At the cathedral: truth to power

An Italian philosopher challenges the church to become exiles again

Giorgio Agamben starts his address to the Bishop of Paris and other church leaders at Notre-Dame much as Peter starts his first epistle: "to the Church of our Lord, in sojourn or exile, here in Paris." Thematically, the Italian philosopher’s short talk at the cathedral in March of 2009 doesn't go beyond that opening. The church long ago, he tells the bishop, abandoned its refugee status in favor of becoming a citizen, an institution within the Roman Empire and within every subsequent empire, kingdom, and nation-state.¹

Peter's incipit—"to the scattered people of God now living as aliens"²—is as revolutionary in its potential as the title to Hannah Arendt's 1943 essay "We Refugees," an essay that Agamben admires.³ As a stateless, Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Arendt seems to have chosen her title to parallel the opening words of her new host country's Constitution: "We the people." Mikkel Flohr calls the title "a public statement of a conscious pariah that insists on highlighting and politicizing the exclusion that she and her compatriots confront."⁴ Agamben, Flohr, and others have found promise in the Arendt essay's bold claim that refugees "represent the vanguard of their peoples."⁵

Agamben cites Arendt's "We Refugees" to elsewhere make another bold challenge—to phase out the nation-state in favor of a more just political community:

. . . the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today . . . the forms and limits of a coming political community.⁶

In our time, around 50 million people have been forced to leave their country due to conflict or disaster, and that figure will grow much higher soon because of climate change.⁷ Meanwhile, the nation-state structure is breaking down, Agamben says,⁸ and a century-old movement in several nation-states to denaturalize or denationalize their own citizens creates more stateless people.⁹ When Agamben at Notre-Dame invites the church to return to its exilic roots, he seems to suggest that it could join refugees and other stateless people as a vanguard of this “coming political community.”

Peter sees the potential of his and his fellows' refugee status the same way. He, Paul, and the other New Testament writers call their "coming political community" the kingdom of God. For them, words and phrases such as aliens, exiles, sojourners and "not a people"¹⁰ are not mere religious metaphors used to privilege a life in heaven after death over life on earth. Instead, the ancient church's refugee status is an assertion of its primary association with a new political community, which itself is evidence of heaven come to earth through the Messiah's crucifixion by an empire.

The church forsook its exile when it forsook messianic time

How did the church lose its exilic self-understanding? Surprisingly, perhaps, Agamben says that the church didn't become a vassal of the state by compromise.¹¹ It became one instead, he says, by a misapprehension of messianic time. The church reasoned that Jesus got the time of his second coming wrong. The church responded to Jesus's delay by starting to function "like every other worldly institution." But Agamben tells his audience of high church officials that this position on the parousia, a word which can refer to either the Messiah's coming or his presence, is "blasphemous," presumably because the position denies God's own exilic presence in the world.¹²

Agamben explains messianic time not as Jesus's return but as kairos, often understood as an opportune moment, a presence that breaks through chronological time (chronos). Messianic time involves no delay because the church never ceases to be in exile among this age's nations and empires. No place means no time—at least, no reliance on chronos time—and no time means no delay:

Because there is no place in messianic time for a fixed and final habitation, there is no time for delay.¹³

Agamben thereby links the disruptive experience of messianic time with the rootless experience of exile. This seemingly unpromising combination gives time and space for political agency:

. . . the time of the messiah cannot be, for Paul, a future time. The expression he uses to refer to this time is always ho nyn kairos, "now time." . . . Paroika and parousia, the sojourn of the foreigner and the presence of the messiah, have the same structure, expressed in Greek through the preposition pará: a presence that distends time, an already that is also a not yet, a delay that does not put off until later but, instead, a disconnection within the present moment that allows us to grasp time.¹⁴

Kairos time (messianic time), then, is the "now time" of our exile's political agency. It is, Agamben says, "not some other time but, instead, an integral transformation of chronological time."¹⁵ One might say, then, that kairos time is a refugee in the land of chronos time. Kairos time is the only time we have to act, the only way our political actions will resonate on earth as in the coming heaven.

