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disputes that took place between the eighth and ninth centuries. Even after Richter’s
comprehensive study, whose orientation is—in spite of the title—theological and not
linguistic-philological, we still lack an adequate lexical analysis that supplements Wilhelm Gass’s useful but dated work “Das patristische Wort oikonomia” (1874) and Otto Lillge’s
dissertation Das patristische Wort “oikonomia.” Seine Geschichte und seine Bedeutung (1955).
It is probable that, at least in the case of theologians, this peculiar silence is due to their embarrassment in the face of something that could only appear as a kind of pudenda origo of the Trinitarian dogma (indeed, it is surprising, to say the least, that the first formulation of the fundamental, in all senses, theologumenon of the Christian faith—the Trinity—
presents itself initially as an “economic” apparatus). The eclipse of this concept that, as we shall see, is one with its penetration and diffusion in different fields, is testified to by the scanty attention that the Tridentine canons pay to it: just a few lines under the rubric De dispensatione ( dispensatio is, with dispositio, the Latin translation of oikonomia) et mysterio adventus Christi. In modern Protestant theology, the problem of oikonomia reappeared, but only as an obscure and indeterminate precursor of the theme of Heilsgeschichte, while the opposite is true: the theology of the “history of salvation” is a partial and, all in all, reductive resumption of a much broader paradigm. The result of this is that in 1967 it
was possible to publish a Festschrift commemorating the sixty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Oscar Cullmann’s Oikonomia. Heilsgeschichte als Thema der Theologie in which the term oikonomia appeared in only one of the thirty-six contributions.
1.2. In 1922, Carl Schmitt encapsulated the theological-political paradigm in a
lapidary thesis: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are sec-
ularized theological concepts” (Schmitt 2005, p. 36). If our hypothesis about the
existence of a double paradigm is correct, this statement should be supplemented
in a way that would extend its validity well beyond the boundaries of public law,
extending up to the fundamental concepts of the economy and the very idea of
the reproductive life of human societies. However, the thesis according to which
the economy could be a secularized theological paradigm acts retroactively on
theology itself, since it implies that from the beginning theology conceives divine
life and the history of humanity as an oikonomia, that is, that theology is itself
“economic” and did not simply become so at a later time through secularization.
From this perspective, the fact that the living being who was created in the image
of God in the end reveals himself to be capable only of economy, not politics, or,
in other words, that history is ultimately not a political but an “administrative”
and “governmental” problem, is nothing but a logical consequence of economic
theology. Similarly, it is certainly more than a simple lexical fact that, with a
peculiar reversal of the classical hierarchy, a zoē aiōnios and not a bios lies at the center of the evangelical message. The eternal life to which Christians lay claim
ultimately lies in the paradigm of the oikos, not in that of the polis. According to
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Taubes’s ironic boutade, the theologia vitae is always in the course of converting itself into a “theozoology” (Taubes, p. 41).
א A preliminary clarification of the meaning and implications of the term “secu-
larization” becomes all the more urgent. It is perfectly well known that this concept has
performed a strategic function in modern culture—that it is, in this sense, a concept of
the “politics of ideas,” something that “in the realm of ideas has always already found
an enemy with whom to fight for dominance” (Lübbe, p. 20). This is equally valid for
secularization in a strictly juridical sense—which, recovering the term ( saecularisatio) that designated the return of the religious man into the world, became in nineteenth-century Europe the rallying cry of the conflict between the State and the Church over
the expropriation of ecclesiastic goods—and its metaphoric use in the history of ideas.
When Max Weber formulates his famous thesis about the secularization of Puritan as-
ceticism in the capitalist ethics of work, the apparent neutrality of his diagnosis cannot hide its function in the battle he was fighting against fanatics and false prophets for the disenchantment of the world. Similar considerations could be made for Troeltsch. What
is the meaning of the Schmittian thesis in this context?
Schmitt’s strategy is, in a certain sense, the opposite of Weber’s. While, for Weber,
secularization was an aspect of the growing process of disenchantment and detheologi-
zation of the modern world, for Schmitt it shows on the contrary that, in modernity,
theology continues to be present and active in an eminent way. This does not necessarily
imply an identity of substance between theology and modernity, or a perfect identity of
meaning between theological and political concepts; rather, it concerns a particular strategic relation that marks political concepts and refers them back to their theological origin.
