The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  But time passed, and still he did not come. As Peter wrote to his flock, “You must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, ‘Where is this “coming” he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.’” And so it did. Generation after generation passed away, but the sun did not darken; the stars did not fall from the sky; children did not rebel against their parents; and perhaps most remarkably, scoffers did not come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. An exclusive millenarian sect formed in the expectation of a violent destruction of the world and a brutal humiliation of the proud and the arrogant grew into a universal church at peace with the state, family, property, priestly mediation, and a continued separation of humankind from God. The immediate salvation of a saintly community on earth turned into the eventual liberation of an individual soul in heaven. The thousand-year reign of Christ over the nations became, thanks to Augustine, a metaphor for the really-existing institution of the Christian Church.39

  Jesus’s solution to the “Axial” split between the real and the ideal (earth and heaven, the observable and the desirable) was a revolutionary transformation of the world through the imminent coming of the Lord. His disciples’ solution to the Axial split was a revolutionary transformation of the world through the imminent return of Jesus. Christianity as a set of doctrines and institutions was an elaborate response to the failure of its two founding prophecies. Most scoffers seem to have been convinced by Peter’s explanation. “Do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”40

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  Muhammad, like Jesus, was a radical renovator of the Hebrew scriptural tradition. He insisted, above all, on the unlimited and undivided nature of divine autocracy (“there is no god but God,” who knows “how ye move about and how ye dwell in your homes”); accepted the legitimacy of Abrahamic succession; recognized Moses and Jesus as God’s messengers; urged his followers to separate themselves from the nonmembers (“take not into your intimacy those outside your ranks: they will not fail to corrupt you”); and warned his audience of the approaching catastrophe, the return of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, and the final Day of Judgment, when all humans would be divided into two clearly defined categories and dispatched accordingly. “Do they then only wait for the Hour—that it should come on them of a sudden? But already have come some tokens thereof, and when it (actually) is on them, how can they benefit then by their admonition?” The answer was the familiar combination of faith and works, action and intention, what goes into a man’s mouth and what comes out of it.41

  Both Jesus and Muhammad were apocalyptic millenarian prophets (in the broad sense of predicting an imminent and violent end of the world followed by a permanent solution to the real-ideal problem understood as a coming together of heaven and earth). The most important difference between them—in addition to the obvious ones of time, place, and audience—is the fact that Muhammad, whose ministry was much longer (about twenty-two years) and much more successful at attracting followers, found himself in charge of a growing state and a conquering army. Jesus never left the confines of a small egalitarian sect unencumbered by women, children, and property; never became king of the Jews by either popular acclaim or formal recognition; never got to rule the nations during his first stay on earth; never outlived the poised-on-the-brink intensity of the last days; never saw his disciples form a self-sufficient society; and never had a chance to explain what a complex polity should look like. Muhammad, whatever his original intentions, had no choice but to do all these things. God was no longer a virtual Big Father with a monopoly on knowing “how ye move about and how ye dwell in your homes”: thanks to Muhammad and his immediate successors, he became the uncontested legislator of a large empire, with the power to enforce his rules on how human beings should move and dwell, love and hate, live and die.42

  Islam inherited a sacred beginning that was well-developed legally, politically, and militarily—and thus much more similar to the Jewish golden age of King David’s reign than to the New Testament story of the ministry and martyrdom of a mendicant preacher. It is also much better documented than its two predecessors, providing a would-be fundamentalist renovator with a ready-made (if obviously contested) blueprint for a proper Islamic state. All human societies periodically recover and relive their sacred beginnings: the “traditional” ones do it through ritual; the Axial ones imagine—each in its own way—a total or partial resacralization of human existence. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which represent the institutionalized embodiments of unfulfilled millenarian prophecies, such attempts at resacralization are associated with renewed expectations of imminent fulfillment. In post–Second Temple Judaism, episodes of intense messianic hope were not uncommon, but, in the absence of a Jewish polity to reform or liberate, were relatively muted. Indeed, the viability of the Mercurian (“middleman minority”) specialization of diaspora Jews depended on their continued existence as strangers in Egypt/Babylon/Rome. After the collapse of that specialization, radical Jewish fundamentalism reemerged with great force (or was redirected into communism and other new dispensations). In Islam, renovation movements have been both frequent and diverse, but the political ideal rooted in visions of the Prophet’s reign has remained stable and within reach. Most latter-day Islamic states are not fully legitimate because they do not live up to the Prophet’s model; most restorations are political revolutions with explicit agendas; and most Muslim political “utopianism” is scrupulously historicist. The Abbasid and Safavid empires began as militant millenarian movements seeking divine justice. The possibility of nonpolitical politics, or of a perfectly just, this-worldly state composed of mortal men and women, is one of Islam’s most fundamental assumptions.43

