The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  confers on the term a priestly character and aura (as it had already had in the

  Septuagint) that was anything but taken for granted at that point (as we have

  seen, none of the original documents use the term priest— hierus, sacerdos—

  to indicate a member of the community). From an occasional public service,

  which does not have a specific title within the community, liturgy begins to

  transform into a special activity, into a “ministry” that tends to define a particu-

  lar subject as entitled to it: the bishop and the presbyters in the letter and, later,

  the priest. What defines this activity? What constitutes a determined sphere of

  action as a liturgy?

  א In the section of the Apostolic Constitutions known as the Canones apostolici one can see how the passage from a charismatic community to an organization of a juridical

  type was not only a fact already in some sense achieved, but had constituted the object

  of a precise strategy. The text—which, although composed around the end of the fourth

  century, pretends to be a work of the apostles themselves—actually opens with a lengthy

  treatment of the traditional charismas (glossolalia, etc.), but the goal of the author is

  obviously to minimize their relevance with respect to what he defines immediately after

  as “ecclesiastical organization” ( ekklēsiastikē diatypōsis). In question are precisely the “constitutions” ( diatexeis, a technical term for testamentary provisions) that the apostles had established as a configuration or general model ( typos) of the church, from the ordination of the bishop to the articulation of the hierarchy to the rituals of the sacraments. What

  is evident in the Constitutions is the construction of a separate ecclesiastical hierarchy which culminates in the bishop: “Those which were then the sacrifices now are prayers,

  and intercessions, and thanksgivings [ eucharistiai]. Those which were then first-fruits, and tithes, and offerings, and gifts, now are oblations, which are presented by holy bishops

  to the Lord God, through Jesus Christ, who has died for them. For these are your high

  priests [ archiereis] and presbyters are your priests, and your present deacons instead of your Levites” ( Apostolic Constitutions 2.4.25). “If anyone does anything without the bishop,”

  one reads a little further down, “he does it to no purpose [ matēn]” (2.4.27). “For neither

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  may we address ourselves to Almighty God, but only by Christ. In the same manner,

  therefore, let the laity make known all their desires to the bishop by the deacon” (2.4.28).

  In Irenaeus, by contrast, the charismas are still not subordinated to the succession

  according to apostolic ordination. The passage in which he recommends obedience to

  the presbyters, “who, together with the succession of the episcopate, have received a

  charisma veritatis certum” (Irenaeus 4.26.2), does not mean, as has been suggested, that he claims a sort of infallibility for the bishop. Rather, the fact that immediately afterward he distinguishes between good and evil presbyters and confirms the importance of the

  charismata Dei shows that Irenaeus conceives the latter as an equally important element of ecclesiastical ordination: “Where, therefore, the gifts of the Lord have been placed [ ubi igitur charismata dei posita sunt], there it behooves us to learn the truth, namely, from those who possess the succession of the Church which is from the apostles, and among

  whom exists what is sound and blameless in conduct, as well as that which is unadul-

  terated and incorrupt in speech” (Irenaeus 4.26.5). At the end of the second century, a

  charismatic community and a hierarchical organization still cohabitated in a functional

  unity in the church.

  7. Guy Stroumsa has recently called attention to the persistence of sacrificial

  ideology in Christianity. It is well known that after the second destruction of

  the Temple, rabbinic Judaism oriented itself in the direction of a spiritualization

  of the liturgy, transforming it from a sequence of rites that accompanied the

  sacrificial action into a collection of prayers that were actually substituted for

  the sacrifices. From this perspective the talmud Torah, the study of the Torah,

  supplanted sacrificial practices, and “the rabbis gathered in Yavneh in 70 suc-

  ceeded in transforming Judaism—without admitting doing so, and perhaps also

  without admitting it completely even to themselves—into a non-sacrificial reli-

  gion” (Stroumsa, 129/72). Christianity, by contrast, defined itself early on “as a

  religion centered on sacrifice, even if it was a reinterpreted sacrifice. The Chris-

  tian anamnēsis of the sacrifice of Jesus has a power very different from that of the Hebrew memory of Temple sacrifices, because the anamnēsis is the reactivation

  of the sacrifice of the Son of God, performed by the priests” (Stroumsa, 129/72).

  Stroumsa could have added that the construction of the sacramental liturgy

  is founded, starting already with the Church Fathers, on explicit and unreserved

  opposition of the sacraments of the Old Law—which signify and announce but

  do not achieve what they signify—to the sacraments of the New Law, which

  accomplish what they signify.

