Mysticism and Sovereignty: From Katechontic to Mystical Political Theology

Abstract

This paper juxtaposes the katechontic political theology of modern sovereignty that sacrifices life in the name of its protection with a paradigm of mystical sovereignty whose purpose is to serve the power of life. Reclaiming the power and politicality not only of theology but also of an overlooked and denigrated discourse, such as mysticism, serves two purposes: it restores the true content of mystery and elucidates the political dimension of theology. Mysticism has been either unduly dismissed in secular modernity as obscurantist, or its meaning has been abused by modern sovereignty for the purpose of investing power with an air of transcendent legitimacy. The proper restoration of the meaning of mysticism may eventually help us reconstruct an alternative conception of sovereignty, one that inverses the attributes Schmitt associates with sovereign power: mastery, supreme potency, legitimate exercise of arbitrary violence. Such an alternative conception of sovereignty, as vulnerability, sacrifice, service, and potent powerlessness may then enable us to appreciate the resources mystical theology can contribute to rethinking the nature of the political and the political nature of theology.

1. Introduction

Political theology and sovereignty are intimately linked. If we believe Carl Schmitt, they are, in fact, congenitally connected. The infamous German jurist kicks off his eponymous Political Theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty with the provocative aphorism: ‘[s]overeign is he who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt [1922] 2005, p. 5). The state of exception is later in the text likened to the miracle in theology, while the sovereign is modelled after the nominalist God of modernity whose omnipotence guarantees the cosmological, social, and political order (see also Bain 2020; Gillespie 2009; Elshtain 2008). The genealogy of sovereignty on which Schmitt’s reconstruction of the concept draws relies on a political theology of power (Newman 2019) and a theory of divine representation that appropriates the aura of religious transcendence in the service of sovereign authority. A landmark illustration of such a genealogy is Kantorowicz’s (1997) unsurpassed The Kings’ Two Bodies that patiently registers the historical process through which in late medieval and early modern times, state sovereignty arose as the usurpation of the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope and sovereign power was invested with the numinous mysticism of his glorious office.

For those familiar with this backdrop, Schmitt’s famous dictum, that modern juridical concepts of the state are secularised theological concepts, was never really about the persistence of religion in public life per se but, rather, about what Lefort (2006) has called the ‘permanence of the theologico-political’, the void left by the retreat of religion in modernity that the secular political concepts of the modern state, such as sovereignty, anxiously tried to fill. And yet, for the same reason, for those familiar with the genealogy of sovereignty as divine representation, upon which Schmitt’s conception of political theology rests, the latter was never really about theology’s ineradicable political dimension, namely the politicality of theology. It was rather about the sacralisation of power or, perhaps, about the embrace of a specific theology of power that sanctions modern sovereignty as an apparatus for monopolising the legitimate use of violence. Such a political theology has a name in Schmitt. It is the political theology of the katechon, the mysterious figure that is supposed to withhold the apocalypse and delay the end of the world, announced by St Paul in his disputed Second Letter to the Thessalonians. In the imaginary of political theologians, like Schmitt ([1950] 2003), the modern katechon is secular sovereign power whenever it fulfils the sacred role of restraining chaos and maintaining world order.

By delaying the end of the world, however, the katechon also seems to be preventing the coming of the Messiah, namely the fulfilment of the promise of salvation at the end of history (=eschaton). In the Christian imaginary, the latter is the telos of history, and so, the katechon’s mission seems to contradict the very core of Christian faith (see Cacciari 2018). This ambivalence was not lost on the Jewish critics of Schmittian political theology, such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, or Jacob Taubes, but also on Catholic theologians, such as Erik Peterson and Henri de Lubac, and later on the Christian doyens of the new critical political theology, Jürgen Moltmann and Johannes Baptist Metz (see Paipais and Murphy 2025). Political theology in their work becomes a discourse critical of secular power and of any attempt to make authority sacred. That function of theology as the vehicle to demystify authority serves a purpose antithetical to that of katechontic political theology. Theology and its emancipatory potential are here recruited as a resource of hope, justice, and liberation that resists any effort to appropriate religious faith in the service of sovereign power. Political theology in this form becomes a species of ideology critique, a manifestation of the—fundamental in Judeo-Christian religiosity—critique of idolatry (see Paipais 2024).

The paper will juxtapose the katechontic political theology of modern sovereignty that sacrifices life in the name of its protection with a paradigm of mystical sovereignty whose purpose is to serve the power of life. Reclaiming the power and politicality not only of theology but also of an overlooked and denigrated discourse, such as mysticism, serves two purposes: it restores the true content of mystery and elucidates the political dimension of theology. Mysticism has been either unduly dismissed in secular modernity as obscurantist, or its meaning has been abused by modern sovereignty for the purpose of investing power with an air of transcendent legitimacy. The proper restoration of the meaning of mysticism may eventually help us reconstruct an alternative conception of sovereignty, one that inverses the attributes Schmitt associates with sovereign power: mastery, supreme potency, legitimate exercise of arbitrary violence. Such an alternative conception of sovereignty, as vulnerability, sacrifice, service, and potent powerlessness may then enable us to appreciate the resources mystical theology can contribute to rethinking the nature of the political and the political nature of theology.

