Pecknold

[PT 11.
1 (2010) 77-101] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X

doi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.77 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719
Migrations of the Host:

Fugitive Democracy and the Corpus Mysticum
C. C. Pecknold
The Catholic University of America
School of Theology and Religious Studies
Washington, DC 20064
USA
pecknold@cua.edu
Abstract
The essay argues that Sheldon Wolin’s case for decoupling democracy and
liberalism, which he makes in both editions of Politics and Vision (1960 and
2004), significantly depends on the historical argument Henri Cardinal de
Lubac made in his book Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Eglise au moyen
âge (1944 and 1949). Such a claim for the importance of this dependence
deepens our understanding of the significance of both Wolin and Lubac
for contemporary debates about religion and democracy. To this end, the
essay has two proximate goals: (1) by displaying Wolin’s use of Lubac’s argu-
ments concerning the shifting use of the term corpus mysticum, we will have
a better theological understanding of Wolin’s complex criticisms of liberal
democracy; and (2) in the midst of claims to uncertainty about the political
implications of Cardinal de Lubac’s thought, we will see some of the con-
clusions that one political theorist came to after considering a theological
argument. Finally, this particular instance of a mutually critical dialogue of
faith and political reason raises crucial questions for thinking about the ends
of democracy.
Keywords: church, corpus mysticum, democracy, eschatology, Eucharist, lib-

eralism, Henri de Lubac, teleology, Sheldon Wolin.
Sheldon Wolin’s magisterial study of the western political imagination,

Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, has
recently become of interest to theologians.1 First released in 1960, the
1. Sheldon Wolin has long been one of the premier political thinkers in America,
and needs no introduction amongst political philosophers. An acceleration of interest in his
work has also been driven by the publication of his expanded edition (which nearly doubled
its size and import) of Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought,
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
78 Political Theology
book became a staple of course curricula in political science departments

for decades as it instructed students in the ebbs and flows of political
history from the Athenian city to the Roman Empire to the American
nation-state. Wolin himself had been a political activist as a professor of
politics at Berkeley, and his work was understood to provide a historically
sound interpretation of political development in the West that sought to
encourage democratic activism, especially at the local level, where ordinary
citizens could learn to speak truth to power. In 2004, Wolin published an
expanded edition of this volume, nearly doubling its size. His vast, ambi-
tious argument concerns the need to decouple democracy from liberalism.
So why would theologians find it of any interest? Largely, I will argue,
because his political arguments concerning the democratic flight from lib-
eralism are contingent upon reading the world theologically. The central
aim of this essay is to show that Wolin’s critique of liberal democracy, and
his constructive argument for “fugitive democracy,” substantially depend
on an argument that Henri de Lubac, sj (1896–1991) makes concerning
the “mystical body” of Christ. In making such a case, the essay suggests
that the gravest contemporary political problems in our time are, in fact,
theo-political problems. Furthermore, it is Wolin who acutely presents
us with a diagnosis of this problematic in the guise of a negative political
theology.
Stanley Hauerwas recently employed Wolin to good effect in his debates
with Jeffrey Stout.2 He is particularly attracted to Wolin’s comment that
“the significance of Christian thought for the western political tradition lies
not so much in what it had to say about the political order, but primarily in
what it had to say about the religious order. The attempt of Christians to
understand their own group life provided a new and sorely needed source
of ideas for Western thought.”3 For Wolin, Christianity “revified” a waning
western political imagination, not by trying to control the empire, but by
introducing a powerful new conception of space and time, largely through
an understanding of its own communal life, built around participation
in the body of Christ, and through its eschatological view of time. Wolin
expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), as well as a series of popular
articles on “inverted totalitarianism,” which he has dealt with at greater length in his most
recent book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
2. Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003) provoked a number of responses from Stanley Hauerwas. See, e.g., Stanley Hauer-
was, “Democratic Time: Lessons Learned from Yoder and Wolin,” Cross Currents (Winter
2006) and his postscript to Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Pacifism (Grand
Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004).
3. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 87. Cited in Hauerwas, “Democratic Time.”
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Pecknold Migrations of the Host 79
understands that Christianity invents the whole notion of the saeculum, as

well as the idea of a community that is redemptive for all humanity. From
this it is easy to see why Hauerwas is attracted to Wolin.4 He seems, on one
level, to validate the claim that the Church presents no political models
to the world. 5 It was what Christians had to say about themselves, rather
than what they had to say about politics that made a difference in the
world. Wolin argued that it was the early Christian attempt “to understand
their own group life” that had unwittingly renewed the western political
imagination.
But the story that Wolin tells is even more compelling and more useful
to contemporary debates about religion and politics than even Hauerwas
is aware of, and for different reasons. Wolin’s narrative in Politics and
Vision is powerful and enduring in part because it identifies the “mystical
element” that Christianity had inserted into western political history. He
narrates political history in a way that takes theology seriously as theol-
ogy. He explains how the political imagination developed in conversation
with Christianity, captured mass allegiances, and took over mystical and
transcendent powers that once belonged to the sacramental actions of the
Church. Wolin’s post-World War II context made him understandably
anxious about fascism, which he saw as a species of nationalism, a type of
political mysticism.6 His genius was in seeing nationalism (and fascism) as
a mere symptom of a broader degenerative disease in the western political
imagination. The problem was what he called “the mystical element” in
liberal conceptions of state and market.
Though apparently no one has recognized this debt, except for Wolin
himself, the political argument concerning the decoupling of democracy
and liberalism that he makes in both editions of Politics and Vision (1960
and 2004) significantly depend on the historical argument de Lubac made
in his 1944 book Corpus Mysticum: Eucharist and the Church in the Middle
4. For Hauerwas’s most developed view of radical democracy to date, see Stanley
Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations
between a Radical Democrat and a Christian (Theopolitical Visions) (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,
2008). Hauerwas seems to agree with Coles that democracy is an autonomously generated
politics, which is uncritical at best.
5. Pope John Paul II wrote that “The Church has no [political] models to pres-
ent…” Centesimus Annus, 43. The encyclical considered the place of the State in protecting
human dignity, and strongly stated the Church’s support for a more “authentic democracy”
is guided by truth as the foundation of freedom, for “the Church’s method is always that
of respect for freedom.” Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 5, “Truth preserves and
expresses charity’s power to liberate in the ever-changing events of history.”
6. See Carlton J. H. Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960) for
a similar view published at the same time.