In other words, secularization is not a concept but a signature [ segnatura] in the sense of Foucault and Melandri (Melandri, p. XXXII), that is, something that in a sign
or concept marks and exceeds such a sign or concept referring it back to a determinate
interpretation or field, without for this reason leaving the semiotic to constitute a new
meaning or a new concept. Signatures move and displace concepts and signs from one
field to another (in this case, from sacred to profane, and vice versa) without redefining them semantically. Many pseudoconcepts belonging to the philosophical tradition are, in
this sense, signatures that, like the “secret indexes” of which Benjamin speaks, carry out a vital and determinate strategic function, giving a lasting orientation to the interpretation of signs. Insofar as they connect different times and fields, signatures operate, as it were, as pure historical elements. Foucault’s archaeology and Nietzsche’s genealogy (and, in a
different sense, even Derrida’s deconstruction and Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images) are sciences of signatures, which run parallel to the history of ideas and concepts, and
should not be confused with them. If we are not able to perceive signatures and follow
the displacements and movements they operate in the tradition of ideas, the mere history
of concepts can, at times, end up being entirely insufficient.
In this sense, secularization operates in the conceptual system of modernity as a
signature that refers it back to theology. Just as, according to canon law, the secularized
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priest had to wear a sign of the religious order he had once belonged to, so does the
secularized concept exhibit like a signature its past belonging to the theological sphere.
The way in which the reference operated by the theological signature is understood is
decisive at every turn. Thus, secularization can also be understood (as is the case with
Gogarten) as a specific performance of Christian faith that, for the first time, opens the world to man in its worldliness and historicity. The theological signature operates here
as a sort of trompe l’oeil in which the very secularization of the world becomes the mark
that identifies it as belonging to a divine oikonomia.
&n
bsp; 1.3. In the second half of the 1960s, a debate on the problem of secular-
ization involving, to different degrees, Hans Blumenberg, Karl Löwith, Odo
Marquard, and Carl Schmitt, took place in Germany. The debate originated
from the thesis enunciated by Löwith in his 1953 book Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen according to which both German idealism’s philosophy of history and the Enlightenment’s idea of progress are nothing but the secularization of
the theology of history and Christian eschatology. Although Blumenberg, who
defended the “legitimacy of modernity,” decisively affirmed the illegitimate
character of the very category of secularization—as a consequence of which
Löwith and Schmitt found themselves against their will on the same side—in
point of fact, as has perceptively been noted by commentators (Carchia, p. 20),
the dispute was more or less consciously instigated in order to hide what was
really at stake, which was not secularization but the philosophy of history and
the Christian theology that constituted its premise. All the apparent enemies
joined forces against them. The eschatology of salvation, of which Löwith spoke
and of which the philosophy of German idealism was a conscious resumption,
was nothing but an aspect of a vaster theological paradigm, which is precisely
the divine oikonomia that we intend to investigate, and the repression of which
constituted the foundation of the debate. Hegel was still perfectly aware of
this when he stated the equivalence of his thesis on the rational government of
the world with the theological doctrine of the providential plan of God, and
presented his philosophy of history as a theodicy (“that the history of the world
[ . . . ] is the effective becoming of the spirit [ . . . ] this is the real theodicy, the justification of God in history”). In even more explicit terms, in the conclusion to his Philosophy of Revelation, Schelling summarized his philosophy with
the theological figure of an oikonomia: “The ancient theologians distinguished
between akratos theologia and oikonomia. The two belong together. It is toward this process of domestic economy ( oikonomia) that we have wished to point”
(Schelling, p. 325). The fact that such an engagement with economic theology
has today become so improbable as to make the meaning of Schelling’s state-
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377
ments entirely incomprehensible to us is a sign of the decline of philosophical
culture. One of the aims of the present study is to make Schelling’s statement,
which has so far remained a dead letter, comprehensible again.
א The distinction between theologia and oikonomia, between the being of God and his activity, to which Schelling alludes is, as we shall see, of fundamental importance in Eastern theology, from Eusebius to the Chalcedonians. Schelling’s immediate sources
are to be found in the use of the concept of oikonomia made in pietistic circles, particularly in authors such as Bengel and Oetinger, whose influence on Schelling is now well
documented. However, it is crucial that Schelling thinks his philosophy of revelation as
a theory of divine economy, which introduces personality and action into the being of
God, and thus renders him “Lord of being” (Schelling, p. 172). From this perspective, he
quotes the passage from Paul (Ephesians 3:9) on the “mystery of economy,” which lies at
the origin of the doctrine of theological oikonomia:
Paul speaks of a Plan of God that has not been spoken of for eons but that has
now become manifest in Christ: the mystery of God and Christ that has become
manifest to the world through Christ’s appearance. It is at this point that the ways
of a philosophy of revelation become possible. It must not be understood, like
mythology, as a necessary process, but in a way that is fully free, as the decision
and action of a will that is most free. Through revelation a new, second creation
is introduced; it is an entirely free act. (Schelling, p. 253)
In other words, Schelling understands his introduction of an absolute and an-archic
freedom in ontology as a resumption and accomplishment of the theological doctrine
of oikonomia.
