1

The Leviathan Crucified

A Critical Introduction to Jacob Taubes' "The

Leviathan as Mortal God"
Jacob Taubes has written the present text on the
Leviathan as mortal god as an introduction to the
volume on "The Prince of this world – Carl Schmitt
and the consequences". This is the first volume of
the trilogy on "The theory of religion and political
theology" which Taubes has edited as member of a
research group which came together for three
conferences in Bad Homburg between the years
1980 to 1986. It refers to the famous debate
between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson on the
theological possibility of political theology and the
political meaning of trinity, a debate which dealt in
fact with the connection between national
socialism and Schmitt's theory of sovereignty. Thus
the volume can be seen as an effort to reestablish
the discredited discourse of political theology and
its theoretician, an effort which was paralleled by
the new leftist theology of Jürgen Moltmann and
 2

Johann Baptist Metz and South American

liberation theology since the mid 70ies. The
second volume on "Gnosis and politics" referred to
another foundational debate, namely between
Erik Voegelin and Hans Blumenberg on the
"Legitimacy of the modern age", while the third
focused on the concept of "Theocracy" which
seemed to become relevant with the Islamic
revolution in Iran 1979. Taubes died 1987, shortly
before the publication of this last volume.
With this trilogy Taubes has left us with a kind of
summary of his life work whose beginnings he
formulated in his doctorate on "Occidental
Eschatology" some 40 years before. One can see it
in fact as one of the foundational documents
which have prepared the return of the discourse of
political theology long before the present clash
between global fundamentalism and secular
modernity and before these problems have
reached the official academic scene. With these
volumes Taubes has not only explored this old new
terrain of discourse, but he has demonstrated its
descriptive and normative possibilities as well as
its practical limits. His own radical self
 3

identification with Gnosis and nihilism,

summarized in the introduction to the second
volume, can, after all, only be understood as an
ultimate negation of all politics.
In the present essay Taubes tries to outline an
epochal constellation of modernity, in which
political theology, together with concepts like
theocracy, apocalypse and Gnosis receive a key
function. His diagnosis of a historical analogy
between the religious civil war of the 17 th century
and the horizon of a clash between enlightenment
and religion at the end of the 20ieth century is
meant as a legitimization of the discourse of
political theology as well as of its ostracized author
Carl Schmitt when it in fact questions together
with Schmitt the enlightened foundations of
modernity.
"The political meaning of theocracy has reached
with the events of world politics the public
consciousness. A piece of history, which has been
laid aside since enlightenment, has returned to us.
What was supposed to be overcome, speaks with
new powers. The quarrel between enlightenment
and theocratic church regime is by no means
 4

settled. In order to understand the spiritual

situation of our times it is important to learn to
understand the quarrel between them from their
sources."
This diagnosis although reacting to the Iranian
revolution as well as to certain religious
tendencies in American and Israeli politics at the
time might have appeared as a premature
hallucination, at least as a boundless exaggeration.
Since 9/11, the revolution of the Moslem brothers
and the new scenes of terror in the midst of
European capitals directed by Isis, however, this
diagnosis has become all too relevant and has
shaped public and academic debates about the
religious layers of secular culture turning back to
the age of reformation, the European religious civil
war and the birth of the classic secular political
philosophy, namely to Thomas Hobbes.
Quite different from Jürgen Habermas and
Cardinal Ratzinger who, in their famous debate in
Munich 2004, tried to readjust the relation
between enlightenment and orthodoxy in a post
secular dialogue as a response to the theocratic
threat, Taubes is digging for the sources in Thomas
 5

Hobbes (in)famous Leviathan from 1651 which

transcends every enlightened rational optimism
with its highly pessimistic view of violent human
nature. Taubes conjures in fact again and again
the spiritual author of this constellation with
whom he established a personal contact and
whom he tried in fact to convince to republish his
esoteric book on the Leviathan written in 1938
which, in its 5th chapter, stresses the negative role
of enlightened reason and legality and especially
the role of the Jews as messianic enemies of
sovereign statehood.
The names of the Leviathan and the "Prince of this
world" embrace a whole texture of perspectives,
questions and dispositions then, which do not only
throw an apocalyptic light on the analogy, but
touch the absolute catastrophe of culture in
national socialism. "Three hundred years after
Hobbes the burden of his questions how we can
get along with the prince of this world lies heavy
on us, " Taubes states in the little introduction
before this introduction. "What Hobbes saw, has
been explained in the 20ieth century by Carl
Schmitt who celebrates this year his 95 th birthday.
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Greatness and poverty of the question are defined