Ages.7 Such a claim for the importance of this dependence is intended to

deepen our understanding of the significance of both Wolin and de Lubac
for contemporary debates about religion and democracy. To this end, this
essay has two proximate goals: (1) by displaying Wolin’s use of de Lubac’s
arguments concerning the shifting use of the term corpus mysticum, we
will have a richer theological understanding of his complex criticisms of
liberal democracy; and (2) in the midst of claims to uncertainty about the
political implications of de Lubac’s thought, we will have before us some
of the conclusions that one political theorist came to after considering de
Lubac’s argument in Corpus Mysticum. The essay will first state Henri de
Lubac’s argument in Corpus Mysticum in order to examine Wolin’s use of
the mystical theme in the political narrative he tells, and to help us better
assess forms of political mysticism. Second, this essay will consider the
theological implications of Wolin’s political argument concerning his most
recent work on the “fugitive” nature of democracy by comparing it with
de Lubac’s understanding of the Eucharist and the Church on pilgrimage
to the City of God. In conclusion, the relationship between Wolin’s work
on fugitive democracy and de Lubac’s on the corpus mysticum will stress
the importance of Wolin’s negative claims, and the positive need for de
Lubac’s view of time and community.
Making the Political Fit the Sacred

The corpus mysticum, the idea of Christ having a “mystical body” that is
really present to the Church in a sacrament (a sacred sign) even though
7. Wolin used the second French edition. See Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 2nd
ed. (Paris: Aubrie, 1949). Wolin also relied on similar kinds of arguments put forward by his
Berkeley colleague Ernst Kantorowicz, whose famous book The King’s Two Bodies (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1957) had been published just prior to Politics and Vision.
But Kantorowicz is just as dependent on de Lubac as Wolin is for his historiographical treat-
ment of the corpus mysticum (see King’s Two Bodies, ch. 5). Wolin’s 1950 Harvard doctorate
on eighteenth-century English Constitutionalism and Conservativism looked back to the
theme of the mystical body of the Church in relation to politics especially with reference to
Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Laws, in whose work he saw not the origins of English lib-
eralism, as was commonly thought, but a kind of proto-Burkean constitutional conserva-
tive who sought an organic religious and political unity along more medieval than modern
lines. The underlying unity could be found not only in legal principles, authority and con-
sent, but in the mystical unity of the society itself. See his “Richard Hooker and Eng-
lish Conservatism,” The Western Political Quarterly 6.1 (March 1953). Two of his subsequent
essays pursued these themes in the 1950s as well: “Politics and Religion: Luther’s Simplistic
Imperative,” The American Political Science Review 50.1 (March 1956): 24–42; and “Calvin and
the Reformation: The Political Education of Protestantism,” The American Political Science
Review 51.2 (June 1957): 428–53.

his historical body has ascended to heaven, dominates the story that Wolin
tells about the western political imagination. The power of his argument
largely derives from his attentiveness to the migrations of the term corpus
mysticum that de Lubac had traced from the fourth to the ninth centuries
and then through to the thirteenth century. De Lubac had initiated his
study out of puzzlement over nineteenth-century ecclesial documents
that consistently referred to the Church as “one mystical body,” which he
could trace back to Unam Sanctam (1302), and even as far back as the ninth
century, but no further. This is because his genealogical study of the term
revealed that a kind of inversion had taken place by incremental degrees,
“slowly, imperceptibly a disassociation began to occur.”8 If the meaning
of the term could be seen in its use, then what de Lubac saw was that
the meaning of corpus mysticum had significantly changed in the medieval
period. In de Lubac’s narrative, the meaning of corpus mysticum changed
from its particular liturgical use in the early church, where it referred to
the sacrament of the Eucharist, to the general socio-political usage that
had settled by the mid-twelfth century, where it referred to the Church-
society as a mystical body. These medieval shifts in terminological usage
ushered in a new modern formulation, which remained in use until the
twentieth century, and explained the nineteenth-century expressions he
had originally questioned.
The early Church had taught that the Eucharist was the corpus mysticum,
the mysterious sacramental communion with God in Christ, into whose
body Christians were being formed. This liturgical usage concerned par-
ticipation in Christ’s sacrifice, and thus his redemption of humanity. Sac-
ramental communion generated the ecclesial communion that gathered
human beings into one mystical but nonetheless real body, united in com-
munion with God and with one another. Thus the invisible but real and
mysterious presence of Christ as a “hidden power” and an “inner reality”
in the bread and wine of the sacrament of the Eucharist was understood as
that which constitutes the ecclesial body. As de Lubac so famously puts it,
“the Eucharist makes the Church.”9
The view of community here is profoundly participatory and relational,
a dynamic in which horizontal relations are all analogically referred,
through the Eucharist, to their proper vertical or transcendent relation
to God in Christ. As de Lubac writes of the early Church view, “being in
communion with someone means to receive the body of the Lord with
them. Being united with the saints in the Church and participating in
the Eucharist, being part of the common Kingdom, and sharing in the
8. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 96.


Holy mysteries go together in tandem and it can be said that they are one
and the same thing.”10 The power generating Christian communion was
understood as the mysterious and sacramental presence of Christ.
For the body of Christ that is the Church is in no way other than the body
and blood of the mystery… Through the Eucharist each person is truly
placed with the one body. It unites all the members of it among themselves,
as it unites them to their one head… In this way, little by little, the ‘whole
Christ’ comes into being, who is always in our minds as the ultimate end of
the mystery.11
What can be seen in the early view of corpus mysticum is a tripartite view
of that mysterious communion between (1) the historical body of Christ
witnessed to in Scripture, now under (2) the veil of the sacrament of
his mystical and real presence, where Christ generates (3) the one true
Church in communion with God that is destined for heaven. Christians
of antiquity would not have thought of the Church as the corpus mysticum;
they would have thought of the Eucharist as that sacrament of commu-
nion with Christ’s body, now ascended to heaven, but really and mysti-
cally present to the one true Church. The Church receives its institutional
life, its reality, as a gift precisely because it receives Christ’s mystical pres-
ence in the Eucharist. That is to say, corpus mysticum would not have been
thought to refer to “the body of believers” as a separate, sociological thing.
The Church was causally related to the Eucharist as the corpus mysticum.
Christians of the first millennium could, however, make distinctions
between Christ’s historical body, his sacramental or mystical body, and
his true, ecclesial body.12 And it is in the making of these distinctions that
the term gains some “freedom of movement” that will later distort the
meaning.
De Lubac certainly wanted to show with his study that the Eucharist
and the Church were inextricably, and causally linked, for, as he notes,
“the Eucharist corresponds to the Church as cause to effect, as means to
end, as sign to reality.”13 But the burden was upon him to show how this
meaning had slowly changed. His historical investigations led him to be
critical of early medieval thinkers who transitioned “from the sacrament to
the power of the sacrament or from visible form to the reality itself so swiftly”
and placed “the accent so strongly on the Church,” that distortions arose.14
He saw the shifts beginning as early as the ninth century, and by the late

14. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 13; original emphasis.