1.4. Between 1935 and 1970, Erich Peterson and Carl Schmitt—two authors
who, in different ways, could be defined as “Apocalyptics of the counterrevolu-
tion” (Taubes, p. 19)—had a singular dispute. Its singularity was not only due
to the fact that the two adversaries, both Catholics, shared common theological
presuppositions, but also to the fact that, as shown by the long silence that sepa-
rates the two dates mentioned above, the jurist’s answer was formulated ten years
after the death of the theologian who had opened the debate. Moreover, this
answer took its cue from the more recent debate on secularization, as shown by
the Nachwort that concludes it. However, the “Parthian arrow” (Schmitt 2008a,
p. 32) cast by Peterson must still have been stuck in Schmitt’s flesh if, according to
the latter’s own words, Politische Theologie II, which contained the belated answer, aimed to “rip [it] from the wound” (ibid.). What was at stake in this controversy
was political theology, which Peterson put resolutely in question. But it is possible
that, as had happened with the secularization debate, this time the explicit stake
hid another, exoteric, and more frightful one, which we need to bring to light.
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In every theoretical work—and maybe in every human work—there is
something like an un-said. There are authors who attempt to approach this
un-said and allusively evoke it, while others knowingly leave it unspoken. Both
Schmitt and Peterson belong in this second category. In order to understand
what is the hidden stake of their debate, we will need to try to expose this
un-said. The two adversaries shared a common theological conception that can
be defined “Catechontic.” As Catholics, they could not fail to profess their
eschatological faith in the Second Coming of Jesus. Yet, referring to 2 Thes-
salonians 2, they both claimed (Schmitt explicitly, Peterson tacitly) that there
is something that defers and holds back the eschaton, that is, the advent of the
Kingdom and the end of the world. For Schmitt, this delaying element is
the Empire; for Peterson, it is the Jews’ refusal to believe in Christ. According
to both the jurist and the theologian, the present history of humanity is there-
fore an interim founded on the delay of the Kingdom. However, in one case
this delay coincides with the sovereign power of the Christian empire (“The
belief that a restrainer holds back the end of the world provides the only bridge
between the notion of an eschatological paralysis of all human events and a
tremendous historical monolith like that of the Christian empire of the Ger-
manic kings” [Schmitt 2003, p. 60]). In the other case, the suspension of the
Kingdom due to the Jews’ failed conversion founds the historical existence of
the Church. Peterson’s 1929 work on the Church leaves us in no doubt about
this: the Church can exist only because “the Jews, as the people elected by God,
have not believed in the Lord” (Peterson 1994, p. 247), and, consequently, the
end of the world is not imminent. “There can be a Church,” Peterson writes,
“only on
the presupposition that the coming of Christ will not be immediate,
in other words, that concrete eschatology is eliminated and we have in its place
the doctrine of last things” (ibid., p. 248).
Thus, what is really at stake in the debate is not the admissibility of political
theology, but the nature and identity of the katechon, the power that defers
and eliminates “concrete eschatology.” But this implies that what is crucial for
both Schmitt and Peterson is ultimately the very neutralization of a philosophy
of history oriented toward salvation. At the point where the divine plan of
oikonomia had reached completion with the coming of Christ, an event (the
failed conversion of the Jews, the Christian empire) that had the power to sus-
pend the eschaton took place. The exclusion of concrete eschatology transforms
historical time into a suspended time, in which every dialectic is abolished and
the Great Inquisitor watches over so that the parousia is not produced in his-
tory. Understanding the sense of the debate between Peterson and Schmitt will
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379
then also mean understanding the theology of history to which they more or
less tacitly refer.
א The two presuppositions that Peterson relates to the existence of the Church (the
failed conversion of the Jews, and the delay of parousia) are intimately connected: this
very connection defines the specificity of the particular Catholic anti-Semitism of which
Peterson is a representative. The existence of the Church founds itself on the endurance of the Synagogue. However, given that in the end “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26) and the Church must give way to the Kingdom (the essay Die Kirche opens with a quotation of Loisy’s ironic dictum: “Jésus annonçait le royaume, et c’est l’Église qui est venue”), Israel will also have to disappear. If we do not understand this underlying connection between
the two presuppositions, we do not even understand the real meaning of the closure of the
“eschatological bureau,” about which Troeltsch spoke already in 1925 (“the eschatological
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