by these by these markings. We do not want to
hide the abysses which open themselves up here.
Out of these abysses the great animal crawled
which Plato and John's revelation have talked
about and which has become a concrete reality
half a century ago."
Thus the name Schmitt is not only determining the
agenda of this project according to which "political
theology analyses the political index of theology
and the theological kernel of politics", and its
apocalyptical depths, but Taubes seems to intend
no less than an exculpation of the national socialist
jurist Schmitt, too. "Even people who knew, were
not immune against the temptation. This should
turn us, who are born after and did not come into
temptation, somewhat milder. Whoever is without
guilt might throw the first stone." (I-5) To be sure
this exculpation is all the more strange since it
refers to the very Schmitt who with his definition
of sovereign decision and the state of exception
prepared Nazi rule and through his definition of
the Political as the differentiation between friend
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and enemy aimed at the differentiation between

the sovereign leader and the Jewish enemy.
Here, already at the outset of the trilogy, the
reader touches on the very Arcanum of Taubes'
discursive politics, which on the one hand courts
Schmitt, in order to make him his ally in the
political theological enterprise, on the other
recognizes in Schmitt the ultimate enemy himself,
the prince of this world, against whom Taubes
according to apocalyptic logic will fight. In his "Carl
Schmitt – an apocalyptic of the Counter
revolution" from 1985 Taubes writes: "I want to
express my respect to Carl Schmitt who at the
highest age is still a restless spirit, although I, as a
conscious Jew, belong to those people whom he
has marked as enemy." 237
The circumstances which govern this dispositions
are indeed much more complicated if one
considers the fact, that Taubes together with his
friend Herbert Marcuse supported the German 68
students' movement which at its more radical
stages adopted Schmitt's sovereign decisionism as
a revolutionary strategy of political resistance and
violence. Schmitt's booklet on the theory of the
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partisan from 1962 dealt in fact with all the heros

of this movement, from Che Guevara to Ho Che
Min, who would later inspire the so called red
army fraction, the anarchist terror group founded
by Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Horst
Mahler in their urban guerilla war against the
imperialist state of the federal republic. In their
underground jargon these terrorists used Schmitt's
terminology and defined their mission as hunters
of the great Leviathan. The clandestine letters (in
German "Kassiber") smuggled by the lawyers of
these terrorists, in prison since 1971, let Taubes
offer Carl Schmitt after their suicide in 1977 to be
part of a new journal with the name "Kassiber".
Friend or enemy? The friend as the configuration
of one's own question? Taubes' trilogy does not
only aim at a rehabilitation of political theology
and its author Schmitt, but it presupposes his
secret agenda which, in his doctorate on the
"Occidental eschatology" from 1947, he called
"apocalyptic ontology". This ontology aimed at
nothing else but a final confrontation between the
sovereign power, the Leviathan or prince of this
world, and the revolutionary subject of history par
 9

excellence, Israel. "The historical place of

revolutionary apocalyptic is Israel", Taubes writes
in this early manifest. "The essential attitude of
Israel towards life is determined by the
revolution." (21) This revolutionary interpretation
of the essence of Israel is prefigured in Martin
Buber's anarchic theopolitics and Ernst Bloch's
theology of the revolution whom both Taubes
adopts as his figures of orientation in the
revolutionary war against the prince of this world.
Young Taubes creates in fact a kind of apocalyptic
front against the Leviathan relying on John's
revelation as well as on "St.Paul's political
theology" which according to him point both to a
Gnostic world view.
"Like in Gnostic literature the demonic powers in
St.Paul's theology are the satan and the prince of
this world. Demonic are not only the singular
entities in the space of this world, but the world is
demonic in its substance. The space of the world,
wherein life dwells, is as such a demonic power."
34
Political theology presents itself here in the
different layers of eschatology, apocalypse and
 10

