Amidst the dualisms

In order to understand the rationale behind Schmitt’s theorization of a particularly Catholic human rationality it is important to understand the situation in which Schmitt formulates his reading of the Church and the opponents at which it is directed. This situation is announced, though somewhat obliquely, in the text’s opening sentence: “There is an anti-Roman temper”

(Es gibt einen antirömischen Affekt)¹³⁵. Schmitt describes this anti-Roman feeling through a list of the various ways in which the Church has been criticized and demonized: “It has nourished the struggle against popery, Jesuitism and clericalism that has impelled several centuries of European history with a gigantic array of religious and political energies”¹³⁶. The core of this anti-roman feeling is “more an unspoken sentiment” than a concrete theory, visible in the diversity of critiques which have been launched against Catholicism¹³⁷:

It is a striking contradiction, again demonstrating the curious complexio oppositorum, that one of the strongest Protestant perceptions finds in Roman Catholicism a debasement and misuse of Christianity because it mechanizes religion into a soulless formality, while at same time Protestants return in Romantic flight to the Catholic Church seeking salvation from the soullessness of a rationalistic and mechanistic age¹³⁸.

“For the whole of the parliamentary and democratic nineteenth century, one most often heard the charge that Catholic politics is nothing more than a limitless opportunism”¹³⁹. Attacked from all sides, seen by Protestants as a gigantic spiritually dead and technical bureaucracy and by modernity's profane scientific-technical thought as absurdly irrational, “subjective”

(unsachlich)¹⁴⁰, the Catholic Church stands at the center – but at the center of what?

The answer is provided when Schmitt describes the diversity of criticism faced by the Church: “But these constructs are still more than fantasies out of the blue. Though it sounds improbable, they are completely in harmony with the spirit of our age because their intellectual structure accords with a reality”¹⁴¹. What Schmitt suggests is that, while

135 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 3.

136 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 3; RK, p. 5: translation – N.H.. My transation of this passage is motivated by the fact that the first sentence of Ulmen’s translation combines both the first and second sentence and, in doing so, does not preserve the rhetorical value of the concision of this text’s first sentence: “Es gibt einen anti-Römischen Affekt”, a rhetorical device which Schmitt employs not only but, more famously, in Political Theology: “Sovereign is who decides on the state of exception”, as well as Land and Sea, “The human is a terrestrial being”, among other texts.

137 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 4.

138 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 11; RK, p. 19: modified – N.H..

139 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 4

140 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 17; RK, p. 29: modified – N.H..

141 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 9

erroneous, all these criticism are highly indicative of the reality that “Every sphere of the contemporary epoch is governed by a radical dualism”¹⁴². In his attempt to theorize the Church, that is, in his attempt to find a response to the dualisms of modernity, Schmitt is participating in what Carlo Galli calls the “crisis of mediation”. This crisis of mediation, manifest in the appearance of philosophical thought which turns to ‘irrationalism’ or

‘experience’, as well as in modernity’s incapacity to posit a ‘telos’¹⁴³, proceeds from what Weber called modernity’s “loss of meaning” (Sinnverlust) and makes itself visible in the discovery of language’s insufficiency and the ensuing impossibility of communication (Hofmannsthal: Letter to Lord Chandos). Politically speaking, Giuseppe Duso has referred to the “crisis of representation”¹⁴⁴.

Then however, while Schmitt concedes that the anti-roman feeling is not a mere fantasy, he quickly turns this critique around in order to continue with the observation that “Its [the Church’s] elasticity is really astounding”¹⁴⁵. Schmitt argues that what appears to be mere arbitrariness, the Church’s willingness to enter into political alliance with a diverse range of partners, often written off as nothing but opportunism, is actually the manifestation of the church's constant essence, its elasticity which Schmitt calls the complexio oppositorum, the term which Adolf von Harnack also used to describe the Catholic Church some years before Schmitt¹⁴⁶. The complexio oppositorum is the church's “diversity and ambiguity – the double face, the Janus/head, the hermaphroditic nature”¹⁴⁷. With the term complexio oppositorum Schmitt attempts to give a conceptual name to the Church’s capacity to differentiate between the essential and the unessential and to have a certain indifference towards and tolerance of internal differences and disagreements. Schmitt's vision of the Catholic complexio is that of a structure capable of housing differences, that is, a structure certainly authoritarian and yet not homogenizing. It is the flowering diversity of the Church, its capacity to encompass lay and clergy of all kinds, which Schmitt celebrates and theorizes.

142 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 9.

143 Galli, Carl. Genealogia, p. 77. Schmitt himself identifies and discuses a turn to irrationalistic theories of unmediated violence and myth in the Parlamentarismus text’s fourth chapter.

144 Duso, Giuseppe. Die moderne politische Repräsentation: Entstehung und Krise des Begriffs, Berlin: Duncker

& Humblot 2006. Duso sees the “crisis” of representation therein that “the conceptions which came into being with modern political science and entered into the figure of the state and its constitution were very apparently incapable of understanding a current situation which had already surpassed the horizon of national states and of the ius publicum europaeum” (p. 14). See further: pp. 146-150.

