The Kingdom and the Glory

Here, the debate is compromised by the presupposition that there are two different and incompatible meanings of the term oikonomia, the first referring to the incarnation and the revelation of God in time, and the second concerning the procession of the persons within the deity

These “economic” relations (Aristotle emphasizes their diversity: ibid., 1259a–b) are linked by a paradigm that we could define as “administrative” [“gestionale”], and not epistemic: in other words, it is a matter of an activity that is not bound to a system of rules, and does not constitute a science in the proper sense (Aristotle writes that “the term ‘head of the family’ [despotēs] does not refer to a science [epistēmēn] but to a certain way of being”: ibid.,

God is the presupposition of power [ . . . ] to act in the cosmos, but precisely for this reason he is not power

A single God who, in the times when he decided to reveal himself, established this unity of the kingdom is loved and feared by all: the same laws rule everywhere, the laws of those who are subject to the single God. (Ibid., p. 55)

Israel is a theocracy, that single people is governed by the single divine monarch. One only people, one only God [ . . . ] But given that the single God is not only the monarch of Israel, but also of the cosmos, for this reason that single people—“the people most loved by God”—governed by this cosmic monarch, becomes minister and prophet for all mankind. (Ibid., pp. 28–29)

ℵ Eusebius’s thesis on the solidarity of the advent of a single global empire, the end of polyarchy, and the triumph of the only true God shows some analogies with Negri and Hardt’s thesis according to which the overcoming of nation-states in a single global capitalist empire paves the way for the triumph of communism. However, while the doctrine of Constantine’s theological hair-dresser had a clear tactical meaning and was the effect not of an antagonism, but of an alliance between Constantine’s global power and the Church, the meaning of Negri and Hardt’s thesis can certainly not be understood in the same way and thus remains enigmatic to say the least.

ℵ In other words, in Gregory, the logos of “economy” is specifically designed to prevent the Trinity from introducing a stasiological, or political, fracture in God. Insofar as even a monarchy can give rise to a civil war, an internal stasis, it is only a displacement from a political to an “economic” rationality (in a sense that we shall explain) that can protect us against this danger.

From this perspective, the fact that the living being who was created in the image of God in the end reveals himself to be capable only of economy, not politics, or, in other words, that history is ultimately not a political but an “administrative” and “governmental” problem, is nothing but a logical consequence of economic theology.

political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God, and economic theology, which replaces this transcendence with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent ordering—domestic and not political in a strict sense—of both divine and human life

opposition to the ingenuous emphasis on productivity and labor that has long prevented modernity from accessing politics as man’s most proper dimension, politics is here returned to its central inoperativity, that is, to that operation that amounts to rendering inoperative all human and divine works. The empty throne, the symbol of Glory, is what we need to profane in order to make room, beyond it, for something that, for now, we can only evoke with the name zoē aiōnios, eternal life.