Gnosis leading to the ultimate final war of the end

of times between these demonic sovereign powers
and the true divine anarchist, between political
theology and theopolitics, between theocracy and
revolution, Katechon and Messiah. Thus World
history is but one apocalyptic dramaturgy leading
with this confrontation to the absolute emergency
state revealing the Gnostic abyss between the God
of this world (i.e. the satanic prince) and the God
without Being who comes in order to destroy the
world.
Revolution as nihilism? The non being God
(nichtseiender) is an annihilating God (nichtender)
"who embraces the world and destroys it (…) The
non being God puts the essence of this world into
question by denying all validity and finality of
being. This is the reason why the gospel of the far
and unknown God, which Gnosticism announces,
is the inspiring parole of nihilistic revolutionary
desire." 15/16 These explosive sentences open the
Gnostic abyss as they seem to be a reflex of the
horrors of the extermination if Judaism in the
Holocaust. Destruction against extermination. The
revolutionary nihilism belongs to Taubes'
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existential life experience, which he describes in

the language of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Hans
Jonas as a fundamental strangeness if the world
and estrangement of the self from the world which
has turned into a machine of destruction itself.
Taubes has defined his nihilism both as the
revolutionary and the existential dimension, the
inner and outer aspect of this world hour, which
according to the Jewish heretic messianism Taubes
often adopts can only be redeemed through a
radical destruction of all norms and rules valid in
this world. In a letter to Armin Mohler, a close
friend from his early study years and a radical right
wing activist at the time (!), Taubes summarizes his
own nihilism in the following convulsive words: "I
always navigate towards the center, I am driven
towards - the nothing. The zero point is the central
point (…) The ones who are afraid of the nothing,
will suffocate from it like in a disease, but the ones
who can look into the face of the nothing, their
face will be illuminated." 117 BW
These lines written in the spirit of Max Stirner's
radical nihilist and egocentric anarchism point in
fact to a secret focus which Rene Girard has
 12

defined as mimetic desire. In Stirner's nihilism

both, Taubes and Schmitt, find their common
ground, since both, the revolutionary and the
sovereign ideologist of dictatorship in their war
against each other, use the same means, copy
each other and thus become more and more
similar until they are in fact identical in their only
will to nihilism.
It is difficult not to refer to these aspects of
Taubes' adoption of Schmitt's political theology as
his own point of departure. Schmitt is every
where, he is the prince of this world governing the
political, eschatological, apocalyptic and gnostic
figures of Taubes' thought. In the introduction to
the second volume on "Gnosis and politics" (1983)
he has given a more explicit account of his own
Gnostic world view which was supposed to be
developed in the third volume on theocracy
(1987), a volume which Taubes could not finish
himself, since he died in this very year. His
Leviathan as Mortal God is an esoteric text which
reveals by concealing. It is conceived in the spirit
of Hobbes as the opening of a window which the
philosopher himself has immediately closed
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because of the dangerous storm that would break

off. Taubes at least wants the reader to know from
where the apocalyptic storm blows, but even he
himself might not be fully aware of all its powers.
In nearly all its aspects Taubes follows Schmitt’s
reading of Hobbes from 1938 which against
common scholarly and systematic interpretations
picks up the biblical symbol of the Leviathan, the
living power to which no other power on earth is
comparable (Hiob 41: 24: Non est potestas super
terram quae comparetur ei) According to Schmitt
this mysterious symbol does not only reveal the
deep dimensions of the sovereign state, but
Schmitt is determined to open the window which
points to the horizon for an understanding of the
failure of the state.
In this line Taubes focusses on the emblematic
symbol of the title page to Hobbes’ Leviathan
which is supposed to illustrate it. It is the “Makros
Anthropos”, the gigantic man who is composed of
numerous little men. When this huge man holds
with his right arm a sword and with his left a
crosier in order to protect a peaceful town, he
symbolizes the civil state overcoming the natural
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state of war. Through a contract of everybody with

everybody the state which Hobbes compares the
state with the representative magnus homo or
with a supernatural machine, comes into being.
But the most intriguing symbol here is the mortal
god. This symbol has to be understood as the
reverse of the ecclesiastical conception of the
unity between spiritual and profane power, of
auctoritas and potestas. When Gregory VII in his
Dictatus Papae and Bonifatius VII in his papal bull
“Unam sanctam” have derived from the spiritual
authority of the pope an absolute power over the
profane world, too, Hobbes derives absolute
power over the spiritual powers from the profane
sovereign. His principle “Authority gives the law
and not truth” is formulated against the absolute
claims of the catholic and protestant church at war
with each other in the religious civil war of the
time. Thus the profane sovereign represents both
by placing the spiritual under the profane power.
When “all central concepts of the theory of state
are secularized theological concepts”, then here
secularization is functioning as a mirror image of
the theological symbol. Schmitt has summarized
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this process of reverse through the Leviathan as

