What if I told you, dear reader, that the Modern State is an illusion designed to pacify the anxiety of the populace while they await the State’s actualization of a time when life on Earth will become heaven-like? What if I added that this illusion is a demanding one? The State asks from its subjects two things in return. Firstly, it demands the surrender of one’s quiddity as an ethical subject, and to transfer the power to define good and evil to an “Egregore of the People.” Secondly, one must agree to be reduced to a fragment of oneself: to appoint a specific identity as the entirety of one’s being and, since it is not possible to live in such a condition, one must remove what is deemed unessential while nevertheless pretending to be whole. 

Reading this introduction, you, dear reader, might have considered it a metaphor at best or as an unfunny joke aimed to troll one’s emotion at worst. But in this article I will demonstrate that it is an expression in present-day terminology of the words of one of the key authors of Western Modernity — Thomas Hobbes. 

It is often overlooked that (as of the 17th century) the West has been living, to a significant extent, in line with the symbolic archetypes shaped by the works of this philosopher. Hobbes cannot, however, be granted exclusive credit for what will be discussed in the following text. For as with all great minds, he was standing on the shoulders of those who came before him: William of Ockham, and nominalists in general, who opened to western thought the path to see the world not as a whole, but as parts with no intrinsic purpose — no “telos”; Martin Luther who, from the perspective of social practices, demystified the matter of salvation and made it conditional upon good governance, and paved the way for the principle “whose realm, his religion”; René Descartes who revived the ancient understanding of a Human as a lonely spirit trapped in the body, combined with his mechanistic understanding of reality; Justus Lipsius who devised Christian Stoicism, which replaced the ideal of agape (love and mercy) with apatheia (permanence in all states of life), and after removing compassion from the heart of common social life, inserted instead civic activism and military discipline. 

However it was Hobbes who was the most influential early modern thinker. It was Hobbes who, while staying within Christian symbolism, created the theology of a community where, according to philosopher Eric Voegelin, “The contradiction between temporal and spiritual becomes meaningless.”¹ Let us consider the image printed as the frontispiece of the original 1651 edition of Leviathan, an engraving by Abraham Bosse made in collaboration with Hobbes (see above). Initially, one sees a giant rising from the sea beyond the hills, assembled from male figures in hats and cloaks; they stand with their backs to the viewer, turning their gaze to the face of a crowned head, atop the body of the giant. There is also a foreground: a town surrounded by city walls. The town is empty, except for a dozen soldiers moving from left to right, apparently towards the city church, located in the lower right corner of the image. Near the church, one sees two figures also moving from left to right who seem to be leading the procession. These two figures are priests or doctors in medieval plague masks with beaks.

This giant is the Leviathan — the Artificial Man or, as we might say today, an Egregore — within him the multitude of citizens are combined into one being, and it is this combination, this mechanism, which becomes the actor in history rather than the elected ruler or any other representation of the whole. One cannot understand the extent to which this concept is revolutionary, without paying some respect to the particular understanding of Man which is pressed into this Artificial Human. For Hobbes, any Man is guided only by Passions; the strongest of which is Libido Dominandi — the desire to serve and suppress. However, it is not the whole of an individual that has this desire, but a Person. As Hobbes himself writes: 

The word person is Latin, instead whereof the Greeks have prosopon, which signifies the face, as persona in Latin signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it which disguiseth the face, as a mask or vizard: and from the stage hath been translated to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals as theatres. So that a person is the same that an actor is.²

Of course, Hobbes did not invent this concept of Person. Rather, Person has been an integral element of Western thought since Greek and Roman times. All facets of the idea of Person are present within Western symbolism, but when it comes down to it, being a Person means first and foremost being in a social relationship. From this thought arises the great culture of Roman and Western Law: if “I” is primarily how “I” appears to others, then the rules and modes of these appearances undoubtedly matter. An insult to one’s public face is an insult to who one is no less. It is through the Person that the culture of public dignity was anchored in Europe and the possibility of limited Government became imaginable. Emphasis on an Individual as a Person is, under certain conditions, a way to harmonize relationships in a society. Indeed, it is a Person to which public respect is attributed, and thus all the symbols of Power, Status, and Rights. 

