Hazony’s dichotomy between nations and empires, even if these were charitably considered as ideal types, was always a tendentious one, rapidly starting to erode when subjected to historical examination. In actuality, nations and empires have often been complicatedly intertwined and far from straightforwardly opposed (would the state of Israel—a prominent exemplar of nationhood in Hazony’s work—have been sustainable without America’s quasi-imperial hegemony?). Furthermore, as Waldstein rightly observes, imperial orders have often been far more hospitable to the concrete diversity of actually existing cultural and societal ecosystems and protective of their more marginal members than nation-states have been.
Indeed, the imposition of a false uniformity has often been a much greater temptation for nations, whose focus on forging a single united peoplehood can leave little room for a healthy pluralism. Liah Greenfeld, in her scintillating Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, claims that nationalism ‘is determined not by the character of its elements, but by a certain organizing principle which makes these elements into a unity and imparts to them a special significance’ (7). In contrast to the homogenization that often results from the monopolization and centralization of sovereignty more characteristic of nationalism, imperial hegemony can be much more tolerant and protective of a pluralistic and variegated order (as John Milbank observes in a recent Theopolis essay). As a principle of political organization, empires may have less of a totalizing impulse to assimilate their inhabitants than nations do, being better situated to recognize their alterity.
The identitarian and particularistic impulse of contemporary American ‘nationalism’ may ironically find its principal antagonist in the homogenizing and departicularizing impulse of the American national project itself (a national homogenizing and departicularizing impulse that also functions prominently in the vanguard of the globalism Hazony decries). The sustainability of the principle by which the USA was forged as a nation is increasingly uncertain as the societal and institutional dominance of the Protestantized Christian peoplehood of European cultural and historical origins to which it was tacitly wedded passes. As a majority-minority population takes its place and the cruel inhospitality of the former settlement to black Americans in particular becomes openly apparent, the totalizing national principle can end up functioning as a sort of moralized auto-immune disorder against the peoplehood that it once privileged. The long-term prognosis of this disease is increasingly uncertain. Hazony may be correct to recognize the importance of the particularity of peoplehood, yet nationalism has often proved a fickle spouse for those with such concerns.
Hazony presents ancient Israel as a paradigm case of a rise to nationhood, a kind of nationhood that he champions as normative. Much that Hazony says is instructive here, although there is something extraordinary about the character of Israel that Hazony does not sufficiently register (Numbers 23:9: ‘behold, a people dwelling alone, and not counting itself among the nations!’). Hazony’s account of Israel’s rise to nationhood focuses on disparate tribes joining together into a voluntary alliance, resulting in the formation of a national state (a narrative of ethnogenesis more congruent with the history of Rome than Israel). While Hazony is a perceptive reader of Scripture, here his political theory seems to get the better of his attentiveness to the text. Where Hazony presents the national order as something that supersedes (albeit without erasing) the order of tribes, producing a new somewhat homogenizing unity out of a variety of existing peoples, for the biblical account the nation of Israel is the outgrowth and expression of the life of a family—the house of Jacob. Just as the unity of a family is peculiarly and variously represented by specific members (typically the father as its empowering head and the mother at its heart, grandparents as its legacy-transmitting past, and the children as its strength and future promise), rather than a homogenizing unity for whose sake all members are interchangeable, so the unity of Israel was forged through and within its differences.
To achieve the national unity of the house of Jacob, a common sense of peoplehood and place had to be forged. The common memory of the unprecedented events and shared experience of the Exodus, institutionalized in Israel’s feasts and cult, were powerful unifying forces (Deuteronomy 4:34), albeit constantly threatened by forgetfulness and covenant infidelity. But this common peoplehood did not come at the expense of the diminution of the tribe’s individuality. Rather, Israel’s solidarity as a people depended to a surprising degree upon the setting apart of certain tribes from others (expressed in the blessings of Jacob). Judah’s destiny was as the royal tribe, but its place at the head of the tribes depended in part upon the special relationship that it formed with Benjamin. Benjamin was the first royal tribe, mediating between his brother Joseph’s powerful tribes in the north and the dominant Judah in the south, under whose wing he later came. Foreshadowing later history in Genesis, it was through his intercession for Benjamin that Judah healed the breach between Joseph and the brothers and allowed for their (re)unification. Levi united the tribes through his distinctive scattering among them as a centripetal force requiring their practice of hospitality and ordering them to the common cult, covenant memory, and sanctuary.
Israel’s nationhood required the overcoming of certain obstacles of geography. Perhaps the greatest initial obstacle to its nationhood was the River Jordan, which divided the Promised Land from the region of the Transjordan. The partitioned tribe of Manasseh straddled this geographical division, providing a tribal bond between the two regions, ensuring that Reuben and Gad were less likely to become alienated from the wider body of the nation. This was a very live concern in Israel’s earliest history, as the Transjordanian tribes, though part of the nation, technically lived outside of the ‘land’. Some of Israel’s earliest conflicts occurred on this fault line.
