Kingdom

The idea of a world state. by Gerardo Muñoz

As a theme for his 1949 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University, an American scholar, Robert Hutchins, decided to titled his conference “St. Thomas and the World State”. It is obvious that Hutchins had fresh in his mind the fact that the long European Civil War of the twentieth century, which included two World Wars, was a direct consequence of warring nationalisms and militarized nations that in our times it is once again has lavishly returned with even higher lethal consequences. There is a major historical difference, however; and that is the fact that whereas the nationalisms of the twentieth century were distinct territorial struggles in the wake of crumbling empires, the emergence of the new nationalisms are concerted, nourished, and aligned to the global commanding American imperialism. The techno-political ideal of an influential figure on American elites such as Peter Thiel takes the form of warring nations and firms against the possibility of a global world state to secure peace, interdependence, and free movement of populations across borders and communities [1]. It is fair to say that contemporary technopolitical dominance is a combination of imperial and national forces through the perpetual administration of anomia or lawlessness. 

What is striking about Hutchins’ 1949 lecture is that although Aquinas’ philosophy of law has been traditionally understood as the most important source of natural law, in his proposal Thomas’ actuality is able to fulfill positive law against the instrumental morality of nationalist empires (the United States and the Soviet Union then) that “in the absence of positive law; they may be expected to break the peace” [2]. For anyone that knows the emergence of the European state as coterminous with the secular authority of legal positivism will find this emphasis contradictory at best. The very notion of positive law requires principles of sovereign authority and normative internal recognition of its command coordination in order to consolidate a stable political form over time. This is a contradiction that Hutchins was aware of throughout his lecture. Consider, as an example, when he claims that: “The origin and meaning of the saying that a state has the natural right to sovereignty therefore, is that one state may not forcibly impose its will upon another. It means that Catholicism should oppose the foundations of a world state by force” (36). 

Or, when glossing over the obvious tension between the right of national sovereignty and a potential international federal state in the views of popes and Catholic thinkers: “I think they know that the national state is no longer the perfect community and that positive law is required to make the world community an effective political organization. I believe that they are making two points that are of the utmost importance: first, they are saying that any world government must be a federal government; and second, they see that world must come into existence by consent and not by conquest” (34). However, any student of modern political thought knows that consent and coercion are two internal modalities of governance for legitimate rule. Hutchins’ notion of “consent”, along with positive law, remains not only unthematized, but dependent on a circular of definition of law; that is, the “common good”, which is not a political concept, but a theological and moral notion extracted from the philosophy of history of Christian salvation. 

Towards the end of the lecture, Hutchins goes beyond strict positive law as if searching for some substantive ground: “…the West should not only survive, but also revive and rescue a deeper conception of human civilization than the one recently current, which enters around a religion of progress by resourceful greed and technological mastery of non-human nature” (42). But Hutchins’ plea for the retrieval of a past memory of the West runs astray when it relocates Church and State into a dual predicament of a new world state for peace on the conditions of the same structure of political theology that are no longer operative, but that actually make up the very ground of the modern collapse into nihilism – nihilism that political form does not remain immune to, quite the contrary. In fact, it is the most salient symptom of civilizational collapse. In the same way that Ernst Jünger immediately after the war called for the subsidiary spiritual assistance of the churches in the face of technological power- “the true conquest of nihilism and attainment of peace will be possible only with the help of the churches” – Hutchins will also repeat that only the conjointment of Church and State “must now work together for world peace founded on university charity…and universal democracy” (44) [3]. And the same thesis has found a clear expression in Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aetenae (2021): “To restore order and salvation, faith and reason, Beatrice and Virgil…Church and Empire are called to operate in harmony” [4]. This speaks directly to what we have recently called the plasticity inherent in the historical adaptations of thomism in social life [5].

This plasticity amounts to the administration of desperate souls from the structures of the state and Churches, without ever transforming the mere survival of life on Earth. This leaves us with the notion of kingdom, which Hutchins introduces in opposition to the political community of city life (polis), but only to reabsorb it into the order of political theology. And it is at this threshold, that we can claim that the kingdom is not a political theological category, but an experiential allowance in which life, the dead and languages occur beyond and before political determinations. It is no surprise, then, that Ivan Illich called the kingdom primarily a mystical experience: “I will dare to formulate a hypothesis: the kingdom is what constitutes the authentic mystical experience, if the mystic knows what experience is really constituted by. The mystical experience of the believer is the conscious experience of the kingdom before the parousia. The mystical experience is the fruit of love, and, therefore, it is also accessible to every lover. The awareness about its meaning is the fruit of faith…” [6]. 