Yet there are ways in which centrality of the idea of Person is not self-sufficient and, under certain circumstances, disastrous for the society. Ultimately, the symbolism of Person can function only if it is anchored in the realities of a higher order — particularly justice (traditionally understood as “giving something what it is due”). Such justice presupposes a) an objective reality and b) the idea of telos and its hierarchies. Without these, no real criteria for respect and dignity remain in society, and each person inevitably becomes interchangeable. One can argue that such an understanding of an Individual is cruel — what about those whose objectives deserve less respect than others? It is no coincidence that many utopian projects, Marxism being the most famous one, have attacked Western Tradition precisely for trying to make Respect not contingent upon Justice. But by trying to dilute the ontological foundation of Respect and award everyone a participation trophy, we are left with no justice, no right, and no respect. 

At the same time the problem of Person is a real one and it will continue to haunt the West as long as we tend to think that a Person (social relations) is all that an individual is, thus extending the domain of a Person from the public forum to the forum of life of the soul. To find an alternative understanding of the subject is a difficult task. Without going too much into detail I will mention that the Orthodox tradition offers a helpful hand here — the notion of Hypostasis/substance: something that underlies any social interaction, a fundamental reality of the life of the soul. This Hypostasis in its turn is not contingent upon one’s social interactions, since it is not a mask but the living force inside a man. It cannot be lost, it cannot be taken away, it does not depend on justice, but is opened to love. Respect indeed belongs to a Person and is conditional, but love has no limits and can be given to all Hypostases. More can and should be said on the subject of Person and Hypostasis and the impact of this question for the cultural, social and political, but for now it is important to understand that Hobbes being not particularly familiar with the Orthodox tradition was limited to the notion of the Person.

And, in this very same notion by which we owe the existence of Human Rights and Rule of Law, hides the possibility of a totalitarian utopia. Indeed, why not try to change an individual and the whole of society to perfection by changing the rules of interaction and appearance? Hobbes suggests precisely such a course of action. He advocates for assembling these masks as cogs in an Artificial Machine which would run perfectly and achieve… Achieve what exactly? 

Hobbes’s ambition is not simply to solve the practical problem of peaceful governance in the context of a Europe torn apart by Wars of Religion. No, the reach of his project is more timeless. He tries to solve the problem of the coexistence between the particularities of an individual and the integrity of a community. In short, humans are so incredibly diverse — of different physical characteristics, born with wide-ranging backgrounds and opportunities, etc. — one could say it is a miracle that any society can exist for a prolonged time and not break apart immediately. This is especially so in times when members of society disagree not only about the meaning of good and evil, but also on what basis to make such distinctions, in times when the political community no longer reads the same texts, and its members begin their reasoning from fundamentally different axioms, dissolving the very possibility of dialogue. How can the survival of a community be ensured when its members radically disagree about basic moral principles? It was in such times as these that Hobbes spent his life, such questions as these that became central to his philosophy. 

The answers Hobbes suggests created the paradigm of Western thought for the next four hundred years. At first, he accepts that no reasonable agreement on the hierarchy of morality is possible: 

Whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion, evil; and of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and contemptible are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.³

Here, in a Hobbesian world, in what he calls “the state of nature,” there cannot be any peaceful co-existence. The central tenet of previous political social thought (the idea of common good or “summum bonum”) is abandoned. What one is left with are paranoid cowards afraid of contact with other humans, or, as mentioned above, masks on the stage, and the only thing that can possibly hold them together is fear and manipulation.

It is difficult to truly understand how radical such a proposition is without reading Leviathan in parallel with the ideal it replaces. For example, in Ephesians 4:15–16, Paul the Apostle addresses this same problem of unity within the diversity of gifts among believers. Here is Paul’s solution: “[...That we,] speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.”

Whereas Hobbes proposes: 

By art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man … in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves....⁴

Now, the direct opposition to apostolic ideals in Hobbes’s writing is clear. St. Paul presents the proper relationship between unity and multiplicity when the multiplicity of gifts of the members of the ecclesia is transformed into unity through the love of Christ. Hobbes writes how the political community (joints and elements of the Leviathan Egregore) are forced to be together through the will of the Sovereign. Whereas the apostle speaks of an indefinite time — “endeavoring … till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13; this moment may as well come tomorrow or in a million years) — instead Hobbes speaks of categorical time. The Leviathan already exists, human cogs are already arranged into a single artificial person, and not by love, but by “reward and punishment.” Where Christian Res Publicum is supposed to be united in love and through grace, Hobbes unites people through propaganda and fear of death. 