well as the secular reverse of the ecclesiastical
principle of redemption: Extra civitatem nulla
securitas. Taubes follows Schmitt and his disciple
Hans Barion when he re-projects the Leviathan on
his model in the Corpus Christi, in order to stress
the analogy between the mortal god Leviathan
and the mortal Christ. As Christ comes for
redemption, the Leviathan comes to give security.
The Leviathan is the secularized Christ.
With the reversal of the hierarchy of auctoritas
and potestas the Leviathan does not only become
the absolute principle of the political order, he
acquires the right to regulate the relations of the
citizens to transcendence. And not less important:
he signifies the end of any right to resistance, the
same right which both parties, the protestant and
catholic monarchomachians, have claimed for
themselves as absolute. The Leviathan is thus
erected against the presbyterian revolution, the
Behemot, but he is meant first of all as a weapon
against the realm of darkness, i.e. the catholic
church and the dictate of the popes. This is the
meaning of the reversal of powers in the symbol!
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When Hobbes has polemicized against Cardinal

Bellarmin, who derived from the spiritual
superiority of the church the right for a special
"potestas indirecta", the right for intervention into
state affairs, Taubes like Schmitt opposes here the
position of Karl Barth's dialectical theology and
especially Erik Peterson who by returning to St.
Augustine approved of the Church's right of this
interference.
This means that Taubes takes side of Schmitt's
position in the debate between him and Peterson,
the issue dealt with extensively in the first volume.
Against Schmitt's political theology from 1922
which takes the sovereign as an analogy to god
and relies heavily on Hobbes, Peterson, in his
"Monotheism as a political problem" from 1935
took recourse to Augustine, in order to dispatch
the theological possibility of all political theology.
Peterson argued with Augustine's trinity against all
theology of the "Reich" and especially against
Schmitt's affirmation of Hitler's third Reich.
Schmitt, in his political theology II from 1970
questioned this dispatch of all political theology by
claiming that the dogma of trinity is itself
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instrumentalised here as a political weapon for the

legitimation of Augustine's teaching of the two
realms, Church and State. Taubes summarizes
Schmitt in the following words: "The incantation of
St. Augustine through Christian theologians who
believe that with this incantation they dispatch
with political theology, forget and conceal, that
they themselves as profane citizens carry
responsibility on the state of the humans." (14)
When Taubes interprets Hobbes' Leviathan as a
secularized political Christology, the
transformation from the natural to the sovereign
civil state appears as the secularization of the
redemption from the state of sin to the state of
grace. The state represents the event of
humanization, the becoming human, which is
made possible by the state, the Leviathan. Re-
projected onto Christ: the state is Christ become
human. According to Taubes this political
Christology is the deep dimension of European
political theology which leads from Hobbes to
Hegel's philosophy of right and Nietzsche's
superman. Where Hegel unfolds Hobbes' sudden
and unique event of the birth of the Leviathan into
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singular dialectical steps leading to the formation

of reason in modern democracy, Nietzsche
indicates with his formula of the "Cesar with the
soul of Christ" as the superman of perfect will to
power the return to Hobbes' sovereignty.
This is of course a cryptic sketch, which, thought
through, constructs a circle of the genesis, decline
and regeneration of the mortal Leviathan, the
Leviathan as Christ: the secular resurrection of the
mortal Leviathan, the god of the state? A reading
in this line would remind us of Leo Strauss' analysis
of the Leviathan, whom Taubes does not mention
here at all, although his book on Hobbes is written
in the same years as Schmitt's and corresponds
with his in many ways not only in critical ways.
Strauss describes in his book this circle as a
function of the foundation of the law on the will of
the subject. From the sovereign will of the
Leviathan to Kant's practical reason and the
Hegelian Spirit, the law becomes rationalized, but
since this rationalization is grounded in the
(universal) will of the subject, it can "degenerate"
back into a law of the sovereign will of the king or
Nietzsche's "will to power", since reason alone
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cannot promise that the law will be kept. In other

words, the Leviathan represents the historical
moment of this subjective foundation of the law
which creates the circle from power to reason and
back to power as the mythical movement of
modernity, the "eternal return of the same" which
can only be overcome by another, a
"transcendent" law like the Platonic "nomos" or
the orthodox religious law, which are not a
function of the human will.
But as we have seen, Taubes does not want to go
back to a primordial order of this world given
through orthodox Jewish or catholic belief, nor is
he interested in a restauration of Platonic
metaphysics. With Schmitt he aims at a radical
overcoming of the traditional political orders fixed
in orthodox metaphysics or theology, with Schmitt
he wants to restore the Leviathan, only in order to
destroy him and with him all power structures and
authorities. Taubes accomplishes this project with
Schmitt's negative indication of the destructive
powers who in fact led to the downfall of the
Leviathan. These dark powers are the storm which
is breaking through when Schmitt and Taubes
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open the window Hobbes has closed immediately