A further geographical obstacle was the lack of a central sanctuary, in the absence of which divergent and syncretistic local cults developed and there was little pulling Israel into a common centre. The varied topography of the land and the character of the region as a buffer between Egypt and northern powers had also made it difficult for any group to hold possession of the entirety of Canaan securely for long. Even in the early days of the kingdom, vast swathes of the land were under the rule of other powers. Certain tribes did not easily enter into possession of their territories, especially in the plains, where they could overcome inhabitants with chariots.
While the involvement of all of the tribes in the initial conquest of the land—the involvement of the Transjordanian tribes was significantly required of them—encouraged a sense of a unified stake in the land, the establishment of the monarchy greatly strengthened such an understanding and its effectiveness. The establishment of the monarchy and the sanctuary in Jerusalem powerfully consolidated Israel’s nationhood through its centripetal impact, but also bolstered the security of regions distant from it by empowering them through its unified sovereignty. Jerusalem—Zion—would become synecdochic for the nation as a whole, the city to which the tribes were regularly to ascend, where the effective spectacles of their peoplehood were performed. At its height, Israel enjoyed regional hegemony, controlling Edomite Red Sea ports and being surrounded by tributary nations, which, during the reign of King Solomon, introduced the first possibility of something akin to a minor imperial cosmopolitanism.
All of the above, while engaging with a specific aspect of the account of Hazony, might seem to be irrelevant to the essay to which I am supposed to be responding. Using his paradigm case of ancient Israel, I want to demonstrate that Hazony’s vision of nationalism is flattened out, failing to account for the degree to which the rise to nationhood can be achieved through the integration of constitutive differences, rather than transcending or suppressing them. However, whereas Waldstein’s account may claim to extend greater hospitality to the integrity of different peoples in larger political unities, it nonetheless threatens these in championing a vision of the role of the ultimate good that does not adequately recognize the constraints of place and people.
As Oliver O’Donovan observes, ‘If we ignore the role of place, the idea of society can hardly fail to become threatening to freedom’ (The Ways of Judgment [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005], 258). Likewise, peoples have an ineluctable particularity grounded in their concrete histories, customs and practices, cultures, traditions, religious commitments, and languages. ‘Explicit subordination to the spiritual authority of the Church’ would do little to address the weakness of the contemporary European Union, which has much more to do with the failure to establish develop social communications between the specific European nations to the point where self-consciousness of belonging to the ‘European’ people and to Europe would make other Europeans cease to be foreigners to us.
The imperial ambitions of the papacy have long been criticized as hostile to the integrity and the peace of peoples—Marsilius of Padua was making this argument two hundred years before the Reformation. Reformation support for nationalism arose in part from the recognition that a people’s ordering to the ultimate good required the creative, imaginative, and pragmatic task of orienting the specific forms of their actual peoplehood and place to the reign of Christ, to which distinct national identities were contextually more conducive. This differed significantly from subjecting them to the quasi-imperial authority of a distant yet meddlesome Rome. Nationalism was in large measure a reassertion of the dignity of the lay estate and the laity against the tyrannical clericalism of the papacy. One of the most immediate achievements of this vision was the translation and dissemination of the Bible in the vernacular.
The pursuit of the ultimate good must occur in and through the specific realities of the actual place, time, and people in which we find ourselves. Within this order, a church—embedded in its particular social location, while recognizing and seeking practically to manifest the sisterhood of churches around the world and the unifying reality of the invisible Church—declares the word of its Lord, subjecting the claims all local common goods to his judgment, without usurping the jurisdiction or dictating the actions of the magistrate.
The opening of Waldstein’s essay presents an attractive portrait of a particular Christian empire’s benevolent unification of particular peoples. However, what is introduced as an account of the historical creation of a unity of certain European nations is soon presented as an instantiation of the ‘Catholic ideal of empire’ and, what is more, of the ideal of the universal empire of Rome. The theoretical move made here may rest in part upon a common error by which the characteristically modest particularity and rootedness of a Christian ethic of neighbour love is transmogrified into a placeless ethic of universal love, with the largest possible solidarities being idealized. While the situation of Ukrainians in the Austrian Empire offers a good counter to excessive claims for the virtues of nationalism, it does not justify excessive claims for the virtues of an imperial order, let alone a universal papal one. Good nations and empires are forged, not through the imposition of such a hubristic ideal (as if either imperialism or nationalism were the universal desideratum), but through the patient and attentive establishment and development of the bonds of communication in terms of which persons will effectively imaginatively recognize themselves in a sustainable people, subject to the critical judgment of a higher good.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
Hazony’s dichotomy between nations and empires, even if these were charitably considered as ideal types, was always a tendentious one, rapidly starting to erode when subjected to historical examination. In actuality, nations and empires have often been complicatedly intertwined and far from straightforwardly opposed (would the state of Israel—a prominent exemplar of nationhood in Hazony’s work—have been sustainable without America’s quasi-imperial hegemony?). Furthermore, as Waldstein rightly observes, imperial orders have often been far more hospitable to the concrete diversity of actually existing cultural and societal ecosystems and protective of their more marginal members than nation-states have been.
