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

medievalism and secularism 147

phy and to recognize them as such means also to recognize that they were

and are insoluble. As Gordon has explained, relativism amounts to a

universal and transcendental claim: if historians claim that all meaning

derives from context, then they also generalize that claim across all con-

texts, as something universally true.^35 This, in short, is the problem of self-

defeating relativism. For Gordon, this insolubility, this nagging problem of

transcendence, is an essential and inescapable feature of the post- Kantian

intellectual tradition. From this perspective, the intellectual problem of

sovereignty — what Schmitt identified as the exception and Kantorowicz

as “the king’s two bodies”— can never be resolved. One cannot ultimately

choose between religion and politics or, as Leo Strauss put it, between

Jerusalem and Athens.^36

I would, however, like to push Gordon’s insight further and contend

that this insolubility — this haunting idea of transcendence — derives from

a more fundamental agreement between the poles of these debates that

is deeper than Kant. If liberals saw religious belief as an irrational and

unnecessary delusion that impedes freedom, and conservatives saw it as

a passionate and necessary force that binds community, then what is strik-

ing — but little mentioned — is that they both seem to be in agreement

about the nature of religion and its relationship to politics.^37 Both see re-

ligion as a set of nonrational and premodern beliefs that served to cre-

ate social cohesion.^38 Both find the meaning of religion in its extravert

effects — in its worldly function.^39 And both see religion as essentially

incompatible with modernity. In other words, they share an essentially

secular understanding of religion, one that sees it as a category of abstract

beliefs and transcendent claims distinct from and opposed to rational

thought. Where they differ is simply upon its value: one sees religion as an

impediment and the other as a fundament without which politics cannot

function. More than opposing empirical, methodological, or even philo-

sophical positions, therefore, they are better understood as competing

moral narratives of modernity.^40

This shared secular horizon accounts for both the ferocity of the

political- theological debates and the manner in which these debates con-

tinue to ramify and reverse.^41 It explains how Giorgio Agamben has re-

suscitated Carl Schmitt or how Charles Taylor has revived Hans Blumen-

berg in order to act as a witness for the opposition.^42 One extreme readily

collapses into another because they share the same beating heart. Indeed,

this internal agreement casts a dark shadow over the recent recrudescence

the political- theological debates.

The contemporary cultural approach to religion, epitomized by the