Middle Ages, de Lubac argued that this language had been transformed
and obscured through a new focus that inverted the terms “mystical” and
“true,” making the Church a mystical power, and speaking of the Eucha-
rist in a way that had the potential to separate its reality from its mystery.
By the twelfth century, terminology once used solely for the conse-
crated host had begun to be used for the Church so that it was far more
common to call the Church the mystical body, while the Eucharist had
now come to be called the corpus verum. The inextricable, causal relation-
ship between the Eucharist and the Church now seemed to be reversed.
At the same time, against spiritualizing trends that had been mounting for
several centuries—trends that effectively denied Christ’s real presence in
the consecrated host—the Eucharist ceased to be called the corpus mysticum
and began being called, in hyper-realistic terms, the corpus Christi. The
reversal could be said to be completed by 1302 when Pope Boniface VIII
wrote and signed the papal bull, Unam sanctam, which demonstrates that
some kind of reversal had taken place, and that the shift gave to the Church
those mystical powers of communion that were once ascribed to Christ’s
mystical body in the Eucharist, and thus authorized the Church in its
political claims. As the Church comes to terms with a new historical situ-
ation, the earlier emphasis upon the Eucharist constituting the Church as
Christ’s Body gives way to a new political emphasis on the Church making
the Eucharist. While the bull ostensibly attempts to staunch or discipline
the growing schism between Latin and Greek-speaking churches through
the universal primacy of St. Peter’s successor, it also represents the caesura
between the sacramental origins of the term corpus mysticum and the new
exclusively ecclesial and institutional/political meaning. It introduced the
possibility of detaching the Church from the Eucharist.
At the dawning of the fourteenth century, in de Lubac’s account, the
mystical body language had finally ceased to be used of the Eucharist at all,
and its meaning had migrated in such a way that it was now used exclu-
sively of the Church. As the bull states, “she [the Church] represents one
sole mystical body (corpus mysticum) whose Head is Christ and the head of
Christ is God.” The entire papal document reflects the full sacralization
of the Church’s cohesive powers in the society (“We venerate this Church
as one”). While Augustine could speak of “two cities” in the fifth century,
now it was clear that there was only one city, with two swords, both of
which had been given to the Church. “[I]n this Church and in its power
are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal.” This transfer of
mystery from the sacrament of the consecrated host to the Church also
meant a transfer of power: from a liturgically centered form of political and
social life to the heavy concentration of institutional power. The power of
the sacrament of communion had shifted from its transformative role in

forming the character of Christian community to an objective view of

the institutional Church as that mystical power. A new fusion of horizons
(to borrow a metaphor from Gadamer) had become the occasion for the
corpus mysticum to migrate from mysterious sacrament to mysterious socio-
political power. As the papal bull states, “Both, therefore, are in the power
of the Church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the
former is to be administered for the Church but the latter by the Church;
the former in the hands of the priest; the latter by the hands of kings and
soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.” Pope Boniface VIII
concludes, “temporal authority [has been] subjected to spiritual power.”
In these migrations of the term corpus mysticum, it becomes the divine right
of the “spiritual power” to “establish the terrestrial power.”15 Since Unam
Sanctam is precisely where de Lubac locates the decisive shift having taken
place, it is reasonable to conclude that he is aware of how profoundly
political his argument is. As we shall see, the political implications were
obvious to Wolin.
In the wake of the protracted investiture controversies that preceded
Unam Sanctam, the bull seems like so much water under the bridge. But
exactly the same process was occurring on the political side of the ledger.
Monarchs also intensified their claims to holiness and divine right. For
example, a royal touch was believed to cure illnesses, and would often be
accompanied by the sign of the cross.16 As Ernst Kantorowicz put it, the
pope wore a royal crown, and the king wore papal shoes. The exchanges
worked both ways over centuries “until finally the sacerdotium had an
imperial appearance and the regnum a clerical touch.”17 It exemplifies a
process that had been underway for hundreds of years—at least since Pope
Gregory VII affirmed the jurisdictional authority of the papacy in Dictatus
Papae in 1075, and more arguably still since Pope Gelasius I at the end of
the fifth century—a patient process that had finally made the sacred fit for
political use, and equally important, made the political fit for sacred use.
The patient process, whose gradual, imperceptible shifts in the meaning
of words de Lubac argued had unintended consequences. And this was
what Sheldon Wolin recognized as preeminent in the history of western
15. Cf. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. R. Balinksi (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 3–9.
16. See e.g. Guibert of Nogent, De pigneribus sanctorum, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, in Corpus
Christionorum Continuatio Medievalis 127 (Brepols, 1993), 90.
17. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 193. “Mutual borrowings and exchanges of
insignia, political symbols, prerogatives, and rights of honor had been carried on perpetu-
ally between the spiritual and secular leaders of Christian society. The pope adorned his
tiara with a golden crown…the emperor…donned the pontifical shoes and other clerical
raiments.”

political thought, even if de Lubac himself hesitated to draw political con-

clusions from it. In what follows, the article develops the political conclu-
sions that Wolin drew from de Lubac’s early work.
Wolin’s Use of Henri de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum

In his first chapter, “Political Philosophy and Philosophy,” Wolin sets out
the terms of his study. He states, in a manner reminiscent of Alasdair
MacIntyre, that his interest is in “the problem of perspective or angle
of vision, and the manner in which a tradition operates.”18 He states his
interest in the complex and varied tradition of political philosophy “since
Plato” and the Ciceronian res publica, government as the “property of all
people.” And he states his interest in the medieval Church as “the only
institution that ever rivaled the authority of the political order.”19 Wolin
is interested in the way political institutions “define ‘political time’,” and
in the way “political arrangements provide a setting wherein the activities
of individuals and groups are connected spatially and temporally.”20 From
the outset of his project, Wolin gives thematic precedence to “time” and
“space,” and does so explicitly in relation to Christianity as both inspiration
and rival to political arrangements in the West. After having established
that political thought had been in decline due to the failure of philosophy
to “face the implications of concentrated power,” Wolin argued that it fell
“to Christianity to revivify political thought.”21
Wolin, supported especially by Oscar Cullmann’s Christ and Time,
argues that Christianity infuses a new understanding of time into political
thought.22 In contrast to the classical “cyclical” view of time, the Christian
eschatological view—that time has a beginning and will come to an end—
meant that political history was now charged with a new meaning and
destiny. Not only was this a new linear view of time, as has sometimes
been said; it was also a vertical view of time, in which there are genuine
18. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 3. A fruitful comparison between MacIntyre and Wolin
might begin with their common Aristotelianism and their rejection of Nietzsche. Cf. Alas-
dair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2007), 256–63. Wolin is, however, decidedly non-Marxist.
19. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 4.
22. Stanley Hauerwas has rightly focused on the use of Oscar Cullmann’s study of
Christian time in Wolin’s work, yet he neglects Wolin’s greater dependence on de Lubac,
whose work on the corpus mysticum stresses the nature of Christian community in light
of this eschatology. Wolin’s dependence on these two theologians, one Protestant and the
other Catholic, is itself indicative of his attentiveness to political time and space in the
Christian West.

