In this essay, found HERE, Prof. Roger Friedland expands on Dotan Leshem’s work exploring the theological origins of our notions of Neoliberal economy to include, rather daringly, ALL institutions.
If you dig it, check out Friedland's follow up essay, where he clarifies a few things HERE
Christ’s Body Is Everywhere
An Excessive Reading of Dotan Leshem’s Origins of Neoliberalism
Dotan Leshem offers us a new Christian secularization story, not of the sovereign as an earthly God, à la Schmitt, but of the transposition of the Christian model of the earthly ecclesia, the expansionary sphere of the revelation and outworking of God’s salvific plan, to the capitalist market. In contrast to Noam Yuran, his countryman, who has recently sought the secret of Protestant asceticism as a religious outworking of the “unspeakable voice of money,” the infinitely expansive desire that constitutes its substance, a desire for what money cannot buy,46 Leshem tells a secularization story not of money nor market, but of the ordering of divine excess, the generation of surplus, and growth. The formation and functioning of the Christian economy as a divinized earthly sphere parallels the Father’s begetting of the Son, “a surplus world created through the Son” (33).47 Following Tatian, the economy’s “principle of movement” is the generation of surplus from the divine excess immanent in its formation.
In Leshem’s account the Christian model, “a techno-theoretical apparatus” of the divine economy, understood as the outer earthly expansion and transcription of the inner economics of the triune Godhead in the ecclesia, ultimately migrated to the capitalist market (3, 9). Contra Agamben, it is this divine growth, not providential administration of the mystery, that constitutes the Christian economy.48 Paul first proclaimed the role of the church bishops as economists charged with “the dispensation of revealed divine mystery” (25). Major elements of the formal model grounding their understanding of their mission would, centuries later, show up in those of the economists who laid out the beneficent temporal logic of the market in wealth formation, and the growth of employment and consumption. It is not that religious figurations are economic; his genealogy demonstrates that our economics, our formal understandings of the capitalist market, are religious in form.
Leshem’s text, a brilliant, muscular historical semiotics of the economy, traces not only the category, but the model, of the economy from the classical world in which the private oikos whose prudent management of nature’s excessive means would generate a surplus allowing the master to freely participate outside in the polis or to pursue philosophy, to the Christians, through Paul of Tarsus who identified the ecclesia as an open-air oikos within which the excessive economics of the mystery of divine incarnation was proclaimed, witnessed and experienced, to Iranaeus who set the stage for the economy to be understood as a progressive history of salvation, a realization of the divine plan culminating in the “fullness of the ages” (38, 48), to Gregory of Nyssa who theorized an ever-growing sphere of human souls purified of sin, driven by their ever-growing, unsaturated desire for God (93–96), a desire that itself became desired, right up to the relentlessly expansive free market, likewise grounded in limitless human desire, which transforms all, including the self, into commodities convertible into coin.
In both the Christian and the market orders, growth is the watchword and telos, the substantiation of their value and truth, the evidence of the excess that animates them: growth of membership, belief and desire in the Christian economy, of the reach of the market and the amount of the goods that circulate within its ambit in the liberal market. As Cyril writes, “the ultimate end of economy is the sheer size of the Church” (143). In both, excess is desirable. In both, the economy is a sphere of freedom, of choosing. In both, the economy is a society of believers (163). In both, the state, a potentially coercive sinful body, should be subservient to the service of economic expansion based upon the free choice of its members.49 For those of us in the social sciences long conditioned to understand the capitalist economy as a profane and carnal domain, as the secret sociological ground of the power of dominant classes and nation-states, let alone our god, Leshem has turned the tables. God is the originary invisible hand.
But perhaps there are no tables to turn.
I engage Leshem’s book not as a historian of religion, let alone a theologian or philosopher of religion, but as a religious sociologist. My project is not to locate the sociological ground of religion, but the religious constitution of society. I look to Leshem’s elaboration of Christian “models” of the economics of mystery not for their interpretive adequacy and textual faithfulness in his reading of master Christian thinkers, something I am anyway not qualified to judge, but as materials for the building of a religious approach to orders of social being. I wish to push Leshem’s model beyond where he intended it to go.