Kairos time interrupts chronological time the way the exile's presence interrupts the nation-state.

How refugees expose nation-states

Refugees disrupt a nation-state by exposing its fundamental weakness, according to both Arendt and Agamben. The weakness arose at the nation-states' inception. The state as a means of political organization is ancient, and monarchs presided over states for centuries, Arendt explains. When monarchs receded, though, the state in various other forms took their place as the territory’s "supreme legal institution" to protect all of their territory's inhabitants. But national consciousness, a more recent development that the monarchies gave way to, interfered with the nation-state's function to protect all of its territory's inhabitants:

The tragedy of the nation-state was that the people’s rising national consciousness interfered with these functions. In the name of the will of the people the state was forced to recognize only “nationals” as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the national community by right of origin and fact of birth. This meant that the state was partly transformed from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation.¹⁶

Agamben agrees with Arendt, and he offers a perspective complementary to Arendt's. He gains insight from Arendt's chapter title in which the above summary of the nation-state's tragedy appears: "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man." Agamben points out that in the title’s conjunction of phrases, "the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former."¹⁷ Refugees expose a nation-state's fundamental weakness, he says, because they represent naked human life, people without political rights, people who as stateless people "should have embodied human rights more than any other."¹⁸ The nation-state exists to uphold the "Rights of Man" (or, in American parlance, the "inalienable rights" of all men) because a "nation-state" is, by definition, “a state that makes nativity or birth [nascita] (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty." In a nation-state, all humans become citizens, and everyone's birth (nativity) reinforces the nation's sovereignty—the nation's right to be the state. But refugees break "the identity between the human and the citizen and . . . between nativity and nationality, [which] brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis.”¹⁹

By their very existence in a nation-state, then, refugees expose the fiction behind the nation-state's claim to sovereignty. More to Arendt's point, refugees also expose nationalism's inevitable capture of the nation-state.

Refugees lead us past the nation-state

Refugees expose the nation-state but suggest the contours of a new state order beyond it, one in which we would all understand our citizenship as an extension of our real or imputed refugee status. The presence of refugees suggests to Agamben "the paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better yet, aterritoriality)." To make this "aterritoriality" comprehensible to us, Agamben exchanges the geographic concept of topography for the mathematical concept of topology, the study of spacial relations. Agamben offers as analogies the topological forms of the Klein bottle and the Möbius strip—one-sided surfaces that flip travelers on them upside-down as they continuously cross the same point. He gives an example of two political communities operating on the same "Möbius strip":

Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it might be possible to imagine two political communities insisting on the same region and in a condition of exodus from each other . . .²⁰

Each of the two political communities would constitute the "being-in-exodus of the citizen," Agamben reasons.²¹

I've lived on such a Möbius strip. The Columbia Pike corridor in Arlington, Virginia includes immigrants from many nationalities, who taken together speak over a hundred languages. They live in relative harmony, and many of the people there publicly celebrate their own national heritages and participate in other nationalities' celebrations.

These communities of refugees (actual and imputed refugees), each in a permanent state of exodus from all of the other communities, would "act on" existing national territories, Agamben says.²² Anyone who has lived in a nation-state and who has struggled to escape its mindset could imagine how "acting on" a nation-state could become dangerous. The nation state might perceive the "Möbius strip" of these "being-in-exodus" communities as a threat. God's multinational kingdom of justice, peace, and joy won't come without struggle and cost.

Interrupting the nation-states's “fictive sovereignty”

How might the church join other exiles as a vanguard of a new state order? Its members might take seriously God’s claim to all the land and our concomitant status on it as resident aliens, as set forth in Leviticus.²³ Its members also might no longer choose between living strictly in chronos time and denying life in favor of time's ultimate end, which Agamben calls "the last things."²⁴ They would discover instead that eschatology is "nothing other than a transformation of the experience of the penultimate,"²⁵ the messianic time "that contracts itself and begins to end . . . or, if you prefer, the time that remains between time and the end."²⁶ Here's how Agamben describes a biblical interaction between the ultimate (the end of time) and the penultimate (messianic time):