  In reality the author of the Letter to the Hebrews does not establish any con-

  nection between the doctrine of Christ’s priesthood and the eucharistic celebra-

  tion. This is not the place to reconstruct the genealogy of this connection, whose

  strategic importance for the Church is obvious. Already implicit in Origen

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  ( Homiliae in Numeros 9.5.2, 10.21), it often appears surreptitiously, through the

  simple juxtaposition of the two motifs. Thus in two passages of the Apostolic

  Constitutions, in which the ecclesiological preoccupation is evident: “Lord, grant that this your servant, whom you have chosen to be a bishop, may feed your

  holy flock and discharge the office of a high priest [ archierateuein] before you

  blamelessly night and day . . . offering to you a pure and unbloody sacrifice,

  which you have appointed through Christ as the mystery of the new covenant”

  ( Apostolic Constitutions 8.2.5; translation altered); “The first High Priest therefore, who is so by nature [ prōtos . . . tēi physēi archiereus], is Christ the only begotten; not having snatched that honor to himself but having been appointed

  such by the Father. He was made man for our sake, and offering the spiritual

  sacrifice to his God and Father, before his suffering charged us alone to do this”

  (8.5.46); and in Epiphanius (“so as to be made a priest for us after the order of

  Melchizedek . . . for he abides forever to offer gifts for us—after first offering

  himself by the cross, to abolish every sacrifice of the old covenant”; Epiphanius

  55.4.5–7, 2:80–81). Later, we find the two terms connected in Ambrose (“Who

  then is the author of the sacraments but the Lord Jesus? . . . We learn that those

  sacraments were prefigured in the times of Abraham, when holy Melchizedek of-

  fered sacrifice, having neither beginning nor end of days. Hear, O man, what the

  Apostle Paul says to the Hebrews”; On the Sacraments 4.13, 5.1) and in Augustine

  (“Also, our priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, he offered him-

  self as a sacrifice for our sins, and recommended the reenactment of that sacrifice

  to be celebrated in memory of his suffering and death, so that what Melchizedek

  offered to God now we see o
ffered in the Church of Christ throughout the

  whole world”; De diversis questionibus, question 61 [117]).

  In each case, in bringing together two distinct texts, it is a matter of conceiv-

  ing the institution of the Eucharist as a priestly service of Jesus, who according

  to the doctrine of the letter acts as high priest of the order of Melchizedek and

  in this way transmits the priestly ministry to the apostles and to their successors

  in the Church. In this sense one can say that the definition of the priestly char-

  acter of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is constructed precisely through founding

  the sacramental liturgy in the doctrine of Christ as high priest. In the summa

  of the Catholic liturgy that is William Durand’s Rationale divinorum officiorum,

  the connection already has the obviousness of a formula: Missa instituit Dominus

  Iesus, sacerdos secundum ordinem Melchisedech, quando panem et vinum in corpus

  et sanguinem suum transmutavit, dicens: “Hoc est corpus meus, hic est sanguis meus,”

  subiungens: “Hoc facite in meam commemorationem” (The Lord Jesus instituted

  the mass as priest according to the order of Melchizedek, when he transmuted

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  bread and wine into his body and blood, saying, ‘This is my body, this is my

  blood,’ and enjoining, ‘Do this in memory of me’”; Durand, bk. 1, 240).

  The Council of Trent (session XXII, chap. 1) confirms beyond any doubt the

  foundational and eternal character of Christ’s priesthood, which is renewed and

  perpetuated in the eucharistic liturgy, in the celebration of which the Church is

  linked to Christ as the liturgue of the Letter to the Hebrews:

  He, therefore, our God and Lord, though He was by His death about to offer

  Himself once upon the altar of the cross to God the Father that He might there

  accomplish an eternal redemption, nevertheless, that His priesthood might not

  come to an end with His death, at the last supper, on the night He was betrayed,

  that He might leave to His beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice, such

  as the nature of man requires, whereby that bloody sacrifice once to be accom-

  plished on the cross might be represented . . . , declaring Himself constituted a

  priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, offered up to God the Father

  His own body and blood under the form of bread and wine, and under the forms

  of those same things gave to the Apostles, whom He then made priests of the New

  Testament, that they might partake, commanding them and their successors in

  the priesthood by these words to do likewise: Do this in memory of me.

  In the idea of Christ as a “priest forever,” the “once for all” ( hapax) of the Letter to the Hebrews is joined with the “forever and ever” of the eucharistic celebration ceaselessly repeated by the Church, and the continuity of the ecclesiastical

  hierarchy of Clement’s letter receives its priestly seal.

  The definition of the liturgy in twentieth-century encyclicals has only con-

  firmed this connection: “The sacred liturgy is, consequently, the public worship

  which our Redeemer as Head of the Church renders to the Father, as well

  as the worship which the community of the faithful renders to its Founder,

  and through Him to the heavenly Father” ( Mediator Dei §20; cf. Braga and

  Bugnini, 571).