2. The Political Theology of the Katechon

The Schmittian katechontic project of political theology seeks to outrightly defend the role of political power in securing and maintaining order. Schmitt’s aim is to establish the sovereign as a figure that derives transcendent legitimacy from the sanctification of power. Such a politico-theological argument has its origins not in the modern ‘politicisation of theology,’ as Schmitt thought, but in the ‘theologisation of politics’ (Assmann 2000). Indeed, Schmitt’s rendition of political theology is mediated by a tradition of jurisprudence that harks back to efforts by the German Holy Roman Emperors and the legal scholars at the court of the Norman and Tudor kings of England to place princely rule on the same par as papal authority, to appropriate the sacral allure of ecclesiastical power. This process of sanctification of power, superbly documented in Kantorowicz’s (1997) The King’s Two Bodies, is largely responsible for the mystical aura surrounding sovereign rule in the medieval and post-medieval modern West. Schmitt ([1923] 1996) is direct heir to these genealogies essentially claiming that, after the collapse of the Papal/Catholic complexio oppositorum—as the possibility of the Catholic Church and the Pope embodying/representing a ‘union of opposites’, a balance of secular and heavenly order—and of united Christendom, the Pope’s absolute authority (plenitudo potestatis) was usurped by the modern sovereign state (see also Elshtain 2008).

In the process of this gradual osmosis of sacrality and sovereignty, the concept of the katechon played a pivotal role. Though early Christian exegetes, such as Augustine, admitted their absolute ignorance as to the meaning of the term, in the context of Christian political theology, at least since Hippolytus and Tertullian, the katechon developed into a powerful myth that provided theological legitimacy to sovereign power (see Agamben 2017, pp. 20–21). Its history was not without ambivalence, often used in a manner critical to state power owing to the inherent ambiguity of its function both preventing chaos and the revelation of the Antichrist, thus delaying the Parousia, Christ’s Second Coming (Wilde 2013). Yet, while historically the question of the identity of the katechon was met with a variety of answers that reflected this ambivalence—e.g., the Roman Empire, the community of believers, the Roman Church, the Jews whose refusal to convert allegedly delayed the end of days1—the figure of the restrainer gradually lost its spiritual significance and became a tool for the sanctification of state power.

The term is introduced in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians (2: 3–8)2 as a force that withholds (qui tenet) chaos, restrains the apocalypse, and thus delays the end of the world, until the mystery of lawlessness is completed with the coming of the Antichrist. Paul’s Letter seeks to check the enthusiasm of the community of believers who thought that Christ’s Second Coming was imminent. Fearing that this may lead to eschatological paralysis, as some members of the congregation abandoned their vocations in their ecstatic anticipation of the world to come, Paul introduces the katechon or ‘restrainer’. The katechon’s task is to hold back the arrival of the ‘wicked’ or ‘lawless’ one (whom the early Church identified with the Antichrist mentioned in John’s letters), whose presence precipitates the return of Christ. Paul’s theology could now account for both the imminent possibility of Christ’s return and its deferral.

Importantly, though, the Letter seemed also to serve a political purpose. From the Letter and its context, it appears that the device of the katechon was introduced to restore not just piety, but order in Thessalonica. Indeed, as time went on and the Church’s relationship to political power became more complicated, it became apparent that Paul’s invocation of the katechon could be recruited to serve a political purpose that both imitated and was intimately linked to, its theological operation. If, in early Christian theology, a concept like the katechon was required to explain why the day of the Lord was simultaneously both imminent and deferred, so too was there a need to account for why subjects ought to treat temporal political authority as something other than ephemeral and, hence, deserving of their obedience. The concept of the katechon proved remarkably apt and adaptable to this end, in part because of the indirect way it delayed the Second Coming of Christ. By delaying the arrival of the Antichrist, the political katechon sets itself seemingly not against the return of Christ, but against the chaos that would be brought about by the lawless one. The katechon requires obedience because of the stabilising role it performs containing the evil forces in history and postponing the arrival of the Antichrist. However, the ambivalence remains as, in performing this role, the katechon also postpones the arrival of Christ.

