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THE NEW INQUISITIONS: HERETIC-HUNTING AND THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM |
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Acknowledgments My thanks to the journals Telos and Esoterica for publishing earlier versions of two chapters from this book, and to various readers for their editorial comments and suggestions. The chapter on Voegelin appeared in Telos in Summer 2002, and the chapter on Schmitt appeared in Esoterica in 2004. This book is dedicated to those many colleagues and friends with whom I have shared enjoyable and illuminating conversations over the past few years. This book represents an inductive intellectual journey, a form of intellectual history with relatively few precedents or analogues. Its closest analogues are -- perhaps ironically -- those works and authors to which it is most indebted, but of which it is sometimes most critical. I had read before nearly all the broad interpretations of political and intellectual history offered by figures such as Oswald Spengler, Isaiah Berlin, John Lukacs, and others, and had taken from each the particular insights that they offered. Intellectual history requires an interpretation, an argument, if it is to reveal insights into history and a better understanding of our present time. It is not enough to creep over the minutiae of the past and never come to any conclusions -- much more valuable is to make broad sense of what one sees, to make a case. To writers like these, I am indebted. In making my case, I have undertaken an inductive inquiry: I begin with a conundrum, and slowly, by accumulating evidence, seek to solve it. Our conundrum is nothing less than the great scourge of the twentieth century: the emergence of totalitarianism in a variety of forms. Previous ages saw nothing like the barbarism of the twentieth century as manifested in totalitarianism. For the first time, a massive technical apparatus was marshaled against individual freedom, and was responsible for the slaughter not of thousands, but of millions upon millions of people. Understandably, totalitarianism is often treated as having come nearly ex nihilo into the world in the twentieth century, and is depicted as having few real antecedents. One has to admit the fundamental newness of the gulags and the great heaps of bodies, the institutionalized murder of millions, the security state and the totalization of war in the twentieth century. Further confusing much scholarship in this area, the right tends to depict communism as the worst form of totalitarianism, whereas the left sees fascism as the worst. Even today, it is often regarded as somewhat egregious to treat communism and fascism as aspects of a single phenomenon that we can term simply totalitarianism. But the more I have studied those states that can reasonably be seen as totalitarian, the more I have been convinced that what are often depicted as incommensurable and opposed systems are in fact very nearly identical in how they actually operate. Secret police, secret imprisonments, torture, show trials, insistence on public confessions, public executions, gulags, or concentration camps in which people are held incommunicado and interminably in what is sometimes figuratively called a "state of exception," but what is in fact the attempted suspension and removal of basic human rights to, at minimum, a fair trial. All of these characteristics of totalitarianism recur in National Socialist and in Communist states alike. These are among the operative "markers" of a totalitarian state, whatever putative form of government it might appear to have. Such a state might seem putatively a "liberal democracy," but the presence of these markers would indicate that the real state tends toward totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is the modern phenomenon of total centralized state power coupled with the obliteration of individual human rights: in the totalized state, there are those in power, and there are the objectified masses, the victims. And the overarching question left by the twentieth century is simply this: where did the phenomenon of totalitarianism really come from? It is not enough to look back merely a century or two for the origins of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, as most historians tend to do. One has to look more broadly at precedents in the West in order to understand the real nature of totalitarianism. What is the intellectual genealogy that leads inexorably toward the totalizing state, the single most important (and sinister) legacy of the twentieth century? As you will see, our inquiry will lead toward some unexpected conclusions that have important ramifications not only for how we understand the course of history, but also for the dangers that we still face today. When I began the journey that this book represents, I did not expect that it would lead me where it has. It has genuinely been a journey of discoveries. The journey began with a foray into the anti-gnostic work of Eric Voegelin, which in turn led me to Carl Schmitt, then to Theodor Adorno, and