The Christian economic model at the center of his story crystallized in response to the vexed relationship between the humanity and divinity of Christ. The critical Christian move that sets up the ontology and the cartography of the divine economy, Leshem shows, comes in the fourth and fifth centuries, between the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon, when on the one hand, an “ontological communion” of the three personas of the Godhead is elaborated as a theological domain outside space and time and the reach of philosophy, and on the other the separate sphere of the ecclesia as a human domain outside the Godhead in and to which he reveals his plan for salvation. It is this latter sphere, to which the Godhead is invisible, known only by its operations, that is henceforth identified by the Christians as the economy, the kataphatic face of “revealed operations” of the apophatic God (51).
Humans do not share in divine nature, yet participate in the Godhead through the divine indwelling of the perichoresis. It is only through human practices in the divine economy, in a human becoming afforded by divine being, that man is in communion with God, that human society becomes “a mirror in which the Godhead participates and in which it is reflected” (68). The inner organization of the trinity, its paradoxical combination of unity and plurality, one divine substance and multiple personas, this central mystery, is mirrored, or mimed, by the outer organization of the ecclesia (57, 71). The relationship between the divinely human Christ and God is the template for the relationship between the earthly ecclesia and Christ, the church as the body of Christ. Growth of the divine economy depends on human mirroring and miming of the Godhead, on what Leshem terms Christomimesis.
Although he asserts that the model is productive, a “paragon to be imitated, a mimesis by which the economy’s proper conduct and growth are secured,” its actual impact on growth is neither specified nor estimated (57). This is not a study of how growth actually takes place—the material practices of preaching, conversion, baptism, tithing, charity, taking of sacraments, church building, missionizing, conquest and colonization—in the Christian economy. Nor is it a study of the productive role of the economic models through which that growth was understood. This is a historical semiotics, not an analysis of the productive performativity of those words. It is a study of economics, not economies.
When I read Leshem’s Christian models of the economy of mystery, of hypostasis and perichoresis, of one essence and multiple modes of being, of the relation of divine and the human, it was uncannily familiar. I had not imagined that I would find sociological tools in the Cappadocian settlement. I read in Leshem’s model of the divine economy the elements for a model of a general institutional logic.50 I want to explore the possibility that this Orthodox Christian incarnational theology is not just a model of a divine Christian economy, but the general form and mode of operation of all institutions. The implication, as Weber suggested long ago, is that we live in a world of heterogeneous “value spheres,” an earthly polytheism.51
Institutional logics are constellations of subjects, practices and objects whose coherence and efficacy depend on metaphysical goods.52 Institutional logics are grounded in goods that I conceptualize as non-phenomenal institutional substances, beyond experience and reason, which can only be known through the operations which presume them and the institutional objects through and around which those practices are effected. And reciprocally, the practices of an institutional logic are only effective because of their grounding in the institutional objects which themselves depend on those institutional substances, for their believability and desirability, on belief and faith. Institutional objects—money, equity, accounts, contracts, borders, ballot boxes, scientific findings, a lover’s body, depend for their objectivity on institutional substances—market value, accountability, state sovereignty, popular representation, knowledge, love. Institutional objects incarnate the substance. These goods function as the gods of institutional life, not as highest beings, which would imply an institutional theolatry, nor as subjective values externally imprinted on things, but as virtual entities, or, in terms laid out by Jean Luc Marion, as divine givens.53
Christianity is true. But the truth of this Christianity, I want to suggest, is the truth not just of God and Jesus, but of institution. The troubling question for a book entitled The Origins of Neoliberalism is the historical relation between the two. I would suggest that the model of the Godhead, a “community” of divine personas, a “self-sufficient excess that inherently exceeds human rationality” (56), which is reflected and participates in the ecclesia, is a model of all expansionary institutional worlds. In the “ontological communion,” there is a “communion of interpenetration and mutual inclusion that subsists as the condition of appearance of the singular mode of being (hypostasis) of each of the Godhead’s personas” which is likewise the model for the ecclesia (56). In this new Christian understanding, Leshem writes, “the relation between the origin (God the Father) and the image (God the Son) is reflected and participates in the persona of the transcribed image, in the mirror of the being of the Son” (66). Just as Gregory imagined the church, human communities are held together by their communion, their mutual participation, with and through these institutional substances mirrored by their communion (98). And parallel to Gregory of Nazianzus’s anti-Arian proposition that the communion of divine persons of the Godhead be a model for the thinking the relation of ecclesia and Caesar, institutional communities are constituted through practices organized through constellations of institutional objects, no one of which necessarily has primacy (118).
