Abstract

The following essay examines the temptations of ultimacy in 20th-century politics, namely, the urge to infuse temporal arrangements with transcendental meaning and purpose. This sets up an idolatry of the state or of political processes and brings to a halt the complex dialectic between immanence and transcendence, between what Bonhoeffer calls the “penultimate” and the “ultimate.” This dialogic encounter between claims, loyalties, purposes, and meanings defines the West at her best. When the window to transcendence is slammed shut and politics is subsequently sacralized, the result is a politics that crushes human freedom in the name of a divinized ideological purpose. In addition to Bonhoeffer, the essay brings the work of Albert Camus to bear in analyzing this matter and offering up a politics that is neither “too low” (simply a remedy for sin) nor that aims too high and thereby, paradoxically, descends into those hells on earth that were 20th-century totalitarian societies.