In Schmitt’s early work, it is the Roman Catholic church that is presented as the greatest anti-apocalyptic force. Exhibiting features that, in all but name, resemble the interim nature and governing dexterity of the katechon, the Roman Catholic church is described as a complexio oppositorum, a ‘union of opposites’. In Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Schmitt ([1923] 1996, p. 4) begins by noting the astounding political elasticity of the Church, aligning itself throughout history with absolute monarchists, liberal democrats, and socialist revolutionaries alike. And yet, for Schmitt, ‘[u]ltimately, most important is that this limitless ambiguity combines with the most precise dogmatism and a will to decision as it culminates in the doctrine of papal infallibility’ (ibid., p. 8). For Schmitt, it is through the personal authority of the Pope that the Church becomes ‘eminently political’ (ibid., p. 16) because political representation is based upon the ability, or authority, to decide (ibid., p. 21).3

Schmitt interprets the waning of the Church’s role as the katechon as the result of secularisation, and the ‘functionalisation’ and ‘bureacratisation’ that emerges from the ‘economic thinking’ of late modernity (ibid., pp. 16–17). The latter, in eschatological terms, represent the forces of lawlessness that the katechon is charged with restraining. The theological correlate for this paradigm of ‘economic thinking’ for Schmitt is deism, which really is functional atheism, the view that divine activity survives only indirectly in the impersonal, mechanistic processes that persist without God’s active governing of the world (Schmitt [1922] 2005, pp. 36–37). In such a paradigm, order must be self-grounded and in opposition to the preserving katechontic function that the Church’s juridical rationality performed. In his reply to Blumenberg in Political Theology II, Schmitt ([1970] 2010, p. 121) describes secular modernity as a ‘self-empowering novelty’, extending his earlier diagnosis of modernity’s immanent ‘atheistic theocracy’ that ‘must end in anarchic freedom’, wherein ‘mankind had to be substituted for God’ (Schmitt [1922] 2005, p. 51). Such anarchic freedom does not produce a peaceful utopian order, but a violent form of nihilism, as this form of humanity that believes in nothing but itself ‘must radicalise and inaugurate the immanent aggression of the unfettered new’ (Schmitt [1970] 2010, p. 121). The violence unleashed is clearly Schmitt’s interpretation of the mystery of lawlessness, the process through which the lawless one—the Antichrist not as the antithesis but as the usurper of the power of God—is at work (energeitai) and revealed, precisely the event that the katechon, who is now removed, worked to prevent.

When Schmitt explicitly uses, and reflects on the significance of, the concept of the katechon in the early 1940s, its usage is by then already mediated by a theory of divine representation and a Christian philosophy of history that invests the idea of empire (represented by Pope or Emperor) with a world historical mission (Schmitt [1950] 2003, pp. 59–66; [1929] 1994). Schmitt adopts the idea of the katechon from a variety of sources (Wilde 2013, pp. 115–17), all converging on the notion of the empire (the force of the German world-historical state) as a monolith that operates as a power of preservation rather than redemption. Although it must be acknowledged that the use of the concept by Schmitt is marked by ambiguity and incoherence (see Meuter 1994; Grossheutschi 1996; Paléologue 2004), still the anti-apocalyptic tenor is unmistakable. In the words of one of his sources, Wilhelm Stapel (1882–1954), the sovereign authority has the ‘apocalyptic responsibility’ not only to preserve the existing order by preventing ‘all kinds of anarchy’ but also by restraining the ‘satanic revolt and perversion as such’ (Stapel in Wilde 2013, p. 117).

Equally, following another of his sources, Hans Freyer (1887–1969), Schmitt saw the katechon not as a static force but as a power whose role is to preserve the experiences of past generations and channel them into new contexts. Put differently, the function of the katechon was to manage history’s infinite reversals or the endless deferral of the eschatological event. In that form, the katechon preserves order, paradoxically, by turning into its opposite, the anarchic lawless power it seeks to hold back: ‘the lawless one returns to the heart of sovereignty itself in the form of a kind of state anomia or anarchy’ (Bradley 2019, p. 16). This ambivalent treatment is already present in the first text in which the figure makes its appearance in Schmitt’s ([1942] 1995) work. The katechon does not simply act as a static obstacle to disorder but rather as ‘an accelerator despite itself’ (beschleuniger wider willen): ‘it paradoxically maintains order through chaos, paralyzes by catalysing, preserves the status quo by accelerating the forces of change… [it] does not merely restrain lawlessness but seeks to incorporate or internalize a kind of anomia— “acceleration”— into itself as its own sovereign principle’ (Bradley 2019, pp. 16, 152; emphasis in original).

Schmitt’s investment in the concept of the katechon after World War II was existential. He described it as a ‘belief’, a personal article of faith, or a form of historical knowledge that can only be grasped experientially and only from the viewpoint of Christian cosmology. Indeed, he famously regarded it as the only historical concept possible for the original Christian faith because it provides a ‘bridge between the notion of an eschatological paralysis of all human events and a tremendous monolith like that of the Christian Empire of the Germanic kings’ (Schmitt [1950] 2003, p. 60). In fact, for Schmitt, it becomes the only way to keep the faith (and be counted amongst the righteous amidst the greatest trial) in the prospect of Revelation in the interim time between Christ’s Incarnation and Second Coming.