For Hobbes, multiplicity gains unity not through Christ’s love, but through the figure of the State: the historical Person, a “mortal God,” to which the individual has the same obligations as to Christ. And only this golem-state has the right to moral doubt, to search for answers to the most difficult moral questions: “To make covenant with God is impossible but by mediation of such as God speaketh to, either by revelation supernatural or by His lieutenants that govern under Him and in His name: for otherwise we know not whether our covenants be accepted or not.”⁵ It is in such notions that the key question of any political project within the European intellectual tradition is fully apparent: how one understands Time and History. 

All the political theories formulated in the West are, whether the authors admit it or not, deeply rooted in Greek and Christian symbolism in one way or another. One of these symbols is Kairos — a word indicative of a particular understanding, used by Greeks to mean not just time but the right time.⁶ In Christianity, the idea of Kairos transformed into the divine time that does not exist within the limitations of our measuring instruments and instead answers the most intimate questions of being and purpose. Moreover, after Christ, any collective time within the West is essentially eschatological time: time which is playing itself out in view of its final point — a moment of closure and of transformation.

Therefore, it is no coincidence that the temptation to manipulate time thrives within the West. Whereas the Far East (China and India) can live in endless repetition,⁷ the West cannot stop knowing (both at the level of philosophical archetypes and at the level of collective imagination) about Eschaton, about Paradise and about Transfiguration. But at the same time, it is extremely difficult for the West to be without chronological clarity in temporal uncertainty. The life of the Western man is “a life in anticipation of Paradise,” and one does not know whether this Paradise will come in the next second, tomorrow, in a hundred or even ten million years. One of the last things that Christ told his disciples answers precisely the question: “Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). That is to say, When will Earth be turned into Paradise? And His response was not what one desires to hear in the time of the Apostles, in the time of Hobbes, or in modern times: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7). Christ not only provides an answer, but a demand for humility and trust in the face of divine time, since the arrival of Paradise is not like the arrival of a train at the station; it is without timetable.

For the observer, however, it is often difficult to wait, especially when the potential growth of humanity’s collective strength and ability to manipulate matter is so apparent. How can one not wish to quicken the advance of Kairos, to speed up the “times and seasons”? Hobbes is more modest in this regard — he still remembers that God must have the final word in this process — but he dares to dream of the possibility of accelerating chronological and cyclical time to the point of “one second before the end of the world,” preserving a state of eternal Constitution.

In Leviathan, Hobbes makes a move fundamental for any future utopia: he breaks away from reality, from the world “as it is,” in favor of a simplified and simultaneously comprehensive understanding of man and society. And his legacy for future political thought is in fact ontological. Specifically, he reduces a person to a set of passions, the primary of which is the desire to rule and subjugate — Libido Dominandi. For the first step towards his utopia, or any utopia, must be reduction; the very process of simultaneous reduction of Human Individuality to the Mask of a Person, to the actor’s make-up, to that which “turns to other people.” Then comes the assembly of these Masks into the gears of the state mechanism, which can be polished in accordance with the will of the Sovereign. After this, the only thing that changes is the particular principle of reduction. For Hobbes, the color and shape of a mask is determined by the passions. But for other seekers of utopia, there will be different criteria for masks: economic position in society, the language one speaks, their sex, and so on. 

In Hobbesian thought, one of the greatest political achievements of Christianity, the principle of “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” is abandoned. And it is precisely Hobbes’s borderline position between the worlds of Tradition and Modernity that makes it possible to notice this parallelism and deep connection between the logic of the biblical text and the archetypes of a utopia. In subsequent political theories, such a connection will become more difficult to distinguish, but will remain integral.

