HENT DE VRIEScontrary, expresses itsanomalyin the very interruption of its gathering (orrassemblement)
as such. Only thus, Nancy concludes, can we circumvent the pernicious extremes of either
swallowing or annihilating the other (and all other others), that is to say, of sacrifice,^99 or
of imposing cosmic, organico-political totality—extremes that both deny human finitude.
A ‘‘deconstruction of Christianity’’ prepares the ground for an assessment of emerging
forms of ‘‘being-with,’’ the experience and experiment of freedom and community, of
which the political—especially in its very retreat—is, perhaps, not even the most signifi-
cant instance. And the fact of globalization contributes to no small extent, Nancy suggests
in the opening essay ofLa De ́closion, to the dis-closure that may or may not help us
rethink these matters in a sharper light than ever before. For one thing, it forces us to
recognize the continuous presence of Christianity—of the Judeo-Christian, and whatever
it touched upon and was touched by—in the seemingly secular West, which may or may
not emerge out of the self-deconstruction of that same Christianity.^100
As M. B. Pranger and Anto ́nia Szabari demonstrate in their contributions to the
volume, a subtle counter-paradigm to the Greco-Roman city-state–imperium is devel-
oped from St. Augustine through the early Reformation. What stands out in their respec-
tive readings is an analysis of the theological articulation of the aspiration toward
conjoining the political and the religious (as in the Augustinian motif of thecivitas per-
mixta), on the one hand, and the Reformation’s concern with modulating and moderating
divisive speech acts), on the other. Whereas Pranger brings out the intrinsic instability
and fragility, that is to say, the temporality or finitude, of Augustine’s sense of the individ-
ual self and the communal body (i.e., the Church), suggesting that they remain premised
upon creation and contingency, authority and grace, at least so long as history runs its
course, Szabari, by contrast, emphasizes a different instability in the theological dealing
with self and other, faith and the visible Church, by analyzing the nature of Luther’s
conception of ‘‘public speech’’ as it intermingles praise (or prayer) and insult (or cursing)
and thereby creates—or, rather, stages—a whole new world, reversing the former hierar-
chical order.
Referring to the historical studies of Janet Coleman, Pranger recalls that Augustine
contributed to the modern understanding of the state as the guarantor against chaos and
hence to the conception of the secular as premised upon the curtailment of sin. Augustine,
in this view, could even be seen as a precursor of Thomas Hobbes in that he portrays the
whole spectrum of the political—absolute terrestrial sovereignty and the state’s down-to-
earth politics (including war)—as the sole solution to the tragedy of the human condition.
In a different reading of Augustine’s conception of thesaeculum, there is a tradition of
medieval political thinking that counterbalances the unstable temporality of the terrestrial
civitaswith the motif of thecorpus mysticum, the mystical body of Christ. This line of
thought is explored by Henri de Lubac, and it is the historical basis for the understanding
of the temporal continuity of the state—in particular, of the monarchy—that Kantoro-
wicz, inThe King’s Two Bodies, develops against the backdrop of the doctrine that the
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