with the employment of the symbol of the
Leviathan. In chapter 5 of his Leviathan from 1938
Schmitt develops these concealed dark dimension
of the symbol, the Achilles' tendon of the mortal
god, in the dichotomy between inside and outside
of the public political sphere. The sovereign
governs the public space in all its aspects including
the definition of the religious cult, but he cannot
govern the souls of the citizens. This inner space of
the Leviathan is according to Hobbes the very
space of liberty, since "privacy is in secrecy free".
Schmitt quotes this sentence as the indication for
the possible collaps of the Leviathan.
"But at this place, at the zenith of the sovereign
power that brings about the unity of religion and
politics, occurs the rupture of the otherwise so
complete, so overpowering unity, the decisive
point. Concerning miracle and belief that Hobbes
evades (…) At this point enters the differentiation
between inner faith and outer confession into the
political system of the Leviathan.” 55 56
The freedom of belief is in fact the seeds of death,
which "have destroyed the powerful god from
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within." In this context Schmitt develops a

demonic scene, in which "the Jews" occupy this
inner space as a strategic point of departure, in
order to eliminate the Leviathan.
"Only a few years later after the appearance of the
Leviathan, a liberal Jew noticed the barely visible
crack in the theoretical justification of the
sovereign state. In it he immediately recognized
the telling inroad of modern liberalism, which
would allow Hobbes' postulation of the relation
between external and internal, public and private,
to be inverted into its converse." 57
Schmitt refers to Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico
Politicus herem namely to its 19th chapter. It is
true, Schmitt mentions Kant, Goethe and the
German enlightenment here too as well as the
illuminates and free masons as powerful enemies,
but the Jews are from within their supposed inner
nature predestined as subversive powers.
Subversion lies in their "double essence" which is a
function of their "mask existence". 70 Precisely
because they are outsiders, who can activate their
hidden Jewish Inwardness behind the mask, they
are supposed to be capable to conquer the inner
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depths of the Leviathan and destroy him from

within.
"The young Rothschilds, Karl Marx, Börne, Heine,
Meyerbeer, and many other occupied, each in his
circle of activity, places in the fields of economics,
journalism, the arts, and science. Stahl Jolson was
the boldest in this Jewish front . He penetrated the
Prussian state and the Evangelical church." 70
Although the earlier Schmitt did not mention
"inner essences" or Jewish origins, he has criticized
much earlier Hans Kelsen's theory of constitution
for detaching the law from all sovereign personal
authority, thus aiming at a state of perfect legality,
which has lost its power of decision and thus is
bound to fall pray to its internal and external
enemies. Now, the Jews are, according to the later
Schmitt, the very political religious power, which is
in line with its internal messianic tradition, when it
liquidates the sovereign personal power, the
Leviathan: they in fact turn out to be the ultimate
eschatological enemy.
At the entrance to his book on the Leviathan
Schmitt explains the symbolic meaning which the
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Leviathan has achieved in the Jewish mystical

tradition. It is here that he opens the mysterious
window, that Hobbes hinted at, when he turned to
this symbol. The demonology Schmitt develops in
this context plays already a central role in the
liturgy of the feats of tabernacles, at the end of
which the religious Jews pray, that in the days of
the messiah they will sit in the tabernacles made
off the skin of the Leviathan and eat its flesh.
"According to such Jewish Cabbalistic
interpretations, the leviathan represents "the
cattle upon a thousand hills".(Psalms 50:10),
namely, the heathens. World history appears as a
battle among heathens. The leviathan, symbolizing
sea powers, fighting the behemoth, representing
land powers. The latter tries to tear the leviathan
apart with his horns, while the leviathan covers
behemot's mouth and nostrils with his fins and
kills him in that way. This is, incidentally, a fine
depiction if the mastery of a country by a
blockade. But the Jews stand by and watch how
the people of the world kill one another. This
"ritual slaughter and massacre" is for them lawful
and "kosher", and they therefore eat the flesh of
 24

