economy in which many individuals were involved in subsistence farming. The notions of “rest” and “leisure” seem ill adapted to capture the radical nature of such interventions. These are two of the principal texts that set forth the provisions regarding the treatment of the land during the Sabbatical year: You may plant your land for six years and gather its crops. But during the seventh year, you must leave it alone and withdraw from it. The needy among you will then be able to eat just as you do, and whatever is left over can be eaten by wild animals [hayat]. This also applies to your vineyard and your ˙ olive grove. (Exod. 23:10 – 11, World ORT Version)

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God spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai, telling him to speak to the Israelites and say to them: When you come to the land that I am giving you, the land must be given a rest period, a sabbath to God. For six years you may plant your fields, prune your vineyards, and harvest your crops, but the seventh year is a sabbath of sabbaths for the land. It is God’s sabbath during which you may not plant your fields, nor prune your vineyards. Do not harvest crops that grow on their own and do not gather the grapes on your unpruned vines, since it is a year of rest for the land. [What grows while] the land is resting may be eaten by you, by your male and female slaves, and by the employees and resident hands who live with you. All the crops shall be eaten by the domestic and wild animals [hayah] that are in your land. (Lev. 25:1– 7, World ORT Version) ˙

The Sabbatical year was connected with the concept of shemitta, or release from debt, which was also supposed to occur every seventh year: At the end of every seven years, you shall celebrate the remission year. The idea of the remission year is that every creditor shall remit any debt owed by his neighbor and brother when God’s remission year comes around. You may collect from the alien, but if you have any claim against your brother for a debt, you must relinquish it. (Deut. 15:1– 6, World ORT Version)

The Sabbatical year represented an end both to debt and to servitude, the latter being a frequent consequence of indebtedness. Rather than pledging one’s body or labor, one might pledge one’s land or farmstead, or the proceeds thereof, in return for a loan. The Jubilee legislation addressed this situation explicitly by prescribing that every forty-ninth or fiftieth year— every seven cycles of seven, in other words, and only once in the course of a normal lifetime— land (with the exception of urban real estate) that had been lost due to indebtedness and that had not been redeemed would be returned to its original ownership: And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family. A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be to you; in it you shall neither sow, nor reap what grows of itself, nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you; you shall eat what it yields out of the field. (Lev. 25:10 – 12)

The mechanisms of lending in ancient Israel were complex,26 but the details are irrelevant to our understanding of the general principle, according to which the Jubilee, at least among Israelites, extinguished all debts, manumitted slaves, and returned agricultural land to its original ownership. The fact that only farmland was so protected, and that urban residences not redeemed within a year of sale were treated as permanently alienated and were

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not returned during the Jubilee, shows the importance of agriculture in this legislation. The Jubilee depicts an ideal according to which farmland was not permanently alienable, so that it would return eventually to some version of the original distribution that had been made upon the Conquest of Canaan.27 The idea of a general cancellation of debts found precedent in the ancient Near Eastern imperial declarations of debt amnesty called the andurarum or misharum.28 As a number of scholars have noted, what distinguished the Sabbatical and Jubilee years is that, unlike these precedents, they were not unscheduled declarations, but rather events marked on the calendar.29 This very fact made them more harmful to economic planning, for who would agree to lend when the Sabbatical or Jubilee year was approaching? Jewish law subsequently invented devices such as the prosbul to allow lending to continue at such times.30 Such institutions as the Sabbath, the Sabbatical year, and the Jubilee confront us directly with the un- or even antieconomical dimensions of religion. On certain occasions we are supposed to abstain from labor, including agricultural production, and to allow ourselves and the land to be idle. What accounts for such institutions, which on the one hand, appear to serve the natural human interest of freedom from bondage and toil, and on the other, prescribe the most stringent limitations on what may be done to preserve one’s self, so as to place in doubt the very prospect of survival owing to the threat of starvation during a Sabbatical or Jubilee year? Being aware of this danger, the authors of the text addressed it directly: And if you say: “What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?” I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, so that it will bring forth fruit for three years. When you sow in the eighth year, you will be eating old produce; until the ninth year, when its produce comes in, you shall eat the old. (Lev. 25:20 – 22)

With the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, we find a notion of the land as sacred that runs directly counter to the Lockean tradition. In place of a utilitarian justification for ceaselessly expanding development, we find an enforced quiescence. Instead of the fungibility of land, we find a reversion to original ownership and a redemption from debts that undo the accumulation of wealth enabled, as Locke argues, by a money economy. And in lieu of private property as a division of the commons, we find an interval in which all may benefit from what the land provides in its unadulterated condition, especially “the poor of your people” (Exod. 23:11) and “your male and female slaves, and . . . your hired servant and the sojourner who lives with you” (Lev. 25:6). However, this does not mean that we can draw a simple equivalence between,

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for example, biblical and Native American traditions of sacred property. The biblical tradition expresses an understanding of the sacred that may be at odds both with utilitarianism and with the stewardship of nature that some have identified as lying at the heart of Native American traditions. There is a range of opinions concerning the meaning and purpose of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years. The principal explanations are that these were instituted in recognition of the need for the land to lie fallow in order to continue to be fertile; to assist the poor, including those who had lost their land through debt; for theological or symbolic reasons similar to those that required the institution of the Sabbath day; and out of a nascent environmentalism or ethic of care for nature. Let’s consider the last explanation first. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson has made a case for an environmental ethic that is authentic to Judaism. She acknowledges that “an honest examination of the Jewish tradition does suggest that Judaism harbors a genuine tension in regards to nature.”31 The distinction between sacred and profane parallels “the setting of boundaries at the moment of creation . . . [This] emphasis on orderliness of creation explains why in Judaism we do not find glorification of wilderness (so cherished by the environmental movement), and why the cultivated field is the primary model for the created universe in the Bible.”32 However, it is also the case that humans have “responsibility for the whole of creation,” and that nature belongs to God and cannot therefore be reduced to its use value.33 Like Hiers, TiroshSamuelson points in particular to the rule that, during the Sabbatical year, the land must not be worked: “The connection between land management, ritual, and social justice is most evident in the laws regulating the Sabbatical year . . . The Torah enjoined human beings to allow nature a period of rest and regeneration . . . By returning the earth to God, nature’s vitality is restored and protected from human use and abuse.”34 Tirosh-Samuelson’s evidence for such an environmental ethic is thus largely reduced to an assumption about the meaning of the rest prescribed during the Sabbatical and Jubilee years as a fallow period. The existence of such an ethic is, however, questionable, considering the numerous provisions for animal sacrifice and the identification of certain animals as unclean and inedible. Not all of nature is valued equally, nor is it preserved from human use. The argument that the Bible anticipates contemporary environmentalism, like the argument that the kosher laws anticipate contemporary vegetarianism, appears to be an anachronism.35 The main categories of rationale are therefore agricultural, social, and theological. A reason often given is the pragmatic recognition of the need for a fallow period in order for the land to remain productive. Despite scholarly

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debate, it seems clear that the beneficial effects for agriculture of allowing the land to rest were recognized in biblical times.36 Indeed, under ordinary conditions land must be rested more frequently than once every seven years, and this may have been done as often as every other year in the Levant prior to the availability of chemical fertilizers.37 Some proposed reconstructions of the Sabbatical year conclude that, by farming different fields on a precise schedule, which involved allowing half of the land to rest in any normal year, a farmer could plant all of the available land and bring in the promised double harvest on the eve of the Sabbatical, which would be sufficient to last throughout the fallow period.38 Such hypotheses emphasize the feasibility, even the practicality, of the Sabbatical year. However, as Philip Guillaume points out, although Judah had half a dozen distinct climates, with varying levels of precipitation, the Sabbatical year applied uniformly to all of them.39 This undermines the view that the Sabbatical year was merely a codification of an agriculturally beneficial practice.40 Moreover, as Wellhausen noted, “It is not a Sabbath or fallow time for the land that is contemplated, but a surrender of the harvest.”41 Next let us consider the social-justice rationale. Jacob Milgrom tips his hand in favor of this explanation by adding to his translation of Leviticus 25 the title “Jubilee, the Priestly Solution for Economic Injustice.”42 The Sabbatical and Jubilee years paralleled other laws that provided for the remission of debts and the manumission of slaves every seventh, or forty-ninth or fiftieth, year. The Sabbath itself has often been interpreted in social-justice terms as one of the earliest proworker laws. As Todd Buchholz states concerning the Sabbath day, “To reduce potential labor hours in a labor-intensive land, undeveloped by modern standards[,] . . . is extremely important.”43 Wellhausen argued that the Sabbath was originally only for the employee; the prohibition on work was later extended to everyone.44 Pierre Proudhon, a socialist whose views are addressed further below, labeled the Sabbath “the most progressive step taken in labor law from ancient times to the nineteenth century.”45 Joseph Husslein said that the Sabbath “enforced the lesson of granting the laborer the much needed rest by which alone he can retain his human powers unimpaired . . . no other labor law was ever of such tremendous effect.”46 He interpreted the Sabbatical and Jubilee years in similar terms, justifying the application to Moses of the title “History’s Greatest Labor Leader.”47 It is clear that part of the intention of these and parallel laws was to assist the economically disadvantaged.48 The Torah contains a number of provisions that are certainly designed to benefit the poor and that promote social and especially economic justice.49 Tirosh-Samuelson notes that “parts of the land’s produce— the corner of the field (peah), the gleanings of the stalks (leket),

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the forgotten sheaf (shikhekhah), the separated fruit (peret), and the defective clusters (olelot)— are to be given to those who do not own land: the poor person, the widow, the alien resident, and the Levite.”50 The Jubilee provision that agricultural land reverted to its original ownership also countered latifundia, the formation of large agricultural estates with their attendant social inequities. By returning the land to its original, ostensibly egalitarian distribution, and thereby undoing the preceding half century of inequalities that had arisen in the context of a market economy, the Jubilee represented a strong program for socioeconomic progressivism (by way of regression). However, other details of the same institution indicate clearly that social justice cannot have been the sole aim. If the idea were merely to enrich the poor, shouldn’t farming have continued and the proceeds been donated entirely to those most in need? And why should wild animals (hayah) as well ˙ as cattle (behemoth) have been permitted to consume whatever grew freely in the fields?51 The idea of a self-imposed scarcity resulting from an abstention from labor is at the heart of such institutions; and it is this aspect that defies attempts at economic rationalization, as Weber noted: “Every single attempt to divest the regulation, in the formulation in which it lies before us today, of its utopian character, and to explain it rationally, whether in terms of agricultural technology or sociology and politics, appears fruitless, because the sacrally motivated prohibition against ‘sowing’ stands in the way of all interpretations of this sort.”52 Milgrom allows, indeed, that, in terms of the rationale articulated in the text, the primary reason for the Sabbatical and Jubilee years was not economic but rather theological: “The periodic fallowness of agricultural land is indispensable to its continued fertility. But not a word of this practical consideration is voiced in the text. Its requirement is justified theologically, not economically—[in terms of ] the Sabbath.”53 These times were sacred— literally “set apart” from ordinary activity. Further, the reason given for the reversion of the land is that human beings had a limited power to dispose of it, as it belonged ultimately to God: “the land is mine; you are but resident aliens under my authority” (Lev. 25:2354). In addition, the Jubilee year was connected with the idea of return and redemption— from poverty, servitude, and alienation from the land— in a manner that, even in its original form, had eschatological overtones.55 Certain aspects of the Sabbath and Jubilee years indeed appear to be symbolic and theological. As the Protestant Matthew Henry pointed out long before Milgrom,56 the idea of a double or triple harvest on the eve of a Sabbatical year is analogous to that of the double portion of manna that was received on the eve of each Sabbath day during the Exodus, to tide the Israelites over until

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they could once again engage in labor and collect their miraculous food: “On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days” (Exod. 16:4 [Holman]; see also Exod. 16:29). Another parallel is that, in both cases, hoarding was prohibited: one was allowed to collect only enough manna for one day, and manna left overnight spoiled (except on the Sabbath) (Exod. 16:19 – 20).57 Similarly, during Sabbatical and Jubilee years, only organized reaping was prohibited, while the fruits of the land were made available to all (even wild animals) to eat their fill directly from the vine (Lev. 25:12). The parallel to the miraculous occurrence of manna highlights the anachronism in rationalistic interpretations of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years. Both emphasize the radical dependence on divine intervention, rather than economic calculation. What is expressed in such prohibitions is a notion of divine sovereignty that extends both to God’s ownership of the land and to human reliance on divine providence. Let us return now to consider how this biblical concept of sacred land compares with Locke’s idea of property. The Sabbatical and Jubilee years reveal a mode of relating to the land, and a conception of property more generally, that is directly at odds with the utilitarian viewpoint that underlies both Locke’s idea of property and the “antiwilderness bias” in contemporary American law. During the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, there was a kind of temporary ownership in common of the right of usufruct resembling the communal forms of land ownership among some Native Americans that colonists found objectionable (or unrecognizable). The Sabbatical and Jubilee years provided for a periodic reversion to what we must understand, in Locke’s terms, as the state of nature, when property was communally rather than privately owned. Indeed, even in the intervals between Sabbaticals the commons never disappeared entirely: it was maintained through the practice of leaving the gleanings of the field. This process was supposedly governed by chance, as whatever was left uncut by accident, or whatever fell from the bushel, would belong to the poor, the farmer not being allowed to pick the worst of the crops as their portion (Lev. 19:9 – 10).58 It was said that “when you go into your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes, as many as you wish, but you shall not put any in your vessel. When you go into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to your neighbor’s standing grain” (Deut. 23:24 – 25). The commons is always there in reserve, qualifying, and thereby perhaps justifying, private ownership. During the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, with a temporary return to the commons, what is specifically disallowed is hoarding: the organized collection of the produce of the fields. Although the provision that a double harvest would come in on the eve of the Sabbatical year would

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appear to contradict this, other provisions made clear that hoarding was, so to speak, the original sin that was purified by the abstentions of the Jubilee.59 During this reversion to the commons, the land returns also to the state of nature, the condition that it was in before human habitation. This explains the provisions of the Sabbatical year that allow “wild beasts” to graze freely. As Robert Kawashima argues: “The land, usually inscribed with agriculture through various human tools, returns to a state of wild, natural growth, a state of purity like that of the Nazirite [whose hair was uncut, like the grapes during the Jubilee]. . . . Leviticus thus returns the land to a ‘virginal’ state of innocence, unencumbered by the burdens of human culture.”60 The land is allowed to rest not only to maximize social justice or agricultural production, but as a sort of offering or penance. After a year, however, the commons was again subdivided into private property, albeit in an egalitarian fashion. Agricultural land was inalienable— or, rather, any alienation was only temporary. This redistribution was identified with the status quo ante of the distribution of the land that occurred upon the Conquest of Canaan, a distribution valued also because it was seen as fair.61 Even the idea that the original division was made through the casting of lots (Num. 33:51– 54) reinforces this, for everyone had an equal chance. Distribution by divination is a simple technique for effecting Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.” Yet the modern notion that, for an egalitarian polity, it is sufficient that all chances be equal is not the idea of the Jubilee, which insists that ultimately the result must also be equitable. The market economy is like a game of musical chairs, in which some are inevitably left standing. At the Jubilee, everyone receives a place again. The association of Jubilee with a forced abstention from farming and harvesting similarly has no counterpart in Rawls’s system, according to which human beings are supposed to be economically rational agents.62 Kawashima has argued that the Jubilee coincided with the Day of Atonement and effected the purification of the land from “socioeconomic pollution.”63 The Jubilee also represented a return to something like the primitive Israelite economy, at least as that economy was idealized by the authors of the text. Chapter 3 considered the manner in which the Exodus and Conquest narratives encoded an opposition between nomadic and settled, especially urban, life. The ancient Israelites were nomads who desired settlement yet despised the ways of the Canaanite city dwellers. In this hierarchical opposition of values, the period spent in the desert played an ambivalent role: as a moment of special nearness to God, but also a way station to the Promised Land, which was a land of plenty. Norman Gottwald saw in the opposition between Israelite and Canaan-

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ite a difference in classes or in economic modes of production: the Canaanite cities housed the bourgeoisie, against whom the Israelites represented a movement, partly rural, for egalitarianism or even primitive communism. In Gottwald’s view, there was a direct link between the Israelites’ mode of social organization and their concept of divinity: “mono-Yahwism was the function of sociopolitical egalitarianism in pre-monarchic Israel,” in the context of a tribal society.64 By making everyone equal in worship, ancient Israelite monotheism acted as a mechanism to promote equality: “‘Yahweh’ is the historically concretized, primordial power to establish and sustain social equality.”65 The Jubilee would presumably then be an example of how the radical ownership of everything by God justified the return of the land first to nature, and then to its original distribution, as if only God could hit the reset button. Challenging this view is not only the evidence that ancient Israelite society was less egalitarian than Gottwald maintained, but also the frequent association of high gods with urban states. Ithamar Gruenwald argues that the Torah distinguished between two principal modes of production, which were differently valorized: “God is setting economic norms and preferences. Principally, the options are either sheep-herding and nomadism or tilling the land, cattle-breeding, and urbanization. . . . The dialectics of these dual lifestyles shaped the narratives of the history of the ancient Israelites before and after they entered the Land of Canaan.”66 He suggests that the superiority of pastoralism over agriculture is symbolically expressed in God’s preference for Abel’s animal sacrifice over Cain’s cereal offering.67 Settled farming leads to cities, which lead to monarchy as well as slavery, the very evil that the Israelites escaped from in Egypt, the liberation from which during the Exodus residually marks the desert as having a positive value, at least relatively speaking.68 Supporting Gruenwald is Philippe Guillaume’s interpretation that “the ban on sowing on the seventh year was a highly practical economic measure, leading people to retain the mode of life celebrated in the patriarchal stories. The centrality of the Abraham paradigm with its herder-in-tent lifestyle that characterized the mode of survival in Yehud after the destruction of Jerusalem and of the coastal cities, reinforced mobility, discipline and output.”69 Of course, this is “pragmatic” only if we assume the real rather than the symbolic nature of the institution. Qualifying Gruenwald’s account is the value placed upon farming by such institutions as the Jubilee, which aimed, as Neal Soss put it, “to maintain the agrarian society of small landholders created at the Conquest.”70 In this case the stronger opposition would appear to be between farm and city, as Gottwald already suggested. Long before Gottwald, Henry Schaeffer advanced the idea that the Jubi-

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lee reflected the mode of economic organization of ancient Israel.71 Arguing against Wellhausen’s relegation of the Jubilee to a later stage in the history of the Bible,72 Schaeffer contended that it actually preserved aspects of ancient Israel’s tribal inheritance: in particular, the practice of holding the land in common, and the consequent inalienability of the land by any single individual. Schaeffer idealized the ancient Israelite tribal economy, describing it as communalistic, solidaristic, fraternalistic, and egalitarian.73 Like some contemporary scholars, he saw in Leviticus 25 the expression of a distinction between city and farm, and between Amorite (Canaanite) and Hebrew, that privileged the latter.74 The Jubilee was “a periodic reminder of the simple life of Israel’s seminomadic past. As a matter of fact it came to be regarded by the more conservative elements of Hebrew society as the ideal of Israel’s social economy” and as the expression of a simpler time in the history of Israel, before the corruption introduced by settled life and urbanization.75 Despite such historical claims, the thrust of the Sabbatical and especially Jubilee legislation appears utopian. Jacob Milgrom concluded that “in contrast to the land sabbatical, there is no evidence at all that the Jubilee was ever observed.”76 Carl Schmitt contended, in connection with his discussion of the association of nomos with a primeval division of the land, that “progressive redivisions and distributions are normal with nomadic tribes. People who have become settled and live in houses cannot continuously redistribute.”77 Although he cited the Conquest of Canaan as a prime example of nomos or nemein (appropriation), Schmitt did not discuss the Jubilee in this context, so we must extrapolate from his comments. The more settled and urban Israel became, the less practical became the idea of a general redistribution of the land, as well as the egalitarianism encoded in such a redistribution.78 In the context of a priestly, possibly post-Exilic reworking of the earlier institutions of the Sabbath and Sabbatical year, the Jubilee represented not a survival of ancient Israel’s “tribal economy,” as Schaeffer believed, but rather the utopian expression of a return to the state of nature and to relative egalitarianism. Many have noted that contemporary depictions of human beings as rational economic agents maximizing individual preferences leave out the specifically communal dimension of society, the good that we experience by regarding ourselves as participating in a larger collective to which our selfish interests must on occasion be subordinated. The Jubilee appears to express something closer to modern communitarianism than to utilitarianism. This was anticipated by the miracle that when the manna was collected, “he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; each gathered according to what he could eat” (Exod. 16:18). This is almost a

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paraphrase, avant la lettre, of the Communist injunction “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” Schaeffer’s characterization of the Jubilee supports this conclusion: “There is abundant evidence, in the early literature of Israel, of the dominance of the feeling of religious, political, moral, and economic solidarity.”79 He does not hesitate to refer to this earlier economy as “communism.”80 This is perhaps too optimistic an assessment. But it is certainly true that the Jubilee expresses a preference for solidarity over utility. The Sabbatical or Jubilee represented a partial and temporary return to the condition of the wilderness,81 which is recalled within these institutions as a state of relative equality, where everyone was subject to the same deprivations. This serves a leveling function analogous to that described in the rationale for Passover: “Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt.” The event of the Sabbatical or Jubilee itself, in which private ownership effectively dissolves (before being restored), illustrates the starkness of the dichotomy between what Walter Brueggemann calls the “land mentality, the effort at managed security” as well as “planning and calculation and control,” and the wilderness, which forbids such control, by forcing dependence on divine providence rather than human ingenuity.82 He argues that “landed people are tempted to create a sabbathless society in which land is never rested, debts are never canceled, slaves are never released, nothing is ever changed from the way it now is and has always been.”83 According to this interpretation, the Sabbath (or Jubilee) represented the intrusion of radical uncertainty into the  landed habit of rational economic calculation. However, it is also true that this disruption actually promoted a form of insurance against the chances, whether good or ill, of the market. There is a certain security in the idea that, no matter what the intervening years have brought, the Jubilee will restore each to his proper estate. Shmuel Trigano argues that the Hebrew Bible expresses the dependence of the polity on a transcendent reference, in a manner strictly parallel to Rousseau’s figment of the “social contract.” This dependence was revealed most directly in institutions such as the Jubilee: “The aim of perpetuating such a limited relationship [of ownership and use of land] was to occasionally suspend the relationship to the earth and thus the process of rooting, as if all the tribes became Levites every seven years. Here we have an entire system that could be defined as the ‘Levitical constitution’ of the people of Israel (resting on the Sabbath, in the year of fallow, and in the year of the Jubilee). This economic system of gifts, as well as the Levitical status, aimed indirectly at keeping the existence of a political center, left vacant, separated from the environment.”84 Allowing for some differences of inflection, Trigano’s recognition of the role of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years in preserving a reference

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to nomadism, in the form of a state of exception to land ownership as part of the social contract of the ancient Israelite polity, converges with the interpretation I am offering here. This returns us to a point raised in chapter 4 concerning the social significance of sacrifice. As the case of the Jubilee suggests, the contentions of Wellhausen, Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Iannaccone that sacrifice and other rituals contribute to community or social solidarity are not wrong, but they are incomplete. The contribution of such institutions to the constitution of polity is more complex than can be captured by reducing them to occasions of commensality or, worse, to utility maximization. The Sabbath and Jubilee have continued to serve as fruitful metaphors for the idea of an egalitarian foundation of polity. In 1845 Pierre Proudhon published a remarkable treatise in which he reflected on the Sabbath and the Sabbatical and Jubilee years.85 The value of these institutions for him consisted in large part in the notion that they served as precedents for his own economic and political views, as anticipations, that is, of social and economic egalitarianism. Proudhon found in the Sabbath and related institutions the fulfillment of the condition that Rousseau had set for a civil religion consonant with the social contract: “It is necessary for there to be fixed and periodic assemblies, that no one may abolish nor put off, such that at the appointed date the people should be convened legitimately according to law, without there being need for any other formal summons.”86 While acknowledging that the ancient Israelite polity was hardly the democracy Rousseau called for, Proudhon argued that the Sabbath and related institutions tended precisely to promote solidarity against the centrifugal or dispersive force of the ascetic impulse, which drives individuals away from society and into the desert. Moses “wanted, in a word, not an aggregation of individuals, but a truly brotherly society.”87 The Sabbath fulfilled this function by “suspending the rude work of a population almost entirely agricultural, and placing their spirits in accord through the accord of their persons, . . . [and] arresting the speculations of interest.”88 This was achieved by insisting that everyone, no matter what his or her social station, was required to rest.89 The submission of all equally to the law paralleled the practice of economic egalitarianism: “The Israelites . . . could not change their places, neither to ruin nor to enrich themselves excessively. The reason for this is easy to discover: among them the fortunes in real estate were equal, at least as far as the fluctuating divisions of inheritance and unforeseen accidents permitted.”90 The chief device for remedying such chance inequalities was the Jubilee. Against the objection that such an egalitarian society is impossible, Proudhon held up the Mosaic legislation as proof to the contrary.91 In a stroke of genius, Moses had har-

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nessed the pernicious impulse toward solitude and idleness (far niente, désoccupation) toward a socially beneficial end.92 Proudhon’s reflections on the Sabbath anticipated not merely Durkheim’s later emphasis on the function of communal rituals in producing social solidarity, but also the question, raised by such thinkers as Schmitt and Agamben, of the relation of such festivals to sovereignty. As occasions for the expression of the popular will, to which by law even the king was subject, Proudhon identified in the Sabbath and Jubilee moments of return of sovereignty to the people themselves. The Sabbath was simultaneously a group ritual and the occasion for a plebiscite. Although he regarded such moments as absolutely exceptionless— as evidenced by the fact that even the king must obey God’s law93— Proudhon noted that on certain historical occasions popular festivals such as the Sabbath had given way to revolts against the existing regime.94 He therefore identified the liberating potential of such convocations, linking them in another way to the state of exception that is fundamental to the constitution of social order. Invoking Adolphe Thiers’s famous observation—“The king rules, but he does not govern” (Le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas)95— Proudhon asserted: “We dispute, without ceasing (the idea that): The king rules and governs, the king rules and does not govern. Let us begin by saying: He governs and does not rule, and if we are not yet there, at least we approach the truth more closely; because the people are the executive power [pouvoir executive], and it is the law that invests them with this.”96 Reversing the traditional association between the king and the law, in other words, Proudhon made the king merely the functionary of the law and of a sovereign power that remained in the people, who retained the “executive power.” The Jubilee was an illustration, or perhaps an anticipation, of such an ideal. Benavides suggests a function for such collective rituals similar to that expressed earlier by Proudhon: In his essay on the Kronia festivals, [Walter] Burkert has emphasized the anduraru aspect of the festivals of reversal of the ancient orient that is the release from forced labour and debt servitude. Similar practices are found in [ancient] Israel  .  .  . In the Babylonian, the Israelite and countless other cases, divinely instituted reversals remind us of an aspect of religion . . . that which involves dismantling hierarchies, erasing distinctions, leaving behind all forms. Should one be surprised to find that most of these utopian dreams have to do with leaving work behind?97

Benavides places emphasis on “the role played by labor in the genesis of religion, the transfigured presence of work in the very fabric of ritual activity, the pulsating reality of need, the desire to transcend having to work

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present at the heart of utopian dreams.”98 Interpreted in this way, the Jubilee represented within the political imaginaire of its authors something midway between Carnival and the state of nature as described in Locke’s and other modern social-contract theories. Benavides’s connection of the Jubilee with festivals of reversal converges with the suggestion made in chapter 1 that such occasions often coincide with or represent an interregnum or return to a condition of primal sovereignty, in which chaos and order meet. The state of nature or return to the wilderness condition depicted in the Sabbatical and Jubilee years is only one expression of this idea. Although the evidence is equivocal, in ancient Mesopotamia such debt releases appear to have coincided with several types of events: a threat to the polity resulting from foreign armies or a famine; the first full year of a king’s reign; and the Akitu or New Year’s festival. Michael Hudson states that clean slates were declared “especially in times of crop failure or warfare  .  .  . when military emergencies or crop failures made debt repayment impossible.”99 Similar to the Latin iustitium described by Agamben, these were sovereign acts that sometimes coincided with an actual state of martial law, in the event of which there were pragmatic reasons for removing the burden of debt from citizens whose attentions should be focused fully on addressing the immediate threat. Calling a general debt amnesty permitted the ruler to assemble a defensive army. When declared at the enthronement ceremony occurring at the start of the first full year of a king’s reign, clean slates were timed to coincide with the end of an interregnum, possibly to gain goodwill for the new ruler. This resembles the ritual distribution of largesse described in chapter 4. There was also a symbolic dimension to such acts. Hudson connects them with the idea of a restoration of order out of chaos, and with the New Year’s festival that depicted this renewal, although the evidence for this connection remains uncertain: “Clean slates were intended to create an idealized status quo ante akin to that associated with the re-starting of time.”100 During the Akitu festival, the king was supposedly subjected to ritual humiliation before being restored to power.101 Such practices, as we have seen, are common in representations of the state of exception. As a suspension of otherwise valid legal obligations, the clean slate manifested the sovereign’s authority to declare a state of exception.102 Such debt cancellations are closely related to the pardon power, the ability to release from punishment or even expunge a criminal record, which is still enjoyed by sovereigns such as the president of the United States, who customarily exercises such power during the interregnum that occurs with a transition in sovereignty. U.S. presidents normally issue most pardons at the end of their final term in office, to avoid complaints that might result were they to do so mid-

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way through. When, for example, Gerald Ford pardoned former President Richard Nixon on September 8, 1974, almost exactly one month after Ford assumed office on August 9, this was in response to a real state of emergency or constitutional crisis in America, and it provoked a controversy that may have led to Ford’s own fall from power. Contemporary scholars have emphasized the connection of the modern pardon power with older Christian ideas of divine right and God’s absolute power.103 The Sabbatical and Jubilee years continued the pattern of these older institutions while removing the element of sovereign arbitrariness. Rather than requiring a declaration by the ruler, debt cancellations would occur on a regular schedule. Just as Proudhon suggested, this was an attempt to render the sovereign accountable to law, and by doing so, to make sovereignty more democratic. Of course, this also removed the flexibility that the ruler had to declare a debt cancellation in response to a real emergency. The Jubilee later emerged as a powerful utopian metaphor in Christianity. Matthew Henry remarked concerning the Jubilee: They were reminded of the easy life man lived in paradise, when he ate of every good thing, not, as since, in the sweat of his face. Labour and toil came in with sin . . . And, as the fruits of this Sabbath of the land were enjoyed in common, so the salvation wrought out by Christ is a common salvation; and this sabbatical year seems to have been revived in the Christian church, when the believers had all things in common, Acts 2:44.104

Leaving aside the debate over whether communism was practiced within the primitive Christian Church, what Henry’s commentary signals is the conversion of the reference of the Jubilee metaphor from an idyllic, primeval state to a future salvation. David Daube argued that the idea of redemption in later Jewish and Christian traditions represented the adoption of an originally legal notion of “buying back” as a central metaphor for salvation. This process began in the Hebrew Bible with the institutions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years. Gradually, the ideas of a redeemer (go’el), one who buys something back from debt, and of a future redemption that involved a literal liberation from bondage, were extended to a more general idea of salvation: This idea [of redemption], of fundamental importance in the Old Testament and Talmud, in the gospels and all Christian doctrine, has its root in early law. It is one might justly say, an outstanding example of a legal notion being taken up and made into a religious notion by priests and prophets. . . . In the end, the notion of redemption was even more spiritualized, and God thought of as redeeming His people not only from physical slavery but also from the fetters of sin and death.105

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During the English Civil War, a number of eschatological movements revived the original economic reference of these institutions. In 1649, the radical Diggers squatted on Georges Hill in Surrey, and claimed to be returning to the commons those lands that had been expropriated by the evil landlords, identified variously with the Norman invaders and the biblical Cain and Esau. The grant of dominion in Genesis 1:28 was made to all alike, and not merely to one man, to rule over others: The work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows. And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the Land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother . . . Not Inclosing any part into any particular hand, but all as one man, working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father . . . all the Commons and waste Ground in England and in the whole World, shall be taken by the People in righteousness, not owning any Propriety; but taking the Earth to be a Common Treasury, as it was first made for all.106

How like and how unlike Locke this is! The wasteland is appropriated in the name of labor, and by right of the same biblical grant of dominion, but is then held in common and the proceeds shared: a mode of life the Diggers explicitly equated with the Sabbath, as well as with a return to the golden age of communalism, either before the Fall or in primitive Christianity. The next chapter begins with a discussion of the Roman or papal Jubilees that started in 1300 and shows how these ritual institutions extended this metaphor of salvation and its connection with economy and sovereignty. The Origins of Inequality, or Storage and Its Discontents From all parts of the world materials are thus on hand to make clear that primitive societies everywhere, producing more goods than the minimum requirement for the support of life, translate their economic surpluses into the social leisure which is only afforded some members of the community— persons of privilege supported by this excess wealth. m e l v i l l e j . h e r s k o v i t s , The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples (1940), 369 – 70

The Jubilee imagined the possibility of a return to a condition of equality, before scarcity and hierarchy, even before labor. Yet most of what we know about precapitalist agricultural economies suggests that these were marked by inequalities of wealth and status. This was true even of the ancient Israelite

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economy, which knew money and private property as well as the inequities addressed by the Jubilee. When did such inequalities emerge, and what consequence did they have, from a religious perspective? While the answers are not entirely clear, some of the existing evidence points to the technological development of surplus and storage as key to the rise of both inequality and religion as we know it. An economy of surplus is a precondition for maintaining a class of individuals who, having been freed from the necessity of manual labor for their sustenance, may devote themselves to other, less tangible goals. This is just as true of religious mendicants as it is of university professors and wealthy men and women of leisure. As soon as someone is able to produce more of a good than he or she needs, and to exchange this surplus for the necessities of life (food, clothing, etc.), there arises a division of labor that, in theory, is more efficient. Those who are better at basket weaving may devote themselves to that occupation, the village may need only one master potter and one kiln, and so on. Given that the most basic necessity is food, at first everyone must be involved in the procuring of this necessity as a primary occupation, until such time as a sufficient surplus may be produced at the group level to allow for a significant number to absent themselves in whole or part from this activity. That moment is generally regarded as having come about with the rise of large-scale farming of the type associated with the production of cereal grains such as wheat or rice. The problem is that surplus is a two-edged sword. It enables some to free themselves from the necessity of labor, but it also tends to give rise to inequality. Religious traditions such as those expressed in the Jubilee often take a dim view of such inequality and of the relations of production that give rise to it. Benavides notes the dependence of the san˙gha— the Buddhist monastic order— on gifts from the laity. Although monks are specifically prohibited from handling money or working,107 such practices cannot fully separate the san˙gha from the surrounding economy, especially as the prohibition against work necessitates donations from the laity to the monks to ensure their survival. Earlier, Melford Spiro described the difference between “Kammic” and “Nibbanic” Buddhism in Burma: while the laity seek to improve their karma by giving gifts (dāna) to the monks and receiving merit (punya) in return, ˙ the monks strive for nirvāna as a condition utterly beyond such a cycle of ˙ gift exchange.108 Yet the economy of nirvāna is unthinkable without that of ˙ karma as a basis. This is not only because, in order to live and pursue nirvāna, ˙ the monks must first eat (as reinforced in an important episode in the Buddhacarita, or Life of the Buddha, where the Buddha breaks his fast in order to have the strength to meditate), but also because the very idea of nirvāna or ˙

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liberation has been articulated in opposition to such a cycle of dependence. Benavides suggests further that the laity receive from the monks the opportunity to live vicariously a life beyond necessity and labor.109 As Benavides notes, Buddhism emerged in India during the middle of the first millennium BCE, following the development of urban economies on the Gangetic plain.110 Buddhism appears to have found some initial success among urban elites, and the Buddha himself was later depicted in his biography as a Ksatriya or member of the ruling warrior class, rather than a Brahmin ˙ or priest. The so-called urbanization hypothesis (see chapter 6) posits that movements of renunciation such as Buddhism arose in South Asia during this period in response to economic development. Perhaps the conditions in the cities were difficult enough to inspire some to walk a path of renunciation (samnya¯s), becoming wanderers (śramana) who avoided the entanglements ˙ ˙ of family and labor and lived instead as mendicants. This troubled birth, leading to a conflicted relationship, between Buddhism and the economic order is, as Benavides describes, expressed in a famous myth of the origins of the world and of society. The Aggañña Sutta (“Sermon on What Will Come,” hereafter AS) recounts how the world comes into being again, in every age, as the result of a kind of fall from grace.111 Originally ethereal and made of light, humans assume increasingly corporeal form as a result of committing various sins. The first is gluttony for a sweet earth, then a sweet mushroom. As these foods are gorged upon, and possibly exhausted, they disappear. Next the beings receive rice as their food. They take only as much as they can eat in a day. Some beings grow sex organs and, through concupiscence, become lazy. They take to hoarding rice for several days. As a result, the rice becomes less abundant. The beings then divide the land into private property so as to have enough for themselves. Already distinguished by gender, attractiveness, and other natural attributes, the beings are now divided into social classes. The first king, Mahasammata (“the Great Elect”), is chosen to rule over them and keep the peace that had been disturbed by the thievery and violence associated with scarcity and private property. Some scholars have noted that this story seems to include, in addition to a cosmogony, a kind of social-contract theory.112 The AS is a response to the Brahmanical theory that caste is natural or eternal.113 Contradicting this notion, the AS contends that caste and kingship are necessary evils that arise in response to human sinfulness and the consequent need to restore order. The story reinforces Buddhist ethics— for example, by condemning sexual misconduct— while reflecting on such general themes as the rise of private property and government. Perhaps the most innovative part of his analysis is Benavides’s suggestion