Grounded in the Augustinian anti-apocalyptic tradition Schmitt largely belongs to, the katechon’s role is to ward off the idea that humans can definitively judge over the world, history, and morality and announce for themselves the end of history. The katechon, then, can be seen as playing an almost metapolitical (though still part of Heilgeschichte) role, safeguarding the ability of the political to resist an illegitimate theologisation of history (Lievens 2013; Rasch 2004, p. 100). Yet, paradoxically, it does so by keeping history profane for theological reasons. If the anomos had already arrived and history has come to an end, Christ’s Second Coming would have already happened. So, since such an event has not come to pass, the katechon must be in effect and must be named in every epoch as the very meaningfulness of history depends on that: ‘One must be able to name katechon for every epoch of the past 1932 years. The position has never gone unoccupied otherwise we would no longer exist’ (Schmitt in Meier 1988, p. 161; emphasis in the original; Ojakangas 2004, p. 197).

In that sense, the katechon is, in significant ways, symptomatic of Schmitt’s engagement with this wider context of European imperial thought and its imperial spatio-temporal imaginary. Hell (2009, p. 290; emphasis in the original) registers his effective preoccupation with the notion in those terms,

as a scopic scenario that articulates imperial space and time… Schmitt, thus, defined the katechon as a kind of ruin-gazer scenario: the imperial sovereign—empire or emperor—who, with its or his eyes fixed on the end of time, prepares for a political battle to delay that very end. This battle is both military and ideological, fought, in the case of Rome, in the name of the divine Caesars and in the case of the Spanish-Portuguese Empire in the name of the Virgin Mary, that is, the Church.

As such, the katechon represents a radical reconceptualisation of the imperial imaginary, forcing into the foreground the knowledge that drives all imaginaries of imperial decline: that time is running out. It is Schmitt’s response to the urgent question that has haunted all post-Roman empires: when (and how) to act in order to prevent imperial decline and survive their own finitude. For Hell, then, we are dealing, here, not with a katechontic theology that recruits the empire for its providential role4 (the empire is eschatologically weak and historically strong, a tension that it perpetuates), but with a post-imperial sensibility of ‘ruin-gazing’ that paradoxically recruits the vision of the empire’s inevitable demise as a survival mechanism (a dispositif of governmentality, to use Foucault’s terminology). Not only does the empire survive at the moment of its utmost defeat as an aesthetically vindicated vision, as Hell would have it. But also, an imperialist theology is shored up in the service of the sacralisation of power that feeds off the fragments of Christian eschatology and their residual myth-making function.

As we have mentioned, the flip side of the eschatological role of the katechon that Schmitt is desperately trying to diffuse is, of course, that by indefinitely postponing the end of the world the katechon also seems to be preventing the coming of the Messiah, namely the fulfilment of the promise of salvation at the end of history. In the Christian imaginary, the latter is the telos of history, and so, the katechon’s mission seems to be contradicting the essence of Christian faith as it restrains evil by tolerating it and by indefinitely postponing salvation (see Cacciari 2018; Virno 2008). The aesthetic perspective, then, of the ruin-gazer enables Schmitt to manage the historico-eschatological tension at the heart of power’s function by capturing the future and recruiting it in the service of its own perpetuation, effectively transforming ‘the end of empire into the empire’s own end’ (Bradley 2019, p. 157). This is a dimension that Schmitt’s theology of power seeks to appropriate since Christian eschatology is ambiguous and may cut both ways: it can authorise an anti-apocalyptic obsession with order or the management of disorder,5 but it may also inspire an anarchistic de-legitimation of any order or, at least, question any claim that attributes divine legitimacy to worldly institutions. It can, then, be credibly assumed that there is considerable tension between Schmitt’s political theology and Christian revelation, a tension whose management he himself identified as the very task of the katechon, infinitely extending the interregnum between history and eschatology, creation and redemption, and ultimately politics and theology.

Now, such a vision of theology premised on the ambiguity of a katechon that restrains by accelerating lawlessness, governing through anomia, and having had its eschatological sting removed or suppressed, is not necessarily unprecedented nor is it a mere theological eccentricity on Schmitt’s part. After all, post-Tridentine Counter-Reformation Catholicism did develop as a counter-revolutionary force interested not only in suppressing intra-ecclesial rebellion and confessional fragmentation, but also in re-appropriating and reorienting the reform imperative. But, the theological foundations of Schmitt’s political theory (Staatslehre) are even more eclectically grounded in his rather unorthodox and peculiar Catholicism, a perverse mixture of Gnostic-like metaphysics (see Hohendahl 2008; Groh 1998; Manemann 2002), pagan fatalism, and heretical Christian theology that, according to Geréby (2008, p. 32), ‘belonged to a special breed of German nationalistic Catholicism that was based on race rather than on the idea of the church universal’.6 Eventually, Schmitt’s Gnosticising Christianity does not break with the sacrificial logic of paganism, as described by René Girard in his monumental Violence and the Sacred (Girard [1972] 2013), but actually confers legitimacy on the reproduction of the very scapegoating sacrificial machine that Christianity was supposed to dismantle in the first place.7