Indeed, the imposition of a false uniformity has often been a much greater temptation for nations, whose focus on forging a single united peoplehood can leave little room for a healthy pluralism. Liah Greenfeld, in her scintillating Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, claims that nationalism ‘is determined not by the character of its elements, but by a certain organizing principle which makes these elements into a unity and imparts to them a special significance’ (7). In contrast to the homogenization that often results from the monopolization and centralization of sovereignty more characteristic of nationalism, imperial hegemony can be much more tolerant and protective of a pluralistic and variegated order (as John Milbank observes in a recent Theopolis essay). As a principle of political organization, empires may have less of a totalizing impulse to assimilate their inhabitants than nations do, being better situated to recognize their alterity.
The identitarian and particularistic impulse of contemporary American ‘nationalism’ may ironically find its principal antagonist in the homogenizing and departicularizing impulse of the American national project itself (a national homogenizing and departicularizing impulse that also functions prominently in the vanguard of the globalism Hazony decries). The sustainability of the principle by which the USA was forged as a nation is increasingly uncertain as the societal and institutional dominance of the Protestantized Christian peoplehood of European cultural and historical origins to which it was tacitly wedded passes. As a majority-minority population takes its place and the cruel inhospitality of the former settlement to black Americans in particular becomes openly apparent, the totalizing national principle can end up functioning as a sort of moralized auto-immune disorder against the peoplehood that it once privileged. The long-term prognosis of this disease is increasingly uncertain. Hazony may be correct to recognize the importance of the particularity of peoplehood, yet nationalism has often proved a fickle spouse for those with such concerns.
Hazony presents ancient Israel as a paradigm case of a rise to nationhood, a kind of nationhood that he champions as normative. Much that Hazony says is instructive here, although there is something extraordinary about the character of Israel that Hazony does not sufficiently register (Numbers 23:9: ‘behold, a people dwelling alone, and not counting itself among the nations!’). Hazony’s account of Israel’s rise to nationhood focuses on disparate tribes joining together into a voluntary alliance, resulting in the formation of a national state (a narrative of ethnogenesis more congruent with the history of Rome than Israel). While Hazony is a perceptive reader of Scripture, here his political theory seems to get the better of his attentiveness to the text. Where Hazony presents the national order as something that supersedes (albeit without erasing) the order of tribes, producing a new somewhat homogenizing unity out of a variety of existing peoples, for the biblical account the nation of Israel is the outgrowth and expression of the life of a family—the house of Jacob. Just as the unity of a family is peculiarly and variously represented by specific members (typically the father as its empowering head and the mother at its heart, grandparents as its legacy-transmitting past, and the children as its strength and future promise), rather than a homogenizing unity for whose sake all members are interchangeable, so the unity of Israel was forged through and within its differences.
To achieve the national unity of the house of Jacob, a common sense of peoplehood and place had to be forged. The common memory of the unprecedented events and shared experience of the Exodus, institutionalized in Israel’s feasts and cult, were powerful unifying forces (Deuteronomy 4:34), albeit constantly threatened by forgetfulness and covenant infidelity. But this common peoplehood did not come at the expense of the diminution of the tribe’s individuality. Rather, Israel’s solidarity as a people depended to a surprising degree upon the setting apart of certain tribes from others (expressed in the blessings of Jacob). Judah’s destiny was as the royal tribe, but its place at the head of the tribes depended in part upon the special relationship that it formed with Benjamin. Benjamin was the first royal tribe, mediating between his brother Joseph’s powerful tribes in the north and the dominant Judah in the south, under whose wing he later came. Foreshadowing later history in Genesis, it was through his intercession for Benjamin that Judah healed the breach between Joseph and the brothers and allowed for their (re)unification. Levi united the tribes through his distinctive scattering among them as a centripetal force requiring their practice of hospitality and ordering them to the common cult, covenant memory, and sanctuary.
Israel’s nationhood required the overcoming of certain obstacles of geography. Perhaps the greatest initial obstacle to its nationhood was the River Jordan, which divided the Promised Land from the region of the Transjordan. The partitioned tribe of Manasseh straddled this geographical division, providing a tribal bond between the two regions, ensuring that Reuben and Gad were less likely to become alienated from the wider body of the nation. This was a very live concern in Israel’s earliest history, as the Transjordanian tribes, though part of the nation, technically lived outside of the ‘land’. Some of Israel’s earliest conflicts occurred on this fault line.