on to Joseph de Maistre in a kind of spiral, each arc of which turned on the axial question of the Inquisition and of the central role that it played not only as an institution but even more as a guiding metaphor in Western history. Each time that I thought the project had reached an impasse, a new chapter revealed another dimension of the intellectual genealogy that stretches from the emergence of historical Christianity in late antiquity, through the medieval and early modem periods, straight into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In my view, the fundamental politico social question facing us is how to avoid totalitarianism. The technical and sociobureaucratic apparatus that makes a totalitarian state possible are already in place in much of the world, and what is more, great swathes of the world's population were already subject to a totalitarian state in the twentieth century: in the Soviet Union and the lands under its domination, like Eastern Europe; in China and the lands under its domination, like Tibet or Hong Kong; in Germany, Italy, and Spain under the various forms of fascism; in various dictatorships; and even to some extent in states sometimes deemed "liberal" can we see the tell-tale markers of totalitarianism. The twentieth century, seen as a whole, suggests that periods of relative prosperity and freedom are more anomalous than they are the norm. How do we prevent the ascendance of the totalitarian state? In order to understand the nature of totalitarianism, we need to know where it came from, and what its fundamental characteristics are. The truth is, what we're considering is nothing less than the face of evil itself, and to the extent that this is so, we cannot lay blame for the advent of totalitarianism at the feet of any single individual or institution. Yet it is not enough to say that totalitarianism is simply evil and let it go at that. The phenomenon of totalitarianism emerged in the twentieth century as an archetypal form out of the West, and it took hold in societies with a great cultural-religious inheritance: Germany, Italy, Russia, China. How could this have happened? How could the nightmares of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao have come forth out of the former greatness of Germany, Russia, and China? Clearly there is a preexisting archetype on which totalitarianism could draw, an archetype that answered some visceral need within some of humanity. What follows is an inquiry into what that archetype is, and how it functions. We begin where this archetype has its roots: in late antiquity and in the emergence of historicist Christianity.
Among the most pivotal concepts in the history of ideas in the West is that of heresy -- arguably the single most definitive concept in the early Christian period. Etymologically, heresy derives from hairein, a Greek word meaning "to choose." A "heretic," then, is one who chooses, one who therefore exemplifies freedom of individual thought, and by implication, who does not accept at least some of the doctrines of the corporate Church. If, on the one hand, the heretic is one who chooses, then the heretic exists by affirmation -- but, on the other hand, in the context of an organized Church, the heretic is also one who may refuse. It is in this sense, more than any other, that the heretic can be termed a dualist -- for as soon as the representatives of an institutionalized Church insist on a particular set of doctrines and no others, those who choose are placed between two worlds or spheres. The institutionalization of the historicist Church in turn creates the possibility of the heretical. After all, another model is quite possible. When one looks East, to Eastern Christianity, or even farther East, to the religions of India, China, and Tibet, for example, one sees some more pluralistic models. Hinduism -- if we can use that term -- embodies a great variety of traditions, and is famously absorptive of new traditions. Rather than establishing a Vedantic, a Vedic, or for that matter, a Shaivite, a Tantric or some other doctrine at the expense of all the others, one finds instead what we might call an uneasy pluralism. Certainly there are forms of Indian religion that stand more or less in opposition to one another, but the tendency is nonetheless to live and let live. The same is true in, for instance, Tibetan Buddhism. A great variety of practices and traditions exist under a large umbrella, and although some are more dominant than others, still there is broad willingness to coexist. Traditional China, too, was famous for its uneasy pluralism, where Taoist, Buddhism, Confucianism, and sometimes even Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity all could live side by side. There was no single tradition that insisted on the heretical nature of the others to the extent of establishing permanent dominance. However, relatively early in the Christian era, we see a very different dynamic emerging. On the one side, there is a pluralistic model akin to those found in Asian religious traditions. This pluralistic model is loosely termed "Gnosticism," because what unites