Clearly, Schmitt severely criticizes Promethean thoughts of human self-poiesis, as he does their political equivalent, the doctrines of the spontaneous formation of the State by society. Nevertheless, he occasionally reveals some secret fascination, as in his argument against Blumenberg at the end of his second Political Theology of 1969. To this liberal optimism, he opposes the Christian theology of original sin. But the problem lies in the meaning he gives to the notion of original sin. In his Political Theology of 1922, he underlines the heterodox nature of the conception of original sin of the counterrevolution thinkers, such as Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, and Donoso Cortès, for whom the state of man after the sin is a state of absolute abjection, preventing man not only from reaching the good, but also from striving to reach it.⁹ In reality, Schmitt rallies towards this radical pessimism. “All true political theories postulate a corrupt (böse) man, fully problematic, of a dangerous and dynamic nature” (Notion of politics 1927).¹⁰  

Among these “true” (echt) political theories (which exclude liberal political theories as “false” theories), Schmitt quotes the names of Joseph de Maistre and of Donoso Cortès : we may conclude that, for Schmitt, “true” political theories postulate a man deprived of the desire of God. The paradox is that, however serious the fault may have been, it nevertheless gave man a real chance, so that the sin appears to be a felix culpa. Thanks to this fault, hostility is preserved as the foundation of political identity–I mean an identity based on the seriousness of the human existence. If we remove sin, and with it hostility, we find an economic and cultural society. This society, as Leo Strauss summarized, of peace and recreation has within it no possibility of sacrifice and therefore no ethical dimension. Evil thus becomes the foundation of an order, besides which there is nothing for man to desire.

By depriving man of momentum toward the Divine, the Schmittean conception meets, at least functionally, its antagonist, i.e., secularized liberalism. And it meets it in its most extreme version, that of Bakunin’s atheist anarchism. On a number of occasions, Voegelin analyzed this paradoxical phenomenon in his studies on Hobbes.¹¹  By removing the desire for God, Hobbes reduced the homo politicus to his mere libido dominandi, and politics to a mere race for domination. To the transcendent orientation of the Platonic-Christian Imperium sacrum, Hobbes substituted a purely immanent orientation of secularized politics. This rebellion of the soul against order constitutes, for Voegelin, the ultimate foundation of totalitarianism. The distortion of the meaning of transcendence into a radical heteronomy, with its corollary–removing the desire of God–therefore paradoxically leads to the elevation of the mundane political institution to a deified immanent reality. As Voegelin summarized in his Political Religions, “when God is invisible behind the word, the contents of the word will become new gods.”¹² In this context, Schmitt’s adherence to Nazism, as opportunistic as it may have been, appears to be quite consistent with his intellectual positions in the 1920s.

To conclude, Voegelin’s reflection on the relationships between religions and politics (what we could call in a very specific sense “religious politics”) has nothing to do with “political theology” in Schmitt’s sense. By “political theology,” Schmitt designates an analogy of structure between two types of rationalities, both confronted with the problem of visibility (that is of concreteness) and, therefore, with a certain form of irrationality (revelation, dogma and miracles for theology, sovereign authority for politics). Both rationalities, while similar, keep their autonomy in their specific order. According to Voegelin, such autonomy does not exist: the question of the relationship between theology and politics is always presented in terms of direct relationship. The man who lives in society is the same man who strives for a transcendent end. State and church, says Voegelin in his course on Hitler and the Germans, are not two different societies, but “the same societies, which only have different representations, one temporal and one spiritual . . . . There isn’t, on the one side, the Churches and, on the other, political people, but . . . people are the same in both cases.”¹³

In fact, political society can never acquire the full status of societas perfecta as it does for Schmitt. Voegelin’s “religious politics,” if we can call it that, has a different meaning. It designates the structuring presence of the religious experience at the heart of the rational activity of man, and in particular of his communitarian activity. This presence preserves the finitude of politics–or what could be called a zetetic of politics–preventing its self-formation in a mundane theology (be it republican, liberal or totalitarian). More generally, it preserves the fundamental inquietude of the human soul and its openness to the question of the transcendence of the foundation.   

NOTES

(Note on references to the Collected Works: The 34 volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin have been published in their entirety by University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, between 1997 and 2009.  Hereafter individual volumes will be cited by their title, followed by CW‘ and volume number.)  

 1. Gentile, Emilio, Le religioni della politica, fra democrazie e totalitarismi,  Roma, Laterza, 2001.

 2. Voegelin, Eric, Autobiographical Reflections, CW  34, p. 78,

 3. Rougier, Louis, Les mystiques politiques contemporaines et leurs incidences internationales. Paris, Librairie du Recueil Sirey, s.a, 1935.

 4. Schmitt, Carl, Politische Theologie, München und Leipzig, Duncher und Humblot, 1922, 1934. (English edition, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, c.1985.}

 5. On the Catholic period of Schmitt’s thought, cf. the letter to Theo Morse of November 18, 1953, Selected Correspondence, 1950-1984, CW 30, p. 184. On the institutionalist period, cf. The Authoritarian State (CW, 4, p. 53) and, above all the review of Krupa’s Carl Schmitt’s Theorie des "Politischen," 1937 (CW 13, p. 109).

 6.  Voegelin, Eric, The Theory of Governance and other Miscellaneous Papers, 1921-1938, CW 32, pp. 477-478.

 7.  Voegelin, Eric, Selected Book Reviews, CW 13, p. 109.

 8. Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Ages, trans. L.M. Wallace.Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1983, p. 178.

 9. Schmitt, Carl, Politische Theologie, p. 51.

10. Schmitt, Carl, Der Begriff des Politischen, 1932. Berlin, Duncker und Humblot, 1987, p. 61. (English edition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007.)

11. There are many references to Hobbes’ Leviathan as a step toward the formation of the modern state, of which totalitarianism is the assumption, and above all in the Political Religions of 1938. However, one of the clearest texts, to my view, is to be found in the letter to Robert Heilman of August 20 1959, Selected Correspondence, 1950-1984, CW 30, p. 393.

12. Voegelin, Eric, The Political Religions, found in Modernity without Restraint, CW 5, p. 60.

13. Voegelin, Eric, Hitler and the Germans, CW, 31, pp. 156, 175.