points of contact between the above and the end and the below and the
present. “History was thus transformed into a drama of deliverance…,”
Wolin writes, “the future had become a dimension of hope.”23 Likewise,
the Christian view of community called human beings to live a new life
of “meaningful participation,” as well as “ideals of solidarity and member-
ship that were to leave a lasting imprint, and not always for the good,
on the Western tradition of political thought.”24 Wolin’s reference to the
ill-effects of the Christian view of community refers directly to develop-
ments that came in the medieval period, in which, as he puts it, the political
community became “a pneumatic being.” In following de Lubac’s argument
concerning a sacramental society, Wolin comes to this surprising political
conclusion: “Christianity helped father the idea of a community as a non-
rational, non-utilitarian body bound by a meta-rational faith, infused by
a mysterious spirit taken into the members; a spirit that not only linked
each participant with the center of Christ, but radiated holy ties knitting
each member to his fellows.”25 These were the developments that Henri
de Lubac’s work on the Eucharist in the Middle Ages had carefully traced.
And while de Lubac would have objected to the “non-rational” descrip-
tion that Wolin provides for the late medieval view of the corpus mysticum,
this gives us an important clue to how Wolin understands the mystical
element in liberalism, counter-intuitively as non-rational, even irrational.
Thus the story that de Lubac told in Corpus Mysticum fits the politi-
cal history well, and Wolin utilizes it with subtle skill, stating clearly that
when it comes to these developments in the Christian view of commu-
nity, “the basic work here is H. de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum.”26 The depth
of his understanding of de Lubac reveals itself in the succinctness of his
summary, and the verifiable political implications he sees. Wolin writes
that:
the term itself, corpus mysticum, is uniquely Christian and without biblical
background. It did not come into usage until the ninth century and at that
time its meaning was strictly sacramental, referring to the Eucharist and not
to the Church or to any notion of a society of Christians. By administra-
tion of the sacrament the host was consecrated and incorporated into the
mystic body of Christ. As a result of the doctrinal disputes raised by Beren-
gar, the mystical element receded, and the doctrine of the real presence of
the human Christ replaced it. The corpus mysticum was now called the corpus
Christi (or corpus verum or corpus naturale). This, however, was preliminary to
the socializing and politicizing of the concept of the corpus mysticum, for after


the middle of the twelfth century, the corpus mysticum, which had previously
been employed in sacramental usage to describe the consecrated host, was
now transferred to the Church. The mystical force and passion surrounding
the old notion was brought to sustain the whole society of Christians and
its power structure.27
However, what is most curious is the fact that Wolin takes de Lubac’s
conclusions, which go as far back as the thirteenth century, much further
even up to the late modern innovations that such development made pos-
sible. But his use of de Lubac’s work is surprising, for it reveals that while
Wolin sees early Christianity as generative of political knowledge, he sees
the later theological developments in which the Church is identified as
corpus mysticum, as politically degenerative. The shifts gave rise to a “split”
between structures of governance and an invisible, mystical bond that
generated a new political mysticism. In Wolin’s view, this inversion of the
meaning of the corpus mysticum within Christianity is the political cause for
the effects of nationalism in temporal societies, as is clearly indicated in a
second lengthy quotation that also reflects on de Lubac’s work:
we can find at various times throughout the Middle Ages an undercur-
rent of unease fed by the Church’s attempt to maintain a double identity:
on the one side, the Church as the governing organ of Christendom; on
the other, a society of believers who, in their mystical unity, were members
of a living body following a common life inspired by the love of Christ.
These two conceptions did not easily coexist, and out of their commingling
emerged a somewhat confusing image of an imperial power organization
which professed also to be a community. The significance of this dual nature is
that it expresses the quandary of most modern societies. Moreover, this similarity
between the Church and modern political societies is not fortuitous. In both
instances the force fusing the members into a solidary whole has been a mystical, non-
rational one. In temporal societies it has been the force of nationalism; in the church-
society it has been the sacrament of symbolic communion which joins the members of
the mystical body of Christ. The religious element in national sentiment can be
exposed more clearly by indicating briefly the changes that the corpus mysti-
cum idea underwent and how these were reflected into political thought.28
Wolin notes that classical political thought had never understood

itself as “a mystic body cohering around a godhead,” and certainly early
Christianity had strictly speaking resisted thinking of politics in this way

28. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 119; emphasis added. It is clear that Wolin is reading de
Lubac in light of his concerns about political mysticism; for de Lubac, the Catholic could
have never admitted that the mystical was non-rational, nor even that it was before or after
the inversion of the meaning of the term corpus mysticum. Indeed, the Apostle Paul sug-
gests that sacramental worship renews, perfects and elevates reason (alla metamorphousthe te
anakainosei tou nous) in Romans 12:1–2.

for fear of its idolatrous implications.29 But the migrations of the term
corpus mysticum now seemed to authorize the view of political society as
itself mystical. What had been a legitimate, if sometimes distorted, claim
within the Church continued to migrate further away from the Church
and became manifest in a politics that would have been unrecognizable to
antiquity.
Modern Migrations of the Host

Extending de Lubac’s thesis to the sixteenth century, Wolin provides a
rather unsympathetic view of Luther whom he reads as serving “the
cause of national particularism.”30 He considers Luther’s “depoliticized
religion” merely the unwitting, cooperative flipside of Machiavelli’s de-
theologized politics. In Luther’s attempt to return to some primitive
purity, in his attempt to step outside of history, and out of the socially
embedded nature of institutions, Wolin sees a schizophrenic thinker who
was at once repelled by, and obsessed with, politics.31 Far from “a politics
of indifference,” Luther displays an anti-institutional attitude towards
the Catholic Church, and an institutional dependence on the rising
significance of newly forming nation-states (“national particularism”).
The “split’ nature of Luther’s political attitude meant that he “oscillated
between a disdainful and a frenetic interest in politics and sometimes
combined both.”32 Since political power was to be taken away from the
Church, Luther understood that it had to go somewhere: it must go
to the secular authority of the princes. Surprisingly, Wolin barely con-
tains his contempt for Luther. But Wolin’s disdain for Luther does not
arise from some theological concern about the subjectivity of faith (as is
common with critics of Luther) but arises because Luther weakens the

31. In the common coupling of Luther and Machiavelli, Wolin reservedly follows J.
N. Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1931), 55–61. Wolin argues, however, that Figgis understands
the importance of the Luther/Machiavelli relation, but he misses the “fundamental weak-
ness in Luther’s thinking,” namely Luther’s failure to see the role of religious institutions
as a countervailing authority that could restrain politics (Wolin, Politics and Vision, 145).
Cf. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Age of the Reforma-
tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 142–3. Skinner also sees Luther and
Machiavelli converging as the founding fathers of the “impious modern State,” but mainly
in their rejection of natural law as a basis for political life. The assumption is not only that
Machiavelli represents, as Suarez thought, a “totally false” conception of political life, but
that Luther’s theology makes such an erroneous politics possible.