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that this story constitutes also a meditation on surplus, on the storage of food that came with the transition to a developed agricultural society and the rise of cities that could subsist off of tribute from farmland. The AS depicts the rise of scarcity (of the rice supply), of private property, and of theft and violence as consequences of hoarding some of the surplus that grew abundantly in the fields in the state of nature, when the world was a commons open to everyone, and all were provided for according to their needs. Benavides contends that, for the rise of storage and a money economy, individuals must develop the habit of self-denial and deferred gratification: “money is the condensation of deferred satisfaction.”114 While Buddhist monks embody the quality of self-denial, they live on what they are able to beg from day to day and are prohibited from touching money, which necessitates the appointment of a member of the laity as treasurer for the san˙gha. The AS suggests that, prior to our fall from grace, we all lived day to day, as monks do. The detail that the original beings were sexless may reflect also the idea that the monks, having renounced sexual behavior, have returned to or approached this original condition. Elsewhere, following the anthropologist James Woodburn, Benavides posits that, by denying instant gratification, religion may have served a vital role in facilitating the transition from societies based on “immediate return” (hunting and gathering) to those based on “delayed return” (the cultivation and storage of goods, such as yams).115 In an unpublished paper, Benavides has elaborated on this thesis and expanded it to include a wide range of religious derogations from the mundane economy: Why is it necessary to sacrifice something, whether that something be comfort, sexual pleasure, blood, one’s [own] or someone else’s life, or, worst of all in a stratified society, leisure? The answer, advanced now with the utmost tentativeness, may have to do with the transition in hunter-gathering societies from immediate to delayed consumption, the latter requiring storage, however short-term or elementary this storage may be. Even though storage and delaying consumption allow one to satisfy one’s needs later, the postponement of consumption constitutes a giving up, a sacrifice of sorts; more important in the long term that lasts to this day is the fact that with storage begins a process of social differentiation, one in which those who are able to accumulate begin to gain followers.116

What Benavides is suggesting is that the habit of sacrifice inculcated through religious practice may partly be accounted for as good training for the self-denial and deferral of gratification required for success in an economy based upon surplus production and the storage, exchange, and distribution of this surplus. Long before the Protestant ethic encouraged capitalists to

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reinvest the profits of their labors rather than enjoy them, religious asceticism already had an “elective affinity” with the surplus economies that arose with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to settled agricultural societies with diversified economies. The latter were precisely those in which ascetic behaviors arose, at least on the scale represented by the Buddhist san˙gha or early Christian monasticism. Of course, one would immediately need to qualify any one-sided emphasis on asceticism and deferred gratification by noting the orgy of consumption associated with the festival, which is equally a part of what we call religion. The relationship between storage and excessive consumption is complex. Mauss already pointed out that the potlatch in the American Northwest, like many harvest festivals, generally took place on the cusp of winter, after an extended season of harvesting, fishing, and hunting during the warmer months, which provided the collected goods that would both enable a brief moment of indulgence and carry the tribes through the subsequent period of relative want. Although occurring in the spring, the Carnival that precedes the season of Lent in Catholic countries is another illustration of this paradox.117 What unites both gestures— the self-denial of the ascetic, and the excessive indulgence of the potlatch celebrant or Carnival-goer, may be only the fact that both express a control or mastery over scarcity, albeit through diametrically opposed gestures, in the one case of amor fati, in the other of hostile or joyous defiance. Either feast or fast may express the same attitude of sovereignty, as long as the abstention from food is chosen from within rather than imposed from without. It is this very self-willed stance of the ascetic that distinguishes his or her posture from that of a mere starving person. Whereas the latter exists under conditions of scarcity (or of maldistribution), the former, as we have seen, is strangely to be found in the midst of surplus and luxury— note that the Buddha was born to princely wealth and confined to the royal palace. Neither the fast nor the feast appears to constitute in any direct way an endorsement of the habit of storage. This is sufficiently obvious in the case of the feast. In the case of the fast, with respect to the AS at least, the habit of deferred gratification through prudent storage facilitated by the exchange of perishable goods for more durable ones, such as gold, is precisely not the moral of the myth. Instead, the AS expresses an antihoarding ethic that condemns the very behaviors that Benavides suggests religions ought to be expected to encourage. The Buddha is not Benjamin Franklin (“a penny saved is a penny earned”). While the AS may be a meditation on or about the values and consequences of storage, it does not, in any straightforward way, constitute an endorsement of storage as a practice, unless perhaps by providing a rationale for private property and for kings, who are enabled by and charged

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with defending surplus, as necessary evils. The AS protests against the social and economic ills that naturally follow from an economy based on surplus. Benavides states that “early Buddhism can be understood as a meditation on the process of deferral and the new approach to labor; not merely, however, as the justification of the new economy, but also— and perhaps more so— as a critique, and above all as a commentary.”118 This is partly because, while “money is the condensation of deferred satisfaction,” it is also, by the same token, the primary mechanism for hoarding, which is presented in the AS almost as the original sin. The Jubilee depicts a state of nature that is analogous, though scarcely identical, to that depicted in the AS. Both texts represent hoarding and the resulting social stratification as a fall from a more primitive state of equality. In the Buddhist case, the state of nature is presented more radically as preceding embodiment, sexual differentiation, and private property. In the ancient Israelite case, the state of nature is depicted as a more equitable division of the land, and as associated with the pastoralism and agriculture that preceded the more complex differentiation of labor introduced by urban life and a money economy. Both utopian visions are familiar with money and markets. They do not record any actual state of nature, but express the yearning for a time before or beyond the mundane economy and its attendant inequities. In the AS, hoarding begins with the greed of those who eat the sweet magical food and descend into corporeal form, continues with the laziness of those who gather more rice than can be consumed in one day so as to spare the effort of daily labor, and ends in the drawing of boundaries and the rise of private property as a means of self-insurance against scarcity. The parallel in the Torah is to the prohibitions on hoarding manna during the Exodus, and on hoarding the harvest during (as opposed to immediately before) the Sabbatical and Jubilee years. The problem addressed by the Jubilee is the inequitable hoarding of real estate (and/or usufruct), which is remedied by returning the land to its original ownership. Exodus refers to leftover manna spoiling: “And Moses said to them: ‘Let no man leave any of it till the morning.’ But they did not listen to Moses; some left part of it until the morning, and it bred worms and became foul; and Moses was angry with them. Morning by morning they gathered it, each as much as he could eat; but when the sun grew hot, it melted” (Exod. 16:19 – 21). In condemning the hoarding of the commons, ancient Buddhist and Israelite texts anticipated some of Locke’s arguments on the origins of property:119 The greatest part of things really useful to the life of man, and such as the necessity of subsisting made the first commoners of the world look after, as

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it doth the Americans now, are generally things of short duration; such as, if they are not consumed by use, will decay and perish of themselves. . . . Now of those good things which nature hath provided in common, every one had a right . . . to as much as he could use. . . . He that gathered a hundred bushels of acorns or apples, had thereby a property in them. . . . He was only to look, that he used them before they spoiled, else he took more than his share, and robbed others. And indeed it was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of . . . the exceeding of the bounds of his just property not lying in the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of any thing uselessly in it.120

Taking only such foodstuffs and other goods that one can use oneself without spoiling them and allowing their value to perish was, in Locke’s view, simply good economic sense. It justified a money economy in which one may preserve the value of one’s labors by exchanging perishable goods that one cannot use for something more durable, such as gold.121 The disapprobation of hoarding that Locke expresses depends not on any inequality that might arise because some individuals exhibited more industry than others in gathering apples or otherwise acquiring by their labor a greater share of the commons. His disapprobation depends entirely on the violation of utility that occurs when a perishable good’s value is lost. By introducing a relatively imperishable medium of exchange that permits the trading of such perishable goods to others, money contributes to the resolution of this problem. Perhaps more realistically than Locke, the early Buddhist and Israelite texts acknowledge that hoarding leads to scarcity. Locke does add the caveat that such acquisitiveness should not be undertaken to the prejudice of anyone else’s right to do the same. His invocation of the image of America as a vast unexplored wilderness supposedly resolves the problem of scarcity, as the new continent is thought to hold such resources that there will be more than enough to go around. However, this does not by any means prevent the dispossession of natives from any particular plot of land. Property is, ordinarily at least, a zero-sum game, the right of ownership consisting primarily of a right of exclusion. Another difference is that Locke sees labor in itself not as potentially sinful, but as always virtuous, for it is what converts any wasteland to productive use and, thus, to private ownership. Although early Buddhism came to value the striving of the monk toward nirvāna as a higher calling than ei˙ ther manual labor or the extraction of rents, and ancient Israelite tradition idealized pastoral and/or agricultural work, neither can be said to condemn work per se. Each reserved unqualified condemnation for hoarding and the resulting inequities. (The Buddhist monastic codes or Vinaya placed severe

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restrictions on what monks could possess and on how often and how much they could eat; as a rule, eating after noon was forbidden, and one had to rest content with what was offered in the begging bowl.) Locke, to the contrary, elevates inutility to the level of the highest sin. This is the true contrast between the enforced idleness of the Sabbath and the newer capitalist ethos that was championed by Locke, inflated into a comprehensive moral, political, and legal principle by Jeremy Bentham, and subsequently codified as scientific dogma by rational-choice theorists. As Benavides suggests, texts such as the AS (or Lev. 25) constitute something of a meditation on the promises but especially the perils of a surplus or storage economy, one that provides the possibility of leisure but that also tends to produce inequalities as well as relative scarcity, which in turn requires the majority to sell their labor in exchange for the necessities of life. Economic anthropology may shed further light on these issues. The predecessor, historically speaking, of the surplus economy is the subsistence economy, such as was still observable by anthropologists working among groups of hunter-gatherers within the last century. Marshall Sahlins’s pathbreaking account “The Original Affluent Society” debunked some of the myths surrounding such groups, in particular the idea that their lives were poor and miserable, at least in material terms.122 In fact, in many cases, despite not having developed the habit of accumulating goods— something impractical for nomadic peoples in any case, which must carry all they own— such groups might be considered in many respects well-off. That is because, surrounded by relative natural abundance and freed from the demand to store surplus, individuals could gather, by working perhaps several hours per day, sufficient food, water, and other necessities to survive. The mode of economic production reinforced this antiaccumulative habit, so that individuals who acquired more than they could use— say, a second stone axe for chopping wood— would quickly be asked to pass the spare to a comrade. Hoarding was subject to social disapproval and sanctions.123 The same conditions led to instant rather than deferred gratification, or what Sahlins calls “prodigality,” as well as to low investment in improvements to soil, dwellings, and the like.124 In the case of a successful hunt, for example, everyone will gorge upon the meat. This is not merely because the technology for storage is lacking, but because of an ethical or behavioral orientation. What Sahlins calls the “domestic mode of production” therefore “harbors an antisurplus principle.”125 Benavides has referred to the work of James Woodburn, who defined the difference between economies based on “delayed return” and those based on “immediate return”: the former are those that possess storage, whereas the latter are such as hunter-gatherers, who tend to consume goods at the time

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they are produced.126 Woodburn argues that both types of economies existed in the Neolithic era. Like Sahlins, Woodburn emphasizes that immediatereturn systems offer numerous advantages, including relatively greater solidarity, egalitarianism, and leisure.127 Richard Lee endorses the concept, if not necessarily the term, “primitive communism” to describe such societies: “Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalized reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.”128 Sahlins explained “generalized reciprocity” as a type of social exchange that tends toward the true gift, where there is little or no implied obligation to reciprocate.129 Generalized reciprocity may be associated even with economies that have developed well past the stage of hunter-gatherer societies.130 As we have seen, certain forms of sacrifice tend also to express this ethic, at least as an ideal. Sacrifice, at least when it constitutes the destruction of an object or its use value, is the logical opposite of storage or preservation. However, sacrifice obviously depends also upon the existence of surplus. Wasteful behaviors such as the potlatch, or the accumulation of more yams than one is able to consume, with the bulk being allowed to rot in the barn, are characteristic of societies that are able to produce and store more than is required for subsistence. As Alain Testart has argued, the crucial shift may come with the transition to a storage economy. Although the conventional wisdom had long held that only agricultural societies could produce the surplus necessary to support “a class of non-producers, priests, warriors, or others,” hunter-gatherer societies that have developed storage (stockage) and become sedentary show the same capability and tendency toward inequality:131 “Among the nonstorers, the only possible use of the excess food is precisely as a gift. Among the storers, this [excess] can be individually appropriated by the producer to the extent to which it can be transformed into a durable good: under these conditions, the prestige attached to the food gift is of a completely different sort.”132 Storage facilitates festivals, such as the potlatch, that serve to consolidate hierarchy.133 Such forms of prodigality, which Veblen suggested are performed out of a desire to secure status, are inegalitarian and individualistic, and differ from those occurring in economies of generalized exchange. What might any of this have to do with religion? Benavides has raised the important question of “how the divinities of hunter-gatherers differ from those generated by the inhabitants of the stratified, agricultural societies of the ancient Near East, and of complex archaic states in general.”134 (As we saw earlier, Veblen had already speculated on this question.) The two cases of early Bud-

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dhism and ancient Israelite religion afford an opportunity for the observation of such a process of transformation and differentiation. Without prejudice to future investigation of this topic, it is worth pointing out that, inasmuch as both of these religions include forms of protest against stratification and hoarding, they encode a nostalgia for an older mode that anthropologists identify with the hunter-gatherer stage or, following Testart, the nomadic, prestorage stage. That these religions depict the economic utopia of egalitarianism variously as communal, nomadic, pastoral, or agrarian may not matter as much as what they are protesting against, namely stratified surplus economies. The question of the role of sacrifice in relation to these matters is a complicated and important one. Following Walter Burkert’s researches into early Greek sacrifice, we have become accustomed to the idea that sacrifice may originally have constituted something like a reflection on, as well as a perfection of, the hunt as the prototypical act of killing.135 The primordial act of social exchange is the partition and distribution of meat secured as the result of a hunt. The ritual regulation of this act is arguably a means of preventing conflicts in a process where the social as well as biological stakes are exceedingly high, and where absolute equality is impossible. When someone gets the breast, someone else must get the offal. This is perhaps the original, empirical basis, if such exists, for Girard’s drama of “mimetic violence,” stemming from envy for what the other has. Whereas the hunt in itself often represents a risky and dangerous confrontation with a wild beast, the sacrifice, which generally selects for a victim a domesticated animal (cow, sheep, or goat), eliminates this danger.136 Jonathan Z. Smith, in response to Burkert’s proposal, suggested that, rather than a survival of the hunt, the sacrifice might therefore represent something closer to a meditation on domestication, on the inevitable dependence of a pastoral economy on such animals for their value as labor and meat.137 He argued that the aspect of the tremendum that attaches to sacrifice “rests on an agrarian mythologization of the hunt and is not characteristic of what we can learn of the attitudes of hunting and gathering peoples toward the activities of hunting.”138 Sacrifice actually “marks a shift from the hunter-and-gatherer’s world of immediacy, skill, and chance to a social world of futurity and planning— of the capacity for continuity of time and place.”139 This explains the extraordinary attention to detail that marks many sacrifices, which constitute a form of the “selective kill” that is used as a means of regulating domesticated herds.140 A recently published study of Polynesian cultures found evidence for the coevolution of social stratification and human sacrifice.141 The study found a significant correlation between hierarchy and the ritual killing of human beings, in which perpetrators were (naturally) from the upper class and victims from the lower class. The authors appear to favor the “social control

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hypothesis,” according to which “human sacrifice legitimizes class-based power distinctions by combining displays of ultimate authority— the taking of a life— with supernatural justifications that sanctify authority as divinely ordained.” These findings support the connection between human sacrifice and sovereignty documented in earlier chapters while also associating both of these categories with the rise of hierarchical societies. More work needs to be done to connect these developments with the rise of surplus. In the study, it is human beings who are treated as disposable surplus. Yet in some cases such killings may address the problem of scarcity by reducing the demand for goods or terrorizing the population into accepting an inequitable distribution of a limited supply of goods. Smith’s suggestion that sacrifice reflects on domestication converges with Benavides’s hypothesis that sacrifice and related acts are connected with the rise of a surplus economy based on storage, and with the question of what to do with that surplus, part of which is sacrificed. Sacrifice, like the hunt, may involve a more or less egalitarian distribution, depending upon whether it is meant to reinforce or mitigate a hierarchy in the surrounding society. When Wellhausen and Robertson Smith imagined primitive sacrifice in ancient Israel as a communal meal, each emphasized the relative egalitarianism of this institution and lamented its degeneration into a means of profit for the priests as they came to demand more and more of the proceeds of sacrifice for themselves. In his own way, therefore, each evinced a nostalgia for a primitive communalism such as that expressed by the Jubilee year. We see how the biblical institutions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, despite exhibiting numerous possibilities of interpretation and many traces of their specific historical conditions, nevertheless converge with the more general problem of the role played by the state of nature, as a state of exception, in the constitution of polity. It accomplishes nothing to dismiss these institutions as utopian. If anything, they become more interesting the more they are seen to contradict the realities of a settled, agricultural, urban, money-lending economy. Against such a background, such institutions express, at least in part, the idea of an escape from labor, lending, and the inequalities of wealth. What makes these protests “religious” is perhaps only the degree of disruption that they prescribe against the mundane business of work and accumulation. On the one hand, such protests point back to some mythical moment in the constitution of “the People,” thereby preserving a sense of solidarity as a counterweight to the rapaciousness of an economy of individual interest. On the other hand, they point forward to some notion of an even more general release that merges into the concept of salvation, as the next chapter aims to show.

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No Deposit, No Return: Religious Rejections of Exchange To tell the history of debt . . . is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life— even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices raised against it. . . . Both Vedic and Christian teachings thus end up making the same curious move: first describing all morality as debt, but then, in their very manner of doing so, demonstrating that morality cannot really be reduced to debt, that it must be grounded in something else. d a v i d g r a e b e r , Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), 89 They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory. It is certain that when money clinks in the money chest, greed and avarice can be increased; but when the church intercedes, the result is in the hands of God alone. m a r t i n l u t h e r , Ninety-five Theses (1517), theses 27– 28

The Roman Jubilee and the Reformation The Jubilee continued to serve as a powerful metaphor for redemption within Jewish and Christian traditions— and not only as a textual image. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, it was brought to life in a new form. The Roman Jubilees first instituted by Boniface VIII in 1300 offered plenary indulgence, or the remission of the punishment that otherwise attached to sins, for those who journeyed to Rome, visited major churches including St. Peter’s, and performed certain other required actions, accompanied by the appropriate contrition or inward penance. Examining the history of the Roman (or “Grand”) Jubilee is instructive, for several reasons. First, it allows us to extend the demonstration of the manner in which the ritual economy is bound up with the mundane economy. The Roman Jubilee followed and coordinated with the growth of the Catholic economy of indulgences, which in itself was linked to the rise of the idea of Purgatory, which Jacques Le Goff has dated to the twelfth century.1 Payments made to the Church on behalf of oneself or another could reduce time spent in this unpleasant waiting room of heaven. The indulgence economy closely connected material payment with spiritual salvation; the Jubilees, by bringing countless thousands of pilgrims to Rome, were themselves major financial windfalls for the Holy City. Second, the Roman Jubilee allows us to reflect again from a different per-

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spective on the meaning of the Protestant Reformation and the relation of this movement to secular modernity. It is well-known that Martin Luther, at the beginning of the Reformation, singled out indulgences for special condemnation. A campaign to secure contributions for work on St. Peter’s in anticipation of the next Jubilee was one of the events that precipitated his posting of the Ninety-five Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg in October 1517. Protestants continued to publish polemics against the practices observed at Jubilees until well into the eighteenth century. Revisiting such polemics reinforces the interpretation given of these historical developments in chapter 2: Luther’s Reformation represented a critique of an economy that tried to make salvation calculable by reducing it to a quantifiable monetary payment, a matter of quid pro quo. Against such a view, Luther insisted that God’s grace could not be purchased. When Weber, exactly four centuries after the Ninety-five Theses, described the disenchantment and rationalization that are characteristic of our secular, modern world as part of a systematic drive toward predictability or calculability (Berechenbarkeit), he was describing not Luther’s doctrine of sola fide, sola gratia, but rather what superseded this with the onward progress of the Reformation. Roman Catholicism already knew— indeed, had invented— the calculability of salvation. Luther’s notion of a sovereign, unpredictable God, which rejected the premise of the indulgence, gave way in turn to deism, which reacted against the figure of such a sovereign God and the anxiety and uncertainty attached to this figure, in favor of a deity whose creation ran smoothly on its own, like clockwork. Without anticipating too much the findings of the second half of this chapter, in which the historical case of the Roman Jubilee and the Protestant reaction against it is compared to examples from other cultures, including that of the Śramana (wandering renunciant) movement in India at the end ˙ of the Vedic period (ca. 800 – 500 BCE), I want to suggest that the Roman Jubilee and its vicissitudes illustrate a general human tendency to rebel against the idea that salvation can be reckoned like a monetary purchase.2 Indeed, in some of the examples we shall see, the more nearly salvation appears to function in transactional terms— the closer it comes to resemble (or even merge with) the money economy— the stronger is the tendency to reject such a mechanism, and to declare a state of exception or holiday, a real Jubilee. While developing the ideas for this chapter, I was fortunate to come across David Graeber’s magisterial work on the history of debt, in which there is a surprising amount about religion. Graeber spends little time addressing the details of Reformation history. Although he does take up the biblical Jubilee as an important instance in which salvation was imagined as a release from

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debt,3 he never mentions the Roman Jubilee. As an Indologist, I find his discussions of classical India insufficient and try to modify them below. With his most fundamental conclusion, however, I am in complete agreement: we cannot escape the power of debt and money, which have had such a pervasive influence in human history that even those dimensions of culture thought to be most distant from such influence are not entirely beyond its orbit. Religion exists in dependence on the mundane economy: is enabled by it, is modeled on it, is even in some cases indistinguishable from it. Even and especially when religion denies the influence of the mundane economy, it only solidifies this dependence, as its very identity is shaped through opposition to that economy, as a photographic negative or ghostly image. As Graeber argues with respect to Chinese traditions: The Confucian ideal of ren, of human benevolence, was basically just a more complete inversion of profit-seeking calculation than Mo Di’s universal love; the main difference was that the Confucians added a certain aversion to calculation itself, preferring what might almost be called an art of decency. Taoists were later to take this even further with their embrace of intuition and spontaneity. All were so many attempts to provide a mirror image of market logic. Still, a mirror image is, ultimately, just that: the same thing, only backwards. Before long we end up with an endless maze of paired opposites— egoism versus altruism, profit versus charity, materialism versus idealism, calculation versus spontaneity— none of which could ever have been imagined except by someone starting out from pure, calculating, self-interested market transactions.4

When Mauss described gift economies in traditional societies as based on a form of reciprocity both anterior and superior to capitalism, he may have been engaging in a bit of wishful thinking. By disguising the obligations transferred together with the gift, by concealing or minimizing its resemblance to transactional exchange, such economies reflect an awareness, however subliminal or remote, of the moral dangers posed by debt and transactionalism. Indeed, gift economies frequently coexist with monetary or transactional economies in the same society; and when they do, it is important to keep gifts separate from purchases. As we saw in the preceding chapters, even if it is possible that some societies are truly egalitarian and classless— such as those hunter-gatherer groups that, as Testart argues, have not (yet) become sedentary storage economies— such a mode of organization arguably ceased to be achievable on any large scale since the advent of cereal agriculture, storage, and debt, all of which were well established in ancient Mesopotamia before the declaration of the first clean slate, around 2400 BCE. Since then it has been instead the idea, utopian though it may be, of a return to a condition of

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equality and of a general release from debt that has served as the model for some depictions of religious liberation: as happened in the case of the biblical Jubilee. The history of the Roman Jubilee is, as it turns out, an ironical one: a history of how something turns into its opposite, of how the promise of release from spiritual indebtedness became entangled in the real oppressions of the money economy. It is now time to tell a little of this history. In 1300 Boniface VIII issued a plenary indulgence for all those who visited Rome and performed certain acts of worship. At the time he announced the indulgence, the year was already partly over, lending the impression that this may have been a spontaneous action. Boniface did not use the word “Jubilee” to describe the event; this was used by others soon after, including Dante Alighieri, and subsequent occasions were assimilated to the biblical model.5 Clement VI declared a Jubilee for 1350, bringing it deliberately in line with the biblical Jubilee, which was supposed to occur every forty-nine or fifty years.6 Boniface IX declared two Roman Jubilees: the first in 1390, a year after assuming office, and the second in 1400. Since then a Jubilee has been held in Rome every twenty-five years, from 1425 to 2000, with the exception of 1800, when Napoleon’s invasion interfered.7 The next will take place in 2025. Such events were sometimes called “Grand Jubilees,” to distinguish them from other Jubilees or special indulgences that might be called at other times and locations in order to extend the accessibility of such indulgences to more Christians and, presumably, to increase the Church’s extraction of rents. At the opening of the Jubilee Year, the pope himself was carried to a door in St. Peter’s that had been bricked up. His Holiness would tap on the door three times with a golden hammer while calling for it to open; at this point the masonry would be broken and the way gradually made clear for him to pass through leading his retinue and a larger crowd of penitents. The door would then be sealed up again at the close of the year. This illustrated in a graphic way the exceptional nature of the Jubilee itself, as a virtual entryway into the body of the Church and into heaven. It also symbolically represented the pope’s “power of the keys,” based upon Jesus’s statement to Peter in Matthew 16:19: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” This power was regarded as having passed from Peter to the subsequent Bishops of Rome. The rapidity with which the Roman Jubilee increased in popularity and frequency mirrored the rise in popularity of the indulgence economy more generally,8 as Henry Lea emphasized: “We have seen how slow was the growth of indulgences, throughout the thirteenth century. With the fourteenth their

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development becomes accelerated gradually, and with the fifteenth their expansion continues rapidly. A leading factor in this was the invention of the jubilee, a remarkable outgrowth of the system.”9 Two theological innovations underwrote the success of this economy. The first was the invention of the idea of Purgatory in the twelfth century. The second came in the thirteenth century, with the notion that the Church possessed a treasury (thesaurus ecclesiae) of merit stored up from Christ’s saving sacrifice and the actions of the saints.10 (This was sometimes referred to as an “Inexhaustible Treasury,” using the same phrase used to refer to the T’ang Buddhist depositories described in chapter 4 above.) Given that the Passion had deposited a limitless redemptive power, it only remained for individuals to make the appropriate withdrawal from this treasury in order to secure remission for themselves. This could be done by means, among other things, of a quid pro quo payment of money. Individuals could purchase a release from punishments in this life for themselves or reduce time spent in Purgatory for their deceased loved ones. There grew up a precisely quantified price scheme according to which each amount of punishment would be remitted upon payment of a set fee.11 This economy became increasingly more specialized, with a differential price scheme that had three or even five tiers, according to which individuals with higher wealth would have to pay more to remit the same punishment.12 (This is reminiscent in some respects of the ancient Israelite allowance that the poor could offer birds rather than larger, more expensive animals as whole burnt offerings.) The whole process became so routinized and mechanical that in 1517 the pope’s legate Johann Tetzel could argue that “as soon as the money flies into the confession box, the soul flies out of Purgatory.” It was this statement that Luther rejected in his Ninety-five Theses (see the epigraph to this chapter). Benavides states that “the Protestant Reformation itself can be understood as having emerged in part as a revolt against the Roman church’s extreme rationalization of its salvific practices, involving the quantification, commodification, and marketing of merits and demerits. . . . Cultivation of one’s subjectivity clashed with spiritual accountancy.”13 Despite having praised the luxury of the Roman church as an expression of sovereignty, Bataille acknowledged Luther’s point: If the faithful’s salvation is the reward for his merits, if he can achieve it by his deeds, then he has simply brought more closely into the domain of religion the concatenation that makes useful work wretched in his eyes. Hence those deeds by which a Christian tries to win his salvation can in turn be considered profanations. . . . Through the buying of indulgences, the faithful Roman

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Catholic could even employ his resources to purchase a time in paradise. . . . The Lutheran conception was radically opposed to this.14

Following the Reformation, many Catholics also objected to the quantification of salvation. The Counter-Reformation responded by curbing some of the practices criticized by Protestants. Lea states: “Among the reforms proposed by the council of Bologna, in 1547, was one forbidding the affixing of a stated price for indulgences.”15 The sale of indulgences was prohibited in 1562 by Pius IV.16 Yet the calculability of salvation continued. Jacob Viner noted the seventeenth-century Jansenist critique of Jesuit manuals of casuistry that “were in effect guides as to how far a Christian could go without becoming liable to penitential penalties or risking salvation; a seventeenth-century cleric called them ‘peccameters.’”17 What Luther objected to most particularly was the belief that through such practices one could have assurance, even complete certainty, of salvation. See Theses 30 and 32: “No one is sure of the integrity of his own contrition, much less of having received plenary remission. . . . Those who believe they can be certain of their own salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.”18 However, such certainty is exactly what continued to be claimed by many Catholics, as we see in the following instructions accompanying a special Jubilee called in 1769: “Q. What then is the Difference betwixt a Jubilee, and any other plenary Indulgence? A. A Jubilee is more Solemn, and accompanied with certain Privileges not usually granted upon other Occasions . . . as the Cause for granting an Indulgence at such Times is usually more evident, and more or greater Works of Piety are prescrib’d for the obtaining it; so the Indulgence of Consequence is likely to be much more certain and secure.”19 It may have been technically true, as Herbert Thurston claimed, “that an Indulgence a pœna et culpa (of the penalty and the guilt) was not understood to remit the guilt of sin without confession and contrition”: the indulgence released the sinner only from the punishment (pœna), whereas only true repentance would release him from the guilt (culpa).20 However, this distinction was frequently omitted from promises made to the faithful, of whom, in any case, the understanding of such theological niceties could not be expected, particularly when the entire raison d’eˆtre of the Jubilee, and the justification of its expense for pilgrims, was premised on its efficacy. Lea therefore referred to the manner in which the indulgence economy led to “the mercantile treatment of sin and pardon . . . in which the sinner is taught that God keeps an account with him, which is to be paid, it matters little how.”21

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There emerged during the Reformation a genre of polemics against not only indulgences in general, but also Jubilees in particular. One German text published in Frankfurt in 1576 under the pseudonym “Peter Patience” (Petrus Patiens, Peter Geduld) attacked Leo X’s (1513 – 21) declaration of additional indulgences outside the time ordained for the Roman Jubilees and attributed these excesses to his fear that he would not survive until the next Jubilee in 1525: “And in the two following [i.e., initial] years of his rule, he filled all of Christendom with his Jubilee bulls and letters of indulgence.  .  .  . without regard for the fact that this was done outside of the time that had been appointed by other popes for the Jubilee.”22 These were, of course, some of the very excesses that precipitated Luther’s reaction. Herr Patience proceeded to label the Jubilee, as well as Purgatory and the practice of selling indulgences itself, as unbiblical innovations.23 An English text, printed on a single folio in the seventeenth century, used humor to attack the event. Titled The Pope’s Great Year of Jubilee, or, The Catholicks Encouragement for the Entertainment of Popery, it contained twelve stanzas, among which appeared the following: For now with you I shall be free, This is the year of Jubilee, Where all are welcome to their charge, For we our coffers shall inlarge, Good wares we proffer every day, Which you may try, before you buy, Come all away, come all away . . . Therefore all those that will repair, And come to traffick at this fare, Be sure you money with you bring, For that we count the only thing; His holiness must have they say, New cloaths most fine, against the time, Come all away, come all away . . . We have a place cal’d purgatory, Though fools do count it a vain story; In which if you be purged well, You need not fear the jaws of hell: I must confess ’tis hot they say, But money will do’t, and bring you out, Come all away, come all away . . .24

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At the beginning of the eighteenth century, an anonymous travel account of a voyage made by an Englishman across Italy, which spiced up descriptions of exotic destinations with fairly explicit accounts of the protagonist’s amorous exploits, found time to give an account of the Jubilee and also to mock the cupidity of the Roman clerics.25 A neglected aspect of these theological debates concerns the manner in which they reflected differences in conceptions of sovereignty, both papal and divine. The Roman Jubilee was a declaration of a state of exception— more specifically, a pardon, or a suspension of the laws prescribing certain punishments for sins committed— and was, as such, undertaken by a sovereign. Although satirical, Nicholas Purdon’s account of the Roman Jubilee in 1750 captured this element well: If any rational man should happen to be present at the grand festival, and the solemnity of the popish jubilee, he should see a man (whom they term, deus terrestrem: a god on earth) pompously array’d, and hem’d in by a throng of his creatures; carry’d in a magnificent manner, on the shoulders of princes and noblemen, seated on a golden throne, with a triple crown on his head, breaking open with a golden hammer, the gates of paradise, whilst the ambassadors of mighty kings and emperors, and also, the emperors, (if personally present) fall prostrate on the earth, and adore him, as if he really was a divine, powerful, incomprehensible being; and withal, a thronging multitude, kneeling around him, supplicating the remission of their sins, and eternal life, as a romish larges [largesse], and the undoubted right and prerogative of his blessed holiness, what could he suppose he was?26

Purdon answers his own question, that the pope is nothing but an insolent man, pretending to be a king, nay God himself. Purdon’s reference to the pope’s behavior at the Jubilee as an act of largesse (“larges”) reinforces this image of sovereignty. As described in chapter 4, Starobinksi connects largesse with the distribution of gifts by a sovereign or auctor, especially at the beginning of his or her reign.27 Riches or food were tossed (sparsio); sometimes caged birds were also set free. Starobinski interprets this as a gesture of authority more than of generosity. In this context, it is striking that a number of Jubilees that were called outside of the normal schedule occurred at or toward the beginning of a pope’s reign,28 echoing, in some measure, the ancient Mesopotamian debt cancellations on which the biblical Jubilee itself was based. Given that the Mesopotamian sources were long forgotten, it is more likely the classical model of largesse that the popes had in mind. One of the hallmarks of sovereignty is the condition of being literally beyond the law. Purdon attributes this quality to the pope as well, not to praise him but to condemn him as the Antichrist:

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The greek word [nomos] signifies in Latin, lex, which in our English language, is construed, the law; the letter or particle a [a-] being joined, renders it lawless; a man confin’d within the compass of no law. . . . The Pope, is such, in the superlative degree, if we may believe [those] . . . who testify, Papa est solutus legibus: the Pope is exempt from all law. Solutus est omni lege humana: the Pope is bound by no human law. Non potest judicari: he can be judged by no law. . . . Capistranus concludes with a little addition of blasphemy, apud Deum et Papam sufficit pro ratione voluntas: God and the Pope have their will for a law. . . . all which, doth but amplify, that the Pope is lawless, and therefore, Antichrist, the man of sin, and son of perdition.29

Leaving aside the vinegar of Purdon’s anti-Catholic rhetoric, he has described accurately the classical doctrine of divine right, with its potentia absoluta, or power to break and remake law, in terms that even Carl Schmitt, versed in Catholic doctrine, could endorse. The Roman Jubilee appears as a clear example of the pardon power, a particular form of the sovereign state of exception, which in this case mirrors the operation of divine grace. Like its biblical counterpart, the Roman Jubilee attempts to regularize or normalize this power, by subjecting it to a particular procedure and, above all, by conforming it to a set schedule. (The same cannot be said of those additional plenary indulgences or local Jubilees that were called at the whim of the Holy See.) When Luther objected to the pope’s exercise of this power, he was rejecting the claim that this power could be normalized in such a way, and made calculable, also in terms of a quid pro quo in which indulgences could be purchased for certain sums of money. Luther was also reaffirming that the true sovereign power of grace remained with God, and not with the pope. A spurious bull of Clement VI circulated during the Jubilee year of 1500, which was also a year of plague, commanded the angels to release from Purgatory all those pilgrims who perished en route to Rome. Commenting on this bull, Luther said: It has finally come to pass that some of them have begun to command the very angels in heaven, and to boast in incredible, mad wickedness that in these words they have obtained the right to rule in heaven and earth, and possess the power to bind even in heaven. Thus they say nothing of faith which is the salvation of the people, but babble only of the despotic power of the pontiffs, whereas Christ says nothing at all of power, but speaks only of faith. For Christ has not ordained authorities or powers or lordships in his church, but ministries.30

The choice was between acknowledging the sovereignty of God and affirming the (false) Roman doctrine of the certainty of salvation,31 a certainty

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founded upon the pope’s usurpation of God’s sovereignty. Purdon expressed this clearly: The Romanists by order, as also by the directions of the bishops of Rome, have assumed to themselves a power to correct, or cancel the ordinances of God. . . . It is the height of insolence, and arrogance in mankind, to refuse obedience to the lawful commands of his sovereign, especially when he can, and is able to enforce it at his discretion. If it be dangerous to tempt a monarch’s rage? What phrenzy, what madness must it be in a superlative degree, to fly in the face of a deity, that can in one moment reduce us to our primitive indigested chaos? but what have they to dread? their clergy have placed a barrier between them and damnation. A state of purgation is their ne plus ultra, from whence an ample donation to a clyster, a legacy to a Church, or as much ready money as is sufficient to purchase half a score masses will (if we may give credit to their heterodox preaching) infallibly transport them from thence directly into Heaven.32

