The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

218 M. Ojakangas
eagerly than ever. According to him, every nomos is ‘based on sacred orientations’
(Schmitt 2003a: 70). What has disappeared is the belief that the sacred in
the world can be restored by restoring the grandeur of Christ and especially by
reawakening the memory of His sacrificial death, the event of the sacred for
Christians. In other words, what has disappeared is his belief that revitalizing the
memory of the death of Christ would be enough in the age of absolute profanity.
To be sure, Schmitt, like a good Christian, seemed to believe that the sacred can
only be an event. Only an event, a great event within the immanence of history,
can elevate existence beyond the senselessness of absolute immanence and
bestow order and orientation upon man. But his longing was for a new event, a
new, violent beginning, that is, a new sacred – for only violence, as Schmitt
well knew, can re-establish the difference between the sacred and the profane.
This is, at least, a perspective that we cannot completely dismiss when we
read Schmitt who, only four years after the most atrocious war ever experienced
in world history, was able to write: ‘When culture comes, heroes come to
an end, says Hegel. For us, this culture has become dull. This peace is getting
foul for me. Therefore, we call for heroes. And they will come!’ (Schmitt 1988:
249).
This is not to say that the theological takes fundamental precedence for
Schmitt, as Meier claims. Rather the fundamental precedence is an order in
which the theological is not an autonomous sphere, as in Christianity, but pervades
the whole society. In other words, as has been pointed out, we do not find
a theological interpretation of politics in Schmitt, but, on the contrary, a political
interpretation of theology. We find an attempt to reintegrate religion into politics,
the two having been separated first by the Jews and subsequently by the
Protestants. Late modern secularized society is a result of this separation, which
is therefore also the origin of contemporary nihilism: ‘Our situation is completely
rotten [zersetzt]’, Schmitt writes in The Nomos of the Earth (2003a: 71)
– and it is rotten because the ‘original and natural unity of politics and religion’
(Schmitt 1996c: 10) was destroyed far too long ago, the unity which alone could
endow men with meaningful order and genuine orientation. According to
Schmitt, of course, such a unity should not be a worldwide unity. In fact, it
could not be worldwide, because meaning and orientation are always a matter of
borderlines. Only if the solid ground of the earth is delineated by enclosures and
boundaries, will the orders and orientations of human life become apparent:
‘True and authentic fundamental order is based, at its essential core, on certain
partitioning up of the earth’ (Schmitt 1997: 37). The unity of politics and religion
can only take place in a pluralistic world, because in a worldwide unity,
there is no room for politics, the constitutive borderline of which is, after all, the
borderline between friends and enemies. This is why the question of the enemy
always remained Schmitt’s own. 14