THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?singular ability to attack the image of the ‘‘new man’’ and of the ‘‘radiant future’’ by
deriding it.
Might it not, however, be a further mistake to believe that the new links that are
being forged between the democratic opposition and the religious opposition bear witness
to the democratic essence of Christianity or to the Christian essence of democracy? If we
accept that, do we not lose sight of the meaning of the adventure that began when they
became disentangled in the nineteenth century? To put it more simply, do we not have
to admit that they come together in a restoration of the dimension of theother, which
totalitarianism tries to suppress with its representation of the People-as-One?
We have until now been asking how we can conceive the links between the religious and
the political, and the possibility of their being broken. But is this the appropriate language
to use? Is there any sense in trying to apprehend the religious as such by extracting it
from the political and then specifying its efficacy in one or another form of society? Or,
to be more specific, and since the scope of our investigation has from the beginning been
restricted, are we entitled to refer to an essence of Christianity and to relate certain fea-
tures of modern political societies (that is, societies instituted since the beginning of the
Christian era) to that essence? The question may be disconcerting insofar as Christianity
is based upon a narrative, or a body of narratives, to which we are free to refer, whatever
degree of veracity we may accord it, in order to identify it as a specific religion that
appeared at a given epoch in the history of humanity. Even at this stage, however, we
cannot ignore the fact that the birth of this religion has a political meaning. That fact was,
of course, stressed and discussed by theologians for centuries, long before Dante based
his apologia for a universal monarchy on the argument that the Son of God resolved to
come to earth and to take the form of a man at a time when humanity was united
under the authority of the Roman emperor, who was, metaphorically, the emperor of all
humanity—and that, more specifically still, He resolved to do so at a time when the first
census of all the emperor’s subjects was being carried out. It is, however, more pertinent
to note that one cannot derive the principles of a political order from the sacred texts.
Attempts to do so were made over and over again, but the point is that they involved
digressions through multiple and often contradictory interpretations. The new religion
reformulates the notion of a duality between this world and the next, and between man’s
mortal destiny and his immortal destiny; it depicts a mediator who is a God-made-man.
It is believed to bring together not only one people but the whole of humanity; the body
of Christ symbolizes the unity between men and God, and the union of all men in the
authority. Christ lives on in a Church of which he is simultaneously the head. The very
fact that the event of his birth took place at a specific time and in a specific place indicates
that he was born to be the new Adam. A link is established between the idea of the fall
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