To claim the “power to correct, or cancel the ordinances of God”— to declare a state of exception from the punishment otherwise prescribed by these ordinances—was to arrogate to oneself a power that remained the deity’s alone, as represented by his capacity to unmake us, just as he had made us. The debate over the propriety of the Jubilee, and of the entire indulgence economy, thus reprised earlier debates over the nature of divine and royal, including papal, sovereignty. Indeed, the debate was not over what sovereignty represented, but rather over who properly possessed it. Roman Catholics attributed sovereignty to the pope, as reflected in the power “to bind and loose.” Luther and other reformers contended that this power had not been delegated to the bishop of Rome, but remained God’s alone. The power to save or damn an individual soul would be exercised by the deity, and not by any mortal. Even this brief summary of the Reformation-era debate over the Roman Jubilee and the indulgence economy of which it constituted an important part highlights again the contradiction, discussed in chapter 2, involved in attributing to the early Reformation Weber’s definition of rationalization and disenchantment as predictability or “calculability” (Berechenbarkeit). What Luther insisted on was the incalculability of salvation. The Roman Jubilee also exposes further weaknesses in Weber’s historical account. Scholars have long noted that some forms of economic rationalization that Weber regarded as especially important for the development of capitalism had already begun under Roman Catholicism, specifically in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy.33 More than half a century ago, Kurt Samuelsson stated: “In fact, a ‘spirit of capitalism’ manifested itself in the Italian merchant cities and the

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Hanseatic League . . . long before changes of opinion about usury and other economic phenomena can even have started seriously to affect the Catholic outlook, let alone become a motivating force in practical economic conduct.”34 Some scholars have traced the beginnings of economic development even earlier, to large-scale monastic institutions, which operated not only as landowners and agricultural enterprises, but also as factories.35 If Roman Catholicism and economic rationalization were not incompatible, it is also true that not all forms of Protestantism were especially conducive to the kinds of profit-seeking activities associated with capitalism. According to Kurt Samuelsson, “Calvin reveals not the faintest trace of any conception of the ‘sanctity of labor,’ of the prospect of changing God’s decision, once made, or of obtaining knowledge of that decision through the medium of worldly success.”36 He means that, pace Weber, the idea of success in one’s occupation as a substitute sign of grace was not part of early Puritanism. Ernst Troeltsch had already argued that any impetus given by Luther’s Reformation to the economy was indirect, accidental, or even against his will.37 Theologically speaking, Arminianism and Unitarianism (and, we may add, deism), which insisted on the reasonableness of God and allowed room for the soteriological efficacy of human works, were more compatible with capitalism.38 This tallies with the fact that the Reformation appears to have had a delayed effect on economic development. As Robert Nelson notes, “It was only after the period of religious warfare eventually ended, and a new order had begun to emerge, that the way for capitalism was opened. Weber acknowledged that his evidence referred largely to economic gains achieved by capitalism in the eighteenth century and afterward. By then, Protestantism no longer meant the theology of Luther.”39 Nor that of Calvin, we may add. If the Reformation encouraged the rationalization of the economy, this may have resulted less from a direct theological inspiration and more from the withdrawal of religion from mundane affairs, which opened the way for an independent development of the economic sphere: something that appears to have happened only gradually. To be fair, Weber himself already noted some of these points. He admitted that the “capitalist spirit” cannot be found in Luther’s writings, that Luther would have repudiated this spirit, that “Puritan writings . . . that condemn the pursuit of money and material goods can be accumulated without end,” and that “certain forms of capitalist business companies are drastically older than the Reformation.”40 James Aho has argued recently for a closer historical relationship between Roman Catholic penitential practices and the rationalization of accounting practices for economic purposes. Aho emphasizes the role in this regard of

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the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which prescribed regular confession and heightened the consciousness of sin and the need for penance. He claims that the theological practices of tallying sins as debts and registering penances as payments of such debts served as a model for the rise of double-entry bookkeeping (“DEB”) for business purposes.41 In all world religions (except perhaps Protestantism?), “divine judges keep ledgers on their commandments”:42 “Far from being a product of the Calvinist spirit, DEB emerged from the culture of the high Middle Ages, when through her sacramental regulation of the total life course of the individual, Roman Catholicism dominated the European psyche as never before.”43 After 1300 there was an “epidemic of scrupulosity” that encouraged Catholics to note down their sins and bring these notes to confession so as not to omit the mention of any debt that might require repayment. Such practices translated into DEB. Aho suggests that Luther’s opposition to such practices came from a delayed reaction against his own overscrupulousness earlier in life.44 While allowing that Weber was right to note that Protestantism encouraged economic growth, Aho opines that such growth came about not from any positive encouragement given by theology, but rather from the greater degree of independence afforded to economic activity in Protestant countries.45 Hans Derks quibbles with Aho’s arguments.46 His disagreement concerns in part the definition of DEB. Settling this aspect of the debate need not concern us here. What is important is Aho’s account of the contribution made to a longue durée process of modernization by the rationalization of religion undertaken by the Roman Catholic Church in the High Middle Ages, a trend that began with the Fourth Lateran Council and that continued in a series of events, including the rise of Purgatory and the indulgence economy. This account coincides to some extent with Charles Taylor’s emphasis on the contribution of medieval developments to secularization and even with Weber’s own recognition that the medieval reform of canon law was an important event of rationalization.47 Whatever the causal relationship— direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional— between the Reformation and economic development, what cannot reasonably be doubted is that it was these efforts by the Catholic Church to make salvation calculable and quantifiable that provoked a theological backlash during the Reformation.48 As Benavides put it, “Cultivation of one’s subjectivity clashed with spiritual accountancy.” Even this comment should be given further nuance: the regularization of confession after 1215 and the impetus this provided to the indulgence economy were part of a large-scale effort to cultivate a certain form of subjectivity, one that aimed to become aware of and atone for one’s sins. This effort arguably pro-

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duced what we think of as Protestant inwardness, which eventually turned against the very legal-ritual mechanisms that had given birth to it. In a series of publications, Robert Ekelund, Robert Hébert, and Robert Tollison have presented an economic account of both the medieval indulgence economy and the subsequent Reformation that converges on the same set of facts highlighted here.49 The authors argue that the indulgence economy expanded because of the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly position as a seller of salvation goods, a position that the Church expended a great deal of effort to maintain. Under these circumstances, as well as by deploying increasingly sophisticated price schemes, the Church was able to extract more money from its customers. Luther and subsequent reformers, on this view, were trustbusters, who responded to the demand for salvation at lower costs by undercutting the Catholic Church’s monopoly: “Luther’s innovations provided an all-or-none offer of the afterlife with a still lower entry price (i.e., salvation was determined by faith alone).”50 Ekelund and his coauthors conclude that “the Protestant Reformation cannot be completely explained by its environmental setting. It should be viewed in part as the outcome of endogenous, economically inspired manipulations of Church doctrine in the centuries before the full-scale emergence of competitive religious markets.”51 There is a kind of obtuseness to such rational-choice accounts of religious developments; they are simultaneously imperialist in their attempt to apply contemporary standards of economic thinking to all ages and cultures, and naive concerning their own limitations. One scarcely knows where to begin. Initially Luther did not, of course, intend to end the Church’s monopoly, only to reform the Church from within. He did not offer salvation at a lower cost, but for no cost at all: the doctrine of sola fide, sola gratia means that salvation is not available for purchase at any price, simultaneously free and priceless. This also required not a lesser but arguably a greater effort on the part of the individual believer, namely the “cultivation of one’s subjectivity” and an intensified awareness of one’s inherent sinfulness, which could no longer be discharged through ritual performance. How, then, may we explain Luther’s economic motivations? Why was he not a “profit maximizer,” interested in filling his own coffers, like the proponents of the indulgence economy? On the contrary, Luther’s Reformation must be seen as an attempt to liberate salvation from the marketplace, especially from the kind of cost-benefit analysis that, according to Becker, Iannaccone, and Ekelund and colleagues, must be identified as the single motivation underlying every form of human behavior. That even attitudes and behaviors that announce themselves in opposition to the market are found, according to the predetermined conclusions of these theorists, to exhibit exactly the same logic as the market shows that such

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interpretations are scarcely as scientific as they claim. They are rather unfalsifiable dogmas, which, when presented with counterevidence, change the meaning of such fundamental categories as “goods,” “market,” and “calculation” in order to avoid being confronted with human behaviors that cannot be reduced to the models they expound. The argument I am presenting here is of a different nature. While acknowledging both the connection between the economy of salvation and the mundane economy, I have attempted to trace some moments in which a state of exception has been declared from the dominance of the market model. The biblical Jubilee represented such an exception, as did the Roman Jubilee made in its image, until the latter became so coopted by the market that it no longer fulfilled this role. At that point Luther declared a new state of exception, one that arguably fell in its own turn into the logic of the marketplace, into calculation and transactionalism, which was the irony that Weber attempted to explain by connecting Protestantism with capitalism. There may be no possibility of a permanent deviation from the mundane economy, but only of a temporary or symbolic escape. In terms of Victor Turner’s model, this escape is a liminal moment, a moment of antistructure that interrupts the unrelenting dominance of the structures of the everyday. Applying Weber’s own categories to movements rather than persons, we should call such exceptions “charismatic.” They represent a fundamental break in the bureaucratic routines of normal life, tantamount to miracles. Whereas Weber argued that charisma always gives way to routinization, however, I see something different: the manner in which, against the “eternal return of the same,” human beings seek a release from the routine, from the stale habitus of calculation and the oppressions of social, financial, and spiritual debt. When people imagine freedom, they see it obliquely, as an inverted mirror image of the marketplace, just as Graber concluded.

The Origins of Money and the “Axial Age” Janaka, the king of Videha, once set out to perform a sacrifice at which he intended to give lavish gifts to the officiating priests. Brahmins . . . had flocked there for the occasion, and Janaka . . . wanted to find out which of those Brahmins was the most learned in the Vedas. So he corralled a thousand cows; to the horns of each cow were tied ten pieces of gold. He then addressed those Brahmins: “Distinguished Brahmins! Let the most learned man among you drive away those cows.” . . . Ya¯jñavalkya . . . drove them away. The Brahmins were furious and murmured: “How dare he claim to be the most learned?” . . . Ya¯jñavalkya replied: “We bow humbly to the most learned man! But we are really after the cows, aren’t we?” b r h a d  r a n y a k a u p a n i s a d , 3.1.1– 2 ˙ ˙ ˙

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From the Protestant perspective, the indulgence economy, including the Roman Jubilee, had inappropriately tied salvation to the money economy. What the popes did, however, was simply a more extreme version of what people had been doing for ages: ritual exchange had long been connected to money, potentially going all the way back to the origins of money as a medium of exchange, measure of worth, and store of value. When Mauss drew a sharp contrast between capitalist transactionalism and ritual gift exchange, in order to present the latter as a morally superior alternative to the former, he ignored the many points of interconnection between these two types of exchange.52 Like monetary transactions, ritual exchanges express obligations or debts, as Mauss told us; they often involve the circulation of highly valued objects, which in some cases possess certain attributes of money; and they are compatible with a class hierarchy or system of social stratification. Moreover, economies of ritual exchange among members of a community can coexist with money economies or other systems that provide for anonymous, onetime transactions among strangers. Indeed, there are a number of indications that money originated in the context of ritual exchange and that reflection on money and/or debt contributed to movements of critical thinking that influenced the development of several major religious traditions. Such indications qualify the sharp distinction that some would wish to draw between ritual and transactional economies. Let’s start with the evidence that connects the birth of money with ritual exchange. Nearly a century ago, in a classic work called Heiliges Geld (Holy Money) (1924), Bernhard Laum pointed out that in the earliest Greek sources, such as Homer, oxen served as a standard of valuation of other goods.53 (Cattle served similar roles also beyond Greece.54) Literary references to valuations in oxen did not suggest that people were constantly trading oxen, the way that they currently exchange money. Oxen were too cumbersome to serve as a regular medium of exchange and thus did not satisfy all of the characteristics of modern money. Rather, oxen served as a measure of worth. They were certainly very valuable. Their primary use, apart from as draft animals, was in sacrifice. Laum hypothesized that early valuations in terms of oxen may have had some reference to their role in sacrifice. Significant support for this argument was afforded by the fact that the earliest coins were named obelos (or obolos) and drachma. Obelos was the word for a spit or skewer on which the meat of the sacrifice was roasted.55 Drachma meant a “hand” or bundle of six such skewers. Archaeological evidence supports Laum’s thesis of the emergence of money from sacrifice.56 Actual iron spits, sometimes bundled or melted together, twisted, or otherwise transformed— even apparently replaced by an

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equivalent weight of iron, so as to lose their functional value for cooking but not their symbolic value as money— have been identified in excavations of Greek tombs and sanctuaries. Richard Seaford concludes that this additional evidence makes it “almost certain” that sacrificial spits played a role in the development of money.57 He argues further that “communal sacrificial distribution was a precondition for the emergence of the communal confidence in abstract monetary value embodied in the rapid development of coinage.”58 The connection between money and sacrifice should perhaps not come as a great surprise. The ancient Greek temple was a site for some of the first major public works, including the large expenditures involved in communal sacrifice. Temples stored precious metals that were obtained by taxes levied on the public to support these civic works.59 The same appears to have been true in ancient Mesopotamia. In Sumeria temples functioned as banks, industrial operations, and distribution centers.60 They stored vast quantities of silver, which only occasionally circulated in raw form, while serving as countinghouses for the tallying and reconciliation of debts. The view of temples as centers of economic activity suggests a natural, organic explanation for the evolution of money from sacrifice. Laum’s brilliant argument, which concluded with a reference to Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis, developed further his predecessor’s insight that the economy is connected to other domains of life, including religion, that appear to have nothing to do with money and trade.61 Whereas Weber had addressed religious factors in the secularization of the economy, Laum described what we might call the original form of secularization, namely the creation of an economic domain, concretized in the form of coin money, separate from that of religious sacrifice. He concluded with a pointed call to end the “isolating theory” (isolierende Theorie) that, in the name of an ahistorical and positivist science, would segregate economics from the other human sciences. Some have asserted a deep ontological connection between religion and debt or money. Graeber describes a French school of “primordial-debt theorists” who argue that debt and sin are metaphysically related.62 The connection between these two categories is suggested by the fact that in some languages, the same word extends to both meanings, as with German Schuld, which means both “debt” and “[moral] guilt.” Sins have often been regarded as analogous to debts in that they require repayment, either through suffering or through the payment of money. Although in English there are different terms for “debt” and “sin,” both are discharged through “redemption.” We have seen already how, in the case of the biblical Jubilee, the originally literal reference of this institution to a redemption of monetary debts was extended over time, especially by Christians, into the notion of a general salvation

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brought about by a divine Redeemer. Another example of the convergence of these two concepts occurred in the eleventh century with Anselm of Canterbury’s argument that Christ, through his sacrifice, paid in full the debt of sin inherited from Adam.63 Anselm’s rather literal or materialist interpretation of the Crucifixion has been condemned by some as depending on a feudal notion of blood debt or Wergild, the practice of paying money as a penalty for a homicide. Yet the analogy between the discharge of sins, especially through sacrifice, and the repayment of a monetary debt has been widespread, outside of Christianity as well. Graeber’s primordial-debt theorists cite the example of ancient Vedic sacrifice, which texts such as the Brāhmanas (ca. 1000 – 800 BCE) frequently de˙ scribe as the repayment of a debt (r.n.a). Charles Malamoud, a French Indologist upon whom these primordial-debt theorists rely, argued already more than thirty-five years ago in a well-known article on the theology of debt in Brahmanical Hinduism that the vocabulary of Vedic sacrifice is suffused with such metaphors, and that the entirety of life is often presented in these texts as a cycle of debt and repayment.64 Malamoud quoted the Taittirīya-Samhitā: ˙ During birth, the Brahman who is born is charged with three debts: the debt of Vedic study owed to the seers (rsi), that of sacrifice to the gods, and that ˙˙ of procreation to the fathers. He is liberated from debt who has a son, who sacrifices, and who has lived the life of a Vedic student.65

Malamoud calls it “remarkable” that religious and material debts are viewed as identical.66 To the contrary, as we have seen in some other contexts, it appears that this convergence is entirely natural, being suggested first by the real coincidence of ritual exchange and the creation of social obligations or debts, and second by the connection between sacrifice and the rise of money. Revisiting these issues a few decades later, Malamoud concluded that, although Vedic society did not know money, it knew gold, silver, and cows, which acted as a kind of proto-money. In the story from the Brhadāranyaka ˙ ˙ Upanisad quoted in the epigraph to this section, Ya¯jñavalkya, the quintes˙ sential early Upanisadic sage, asserts his superior wisdom by claiming (in ˙ advance!) the cows and gold as the prize of a debate or wisdom contest, which he subsequently wins. Malamoud summarized the perspective of such texts: If the question of money remains without a clear answer . . . it is certain, on the other hand, that economic transactions are frequently mentioned, and that these are really thought within the framework of the omnipresent sacrificial system: purchase, sale, borrowing, provisions of services, remunerations, all of this is known and is the object of a discourse that is direct as well as metaphorical.67

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The situation sounds rather like that in ancient Greece, where, as we have seen, money appears to have evolved only gradually from an earlier system in which sacrifice was the dominant matrix for social exchange. This is supported in the Vedic case by the fact that one’s debts as a male Brahmin involved producing a son, who alone is entitled to perform the sacrifices that, in turn, both discharge one’s obligations to the gods and improve one’s own lot in the next world. As some of the texts suggest, ancestor worship may have been the original purpose of the sacrifice, which therefore perpetuates the cycle of social exchange not only intergenerationally, but even beyond this present existence. Much later, the Laws of Manu (ca. 100 CE) even derive the word for son—putra— from this function: by offering the necessary sacrifices, he saves (trāyate) one’s soul from the hell called Put.68 While such cosmological views make the sacrifice into something like Mauss’s “total prestation”— a form of exchange that, unlike simple monetary transactions, involves an entire social network of reciprocity— sacrifice also can be of direct material benefit in the here and now. Normally a sacrifice (yajña) was performed on behalf of, and for the benefit of, a sacrifiant (yajamāna)  or patron by a number of Brahmin priests. In the case of the solemn sacrifice described by Malamoud, there were four principal priests, each of whom had three attendants, making a total of sixteen officiants. The payment for their services was not an incidental but an integral part of the sacrifice and therefore took place during and within the sacrifice itself. Without such payment, “the sacrifice would be incomplete and without any validity.”69 The suggestion here is not that there is a perfect coincidence between sacrifice and the mundane economy— to put it crudely, that religion is all about money. The relationship is rather one of complementarity and convergence, which was closer prior to the origins of a distinct money economy. One doubts that any society ever managed or even desired to subject all modes of exchange, no matter how mundane or personal, to the formal conventions of public ritual. And yet we see that there has often existed a high level of coordination between the mundane economy and its ritual expressions. In particular, ritual exchange may reflect and guide the social order that exists outside of ritual by creating, reinforcing, or moderating relationships of patronage, hierarchy, and subordination. Modes of ritual exchange— such as the precise division of meat during a sacrificial meal— may mirror the divisions of labor and wealth that exist generally in a society, which are inherently unequal in any poststorage society; or they may suspend such divisions by expressing an egalitarianism that can exist only in a temporary solidarity. Ritual exchange can be what Clifford Geertz said religion is, a “model of ” and a “model for”

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social behavior.70 For any society that seeks to base itself in some sense upon the principle of altruism or solidarity, such ritual occasions are highly important, as Durkheim argued and Mauss demonstrated more concretely in his study of the gift. The relationship between the mundane economy and ritual parallels that between the “real” and the “ideal.” Christian Wells and Patricia McAnany attempt to capture this with the concept of a “ritual economy”: “A ritual economy framework can be used to decipher the complex structure of decision making as cultural agents attempt— consciously and unconsciously— to bridge the divide between the social and material conditions of everyday life (how the world works) and idealized conditions (how the world should work).”71 Drawing on the work of Roy Rappaport, they show how ritual can play the role of a homeostatic regulating mechanism, guiding and smoothing out the processes of production in the mundane economy. As a form of reflection on social order and its vicissitudes, which is inherently deliberative— fulfilling the ostensible etymology of religion as relegio, “to go over again”— ritual is separated from ordinary conduct through a conscious delimitation of its spheres and a high degree of formalization of its procedures. This underwrites the role that ritual speculation has played historically in the development of critical modes of thinking. In the case of ancient India, what we call philosophy begins with reflection on the meaning of the sacrifice. The first chapter of the Brhadāranyaka Upanisad reinterprets ˙ ˙ ˙ the horse sacrifice (aśvamedha) in metaphorical terms: each part of the dismembered horse is equated with a different part of the world; the sum of equations or identities (bandhu) amounts to a cosmology, which also represents the world in metaphysical terms, a process displayed earlier in the cosmogony of the Purusa Sūkta (Rig Veda 10.90), where the dismembered ˙ victim is a human being. Significantly, this metaphorical procedure is also based fundamentally on exchange: the horse’s eyes “stand for” the sun and moon, and so on. As this process of metaphorization proceeds, it comes to replace the physical procedures of ritual exchange, or the performance of the sacrifice itself. The decline of Vedic sacrifice, as Stephanie Jamison emphasizes, occurred more gradually than is often thought to be the case.72 Statements in the Upanisads recommending the “internal fire sacrifice” (anta˙ ram agnihotram) or “fire sacrifice of breath” (prānāgnihotram) did not mean ˙ that the actual performance of the sacrifice was abandoned forthwith. The Upanisadic refrain that only “one who knows thus” (ya evam veda), that only ˙ ˙ a person who understands the real meaning of the sacrifice will receive the benefit from its performance, did not lead immediately to the conclusion that such knowledge, without practice, is sufficient in itself. However, such a shift of perspective appears to have led eventually, if not to the cancellation of the

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sacrifice, at least to the elaboration of a spiritual path, called in the Bhagavad Gītā the “path of knowledge” (jñānayoga), relatively independent of such forms of ritual praxis. If, as Malamoud contended, Vedic sacrifice, as theorized prior to the Upanisads (ca. 500 BCE) in those texts known as the Brāhmanas (ca. 1000 – ˙ ˙ 800 BCE), represented to a significant extent a meditation on debt— as we should say, on the mechanisms of exchange that in any society are crucial to both material survival and communal solidarity— something similar may have happened also in ancient Greece. Richard Seaford, who, as we saw earlier, endorses Laum’s thesis that money originated in Greek sacrifice, credits money in turn with precipitating the rise of philosophical speculation: “The communal transcendence of monetary value, its embodiment— derived from sacrificial distribution— of the long-term order, underlies its unconscious projection onto the heart of the cosmic order in presocratic metaphysics.”73 Money enabled abstract thinking, as it required a notion of value that was separated from specific objects and could become standardized as a unit of exchange and represented concretely in a token, such as a coin. Money also facilitated rational calculation, by enabling the quantification of items, their addition, subtraction, and substitution according to a common numerical scale. Seaford’s argument here seems plausible, yet far from proven. Among the entire range of activities that are said to have potentially given rise to Greek philosophy, including alphabetic writing, geometry, architecture, political debate, and so on— all of which were initially pragmatic rather than speculative endeavors74— monetary exchange is only one claimant. Moreover, as we have already seen, sacrifice, whether on its own or by giving rise to money, appears to have an equal claim as the parent of philosophy, as long as we add ancient India in the mix. Seaford, however, has no interest in extending his argument, or the term “philosophy” itself, to other cultures; he aims rather to provide an account of the “Greek miracle” as a singular exception in the history of thought and accordingly argues that Egypt and the early Near East lacked proper money, or the preconditions for speculative thought.75 We cannot therefore accept his argument without modification as suitable for a comparative historical approach to the rise of critique. Graeber, on the other hand, offers precisely such a comparative historical approach, by connecting the invention of money with the rise of movements of critique that shaped the beginnings of a number of religious traditions at a time that has been referred to as the “Axial Age.”76 This term was used originally by Karl Jaspers to describe the relatively contemporaneous appearance of Pythagoras, the Buddha, Confucius, and the ancient Israelite

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prophets.77 Despite major problems with Jaspers’s concept— some of which I have detailed on a previous occasion78— it has experienced something of a resurgence in recent years in the sociology of religion. Graeber himself embraces the term and produces an innovative explanation for this apparent historical convergence. He contends that “the core period of Jaspers’s Axial Age . . . corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented.”79 Although he relies in part on Seaford,80 Graeber does not draw a straight line between money and abstract thinking. He claims instead that the rise of money coincided with a series of economic and political transformations in which money became both the means and the end of empires of conquest. New imperial formations required coinage to pay mercenaries. The old reciprocal debt mechanisms worked only in close communities and could not be used to pay vast armies of strangers who lacked mutual trust. What to do? Send the mercenaries to plunder stores of precious metals, then pay them in turn with coins minted from these metals. Graeber argues that slavery was also essential to this military-monetary complex. All in all, his Axial Age sounds like a very nasty era. Like all such versions of the Axial Age thesis, Graeber’s suffers from a lack of clarity concerning what all of the various movements involved are supposed to have had in common. At one point he defines this as “a certain habit of rational calculation. . . . Cash transactions . . . allowed human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation,” similar to astronomy.81 Criticism is just abstraction. This sounds very much like Seaford’s thesis. On the other hand, Graeber also identifies the Axial Age with those forms of thought that arose as reactions against reducing human beings to numbers— to mercenaries, slaves, or dollar signs; or with peace movements, which rejected the militarism that supposedly characterized this period.82 Despite the contradictions involved in this account, one insight in particular appears to be worth saving. Graeber states that “the strongest impulse is to imagine another world where debt— and with it, all other worldly connections— can be entirely annihilated, where social attachments are seen as forms of bondage, just as the body is a prison.”83 This refocuses our attention on movements of renunciation, often associated with negative appraisals of mundane life, such as we find in ancient Greek Orphism or the Śramana movement in India. I propose now to revisit the moment in ancient ˙ India in which the entire mechanism of sacrificial exchange was relativized or outright rejected, in which the model of social and cosmological order based on a cycle of debts or quid pro quo payments itself came under severe critique. It is this specific development, rather than the more vague concept

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of “abstraction,” that both distinguishes Indic movements of renunciation and potentially links them to other important historical moments, such as the Reformation. Graeber alludes to this development when he states that some ambitious Brahmins began telling their clients that sacrificial ritual, if done correctly, promised a way to break out of the human condition entirely and achieve eternity (since, in the face of eternity, all debts become meaningless). . . . Perhaps what the authors of the Brahmanas were really demonstrating was that, in the final analysis, our relation with the cosmos is ultimately nothing like a commercial transaction, nor could it be.84

Actually, this development did not occur in the Brāhman.as, but in those somewhat later texts called the Upanisads that broke, in some respects, with ˙ the earlier ethos of sacrifice and debt. As described above, while continuing the Brāhman.as’ pattern of speculation on the true meaning of the sacrifice, the Upanisads began a gradual process of marginalization of the external ˙ practice of the sacrifice. More importantly, the entire mechanism of sacrificial exchange was relativized through the articulation of a new goal: liberation, which supposedly could not be obtained by means of ritual offerings. This goal was expressed through the notion of the two paths by which the souls of the dead proceed, as described in the Br.hadāran.yaka Upanisad: ˙ He remains alive for as long as he lives, and when he finally dies, they offer him in the fire. . . . The people who know this, and the people there in the wilderness who venerate truth as faith— they pass into the flame, from the flame into the day, from the day into the fortnight of the waxing moon, from the fortnight of the waxing moon into the six months when the sun moves north, from these months into the world of the gods, from the world of the gods into the sun, and from the sun into the region of lightning. A person consisting of mind comes to the regions of lightning and leads him to the worlds of brahman. These exalted people live in those worlds of brahman for the longest time. They do not return. The people who win heavenly worlds, on the other hand, by offering sacrifices, by giving gifts, and by performing austerities— they pass into the smoke, from the smoke into the night, from the night into the fortnight of the waning moon, from the fortnight of the waning moon into the six months when the sun moves south, from these months into the world of the fathers, and from the world of the fathers into the moon. Reaching the moon they become food. Then, the gods feed on them, as they tell King Soma, the moon: “Increase! Decrease! When that ends, they pass into this very sky, from the sky into the wind, from the wind into the rain, and from the rain into the earth. Reaching the earth, they become food. They are again offered in the fire of man and then take birth in the fire of woman. Rising up once again to the heavenly worlds, they circle around in the same way.

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Those who do not know these two paths, however, become worms, insects, or snakes.85

The text makes clear which of these two (actually three) paths is preferable. The path to the gods is associated with the sun, unchangeability, and the permanence of Brahman, the absolute; that to the fathers, with the moon, changeability, and a return to the cycle of earthly existence. The Chāndogya Upanisad has a similar account of the two paths, in which those who wor˙ ship thinking that “gift-giving is offering to gods and to priests” return to earth after they die, and are reborn in accordance with their worldly actions:86 “People here whose behavior is pleasant can expect to enter a pleasant womb, like that of a woman of the Brahmin, the Ksatriya, or the Vaiśya class. But ˙ people of foul behavior can expect to enter a foul womb, like that of a dog, a pig, or an outcaste woman.”87 This is one of the first statements of the law of karma, the idea that “a man turns into something good by good action and into something bad by bad action.”88 The law of karma governs the process of rebirth for those who have not yet learned to travel the path that leads to nonreturn into the world, the path later called moksa by Hindus and nirvāna by Buddhists. The economy of retri˙ ˙ bution and reward was modeled on sacrifice itself: karma is a word that refers paradigmatically to ritual action and, by extension, to all action in its ethical dimensions. The same word can be used two millennia later to denote the six magical rites (satkarmāni) in Hindu Tantric tradition. The original quid pro ˙ ˙ ˙ quo was the gift exchange represented by sacrifice, in which the gods were expected to reciprocate by granting benefits. Those who are trapped within this sacrificial economy still experience karma, even if their actions are good; thus people who worship thinking that “gift giving is offerings to gods and priests” are destined for rebirth.89 Such ideas led to a gradual relativizing of Vedic sacrifice and an internalization of sacrificial practices as yoga. The idea of karma was arguably nothing other than an abstract restatement and generalization of the principle of reciprocity or quid pro quo on which the sacrifice was based. We see how travel on one of the two paths is preceded by the death and offering of a human being in the fire. Offering in the fire is the sacrificial method par excellence. Only those who can imagine sacrifice without reciprocity and retribution can avoid returning over and over again. Half a millennium or so later, the Bhagavad Gītā describes the two paths in similar terms, and concludes: In the Vedas, in acts of worship, and in austerities, In alms-gifts, what fruit of merit is ordained, All that surpasses he who knows this [higher truth], The man of discipline, and goes to the highest primal place.90

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It is striking that some of the first explicit statements of the iron law of karma should occur in those very same passages in which an escape clause from this law is also announced. It appears as if the idea of such a cosmic mechanism may have led, by way of counterreaction, to the imagination of a state of exception from the same. Indeed, the condition of being beyond the law of karma is defined apophatically, or through negation, in opposition to the cycle of death and rebirth that represents, simultaneously, the cycle of indebtedness and repayment that is sustained and expressed through the sacrifice. It is “neither this nor that” (neti, neti).91 The Buddha famously refused to say whether a person who had achieved nirvāna continued to exist.92 ˙ Scholars have long sought to account for the peculiarity of these Indic ideas, which are shared in slightly different forms by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. One partial explanation is the rise of the Śramana movement around ˙ 500 BCE, a movement that gave birth to Buddhism and Jainism, and that transformed Vedic and Brahmanical religion into what we think of as Hinduism. The Śramanas were wandering renunciants who practiced austerities ˙ in the hope of liberating themselves from this world. Their character is amply demonstrated by the episode in the Buddha’s life story after he has left his luxurious existence as a prince in his father’s palace and taken up with a band of five ascetics. He nearly starves to death before finding a “Middle Way” between sensual life and extreme asceticism. The Śramana movement, ˙ broadly speaking, represented a heterodox impulse from the standpoint of orthodox Brahmanical religion: it marginalized or rejected the practice of sacrifice, at least as a means to liberation; it embraced a nascent ethic of noninjury (ahimsā) of living creatures; and it counseled renunciation of fam˙ ily and sexual life. All of these worldly activities were seen as perpetuating one’s entanglement in samsāra, or the round of death and rebirth. Given its ˙ radicalism and heterodoxy, the Śramana movement has sometimes been re˙ garded as a product of surviving non-Indo-European traditions.93 That the Śramana movement also relativized the Vedic caste hierarchy, as developed, ˙ for example, in Rig Veda 10.90, appears to support this view. Another explanation for the rise of renunciation in ancient India is the so-called urbanization hypothesis. The Śramana movement appears to have ˙ occurred around the same time as the development of larger cities in the Ganges River valley.94 Patrick Olivelle argues that this era was one of “radical social and economic changes,” including the rise of urbanization and of centralized kingdoms with extensive travel networks: It is doubtful whether the new religious ideologies and modes of life both within and outside the Brahmanical tradition, ideologies that presented seri-

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ous challenges to the vedic theology . . . could have risen without these socioeconomic changes.  .  .  . The facility of travel that enabled religious mendicants to travel freely over a large region and to disseminate new ideas and customs also permitted a merchant class to flourish. Archeological evidence supports the growth of trade and the development of trade networks during this period. . . . Cities, kings, and the merchant class contributed to the rise of individualism, a factor of great significance for [asceticism]. . . . Such nonconformity and voluntarism are less likely to appear within village communities, and the institutionalization of non-conformist modes of life in mendicant orders was certainly facilitated by the new urban environment. Food surplus, which is at the heart of city life, also made possible the rise of these economically unproductive organizations which were maintained by the surplus and generosity of the population.95

There is additional evidence that economic development associated with urbanization may have served as a stimulus for the renunciation movement. The early Buddhist movement was associated closely with the merchant classes that emerged in the new urban economies.96 Olivelle suggests further that the first coins may have been in use by the fifth century BCE, around the time the Śramana movement started.97 This coincides with Graeber’s argu˙ ment that “sometime between 500 and 400 BC . . . in India appears to have been just around the time that a commercial economy, and institutions like coined money and interest-bearing loans were beginning to become features of everyday life.”98 Is it possible that renunciation arose as a reaction to the development of money and market economies? At the least, as Olivelle notes, the development of an economic surplus appears to have been a precondition for the rise of these ascetic movements, which paradoxically depended on the very economies from which they offered liberation, by validating alternatives to a life of production and procreation. It is always speculative to connect movements of thought with events in material history. However, in this case, we have not only the historical context emphasized by the urbanization hypothesis, but also the textual evidence that links the idea of liberation to a rejection of sacrificial exchange. Once again, we see that it is not sacrifice or ritual gift giving that forms the antipode to an economy of money, markets, and transactionalism. The Śramana ˙ movement opposed itself to all of these economies, both the ritual and the mundane (to the extent that these were even distinguishable), by positing the utopian vision of a life that was beyond all economism, a mode of existence that could not be purchased. Once an individual has been liberated in this way, he is free from the consequences of his actions. “This immense, unborn self is none other than the

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one consisting of perception here among the vital functions. There, in the space within the heart, he lies— the controller of all, the lord of all, the ruler of all! He does not become more by good actions or in any way less by bad actions.”99 Karma, imagined as a substance that clings to the body of an individual, now simply slides off him. “When someone knows it bad actions do not stick to him, just as water does not stick to a lotus leaf.”100 He may even associate with thieves, drunkards, fornicators, and the killers of Brahmins without being tainted.101 This knowledge liberates even the “worst sinner.”102 In short, such an individual becomes a sovereign, with all the attributes that attach to that figure.103 The reference to him as a “lord” (īśāna) and “ruler” (adhipati ) only makes explicit what he shares with gods and other sovereigns, namely the quality of being beyond good and evil. It is a commonplace in the study of Hinduism that such antinomian ideas belong to a later, degenerate phase of the tradition associated with Tantra. This is incorrect, for we see that similar ideas were articulated at the beginning of the phase of development that introduced the ideas of karma and liberation, that is to say, at the very beginnings of classical Hinduism. The Upanisads and the broader Śramana movement represented a mo˙ ˙ ment of opposition to the transactionalism of the ritual economy. A similar displacement of a preexisting ritual economy occurred in (at least) two moments in the development of Western traditions: at the beginning of Christianity and during the Protestant Reformation. The Apostle Paul’s distinction between the Gospel of “grace” (charis) and Mosaic “law” (nomos), combined with his assertion that the Gospel had abolished the rituals that separated Jew from Greek, relativized or even discarded the distinction between insider and outsider, pure and impure.104 This was the basis for later antinomian tendencies in Christianity. Early Christians also rejected the Mosaic practice of sacrifice.105 Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice on the Cross supposedly ended the cycle of retribution associated with the “old law.” During the Reformation, the Protestant valorization of grace over works, which reinterpreted Paul’s earlier distinction, affirmed the notion that salvation lay beyond the ritual economy and its laws. As we have seen, Luther objected to the mechanization of the sacraments and to the calculus of indulgences and other routinized techniques of salvation that had reached a high point on the eve of the Reformation. The Puritan doctrine of predestination insisted on the uncertainty of salvation. Although far from the Upanisadic ˙ idea that liberation could be ascertained through esoteric knowledge, these Protestant soteriologies did resemble the Upanisads in other ways, specifi˙ cally by rejecting or relativizing external ritual performances. This similarity holds despite other fundamental differences: for example, the fact that, in

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Luther’s Reformation, all of the sovereignty is given over to the deity, who remains unique and incomprehensible; while in the Upanisads, such sover˙ eignty is attributed to the renunciant him- or herself, as reinforced also by the identification of the individual self or Ātman with the universal Brahman. Each of these cases (ancient India, early Christianity, and the Protestant Reformation) witnessed a certain leveling of social hierarchy associated with minimizing the distinction between pure and impure. In ancient India the distinctions among castes— including Brahmins and Ksatriyas— were rela˙ tivized; in early Christianity the ritual separation between Jew and Greek was abolished (Gal. 3:28); and during the Protestant Reformation the distinction between priesthood and laity decreased. These were moments, and movements, of what Turner called communitas. Some of these tendencies in Christianity have influenced what we call secularism. Thus, Weber argued that Paul’s idea that the Gospel was universal was the birth of the Western notion of citizenship, and that the abolition of ritual separation enabled the rationalization of the modern economy.106 In our secular polity, this universalism has proceeded in tandem with the relegation of ritual and religious particularity to the private sphere, or even to the inner conscience of the individual. Both of these parallel dynamics— universalization and privatization/ spiritualization— can be interpreted as forms of transcendence. There was no “Axial Age” or single historical moment in which this happened. Moreover, even in those cases that are thought to be most characteristic of the “Axial,” elements of earlier social systems are conserved and incorporated. The economy and declarations of exception from this economy exist in a symbiotic, dynamic relationship. We have noted the curious fact that, in ancient India, the concept of karma first appeared at the same time, and in the very same texts, as the idea of a liberation from karma. We can speculate that it was the vision of a deterministic, cosmic law of retribution that appears to have led, by way of compensation, to the hope of an escape from this same law. In the Reformation case, as well, it appears that the increasing rationalization of the Catholic sacramental economy of salvation precipitated, as a counterreaction, the Protestant emphasis on grace and predestination. As the case studies in this chapter have shown, the stronger contrast is not, as Mauss thought, between ritual exchange and a money economy, but rather between all such forms of exchange, in which sacrifice, debt, and money mix promiscuously, and the rejection of exchange, which aims at a condition altogether beyond economism, rational calculation, and the limitations and dependencies (material, social, and spiritual) that are indissolubly linked to exchange. This condition of independence or (as Bataille called it)

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“insubordination” is at the same time a declaration of a state of exception from the mundane order. Despite their countercultural tendencies, ascetic movements represent not only expressions of individualism, but also commentaries on polity. Asceticism in its own way expresses the need for an exit that, by way of compensation, justifies the limitations of the social order.