Whether one admits it or not, societies inevitably find themselves in the Hobbesian trap the moment they try to “stop history,” when an intellectual or political movement decides to determine the “times and seasons” of the Second Coming. It doesn’t matter what this paradise will look like, be it Communism, an ethnically clean “homogenized” society, the world of a green utopia, or the “Kingdom of Science.” If a political movement genuinely intends to achieve this ideal in the foreseeable, or at least in an “accelerated” future, it will inevitably simplify an individual’s entire Self to a mask of class, race, gender, or any other part of the human personality that is selected. After that, having renounced love towards people and patience in the face of their natural shortcomings, the utopian movement will learn to love the State (including its fear, violence and brainwashing capabilities). This is the main lesson that Hobbes teaches. 

The second lesson is that the only thing that such a monstrosity as the Leviathan can offer us in exchange for personal freedom, is security — not for the Self, but for the mask: “The motive and end for which this renouncing and transferring of right is introduced is nothing else but the security of a man’s person, in his life, and in the means of so preserving life as not to be weary of it.”⁸ That is, if an individual manages to reduce himself to one aspect of his personality, say a worker or a particular sexual identity, then the State will give him comfort and security. But such benefits do not come free of charge. In return, one must consent to be in a state of internal split, a schizophrenia, since one will have to engage constantly in internal self-censorship of everything that goes beyond the mask. By fair reckoning, such an exchange is a bad one but is the inevitable price to be paid in order to maintain the illusion of an artificial God who has outstripped or frozen divine time.

What Hobbes refused to admit was the absurdity of his own thought. An absurdity that lies in the fact that, having locked a person in a prison of the private existence of a mask, Hobbes not only neglects to establish the conditions for peace between people, he, to the contrary, creates an eternal war between them. After all, if there is no common good, no Homonoia, then why should the will of one person be limited by the will of others? Fear and illusions work only until the moment an ambitious and ruthless Raskolnikov arrives and decides to become the controller of this golem — to be Sovereign himself.⁹ After all, such a “Superman” has no ethical reason not to do this.

It is quite naïve to believe that fear and manipulation are sufficient means by which to maintain the illusion of the Egregore-God for any extended period; but the preservation of such an illusion is precisely the goal. The Modern State must, by any means (illusory or otherwise), cover the hole (one could call it the empty throne) that lies within its heart. Just as Hobbes’s Man is artificial, so too is his State. The political theorist Carl Schmitt emphasizes the internal fragility of such a collective body, noting that in the world of Hobbes, “Public power and force may be ever so completely and emphatically recognized and ever so loyally respected, but only as a public and only an external power, it is hollow and already dead from within.”¹⁰ Moreover, as philosopher Giorgio Agamben has noted, this State “formed by innumerable tiny figures is not a reality, however artificial, but an optical illusion.”¹¹ The Leviathan is not just an artificial God, but a fake god in which it is impossible to truly believe. One can only pretend to, and consent to, outwardly worship it as genuine, while understanding in the depths of one’s heart its fakeness.

The fakeness of this State is not accidental but is a substantial consequence of the deeper Christian meaning of Hobbes’s work. The Leviathan project is deeply eschatological from the outset and Hobbes is fully aware of this. In his world, there is no room for public discord, as it threatens the illusion: 

It is annexed to the sovereignty to be judge of what opinions and doctrines are averse, and what conducing to peace; and consequently, on what occasions, how far, and what men are to be trusted withal in speaking to multitudes of people; and who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they be published. For the actions of men proceed from their opinions, and in the well governing of opinions consisteth the well governing of men’s actions in order to their peace and concord.¹² 

Such control can only be exercised by the earthly God — the State — and it extends not only to the public space, but also de facto to the space of each individual human soul. The forum of conscience is merged with the forum of law.