it is not outward -- corporate, historical, and bureaucratic organization -- but inward knowledge, or gnosis. The pluralistic nature of Gnosticism is visible in its most famous collection of treatises, known as the Nag Hammadi Library. In this collection, we see Platonic, Hermetic, Jewish moralistic, and Christian visionary treatises together, side by side. An insistence on inward spiritual knowledge or gnosis informs many of these treatises, but by no means all of them. Gnosticism has occasionally been likened to Buddhism, and there are more resemblances and even possible historical affiliations than we can consider here. Most important, for our purposes, is this: had Gnosticism become the dominant model in early Christianity, Christianity would have been a much more pluralistic tradition. But, as is visible in the collection of writings under the rubric of "the Ante- Nicene Fathers" -- so named because they preceded the Nicene Conference that decided doctrinal matters decisively in favor of historicist Christianity-we see the other end of the politicosocial spectrum. If the Gnostics tended toward an uneasy pluralism, most of the Ante-Nicene Fathers tended toward a united bureaucratic, corporate, and historicist organization. It's true that the greatest of the Ante-Nicene Fathers -- St. Clement of Alexandria, and Origen -- encouraged a pluralistic model that explicitly included an orthodox gnosis. And, again, had Clement's views prevailed, so, too, would some measure of Christian pluralism that would have avoided much and perhaps all of the anti-heresiological frenzies of subsequent centuries. Alas, this was not to be. Instead, with the writings of figures such as Tertullian, Epiphanius, and Irenaeus, we see a series of bitter denunciations of all those who might be deemed heretics. Even within what came to be deemed orthodoxy, there was a spectrum of views that included not only Clement of Alexandria and Origen but also Dionysius the Areopagite -- all three of whom became the basis for the mystical currents within Christianity. These mystical or orthodox gnostic currents were not concerned with hunting down and destroying other people who held dissenting views -- or to put it another way, with objectifying, vilifying, and seeking to destroy others -- but, rather, turned their attention inward and sought the inner transcendence of the subject-object dichotomy on which heresy-hunting is inevitably based. Thus, Clement of Alexandria, for example, embraced and encouraged an orthodox gnostic spirituality that, by widening the possibilities within orthodoxy itself, at least the possibility of a limited pluralistic clemency. But this was not the dominant tradition within early Christianity, the tradition that ultimately became known as orthodoxy. Indeed, still today one finds Roman Catholic authors who vilify even Clement of Alexandria, and so inadvertently confirm their own indebtedness to the bitter anti-heresiological rhetoric of Tertullian, Irenaus, and Epiphanius. [1] Tertullian, in his de Praescriptione Haereticorum, or "On the Church's Prescriptive Rule Against Heresies of All Kinds," exemplifies in its very title the broad swathe of condemnation that he levels. A praescriptio is a legal term, meaning an objection or demurral, and Tertullian in many respects inaugurates the basis for a legal or juridical persecution of those who, drawing from "pagan philosophy," develop their own spiritual interpretations or understandings (ch. VII). Perhaps most fascinating about Tertullian's anti-heresiological writing is its clear derivation from Roman legal tradition. Tertullian is essentially taking into Christianity the prosecutorial or persecutorial Roman attitude toward Christianity -- which he decries at length. In ad Nationes, probably dated to around 217 A.D., Tertullian seeks to vindicate Christianity from the accusations of the Romans, just as he did in his Apologia, which has been dated to around 200 A.D. In both treatises, he writes of how Romans hated Christians until they became converted, and then they "begin now to hate what they had formerly been" (ch. 1). He discusses how the Romans would torture Christians in order to extract confessions, and decries the Roman insistence on forced confession followed by punishment (ch. II). And yet we can see what Tertullian denounces as Roman practice in fact is being absorbed -- in such works as de Praescriptione Haereticorum -- into orthodox Christianity and in turn applied to "heretics." Tertullian's work in itself represents that peculiar point at which Rome is being transformed from the center of opposition to the center of Western Christianity. During precisely this shift, Christianity goes from being persecuted to being persecutor. And in this shift, Christianity takes on a particular kind of anti-gnostic cast; it takes on rationalism and historicism as primary characteristics. Tertullian, for instance, insists that only one interpretation of the scriptures and only one set of doctrines are authentically Christian, and he heaps ridicule on the claims of the Valentinian gnostics, for instance, that there are more profound