Conclusion

Exit Signs

The history of religions sketched above shows that human beings aim at something more than reason and legality alone. They also aim for the security of a strong foundation; for the affective commitment signaled by sacrifice; for a justice that transcends legality; for the possibility of grace, pardon, or redemption, even though this may be unearned; and, when all else fails, for an escape. Depictions of an antinomian sovereign, or of a return to the chaos of foundations, have played a key role in establishing the legitimacy of polity, as well as in pointing the way toward a release from the compromises involved in living together as members of a society, even if this is expressed in the form of a yearning for more communitas. We must acknowledge the existence of something wild— something untamed and spontaneous— in human nature. This something is what we call the sacred, although a better name for it might be sovereignty. It is a question not of endorsing this quality, but of facing up to it. Doing so, of course, raises new problems, particularly ethical ones. Granting that legality alone is not sufficient for sovereignty appears to return us to Schmitt’s argument for dictatorship, or to Hobbes’s Quis judicabit? (Who decides?). Accepting that violence may be a necessary attribute of sovereignty does not suggest any means of constraining this violence. Against accounts, such as Otto’s, that depict the sacred as ambivalent, the common complaint is that they aestheticize the sacred by separating it from its ethical dimension. However, the question of whether the sacred, or the sovereign, is antinomian must be answered on the basis of empirical (anthropological and historical) study, and not through a priori considerations, still less by consulting our own hopes and fears. Our secular polity has postponed a reckoning with these antinomian im-

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pulses, at the same time as it has exacerbated the underlying tension that demands such a reckoning, by subordinating ever-greater domains of social experience to the calculability of laws and markets. Weber’s perceptive diagnosis of this tendency as the chief characteristic of modern rationality paralleled his account of “disenchantment” and its associated discontents. Yet he failed to recognize that the choice for calculability— for security and certainty— was after all a choice, albeit one conditioned by our inheritance of the winning side of a theological debate that had endured for centuries and does so still. This debate has been marked by an oscillation between two diametrically opposed poles, which he named “charisma” and “law.” The question is how to escape this dilemma, to reconcile these qualities, to soothe the tension between them, so that it can be expressed productively, rather than destructively. If every economy appears bound to contain its moments of antinomianism, of return to primal chaos, then the ethical question becomes one of how to direct such moments: a matter of compartmentalization, canalization, and control. Some older models of polity attempted to do precisely this by granting temporary license on festival occasions or telling stories of violent origins, which relegated such mayhem to the past while also channeling it in a more ethical direction, as in the Binding of Isaac. The history of religions suggests potential solutions to the problem of violence that it has itself revealed, without predetermining which solution might be adopted. Even my own retelling of violent origins can be interpreted as an attempt at catharsis of the horror sacer. The Jubilees— both biblical and Roman— further highlighted the ethical potential of sovereignty, the antinomianism of which is not limited to violence but includes also grace or the power to pardon. The positive side of sovereign rule breaking may be inextricably linked to its negative side; it is at least difficult to imagine one without the other. Sovereignty serves ethical goals when it is exercised in the service of combating inequality, as in the case of the biblical Jubilee, which temporarily returned the people to a state of nature as a means of restoring their property and liberty. The ancient Saturnalia and Kronia, like similar festivals, mitigated the evils of social stratification by granting at least a temporary and symbolic right to lower classes. Even individual acts of asceticism, when declaring the sovereign independence of an empire of one, served the goal of freedom. Various forms of sacrifice, as well as of the refusal to engage in economic conduct, protested against the sins of transactionalism, of reducing questions of value to purely monetary terms. The history of religions reveals that our modern, secular dispensation is only one alternative among many that might be adopted. Although Schmitt

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argued that sovereignty necessarily reposes in a singular figure, modeled on Hobbes’s Leviathan, as well as on the biblical God, various other, particularly festival moments depicted the possibility of a return of sovereignty to the popular collective. This dimension was captured by Proudhon’s reading of the Sabbath and Jubilee, as well as by some scholars of Carnival and similar “rituals of rebellion.” However, these moments remain, at least most of the time, fictive. The choice is not only between law and chaos, between dictatorship and popular sovereignty, but also between revolution and utopianism. At least we should try to make an informed choice. In recent decades, the history of religions has largely been displaced, even as concerns the study of religion, in favor of other approaches closer to the positivistic social sciences. Under the banner of relevance, in the declared interest of overcoming antiquarianism in order to produce some knowledge that might be useful for life, there has been a wholesale, progressive, and relentless turn toward the study of contemporary phenomena. The academy being conservative, there still remain some corners where philological and historical studies are carried out. Yet the center of gravity of the study of religion has shifted elsewhere. Partly this is the fault of the history of religions itself, for not having demonstrated its own relevance. This failure is, as I believe to have shown in the present work, remediable. The same is not true of the presentist approaches that now dominate. Instead of offering a different account of the history of religions— of the data or archive that is the sine qua non of the discipline, and indeed of the humanities as a whole, understood as the study of literary and historical traditions—they choose to ignore the data. This repeats the earlier move of the Enlightenment to close the door to the past. Such a move is not, as it is often styled, critical, but instead actually disables critique, if the target of such is, as it ought to be, our contemporary system. In the end, the goal of a history of religions that has advanced beyond antiquarianism must be the understanding of human nature, and of the present as a function of that nature. A relentless focus on modernity will never achieve sufficient distance from the present to reflect productively upon it. It will remain trapped in solipsism, in a form of circular reasoning. This is especially true when it comes to our contemporary economic and political systems. The history of religions provided above has outlined a stark contrast with these systems by tracing alternatives to bureaucratic legalism and bourgeois capitalism. Rather than extend the imperialism of contemporary ideologies, such as rational-choice theories, it has directly confronted these ideologies by providing counterexamples that, at the very least, show that these ideologies are neither comprehensive as explanatory models nor

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inevitable as societal choices. The most direct value of such historical studies, as a form of liberal art, subsists in the contribution they make to freeing our thought from the confines of modernity. Indeed, the goal of this book has been to reread the historical archive so as to reveal that what we call religion is an anamorphosis, a distorted image that can be seen properly only from a particular perspective, from which it reveals its true form, as sovereignty. This shift of perspective at the same time discloses an opening in the system: an exit sign. Once this shift has been achieved, it is impossible to unsee the opening. What lies on the other side is anyone’s guess.

Notes

Introduction 1. A note on usage: in this book I do not distinguish between “sacred” and “holy,” but rather use the terms interchangeably, as synonyms. In the case of specific authors, my usage generally will follow that of the author in question: e.g., “holy” in the case of Rudolf Otto, because this is the English translation of das Heilige; and “sacred” in the case of Mircea Eliade and others. More specific usages are indicated by context. This use of the terms follows their interchangeability in much of the theoretical literature and reflects, to a significant extent, the difference between Germanic and Romance languages, the French translation of Otto’s principal work being titled Le sacré. Reflecting its composite origins, English uses both terms (“holy” and “sacred”) without indicating, through the choice of one or the other, any strong difference of meaning. 2. Max Gluckman, Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954). 3. See discussion and references in chap. 1. 4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 13. All references are to the edition by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). 5. Paul Kahn, Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 32 – 35, 98 – 99. 6. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 66 – 67, 74. Chapter One 1. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36 – 37. 2. Schmitt draws the analogy between the sovereign decision and ex nihilo creation in Political Theology, 31– 32: “looked at normatively, the decision emanates from nothingness”; and in The “Nomos” of the Earth in the International Law of the “Jus Publicum Europaeum,” trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 345: “Only a god, who created the world from nothing can distribute without taking.” Richard Lebrun, Throne and Altar: The Political and Religious Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1965), 70 – 73, 140, discusses the role of the idea of ex nihilo creation and of occasionalism in the thought of Joseph de

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Maistre, one of Schmitt’s sources. Robert M. Grant, Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1952), 136, notes that the opening verses of Genesis have not always been interpreted this way. For the early development of the ex nihilo idea in Christianity and the response of Rabbinic Judaism, see Maren R. Niehoff, “Creatio ex Nihilo Theology in Genesis Rabbah in Light of Christian Exegesis,” Harvard Theological Review 99 (2006): 37– 64. 3. Possibly in awareness of this, a standard Gnostic ploy to diminish the authority of the God of the Hebrew Bible placed this deity in a secondary or tertiary stage of creation. See, e.g., Anon., “On the Origin of the World,” in The Other Bible, ed. Willis Barnstone (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1984), 62 – 74. 4. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John Harvey (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1959), 20. 5. Ibid., 40. 6. See ibid., 87, asserting that “the feelings of the numinous . . . are pre-eminently in evidence in Semitic religion and most of all in the religion of the Bible.” Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1983), 88 – 89, suggests that the threat of violence in Exod. 4:24 may have been by Moses against his son, rather than by God against Moses. 7. Otto, Holy, 32. 8. Ibid., 38, 113 – 14, 118, 124 – 25. Otto even states: “Indeed, I grew to understand the numinous and its difference from the rational in Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio long before I identified it in the qādôsh of the Old Testament and in the elements of ‘religious awe’ in the history of religion in general” (116). See also Rudolf Otto, Indiens Gnadenreligion und das Christentum (Munich: Beck, 1930), 88: “Die seltsame Selbstverständlichkeit, mit der für Luther der deus absconditus, die all- und alleinwirkende ‘omnipotentia’ und die ‘praedestinatio’ zusammengehören, findet sie auch bei den Buddhisten.” Marcel Poorthuis has traced earlier phases in the proscription of the idea of an antinomian holy: “both in the Rabbinic and the Patristic hermeneutics the notion of the numinous in Otto’s sense is played down to the point of disappearance. Gnostic interpretations of Scripture are no less inclined to do away with the numinous in the Bible, but in a completely different way.” Marcel Poorthuis, “Rudolph Otto Revisited: Numinosity vis-à-vis Rabbinic, Patristic and Gnostic Interpretations of Scripture,” in Purity and Holiness: The Heritage of Leviticus, ed. M. J. M. Poorthuis and J. Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 107– 27. Whereas Orthodox Jewish and Christian sources sometimes tamed or glossed over the more disconcerting episodes in the Bible, Gnostics used these same episodes to argue against the legitimacy and goodness of the Jewish God. 9. Otto, Holy, 118. See also Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 200, quoting the Cambridge Platonist John Smith’s statement that God is “not Ex Lex and without all law.” Despite Otto’s clear reference to divine command theory and the convergence of his biblical evidence for the numinous with traditional scholastic evidence for this doctrine, there has been little recognition of this connection in the standard secondary literature. Two exceptions are Poorthuis, “Otto Revisited,” esp. 110 – 11, connecting Otto’s idea of the holy with the unfathomability and apparent arbitrariness of the divinity, as illustrated by God’s commandment not to eat the apple, his preference for Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s, and his attack on Moses, as well as the binding of Isaac; and Melissa Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 72 – 73, contending that Otto “exclude[ed] morality from the

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primary and ultimate moments of the divine-human relationship . . . And [this] is an insight with weighty implications for one of the central questions of philosophy of religion: namely, the proper relation of morality and religious obedience to divine command.” See also ibid., 120. 10. See chap. 2 for a discussion of this Scholastic doctrine and its relation to divine sovereignty. For a selection of readings on this ethical theory from ancient philosophy and Christian Scholasticism up to present times, see Janine Marie Idziak, Divine Command Morality: Historical and Contemporary Readings (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1979). For a survey of the philosophical issues, see Paul Helm, ed., Divine Commands and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, trans. Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 74 – 75, endorses the biblical basis of this doctrine. 11. Otto, Holy, 12, 87– 88. See, however, Otto’s later attempts to reconcile the holy and the ethical dimensions of the divine, esp. “The Autonomy of Values and Theonomy,” in Rudolf Otto: Autobiographical and Social Essays, ed. Gregory D. Alles (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996), 274 – 88, esp. 284: “Instead of the image of an arbitrary will, erupting and making its choices purely arbitrarily, in fact, instead of the image of a despot, and a rather ill-tempered one at that, we encounter . . . the image of an immeasurable depth of value, resting on itself, which breaks forth from itself and becomes a creator at the impulse of a will to self-giving love as well as the impulse creatively to construct meaning and value in a creature.” 12. Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, trans. Marcus Brainerd and Robert Berman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 92. See also Carl Schmitt, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, trans. Joseph W. Bendersky (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 59 – 60, quoting Tertullian. 13. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26. 14. Todd Gooch, The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 54 – 55. 15. Otto, Holy, 129, 153. 16. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927– 1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 94. 17. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Zone Books, 1991– 93). 18. Steven Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 221– 22, 224, 226, 230 – 32, 300, 307, 313. See also Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1987), 20 – 21, 26. 19. Cristiano Grottanelli detailed Eliade’s brief encounters with Schmitt and presented a largely circumstantial case for the connections in their thought; Grottanelli, “Mircea Eliade, Carl Schmitt, René Guénon, 1942,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 219 (2002): 325 – 56; see also Grottanelli, “Fruitful Death: Mircea Eliade and Ernst Jünger on Human Sacrifice, 1937– 1945,” Numen 52 (2005): 116, 136 (linking Schmitt to Eliade and Jünger). Gustavo Benavides, in a discussion of the Italian Buddhologist Giuseppe Tucci, has already pointed out the parallels between authoritarianism and certain notions of religious experience prevalent in the history of religions. Benavides, “Giuseppe Tucci, or Buddhology in the Age of Fascism,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald Lopez, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 165, 180. See also Christian Graf von Krockow, Die Entscheidung:

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Eine Untersuchung über Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1958); and Joseph Bendersky, “Carl Schmitt and the Conservative Revolution,” Telos 72 (1987): 29 – 31, critiquing von Krockow. 20. Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion, 230 – 32, 177– 79. 21. Gustavo Benavides, “Holiness, State of Exception, Agency,” in Religion in Cultural Discourse: Essays in Honor of Hans Kippenberg on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Brigitte Luchesi and Kocku von Stuckrad (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 61. 22. Gustavo Benavides, “Afterreligion after Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 (2001): 451. 23. See also Rainer Flasche, “Der Irrationalismus in der Religionswissenschaft und dessen Begründung in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen,” in Religionswissenschaft und Kulturkritik, ed. Hans G. Kippenberg and Brigitte Luchesi (Marburg: Diagonal-Verlag, 1991), 243 – 57. 24. Martin Jay, “The Reassertion of Sovereignty in a Time of Crisis,” in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1992), 49 – 60. See also Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 173. 25. See Christian Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger, eds., Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), for a review of the debate on Eliade. 26. Raphael, Rudolf Otto, 79. 27. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). 28. Robert Yelle, Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 137– 56. 29. Owing to the ambiguities of euphonic combination in Sanskrit compounds, Tathāgata may also mean the “thus arrived one.” 30. For various versions of this argument, see, e.g., Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Politics of Religious Studies and the Discourse on Sui Generis Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myth, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). A number of these writers support their arguments through genealogical investigations of the constructed nature of “religion” and associated categories. We have learned much from such scholarship, especially the need to be critical of the terms we deploy and the assumptions— philosophical, political, or ethnocentric— that these terms encode. One difficulty with such critiques is that, as some historians have demonstrated, our categories owe much to the influence of specific Christian theological traditions. See Robert Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). The present book, esp. chap. 2, may be taken as a further demonstration of this point. Hence we are left in the uncomfortable position of denying the existence of a universal “religion” while affirming both the existence (as a cultural and historical tradition) and, more, the pervasive influence of

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one particular religion, namely Christianity. In my view, the problem is mainly a semantic one. The problem with the category of “religion” or the “sacred” is in principle no different from the problem with the category of “politics,” “literature,” or “culture.” Whereas a nominalist critique of all of these categories is equally possible, it gets us no closer to either a history or a science of the phenomena under analysis. 31. I do not claim that this approach is unprecedented. See, for example, Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967); and Niklas Luhmann, A Systems Theory of Religion, trans. David Brenner with Adrian Hermann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), esp. 53 – 63. 32. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 33. Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 54. 34. Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 9. 35. Ibid., 12 – 13. 36. As Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 129, states that “no society can function adequately without this dialectic” between structure and anti-structure. See also Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 86: “As long as the two elements [auctoritas and potestas] remain correlated yet . . . distinct (as in . . . medieval Europe’s contrast between spiritual and temporal powers) their dialectic— though founded on a fiction— can nevertheless function in some way.” 37. Martin Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion, trans. Steven Rendall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), xiii, 126. 38. Ibid., 122. 39. Ibid., 169 – 85. 40. Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 74 – 97. 41. Ibid., 92. 42. Ibid., 94, 130, 135: “In mimetic ritual the society overcomes all the incessant bickering, the factional disputes, the injury, anger, and resentment, that are endemic in any society, and shows society united instead.” 43. Ibid., 527– 30, has a brief, unilluminating discussion of the Śramana movement in an˙ cient India. 44. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958). 45. Ivan Strenski develops a structural definition of religion as auctoritas as opposed to the potestas of the mundane political order. I am in general sympathy with his approach, but find the dialectic between sovereignty and legality a more appropriate basis on which to theorize the exceptional aspects of religion than the auctoritas-potestas binary, which is, also in its origins in Republican Rome, closer to the separation of powers familiar from contemporary democracies. Strenski, Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 46. For Carnival and related phenomena, such as the charivari, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 97– 151; Agamben, State of Exception, 65 – 73; and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 45 – 54.

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47. Benavides, “Holiness,” 69. 48. Ibid., 61. Benavides, “Cognitive and Ideological Aspects of Divine Anthropomorphism,” Religion 25 (1995): 15 – 16, argues for a connection between political ideas (and possibly specific organizational formations) and ideas about divinity: “[These considerations] support . . . the connection among belief in gods, subjectivity, agency, and will. It is not a case of the will and arbitrariness of the god mirroring and validating the will and arbitrariness of the ruler but rather one in which the unpredictability of the raw material or of the animal demands an efficacious and purposeful behavior which in turn seems to demand the postulation of a parallel divine will, equally purposeful and efficacious.” 49. Gustavo Benavides, “Irrational Experiences, Heroic Deeds and the Extraction of Surplus,” in The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism, ed. Horst Junginger (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 263 – 79. 50. Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essay in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 125, citing Ernest Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1843), 2:371– 72. Gerardus van der Leeuw began his famous study of religion, based partly on the concept of mana, with a focus on religion as power. Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, trans. J. E. Turner (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 24 – 28. See now Nicolas Meylan, Mana: A History of a Western Category (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 2 – 3, arguing that “in Westerners’ understanding of mana, one rather ominous term comes up again and again: power . . . in its early Western life mana was not typically defined as a religious concept.” See also ibid., 11. 51. Another is Naomi Goldenberg’s view that religions are vestigial sovereignties, once and/ or future polities. Goldenberg, “The Category of Religion in the Technology of Governance: An Argument for Understanding Religions as Vestigial States,” in Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty, ed. Trevor Stack, Naomi Goldenberg, and Timothy Fitzgerald (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 280 – 92. 52. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 39. See Herbert W. Schneider, “Christian Theocracy and Hobbes’s ‘Mortal God,’” in The Sacral Kingship (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1959), 627– 32. 53. On the paterfamilias, see Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), §582. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 87– 90, cites this power of the paterfamilias, but neglects that this was sometimes interpreted as the power to sacrifice. 54. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 26. 55. Agamben, Homo Sacer. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 46 – 47. 56. Joseph de Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues: or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence, trans. Richard Lebrun (Montreal and Kingston: McGill– Queen’s University Press, 1993), 366. On de Maistre, see Lebrun, Throne and Altar, and Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). 57. de Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues, 19 – 20. 58. Schmitt, The “Nomos” of the Earth, 81, 329. 59. See chap. 3. 60. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, trans. W. D. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 61. James I, The Kings Majesties Speech to the Lords and Commons of this Present Parliament

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at Whitehall, on Wednesday the 21st of March, Anno Dom, 1609 (London, 1616). Reprinted in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 306 – 325. See also James I, The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (London, 1603): “Monarchie is the true paterne of Divinitie . . . Kings are called Gods by the propheticall King David, because they sit upon God his throane in the earth.” A later echo of this is Nathaniel Johnston’s statement “That Sovereigns are both in Scripture, and by Heathen and Christian Writers, called Gods: The import of which Name being a Denomination of a Being, Sovereign over other subjected Beings.” Johnston, The Excellency of Monarchical Government (London, 1686), 106. 62. James I, The Kings Majesties Speech. For further discussion of this important text, see chap. 2. 63. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from and citations to the Bible are taken from the Revised Standard Version. 64. Turner, Ritual Process, 94 – 130. 65. This appears to explain the narrative detail that God tells Noah to bring with him on the Ark seven pairs of all the clean animals, but only two of the unclean; for now there is an excess that may be sacrificed, while allowing a remainder to repopulate the earth (Gen. 7:2). See Anthony Phillips, Essays on Biblical Law (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 134. 66. E.g., Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Ed Noort and Eibert Tigchelaar, eds., The Sacrifice of Isaac: The Aqedah (Genesis 22) and Its Interpretations (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 67. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1– 176. 68. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15; Burkhard Conrad, “Kierkegaard’s Moment: Carl Schmitt and His Rhetorical Concept of Decision,” in Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 12 (2008): 145 – 71. 69. John Wilson, A Discourse of Monarchy (London, 1684), 23 – 25. The Bible verse (Gen. 38:24) states only the command that Tamar be burned; it says nothing of sacrifice. The same examples are cited in support of the naturalness of absolute power in the paterfamilias in Johnston, Excellency of Monarchical Government, 64. See discussion in Yvonne Sherwood, Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 320. On other interpretations of Jephthah in this period, see Jonathan Sheehan, “Assenting to the Law: Sacrifice and Punishment at the Dawn of Secularism,” in After Secular Law, ed. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Robert A. Yelle, and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 71– 73. 70. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (New York: Free Press, 1967), 83 – 86. 71. Maccoby, Sacred Executioner, 82 – 83. 72. Yvonne Sherwood, “Textual Carcasses and Isaac’s Scar, or What Jewish Interpretation Makes of the Violence that Almost Takes Place on Mt. Moriah,” in Sanctified Aggression: Legacies of Biblical and Post-Biblical Vocabularies of Violence, ed. Jonneke Bekkenkamp and Yvonne Sherwood (London: T & T Clark, 2003), 35. 73. In addition to the present case, see the discussions of the Greek pharmakos and the biblical herem in chap. 3. ˙ 74. There are other differences between the biblically based idea of an ex nihilo creation and

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Hindu cosmogonies, which are, on the whole, immanentist. However, a discussion of these differences would take us too far from the present topic. 75. Kasten Rönnow argued that the Purusa Su¯kta is evidence of a broader tradition of hu˙ man sacrifice in Vedic or “Asuric” (pre-Vedic) tradition. “Zur Erklärung des Pravargya, des Agnicayana und der Sautrāmanī,” Le monde oriental 23 (1929): 113 – 73, esp. 126, 130, 139 – 40, ˙ 159 – 60. There are parallels in other Indo-European cultures. The well-known story of Ymir’s sacrifice in Norse mythology is one such. 76. For recent scholarship on the topic, see, e.g., Karen Finsterbusch, Armin Lange, and Diethard Römeld, eds., Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Jan N. Bremmer, The Strange World of Human Sacrifice (Leuven: Peeters, 2007); Jacob Milgrom, “Were the Firstborn Sacrificed to YHWH? To Molek? Popular Practice or Divine Demand?,” in Sacrifice in Religious Experience, ed. Albert I. Baumgarten (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 49 – 56. 77. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); and Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 78. Mircea Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, trans. Willard R. Trask, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 1982, 1985), 2:108. For references to the extensive literature on foundation sacrifices (Bauopfer), see chap. 3, n. 21. 79. Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1919); translated as “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1991), 78; emphasis in original. Earlier versions of this idea can be found in, inter alia, Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. 80. Thomas Morgan, The Moral Philosopher (London, 1738), 210 – 11. 81. Ibid., 129 – 38 (quote at 134). See also Morgan, The Moral Philosopher II (London, 1739), 115 – 18, 126 – 31 (on akedah). 82. Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old As Creation: Or, The Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London, 1730). See also Morgan, Moral Philosopher, 209 – 10. 83. Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten (Königsberg, 1798). See the discussions in Delaney, Abraham on Trial, 123; and Ed Noort, “Genesis 22: Human Sacrifice and Theology in the Hebrew Bible,” in Noort and Tigchelaar, Sacrifice of Isaac, 1. 84. Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520),” in Selected Writings of Martin Luther, 4 vols., ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), vol. 1 (1517– 20), 403 – 5. 85. See chap. 4. 86. Henry Maine, Ancient Law (London: John Murray, 1861). 87. Arthur Sykes, An Essay on the Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifices (London, 1748), 59, 120, 306 – 7, 335. 88. Geoffrey P. Miller, The Ways of a King: Legal and Political Ideas in the Bible (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011); and Miller, ed., Economics of Ancient Law (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2010). 89. Miller, Ways of a King, chap. 8. On covenant traditions in the Hebrew Bible more generally, see, e.g., Ernest W. Nicholson, God and His People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986); and Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions, vol. 1, Of the Covenant Tradition in Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995). 90. Miller, Ways of a King, 141.

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91. Ibid., 147. 92. Geoffrey P. Miller, “Ritual and Regulation: A Legal-Economic Interpretation of Selected Biblical Texts,” Journal of Legal Studies 22 (1993): 501. 93. Miller, Ways of a King, 149 – 50, emphasizing the role of popular consent in covenant renewal according to Deut. 31:9 – 13. 94. Miller, Ways of a King, 493. 95. I am therefore skeptical of the premise articulated by Alexander Raskovich, in reliance on Miller among others, that “individuals (supplicants as well as priests) are assumed to be rational and self-interested.” Raskovich, “You Shall Have No Other Gods besides Me: A LegalEconomic Analysis of the Rise of Yahweh,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 152 (1996): 450. See also Laurence Iannaccone, “Voodoo Economics? Reviewing the Rational Choice Approach to Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34 (1995): 81, stating that “I would argue that from casual conversation to biblical commands, we find language that is compatible with, and often equivalent to, cost-benefit terminology.” 96. Geoffrey P. Miller argues that the Hebrew Bible responded to the challenge posed to legal order by the idea of a sovereign God who communicates through revelation. Miller, “The Political Function of Revelation: Lessons from the Hebrew Bible,” Touro Law Review 30 (2014): 77– 101. He does not deny that the Bible holds that God’s commands are binding without justification, as in the command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (78). Further, “The author recognizes that God has the power to change his mind at any time, and therefore the power to undo or reverse the impact of any previous revelation” (84). Still, through voluntarily submitting to binding covenants (85) and framing general laws, “God consistently manifests a reluctance to intervene unnecessarily in human affairs” (87). This description strikes me as more apt for the God of the deists than for that of the Hebrew Bible. 97. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), e.g., 99 – 100, 104 – 8; and Agamben, State of Exception, 65 – 73. 98. See, e.g., Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, eds., Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Andrew Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray, eds., The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008); Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (New York: Routledge, 2010); Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Nasser Hussain, “Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred,” Law and Society Review 34 (2000): 495 – 515. 99. As opposed to theologians and continental philosophers who engage with theology: see, e.g., Colby Dickinson, Agamben and Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2011); Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries, eds., Paul and the Philosophers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Adam Kotsko, The Prince of This World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 100. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105. 101. Agamben, State of Exception, 70. Agamben also uses the word “anomie” in Agamben, State of Exception, 23, 39. 102. See Agamben’s discussion of the figure of Leviathan in the frontispiece of Hobbes’s famous book in Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 47– 51.

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103. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 104 – 11. 104. Agamben, State of Exception, 71– 72, commenting on Karl Meuli. See also Karl Meuli, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Basel: Schwabe, 1975), which presents a fascinating survey of some relevant folk customs regarding anarchic festivals (214 – 17, 222 – 25, 284 – 87, 292 – 99) and forms of vigilante justice by the mob related to banishment (445 – 69) and the charivari (471– 84). The phrase “legal anarchy” appears in ibid., 216, 292. 105. Agamben, State of Exception, 65 – 67, also criticizes Versnel for interpreting these episodes in psychological terms, rather than in terms of sovereignty. 106. Hendrik Versnel, “Destruction, Devotio, and Despair,” in Perennitas: Studi in onore di Angelo Brelich (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1980), 579, 587– 88. 107. Ibid., 601– 3. Versnel writes this word with a “y” at the end, supposedly to distinguish it as a general social condition from Émile Durkheim’s use of “anomie” to refer to an individual’s response to that condition. 108. Ibid., 584 – 85. 109. Hendrik Versnel, Transition and Reversal in Greek and Roman Ritual (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), e.g., 125 – 26: “Such aspects of the Kronia reveal a marked ambivalence in the Greek concept of harmony: the idea of freedom and abundance is unstable; it cannot last, because it carries the seed of real social anomie and anarchy.” 110. Durkheim regarded anomie as a disintegrative force that could lead to suicide, as described in his book on that phenomenon, whereas festivals--even those marked by transgressive and violent behaviors-- could represent conversely a heightening of social solidarity. Hence Caillois’ emphasis on such expressions of the sacred. Versnel and Agamben are arguably using the term anomie in a way that Durkheim would not have approved; yet this indicates, in another way, the ambivalence of the sacred (see chap. 3). 111. Agamben, State of Exception, 68. 112. Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 115 – 16. 113. Ibid., 116. Following Caillois, Bataille, Accursed Share, 3:210, noted also the association of the festival with the extreme circumstance of the apparent dissolution of sovereignty occasioned by the death of the king: “In certain islands of Oceania, the death of the king would provoke an outburst of passion on the part of a whole people, where the rules ordinarily determining what was possible were overthrown, where all of a sudden the youngest men would try to outdo one another in killing and violating. When it struck the king, death would strike the whole population at its sore point and then the latent pressure would be directed toward a reckless dissipation, an enormous festival whose presiding theme was sorrow.” 114. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 75, 79, 112 – 13. 115. Versnel, Transition and Reversal. 116. Vico, New Science, §§30, 957. 117. Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 125. R. S. Rattray has described similar customs among the Ashanti, where “blood-lust” and “indiscriminate slaughter” accompanied the funeral of a king and “continued during the days that the body of the king remained lying in state at the palace.” Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 104 – 12. See also George P. Hagan, “The Golden Stool and the Oaths to the King of Ashanti,” Research Review 4 (Legon: University of Ghana, 1968): 17. 118. Bataille, Accursed Share, 2:89, 3:210, 2:90. See also S. Romi Mukherjee, “On Violence as the Negativity of the Durkheimian: Between Anomie, Sacrifice and Effervescence,” International Social Science Journal, supplement issue s1 (August 2006): 30: “The inversion of sexual and social

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taboos, the hyper-excitement of physical and emotional concentration, the fury and the howling, do not challenge existing political and social regimes.” 119. Gluckman, Rituals of Rebellion. 120. Turner, Ritual Process, 100 – 102, 201. 121. Ibid., vii. 122. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York: George Braziller, 1979). 123. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 119. 124. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 53 – 74 (Ncwala), 89 – 102 (St. Bartholomew’s Day). 125. Agamben, State of Exception, 6. 126. Versnel, “Destruction,” 592. 127. See chap. 3 . 128. Turner, Ritual Process, vii, 127– 29. 129. Ibid., 134 – 35, quoting The Tempest, act 2, scene 1, lines 141ff. This is not the only time that Turner’s account of liminality anticipates aspects of Agamben’s account of sovereignty. See Turner, Ritual Process, 170: “Manifold evidence from other societies suggests that [initiation rites] have the social significance of rendering [initiates] down into some kind of human prima materia, divested of specific form and reduced to a condition that, although it is still social, is without or beneath all accepted forms of status.” What does this remind us of, other than the homo sacer and the condition of bare life as described by Agamben? 130. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 91– 103. 131. The image of Hobbes’s Leviathan from the frontispiece of the 1651 edition of his famous book depicts the members of the body politic with their backs turned, thus facing toward their “mortal God,” who faces them. Whether this was also an allusion to the Protestant innovation of the priest worshipping versus populum, I cannot say. 132. For a sketch of this history, see Hent de Vries, ed., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 1– 88. 133. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15. Chapter Two 1. Schmitt, Political Theology II, 66 – 67. 2. Hans Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), 201– 77, presents a careful and systematic interpretation of this concept in Weber’s own oeuvre. While acknowledging the value of such a focused approach, my goal in this chapter is to connect Weber’s concepts of disenchantment and rationalization with a longer history and a wider context. 3. As recently noted by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 279. 4. Heinrich Meier (personal communication) states that it was specifically French deism that Schmitt had in mind. While that may be the case, we shall see that Schmitt’s contention is borne out by a study of English deism and Protestantism more generally. 5. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36 – 37, 46, 48. See also Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 12: “the methodology of the natural-technical sciences dominates contemporary thinking. For example, the God of

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traditional theological evidence [e.g., the miracle]— the God who governs the world as the king governs the state— subconsciously is made the motor impelling the cosmic machine.” Schmitt invokes the deist idea of the watchmaker God, which he calls a “naïve mechanistic and mathematical mythology” in ibid., 13, and Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 42: “The juridic formulas of the omnipotence of the state are, in fact, only superficial secularizations of theological formulas of the omnipotence of God.” Schmitt refers to miracles as an example of sovereignty also in Political Theology II, 120, 146 – 47; in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 53 – 54; and to the deist role in their prohibition in “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” in Concept of the Political, 90. See also his reference to the rise of the idea of the state as a “machine” or “mechanism” in Leviathan in the State Theory of Hobbes, 99. 6. Robert A. Yelle, “The Trouble with Transcendence: Carl Schmitt’s ‘Exception’ as a Challenge for Religious Studies,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 184 – 201; Benavides, “Holiness,” 64 – 65. 7. On Nicolas Malebranche’s occasionalism, see Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 225 – 26. 8. Especially the Ash’arite school of theology. See Francis Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 78 – 79 (drawing the parallel with medieval nominalism and atomism) and 89 (attributing a version of this idea to Descartes). Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 12, refers to this as “Shari’a” (presumably a copy-editing mistake) and suggests a potential contact between such ideas and Christian Scholasticism. The connection had been suggested earlier by William J. Courtenay, “The Critique on Natural Causality in the Mutakallimun and Nominalism,” Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973): 78 – 82; and by Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the 17th Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 128. On Islamic atomism/occasionalism, see Shlomo Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism, trans. Michael Schwarz (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997). 9. Paul Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), tracks Schmitt’s Political Theology chapter by chapter. From the perspective of American and general jurisprudence, Kahn presents a lucid and insightful critique and application of Schmitt’s political and legal theories. He also provides a forceful argument for the importance of sacrifice, as opposed to consent to the social contract, as a foundational moment for polity (see esp. 7, 29, 155): themes addressed in the present book. Yet Kahn does not examine Schmitt’s central genealogical claim that the modern constitutional order required the proscription of a sovereignty based on the miracle. A similar disregard for historical context weakens Bonnie Honig’s otherwise interesting critique of Schmitt in her Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 87– 111. She accepts his contention that our politics has been disenchanted, but opposes his view that reenchantment would require embracing authoritarianism. Honig draws on a different, more democratic model of the sovereign miracle, one developed on the basis of Franz Rosenzweig’s thought. Honig (83) only briefly mentions the deist exclusion of the miracle as background for both Schmitt’s and Rosenzweig’s efforts to rehabilitate the miracle. There has also been a debate within the literature on Schmitt concerning the extent to which Christian theological traditions actually shaped his views. Meier, Lesson, xviii, 77– 78, has argued that theology is central for Schmitt; whereas Mika Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life: Carl Schmitt and the Political Theology of Late Modernity (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 200, disputes Meier’s position. Some important interpretations of Schmitt, such as John P. McCormick, Carl

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Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), have simply ignored the question of theology. My own view, as elaborated in the present book, is broadly in accord with Meier’s. 10. Not all English deists were equally opposed to Judaism. John Toland, for example, argued in favor of the naturalization of the Jews in England, and defended the commonalities among Judaism, Islam, and Christianity in his Nazarenus: Or, Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London, 1718). However, Tindal and Morgan exemplified the general tendency of English deism to oppose natural religion to that of the Old Testament. 11. Morgan, Moral Philosopher, 134. 12. Tindal, Christianity as Old As Creation, 118, 222. 13. John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious (London, 1696), xii– xiii. 14. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 315. 15. Kaufmann, Religion of Israel, 102 – 3, finds this doctrine not in the Torah but in later attempts to account for the apparent amorality of God’s commands: “The problem of this material was later solved by the idea of the absolute command of God. The ultimate sanction of the rite became the divine will. Judaism thus created a noble symbol for its basic idea that everything is a divine command; fulfilling the command is an acknowledgment of the supremacy of God’s will.” Cf. Elisha Ancselovits, “Wise Hukkim and the Byzantine Sermonic Ideology of a Divine Fiat,” in Jewish Religious and Philosophical Ethics, ed. Curtis Hutt, Halla Kim, and Berel Dov Lerner (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018), 51– 84, arguing that Jewish tradition in general regarded all of the Mosaic laws as rational and meaningful, and that the justification of certain ritual laws as divine commands was advanced as a last resort in order to defend these laws from Christian attacks, in cases where no intelligible reason could be found. 16. Jiří Moskala, The Laws of Clean and Unclean Animals of Leviticus 11: Their Nature, Theology, and Rationale (An Intertextual Study) (Berrien Springs, MI: Adventist Theological Society Publications, 2000), 114. 17. Isaac Heinemann, The Reasons for the Commandments in Jewish Thought, from the Bible to the Renaissance, trans. Leonard Levin (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 16 – 17, 96 – 97. For the reactions of two important Jewish thinkers— Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber— to the Kantian characterization of Mosaic law as heteronomous, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Rosenzweig and Kant: Views of Ritual and Religion,” in Mystics, Philosophers, and Politicians: Essays in Jewish Intellectual History, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Daniel Swetschinski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982), 315 – 41. 18. Heinemann, Reasons for the Commandments, xix, 16 – 17, 19 – 21, 160. 19. Ibid., 17, 88. 20. Ibid., 2. 21. Yelle, Semiotics of Religion, 145 – 50, 154. 22. That is, unless one counts the sanction “lest you die” as an explanation rather than a threat of punishment. 23. Poorthuis, “Otto Revisited,” 111. “Contradictory” refers of course to the fact that Isaac’s death would have voided God’s promise to Abraham to multiply his generations. 24. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. 25. On the parsimony in the Bible’s description of this episode, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 6 – 11. 26. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15, referring to “a certain Protestant theologian.”