the slaughtered peoples and are sustained by it." 8

9
Certain voices claimed that this demonic use of
Jewish Kabbala was a kind of disguise of an
esoteric argument in favor of inner emigration at a
time where Schmitt himself was not protected
anymore against attacks from the SS. But the
brutal anti-Semitic gesture is not only straight
forward, is repeats what Schmitt has lectured on
the role of the Jews in German law in 1935, and
certainly picks up on his attacks against Hans
Kelsen who since the political theology from 1922
has become the representative of the enemy of
personal sovereignty. In "State, Movement,
People" from 1934 Schmitt legitimizes his theory
of sovereignty in light of the Nazi rule and reminds
the reader of Kelsen's theory, while adding to his
attack the fact, that Kelsen was Jewish.
As we have seen already, Taubes was perfectly
aware of all this and has identified himself with the
role of the Jewish enemy and this messianic Jewish
politics of destroying the Leviathan. This enmity
was in fact the kernel of what he called his
"apocalyptic ontology", the quintessence of his
 25

revolutionary nihilistic yearning which Taubes

would identify with Jewish Kabbala and its Gnostic
sources rediscovered by Gershom Scholem. After
all, it was Kabbala which Schmitt defined here as
the counter principle of the Leviathan and which
Taubes like Scholem saw through the perspective
of heretical Sabbatean messianic mysticism.
Weren't the apocalyptic gnostic heroes of Jewish
mysticism, Shabtai Zwi and Jacob Frank, the
configurations of Taubes nihilistic revolutionary
attitude, the yearning for the destruction of the
existing world order.
The prince of this world had recognized and
defined with his political theology the Jewish
enemy, he had recognized the apocalyptic Taubes,
as Taubes has seen himself in the role of this
revealed enemy. In post war Germany with its
fragile political correctness and its silence of guilt
afraid of even mentioning the fact that someone
was Jew, Taubes might have felt attracted to the
clear and open language of Schmitt reminding him
of the historical reality as well as its apocalyptic
meaning. Only Carl Schmitt, the Katechon, has
revealed the messianic enemy on eye level who
 26

felt so much attracted to the possibility of an

intimate encounter with him! After all, both hated
the new boring parliamentary order, both
despised liberal democracy with its enlightened
sources in a bourgeois mentality: this was their
common enemy!
In the same way Taubes had only contempt for all
other leftist political options, from Adorno's and
Habermas' critical theory to the new left political
theology of Johann Baptist Metz and Jürgen
Moltmann and South American liberation
theology. He chose Martin Buber's theopolitics,
Ernst Bloch's Gnostic messianism and Benjamin's
apocalyptic spirit as the only, the Jewish
companions in his unavoidable and constitutive
confrontation with his enemy Schmitt.
In his preface to the Leviathan Taubes has hinted
to a deep cryptic insight, too, which is worth
reconstruction, since it connects to this specific
ritual of friend and enemy. When the Leviathan as
mortal God is the secular version of Christ, the
mortal God, who came to redeem mankind on the
cross, then it becomes clear, that the Leviathan
slaughtered by the messianic Jews is only the
 27

secularized name for the crucified Christ. The Jews

have - according to this anti-Semitic scenario – to
kill the Leviathan as they have played the role of
the murderers of Christ not only in popular
Christian culture. Carl Schmitt's political theology
culminating in the differentiation between friend
and enemy is thus decoded as a secular mode of
this primordial Christian mythology and its Anti-
Judaism. Carl Schmitt, although arguing as the
theorist of the modern secular state, is
nevertheless still deeply caught up in this catholic
mythology.
But here one might have to ask whether Taubes is
not on the way to another symbolic deep layer,
which he does not control or oversee. If one puts
together the two pictures, the two mortal gods
next to another, as Taubes suggests, namely the
Leviathan, whom the Jewish Zadikim consume,
and Christ, the messiah, whose flesh and blood is
consumed by the believers, then the Rightous,
who consume the Leviathan would in fact
consume Christ! However esoteric, here one
encounters another deep messianic dimension,
which cannot be dismissed, since Taubes has
 28

especially in his later political theology of St.Paul

developed the vision of the crucified Christ against
all figures of political sovereignty. Christ as the
revolutionary reversal of all sovereign powers,
who, according to the letter to the Colossians are
stripped of their powers and presented as
prisoners at the end of times.
It is here that another political abyss opens up
with the explicit symbol of the Leviathan. When
Taubes has adopted with Martin Buber's
theopolitics and Ernst Bloch's revolutionary
Gnosticism which are supposed to eliminate not
only all Christian forms of secular sovereignty, but
also all forms of Jewish sovereignty and orthodox
restitutions, then Taubes' political theology is
always already both against Zionist sovereignty
and against Jewish orthodox aspirations for a
halachic society! The revolutionary Christian
messiah functions as a critical configuration
against Jewish statehood, too, so that the
sovereign political theology of the Jewish state is
dispatched with!
But Taubes’ political theology aims at a permanent
intensification of the apocalyptic front, he thinks
 29