Ultimately Hobbes transfers the ownership of the souls of subjects from God to the State, thus changing the course of Western political thought. In Protestant movements from Hobbes’s time, there is no true unity between Christ and His Church, as they will become one only at the end of time. The same is true of the Leviathan model, wherein a true political body can exist only in the form of an illusion — light scattered in multitudes against the background of the shadow of possible civil war — and only at the time of the end of the world will the people acquire a unified and not illusory body. Until then, the political community should not even think about the fact that the State is an illusion. Otherwise, the magic of the mechanism stops working, and it breaks, in Schmitt’s words, like an engine into which sand has fallen: “The wonderful armature of a modem state organization requires uniformity of will and uniformity of spirit. When a variety of different spirits quarrel with one another and shake up the armature, the machine and its system of legality will soon break down.”¹³

Such is the internal logic, and the origins, of the inner emptiness which is hidden behind all the political institutions of modernity. Nietzsche was right when, horrified by the direction of humanity, and standing on the brink of madness, he realized that the only thing left for a world without “living faith”¹⁴ — without a faith that can fill life and transform a human with transcendent grace — and for a world that continues to wait for paradise while continuously creating artificial gods for itself, is war. A war until the strongest Will is revealed, the will of the Leviathan, capable of suppressing everything around him. In the meantime, until the next Will comes, the people must be sedated in the illusion of a promised artificial heaven, one which can never arrive.

This is a terrifying world, but it is the inevitable logical consequence of the premise that Common Good is a lie as devised by the will of a benevolent tyrant to hide the true nature of society, which in this paradigm is a senseless and endless power struggle. And we in Modernity will keep falling into the same trap as long as we believe that Individual equals Persona, and as long as we desire to manipulate the time of Kairos. However, this trap can be avoided if one considers the possibility of the “summum bonum” not as a trick of mind but as an objective reality; and that the unity of individuals is possible, not based on fear or manipulation, but based on a common love for something greater. It is indeed a difficult task especially since a Hobbesian way of thinking has become so integral to our most basic archetypes in which we regard politics. Difficult but not impossible. A means to pave the way from this worldview would be to focus on what is near — on our neighbor, on our thoughts, and on striving to do whatever good we can with the position we are in.

Appendix: Example of Hobbesian Symbolism in Popular Culture

One of the best cultural artifacts of the past decade where Hobbesian symbolism is accurately represented is the TV series Game of Thrones. 

One of the central characters in Game of Thrones is Daenerys Targaryen, whose philosophy comes very close to exposing the inner drama of Modernity. This philosophy is expressed by the phrase “breaking the wheel”:

Daenerys Targaryen: “Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell. They’re all just spokes on a wheel. This one’s on top, then that one’s on top. And on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground.”

Tyrion Lannister: “It’s a beautiful dream, stopping the wheel. You’re not the first person who’s ever dreamt it.”

[Interestingly, in this dialogue its second participant — Tyrion Lannister — is a direct artistic embodiment of Thomas Hobbes: he who does not hope for heaven, but only dreams of freezing history and “stopping the wheel.”]

Daenerys Targaryen: “I’m not going to stop the wheel. I’m going to break the wheel.”

What is “breaking a wheel” if not the moment of the establishment of Paradise on Earth through the strongest and most benevolent will? In this case, such a will is that of the Mother of Dragons [Dragons in this case being the ultimate symbol of unrestrained Willpower], as she is the one who ended slavery, thus taking steps towards a world built on a philosophy radically different from the current system of oppression. How does such a dream end? Daenerys is unable to control her own Will, and the dragon turns King’s Landing into ash. The price of trying to establish a Paradise is scorched earth and a new tyrant on the throne.

[Bran Stark who becomes the winner of the Game of Thrones is indeed an ultimate Tyrant who, having unlimited access to all information, is the master of manipulation. One could say he is an Artificial Intelligence to rule over humans.]

While Daenerys may not understand the reasons for her failures, we, long before the series finale, are shown the logic behind the doom of her ambition in a dialogue between two other key characters: Petyr Baelish and Varys. Standing in front of the symbol of the Sovereign — the empty Iron Throne — they have one of the most memorable conversations from the show, which is also a fine illustration of the internal poverty of the modern state as discussed above:

Varys: “I did what I did for the good of the Realm.”

[The statesman should serve the State as an impersonal value in itself, not in any way connected with the particular body on the throne. The State is a symbol of the summum bonum, of the common good. Varys speaks the right words, but ...]

Petyr: “The Realm ... do you know what a Kingdom is? It’s a thousand blades of Eigon’s enemies — a story we agree to tell each other over and over till we forget that it is a lie.”

[The State you serve is but a simulacrum, a fake God, a mask behind which there is nothing, how can you sincerely serve this illusion? You are either a fool or a hypocrite.]