In my view institutional substance is a Godhead whose being is knowable neither to experience nor reason—or as Basil remarked, “his essence remains beyond our reach” (70)—which, like Christ, penetrates and is reflected in the singular mode of being of institutional objects, whose objectivity depends on that hypostatic immanence, on the penetration, participation and reflection that is there in the mystery of its central material symbolizations. In this vein, Devin Singh has pointed to money’s incarnational logic, of Jesus as “God’s coin.”54 Institutional objects, whose substance is not located in Cartesian extension but through their participation in something which make them a “this” in Aristotelian terms, are icons of the substance. Institutional objects depend on this same “mutual interpenetration/inclusion,” the mutual immanence, that distinction without separation, that obtains in the ontological communion, the hypostatic elimination of any gap between a transrational good and its exemplary material objects.
The Christian cannot rationally access the relationship between divine personas, can never fathom Christ’s divine begetting. He can only know his God through God’s principles of action, through the ways in which we, not just God, participate in God’s divine operations in the human economy. In our institutional worlds, we only know institutional substances through the material practices they afford which participate in and reflect them. It is through these practices anchored in institutional objects that we “participate in the divine personas which reveals itself in the economy, whether of Christ’s body, the Church, the martyr’s flesh, a human’s own souls, and in the eyes of the his fellow members in the society of believers” (68). As with the hypostatic Christ, it is through institutional objects that we achieve a consubstantiality with the substance—with truth, sovereignty, market value, love, knowledge, representation. We have been formed and form ourselves in their image. They afford kinds of personhood, written in our hearts, interiors that exceed us. And thus the substances both participate and are reflected in our practical relation with institutional objects (68). Defending the border, appreciating the masterwork, manipulating a body of knowledge, turning goods into property, casting our ballot, caressing the body of a beloved, we become members through the incarnations of the highest goods. As in Gregory’s account of the Christian community, we are both bound as a community and revealed in our singularity in the eyes of others through this “communion in divine excess” (92). Through them we likewise “ceaselessly beget” ourselves “anew” (93). The truth of each of us is located in the way we reflect and participate in our distant, yet intimate, gods. In our institutional worlds, we “become at home only in a perichoresis with some One whose nature is alien” to us “beyond recognition” (77). Like Gregory’s virgin we all desire invisible grooms. We all, like Jesus, freely, lovingly subject ourselves to one Father or another (119). Christ’s body is everywhere.
Institutional substances are, and must be, excessive to the material practices through which they are substantiated on earth. That excess is essential to the central engine of the divine economy, the individual freedom to choose to participate in the persona revealed within it (68). The economy depends on a double gift, on a double exception external to it. The mystery of divine will, his self-giving, to which Paul pointed is complementary to the twinned mystery of human will, in which we give ourselves to the given which gives us to ourselves.55 This excess is integral to our choosing, choice being the center of the Christian economy.
That excess is part and parcel of the indeterminacy of reference, essential then to the inclusionary growth of any institutional logic, to its ability to incorporate new objects, new persons, new practices. Growth entails the uncertainty of reference, and reference exceptional authority that can never be reduced to a norm. Reference is always a potential state of exception. That excess, the intentional energy of growth it implies and its irreducibility to the visible practices it informs is also integral to the exceptional powers of institutional authorities to suspend the rules in pursuit of inclusion and the prevention of exclusion, just as Leshem documents in the extra-canonical validation of words and sacraments outside the boundaries of the church as in the case of the Catharoi (138). That growth—the ever-changing reference, the multiplication of practices, the re-agglomeration of institutional objects, the increasing number of things that circulate in its name—affirms the immutability and eternality of the Name (95). The transcription of this excess is sustained by the perpetual possibility of the sacrifice of its material forms and instances—results which are no longer knowledge because they have paved the way to new knowing, money that disappears only to reemerge in new expanded form, even objects and persons who have been institutionally excised, made inert. Such sacrifices are both a test and a source of belief in the divine substance which is in no way diminished, and indeed its excess is revealed, affirmed and grows, by them.