Church’s ability to check temporal monopolies on power.33 As long as

the Church had political power, however it imagined itself to have it,
kings and princes were limited. For Wolin, Luther unwittingly opened
the way to the monopolizing power of early and emerging nation-states.34
Furthermore, Luther merely shifted the corpus mysticum further from
reality, making the Church into an invisible mystical body whose visible
structures depend on the state, thus generating a confusion of politics
and mysticism. In an ironic turn, Luther actually illustrates the effects
of the shift in the meaning of the term by radicalizing it, and revealing
its inner logic. Luther etherealizes the Church as mystical in an anti-
institutional sense, ceding all reality, power, juridical and institutional
authority to the state. Wolin’s disdain for Luther can only be explained
by what he had learned from de Lubac: Luther’s unwitting split between
the mystical and the real in turn authorized an autonomous secular state
unchecked by any other countervailing authority.
Luther’s attack on the medieval political theology of the Catholic
Church was at the same time a turn to the subject, individualizing the
Christian view of community that had previously been understood in
terms of an organic whole. Luther’s faith had become “an inward disposi-
tion of the individual inclining him towards God. The reward of faith
was membership in the invisible communion of Christians, the corpus
mysticum ruled by Christ” but without location, offices or institutions.35
Luther’s “assembly of hearts in one faith” provided a vague social unity
that could be easily extended to wherever associations of individuals of
faith were found. The Reformer’s failure to appreciate the importance of
institutions, as well as his quietism, did not entail a separation of religion
and politics as is often assumed. In Wolin’s account, this was the most
devastating shift of all, for Luther’s reforms entailed “the political irrel-
evancy of the Christian ethic” and a new moral autonomy for the state.36
Christian ethics, indeed religion itself, could now be thought of as
personal, private, intimate matters of the heart and soul precisely because
the corpus mysticum had become radically interiorized, invisible, mystical
but not powerful in any real way. Real power would be limited to the

34. Cf. Hugo Rahner’s pointed claim that “all the churches who wish to withdraw
from the unity of the Church dogmatically first of all seek refuge with the state but soon are
absorbed by the state and fall with it,” Church and State in Early Christianity (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1992), xvi.
35. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 137. For a contrary view from a Catholic perspective, see
Jared Wicks, sj, “Roman Reactions to Luther: The First Year (1518),” The Catholic Historical
Review 69.4 (October 1983).

secular authority. Luther had successfully shown not only the irrelevance
of the Christian ethic for the logic of a secular politics, but he had pro-
vided a theological rationale for dismantling “the medieval conception
of a political society…[as] a corporate whole knit together in a common
involvement.”37 It was a theological rationale that the ruling elites badly
needed.38 The “split” in Luther’s soul had already been formed by a politi-
cal culture that had begun to shift well before he ever had the language
for, let alone his experience of, his sola triplex. But he played a crucial role
in pushing the corpus mysticum further away from its sacramental origins,
and further away still from its ecclesial extensions.
No longer was there an actual politics appropriate to a Christian
people. Politics had been reduced to a single coercive form, the kind
that Machiavelli could recommend to Italian princes at the same time as
German ones.39 Thus Wolin further extends de Lubac’s thesis that the
corpus mysticum, both as a term and an idea, had slowly been detached
from its concrete sacramental, scriptural and local institutional meaning.
The medieval migrations which enabled the corpus mysticum to migrate to
Church-society as a whole (de Lubac’s conclusion) find their end with
Luther. Ironically, however, this enabled the power of the corpus mysticum
to be transferred in complex ways to new symbols and new institutions.
From Luther’s bifurcating “simplistic imperative” Wolin sees the begin-
ning of a process of political cell-division that will replicate itself at high
speed, all in service of the cause of national particularism.
John Calvin, however, seems to be viewed as having put the brakes
on this cell-division. Calvin aids the migrations of the mystical body in
a way that partly follows Luther’s reforms, but also tries to restore the
organic complexity of the medieval order. Wolin sees in Calvin a thinker
who understands that the corpus mysticum is a union between Christians
and Christ that generates love that can be shared with one’s neighbors.
In contrast to his disdain for Luther, Wolin admires what he takes to be

38. For a recent, persuasive account of how ruling elites needed theological ratio-
nale in order to secure collective sentiment for newly emerging nations, see Anthony W.
Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003).
39. Luther and Machiavelli were nearly exact contemporaries, and did most of their
work in exile: Machiavelli exiled from Florence, and Luther excommunicated from the
Catholic Church. It is interesting to consider the way exclusion, exile and excommunication
helped to generate new narratives of inclusion that would in fact turn the tables on their
erstwhile foes. Anthony Marx argues (see note 38 above) that the early nation-states wove a
narrative of inclusion out of the fabric of systematic exclusions around which national unity
could be forged, and state power centralized.

Calvin’s attempt to partially restore the medieval commitment to the

common good, one which would not be preserved by “a pope who acted
as a trustee for the corpus christianum” of course, but a “cohesive force
[which] came from a mystical spirit working through the members who
had joined with Him to form a corpus mysticum.”40 In Calvin’s case this was
an explicitly Eucharistic understanding of how members were formed
in a common good which could in turn be shared with others (albeit a
“virtualist” understanding of the real presence of Christ). Wolin writes
that for Calvin,
The sacramental rite signified a common good, which the participants
shared with, and through, Christ. And the common love of Christ became
the accentuating principle compelling the participants to share this good
with their fellows; they could not love Christ without loving each other;
and they could not injure each other without injuring Christ.41
In addition to this sacramental unity, Calvin also looked to doctrinal

and scriptural bonds. Preaching was central. Yet Word and sacrament
were not sufficient on their own. In order to promote cohesion and
unity, and to regulate life together through “proper instrumentalities
of power,” an ecclesiastical government was needed.42 Thus Calvin was
“rediscovering what the Roman Church had always practiced and the
early Reformers had nearly always forgotten: that a religious society, like
any society, must find support in institutions; and that institutions, in
turn, were aggregates of power.”43 Far from Luther’s private vision of the
corpus mysticum, Calvin’s communal vision was founded on a commit-
ment to public truth, which is why “preaching” was always an “office”
with all of the political connotations that word implies. While Calvin
attempted to repair Luther’s individualizing reforms with a communal
understanding of power structures, Wolin admits that it was not in fact a
return to the medieval model at all, and seems to worry about its totali-
tarian implications.
At its deepest level, the church cohered as a corpus mysticum, but on top of this
mystic foundation Calvin erected a set of institutions to articulate and enforce
a distinctive way of life. The tight corporate quality of the whole recalled the
ancient polis, yet the underlying element of mystery was a reminder of that
transcendent strain utterly alien to the classical community.44
40. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 151. Interestingly, De Lubac is also quite conciliatory in
tone towards Calvin. Cf. Corpus Mysticum, 118.