We tend to forget that both national units and the contemporary empires of world building and destruction have been first and foremost enemies of spoken living languages and idioms. On the one hand, the historical grammars to build the unity of people’s official language, and in our days the rise of Artificial Intelligence has clearly become the last stage through which power abandons languages to computational and rhetorical obsolescence. This opening towards awareness is not an article of faith through consent nor a moral predicament that can be adequate prima facie into a political register; it is fundamentally a linguistic experience that allows for the delicate cultivation of peaceful coexistence taking place not in a world, but between them: “To learn a language in a human and mature way way is to accept the responsibility for its silences and sounds. The gift a people gives us in their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode, and the subtleties of its system of silences than its system of sounds…The greater the distance between two worlds, the more this silence of interest is a sign of love” [7]. 

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Notes 

1. “Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel On Ancient Prophecies And Modern Tech,” in conversation with Peter Robinson, October 2024, Hoover Institute: https://youtu.be/wTNI_lCvWZQ?si=M8-qrBh-G7bYZPfw

2. Robert M. Hutchins. St. Thomas and The World State (Marquette University Press, 1948), 15. 

3. Ernst Jünger. The Peace (Henry Regnery Company, 1948), 69. 

4. Pope Francis. “Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aeternae (2021)”: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco-lettera-ap_20210325_centenario-dante.html 

5. Gerardo Muñoz. “The social efficacy of thomism”, Infrapolitical Reflections, August 2025: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2025/08/31/the-social-efficacy-of-thomism-by-gerardo-munoz/

6. Ivan Illich. “Concertning Aesthetic and Religious Experience”, in The Powerless Church and other selected writings, 1955-1985 (University of Penn State Press, 2018), 86.

7. Ivan Illich. “Missionary Silence”, in The Church, Change, and Development (Urban Center Training Press, 1970), 121.

Vladimir Lossky’s third way. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his war diary Seven days on the roads of France June 1940 (2012), which recounts his itinerant vicissitudes in occupied France, the Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky makes an explicit case for the emergence of a third way beyond conservation and destruction, and its modern ideological avatars that led astray into the modern catastrophe; that is, the social revolution and conservative reaction cloaked under “traditionalism”. As it has been recently glossed, Lossky was not the only person from the East to be preoccupied with putting a halt to the eternal dialectical movement of destruction and conservation only fueling historical abstraction. Indeed, immediately in wake of the Russian Revolution, the poet Alexander Blok, in an epistolary exchange with Vladimir Mayakovsky, and anticipating the bewildering enthusiasm of the revolutionary energy, also demanded an effective exit from servitude so that “a third thing appears, equally dissimilar to construction and destruction” [1]. It matters little whether Lossky knew about Blok’s “third figure”, although it is at the same time impossible not to have it in mind when reading his own annotation in the June 16th entry of his diary, which does seem to offer a answer to Blok’s proposal:

“Nonetheless, revolutionaries are always in the wrong since, in their juvenile fervour for everything new, in their hopes for a better and a way of life built on justice they always base themselves on theories that are abstract and artificial, making a clean sweep of living tradition, which is after all, founded on the experience of centuries. Conservatives are always wrong, too…for in their desire to preservice ancient institutions that have withstood the test of time, they destroy the necessity of renewal and man’s yearning for a better way of life. Is there, then, a third way? Another destiny for society than of always being subject to the threat of revolutions which destroy life, or reactionary attitudes which mummify it? Or is this the inevitable fate of all terrestrial cities, the nature of their existence? In fact, only in the Church can we find both a Tradition that knows no revolution and at the same time, the impetus towards a new life that has no end. Which is why she is in possession of those infinite resources upon which may draw all who are called to govern the perishable cities of this world” [2]. 