The ultimate reality deactivates, suspends and transforms, the penultimate ones—and yet, it is precisely, and above all, in these penultimate realities that an ultimate reality bears witness and is put to the test.²⁷

In such kairos moments (“these penultimate realities”) when “an ultimate reality bears witness,” churches would become exiles again and would demonstrate heaven on earth. Encounters originated by church members in this messianic time would amount to acts of public faith, deactivating (at least for a moment, and in a few cases perhaps forever) what Arendt calls "automatic historical or political processes" that can "last and creep on for centuries."²⁸ These acts of faith would give witness to the Messiah who is Lord of heaven and earth, master of the ultimate and the penultimate. They would testify about whom each Gospel calls "he who comes,” the original Greek of which, Agamben points out, could also be translated as "he who never ceases to come."²⁹

The time is now, the place is here

Could a newly exilic church help a new political community orient itself around its refugees? If so, the church would fulfill its vocation of transcending time, and the refugees would lead us in transcending place. The church's embodiment of "he who never ceases to come" would combine with the refugees' embodiment of "being-in-exodus"—of they who never cease to leave.

Another bishop in another cathedral

Last month at Washington National Cathedral, a bishop of such a church by faith entered kairos time, interrupting a scripted chronology of inaugural events. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde pled for mercy before the new president on behalf of gay, lesbian, and transgender people; illegal immigrants; and political refugees.

Her words disturbed many in the chronos-oriented political and religious establishments. But in that moment, the Bishop of Washington seems to have accepted the same challenge that, sixteen years earlier, Giorgio Agamben placed before the Bishop of Paris.

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography. The longer footnotes refer to works not referenced in the manuscript.

1. Agamben, Giorgio. The Church and the Kingdom. Translated by Leland De la Durantaye. The Italian List. London: Seagull Books, 2018.

2. 1 Peter 1:1 REB.

3. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jewish Writings, by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken books, 2007), 427–41; Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, Theory out of Bounds, v. 20 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 15.

4. Flohr, Mikkel. 2024. “Beyond the Nation State: Rereading Hannah Arendt’s ‘We Refugees’ Eighty Years Later.” New Political Science 46 (1): 6–20. doi:10.1080/07393148.2024.2303223, 15.

5. Besides Agamben, Means Without End, above, and Flohr, above, see Horst, Cindy, and Odin Lysaker. “Miracles in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt and Refugees as ‘Vanguard.’” Journal of Refugee Studies 34, no. 1 (June 26, 2021): 67–84. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fez057.

6. Agamben, 16.

7. Lydia Polgreen, “Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World,” The New York Times, January 31, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/opinion/trump-migration-world.html.

8. Agamben, 15-16.

9. Agamben, 17-18.

10. For instance, 1 Peter 1:1, 17; 2:10-11. “Once you were not a people at all; but now you are God’s people. Once you were outside his mercy; but now you are outside no longer.” 1 Peter 2:10 REB.

11. Agamben, Church and the Kingdom, 27.

12. Agamben, 4.

13. Agamben, 5.

14. Agamben, 26.

15. Agamben, 19.

16. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 230.

17. Agamben, Means without End, 19.

18. Agamben, 19.

19. Agamben, 21.

20. Agamben, 24-25.

21. Agamben, 25.

22. Agamben, 25.

23. “And the land shall not be sold irreversibly, for Mine is the land, for you are sojourning settlers with Me.” Leviticus 25:23 (Alter, Hebrew Bible, Vol. 1, 453). Alter points out that the two Hebrew nouns translated as sojourner and settler carry the “modern legal sense of ‘resident alien’” (Alter, 453n23).

24. Agamben, Church and the Kingdom, 18.

25. Agamben, 19.

26. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey, Nachdr., Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2006), 62.

27. Agamben, Church and the Kingdom, 19.

28. Arendt, Between Past and Present, 167-69.

29. Matthew 21:9; Mark 11:9; Luke 19:38; John 12:13. Agamben, 5.