The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

150 epilogue

and rational unfolding of God’s worldly plan. To save religion, Schleier-

macher privatized and encastellated belief, removing it from the play of

temporal concerns and concealing it from what Geertz called “the bitch-

goddess seductions of secular life.”^55 But the Protestant- liberal synthesis

did not hold. Secular liberals drew upon Schleiermacher’s basic distinc-

tion between religion and politics to dismiss religion as pure unreason.^56

Catholic conservatives like Bonald and Maistre rejected the Protestant

solution and called for a reintegration of religion with politics, a return to

what they imagined was the medieval Catholic synthesis, political theol-

ogy.^57 Significantly, these conservative arguments for the necessity of reli-

gion to politics profoundly influenced the secular sociological tradition.^58

Catholic antimodernism and modern philosophy similarly went hand in

hand. As Robert Nisbet demonstrated decades ago, while exchanging an

emphasis on veracity for function, Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, Weber’s

charisma, and Simmel’s piety openly drew upon conservative theology.^59 In

order to explain belief’s social effect, its ability to create community, these

ideas also openly accepted that belief was something fundamentally sponta-

neous and irrational. From here, it is a short step to the cultural theory of

Geertz.

Schleiermacher’s distinction between religion and politics does lead

back to Protestant debates of the sort Blumenberg imagined. In their as-

saults upon Catholics as well as Jews, Muslims, and other non- Christians,

Protestant theologians drew sharp distinctions between true belief and

mindless ritual, between spirit and flesh, between ancient and modern

religion.^60 True religion oriented men consciously toward inward belief,

while false religions were merely political ( politia), forms of primitive

idolatry. To be sure, this distinction between religion and politics does

not begin with or belong only to Protestantism. Medieval Catholics made

it when they looked on China and the Islamic world with simultaneous

admiration, for their political skill, and horror, for their false beliefs.^61 It

can be found in medieval Islamic and Jewish theology, some of the very

same ideas that shaped Mediterranean notions of imperial authority.^62 It

can also be found in the writings of Augustine, the Gnostics, Paul, and

even the Stoics. If anything, what distinguishes Protestant polemics from

earlier ones is the fact that they circulated globally through modern im-

perialism.^63 But my central point is this: the rigid distinction between re-

ligion and politics, from which the secular critique of religion proceeds, is

a polemical one. The radical purification of belief from practice, of being

from substance, of unreason from reason, and of God from man was and