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27. Morgan, Moral Philosopher II, 42. 28. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, 17, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 29. As Jacob Taubes noted, “Kant regards the shalt of the law not as ‘an order given by an external agency’ but as a ‘consequence of one’s own understanding.’” He quoted Kant: “Between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord within himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.” Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 149. 30. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, 2nd ed. (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1960), 116; see also 90 – 91, 166 – 67. 31. Robert A. Yelle, “Moses’ Veil: : Secularization as Christian Myth,” in After Secular Law, ed. Winnifred F. Sullivan, Robert A. Yelle, and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 23 – 42; Yelle, Language of Disenchantment, 137– 60; and Yelle, “Imagining the Hebrew Republic: Christian Genealogies of Religious Freedom,” in Politics of Religious Freedom, ed. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter Danchin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 17– 28. 32. Tindal, Christianity Not Mysterious, title page and passim. 33. Ibid., 60. 34. Ibid., 92. 35. Morgan, Moral Philosopher, 183. 36. David Ellenson, “Max Weber on Judaism and the Jews,” in After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004), 80 – 95; Gary Abraham, Max Weber and the Jewish Question: A Study of the Social Outlook of His Sociology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Peter L. Berger, “Charisma and Religious Innovation: The Social Location of Israelite Prophecy,” American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 940 – 50. 37. Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory, trans. Joel Golb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). 38. See, e.g., Schmitt, Three Types, 45: “There are peoples that, without territory, without a state, and without a church, exist only in ‘law.’ To them, normativist thought is the only reasonable legal thought, and every other type of thought appears inconceivable, mystical, fantastic, or ridiculous.” See also Schmitt’s critique of the Jewish scholar Stahl-Jolson in Leviathan in the State Theory of Hobbes, 68 – 71. 39. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 1, 3. 40. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 215. For a general discussion of the concept, see Charles Lindholm, Charisma (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 41. Weber, Economy and Society, 241– 42, 1112. 42. Ibid., 244, 1111, 1133. 43. Ibid., 1115; see also 243. 44. Ibid., 1139 – 41, 220 – 23, 245, 1164 – 66.

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45. Ibid., 1165. 46. Ibid., 828 – 29. 47. Ibid., 1133 – 34. Cf. Martin Riesebrodt’s critique of the association that some scholars, including Edward Shils, have made between Weber’s “charisma” and the idea of the “sacred.” Riesebrodt, “Charisma in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion,” Religion 29 (2009): 1– 14. This essay overlaps substantially with Riesebrodt’s earlier essay, “Charisma,” in Max Webers Religionssystematik, ed. Hans G. Kippenberg and Martin Riesebrodt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 151– 66. See also Meylan, Mana, 123 – 26, showing Weber’s association between charisma and mana. 48. William H. Swatos, Jr., “The Disenchantment of Charisma: A Weberian Assessment of Revolution in a Rationalized World,” Sociological Analysis 42 (1981): 119 – 36; and Riesebrodt, “Charisma,” 5. 49. Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1919); translated as Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1991), 139. 50. John P. McCormick has shown that Schmitt was deeply influenced by Weber, and particularly by the latter’s idea of charisma and its routinization. See McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, 31– 42, 135 – 36, and esp. 207: “Schmitt’s critique of formalist jurisprudence is generated by his engagement with Max Weber’s sociology of law as it is eventually published in Weber’s massive Economy and Society.” McCormick (208) proceeds to quote Schmitt’s statement that Weber’s theory of charisma was a “political theology.” On Schmitt’s relation to Weber, see also Norbert Bolz, “Charisma und Souveränität,” in Religionstheorie und politische Theologie, Band 1, Der Fürst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, ed. Jacob Taubes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1983), 249: “Max Webers Lehre vom Charisma steht für den historischen Kontext [of Schmitt’s theory] ein.  .  .  . Politische Theologie antwortet auf eine Leere im Zentrum der Weberschen Theorie”; Gross, Carl Schmitt, 107– 9, and esp. 152: “The approach to secularization Schmitt suggested in his Political Theology of 1922 could be read as a refinement of Weber’s argument regarding Protestantism.” 51. Carl Schmitt,“Soziologie des Souveränitätsbegriffes und politische Theologie,” in Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber, vol. 2, ed. Melchior Palyi (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1923), 3 – 35. 52. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “The German Theological Sources and Protestant Church Politics,” in Weber’s “Protestant Ethic”: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27– 49; Graf, “Max Weber und die protestantische Theologie seiner Zeit,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 39 (1987): 122 – 47; and Peter Haley, “Rudolph Sohm on Charisma,” Journal of Religion 60 (1980): 185 – 97. 53. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 11. 54. Schmitt, Political Theology II, 74, 66 – 67. See also McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, 207– 8, citing G. L. Ulmen, Politischer Mehrwert: Eine Studie über Max Weber und Carl Schmitt (Weinheim: VCH Verlag, 1991), 178, 20 – 21. 55. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1885; repr., Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1957). Rudolph Sohm, Kirchenrecht, vol. 1, Die geschichtlichen Grundlagen (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1892), esp. 22 – 23, 26; and vol. 2, Katholisches Kirchenrecht (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1923), 168 – 71, 180 – 82. Walter Lowrie, The Church and Its Organization in Primitive and Catholic Times: An Interpretation of Rudolph Sohm’s “Kirchenrecht” (London: Longmans, Green, 1904), is partly a translation and partly a paraphrase

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and extension of Sohm’s work. On Sohm’s influence on Weber, see Graf, “Max Weber und die protestantische Theologie,” 132 – 33. 56. Schmitt, Three Types, 60 – 61. 57. For a brief overview of the scholarship on this distinction, see Funkenstein, Theology, 124 – 51; Ullrich Langer, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 6 – 11. 58. Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1947 bis 1958, ed. Gerd Giesler and Martin Tielke (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015), 4, 8, 100, 150. Thanks to Wenzel Braunfels for these references. See also Schmitt, The “Nomos” of the Earth, 82, referring to “the differentiation between constitutive acts and constituted institutions, the juxtaposition of ordo ordinans and ordo ordinatus, of pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitué.” See also Mika Ojakangas, “Potentia Absoluta et Potentia Ordinata Dei: On the Theological Origins of Carl Schmitt’s Theory of Constitution,” Continental Philosophy Review 45 (2012): 505. 59. On the application of this idea to human sovereigns, see, in addition to the quotes in this section, Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, 109: “We find that from the late thirteenth century onward, side by side with the theological tradition of distinguishing between the absolute and ordained powers of God and touching it at more than one point ran a parallel tradition of distinguishing between the absolute and ordained or ordinary or civil or regulated powers . . . of popes, emperors, and kings”; Oakley, “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God and King in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Philosophy, Science, Politics, and Law,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 681, 689ff.; Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 128ff.; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 39ff., 96ff. (on James I); and Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal Monarchy with Augustinus Triumphus and the Publicists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 162 – 63, 294 – 95. The language in which Wilks describes some of these medieval ideas recalls Schmitt’s doctrine: “The exceptional event in which human law fails to conform to natural law becomes a period of emergency, a state of necessity in which all law ceases” (212); “It was accepted that the ruler himself should have full discretion in deciding when a state of emergency existed and what measures should be taken to counteract it” (220). 60. Quoted in William J. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition: A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina Editore, 1990), 101; and in Ojakangas, “Potentia Absoluta,” 513 – 14. 61. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). 62. Francis Oakley, “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Theology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 452; and Oakley, Omnipotence and Promise: The Legacy of the Scholastic Distinction of Powers, Etienne Gilson Series 23 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2002), 26. 63. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition, 194: “There are two periods . . . in which the concept of absolute and ordained power was important for ‘science.’ One was the fourteenth century . . . The other was the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it served as a [device] for ‘keeping God in’ an increasingly mechanistic, non-miraculous, and orderly universe in which everything worked according to the Laws of Nature.” 64. See Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England: Theology, Politics, and Newtonian Public Science (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 7. 65. Ojakangas, “Potentia Absoluta.”

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66. John Milbank, “Paul against Biopolitics,” Theory, Culture and Society 25 (2008): 130, citing Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 9 – 25. 67. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, 86; and Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 24 – 25. 68. Otto, Holy, 118. 69. Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (London, 1731), 10. 70. Ibid., 27. 71. Idziak, Divine Command Morality, 5 – 6, notes the close association of the two discourses on divine command and predestination. 72. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, 62 – 63. 73. Gillespie, Nihilism, 14. 74. Elshtain, Sovereignty, 26 – 27. 75. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, 55. 76. Ibid., 74. 77. See especially the skeptical rehearsals of the “crisis” thesis in William J. Courtenay, Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), 27; and Courtenay, Capacity and Volition, 15, 17, characterizing such a thesis as typical of an earlier period in scholarship. 78. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition, 18 – 19; and Oakley, “Absolute and Ordained Power in Theology.” 79. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition, 92 – 95; and Courtenay, Covenant and Causality, 10 – 13. 80. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition, 100 – 101. 81. Ojakangas, “Potentia Absoluta,” 505, 516. 82. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, 54, 60 – 61. See also Oakley, Omnipotence and Promise, 13 – 14: “The portrayal of the distinction as being employed for negative, destructive, or even malicious purposes really misconstrues its nature and the purpose for which it was deployed. . . . If the postulation of the absolute power erected a stout bulwark against any form of Greek necessitarianism, affirming the utter freedom of God and the concomitant contingency of the entire created order of nature, morality, and grace, the juxtaposition with it of the ordained power served at the same time to affirm the de facto stability and reliability of that contingent, will-based order”; Elshtain, Sovereignty, 27; Idziak, Divine Command Morality, 11, noting that E. Pluzanski “connects the espousal of divine command morality with the unwillingness of the medievals to take liberties in interpreting Scripture.” 83. Oakley, “Absolute and Ordained Power: Philosophy, Science, Politics, and Law,” 669 – 70, largely accepts Courtenay’s account of the distinction between the “classical” and “juristic” or “operationalized” understandings of the absolute power, where the latter described the power to act presently outside of the law. 84. Oakley, Omnipotence and Promise, 10 – 13. 85. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition, 94 – 95. 86. Oakley, Omnipotence and Promise, 3. 87. Ibid., 6. See also ibid., 19; and Oakley, Kingship, 154. 88. Yelle, Language of Disenchantment, 18 – 25. Josephson-Storm, Myth of Disenchantment, 80, 311, has also noted the ancient version of this trope. 89. Weber, Economy and Society, 767. Endorsing William Blackstone’s depiction of the English judge as a “living oracle,” Weber argued that charismatic authority could still be observed in the common law: “the role played by decision as the indispensable and specific form in which

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the common law is embodied corresponds to the role of the oracle in ancient law: What was hitherto uncertain, viz., the existence of the particular legal principle, has now, through the decision, become a permanent rule.” See also ibid., 243 – 44, 1115, 1185 – 86. 90. Yelle, Language of Disenchantment, 23 – 24, 137– 41; and Yelle, “Moses’ Veil.” 91. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, 73. 92. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West, ed. Stephen Kalberg, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 107, 114 – 15, 135. 93. Ibid., 147: “The Puritans opposed the theory that the law of Moses had lost its legitimacy with the founding of Christianity. They argued instead that only those passages relating to Jewish ceremonial or historically conditioned statutes [civil or judicial laws] were invalid. Otherwise this law, they maintained, as an expression of lex naturae, possessed its validity from eternity and must therefore be retained. This interpretation allowed . . . the elimination of statutes not easily adaptable to modern life.” See also Weber, Economy and Society, 820: “In consequence of the New Testament’s eschatological withdrawal from the world, the basic writ of Christianity contains only such a minimum of formally binding norms of a ritual or legal character that was left entirely free for rational enactment.” 94. Jon Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Biblical Miracles (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), focuses on the ancient versions of this trope. Josephson-Storm, Myth of Disenchantment, 29, 55, 139, 151, notes the ancient and Protestant versions of this idea. 95. John Potts, A History of Charisma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 35 – 36. 96. See Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” where he says (in addition to the statements quoted above) that “today only within the smallest and intimate circles, . . . that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.” See also Weber, Economy and Society, 819, 828; and Weber, Ancient Judaism, 379, 395, 412. 97. Adolf Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, trans. James Moffatt (London: Williams & Norgate, 1908), 199 – 205, 445 – 46. 98. James I, The Kings Majesties Speech. 99. Decades later, defending the absolute sovereignty of kings, Robert Filmer paraphrased, in part verbatim, the passage in which James accepted this limitation. He reasserted the king’s authority to mitigate, interpret, or even suspend the law, adding the ultimate caveat: “although a King do frame all his Actions according to the Laws, yet he is not bound thereto, but as his good Will.” Filmer, Patriarcha: or The Natural Power of Kings (London, 1680), 94. 100. As James pointed out, conquest was another example of the antinomian origins of sovereignty. See the discussion in chap. 3 of the biblical herem and the Conquest of Canaan as ˙ moments where the sovereign exception converges with founding violence. 101. James I, The Kings Majesties Speech, 309. According to Francis Bacon, James I stated “that kings ruled by the laws, as God did by the laws of nature; and ought as rarely to put in use their supreme prerogative, as God doth his power of working miracles.” Bacon, “Advancement of Learning,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 3, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longmans, 1857), 429; quoted in John R. Milton, “The Origin and Development of the Concept of the ‘Laws of Nature,’” Archives européennes de sociologie 22 (1981): 182 – 83. Milton states that “the correctness of the attribution is irrelevant,” but as noted here James did indeed articulate a similar idea in his 1609 speech to Parliament.

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102. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, 96 – 97, 103 – 05; Oakley, Omnipotence and Promise, 16 – 17; Oakley, Kingship, 129 – 30; Oakley, “Absolute and Ordained Power: Philosophy, Science, Politics, and Law,” 685 (where he even notes the “intriguing” idea of a historical change in sovereignty); and Oakley, Politics and Eternity: Studies in the History of Medieval and EarlyModern Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 324 – 27. 103. James I, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue (London, 1597), 65 – 66; see also ibid., 53 – 54 (mentioning oracles). D. P. Walker, “The Cessation of Miracles,” in Hermeticism and the Renaissance, ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), 121, quotes part of this passage. It is interesting that James simultaneously entertained a belief in the reality of witchcraft. 104. Potts, History of Charisma, 51– 83. Strangely, although Potts does such a fine job of tracing the history of this early Christian idea, he does not note its revival during the Reformation nor connect it with the debates over miracles that occurred in the late seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries. This means that his claim that the early Christian idea served as part of the background for Weber, while true in a sense, is really unsubstantiated, as it fails to trace the more proximate sources. (As I argue below, Potts also mistakes the cessation of charismata for a reality rather than a soteriological idea.) For a survey of ideas concerning miracles in the classical pagan and early Christian world, see Grant, Miracle and Natural Law. 105. Ruthven, Cessation, 24, claims that “cessation did not originate within orthodox Christianity but within normative Judaism and in Christian sects during the first three centuries of the Common Era.” Most scholars would likely acknowledge that cessationism emerged as one important strand of thought already among the early Church fathers. Ruthven puts it the way that he does because his normative goal is to discredit the doctrine of cessationism itself: he is a Pentecostal theologian who is committed to the continuing possibility of miraculous signs of grace. The idea of a cessation or decline of miracles or prophecy in Jewish tradition is a topic I do not take up here. On the origins of the cessationist idea in Judaism and early Christianity, see David E. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 103 – 6; and Niels Christian Hvidt, Christian Prophecy: The PostBiblical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 41– 45, 73 – 81. 106. Martin Luther, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 41 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1910), 20: “Nun aber Christus mit seiner Taufe angenommen ist, und die Abgötterei aufgehöret, daß auch Könige und Fürsten (die zuvor Heiden gewesen), den Namen Christi führen, höret er auf mit Wunderzeichen, so zuvor geschehen waren, die Abgötterei auszurotten und den Glauben zu pflanzen: Denn warum oder wozu sollten sie geschehen, weil die Lehre nun gewiß und bestätigt ist?” Thanks to Lorenz Trein for this reference. 107. Ruthven, Cessation, 22 – 23. 108. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 32, “Of the Principles of Christian Politics.” Between the publication of the English version of Leviathan in 1651, and the Latin revision in 1668, Hobbes changed the date of the cessation of miracles from “the time of our Saviour” to “the time of the Apostles,” reflecting the different opinions concerning this event. 109. Walker, “The Cessation of Miracles,” 111– 24; Alexandra Walsham, “Miracles in PostReformation England,” in Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 273 – 74: “sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant ministers consistently maintained that this category of extraordinary events had long since ceased. . . . By the early seventeenth century the cessation of miracles was not merely a doctrinal precept but also a cultural commonplace.”

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For additional discussion of polemics against miracles in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 76, 80 – 81, 107– 8, 124 – 25, 578. 110. Thomas Morton, A Catholike Appeal for Protestants (London, 1609), 417, 426 – 27. 111. Thomas Morton, The Lords Supper or, A Vindication of the Sacrament of the Blessed Body and Blood of Christ According to Its Primitive Institution ([London], 1656), 197. 112. Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 161. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, 144 – 49, admits the possibility of divine miracles while declaring them to be rare. Morgan, Moral Philosopher II, 30 – 40, is basically similar. Charles Blount, Miracles, No Violations of the Law of Nature (London, 1683), denied miracles, in the sense of violations of the law of nature, altogether. R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981), while covering a period that overlaps with the one discussed here, ignores the theological idea of the cessation of miracles and the role it played in these debates. 113. Morgan, Moral Philosopher, 264 (emphasis in original). 114. Conyers Middleton, A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, Which Are Supposed to Have Subsisted in the Christian Church, from the Earliest Ages through Several Successive Centuries (London, 1749). 115. Conyers Middleton, A Vindication of the Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers (London, 1751), 33. 116. Ibid., 32 – 33. 117. [Samuel Musson,] A Review of the Important Controversy concerning Miracles (London, 1758), 278. 118. See, in addition, John Douglas, The Criterion: or, Miracles Examined with a View to Expose the Pretensions of Pagans and Papists (London, 1754), 391: “The Age of Christian Miracles, must have ceased with the Age of Christian Inspiration. So long as Heaven thought proper to set apart any particular Set of Men, to be the authorized Preachers of the new Religion revealed to Mankind, so long, may we rest satisfied, miraculous Powers were continued. But whenever this Purpose was answered, and Inspiration ceased to be any longer necessary, by the complete Publication of the Gospel, then would the miraculous Powers, whose End was to prove the Truth of Inspiration, be, of course, withdrawn.” 119. An example is Middleton’s conservative critic Thomas Church, who argues that “most learned Protestants suppose, that Miracles were in a great measure withdrawn, when it pleased God to put an End to the Persecutions of the Church, and to turn the Hearts of the Emperors to embrace and protect Christianity. . . . Almost all learned Men, both Papists and Protestants, are agreed in allowing the Miracles of the Three First Centuries. . . . We must carry our Thoughts back Fourteen Centuries, consider the Circumstances of those Times, and what might be expected then. We must consider the Christian Religion, as it was in its Infancy, struggling with potent Enemies, contending with the strongest Prejudices, and with prevailing Vices of all Sorts; and we surely cannot wonder, if it pleased God then to confirm it, to confound and baffle its Opposers, and to comfort the Minds of its persecuted Professors, by some extraordinary Communications of His own Divine Power; and by continuing to it for some Ages the same miraculous Assistances, by which He enabled the first Preachers of it to support themselves under the like Difficulties, and to prevail in the World.” Thomas Church, A Vindication of the Miraculous Powers, Which Subsisted in the Three First Centuries of the Christian Church (London, 1750), 4, 25. 120. Middleton, Free Inquiry, xl– xli.

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121. Ibid., xxxvii, xli; see also xxxii. 122. Middleton, Free Inquiry, 7 n. 1; see also Middleton, Vindication of the Free Inquiry, 17. Church, Vindication of the Miraculous Powers, 98, asserts that the word retains a reference to the supernatural: “In short, [Gr. charisma] is a Word of some Latitude. It signifies any Gift in general, either supernatural or natural; such as outward Circumstances, or a particular Constitution of Body, or Ability of Mind. . . . It is particularly applied by St. Paul to denote the extraordinary Powers then vouchsafed to the Church.” 123. Middleton, Free Inquiry, lii. 124. Ibid., xliv– xlv. 125. Ibid., 153, cites Isaac Newton’s Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel (1733) on this point. Another source was Bernard Fontenelle, Histoire des Oracles (1687): see Middleton, Free Inquiry, 232. Ibid., 91– 92, refers also to the explanation of oracles as a kind of ventriloquism, an explanation found also in Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark (London, 1655), 77– 81. 126. Middleton, Free Inquiry, xxviii– xxix; see also xlvi– xlvii, lxxvii. 127. On Spencer’s ideas and context, see Guy Stroumsa, “John Spencer and the Origins of Idolatry,” History of Religions 40 (2001): 1– 23. 128. William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions, 3rd ed. (repr., New York: Ktav, 1969), xiv (Preface to the First Edition), refers to “Dr. John Spencer, . . . whose Latin work on the ritual laws of the Hebrews may justly be said to have laid the foundations of the science of Comparative Religion.” Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 61, n.1, calls Spencer’s “book, or the part titled De ratione et origine sacrificiorum (De Legibus, iii.2) . . . by far the best thing that has ever been written on the subject.” 129. Stroumsa, “John Spencer,” 19, rejects the idea that Spencer was “a Deist in disguise.” While it is true that Spencer expressed an orthodox belief in the Bible as revelation, his embrace of the watchmaker God, critique of miracles and prophecies, etc., certainly anticipated the later deists. 130. John Spencer, A Discourse Concerning Prodigies: Wherein the Vanity of Presages by Them is Reprehended, 2nd ed. (London, 1665), Preface. 131. Ibid., 26. 132. Ibid., 27. 133. Ibid., 27– 28. 134. Ibid., 29. 135. Ibid., 324. 136. Ibid., 29 – 30. 137. Ibid., preface, 26 – 30, 323 – 25. See also John Spencer, A Discourse on Vulgar Prophecies wherein the Vanity of Receiving Them as the Certain Indications of Any Future Event is Discovered (London, 1665), 131. 138. Spencer, Vulgar Prophecies, 111– 12, 115 – 16. 139. Ibid., 42 – 53, 106, 107. 140. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 107. This and related passages (114 – 15, 135, 137) describing disenchantment and identifying this with a thorough rejection of the Catholic ritual economy were not found in the original text, which appeared in 1904 – 5, but were inserted into the 1920 edition. Peter Ghosh, Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 159, 215, attributes these passages mainly to 1919. Thus, Weber’s definition of “disenchantment” in Protestant Ethic is later than the definition given in Wissenschaft als Beruf (1919, based on a lecture from 1917), which is discussed below. See Ghosh, Max Weber, 255 – 64, on the sources and meaning of the term Entzauberung for Weber.

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141. On Weber’s use of and source for the term entgötterte, see Antônio Flávio Pierucci, “Secularization in Max Weber: On Current Usefulness of Re-Accessing That Old Meaning,” Brazilian Review of Social Sciences, special issue no. 1 (2000): 129 – 58. 142. For nearly a century, this appears to have gone unrecognized by all the major scholars on Weber. See, e.g, Johannes Winkelmann, “Die Herkunft von Max Webers ‘Entzauberungs’Konzeption,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 32 (1980): 12 – 53. Hans G. Kippenberg recently reiterated that “until today, no one can find any source from which Weber drew this concept” of disenchantment. Kippenberg, “Dialektik der Entzauberung: Säkularisierung aus der Perspektive von Webers Religionssystematik,” in Alte Begriffe— Neue Probleme: Max Webers Soziologie im Licht aktueller Problemstellungen, ed. Thomas Schwinn and Gert Albert (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 81– 116. Thanks to Lorenz Trein for this reference. 143. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty. 144. Yelle, Language of Disenchantment, 103 – 35. 145. On the meaning for Weber of calculation as a feature of modernity, see Ghosh, Max Weber, 15. Weber used various terms for this characteristic, including Rechenhaftigkeit, Kalkül, etc. Ghosh (67) states that Weber borrowed the idea from Werner Sombart. 146. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 139. Weber asserted the dependence of the modern economy on calculability in his General Economic History (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1981), 276 – 77. 147. Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse 1900 – 1939 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 33 – 34, 47, and Josephson-Storm, Myth of Disenchantment, 282 – 83, have rightly focused on Weber’s identification of “calculability” as a distinctive feature of modernity. 148. Moshe Halbertal has made a parallel point regarding sacrifice: “Ritual is analogous to legal systems as a whole insofar as they impose order while confronting the unreliability and capriciousness of emotional responses. It makes cooperation and the division of labor independent of the chaos of personal encounter; it is therefore an attempt to project a stable future. . . . Ritual is an attempt to grapple with the inherent unpredictability of rejection [e.g. of the sacrifice by the intended recipient]. In order to smooth the passage from bringing forward to acceptance, practitioners tend to go a step further and endow ritual with magical powers. The magical reading of ritual introduces a causal dimension that closes the gap between giving and receiving, thereby ensuring acceptance of the gift and leaving nothing voluntary to the recipient.” Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 15, 18. 149. Weber, Economy and Society, 1139 – 41. 150. Ibid., 758 – 59, similarly classifies ordeals as charismatic magical procedures resorted to in primitive law. But the point of the ordeal, in many instances, is to eliminate uncertainty by producing a clear outcome, particularly in cases where an alternative method of dispute resolution is unavailable. See Robert A. Yelle, “Poetic Justice: Rhetoric in Hindu Ordeals and Legal Formulas,” Religion 32 (2002): 259 – 72. Many ordeals do this by requiring a binary “yes” or “no” answer to the question of guilt. This is true even in cases such as trial by battle, where chance is obviously more of a factor. 151. Luther, “Babylonian Captivity,” 396, 399, 407– 8. 152. Gustavo Benavides, “Western Religion and the Self-Canceling of Modernity,” Journal of Religion in Europe 1 (2008): 93 – 94. Benavides cites Arnold Angenendt, Thomas Braucks, Rolf Busch, Thomas Lentes, and Hubertus Lutterbach, “Gezählte Frömmigkeit,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 29 (1995): 1– 71. For discussion of this point, see chap. 6.

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153. Elshtain, Sovereignty, 80, notes that Luther in The Bondage of the Will also appeared to endorse a version of the divine command theory of morality. See also Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 31. 154. Compare Roland Boer’s argument that in the Netherlands it was not Puritanism but Arminianism that was the true bearer of the capitalist spirit, because Arminius’s tempering of the doctrine of predestination with the concept of “prevenient grace,” which enabled a larger role for human beings in their own salvation, valorized the field of human endeavor in a way that pure predestination never could. Boer, “The Arminian Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Political Theology Today, http:// www.politicaltheology.com / blog/ the-arminian-ethic-and-the -spirit-of-capitalism /. The relationship between salvation doctrines and worldly actions is complex and elusive. Ernst Troeltsch earlier opined that “whoever is so absolutely sure— through predestination— of his earthly goal and his salvation hereafter, can apply his natural energies all the more freely to the acquisition of wealth.” Troeltsch, Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie, ed. Hans Baron (Tübingen, 1925), 393; quoted in Graf, “German Theological Sources,” 34. As Graf points out, this is technically the opposite of what predestination means. In a sense, however, predestination may indeed be said to produce the certainty of salvation— one’s status has been determined from all time by God’s fixed will— even if one cannot know what this status is. And if salvation is thus removed from the field of human action and taken off the table, that can indeed encourage a this-worldly orientation: why concern oneself with a result over which one has no control in any case? 155. Ghosh, Max Weber, 310, has argued that, although Weber scarcely uses the term “charisma” in Protestant Ethic, “the argument of the PE of 1904 – 5 is as much charismatic as rational ” (emphasis in original). Ghosh’s claim is that “predestination” was understood by Weber as a charismatic doctrine, such that his use of such terms as “election to grace” (Gnadenwahl) in Protestant Ethic and “grace of predestination” (Prädestinationsgnade) in the later Sociology of Religion should be understood as referring to grace (Gnade) or charisma. This is a compelling interpretation, which, if accepted, accentuates the contradiction I am highlighting here in Weber’s description of the Reformation as the moment of the rise of modern “calculability.” Ghosh, Max Weber, 313, notes that the process whereby the early Reformation declined into utilitarian capitalism would then be a prime example of the routinization of charisma. 156. See chap. 1. Otto, Holy, 103, disparaged the notion of natural law and determinism put forward by, e.g., Spinoza: “This predetermination by nature, having been identified with the allembracing efficacy of God, in the end the outcome of the most profound and purely religious intuition of divine predetermination— which has no concern at all with ‘laws of nature’— is the comparatively trivial ‘scientific’ notion of universal causal connection. There can be no more spurious product of theological speculation, no more fundamental falsification of religious conceptions than this; and it is certainly not against this that the rationalist feels an antagonism, for it is itself a piece of solid rationalism, but at the same time a complete abandonment of the real religious idea of ‘predestination.’” 157. Schmitt, Three Types, 59 – 60, 60 – 61. See also Meier, Lesson, 89 – 90. 158. Schmitt, Political Theology, 27– 28, focused attention on this aspect of Weber’s theory: “When he [Weber] speaks of differentiations in the categories of legal thought, he equates the word formal with the words rationalized, professionally trained, and, finally, calculable. . . . Because of its evenness and calculability, regularity [in law] passes over to the third form, the ‘rationalistic,’ that is, technical refinement, which . . . is oriented toward calculability.” See also Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 15.

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159. Gooch has pointed out that Otto’s “Das Heilige may be understood as a response to the ‘disenchantment of the world’ . . . famously identified by Max Weber as the principle tendency of scientific rationalism and the routinization of daily life— a process which, in Ottonian terms, coincides with the marginalization of the numinous.” Gooch, Numinous and Modernity, 24; see also 204 – 5. 160. Ghosh, Max Weber, 311: “charisma can become ‘routinized’ and so rationalized over time; alternatively, a previously entrenched rationalist framework or Gehäuse can be disrupted by a charismatic incursion.” 161. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Funkenstein, Theology, overlaps with the arguments of Blumenberg and Gillespie in certain respects also. Gillespie, Nihilism, 23, expressly refutes the idea that nominalism led in any direct way to human self-assertion: “While nominalism clearly rejects the basic structure of medieval life and thought, it does not establish man as a free being capable of mastering nature and securing himself in the world. Rather it announces the utter insignificance of human beings in comparison to God. Moreover, rather than establish man as lord of nature and his own destiny, it leaves him afloat in a universe utterly dependent upon a capricious divine will. Nominalism points not toward the dawn of a new enlightenment but toward the dark form of an omnipotent and incomprehensible God.” 162. Gillespie, Nihilism, xvii. 163. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” P. Nowell Smith, in Idziak, Divine Command Morality, 277, in the course of a discussion of divine command morality, quotes Jean Piaget’s view that children adopt the “heteronomous” view that rules are “sacred and inviolable.” In connection with his characterization of the distinction between the moralities of the Old and New Testaments, this shows Nowell-Smith’s perpetuation of the thesis that the Hebrew Bible exemplified an infantile morality, a position possibly carried over from earlier Christian accommodation theories of Mosaic law. 164. Those familiar with Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age will know that he rejected theories of “secularization” that depicted modernity as dependent on a theological past. See Part One of Blumenberg, Legitimacy, and the postscript to Schmitt’s Political Theology II (116 – 30) for their respective critiques of each other’s views. See also Joe Paul Kroll, “A Human End to History? Hans Blumenberg, Karl Löwith and Carl Schmitt on Secularization and Modernity” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2010). Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 30, did allow, however, that “much in the modern age is ‘unthinkable without’ the Christianity that went before it,” an acknowledgment that was already clearly implied by his own impressive effort to trace a path from ancient Greek and early Christian philosophies to modernity. Thus he frankly averred that “the claim that the modern age made an absolute beginning through philosophy is no more correct than the claim that the latter half of history had an absolute beginning in the events to which the Christian era traces its origin” (74). Modernity is neither a sheer novum nor a mere continuation of tradition. Later in the book, Blumenberg stated that “the idea of an absolute beginning is in its turn . . . no more rational than any creatio ex nihilo” (146). I agree with Gillespie, Theological Origins, 12, that “Blumenberg[] . . . does not understand the metaphysical significance of his own argument” which itself traces the dependence of modernity on a theological past and, therefore, calls into question the independence of the “secular.” See also Gillespie, Nihilism, xxii: “My argument also resembles the argument presented by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. I agree with Blumenberg’s general thesis that modernity developed in response to the intractable questions that arose out of late medieval thought, but I argue, con-

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trary to Blumenberg, that the modern notion of will, or what Blumenberg calls self-assertion, is not a new construct that reoccupies an intellectual position that skepticism opened up, but the secularization of the idea of divine omnipotence.” 165. Blumenberg’s magisterial account, as persuasive as it is in many respects, is also vulnerable to other challenges, the main one being, from my perspective, that he never provides a satisfying etiology of the threat posed by nominalism. If the source of this threat was merely the logical difficulty of justifying God’s omnipotence and his goodness simultaneously, that is a perennial problem that has never been resolved, neither by Christianity nor by any other system. However, if the nominalist idea of an all-powerful deity was so anxiety-producing and destabilizing, then why was it advanced in the first place? What purpose motivated such thinkers as Scotus and Ockham to insist upon omnipotence as a central feature of the Christian deity? One partial answer that has frequently been given is that such thinkers were attempting to vindicate the God of scripture against the God of philosophy, and to assert the priority of the claims of Jerusalem over Athens, of the miracle over natural law. See the discussion above at pp. 50 – 52. From this perspective, what nominalism represented was not the return of “Gnosticism” (pace Blumenberg) but rather of “Judaism” and of the Holy One of Israel, in response also to the rise to prominence of Aristotelian philosophy in medieval Scholasticism, which posed a challenge to the authority of biblical revelation. It is clear that Blumenberg has provided no convincing account, nor positive role, for the periodic resurgence of the insistence on the radical sovereignty of the holy that we see in both nominalism and the early Reformation, as well as, arguably, in the Hebrew Bible itself. By assigning to a sovereign deity a purely negative or antagonistic role, as the necessary foil in the drama of the rise of human self-assertion, Blumenberg not only fails to address the diremption between sovereignty and lawfulness: he leaves us unprepared for its contemporary resurgence. 166. Gillespie, Nihilism, xii: “Nihilism is not the result of the death of God but the consequence of the birth or rebirth of a different kind of God, an omnipotent God of will who calls into question all of reason and nature and thus overturns all eternal standards of truth and justice, and good and evil. This idea of God came to predominance in the fourteenth century and shattered the medieval synthesis of philosophy and theology, catapulting man into a new way of thinking and being. . . . This new way was in turn the foundation for modernity as the realm of human self-assertion . . .” 167. See Berger, “Charisma and Religious Innovation.” 168. Yvonne Sherwood, “The God of Abraham and Exceptional States, or The Early Modern Rise of the Whig/Liberal Bible,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76 (2008): 312 – 43; and Sherwood, Biblical Blaspheming, 303 – 32. 169. Sherwood, “God of Abraham,” 319. 170. Personal communications from Yvonne Sherwood, Monique Scheer, and Ann Taves have convinced me that there must be some connection between the discourses of disenchantment examined in this chapter and the political turmoil in seventeenth-century England, although the precise nature of this connection may be impossible to pin down. 171. Robert Zaller, “Breaking the Vessels: The Desacralization of Monarchy in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 757– 78, esp. 776 – 77: these developments “reflect . . . the rationalizing temper of the later seventeenth century. The intellectual presuppositions on which sacred monarchy had rested— the world of signs and wonders that betokened divine intention, of essences and influences that channeled royal healing— was being rapidly eroded.” 172. Sherwood, “God of Abraham,” 316, 320, 334.