  The founding act of political Judaism was an escape from slavery, and most of the Hebrew prophetic and apocalyptic tradition is about the imminent, violent destruction of “Babylon,” real or symbolic. In Islam, foreign rule is worse than an abomination: it is not a part of the formative experience or the traditional conceptual repertoire (except when a bad Muslim ruler is the functional equivalent of an infidel, as argued by the Wahhabis, among others). Early Islam’s Babylon was “Rum” (Byzantium), an evil empire to be conquered, not an evil conqueror to be destroyed. When, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, most Muslims found themselves in a world governed and defined by non-Muslims, the millenarian intensity of the response was reinforced by the sheer novelty of the experience. In the words of Osama bin Laden, “the umma is asked to unite itself in the face of this Crusaders’ campaign, the strongest, most powerful, and most ferocious Crusaders’ campaign to fall on the Islamic umma since the dawn of Islamic history.”44

  Christianity’s sacred beginnings are limited to Jesus, his sect, and his teachings (the Old Testament tradition serving as a prophecy to be realized or prologue to be transcended). There is no guidance on how to run a state, an army, or a justice system, no clear indication of what life outside the sect should look like. The point, of course, is that there should be no state, no army, no justice system, and no life outside the sect. Or rather, the point is that there should be no state other than Jesus’s millennial reign, no army other than the heavenly host of Armageddon, no justice other than the Last Judgment (salvation or damnation), and no life other than the eternal kind. All Christian societies are improvisations (concessions, inventions, perversions) to a much greater degree than their Judaic or Muslim—let alone Confucian—counterparts. Most earnest attempts at returning to the source of Christianity have led to a radical denial of non-sectarian (nontotalitarian) forms of human existence. At its sacred core, Christianity is incompatible with politics, but, unlike Hinduism or Buddhism, it foresees
—and, in some sense, remembers—a redemption that is collective, violent, and this-worldly. Imitation of Christ suggests a sectarian or monastic existence (in the world but not of the world); faith in Christ’s prophecy suggests the expectation of the imminent coming of the kingdom of God.

  This congenital condition has three principal consequences. The first is the inbuilt tension—unique among Axial civilizations—between the City of God and the City of Man (“the church” separable from the state and the state separable from the church). The second is the variety and flexibility of political institutions with a potential claim to divine legitimacy. The third is the essential illegitimacy of all these institutions. The fact that Jesus did not envisage a just society before the End meant that, in the meantime, any society might qualify. Or none could. All avowedly Christian states have to mount a more or less unconvincing defense of their Christian credentials; all have to contend with more or less convincing millenarian challenges.

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  During the Middle Ages, such challenges bubbled up repeatedly and often violently, but the church managed to isolate and suppress them as heresies, incorporate and discipline them as monastic orders (that is, legalized and institutionalized sects), or contain and channel them into more acceptable activities, such as the extermination of Jews and Muslims (most prominently during the first two crusades).45

  The Reformation was a massive revolt against the rites, symbols, and institutions that claimed to mediate between Jesus’s prophecy and life in the world. Few were warranted and, ideally, none would remain. As Luther wrote to the Duke of Saxony, “If all the world were true Christians, that is, if everyone truly believed, there would be neither need nor use for princes, kings, lords, the Sword, or law.” But all the world was not made up of true Christians—indeed, “scarcely one human being in a thousand is a true Christian.” Accordingly, and on a strictly temporary basis, “God has ordained the two governments: the spiritual [government], which fashions true Christians and just persons through the Holy Spirit under Christ, and the secular government, which holds the Unchristian and wicked in check and forces them to keep the peace outwardly and be still, like it or not.” Each had its own subjects, laws, and procedures. “Secular government has laws that extend no farther than the body, goods and outward, earthly matters. But where the soul is concerned, God neither can nor will allow anyone but himself to rule.46

  The doctrine of a clear line separating the inward and outward inclined many of Luther’s followers toward pietism and provided political liberalism with one of its most productive and enduring fictions. The separation of church and state was possible only if one assumed that the state could occupy itself with “the body, goods and outward, earthly matters” without ruling over the soul—or rather, that “taxes, duties, honor, and fear” (among many other things Luther mentions) had nothing to do with virtue.47