While the political community could draw support and even pedagogi-
cal guidance from the “mystic solidarity of Christians,” Calvin was, no
less than Luther, ultimately opposed to the unity and cohesion of the
political order understood as the corpus mysticum. Yet Calvin gave theologi-
cal permission for the “transcendent strain” (which was, Wolin reminds
us, utterly alien to Athenian democracy) to migrate into the social founda-
tions of new political institutions. The Christian society in Calvin’s view,
if it can be put this way, “donated” the mystical unity and cohesion of
the Church as the social basis for the political order which would other-
wise be quite independent from the Church (Calvin’s Geneva theocracy
notwithstanding).45
Wolin observed a common pattern emerging in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Theological and political arguments of the period
seemed to work in apparently opposite directions for the same ends. If
Luther has his alter-ego in Machiavelli’s principe, so Calvin has his in
Thomas Hobbes’s “matter, form, and power of a commonwealth eccle-
siastical and civil.” The mystical elements that had already shifted from
the sacraments to the Church, to the wider society, also migrate to a new
understanding of the person, community and history in liberalism. But
what can be said of democracy itself? He hopes that critics will learn “to
disentangle” what he calls “democratic radicalism” from “liberalism,” a
philosophical tradition that was “born in fear, nourished by disenchant-
ment, and prone to believe that the human condition was and was likely
to remain one of pain and anxiety.”46 Despite the view that liberalism is
shaped by eighteenth-century rationalism, Wolin argues that its deepest
influence comes from classical economics which had a firm grasp on “the
limits of reason and the pervasiveness of irrational factors in man and
society.”47
The Protestant Reformers, no less than Thomas Hobbes, bequeathed
to the liberal progeny “the problem of subjectivism implicit in both the
Protestant belief in the primacy of individual judgment and the Hobbe-
sian insistence that human judgments were inevitably tainted by personal
45. Wolin’s account might challenge the Calvinist defenders of modern democ-
racies. For example, Jeffrey Stout’s preference for Reformed theologians like Nicholas
Wolterstorff might be understood in light of this need for democratic solidarity, partly
owing at least to the gift that Christian citizens are imagined to provide. But does Cal-
vin’s “virtualist” understanding of the Eucharist not commit him to the same kind of split
between the mystical and the real as Luther? See J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation and
the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).

bias or by interest.”48 Wolin sees the political implications clearly: “liberal-

ism transformed the older notion of the common good from an object
posited by reason to one rooted in desire.”49 So it is hardly surprising that
economic theory, according to Adam Smith, posited an “invisible hand”
for the economic well-being of a society in which individuals will always
attempt to satisfy their own selfish desires.50 Adam Smith’s “invisible
hand” is no sign of liberal rationalism regulating the market in perfect
harmony, but reveals what might be seen as the last mutation of the corpus
mysticum, a shadowy force that orders the social but is not itself the social.
The political implications were ultimately economic.
Wolin observes that from the early Christian sense of community to
the medieval, a coherent view of the common good had emerged. At some
point in the migratory process, between the first caesura (between the
sacramental and ecclesial uses of corpus mysticum) and a second caesura
(between the ecclesial and socio-political uses) de Lubac saw an individu-
alizing tendency with regard to Eucharistic piety emerge. But Wolin saw
the individualistic tendency in terms of moral judgments, and a confusing
tendency with regard to inner-outer distinctions. Luther’s sacrifice of “the
political relevancy of the Christian ethic” naturally meant that the moral
judgments of the community would have to be carried not by the com-
munity, but by the individual conscience (and inevitably, desire). Wolin
sees in Calvin, and in Locke, an attempt to restore that “lost” community,
and thus an attempt to articulate a “collective conscience.” But they never
were able to overcome the fundamentally subjectivized sense of conscience
that had emerged. The only way to “exteriorize” the conscience, and thus
make it genuinely collective, was to look for political arrangements that
could protect what “a growingly secular society most treasured; namely,
wealth and status, or more briefly, ‘interests.’”51 Wolin discerns, then, a
shift from the medieval common good, to Luther’s individual conscience,
to Calvin’s collective conscience, and finally Locke’s social conscience,
which is so easily transcribed to economic terms, from “personal inter-
est” to what is in the “public interest.” The loss of the medieval sense
of community had led to a largely materialist, physicalist and reductive
view of the human person. “Having reduced man to mere externality and
stripped him of conscience, it was easy for the liberal economists to treat
him as a material object,” and thus property becomes the sine quo non for

50. Samuel Fleischacker’s Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”: A Philosophical Companion
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) gives a much more nuanced understanding
of Smith’s “invisible hand.”

participation in the society.52 Wolin’s use of de Lubac’s argument in Corpus

Mysticum culminates in his conclusion about liberalism at the end of the
first edition of Politics and Vision. Wolin concludes:
In retrospect the long journey from private judgment to social conformity
appears as the desperate effort of liberals to fashion a substitute for the sense
of community that had been lost.53
In sum, Wolin follows de Lubac’s argument from the fourth to the thir-
teenth century in seeing an increasingly widespread use of the term corpus
mysticum to describe the whole society in a way that had moved far beyond
its original sacramental or ecclesial sense. But the import of Wolin’s treat-
ment of de Lubac is not in his dependence on de Lubac in his footnotes
on medieval political theology. The import of his use of de Lubac can be
seen most fully in how he carries the argument further, and articulates
an interpretation of the political implications of Corpus Mysticum that has
been missing from literature on de Lubac ever since he himself declared
the work to be “naïve.”54 De Lubac habitually and famously identifies a
trajectory without coming to conclusions. But Wolin employs the theme
so thoroughly in Politics and Vision that he can simply note in passing that
Sir John Fortescue readily used corpus mysticum to refer to either the people
or the state, or that much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s understanding
of community was thoroughly shaped by the idea of a “common spirit”
of “communion and dependency.”55 Wolin reveals his dependency on de
Lubac’s argument in Corpus Mysticum only at the beginning of the work,
in relationship to early and medieval Christianity. But it is clear that it
exerts a profound and often unnoticed influence on the entire argument
he makes in Politics and Vision (in the original and expanded editions).
Rousseau’s dictum, “as soon as he is alone, man is nothing,” could
now be seen as merely the romantic version of the corpus mysticum having
migrated further from its source, now generating a new theological
anthropology (“Man is born free, but is everywhere in bondage”), and
a new vision of the redemptive community (the social contract that
will save us from bondage).56 Such migrations, in Wolin’s view, would

