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A Response to Sovereignty and the Sacred in Three Parts

2022; Wiley; Volume: 48; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/rsr.16203

1748-0922

Brian D. Collins,

Augustinian Studies and Theology

SOVEREIGNTY AND THE SACRED: SECULARISM AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF RELIGIONBy Robert Yelle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019 Pp. x + 270. $35.00. I am glad to have the opportunity to respond to Robert Yelle's noteworthy new book Sovereignty and the Sacred, especially since I have thought a lot recently about the subject matter, having published in 2020 a book about the mythology of the Hindu god Paraśurāma. Paraśurāma is a divine hero from the Sanskrit Mahābhārata epic who is famous for annihilating (in what some might call a type of ḥerem) all the warriors in the world for twenty-one generations, filling five lakes with their blood, and then offering up the earth he has conquered as a sacrifice. Afterward, the divine sages banish him to eternal life as a perpetual outsider, not unlike the homo sacer. Indeed, no longer having the right to live on the earth he has given away, he must drive back the ocean to create a new strip of land in which to dwell (this being a familiar local creation story on India's western coast). My work on this project and a related one on sacrifice in the Hindu tradition has given me many opportunities to consider the issues and the thinkers (especially Giorgio Agamben and René Girard) with which Yelle is dealing in this book. As so often happens, my mind was led in several directions over the course of reading it. Here I will explore, to varying lengths, three of these directions. The first is a body of ethnographic evidence that may have a place in Yelle's project, should he continue it. The second is the work of one whom I consider a must-read Italian thinker on the categories of the sovereign and the sacred who is not Giorgio Agamben and whose work is almost never cited by historians of religion. And the last is a question, raised by a throwaway phrase used by a University of Chicago law professor in the 1950s that has long perplexed me and was brought again to the forefront of my mind by Yelle's discussion of Max Weber and Protestant theology in chapter six. One thing that is clear from Sovereignty and the Sacred, as well as his earlier work, The Semiotics of Religion, is that Yelle is gifted at illustrating his theoretical discussions with richly contextualized examples from myth, history, and ritual. There is one ritual, though, which Yelle does not treat in his book, even though it perfectly exemplifies both the antinomian sacred and the establishment of sovereignty. It is the Indo-European Horse Sacrifice, best known in its late Vedic form as the Aśvamedha. But it is also the basis of the Roman October Equus; the 12th-century Irish inauguration rite described by Gerald of Wales; and 19th and early 20th-century Kirghiz chiefly succession feasts on the Central Asian steppe, the likely homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language (Prior and Storsved 2021, 1-2). On the one hand, this ritual is meant to define a sovereign's power, in the Vedic case, by allowing a stallion to roam free for one year (followed by the king's army) and claiming all the land that he covers. On the other hand, it also features elements of obscene sexual spectacle, in the Vedic case, by requiring to king's chief wife to mount the erect phallus of the sacrificed stallion and couple with it in an act of either real or feigned bestiality. If we follow Yelle's equation of the antinomian sacred with the antinomian sovereign, it makes perfect sense to combine these two elements. Advertising its obscene spectacle lends force to the rite's investiture of power either in the body of the sovereign or in the border of his realm, which is established (in the Aśvamedha, at least) as homologous to his person. Daniel Prior and Benjamin Storsved have speculated that this widespread ritual began millennia ago among Proto-Indo-European-speaking inhabitants of the steppe as a loosely organized gathering of tribespeople to mark the death of one chief and the ascension of the self-proclaimed next chief, with elements of obscene sexual spectacle spontaneously arising in the idle crowds as a form of entertainment. It was only later, as nomadic tribal organizations gave way to spatially bounded kingdoms, that sovereigns co-opted the ritual and formalized its antinomian elements, which were subsequently reinterpreted through myths of origin (Prior and Storsved 2021, 7-8). If this thesis is correct, it lends weight to Yelle's conclusion that religion is an “anamorphosis” which is revealed in its true form as sovereignty when viewed from the proper angle (Yelle 2019, 187). This leads me to another set of ethnographic observations that could enrich Yelle's project. Mounting his own critique of Agamben, the anthropologist Bhrigupati Singh has identified a political theology in the contemporary cult of the central Indian minor deity (devtā) Thakur Baba, understood as the spirit of a Rajput horseback warrior who continued to fight even after he was decapitated in battle. The “bipolar” political theology Singh identifies in Thakur Baba is based on the ancient Vedic pair of gods, Mitra and Varuṇa, who represent, respectively, the contractual and the judicial forms of the magico-sovereign function. Or, to put it another way, Mitra is the enforcer of contracts and Varuṇa is the enforcer of oaths. In a more recent part of Agamben's homo sacer project, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, he argues that “[men] do not swear by God but by his name” (Agamben 2011, 20-21). Indeed, a common way of using the Sanskrit verb śapati (“swear”) requires the name of a god, usually Varuṇa, followed by the particle iti, which functions as a pair of quotation marks. I would be curious to know what value Yelle finds in this later work of Agamben's. With this concept of sovereignty I understand the ambivalent variability of Thakur Baba's power more clearly as modes of force and contract. Punitive force, for instance, can be expressed through a range of aggressions such as a motorcycle slipping in front of a shrine or mental and physical illnesses and even death …. In contrast, the aspect of contract involves more routine human–spirit relations, maintained with specific shrines. Routine does not necessarily mean “fixed,” because a pact entails varying forms of give-and-take. In Shahbad the term for such a transaction