3. From Katechontic to Mystical Political Theology

Schmitt’s vision of katechontic power and sacrificial Christianity is employed to legitimise a model of sovereignty that relies on the sacrifice of life itself in the name of its protection (see Esposito 2011). The paradigm of sovereignty that Schmitt defends reflects the traditional characteristics of sovereignty, as described by Foucault (1990) in the first volume of The History of Sexuality: it has the supreme right to kill life in the name of its protection. However, with the transition from traditional sovereign power to bio-power, where, according to Foucault, life itself becomes the object of concern for power, the lethality of sovereign power has intensified. The 19th century coupling of sovereign power and biopower through the dispositif of racism inaugurated the era of sovereign thanatopolitics (=the politics of death), briefly discussed by Foucault (2003) in Society Must Be Defended.

To be fair, Schmitt’s ([1950] 2003) The Nomos of the Earth laments the aggravation of negative biopolitics after the collapse of the Jus Publicum Europaeum and the rise of revolutionary and universalist political ideologies, such as liberalism and socialism, since the 19th century. For Schmitt, the political suddenly assumes an extreme destructiveness as enmity ceases to be the possibility of antagonism in politics that can be tamed or ‘pruned’ (Hegung), as in the golden days of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, and is, rather, enacted directly in politics in the form of revolutionary or ‘liberal’ wars (that reduce war to police action). With the collapse of the classical European idea of limited war as a legal ‘duel’ between legitimate enemies, the possibility of total war is introduced as a zero-sum existential confrontation that threatens to annihilate the political. Paradoxically, this is brought about through a hyperpoliticisation that criminalises the enemy and renders the old European concept of the justus hostis (=legitimate enemy) useless. It is no accident that Schmitt writes The Nomos of the Earth on the eve of the Cold War when this idea of zero-sum conflict assumed global proportions threatening the planet with thermonuclear annihilation.

Be that as it may, Schmitt’s katechontic approach still exclusively associates the sacred or the mystical with the legitimation of power, rather than with the possibility of justice as, for instance, is the case in the messianic tradition that inspires Benjamin (2007b). This objection strikes at the heart of the relation between theology and politics as it opens up an alternative possibility of recruiting the resources of theology for the purposes of redemption as this-worldly justice. The Benjaminian invitation in the first thesis of his Theses on the Concept of History to enrich the political with the mystical power of theology assumes here its true meaning (Benjamin 2007c). Not that which sees in theology only the triumph of a transcendent discourse that sanctifies power and dominates or manipulates life (like the dwarf pulling the strings of the puppet, in Benjamin’s famous parable), but that which reads it as the agent of the messianic promise of another life and another justice emerging, paradoxically, in the place of the profane, that is, in the place of an inverted sacrality.

Arguably, this is the true meaning of theocracy in Benjamin’s ‘Theological–Political Fragment’ too. In line with a tradition of Jewish theology that exalts the direct exercise of God’s authority, prior to the dispensation of kingship to the Jews, as the preeminent example of anarchic (‘no rule’) divine sovereignty (see Vatter 2021; Paipais 2022b), Benjamin (2007a) introduces us to theocratic anarchic rule through the problematique of ‘divine violence’. The latter opens up the possibility of a redoubling of the exception (what Benjamin calls the ‘real emergency’) that radicalises the Schmittian exception in the direction of its suspension. Divine violence opposes the logic of mastery that drives sovereign power in history and applies the ‘emergency brakes’ to stop the locomotive of progress, the vehicle of the victors of history. The re-doubling of the exception (suspending the exception) in Benjamin reveals the significance of an already political life, a life whose salvation coincides with its profanation in which the sacred is not cancelled but restored to its true content, that of the reception of life in all its politicality/historicity or, more theologically, in all its creatureliness—what Rosenzweig (2005) in The Star of Redemption calls Geschöpflichkeit.

Such creatureliness in the Judeo-Christian eschatological context is uniquely associated with the paradigm of the ‘suffering servant’. The Second Isaiah figure of the ‘suffering servant’ (Isaiah 52:13–53:12), arguably embodied in the biblical person of Job and in the crucified Christ, represents a model of sovereignty that discovers in impotence and self-surrender not simply a renunciation of divine transcendence and a rebellious insubordination to it, as Negri (2009) thinks, but, really, a radical reconfiguration of what divine transcendence really is. The recent scholarship on mystical theology highlights that union with the divine is always presented as an affirmation of this life, never a correction externally imposed (McIntosh 1998, p. 61; Milne 2017, p. 61; Davies 2017, p. 15; Exall 2017, p. 84; Papanikolaou 2020, pp. 574–77). The mystical idea of the kenotic union of Christ’s two natures, the divine and the human, stands for a conception of sovereignty (in liturgical parlance, Christ’s Lordship) that instantiates creaturely life as a life stripped of the illusions of the supernatural, teleology, and theodicy; inherently fragile, vulnerable, dependent, and exploitable, but also recalcitrant, resistant, and inexhaustibly creative (see Paipais 2022a).

