Afterword: Hugo Ball’s Theology

MATTHEW VoLLGrAff

In 1970, the jurist, ex-Nazi, and perennial cause célèbre Carl Schmitt was
interviewed about his relationship to Hugo Ball. “Hugo Ball,” he reflected,
“encountered a kind of brother in me. We both came from very Catholic fami-
lies; and then we were dragged into the Wilhelmine age and had to see how we’d
find our place. Each of us achieved this in our own way. This is how I explain the
otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm of his essay.”1 The essay in question is “Carl
Schmitt’s Political Theology,” published in 1924 and translated into English
here for the first time. Ball’s review was one of the first-ever published examina-
tions of Schmitt’s work, one that even today reveals new aspects of his
theologico-political theory.
A former Dadaist turned Catholic oblate, Ball saw in Schmitt not just a com-
manding juridical intelligence but also a new Christian philosopher, “great and
expansive like a Scholastic.”2 That was a term that Schmitt had applied to himself
once before, in his 1917 essay “The Visibility of the Church: A Scholastic
Consideration,” published in the journal Summa—where Ball, fresh from his break
with Dada, had likely read it. There, in language one might call esoteric, Schmitt
first addressed the perennial problem that would inform Ball’s review: namely,
how to square divine authority with secular law.
To those for whom the Church’s institutional presence in the world con-
flicted with the eschatological tenets of Christian faith, Schmitt answered that “the
visibility of the Church is based on something invisible. . . . There is no invisible
Church that is not visible and no visible Church that is not invisible. Thus the
Church can be in but not of this world.”3 Evidence of this text’s profound effect on
Ball can be seen in his own Critique of the German Intelligentsia, published two years
later. “We do not believe in the visible church,” he proclaims, “we believe in an
invisible Church; whoever wants to fight in its battles is a member. We believe in a

1. Joachim Schickel, “Gespräch über Hugo Ball” (1970), in Gespräche mit Carl Schmitt (Berlin:
Merve, 1993), p. 33. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
2. Hugo Ball, Briefe 1911–1927, ed. Annemarie Schütt-Hennings (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1957), p.
171.
3. Carl Schmitt, “The Visibility of the Church,” in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L.
Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 51–52.

OCTOBER 146, Fall 2013, pp. 93–96. © 2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
94 oCToBEr

holy Christian revolution and in the unio mystica of the freed world.”4 It is possible
that Schmitt’s “Scholastic” treatise even encouraged Ball on the path to his re-con-
version in 1920; and when his engagement with the jurist’s work intensified in the
autumn of 1923, it was already tinged with a sense of profound personal signifi-
cance and identification. 
The appearance of Roman Catholicism and Political Form that same year
seemed, moreover, to cement Schmitt’s reputation as a Catholic ideologist of con-
sequence. In this vigorous defense of ecclesiastical involvement in political life, he
argued for the Church as a superior institutional power among nations, one that
embodied the continuity of an imperial order: “The Church is the consummate
agency of the judicial spirit and the true heir of roman jurisprudence.”5
Meanwhile, 1923 also saw the publication of Hugo Ball’s second book,
Byzantine Christianity, a magisterial hagiography of three Eastern ascetics and mys-
tics that sociologist and philosopher Jacob Taubes has called “one of the really
powerful works in the German language.”6 It is a work of scintillating spiritual
depth, written in a style that is at once lyrical and scholarly, and is as far in spirit
from Schmitt’s rome as Byzantium itself. for whereas Schmitt extols the “political
power of Catholicism” as its “absolute realization of authority,”7 finding in the
Pope’s vicarious sovereignty the metaphysical root of all political representation,
Ball dwells instead on paragons of abnegation such as John Climacus and Simeon
Stylites; he is concerned with individuals whose ecstatic devotion binds them to a
higher, hieratic order. 
Thus if Ball had a political theology of his own, it took as its point of depar-
ture not the sovereign but the saint. Against the “archaic ideal of the hero that has
been reborn in Germany,” he opposed the precedents of his Byzantine saints, in
hopes that these pneumatic heroes might ultimately inspire individuals to aban-
don worldly values and return to the Church.8 The aim was the same as it had
been in 1919, “a holy Christian revolution and in the unio mystica of the freed
world,” but this revolution no longer relied upon material expedients; on the con-
trary, Ball’s religious militancy was itself a form of politics by other means.
A case in point is his interpretation of the Neoplatonic theologian Dionysius
Areopagita, which is the theme of the core chapter of Byzantine Christianity. The
writings of Pseudo-Dionysius (as the apocryphal author is otherwise known) depict
a sacred, all-encompassing hierarchy bridging heaven and earth by infinitesimal

