Abstract
In the midst of the dissolution of the Weimar Republic, the personal, the political and the theological collided for the German intellectuals who explored the areas of Church-state relations, constitutional law, intellectual history and cultural criticism. Carl Schmitt serves as a prime example of one for whom the consequences of professional political decisions threw into upheaval, and in many cases permanently ruined, friendships that had been formative to his development as a legal and political theorist. The obvious narrative is that Schmitt’s turn to National Socialism in 1932 caused many of his acquaintances, Catholic intellectuals who had adored his early work and who had in turn helped shape it, to abandon him entirely. Perhaps the most dramatic of these ruptures is that between Schmitt and his student, Waldemar Gurian, which seems to have been brought on by the former’s alliance with the Papen government and the publication of 1932s Legalität und Legitimität with its concept of the “total state.” However, this is an incomplete account of the friend-to-enemy transformation of this relationship, which, I would argue, begins not with National Socialism, but with the Church.
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Notes
- 1.
The nature of this “turn” is a matter for debate. Schmitt ’s legacy is contested largely due to the question of whether his involvement in the Nazi party was sudden and opportunistic, and therefore not the determining moment by which to judge his earlier and later life and work, or whether his support of the party was in fact consistent with his early political theory as well as his personal beliefs and therefore should be the rule by which his life and work are measured. Here I mention the year 1932 because it can serve as an “official” temporal marker for when Schmitt fully and publically supported and worked for the party.
- 2.
On a personal note from Gerd Giesler, Schmitt ’s longtime confidante, with whom I spoke in Berlin on February 25, 2014: Schmitt not only was well acquainted with Catholic intellectuals, but also monks/friars; but was always wary of things that were “too spiritual.” He was always most interested in the form of the Church.
- 3.
Gurian used the term “totalitarian” consistently after the outbreak of the Second World War. He also used the term “political religions” throughout his work.
- 4.
He is mentioned by Schmitt as early as March 14, 1923 in his diary as “a Russian Jew from Cologne.”
- 5.
“Peace Ideals and Reality” was not published until 1948, many years after the catastrophic falling out of Gurian and Schmitt . In this piece, Gurian writes of the start of the Cold War in the wake of WWII: “Many troubles of the postwar period must be ascribed to the fact that the character of the war as a war of survival, of defense against threatening slavery, was not stressed enough whereas promises of an ideal future, a future without fear, were overstressed. Therefore, concrete issues were not dealt with, but sidestepped and postponed.”
- 6.
Schmitt was excommunicated for re-marrying without an annulment from his first marriage. Balakrishnan notes that Schmitt ’s excommunication would have been devastating to him in some way, even if just because of the embarrassment it would have caused him within his tight-knit Catholic circles in Bonn. Still, he continued to publish in Catholic journals, remained cordial with the Church, and was active in the Catholic Center Party after this event.
- 7.
Also of note is the Hochland Circle and Carl Muth, which requires its own separate conversation.
- 8.
The imprimatur reads “Moniachii, die 17. VII 1925 i.v. G. Degenbeck.” Degenbeck was the Church emissary who granted the imprimatur. My deepest gratitude to Gerd Giesler for allowing me to work with archival material in Berlin and providing me with a copy of this second edition with Schmitt ’s handwritten notes.
- 9.
This is Schmitt ’s much later (but still consistent) articulation of his position, from Politische Theologie II, translated here by Ulmen. It is worth considering the question of what Schmitt means by “secularized,” as this remains a debated term. I interpret “secularized” in his usage as the end result of a process that the theological has been subjected to by modern state theory in which its concepts have first undergone a dilution/liberalization at the theological level (for example, the concept of a single, sovereign God who is always in control of the world undergoing a conceptual shift toward a deistic, “clockmaker” God) and then are translated into the foundation of state theory through a poor process of representation, creating a two-fold problem.
- 10.
For Schmitt , European states can benefit greatly in looking to the Church as a model for the proper representation of powerful political form in the struggle against the “technicized,” atheistic and anarchistic ideology of Soviet Russia. Even the Orthodox Church and Russian Christianity, such as that of Dostoevsky, is included in this indictment as forms of “latent atheism.” Hence, the Catholic Church must make a decision to ally itself with Western Europe, even in the current weakness of its liberal parliamentarism. The Church must help guide the European states to recognize the importance of a stronger and more secure principle of political representation; and it can provide the theological “ethos of belief” by which to do this. If it does not declare its support for this goal, it leaves Soviet Russia one step closer to ideological domination.
- 11.
Translations of phrases are mine. This review originally appeared in Kölnische Volkszeitung from January 1925. Schmitt notes that he has read this review, in a letter dated January 24, 1925.
- 12.
“Es gibt einen antiromischen Affekt.” Er vernichtet Staaten: denn er macht blind dafür, daβ gerade die römische Kirche Repräsentantin der politischen Form ist, auf der alle Staatlichkeit beruht: ihre Autorität gründet darauf, dass sie Christus, den Mensch gewordenen Sohn Gottes, repräsentiert. Er schafft gerade im Namen der Freiheit Sklaven des Betriebes und der Maschine; man ist nicht mehr Repräsentant einer heiligen Idee oder einer autoritären Person; man ist nur noch Exponent einer blinden Masse. Er zerreiβt die Einheit von Natur und Ratio; bald ist Gott nur der von Welt Abgewandelte verborgene Gott und die Welt eine Beute sinnloser Gewalt; bald versinkt jede Transzendenz vor der Allmacht der Immanenz.