Paradoxically, creaturely life as kenotic divine/human mystical union is sovereign by exactly being infinitely more exposed to the vicissitudes of historical, embodied life traversed by the amorphous, discursively dissonant, antagonistic social forces that make it a political life (see also Santner 2006). Truly sovereign incarnate life is the site of a constant decreation and disincarnation of what is destined to be incarnated in its failure, suffering, and powerlessness. As Williams (2018, p. 236; emphasis in original) puts it, such a life is the affirmation of the transforming coincidence of finite and infinite in the detail of this finite life, including and especially its humiliation and powerlessness, in an ‘ultimate realism’ that insists that the unprotected historical fleshliness of the incarnate Word is the appropriate embodiment of the selflessness of the divine.

In other words, the incarnate divine (i.e., the becoming-human of the divine through the becoming-divine of the human) is a finite mode of existence that enacts infinity through its mode of relatedness with the absolute self-dispossession and self-abandonment of God’s love. Infinity reveals itself in the abandoned and despised mortal as a finite mode of unrelated relating (hypostasis),8 a decreated creaturely life as a deformed form of ‘weak’ praxis, enacting itself ultimately in the emptying power, the dereliction, and the wordless helplessness of the Cross: ‘The “in-and-beyond” of [this] analysis already implies that what we encounter in any finite substance is a kind of excess, an overflow of connectedness and so of possible meaning’ (Williams 2018, p. 252; emphasis in original; also Santner 2006; Nancy 2013).

That possible meaning qua surplus/remainder, if it is to become divine (theōsis qua powerlessness) and not human (will-to-power) or animal (nullification of the will), can only be our re-connection with our creatureliness as a vulnerable, fleshly (always a spectral/hauntological, never natural, perturbance in the fabric of being) and suffering hypostasis (a becoming-divine human form of animality).9 Such an idea of creatureliness as exposure to vulnerability and powerlessness is constantly open to a mystical union that katechontic power always attempts to foreclose. Katechontic power, unlike what both Schmitt and Hobbes thought, cannot represent Christ in the world because it draws its legitimacy from immunising the community from the type of exposure (mutual contamination, divine–human passibility) that Christ’s body represents.

God’s mystical sovereignty, however, is only revealed in the world’s abandonment to profanation (first kenosis), whereby profanation itself becomes the terrain of the revelation of the divine in its powerless vulnerability, frailty, and mortality (second kenosis).10 In this apophatic logic of double kenosis, the divine does not engage in self-subtraction—a tsimstsum from its essence11—in order to declare its distance from the creaturely and safeguard it self-sufficiency, but rather in order to achieve a ‘concealed presence’, to be able to cross apophatically the distance that separates it from the creaturely without either cancelling or reifying that distance. Incarnation signifies the truth of worldly existence whereby the divine does not spiritualise flesh but enfleshes the spirit to the point of offering itself to ‘the folly of being-eaten’ (the Eucharist); and eating/nourishment is the original and literal activity of incorporating the world (Manoussakis 2015, p. 311; Pelluchon 2019).

In this mode of existence (τρόπος ὑπάρξεως), transcendence (the Schmittian mark of sovereignty) is not enacted as the extrinsic ‘interruption’ or exception of the historical, the human, the profane—the horror of Rudolf Otto’s ‘numinous’ that Lévinas (1990, p. 14) rightfully categorises as ‘enthusiasm’ and idolatry; nor can divinity be added as a predicate to the sum-total of what is creaturely life (this would not simply be a category mistake but also a misunderstanding of the divine gesture). In its radical separateness, the divine is revealed (or modally enacted), not merely as in proximity to human plight, but as the genuine creaturely, an incarnate suffering existence.12 Such a self-emptying doubly kenotic existence signals (the body is always a sign) not only the end of all ontotheology (Vattimo 1999), in a move that has been described as ‘transcendence transcending itself or transdescendence’ (Dickinson 2018, p. 110), but, more importantly, abandonment at a zero level of sacrality where the divine is the coming to presence of the creaturely (not in absentia but in the form of the presencing of absence) (Nancy 2008, pp. 63–65).13 Once the ‘false sacrality’ of the divine is self-exposed, the divine body reveals itself as the placing of creaturely life. Incarnation as a sign does not, in this sense, represent the divine, nor does it substitute for the divine, but rather indicates an infinity in the present that the present cannot hold or exhaust (Williams 2020, p. 13; McIntosh 2020, p. 37). The mystical and the incarnational, the apophatic and the ritualistic/liturgical, enter a relationship of irreducible indistinction or a unity without confusion, change, division, or separation that mirrors the mystical union of Christ’s two natures.