That excess is a source of desire that is itself excessive, yet integral, to their operation and their extension or growth. It is, as Gregory maintained, an erotic desire that “nourishes itself” (74). It is that institutional excess—as characteristic of money as it is of Christ—that is the presupposition of expansive “human wants,” which Leshem identifies as a natural source of excess in the market (177). To ground those practices solely in the pleasures of our individual benefit is to make a carnal reduction, making the origins and operations of institutional practice solely about passions and interests, conflating the desire for goods with the desire for the goodness of the good. To ground those practices only in their productivity, to refuse to ground them in something which transcends them, which can never be present, is to engage in an idolatry, to fail to understand the mysterious excess and consubstantiality essential to the fusion of productivity and performativity upon which institutional logics depend. The divine economy of an institutional logic is constituted by excess, an excess that is an engine of growth, a source of a limitless desire, of individual choice, a basis of passionless desire, the creation and production of surplus, and the suspension of norms and breaking of rules.56
Although not referenced in his text Leshem returns us to the preoccupations of Karl Lowith’s Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History who read the Western doctrine and apotheosis of progress as a secularization of Christian eschatology. Leshem, too, locates the “debut” of the “story of progress” in Christian historicity, “composed of crucial moments that are connected and ordered along a line that begins with creation and ends in endless eternality” (49). Lowith’s account was challenged by Hans Blumenberg both for his failure to recognize the Christian sources of secularization of eschatology as it adapted to the apparent deferral of Christ’s return, the conversion of the “energy of eschatological ‘state of emergency,’ set free, pressed toward self-institutionalization in the world,”57 and his failure to see the ways in which the nominalist tradition in Christianity, precisely the one that emphasized the unknowable and transcendent Divine will, his potential absoluta, that thereby stripped history of any telos and created the conditions for human self-assertion, not as a driver of secularization, but of the creation of a new modern world.58
What is the historical force of Leshem’s model of the divine economy? For Leshem, the model of the Christian economy worked out in the fourth and fifth centuries is a “key moment” in the “genealogy of the neoliberal marketized economy” (6). Leshem tells us a tale of the “migration” of economy—as concept and model. In part Leshem follows in the footsteps of Blumenberg who recast what had been described as secularization as the “reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant,” not a “transposition of authentically theological contents.”59 Leshem offers us a history of ideas as answers to “seemingly different” questions grounded in a trans-historical conceptualization of an invariant economy, a separate sphere in which excess is converted into surplus through prudence (3).
But contra Blumenberg, there is still a secularization story in the answers, in the uncanny parallels between the Christian economics of mystery and the neo-classical mystery of the market, particularly its emphasis on growth, in the migration of the model and the identification of the “origins” of a growth-centered marketization in the Christianity of late antiquity (163).60 So while Leshem repeatedly tangles with Agamben over his reading of the Christian economy, he repeatedly adopts Agamben’s understanding of secularization as a “signature,” “which move[s] and displace[s] concepts and signs from one field to another . . . without redefining them semantically.”61 In Leshem’s account the institutional movement of oikonomia is understood not in terms of changing sense, but of new denotations, in which the “very secularization of the world becomes the mark that identifies it as belonging to a divine oikonomia.”62
A religious approach to institution would obviate the need to invoke secularization. It is not that the economy has religious origins: All institutions are religious mechanism, which may also facilitate the transposition of models across them. That the divine is always already contained in the Son spells out a more general economics, ultimate goods as givens that ground an infinite desire for their materialization on earth. We all live for one Son or another, this One a hypostasis that provides a clarified formal model for the ways in which the goods of human life give us to ourselves, and that it is the necessary sacrifice of their material instantiations that both expresses and enacts the gap between the “economy” as a domain, or theater, of divine operations and the existence of the divinity itself. The god is known through this difference in the same way that market value transcends any price, knowledge any result, sovereignty any border, information any datum, property any possession. In an institutional approach, the origins of excess never fall to earth; they remain on the plane of the gods.