politics in the last instance from the extreme, from

the absolute state of exception. This state of
emergency is settled in the very Gnostic
dramaturgy which Taubes has defined in his
“apocalyptic ontology”. He refers here explicitly to
the totally other God as the power which
overcomes the being of this world and its prince.
“The God beyond being is a God who embraces
and destroys the world.” This God beyond being
rises against the evil god of this world, the god of
being and the prince of this world, in order to
eliminate him. This God is the name for a total
destruction of the existing world, for which the
revolutionary hopes for, he represents a totally
different world, a new homeland, which never has
been seen. Under the secular presuppositions,
which Taubes shares with Ernst Bloch, this political
theology appoints the Messiah or Christ of this
other god as a “homo absconditus”, the totally
other human being, man beyond being, man
beyond evil and sin.
In this context Taubes refers again and again to
the rediscovery of the Gnostic Marcion by Adolph
 30

von Harnack and Ernst Bloch in the early Twenties

of the 20ieth century:
“Already Ernst Bloch’s interest in Marcion is
designed by his specific modernist index. Marcion
is modern because of the radical opposition
between inwardness, with which no exteriority
can conform, and exteriority, which no inwardness
can reflect. The antique religions, philosophies
and Gnostic systems do not recognize such a
dichotomy. The other modern aspect in Marcion,
different from the Neoplatonic and Gnostic
systems, is the idea, that the process of
redemption is by no way symmetrical to the
catastrophic prehistory. Redemption is not
understood as a reconstruction of an original
state, but, as Adolph von Harnack says in his
monography on “Marcion, the Gospel of the alien
God”, “a glorious strangeness opens itself in front
of us and becomes our homeland.” It is this aspect,
which Ernst Bloch will describe in his “Principle of
Hope” from 1959, referring to Harnack, as “shining
into our Childhood and which never has been:
homeland.” 11
 31

It would transcend the limits of this essay, if we

wanted to give an exposition of the debate
between Voegelin and Blumenberg on the relation
between modernity and Gnosis. But Taubes’
Marcion is a reaction to this debate, rejecting both
Voegelin’s general denunciation of modernity as
Gnosis and Blumenberg’s radical detachment of
secular modernity from all theology, including
orthodoxy and heretic Gnosis. Taubes wants to
save political theology as active eschatological
Gnosis. The crisis of all political eschatology of the
revolutions and the accomplished process of
secularization in the age of technology and late
capitalism become symptoms of the “steely shell”
which Max Weber has defined as the destiny of
modernity and rationalization. 10 11 This gnostic
hieroglyph indicates that no mediation between
inwardness and exteriority, between the human
soul and the political economic reality is possible
anymore.
With the adoption of Marcion Taubes has to clarify
the issue of Marcion’s metaphysical Anti Judaism
and the role this Marcionite Anti Judaism has
played in modern liberal protestant theology,
 32

especially in Adolph von Harnack’s work on

Marcion from 1921. This monography has often
been interpreted as one of the central indications
of the coming events in Nazi Germany, since
Harnack approved of Marcion’s demand to detach
the Jewish bible as a document of the evil god of
creation from the new testament and the new
gospel of the totally other God Christ.
Here Taubes turns to Ernst Bloch who claimed that
Marcion’s theology of the totally other God as the
true homeland of man determined already Moses’
theology of Exodus itself which was supposed to
be a rebellion against the God of domination and
creation, God as father. Thus Bloch manages to
construct a genealogy of the theology of Exodus
leading from Moses to Jesus, Paul and Marcion as
the sons of the other God who leads man to his
true homeland beyond being.
“In other words: Marcion does not come from
St.Paul (only), he comes also from Moses, the true
and strange God already appears in the God of
Exodus, between Egypt and Kanaan.” 12 13
 33