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173. Ibid., 316, 320. Agamben’s recent work has performed an extended analysis of the meaning of oikonomia in Christian traditions. See also Dotan Leshem, The Origins of Neoliberalism: Modeling the Economy from Jesus to Foucault (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 174. For example, Toland, Nazarenus, 9 – 10: “The Mahometans believe, as a fundamental article, that there have been six most eminent persons, who were the authors of new Institutions; every one of these gradually exceeding each other in perfection. These six are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet; wherein all Christians (excepting only as to this latter) agree with them, reckoning up in their several Systems so many periods or dispensations, and calling the whole GOD’s ECONOMY.” 175. Yelle, Language of Disenchantment, 17– 32. 176. Potts, History of Charisma, 107, 115. 177. Ibid., 80 – 81. 178. Shaw, Miracles. 179. Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 180. Walsham, “Miracles,” 275. 181. Ibid., 278. 182. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650 – 1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 218 – 29 (Spinoza’s argument against miracles and its reception), 599 – 609 (Spinoza’s influence on deism, also with respect to the argument against miracles), 359 – 74 (Fontenelle). 183. Jonathan Sheehan, “When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 217– 42. 184. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 13 – 14; Manuel Borutta, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie: Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,“ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010): 347– 76; Michael Saler, “Modernity, Disenchantment, and the Ironic Imagination,” Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 137– 49; see also Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, The Reenchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009) and Michael Saler, “Modernity, Enchantment, and Fictionalism,” (http:// blogs.ssrc.org/ tif/2013/12/20/modernity-enchantment-and-fictionalism /). 185. Josephson-Storm, Myth of Disenchantment, 29, 55, 80, 139, 151, 311.

Chapter Three 1. On the homo sacer, see Rudolph Jhering, Geist des römischen Rechts aus den verschiedenen Stufen seiner Entwicklung, 2nd ed., pt. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1866), 278 – 87; Theodor Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1899), 901– 4; W. Warde Fowler, “The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer,” in Roman Essays and Interpretations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 15 – 24; Harold Bennett, “Sacer Esto,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 61 (1930): 5 – 18; James Leigh Strachan-Davidson, Problems of the Roman Criminal Law, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 3 – 19; Leon ter Beek, “Divine Law and the Penalty of Sacer Esto in Early Rome,” in Law and Religion in the Roman Republic, ed. Olga Tellegen-Couperus (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 11– 29. On the related institution of the noxae deditio, see John Scheid, “Oral Tradition and Written Tradition in the Formation of Sacred

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Law in Rome,” in Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome, ed. Clifford Ando and Jörg Rüpke (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 27– 30. 2. See, e.g., Strachan-Davidson, Problems, 2; Celia E. Schultz, “The Romans and Ritual Murder,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (2010): 516 – 41; Zsuzsanna Várhelyi, “Political Murder and Sacrifice: From Roman Republic to Empire,” in Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice, ed. Jennifer Wright Knust and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 125 – 41, commenting (at 126) on Agamben’s interpretation of the homo sacer; Peter Gratton, The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fiction of Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 161– 200. See also Vico, New Science, §§191, 957. Vico connected human sacrifice, including “Saturn’s victims (Saturni hostiae)” and the anathēmata with the interdict on sharing fire and water (§957). His earlier mention of this interdict (§610) immediately preceded his mention of the hostis: “The second division was that between citizen and hostis, which meant both guest and stranger or enemy” (§611). Vico may have been another possible source for Schmitt’s and Agamben’s reflections on these matters. 3. Jhering, Geist des römischen Rechts, 287– 89; Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht, 72 – 73; Bennett, “Sacer Esto,” 12 – 16. 4. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83. 5. Johan Willem Gous van der Walt, Law and Sacrifice: Towards a Post-Apartheid Theory of Law (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2005), 125 – 26: “Agamben would seem to argue that the history of biopolitics is a non-sacrificial history. . . . By linking sovereignty to the non-sacrificial biopolitics of Western metaphysics and modern politics, Agamben would seem to suggest that sovereignty itself is not a matter of or related to matters of sacrifice. . . . Following [Jean-Luc] Nancy, I argue . . . that the history of sovereignty is indeed a history of sacrifice.” 6. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 74 (emphasis in original). 7. Ibid., 85. 8. Roger Friedland, “Religious Terror and the Erotics of Exceptional Violence,” Anthropological Journal on European Cultures 14 (2005): 49. 9. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 105 – 6. 10. Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht, 901– 4; Fowler, “Original Meaning,” 20; Várhelyi, “Political Murder,” 125 – 26, 130, 132; and ter Beek, “Divine Law,” 26 – 29. See also the discussion of “Saturn’s victims” in Vico, New Science, §§191, 957. I use the masculine pronoun because I have not come across any cases of a female having been declared sacra in this way. 11. Citing a number of such cases from ancient Greece, Rome, and other areas, Robertson Smith stated that “all such forms of sacrifice are precisely parallel to those which were employed in sacred executions, i.e. in the judicial slaying of the members of the community.” Smith, Religion of the Semites, 418. Cf. ibid., 361: “There is every reason to think that even at this early stage [of pastoral religion among the ancient Israelites] certain impious crimes, notably murder within the kin, were expiated by the death of the offender. But the death of such a criminal cannot with any justice be called a sacrifice.” 12. Várhelyi, “Political Murder”; ter Beek, “Divine Law.” See also Marcel Mauss, “La religion et les origines du droit pénal,” pt. 2, Revue de l’histoire des religions 35 (1897): 58 – 59, arguing already that the homo sacer illustrated the close association between religious and public criminal law. 13. Van der Walt, Law and Sacrifice, 127, also makes this point. 14. See Strachan-Davidson, Problems, 5; Bennett, “Sacer Esto,” states that “for the earliest

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period human sacrifice seems reasonably well established” (8) but that by Festus’s day, such practices had been banned (9 – 10). 15. Jhering, Geist des römischen Rechts, 280 – 87; Bennett, “Sacer Esto,” 11. 16. Strachan-Davidson, Problems, 11– 15. 17. Jhering, Geist des römischen Rechts, 280. 18. Steven DeCaroli, “Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignty,” in Calarco and DeCaroli, Giorgio Agamben, 43 – 69. 19. ter Beek, “Divine Law.” 20. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 1, chap. 7. 21. On the topic of foundation sacrifices (Bauopfer), see, e.g., Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Dieterichsche Buchhandlung, 1844); John Albrecht Walz, The Foundation Sacrifice and Kindred Rites (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1897); Paul Sartori, “Über das Bauopfer,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 30 (1898): 1– 54; Alfred C. Haddon, The Study of Man (London: Bliss, Sands, 1898), 275 – 87; Lewis Dayton Burdick, Foundation Rites with Some Kindred Ceremonies (New York: Abbey Press, 1901); Elsdon Best, “Human Sacrifice for a New House,” in Maori Religion and Mythology (Wellingdon, N.Z.: W. G. Skinner, 1924); Paul Brewster, “The Foundation Sacrifice Motif in Legend, Folksong, Game, and Dance,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 96 (1971): 71– 89; and Torsten Capelle, “Eisenzeitliche Bauopfer,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 21 (1987): 182 – 205. 22. Jhering, Geist des römischen Rechts, 286 – 87. 23. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 28 – 31. See Dominick La Capra’s analysis, with reference to Agamben, of the problems involved with choosing either sacrificial or nonsacrificial terms for this event: “Approaching Limit Forms: Siting Agamben,” in Calarco and DeCaroli, Giorgio Agamben, esp. 128 – 29, 141– 42. 24. La Capra, “Approaching Limit Forms,” 141– 42. 25. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 85. The reference is to Sigmund Freud’s statement that “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.” Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 17: 226. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 78, mentions Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) and states that “only with this book does a genuine general theory of the ambivalence of the sacred come to light.” Here Freud cites Wilhelm Wundt for the idea that the word “taboo” was originally ambivalent, as it meant “holy” and “unclean” at the same time. Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” in Psychological Works, 13: 18. Both Robertson Smith and Wundt, then, developed this idea prior to Freud. Agamben also notes Freud’s earlier essay, “On the Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910). The latter indeed relied in part on the subsequently discredited work of Karl Abel. However, several of the examples noted by Freud in this essay are not necessarily false, including the English “cleave,” which can mean either “join” or “split,” and “sacred” itself, which he says can mean either “sacred” or “accursed.” Freud, “On the Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,” in Psychological Works, 11: 159. “Cleave” is a common example of what is now called a contranym, antagonym, or autoantonym. Another English example is “sanction,” meaning to allow or to punish. Antonyms can sometimes be formed with the slightest alteration in a word; examples are the English “again” and “against,” and the German “wieder” and “wider.” Freud notes the latter in ibid., 11: 160. 26. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 75.

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27. Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lecture IV, “Holiness and Taboo,” and esp. Note B, “Uncleanness and Taboo,” 446 – 54. 28. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 10 – 12. 29. Marie-Joseph Lagrange, Études des religions sémitiques (Paris: Victor Lecoffre, 1905), 266 – 67: “Chacun de ces systèmes a sa part de vérité, mais aucun n’insiste sur le point essentiel du sacrifice: l’immolation. . . . Que l’on suppose d’abord que le sacrifice est une simple offrande. Si on l’entend d’une offrande intéressée, à manière de Renan, d’un contrat do ut des, on ne s’explique pas la vertu sacrée, nous dirions volontiers l’horror sacer du sacrifice.” 30. See the discussion of Eliade in Douglas, Purity and Danger, 7– 11. 31. Caillois, Man and the Sacred, chap. 2, “The Ambiguity of the Sacred,” 33 – 59. Caillois refers to the homo sacer in ibid., 35. Mauss, “La religion et les origines du droit pénal,” 57– 59, already connected the homo sacer with the ambivalence of the sacred. 32. Franz Steiner, Taboo (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1967), 33 – 34. 33. Smith, Religion of the Semites, 153 – 54, quoted in Steiner, Taboo, 75. Steiner criticizes Robertson Smith’s idea that many of the rules concerned with establishing and maintaining holiness are arbitrary. Steiner, Taboo, 57, quotes Robertson Smith’s statement that “when the rules of uncleanness are made to rest on the will of the gods, they appear altogether arbitrary and meaningless” (Smith, Religion of the Semites, 447). Douglas similarly disputed the idea that such rules can be arbitrary. Steiner and Douglas both ignore that Jewish tradition itself was divided on this point, many authorities holding that it was the very arbitrariness of such rules that established their authority. See discussion in chap. 2 . 34. Nathan Söderblom, “Holiness (General and Primitive),” Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1913), 6: 736. Otto, Holy, 89, notes Söderblom’s interpretation. 35. Steiner, Taboo, 129. 36. Ibid., 35 – 36. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 8, also notes with respect to sacer that “it may apply to desecration as well as to consecration.” Norman Snaith states that “the Hebrew qodesh is primitively like mana . . . It is dangerous and deadly as well as beneficent and life-giving.” Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 40. Robert Parker accepts Steiner’s analysis but also points to the ambivalence and contagiousness of things belonging to the category of miasmata in ancient Greece, which paralleled to some extent the homo sacer. Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 7, 11, and “The Greek for Taboo,” in ibid., 328 – 29; see also Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 268 – 71. 37. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 8. 38. Wolf Wilhelm Grafen Baudissin, Studien zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Grunow Verlag, 1878), 20 – 22. 39. Ibid., 35 – 36. Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 34; see also ibid., 46: “The entire book of Leviticus can be interpreted from this point of view. Each verse proves the intimate connection between the pure and the impure”! 40. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 160. 41. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 149. 42. de Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues, 365. 43. Ibid., 375. See also Vico, New Science, §611: “The second division was that between citizen and hostis, which meant both guest and stranger or enemy”; and Helmuth Berking, Sociology of

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Giving, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 1999), 82, on the ambivalence of “guest” in relation to this etymology. 44. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 78 – 79. Agamben here relies upon Huguette Fugier, Recherches sur l’expression du sacré dans la langue Latine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963), 238 – 41. See also Fowler, “Original Meaning,” 17. Fugier’s own argument against the ambivalence of the sacred is vulnerable to the same counterarguments I am making here. 45. Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973), 452 – 54, 469; Harriet Lutzky, “On a Concept Underlying Indo-European Terms for the Sacred,” Journal of Indo-European Studies 21 (1993): 283, 293 – 95. 46. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 75. 47. Jan Bremmer, “Scapegoat Rituals in Ancient Greece,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 87 (1983): 299 – 320; Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 59 – 77; Burkert, Greek Religion, 82 – 84; Dennis D. Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1991), 139 – 65; Parker, Miasma, 24 – 25, 258 – 59; and Daniel Ogden, The Crooked Kings of Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth, 1997). 48. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed., 13 vols., repr. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966), pt. 6, The Scapegoat, chap. 8, “The Saturnalia and Kindred Festivals,” 306 – 411. 49. Agamben, State of Exception, 65 – 73. 50. See Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 47. Another example is the transformation of the Eumenides from malevolent to benevolent powers in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. 51. The theme of ambivalence expressed in the convergence, not only in the story of Cain but in other cases, of a murder with both sanctity and sacrifice is elaborated in Maccoby, Sacred Executioner, 28 – 33. 52. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 76 – 77. 53. Others who have noted this comparison between the homo sacer and the herem are Fried˙ land, “Religious Terror,” 57– 58, citing the episode of Phineas and the Midianites in Numbers 25; and van der Walt, Law and Sacrifice, who cites the herem against Agamben’s attempt to decouple ˙ the ban from sacrifice. 54. This should not be confused with the later, postbiblical meaning of herem as excommu˙ nication and banishment without killing, as happened for example to Spinoza in seventeenthcentury Amsterdam. See Philip D. Stern, The Biblical Herem: A Window on Israel’s Religious ˙ Experience (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991); Charles Sherlock, “The Meaning of Hrm in the ˙ Old Testament,” Colloquium 14 (1982), 13 – 24; Joel N. Lohr, Chosen and Unchosen: Conceptions of Election in the Pentateuch and Jewish-Christian Interpretation (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), Appendix 2, “Herem in the Old Testament: An Overview,” 208 – 25; Herbert Lohfink, ˙ “Herem,” in G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren, Theological Dictionary of the Old ˙ Testament, trans. David E. Green, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 180 – 99; Sa-Moon Kang, Divine War in the Old Testament and in the Ancient Near East (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 80 – 84. 55. Kang, Divine War; Patrick D. Miller, The Divine Warrior in Early Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 157– 60; Gerhard von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel, trans. Marva J. Dawn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 49 – 50; Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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56. Cf. Stern, The Biblical Herem, 149, who qualifies this appropriately: “the herem is not ˙ ˙ ‘contagious’ in the sense that one becomes proscribed if one has touched someone who has touched a proscribed object— nor do Joshua or his messengers fear to touch the proscribed objects Achan stole [from Jericho]. On the other hand, a person who infringes on the divine sphere has entered an area which is fatal, for there deity and human cannot coexist.” See also ibid., 225. 57. E.g., Deuteronomy 13:17 refers to the herem against Canaan as a whole burnt offering ˙ (kalil); Isaiah 34 represents banned humans as sacrificial animals and refers to this as a zebah; ˙ Numbers 18:14 and Ezekiel 44:29 associate herem with the various categories of sacrificial offer˙ ings. In favor of the view that herem was associated with sacrifice, see Niditch, War, 28 – 55, 63; ˙ and Sherlock, “Meaning of Hrm,” 14, 20 – 21. Against the view that herem was associated with ˙ ˙ sacrifice, see Abraham Kuenen, The Religion of Israel to the Fall of the Jewish State, trans. Alfred Heath May, 3 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1882 – 83), 1:290 – 91; Stern, The Biblical Herem, ˙ 191; and Stern, “Isaiah 34, Chaos, and the Ban,” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine, ed. Robert Chazan, William W. Hallo, and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 391– 95 (critiquing Niditch). Other scholars fall in between: David Janzen, The Social Meaning of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 162 – 69, acknowledges both similarities and differences between herem and sacrifice; Lohr, Chosen and Unchosen, 211– 14, allows that herem might be thought ˙ ˙ of as a kind of sacrifice, as it involved the giving over of valuables to God. More generally, the problem of the religious justification for violence in the Hebrew Bible has posed a problem not only for the English deists, but also for rabbinic interpretation. See Lohr, Chosen and Unchosen, 217– 18; and G. Braulik, “Hermeneutische Bemerkungen zum Buch Deuteronomium,” in Deuteronomy and Deuteronomic Literature: Festschrift C. H. W. Brekelmans, ed. Marc Vervenne and Johan Lust (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1997), 4. For early Christian and Gnostic interpretations, see R. D. Nelson, “I and the Deuteronomic Social Conscience,” in ibid., 39. 58. Nelson, “Deuteronomic Social Conscience,” 44: “herem may be defined a[s] ‘the state of ˙ inalienable Yahweh ownership.’” 59. Snaith, Distinctive Ideas, 34; and Stern, The Biblical Herem, 126. ˙ 60. Niditch, War, 40. See also T. M. Lemos, “Dispossessing Nations: Population Growth, Scarcity, and Genocide in Ancient Israel and Twentieth-Century Rwanda,” in Ritual Violence in the Hebrew Bible: New Perspectives, ed. Saul M. Olyan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 47. For an explanation of the do ut des model of sacrifice, see pp. 99 and 112 below. 61. See the discussion in chap. 4. 62. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 35, §§14 – 16. 63. Agamben’s desire to demystify the sacrificial myth, in order to expose the naked sovereignty that lies behind this, leads him too far. Why should we expect the homo sacer or any other expression of this myth to disclose, and so to render powerless, its own secrets? In any case, it is first necessary to understand the logic of this myth before we can undertake to contest it. 64. C. Brekelmans, author of an important monograph, De herem in het Oude Testament ˙ (1959) (which I have not been able to consult as I do not read Dutch), states in a brief article on the term: “The root hrm referred originally to that which is forbidden, either because it is ˙ accursed and should be destroyed (res exsecranda), or because it is very holy (res sacrosancta).” Brekelmans, “Hērem/ban,” in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. Ernst Jenni and Claus ˙ Westermann, trans. Mark Biddle (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), 2:474 – 77. Smith, Religion of the Semites, 453 – 54, already invoked the biblical herem, as well as the Islamic haram as applied ˙ to Mecca (451), in connection with the ambivalence of the sacred, though without connecting

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these two linguistically related examples. See also Owen C. Whitehouse, “Holiness (Semitic),” Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1913), 6:752 – 53. 65. Baudissin, Studien, 26; see also Steiner, Taboo, 68 – 69; and Snaith, Distinctive Ideas, 32 – 34. 66. Stern, The Biblical Herem, 13. As he points out (14), even in biblical Hebrew certain ˙ names use the root h-r-m with a positive value. ˙ 67. Ibid., 104. 68. Joseph Chelhod, “La notion ambiguë du sacré chez les Arabes et dans l’Islam,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 159 (1961): 71, 74, 79. 69. Steiner, Taboo, 35 – 36. 70. Karl Tutschek, Lexicon der Galla Sprache, ed. Lorenz Tutschek, Erster Theil: GallaEnglisch- Deutsch (Munich, 1844), s.v. “hirmi” and “boye” (with my translations from the German). See also E. C. Foot, A Galla– English English– Galla Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913)¸ s.v. “hirmi”: “(adj.): unclean (of food).” Neither dictionary, it should be noted, shows any corresponding borrowing of the word halal, corresponding to the Hebrew hol. ˙ ˙ 71. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 78. 72. Caillois’ idea that the sacred combines the pure and impure has been noted at p. 81. For his assimilation of this with Otto’s idea, see Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 36 – 37: “[The sacred] both repels and fascinates. . . . Its foremost ambiguity tends to resolve itself into . . . feelings of awe and aversion. . . . Theology preserves this dual aspect of divinity, while distinguishing its terrifying and captivating sides, the tremendum and the fascinans, using once again R. Otto’s terminology.” See also Lutzky, “Indo-European Terms for the Sacred,” 295; Snaith, Distinctive Ideas, 40. 73. Snaith, Distinctive Ideas, 31– 32, recognizes that this debate concerns Baudissin’s “emphatic claim that the word [holy] had originally no moral content whatever,” a claim upheld by Nöldeke and partly echoed by Otto, and adds his own caveat that the category “did involve pre-ethical restrictions.” While resisting the idea that the holy is amoral or antinomian, Snaith repeats the notion that this quality has a dual nature. 74. Morgan, Moral Philosopher, 130 – 31; Tindal, Christianity as Old As Creation, 245. 75. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 76 – 77, does note Robertson Smith’s invocation of the herem as ˙ an example of the ambivalence of the sacred. It is therefore all the more strange that Agamben does not take up the task of interpreting the scholarship on the herem. ˙ 76. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 4, 54. 77. Otto, Holy, 28. 78. Kaufmann, Religion of Israel, 74 – 75. 79. Agamben, State of Exception, 70. 80. Pace F. S. Bodenheimer, “The Manna of Sinai,” Biblical Archaeologist 10 (1947): 1– 6, which presents a “scientific” argument that the manna was either tamarisk or, more likely, exudations from scale insects. On Bodenheimer, see Smith, Relating Religion, 119. 81. The miraculous nature of the manna, the forty years’ wandering, and ritualized sacking of Jericho are all singled out in Kuenen, Religion of Israel, 1:20 – 22, as examples of how events long removed from historical memory— as these episodes were supposedly added later to the text— may become sensationalized: “most natural events, if they be handed down for a long time by tradition, become exaggerated, and assume of themselves, as it were, the character of miracles.” Such a typical rationalistic interpretation of course misses the entire import of the story, which is motivated not by a simple “forgetting,” but rather by a desire to stress a particular theology of divine omnipotence.

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82. I am concerned here only with how the episode is presented in the biblical text, not with the reconstruction of the historical reality, if any, underlying such representation. That the textual representation has been heavily influenced by a particular theology I assume to be the case and take as my point of departure. See Kang, Divine War, 143. 83. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 19. See Mika Ojakangas, “Carl Schmitt and the Sacred Origins of Law,” Telos 147 (2009): 34 – 54. I find Agamben’s translation of Ausnahme as “taking the outside” to be tendentious. The German prefix aus- (out) here has the same valence as in, e.g., Auswahl (election, selection). 84. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492 – 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2. Seed’s comparative study of French, Spanish, and English practices shows a wide variety in the degree of ritualization of European conquest. 85. Robert Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 91– 93. 86. Schmitt, The “Nomos” of the Earth, 345. He also suggests a connection between Nahme and name: “a land-appropriation is constituted only if the appropriator is able to give the land a name” (348). In the case at hand, this means the renaming of Canaan as Israel. 87. Ibid., 81, 329. 88. Bernhard Laum, Heiliges Geld: Eine historische Untersuchung über den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes (Tübingen: Mohr, 1924), 29. See also Gerhard Baudy, “Hierarchie oder: Die Verteilung des Fleisches,” in Neue Ansätze in der Religionswissenschaft, ed. Burkhard Gladigow and Hans Kippenberg (Munich, 1983), 157; cited in Berking, Sociology of Giving, 69. 89. Von Rad, Holy War, 85 – 86: “Characteristic for this form is the strong and undoubtedly unhistorical stylization of the event and the accentuation of the purely miraculous. This miracle is absolute; over against it, no human activity belongs at all. . . . Yahweh’s action in the miracle is absolutely autarkic.” 90. Walter Brueggemann, The Land (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1977), 48. 91. Schmitt, The “Nomos” of the Earth, 348. 92. Von Rad, Holy War, 85, notes discrepancies in the differing versions of this episode. 93. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, eds., The Midrash Rabbah, compact ed., vol. 3, Numbers and Deuteronomy, trans. Judah J. Slotki (London: Soncino Press, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 565 – 66. Of course, the explanation that the herem was applied to Jericho ˙ because it was conquered on the Sabbath, which was also holy, does not explain the other applications of the herem in Canaan. ˙ 94. Heinrich W. Guggenheimer, ed. and trans., Seder Olam: The Rabbinic View of Chronology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998), 112 – 14. See also John Gill, Exposition of the Old Testament, 6 vols. (London, 1748 – 63), on this passage. 95. See also Kang, Divine War, 144 – 45, which discusses parallels to other Semitic war rituals sometimes involving a seven-day period; and Daniel E. Fleming, “The Seven-Day Siege of Jericho in Holy War,” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine, ed. Robert Chazan, William W. Hallo, and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 211– 28. 96. Stern, The Biblical Herem, 219, 226. See also Stern, “Isaiah 34,” 396 – 400. ˙ 97. Philippe Guillaume, Land and Calendar: The Priestly Document from Genesis 1 to Joshua 18 (New York: T & T Clark, 2010), 93, notes that “the importance of the River Jordan as a limit of the wilderness is underlined by a string of wordplays using the same root ([avar]) [i.e., “to cross over”]. . . . The Jordan crossing thus marks the return to ordinary life, to agriculture and to a meat diet.”

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98. Schmitt, The “Nomos” of the Earth, 341. 99. Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250 – 1050 BCE (New York: Maryknoll, 1979). See also Roland Boer, Marxist Criticism of the Bible (London: T & T Clark, 2003), 233 – 45, for a summary of Gottwald, with a review and critique of more recent scholarship on the ancient Near Eastern modes of production; and Boer, “Marx, Method and Gottwald,” in Tracking the Tribes of Yahweh, ed. Roland Boer (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 131– 33, on the opposition between city and country in ancient Israelite religion. 100. DeCaroli, “Boundary Stones,” in Calarco and DeCaroli, Giorgio Agamben, 65. 101. Eliade, History, 2:108. 102. Ibid.; and Jacob L. Wright, “Urbicide: The Ritualized Killing of Cities in the Ancient Near East,” in Ritual Violence in the Hebrew Bible: New Perspectives, ed. Saul M. Olyan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 153 (citing Judg. 9:45 and Assyrian parallels). 103. Agamben, State of Exception, 65 – 66. 104. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 87. 105. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, excerpted in Idziak, Divine Command Morality, 110 – 11, 114, 116. 106. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 7, 126, 145. See Richard Wolin’s critique of Assmann: “Biblical Blame Shift: Is the Egyptologist Jan Assmann Fueling Anti-Semitism?,” Chronicle of Higher Education Review, April 19, 2013. 107. E.g., the Mesha Stele, which records the dedication of a herem to Chemosh, the deity ˙ of Moab. Chapter Four 1. Gottwald, Tribes, 543, notes that the most extreme forms of destruction were applied to Canaanite as opposed to non-Canaanite cities. 2. Jonathan Judaken, personal communication, suggested to me that the herem may have ˙ represented an attempt to remove the profit motive from violent conquest, and thus to civilize the conduct of war, by placing a taboo on the taking of booty. This idea is interesting but unconvincing, especially as much of the “booty” that was denied was human beings, and the prohibition against taking them meant consigning them to violent death. It might be closer to the truth to say that the prohibition against taking booty was designed to ensure the holiness— i.e., the singularity, independence, or sovereignty— of the motive for conquest. 3. Niditch, War, 42. 4. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 8, chaps. 9 – 10. 5. See Gerardus van der Leeuw, “Die do-ut-des Formel in der Opfertheorie,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 20 (1920 – 21): 241– 53; Arnoud-Jan Bijsterfeld, Do Ut Des: Gift Giving, Memoria, and Conflict Management in the Medieval Low Countries (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2007). 6. Gottwald, Tribes, 550. 7. Ibid., 543, 547. Gottwald cites Joshua’s and David’s hamstringing of horses but not oxen. 8. Ibid., 546. See also Roland Boer, The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 155, describing the herem as “propaganda.” ˙ 9. The main current of scholarly opinion would appear to label the biblical account of the

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Conquest as a violent extermination and displacement of one tribe by another as a theological fiction. Kaufmann, Religion of Israel, 249 – 51, argues for the historical reality of this depiction. 10. Stern, The Biblical Herem, 221. 11. Ibid., 81. 12. See also Niditch, War, 23, contrasting the “requirement of the ban or herem that all con˙ quered human beings be killed . . . with the taking of young virgin girls in Numbers 31, and with the seemingly more pragmatic taking of male and female war captives elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures? . . . Do the contrasts in the treatment of enemy captives reflect the perspectives of groups who are or are not able to absorb, feed, and put to work new people, whether as slaves or wives or adopted children?” 13. Jacob Neusner, The Economics of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), x, defines economics as “the theory of rational action with regard to scarcity.” 14. Compare the use of the term by Boer, Sacred Economy. This indispensable work is focused on what we may discern of the realities of the economy of Israel in the biblical period, whereas my focus, as will become clear, is on certain of that economy’s ideological dimensions. 15. The contradiction between a “rational economics” and divine command is underscored by the influence of deism on two of the leading proponents of enlightened self-interest, Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith. Bentham’s opposition of utility to asceticism is noted below. He was heavily influenced by deist critiques of “priestcraft,” which he converted into a condemnation of “lawyercraft.” See Robert A. Yelle, “Bentham’s Fictions: Canon and Idolatry in the Genealogy of Law,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 17 (2005): 151– 79. Regarding Adam Smith, I will note only that Andy Denis has made a cogent argument that “the invisible hand concept was entirely and unambiguously theological” and “just another expression of Smith’s deist philosophy.” Andy Denis, “The Invisible Hand of God in Adam Smith,” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology 23 (2005): 16. More recently, Devin Singh has argued that the rise of an economics of calculation articulated with theological polemics against enthusiasm. Singh, “Irrational Exuberance: Hope, Expectation, and Cool Market Logic,” Political Theology 17 (March 2016): 120 – 36. 16. Neusner, Economics of Mishnah, xii. 17. Ibid., 9. 18. Ibid., 124. 19. Ibid., 95; italics in original. 20. Ibid., 101. 21. The economics of religion is a vast field that intersects with general economics, rationalchoice theory, game theory, evolutionary biology, the history of material culture, socialexchange theory, economic anthropology (including theories of the gift, and of sacrifice), and a number of other disciplines. For a partial bibliography, compiled by Anne Koch, see https:// epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/12437/. Some key works in the rational-choice approach to religion are Richard A. Posner, “A Theory of Primitive Society, with Special Reference to Law,” Journal of Law and Economics 23 (1980): 1– 53; Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); Lawrence A. Young, ed., Rational Choice Theory and Religion: Summary and Assessment (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Ilkka Pyysiäinen, ed., Religion, Economy, and Cooperation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010). For an application of such ideas to Judaism in particular, see Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994). 22. Laurence Iannaccone, “Sacrifice and Stigma: Reducing Free-riding in Cults, Communes, and Other Collectives,” Journal of Political Economy 100 (1992): 272 – 73.

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23. This explanation, it should be noted, directly contradicts that of Rodney Stark, “Micro Foundations of Religion: A Revised Theory,” Sociological Theory 17 (1999): 278, who lists as proposition number 17 that “People will seek to minimize their religious costs” (emphases in original). He argues that ethnographic data proves the existence of self-interested behaviors even in the case of sacrifice, such as substituting a sick animal or a less valuable offering. When the experts cannot agree on the facts, nor on the definition of self-interest or of a “good,” in what sense can we label the economics of religion a “science”? 24. Weber, Economy and Society, 820. He was scarcely the first to make such claims. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776), chap. 15, after attributing limits on the expansion of Judaism to its ritual requirements, stated that “Christianity offered itself to the world, armed with the strength of the Mosaic law, and delivered from the weight of its fetters.” 25. David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Joseph Bulbulia and Andrew Mahoney, “Religious Solidarity: The Hand-Grenade Experiment,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 8 (2008): 295 – 320. 26. Iannaccone, “Sacrifice and Stigma,” 289: “if the underlying argument is correct, it should not apply only to religious groups.” 27. [Musson], Review of the Important Controversy, 41. 28. See Robert A. Yelle, “From Sovereignty to Solidarity: Some Transformations in the Politics of Sacrifice from the Reformation to Robertson Smith, History of Religions (forthcoming). 29. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 76 – 77. See also Wellhausen, Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, 8th ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1921), 172 – 73: “Die alten Festopfer waren die Erstlinge der Jahreszeit, die von einzelnen Familien dargebracht und grösstenteils in Freudenmahlen vor Jahve verzehrt wurden. . . . Das alte Hauptopfer was das Mahlopfer, welches in kleinen Kreisen an heiliger Stelle verzehrt wurde und eine Tischgemeinschaft zwischen den Gästen und Jahve stiftete. . . . Wenn man schlachtete, so opferte man auch.” 30. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 100; see also 72: “The burnt-offering has become quite independent and comes everywhere into the foreground, the sacrifices which are unconnected with a meal altogether predominate”; and Wellhausen, Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, 173: “Was das Mahlopfer verloren hat, ist einerseits dem Brandopfer zugewachsen; es wird ganz und ausschliesslich der Gottheit geweiht, und zwar nicht von einer kleinen Gesellschaft, die sich dabei an heiliger Stätte beteiligt, sondern von der abstrakten Gemeinde, die gar nicht dabei anwesend ist.” Kuenen, Religion of Israel, 257, described a similar trajectory in which the priests receive an increasing share of the sacrifice, but diverged from Wellhausen in stating that “the burntoffering . . . is the most perfect and the most common, the principal sacrifice, in the true sense of the word . . . the oldest and original sacrifice,” which had special expiatory power (2:262 – 63). 31. See p. 25 above. 32. Smith, Religion of the Semites, 261. This connection was scarcely surprising, for Robertson Smith wrote the introduction to the first English translation of Wellhausen’s Prolegomena and, as editor of the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, also commissioned Wellhausen to write important articles such as that on “Israel.” 33. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 340 – 54. 34. William Lang Baxter, Sanctuary and Sacrifice: A Reply to Wellhausen (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1896), 377– 79, 380 – 82. See also Geerhardus Vos, The Mosaic Origin of the Pentateuchal Codes (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1886), 96 – 103.

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35. M. F. C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes, eds., Sacrifice (London: Academic Press, 1980), 21. 36. Maurice Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, trans. Robert Brain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 41. 37. Wellhausen, Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, 173. 38. Smith, Religion of the Semites, 367; Roland De Vaux, Studies in Old Testament Sacrifice (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1964), 64. 39. Julius Wellhausen, “Israel,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed. (Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1889), 497, 499 – 501. See also Wellhausen, Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, 284 – 85: “Es herrschte ein wahrer Götzendienst des Gesetzes. . . . Ebensowenig darf man glauben, dass unter dem Joch des Gesetzes alle anderen Triebe des geistigen Lebens verkümmert wären”; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, 2:286: “The lawgiver, by his endless and minute enactments, reduces his ideas to smaller proportions, and produces a mere outward conception of duties toward Jahveh and an empty formalism”; William Robertson Smith, “Sacrifice,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. (Edinburgh, 1886), 132 – 38: “sacrifice becomes a merely conventional way of expressing religious feeling; the ritual becomes a simple affair of tradition, which may, as in the Levitical legislation, be based on an express divine command” (emphasis added). 40. Another example is Morris Silver, Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel (Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff, 1983), 102, who cites Royden Keith Yerkes, Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religion and Early Judaism (New York: Charles Scribner, 1952), as the authority for the proposition that the ’olah was the last form of sacrifice to develop— apparently Silver was unaware of Wellhausen’s earlier argument— and concludes “that the ’olah postdated the zevach in which the animal was partly burned and partly consumed by the worshippers . . . is not unreasonable since the ’olah is more expensive than the zevach.” In other words, only in a growing economy could such a wasteful form of sacrifice be afforded. 41. Bellah’s version of this argument was addressed briefly in chap. 1. 42. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 4, 10. 43. Ibid., 40 – 41, 58 – 62. 44. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961). Especially important is his distinction between competitive activities or sporting contests that depend upon skill (agon) and gambling and other games of chance (alea). The two are arguably radically different, but such differences are often glossed over in accounts of the similarity between ritual and play. A Mass is not (except in rare circumstances, such as a heart attack by the priest officiating or an event similar to Pussy Riot’s 2012 protest in Moscow’s Cathedral Church of Christ the Saviour) in any sense open to the vagaries of chance. Many games arguably involve some combination of luck and skill, even if the latter is demonstrated only in the player’s selection of moves on a game board governed by a random roll of the dice. Chess would arguably be pure skill, more analogous to trial by battle. Indeed, in this sense it is the relative absence of chance in most religious rituals that would appear to mark a divide from play. 45. Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Pantheon, 1952), 59. 46. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 209 – 11. Huizinga here was attempting (unsuccessfully) to distinguish his approach from Schmitt’s idea of politics as based on the distinction between friend and enemy. 47. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Bataille, Accursed Share.