An Excessive Reading of Dotan Leshem’s Origins of Neoliberalism
Dotan Leshem offers us a new Christian secularization story, not of the sovereign as an earthly God, à la Schmitt, but of the transposition of the Christian model of the earthly ecclesia, the expansionary sphere of the revelation and outworking of God’s salvific plan, to the capitalist market. In contrast to Noam Yuran, his countryman, who has recently sought the secret of Protestant asceticism as a religious outworking of the “unspeakable voice of money,” the infinitely expansive desire that constitutes its substance, a desire for what money cannot buy,46 Leshem tells a secularization story not of money nor market, but of the ordering of divine excess, the generation of surplus, and growth. The formation and functioning of the Christian economy as a divinized earthly sphere parallels the Father’s begetting of the Son, “a surplus world created through the Son” (33).47 Following Tatian, the economy’s “principle of movement” is the generation of surplus from the divine excess immanent in its formation.
In Leshem’s account the Christian model, “a techno-theoretical apparatus” of the divine economy, understood as the outer earthly expansion and transcription of the inner economics of the triune Godhead in the ecclesia, ultimately migrated to the capitalist market (3, 9). Contra Agamben, it is this divine growth, not providential administration of the mystery, that constitutes the Christian economy.48 Paul first proclaimed the role of the church bishops as economists charged with “the dispensation of revealed divine mystery” (25). Major elements of the formal model grounding their understanding of their mission would, centuries later, show up in those of the economists who laid out the beneficent temporal logic of the market in wealth formation, and the growth of employment and consumption. It is not that religious figurations are economic; his genealogy demonstrates that our economics, our formal understandings of the capitalist market, are religious in form.
Leshem’s text, a brilliant, muscular historical semiotics of the economy, traces not only the category, but the model, of the economy from the classical world in which the private oikos whose prudent management of nature’s excessive means would generate a surplus allowing the master to freely participate outside in the polis or to pursue philosophy, to the Christians, through Paul of Tarsus who identified the ecclesia as an open-air oikos within which the excessive economics of the mystery of divine incarnation was proclaimed, witnessed and experienced, to Iranaeus who set the stage for the economy to be understood as a progressive history of salvation, a realization of the divine plan culminating in the “fullness of the ages” (38, 48), to Gregory of Nyssa who theorized an ever-growing sphere of human souls purified of sin, driven by their ever-growing, unsaturated desire for God (93–96), a desire that itself became desired, right up to the relentlessly expansive free market, likewise grounded in limitless human desire, which transforms all, including the self, into commodities convertible into coin.
In both the Christian and the market orders, growth is the watchword and telos, the substantiation of their value and truth, the evidence of the excess that animates them: growth of membership, belief and desire in the Christian economy, of the reach of the market and the amount of the goods that circulate within its ambit in the liberal market. As Cyril writes, “the ultimate end of economy is the sheer size of the Church” (143). In both, excess is desirable. In both, the economy is a sphere of freedom, of choosing. In both, the economy is a society of believers (163). In both, the state, a potentially coercive sinful body, should be subservient to the service of economic expansion based upon the free choice of its members.49 For those of us in the social sciences long conditioned to understand the capitalist economy as a profane and carnal domain, as the secret sociological ground of the power of dominant classes and nation-states, let alone our god, Leshem has turned the tables. God is the originary invisible hand.
But perhaps there are no tables to turn.
I engage Leshem’s book not as a historian of religion, let alone a theologian or philosopher of religion, but as a religious sociologist. My project is not to locate the sociological ground of religion, but the religious constitution of society. I look to Leshem’s elaboration of Christian “models” of the economics of mystery not for their interpretive adequacy and textual faithfulness in his reading of master Christian thinkers, something I am anyway not qualified to judge, but as materials for the building of a religious approach to orders of social being. I wish to push Leshem’s model beyond where he intended it to go.
