The Renunciation of God: Political Theology and Theological Resistance in Georges Bataille, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Simone Weil

Abstract

Theorists of political theology and secularization have extensively analyzed interwar European texts describing modern Western politics—and specifically the crisis of fascism—as shaped by theological signs like sovereignty, glory, salvation, and the mystical body. What has received significantly less attention is that these same critics of political theology often called for or themselves experimented with new forms of theological writing, which they saw as indispensable in the struggle against fascism, and which emphasized vulnerability, finitude, and moral ambiguity. This dissertation returns to and rereads critiques of fascism’s political theology, focusing on the works of Georges Bataille, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Simone Weil, to read this disparate constellation of writers as making up a loose theological movement, one that pushed for a resignification of theology’s central signs and whose importance has yet to be reckoned by theology itself. I begin by with a survey of interwar antifascist writers who understood the crisis of fascism as a crisis internal to Christian theology, and who called for or themselves engaged in creative theological writing as a form of political resistance. I then narrow my focus to three key texts by three such writers: Georges Bataille’s Atheological Summa, a late sermon by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Simone Weil’s Waiting for God. I begin with Bataille, who offers the most direct critique of Christian theology’s complicity with authoritarian politics and gives the most explicit call for resignifying theology against fascism. Bataille’s “hatred of salvation” leads to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s baptismal sermon, which blames Christian complicity with Nazism on its will to self-preservation and calls for a new kind of Christianity that would renounce itself and welcome being transformed by its others. I then deepen this theology of renunciation by turning to Simone Weil, whose descriptions of God’s unwavering refusal of force gives rise to a theology that is as bleak and tragic as it is politically engaged and morally demanding. All three write the renunciation of God in both senses: at once writing their own renunciations of classical theology’s God, and resignifying God as in some sense the renunciation of theology’s traditional divine attributes. Throughout the dissertation, I weave these threads together into a theology of mourning that refuses the politics of purity, permanence, and power.