is dharam bolja, which I translate with respect to religious antiquity as do ut des in Latin, dadami se dehi mei [sic.] in Sanskrit (“I give so that you may give”). (Singh 2012, 394) Hindu nationalists prize Sanskrit above all other languages, so of course, the term is borrowed from its word stock. But, as a Sanskrit word meaning “boundary,” its derivation is doubtful. As is frequently the case, the completely invented folk etymology listed by Monier Monier-Williams's 1899 Sanskrit-English Dictionary elucidates the word wonderfully. According to his entry, the word is “fancifully said to be [from] marya + ada ‘devouring young men’ who are killed in defining boundaries” (2009, 791). This etymological myth would seem to fit right in with the discussion of boundary stones and the story of Romulus and Remus on pages 78-9. And, in an earlier work, Yelle himself writes (citing Patrick Olivelle) that such definitions “were not ‘folk’ etymologies produced by those too unsophisticated to know the true etymologies of these words; they instead reflected a quest for ‘deeper and hidden connections’ to which the surface forms of language were thought to give clues” (Yelle 2003, 46). Once upon a time, it was enough to glorify the emperor in order to guarantee social cohesion. This was now no longer the case. Society itself had to be glorified. And cohesion became the divine substance circulating around its body. Durkheim was not worried about criticizing (or demonstrating the non-existence of) the (divine) object that religious men claimed they turned to. On the contrary, with paternal solicitude he was reassuring: that object exists. But there's no need to call it with names of gods, or of one god. That object is society itself: “It is the same for its members as a god is for his followers”. (2014, 407) Over the course of his unclassifiable eleven-volume work covering Greek myth, the Vedas, Baudelaire, Kafka, Tiepolo, the Hebrew Bible, and all other things besides, Calasso traces the arising of the category of the sacred, its transformation into sovereignty, and its slippage, first into the social and then into nothing. Along the way, he paints vivid but fragmented pictures of a wide array of historical figures. One, in particular, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838), the subject and opening narrator of Calasso's first book, The Ruin of Kasch, speaks directly to the concerns raised by Yelle. Over the course of his career, Talleyrand successfully navigated revolutions and counterrevolutions to hold successive positions of power and influence in the governments of Louis XVI, the revolutionary Directorate, the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Bourbon restoration of Louis XVII. He had the remarkable ability to seemingly shift his allegiances at just the right moments (but without ever actually changing anything at all) and to remain indispensable (if never liked or trusted) to ideologues of all stripes. Calasso sees this as a product of his being “the first to understand that the new world, as it emerged from the Napoleonic Age in the hope of finding some kind of equilibrium, was no longer expecting, was not demanding a law but the semblance of a law.” Calasso continues, “[An] absence of law, a total submission to power and to short-lasting agreements between powers was exactly what the world couldn't bring itself to admit, though it practiced it daily” (1994, 19). It is a difficult path, which has no name, no points of reference, apart from those that are coded and are strictly personal. But it is also a path along which one encounters the unexpected assistance of kindred voices, as in a clandestine constellation. I don't believe we can expect any more, in the fraction of time in which we live. And yet, if we look carefully, that is an enormous amount. (2014, 407) Even as a historical study, however, the book is not only incomplete, it is lacking in perspective. It has, for example, no reference to the phenomenon typified by the Crucifixions by Crivelli or to the fascinating elements of devil worship in Calvinism. (Sharp 1954, 327) The reference to Crivelli is probably the artist's depiction of Christ in agony. The painting he was most likely thinking of is currently in the Art Institute of Chicago, as it probably was in 1950 when Sharp was writing his review. But what could he possibly be referring to when he writes “the fascinating elements of devil worship in Calvinism” as if it should have been as familiar to the reader as Crivelli was? As if pointing out its absence from the book he was reviewing was a final piece of damning evidence of its incompleteness as a historical study and/or its lack of perspective? And above all, what phenomenon do Crivelli's depictions of Christ and Calvinism's supposed tendencies toward demonolatry typify? Neither of the scholars of Calvin that I have consulted could make any sense of Sharp's words whatsoever beyond a guess that they refer to double predestination somehow. But double predestination, while it could be read as positively assessing damnation as proof of the ultimate sovereignty of God, neither contains nor entails any elements of devil worship. If Sharp were so ignorant of Calvinism as to believe that it did, why would he use it as an example? And if it had been a casual reference to something with which he was largely unfamiliar, why would he describe it as if he himself had been fascinated by it? If we want to take Sharp literally, how do we understand the connection he saw between Calvinism, devil worship, and the Crucifixion? [Let] godly readers consider how honorable it would be for Christ to have been more unmanly and cowardly than most men of the common sort! Thieves and other wrongdoers arrogantly hasten to death; many despise it with haughty courage; others bear it calmly. What sort of constancy or greatness would it have been for the Son of God to be stricken and almost stupefied with the dread of death? (1960, 519) Calvin, the greatest defender of God's sovereignty since Augustine, could only preserve that sovereignty by damning (temporarily at least) the Son of God. The torments of Christ in Hell, and by extension the devil who inflicts them, thereby take center stage in Calvin's quest to understand God's unlimited power with the limited perspective of human beings. The phenomenon that Sharp understood to be typified by the sufferings of Christ, as depicted by Crivelli and imagined by Calvin, is thus the unsettling tendency of sovereignty, when carried to its logical conclusion, to glorify cruelty and enthrone Satan himself.