dimensions of spiritual knowledge than those accessible through reason and belief. [2] It is in such works that we begin to see the insistence on the historical nature of Christianity. Historicity and legalistic reasoning become far more primary in this tradition, which we see too in the work of Augustine of Hippo (also trained as a Roman lawyer) several hundred years later. In the period between Tertullian and Augustine, we see orthodox Christianity solidifYinginto the basis for a centralized bureaucratic power insistent on the primacy of a single set of doctrines and on historicism combined with what we can only call an adversarial or prosecutorial rationalism. In this, we see the foundation for the later development of the Inquisition, and for the consistent hostility toward gnosticism that has haunted Western Christianity throughout its sub· sequent history. Although the word "heresy" derives from an innocuous Greek word for individual choice, it became associated with demonic influence or with the devil. The demonization of heresy began relatively early -- we can see it in the works of Tertullian and Irenaeus -- but by the medieval period, the attribution of heresy to the devil or to demons took on a special power. The heretic was typically depicted in orthodox writings as proud, deceptively pious, secretive, and obstinate in defending his heresy, all characteristics said to have been inspired by demonic forces. The demonization of heresies that became commonplace in the medieval period in turn made possible the hideous treatment of heretics: because they represented the devil, they could be tortured or killed. The hardening of the Church's attitude toward heretics corresponds, in many respects, to the Church's bureaucratization and centralization during the same period. If the mainstream Church took on its bureaucratic, historicist form by way of contrast with heresies in late antiquity, in the medieval period the authority of the Church was underscored and intensified by exactly the same means, but made more effective through the bureaucratic-juridical machinery of the Inquisition. There are two aspects of the Inquisition that are particularly significant for our later argument connecting it to the modern era. First, the Inquisition represented the peculiar legal construct of the prosecutor and the judge being the same. This accounted for a great deal of the fear that the Inquisition generated in the general populace, especially (for instance) in Spain during the period of the Spanish Inquisition. If the prosecutor and the judge are identical, and if on top of that one is unable to face one's accusers, who operate in secret, then one can see that the inquisitorial method itself has a nightmarish, even hellish quality. Second, the Inquisition represented a peculiar union of religious and secular state power. It is true that the inquisitors did not themselves kill their victims but, rather, turned the condemned over to the secular arm of the state. Yet this very arrangement -- which reminds one of Pilate washing his hands of Christ's fate -- itself represented a union of the religious and the secular. And there is a final aspect of the Inquisition that connects it to modernity and that is perhaps the most important of all: the "crime" in question is fundamentally a "crime" of thought. That is: by definition, "heresy" is independent thought that diverges from standard Church doctrine. Anti-heresiologists seek to enforce uniformity of thought: that's the very nature of the beast. And in this enforced corporatism, more than in any other place, we see the predecessor of the totalitarian state, where again, dissent is considered a criminal act. It is true that the Soviet Union and Communist China represent violently secular states in which religion itself is controlled and often regarded as criminal -- yet it is also true that expressing dissenting thought in such totalitarian states is punished by secular inquisitors with very severe penalties that include torture, imprisonment, and death. Enforced corporatism is seen as vital to the centralized, totalizing state, just as it was to the medieval Church. Of course, one has to wonder why. Why is dissent so feared by the totalizing state? It is here that the term "ideocracy" might be introduced. [3] An ideocracy is a form of government characterized by an inflexible adherence to a set of doctrines, or ideas, typically enforced by criminal penalties. Such an ideocracy is Communist China, where state ideology enforced criminal penalties for even possessing a photograph of H.H. the Dalai Lama, let alone for professing a belief in an independent Tibet or in religious freedom. An ideocracy is monistic and totalistic; it insists on the total application of ideology to every aspect of life, and in it, pluralism is anathema. In this sense it conforms to the theory of Benito Mussolini, who said that: The Fascist conception of the state is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual value may exist, much less have any value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian and the Fascist State, as a synthesis and