  Calvin and the Puritans accepted the need for the distinction but argued that “Christ’s spiritual rule establishes in us some beginnings of the celestial kingdom.” Civil government could not yet be fully dissolved in the spiritual life of a Christian community, but it could—and should—be as godly as the saints’ pursuit of righteousness would allow. Members could not be expected to abandon their “houses and brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers and children,” but they could be asked to make their families as open, transparent, rule-bound, churchlike, and church-dependent as possible (ultimately constituting the primary unit of a godly commonwealth). They could not be counted on not to be angry with their brothers or commit adultery in their hearts, but they could be expected to demonstrate ceaseless self-restraint indicative of inner discipline. They could not be trusted not to let up occasionally in their efforts at self-observation, but they could be urged to monitor each other by means of formal surveillance and mutual admonition. Politics was a matter of public piety, which was a matter of laborious self-improvement, which was a matter of active participation in moral-political self-government (by means of attending endless meetings, sermons, votes, and debates, while also “keeping diligent watch, both by day and by night, each in his own place, of all comings and goings”). Official regulations reinforced self-generated activism: under Calvin’s prodding, Geneva’s magistrate not only banned gambling, dancing, begging, swearing, indecent singing, game-playing on Sundays, and the owning of unlicensed books and popish objects of any kind, but also prescribed attendance at Sunday sermons, the religious instruction of children and servants, the number of courses at public banquets, the proper attire of artisans and their families, the number of rings to be worn on various occasions, and the kinds of ornaments and hairstyles compatible with Christian decorum (silver belts and buckles were permitted, but silver chains, bracelets, collars, embroidery, necklaces, and tiaras were not).48

  Those who could not be reformed through participation or even excommunication were to be turned over to the secular authorities for appropriate punishment. Some might ask if magistrates could “be dutiful to God and shed blood at the same time.” Calvin thought that they could. “If we understand that when magistrates inflict punishments, it is not any act of their own, but only the execution of God’s [own] judgments, we will not be inhibited by any scruple on this score.” Christians who steadfastly resisted sanctification had no place in a Christian commonwealth. As Calvin’s friend Guillaume de Trie wrote of the antitrinitarian Miguel Servetus, Christendom should be “purged of such filth” (Servetus was burned at the stake). And as the Oxford Puritan Francis Cheynell told the House of Commons in May 1643, “these are purging times; let all the malignant humors be purged out of the ecclesiastical and political body.”49

  For most Calvinists, purging was a last resort and a sign of defeat. Their duty in an imperfect world was to do battle for the souls of the unrighteous, to touch their hearts with persuasive speech, and to teach self-discipline through godly discipline. But there were other reformers—“reformers” in the original sense of “going back to the source”—who stood for a universal purge, expected the Second Coming, and believed, on very good evidence, that Jesus had preached a life of sectarian equality and prophesied a violent apocalypse on the eve of a great feast for the hungry.

  According to the radical German preacher Thomas Müntzer, the violent apocalypse and the great feast for the hungry were one and the same thing. Christ’s warriors were the plowmen; the Antichrist’s servants were the lords; and the end of time was now. The only way to receive the Holy Spirit was to follow Jesus along the path of poverty and suffering, and the only ones who understood the meaning of poverty and suffering were those who suffered on account of their poverty. “The stone, torn from the mountain without hands, has become mighty. The poor laymen and peasants see it more sharply than you do,” he told the Duke of Saxony (the same one to whom Luther had addressed his letter on secular authority). The kingdom of heaven was for those with nothing but their chains to lose.50

  There was but one way to enter. According to Jesus, the kingdom of heaven was prefigured in the story about a man who sowed good seed and told his servants to begin the harvest by burning the weeds:

  “The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.”

  “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.”51

  Müntzer had ears, and he heard. “At the harvest-time one must pluck the weeds out of God’s vineyard,” he wrote, “but the angels who are sharpening their sickles for that work are no other than the earnest ser
vants of God.” The problem, as foretold in Jesus’s parable, was that most servants of God had ears but did not hear. They were first by virtue of being last, but, like all the biblical proletarians from Moses’s Israelites to Jesus’s heavenly army, they needed to be awakened, instructed, and disciplined. “In truth, many of them will have to be roused, so that with the greatest possible zeal and with passionate earnestness they may sweep Christendom clean of ungodly rulers.” Müntzer’s role was to show the way. “The Living God is sharpening his scythe in me, so that later I can cut down the red poppies and the blue cornflowers.” In May 1525, a large army of poor laymen and peasants followed him to Frankenhausen, where his promise to catch the enemy’s cannonballs in the sleeves of his cloak seemed to be confirmed by the sudden appearance of a rainbow. In the ensuing massacre, about five thousand rebels were killed. Müntzer was found hiding in a cellar, forced to confess under torture, and beheaded in the camp of the princes. Luther found his confession to be “a piece of devilish, hardened, obduracy.” 52