The Christian economic model at the center of his story crystallized in response to the vexed relationship between the humanity and divinity of Christ. The critical Christian move that sets up the ontology and the cartography of the divine economy, Leshem shows, comes in the fourth and fifth centuries, between the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon, when on the one hand, an “ontological communion” of the three personas of the Godhead is elaborated as a theological domain outside space and time and the reach of philosophy, and on the other the separate sphere of the ecclesia as a human domain outside the Godhead in and to which he reveals his plan for salvation. It is this latter sphere, to which the Godhead is invisible, known only by its operations, that is henceforth identified by the Christians as the economy, the kataphatic face of “revealed operations” of the apophatic God (51).
Humans do not share in divine nature, yet participate in the Godhead through the divine indwelling of the perichoresis. It is only through human practices in the divine economy, in a human becoming afforded by divine being, that man is in communion with God, that human society becomes “a mirror in which the Godhead participates and in which it is reflected” (68). The inner organization of the trinity, its paradoxical combination of unity and plurality, one divine substance and multiple personas, this central mystery, is mirrored, or mimed, by the outer organization of the ecclesia (57, 71). The relationship between the divinely human Christ and God is the template for the relationship between the earthly ecclesia and Christ, the church as the body of Christ. Growth of the divine economy depends on human mirroring and miming of the Godhead, on what Leshem terms Christomimesis.
Although he asserts that the model is productive, a “paragon to be imitated, a mimesis by which the economy’s proper conduct and growth are secured,” its actual impact on growth is neither specified nor estimated (57). This is not a study of how growth actually takes place—the material practices of preaching, conversion, baptism, tithing, charity, taking of sacraments, church building, missionizing, conquest and colonization—in the Christian economy. Nor is it a study of the productive role of the economic models through which that growth was understood. This is a historical semiotics, not an analysis of the productive performativity of those words. It is a study of economics, not economies.
When I read Leshem’s Christian models of the economy of mystery, of hypostasis and perichoresis, of one essence and multiple modes of being, of the relation of divine and the human, it was uncannily familiar. I had not imagined that I would find sociological tools in the Cappadocian settlement. I read in Leshem’s model of the divine economy the elements for a model of a general institutional logic.50 I want to explore the possibility that this Orthodox Christian incarnational theology is not just a model of a divine Christian economy, but the general form and mode of operation of all institutions. The implication, as Weber suggested long ago, is that we live in a world of heterogeneous “value spheres,” an earthly polytheism.51
Institutional logics are constellations of subjects, practices and objects whose coherence and efficacy depend on metaphysical goods.52 Institutional logics are grounded in goods that I conceptualize as non-phenomenal institutional substances, beyond experience and reason, which can only be known through the operations which presume them and the institutional objects through and around which those practices are effected. And reciprocally, the practices of an institutional logic are only effective because of their grounding in the institutional objects which themselves depend on those institutional substances, for their believability and desirability, on belief and faith. Institutional objects—money, equity, accounts, contracts, borders, ballot boxes, scientific findings, a lover’s body, depend for their objectivity on institutional substances—market value, accountability, state sovereignty, popular representation, knowledge, love. Institutional objects incarnate the substance. These goods function as the gods of institutional life, not as highest beings, which would imply an institutional theolatry, nor as subjective values externally imprinted on things, but as virtual entities, or, in terms laid out by Jean Luc Marion, as divine givens.53
Christianity is true. But the truth of this Christianity, I want to suggest, is the truth not just of God and Jesus, but of institution. The troubling question for a book entitled The Origins of Neoliberalism is the historical relation between the two. I would suggest that the model of the Godhead, a “community” of divine personas, a “self-sufficient excess that inherently exceeds human rationality” (56), which is reflected and participates in the ecclesia, is a model of all expansionary institutional worlds. In the “ontological communion,” there is a “communion of interpenetration and mutual inclusion that subsists as the condition of appearance of the singular mode of being (hypostasis) of each of the Godhead’s personas” which is likewise the model for the ecclesia (56). In this new Christian understanding, Leshem writes, “the relation between the origin (God the Father) and the image (God the Son) is reflected and participates in the persona of the transcribed image, in the mirror of the being of the Son” (66). Just as Gregory imagined the church, human communities are held together by their communion, their mutual participation, with and through these institutional substances mirrored by their communion (98). And parallel to Gregory of Nazianzus’s anti-Arian proposition that the communion of divine persons of the Godhead be a model for the thinking the relation of ecclesia and Caesar, institutional communities are constituted through practices organized through constellations of institutional objects, no one of which necessarily has primacy (118).