a unit which includes all values, interprets, develops, and lends additional power to the whole life of a people. [4] The totalitarian state -- a phenomenon of modernity -- consists in the attempted extension of the secular state into all dimensions of life, and the only way this would be possible is through the imposition of a totalitarian ideology that can brook not a single dissenter or heretic. In an ideocracy, the greatest criminal is imagined by ideocrats to be the dissenter, the one who by his very existence reveals the totalistic construct imposed on society to be a lie. Czeslaw Milosz and the Captive Mind In his book Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz wrote about what it was like to live in the ideocracy of Eastern Europe under Soviet domination, and heresy and orthodoxy were his main themes. Milosz likened the mentality cultivated under a Communist ideocracy to a kind of acting, analogous to the Persian concept of ketman. Ketman is a word for the dissimulations of heretics in Persian Islam, who take great pleasure in pretending to be what they are not in order to avoid censure or punishment, and about whom Arthur Gobineau wrote:
Hence, for example, those under Russian occupation carry Russian books and proclaim the merits of the Russian people, even as they privately detest the Soviet Union as barbarous, and Soviets as entirely contemptible. Milosz goes on to observe that under the "New Faith" of Communism, "the varieties of Ketman are practically unlimited," and "the naming of deviations cannot keep pace with the weeding of a garden so full of unexpected specimens of heresy." [6] Milosz's erudite and beautifully written meditation on the nature of the captive mind under the totalitarian state does draw on the concept of ketman from Persia, but his primary metaphor in the rest of his book is heresy and indoctrination under Catholicism. Thus, he writes, "the Catholic Church wisely recognized that faith is more a matter of collective suggestion than of individual conviction." Communist meetings function the same way, Milosz observes: their function is "under the heading of collective magic. The rationalism of [Communist) doctrine is fused with sorcery, and the two strengthen each other. Free discussion is, of course, eliminated." [7] Confusion between Church doctrines and Communist doctrines was encouraged by clerics who became Party tools, like Justinian Marina, the Romanian patriarch, who said, "Christ is a new man. The new man is the Soviet man. Therefore Christ is a Soviet man!" [8] This confusion, Milosz points out, is arguably the greatest lie in centuries, but, all the same, it illustrates how Communism drew on and perverted Christianity for its own ends. What is more, Milosz himself shows how in Communism, the "reactionary" is anyone who thinks wrongly (that is, in conflict with the Politburo police and official state dogma). False views lead to bad action, and thus those who doubt state doctrines are "criminals." Hence "Catholics who accept the Party line gradually lose everything except the phraseology of their Christian metaphysics." [9] For the Communist Party in power, nothing is "as great a menace as is heresy." [10] And so, Milosz concludes, "when one considers the matter logically, it becomes obvious that intellectual terror is a principle that Leninism-Stalinism can never forsake, even if it should achieve victory on a world scale. The enemy, in a potential form, will always be there; the only friend will be the man who accepts the doctrine 100 per cent. If he accepts only 99 per cent, he will necessarily have to be considered a foe, for from that remaining I per cent a new church can arise." [11] Communism enforces on people a numbing intellectual deadness generated by fear of the state Inquisition. In place of Christian faith, it substitutes doctrines of "historical inevitability" and "progress" on earth, but it functions similarly to the Spanish Inquisition. In the Communist system, the state that Lenin claimed would wither away is become "all-powerful. It holds a sword over the head of every citizen; it punishes him for every careless word." For, Milosz continues, "orthodoxy cannot release its pressure on men's minds; it would no longer be an orthodoxy." Communist orthodoxy requires an "enemy," a "heretic" for self-definition. [12] And only the widespread realization of how false and hollow are its claims will bring about the sudden and total collapse of the Soviet empire, Milosz prophesied. What Milosz wrote about life under Communist domination-and in particular about the almost universal use of ketman (hypocritical subterfuge) in order to survive -- is strikingly borne out in the history of Catholicism as well. The Inquisitors were constantly on guard against the tendency of Cathars and other "heretics" to provide equivocal answers to questions or to "falsely" profess their belief in orthodox Church doctrine. Of course, this created an almost impossible situation for those accused of heresy, because even if they espoused Church doctrines, this could be used against the "heretics" under the accusation that they didn't