4. The True Content of Mystery

Mystical theology here bridges the gap between the profane, this-worldly, and the sacred qua divine transcendence. To understand how this is possible, given the usual but unfortunate association of mysticism with secrecy, opaqueness, strangeness, and abnormality (see de Certeau 1992), one needs to restore ‘the old sense of the word’ mystērion that, in de Lubac’s (2007, p. 49) words, refers to ‘more of an action than a thing.’ Long associated with the revival of the ‘spirit of liturgy’ in the church, as Agamben (2017, pp. 27–28) informs us, the term mystērion does not designate a ‘secret doctrine’, but rather ‘a praxis, an action or a drama in the theatrical sense of the term as well, that is, a set of gestures, acts, and words through which a divine action or passion is efficaciously actualised in the world and time for the salvation of those who participate in it’. The fact that mystery is not a secret but an action or manifestation in deeds or words that is intended for the initiated (teleiois) is made clear by St Paul himself, says Agamben (ibid., pp. 29–30; emphasis in original), who in 1 Corinthians 2: 6–8 proclaims, ‘[b]ut we express God’s wisdom in mystery [laloumen en mystērioi; Vulgate, loquimur in mysterio], wisdom that was hidden and that God had decided before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’. And Agamben adds, the content of this mystery is, ‘[w]e proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Corinthians 1: 23).

This association of mystery with the lived practice of participants in a way of life is a longstanding motif in the recent reappreciation of the mystical experience. Bernard McGinn sits at the centre of a reappraisal of Christian mysticism that foregrounds a refusal to privilege contemplation over praxis in mystics like Meister Eckhart (McGinn 2001, pp. 158–59).14 In his immensely influential series, The Presence of God (1991–2021), Bernard McGinn states that mysticism ‘centers on a form of immediate encounter with God whose essential purpose is to convey a loving knowledge (even a negative one) that transforms the mystics’s mind and whole way of life’ (McGinn 1998, p. 26). Julia Lamm highlights how the focus here is not on a special experience, but on sustained practices that aid the transformative awareness of divine presence here and now (Lamm 2013, pp. 3–4). Mystical theology, therefore, should be understood primarily as devotional practice (Flory 2019, pp. 219–24; McCabe 2019; Perkins 2019; Podmore 2017, p. 201) aimed at guiding the practitioner through a ‘transformative process and sustained way of living’ (Lamm 2013, p. 4; McGinn 1991, pp. xvi–xviii).

The form that this transformative way of living takes is that of the mystical union with the divine. For McGinn, the mystic’s aim of union with the divine is understood through a detached form of living (‘as though not’, 1 Corinthians 7: 29–31), a life in eschatological tension that is experienced, as Eckhart describes it, as living ‘without a why’, a form of disinterested or self-sacrificial love that is at the same time an endlessly spontaneous joy that reflects an orientation toward the divine (McGinn 2001, pp. 154–55; 2005, pp. 121–22).15 The form of practice that makes the divine manifest is that which is not performed in anticipation of reward or out of fear of punishment, nor in the fulfilling of orders. It is the natural overflowing in praxis of a love that is divine, one that does not ask for anything in return, and does not dread the vulnerability that is necessary for such union. McGinn (2001, p. 159) argues that, in this interpretation of mysticism, ‘life, that is, actual practice, gives a higher form of knowledge than even the light of contemplative ecstasy without application to actual living’.

Exall (2017) builds on these insights in a way that is directly relevant for thinking through sovereignty in mystical terms. She argues that a ‘“this-worldly” mysticism would lead us to consider the advantages of embracing a negative ecclesiology in our time … an open acknowledgement that the Church does not exist for itself, but rather for the salvation of the whole world’ (Exall 2017, p. 84). Exall’s negative ecclesiology is not a simple antinomian call to dismantle the Church as an institution. Rather, she is trying to maintain eschatological focus at a time when the institutional form could be captured by the katechontic logic, whilst also recognising the continued need for it in the world as it is (see also Agamben 2010, p. 35). This ‘dialectical tension’ at the heart of a mystical idea of sovereignty reflects the eschatological tension between the ‘not yet’ and the ‘already’ as a drama whereby eschatological time comes up against concrete historical forces. As Agamben (2017, p. 35; emphasis in original) put it:

The ‘not yet’ defines the action of the katechon, of the force that restrains; the ‘already’ refers to the urgency of the decisive element. And the text of the epistle allows for no doubt as to the final outcome of the drama: the Lord will eliminate the anomos ‘with the breath of his mouth, rendering him inoperative with the manifestation of his coming’.

