Modernism and Political Theology: Shared Origins

Modernism has many different origin stories, but perhaps the most familiar is the one it shares with political theology. Andrews gestures towards this common origin in his account of the cross-pressures—”global war, economic instability, radical social change, heated political ideology, etc.”—that gave rise to a new and innovative “fusion” of the personal and political in the English novel. It was this combination of internal and external forces, he suggests, that reshaped and reanimated the novel as  “a mode of political theology” (181). The modern understanding of political theology emerged from the same moment of European upheaval, although in the works of Carl Schmitt, the leading Weimar Jurist and later president of the National Socialist Jurists Association, it took a very different form. As Tracy B. Strong points out in his foreword to Political Theology (1922, 1934), Schmitt feared the consequences of the shift to an increasingly technologized and bureaucratised state and sought “to restore to the concepts of sovereignty and political authority in a secular age the qualities that they had had earlier” (xxv). Schmitt’s writings, together with works of political theology in general, are diagnostic and propositional whereas, as Andrews rightly reminds us, modernist fiction is characterised by indirection and indeterminacy.  Accordingly, Andrews does not suggest a direct correspondence, or that we should turn to modernist novelists for lessons in statecraft. But he is right to suggest that both modernism and political theology are shaped by the need to regenerate meaning and forge deeper and more effective social bonds in a world from which these things had seemingly vanished.

Andrews is not the first to link the emergence of modernism to that of new political or civil religions in the first quarter of the twentieth century though he is, to my knowledge, the first to ascribe a theopolitical imagination to the modernist novel as such. Roger Griffin’s Modernism and series similarly argues for a “maximalist” understanding of modernism which links a variety of cultural, social and political projects under a sign of revitalisation and regeneration: “Such modernists consciously sought to restore a sense of higher purpose, transcendence and Zauber (magic) to a spiritually starved modern humanity condemned by ‘progress’ to live in a permanent state of existential exile, of liminoid transition, now that the forces of the divine seem to have withdrawn” (x). Michael Lackey comes perhaps the closest to Andrews in The Modernist God-State where he challenges the once prevailing view of the modernist novel as secular in character. Lackey too observes that once we account for the influence of civil religion on English society and culture—an influence experienced especially acutely by minoritized groups—it seems very far from evident that interwar Britian was a Godless State:

[I]t is my contention that the twentieth-century novelists’ focus on the subconscious led them to reject the secularization hypothesis and to conceive of modernism in theological terms. This was the case because they understood that religion in the modern age functions most powerfully and effectively at the level of the subconscious. (23)

Andrews acknowledges that although his subjects—Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and Sylvia Townsend Warner—were not people of faith they were nonetheless immersed (“supersaturated” in Lawrence’s case [68]) in the Christian cultures in which they were raised and lived. But in a welcome step beyond Lackey and other scholars who have stressed the inward and experiential aspect of a ‘secular-sacred’, Andrews insists on the “public, collective and material dimension” of modernists’ engagement with civil religion (20). The renunciation of God, he points out, does not insulate you from the part played by Christianity in collective practice and public ritual nor, in turn, from the “seductive power of nationalism and the devastations wrought by militaristic and imperialist violence” (9).

How then might modernist novelists engage with civil religion and its discontents and on what resources might they draw to challenge and reimagine existing political horizons? Over four chapters, Andrews demonstrates how his subjects interrogate and critique the invidious manner in which state power operates through and with the authority and legitimacy of Christianity. Offering suggestive points of comparison and dialogue with contemporary political theology, Andrews suggests new ways of reading novels that are not usually flagged as political in character. Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938), for instance, is her most explicit study of the pernicious influence of the Victorian Trinity of State, Church and Army on domestic and foreign affairs in the 1930s. But Andrews finds persuasive evidence of the same concerns in the novel often identified as Woolf’s first fully experimental and therefore modernist novel, Jacob’s Room (1922). The vagueness and indeterminacy which characterises this novel,  Andrews argues, frustrates our expectations of a life redeemed and given meaning through sacrifice in war. Staying with the “unredeemed”, he points out with reference to Judith Butler and Karen Bray, creates a sense of solidarity with the dispossessed. Andrews’s chapter on Sylvia Townsend Warner finds unexpected parallels with Woolf in this mode. Warner too is seen to find hope in the existence and persistence of lives and places that resist legibility in terms of salvific and hegemonic discourses of State and Church. And again, like Woolf, Warner challenges narratives linking national destiny with compulsory heterosexuality and reproductive futurity. While Andrews rightly cautions us not to read Lolly Willowes (1926) as the triumph of queer utopian hopes, the novel nonetheless, he argues, “calls us to reflection about interstitial spaces for flourishing” (175).

Lawrence is less easily co-opted than Woolf or Warner into a reparative interpretation of modernism. Yet, as Andrews shows, his late work is perhaps the richest and most ambitious in its engagement with competing political-theological paradigms and their implications for class, race and gender relations. Here Lawrence attacks versions of “low church” religion which draw on eschatological Christian millenarianism to legitimate class resentment and a life-denying investment in an other-worldly Kingdom-to-come. As Andrews suggests, Lawrence’s version of low-church religion is based a partial and reductive version of the Book of Revelation. Even so, as Lawrence likely knew, his reading picks up on a long tradition in British socialist thinking which links hopes of a future aeon of justice and equality with the Christian Utopia of the Kingdom. In place of this millenarian paradigm Lawerence offers a cosmic vision of this-worldly regeneration in which human lives again find their natural harmony and rhythm with supra- and inter-personal forces.While his novella, The Man Who Died (1931), is perhaps the most obvious fictional restatement of his political theology, Andrews turns to the better known and more successful novel in the form of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). What is at stake in The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology overall is the question of what the modernist novel as such has to offer by way of alternative theological-political narratives of individual and collective flourishing. Its much-vaunted ‘inward turn’ is seen to be an advantage rather than an obstacle insofar as it demands close attention to how even the most secular and mundane of lives are (con)scripted into theological-political narratives that shore up the authority of the modernist God-State and legitimate the exercise of militaristic and imperialist violence.

My own current work is in part an attempt to further Andrew’s enquiry into the twentieth century religious-political imagination. I depart from his example, however, in focusing on a non-modernist tradition in fiction in the first half of the twentieth century that might be described as the ‘discursive’ novel or novel of ideas. Together comprising a loosely progressive strand in interwar Anglophone fiction, writers such as H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, Naomi Mitchison and Rebecca West all turn to Christian tropes and narratives in envisioning new, more just and equal social formations. How, I ask, do these narratives sit alongside or challenge the officially sanctioned religious discourses and how might they be seen to resist the new threat of ‘political religions’ in the form of Fascism and Communism? In Andrews’s book I find both inspiration and motivation for my enquiry. The hope as he puts it in his conclusion is to help realise the “promises of a literary studies that can intervene in war, envision newly inclusive communities, reorient broken economies, contend with climate crises, and challenge the nation’s sacralization with a theopolitical imagination that is dynamic, creative and artful” (187). This is ambitious and, to some, itself utopian. But in a historical and political moment that has frequently been compared with that to which the modernists themselves responded can we reasonably aim for any less? 

 Bibliography

Andrews, Charles. The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology: Challenging the Nation. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.

Griffin, Roger. ‘Series Editor’s Preface’. In Modernism and Christianity by Erik Tonning. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Lackey, Michael. The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazi’s Christian Reich. New York: Continuum, 2012.

Strong, Tracy B. Foreword to Political Theology by Carl Schmitt. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005.