The previous chapter focused on the Scriptures as a figure that speaks of the instituted practice of writing as a constitutive element of any political community. What makes sacred Scriptures an exceptional type of writing is their prophetic character. This means that Scriptures unfolds figuratively in historical time, but also contains an idea of historical time. It is to this aspect that this chapter is devoted.

Every historical narrative is written in a present time – a now – which is not only pervaded by the past, but also looks towards something in the future. In fact, the act of writing historical narratives – the usual way of interpreting history, that is, of building history as such – is at the same time a way of shaping destiny. In this sense, historians seem to be like prophets. But can the historian achieve the future he or she imagines? The future cannot be master-built from the present. Nietzsche himself once said that ‘the past always speaks as an oracle’. In fact, past, present and future are intermingled in every twist of history in an enigmatic way that is structurally analogical to the representation of time in prophecy.

Prophetic Time: Historical Time from the Future

Prophetic literature is central to divine revelations. We find it not only in Israel, but in every ancient civilisation. The prophet is not a soothsayer, who interprets exterior signs; he is not a theologian, who interprets a given revelation. The prophet is the voice of God moved by his divine spirit to interpret the ‘signs of the times’. Certainly, prophets coexisted with the soothsayers and the augurs in ancient civilisations; but unlike them they did not try to initiate a course of action or to legitimise a situation. The role of prophets was rather to make a historical interpretation.

Prophetic history and human history are uncoupled from the point of view of their factuality and of their possible interpretations. However, from the point of view of meaning, they cannot be completely separated: first, because prophetical narratives imply a definite judgement of the events of history; and, secondly, because profane history can only expect a future to come, but not assure the future as prophetic history does.

It is because of their potency in generating obligations that oaths are at the heart of the constitution of political communities. The oath is one of those concepts that have undergone numerous theological– political transfers, to which Carl Schmitt referred when talking about political theology. Schmitt himself thought that the oath will always remain a necessary institution, no matter how much it might seem to have disappeared from public life: whatever the formula, it ensures internal disposition, so that the institutions of the modern state are not abused and their very foundations destroyed. In fact, when written constitutions emerge, legislatures seek to institute and sanction their identity through solemn declarations, for example, by appealing to God or some other moral or ideological formula. Paolo Prodi, following Schmitt's theological–political hypothesis, declares that the oath is the basis of the political covenant in Western societies. Prodi's main theological–political argument is that the modern state has taken the place of God as the absolute witness of every oath as a result of the secularisation process. Hence, the oath has become a prerogative of sovereignty.

The oath, as a mutual promise between two or more persons to trust each other's word under the sight of the ‘immortal God’, can be understood as a meta-political guarantor of the political bond. Consequently, it is possible to think as Prodi does, that the decline of the oath to the status of a solely secular commitment, which can be broken at any time, carries with it the crisis of the very idea of political community. In contrast to this catastrophist thesis, Aroney still perceives that oaths of office and oaths of allegiance have marked the path of the authority of the modern state and continue to do so until today. In fact, he argues, that we can still find the theological–political paradox at the core of the state's institutional proceedings and arrangements. On the one hand, oaths seek to guarantee the performance of official duties; on the other hand, they subject the content of those duties to another potestas external to that of the state, that of God.

Any discourse can only claim to be an untimely intervention in the context of a discursive framework. This book, which aims to elucidate on the theological–political figures present in the constitution of the political, is therefore written against a backdrop. This backdrop is made up of many interwoven threads that are the result of numerous discussions bearing on the question of the political and the sacred. If the characteristics of this backdrop were not made at least minimally explicit, it would not be possible to understand the course of action that is intended to be followed and developed in the rest of the book. This is what this brief introduction intends to do.

The Backdrop

The first clarification to be made is that we speak of the theological instead of the religious, because the concept of “the religious’ is much more blurred. When we use the expression ‘the theological’ we are not referring to positive confessions, that is to say, to a set of dogmatic beliefs held by any one church, which is one of the meanings of ‘religion’, as in, for example, the Christian religion. As Trevor Stack argues, the proper meaning of religion is defined as a counterweight to the modern state. In fact, the category of religion appeared and started to be used in opposition to the modern state, meaning those kind of confessions excluded by the state. Nevertheless, religion can be retraced to ancient times, even if, as Talal Asad has suggested, the Reformation was crucial in order to construct the category ‘religion’.