(2 Thessalonians 2:8)

There is no denial of the need for order or for maintaining peace in the face of chaotic violence. The recognition that violence is not ontologically necessary is distinct from the acknowledgement that violence is a historical inevitability to be protected against. Rather, the katechontic call for order is revealed as an apparatus through which the mystery of lawlessness is ontologised, so that it may then authorise a katechontic response. The alternative sees history as already mystical, a drama, a praxis that manifests the economy by which ‘God arranges and reveals the divine presence in a world of creatures’ (Agamben 2017, p. 31). Conversely, but equally dialectically, from the perspective of eternity, McGinn (2001, p. 160) notes that far from eternity being an escape from the flow of time, ‘[it] must be seen as the “fullness of time”; and the soul as situated between time and eternity must learn by its “rational activity in time” to redeem the times.’

Mystical sovereignty, then, is not something that a katechontic sovereign can deliver. By interpreting the mystery of lawlessness as apriori evil, ‘a gloomy theological drama that paralyses every action and renders it enigmatic and ambiguous’ (Agamben 2017, p. 38; emphasis in original), it derives legitimacy from immunising against the exposure to creatureliness that is the site of the true correspondence between history and eschatology. In mystical sovereignty, in contrast, profanation and sacrality enter a zone of indistinction, mutually contaminated by the passibility that is the common sign of divine life and human creatureliness. At the end of the drama between the katechon and the lawless one, in the fullness of time, ‘mystery and history correspond without remainder’ (Agamben 2017, p. 30) or, as Williams (2020, p. 19) notes, referring to Revelation (21:22), there is no need for a separate temple. The content of mystery, in this case, is the paradigmatic divine pedagogy revealing life as ‘a praxis of “unpowering”’ (Exall 2017, p. 84). Sovereignty is manifested as the praxis that is fulfilled in its own irrelevance, when it becomes not the domination but rather the stewardship of life in all those moments that life falls short of the promise of love and justice.

5. Epilogue: The King of Glory

On another occasion, one of us has recommended the image of the ‘King of Glory’ as the paradigm of such a life (Paipais 2017, p. 228; 2022a). A life enacted as the tragicomedy of an incarnate dying God that performs a double kenosis: the death of an absolute transcendence (posited in contradistinction to immanence) and the deactivation of an imagination that equates the Word with supernatural agency or power and earthly glory. This title is often found on Greek Orthodox icons of the Crucifixion, sometimes on the signboard at the top of the cross as ‘Ό Βασιλεύς της Δόξης’—‘The King of Glory’ and sometimes written in full on or near the main crossbeam. This inscription is often associated with another icon of the humbled and mocked Jesus. Jesus is shown after his scourging, wearing a scarlet cloak over his shoulders, hands tied at the wrists, the crown of thorns on his head, and a long reed in one hand.

This image has long been known in the West by the Latin name Ecce Homo—Ίδε ο Άνθρωπος, in Greek—‘Behold the man’, the words Pilate uttered when he presented Jesus to the crowd. These two presentations of Jesus are related by the fact that the very moment Jesus’ human vulnerability reaches its apex is identified with the glory of the divinity. The very moment his humanity is caught in the mechanism that renders him bare life, a guiltless sacrificial victim that renders the sacrificial machine of power inoperative, is the moment of the fulfilment of creation. According to a typological interpretive tradition, Jesus’ last word on the cross, Τετέλεσται (‘it is finished’, John 19: 30), refers to Creation. The dying moment on the Cross announces the completion or consummation of God’s creative act. The human being finds its completion (it is finally created as new Adam), not at moment of the Incarnation per se, or at the Resurrection, or at the Second Coming when the resurrected will assume glorious bodies, but at the moment of ‘extreme humility’ (Akra Tapeinōsis—Άκρα Ταπείνωσις) when the bondage of death is shattered through death (thanatō thanaton—θανάτω θάνατον).

Such a paradigm of mystical sovereignty challenges the sacralisation of exceptionalist politics by the Schmittian katechontic political theology. Agamben (2011) is right to point out that, in the Schmittian paradigm, glory is inoperativity itself (the formalism of the exception) captured, confined, manipulated, and sacralised by the theopolitical signature of sovereign power. Indeed, Agamben reads glory as the apparatus through which power veils the hollowness at the core of the Godhead transforming it into an empty cipher of ‘necessary’ grace or economic Providence. In contrast, in the paradigm of the Crucified Christ as ‘King of Glory’, glory is revealed not as the sacralised visibility of an invisible void (ibid., p. 245), but as the hypostatic presentation of creaturely life.16 The glory of the cross lies in the assumption by divinity of the ultimate creatureliness of the flesh. Glory is the tragicomic abject body of a dying God that appears foreign to what most would imagine sacral regality to be. The latter is, rather, revealed as the glory of the creaturely, kenotic incarnate existence at once serving as a living indictment of the world’s injustices and pointing to another life. This other life that glory signifies is the revelation of suffering as love, that is, without reward, justification, or retribution. As such, it disturbs and renders the very meaning of the sacred ‘out of joint’.17 The profanation of the sacred, the ultimate demystification of sacrality (the immanentisation of the eschaton), and the true content of mystery and mystical sovereignty, one might say, is already there, hidden in plain sight.