Varys: “But what do we have left once we abandon the lie? Chaos. A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.”

[Yes, I serve this illusion, knowing that it is an illusion.¹⁵ But if we all admit this, we immediately end up in the natural state of Hobbes: “A war of all against all.” Behind an empty throne lies only cold and destruction, which is impossible to contain, so the best we can do is to pretend that there is such a thing as Common Good.]

Petyr: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but refuse. They cling to the realm, or love, or the gods … illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”

[So, you are just a hypocrite and coward. Realizing that the Sovereign is a fake, you are afraid to admit that all that exists is Will and the absorption of the will of the Weak by the will of the Strong. You are afraid to become a Superhuman, although you are playing in the game of Superhumans. Worse than that, you know that there is no point in the Game, but you keep saying that there is a meaning (a fake meaning, but a meaning worth believing in nevertheless) instead of accepting this emptiness and enjoying it. Yes, we are in hell, where there is no sense, no love, there is only fish devouring each other. Do not lie to yourself that another world is possible — become the largest fish.]

Baelish in this passage is a consistent Nietzschean, a man who accepted the hollowness of the world and decided to assert himself in it. But in fact, both Varys and Petyr are wrong about the same things. Not only do they refuse to see the possibility of the summum bonum, not as an elaborate fake, but as objective reality. They also are wrong in that ethics is not relative and that moral agreement is possible, especially without pursuing impossible utopian tasks like “stopping [or breaking] the wheel.” Ironically, for being characters from a world of historical fantasy, both Petyr and Varys are very modern people in their misconceptions.

———

Pavel Shchelin is a Russian political philosopher who specializes in political theology and its implication for the theories of political community and world politics. On his YouTube channel, mostly in Russian, can be found also conversations in English with Jonathan Pageau and Richard Rohlin (located here).

1.  Eric Voegelin, Political Religions (1938), republished in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 5: Modernity Without Restraint (Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 53.

2.  Leviathan, ch. XVI. All quotations from Leviathan are taken from the following online source: resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/index.html.

3.  Ibid., ch. VI.

4.  Ibid., introduction.

5.  Ibid., ch. XIV.

6.  Greek thought generally provides a more complex understanding of time compared with modernity. Apart from Kairos, the Greeks distinguished Chronos — an inextricable linear time measured by the movement of the second hand on the dial, and Kyklos — time of governmental cycles doomed to repeat themselves.

7.  I cite here the concept of the Wheel of Time or Kalachakra, which generally means the idea of time as something cyclical consisting of repeating ages.

8.  Leviathan, ch. XIV.

9.  Raskolnikov: from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, an archetype of a young man striving to become a Nietzschean Übermensch.

10.  Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 61.

11.  Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (Stanford University Press, 2015).

12.  Leviathan, ch. XVIII.

13.  Carl Schmitt, op. cit., p. 74.

14.  The concept of “living faith” is borrowed from Jose Ortega y Gasset, Toward a Philosophy of History (University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 172:

Theologians make a very shrewd distinction, one capable of throwing light on not a few things of today, between a live and a sluggish faith.... We believe in something with a live faith when that belief is sufficient for us to live by, and we believe in something with a dead, a sluggish faith when, without having abandoned it, being still grounded on it, it no longer acts efficaciously on our lives. It is become a drag, a dead weight; still part of us, yet useless as lumber in the attic of the soul. We no longer rest our existence on that something believed in; the stimuli, the pointers we live by no longer spring spontaneously from the faith. The proof is that we are constantly forgetting we still believe in it, whereas a living faith is the constant and most active presence of the entity we believe in.... For a living love is likewise distinguished from a lifeless, dragging love in this, that the object loved is present to us without need of trance or fear or eclipse. We do not need to go in search of it with our attention; on the contrary we have difficulty in removing it from before our inner eye.

It is difficult to argue that in the last five hundred years within the Western Imaginary, one by one Faith, Progress, Nation, Family, and Democracy have become such forms of dead faith (ideas that are dear to the heart but which hardly anyone would dare trust to be the foundation of public life).

15.  Varys is internally split, and for the sake of plot he will inevitably choose one side, and not the side of the State, but this comes later in the series.