Harnack has not really understood then the impact

of Marcion’s gospel, when he detached the New
from the Old Testament, since the underlying
meaning of both is Gnostic. Taubes even
speculates about a possible Jewish descent of
Marcion! In any case, Marcion becomes the
symbol for the most radical theology of
revolutionary transformation of the world and of
man, which will be performed by the human son
of God, the Messiah and Christ as the true figure
of the human essence beyond being. For Bloch as
for Taubes who both adopt Feuerbach’s and
Marx’s anthropological reduction the other God is
at the end nothing but the name for the true
essence of man, the “homo absconditus” who will
establish the totally other world.
When Taubes raises with Marcion the totally other
world as “miracle, ecstasy, power and
astonishment” about the fact, that “one cannot
say anything or think anything about this gospel”,
Gnosis thus finalizes the fundamental rupture
between inwardness and exteriority: it becomes
the last resort for a “fuga saeculi”, a flight from the
world age, which leaves behind itself all
 34

revolutionary possibilities. This miraculous and

uncomparable homeland is then the real
metaphysical antithesis to the Leviathan of whom
God says that “with him nothing is comparable”.
Conclusion: Taubes’ project of a renewal of
political theology as he pursues it in the trilogy on
“Theory of religion and political theology” unfolds
in three different levels then:
1 Political theology describes the political index of
theology and the theological dimension of politics.
It is basically descriptive when it analyses the
various metaphorical and analogical interferences
between politics and religion.
2 The horizon of these descriptions is normative
and critical. Political theology functions as a critical
theory and practice vis a vis the existing power
structures in politics and religion. Its practical aim
is the revolution.
3 The revolution is a rather vague and general
name for a whole set of strategies of intervention
which in Taubes' use oscillate between the
messianic, the apocalyptic and Gnosis. According
to the involved radical logic of exception
 35

revolutionary theory and practice culminate in the

complete negativity of all political realities which
never can realize the splendid utopia of the totally
other homeland in a concrete reality. Interiority
and exteriority are aporetic, Marx and Kierkegaard
remain beyond any post-Hegelian synthesis.
Interesting enough, Taubes has analyzed these
issues in his early "Occidental Eschatology" from
1947 already in their inner logic which leads to
what he calls the "nihilistic revolutionary attitude".
Here he defines this aporia clearly as the tension
between telos and topos, but he obviously does
not want to draw any consequences from this
aporetic situation.
"Apocalypse is revolutionary, because it does not
see the turn in an indeterminate future, but very
close. This is the reason why apocalyptic prophesy
is oriented towards the future but at the same
time pointing to the presence. (…) The
apocalyptical principle unifies in itself elements
which destroy the form and those which create
form. According to the situation it is one or the
other of these components which comes into play,
none can be absent. If the demonic destroying
 36

element is missing, the petrified order, the very

positivity of the world cannot be overcome. If the
elements of destruction are missing in the
appearance of the "new covenant", the revolution
sinks into nothingness. (…) But here the tragic
element of the true revolution reveals itself.
Because it drives towards the absolute telos, it has
to transcend any form. Nevertheless, utopia can
only become reality in a topos. Every realization
jeopardizes thus the absolute claim of the telos."
16
Taubes' thinking always moves from the political
theological analysis to the eschatological and
apocalyptic horizon, in order to reveal the last and
ultimate telos in Gnosis. But here he loses the
concrete context he is aiming at and with it the
possibility for a concrete practice. Like the
Leviathan, political Gnosis is tragic in its essence
then. Where the Leviathan fails to secure the
Political, political Gnosis does not reach politics
beyond the nihilistic gesture. Gnosis thus becomes
the point of rupture and the seeds of death of
Taubes' revolutionary political theology. This was
supposed to eliminate the Leviathan by identifying
 37

the point of rupture and the seeds of death of the

mortal God. The only option left for the Gnostic
becomes so similar to the option of the citizen in
the Leviathan who wants to be free: both can only
retreat into the interior, the private space. They
have to "flee from the world and from society", for
both "the world is an unbearable place". Taubes
who quotes Simone Weil's radical revolutionary
Gnosis in this context is aware then of the fact that
the only thing left for the Gnostic, is either the
permanent revolution leading to nothingness and
desperation or the silent retreat into the inner
soul. In the retreat into the inner soul, the
Leviathan and the Gnostic revolution reveal their
true space and essence as an identical space: but
definitely beyond the political!
There is a third option, however, which Taubes has
chosen, in order not to resign to the mentioned
alternative, and this is the reinvention of the
enemy as the vital point of departure for the
meaning of one's own life! The enemy is then the
Katechon of the revolution as he is the Katechon
of one's own desperation from revolution: only he
can avoid it! Revolution at this ultimate level is
 38

becoming a ritual and a game which can, of

course, be taught in academic seminar rooms, it
opens itself wonderfully for rhetorical and
philological interventions, which illuminate this
type of apocalyptical political theology without
exposing its own Katechontic purpose. The
academic Gnostic will, like the God of Kabbala and
like Luther's God, prefer to play with the Leviathan
for a couple of hours a day, let him confuse the
world, in order to catch him and be safe – for
entertainment!