  The fact that the Church has founded its liturgical praxis on the Letter to the

  Hebrews, namely by putting at its center an unceasing reactualization of the sac-

  rifice achieved by Christ the leitourgos and high priest, constitutes both the truth and the aporia of Christian liturgy (which Augustine summarizes in the antithesis semel immolatus . . . et tamen quotidie immolatur [offered once . . . and yet he is offered daily]). The problem, which will never cease to appear again and

  again in the history of the Church as its central “mystery,” is precisely that of

  how one is to understand the reality and effectiveness of the sacramental liturgy

  and, at the same time, of how this “mystery” can take the form of a “ministry,”

  which defines the specific praxis of the members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

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  8. The doctrine of the liturgical character of Christ’s sacrifice has its root

  in the doctrine of the Trinity itself. We have shown how the Fathers, in order

  to reconcile the unity of substance with the plurality of persons in God and in

  close hand-to-hand combat with Gnosis, initially formulate the doctrine of the

  Trinity in terms of an oikonomia, of an activity of “administration” and “man-

  agement” of the divine life and of creation (Agamben, 17–50). In the words

  of Tertullian, who (in opposition to the monarchians) was among the first to

  elaborate the doctrine of the Trinity as a divine “economy”: “they must believe

  in one only [God], yet they must believe in him along with his oikonomia. . . . A

  unity which derives from itself a trinity is not destroyed but administered by it

  [ non destruatur ab illa sed administretur]” ( Against Praxeas 3.1; qtd. in Agamben, 42). Reversing an expression of Paul, who in his letters had spoken, in reference

  to the divine plan of redemption, of an “economy of the mystery” ( oikonomia

  tou mystēriou, Ephesians 3:9), Hippolytus, Irenaeus, and Tertullian thus pre-

  sented the very articulation of the Trinity and its salvific action as a “mystery

  of the economy” ( mystērion tēs oikonomias, oikonomias sacramentum). The insistence on the “mysterious” character of the divine work of salvation shows, how-

  ever, that the caesura they had wanted to avoid on the level of being reappears

  as a fracture between God and his action, between ontology and praxis. What

  is mysterious is now no longer, as in Paul, the divine plan of redemption, which

  demanded an oikonomia that was clear in itself. What is inscrutable or myste-

  rious is now the “economy” itself, the very praxis through which God secures

  the salvation of his creation. Whatever meaning is to be assigned to the term

  mystērion and its Latin equivalent sacramentum, what is essential here is that the divine economy takes the form of a mystery.

  Through the incarnation, Christ takes this mysterious economy on him-

  self. But on the basis of the passage from John according to which “the Son of

  Man has been glorified by God and God has been glorified in him” (13:31), the

  “economy” is understood simultaneously as a glorification and as a reciprocal

  manifestation of the Father through the Son and of the Son in doing the Father’s

  work. In Origen’s commentary on the Gospel of John, the “economy of the

  passion” of the savior thus coincides perfectly with the economy of the glory by

  which the Son reveals and celebrates the Father. The mystery of the economy is

  a doxological, which is to say liturgical, mystery.

  It is along with this aporetic conception of the trinitarian “economy,” in which

  Christ acts as “economy” of both redemption and the glory of the Father, that one

  must read the doctrine of the Letter to the Hebrews, in which Christ is presented

  in the guise of a leitourgos, of a high priest who takes upon himself the “liturgy,”

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  the “public” and “sacrificial” service of the redemption of the human race. Trin-

  itarian Chri
stology is elaborated, that is to say, through a twofold metaphorical

  register: to the political and cultic metaphor of Christ as liturgue of redemption

  in the Letter to the Hebrews there corresponds point by point in the Fathers the

  “economic” metaphor of Christ as administrator and dispenser of the divine mys-

  tery of salvation. The relation and tension between these two metaphors define the

  locus in which Christian liturgy is situated. In liturgically celebrating his sacrifice (his “mystery”), Christ brings the trinitarian economy to completion. The mystery

  of the economy, insofar as it is an economy of salvation, is fulfilled in and trans-

  formed into a liturgical mystery, in which the economic metaphor and political

  metaphor are identified.

  Modern theologians are accustomed to distinguishing the “economic Trinity”

  (or Trinity of revelation), which defines God in his salvific action with respect to

  humans, and the “immanent Trinity” (or Trinity of substance), which defines the

  internal articulation of the divine life in itself. Economic Trinity and immanent

  Trinity must correspond in the liturgy. But the tensions and contradictions that

  are implicit in the “economic-mysterious” paradigm of the Trinity will also con-

  tinue to mark the public activity of the Church, in which mystery and economy,

  priestly action and economic-political praxis, opus operatum and opus operantis will continue to be endlessly distinguished and superimposed. The “kingdom of

  priests” of Exodus 19:6 and the “royal priesthood” of the Septuagint and the First

  Letter of Peter define the paradigm and, at the same time, the constitutive aporia

  of the Church’s liturgy.

  9. The Letter to the Hebrews and the Letter of Clement constitute two po-

  larities, and Christian liturgy will never cease to articulate itself and define itself

  through the tension between the two. On the one hand, the semel [once] of the

  efficacious but unrepeated sacrament, whose sole subject is Christ; on the other,

  the quotidie [daily] of the “liturgy” of the bishop and the presbyter in the community. On the one hand, the mystery of a perfect sacrificial action, whose effects are accomplished once and for all (in the words of Cabasilas’s liturgical treatise, “sanctification”); on the other, the ministry of those who must celebrate its memory