It is no surprise that for both Blok and Lossky, the fundamental tension in the amphibology between conservation and rupture rests on the problem of “tradition”; given that, as Blok had also eloquently written in his letter to his fellow poet: “a breach with traditions is a tradition”. This is something that an artist like Kazimir Malevich understood well in his programmatic text about museums in the wake of the revolution (“On the Museum”, 1919): the turn into ashes of all the works of art altered their aura, but it left in place the topological frame and it still produced an image; in order words, the destructive artworks still demanded a museological space for storage, thus enacting new principles of the triumphant revolution. Understood in this sense, tradition is merely the retroactive accumulation of practices by the archē that orients its development retroactively from the point of view of the present with provisions towards the administration of the future. But, how did Lossky understand by the notion of “Tradition”? Rereading the fragment of his war diary entry, it would seem that this notion merely rests on the dogmatic transformations within the Church, and in this sense, a conceptual elucidation similar to the doctrinal exegesis not very different from John Henry Newman’s An essay on the development of Christian doctrine (1845). However, in his important essay “Tradition and Traditions”, Lossky attempts at defining the site and tension of the tradition, which he notes that in the language of theology it has been a term left vague and repeatedly undefined [3]. Lossky writes with sharp precision: “Tradition sometimes receives that of a teaching kept secret, not divulged, lest the mystery be profaned by the uninitiate” [4]. Thus, Tradition is the positive and textual scripture that registers the Word, but it is not exhausted in the positive scriptural authority. 

At the heart of Lossky’s argumentation about the theological meaning of Tradition, is the fact that it exceeds both textual sources and narrative mastery and transmission. In fact, the theology garment of Tradition belongs to the mystery of revelation shared in conspiracy, rumors or whispers [5]. And although, in his essay Lossky reaffirms himself that Tradition is the invisible intertwined with the Church – what keeps the “critical spirit of the institution” for the incorporation of new dogmatic definitions – it is nonetheless important to note that for the theologian, Tradition as “opposed to the reality of the word, it would be necessary to say that Tradition is Silence” [6]. In this sense, Tradition is that which is created and transmitted but that no one has the right nor the authority to speak through its incommunicable name. Is Tradition transmitted at all? If it is not through the written word, how can there be any continuity? This is the ultimate lacuna of the theological underpinning of Tradition for Lossky: Tradition can only be properly understood as the crafting of a “unique mode of receiving truth”; in order words, it names the contact between revelation and the witness who receives its ‘fullness of knowledge’, which far from mastering the totality, it points to “the external limit…the narrow door which leads to the knowledge of Truth” [7]. As Monica Ferrando has recently glossed from Plato’s philosophical corpus, any robust conception of Tradition should be understood as that which maintains an absolute inseparability between wonder and salvation, as well as bridging invention and received grace (charîs) [8]. One step at a time, we invent traditions whenever we are thinking through the abyss that separates our language from the inheritance bestowed upon us. Tradition moves in every ethical position of thought overcoming the pseudo-authorization of alienated and metaphorical knowledge of the past.

But if  the Church is no longer the institutional site for the keeping of the impossibility of the transmission and renewal of Tradition and revealed Truth – subsumed to the mysterium iniquitatis that works against the possibility of the rendition of the eternal life of a permanent vita nova  – it entails that one can still hold on to Lossky’s assertion that the task is to be attentive to the ossified expressions and reified appearances of Truth against the “living Spirit of Truth”. Hence, to insist on the restitution of the Church in our current predicament, would place us on the side of instrumentalized and subject-oriented salvation that turns away from the active kingdom that is the only passage from the world of the living to that of the dead. The traditionalists or integralists are incompetent representatives of the Tradition in this sense: as Von Balthasar once argued, they lack the humor and contact with the invisible to apprehend the mystery that arrives without solicitation, as pure depotentialization [9]. In a godless world of the secularized gnosis of political force – that is, after the fleeing of the gods – perhaps theology could only be understood as the path of Tradition of uncountable wonders and the event of speech that produces an unworldly sensation within this world. Tradition brings the world beyond its shape and legibility. In this sense, we are always participants of Truth that the world cannot retain, and thus keepers of an enduring secret that will ineluctably outlive us. 

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Notes 

1. Philippe Theophanidis. “Alexander Blok: ‘A breach with traditions is a tradition'”, October 13, 2024: https://aphelis.net/breach-with-traditions-alexander-blok/ 

2. Vladimir Lossky. Seven days on the roads of France June 1940 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 54.

3. Vladimir Lossky. “Tradition and Traditions”, in In the image and likeness of God (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 141.

