Jacob Taubes

“The first few lines of the third chapter run as follows: All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The state of exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical idea of the state developed over the last few centuries. I had quickly come to see Carl Schmitt as an incarnation of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. During a stormy conversation at Plettenberg in 1980, Carl Schmitt told me that anyone who failed to see that the Grand Inquisitor was right about the sentimentality of Jesuitical piety had grasped neither what a Church was for, nor what Dostoevsky—contrary to his own conviction—had “really conveyed, compelled by the sheer force of the way in which he posed the problem.” I always read Carl Schmitt with interest, often captivated by his intellectual brilliance and pithy style. But in every word I sensed something alien to me, the kind of fear and anxiety one has before a storm, an anxiety that lies concealed in the secularized messianic dart of Marxism. Carl Schmitt seemed to me to be the Grand Inquisitor of all heretics.”
― Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections