Carl Schmitt e seus leitores: o significado teológico de uma confusão

Abstract

Carl Schmitt s thinking has been variously received. Not only it has received a different reception across different intellectual traditions but and even by different readers in the same tradition. It has not, remarkably, been possible to achieve any overall consensus about his main political and theoretical tenets. Was him a fascist? Or rather an authoritarian liberal? Was his constitutional theory developed pro or against Weimar constitution? Was him a committed Christian or an atheist? A nihilist pledger of irrational decision in politics or a prudent defender of rule of law? My dissertation raises the hypothesis that this abnormal amount of conflict between interpretations results from the fact that Schmitt is a Christian thinker. Not that he is Christian in his private convictions but in his discourse. It is possible if not commanding to read him as an elusive representative of the tradition of thinking that starts with Augustine and include names as John Henry Newman, Jacques Maritain and so many others. To convert such assertion in a plausible vision it is required two different tasks. We need, first, to address the question of how it is possible to exist a Christian thinker that contrary to the most typical examples is not a theologian not even an apologist of the dogmas and values of Christian religion. Obviously, Schmitt is neither one nor the other. And we need, besides his, to show that whatever the way we have founded to solve this problem, it must be according to Schmitt s own understanding of the matter. The first of these tasks is handled by redefining the notion of Christian thinker . A Christian thinker , so it ll be argued, is not a Christian moralist nor a Christian theologian but, rather, a Christian translator. What he does is convert truth from the language of the dogma to the language of his auditorium. This is not a novel conception, but one can be retraced do Augustine s rhetorical thinking. The great number of controversial interpretations of Schmitt ideas must be understood as the final product of this act of translation. The second task is accomplished through an analysis of Schmitt s vision of rhetorical condition of modern political discourse. It showed that not only he does understands the role of the Christian thinker as a translator; most importantly, he conceives the modern auditorium in way that allow us to attribute a theological meaning to the essentially controversial reception of his work.