4. Ibid., 144-145.

5. Ibid., 146.

6. Ibid., 150.

7. Ibid., 162. 

8. Monica Ferrando. “La libera grazie della tradizione”, in Un anno con Platone (Neri Pozza, 2024), 424.

9. Hans Urs Von Balthasar. The Office of Peter And the Structure of the Church (Ignatius Press, 2013), 403.

Sundays outside history: some observations on Eliseo Diego’s La Calzada de Jesús del Monte (1949). by Gerardo Muñoz

The origin of Eliseo Diego’s mythical poetic collection En la Calzada de Jesús del Monte (1949) is so well known and recorded that it has been completely forgotten even by its most copious commentators. In his short memoralist essay “Un día ceremonial”, written decades after the publication of the poem, José Lezama Lima wrote the following: “En uno de sus ceremoniales litúrgicos, en un día de nuestro santo, nos reunimos en la iglesia de Bauta. En esa ocasión Eliseo Diego leyó su “Primer discurso” de En la Calzada de Jesús del Monte. Era un precioso y sorprendente regalo, suficientemente para llenar la tarde con aquella palabra que nace para uno de los más opulentamente sobrios destinos poéticos que hemos tenido…Cuando se publicó En la calzada de Jesús del Monte, el júbilo que me produjo fue esencialmente poético. En unos versos de circunstancia amistosa he intentado decir la alegría que me produce ese libro que traía esclarecimientos para nuestro paisaje y su acercamiento” [1]. At the center in this confession is not only the centrality of a poetic liturgical practice that vested the friendship of the origenistas poets, but more fundamentally the efficacy of the poetic word that Lezama describes as a “júbilo poético” or poetic happiness. It is a strange remark (like almost everything written by Lezama), since En la calzada de Jesús del Monte has been largely read as the litany of a domestic space (a “gran casa de todos”) consumed by dread experienced at the turn of the mid-century failed and stagnated republic.

The intuition raised by Lezama, although not elaborated, still haunts us: in what sense is En la calzada de Jesus del Monte about poetic happiness and what could stand for? We can go astray if we claim that happiness is a particular substantive and representational content of the poetic word. Indeed, there is really no event of happiness in En la calzada de Jesus del Monte except for the taking place of the poetic word fully estranged and foreign from its own place of annunciation. This seems to confirm Diego’s poetic vortex who writes in the dedicación of the book: “A poem is nothing more than a few words told one afternoon to a group of friends” [2]. However, this only deepens the mystery, since whoever tries to find concrete friends in En la calzada de Jesús del Monte (1949) will find none. Solitude abounds and expands throughout spaces. Lezama attempted to elevate the secret of friendship from thought to the liturgical enactment in search for transcendent meaning. Indeed, the emphasis on the mystery of liturgy is emphatic and compressed in Lezama’s programmatic memory about the almost ecclesiastical origins of the poem. I would like to suggest another path for the mysterious and inapparent force of the poem, which is no longer situated at the liturgical aesthetic experience, but rather in the mystery of a felicitous life at the threshold of history. If anything is disclosed throughout the pages of En la calzada de Jesús del Monte this is, precisely, that things appear to dwell in their place, even if no one is around and no community could stand for its reverence. Indeed, the poetic event dwells in an existential solitude before a changing world now fallen into pure disenchantment.

The happiness that falls from the poem, then, is not merely about the execution of the word or the unity of form, but it consists of something previous, altogether different: a mysterious shadow of the enchanted myth. In En la calzada de Jesús del Monte (1949) we are exposed to a poetic language that gathers in a desecularized dimension that suspends what Gianni Carchia identified as the postmythical form of mystery that seems to anticipate the semblance of historical order [3]. But Diego’s En la calzada de Jesús del Monte transfigures mystery to the point of disclosing the limit where life and redemption from the material world take place; namely, in the Sunday of life. But, unlike for Carchia, this poetic transfiguration takes place within the grammar of Christian theology and not the Greek classical past. Here Diego’s poetic mysterium differs fundamentally from the liturgical mystery, which presupposes a “fundamental sacrifice” that allows the temporal sequence of the end of time as the motor for universal religious redemption [4]. By contrast, Diego’s idea of a poetic mystery (which is also the mystery of the poem, which he never ceased to reflect upon through his life) is spatially dispersed, redeeming eternal life from the visibility of worldly phenomena. As Diego writes in an essay defining his conception of the theological mystery: “Primero les haré una confesión…no veo por la sala ningún hábito de Santo Domingo. Uno no debe jugar con los Misterios Mayores, y ninguno es mayor que el Misterio de los Tres que son Uno. Pero, ¿acaso no hizo Él a las ballenas y a los colibríes? ¿Acaso él no sonríe con la infinitud de sus peces y sus insectos? No creo que me tome a mal esta broma que hago como un niño pequeño que pretende jugar con su padre” [5].

By separating the “mayor mystery” of the Trinity from the minor mysteries of imaginative creations of the world (fables, poetry, child’s play), Diego was able to displace the grandiose stage of the liturgical mystery emphasizing the role that humor plays in the affective realization of the kingdom. In other words, it is most definitely the case that the mystery and the poetic musicality compose the parabolic nature of a transfigured kingdom that accompanies the inner existence of each and every human being [6]. Furthermore, this is why the Calzada is a defined in “Primer Discurso” as a pantheistic kingdom: “mi reino, en esta isla pequeña rodeada de Dios por todas partes / en ti ciego mis descanso” [7]. The happiness of the poetic effect in En la calzada de Jesús del Monte is the consummation of an eternal life that, by withdrawing itself from the representation of historical time, can outlive both dread and death. However, in its call for “eternity”, it is language itself that becomes a mode within a series of uncountable events: “sigo pensando, aquí, mi amigo, sucediéndome. / Luego de la primera muerte, señores, las imágenes … .Porque soy reciente, de ayer mismo” [8]. The “sigo sucediéndome”, a modal attempt at transforming life through event diffuses life and death like “Abel y Cain reunidos en Adán, como la muerte” [9]. The transfiguration of liturgical mystery does not evoke a christological arcana, but the overcoming of the civilizational myth of fratricide only to find “unity” in the eternal paradise evoked through Adam. As Diego will also write in an essay about the work of British novelist Jean Rhys: “…el sentido de orar para convertirse en símbolo del misterio de vivir: nuestro jardín era grande y hermoso como aquel jardín de la Biblia – el árbol de la vida crecía allí, nos dice, en medio del terror de una violencia que no entiende” [10]. The reemergence of the myth of an enchanted Edenic garden through the poem?

The fact that Diego chose to write En la calzada de Jesús del Monte as a series of poems and not a novel speaks to his resistance to metaphorize the Garden of Eden outside of the world, overly compensated through a figural postmythical semblance that could have only been taken as a form of parody. On the contrary, En la calzada de Jesús del Monte evokes the original paradise as a recurring and parabolic Sunday of life. A life of nothingness: “si la nada / es también el dormir, pesadamente / la caída sin voz entre la sombra… el Paraíso / realizado en la tierra, como un nombre!” [11]. What cuts through between the forms of the world is the poetic parabola that put us in nearness to the limit of the mystery and the unspeakable. This is what poet Fina García Marruz beautifully captured in one of the most outstanding essays on En la calzada de Jesus del Monte where the weight of the question is meshed with the eros of the poem’s parabola: “Todo arte es, o debería ser, arte de amor, qué es arte de re respeto, la estrategia de una amorosa retirada. Donde el yo se manifiesta en exceso, invade los otros límites, incendia el mundo, pero el verdadero sol del centro, como en Heráclito, no rebasa sus medidas” [12].

García Marruz will even allude to a “magical distance” to elucidate Diego’s poetic measureless opening to proximity: “para el dulce tamaño de la vida que miden estas distancias” [13]. The distances modulate situated existence against the reduction of ordered historical time: “El sitio donde gustamos las costumbres / aquí no pasa nada, no es más que la vida” [14]. As an authentic habitante Diego’s parabola solves the problem of the eclipse of historical time (the ruins of the first morning of historical development) through a descension to spatial detachment where the rest of Sunday is achieved amidst the dust of the world (“como el polvo del mundo”). And from the vantage point of every concrete experience and every limit, life emerges from the dead before a ruinous world marked by the failed Republic. This was a Republic that could not be named (“Yo no sé decirlo: la República”) in a paradoxical display of expository nominalism. As Diego writes in “El sitio en el que tan bien se está”: “en la penumbra como deshabitado sueño” [15]. At the height of 1949, En la calzada de Jesús del Monte was the most rigorous attempt to retreat from this penumbra of historical political life and its daydreaming.