In my view institutional substance is a Godhead whose being is knowable neither to experience nor reason—or as Basil remarked, “his essence remains beyond our reach” (70)—which, like Christ, penetrates and is reflected in the singular mode of being of institutional objects, whose objectivity depends on that hypostatic immanence, on the penetration, participation and reflection that is there in the mystery of its central material symbolizations. In this vein, Devin Singh has pointed to money’s incarnational logic, of Jesus as “God’s coin.”54 Institutional objects, whose substance is not located in Cartesian extension but through their participation in something which make them a “this” in Aristotelian terms, are icons of the substance. Institutional objects depend on this same “mutual interpenetration/inclusion,” the mutual immanence, that distinction without separation, that obtains in the ontological communion, the hypostatic elimination of any gap between a transrational good and its exemplary material objects.
The Christian cannot rationally access the relationship between divine personas, can never fathom Christ’s divine begetting. He can only know his God through God’s principles of action, through the ways in which we, not just God, participate in God’s divine operations in the human economy. In our institutional worlds, we only know institutional substances through the material practices they afford which participate in and reflect them. It is through these practices anchored in institutional objects that we “participate in the divine personas which reveals itself in the economy, whether of Christ’s body, the Church, the martyr’s flesh, a human’s own souls, and in the eyes of the his fellow members in the society of believers” (68). As with the hypostatic Christ, it is through institutional objects that we achieve a consubstantiality with the substance—with truth, sovereignty, market value, love, knowledge, representation. We have been formed and form ourselves in their image. They afford kinds of personhood, written in our hearts, interiors that exceed us. And thus the substances both participate and are reflected in our practical relation with institutional objects (68). Defending the border, appreciating the masterwork, manipulating a body of knowledge, turning goods into property, casting our ballot, caressing the body of a beloved, we become members through the incarnations of the highest goods. As in Gregory’s account of the Christian community, we are both bound as a community and revealed in our singularity in the eyes of others through this “communion in divine excess” (92). Through them we likewise “ceaselessly beget” ourselves “anew” (93). The truth of each of us is located in the way we reflect and participate in our distant, yet intimate, gods. In our institutional worlds, we “become at home only in a perichoresis with some One whose nature is alien” to us “beyond recognition” (77). Like Gregory’s virgin we all desire invisible grooms. We all, like Jesus, freely, lovingly subject ourselves to one Father or another (119). Christ’s body is everywhere.
Institutional substances are, and must be, excessive to the material practices through which they are substantiated on earth. That excess is essential to the central engine of the divine economy, the individual freedom to choose to participate in the persona revealed within it (68). The economy depends on a double gift, on a double exception external to it. The mystery of divine will, his self-giving, to which Paul pointed is complementary to the twinned mystery of human will, in which we give ourselves to the given which gives us to ourselves.55 This excess is integral to our choosing, choice being the center of the Christian economy.
That excess is part and parcel of the indeterminacy of reference, essential then to the inclusionary growth of any institutional logic, to its ability to incorporate new objects, new persons, new practices. Growth entails the uncertainty of reference, and reference exceptional authority that can never be reduced to a norm. Reference is always a potential state of exception. That excess, the intentional energy of growth it implies and its irreducibility to the visible practices it informs is also integral to the exceptional powers of institutional authorities to suspend the rules in pursuit of inclusion and the prevention of exclusion, just as Leshem documents in the extra-canonical validation of words and sacraments outside the boundaries of the church as in the case of the Catharoi (138). That growth—the ever-changing reference, the multiplication of practices, the re-agglomeration of institutional objects, the increasing number of things that circulate in its name—affirms the immutability and eternality of the Name (95). The transcription of this excess is sustained by the perpetual possibility of the sacrifice of its material forms and instances—results which are no longer knowledge because they have paved the way to new knowing, money that disappears only to reemerge in new expanded form, even objects and persons who have been institutionally excised, made inert. Such sacrifices are both a test and a source of belief in the divine substance which is in no way diminished, and indeed its excess is revealed, affirmed and grows, by them.
