Political Hebraism and the Christian political theology of citizenship

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Abstract

Political Hebraism and the Christian political theology of citizenship
Catherine R. Power
University of Toronto
catherine.power@mail.utoronto.ca

This paper asks how the sovereign state model first put forward by Jean Bodin in the 16th century as a means to peacefully manage and accommodate diversity became a model for the homogenization of the political community and the suspicion of Jewish difference in the 18th century Enlightenment and onward.

Bodin, who wrote amidst the internecine violence of the French Wars of Religion, put forward the notion of a unified sovereign under whom a plurality of citizens could peacefully live. Bodin, the self-described ‘discoverer’ of sovereignty, made extensive use of Hebraic sources, both biblical and rabbinic, when constructing his divine model of sovereignty and citizenship. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, writing almost a century later, took Bodin’s sovereignty to its absolutist extreme, but re-envisioned the qualities of citizenship. Where Bodin’s citizen was simply, “one who enjoys the common liberty and the protection of authority,” and thus potentially of diverse origins and confessions, Bossuet’s citizen is a Catholic desciple of Christ whose, “Gospel renders men more fit to be good citizens.” Unlike Bodin, Bossuet is careful to base his theological arguments on solidly Christological grounds, even as he makes extensive use of the Hebrew bible as a source for models of temporal sovereignty and political commonwealth. By upholding Christ-like forebearance as the model for citizenship, Bossuet supplements Bodin’s more ecumenical ideas about political subjection with a Catholic (in both its universal and specific denominational sense) political theology of the modern fantasy of homogenous political community.

Bossuet’s political theology of citizenship took on increasing salience in the following century when the sovereign and the [Christian, homogenized] citizenry became coterminous. By examining developments in the political theology of sovereignty and citizenship from its Bodinian origins to its absolutist, Christian apogee in Bossuet, we can better understand how Bodin’s model of sovereignty and citizenship that were put forward as a means of accommodating early modern France’s religious diversity came to frame Jewish difference as potentially existentially challenging and Jews & Judaism as a constitutive other in the centuries that followed.

Author

• Catherine R. Power, University of Toronto