From “Political Theology” to “Political Religion”—
Voegelin and Carl Schmitt

by Thierry Gontier 

 M. Gontier is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, Université de Lyon Jean Moulin – Lyon III. This text is the summarized version of a longer article which will appear shortly in French as: "De la théologie politique aux religions politiques: Voegelin et Carl Schmitt"  in Th. Gontier & D. Weber, Eric Voegelin, Politique, Religion et Histoire, Paris, éd. du Cerf. 

In his book on Politics as Religions, Emilio Gentile credits Eric Voegelin with the invention of the concept of “political religions,” a concept that will be systematically used in the 1960s to describe totalitarian regimes.¹ We know that Voegelin himself was not particularly attached to this expression, which he does not use in his published work after 1938. He briefly explains himself in his Autobiographical Reflections: "I would no longer use the term 'religions' because it is too vague and already deforms the real problem of experiences by mixing them with the further problem of dogma or doctrine."²

The term “religion” is therefore ambivalent. We mean by it a fundamental experience that man makes of his existence and his participation to an order that links the two levels of temporal and eternal. In this sense, every politic, for Voegelin, has a religious dimension and, vice versa, every religion has a function of structuring the social order. By the term “religion” we also mean a body of dogmas and doctrines. For Voegelin, this is a secondary aspect of the problem. It is true that totalitarianisms– and maybe not only totalitarianisms– have produced a form of religious propaganda. But what is characteristic of totalitarianisms is not this instrumentalization of theology, which is only a concomitant phenomenon, but a spiritual perversion.

Among the sources that inspired his title, Voegelin quotes Louis Rougier and his Les mystiques politiques.³ He also implicitly refers to French Christian personalists (such as Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, or Joseph Vialatoux) who, before him, had explained totalitarianisms less by their historical and social context than by referring to a kind of spiritual disorder. But nowhere does Voegelin quote Carl Schmitt’s famous work, Political Theology, published in 1922.⁴ Schmitt too had invented, if not an expression–which was used at times from Varro to Bakunin–at least a concept destined for a promising future. Schmitt and Voegelin’s books share at least one theme: they put forward that every political doctrine involves a relationship of man to the sacred–even (and maybe above all) the doctrines that claim to have severed this link.

Why did Voegelin leave out this reference even though he quoted Schmitt several times in his earlier works? The obvious reason is that, in 1938, Schmitt was considered one of the major intellectual figures of Nazism. Surprisingly, in his 1936 Authoritarian State, Voegelin appears to be virtually ignoring Schmitt’s adherence to the Nazis, referring only to the writings of Schmitt from his pre-Nazi years. Only a short footnote mentions the more recent developments in his thinking. It is likely that, by 1938, Voegelin had a clearer idea of Schmitt’s intellectual project. This is probably why he seldom quoted him in his subsequent published work. But this is not the only reason. Even in the years 1930-1936, when he often discussed Schmitt’s theses, Voegelin’s interest turned to legal and political issues, such as constitutional law, forms of governance, analysis of parliamentary democracy and its contemporary development, etc. His references to Schmitt never directly concern Political Theology, published in 1922.