54. Henri de Lubac, At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circum-
stances that Occasioned his Writings (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 30.
56. Cf. William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Politi-
cal Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 9. Cavanaugh’s recent
and influential argument is apparently made independently of Wolin’s earlier work but the
similarities are striking. Cavanaugh notes that “it is essential to see fundamental agreement

increasingly and necessarily take on nationalistic dimensions, culminating

in the nineteenth-century concentrations of coercive power, namely in
the newly minted nation-state.57 The mystical element now authorized
strong notions of “a single government” in which individuals would need
to make sacrifices for the distinctive identity of the political whole. Wolin
does not cite de Lubac’s later work The Drama of Atheist Humanism, but
doing so would only have shown how distortions of Christianity gave rise
to the “transvaluation of values” in a new world of secularism, atheism
and nationalism.58 Wolin, a secular Jew, and a thoroughgoing critic of
Nietzsche, was less interested in secularism and atheism in themselves
because these were simply new cultural forms that masked the deeper
problems of political mysticism that he believed were the greatest threat
to genuine democratic freedom.
What is clear is that Wolin went further than de Lubac, both historically
and philosophically, in his judgments. Would de Lubac have moved in
quite this direction? We will never know. But consider de Lubac’s sugges-
tive conclusion to his argument concerning one strand of his argument in
Corpus Mysticum:
In the sixteenth century, Scholastics, Humanists and Protestants spoke
repeatedly of the mystical body. As an exception to this Calvin preferred to
replace it with any of several analogous turns of phrase… But Erasmus and
Luther in contrast both contributed to the success of the modern formula-
tion. Since then, it has remained the common property of both Catholic and
Protestant theologians… From theology it would even make some inroads
into the world of philosophy: Suarez would say that people grouped into
society formed: “a mystical body that morally can be called one in itself”, and, in his
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant would address his readers on the mystical body
of reasonable beings formed by the free submission of each one to the rule
of moral laws.59
It is not unreasonable to think that Wolin represents one possible politi-

cal development of the trajectories that Cardinal de Lubac’s early work
more than suggests. Moreover, while one can imagine that de Lubac would
between Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke on the need to domesticate the Body of Christ in
order to produce unity” (39) and “the rise of the state is predicated on the creation of the
individual…liberated from the confines of the traditional group and now relating to other
individuals on the basis of contract” (73–4).
57. Wolin’s argument has been replicated, augmented and supplemented by a wide
range of contemporary theorists; however, many who follow this line most often, and inex-
plicably, neglect the theology that Wolin saw as so important to his analysis in the 1950s.
E.g. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1996).
58. See Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1995).
59. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 118; original emphasis.

have done this work much differently, he would have found much to agree
with in Wolin’s development of thesis with regard to political mysticism
beyond the Church. But how might de Lubac have criticized Wolin?
In this next and final section, we will conclude with some compara-
tive reflections on time and community, and consider what theological
criticisms of Wolin’s “fugitive democracy” might be raised in light of de
Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum.
Theo-political Reflections on Fugitive

Democracy and the Corpus Mysticum
Jeffrey Stout concludes: “Sheldon Wolin’s work on the evisceration of
democracy, though admirably accurate in its treatment of the dangers
posed by empire and capital, abandons the project of democratic account-
ability too quickly in favor of the romance of the fugitive.”60 Wolin’s fugi-
tive democracy certainly can be taken as the dark “small town democratic”
vision of a hopeless Romantic. But this would betray the reading of Wolin
that has been offered in these pages, especially given his strong critique of
the “mystical element” in politics.
Wolin seems more realistic than romantic when we understand his
insistence that democracy is fugitive by nature, that it is “fleeting,” and
always on the run from being “managed.” It is not the “flight from author-
ity” that interests Wolin, it is the flight from the political mysticism and
irrationalism of liberal political and economic forms. If he has hope, it is
hope that we may be vigilant for wherever such democracy might emerge
or irrupt. Just as he wants to remove, as de Lubac seemed to suggest was
required from a theological point of view, the errant understanding of the
corpus mysticum from the western political imagination, and return it to its
proper sacramental home, so he seems to want to retain a sense of the loss
of Christian time, and Christian community, always careful not to search
for political substitutes for Christianity in the West.
What may we critically observe about Wolin’s “fugitive democracy”? In
terms of political time, we can say that he captures a sense of the radically
incomplete nature of democracy as a temporal activity. Wolin’s Aristote-
lianism seems to allow democracy no transcendent telos, and thus refuses
the grand mysticism that he associates with the enormous scale of modern
political thought. His argument to decouple democracy and liberalism,
then, is really an argument about political time, refusing mystical ends for
democracy. Should we be surprised that calls for “radical democracy” are
often viewed as futile?
60. Jeffrey Stout, “The Spirit of Democracy and the Rhetoric of Excess,” Journal of
Religious Ethics 35.1 (2007): 3–21.

In his humanism, Wolin is perfectly Aristotelian. Wolin resists political

forms, which would restrict human beings freedom as political animals. To
be human is to be political. Thus any political form that collects consent,
but rejects participation is dehumanizing. His project is an invitation to
human beings to be political agents, and to attend to their own local ways
of knowing and naming the political. Wolin identifies the human need for
political knowledge, and this works in ways which bear striking similarities to
theological knowledge, and perhaps his work can be seen analogically as a par-
ticular kind of negative political theology. In medieval terms, negative the-
ology was part of a complex triplex via that safeguarded human knowledge
of God, and human naming of God, from idolatry. They were interested
in saying, as part of their theological grammar, what God was not. This
attentiveness to the via negativa in theological language was no less true
when the Church considered the city of God. After all, Saint Augustine’s
City of God has far more to say about the city of man than it does about
the city of God (and thus Augustine also might be understood in terms of
a negative political theology, for he, no less than the Church, presents no
political models to the world—despite accounts to the contrary).
In this negative sense, Wolin is more confident in saying that democ-
racy is fugitive, that it is on the run from settled, secure, fixed political
forms. Surprisingly, though he refuses liberalism, he does not, however,
refuse political forms or the institutions that embody them. Wolin’s work
can thus be seen as an attempt to purify our naming, not of God, but of
“the political,” which for him is always the common good of ordinary
human beings who, as he once put it, are just trying to eke out “a decent
existence” at the most local level.61 Thus it might be most accurate to view
Wolin as offering a negative political theology that is really in the service,
not of God, but humanity—though hopefully he might admit that these
ends are not mutually exclusive. For such a radically local and democratic
thinker, he heightens rather than lessens the importance of thinking about
“the common good” in theological, political and economic terms.
Where does this leave American democratic visions of e pluribus unum?
Wolin is devastatingly critical of this liberal drive to unity, which he sees
as the mystical impulse inherited from the migrations of the corpus mysti-
cum. De Lubac would agree that unity is the fundamental impulse of the
corpus mysticum. But for the Jesuit theologian, unity was the work of God
61. While no Catholic, Wolin’s humanism seems in line with the minimal way in
which Catholic Social Teaching defines the “common good” in terms of the conditions nec-
essary for human flourishing. He is not so much concerned to deny the Church its claims
to comprehensive superiority in faith and morals, or its call to communion for all human-
ity; he is only concerned to deny liberalism, the nation-state or the market an unchecked
power that would be a simulacrum of the same.