truly believe what they were saying. Here we see the dynamic that Milosz saw at work in the Soviet state so many centuries later: under state-enforced coercion of belief and in an environment of inquisitorial terror, even a profession of orthodoxy may not be enough to save one. The condemnation of others becomes the primary way of saving oneself Here is the self-perpetuating mechanism of institutional terror: informants in a system of "purging" those deemed "heretical." Milosz recognized that the new inquisitorial apparatus of the Communist state has much in common with the apparatus of earlier Catholicism, even if Communism is officially a mortal enemy of religious faith itself. But there is another dimension of this commonality that Milosz only tangentially recognizes, and it is this: both the doctrines that produced the Communist inquisition, and the doctrines that produced the persecution of "heretics" in the medieval and early modem periods were thoroughly historicist. In both cases, one had to profess belief in the historical Church or in the triumph of history in the New State -- or be deemed heretical and subject to the most horrendous penalties. Mysticism, transcendence, even art and literature -- all that encouraged people to look inward into the heights of what humanity can achieve -- in such a system represents a great threat. Even the greatest mystic in Western Christian history -- Meister Eckhart -- was declared heretical by some Church officials. Milosz outlines how the "captive mind" under the Communist ideocracy is forced to twist itself into requisite ugly forms or also be condemned: neither authentic religion nor authentic art -- both of which inherently transcend the confines of history -- can be tolerated under an ideocracy. Why? What is it about the "heretical" advocate for timelessness that so frightens the ideocrat as to produce an Inquisition? Although many reasons might be adduced, the most important of them is, I think, the need to enforce a strictly historicist perspective on a populace. Whether it is the Inquisition and the doctrines that produced that institution, or the Communist state and its doctrines that insist on its own Progress through history (even if it is Progress over tens of millions of corpses), or for that matter the futuristic mechanism of the Fascist state, all represent a concerted effort to eliminate individual freedom and to insist upon a corporate unity enforced by terror. To such a mentality, the greatest enemy is not external, but internal: it is the one who insists on the primacy of timelessness over time, of eternity over history. The "heretic" or rebel who has glimpsed eternity represents the greatest challenge of all for these corporate institutions, which by contrast must restrict themselves to the historical-temporal world. Thus, the totalitarian inquisitorial power pursues relentlessly those who insist on the transcendence of history through religion, art, and literature, sometimes even more than it pursues the political rebel. Dostoevsky understood this dynamic-indeed, he foresaw its terrible consequences in the coming century. In his great novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky included a chapter entitled "The Grand Inquisitor," in which he outlined precisely the connection between the Catholic Inquisition and the coming totalitarianism that was to infect not only his beloved Russia but also China, Korea, and many other countries. Dostoevsky intuited already in the nineteenth century the heart of the matter: that if Christ's kingdom is not of this world, still there are those who would attempt to enforce a new kingdom that is precisely of this world. Thus, the Grand Inquisitor himself says "we are not working with Thee, but with him [the devil] -- that is our mystery." We, he continues, "shall be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man," through "some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap." [13] The Grand Inquisitor is one who rejects transcendence and embraces immanence -- that is, historical, worldly power -- in order to "help" humanity realize earthly "utopia" through the obliteration of human freedom. Dostoevsky could see totalitarianism coming, and he understood its predecessor, the Inquisition, all too well. But what is the historical nature of this link? Where do we find the ties that bind the emergence of totalitarianism in the twentieth century with its historical precedent in the Inquisition? In what follows, we will explore such links, and see exactly how "heresy" could shift from a religious to a secular context -- indeed, how a secular Inquisition could emerge in the twin forms of totalitarianism: fascism and communism. In the figures we'll investigate -- pivotal authors such as Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt, and pivotal historic figures such as Lenin and Stalin -- we will see how the archetypal institution of the Inquisition emerges in the totalitarianism that marks the twentieth century, and that arguably is the most characteristic manifestation of modernity itself.
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