- 13.
“Diese Antithese verliert gleich ihre Suggestivitat, wenn man bedenkt, dass der Zugang zur objektiven Welt nur durch eine subjektive Entscheidung moglich ist, und dass andererseits die subjektive Welt erst von der objektiven her ihren wahren Wert gewinnt. Und dass in Carl Schmitts Schrift auch eine Entscheidung aus dem Augenblick gefallt wird, sieht man aus ihrer Rhetorik. “Rhetorik setzte eine Hierarchie voraus. Denn ihre grosse Resonanz kommt aus dem Glauben an die Repräsentation.”
- 14.
Thanks to Michael Zank for comments on this.
- 15.
I interpret Schmitt ’s understanding of the Church as a “Body of Christ” as a somewhat “reluctant” community. Throughout Sichtbarkeit and RKPF, Schmitt uses language that suggests that community is simply a fact of life, a necessity, and not always a pleasant one. Loneliness is a feeling that “no man of worth ever loses.” However, he is still responsible to his Church and to his political community as a public citizen. He must not succumb to championing his own individuality at the expense of the community.
- 16.
I have added “bishops” parenthetically; in context, this is what Dulles is referencing when he writes “teachers.”
- 17.
Ulmen sees this as an indication of his later shift from the Church to Roman law and jurisprudence “as guaranteeing the higher categories of European civilization.”
- 18.
“One cannot say that the events of 1933 changed him in the sense that they threw him back to his origins. The point is not that he was made conscious of his Jewish extraction, but that he now thought it necessary to talk about it publically because it was no longer a fact of personal life; it had become a political issue and it was a matter of course for him to solidarize himself with those who were persecuted.”
- 19.
On the comparison between Schmitt and Maurras—Gurian claims that Schmitt is worse than Maurras, who, at least, does not pretend to be “a believer.” However, as Gopal Balakrishnan rightly points out, Schmitt is not a Catholic integralist despite his appeal to the Vatican to ally itself with Western Europe and the Idea in RKPF. This distances him from the modern counter-revolutionary thought of the French Charles Maurras, whom he cites in RKPF and who advocated an alliance of military and Church to overthrow the Third Republic and restore a form of Catholic royalism. Schmitt knew that this was not a practical solution for post-WWI republican Germany, and he does not seem interested in the potential for Catholicism to integrate with nationalism in Germany or any Western power. Of course, it is not easy to discern exactly what specific actions he would propose in his call to the Vatican to “choose a side” and his hope that the Church will serve as a model for political form for Western Europe, so it is easy to confuse this with an integralist model. Still, like Balakrishnan I see nothing in Schmitt ’s theology that would allow for such an alliance of “nationalism through religiosity.”
- 20.
Schmitt ’s opportunism is certainly an ongoing point of debate. While Gurian interpreted his political choices and alliances as matters of convenience and careerism, it is equally possible to argue that Schmitt’s decisions were principled and supported by his own theories of state.
- 21.
“Seine Fragen sind nicht Fragen, welche die Laune einem isolierten Individuum eingibt, sondern sie sind wirklich Fragen, welche die Krise im 19. Jahrhundert als selbstverstandlich geltender rechtlicher und gesellschaftlicher Grundvorstellungen hervortreibt.”
- 22.
The majority of Gurian ’s work during his time in Switzerland was published in Deutsche Briefe. In his contributions to the journal, he attacks no one with the frequency and ferocity of Schmitt .
- 23.
Note that racial anti-semitism was prevalent in his private diaries before this time, but not in public writings.
- 24.
Gurian also accuses Hugo Ball of acting irresponsibly in a review of his work, but in that case it is a far less serious charge—Ball had misrepresented history and as such provided a very poor apologia for Catholicism, but in Schmitt ’s case, his irresponsibility had the potential to affect the concrete lives of innocent people.
- 25.
Another interesting side to this is that it was somewhat easy for Schmitt to abandon the Catholic model that he set up in RKPF, and that Gurian found compelling, as he later separated the political from the category of morality. For more on this, see John McCormick’s account of Schmitt on human nature; Schmitt always refuses to fully accept the depravity of the human being, at first because of his Catholic “ethos of belief,” and later he simply skirts the entire problem by separating the question of human nature from the question of the political.
- 26.
This is how Jacob Taubes explains the case of Schmitt as a juristic thinker. It is important to note that in this Afterward, Hartwich, Assmann and Assmann draw a distinction between Taubes’ understanding and their own perspective, arguing that “one might certainly envision a theory of the state that takes into account the possibility of a ‘chaos from above’ and the necessity, or at least justification, of civil disobedience.” I agree with this assessment, that juristic thinking is not necessarily always linked to theories of chaos “from below.” However, I also agree (with Taubes) that Schmitt himself was unable to imagine that there could be any greater threat than the uprising of anarchist, atheistic, uneducated and oppressed masses.
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Cooney, T.A. (2017). Merely Political: Waldemar Gurian and Carl Schmitt’s Early Political-Theological Divide. In: Speight, C., Zank, M. (eds) Politics, Religion and Political Theology. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1082-2_12
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