“Yes, and here’s to the few

Who forgive what you do

And the fewer who don’t even care”

Leonard Cohen, Night Comes On

When a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that he should wish autonomy to be preserved both in himself and in the other. It is impossible by virtue of the mechanism of nature. It is, however, made possible by the miraculous intervention of the supernatural. This miracle is friendship.^[1]

If A needs B (in Simone Weil’s sense), A will seek to subject B to his will, and in that sense deny his autonomy, because that is the condition of his (A’s) freedom. In an opposition reminiscent of Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil then says that the pair of positions “necessity/freedom” is equivalent to the pair “subordination/equality”. That is, necessity is to subordination as freedom is to equality. This is “by virtue of the mechanism of nature”. The basic grammar of this “mechanism of nature” was described by Hobbes and, following the theologian Antonio Gonzalez, we could call it the “scheme of the law”. The scheme of the law is a form of reduction of contingency, which seeks to ensure correspondence between action and result, and which therefore rests fundamentally on the idea of desert. Under the scheme of the law everyone must receive his due: no more, no less. As Gerald Cohen showed, even the Marxian critique of capitalism was couched in these terms: workers were exploited because they were robbed of what they had created, and because they had created it they deserved it (though the communist society would reject this idea of desert, would reject the scheme of the law: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”).

The parable of the workers in the vineyard: the master hires labourers at different times of the day. Only the wages of those hired at dawn are given in the story: a denarius (“the usual daily wage of a day labourer”, as a note to the text in the New International Version crucially explains). The other labourers were promised “whatever is right”. When the day is over, they are each paid a denarius. Those who were hired earlier protest. The master’s response is “Are you envious because I am generous?”.

They were jealous because the master violated the scheme of the law: according to it, each one receives what he deserves, and the criterion for desert is the work done. The promise of “paying each what is right” is understood as a reference to a criterion of justice. The labourers, who stand in place of the readers, understand that criterion to be the scheme of the law. But not the master; he announces another criterion, that of love: what the master pays each one is a daily wage, the usual pay for a day’s work; that is, what a worker needed to support himself and his family for a day. He pays what the worker needs, not what he deserves.

The point of the parable is somewhat hidden by an attempt to make the master’s position compatible with the scheme of the law. For this, from a narrative point of view, it is relevant that only the first-hired are told a precise wage. Given this explicit agreement, they had no complaint: they got what they bargained for. That is indeed part of the master’s response to their protest (“Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?”). But it is not the centre of the response, the centre is precisely a challenge to the scheme of the law: the master’s final question is not “Are you envious because I honour my contracts?”, but “Are you envious because I am generous?”

Since the scheme of the law is based on desert and the correspondence between action and consequence, it makes social life predictable. It takes a miracle to break the scheme of the law. A miracle is indeed a violation of a law of nature. But our idea that “religion” has to do with acts of wizardry makes us believe that the laws that are broken by miracles have to be the physical laws of nature; as regards “miracles” in this sense, however, Hume’s argument is enough. A miracle is a violation of the scheme of the law, of Simone Weil’s “mechanism of nature”. “This miracle is friendship”: friendship implies a subversion of the scheme of the law, because it does away with the idea of desert: they are not the few that forgive what you do, but the fewer who don’t even care. And that is “supernatural”. 

Carl Schmitt famously claimed that there is a common “systematic structure” between theological concepts and “all significant concepts of the theory of the state”. In particular, he claimed that “the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology”. But the miracle is understood as a violation of the physical laws of nature, hence the exception is the corresponding suspension of the law, a condition of unmediated exercise of power. This fixation with the miracle as the suspension of the laws of physics has prevented the insight contained in the very idea of a political theology to be seen and realised. A miracle is the violation of the mechanism of nature, the scheme of the law, of the natural link between action and consequence that underpins the idea of desert: for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, we get no more and no less than what we deserve. A miracle, precisely because it breaks the scheme of the law, can transform political terms and open up possibilities that were closed. The miracle contains the idea that we are not slaves of the circumstances, that, to put it in Arendt’s terms, action is possible. The miracle is that we are not forced to live according to the scheme of the law.

Let me finish with an illustration. In Chile we have a constitution that was unilaterally imposed by the victors of the 1973 coup d’état. Nothing unexpected here, they were the victors: vae victis! The Constitution also secured, for the heirs of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the key to any constitutional change. Since they had the key, it was for them to accept any constitutional change; and since it is impossible that a Constitution agreed upon in reasonably democratic conditions will be kinder to their interests, here was no fundamental constitutional change for 30 years. All of this is predictable, is according to the “mechanism of nature”, the scheme of the law. However, the refusal to allow for significant constitutional change led the country to rebel in October 2019. Fearing a collapse of political institutions, the Right at long last decided to allow for a genuine constituent process. This, again, is the mechanism of nature: you cling to what is important to you regardless, until clinging to it risks things that are more important to you. This constituent process implied the election of a “Constitutional Convention” that would agree on a proposal of a new constitution that would be put to the vote in a referendum. In the election for the Constitutional Convention there was a landslide against the Right, so big that its positions could be disregarded completely. Again, the scheme of the law: since the claims of the Right could be ignored, so they were (vae victis again… with the not entirely insignificant difference that this time the victors did not owe their victory to the bullets, but to the ballot). And the constitutional proposal was effectively charged with “revanchism”, and this contributed to its defeat in the referendum. Then the process was repeated, and this time the landslide favoured the Right. And even though they had the benefit of hindsight, they wrote their proposed constitution with the same unilateralism. And this in turn contributed to its rejection in a second referendum. It will take a miracle to have a new constitution.

Fernando Atria is Professor of Law at the University of Chile

^[1] Simone Weil, “Friendship”, in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed Sian Miles, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2005, p.286.