That excess is a source of desire that is itself excessive, yet integral, to their operation and their extension or growth. It is, as Gregory maintained, an erotic desire that “nourishes itself” (74). It is that institutional excess—as characteristic of money as it is of Christ—that is the presupposition of expansive “human wants,” which Leshem identifies as a natural source of excess in the market (177). To ground those practices solely in the pleasures of our individual benefit is to make a carnal reduction, making the origins and operations of institutional practice solely about passions and interests, conflating the desire for goods with the desire for the goodness of the good. To ground those practices only in their productivity, to refuse to ground them in something which transcends them, which can never be present, is to engage in an idolatry, to fail to understand the mysterious excess and consubstantiality essential to the fusion of productivity and performativity upon which institutional logics depend. The divine economy of an institutional logic is constituted by excess, an excess that is an engine of growth, a source of a limitless desire, of individual choice, a basis of passionless desire, the creation and production of surplus, and the suspension of norms and breaking of rules.56
Although not referenced in his text Leshem returns us to the preoccupations of Karl Lowith’s Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History who read the Western doctrine and apotheosis of progress as a secularization of Christian eschatology. Leshem, too, locates the “debut” of the “story of progress” in Christian historicity, “composed of crucial moments that are connected and ordered along a line that begins with creation and ends in endless eternality” (49). Lowith’s account was challenged by Hans Blumenberg both for his failure to recognize the Christian sources of secularization of eschatology as it adapted to the apparent deferral of Christ’s return, the conversion of the “energy of eschatological ‘state of emergency,’ set free, pressed toward self-institutionalization in the world,”57 and his failure to see the ways in which the nominalist tradition in Christianity, precisely the one that emphasized the unknowable and transcendent Divine will, his potential absoluta, that thereby stripped history of any telos and created the conditions for human self-assertion, not as a driver of secularization, but of the creation of a new modern world.58
What is the historical force of Leshem’s model of the divine economy? For Leshem, the model of the Christian economy worked out in the fourth and fifth centuries is a “key moment” in the “genealogy of the neoliberal marketized economy” (6). Leshem tells us a tale of the “migration” of economy—as concept and model. In part Leshem follows in the footsteps of Blumenberg who recast what had been described as secularization as the “reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant,” not a “transposition of authentically theological contents.”59 Leshem offers us a history of ideas as answers to “seemingly different” questions grounded in a trans-historical conceptualization of an invariant economy, a separate sphere in which excess is converted into surplus through prudence (3).
But contra Blumenberg, there is still a secularization story in the answers, in the uncanny parallels between the Christian economics of mystery and the neo-classical mystery of the market, particularly its emphasis on growth, in the migration of the model and the identification of the “origins” of a growth-centered marketization in the Christianity of late antiquity (163).60 So while Leshem repeatedly tangles with Agamben over his reading of the Christian economy, he repeatedly adopts Agamben’s understanding of secularization as a “signature,” “which move[s] and displace[s] concepts and signs from one field to another . . . without redefining them semantically.”61 In Leshem’s account the institutional movement of oikonomia is understood not in terms of changing sense, but of new denotations, in which the “very secularization of the world becomes the mark that identifies it as belonging to a divine oikonomia.”62
A religious approach to institution would obviate the need to invoke secularization. It is not that the economy has religious origins: All institutions are religious mechanism, which may also facilitate the transposition of models across them. That the divine is always already contained in the Son spells out a more general economics, ultimate goods as givens that ground an infinite desire for their materialization on earth. We all live for one Son or another, this One a hypostasis that provides a clarified formal model for the ways in which the goods of human life give us to ourselves, and that it is the necessary sacrifice of their material instantiations that both expresses and enacts the gap between the “economy” as a domain, or theater, of divine operations and the existence of the divinity itself. The god is known through this difference in the same way that market value transcends any price, knowledge any result, sovereignty any border, information any datum, property any possession. In an institutional approach, the origins of excess never fall to earth; they remain on the plane of the gods.
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