A further geographical obstacle was the lack of a central sanctuary, in the absence of which divergent and syncretistic local cults developed and there was little pulling Israel into a common centre. The varied topography of the land and the character of the region as a buffer between Egypt and northern powers had also made it difficult for any group to hold possession of the entirety of Canaan securely for long. Even in the early days of the kingdom, vast swathes of the land were under the rule of other powers. Certain tribes did not easily enter into possession of their territories, especially in the plains, where they could overcome inhabitants with chariots.
While the involvement of all of the tribes in the initial conquest of the land—the involvement of the Transjordanian tribes was significantly required of them—encouraged a sense of a unified stake in the land, the establishment of the monarchy greatly strengthened such an understanding and its effectiveness. The establishment of the monarchy and the sanctuary in Jerusalem powerfully consolidated Israel’s nationhood through its centripetal impact, but also bolstered the security of regions distant from it by empowering them through its unified sovereignty. Jerusalem—Zion—would become synecdochic for the nation as a whole, the city to which the tribes were regularly to ascend, where the effective spectacles of their peoplehood were performed. At its height, Israel enjoyed regional hegemony, controlling Edomite Red Sea ports and being surrounded by tributary nations, which, during the reign of King Solomon, introduced the first possibility of something akin to a minor imperial cosmopolitanism.
All of the above, while engaging with a specific aspect of the account of Hazony, might seem to be irrelevant to the essay to which I am supposed to be responding. Using his paradigm case of ancient Israel, I want to demonstrate that Hazony’s vision of nationalism is flattened out, failing to account for the degree to which the rise to nationhood can be achieved through the integration of constitutive differences, rather than transcending or suppressing them. However, whereas Waldstein’s account may claim to extend greater hospitality to the integrity of different peoples in larger political unities, it nonetheless threatens these in championing a vision of the role of the ultimate good that does not adequately recognize the constraints of place and people.
As Oliver O’Donovan observes, ‘If we ignore the role of place, the idea of society can hardly fail to become threatening to freedom’ (The Ways of Judgment [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005], 258). Likewise, peoples have an ineluctable particularity grounded in their concrete histories, customs and practices, cultures, traditions, religious commitments, and languages. ‘Explicit subordination to the spiritual authority of the Church’ would do little to address the weakness of the contemporary European Union, which has much more to do with the failure to establish develop social communications between the specific European nations to the point where self-consciousness of belonging to the ‘European’ people and to Europe would make other Europeans cease to be foreigners to us.
The imperial ambitions of the papacy have long been criticized as hostile to the integrity and the peace of peoples—Marsilius of Padua was making this argument two hundred years before the Reformation. Reformation support for nationalism arose in part from the recognition that a people’s ordering to the ultimate good required the creative, imaginative, and pragmatic task of orienting the specific forms of their actual peoplehood and place to the reign of Christ, to which distinct national identities were contextually more conducive. This differed significantly from subjecting them to the quasi-imperial authority of a distant yet meddlesome Rome. Nationalism was in large measure a reassertion of the dignity of the lay estate and the laity against the tyrannical clericalism of the papacy. One of the most immediate achievements of this vision was the translation and dissemination of the Bible in the vernacular.
The pursuit of the ultimate good must occur in and through the specific realities of the actual place, time, and people in which we find ourselves. Within this order, a church—embedded in its particular social location, while recognizing and seeking practically to manifest the sisterhood of churches around the world and the unifying reality of the invisible Church—declares the word of its Lord, subjecting the claims all local common goods to his judgment, without usurping the jurisdiction or dictating the actions of the magistrate.
The opening of Waldstein’s essay presents an attractive portrait of a particular Christian empire’s benevolent unification of particular peoples. However, what is introduced as an account of the historical creation of a unity of certain European nations is soon presented as an instantiation of the ‘Catholic ideal of empire’ and, what is more, of the ideal of the universal empire of Rome. The theoretical move made here may rest in part upon a common error by which the characteristically modest particularity and rootedness of a Christian ethic of neighbour love is transmogrified into a placeless ethic of universal love, with the largest possible solidarities being idealized. While the situation of Ukrainians in the Austrian Empire offers a good counter to excessive claims for the virtues of nationalism, it does not justify excessive claims for the virtues of an imperial order, let alone a universal papal one. Good nations and empires are forged, not through the imposition of such a hubristic ideal (as if either imperialism or nationalism were the universal desideratum), but through the patient and attentive establishment and development of the bonds of communication in terms of which persons will effectively imaginatively recognize themselves in a sustainable people, subject to the critical judgment of a higher good.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
-->