Geopolitics

Political Theological Arguments Concerning the War in Ukraine

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David Pan
Part of the Russian argument for its invasion of Ukraine has been that it is defending a commitment to the sacred against a secularizing West. In his essay in Telos 201 entitled “Russia, the Ukraine War, and the West’s Empire of Secularization,” Matthew Dal Santo discusses the intellectual roots of this argument in the work of the Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce. Del Noce considered the Russian Revolution to be on the one hand a culmination of the secularizing project of the Enlightenment and on the other hand a continuation of a Russian millenarian religious perspective under the guise of Marxist utopianism. With the fall of Communism, Russia has returned to its long-term trajectory of combining religious and political authority, in which the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church can collaborate in describing the overarching war aims as the defense of religion against a secular West. While he condemns the invasion of Ukraine, Dal Santo considers whether the Russian narrative retains some legitimacy insofar as the West has indeed proceeded along a path of secularization that leaves no space for the sacred. In our podcast discussion, we discuss this possibility as well as the alternative one that the Russian vision of political theology insists on a top-down establishment of religion as opposed to a Western promotion of a freedom of religion that leaves the approach to the sacred to develop independently of state control. Does freedom of religion lead inexorably to secularization? Does an established religion lead just as inexorably to a bureaucratization of the sacred?

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Categories: Geopolitics, Religion and Philosophy

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