145 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 4.

146 Harnack, Adolf von. Das Wesen des Christentum: sechszehn Vorlesungen vor Studierenden aller Fakultäten im Wintersemester 1899/1900 an der Universität Berlin, ed. Trutz Rendtorff, Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser 1999, p.

234: “Thus the astonishing „complexio oppositorum“ arose in occidental Catholicism: the church of ritual, of law, of politics, of world-domination and the church in which a most highly individual, tender, sublimated sense for and doctrine of sin and grace are put into effect”.

147 Schmitt, Carl. RC, p. 5.

However, despite Schmitt's use of the word “elasticity”, this multifaceted nature of the church should not lead us to believe that we are dealing with the “elastic moment” of political romanticism.

Out of a spiritual promiscuity which seeks a Romantic or Hegelian brotherhood with Catholicism, as with so many other ideas and individuals, [one] could make the Catholic complexio into one of many syntheses and rashly conclude that [one] had thereby construed the essence of Catholicism.

The metaphysicians of speculative post-Kantian philosophy conceived organic and historical life as an eternal process of antithesis and synthesis, assigning the respective roles at will. When Goerres pictures Catholicism as the masculine and Protestantism as the feminine principle, he makes Catholicism nothing more than an anti-thetical extreme and sees the synthesis in a “higher third.” It is obvious that Catholicism could [also] be considered the feminine and Protestantism the masculine principle. It is also conceivable that speculative system-builders have at one time or another considered Catholicism the “higher third.” This idea had particular appeal for Romantics who toyed with Catholicism, although they did not readily refrain from exhorting the Church to break free of Jesuitism and scholasticism in order to create an “organic” higher unity out of the schematic externality of formal Catholicism and the [invisible interiority] of Protestantism. Such is the basis of the apparently typical misunderstanding¹⁴⁸.

Though not frequently noted¹⁴⁹, the roots of this concept of a complexio can clearly be seen in Schmitt's short essay Illyria: notes from a Dalmatian journey, where he writes the following:

thus Illyria represents the most extreme degree of a mixture of races and destinies. But in the concept of Illyria lies something real which remains inaccessible to all romanticism and the great Illyrians do not make romantic music, but rather have a language. Naturally they speak in many tongues. It appears as if they were acquainted with all European languages and there were in the Illyrian spirit a particular, most strange kind of multiligualism […]

Luther germanised the Holy Scripture, that means incorporated it into the German language. That is not the same as the translation of the holy. The German bible has its particular merits and its particular force, but its author still lacks the multilingualism of the Illyirian and the assured floating above the languages¹⁵⁰.

148 Schmitt, Carl. RC, pp. 8-9; RK, pp. 14-15: modified – N.H.: Ulmen translates the phrase ‘unsichtbare Innerlichkeit’ as imperceptible internality, a translation which I have replaced with ‘invisible interiority’ both for the sake of consistency, because I will employ the term ‘interiority’ in the following discussion as well as because interiority carries the spatial sense of an interior.

149 In his essay, Carl Schmitt und die „konservative Revolution“ (pp. 129-157 in: Complexio Oppositorum), Armin Mohler writes: “Less well known, but at least as intense [as Schmitt’s relationship to Spain] were his ties to ‘Illyria’. […] This hymn is a key text for Schmitt’s work” (pp. 134-135).

150 Schmitt, Carl. Illyrien – Notizen von einer dalmatinischen Reise (1925), pp. 483-490 in: SGN, p. 486.

Originally published in: Hochland, 23. Jg., H. 3, Dezember. The background of this short essay is a trip taken by Schmitt to Podrawska with his then future second wife Frau Duška Todorović to visit her father. The

The deep relationship between these two texts, published in chronological proximity to one another, becomes clear when one considers that Schmitt’s formulation in the Illyria essay; “the great Illyrians do not make romantic music, but rather have a language”, was already formulated as a critique of “large-scale enterprise” in Roman Catholicism when Schmitt wrote, in a strangely almost backhanded defense of Soviet aesthetics, that “this primitive symbolism has something lacking in the most advanced machine technology, something human, namely, a language”¹⁵¹.

Roman Catholicism is an essay of manifold significance and can be understood as “a document of anti-modern criticism and of attack on the Weimar Republic, both as an elogium to the catholic majestas as well as a fragment and thus the foundation of Schmitt’s

‘irrationalism’ as well as a homage to Latin rationality, inspired by a deep Antinordischer Affekt”¹⁵². In all its aspects, however, it is embedded in Schmitt's attempt, present not only in Roman Catholicism, but in his entire oeuvre, to overcome the dualisms of modernity, the conflict between “thinking and being, material and spirit”¹⁵³, universality and the particular, between the infinite and the finite, the “Rechtsidee” and the Rechtswirklichkeit¹⁵⁴, the constitution as such (Verfassung) and the laws of the constitution (Verfassungsgesetze). In order to understand Schmitt's vision of the Catholic Church we therefore begin by looking at two prominent manifestations of modern dualistic thought which Schmitt addresses in this work. The first of these is Protestantism and the second what Schmitt calls “economic thought”.