We speak of the theological in a similar way that Hent de Vries speaks of ‘religion, beyond a concept’ to signify a ‘set of phenomena whose simultaneous density (“thickness”) and elusiveness (or “thinness”) belong to the “heart” of this “matter” and constitute its references in their very “essence”, that is to say, their logic and grammar’. To move beyond the concept as defined by de Vries means entering into a constellation of particulars, such as words, gestures, texts and practices that have the character of thickness and elusiveness at the same time; that is, that they conceal while they reveal. The absence–presence dialectic is at the core of these phenomena: historical origins, scriptural sources or ritual practices.

The complex relationship between the post-secular and the theological turn in philosophy and political theology is the backdrop that inspired the main theme of in this book: to what extent the centrality of theological discourse in originating meanings, symbols and realities has been, and continues to be, relevant in shaping instituted practices in the political realm.

This relevance has historically been shown in the conceptual transfers and mutual borrowings of terms and meanings from one field to another: from the theological to the political and vice versa. Through this hybridisation of theological and political vocabulary, it is shown that some divine traces could be considered embedded in institutionalised political practices. Throughout the various chapters, we have tried to discover the divine marks, the theological signatures or, as we have characterised them here, the figures of the divine embedded in certain instituted political practices. These figures speak of God. In a way, they reveal God by saying something about Him or by representing Him. The five theopolitical figures examined in this book are other names of God found in the political realm. Following the tradition of the apophatic theology, they name God in a negative and symbolic way: in particular, He is the written revelation (scripture); He is the to come (prophecy); He is truthful and faithful (oath); He is mercy and forgiving (charisma); and He is the absolute host (hospitality). These figures refer to symbolic meanings which happen as historical events representing the divine in a negative way. In fact, these theopolitical figures appear in the form of a paradox: while being the necessary conditions for the constitution of any possible community, they always remain unconditional and impossible in their absolute happening.

Hence, this book is intended to be a contribution to the theological turn in political philosophy. It reinscribes contemporary political concepts and experiences in the ‘theological locus’ from which they supposedly come and at the same time looks for alternative semantic derivations for the political theory and practice. The discursive trajectory of the book has engaged with the discussions of different continental philosophers of the twentieth century, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, John Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion and Vladimir Jankélévitch among others.

Under the name of hospitality, we understand the generous opening of our space and time to another who is in principle a stranger. This willingness to welcome the other, both stranger and fellow, is an unconditional duty for anyone who wishes to live as a human being. Levinas and Derrida have written eloquently on this idea. But this is an old ‘Christian trope’. In fact, as Derrida notes in The Gift of Death, the mysterium tremendum of dying for the other is the secret of the historic and political responsibility that engulfs the future of European politics. The ‘weakness’ of a God who dies for the fellow other makes hospitality imaginable in a political context marked by the idea of a community with borders.

Derrida arrives at the idea of hospitality via the ideas of fraternity and friendship. In fact, in Politics of Friendship, Derrida undertakes the deconstruction of several political texts in which the idea of a political community is associated with that of proximity, as if it were an extension of the idea of the brotherhood proper to the family. His aim is to situate the political beyond fraternity and consequently beyond the family schema. The political deals with the distant other who arrives to my side; not with the one who is in my genealogy. Separation is the condition of possibility, and at the same time of impossibility, of the political friend, he says, echoing Schmitt's political concept of the political as friend–enemy relationship.

Indeed, one of the Christian tropes that Derrida takes most seriously is the Judeo-Christian ethos of ‘brotherhood’. He speaks of the Christian semantics of fraternity, specifically of a ‘christianization of fraternization’. In fact, brotherhood was a Christian appropriation of the classical Greco-Latin trope: ‘brother or sister in religion’. According to Derrida, Kant's statement that ‘all men represent themselves as brothers under a universal father’ remains rooted in the need for natural fraternity, and thus refers to the anthropological schema of the family. By deconstructing the elements of ‘natural’ and ‘spatial contiguity’, generally attributed to fraternity, Derrida tries to decentre the Christian trope of fraternity.