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48. Bataille, Accursed Share, 1:37, 71. On the concept of dépense, see Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess, 116 – 29; and Frank Neubert, “Indicating Commitment: The Notion of Dépense in the Study of Religion and Ritual,” Journal of Classical Sociology 8 (2008): 306 – 20. On souveraineté, see Bataille, Accursed Share, 3:198 – 200. Mauss, Gift, 23, anticipated this: “The aim of all this [the kula] is to display generosity, freedom, and autonomous action, as well as greatness.” At times, Pieper’s account of “leisure” closely resembles Bataille’s of “sovereignty.” See, e.g., Pieper, Leisure, 74 – 75: “Divine worship, of its very nature, creates a sphere of real wealth and superfluity, even in the midst of the direst material want— because sacrifice is the living heart of worship. And what does sacrifice mean? It means a free offering freely given and never anything useful or utilitarian; in fact it means the very opposite of ‘using’ and ‘useful.’ And thus by means of active participation in the sacrifice of the cultus a capital wealth is created which the world of work can never consume, a super-abundance of wealth that cannot be calculated.” This is possibly a reference to the Church’s thesaurus ecclesiae, an inexhaustible treasury of merit created by Christ’s redemptive sacrifice and the actions of the saints. See chap. 6 for a discussion of this treasury. 49. Bataille, Accursed Share, 3:198 – 99. 50. Ibid., 1:55 – 56, 57– 58. For a valuable summary of Bataille’s views on sacrifice, see Ivan Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 53 – 60. 51. Bataille, Accursed Share, 1:69. 52. Ibid., 1:55. 53. Ibid., 1:120. 54. Ibid., 1:12; emphasis in original. 55. Ibid., 1:106. 56. Ibid., 1:119; emphasis in original. 57. The original monastic idea was of ora et labora, i.e., both praying and working. 58. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 143. 59. Pieper, Leisure, 76. 60. Eli Ginzberg, “Studies in the Economics of the Bible,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 22 (1932): 344, says that Weber referred to the Sabbath and Jubilee as “unverdaulicher Stoff.” See the discussion of Weber’s rejection of rationalizing interpretations of the Jubilee in chap. 5 . 61. Pieper, Leisure, 73 (emphasis in original). The reservation of certain fields as sacred and unusable has also been noted by other scholars, e.g., Parker, Miasma, 163: “Untilled sacred land [in ancient Greece] could be spoken of as ‘let go,’ which brings out what it has in common with days, animals, and persons ‘let go’ in favour of the gods. It would be interesting to know whether at any period real religious renunciation had been practised, in the sense that large areas of good land were left unused.” 62. The last example was claimed to be true of a fakir I met in Bangladesh in 1998. 63. Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, chap. 2 (London, 1781; repr., Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 8 – 13. 64. This was Mauss’s view of the potlatch: “The purpose of destruction by sacrifice is precisely that it is an act of giving that is necessarily reciprocated.” He denied further that the potlatch was “only in order to display power, wealth, and lack of self-interest.” Mauss, Gift, 16. Further on, however, his interpretation appears to converge with Bataille’s: “Even pure destruction of wealth does not signify that complete detachment that one might believe to be found in it. Even these acts of greatness are not without egoism. . . . The reason for these gifts and frenetic acts of wealth consumption is in no way disinterested, particularly in societies that practice the potlatch. Between chiefs and their vassals, between vassals and their tenants, through such gifts

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a hierarchy is established. To give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, to be higher in rank, magister” (ibid., 74). 65. David Hume, “The Natural History of Religion,” in Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757), 1– 117, quoted in de Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues, “Elucidation on Sacrifices,” 373. 66. In a typically rationalizing move, Posner, “A Theory of Primitive Society,” 16, rejects the idea that redistributions in primitive society are “gifts” based on altruism and calls them instead “insurance payments.” 67. John Toland, Letters to Serena (London, 1704). 68. Michael Harner, “The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice,” Natural History 86 (1977): 46 – 51. 69. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1912). 70. Ibid., chap. 4. As Barry Schwartz points out, Mauss ignored his predecessor Veblen’s pioneering work on “conspicuous waste.” Schwartz, “The Social Psychology of the Gift,” American Journal of Sociology 73 (1967): 6. See also Posner, “A Theory of Primitive Society,” 25: “Viewed as a signaling device, a gift need not actually be received or enjoyed by the donor. The form of Northwest Indian potlatch, sometimes regarded as pathological, in which goods are destroyed rather than given away can be interpreted as an especially credible method of signaling the possession of wealth, and of whatever qualities are correlated with the possession of wealth.” The question, however, is what such qualities are. 71. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 336. 72. Ibid., 2. 73. Ibid., 43. 74. Ibid., 75 – 76. 75. Ibid., 307– 9. Veblen notes also the opposite tendency to austerity in certain churches (120 – 22), but his theory is not very effective at accounting for such cases. 76. Ibid., 125 – 26, 367– 70. 77. Ibid., 301– 2. 78. J. H. Boeke, Oriental Economics (New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1947), 7, 11. I quote extensively from this typescript source as it is not widely available. 79. Ibid., 69. 80. Jacques Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society, trans. Franciscus Verellen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 14, 20 – 22, 189 – 41. 81. Ibid., 78, 92, 153 – 91. 82. Ibid., 210 – 14, 227. 83. Ibid., 227– 28. 84. Ibid., 217. 85. Ibid., 235 – 36. 86. Ibid., 241. 87. Ibid., 241, 246. 88. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 89. This terminological distinction was developed in Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice. 90. See Bataille, Accursed Share, 1:73: “Rank is the opposite of a thing: What founds it is sacred, and the general ordering of ranks is given the name of hierarchy.” 91. Godelier, Marxist Anthropology, 60: “With all its material, political, ideological, emotional and aesthetic aspects, religious activity broadens and exalts all positive aspects of social relations and at the same time allows the maximum attenuation, the temporary putting aside,

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of all the contradictions contained within these social relations. Religious activity is therefore a form of genuine labour, involving contradictions determined by the mode of production and other social relations, such labour constituting one of the essential conditions for the reproduction of these relations. . . . Far from having nothing to do with material culture and the mode of production, as some idealists would wish, religious observance is both a material and political function and is at the core of the process of reproduction of this mode of production.” 92. Bataille, Accursed Share, 1:57. 93. Ibid., 3:197. 94. For a similar critique of Bataille, see Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, 170 – 71. 95. The charter myth of Aztec sacrifice, according to Bataille, Accursed Share, 1:47, glorifies precisely this aspect, as the overlooked god, Nanauatzin, unlike Tecuciztecatl, goes into the fire willingly and thus receives the greater glory. 96. Jean Starobinski, Largesse, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 12 – 13. 97. Ibid., 13 – 14. 98. Ibid., 18 – 19. 99. Gustavo Benavides, “Economy,” in Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, ed. Donald Lopez (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 88. For references to the state of exception, see Benavides, “On the Production of Religious Configurations,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 245; and Benavides, “Irrational Experiences,” 265. 100. Benavides, “Religious Configurations,” 242 – 43. 101. Ibid., 242. Benavides invokes the example of sports contests, an example cited also, as we have seen, by Veblen, Huizinga, and Caillois. 102. With the additional curses that women should suffer pain in childbirth and have to obey their husbands. 103. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Third Essay, §7, p. 77. 104. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Appendix B, “World Renunciation in Indian Traditions,” 273 – 78. 105. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Second Essay, §3, p. 38. 106. Yelle, Semiotics of Religion, 159. 107. Timothy Lubin, “Ritual Self-Discipline as a Response to the Human Condition: Toward a Semiotics of Ritual Indices,” in Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, vol. 1, Grammars and Morphologies of Ritual Practices in Asia, ed. Axel Michaels, Anand Mishra, L. Dolce, G. Raz, and K. Triplett (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 276. 108. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Third Essay, §13, p. 88. Chapter Five 1. John G. Sprankling, “The Antiwilderness Bias in American Property Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 63 (Spring 1996): 532. 2. John G. Sprankling, “An Environmental Critique of Adverse Possession,” Cornell Law Review 79 (May 1994): 856 – 57. Sprankling traces how this bias was expressed by the courts’ upholding of acquisition of ownership by adverse possession in cases where such possession was based upon marginal or occasional economic uses that would never afford actual notice to the original landowner. In these cases, the courts extended the fiction of “constructive notice” in such a way as to favor the adverse possessor. Sprankling reasonably concludes that the real rea-

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son underlying these decisions was an inherent bias in favor of development. He argues further that this bias should be countered in order to recognize the need for environmental preservation of wilderness tracts. 3. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Second Treatise, chap. 5, “On Property.” All references are to this edition. 4. Ibid., chap. 5, §30. Locke’s theory of ownership by capture had a long literary life; for example, his statement (§30) that “what fish any one catches in the ocean, that great and still remaining common of mankind; or what ambergrise any one takes up here, is by the labour that removes it out of that common state nature left it in” is echoed in Hermann Melville’s MobyDick, chap. 89, “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.” The example of the captured deer is even older than Locke. Eliade, History, 1:36, refers to the connection between capture and the taking of land: “the pursuit and killing of a wild animal becomes the mythical model for the conquest of a territory (Landnáma) and the founding of a state.” See also the discussion of nemein at p. 92. 5. Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise, chap. 5, §49. 6. Ibid., chap. 5, §§41– 42. 7. Ibid., chap. 5, §37. 8. Ibid., chap. 5, §§34 – 35. 9. Elshtain, Sovereignty, 125: “Unfortunately, Locke’s terra nullius also provides the intellectual and theoretical backdrop to the removal of various Indian tribes in America from their ancestral land.” 10. Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protection Association, 485 U.S. 439 (1988). Congress subsequently (in 2000) passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which prohibits the government’s imposition of a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion through “land use regulation.” However, this requires that a claimant have a property right in the land in question. 11. Lyng 442, quoting a Forest Service impact statement; see also Lyng 440. 12. Lyng 460 – 61. 13. Lyng 460, quoting Federal Agencies Task Force, American Indian Religious Freedom Act Report, P.L. 95-341 (August 1979), 11. Justice Brennan (Lyng 460 – 61) also asserted several other theological differences, such as that Western traditions distinguish religion more sharply from other areas of activity, and value belief or dogma over ritual practice. 14. Emily Cousins, “Mountains Made Alive: Native American Relationships with Sacred Land.” http:// www.crosscurrents.org/mountainsalive.htm. 15. D. T. Suzuki, “The Role of Nature in Zen Buddhism,” in Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki, ed. William Barrett (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 229 – 32. 16. Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (10 March 1967): 1206. 17. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 24, explains that Locke was refuting Filmer’s invocation of this verse in defense of monarchy. For an argument that Locke’s reliance on the Bible went deeper than is normally thought, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Political Thought of John Locke and the Significance of Political Hebraism,” Hebraic Political Studies 1 (2006): 568 – 92. On Locke’s political theology more generally, see Elizabeth Pritchard, Religion in Public: Locke’s Political Theology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). For a broader analysis of the relationship between theology and political economy that also engages Locke, see Roland Boer and Christina Petterson, Idols of Nations: Biblical Myth at the Origins of Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014).

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18. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 12 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1871– 73): 239. Winthrop cites the same biblical verse again (241). On the use of this verse as a justification for ownership and possession in Protestant England and the New World, see Seed, Ceremonies, 32 – 35. 19. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 345n. 20. Richard Lee, “Reflections on Primitive Communism,” in Hunters and Gatherers, ed. Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn, vol. 1, History, Evolution and Social Change (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 253, 263 (fifteenth c.). Cf. Seed, Ceremonies, 28: “Beginning in the eleventh century, Englishmen began to erect a physical barrier— a fence or wall— to separate the wild from the cultivated. . . . By acquiring a physical boundary, the English garden began to signify possession. While New World peoples most certainly cultivated crops, and their plots were sometimes described as ‘resembling’ gardens, most native American agriculturalists did not wall or fence in their plots. The failure of most native Americans to use the fence to symbolize ownership convinced Englishmen that despite their resemblance to gardens, native plots did not create possession.” 21. Cousins, “Mountains Made Alive,” also acknowledges this and, in the spirit of interfaith dialogue, argues that “learning about Native American religious traditions . . . may encourage non-Natives to reflect on their own traditions and cultivate those strains which foster a sense of sacred land.” 22. Richard Hiers, “Reverence for Life and Environmental Ethics in Biblical Law and Covenant,” Journal of Law and Religion 13 (1996 – 98): 168. 23. Raymond Westbrook, “Jubilee Laws,” Israel Law Review 6 (1971): 209 – 26; Edward Neufeld, “Socio-Economic Background of Yobel and Shemitta,” Rivista degli studi orientali 33 (1958): 53 – 124. Robert Gnuse, “Jubilee Legislation in Leviticus: Israel’s Vision of Social Reform,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 15 (1985): 43 – 48, provides a useful review of the literature. The question of whether the Jubilee was supposed to occur every forty-ninth or every fiftieth year was the focus of Benedict Zuckermann, A Treatise on the Sabbatical Cycle and the Jubilee, trans. A. Löwy (London, 1866; repr., New York: Hermon Press, 1974). The most satisfying explanation appears to be that advanced by Guillaume, Land and Calendar, 106, according to whom the Jubilee year does not follow after but rather coincides with a Sabbatical year. Otherwise, the law would have required two consecutive years of abstention from agricultural activity: a form of deprivation unthinkable even for a utopian piece of legislation. 24. Gnana Robinson, “The Idea of Rest in the Old Testament,” Zeitschrift für Alttestamentlische Wissenschaft 92 (1980): 42. See also Guillaume, Land and Calendar, 103, who rejects the “false premise that ‘Sabbath’ means ‘rest’ (Gen 2:2), [which] has been used to claim that [the Sabbatical year] involves the resting of the land every seven years” as a kind of fallowing. 25. Bruce Rosenstock, personal communication. 26. Guillaume, Land and Calendar, 117– 20, argues that many loans at this time were antichretic pledges: these allowed the lender to occupy and use the land pledged against the loan, which would be forfeited if the loan were not repaid. 27. Ibid., 108; Walter Brueggemann, “Land: Fertility and Justice,” in Theology of the Land, ed. Bernard F. Evans and Gregory D. Cusack (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1987), 46 – 47, 59 – 61. 28. Westbrook, “Jubilee Laws,” 215 – 19. 29. Ibid., 219. 30. See http:// www.jewishencyclopedia.com /articles/12390-prosbul.

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31. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Nature in the Sources of Judaism,” Daedalus 130 (2001): 100. 32. Ibid., 101. On the pejorative connotations of wilderness in the Exodus tradition, see Brueggemann, The Land, 29. 33. Tirosh-Samuelson, “Nature,” 102. 34. Ibid., 110. 35. For similar, arguably anachronistic environmentalist interpretations of these provisions, see Hiers, “Reverence for Life”; Hyun-Chul Cho, An Ecological View of the World: Toward a Christian Ecological Theology (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 2004), 206 – 7, citing Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Eco-Feminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1992), 213. 36. Westbrook, “Jubilee Laws,” 222. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23 – 27: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 2154, notes that such pragmatic explanations go back at least to Maimonides’ view (Code 3.39) that “the sabbatical year is necessary for the land to renew its strength.” John Sietze Bergsma, The Jubilee from Leviticus to Qumran: A History of Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 32, 86 – 87, notes and refutes the opinion that the ancient Israelites were unaware of the need for fallowing the land. Hiers, “Reverence for Life,” 170, argues that “Israelite farmers probably did not practice crop rotation or other modern soil conservation strategies. The sense of this law [the Sabbatical year] is that the land itself desired or needed a rest after producing crops for six consecutive years. . . . We see that the land itself was to be respected and protected against over-use.” Hiers’s skepticism concerning the pragmatic rationale for the Sabbatical year supports his argument for an environmental ethic in the Hebrew Bible similar to that discerned by Tirosh-Samuelson. 37. Guillaume, Land and Calendar, 103. 38. David C. Hopkins, The High Lands of Canaan (Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1985), discussed in Milgrom, Leviticus 23 – 27, 2249 – 50, and Bergsma, Jubilee, 86 – 87. Milgrom, Leviticus 23 – 27, 2158, notes that during a fallow period there is often an abundant aftergrowth. 39. Guillaume, Land and Calendar, 103. 40. Neusner, Economics of Mishnah, 49, 129. 41. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 117. 42. Milgrom, Leviticus 23 – 27, 2145. 43. Todd G. Buchholz, “Biblical Laws and the Economic Growth of Ancient Israel,” Journal of Law and Religion 6 (1988): 404. 44. Moshe Weinfeld, The Place of the Law in the Religion of Ancient Israel (Boston: Brill, 2004), 120 – 21. As Weinfeld notes (121), “As in other areas, so with regard to the Sabbath, Wellhausen was caught up by the concept of evolution and sought to place the secular before the sacred.” 45. Cited in Buchholz, “Biblical Laws.” Pieper, Leisure, 69 – 70, also cites Proudhon for the defense of “leisure” against the economy of “total work.” 46. Joseph Husslein, Bible and Labor (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 6 – 7. 47. Ibid., 33, 63 – 65. 48. Roman Ohrenstein and Barry Gordon, Economic Analysis in Talmudic Literature, 3rd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 39 – 40, 158. 49. As already noted in Henry Schaeffer, Hebrew Tribal Economy and the Jubilee, as Illustrated in Semitic and Indo-European Village Communities (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1922), 11. See also Roman A. Ohrenstein, “Talmud and Talmudic Tradition: A Socio-Economic Perspective,”

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in Ancient and Medieval Economic Ideas and Concepts of Social Justice, ed. S. Todd Lowry and Barry Gordon (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 253. 50. Tirosh-Samuelson, “Nature,” 109. 51. As pointed out also by Adrian Schenker, “Der Boden und seine Produktivität im Sabbat und Jubeljahr: Das dominium terrae in Ex. 23:10f. und Lev. 15:2 – 12,” in Recht und Kult im Alten Testament (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 132; and Bergsma, Jubilee, 49. 52. Quoted in Eckhart Otto, Max Webers Studien des antiken Judentums (Tübingen: Mohr, 2002), 91 (my translation). Ginzberg, “Economics of the Bible,” 363, states that “such immature analogies as comparing the lying fallow of the land with the rotation of crops are worthless. As Weber justly remarks, ‘Why should one be prohibited from pruning the vines and cutting that which grows of itself ?’” (meaning that no rationalistic interpretation appears adequate). Cf. Silver, Prophets and Markets, 21: “Leviticus 19:23 – 25 forbids the Israelites to eat the fruit of a tree until the fifth year of its growth, ‘that it may yield unto you more richly the increase thereof.’ What is the connection? It would seem that the Israelites were aware of pruning techniques that diverted the nutriments of the tree into the fruit.” Silver ignores that, while any fruit produced in the first three years may not be eaten, the fruit of the fourth year is called qodesh, and is at least symbolically a sacrifice to the Lord. There is no mention of pruning anywhere in the text. 53. Milgrom, Leviticus 23 – 27, 2153. See also Neusner, Economics of Mishnah, 129: “The notion of the land’s observing the Sabbath carries not a trace of recognition that the land gains from lying fallow”; and Buchholz, “Biblical Laws,” 404. Ginzberg, “Economics of the Bible,” 354, maintains that “in Leviticus the primary concern of the law is the religious Sabbath for the land,” whereas in Exodus the primary concern is social justice. 54. Trans. Milgrom, Leviticus 23 – 27, 2146. 55. Bergsma, Jubilee, 295. Pace Zipporah Glass, “Land, Slave Labor and Law: Engaging Ancient Israel’s Economy,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 91 (2000): 27– 39, arguing for a pragmatic basis for the related provision that freed slaves: “the manumission of Hebrew debtslaves served to enlarge the pool of unencumbered free labor available for hire because the cost of maintaining debt-slave labor had reached the point of exceeding the cost of free labor.” This reduces redemption to a function of market logic. 56. Matthew Henry, comment on Lev. 25:21, in Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991); Milgrom, Leviticus 23 – 27, 2181. 57. The provisions against hoarding resemble those against eating leftovers from a sacrifice: see Lev. 7:15. 58. See discussion of this passage in Robert C. Ellickson and Charles DiA. Thorland, “Ancient Land Law: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 71 (1995): 344. On the operation of such principles in the Mishnah, see Neusner, Economics of Mishnah, 119; and Roger Brooks, Support for the Poor in the Mishnaic Law of Agriculture: Tractate Peah (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 18, 82 – 83. 59. Milgrom, Leviticus 23 – 27, 2176, cited in Robert S. Kawashima, “The Jubilee Year and the Return of Cosmic Purity,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 65 (2003): 385 n. 71; Neusner, Economics of Mishnah, 130 – 31: “The authors of the tractate [Mishnah Shebiit] extend the prohibition against sowing and reaping grain and grapes to all agricultural activities. . . . Essentially the markets are supposed to close, in that the prevailing assumption is that everything is free. . . . All rights of ownership of crops are suspended by the advent of the sabbatical year. Produce in that year is held to be ownerless property. That food belongs equally to all Israelites, so it is not a common commodity, like produce grown in other years. People may not use it for their own financial

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gain, and if they sell it or process it, it must be done in an unusual manner. They may not hoard it but must remove it from the house if it has been stored there, at exactly the same time at which the produce is no longer found in the fields. The householder places the produce outside his house and makes it accessible to all. Accordingly, what people have to do with their crops is remove [them] from their house and declare ownerless whatever has grown in the sabbatical year. When a given crop disappears from the fields, it also may no longer be stored in the household. Whatever is fit for human or animal consumption or use and is an annual [crop] is subject to the requirement of removal, that is, to the declaration of being ownerless.” 60. Kawashima, “The Jubilee Year,” 384, 385. 61. Neal M. Soss, “Old Testament Law and Economic Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 324 – 26, 332. 62. Similarly, I find unconvincing Posner’s rationalizing of the inalienability of land in many primitive societies (“A Theory of Primitive Society,” 32 – 33). He suggests that alienability is deterred by kinship networks, and by the absence of organization that would enable economies of scale in large estates. The Jubilee, as we see, is precisely a response to latifundia— the fact of which Posner seeks to minimize— and is based not on market logic, but on egalitarian ideals. 63. Kawashima, “The Jubilee Year,” 371, 387. 64. Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, 611; quoted in Jacques Berlinerblau, “The Delicate Flower of Biblical Sociology,” in Boer, Tracking, 65. 65. Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, 692. 66. Ithamar Gruenwald, “Forms of Ritual Ethos in Ancient Israel: The Case of Sacred Economics,” in Religious Belief and Economic Behavior: Ancient Israel, Classical Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and Contemporary Ireland and Africa, ed. Jacob Neusner (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1999), 207, 223. 67. Ibid., 207– 8, 221. Cf. Maccoby, Sacred Executioner, 28, rejecting this inference. 68. Gruenwald, “Ritual Ethos,” 223, 227, 232 – 33. See also Yairah Amit, “The Jubilee Year: An Attempt at Instituting Social Justice,” in Justice and Righteousness: Biblical Themes and Their Influence, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow and Yair Hoffman (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), 57: “It is more likely that the jubilee year represents a position which is critical of the monarchy and presents the tribal period as the model to be adopted for imitation.” 69. Guillaume, Land and Calendar, 105. 70. Soss, “Old Testament Law,” 343. 71. Schaeffer, Hebrew Tribal Economy. Otto, Max Webers Studien, 86 – 87, has noted that Weber rejected the thesis, common in his day, that the Pentateuch reflected nomadic origins and a stage of collective ownership. Weber affirmed, conversely, that ancient Israel had a money economy. 72. Schaeffer, Hebrew Tribal Economy, 1, 93. 73. Ibid., iii, 1, 72. 74. Ibid., 73. 75. Ibid., 92. See also Jean-François Lefebvre, Le jubilée biblique (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 394: “l’année sabbatique abolit pour un temps les differences issues des rapports de travail et retrouve les conditions de la fraternité vécue au desert.” 76. Milgrom, Leviticus 23 – 27, 2246 – 47. He adds, however, that the Jubilee was “not completely utopian,” for the law was amended, which would not have happened in the case of a completely imaginary rule: “Thus just as the law of slave release existed but was not practiced, so too the Jubilee.” Kuenen, Religion of Israel, 2:283, contended that “the Sabbath-year, which was

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not observed before the exile, was kept regularly after it. But the year of Jubilee never came into practice.” Richard Cartwright Austin, “Rights for Life: Rebuilding Human Relationships with Land,” in Theology of the Land, ed. Bernard F. Evans and Gregory D. Cusack (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1987), 107, notes that, while there is no direct evidence for the Jubilee, “there is record of one instance of redistribution [by Nehemiah] after a remnant returned from the Babylonian captivity and attempted to reestablish a faithful society around Jerusalem.” Bergsma, Jubilee, 295, states that “the jubilee was intended to be practiced as law, and there is a small amount of indirect evidence that it was not completely unobserved, even if for most of Israel’s history it seems to have been ignored.” See Guillaume, Land and Calendar, 121: “The Jubilee is not a year but a point set on the day of Kippurim every seventh sabbatical year to mark the maturity of all loans and the return of all pledges. The very good of creation is restored periodically by a set of practical measures that belong neither to utopia nor to a nostalgic attempt to restore an original state of purity.” Arguing against this is the lack of positive evidence for the enforcement of this legislation. 77. Schmitt, The “Nomos” of the Earth, 345. 78. As Jeffrey Fager reports, “the jubilee came into existence in a context where small farms were constantly vulnerable to being absorbed into the large holdings of wealthy creditors. . . . Archaeological excavations have indicated a shift from a rather egalitarian early Israelite society, in which the housing was relatively equal in size and arrangement, to a stratified society during the monarchy.” Fager, Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee (Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1993), 85, 87. See also Carol Meyers, “Tribes and Tribulations: Retheorizing Earliest ‘Israel,’” in Boer, Tracking, 36 – 37, summarizing the archaeological evidence that contradicts Gottwald’s depiction of ancient Israel as tribal and egalitarian. The older view is represented by Delbert Hillers, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 79: “The typical Israelite lived in a village and worked his own few acres. He was not much better off than the poorest man in the village, and few had much more than he. At this point the biblical picture is supplemented by archaeological finds, which show that early Israelite houses are of basically similar size and construction.” 79. Schaeffer, Hebrew Tribal Economy, iii. 80. Ibid., 91, 95, 111. 81. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 104: “One can characterize the entire Priestly Code as the wilderness legislation, inasmuch as it abstracts from the natural conditions and motives of the actual life of the people in the land of Canaan and rears the hierocracy on the tabula rasa of the wilderness, the negation of nature, by means of the bald statutes of arbitrary absolutism, so also the festivals, in which the connection of the cultus with agriculture appears most strongly, have as much as possible been turned into wilderness festivals.” 82. Brueggemann, The Land, 33 – 34. 83. Ibid., 65. 84. Shmuel Trigano, “The Return of the Theological-Political in Democracy and the Rediscovery of Biblical Politics,” Hebraic Political Studies 4 (2009): 317. 85. Pierre Proudhon, De la celebration du dimanche, considérée sous les rapports de l’hygiène publique, de la morale, des relations de famille et de cité, 3rd ed. (Paris: Garnier, 1848). All translations from Proudhon’s French are my own. 86. Ibid., 5, quoting Rousseau. 87. Ibid., 7; see also 37. 88. Ibid., 8. 89. Ibid., 17.

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90. Ibid., 21. 91. Ibid., 23, 28. 92. Ibid., 36 – 37. 93. Ibid., 63, even invokes the scholastic distinction between the two powers, in this case “ex ordine ordinate” and “ex ordine ordinante,” in denying the ability of royalty to derogate from the law. 94. Ibid., 65 – 66. See the discussion in chap. 1 of the revolutionary potential of rituals of inversion. 95. Adolphe Thiers, in Le national, Jan. 20, 1830. The fuller version makes clear that this was an argument for limited monarchy: “Le Roi garde le trône, poste toujours menacé, pour qu’un ambitieux ne s’en empare pas. Le pays se gouverne sous ces yeux avec son assentiment et sa gloire, car on vient tous les ans le féliciter de la prospérité publique qu’il n’a pas faite mais qu’il a suffisamment faite s’il ne l’a pas empêchée. En un mot, il règne et le peuple se gouverne.” Another version of this quote that is attributed to Thiers is “Le roi n’administre pas, ne gouverne pas, il règne.” Thiers’ famous statement was later to be quoted by Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, among others. 96. Proudhon, Dimanche, 67. 97. Gustavo Benavides, “Towards a Natural History of Religion,” Religion 30 (2000): 237. 98. Benavides, “Economy,” 86. 99. Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop, Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2002), 36. 100. Ibid., 39. 101. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 55 – 58. Eliade devoted attention to this as an example of the “regeneration of time,” whereas Jonathan Z. Smith, ever eager to deflate Eliade’s claims, contended that the humiliation was due to the foreignness of the king in question. Smith, “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams: A Study in Situational Incongruity,” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 90 – 105. Of course, Smith’s argument that there were extrinsic reasons for the humiliation of the king in this case does not disprove the more general pattern of rituals of inversion and humiliation described in chap. 1. 102. See Devin Singh, “Debt Cancellation as Sovereign Crisis Management.” http:// cosmologicsmagazine.com /devin-singh-debt-cancellation-as-sovereign-crisis-management /. 103. Paul Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 66 – 69, 72; Daniel P. Franklin, Extraordinary Measures: The Exercise of Prerogative Powers in the United States (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 20; Kathleen Moore, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8 – 9. 104. Henry, comment on Lev. 25:1– 7, in Commentary on the Whole Bible. 105. David Daube, “Law in the Narratives,” in Studies in Biblical Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947; repr., New York: Ktav, 1969), 39 – 62. 106. Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard Advanced (London, 1649). 107. Benavides, “Economy,” 83. 108. Melford Spiro, Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970). See also Benavides, “Economy,” 91; Ivan Strenski, “On Generalized Exchange and the Domestication of the Sangha,” Man, n.s. 18 (1983): 463 – 77; James Egge, Religious Giving and the Invention of Karma in Theravada Buddhism (London: Routledge, 2002).

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109. Benavides, “Economy,” 87. 110. Ibid., 81. 111. Steven Collins, “The Discourse on What Is Primary (The Agañña-Sutta): An Annotated Translation,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 21 (1993): 303 – 93. 112. See especially the debate between Steven Collins and Andrew Huxley in the Journal of Indian Philosophy. Collins, “Aggañña-Sutta,” 387– 89, had suggested, following earlier interpreters, the parallel with modern European social contract theories. Andrew Huxley, “The Buddha and the Social Contract,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 24 (1996): 407– 20, disputed the application of the idea of the social contract to the AS as anachronistic, claiming, inter alia, the dependence of the early Buddhist economy on Maussian gift exchange rather than on market principles (409 – 10). Collins, “The Lion’s Roar on the Wheel-Turning King: A Response to Andrew Huxley’s ‘The Buddha and the Social Contract,’” Journal of Indian Philosophy 24 (1996): 421– 46, briefly concedes the point before moving to other topics. In my view, as will become clear below, Collins’s original analogy seems correct, and Huxley’s rejection premised on too narrow a definition of the social contract. When, as is evident from a comparison of examples drawn from different cultural contexts, narrative representations of a “state of nature” justify the constitution of a polity, articulate the hope of liberation from a polity regarded as oppressive, or both, to speak of a social contract in a broader sense seems appropriate. 113. See, e.g., Purusa Sūkta, Rig Veda 10.90. ˙ 114. Benavides, “Economy,” 81. 115. Benavides, “Religious Configurations,” 249. 116. Gustavo Benavides, “Sacrifice and the Production of Sovereignty,” unpublished paper given at the IAHR Congress, Toronto, 2010 (quoted by permission of the author). 117. See Turner, Ritual Process, 169: “Often, too, [calendrical rites] are performed at welldelineated points in the annual productive cycle, and attest to the passage from scarcity to plenty (as at first fruits or harvest festivals) or from plenty to scarcity (as when the hardships of winter are anticipated and magically warded against).” Versnel, Transition and Reversal, has argued that the Kronia and Saturnalia occurred at moments of potential crisis in the agricultural calendar, as at winter when the grain stores were opened. 118. Benavides, “Economy,” 82. 119. Roland Boer similarly suggests that Locke’s negative depiction of waste encodes an allusion to the biblical story of manna. “John Locke, the Fall, and the Origin Myth of Capitalism.” http:// www.politicaltheology.com / blog/ john-locke-the-fall-and-the-origin-myth-of-capitalism /. 120. Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise, chap. 5, §§46. 121. Ibid., chap. 5, §47. 122. Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” in Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), 1– 39. 123. Ibid., 32. See also Alan Barnard and James Woodburn, “Introduction,” in Hunters and Gatherers, vol. 2, Property, Power and Ideology, ed. Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 16 – 17. 124. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 30 – 31. 125. Ibid., 86. 126. See James Woodburn, “African Hunter-Gatherer Social Organization: Is It Best Understood as a Product of Encapsulation?,” in Ingold, Riches, and Woodburn, Hunters and Gatherers, 1:32. 127. Ibid., 62 – 63.

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128. Lee, “Reflections,” 253. See also Barnard and Woodburn, “Introduction,” in Ingold, Riches, and Woodburn, Hunters and Gatherers, 2:11. 129. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 193 – 94. On the distinction between generalized and restricted reciprocity, see also Mary Rogers Gillmore, “Implications of Generalized versus Restricted Exchange,” in Social Exchange Theory, ed. Karen S. Cook (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987), 170 – 89; and Susana Narotzky, New Directions in Economic Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 44 – 47. 130. See Bronislaw Malinowski, “Tribal Economics in the Trobriands,” in Tribal and Peasant Economies: Readings in Economic Anthropology, ed. George Dalton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 206, 211, denying the existence of the “pure gift” in the Trobriands, but allowing that “everyone who possesses betel-nut or tobacco in excess of what he can actually consume on the spot, would be expected to give it away” (208). 131. Alain Testart, Les chasseurs-cueilleurs, ou l’origine d’inégalité (Paris: Société d’ethnographie, 1982), 39 – 40. A recent entry into these debates is James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 132. Testart, Les chasseurs-cueilleurs, 43. 133. Ibid., 57– 76. 134. Benavides, “Religious Configurations,” 248. See Benavides, “Cognitive and Ideological Aspects,” 15 – 16, on the relation between complex societies and representations of the divine. Gottwald, and Veblen before him, had made similar contentions. See also Boer, “Marx, Method and Gottwald,” in Boer, Tracking, 108 – 11, providing a tentative sketch of the relationship among modes of societal organization and economic production, on the one hand, and religion on the other. 135. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). 136. Smith is not the first to have noted that animal sacrifices are generally confined to domesticated species. See Moses Lowman, A Rational of the Ritual of the Hebrew Worship (London, 1748), 220, noting that sacrifices in the Hebrew Bible consisted of “the gentler Sort of Creatures, and of most common Use, such as were bread about their Houses, and in their Fields, and were, in a Sort, domestick”; Sykes, Essay, 90, noting that Israelite sacrifice used only “tame” animals: “nothing was Sacrificed to God, but what was commonly used for Food among Men”; and de Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues, 357: “It must be noticed that in sacrifices properly speaking, animals that are carnivorous or stupid or foreign to man, like wild beasts, snakes, fish, birds of prey, etc., were never immolated. The choice was always made from animals that are the most valuable because of their utility, the gentlest, the most innocent, those nearest to man because of their instincts and habits.” Gustavo Benavides, personal communication, has also informed me that Lucian of Samosata already made this observation. However, each scholar provided a different explanation for this fact. 137. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Domestication of Sacrifice,” in Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 199. See also Benavides, “Towards a Natural History of Religion,” 232 – 33. 138. Smith, “Domestication,” 198. 139. Ibid., 199. 140. A similar point was made in Laum, Heiliges Geld, 27: “Die Auswahl des geeigneten Opfertieres ist der erste Akt [des] wirtschaftlichen Denkens.”

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141. Joseph Watts, Oliver Sheehan, Quentin D. Atkinson, Joseph Bulbulia and Russell D. Gray, “Ritual Human Sacrifice Promoted and Sustained the Evolution of Stratified Societies,” Nature letter, doi:10.1038/nature17159. Chapter Six 1. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 2. For a similar argument with respect to Anselm of Canterbury, see Daniel M. Bell, “Forgiveness and the End of Economy,” Studies in Christian Ethics 20, no. 3 (2007): 325 – 44. 3. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), 82. 4. Ibid., 242. Richard Sage, personal communication, has warned me against placing too much confidence in Graeber’s interpretation of Confucianism. Still, the idea expressed in this paragraph has application beyond this immediate context of interpretation. 5. See Anon., Instructions and Directions for Gaining the Grand Jubilee of the Holy Year, Celebrated at Rome anno 1775 (London, 1776), 3: “It was appointed by the divine Law in the twentyfifth chapter of Leviticus, that every fiftieth year should be sanctified to the Lord as a Jubilee Year, that is a year of rest and remission, in the way of a general release and discharge from all debts. . . . The Holy Ghost, who . . . ever guides and directs his Church, has inspired its chief pastors to institute also a Jubilee Year amongst Christians; not for the freeing them from their worldly debts, or their corporal bondage; . . . but for the discharge of their spiritual debts they owe to the divine justice, for losing the bonds of their sins, releasing them from the slavery of Satan, and restoring them to all those goods of divine grace from which they have unhappily fallen.” See also Anon., Instructions for Gaining the Jubilee Granted by His Holiness Pope Clement XIV (Dublin, 1770), 3 (this Jubilee was, as its date indicates, not a Roman Jubilee, but was allowed to be performed in Ireland for those resident there): “A Jubilee so called from the Resemblance it bears with the Jubilee Year in the Old Law, Levit. xxv and xxvii, is a plenary Indulgence granted not only every twenty-fifth Year; but also, upon other extraordinary occasions . . .” 6. Another potential reason for this “early” declaration of a second Jubilee was the first outbreak of the bubonic plague in Europe, ca. 1347– 51. 7. A table of all the Jubilees held, with their years, the presiding pope and his dates of office, appears in Desmond O’Grady, Rome Reshaped: Jubilees, 1300 – 2000 (Richmond, Australia: Aurora Books, 2007), 207. 8. Robert Ekelund, Robert Hébert, and Robert Tollison, “The Economics of Sin and Redemption: Purgatory as a Market-Pull Innovation?,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 19 (1992): 8 – 10. 9. Henry C. Lea, History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, vol. 3, Indulgences (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1896), 195. 10. Ibid., 14. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollison, “Economics of Sin and Redemption,” 12 – 13, cite the elaborate scheme developed by Jaspar Ponce, the papal representative in England during the time of Alexander I (1492 – 1503), which had five tiers. 13. Benavides, “Western Religion,” 93 – 94. 14. Bataille, Accursed Share, 1:120 – 21. 15. Lea, Indulgences, 419. 16. Pius IV, Bulle decet Romanum pontificum (Rome, 1562), states that all indulgences are “gratis.”