This is the open secret of the actual city street, La Calzada de Jesús del Monte (Havana), during the first decades of the twentieth century, which according to historian Emilio Roig de Lauschering was the only route of communication between the hinterland and the new urban community: “La Calzada de Jesús del Monte que después se llamó después Calzada de Jesús del Monte por haber construido una ermita en la pequeña eminencia donde se encuentra la iglesia parroquial de Jesús del Monte…[…] Pero la Calzada de Jesús del Monte fue desde remotos tiempos hasta no hace mucho la vía principal de entrada y salida entre la población y el campo” [16]. In the late 1940s, la Calzada de Jesús del Monte was already a ‘deshabitado sueño’ as symbolized by dust, debris, oblivion, and death announced by the abstract time of modernization. En la calzada de Jesús del Monte, however, does not cross the path nor seeks a communication between the limits, but rather it opts to dwells on it.

This might be, indeed, Diego’s most important and subtle difference with Lezama’s defense of a liturgical surplus (even ex ecclesia cult of friendship, Freundschaftsdichtung, as a surrogate for national salvation) as if he had found a refuge in the mysterious parish of the Calzada Jesus del Monte or Bauta [17]. Diego’s transfiguration of history placed him at Sabbath in possession of “poderosas versiones de su vida” (“strong modes of his own life”) [18]. But the Sabbath is not a mere memory of a defeated religious community, but as Hermann Cohen argued, a spatial and institutional habit of a people coinciding with the cycles of a bright moonlight [19]. This is why imagination in En la calzada de Jesus del Monte is not enough, and the poet laments: “de tanto imaginarla mi corazón iba callando”. The eternal life of Sundays finds a retreat in the sabbatical experience against the historical time of normality and its revolutionary cycles that demystifies the thingly destruction in which civilization had declined at the end of times. Diego’s La Calzada de Jesús del Monte enshrined the only access to the transfiguration of the mystery: a sabbatical rest disambiguated from the monotone idleness posed by postmythical romanticism [20]. It was in the threshold of parabolic dwelling where En la Calzada de Jesús del Monte remained faithful neither to religious idolatry nor to a free-standing mysterium, but only to the feast of a sabbatical life “como un asno, en perpetuo domingo” (like a donkey, in a perpetual sunday) [21]. The donkey is the transfiguration that must carry this weight. And withdrawing from Juan Vives’ known fable about the peasant who sacrificed a donkey when realizing that he was drinking the moon reflected on a bucket of water, En la calzada de Jesus del Monte stubbornly trumpets not the entry to a “poetic enlightenment”, but the dwelling into the eternal Sunday where poetry is not a resource of radiant sacrifice of beauty, but the prophecy for both silence and sound [22].

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Notes 

1. José Lezama Lima. “Un día ceremonial”, in Imagen y Posibilidad (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1992), 48-50.

2. Eliseo Diego.  En la Calzada de Jesús del Monte (Editorial Pre-Textos, 2020), 103.

3. Gianni Carchia. Dall’Apparenza al Mistero, in Immagine e verità: Studi sulla tradizione classica, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma, 2003.

4. Odo Casel. Misterio del culto en el cristianismo (Cuadernos Phase, 2006), 82.

5. Eliseo Diego. “Viaje al centro de la tierra”, in Flechas en vuelo: ensayos selectos (Editorial Verbum, 2014), 162.

6. Giorgio Agamben. “Parabola e Regno”, in Il fuoco e il racconto (nottetempo, 2014), 25-37.

7. Eliseo Diego, En la Calzada de Jesús del Monte (Editorial Pre-Textos, 2020). 

8. Ibid., 115.

9.  Ibid., 117.

10. Eliseo Diego. “Una Iglesia no muy británica: Jean Rhys y su ancho mar”, in Flechas en vuelo: ensayos selectos (Editorial Verbum, 2014), 124.

11.  E. Diego, 119.

12. Fina García Marruz. “Ese breve domingo de la forma”, in Hablar de la poesía (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1986), 398.

13. E. Diego, 131.

14. Ibid., 177.

15. Ibid., 184. 

16. Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring. La Habana: Apuntes Históricos (Editora del Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963), 111.