4. Hugo Ball, Critique of the German Intelligentsia, trans. Brian Harris (New York: Columbia
University, 1993), p. 95.
5. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, p. 18.
6. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford,
University, 2004), p. 65.
7. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, p. 18.
8. Hugo Ball, “Notizen zum Versuch eines Vorwortes für das ‘Byzantinische Christentum,’” in Der
Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit: Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Hans Burkhard Schlichting (frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 301.
Hugo Ball’s Theology 95

degrees, at whose center “the highest priests and the lowest angels converge.”9
The institutional structure of the terrestrial Church figures accordingly as the
earthly realization of a divinely revealed order. Kurt flasch observes that for Ball,
Pseudo-Dionysius’s “central idea of the hierarchy seemed to unite mystical individ-
ualism with the system of roman law; it appeared to allow the integration of
anarchism.”10 or, to put it differently, it provided him with a conceptual schema
whereby the political could be definitively subsumed into the theological. Giorgio
Agamben has commented that “the central idea that runs throughout the
Dionysian corpus is that what is sacred and divine is hierarchically ordered, and its
barely disguised strategy aims . . . at the sacralization of power. . . . Hugo Ball was the
first to grasp the true nature of the Pseudo-Dionysian angelology.”11
Ball recognized a rather different “sacralization of power” at work in the dou-
ble-edged Schmittian thesis that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of
the state are secularized theological concepts.”12 for while the analogy locates the
originary forms of political (or institutional) power in a higher, inaccessible
sphere, once it has been unmoored from its religious foundation the axiom invites
the danger of sacralizing power per se, of apotheosizing the sovereign. This is the
kernel of Ball’s critique of Carl Schmitt’s “political theology,” understood in the
general sense. In his 1921 work Dictatorship, Schmitt readily credited the Puritan
revolutionary oliver Cromwell with the establishment of a sovereign dictatorship;
despite his defiance of the Church, he is likened to a homo a deo excitatus, a man
called by God. Ball bristles at this, rejoining that “the sovereign dictator can only
be legitimated within the Church.”13 The Pope distributes temporal power to
worldly rulers; it cannot be taken by force. Schmitt’s philosophy consequently
threatened to sanction a form of Caesaropapism, wherein the secular sovereign
forcibly arrogates to himself the Church’s spiritual authority.
By the time Ball’s review was published, Schmitt had already retracted the
position taken in Roman Catholicism and Political Form and suspended religious the-
ory from juridicial practice.14 only thus could his thinking have remained viable in
the service of extreme-nationalistic ideology. In a diary entry from 1924, Ball bit-
terly rejected Schmitt’s ideas of dictatorship as exaggerated and destructive,
benefiting only “the Prussian restoration and the politics of revenge. . . . The same

9. Hugo Ball, Byzantinische Christentum: Drei Heiligenleben (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1923),
p. 245.
10. Kurt flasch, “Von der ‘Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz’ zu Dionysius Areopagita,” in Dionysius
DADA Areopagita: Hugo Ball und die Kritik der Moderne, ed. Bernd Wacker (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996),
p. 128.
11. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy, trans.
Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University), pp. 153 and 156.
12. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab
(Chicago: University of Chicago), p. 36.
13. Hugo Ball, “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology,” in this volume, pp. 63–84.
14. It bears mentioning here that Schmitt was officially excommunicated from the Church in 1926,
for reasons having to do with his remarriage.
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is true for his detestation of the ideas of 1789. His judgment of human rights is
unjust and unobjective.” 15 (Somewhat more problematic is the charge that
Schmitt’s doctrine would not genuinely promote the appearance of Catholic dicta-
torship in Germany.)
And yet, despite the schism that ultimately ensued, there is also evidence that
these two men influenced one another more than has been supposed. In a letter writ-
ten two months after Ball’s death, Schmitt made the enigmatic confession that “I have
never lost sight of him. In my Concept of the Political, every line is directed toward
him.”16 Indeed Schmitt, who had once described Ball as a modern Simeon Stylites,
may well have had him in mind when he wrote in his last book:
Countless church fathers and canonical teachers, martyrs and saints
throughout the ages have passionately engaged in the political strug-
gles of their time because of their Christian convictions. Even the jour-
ney into the desert or the climbing of the stylite’s pillar can become a
political demonstration, depending on the issue. As, from the secular
point of view, the potential ubiquity of the political emerges in ever
new forms, so, from the spiritual point of view, the ubiquity of the theo-
logical emerges in ever new forms.17

15. Cited in Julian Schütt, “Hugo Balls ‘Zweites Tagebuch’: Ein Hinweis,” in DADA Dionysius
Areopagita, p. 272.
16. Bernd Wacker, “Vor einigen Jahren kam einmal ein Professor aus Bonn . . . : Der Briefwechsel
Carl Schmitt / Hugo Ball,” in ibid., p. 239.
17. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. Michael
Hoelzl and Graham Ward (London: Polity, 2008), pp. 83–84. for Schmitt’s description of Ball, see
Schickel, “Gespräch über Hugo Ball,” p. 58.