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17. Jacob Viner, Religious Thought and Economic Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978), 141. 18. Luther, Martin. “Ninety-five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences (1517),” in Selected Writings of Martin Luther, 4 vols. , ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), vol. 1 (1517– 20), 54. 19. Anon., Instructions for Gaining the Jubilee, 3 – 4. 20. Herbert Thurston, The Holy Year of Jubilee (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1900), chap. 8, “The Jubilee Indulgence,” 336. 21. Lea, Indulgences, 28. 22. Petrus Patiens, Warnung für dem Bäpstischen Jubel Jar und Ablaß (Frankfurt am Main, 1576), II: “und in den zweyen folgenden [i.e., ersten] Jaren seiner regierung die ganze Christenheit mit seinen Jubel Jars Bullen und Ablaßbrieffen erfüllet / . . . unangesehen daß er ausser der zeit gewesen / welche von anderen Bäpsten zum Jubel Jar war verordnet” (my translation). 23. Ibid., II, XII, XIII. 24. Anonymous, The Pope’s Great Year of Jubilee, or, The Catholicks Encouragement for the Entertainment of Popery (n.p., [printed ca. 1633 – 74]). 25. A. F., The Travels of an English Gentleman from London to Rome, on Foot, 2nd ed. (London, 1704). A description of the Jubilee appears at 149 – 56. 26. Nicholas Purdon, A Trip to the Jubilee: or, Antichrist Revealed and Popery Unmasqued (Corke [and London], 1758), 46 – 47. 27. Starobinski, Largesse, 18 – 19. 28. Examples are Boniface IX’s first Jubilee in 1390, following his ascension in 1389; and the general (non-Roman) Jubilee called for 1770 after the election of Clement XIV in 1769. For the latter, see Instructions for Gaining the Jubilee. 29. Purdon, Trip to the Jubilee, 63 – 64. 30. Luther, “Babylonian Captivity,” 434. 31. Lea, Indulgences, 31. 32. Purdon, Trip to the Jubilee, 110 – 11. 33. See, e.g., R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926); Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 3 vols. (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1916), esp. 1:881– 82, 3:428 – 29. 34. Kurt Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action (Stockholm, 1961), 49. 35. Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2006). 36. Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action, 44. 37. Robert H. Nelson, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 75. 38. Ibid., 53 – 55. 39. Ibid., 74 – 75. 40. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 91, 142, 97. 41. James Aho, Confession and Bookkeeping (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 40. 42. Ibid., xv. 43. Ibid., 10. 44. Ibid., 95 – 98. 45. Ibid., 93. 46. Hans Derks, “Religion, Capitalism, and the Rise of Double-Entry Bookkeeping,” Accounting, Business and Financial History 18 (2008): 198 – 204.

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47. Taylor, Secular Age, 64, 68, 243, 265; Weber, Economy and Society, 828 – 29. 48. Nor is my thesis that the debate over indulgences singlehandedly caused the Reformation, a movement to which many factors contributed, among them: power disputes between the aristocracy and the Catholic Church; cultural and economic differences among different European nations; grievances of peasants against the aristocracy; the rise of print culture, etc. The argument made here concerns the interpretation of some key theological developments within the Reformation. 49. In addition to their “Economics of Sin and Redemption,” cited above, see Robert Ekelund, Robert Hébert, and Robert Tollison, “An Economic Model of the Medieval Church: Usury as a Form of Rent Seeking,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 5 (1989): 307– 31; and Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollison, “An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation,” Journal of Political Economy 110 (2002): 646 – 71. 50. Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollison, “Economics of Sin and Redemption,” 13. 51. Ibid., 14. 52. The theologian Kathryn Tanner has articulated a similar critique of Mauss. Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005). 53. Laum, Heiliges Geld. For useful discussions of Laum’s thesis, see Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 14, 61, 102 – 15; and Graeber, Debt, 59. 54. A. Hingston Quiggin, Primitive Money (London: Methuen, 1949), 277: “in the regions of Asia, Europe and Africa, where the system of weight standards which has given birth to all the systems of modern Europe had its origin, the cow was universally the chief object of barter. Cattle were the standard of wealth and unit of value; they had a sacred character and were offered to the gods as well as presented to potentates; they were exchanged for slaves and extorted as tribute. The ‘bride-price’ of a woman and the wergild of a man were calculated in cattle. Evidence of the cattle standard can be found in the Rig Veda of India and the Zend Avesta of Persia . . . , in the Brehon Laws of Ireland and the Ancient Laws of Wales. . . . There is the familiar literary evidence in the equation of cattle and money, pecus and pecunia. . . . Cattle cannot, however, provide all the requisites for money. They set the standard of value, [but] they are less often units of exchange, and never sufficiently portable or divisible.” 55. Laum, Heiliges Geld, 56 – 57, 106. 56. Seaford, Money, 102 – 4; Christoph Auffarth, “Gaben für die Götter— für die Katz?,” in Lokale Religionsgeschichte: Beiträge hervorgegangen aus einer Tagung, die die Deutsche Vereinigung für Religionsgeschichte (DVRG) vom 4. bis 8. Oktober 1993 in Bremen gehalten hat, ed. Hans  G. Kippenberg and Brigitte Luchesi (Marburg: Diagonal Verlag, 1995), 265 – 66. Laum, Heiliges Geld, 106 – 7, cites some relevant archaeological evidence. 57. Seaford, Money, 104. 58. Ibid., 10. 59. Ibid., 81– 84, 110. 60. Graeber, Debt, 39, 64 – 65. 61. Laum, Heiliges Geld, 161. 62. Ibid., 56 – 63. 63. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, in St. Anselm: Proslogium; Monologium; an Appendix in Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilon; and Cur Deus Homo, trans. by Sidney Norton Deane (Chicago: Open Court, 1903). 64. Charles Malamoud, “La théologie de la dette dans le brāhmanisme,” Purus ārtha 4 ˙

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(1980): 39 – 62, esp. 45: “Or il se trouve que les Brāhmana présentent une théorie de la dette ˙ comme constitutive de la nature humaine.” See also Patrick Olivelle, The Āśrama System: The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 49 – 53. 65. Taittirīya-Samhitā, VI.3.10.5, quoted in Malamoud, “Théologie de la dette,” 45 (my ˙ translation). See Olivelle, The Āśrama System, 181. 66. Malamoud, “Théologie de la dette,” 60. 67. Charles Malamoud, “Le paiement des actes rituels dans l’Inde védique,” in La monnaie souveraine, ed. Michel Aglietta and André Orléans (Paris, 1998), 37 (my translation). 68. Manu 9.138. 69. Malamoud, “Paiement,” 39. 70. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Banton (London: Tavistock, 1966), 7. 71. E. Christian Wells and Patricia A. McAnany, “Toward a Theory of Ritual Economy,” in Dimensions of Ritual Economy (Emerald, 2008), 7. See also Jonathan Z. Smith’s argument that ritual constructs an ideal that is a conscious reflection on the gap between said ideal and reality. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” in Imagining Religion, 53 – 65. 72. Stephanie Jamison, “The Principle of Equivalence and the Interiorization of Ritual: The ‘End’ of Ritual?,” in Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice: Disengaging Ritual in Ancient India, Greece and Beyond, ed. Peter Jackson and Anna-Pya Sjöden (Sheffield: Equinox, 2016), 15 – 31. 73. Seaford, Money, 14. See Graeber, Debt, 245 – 47, for a discussion of Seaford’s thesis. 74. Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Robert Hahn, Archaeology and the Origins of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010). Geometry, for example, appears to have originated in ancient Egypt to facilitate the repeated land surveys undertaken after the flooding of the Nile. 75. Seaford, Money, 315. 76. Graeber, Debt, 67, 214, 223 – 25. 77. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953). 78. Robert A. Yelle, “Spiritual Economies beyond the Sacred/Secular Paradigm: Or, What Did Religious Freedom Mean in Ancient India?” in Varieties of Religious Establishment, ed. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Lori G. Beaman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 15 – 32. 79. Graeber, Debt, 224, “define[s] the Axial Age . . . as running from 800 BC to 600 AD. This makes the Axial Age the period that saw the birth not only of all the world’s major philosophical tendencies, but also, all of today’s major world religions: Zoroastrianism, Prophetic Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam.” Apart from confusing Jaspers’s original concept by prolonging the duration of this period from a few centuries to fourteen hundred years, this grab-bag approach only compounds the problem of how to identify what, if anything, is common to all of these diverse movements. 80. Ibid., 245 – 47. 81. Ibid., 237– 39. 82. Ibid., 248 – 49. 83. Ibid., 249. 84. Ibid., 57, 68. 85. Brhadāranyaka Upanisad 6.2.13 – 16. Translated in Patrick Olivelle, ed., The Early Upa˙ ˙ ˙ nisads (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from ˙

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the Upanisads are taken from this edition. Bruce Lincoln, Death, War and Sacrifice (Chicago: ˙ University of Chicago Press, 1991), 119 – 27, indicates that the idea of “two paths” in the afterlife may have older, Indo-European antecedents. However, the ideas of karma and moksa associated ˙ with the Upanisadic depiction of the afterlife appear specifically Indic. ˙ 86. Chāndogya Up. 5.10. 87. Chāndogya Up. 5.10.7. 88. Brhadāranyaka Up. 4.4.5. ˙ ˙ 89. Chāndogya Up. 5.10.3. 90. The Bhagavad Gītā, trans. Franklin Edgerton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 8.28. 91. Brhadāranyaka Up. 4.4.22. ˙ ˙ 92. Vacchagotta Sutta. 93. Cf. Johannes Bronkhorst, Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 112 – 35, arguing that ideas of karma and rebirth were absorbed from the indigenous culture of this region into Brahmanism. What I am suggesting here is the opposite: developments within Brahmanism itself produced the idea of liberation as a dialectical response. 94. This is often referred to as the second phase of Indian urbanization, the first being that associated with the Indus Valley civilization, roughly 2500 – 1900 BCE. 95. Olivelle, The Āśrama System, 55, 57– 58. 96. Balkrishna Govind Gokhale, “Early Buddhism and the Urban Revolution,” Journal for the International Association of Buddhist Studies 5 (1982): 7– 22. 97. Olivelle, The Āśrama System, 57. 98. Graeber, Debt, 67. He also (233) points to the Mauryan Empire (321– 185 BCE) as giving crucial impetus to the development of money and markets in India. However, this is too late to account for the appearance of renunciant ideas in the earliest Upanisads, ca. 800 – 500 BCE. ˙ 99. Brhadāranyaka Up. 4.4.22. ˙ ˙ 100. Chāndogya Up. 4.14.3. See also Bhagavad Gītā 5.10. 101. Chāndogya Up. 5.10.9 – 10. 102. Bhagavad Gītā 4.36. 103. See Theodore N. Proferes, Vedic Ideals of Sovereignty and the Poetics of Power (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 2007), 143 – 52, connecting the Upanisadic idea of liberation ˙ with older Vedic ideas of kingship. 104. Jan Assmann, Price, 8 –11, argued that ancient Judaism combined two strands: a preAxial strand based on the priestly tradition and its emphasis on purity, and an Axial strand represented by the prophetic tradition, which transcended the former. In my opinion, this is a biased reading of ancient Judaism from a Christian perspective. 105. The Christian rejection of the practice of animal sacrifice that was widespread in the ancient world occurred gradually and was due to a complex of factors. For recent treatments, see Daniel Ullucci, The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Ingvild Gilhus, Animals, Gods, and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman, and Early Christian Ideas (London: Routledge, 2006). 106. Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, trans. H. H. Gerth and Don Martindale (New York: Free Press, 1958), 37– 38, 112; and Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 207– 8.

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Index

absolute power, 2, 48 – 49, 55, 68, 114. See also potentia absoluta accounting (as religious practice), 160, 166 – 67 Accursed Share, The (Bataille), 107 Adam, 21 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 5 – 7, 21, 28 – 32, 34, 69, 73 – 91, 94 – 97 Aggañña Sutta, 147– 50, 152 agriculture, 130, 133 – 38, 141, 145, 148, 153, 231n36, 232n52. See also land management; property Aho, James, 166 – 67 Alighieri, Dante, 159 Annet, Peter, 39 anomie, 29, 30, 32, 34, 94, 198n110 antinomianism, 2 – 5, 18 – 21, 28 – 31, 37– 38, 55, 88 – 90, 125, 181, 184 – 85 anti-Semitism, 40, 42 – 43, 62, 67, 201n10 antiwilderness bias, 126, 136 Aristotle, 74 Asad, Talal, 71 asceticism, 19, 103, 111– 12, 120 – 25, 141, 148 – 49, 179, 182, 185 Asian traditions, 115 – 17, 124, 146 – 49, 158, 172 – 74. See also Buddhism; Hinduism Assmann, Jan, 96 atomism, 200n8. See also nominalism auctoritas versus potestas, 19 – 20, 193n36 Augustine, 55 – 56 autonomy, 40 – 42, 47, 67, 121– 25. See also heteronomy Axial Age, 175 – 76, 182 Aztecs, 109, 113, 119, 124 Barth, Karl, 95 Bataille, Georges, 6, 11, 31, 80 – 82, 106 – 13, 118, 124, 160

Battle Hymn of the Republic, The, 114 Baudissin, Wolf Wilhelm Grafen, 81 Baxter, William Lang, 105 Bellah, Robert, 17, 106 Bellarmine, Robert, 56 Benavides, Gustavo, 9, 12, 19, 98, 119, 124, 142 – 55, 160, 167 Bentham, Jeremy, 111– 12, 152 Benveniste, Émile, 82 Binding of Isaac, 3, 10, 23, 39, 41, 68, 105 Blumenberg, Hans, 66 – 67 Boeke, J. H., 115 – 16 Bondage of the Will, The (Luther), 10 Boniface VIII (Pope), 156, 159 Borutta, Manuel, 71 Bourdieu, Pierre, 117 Bourdillon, M., 105 Brueggemann, Walter, 140 Buchholz, Todd, 134 Buddha, 13, 123 – 24, 146 – 47, 149, 175, 179 Buddhism, 7, 116 – 17, 124, 146 – 51, 154, 178 – 80 Burkert, Walter, 154 burnt offerings, 104 – 6, 112 – 13, 160, 224n30 Caillois, Roger, 2, 31, 80 – 81, 87, 106 – 7 Cain and Abel, 27, 83, 138 calculability, 63 – 65, 67, 165, 185, 211n155 capitalism, 64, 102 – 3, 108 – 15, 148 – 49, 152, 158, 166 – 67, 170, 180 Carnival, 1– 2, 19, 29, 83, 110, 143, 149 Catholicism, 7, 25, 45 – 49, 53 – 64, 104, 108 – 12, 156 – 61, 164 – 68. See also indulgences; Purgatory; Roman Jubilees charisma, 5, 44 – 49, 52 – 53, 55 – 56, 59 – 72, 94, 185. See also Weber, Max Chelhod, Joseph, 86

266 Christ, 14, 52, 57, 60 – 61, 159 – 60, 172, 181 Collège de Sociologie, 106 colonization, 127– 29 communism, 140, 144 community, 105, 131– 34, 139 – 42, 148, 154, 171, 175 – 76, 182, 184. See also property; social hierarchy concentration camps, 29, 75, 79, 90 Conquest of Canaan, 6 – 7, 15, 21, 26 – 28, 85, 88, 90 – 97, 132, 137– 39 Constantine (Emperor), 57 Courtenay, William J., 50 – 51 Cousins, Emily, 128 covenants, 23, 26 – 27, 54, 94 creation, 9, 15, 39, 128, 130, 147; continuous, 39, 91; ex nihilo, 9, 15, 52, 62, 189n2 (chap. 1). See also atomism; nominalism Cudworth, Ralph, 49 Daube, David, 144 Davis, Kathleen, 15, 62 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 32 Dawes Act, 129 debt cancellation, 5 – 6, 119, 131– 32, 143 – 44, 159, 163; redemption and, 132, 135, 144, 160, 171, 184, 226n48. See also Jubilee years; pardon power; state of exception Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber), 156 – 57 DeCaroli, Steven, 94 deism, 5, 38 – 39, 42 – 43, 47– 49, 57, 64 – 68, 72, 88, 104 De legibus hebraeorum ritualibus (Spencer), 59, 61 de Maistre, Joseph, 21, 35, 82, 86 dépense, 108, 226n48. See also nonutilitarian behavior Derks, Hans, 167 Descartes, René, 49 disenchantment, 37– 38, 44, 46, 49, 52 – 55, 62 – 65, 67– 72, 165, 185. See also oracles (silence of ) distributive economy, 101– 2 divine command theory, 10 – 11, 39, 49, 106, 114, 201n15, 223n15 divine providence, 134 – 36 divine right. See under sovereignty Douglas, Mary, 13, 80 – 81, 88 Dumont, Louis, 121 Durkheim, Émile, 26, 30 – 31, 80, 105, 107, 141, 198n110 Economic Life of Primitive Peoples, The (Herskovits), 145 economics of religion, 113 – 20, 128, 132, 158 – 62, 164 – 68, 173, 223n21 Ekelund, Robert, 168 Eliade, Mircea, 11– 12, 80, 94 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 50

index “Elucidation on Sacrifices” (de Maistre), 82 enemy, the, 11, 21, 82 – 89, 208n118, 215n2 English Civil War, 68, 145 Enlightenment, 15, 58 Exodus, 6, 15, 26, 90, 135 – 38, 150 exploitation, 126 – 30 fascism, 11– 12, 79 Feast of Fools, 2 festivals. See Carnival; inversion rituals; Jubilee years Festus, Pompeius, 74, 78 Filmer, Robert, 21, 68 First Cause, 50 First Treatise of Government (Locke), 129 Fontenelle, Bernard, 71 Ford, Gerald, 144 founding violence, 1– 4, 13, 18 – 22, 35, 74, 86, 90, 94 – 95. See also sacrifice Fowler, W. Warde, 82 Franklin, Benjamin, 149 Frazer, James George, 83 Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers (Middleton), 57 Freud, Sigmund, 80 – 81 Friedland, Roger, 76 Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 11 Geertz, Clifford, 173 Gelasius I (Pope), 20 Gernet, Jacques, 116 Gift, The (Mauss), 107, 109 gift economies, 108, 112, 119, 170, 173 – 74, 178; in Buddhism, 146, 153 – 54, 158. See also reciprocity Gillespie, Michael, 50, 66 – 67 Girard, René, 24, 48, 83, 154 Gluckman, Max, 2, 31– 32 Gnosticism, 12, 190n3, 190n8, 213n165 God: grace of, 157, 164 – 66, 181; obedience to, 40 – 41, 91, 132; omnipotence of, 1– 2, 9 – 10, 48 – 51, 84, 114, 138, 144, 165; powers of, 38 – 39, 42 – 44, 52 – 53, 63, 88, 125; sacrifice and, 83 – 84; sovereignty and, 34, 65 – 68, 72, 182; as watchmaker, 5, 47, 60, 128. See also deism; potentia absoluta; sovereignty Godden v. Hales (1686), 68 Gospels, 15, 25, 42 – 43, 52 – 53, 57, 60 – 61, 65, 104, 181– 82. See also grace; Mosaic laws Gottwald, Norman, 93, 99 – 100, 137– 38 grace, 5 – 6, 34, 43 – 47, 53, 56 – 69, 96, 157, 164 – 66, 181. See also charisma Graeber, David, 156 – 58, 171– 72, 175 – 77 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 113 Greek thought, 51– 52 Gross, Raphael, 43 Gruenwald, Ithamar, 138

267

index Guggenheimer, Heinrich, 93 Guillaume, Philippe, 134, 138 h.aram (in Islam), 219n64 Harnack, Adolf, 53 Hébert, Robert, 168 Heidegger, Martin, 12 Heiliges Geld (Laum), 170 Heinemann, Isaac, 40 Henry, Matthew, 135, 144 h.erem, 6, 20 – 21, 39, 77, 83 – 95, 98 – 100, 107, 111– 13, 219n57 heresy, 44 Herskovits, Melville J., 145 heteronomy, 40 – 42. See also autonomy; divine command theory Hiers, Richard, 130, 133 Hinduism, 7, 172 – 82 Hitler, Adolf, 9 hoarding, 91, 136, 147– 52 Hobbes, Thomas, 3, 19 – 20, 24, 34, 55, 68, 85 – 86 holy. See Otto, Rudolf; sacred holy versus sacred, 189n1 (intro.) homicide, 84, 93 – 94, 99 – 100 homo sacer, 5 – 7, 21, 29, 73 – 86, 89, 94 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 28, 77, 89 – 90 horror sacer, 80, 87, 184 – 85. See also tremendum Hubert, Henri, 21 Hudson, Michael, 143 Huizinga, Johann, 106 – 7 Hume, David, 112 hunter-gatherers. See subsistence economies Husslein, Joseph, 134 Iannaccone, Laurence, 102 – 4, 106, 141 India, 158, 173 – 82 indulgences, 7, 108, 156 – 57, 159, 161– 65, 167– 68, 170, 181. See also Catholicism; Purgatory; salvation interregnum, 2 – 3, 30 – 31, 90, 93 – 94, 119, 143, 169 inversion rituals, 1– 2, 29 – 32, 34, 83, 110, 143, 185 – 86 Islam, 13, 39, 201n10, 219n64 Israel, Jonathan, 71 James I (King), 22, 40, 53 – 56, 60, 206nn99 – 101 James II (King), 68 Jamison, Stephanie, 174 Jaspers, Karl, 175 – 76 Jay, Martin, 12 Jephthah, 23 – 25, 85, 98 Jericho, 84 – 85, 93 – 94, 98 Jhering, Rudolph, 78 Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), 126 Josephson-Storm, Jason, 71 “Jubilee, the Priestly Solution for Economic Injustice” (Milgrom), 134

Jubilee years: economics of, 6 – 7, 102, 107, 110 – 11, 150, 171; nature of, 131– 46, 156 – 57, 234n76; sovereignty and, 1, 4, 185. See also Roman Jubilees; Sabbath; Sabbatical years Judaic thought, 51, 61, 63 Jünger, Ernst, 12 Kahn, Paul, 3, 200n9 Kant, Immanuel, 11, 15, 25, 40 – 42, 66, 202n29 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 34 karma, 178 – 79, 181– 82 Kaufmann, Yehezkel, 88 – 89 Kawashima, Robert, 137 Kierkegaard, Søren, 23, 41 Kuenen, Abraham, 112 labor, 107– 8, 111– 20, 130 – 35, 142, 144 – 47, 149, 151– 52, 155, 173. See also social hierarchy Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 32 land. See property land management, 133 – 35, 138, 141, 150. See also property Language and Death (Agamben), 77 largesse, 119, 143, 163 Laum, Bernhard, 92, 170 – 71, 175 law, the: founding violence and, 1– 4, 13, 18 – 22, 35, 74, 86, 90, 94 – 95; God and, 40, 91; grace and, 5 – 6, 34, 43 – 47, 53, 56 – 69, 96, 157, 164 – 66, 181; Mosaic, 15, 30, 40, 52 – 53, 59 – 63, 69, 104, 141, 181; nomos and, 5, 21, 29 – 30, 43, 47, 53, 91– 97, 139, 164, 184; sacred and, 74, 78, 144; sovereignty and, 2 – 6, 18 – 21, 35, 38, 46 – 52, 55, 65, 67– 69, 89 – 90, 93. See also God; homo sacer ; Schmitt, Carl; sovereign ban; state of exception Laws of Manu, 173 Lea, Henry, 159, 161 Lee, Richard, 153 Le Goff, Jacques, 156 Leviticus, 84, 88, 98, 134, 139 Lincoln, Bruce, 32 Locke, John, 6, 68, 126 – 27, 129 – 30, 132, 136, 150 – 52 Lubin, Timothy, 122 – 23 Luther, Martin, 7, 10, 25, 55, 63 – 65, 105, 156 – 57, 160 – 69, 181– 82. See also Protestantism; Reformation Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988), 127, 229n10 Maimonides, Moses, 41 Maine, Henry, 26 Malamoud, Charles, 172 – 73, 175 Man, Play and Games (Caillois), 106 manna, 91, 135 – 36, 150, 220n81 Marshall, John, 126

268 Mauss, Marcel, 7, 21, 80, 107, 109, 112, 149, 158, 170, 173 McAnany, Patricia, 174 Meier, Heinrich, 10 Middleton, Conyers, 57– 59 Milbank, John, 44, 49, 94 Milgrom, Jacob, 134 – 35, 139 Miller, Geoffrey, 26 – 27, 197n96 miracles, 39, 48 – 52, 57– 59, 109, 122, 207n105, 208nn118 – 19; cessation of, 5, 52 – 56, 60 – 61, 68 – 71 Mishnah, 101– 2 modernity, 44 – 45, 61– 69, 72 – 73, 79, 157, 185, 212n164 money, 7, 116, 132, 146 – 51, 156 – 58; origins of, 169 – 82. See also property; social hierarchy; surplus economies Morgan, Thomas, 25, 39, 41– 43, 60, 62, 67, 88 Morton, Thomas, 56 Mosaic laws, 40, 52 – 53, 59 – 61, 88, 104, 141 Moskala, Jiří, 40 mundane economies, 98, 108, 112, 116 – 20, 150, 158, 169, 173 Musson, Samuel, 104 Native American tradition, 126 – 29, 133, 136, 230n20 natural law, 39 – 40, 43, 54, 109 Nelson, Robert, 166 Neusner, Jacob, 101– 2 Niditch, Susan, 85 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19, 121– 23 nihilism, 67, 213n166 Ninety-five Theses (Luther), 7, 156 – 57 Nixon, Richard, 144 Noah, 22, 54, 195n65 nomadism, 93, 127, 137– 38, 140 – 41, 152, 154 nominalism, 15 – 16, 49 – 52, 66, 212n161, 213n165 nomos, 5, 21, 29 – 30, 43, 47, 53, 91– 97, 139, 164, 184 Nomos of the Earth, The (Schmitt), 92 nonutilitarian behavior, 97, 106 – 7, 109 – 12, 115, 117, 127, 132, 139, 151– 52, 225n44. See also dépense; play; potlatch Oakley, Francis, 51, 53, 55, 67 Ockham, William of, 49 – 51 oeconomy, 60 – 61, 65, 69 Ojakangas, Mika, 49 – 51 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 121 oracles (silence of ), 52, 55, 58 – 62, 71. See also disenchantment; miracles Oriental Economics (Boeke), 115 Origen, 55 Otto, Rudolf, 4, 10 – 13, 18, 37, 39, 49, 65, 80 – 81, 87– 89, 190nn8 – 9

index pardon power, 1– 6, 34, 143 – 44, 163 – 64, 184 – 85 patriarchs, 21– 26, 31, 68, 114, 195n69 Paul, 53, 67, 181– 82 penance. See indulgences Pentecostalism, 70 pharmakos, 83 Philo Judaeus, 41 Picart, Bernard, 120 Pieper, Josef, 107, 110 – 11 play, 106 – 7, 110. See also nonutilitarian behavior Plutarch, 61 Political Theology (Schmitt), 5, 38, 46 – 47, 49 politics. See God; law, the; sacred; social-contract theory; sovereignty; state of nature; and specific theorists Polynesian tradition, 80 – 81, 154 Poorthuis, Marcel, 41 potentia absoluta, 47– 52, 68, 164. See also absolute power; divine command theory; miracles potentia ordinata, 49 – 52 potlatch, 106, 109, 149, 153, 226n64, 227n70 Potts, John, 70 – 71, 207n104 predestination, 47, 49, 64 – 67, 112, 181, 211n154. See also Puritanism property, 85 – 86, 91– 95, 99 – 100, 102; capture theory of, 126 – 30, 229n4; communal, 126 – 31, 133, 136 – 41, 145 – 51, 154. See also land management; social hierarchy prophecy, 53, 55, 68 – 69. See also miracles; oracles (silence of ) Protestant Ethic, The (Weber), 62, 66, 111, 171 Protestantism, 37– 38, 47, 52 – 63, 69 – 71, 104 – 5, 110 – 12, 157, 160 – 61, 166 – 68. See also Luther, Martin; Reformation Proudhon, Pierre, 34, 134, 141– 42 Purdon, Nicholas, 163 – 65 Purgatory, 156, 160, 162, 164, 167. See also Catholicism; indulgences; salvation Puritanism, 47, 53, 110, 166. See also predestination Purity and Danger (Douglas), 13 radical orthodoxy, 44 rational-choice theory, 102, 121– 22, 152, 168 Rawls, John, 4, 24, 26 – 27, 137 reciprocity, 99, 101, 105, 107– 12, 153 – 54, 157– 60, 173 Reformation, 7, 47, 52, 58, 62 – 65, 70 – 72, 157, 160 – 62, 165 – 68, 181– 82. See also Luther, Martin; Protestantism religion: accounting and, 166 – 67; asceticism and, 19, 103, 111– 12, 120 – 25, 141, 148 – 49, 179 – 85; Asian traditions of, 115 – 17, 124, 146 – 49, 158, 172 – 74; charisma and, 5, 44 – 49, 52 – 72, 94, 185; definitions of, 42; deism and, 5, 38 – 49, 57, 64 – 68, 72, 88, 104; economics of, 7, 113 – 20, 128 – 32, 146 – 51, 156 – 68, 170 – 76, 182, 223n21; miracles

index and, 5, 39, 48 – 61, 68 – 71, 109, 122, 207n105, 208nn118 – 19; Native American traditions and, 126 – 29, 133, 136, 230n20; property and, 85 – 86, 91– 102, 126 – 33, 136 – 41, 145 – 51; salvation and, 7, 62 – 65, 112, 144, 157, 160 – 64, 168 – 71, 181, 211n154. See also Buddhism; Catholicism; Hinduism; Protestantism Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World (Picart), 120 Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben), 79 Riesebrodt, Martin, 16 – 17, 124 ritual economy, 62, 111– 12, 156, 174, 181– 82 Robinson, Gnana, 130 Roman Catholicism and Political Form (Schmitt), 46 – 47, 49 Roman Jubilees, 156 – 59, 161– 65, 169 – 70, 185. See also Jubilee years Romulus and Remus, 24, 79, 94 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 34, 141 Ruthven, Jon, 55, 70 Sabbath, 107, 110 – 11, 129, 132 – 36, 140 – 42, 145, 152, 155. See also Jubilee years; Sabbatical years Sabbatical years, 107, 110 – 11, 129, 131– 36, 139 – 41, 143 – 44, 155. See also Jubilee years; Sabbath sacer esto, 79 – 81. See also homo sacer sacramental economy, 49, 64, 108, 181– 82 sacred: ambivalence of, 6, 10, 80 – 82, 86 – 89, 184; homo sacer and, 5 – 7, 21, 29, 73 – 86, 89, 94; land as, 127– 29, 132 – 33, 136, 226n61; nature of, 20, 101, 111, 118; property and, 85 – 86, 91– 102, 126 – 33, 136 – 41, 145 – 51; versus holy, 189n1 (intro.). See also God sacrifice: communal meal theory of, 26, 104 – 5, 112, 119, 155, 173, 224n30; do ut des theory of, 85, 99, 112, 217n29; economics of, 6 – 7, 99 – 103, 105, 112 – 13, 117, 119 – 20, 130, 148, 153 – 55, 170, 185; homo sacer and, 5 – 7, 21, 29, 73 – 86, 89, 94; human, 23 – 25, 31, 78 – 79, 84, 105, 109, 119, 154 – 55; money and, 171– 73; nature of, 19, 23 – 29, 31, 83 – 84; origins of, 1– 3, 21, 104, 106, 173; rejection of, 7, 78, 179 – 80; social hierarchy and, 106, 118, 141; Vedic tradition and, 174 – 75, 177– 78, 180. See also ritual economy; scapegoat rituals; social hierarchy; sovereignty “Sacrifice and Stigma” (Iannaccone), 102 sacrifier (yajamāna), 117, 173 Sahlins, Marshall, 152 – 53 Saler, Michael, 71 salvation, 7, 62, 64 – 65, 112, 144, 157, 160 – 61, 164, 168 – 71, 181, 211n154. See also Catholicism; indulgences; Purgatory Samuelsson, Kurt, 165 – 66 scapegoat rituals, 83. See also sacrifice scarcity, 149 – 51

269 Schaeffer, Henry, 138 – 40 Schmitt, Carl, 2 – 13, 18, 21– 23, 34 – 51, 62 – 71, 92 – 94, 109, 139, 164, 189n2 (chap. 1) “Science as a Vocation” (Weber), 45, 63 – 64 Scotus, Duns, 10, 48, 50 – 51 Scribner, Bob, 70 Seaford, Richard, 171, 175 – 76 Second Treatise of Government (Locke), 126 – 27 secularism, 1– 2, 44, 64, 71– 72, 167, 171, 182. See also disenchantment; modernity semiotics, 122 – 23 shabbat. See Sabbath Shakespeare, William, 33, 52 Shaw, Jane, 70 Sheehan, Jonathan, 71 Sherwood, Yvonne, 23, 68 – 69 Smith, Jonathan Z., 82, 154 – 55 Smith, William Robertson, 10, 25, 59, 77, 80 – 84, 87, 105, 112, 141, 155 social-contract theory, 24, 26, 140, 147. See also veil of ignorance social hierarchy, 106 – 10, 113 – 22, 129, 134 – 42, 145 – 48, 150, 152 – 55, 158, 170, 175 – 82. See also community; money; property; sacrifice; surplus economies Söderblom, Nathan, 81 Sohm, Rudolph, 5, 47– 48, 53, 62, 70 Soss, Neal, 138 sovereign ban, 5 – 6, 74 – 75. See also h.erem sovereignty, 79, 83 – 84, 89, 91– 92, 94; anomie of, 29, 34, 94; asceticism and, 122 – 25; divine rights of, 53, 66, 164; economics and, 109 – 10; founding violence and, 1– 4, 13, 18 – 22, 35, 74, 86, 90, 94 – 95; grace and, 157, 164 – 66, 181; legal powers of, 3 – 4, 6, 74, 76 – 77, 83, 89 – 90, 92, 144, 184; modernity and, 61– 69, 72 – 73, 79; nature of, 44 – 45, 65; papal, 159 – 63, 165; powers of, 1– 6, 18 – 22, 38 – 39, 51, 55, 68, 143, 181; property and, 85 – 86, 91– 102, 126 – 33, 136 – 41, 145 – 51; rebellion against, 31– 32, 142; sacrifice and, 6, 75, 83 – 84, 118, 155. See also absolute power; Agamben, Giorgio; God; Hobbes, Thomas; law, the; pardon power; potentia absoluta; sacrifice; Schmitt, Carl; state of exception Spencer, John, 41, 59 – 62, 65, 68 – 69, 72, 106 Spinoza, Baruch, 71 spiritual economy, 14, 35, 60, 69. See also oeconomy Spiro, Melford, 146 Sprankling, John G., 126 – 27 Starobinski, Jean, 119, 163 state of exception: economics and, 118 – 20, 141– 42, 155, 157, 169, 179, 182; sovereign ban and, 74 – 76, 83, 89, 92; sovereignty and, 1– 6, 18, 20 – 21, 28 – 33, 45 – 46, 108, 163 – 65. See also debt cancellation; Jubilee years; law, the

270 state of nature, 2 – 3, 29 – 34, 54, 89 – 90, 136 – 40, 143, 150, 155 Steiner, Franz, 80 – 81, 86 – 87 Stern, Philip, 86, 93, 100 St. Petersburg Dialogues (de Maistre), 21 subsistence economies, 152 – 55 surplus economies, 105, 110, 146 – 55, 180 Suzuki, D. T., 129 Swazi Ncwala, 31– 32 Sykes, Arthur, 26 taboos, 80 – 83, 87, 111 Taubes, Jacob, 37– 38, 42 Taves, Ann, 70 Taylor, Charles, 40, 44, 167 Taylor, Mark C., 15 – 16, 18 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 33 – 34 ter Beek, Leon, 79 Testart, Alain, 153 – 54, 158 Thiers, Adolphe, 142 Thurston, Herbert, 161 Tindal, Matthew, 25, 39 – 40, 42, 60, 62, 67, 88 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 133 – 34 Toland, John, 40, 53, 60, 112 Tollinson, Robert, 168 totalitarianism, 29, 43, 75, 79, 90. See also fascism; founding violence; state of exception transcendence, 14 transubstantiation, 56 tremendum, 10, 80, 87– 88, 154. See also horror sacer ; Otto, Rudolf Trigano, Shmuel, 140 Troeltsch, Ernst, 166 Turner, Victor, 18, 22, 31– 33, 169, 182 Tweed, Thomas, 15

index urbanization hypothesis, 139, 147, 179 – 80 US Supreme Court, 126, 128 utilitarianism. See Bentham, Jeremy; nonutilitarian behavior Veblen, Thorstein, 113 – 14, 117, 119, 153 Vedas. See Hinduism veil of ignorance, 27, 137 Versnel, Hendrik, 30 – 32 Viner, Jacob, 161 violence. See founding violence; sacrifice; sovereignty Violence and the Sacred (Girard), 24 voluntarism, 54 Wall Street, 113 Walsham, Alexandra, 70 – 71 war, 92 – 94, 107. See also English Civil War Wasserstrom, Steven, 11– 12, 37 Weber, Max: charisma and, 5, 14, 37– 38, 43 – 48, 52 – 59, 95; disenchantment and, 16, 23 – 24, 62 – 73, 165; economics and, 110, 135, 157, 166, 169, 171, 185 Wellhausen, Julius, 25, 47, 59, 104 – 6, 112, 134, 139, 141, 155 Wells, Christian, 173 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant), 41 White, Lynn, Jr., 129 Wigelsworth, Jeffrey, 48 Wilson, John, 23 Winthrop, John, 129 Wolf of Wall Street, The, 113 Woodburn, James, 148, 152 – 53 yajamāna (sacrifier), 117, 173