who made all of humanity in his image for communion with Himself.
The problem of corpus mysticum was not its impulse for unity, but in
the complex distinctions that arose from seeing the source and summit
of that unity as sacramental and ecclesial. For de Lubac, the Church is
unfinished, but constantly nourished by every consecrated moment of
Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist that makes the Church. The future
has become a dimension of hope in the ekklesia which provides a kind of
political knowledge because it is teleological and eschatological knowledge of
“the end of the political,” which is the city of God. And it is surely at this
point, if not at others, where Wolin and de Lubac would most surely agree
that the Church claims knowledge about “the end of the political,” and it
is at this point that they would also part ways. For while they most likely
could agree to a reasonable extent on the nature of the human person
and even community, political time and space could never become wholly
immanent for de Lubac not only for fear of the totalitarian implications
of this view of time, but because Christian revelation bears witness to a
different view of history.
Yet Wolin’s fugitive democracy is perpetually restless by nature, not
unlike Augustine’s restless heart. Wolin cannot answer, as Aristotle could
not, questions about the telos of human souls, or even the telos of the
spirit of the human community. Aquinas himself faulted Aristotle for not
being able to name the telos of the soul. If democracy is fugitive, what is it
running towards? Why is it fugitive? What generates this restlessness? Is
not the very fugitivity of democracy itself a sign that it has lost something
that would make it whole? Wolin is helpful in laying bare the restlessness
of our nature as political animals, and he is right in denying that liber-
alism is that political form which could elevate and perfect democracy.
In this, he might be seen as offering nothing contradictory to Catholic
(negative) political theology. Without intending as much, Wolin can be
seen as a political theorist who clears a space for the political philosopher
and theologian alike to think about the political knowledge the ecclesial
person has access to through the sacramental time of the Church. And yet
it must be noted that Wolin, like so many, is more often right in what he
denies than what he affirms. For his critique of political mysticism is as
profound as his political immanentism is weak.
Wolin reads democracy’s nature rightly when he views it as fugitive;
but when he fails to name from whence that restlessness comes, and to
what end it is directed, he invites us to take theology seriously as theology
once again when thinking “the political.” Partly because it develops so
brilliantly the argument of Corpus Mysticum, Wolin’s work highlights how
much the western political imagination needs the Church. In particular,
the Church is necessary to make sense of the political restlessness (the

political nature) he so ably names. For democracy to embody its fugitive

character it will also need something beyond it to which it can flee so that
it doesn’t become a totalizing, immanent space. Stout, like Hauerwas, has
famously preferred Karl Barth’s totaliter aliter, where the total otherness of
God also means that religion cannot really challenge the autonomy of the
political, which is what the Catholic Church does in a carefully circum-
scribed sense. But likewise, in Wolin’s commitment to detach democracy
and liberalism, it is not clear that “fugitive democracy” can get us out of
an autonomously constituted, autonomous politics and the local space it
needs, even though he helps us to identify it. While Wolin teaches us that
liberal state and market are not mystical bodies, it is not clear that democ-
racy alone, detached from all of this political mysticism, is sufficient on its
own. The upshot is, from de Lubac’s point of view, that only a concrete,
visible Church can save us.
In conclusion, theologians and political philosophers’ attempts to
reconcile religion and liberal democracy might look different were they
to examine Henri de Lubac and Sheldon Wolin together. In Wolin, we
have a theorist who wants to free democratic imaginations from the
disciplines of detachment imposed by both state and market, and from
the political mysticism that gives both state and market their power to
collect consent and allegiance at the same time it forces human beings to
cease to be political animals. In de Lubac, we have a theologian who set
out to free the ecclesial imagination from disciplines of detachment that
separated the historical body of Christ, his sacramental mystical body in
the Eucharist, and his true body the Church. Henri de Lubac imagined a
“mystical body politics” that was more inclusive, more humanizing and
ultimately more social than the isolating politics of the modern, liberal
state.62 While Wolin cannot imagine, as de Lubac could, a “common
destiny” for the world in Catholicism, he did learn from de Lubac a
crucial political insight: from his reading of de Lubac he learned that the
nationalist mystique (to use Péguy’s terms)63 is a distorted reflection of
the corpus mysticum.
De Lubac could have applauded Wolin’s critique of nationalism and the
version of liberalism that amounts to the same. But is it possible to think
that de Lubac could follow Wolin’s vision of democracy as fugitive? Quite
possibly, but he might have noticed, as a thoroughgoing Augustinian, that
62. See F. C. Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), where the term has a certain affin-
ity to Michel de Certeau, another thinker who has tried to work out the political implica-
tions of Cardinal de Lubac.
63. See Charles Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, trans. Alexander Dru (Indianapolis, IN:
Liberty Fund, 2001).

Wolin’s work is charged with a divine yearning (an eros) for that which
he cannot name.64 Wolin’s resistance to settled political forms, and his
insistence on preserving the fugitive nature of democratic action, is no less
a cry for human freedom than liberalism itself. It also resists political rest
through its distinctively theological and historical argument for political
agonism.65 As a negative political theology, Wolin’s fugitive democracy
rejects every distorted reflection of the true corpus mysticum. But does it
not then also yearn for the real thing?
C. C. Pecknold is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at The

Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His most recent
book is Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History.
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[PT 11.

1 (2010) 77-101] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X

Migrations of the Host:

Keywords: church, corpus mysticum, democracy, eschatology, Eucharist, lib-

Sheldon Wolin’s magisterial study of the western political imagination,

book became a staple of course curricula in political science departments

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

understands that Christianity invents the whole notion of the saeculum, as

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Ages.7 Such a claim for the importance of this dependence is intended to

Making the Political Fit the Sacred

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

8. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 96.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

10. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 21.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

forming the character of Christian community to an objective view of

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

political thought, even if de Lubac himself hesitated to draw political con-

Wolin’s Use of Henri de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

23. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 112.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Wolin notes that classical political thought had never understood

27. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 119.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Modern Migrations of the Host

29. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 119.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Church’s ability to check temporal monopolies on power.33 As long as

33. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 145.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

37. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 146.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Calvin’s attempt to partially restore the medieval commitment to the

In addition to this sacramental unity, Calvin also looked to doctrinal

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

bias or by interest.”48 Wolin sees the political implications clearly: “liberal-

48. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 297.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

participation in the society.52 Wolin’s use of de Lubac’s argument in Corpus

52. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 306.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

increasingly and necessarily take on nationalistic dimensions, culminating

It is not unreasonable to think that Wolin represents one possible politi-

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Theo-political Reflections on Fugitive

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

In his humanism, Wolin is perfectly Aristotelian. Wolin resists political

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

political nature) he so ably names. For democracy to embody its fugitive

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

C. C. Pecknold is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at The

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

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