17. Wolfdietrich Rasch. Freundschaftskult und Freundschaftsdichtung im Deutschen Schrifttum des 18. Jahrhunderts (Halle-Saale, 1936).

18. Ibid., 157.

19. Hermann Cohen. “The Sabbath in its Cultural-Historical Significance”, The Reform Advocate, February 10, 1917, 5-6.

20. José Lezama Lima claims in “Pascal y la poesía”: “En la tradición de Pitágoras, que creía que sólo el símbolo daba el signo y que la escritura, tesis incomprehensible para el contemporáneo romanticismo antisignario, nace de un misterio, no de la horticultura de la pereza”, in Algunos tratados en La Habana (Anagrama, 1971), 166.

21. E. Diego, 147.

22. The fable is told by Hans Blumenberg: “The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives recorded the fable of a peasant who killed a donkey because it swallowed the moon while drinking from a bucket, and because the world could sooner do without a donkey than without heaven’s lamp”, in “Glosses on Three Fables” (1984), History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader (Cornell University Press, 2020), 604.

Von Balthasar and the eclipse of humor. by Gerardo Muñoz


Some will surely remember the figure of the painter Tirtorelli in Kafka’s The Trial who executes portraits of monotone and serious judges and magistrates on demand. The aura of these portraits is of absolute austereness and seriousness, as if Kafka wanted to capture the lackluster liturgy of the empire of judges and their repetitive exercise of legal adjudication. This seriousness, however, must be contrasted to the comic dimension of bureaucracy, that is known to anyone who might have glimpsed at the administrative processes that control even the tiniest details of daily life (the literary and cultural objects are too many to even reference them). The comic and the serious are also visual tones in the exhibition of modern public powers. If the empire of judges is gray and inexpressive, the bureaucratic agencies have been rendered as playful even if they repeatedly yield tragic effects on anyone entrapped in the legal construction of the “case”.

I recall this, because if today we are in the rise of an administrative state, this fundamentally entails a collapse of the bureaucratic comedy and the judge’s seriousness. The joining of the two spheres implies not only a transformation of the legal culture in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but also a confusion regarding both the comic and serious that now form an integral techno-political unit. As humor eclipses, comedy becomes controlled, assessed, and weighted against what must be free-standing seriousness each and every time. This integralist institutional imagination, at first sight, could be taken as a return of theology of sorts; but, according to Hans Urs Von Balthasar, it is quite the contrary: the integralist suture is so alien to Catholic theology and the mystery that it only deserves to be taken as a distance from the divine. As Von Balthasar writes in Il Complesso antiromano (1974):

“For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the “progressives” nor the “integralists” seem to possess it—the latter even less than the former. Both of these tend to be faultfinders, malicious satirists, grumblers, carping critics, full of bitter scorn, know-it-alls who think they have the monopoly of infallible judgment; they are self-legitimizing prophets—in short, fanatics.” [1] 

And Von Balthsar reminds us that fanatic is a word that comes from fanum – “holy place” – which alludes to the site that the guardian must guard to keep the divinity at bay. In the same way today, the fanatic is the nexus that organizes the administrative process that covers all spheres of human activity and purpose. If this is the case, then one could say that our current society is “fanatical” not because of the new religious factions or outnumbering of social cults, but rather because new legal administrators exert their control in the guise of priests that speak the rhetoric of a social intelligible common good. This is, indeed, the ultimate comic aspiration of a very seriousness legal process (it impacts literally every living species) in which the precondition to safeguards the “good” must be exerted as to keep everyone away from the irreducibility of what is good, beautiful, and just.

The seriousness of the administrative agents is transformed into a perpetual laughter that secures a social bond where no transgression and sensation is possible. Against this backdrop, we see how Gianni Carchia was correct when suggesting that the passage from comedy to enjoyment (divertimento) renders impossible the laughter of redemption in a life that ceases to be eventful [2]. In this way, comedy mutates into a mere socialization of laughter. And the impossibility of entering in contact with the comic initiates the commencement of the social parody.

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Notes 

1. Hars Von Balthasar. Il Complesso antiromano. Come integrare il papato nella chiesa universale (Queriniana, 1974), 304.

2. Gianni Carchia. “Lo cómico absoluto y lo sublime invertido”, en Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1990), 153.